Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (79 page)

Along the east flank of the abbey ran a long open passageway. Here candles burned softly in the arms of the Gothic arches, lighting the way down to the path that ran along the perimeter of the lake. Beneath her slipper-clad feet, the stones were cool and mossy, smooth with the steps of the many pilgrims that had sojourned here over the last eight hundred years. The air was chill and smoky like very fine whiskey, stinging her eyes and spreading a burn along the expanses of skin that were bare to the night.

Movement caught her eye along the shoreline of the lake. It startled her, as she thought all the monks were in the chapel for Compline. The flash of white was not one of the good Brothers, though, but rather a small white deer who was looking at her with some curiosity. In this world of men, perhaps a woman was an oddity. Though not, Pamela thought, as much an oddity as a white deer with translucent pink eyes.

The deer held her gaze for a time-stopped moment, and a small shiver passed along Pamela’s spine as though some strange understanding had passed between the two of them. Suddenly something else caught the deer’s attention, for her ears pricked and she stepped forward, scenting the air.

Jamie stood farther along the shore, the pale fire of his hair identifying him at once. The deer walked toward him without hesitation and took the berries he held in his outstretched hand, eating with a slow gravity that told of how well she trusted the man who fed her. Jamie murmured to the doe while she ate, and Pamela could hear the silky fragments of the Irish language as it slipped from his tongue.

She walked slowly down to join him, careful not to startle the deer, who seemed entirely unconcerned at her approach, though the large ear closest to Pamela flicked the air every few seconds.

Jamie wore a ridiculously big shearling coat that certainly must be the garment of the large and gentle Brother Aloysius, whose height and width would have made even Casey look positively boyish in comparison. In the high-collared coat with its ruff of sheepskin, Jamie looked like a Russian prince freshly returned from the hunt. The deer however, now nosing at his pockets, didn’t seem to agree with this summation.

“Is she always so tame? Or is it just for you?”

Jamie shook his head. “There’s nothing to harm her here, she knows that. She’s known me since she was a baby. Even if she doesn’t see a great deal of me these days, still she remembers.
Tcha
Virginia,” he gently admonished the deer, who’d poked her head entirely under his arm in an effort to see what the smell in his pockets was.

“She’s yours?”

He laughed softly. “Well as far as a wild creature can belong to a man, I suppose you could say so. I found her on my land in Scotland, just up above the pond. Her mother had been killed and she’d either strayed from the herd or been rejected. Being albino isn’t the most advantageous thing in either the human world or the wild, and I knew she wasn’t likely to survive long without help. So I brought her here, where she’d be safe and sheltered from harm. She’ll be ten years old this spring.”

“Why’d you name her Virginia?”

“I named her Virginia Dare for the first English child born in North America,” he answered, watching as the deer moved away from them to nose among the last of the green shoots at the lake’s edge.

“I know who she was,” Pamela said. “What made you name the deer after her?”

“For the Indian legend. You’ve never heard of it?”

“No. Will you tell it to me?”

He smiled above the ridiculous collar. “You always did like your stories. But it’s perishing out here and you’re not dressed for it. Take my coat.”

She shivered, her feet beginning to feel very penitential in their thin coverings. Jamie took the ludicrously large coat off and folded it around her shoulders. She cuddled gratefully into the warmth he’d left in its depths. The thick collar smelled of balsam and smoke and earth.

“You’ll freeze,” she said, even as she stuck her hands deep into the pockets, fingers encountering the oddment of small treasures Jamie seemed to accumulate wherever he happened to be. A bit of rock that had caught his fancy, two of the little aniseed balls that he liked to roll around his tongue when he was deep in thought and a pen with a small scrap of paper attached to its clip.

He smiled, rubbing his own hands together. “It’s good for the soul, or at least Brother Gilles would have me think so. I believe he intends to retrieve my soul for good and all before I leave here. Come, there’s a wee shelter amongst that thick stand of oaks, it’ll cut the chill from the wind.”

The shelter was hewn of wooden planks, three-sided, its front supports built right into the lake, providing an unbroken view of moonlit water to the darkly forested opposite shore. One could be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a crack in the seams of time, and landed smack-dab in the Middle Ages.

“Here, sit.” Jamie pointed to the bench that ran along the back wall of the shelter, while he rooted underneath it.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, settling onto the worn wood.

“Blankets. Father Lawrence generally leaves a couple out here. He knows my habits well. Besides, Jesuits aren’t big proponents of discomfort adding to one’s spirituality, at least not in theory.”

“But they are in practice?”

Jamie grimaced slightly. “What do you think?”

“I think they’re probably the masters of it.”

He came up with a heavy quilt that he spread across her lap, keeping half for himself as he sat down beside her.

“Do you remember that summer I read
Les Miserables
to you?”

She was startled by the question. Jamie rarely ever referred to their shared past.

“Of course I do,” she responded, “as I was rather
miserable
myself that summer. I must have seemed a dreadful little ingrate, moody as I was, and you a complete stranger that had taken pity on me. I doubt it was too attractive for you, coming to see me everyday.”

“Actually that summer saved me. You gave me something to focus on other than my own troubles. Colleen and I had just lost our first son and she’d withdrawn from me, gone to stay with friends in Spain. She was angry with me, and truth be told I was angry with her. It was hurt and confusion more than anything. I’d gone to the Vineyard to sort myself out, an old friend from Oxford had a place there. And then there you were, a little ragamuffin with too much hair, a rebellious streak and a broken ankle. I felt a little like Galahad, coming to your rescue.”

“I remember the night we danced on the shore,” she said softly, “it was the first time I’d ever felt beautiful. I was so awkward and ungainly and yet somehow dancing there with you I felt as though I were someone else entirely.”

“You
were
beautiful, anyone with half an eye could tell you’d be stunning in a few more years,” he grinned, “once you started combing your hair that is.”

“I waited for you to come back every summer,” she said softly, remembering the terrible loneliness of those years, “but you never did.”

He didn’t respond directly. “The more things change the more they stay the same. Here we are and I’m still telling you tales.”

“And my hair is still uncombed,” she said, remembering the nimbus cloud that had floated around her white face in the water’s reflection.

Jamie settled back against the rough planks with a sigh, and she knew that, for whatever reason, their trip down memory lane had made him uncomfortable. When he spoke again, his words curled upward from a slipstream of white breath, as though they were players preparing to take on the forms that existed within his tale.

“I first heard this story when I was staying on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a night around the campfire on the beach, with a dark bluff overlooking the spot where we sat. An old Wampanoag told it, enacting it as he went. There was complete silence when he finished and everyone was looking over their shoulders at the trees. I can’t possibly tell it as he did, it really did seem—watching him—that he was remembering something rather than just a tale he had inherited.”

She smiled to herself, for Jamie was a born storyteller and could captivate an entire roomful of people with the simplest anecdotes. Had he been born a thousand years earlier he’d have sat by the fire, surrounded by shaggy-haired listeners, passing down the legends of creation and flood and fire.

“It’s said that when the first child was born in the settlement of Roanoke the Indians called her White Fawn, and it was told that when this child died, her spirit would take the form of a frosted fawn whose face would always be turned to the Eastern sea, because that was where her people had come from. The story went on to say that if ever a hunter should catch the fawn after she had grown to a doe, and shoot her with an arrow the head of which was tipped with silver, she would be restored to her mortal form.

‘Many years later an Indian hunter named Little Oak came upon the ruins of log houses in the sawgrass of the settlement of Roanoke. There were no pale people living there anymore; the brambles and rose hips had long grown up between the cracks of the logs. Slow autumn turtles lay amongst the abandoned hearths and the sea wind blew through the ashes that had been left behind many moons before. All the hunter could find was an old baby’s rattle, clutched fast in the thorns of a rose bush. Then he spied a beautiful white doe picking her way amongst the ruins of the house just beyond the one he stood in. By instinct he drew his bow, but he couldn’t find it within him to loose the arrow.

‘Time passed and the white doe became well known to the hunters of Roanoke Island. Often she was seen browsing amongst a herd of brown deer that lived there, but she always stood apart, turning her head to the east, sad-eyed and dreaming in the direction of the distant sea. Those who hunted her said that their arrows, though well-aimed, fell harmless at her hooves, whereupon she would leap with the west wind, swift as milkweed down, bounding along the sand hills, driving the quick curlews and iron-winged cranes up into the cold gray sky.

Some feared the deer in her desolation, thinking she was a portent of death, others thought to catch a glimpse of her meant good fortune. Always in the legends, though, she remained apart, yearning for a land across the sea from whence her people had come.

‘Then one early autumn the people of the islands decided to invite all the best bow hunters for a hunt. The plan was to hunt the milk-white doe. If any runner or hunter could bring her down then all would know if she were flesh or spirit and thereafter, if she should prevail, none would ever hunt her again. And so the hunt was on. The hunters spread out swift as a peat fire across dry ground. The best bows were drawn and the straightest arrows notched. Amongst their number was a hunter who carried about him a silver tipped arrow that had come from the faraway isle called England. This arrow was reputed to have come from the icy queen that sat upon the throne in that land. Such a thing, it was said, could reach to the heart of even the most charmed lives.”

Under the spell of Jamie’s voice, Pamela shivered, seeing all too clearly the hunters swift along the ground, the scent of blood on the air, and the body’s primal response to it.

‘And so it happened that the doe was chased from the grasses of the land, through tangled wood and trail-less bog she flew swift and silver as the north wind, with the hiss of loosed arrows following in her wake. She plunged on through the billows of the sound, finally reaching the sand hills of Roanoke. Here she stopped and stood among the ruins of an old fort, winded and tired, breathing in the air of the Eastern sea.

‘In the grass the hunter with the silver-tipped arrow loosed the fated bowstring. The arrow seemed to hang in the salt air for an eternity, glimmering in the moonlight before plunging into the heart of the white doe. She sank to the ground and the hunter threw down his bow, ran to her side and lifted the snowy head to his lap. He looked into the creature’s dying eyes and saw the face of a pretty, young woman who, through dry-bled lips, whispered her name—Virginia Dare—and died.”

With Jamie’s last words the white doe looked up, flicked her ears, and with one quick leap was gone into the dark of the night wood.

Icy mice feet skittered up her spine. “Now that was a little spooky,” Pamela said quietly.

“It’s mostly atmosphere,” Jamie said sensibly, “this place has a sense of being between realities. The first time I came here was practically the same time of year. About a week after I arrived it was All Soul’s Night. They lit the traditional bonfires to warm the souls of the departed, but they also had candlelit lanterns that they set into little boats and put out upon the water. It was beautiful and yet frightening, because this is one of those places where the veil between worlds seems a bit thinner than most places. You know?”

She did know. There were gateways in this world, invisible to the naked eye and yet felt all the same. One sensed it when one strayed too close to them, for then the hair would go up along the skin and the primeval brain would feel eyes watching though none could be found. And there were times in the stillness, if one listened very closely, that the unlatching of those gates could be heard.

She shuddered, instinctively moving closer to Jamie on the bench.

“I thought the fire would draw them. Father Lawrence said that was the point, that the souls that were lost and forgotten could come to the fire and warm themselves, and know for that one night they might be lost but they weren’t forgotten.”

“Sounds pretty pagan for a bunch of monks.”

“Irish Catholicism has always been a mix of both the old ways and the new. The monks here were so isolated that they pretty much worshipped as they liked.”

“How old were you that first time?”

“Seventeen.”

“Did Father Lawrence bring you here then?”

“Yes, on an enforced retreat.”

“Why?” she asked, noting the underlying bitterness in his voice.

“Because Jesuits will do what they feel is best for you even if you don’t agree with them. They’re rather stubborn that way.” The long gold lashes veiled his eyes.

“Must have seemed rather extreme to a boy of seventeen,” she said.