‘I’d be grateful for anything that you can tell me.’
‘Your mother used to work weekends in the village shop. The family who owned it were the most prosperous for miles around. Their daughter was called Sheila. She was a bit older than your mother, but the two girls were very friendly. Sheila was engaged to my son Robert at seventeen, and married him a year later, when he was twenty-one. Eva was one of their bridesmaids.’
Sheila and Robert Tolly. All Harriet could think about was Sheila’s hostility towards her and Eva. Tolly reached into a drawer and pulled out an old-fashioned photograph album.
‘There’s the three of them together.’
Her slim body tense, Harriet examined the colour picture of his son’s wedding. Eva looked like a delicate blonde angel in an ugly pink satin frock. Her smile struck her daughter as false. Sheila looked nervous and happy, and back then Robert Tolly had been a surprisingly handsome groom.
‘The bridal couple were very young—too young,’ Tolly breathed heavily. ‘My son has always denied that he was unfaithful to Sheila with your mother. He won’t admit that anything happened. He won’t even discuss it. I only have facts to offer you. No proof of anything, though.’
Harriet was hanging on his every word. ‘Go on…’
‘Sheila lost a baby a few months after the wedding. Eva stopped working at the shop very suddenly, and Sheila started spreading unpleasant rumours about your mother’s morals to anyone who would listen. Much later I heard talk that Robert had been seen out with Eva in his car around that time. But it’s only gossip,’ he stressed carefully. ‘A little while later your mother left Ballyflynn.’
‘And you believe that your son may be my father?’
Tolly turned several pages in the album to show her another photograph. ‘This is my late wife, Muriel. You’re the very picture of her…and your hair is the same colour. But that’s not a lot to go on, is it?’
The cheerful woman in the photo had died long before Harriet was even born but Harriet could see the resemblance and she smiled through her own tears to reach for Tolly’s hand. ‘I would be more than happy to settle for a grandfather in place of a father.’
‘If only I had known you were getting tests done with Rafael, we might have found out for sure. Robert wouldn’t have co-operated, but I certainly would,’ Tolly asserted eagerly.
‘Why didn’t you speak up before now?’
‘If your own mother didn’t want to tell you, and my son was equally keen to remain silent, it didn’t seem my place to interfere.’ He shook his white head. ‘Try not to think too badly of Robert. He and Sheila have had their problems and disappointments. Sheila never had another child, and that was a great cause of sorrow to her. If you are Robert’s daughter, it would explain why my daughter-in-law felt the need to be so rude about your mother that day in the gift shop…Yes, Father Kearney mentioned it to me.’
Harriet winced with sympathy. ‘Oh, dear…what a tangled web.’ She sighed. ‘When did you find out that I existed?’
‘Kathleen told me a couple of years after you were born. She believed, like me, that Robert had been responsible, but there was no way of knowing for sure. Eva made it clear to your cousin that she didn’t want contact with anyone in Ballyflynn. When I discovered you were coming here to live I was delighted, because I was hoping to get the chance to know you.’
A happy smile illuminated Harriet
’s face. ‘I bet you were responsible for the flowers and the fire that greeted me the day I arrived at the cottage.’
‘I wanted you to feel welcome. I was really hoping you would stay for good.’
Harriet stood up and gave him a hug. ‘Thank you for being there for me ever since I arrived.’
She thought of phoning Rafael, to share what Tolly had revealed, but lacked the confidence to contact him. She would tell him when she reached Paris. She had a shower and fussed over her hair.
She was packing an overnight bag and agonising over what to wear when Una stumbled in and wailed in despair, ‘Fergal’s gone!’
Harriet sat her down and pointed out that Fergal would visit the stables occasionally and that she would see him then.
‘Hardly ever, though,’ the teenager gasped, stricken. ‘I hate my brother!’
‘Why? He’s given Fergal a great chance—’
‘How?’
‘Fergal’s a really nice guy, and hugely popular. I imagine he’ll be equally popular on the stud farm and I bet he does really well there. Rafael will notice that. Here, Fergal was working as a barman, and I don’t think that would have struck much of a note with your brother—’
‘You’re right.’ Her attention fully engaged by Harriet’s more optimistic outlook on the situation, Una swallowed back a sob and scrabbled for a tissue. ‘Rafael wouldn’t have been impressed by that at all.’
‘This way Fergal gets to prove himself and do what he loves—’
‘And meet some other girl!’