Free The Shadow and the Night: Glenncailty Castle, Book 3 by Lila Dubois Page B

seems he spent most of his time here, though it’s worth noting that he married in 1859. Assuming he was in semi-permanent residence, it makes it plausible that he had a mistress or series of mistresses in Glenncailty.”
    “The poor babies,” Sorcha said quietly. “That would have been a hard life.”
    Melissa nodded. “I want to go back to the Mac Gearailt family, in particular the oldest brother’s wife. Carroll’s maiden name was O’Donnabhain.”
    Another slide, another family tree. Tristan was sitting directly behind Seamus, and the more Melissa spoke the tenser both Seamus and Elizabeth became. He could see the tightening of their shoulders, the straightening of their backs.
    “Carroll had a sister and a brother. Aogan, her brother, lived to be sixty years old and had seven children. There is no record of her sister Mary’s marriage or death. Now, if Mary hadn’t been married, she most likely would have gone to live with Carroll and therefore would have been with the family when they were killed, but as I said, there is no record of her death.”
    Melissa flipped to another slide. This one was an overhead shot of three skeletons, the bones clean and white, laid out neatly on blue plastic.
    “Using the details already mentioned, I’m making my preliminary identification. This is Mary O’Donnabhain.” Melissa pointed to the adult skeleton. “According to her birth record, she was twenty-seven at the time of her death. That means that she was around sixteen when she became pregnant with her first child, Charles.”
    “She was so young,” Sorcha whispered. “I assumed she was his mistress, but if she was that young…”
    Melissa took off her glasses and folded them. “There is no way of knowing how Mary first came to be involved with John, but based on the records and context evidence, we can assume that she remained involved with him, either voluntarily or involuntarily, for the next eleven years.
    “She had three more children—Henry and George, who were old enough to attend school, and a baby.”
    Melissa rose and went to the wall, touching the image of the child’s skeleton. “This is Henry. The skeletal growth indicates a child between eight and nine years old, which aligns with the records. This—” she pointed to the littlest skeleton, “—was Mary’s youngest child, approximately four months old.”
    “She was either mistress or slave to this man,” Tristan said, too caught up in the history to remember that he was avoiding Melissa. “Her oldest child died among his mother’s family, who were rebels against his father’s authority.”
    “Precisely.”  
    Tristan met her gaze. There was no censure, no pity. He relaxed slightly.
    “Henry was strangled to death, with enough force to break bone.” She clicked to an image of a small curved bone. “Can you see the fracture?”
    He’d been killed there. In his mind’s eye, Tristan could still see the image of the woman in the green dress—Mary—grabbing and strangling a young boy, who stared up at his mother, struggling and thrashing against her hold.  
    “The infant was also strangled,” she said, clicked to another slide, another damaged bone.
    “How did Mary die?” Seamus asked, voice nearly expressionless.
    “I cannot say for certain, but based on the bones, I would say that the extent of physical trauma that occurred just before she died would have been enough to result in death.”
    “She was beaten to death?” Tristan asked.
    “That’s my best guess—let me skip to the illustrations of her bone damage. She had a broken leg and ribs. There’s some skull damage, but it wouldn’t have been enough to do serious brain damage.”
    Beside Séan, Sorcha was wiping her eyes. Séan had his arm over her shoulders, his face set in grim lines. Tristan could just see the side of Elizabeth’s face, and her already pale skin had taken on an unhealthy pallor.
    There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, broken only by