Blood Lines

by Liz Ryan

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Kerry Laraghy is the girl with everything. The daughter of a lovely, loving Irish country home, she is destined to succeed her father as a trainer of world-class racehorses. But Kerry doesn't want Ireland or horses: she wants Paris, Africa and a man who can take her far away from her inheritance. Brandon Lawrence, heir himself to a multinational corporation, is a loving father, husband of a glamorous wife, wealthy and secure. But under the smooth surface Brandon is secretly at war with himself. When they meet, the consequences are devastating for them both, and for everyone they love, for decades to come.

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 576

Sample

Eamonn Laraghy was a big man, in every way. His six feet two inches rose from the ground like the trunk of an oak tree, solid, sinewy, unarguable. He could, and frequently had, put the fear of God into anyone fool enough to try to cross him, flattening them with a mere gathering up of his eyebrows. In any dispute, his reputation for physical power preceded him, often ending hostilities before they began. Above all his fearsome attributes, it was his voice that nailed his victories for him: a booming farmyard roar that the local people claimed was a force more frightening than a Kansas cyclone. None had ever seen a Kansas cyclone, but they nearly all had a brother or sister or cousin who had. When Eamonn was angry, as he was now, he could be heard half a mile away.

“I forbid it and that’s final! The end of it, now!”

He chopped a large meaty hand through the air and came dangerously close to striking his adversary, immobilised before him like a hypnotised rabbit. A navy vein popped out on his forehead and the flinty grey eyes snapped sparks. Eamonn did not like to be challenged, much less resisted, here on his own turf where his word was law. By God it was.

Provided they were not personally embroiled in these confrontations, Eamonn’s farmhands enjoyed them immensely. It was like going to a boxing match without having to pay in. Blood was not actually spilled, as a rule, but the atmosphere was much the same. Around the periphery of the house and gardens, grins came to several faces as Eamonn’s furious shouts whirled out on the dancing December wind.

But no smile touched the resolute countenance of his daughter. For the first time in her life, Kerry Laraghy was determined to stand up to her father and get her own way.

“I’m sorry, Daddy, but you are no longer in a position to forbid anything. Today I come of age and there is nothing you can do about it. I’m going to Paris and that’s that.”

Eamonn stopped in mid-tirade to draw breath and stare, bewildered, at his only daughter, the lovely girl who had been the apple of his eye from the day she was born. He adored her, completely, utterly and without reservation, and until this moment he had had no reason even remotely to suspect that his sentiments were not reciprocated. Right from the start, from the day his tiny infant first smiled up at him, they had claimed each other exclusively, investing all their considerable affections in the recognition that they were two of a kind.

And now, here she was, turning eighteen only this very morning and already flaunting her independence provocatively. Eamonn was totally baffled, and deeply hurt.

“But, Kerry, what about the farm, the estate, the horses? I thought we had an understanding? I thought ye wanted it all?”

Mention of the horses would, surely, bring her to her senses. They ran as fast and far through her blood as they did through his own; for generations the love of their horses had been both a Laraghy strength and a Laraghy weakness.

But Kerry stood unmoved.

“Of course I do, Daddy. I just don’t want it now, this minute. It’s too much, too soon! I want to live a little first. Go to Paris with Brian in January, have fun, stay till I’ve flung my fling. I’m too young to take on all this! Look at it!”

With a burst of exasperation she flung open the wide French windows, grabbed her father and propelled him across the room until he stood squarely in front of Ashamber, all nine hundred lush green acres of it, glinting in the wintry morning.

Out on the Italian terrace, the first rays of sunlight stretched luxuriously along the length of the winking mosaic, down the wide steps and on out to the little lake beyond, where even now in winter the willows wept and whispered. In summer the lake was ringed with misty mauve aubrietia and wild exuberant bluebells; but today a frost hung over it fine and delicate as a baby’s lacy shawl. To either side of the lake lay the formal lawns, their roses clipped and furled in wait of warmer weather, and beyond this again the bubbling brown river separated the gardens from the estate proper, with its tiny boathouse and banks of cherry trees, which in spring intoxicated Kerry with their thick foaming blossom.

It was all very lovely. But it was not the gardens that tied Kerry to Ashamber, Eamonn knew. It was the hundreds of acres of rippling grass expanding beyond that, where as a small child she had often wandered lost for hours on end, contentedly weaving her daisy chains while half the staff went mad with worry, fearing her fallen into the river and drowned.

Their fears never materialised. The child never fell into anything worse than a haystack, never got kicked or bitten by any of the horses, never got caught up in the blades of a threshing machine. It was as if she were a part of Ashamber herself, gathered into its arms and assured of a safe berth there. Vividly Eamonn recalled her first riding lessons in the paddocks, on a fat placid pony called Mick which subsequently carried her to precocious success in local gymkhanas. After that there was no stop to her gallop, and as the child grew into a girl she seemed to bond with the very land, riding out across the endless acres at first light each morning, red hair blazing as wet clods of the rich black earth flew up into her tingling face, her mare Zephyr snorting with the sheer exhilaration of it all.

That Kerry would take over Eamonn’s role at Ashamber was understood from the first. Eighteen had been settled on as the age at which she would start training with him, learning all there was to learn about producing Derby winners. Over the years she picked up much of it haphazardly, forking hay and scrubbing tack in the long holidays, but only now was her formal education to commence. And only now, seemingly, had she decided she didn’t want it Eamonn was aghast.

With a sudden renewed burst of anger he slammed the windows shut and marched his infuriating daughter to a sofa, on which she sat down, defiantly waiting for him to recover his composure. Grabbing a chair, he slewed it round to face her, seating himself astride it, his beefy arms incongruously akimbo across its elegant mahogany back.

“So, what the hell do ye want then, Kerry? Ye don’t want Ashamber, is that it? Don’t want to become a trainer after all? Don’t want to build up the breeding with me either, don’t want anything to do with any of it?”

She saw that his rage disguised his pain, and met his gaze anxiously, sudden conciliation in her larch-green eyes.

“Oh, Daddy, don’t be silly. You know I do. All I’m trying to say is that I have my whole life in front of me. If I don’t get out and see something of the world before I bury myself here, I’ll – I’ll explode!”

“It’s that infernal brother of yours. I might have known it. Yer meddling blasted twin causing more trouble. He’s put all this madness into yer head, that’s what.”

Kerry couldn’t and didn’t deny it. Since embarking for Paris three months before, Brian had phoned and written constantly, filling her head full of tantalising tales of the City of Light until now she just had to see it for herself. His departure had been saluted with a final oath from Eamonn, who after years of arguing his son’s choice of career, finally washed his hands of the whole sorry business.

Not that Eamonn didn’t love his son. Of course he did. But the boy was so quiet, so remote, it was like shadow boxing. Not for an instant could he envisage Brian running Ashamber, much less making a go of it. The lad was simply cut from a different cloth – his mother’s cloth. And so Eamonn grunted in disgust as Brian went off to Paris to study, apprentice himself to Yves St Laurent and hotly pursue a young French girl called Lucienne de Veurlay. Lu and Kerry had befriended each other at Sylvermore, the Galway boarding school charged with teaching English to the one and manners to the other, and Lu had come on a summer visit to Ashamber. Felled like a sapling, Brian had fallen madly in lust and, he insisted, love.

Eamonn continued to ridicule Brian’s obsession with fashion, but with rare tenacity Brian stuck to his guns, and was now making unexpected headway with both his guru and his girlfriend. Maeve, his mother, was torn between regret that her son had not gone to college and delight in his choice of Lucienne. Brian’s equable temperament might have produced such a fine lawyer, or a doctor . . . fashion was not the same thing at all, not even quite respectable from what she heard. But, on the other hand, Lu was a most charming girl whose father owned a vast vineyard in the Loire, and that made up for much.

“Yes, Daddy. Brian does have a lot to do with it. But I would have gone anyway – if not to Paris, then someplace else. It’s 1968, Dad, I don’t want to miss what’s left of the swinging sixties! Anyway, wouldn’t you prefer me to have fun for a while, and then come home ready to settle down, rather than be cooped up here all miserable and frustrated?”

Yes. Yes, he would. Eamonn had to admit the truth of that. Furious as he was to find his plans thwarted, Eamonn was not a fool. Through the mist of rage he perceived that Kerry had a point. If he held her here, against her will, she would never be happy, never settle properly into the management of Ashamber; nor was it his wish to imprison his beloved daughter against her needs and instincts. Far better to let her go to Paris and get it over with . . . fondly he recalled his own youthful sojourns, in Tipperary on his mother’s family farm. Only a rural backwater, but what a paradise it had been!

For several moments he said nothing, turning the thing over in his mind like a coin in the pocket of his tweed jacket Kerry suspected he had been wearing the same one all his life, its rough fabric as warmly familiar as her own skin. She had the wit now to stay silent, leaving him to see the sense of her argument for himself.

“All right then.” His voice was gruff. “Since ye seem to want it so badly, ye can go.”

In a single leap she was oft the sofa and hugging him tightly, green eyes sparkling with relief.

“Oh, Daddy! Thank you! You’re so good to me, such a sweetheart!”

Eamonn coughed, mortified. It was a rare day indeed that anyone called him a sweetheart – even, he reflected wryly, his own wife. Especially not his own wife. But Kerry’s hugs and kisses made up now, as they invariably did, for whatever was lacking between Maeve and himself. Reluctantly he allowed a grin to etch itself into his ruddy features.

“Ah, sure, love, don’t I only want what’s best for ye? Would I ever refuse anything ye really wanted?”

No. He never had and never would. He understood her, Kerry knew, as well or maybe better than she understood herself. He hadn’t spoken to Maeve for weeks after Maeve sent her to Sylvermore, and even all these years later Kerry still felt the chill it had caused between her parents. Not that there hadn’t been a chill to begin with. But Kerry had no idea why; it was the one subject she dared not broach, not even to her father although it consumed her with curiosity.

She hugged him again, twining her arms around him as she exuded gratitude and excitement, and Eamonn returned the embrace with equal affection, noting as he did so how the child’s spindly body had lately filled out. What had once been skinny was now slim, no longer a target for teasing, no joke at all.

“Only – only there’s one tiling I’ll ask of ye, Kerry.”

“What, Daddy?”

“I want ye to tell me here and now, honestly, when and whether ye really intend to come home.” His voice was raw.

Come home? But of course she would. Home was Ireland, and Ashamber, and the horses; Paris was just a joyride, a breather before reality. That he could even think otherwise upset her instantly and painfully. She was not a girl to break her word or her bargain.

“Look, Daddy, it’s December 27 now. I’ll go right away, with Brian when he goes back in January, and be home by summer. By July first, say. How does that sound?”

That sounded fine. Terrific. Once a date had been fixed he knew she could be trusted to adhere to it. His smile clinched the deal and they settled comfortably back into the sofa to iron out the details which, he saw, she had already well worked out in her head. In fact she’d had the advantage from the start, springing the whole plot on him from what was obviously a long-considered position, giving him no chance to marshal his own thoughts on the matter. Clever girl. What an heiress she would make, one day, to all that he had built up in the course of his fifty-four long, tough years. All that the Laraghys had built up over six generations.

“And now, missy, if we can put all this talk of Paris out of yer head for a minute, there’s another little matter to be dealt with.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Come with me and see.”

Dutifully she got up and trotted out behind him, across the ancient flagstones of the vast hall, down the two hundred-year-old stone steps with their historic indentations, on around the gravelled driveway to the side of the house, where there stood a ramshackle collection of sheds, garages, outhouses and storerooms.

With undisguised pride and pleasure Eamonn threw back the doors of one of the garages to reveal her birthday gift: a long, low, white Mercedes 380-SLC convertible. Delivered a week earlier, it had been hidden away amongst the spades and hoses and cobwebs until this moment, a moment he wanted to share only with Kerry. The car might come from both her parents but its recipient, Eamonn jealously liked to feel, was his and his alone.

For several moments Kerry said nothing at all, staring spellbound as if it might vanish, a figment of her notoriously fertile imagination. But it didn’t. Sleek and shiny, it sat there with its grey leather seats wrapped in plastic, its keys dangling alluringly from the ignition. Over the years her birthday gifts had been more than generous, even by the standards of such wealthy parents: they included her mare Zephyr, a diamond necklet one year and its matching earrings the next, and the hand-tooled Mexican saddle she had so devoutly desired when she was fourteen. But this – this was magnificent. For once she was lost for words, an aching lump rising to her throat and tears, absurdly, invading her astonished green eyes. It was more than a car. It was an acknowledgment of her maturity and her independence. In this she could, and would, go anywhere and everywhere.

“Daddy. Oh, Daddy.”

Eamonn’s grin seemed to stretch right round to the back of his head.

“Well, milady, since ye want to see the world, ye might as well see it in style, eh?”

It was barely six weeks since Kerry had passed her driving test, one of the various goals she had set herself since leaving school in June. To her outrage she failed the first attempt, with a heartfelt recommendation from the examiner that Miss Laraghy curb her taste for reckless speed before applying again. Fuming, she took it a second time at a steady 30 mph and passed – but there would be few roads travelled at 30 mph in this.

“Omigod. C’mon, Dad, get in – let’s go and get Brian!”

Brian was due into Dublin airport at noon Deeming it tactful to accept a Christmas invitation to the château of Lu’s parents, he had promised to spend his birthday and New Year at home instead, and Kerry had intended to pick him up in Eamonn’s old maroon Jaguar. But this was something else again. Brian would be knocked dead.

But reluctantly Eamonn shook his head. It was nearly eleven, and at that time he met his wife daily in her blue drawing room where they went over the accounts and discussed business with the singlemindedness of two generals mapping out battle strategy. On that, at least, they were agreed. Ashamber took precedence over any number of personal considerations, and this was the one encounter with Maeve that Eamonn did not dread. Far from it; he heartily admired her acumen and farsightedness, even if she did make him feel like a child accounting for itself to the school principal.

“Sorry, love, but ye know what yer mother’s like if I’m late. Off ye go and get him yerself. Just let me see if ye can handle that car, and then I’ll wave ye off down the drive.”

It was more than a drive, it was an avenue nearly a mile long, and Kerry would be out of sight long before she reached the wrought-iron gates that had guarded Ashamber for two centuries. After that, an easy spin up to Dublin, where the traffic might be a bit more – oh well – Kerry assured herself, if everyone else could do it so could she. Kissing her father’s cheek, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel as Eamonn marvelled on what the miniskirt was doing for his leggy daughter these days.

In a flash, the engine was purring and Kerry was grinning up at him, hugely pleased with herself.

“Don’t worry, Dad! I can do it. Tell Mummy we’ll be back in time for lunch – and about the Paris tiling, OK?”

With a miraculously smooth switch from clutch to accelerator, she was out and away, leaving Eamonn bemused behind on the gravel. So he was to be the one to inform Maeve of Kerry’s plans, was he? With the distinct impression that he’d been somehow left holding the baby, Eamonn laughed and scratched his balding head as he stomped back indoors.

In the new car, Kerry fiddled with an alarming array of dials but couldn’t locate the heater. No matter: the top was up and the blood in her veins had never felt more fired. Deliriously she fumbled till she found the radio, tuned into Caroline where the Stones were painting it black, and set off to claim her brother.

In her blue drawing room, Maeve Laraghy’s eye lit idly on a glass paperweight, round and heavy, cunningly filled with entrapped violets and a solitary lily of the valley. Often she gazed at it and wondered whether the flowers were real. Certainly they looked real, but then how could they survive? Perhaps they had been treated somehow, glossed or sprayed or waxed in some clever attempt at immortality.

Her cool white hand stretched out to pick up the paperweight, the glass cold and solid against her neat, taut fingers. She turned it over and over. They couldn’t be real. Could they? There was only one way to find out.

Maeve’s calm face reflected nothing at all of what she was thinking, the thought that was not nearly so terrible as it had been the first time. She would like to open the paperweight to inspect the violets. She would like to open it by cracking it in one swift clean stroke on Eamonn Laraghy’s skull, that strong, thick, hairy skull that reminded her of a coconut brown from the sun and wind, fuzzy, with just the same degree of impenetrability. A coconut pure and simple.

She sank into the embossed cushion of the chair at her desk, inexplicably drained after the row she had just overheard, the heated voices of Eamonn and Kerry raised in conflict. Her husband did not and never would, know how much he terrified her. That pair of steel-grey eyes that rolled and snapped like ball-bearings, that awful roar . . . the grim ghost of a smile twitched across her lips. She knew her own restrained tones drove him mad, he could not abide the low-pitched, modulated speech she deliberately adopted in all her dealings with him It still took him by surprise, after all these years; he still expected an adversary to shout back just as Kerry had now. How could you have a satisfactory argument with a woman who never raised her voice? She had the advantage from the outset, and to this day he never understood how or why she did it. But he hated to engage her in combat. Rather a full-scale row with all the stable hands, lads, drivers, managers, the lot, than that.

But today, at any rate, they had nothing to fight about. With a small sigh she put down the paperweight and dismissed the overheard altercation. Evidently it had been resolved. On the Chippendale desk, four neat piles of paperwork awaited her attention. Maeve was the financial backbone of Ashamber; she did all the accounts, supervised every transaction, vetoed Eamonn’s every extravagance. She loved the ruled columns of figures, all entered in blue ledgers in her small precise hand, and she relished her encounters with the tax inspector the way other women enjoyed drinking champagne, in their bright new hats, at the racecourse on Derby day. She won every year, hands down.

Monetary skills came as easily to Maeve as swimming to a fish. In another, later era, she might have been an entrepreneur or even a tycoon, sending shivers down the spine of the stock exchange. It was her misfortune to have been born rather too early, in the winter of 1920, but even here at Ashamber her success was gratifying. She didn’t take the spectacular risks that Eamonn’s racing cronies loved to take so flamboyantly, but she saw a shrewd investment immediately.

If Eamonn was the heart of Ashamber, Maeve was the brain. The work occupied much of her time, gave her great satisfaction and engaged her attention exclusively, apart from her duties as a mother and society matron. Once, before her marriage, Maeve had liked to play the piano, to read the works of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell and Maynard Keynes; she had had a mind straining at the leash. But not now. Now, she avoided any such distraction, any indulgent reverie, anything at all that might bring her to wonder why on earth she had married Eamonn Laraghy.

Only once had she been honest about it. The day before the wedding, nervous and emotional to an unprecedented extent, she admitted to her mother that she was marrying for money. A business transaction, pure and simple. In exchange for taking her out of small-village life and genteelly impoverished Protestantism, Eamonn got a dutiful, attentive and competent wife; a fair deal all round. Maeve’s widowed mother had not been destitute, but she had been poor, and in a way it was worse to have a very little money than none at all.

If you were really poor, people took care of you. The Irish, North and South, liked to see people a step lower on the ladder than they were themselves, affording them a rare opportunity to be top dog, superior, the donor instead of the eternal alms-seeker. You could abandon yourself to poverty, almost, make a career of it, secure in the knowledge that nobody would let you starve.

But if your family had had money and let it slide away – ah, that was different. That was careless. You were not a sad case then, you were merely a mess. It was up to you to sort things out as best you could, and at twenty-nine Maeve had known that “out” meant a man. Immediately. Any older, and she would be on the shelf for the rest of her life, knitting cardigans and tucking her mother’s shawl round her chest down all the dreary days. There was little demand in the Northern town of Lisburn for ladies of declining fortunes and advancing years who could explain the principle of supply, demand and curve with a clarity that cut clean through a man’s ego.

It was precisely this ability, which she had not then been devious enough to disguise, that had ruined both of her early relationships. It was a major disappointment for a chap to take a blonde little chit of a thing out to a meal or a party, only to find that she wanted to do nothing but talk. Talk about things he had never heard of, to boot, economic theories as remote as the man in the moon. There were plenty of girls who could do better than that. Maeve knew she had frightened off both Peter and James, and that if she was going to improve her lot at all, she would have to relegate her own interests to second string. Moreover, she would have to move outside her own small Northern Protestant circle and consider a Catholic. A Southern Catholic, if necessary, from the Republic’s side of the border.

Maeve was not conscious of the bitter twist to her lips as she sat here now contemplating all this, nor did it occur to her that she was committing that cardinal sin against her own rules, daydreaming. With her chin on her knuckles she leaned on her desk, still focusing on the heavy paperweight.

Not that she hated Eamonn, exactly. She simply disliked him, men in general, all men if she were honest for coming between herself and her ambitions. They appropriated unto themselves all that was best in life and handed, with condescending smugness, the dregs to their women. Their women. The babies and the domesticity and the grind that most women accepted with gratitude. Maeve knew she was lucky; she didn’t have to cook and dean all day, she had the chance to exercise her mind if only in the service of her husband, who happened to need a first-class accountant Not because she had had a chance to go to university and develop herself, or to the London School of Economics, a mecca she had once dreamt about the way other women dreamt of balmy nights in the South Seas.

One thing she would say for Eamonn Laraghy, even now: he never questioned her intellectual ability. Perhaps he recognised from the start what an asset it would be, or perhaps he had just decided to overlook it since she was otherwise so suitable. She was gracious, more sophisticated than the local girls with whose rustic charms Kilbally seemed exclusively endowed, and she would fit in very well at the helm of a business whose affairs, in 1949, were beginning to flourish dramatically. Foreign fillies were all very well for weekends, but Eamonn knew he needed a wife who would look and act the part, entertain with diplomacy, dress with chic, handle his big busy household without bothering him over every petty little detail His was the “real” world, and a wife must manage her indoor empire quietly, invisibly.

Her opportunities, it seemed, all revolved around men, around their requirements and Eamonn’s in particular. So unfair, so absurd: there must be thousands of women burying their abilities and ambitions under piles of laundry. It was a terrible waste, and Maeve’s puritanical mind hated waste. But, having made her bargain with Eamonn, she stuck to it quite literally for better or worse, moving immediately upon marriage to Kilbally, converting to Catholicism, making the right friends and even insisting on regular church attendance. Eamonn hated that, but was forced to tag along for fear people might think his marriage in trouble, which it was soon enough anyway.

Signs of the rift were quickly spotted in such a small place and caused any number of minor complications that irritated Eamonn and galled Maeve intensely in the beginning. Finally he dropped out of church altogether, but she had to go the whole hog, holier than thou, holier than everyone, unwittingly showing him up for the heathen he was. It did not occur to him that there were worse things she could have done too, once safely married to him.

She could, for starters, have salted away an immense amount of money. He never would have noticed; but you didn’t bite the hand that fed you, and Maeve despised people who welched on their debts. She didn’t deal with them, commercially, and saw no reason to operate differently in a marriage that was, essentially, a business.

Or she could have settled into a life of leisure, like so many of the horsey wives, busying herself with just a little charity work for appearances’ sake, to justify the clothes and the jewellery, the beauty treatments and the travel. But to Maeve money simply meant security, status and a position of some authority. It gave her great pleasure to sanction her husband’s expenditures, made her feel in control, and nineteen years later it was still a heady feeling.

Children did not enter much into Maeve’s scheme of things, although she had known there would have to be some, of course. But it seemed to her that the more you could afford to have, the fewer you did. Poor people’s houses teemed with children, rich people’s were full of space and quiet It had been a relief to discover the advent of twins, two for the price of one as it were, all her duty done in one swift swoop. The pain of the birth was appalling, and she made up her mind never to repeat it.

But she was a competent mother, nonetheless, everyone admitted that. She consulted with teachers and dressed the twins beautifully, saw to it that they had music and elocution and dancing classes, a pony apiece for their fifth birthday, little parties with their friends in the rose sitting room. The children were groomed and disciplined and vaccinated, and unanimously agreed to be a credit to her – though it was unfortunate, she privately felt, that Brian had got all the good looks, while Kerry was cursed with such very red hair and a quirky temperament which, in her teens, began to terrorise all the local boys. As yet Maeve could not think of a single young man who would or could be expected to put up with Kerry.

The villagers thought it odd that the Laraghys had stopped at only two children. Funny how rich people so often did, it was a mystery how they managed it . . . but then Mrs Laraghy was already in her thirties, and very figure-conscious, and Eamonn always had had an eye for gamey, buxom girls . . . Maeve heard the murmurs, and learned to let them wash over her like the tide over a rock.

In the early days when the twins were still babies, Eamonn had been an enthusiastic husband. Whenever he had to go abroad, as was frequently the case, he invited his wife to come with him; she need not watch the racing if it didn’t interest her, but couldn’t she have fun, shop, socialise? No man intent on mischief would have issued such candid invitations . . . but he had long since given