In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 11

  For his part, William O’Hara was charmed by his guest. Having never met Ellie’s father, he had expected, from what Madame had indicated, to be entertaining a loud-mouthed roughneck. But instead he found himself in the company of a good-humoured and handsome man, with an Irish eye for life’s absurdities and an apparently limitless fund of anecdotes. As a consequence, they had a most enjoyable dinner.

  Afterwards they sat in the library, drinking the club’s finest Napoleon brandy, still yarning and story-telling. In typically male fashion, the main item on the agenda, namely the proposed marriage of Ellie to the host, had not yet been broached.

  ‘Now before we become altogether forgetful, Pat,’ Mr O’Hara said, as their second large cognac was carefully placed in front of them, ‘I think perhaps we should get the formalities out of our way.’

  ‘Fire ahead, Buck,’ Patrick Milligan replied, ‘you just fire ahead. All I have to say is there’s no need to go down on your knees.’

  ‘Even so,’ Buck O’Hara laughed, ‘this has more than a hint of absurdity about it. For heaven’s sake I’m practically old enough to be your father, and yet here I am, asking for the hand of your daughter.’

  ‘What’s age got to do with it, Buck?’ Pat Milligan asked, inhaling the heady fumes of his cognac. ‘You know what they say back home, no man is truly old until his mother stops worrying about him.’

  ‘I’ll make your daughter a good husband, Pat. I can promise you that.’

  ‘And sure don’t I know that, Buck. No man could make a better one. That’s not what I’m concerned about.’

  ‘You have an objection then?’ O’Hara looked at Pat Milligan in surprise.

  ‘No, no, Buck,’ his guest replied. ‘An objection? Never. Just a concern. Namely for meself. For sure what am I to do? What’s a man to do, a poor old widower, when he loses his daughter? I tell you, Buck, you’re lucky. You have no idea of what a little saint you’re getting. Of course I know she’s me daughter, so I know I’ve a bias, but God love her hasn’t she been like a little wife to me? It hardly bears thinking about, Buck. What me life’ll be without her.’

  ‘You’d have had to face this some day, Pat,’ O’Hara told him. ‘A man with a daughter as fair as your’s.’

  ‘Ah sure and don’t I know that, Buck? But then isn’t truth the one that wounds deepest? All I’ve done is put off the moment, and there’s never an advantage to be had there. Grasp the nettle, Buck. A man has to grasp the nettle of life.’

  ‘Perhaps a housekeeper will provide an answer.’

  ‘And how’s a man like me to afford a housekeeper, Buck? With all due respect. I could never afford a housekeeper.’

  ‘I can see you’re a proud man, Pat.’

  ‘I am, Buck. I’m that indeed.’

  ‘I knew that from the moment you walked in here.’ O’Hara paused and tapped the end of his cigar into a silver ashtray. ‘Even so,’ he then continued, ‘under the circumstances perhaps you’d allow me to make a small settlement.’

  ‘Never!’ Ellie’s father announced, in tones of hurt pride. ‘I’d hear of no such thing! Isn’t it bad enough that my daughter brings nothing to her wedding? As a fellow Irishman you understand that well enough, to be sure! For a father to allow his daughter to go to her marriage unbestowed? Oh, no, never! I would never take a penny as compensation! I’d rather end me days in the poor house!’ Patrick Milligan shook his head, as if to end the conversation, while his host nodded in understanding, although never once taking his eyes off his visitor.

  He had expected a bit of bartering, particularly since the Milligans hailed from County Cork, and O’Hara, coming from Dublin stock, knew well enough that as far as doing business went, the people from Cork took all the beating. But he had not anticipated a point blank refusal. In fact if he had been a gambling man he would have bet good money that Patrick Milligan would not have gone home that night empty handed.

  But such seemed to be his intention, as O’Hara’s prospective father-in-law would hear not another word on the subject. Instead the two men rekindled their good spirits over some more cognac before deciding to call it a night.

  ‘Can I have my driver drop you home, Pat?’ O’Hara asked as his Cadillac drew up in front of the club. ‘It’s no trouble.’

  The liveried chauffeur opened the rear door of the limousine and stood back to allow his employer and his guest to climb into the back.

  ‘This is very kind of you, Buck,’ Pat Milligan said, settling in the seat beside O’Hara. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good. As long as you wouldn’t mind if Sam dropped me off first?’ O’Hara asked. ‘It’s been a grand evening, but I am a little tired.’

  ‘Why not at all,’ Pat Milligan replied. ‘You’d hardly want to be driving all the way out to Westfield and back.’ He looked around him, at the custom-built interior of the car. ‘My, but this is a fine motor car, Buck,’ he said.

  ‘I have the V16 model as well,’ O’Hara told him, ‘which is undoubtedly the best model Mr Leland has ever produced. But I was advised, given the prevalent economic climate, to do my motoring in something a little more discreet.’

  ‘Where I live, Buck,’ Pat Milligan laughed, ‘believe me, this’d still cause a right old stir!’

  The car set off for O’Hara’s apartment, with both passengers in fine fettle. Twelve hours later every newspaper carried the story of their journey, The Boston Herald running it as their headline.

  KIDNAP ATTEMPT FOILED ON BOSTON MILLIONAIRE STORE BOSS SAFE AFTER ’NAPPERS BUNGLE

  Two armed gunmen late last night made an attempt to shanghai one of Boston’s richest citizens, multi-millionaire William John ‘Buck’ O’Hara, owner of O’Hara’s, the city’s top departmental store. Only the presence of mind of his passenger, a Mr Patrick Milligan from Westfield, Boston, and his chauffeur, Samuel Clayton, who has been in Mr O’Hara’s employ for fifteen years, saved the millionaire businessman from certain abduction.

  Mr O’Hara and Mr Milligan were being chauffered home after dining at Boston’s exclusive Colony Club when two masked gunmen forced their way inside O’Hara’s limousine as it stopped outside his apartment. At gunpoint they then made the chauffeur drive to deserted wasteland north of the city limits, where it appears the intention was to shoot Milligan and the chauffeur. But at the critical moment it seems one of the executioners’ gun jammed, and in the ensuing struggle, Milligan overpowered the gunman and seizing his revolver, courageously returned to the hijacked limousine to try and rescue his companion.

  However, sensing the game was up, the second kidnapper panicked and fled, leaving the chloroformed O’Hara in the back of his Cadillac. Unfortunately the gunman who had been knocked down but left momentarily untended also managed to escape in the ensuing mêlée.

  Police are searching for the two well-built young men, but because of lack of any further physical detail they hold out little chance of an early arrest.

  Patrick Milligan went to visit O’Hara that evening. O’Hara was hardly conscious and very weak. According to the doctor in attendance, O’Hara had been badly shaken by the incident, and needed careful watching.

  ‘We’re lucky he’s still with us, Mr Milligan,’ the doctor confided to Ellie’s father, as they left O’Hara to sleep. ‘I’m surprised the incident didn’t kill him.’

  ‘But why should it have, Doc?’ Patrick Milligan enquired in astonishment. ‘It wasn’t as if the poor man was rough-housed.’

  ‘No,’ the doctor agreed, ‘but then had he been, there is absolutely no doubt he certainly would be dead. Mr O’Hara has high blood pressure, and he suffers quite regularly now from angina.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Patrick Milligan replied, a deep frown on his brow. ‘No idea at all.’

  ‘Why should you?’ the doctor asked. ‘Everything is kept well under control and Mr O’Hara is in no danger as long as he is not exposed to, well, how shall I put it, unnecessary anxieties? Sudden stress, or shock? The chloroform was practically enough to do the trick, you kn
ow.’

  ‘The chloroform?’ Patrick Milligan exclaimed. ‘And what harm could a bit of chloroform do, Doc, except put a man to sleep?’

  ‘Anaesthetics aren’t as simple as that I’m afraid, Mr Milligan.’ The doctor poured them both a shot of O’Hara’s best whisky before settling down in a leather chair by the fire. ‘If Mr O’Hara had been in hospital to have an operation, he wouldn’t have been allowed anything to eat or drink for at least four hours prior to surgery. But Mr O’Hara had just had a very large meal, and quite a lot to drink, I gather. Being anaesthetized on top of that lot, he could very easily have vomited, inhaled the fluid into his lungs and died.’

  ‘Never,’ Patrick Milligan replied, taking a deep draught of his whisky. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Mr Milligan,’ the doctor sighed, ‘believe me, anaesthetics aren’t playthings. And these fellows, these gangsters, kidnappers, what you will – what do they know about dosage? I tell you, they could have killed their victim not just by administering the chloroform when they did, but by the very amount they administered! They used enough to put four people to sleep! Oh yes, it’s lucky they didn’t have a corpse on their hands.’

  Lucky? Patrick Milligan thought to himself. Lucky? Dear God, their guardian angel must have been passing overhead.

  ‘I’ll not be able to repay you,’ Buck O’Hara said as he and Patrick Milligan sat in front of the fire, drinking to their mutual survival a fortnight later.

  ‘Sure what did I do?’ Pat Milligan asked, ‘besides be in the right place at the right time?’

  O’Hara smiled and drained his well-watered whisky. In the last week he had at last started to get some strength back, but the incident had considerably weakened him, and he was still finding even the smallest of tasks required a great deal of effort.

  ‘Apparently it’s the anaesthetic, Pat,’ he explained, pulling the rug up over his knees. ‘Apparently it takes much longer than you think to leave your system.’

  ‘You’ll be as right as rain in another few days, Buck,’ Pat Milligan replied, draining his own glass. ‘Ah sure we come from a strong people.’

  ‘We do, Pat,’ Buck agreed. ‘None stronger.’

  ‘Even so,’ Pat Milligan said, rising to replenish their drinks. ‘Even so.’

  ‘Yes?’ Buck enquired. ‘I have the feeling you want to tell me something.’

  Patrick Milligan returned with the two drinks. He set Buck O’Hara’s down by his chair, and then went and stood for a moment to gaze into the fire. ‘The thing is, Buck,’ he said finally, ‘and you can shoot me down here. But the thing is I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s right for a man of your substance to walk around the city, how shall I put it? To walk around the streets unprotected. Not in this day and age.’

  ‘It was an isolated incident,’ Buck replied. ‘A couple of kids probably, with some damn fool notion.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Buck,’ Pat Milligan retorted, ‘and you know it. No man as wealthy as you can take that sort of risk! Didn’t you read about that banker in Chicago? Only last week? They’re holding him for a $1 million ransom! He walked out of his house to get in his car, and they snatched him there and then! In front of his wife and kids! I mean what sort of world are we all living in?’

  ‘I have a large staff, Pat,’ Buck replied. ‘I have a driver, a butler, a staff here and at my country house. I’m hardly alone for one moment.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be able to do a thing, Buck,’ Patrick Milligan replied. ‘They’d be less than useless, believe me, if the real boyos wanted you bad enough.’

  For a while they sat and drank their whisky in silence, while Buck O’Hara considered the danger.

  ‘So who would I get?’ Buck finally asked. ‘I’d need people I could trust.’

  ‘I have three good lads,’ Pat Milligan replied. ‘They’re honest and strong.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ Buck agreed. ‘And then there’s yourself.’

  ‘I suppose if you couldn’t trust us, Buck,’ Patrick Milligan sighed, ‘who could you trust?’

  ‘Grand,’ Buck O’Hara smiled, extending his hand. ‘That’s a deal then.’

  Dermot and Fergal were both at home playing brag when their father returned that night.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ he told them, as he sat down to celebrate with a bottle and three glasses, ‘I spent many a long day fishing. But I’ve never waited so long as this for an old trout to take the bait.’ He looked at his two eldest boys, and smiled at them, and they all grinned back.

  ‘But jeeze, lads,’ he sighed, ‘it was a near run thing. You nearly killed the old boy with the chloroform, you eejits.’

  Everything had gone.

  ‘I can’t see how you can have allowed it,’ Artemis had said.

  ‘There was nothing, regretfully,’ one of the lawyers had replied, ‘absolutely nothing we could do about it.’

  ‘I simply don’t believe it. My mother’s instructions were crystal clear. Brougham was left to me.’

  ‘Brougham was indeed left to you, Lady Artemis,’ Mr Henry Grafton had agreed. ‘The house and estate were left to you in their entirety.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Artemis had said. ‘My point precisely.’

  ‘Brougham was left to you, Lady Artemis, but not its contents,’ Mr George Grafton interpolated, carefully, as if their client had not fully understood his brother’s meaning the first time round. ‘That was the loophole, do you see? The house, and the entire estate, yes, these were correctly bequeathed. But alas, and doubtless due to nothing more than just some careless legal wording in your late mother’s will, your father and stepmother have been able to claim the contents.’

  ‘Careless legal wording?’ Artemis had enquired. ‘Whose?’

  ‘Not our’s, I am happy to say, Lady Artemis,’ Mr Arthur Grafton had volunteered. ‘Grafton, Grafton and Grafton were not called upon to draw up your late mother’s will.’

  ‘I believe,’ Mr Henry Grafton had added somewhat smugly, ‘that your mother called upon the services of a small local solicitor.’

  And so now as a result of some ‘careless legal wording’, everything that was Brougham was gone.

  Artemis made her way slowly across the great marbled hall, staring at the empty niches where once had stood the perfectly sculpted statues of Bacchus and Diana, Venus and Apollo, and on into the saloon, where the late afternoon sunshine filtered down through the glass skylight at the top of the magnificently coffered ceiling on to the now empty room. All the fine Regency chairs and sofas were gone, as were the paintings hung high on the walls above the doorways. The urns and their plinths were gone, and so too the superb and delicate candelabra.

  ‘They’ve even taken the doorhandles, Porter,’ Artemis said to the butler, who was standing to her right, just behind her shoulder. ‘Look.’

  ‘Indeed, milady,’ he replied, pointing. ‘And the locks.’

  They had taken all the portraits which had lined the great staircase, too. The tap of Artemis’s stick echoed across the marbled floors as she made her way to the stairwell where she stood staring up at where the great paintings had hung. Gone, too, was the vast and famous chandelier which had hung in the hall and shone down on so many titled and famous faces, gone from the dining room the great eighteenth-century dining table, capable of seating sixty guests, yet made up in only three leaves, with its gold and silver centrepiece of three prancing horses crowned with garlands, and the gold plate presented to Artemis’s great-grandfather to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Vienna. The set of Coronation chairs, they were gone. Taken too the portrait of the Honourable Miss Deverill painted in 1795, the portrait by Romney of The Countess of Brighton, and the exquisite painting of Lady Mary Deverill in her riding habit executed on commission by Sargent.

  They had taken everything, Artemis slowly realized. She had thought, when the lawyer had informed her of the loophole, that the removal would not be a wholesale one, rather that her father and stepmother
would simply have taken a few of the things they liked and wanted, rather than strip the house bare of its entire contents.

  But they had. They had taken everything.

  The replica of the York Gold Cup, won by Heroic, her great-great-grandfather’s most famous horse, the intricately designed gold wine coolers made by Paul Stirr in 1825, the Charles I Loving Cup, the James II candlesticks, every glass, every decanter, every salt cellar and pepperpot, every knife, spoon and fork, they had removed them all.

  One picture remained in the drawing room, the portrait painted by Joseph Manning of Capers, her mother’s favourite horse.

  ‘I’m not surprised she left that,’ Artemis said to Porter. ‘I’m just surprised she left it undamaged.’

  Otherwise there was not a thing left in the once magnificently furnished room.

  ‘I mean,’ Artemis said, almost under her breath, ‘it looks as though the Barbarians have been in.’

  Limping round the room, she stared at the marks on the walls where the pictures had hung, and the indentations on the floor where the priceless furniture had stood, and tried to remember what had been precisely where.

  It was easy to remember where the large pieces had stood. Here for instance had been a Regency marble and colonnaded side-piece, which invariably bore a vast bowl full of her stepmother’s favourite flowers. And there was where a fine eighteenth-century inlaid table had stood, undecorated by ornaments, to the side of one of the enormous gold and damask sofas, designed and constructed especially for the 4th Duke of Brougham. Here had been one of a pair of Queen Anne card tables, and there the other one, each set with two Hepplewhite arm chairs. And on the wood floor had lain a vast Persian rug, so huge it had taken twenty men to lay it, and which an eccentric female ancestor in a fit of pique and to annoy her husband had made her maids paint green.

  There was absolutely nothing left in the drawing room now, except the great fireplace and the frescoes on the ceiling both of which had obviously proved irremovable, but for different reasons.