Beloved heroine Molly Murphy returns in Wild Irish Rose, from New York Times bestselling author Rhys Bowen, now writing in partnership with her daughter, Clare Broyles...
Release date:
March 1, 2022
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
272
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One thing about New York that is never predictable is the weather. The other thing that has not always been so predictable is my life. I suppose I was destined for trouble in many ways. Never the good child who didn’t question authority. Always with big dreams. My mother used to chant with monotonous regularity that I’d come to a bad end, rolling her eyes as she said it and probably invoking a saint or two as well. Well, the bad end hadn’t happened yet, but I’d certainly come close a few times.
Now that I was no longer working as a private investigator (at least not officially), things were different. I was a New York housewife like any other, looking forward to a time of settled tranquility with my family and friends around me. Hoping for another baby, actually. The doctor had said there was nothing wrong with me so I should get on with my life and not worry. So that’s just what I was doing—taking care of my husband, my son, Liam, and Bridie, the young Irish girl we had saved from a life of servitude and had now made our ward. All was going remarkably smoothly until a snowman appeared outside my door one February afternoon.
After a mild January, just when the first snowdrops were blooming, there came a vicious arctic blast that froze any spring flower that had had the nerve to appear. It was bitterly cold and snowed for two days without stopping, making leaving the house almost impossible. Daniel had joined the other men from our little street and dug a narrow pathway to Greenwich Avenue so that he could go to work and Bridie to school. I had been forced to stay home, making do with the supplies on hand. Although I hoped our supply of coal would last, it was rapidly dwindling and everybody was rushing to buy more. We shut off the front parlor and instead huddled in the back room that was normally Daniel’s realm, or sat around the kitchen table, enjoying the warmth from the stove.
Usually my days involved a visit to my neighbors Sid and Gus. (And in case you are not familiar with my friends and think I am befriending a couple of Irish laborers, let me tell you that they are both young ladies of good family whose given names are Elena and Augusta.) But I had not seen them recently. I suspected they had been busy with their latest project. There was always something new that attracted their attention. They were true Renaissance women, dabbling in art and music and foreign cooking as well as social causes like the suffrage movement. But this wasn’t the time of year for suffrage parades. So I had been wondering if it was just the harsh weather that had kept them away when there was a knock at my front door, late one afternoon.
“Aunt Sid, Aunt Gus!” Liam shouted excitedly, pushing to the front door ahead of me. Actually it sounded more like “Aaa-Si? Aaa-Gu?” but I knew what he meant.
“Hey, young man, you stay inside.” I grabbed him by his sweater at the last minute. “It’s cold and snowy out there. And we don’t know if it is Aunt Sid and Aunt Gus.”
I swept Liam up onto my arms so that he didn’t run out into the snow, then opened the door cautiously, letting in a frigid blast. Liam had been right. It was Sid standing there, her face only just visible under a big shawl.
“My, but it’s bitter,” she said. “How are you faring, Molly?”
“We’re huddled in the kitchen. Come inside.”
“I won’t stay,” she said, “but I’ve brought you some of the Indian vegetable curry we made. We’re devoting ourselves to Indian food at the moment, having decided it’s wrong to kill and eat animals. It’s so good and it will keep you warm. I made far too much for the two of us and there was no way of halving the recipe.”
“It’s very kind of you,” I said, reaching to put the casserole down on the hall stand. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea?”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. I must get back. We’ve work to do. We have a great pile of clothing to sort.”
“Clothing? Are you going through your wardrobes?” It did cross my mind that a few good cast-offs might be coming my way. They had before.
“Not ours. The Vassar Benevolent Society, of which Gus is currently president, is having a warm clothing drive. So many poor wretches freezing to death in the city. We’ve been collecting items and now our front parlor is full.”
“I could come over and help you, if you like,” I said.
“Oh, that’s kind of you, but I think we can handle it,” she said. “Besides, there isn’t space for more than two people in that room at the moment. Sometimes I can’t find Gus under all those clothes.” She smiled. “I’d better not let any more cold air into your house…” She turned to go, then paused, mouth open, and said, “What in heaven’s name?”
I followed her gaze down the alleyway and there coming toward us was a walking snowman. As it approached it revealed itself to be a person, wrapped in a big white shawl but now covered in snow. I recognized that shawl at the same time that Sid called out, “Bridie? Is that you?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I started toward her. “What on earth were you doing? Rolling in the snow?”
Bridie staggered toward us, snow falling from her as she came. “Oh, Molly,” she said, and I could tell she was near to tears. “The boys set on me when I was crossing Washington Square. They were having a snowball fight, then they saw me coming and they all turned on me. They pelted me with snowballs. They wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t run through that snow.”
“Which boys?” I demanded. “Let me get my cape on and I’ll give them a piece of my mind. I’ll teach them to attack young girls.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sid said. “We’ll teach ’em, won’t we, Molly?”
Bridie put up a hand to stop me. “It’s no use. The constable on the corner saw them and came after them. They ran off, laughing. Besides, you’ll only make them hate me more.”
“And why would they hate you?” Sid asked.
“Because I’m Irish,” she said flatly.
“Because you’re Irish?”
She chewed on her lip, which made her look much younger than her thirteen years. “They are mostly Italian in my class. They get into fights with the Irish boys. They call us names.”
“Don’t they know they’re in America now and everyone is welcome?” Sid demanded. “You need to talk to that principal, Molly.”
“I most certainly will,” I said.
I put an arm around her shoulder. “Come inside, my darling. Let’s get you out of those wet things and have a nice hot cup of tea by the fire.” I turned back to Sid. “Thank you for the curry. I must take care of her.”
I put down Liam and he went up to Bridie, who was now shaking snow off the shawl into the alleyway. “Bwidie all wet,” he said.
As I was about to close the door Sid grabbed my arm. “Now do you agree with what we’ve been saying? About Bridie, I mean. We can’t leave her at that place any longer.”
“Let’s not discuss it now.” I shot a warning look at Bridie.
We went inside and I closed the door. I was tempted to go straight down to that school, or find the boys for myself, but Bridie was shivering and still one step away from tears. “You should get out of those clothes right away. Would you like me to run you a hot bath?” I asked her.
“No, I’d rather have a cup of tea by the fire,” she said. “It’s awful cold in the bathroom.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Well, you go up and get changed. We won’t even mind if you put on your nightgown and slippers.”
She gave me a grateful smile and went up the stairs, snow still falling from her hair.
“Bwidie cold,” Liam commented as we went through into the kitchen. “Bwidie make snowman?”
“I think Bridie was a snowman,” I said, having to smile. Out of all of us Liam was the only one who didn’t seem to feel the cold. Still, he had the energy of a naughty two-year-old and was always running, jumping, climbing, and getting into things he shouldn’t.
My mother-in-law stood up as we came into the kitchen. “What on earth was all that about?” she said. “You kept the front door open for ages, Molly. What were you thinking letting all that cold air in? We’ll never manage to heat up the place again.”
My mother-in-law felt the cold most cruelly. We had brought her down to stay with us after she’d suffered a bad bout of influenza. She had lost her maid, Ivy, who had gone on to better things, and her one aging servant, Martha, was finding the big house too hard to take care of alone. So until we could find a new maid and possibly a cook for Mrs. Sullivan, Daniel was insisting she stay with us.
Of course I couldn’t say no, but it was certainly a challenge having so many people crammed into one little house. The real challenge was Daniel’s mother watching me every moment, ready to comment on things she did differently. “Oh, so that’s the way Daniel likes his pork done these days? He always used to tell me that pork chops should be grilled.” I couldn’t quite tell whether she meant it to rankle, but it certainly did. I was all too aware that she had been disappointed when Daniel chose me over a society beauty called Arabella Norton. To be frank, I was a little surprised myself. After all, I had nothing—having escaped from the wild west coast of Ireland, where I had grown up in a peasant’s cottage.
“It was Bridie,” I said. “A gang of boys set upon her in the square. Absolutely pelted her with snowballs, poor little thing. I’ve sent her up to change out of those clothes and I’ll pour her a cup of tea. Can I pour you one at the same time?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” she said. That was another thing that annoyed me about her. She rarely said either please or thank you. “But that’s not a nice thing to happen to a young girl. It’s quite different if she was part of the snowball fight. I remember Daniel always enjoyed a good snowball fight when he was a boy.” And she smiled at the memory.
I’d just put a generous helping of sugar in the tea when Bridie came down, wearing her robe and bedroom slippers.
“Saints preserve us!” Mrs. Sullivan exclaimed. “Is bedtime now at four o’clock?”
“I told her she could,” I replied. “She needs to warm up. Come and sit by the fire, my love.”
Bridie shot a glance at my mother-in-law as she accepted the seat by the fire. She cradled the cup in her hands, took a sip, then gave a sigh of contentment. I watched her fondly, feeling a great surge of maternal love for her. She’d been mine on and off since I brought her across from Liverpool all those years ago—a terrified little mite who had just been taken from her own mother. Now she’d blossomed into a bright and confident young girl—at least until her schoolmates started giving her a hard time.
She looked up from her cup of tea. “What were you talking about just now?”
“When you came down? I can’t even remember.”
“No, to Aunty Sid. She said something about you agreeing with her.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sid and Gus feel that I shouldn’t keep you at that school any longer.”
“But I don’t want to leave school,” she said. “I love learning. I know I’ll have to leave in the summer, but…”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Clearly we’re not going to let you finish your education there. We’ll find a private academy for you. It’s just that—well, you know how passionate Sid and Gus are about educating you and sending you to Vassar one day? Well, Gus has suggested that she would pay to send you to her former ladies seminary.”
“And where would that be?” she asked. “I thought Aunty Gus came from Boston.”
“She did,” I replied. “It’s a boarding establishment out in Massachusetts.”
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