Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

‘Of course nobody is suggesting that you would do something like that, Suki,’ she said. ‘Kyle is merely reiterating his father’s wishes. Nobody in this room would do anything to upset the family, we know that. But other people, other people don’t have the same loyalty. Loyalty is something that is sadly missing today. I’ve often said that. When I was young, loyalty was one of the most respected virtues, but not today, sadly.’

‘My grandpa always says that loyalty is so important,’ echoed Leesa virtuously.

‘I believe in loyalty,’ said Suki, looking from Antoinette to Kyle. ‘As long as people are loyal to me in return.’

She’d had enough. She couldn’t understand why they’d summoned her, unless it was to intimidate her. She got to her feet. ‘You must forgive me, everyone, I am overtired and I think I’ll go to bed.’

Unable to endure one more minute with them, she said goodnight and went to her room, where she sat on the bed and tried not to cry.

The Richardsons were so much more powerful than she was. Compared to them, she was a nobody. If the truth came out, they could easily twist it so that she came out the villainess. One way or another, the family would come up smelling of roses, while her name would be mud.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_d6e06991-5dd9-5ee5-ae54-b3c3312b0c72)

Stanley the estate agent had no gush left. There was, he had learned, no point. People either had the money or they hadn’t. And if they hadn’t, no amount of gushing and going into raptures over beautiful club fenders, stone fireplaces and plaster mouldings that had once been painted delicately by hand with gold leaf was going to make a difference. No, the sort of person with the money to buy and restore somewhere like Avalon House would not be susceptible to having their head turned by a eulogizing estate agent.

That certainly seemed to be the case where Cashel Reilly was concerned. An alpha male with knobs on, in Stan’s estimation. He’d arrived from Dublin in a Maserati Grand: a sleek, dolphin-grey, quite subtle-looking Maserati, but a Maserati nonetheless. Everything he wore, everything about him, reeked of money, power … and precisely zero patience with not getting his own way.

‘Have you been here before?’ said Stan, cautiously, wanting to figure out which way the ground lay. If what he’d heard was true, and Cashel Reilly really had grown up in the area, perhaps he’d lived here at some stage. It wasn’t as if there were any other houses in the town that fitted the profile … But no, the Powers had lived here. Stanley was a blow-in and didn’t know all the families properly. Perhaps Mr Reilly had visited a childhood friend who’d lived here. But looking at Cashel’s stony face, Stan decided it would be inadvisable to ask.

‘Yes, I’ve been here before,’ said Cashel.

Clearly a man who never used more words than necessary.

‘I won’t do the spiel then,’ said Stan.

‘No,’ agreed Cashel.

Stan used to love showing these old Irish houses in the days when people actually had money to buy them. It gave him such a buzz, pointing out all the original features to some delirious client with money to burn and an urge to spend it on historically correct plastering and historically correct painting of fiddly ceiling mouldings. They’d thrown money at these houses, thrown it. Now, you couldn’t shift this type of place for love nor money. Most clients didn’t have the wherewithal, and the ones that did weren’t about to spend it on some run-down pile without the benefit of central heating or modern plumbing.

Stan took a risk.

‘Since you’ve been here before, do you want to walk around yourself while I wait in the hall?’

He was rewarded with the glimmer of a smile.

‘Good plan,’ said Cashel. ‘I know my way around.’

There wasn’t a lot of furniture left in the old house, but Stan found a shabby-looking kitchen chair and pulled it out to the hall, sat down and began to go through his text messages. This Reilly fellow certainly seemed like the sort of bloke who had enough money to buy Avalon House, but whether he would or he wouldn’t, who could tell?

Having long since learned that what would be would be, Stan applied himself to his phone:

Yes, love, home for dinner, fish pie would be great, xx Stan

What astonished Cashel most was how different the house felt. As a child, it had been like some magical palace, home to the amazing Power family, Avalon’s gentry. Whether they were broke or not was immaterial: they could trace their ancestors back hundreds of years. Most people in Avalon would be lucky if they could go back three generations. The Reilly clan did not have a particularly long or noble family tree. When he was a teenager, that had upset him. Mainly because, by then, he had got to know the Powers and was aware of their long heritage. And felt slightly diminished by it.

Suki and Tess could boast a lineage of noble earls and kings. He and Riach were descended from a man who lived his life in the bookmaker’s shop or the pub.

Now, he was proud of his rootlessness. Proud of the lack of rich relatives. Everything he had achieved had been a product of his own hard work. There had been no family money to help him on his way.

Whenever he was invited to give talks to groups of youngsters on how he’d got where he was today, he’d conclude by telling them:

‘It’s not who you are that matters. It’s what you do with who you are. The blood running through your veins is the only blood that matters. When you go out into the world, you have the chance to leave the past behind.’

It was strange how the past seemed so close now as he began his tour of Avalon House.

He started off in the ground-floor drawing room, purely because it was one of the rooms he’d never seen as a child. The left side of the house had always been off limits, according to his mother and Tess. They were the grand rooms, relics of a bygone age when there had been parties and balls up here on the hill. He’d imagined glamorous titled ladies and gentlemen wandering around in evening dress, listening to scratchy gramophones and talking about hunting and estates in the colonies – the way he’d seen people behave at parties in the movies. To a boy whose mother had to clean other people’s houses to keep food on the table, it had seemed an alien and mysterious world.

Stalking past Stan the estate agent, sitting engrossed in his phone, he made his way to the kitchen. That was the room he’d always liked best; a big room, built in the days when many people had lived here, gentry and servants. The huge ovens remained, but the hooks from which saucepans and serving cloches had hung were all gone. Sold, he wondered, or stolen?

Being in here brought it all back though, especially seeing that familiar table, so big it was more like a refectory table from a monastery. He ran his hands over it, feeling the wood, willing some electrifying jolt of memory to leap up into his fingers, but there was nothing. After school, he and Tess used to sit here doing their homework while his mother cooked on the big gas stove. She didn’t know how to cook the sort of food that Tess’s father was used to, so she stuck to the food she knew: peasant food, like bacon and cabbage, barley and lamb shank stew. The food that Cashel had grown up on.

He used to help Tess with her homework. He was five years older and it was fun to help her; she was so sweet, so grateful. Suki, her older sister, never helped in any way. Not that Suki was ever big on homework, even when it was her own. She had made a name for herself in school, a name for being wild, untamed, not caring. She hung around with the most dangerous kids, the ones who had left school and were serving apprenticeships or working with their fathers. She didn’t want to be tied to people her own age, oh no. Suki Power had always wanted to be different.

He walked into the big scullery at the back, where the eggs used to be kept in the water glass to keep them fresh. The meat safe was kept there, a big green painted metal cage where piles of meat would sit on the shelves. Every time the dogs came past, they’d put their paws up and whimper and someone would have to slap them down. It was here in the scullery, the least romantic spot in the whole place, that he’d first kissed Tess.

It had been so innocent and unexpected. Because she was younger, he’d never seen her in that way. He’d loved her, but it had been the sort of love you feel for a kid sister; they got on so well, teased each other, laughed, joked.

And then came that summer day.

He’d been away, working in Dublin. When he arrived home, the house was empty, so he’d headed up to the Powers’ hoping to find his mother. Instead, he’d found Tess. She’d turned eighteen while he’d been gone. The skinny little kid with the lanky legs, the questioning eyes and the hair tied back in an untidy ponytail had vanished. In her place was a new Tess: taller, with a woman’s curves, and the face of a woman, with beautiful rounded lips. His mother had been nowhere to be seen, so he’d stood in the scullery with Tess, feeling strangely dumbstruck in her presence.

She behaved as if nothing had changed between them, chatting happily about leaving school, about her plans to go to college, about how Suki wanted to drop out of college because she was fed up to the tonsils of boring old studies. ‘You know,’ she said, laughing, ‘same old same old. And what about you? What’s it like in the big city? Come on, tell all – are there any fabulous girlfriends on the scene? Your mother will be delirious! She wants you to settle down, you know, Cashel. She wants the patter of tiny feet. Have you found your perfect woman up there in the city?’

Cashel remembered how he’d looked at Tess in that moment and thought with utter astonishment that she was the woman, how could he have not seen this before? Maybe it was the distance that had made it obvious. She’d grown up, he’d been away: suddenly he’d come back to this new woman.

‘No,’ he muttered, ‘no women.’

‘Oh, go on,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

‘No really,’ he said. ‘What if I was saving myself for someone?’

‘Someone in Avalon?’ she said. ‘Tell me – who? Not Suki, please.’

He’d roared with laughter at that. No, not Suki. It was no secret that Cashel and Suki didn’t get on. They squabbled like two fighting cats whenever they were in the same room.

‘There might be a girl,’ he’d said idly, moving closer to her, wondering if she could see it in his face, in his eyes. He didn’t want to shock her, but surely she must feel it too, that electricity in the air?

She’d turned away from him, opening the meat safe to take out a leg of lamb for dinner. It looked heavy. He’d gone to help her, naturally. What else would he do? And their fingers had touched. That was when she felt it too, and she let go of the wrapped meat so that he was left holding it alone. Tess stared at him and said his name, although he couldn’t hear her; he just saw her mouth the words as if she’d been saying them into her mirror for years.

Cashel.

And he’d leaned forward and placed a kiss on her forehead because he didn’t want to frighten her, after all.

It was crazy to buy a house because of a scullery, but he wasn’t buying it because of that. No, Cashel Reilly hadn’t become as rich and powerful as he was today by doing things on a whim. Instead, he told himself he wanted to buy the old De Paor house as a declaration, a declaration that said I wasn’t good enough for the daughter of this house nineteen years ago when she rejected me, but now I’ve returned, and this house that the Powers lost, that has been gone from the family all these years,I can come back and buy it, just like that. With one phone call, I can have the money here.

That was satisfying. The part of him that understood feelings and emotions and the dangers of letting revenge live on inside for ever, told him it was a mistake. But some deeper part, the animal part that was still hurt, told him it was the right thing to do.

Stan was busily scrolling through texts. It was a great time to get some work done. Arrange a time for a valuation, sort out who’d show the old Moloney place tomorrow. Property was a nightmare, these days, make no mistake.