Top o' the Morning

A green-eyed colleen, fresh from the peat-scented hush of County Clare, steps onto the Manhattan quay as though she were a displaced banshee—her suitcase the last relic of a drowned world. Jerry O’Donnell, flame-haired and feral beneath the starched collar of respectability, discovers that her father’s new wife is a gorgon in lace, so she bolts into the cobblestone labyrinth, dragging the Old World with her like a tattered tartan. By candle-glow of a Fifth-Manor salon she collides with John Garland—once a fox-hunting visitor to her village, now a widowed Midas in tails—who hires her to civilize his feral heir. In the hush between lullabies and ledgers, desire germinates: governess and tycoon orbit each other like twin moons over a misty loch. Yet innocence curdles when Jerry’s gentle brother Eugene—penniless clerk in Garland’s marble bank—becomes the fall-guy for a midnight heist; forged signatures bloom like nightshade across the ledger. Imperial spotlights swing onto Jerry herself—handcuffs, paddy-wagon, iron door clang. From cell-shadow she can taste salt on the air: not the Atlantic she crossed, but the brine of treachery. Garland, galvanized by a love that smells of heather and gunpowder, unearths the true culprit in a montage of gas-lamp chases and vault-blueprints. The O’Donnell name is scrubbed clean; dawn breaks over the Tombs; Garland’s whispered proposal drifts through prison steam like the last line of an ancient ballad.