"He was very handsome," Fiona said, a reluctant smile touching her lips. "He was the most handsome boy in all of County Cork. All the girls in Ballykirk were taken with him. But he was from a poor family and my family had a bit of money. My da didn't want me to marry him. They called him a 'culchie,' a country boy, although we lived in the country, too. But they thought he was lower class."
"But you married him anyway," Keely said, "because you loved him."
"He didn't have two pennies to rub together, but he had such grand dreams. Finally, I convinced my da that I couldn't live without him and he gave us his blessing."
"What else?" Keely asked.
"What else?"
"What did he like to do? What was he good at?"
"He liked to tell stories," Fiona said. "Your da could tell such stories. He had a silver tongue, he did. That's how he courted me, with his stories."
This was something new! Keely felt an instant connection to the man she'd never seen. She loved stories and all her friends told her she was good at telling them. "Do you remember any of the stories? Can you tell me one?"
Fiona shook her head. "Keely, I can't-"
"Yes, you can! You can remember. Tell me."
Her mother shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. "No, I can't. Your da was the one who could tell the stories. I never had the talent. The only talent I had was for believin' them."
Keely sat up and threw her arms around her mother's neck, giving her a fierce hug. "It's all right," she said. "Just knowing he told good stories makes me imagine him better."
Her mother kissed her on the cheek, then reached over and turned off the lamp. In the shadows, Keely saw her brush a tear from her cheek. "Go to sleep now."
She walked to the door and closed it behind her. A pale stream of light from the streetlamp filtered through the lace curtains, creating a pretty pattern on the ceiling. "He told stories," Keely murmured to herself. "My da told really good stories."
And though it was only a little bit of who Seamus McClain must have been, it was enough for now. For it gave her a small insight into the person she was. Maybe she wasn't meant to be the good girl that her mother wanted her to be. Maybe she was really more like her father-bold, adventurous, imaginative and daring.
Keely sighed softly. Still, she knew in her heart that her father, whoever he was, would never approve of her pinching a lipstick from Eiler's Drugstore. She made a silent vow to herself to return the lipstick first thing tomorrow.
CHAPTER ONE
A BRISK WIND buffeted the spot where Keely McClain stood. She turned into the breeze and inhaled the salttinged air. Far below her, the sea crashed against jagged rocks at the base of the cliff. Above her, clouds scudded across the sky, casting shadows on the hills around her. A memory from her childhood flashed in her mind as she recalled the fairy tale she once scribbled in her journal, the fanciful story of how her parents had met on a storm-tossed sea.
She tipped her face into the breeze, bathing in the mysterious spell that Ireland had cast. Time and time again, she'd felt this odd sense, a sense of belonging to this place she'd never seen before. This was land that had nurtured her mother and father, green and lush, colored by an unearthly light that made everyday scenery look magical. She could almost believe in leprechauns and gnomes and trolls, and all the other fairy creatures that populated this island.
Keely turned away from the sea and stared at the stone circle she'd come to find. It had been clearly marked on the road map, and though she'd been anxious to arrive in the small town that had once been her mother's home, she had decided to take a short detour.
She'd followed a narrow country lane off the highway, steering the rental car beneath arching fuchsia bushes and between drystone fences. And then, when the sky had reappeared, she found herself in yet another breathtaking spot, a wide field above the sea where cows lazily grazed. Closer to the cliff's edge, a stone circle sat silently in the dappled sunlight, a monument to Ireland's pagan past.
Back home in New York City, she had barely given a second thought to her surroundings, the scraggly trees or patches of trampled grass, the brick buildings that lined her street in the East Village. But here, the world was so incredibly beautiful that it begged to be noticed. She took one last long look, committing the sights and sounds and smells to memory, then hiked back to her car.
She hadn't intended to come to Ireland. She'd been in London, presenting a seminar with a famous French pastry chef and teaching new techniques for marzipan modeling. Since she'd taken over the bakery from Anya and her mother, she'd become known as one of the most talented cake designers on the East Coast, creating bold and original confections for a wide variety of special events.
She'd been so busy with work that she'd never been able to justify a vacation, so she'd decided on a working vacation. Between seminars, she'd seen a few musicals in the West End, searched antique stalls at the Portobello market for the old pastry molds she collected, and visited all the popular tourist sights.
But impulse drew her away from the bustle of the city, compelled her to hop a train that wound across England and Wales to the Irish Channel and to board a ferry that crossed choppy water to a town with the quaint name of Rosslare. Yesterday, from the deck of the ferry, she'd caught her first glimpse of Ireland and, at that moment, felt something deep inside her soul shift, as if she had suddenly discovered a facet of herself that had been hidden until this moment.
She was no longer just a New Yorker, or an American. This land was in her blood, part of her heritage, and she could feel it with every beat of her heart. Keely smiled to herself as she pulled the car door open. Though she'd been forced to drive in the wrong side of the car and on the wrong side of the road, she was getting better at navigating the country roads and narrow streets of the villages that she passed through. She nearly felt at home here.
A gentle rain began to fall and Keely ran to the car. She carefully turned around and started back down the lane, anxious to arrive in the little village she'd marked on the map. Ballykirk was only a few miles down the road, but as she came closer, her nerves got the better of her. She hadn't told her mother she'd decided to go to Ireland, or come to County Cork. She knew the idea would be strongly discouraged. But her mother had never given her a decent reason for her feelings and this was one impulse that couldn't be ignored. Besides, it had been a long time since she'd done anything to please her mother. She didn't dress properly, she didn't behave properly. And now, she didn't travel properly either.
"The past is in the past and it's best if it stays there," Fiona would have said.
As Keely had grown older, she'd asked more questions about her parents' past. And the more questions she'd asked, the more her mother had refused to speak-about her father, about Ireland, about relatives Keely had never known. "That was another life," she'd say. But Keely had remembered one bit of information: Ballykirk, her mother's birthplace in County Cork. A tiny village on the southwest coast, near Bantry Bay.
"So I'll find out for myself." Keely scanned the roadside for the landmarks on the hand-drawn map. She'd found the name in a phone book at the market in a nearby town. Quinn, her mother's maiden name. Maeve Quinn was the only Quinn in Ballykirk and when she'd asked the elderly clerk whether Maeve Quinn was related to the Fiona Quinn who married Seamus McClain about twenty-five years ago, he gave her a puzzled frown, scratched his head, then shrugged. "Maeve would know," he murmured as he scribbled a map to Maeve's home.
She found the place exactly where the clerk had said it would be. The tiny whitewashed cottage was set close to the road, a rose arbor arched over the front gate serving as a landmark. Keely could tell that the home had stood in the same spot for many years. An overgrown garden, filled with a riotous mix of wild-flowers, filled the yard and nearly obscured the cobblestone walk to the front door. Had her mother lived here once, picked flowers in the garden, played hopscotch on the walk? Had she passed her father's home or was it just over the next hill on the road?