A Better Man with Horses

Ted Harriott

Malplaquet, a Queen Anne palace bedecked with exquisite Gobelin tapestries, paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, fine Italian marble halls and with Cuban mahogany floors, is a fit and proper home for the Fitzpatrick family. Eight hundred acres of grassland and fine stabling bear witness to their native-born passion for Irish horseflesh. But a canker lies at the heart of the Fitzpatrick paradise, a rot that devours the glory of the house, and the honour of its inhabitants. Its dark seed lies buried deep in the past when impressionable and undeniably lovely Fiona French is brought to Malplaquet House to marry shy Dermot Fitzpatrick. Her sin is to fall headlong in lust with his bold younger brother, Patrick, to love him and bear his child. Theirs is a tormented, destructive love which brings ecstacy and ruin. Yet her marriage to Dermot takes place when Patrick is banished, disinherited and cursed by his brother. Years later, the past raises it venomous cobra head and strikes at the fragile veneer of normality do precious to Dermot, threatening the future of Malplaquet and Fiona's very sanity. Seamus, Paddy's son, returns to his family's home, an unwitting instrument of his father's malevolent scheme for revenge…