Lily and Harriet blushed, smiled and nodded to acknowledge the compliment. There were whistles and more clapping as the glasses were raised yet again around the room.

‘But a thousand times more than anything else, I want to thank Maria for agreeing to be my wife. She is, as you all know, a wonderful woman, and I freely admit I’m not the best catch in the world. I’m well past the first flush of boyhood, and I haven’t exactly trodden a straight pathway through life.’

‘A classic understatement,’ Lafeyre interjected, grinning.

‘But that, as you will have expected, will now change,’ Swallow responded humorously to Lafeyre’s quip. ‘With Maria and myself united today, our lives are set together for the future. It is my pledge that I will strive with all of my energies and all of my resources to make her future and our future together a happy one. Now,’ he gestured to the doorway, ‘in the adjoining room we can relax, enjoy a drink to help our digestion and have a little entertainment.’

The anteroom had a blazing turf fire with plenty of soft chairs and settees and a baby grand piano. Maria was insistent that there would be no requirement for the ladies to withdraw to allow the gentlemen to smoke, and the entire party moved as one from the dining room.

Harry Lafeyre was straight away at the piano as the waiters proffered drinks. There was whiskey, cognac and port wine. A waiter deposited a tray of porter and ale, ready drawn from the barrel, onto a table beside the wall.

As soon as Lafeyre tinkled the opening notes of Moore’s ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, Pat Mossop was on his feet, singing out the lyrics in a fine baritone voice that belied his fragile frame.

Next up was Father Lawrence with a rousing rendition of ‘The Minstrel Boy’. Then Maria’s housekeeper, Carrie, recited six couplets from Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. Elizabeth Mallon proved to have a surprisingly sweet voice as she rendered Mabel’s ‘Poor Wand’ring One’ from The Pirates of Penzance.

The waiters moved around the happy party, replenishing their drinks. The turf fire blazed in the grate as the northern winter wind, funnelling up from Kingstown Harbour, blew hard against the windows.

Few of the revellers noticed the G-man who had been assigned to the hotel for John Mallon’s protection slip through the door and cross the end of the room to whisper something urgently into the chief superintendent’s ear as he handed him a sheet of paper. But from where he sat with Maria in the centre of the room, Swallow saw it, and he knew from his boss’s expression that what it told him was not good news.

Sunday November 11th, 1888

Chapter 21