he had arrived in New York shaking the dust of Kentucky off the heels of her silver kid boots.

That was in the autumn of 1977, when she was twenty-three years old. It was probably her wry sense of humour that made her characterize herself as ‘just a poor country girl, a hillbilly who knows nothing much about anything’, since, in point of fact, she was neither.

Her full name was Madelana Mary Elizabeth O’Shea, and she had been born just outside Lexington, in the very heart of bluegrass country, in July of 1954.

She was the first daughter of Fiona and Joe O’Shea and she had been adored from the moment she had opened her eyes to the world. She had two older brothers, Joseph Francis Xavier Jr, so named after his father, and Lonnie Michael Paul; Joe was eleven at the time of her birth, and Lonnie was then seven. Both boys fell in love with their beautiful baby sister, and it was a love that never dimmed during the boys’ short lives.

Everyone petted and indulged her throughout her childhood, and it was a miracle that Madelana grew up to be so unaffected and unspoiled, and this was due in no small measure to her own strength of character and sweetness of nature.

Her father was third-generation Irish-American, and a Kentuckian through and through, but her mother had been born in Ireland, and had come to America in 1940, at the age of seventeen. Fiona Quinn had been dispatched by her older sister and brother to stay with cousins in Lexington, in order to escape the war in Europe. ‘I’m an evacuee from the old sod,’ she would say with a bright smile, her green eyes sparkling, enjoying being something of a novelty amongst her cousins and their friends.

Joe O’Shea was twenty-three in 1940, and an engineer who worked for his father in their small family construction business, and he was the best friend of Liam Quinn, Fiona’s cousin. It was at Liam’s house that Joe first met Fiona, and he had immediately fallen in love with the tall, lissome girl from County Cork. He thought she had the prettiest of faces and the most dazzling of smiles it had ever been his great good fortune to see. They had started courting, and to Joe’s delight, Fiona soon confessed that she reciprocated his feelings and they were married in 1941.

After their honeymoon in Louisville, they set up house in Lexington, and in 1943 their first son was born, just a few weeks after his father had embarked for England to fight the war in Europe.

Joe, who was in the US 1st Infantry Division, was initially stationed in England, and later his unit was part of the Omaha Beach Assault Force that landed in Normandy on D-Day, the sixth of June, 1944. He was lucky and survived this and other Allied offensives in the European theatre of war, and came home safely at the end of 1945, proudly wearing a Purple Heart pinned to his battledress.

Once he had settled down to civilian life in Kentucky, Joe had again gone to work in his father’s small business, and slowly life for the O’Sheas had returned to normal. In 1947, Lonnie was born, and with the addition of Maddy seven years later, Fiona and Joe decided it might be wisest not to have any more children, wanting to give as much as they could to the three they already had. Most especially, they were thinking of the cost of college educations for the two boys and Maddy. Joe’s father had retired, and Joe had taken over the little family business and was making a decent living. Whilst they were not poor, they were not rich either. ‘Middlin’ comfortable,’ was the way Joe would put it, and he would always add, ‘But that’s no cause for celebratin’, or for bein’ extravagant.’

Joe O’Shea was a good husband and father, Fiona a tender, loving wife, and the proudest of mothers, and they were a happy family, unusually devoted to each other, and caring.

Young Joe, Lonnie and Maddy were inseparable – ‘the terrible trio,’ Fiona called them.

Madelana was something of a tomboy when she was growing up and wanted to do everything her brothers did; she swam and fished in the creeks with them, went hunting and trekking in the hills, always tagging along on any expedition, but invariably holding her own.

Riding was her favourite sport and at this she excelled. She became an accomplished equestrian at an early age, being fortunate enough to work out at various horse farms in and around Lexington where thoroughbreds were trained, and where her father did jobs from time to time.

She loved horses, had an understanding of them, and like her father and her brothers, she was keen on racing, and her greatest thrill was to accompany them to Churchill Downs in Louisville when the Kentucky Derby ran. And it was she who cheered loudest of all when a horse they favoured won.

From a young age, Maddy was determined never to be outstripped by her brothers, and they, so adoring of her and immensely proud of her good looks, intelligence, independence and derring-do, forever encouraged her. But their mother was constantly shaking her head at the blue jeans and plaid work shirts, and the boyish, boisterous antics, and she tried to instil in her more ladylike ways.

‘Whatever’s going to become of you, Maddy O’Shea?’ Fiona would demand, clucking with exasperation under her breath. ‘Just look at you…why, to be sure, anybody could be mistakin’ you for a stable lad in that get up, and your friends so bonny and feminine in their pretty dresses. You won’t be finding a nice young man to go a-courtin’ with, no, not looking like that, you will not, me girl. I aim to enrol you in Miss Sue Ellen’s dancing class if it’s the last thing I do, so you can be learnin’ a bit about deportment and gracefulness and femininity. I swear I will, Maddy O’Shea. Be warned, me girl.’

Maddy would respond with a vibrant laugh and a jaunty toss of her chestnut head, for this was an old threat. And she would hug her mother tightly then, and promise to mend her ways, and they would sit down at the kitchen table for a cup of hot, steaming chocolate, and talk and talk their hearts away, and they were never anything but the best of friends.

And eventually, just to please her mother, Madelana did attend Miss Sue Ellen’s School for Dancing and Deportment in Lexington, taking ballet and tap. As it happened, she discovered she had a natural aptitude for dance, and she enjoyed her lessons, and it was here that she quickly learned to move with lightness and elegance, where she acquired the dancer’s agile grace that she would never lose.

In later years, when she looked back, Madelana took comfort from the fact that she and her brothers had had such a marvellous childhood. There had been large doses of the Catholic religion rammed down them by their mother, and a good deal of discipline from their father, and they had had to work hard at school and to do chores in the house and yard, but it had been one of the happiest times of her life, and it had made her all the things she was.

Nobody was more surprised than Fiona when, towards the end of 1964, she learned that she was pregnant again, and the following year, at the age of forty-one, she gave birth to Kerry Anne.

Although the child had been unexpected, she was loved, and her christening was a happy affair. The only thing that slightly marred their joy that day was Young Joe’s imminent departure for his tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a private in the US Army and just twenty-two years old.

Sometimes tragedy strikes a family many times in quick succession, and it is so incomprehensible, so inexplicable, it defies belief. So it was with the O’Sheas.

Young Joe was killed at Da Nang in 1966, one year after he had shipped out to Indochina. Lonnie, who had joined the marines and was also serving in Vietnam, lost his life during the Tet offensive in 1968. He was twenty-one.

And then to their further horror and heartbreak, little Kerry Anne died of complications following a tonsillectomy, shortly before her fifth birthday in 1970.

Reeling from shock and stunned by their enormous grief, Fiona, Joe and Maddy cleaved to each other, were barely able to handle their anguish and the pain of their sudden and terrible losses over five short and fatal years. It seemed to them that each new blow was more ferocious than the one before, and it was a suffering they found unendurable.

Fiona was never really to recover, remained forever after bereft and grieving, but despite this, and even though she needed her only living child by her side, she insisted Madelana continue her higher education at Loyola University in New Orleans, when she became eighteen.

Madelana had set her heart on going there some years before, and her parents had approved of this small college run by the Jesuits. Even so, she was reluctant to leave her parents, her mother in particular, who was so dependent on her, and she was more than willing to change her plans.

But Fiona would have none of it, since it had been a long-cherished dream of hers that Madelana attend college. She knew by this time that she was suffering from cancer, as did Joe, but they scrupulously kept this devastating news from their daughter.

However, four years later, towards the end, Fiona became so debilitated it was no longer possible to hide the medical facts from Maddy, who struggled through her last few months at Loyola fighting despair and endeavouring to hold sorrow at arm’s length. The only thing that kept her going during this excruciatingly painful time was the determination not to let her mother down.

Fiona lived long enough to see Maddy graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in the summer of 1976. She died two months later.

‘Kerry Anne’s going was the last nail in your mommy’s coffin,’ Joe kept saying all through the winter of that year, until the words began to sound like a dreadful litany to her.

Or he would sit and stare at Maddy, then ask, with tears welling in his eyes, ‘Wasn’t one son enough to give to my country? Why did Lonnie have to get massacred too? For what?’ And before she could say anything in response, he would add with anger and bitterness: ‘For nothing, that’s what, Maddy. Young Joe and Lonnie both died for nothing.’

Madelana would take his hand and try to comfort him the best way she could, whenever he talked like this, but she never had any answers for her father, and certainly she had none for herself either. Like the majority of Americans, she had scant understanding of the war they were fighting in Vietnam.

After graduating from Loyola, Madelana had found herself a job in the offices of Shilito’s department store in Lexington.

Despite her hoydenish ways and lack of interest in feminine things as a child, she had fallen in love with clothes in her late teens, and had recognized that she had a great deal of flair when it came to fashion. Retailing attracted her, and when she had been attending college she had decided she wanted to carve out a career for herself in this field.

Madelana’s job in the marketing department at Shilito’s had proved to be challenging, and she had found it both stimulating and absorbing as well. She had thrown herself into the work, and divided her time between the store and the family home, where she had continued to live with her father.

Joe had begun to worry her considerably in the early part of 1977, for he had grown more morose than ever and apathetic since her mother’s death, and, unlike her mother, he seemed unable to draw solace from his religion. He still continued to mutter to Maddy that his sons had died in vain, and she would frequently find him staring at their photographs on the mantelpiece in the living room, his eyes filled with hurt and bafflement, his face grown painfully thin, and ravaged by emotional suffering.

Maddy’s heart ached for him, and she did everything possible in her power to take him out of himself, to cheer him, to give him a reason to go on living, but it was to no avail.

By the spring of that year, Joe O’Shea had become a shadow of the handsome, outgoing, jocular man he had once been, and when he died suddenly of a heart attack in May, Maddy realized, in the midst of her searing grief, that she was not really so surprised. It was as if he had willed himself to die, as if he had desperately wanted to join Fiona in the grave.

Once she had buried her father, Madelana had begun to sort out and settle his business affairs. He had left everything neat and orderly, and so this task was relatively easy for her to do.

His small construction company had been in the black for a number of years, and she was able to sell the equipment, the materials and the ‘goodwill’ to Pete Andrews, who had been her father’s right-hand man and wanted to keep the business going for himself and the handful of old employees. And though it was wrenching for her, she had also sold the house where she had grown up, along with most of her mother’s furniture, and moved into an apartment in Lexington.

It was not very long after this that she had started to understand just how difficult living in Lexington was going to be for her from now on. As much as her beloved bluegrass country was part of her, in her blood, each day grew increasingly painful. Wherever she went, wherever she looked, she saw their faces…her parents, Kerry Anne, Young Joe and Lonnie. She yearned for them and for the past, and for the way things once were.

Her father’s passing had opened up her old grief for the others who had died before him.

She knew she had to get away. Perhaps she could come back one day in the future and rejoice in the past. But now she had to put distance between herself and this place. The heartbreak was too fresh, too potent in her, and her emotions were far too near the surface for her to draw any kind of solace from the memories of her family at this particular moment.

Only through the passing of time would her pain lessen, and only then would she be able to draw a measure of comfort from her remembrances, and find peace in them.

And so Madelana made the decision to move to the North, to go to New York City, to start a whole new life.

She was very brave.

She had no job, knew no one, had no contacts, but at least she had a roof over her head when she arrived in Manhattan. This had already been arranged for her before she had left Lexington.

The Sisters of Divine Providence, a teaching order of nuns from Kentucky, and one of the first such orders to be founded in America, maintained a residency in New York. Rooms could be rented at a nominal charge, and were available to Catholic girls and young women from all over the world.

And it was to this residency, the Jeanne D’Arc, that Maddy went in October of 1977.

Within a week of her arrival at West Twenty-Fourth Street she had settled in, and was beginning to get her bearings.

The sisters were warm and helpful, the girls friendly, and the residency itself was pleasant, convenient, and well run. It had five floors of rooms, with showers and bathrooms on each floor. There was a small but rather beautiful chapel, where the young residents and the sisters could pray or meditate, and close by were the common rooms – a library and a television-parlour. Other facilities included a kitchen and a canteen in the basement, for the cooking and serving of meals, plus a laundry room, and lockers for the storage of personal belongings.

One of the first things Maddy had done was to put her nest-egg of forty thousand dollars in the bank, opening both current and saving accounts. After this she had had her own phone installed in her room on the fourth floor. Patsy Smith, who lived across the corridor from her, had recommended that she do so, explaining that it would simplify her life, make it much easier.

She had then gone looking for a job.

Ever since she had decided to make a career for herself in retailing, Maddy’s role model had been the late Emma Harte, one of the greatest merchant princes of all time, in her opinion. In the past few years she had read everything about the renowned Emma that she could lay her hands on, and Harte’s in New York was the only store where she wanted to work. But she quickly discovered there were no vacancies when she went for an interview. The personnel manager had been impressed with her, however, and had promised to be in touch if something suitable came up. Her résumé and application had been duly filed for future reference.

By the end of her third week in the city, Maddy had managed to find employment in the business offices of Saks Fifth Avenue.

Exactly one year later there was finally an opening at Harte’s and she had grabbed it immediately, filled with enthusiasm at the opportunity to work there, and within six months she had made her mark.

And she had come to the attention of Paula O’Neill.

Paula had spotted her in the marketing department, had been struck by her great personal style, pleasant demeanour, efficiency, and vivid intelligence. Thereafter, Paula had constantly singled her out, given her a variety of special assignments, and had ultimately moved her to work in the executive offices. A year after this, in July of 1980, Paula had promoted Maddy to be her personal assistant, in effect, actually creating this job for her.

With this big promotion and a sizeable increase in salary, Madelana had at last felt reasonably secure enough to look for her own apartment. She had found one she liked in the Upper East Eighties, and had had her furniture and other possessions shipped up from the storage warehouse in Kentucky. And she had finally left the residency, feeling a little pang as she had said goodbye to Sister Bronagh and Sister Mairéad.

The first meal she had cooked at the new apartment had been for Jack and Patsy one Sunday night, just before Patsy had gone back to Boston to live.

It had been a lovely evening, very celebratory, and Jack had kept them amused and laughing. But she and Patsy had grown a bit sad towards the end, knowing they would be living in different cities soon. They had promised faithfully not to grow apart, to stay in touch, and they had corresponded on a fairly regular basis ever since.

With her new promotion, Madelana’s life had changed in other ways, and a whole new world had been opened up to her. Paula had brought her over to London so that she would understand the inner workings of the famed Knightsbridge store, and she had visited the Harte stores in Yorkshire and Paris. And twice Paula had taken her to Texas, although this had been on Sitex business rather than Harte’s. She had discovered how much she enjoyed travelling, going to new places, and meeting new people.

Her first year as Paula’s assistant had fled by, filled with excitement, challenges and continuing successes, and very quickly Maddy had begun to recognize that she had found her niche in life. It was at Harte’s of New York, where she was a star.