Free Some Old Lover's Ghost by Judith Lennox Page A

back in Ireland. Daragh himself would have murdered the fellow if she had.
    There was only one answer to their difficulties, though it was a solution he was loath to accept. He had come to England to make his fortune, and he was well aware that an early marriage would bring with it a trail of bills and babies. A family would tie him to a grindstone he had intended to avoid, and would both curtail his freedom and limit his future. Yet he could not see another way. He needed her so much.
    The cellar was tidy, the dust swept into a corner. Daragh’s anger too had been swept away, so he picked up the crumpled scrap of paper from the heap of dirt and cobweb, smoothed it out and glanced at it again. He remembered standing next to Tilda in the church tower, and looking out through the window at the Hall. ‘The de Paveleys live there,’ Tilda had said.
    Daragh took the fork in the road that led to the Hall. There, a servant showed him into the drawing room. Daragh stood, cap in his hand, waiting. He couldn’t imagine why Miss de Paveley had asked him to tea, but he had nevertheless bought new socks and laboriously patched the elbows of his jacket. When he looked down, his face stared back at him from the polished reddish wood of an occasional table. The furniture was dark and heavy, and a froth of photographs, knick-knacks and ornaments cluttered the mantelpiece and sideboard. Heavy curtains excluded the bright sunlight. Daragh reached out to touch the smooth, silky damask covering of a chair, and then slammed his hand back to his side as he heard a footstep behind him.
    A young woman stood in the doorway. ‘Mr Canavan?’
    ‘Miss de Paveley?’ He’d imagined her a gracious old trout with a lifelong ambition to help young men better themselves. She was not old at all, though. He saw a tall, strapping girl, the ordinariness of her face redeemed by a pair of fine dark eyes.
    She didn’t smile. She looked terrified. There was a long, awkward silence. At last, Miss de Paveley blurted out, ‘That was such a sweet note you wrote me, Mr Canavan.’
    He thought she meant his acceptance of her invitation to tea. ‘Ah, sure, it was nothing.’
    ‘It was something to me.’ The vehemence of her tone surprised him. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean—’ She looked frightened again.
    Daragh felt a mixture of embarrassment and impatience and pity for her. Incongruously, he found himself trying to put her at her ease.
    ‘It’s a grand place you have here, Miss de Paveley.’ He was going to add, My ma has a candlestick or two like that , but was stopped by a caution that his months in England had taught him. He had made a fool of himself too often to court further humiliation.
    Conversation died once more. Daragh searched desperately for something more to say. ‘My condolences on the death of your father, Miss de Paveley. It must be a sad time for you.’
    ‘Oh!’ A smile brightened her pale, round face. ‘I saw you in Southam after my father’s funeral.’
    Which explained, at least, how she knew him. Daragh sensed that there was in this odd rendezvous a possibility of advantage. The realization excited him.
    ‘Those people that you were with,’ she said. ‘Are they relations?’
    ‘Friends, miss. Old friends.’
    She seemed to have gained confidence. ‘Shall we walk around the grounds before tea, Mr Canavan? I’ll just get my hat.’
    Miss de Paveley showed him the old motor car in the garage, and her flower garden, and the tennis court. There was no boundary between the kitchen gardens and the fields, just a mingling of decaying brassica stumps and ripe wheat. A dusty track swung out through the fields, parallel to the dike. Daragh could see in the distance a long, low house, its whitewashed walls disappearing into the sky. When she said, ‘The estate’s mine, now that my father’s dead,’ he felt a stab of envy that this drab, diffident little thing – younger than he, surely – should have all