Free Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston Page A

seventy-seven-year-old man appeared with a present for me: a jewelry chest about the size of a shoe box, with dovetailed joints and three drawers lined with red felt. He’d made it himself, like a woodcarver in a fairy tale. It came back to Ireland with me and sat on the windowsill, where the early sun, slanting across the courtyard, made the wood glow. I had little to keep in it, but that didn’t matter; the chest itselfwas the treasure, since it had been made especially for me. Fingering its tiny knobs, pulling open the smooth-sliding drawers, I was the princess. I sat beside my little chest every morning, practicing my knitting—casting on, unraveling, casting on, unraveling—while Nurse brushed my hair.
     
    “You’re going to come and live in the Big House, Allegra,” Betty O’Kelly said to me soon after we got back. “The Little House is being sold. Your father can’t afford to keep it anymore.”
    I felt like the earth was falling away from under me. I had thought St. Cleran’s was forever and unchanging; it had existed as the Hustons’ home for longer than I’d been alive. The idea that Daddy didn’t have enough money to keep it was terrifying. He was the king here, and kings didn’t have to sell. And a child—me—was going to live in the grown-ups’ house.
    “Where will Nurse sleep?”
    “In Mary Margaret’s room. We’ve had to let Mary Margaret go.”
    I didn’t dare ask about everyone else: the Lynches, Paddy Coyne. Their homes were part of the Little House courtyard. My world was being broken in two.
    My toys and clothes were moved into the Bhutan Room, across from Betty’s room at the top of the stairs—the room I had run through on my circuit from the Napoleon Room, when Zoë slept there. At seven, I was a bit old for running in circles, and I felt very grown-up to have this beautiful room for my own. No changes were made to it for me—for a child. Its identity was fixed, and I stayed in it like any other guest. The walls were dark blue, and the bedspread and curtains were made of golden-orange embroidered squares which, Betty told me, were Bhutanese wedding cloth. Daddy had brought them back from Bhutan himself. It was a Himalayan kingdom closed to outsiders, misty and mythical. The sort of place where Daddy, unlike mere mortals, could go.
    I ate breakfast at the round table in the bay window of the dining room, and sometimes Daddy would come down to eat buttered toast and read the newspaper across from me. I’d hear the crunch of gravel and see Paddy Lynch drive around the corner below me, then I’d lug my book bag down the steps from the front door, proud of how big and heavy it was. I got to school half an hour earlier than the other girls for my French lesson with Sister Annunciata, which consisted of a walk through the halls of the convent singing “Frère Jacques” and “Alouette”—which were probably the only French she knew.
    My school friends didn’t come over to play anymore. Even Jackie and Caroline grew distant. The chest of dressing-up clothes, which was our favorite thing to play, hadn’t come to the Big House with me. I did my homework, properly, in the study; my books stayed in my room. This wasn’t a house where dolls or games could be left lying around.
    At night I would hear Seamus, the Irish wolfhound, patrolling up and down the stairs. He spent his days sleeping on the first half landing, and you had to pick your way across him to get up-or downstairs. He was so big that once, when I was four, Paddy Coyne had held me on his back and let me ride him around the kitchen of the Little House. His long, old legs plodded in a rhythm slower than you’d expect from a dog. Dad loved it that guests would hear those padding footfalls and think it was the ghost.
    The ghost’s name was Daly. For some reason he’d been hanged, and the women of the house had watched from the upstairs windows. After that the windows had been blocked up. Dad and Mum had unblocked them,