Taps made of pure gold, a bedroom lined with silk . . . luxuries such as these were the stuff of fairy-tale to Dublin novelist Mary Ryan. When she was a child, her grandmother, Charlotte Larkin, used to tell her of a little girl in the US whose house was decorated in just such extravagant style. As an adult, Ryan decided to investigate these family stories of untold wealth, and discovered they were all true. The girl, Evalyn Walsh, was the daughter of gold-prospecting millionaire Tom Walsh, Ryan's own great-great-uncle.
Tom Walsh is the real-life hero of Hope, a new book by Ryan, who describes her famous ancestor thus: "He was probably the most successful emigrant, in monetary terms, to leave these shores." He was also "a highly cultivated and educated man, albeit self-educated. I've read his business letters, written in beautiful copperplate". Camp Bird, the Colorado gold-mine Walsh discovered in 1896, yielded an estimated $5,000-worth of gold a day, earning Walsh $1.2 million a year and making him one of the richest men in the world.
Walsh is described in the National Encyclopaedia of American Biography as "a man of extraordinary fine parts, generous to a fault, warm-hearted, chivalrous and genial - a typical western American gentleman". Certainly the working conditions at Camp Bird were far superior to any other mine. It was no surprise, Ryan points out, that when American miners went on strike in the early 1900s, the Camp Bird miners - who worked shorter shifts and had their own library and hospital - did not take part in the action.
Tom, the son of a Co Tipperary tenant farmer, emigrated to Boston with his sister, Maria. There he worked as a carpenter, moving on to Colorado, at first to work on the railroads. He was tempted by the lure of prospecting in the mining town of Ouray. After an initial run of good luck, the market for silver collapsed, and he was about to go bankrupt along with many others who had briefly made fortunes in the silver mining industry. Feverishly ill but full of determination, he ended up driving his pick into a rich seam of gold at an abandoned mine he had spotted when he and his daughter, Evalyn, were nearly frozen to death in a blizzard.
His fabulous wealth passed to Evalyn, a Scarlett O'Hara type with plenty of spirit and a wilful temper, whom he indulged shamelessly. Evalyn's extravagant devil-may-care nature drew her to purchase the Hope diamond, a unique blue gem from India said to carry bad luck.
"The Walsh story is so vast and fascinating," says Ryan. "It was hard to know where to stop." She has already cut the novel to half the size of her original manuscript. She is now working on "a companion novel", which will focus more on what was happening to the family Walsh left behind in Ireland, and bring the reader as far as the second World War.
What was it like writing about real historical characters as opposed to inventing them?
"It was much harder," confesses Ryan, whose first novel, Whispers in the Wind, was published in 1990 and became a bestseller. "When you're faced with the truth, you don't feel you have the same licence."
Although she admits she shaped the story into a novel and added a few of her own ingredients (including a cousin with whom Evalyn falls hopelessly in love, and a legacy from Tom to his Irish relations that is embezzled by a gambling solicitor in Cork), she insists: "They are as close to the truth as I could get. Tom Walsh was a very fine man and Evalyn was a wonderful character. I now feel I know them as people, so much so that it seems extraordinary that I can't just pick up the phone and talk to them."
Not only did she have access to some of Tom's correspondence and speeches (he was in great demand as a speaker), she also read Evalyn's memoirs, published in the 1930s, entitled Father Struck it Rich. From the latter she gleaned much information about Evalyn's life, and also some of the descriptions of the gowns worn by the flamboyant heiress, including one made by Worth in Paris of yellow velvet "with lace and inset diamonds".
The novel includes snippets from newspaper reports, including coverage of the tragic death of Vinson, Tom Walsh's only son, in an automobile accident in Newport, Rhode Island. This same accident broke Evalyn's leg and led to her addiction to morphine to dull the subsequent intense pain. A "courageous and quirky" woman, she managed to kick her habit eventually, Ryan notes, but then "hit the booze". Her husband, Ned McLean, son of newspaper magnate John McLean, ended up dying in a sanatorium, his sanity pickled by alcohol. "Evalyn and Ned were given money to burn. They didn't respect it and in the end were destroyed by it," Ryan says.
She believes Tom Walsh's "biggest weakness" was to over-indulge his children: Evalyn herself spoke of the folly of putting unearned wealth into untutored hands. "She was right." Evalyn's most extravagant and wilful gesture was her purchase of the notorious Hope diamond, set in an elaborate necklace, for $154,000. Said once to have been the eye of Sita, a Hindu idol, the rare blue diamond was stolen in the 17th century by a man who was subsequently eaten by dogs. After it was purchased by Louis XIV of France, the king died of gangrene, all of his children having predeceased him. Hence the jewel's reputation for being cursed.
But Evalyn believed that unlucky things were lucky for her, and if she was right, it was the Hope diamond that prevented her from drowning along with so many other monied socialites on the Titanic (she changed her plans at the last minute). If the curse is to be believed, however, it seems no coincidence that Evalyn's oldest son died after being hit by an automobile shortly after having sneaked into his mother's jewel case to handle the sinister bauble.
Ryan plays up the dramatic tension in the novel as a result of Evalyn's purchase. While claiming scepticism, Ryan herself maintains with a laugh that she wouldn't have the jewel under her roof. Evalyn was the last private owner of the Hope diamond, which Ryan saw in the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
"Apparently the postman who delivered it to the museum had bad luck within the year," she says. "His wife died, his dog died, his house burned down and his leg was crushed in an accident."
Ryan, who has been nothing if not prolific since her writing career began, and who only gave up her day job as a solicitor five years ago, spent three years researching and writing Hope. Her research led her to the Camp Bird mine (closed since 1995) and the town of Ouray in the Rockies, where she explored Walsh's old stomping ground. Once the locals heard of the family connection, she was treated "like royalty". She went to Washington DC to visit the sumptuous house at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue (now the Indonesian embassy) where Walsh entertained presidents and other dignitories, "delighted with the knowledge, as I walked up the famous staircase, that Tom and Carrie his wife, Evalyn and Vin, had held the same banister and trod the same treads."
In fact, Tom Walsh installed an electric elevator in the house at a cost of £5,000, and had a royal suite built in case his friend, King Leopold of Belgium (whom he met while a US commissioner to the Exposition in Paris), should ever pay a visit.
Ryan also travelled to Nashville, where she met John Gregory, Tom Walsh's great-great-grandson, who gave her the family photographs reproduced in the book. In Paris, she met Evalyn's grandson, John McClean, who remembers biting the Hope diamond as a child (Evalyn was deliberately blasΘ about the gem, leaving it lying around and sometimes using it on the collar of her Great Dane).
Tom Walsh remained passionately interested in Ireland's progress towards independence, and stayed in touch with members of his family here, sending money and gifts on a regular basis. He renamed his Colorado estate "Clonmel" and two of his mines were called "Old Ireland" and "Tipperary". During his one return visit to his native country, he offered to pay for the building of a new church in his local parish. The priest, however, refused to accept the money because Walsh was a lapsed Catholic who had married a Protestant.
This is the vital clue, believes Ryan, to why Walsh is not remembered here as he should be. There is no memorial to him in Clonmel, nor is his name widely known.
"The Church always had control over our education and they probably didn't mention him because he had not remained a practising Catholic," says Ryan. "Isn't it pathetic? The man was hugely successful and also managed to retain his integrity. He deserves to be remembered and known in Ireland."
Now, thanks to her book, perhaps he will.
Hope by Mary Ryan is published by Headline (£16.99 in UK)