Black Lake by Johanna Lane

Author:Johanna Lane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-05-20T07:00:00+00:00

John

John watched Marianne leave, clutching her guide to the gardens and his history of the house. Murphy had kept his word and printed the whole lot; John was suddenly stricken with panic that Marianne might catch him in the lies he’d written. The IRA had never occupied Dulough. That was a story he’d stolen from his Wicklow cousins. John’s brother was the only other person capable of pointing out the falsehoods, but he was in Dublin, most likely on the golf course today, and anyway Phil would have endorsed this decision. But John knew that Marianne would be of the opinion that appropriating Irish history to suit his own ends was very cheap indeed. Though she’d never said it, he knew that she found Dulough’s past upsetting. The first time she saw the ruins of those cottages, she’d gone quiet and he had wondered whether she was reconsidering her love for him, a man with Philip the First’s blood in his veins.

The rain began to fall softly on the marquee, just as it had during their wedding reception. He remembered that day well, how he’d woken in his bed at dawn, the instant knowledge that there could be no going back now. Not that he’d wanted to go back. He was seized that morning by a need to tell Marianne about Dulough, having, he realized, told her almost nothing. He went to her room and saw the white dress hanging on the cupboard door; her expression told him that he shouldn’t be there, that he shouldn’t see her before the ceremony, that he shouldn’t see the dress—and then he’d watched her reject all that. He sat her down on the bed and in the hour before the hair lady came told her all sorts of things, so many things that he’d been a little sheepish later, when he saw her again, about how much he’d packed into that hour. Unlike in the brochure, he told only truths, the surprisingly small amount of information he had about what had gone on in this place in the hundred and fifty years or so before she arrived. What was he doing? Was he trying to impress her? But she’d already said yes, the evidence hanging there on the cupboard door.

It was she who’d insisted on the chapel, despite the fact that it might fall down around their guests’ ears. They had to perform the ceremony at ten o’clock in the morning so as to accommodate the tides. He remembered their family and friends trouping over the beach in their finery, heels sinking into the sand, Marianne’s veil trailing in the water, so that later it would leave a sticky, salty trail up the aisle.

Francis had worked hard to get the church ready, pulling weeds from between the pews, cleaning the altar of the remnants of birds and small animals. It was a glorious day; but for one quick shower, the sun shone from early in the morning until after eight o’clock that night, when the stragglers came inside to finish the whiskey and the wine.

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