Page 96 of Road Trip
“Put that down there,” Esme said.
Therese did as she was told. “I’ll just go fetch the rest of your things,” she told Esme, who shrugged her resignation.
When she returned with the cases of dog food, she set them on the counter and looked around, to find Esme seated at a small wooden table in a windowed alcove, with Sinead on her lap.
“The place is a fright,” Esme said, looking around. “My housekeeper is unwell right now, and of course, I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
“Understood.” Therese casually leaned against the butcher block.
From the look of the room, the housekeeper must have been terminal. Trash was spilling out of a bin near the back door, a deep sink held unwashed pots and pans and dishes, and the floor was tracked with muddy paw and footprints.
Esme’s face was pale, and her breathing seemed labored.
“It’s pretty warm outside today. Could I get you something cold to drink?” Therese asked.
“There’s Orangina in the icebox,” Esme said. “I suppose you could have a glass before you go.”
The refrigerator seemed to be the newest thing in the room. The shelves were fairly barren, except for a limp-looking head of cabbage, a carton of milk, and assorted lumpy foil packets. She found the half-empty bottle of Orangina on the door rack and poured the juice into a couple of chipped glasses she found in a nearby cupboard.
She joined Esme at the table, uninvited, opposite her hostess, who sipped the juice noisily. Therese realized Esme wasn’t wearing her dentures. Maybe that explained her annoyance?
“Why do you persist in forcing yourself upon me?” Esme blurted the words so suddenly it startled the dog, who’d fallen asleep on her lap.
Therese had been waiting and hoping for an opening like this.
“As my sister and I mentioned, our great-grandmother, Kathleen Rose Connor, grew up here.”
“In the village,” Esme said with a dismissive sniff.
“In the manor house,” Therese said forcefully. “With the lord and his wife and their two sons, and his older sister Delia. One of those sons was your father, correct?”
Esme drew herself up straight in the chair. “My father was the oldest son, Edward, although he was called Teddy. And there was no one in our family named Kathleen Rose Connor. That’s just nonsense. Why would a village girl live at Tarrymore?”
Therese chose her words carefully. “Probably because your grandfather raped Kathleen’s mother, Bridget, who at the time was a seventeen-year-old virgin. He fathered Bridget’s child.”
“Impossible,” Esme said.
“It was hushed up very quickly. As soon as Bridget’s family discovered she was pregnant, the village priest stepped in and had a word with Lord Rossington, and Bridget was quietly married off to a personable village lad named Thomas Connor.”
“That’s utter rubbish,” Esme said calmly.
“Kathleen was quite young when Lady Delia saw her. She was immediately smitten with the little girl, and insisted on raising her in the manor house, as her ‘protégé’ or ward, or whatever Dickensian phrase people used to describe the lord’s bastard child.”
Esme made a dismissive gesture. “Village gossip. My grandfather was a well-respected man. A war hero.”
“A married war hero. Lady Fiona must have suspected Kathleen was her husband’s child. She couldn’t have been happy when her sister-in-law brought Kathleen to live under her nose, in the same house with their two sons.”
Esme sipped her Orangina, and color began to come back to her withered cheeks.
“My grandmother was a formidable woman. She would not have tolerated such an affront.”
“She probably didn’t have a choice in the matter. But Bridgetdidn’t have a choice either, did she? Neither did her daughter, Kathleen.”
Therese pulled out her cell phone and found the photo she was looking for. It was the picture Kathleen had sent her brother Tommy not long after arriving in the States. She pushed the phone across the table to the older woman.
Esme stared down at the image, squinting. She got up, scrabbled among the clutter of papers on the counter, and found a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses.
“That’s Kathleen. My great-grandmother. She’s about nineteen in that photo, taken after she arrived in the States. Notice a resemblance?”
