Page 35 of One Night Only
“I’m a travel agent. Or I will be. I’m starting my own business. A boutique agency for the ancestry market.”
“And what’s this place, a stop on the tour?”
“An experience,” he says. “A chance to stay in a real Irish cottage. And all the history that comes with it. The good and the bad.”
He tilts his head to examine the ceiling and I realize I’m staring at him.Gazingat him.
I swallow and refocus on the room, looking at it with different eyes now. Imagining it not with light and paint and modernity, but as it was meant to be. A place of shelter, if not poverty. Dark and warm and a protector against the outside. “How many children did Maggie have?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve?”
“Good Catholics.” He winks.
“Jesus.”
“Most of them died young. We’re not too sure when or what happened but they didn’t have the best records back then. We know her husband disappeared when the youngest was born. Went in search of work during the famine and never returned.” His expression grows solemn as he follows the beam of his flashlight. A hushed kind of reverence falls over him and I look away, feeling like I’m intruding on some private space.
“She raised the kids on her own?”
“She would have had the village. But otherwise…” he trails off meaningfully. “Sometimes it hits me. To think of her living her entire life in a place like this. Right in the shadow of that great hotel.”
I hesitate as something tugs at the back of my mind. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” he says softly. “To watch people live so close and yet lead such a different life to hers. The rich and the poor. A place like that seems decadent even today. I can only imagine what it must have looked like to people back then.”
I watch with growing suspicion as he gazes at the hearth and think back to the little historical booklet in my hotel room.
“She was a strong woman,” he says. “But it must have been hard for her.”
“I don’t think it would have been hard for her at all,” I say slowly. “Seeing as the hotel would have been built around seventy years after she was born.”
Declan turns to me, almost misty-eyed. “What’s that?”
“You said her husband disappeared during the potato famine,” I say flatly. “Which occurred in the 1840s. The estate was built in 1895.”
“Did I say he went missing during the famine?” he asks after a second.
Any softening feeling I had toward him vanishes as I do the math in my head. “You also said she was your great-great-great-grandmother, which now that I think about it, also puts her nowhere near the time of the house.”
“She may have been my great-great-grandmother.”
“Or you made the whole thing up.”
“I would never— Ow!”
I hit him in the arm. “You’re such a liar! You said this was a family home.”
“It is,” he insists. “Just not my family’s.”
“You’re unbelievable.” Maggie Devlin and her twelve children. I can’t believe I fell for it. “You tell that story to all the girls you bring here?”
“Just the tourists.Hey, I’m kidding! Come on!” He follows me as I stomp out of the cottage and back through the long grass. “I wanted to show you that it’s not just a building,” he says. “It’s not just stone and hay and mud. When most people think about tracing their family tree they think of scrawled names on a census. A place like this can bring their history to life. Make it mean something and… Sarah?”
“What?”
“Car’s that way.”
