Character Biography: Tilly Gallagher

Busy day, making progress on short story, and next biography posted.

Daily Diary, May 25, 2023, Day 996:

As usual for a Thursday, I am very busy because I have a regular zoom meeting mid-day, and often I have a second phone meeting right after that, as I do today. In short, between doing 2 walks, my normal cleaning, doing a final pass-through on the character biography below, I will be lucky to get any writing on the short story done. However, I am confident I will have scene 4 ready to put up here by Sunday or Monday. Here is one of the bushes I encountered today, simply bursting with blooms.

---

Tilly Gallagher:

Tilly, one of the servants in the O’Farrell street boardinghouse, was born the spring of 1866 in Ireland, was sixteen when the events of Dandy and the Dognapper occur. She came to America three years earlier when she was thirteen, brought over by her aunt, Mrs. O’Malley. Readers will be familiar with Mrs. O’Malley and her daughter, Bridget (Biddy) from numerous books in the series, including the short story, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery, and the most recent novel, Entangled Threads, in which Biddy O’Malley is one of the main characters.

Physical Description: Tilly is very small, which makes her look younger than she is, and she has black hair and blue eyes. She was introduced by Kathleen Hennessey in the second book of the series, Uneasy Spirits, in this fashion: “Biddy’s cousin had shown up first thing this morning, her cheeks pink, her hair a mass of black corkscrew curls, and her mouth filled with the soft sounds of Gaelic, which reminded Kathleen so much of her own mother’s voice. While teaching Tilly meant every task took twice as long, it had been ever so much fun to be working with someone. Making the beds, dusting the parlor, beating the rugs, washing the dishes, every task had felt more like a game, borne along by Tilly’s shy giggle.”

Personality: When we first meet Tilly, she simply appears as quiet and shy. However, as the reader discovers in the short story, Tilly Tracks a Thief, much of this behavior is due to her constant anxiety. Her childhood of poverty, with a mother who was dying of tuberculosis and an abusive father, means that she worries constantly about making mistakes or upsetting anyone. However, living and working in the boardinghouse has given her a greater sense of security, and she has begun to come out of her shell. She is also a natural care-taker, having taken responsibility for her aged grandmother back in Ireland and her young O’Malley cousins when she first arrived in America.

While Tilly shows up in almost all the stories, at the beginning, she seldom says more than a sentence or two. This changes in the short story Dandy’s Discovery, which is when we first learn of the friendship between Emmaline and Tilly. On the surface, this seems like an odd pairing: Emmaline with her advanced education, fine dresses, and air of refinement, and Tilly, with no formal education and a childhood spent wearing cast-offs and taking care of her family’s pigs.

Yet, they both, perhaps for different reasons, have a natural reserve and a keen ability to observe others, strengths they recognize in each other. However, their greatest bond is their mutual determination to do all they can to improve the lives of Emmaline’s elderly dressmaking aunts.

While in Dandy’s Discovery, Tilly plays a minor role, I found that I wanted to learn more about her past, which is why I gave her an entire story of her own, Tilly Tracks a Thief. In a similar fashion, as I started to write Dandy and the Dognappers, I hadn’t intended to give Tilly a major role, but at the end of scene three, she spoke up, and now it seems she is insisting she not be ignored.