O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [114]
“I have no intention of coming back.”
“Amanda will not be in need,” Daisy cried.
“Oh, yes, the Blantons, that blight on humanity. God bless the Blantons, who traded you off in order to indebt me.”
“I have remained loyal to you through the disasters of our other children . . .” Daisy fought back as she had never fought before.
“Loyalty is hardly your long suit, Daisy. All your years of trotting back and forth to England. For what? To see Upton?”
Daisy sank into a chair, shaking, but was aware of her daughter’s strong hand on her shoulder.
“Amusing,” Horace said, “but the Hook was on the brink of a four-ship contract when your little dillydally in London first reached my ears. I wasn’t going to lose that contract. Later? I could have made a public fool out of you but I needed you as a head housekeeper to run my mansions. What did that lover ever want with that beggar’s snatch of yours? So I remained decent, publicly decent. Actually, I was midway through treatment for a social medical embarrassment. Aren’t you pleased that I spared you? Lord, can a man have no protection from female vileness?”
“Keep talking,” Amanda said. “It makes me love you.”
“Loyalty. You knew about your mother and her limp-wristed English faggot?”
“The closets of Inverness are full,” Amanda said. “We’ll have to start storing skeletons up here in Tobermory.”
“You are glacial, Amanda, but what a fool. Where will you and your shanty-Irish taig boy be able to hide?”
“We do not intend to hide.”
“Be careful, Amanda!” Daisy screamed to her. “Emily did not become the way she is from falling from a swing. Norbert Jolly took advantage of her innocence and made her pregnant before the cotillion. We had it aborted.”
“I demand you say nothing further,” Horace roared, crimson-faced.
“To hell,” Daisy said, and turned to Amanda. “To my everlasting disgrace, I took part in the ritual! I took her to New Orleans, to the bayou, where some witch butchered her.
“Horace gave no hint of deep sorrow, only the cruel ice of a blunt predator cornering his quarry.”
“Where do you think you’ll go where I will not find you?”
“We are not going to hide. You know where Zach and I will be.”
The long ash, which rarely left the end of his cigar, collapsed and dribbled down his vest.
“You’re going down to the swamp with the niggers!”
“I am going to Nebo to be with loving friends.”
“And you think I can’t overrun a bunch of jigaboo shacks. I’ll burn Nebo to the ground.”
And then, in a second, Horace switched gears.
“Let us be calm,” he said.
The two women tried to let the rancor from his tirade pass on through.
“May I speak?” he asked rhetorically. “I did my best to spare you, Amanda. I stuffed it all inside me, knowing what I know. Now, let me share some truth with you. I have known from the very beginning this Zachary O’Hara was a smooth operator, and smelled the whiffs of his scandals rising in Washington even as he courted you. I thought you and I had come to understand, when we made our bargain on the train, that you had also caught on to him.
“What is clear,” he went on, “you wanted him for one reason alone. You couldn’t have him and you had to win. You caved in the minute he confronted you at the casino. He didn’t really want you or he could have had you all summer.
“Major Boone served up that French whore, Lilly Villiard, and O’Hara tired of her and thought he’d look you up again.
“I suggest O’Hara picked over the virgins in heat in Newport and realized you were the best of the lot. He will piss away whatever inheritance Daisy gives you so he can have a high life. But, Amanda! You haven’t a shred of sacrifice in your soul. You want the empire but will have thrown it away for this Irish garbage.”
“Thank you for trying to save me, Father, but you are a perverse liar.”
Horace roared up from his seat like a sea monster erupting from its lake-bottom lair. He limped to her portrait, jerked it off the easel, lifted it over