Maura had got glances and serious invitations out from other men in the town, but she had always told them simply that she wasn’t free to accept any invitation. She had a husband living in England and really there could be no question of anything else.
Her dream remained constant. A proper little home, not the broken-down cottage where only the hopeless and the helpless lived, where she had grown up and wanted to escape.
Then the Darcys came to Shancarrig. They bought a small grocery shop like the one Nellie Dunne ran, and they put in all kinds of newfangled things. The world was changing, even in places like Shancarrig. Mike and Gloria Darcy were new people who livened the place up. No one had ever met anyone called Gloria before and she lived up to her name. Lots of black curly hair like a gypsy, and she must have known this because she often wore a red scarf knotted around her neck and a full coloured skirt, as if she was going to break into a gypsy dance any moment.
Mike Darcy was easy-going and got on with everyone. Even old Nellie Dunne who looked on them as rivals liked Mike Darcy. He had a laugh and a word for anyone he met on the road. Mrs Ryan in the Commercial Hotel felt they were a bit brash for the town, but when Mike said he’d buy for her at the market as well as for himself she began to change her tune.
It was good to see such energy about the place, she said, and it wasn’t long before she had the front of the hotel painted to make it the equal of the new shopfront in Darcy’s. Mike’s brother, Jimmy Darcy, had come with them. He was a great house-painter and Mrs Ryan claimed that even the dozy fellows from down in the cottages, who used to paint a bit when the humour took them, seemed to think Jimmy did a good job. Mike and Gloria had children, two tough dark little boys who used to get up to all kinds of devilment in the school.
Maura didn’t wait to see whether the town liked the Darcys or not; she presented herself on the doorstep the moment they arrived.
‘You’ll be needing someone to work for you,’ she said to Gloria.
Gloria glanced at the round eager face of Michael, who stood holding his mother’s hand. ‘Will you be able to make yourself free?’ she asked.
‘Michael would come with me. He’s the greatest help you could imagine,’ she said, and Michael beamed at the praise.
‘I’m not sure if we really do need anyone …’ Gloria was polite but unsure.
‘You do need someone, but take your time. Ask around a bit about me. Maura O’Sullivan is the name, Mrs Maura O’Sullivan.’
‘Well, yes, Mrs O’Sullivan …’
‘No, I just wanted you to know, because you’re new. Michael’s daddy had to go and live in England. You’d call me Maura if you had me in the house.’
‘And you’d call me Michael,’ the boy said, putting both his arms around Gloria’s small waist.
‘I don’t need to ask around. When will you start?’
The Darcys were better payers than anyone else in the town. They seemed to have no end of money. The children’s clothes were all good quality, their shoes were new, not mended. The furniture they had was expensive, not lovely old wood which Maura would have enjoyed polishing, but dear modern furniture. She knew the prices of all these things from her trips to the big town, and her dreams of furnishing the house that she’d buy.
Back in the cottage she had hardly anything worth speaking of. The small slow savings were being kept for the day she moved into the place she wanted. Only the glass-fronted cabinet with its small trove of treasures showed any sign of the gracious living that Maura yearned for. Otherwise it was converted boxes and broken secondhand furniture.
The Darcys had been in lots of places. Maura marvelled at how quickly the children could adapt.
They were warm-hearted too. They didn’t like to come across Michael cleaning their shoes. ‘He doesn’t have to do that, Missus,’ said Kevin Darcy, who was nine.
‘I’m doing them great,’ Michael protested.
‘Don’t worry, Kevin, that’s Michael’s and my job. All we ask you to do is not to leave everything on the floor of your bedroom so as we have to bend and pick it up.’
It worked. Gloria Darcy said that Maura and her son had managed to put manners on her children, something no one in any house had ever done before.
‘Don’t you find it hard, Mam, all the moving from place to place?’
Gloria looked at her. ‘No, it’s interesting. You meet new people, and in each place we better ourselves. We sell the place at a profit and then move on.’
‘And will you be moving on from here too, do you think?’ Maura was disappointed. She wouldn’t ever get the kind of hours and payments that the Darcys gave her from anyone else. Gloria Darcy said not for a while. She thought they would stay in Shancarrig until the children got a bit of an education before uprooting them.
And their business prospered. They built on a whole new section to the original building they had bought and they expanded their range of goods. Soon people didn’t need to go into the big town for their shopping trips. You could buy nearly everything you needed in Darcy’s.
‘I don’t know where they get the money,’ Mrs Hayes said one day to Maura. ‘They can’t be doing that much business, nothing that would warrant the kind of showing off they’re doing.’
Maura said nothing. She thought that Mrs Hayes was the kind of wife who might well disapprove of Gloria’s low-cut blouses and winning ways with the men of Shancarrig.
It was around this time that Maura became aware of financial problems in the Darcy household. There were bills that were being presented over and over to them. She could hear Mike Darcy’s voice raised on the phone. But at the same time he had bought Gloria some marvellous jewellery that was the talk of Shancarrig.
‘She has me broke,’ he’d say to anyone who came into the shop. ‘Go on Gloria, show them that emerald.’
And laughing, Gloria would wave the emerald on the chain. It had been bought in the big town in the jeweller’s. She had always wanted one. And it was the same with the little diamond earrings. They were so small they were only specks really, but the thought that they were real diamonds made her shiver with excitement.
Shancarrig looked on with admiration. And the Darcys weren’t blowing or boasting either. Nessa Ryan had been in the big town and checked. They were the real thing. The Darcys were new rich, courageous and not afraid to spend. With varying degrees of envy the people of Shancarrig wished them good luck.
The tinkers came every year on the way to the Galway races. They didn’t stay in Shancarrig. They stayed nearby. Maura was struck with how Gloria looked like the Hollywood version of a gypsy, not the real thing. The real women of the travelling people looked tired and weather-beaten, not the flashing eyes and colourful garb of Gloria Darcy, and certainly not the real diamonds in the ears and the real emerald around her neck.
But this particular year people said some tinker woman must be wearing the jewels because, at the very time they were encamped outside Shancarrig, Gloria Darcy’s jewellery case was stolen.
All hell broke loose. It could only be the tinkers.
Sergeant Keane was in charge of the search, and the ill will created was enormous. Nothing was found. No one was charged. Everyone was upset. Even Michael was interrogated and asked about what he had seen and what he had touched in his visits to the Darcy house. It was a frightening time in Shancarrig; there had never been a robbery like this before.
There had never been anything like this to steal before.
A lot of tut-tutting and head-shaking went on. It was vulgar of the Darcys to have displayed that jewellery; it made people envious. It put temptation in the way of others. But then, how had the gypsies known about it? They had only just come to camp. They hadn’t been given dazzling displays of the glinting emerald on the chain around Gloria’s throat.
‘I’m sorry if the guards frightened Michael,’ Gloria said to Maura.
‘I don’t mind about that. Sergeant Keane has known Michael since he was in a pram, he wouldn’t frighten him,’ M
aura said. ‘But I’m sorry for you, Mrs Darcy. You put a lot of store by those jewels. It won’t be the same without them.’
‘No, but there will be the insurance money … eventually,’ Gloria said. She said they weren’t going to buy emeralds and diamonds again. Maybe put the money into paying off the extension and getting the place rewired and better stocked.
Maura remembered some of the conversations she had heard about the need to pay builders’ bills. She went back over those financial difficulties she thought she had been aware of. Possibly the insurance money was exactly what the Darcys needed at this stage.
Indeed, it could be said to come at exactly the right time.
Maura had been used to keeping her own counsel for as long as she could remember. She had seen what the wild indiscretions of her own family had brought on themselves and everyone else around – her father’s blustering revelations of any bit of gossip he knew, her mother’s trying to play one member of the family off against the other.
Maura said very little.
She had sometimes suspected over the years that the envelope Father Gunn gave her each Christmas, saying that it was from Gerry O’Sullivan from no fixed address in England, actually came from the priest himself. But she never let Father Gunn know of her suspicions. She thanked him for acting as postman.
She sometimes wondered why she had become so secretive and close. When she was a youngster she had been open and would talk to everyone. Maybe it was just the whole business of Gerry and having to be protective of Michael. And because there had never been a real friend to talk to.
The robbery of the jewels had been a nine-day wonder. Soon people stopped talking about it. There were other things to occupy their minds.
There was always something happening in Shancarrig. Maura never knew why people called it sleepy or a backwater. Only people who didn’t know the place would have used words like that. Maura and Michael helped at the Dramatic Society and there was a drama a week there from the time that Biddy who worked at The Glen started to dance and went on like something wound up until no one could drag her from the stage. And there was all the business about Father Barry not being well, and then going off to the missions.
There was Richard, that handsome cousin of Niall Hayes, who had come to The Terrace and broken a few hearts – Nessa’s maybe – and Maura thought there might be a bit of electricity between him and Mrs Darcy, not that she would ever mention a word of it. Yet Nellie Dunne hinted of it too so that rumour might well be going around the place. Eddie Barton had opened all their eyes with his unexpected romance, and the news of Foxy Dunne from London was always worth people pausing to discuss.
There was plenty to distract the minds of Shancarrig from the missing emerald and diamonds.
Maura O’Sullivan and her son Michael went from house to house – the ironing for Miss Ross, who had lines set in her face now, and had begun to look like a waxwork image of her old mother – there was the silver polishing for Mrs Hayes – the two hours on a Saturday for Mrs Barton – but mainly, the Darcys.
There was a lot to be done in a house where there were two boys and where the parents were hardly ever out of the shop. Maura didn’t wait to be asked to do things. She had her own routine.
She was doing the master bedroom, as Gloria called it, when she found the jewellery. It was on top of the wardrobe in a big round hat box. Maura had been dusting the top of the wardrobe with sheets of newspapers spread below to catch the falling dirt. She saw a neater way to stack the suitcases, but it involved lifting them down. Michael stood willingly to take them from her. And it was only because the hat box rattled that she opened it. It was as if there was a big stone in it. She didn’t want whatever it was to fall out.
It was a red silk scarf with two small black velvet bags wrapped up in it.
Michael saw her stop and hold the wardrobe top for support.
‘Are you going to fall down?’ he asked anxiously.
‘No, love.’ Maura climbed down and sat on the bed. Her heart was racing dangerously.
There was no way that she could have accidentally discovered the lost and much-mourned jewellery. There would be no cries of delight if the gems were recovered and the insurance claim had to be cancelled.
She also knew that they had not got into the hat box by accident. The description had been given over and over. The emerald on its chain had been in a box on the desk downstairs, and the little earrings in their black velvet bag beside them. The room they were in, the sitting room, had a pair of glass doors opening on to the small back garden. A light-fingered, light-footed tinker boy could have been in and out without anyone noticing.
That was how the story went.
In all her time cleaning in this house Maura had never known the valuables kept in this hat box. It was not a place someone would have put them and forgotten about them.
‘Why aren’t you speaking?’ Michael wanted to know.
‘I’m trying to think about something,’ she said. She put her arm around his shoulder and drew him close.
She seemed to sit there for a long time, yellow duster in hand, her feet squarely on the spread newspaper, her son enclosed in her arm.
That evening Maura put the two little black velvet bags in her cabinet of treasures. She had to think it out very cleverly. She mustn’t do the wrong thing and end up the worse for this great discovery.
Weeks went by before she brought up the subject of the lost jewels. She waited until she had Gloria in the house on her own. She had left Michael playing with the chickens outside.
‘I was thinking, Mam, Mrs Darcy … what would happen if someone found your emerald chain say … thrown in a hedge by the tinkers?’
‘What do you mean?’ Gloria’s voice was sharp.
‘Well, now that you’ve done all the renovations here … and got used to not having it and wearing it round your neck … wouldn’t it be bad for you if it turned up?’
‘It won’t turn up. That lot have it well sold by now, you can be sure.’
‘But where would they sell it? If they brought it into a jeweller’s shop, Mrs Darcy, wouldn’t people know it was the one that was stolen from you? They’d call the guards, not give them the money.’
‘That crowd travel far and wide. They could take it to a shop miles from here.’
There was a silence.
Then Gloria said, ‘Anyway, it hasn’t been found.’
‘My head is full of dreams, Mrs Darcy. I go walking by the hedges. I often find things … what would happen if I were to find it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well, suppose I did find it, would I take it to Sergeant Keane and say where I came across it, or would I give it to you …?’
Gloria’s eyes were very narrow.
Maura saw her glance towards the stairs as if she were about to run up and check the hat box.
‘This is fancy talk,’ she said eventually. ‘But I suppose the best would be, if you were to find it, to give it to me quietly. As you say, the insurance money was really more use to us than the jewellery itself at this stage.’
‘What about a reward?’ Maura looked confused and eager.
‘We’d have to see.’
Maura went out to the chickens to find Michael, but she paused before she closed the door behind her and heard the light sound of Gloria Darcy’s feet running up the stairs, and the sound of the suitcases being thrown from the high wardrobe to the floor.
Nothing was said.
It wasn’t as hard for Maura as it might have been for others, because after a life of keeping her thoughts and opinions to herself it was relatively easy to work on in the house where Gloria and Mike Darcy obviously walked on a knife edge of anxiety around her.
They offered her cups of tea in the middle of her cleaning. They found things for Michael in the shop as gifts, but Maura said he mustn’t be allowed to think of the shop as a wonderland where he could stroll and take whatever bar of chocolate he wanted. It would
be very bad for him, and she had spent so much time trying to make him see what was his and what wasn’t.
When she said this Maura O’Sullivan looked Mike and Gloria straight in the eye. She could see that she had them totally perplexed.
It was Gloria who broke eventually.
‘Remember you were saying that you were a great one for finding things, Maura?’
‘Yes indeed. I prayed to St Anthony for that good Parker pen of Mr Darcy’s to turn up and didn’t it roll out from behind where we keep the trays stacked in the kitchen.’ Maura was proud and pleased with the results of her prayers.
‘I was thinking about what you said … and in our business, well … we get to know a lot of people. Now, suppose you were to find the stuff that the tinkers took somewhere …?’
‘Yes, Mrs Darcy?’
‘Do you know what the very best thing to do with it would be …?’
‘I do not. And I’ve been wondering and wondering.’
‘You see, the insurance money has been paid and spent improving the shop, providing work for people, even for you in the house.’ Maura held her head on one side, waiting. ‘So, if it did turn up and you were able to give it to me I could get it sold for you, and give you some of it …’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Ah, but if I knew the right place to sell it myself, then I could get plenty of money. Because, as you say yourself, you got the insurance money out of it already. You wouldn’t want to be getting things twice over … it wouldn’t be fair.’
‘But why would it be fair for you to get it all?’
‘If I found it in a hedge, or wherever I found it, it’s finders keepers, isn’t it?’
‘But no use of course if you didn’t know where to sell it.’