The Silent House - Laura Elliot Page 0,61

them in our imagination. Seamus Boylan looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. His flushed face and bloodshot eyes revealed a man in crisis. Madelaine had arrived home unexpectedly and left just as quickly, he said. He shook his head when I asked where I could find her. She’d deserted him, left him bereft and grieving for his dead wife. His self-pitying whine disgusted me yet I was hungry for information and he was hungry for company. I went with him to his local pub. We sat on stools in a snug. He cradled a whiskey then drank it neat before he called for another and waited for me to pay for it.

He thought she might be staying with friends or with an aunt who lived north of the border. Fermanagh, he thought, or maybe it was Armagh. His arm trembled when he lifted it to check his watch. Time seemed meaningless to him and the constant checking was as habitual as a tic. Unable to bear his company any longer, I bought him another whiskey and left him staring at the smoke-stained partition. I also left an envelope containing the medallion with him and asked him to return it to her. No note. Let her form her own conclusions.

Why did I give up so easily? There had to be another truth than the one Olive had set before me. I should have scoured the countryside and the cities to find her but a week after that meeting with her father, I was sunk too deeply in my own hell to think beyond it.

A learner driver broke the red lights on the bridge at Lower Main Street. Now, that once-narrow stretch has been widened and is controlled by traffic lights but back then, drivers depended on common sense and caution when deciding which car would stop to allow the approaching driver to go forward. One night, as my father was mounting the arch on the half-way point, a young learner driver, impetuous and reckless, killed him, my mother and himself when he crashed headfirst at speed into their car.

That’s it. I’m unable to write anymore tonight. I cannot describe love, nor can I describe grief. Both render me wordless.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Time has passed since I last opened my journal. Foul air surrounded me. Right to my doorstep they came with their poisonous load. My body, once so strong, is a feeble joke and I forgot its limitations when I heard them trundling up the avenue. Fury left me senseless and lost to caution. It was like the night of the fire. Pandemonium let loose. What would have happened if Isobel had not found me? Dead, no doubt, and my secret buried with me.

Caesar is restless tonight. Is it the moon that draws him to the door? How full and bountiful it looks. My heart races with longing to be out there in that moonlight, running fleet of foot through the woods as I did when I was young and my future seemed set in stone.

But stone can crack under duress and turn to sand. There we were, Laurence and I, owners of Hyland Stables when we were yet to reach our twenty-first birthdays. Equal shares, declared the solicitor, who read our parent’s will to us. Olive inherited one third of the land and the market garden. She disliked horses and had never shown any interest in the stables. Three years after the death of our parents, she married Maurice Coyne, an auctioneer from Clonmoore. They built their house where vegetables once grew. The strawberry beds became a tennis court and a sun terrace. A wall was erected between Hyland Hall and Mount Eagle with a gate to allow easy access. Not that we called often to see each other. I was too busy struggling to keep the stables going. Laurence no longer pretended to have any interest in the training programme my grandfather and father had perfected. He bought a dark green Aston Martin and drove through Clonmoore with the roof down. He no longer gambled with the men from the town. When he was not at the racetrack, he spent most of his time in Cork or Dublin. Initially, I’d no idea what he did there. All I knew was that the decisions he made were affecting the reputation of Hyland Stables.

He believed we should close down the stables. We could sell the land or lease it to farmers. Anything was better than the endless, back-breaking work of training

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