Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (81 page)

“He’s yours, though you can leave him here if you like. Billy’s already under his spell, though he says he’s a moody bastard. Still, you’ve a touch with horses that’s rare. Even Billy agreed that if he was likely to behave for anyone it was you.”

“Oh Jamie, thank you!” She flung her arms around him, and hugged him tightly. Trust him to know that if anything could touch her in her current state, it would be horseflesh. She had not had a horse of her own since her father had died when she was sixteen.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Phouka, I’ve got his papers in my study. He’s a beauty isn’t he?” Jamie stroked the horse’s long gleaming neck and Phouka nosed at his coat pockets, looking for apples or sugar cubes, no doubt.

“He’s utterly glorious,” she sighed and leaned her head into the horse’s neck, breathing in the smell of his coat—hay and oats and a pure green smell that was simply young healthy horse. It was, for her, the scent of heaven.

Phouka breathed out heavily, snorting into her hair. She laughed and Jamie handed her an apple. “Here, he’s hopelessly spoiled, so you’ll have your work cut out with him.”

Phouka took the apple between silky gray lips, munching fastidiously as the great brown eyes stared down a haughty length of nose at her. He blinked and stuck his cold nose in the lee of her neck, blowing out a great gust of apple-scented air.

“I knew it,” Jamie said with satisfaction, “he’s already taken to you. Been a complete SOB in the stable these last twelve hours, driving everyone to distraction—myself included—and he’s putty for you. So what do you say? Do you want to put him through his paces?”

“Right now?” she asked, though the horse was saddled and edgy as a train ready to charge out of the station.

Jamie nodded, and helped her up onto the horse’s back. It took her a moment to find her seat; it had been a long while since she’d ridden. Her hands flexed around the reins, thighs tensing against the horse’s sides.

Jamie gave Phouka a gentle slap on the rear end and the two of them were off into the frost-gilded morning. The air was heady as chilled champagne, frost riming the gates and glittering in the boughs of trees. In the western sky, Orion was sinking into the horizon, his belt shining softly like arctic pearls.

Phouka had a high step even to his canter, and the suppressed power beneath her was evident in both his energy and the way he moved. She kept him reined in a bit, careful for ice and the slickness of frost on grass. When his hooves found the comfort of the old bridal path that ran down to the very edges of the Kirkpatrick estate, she let him out a little and Phouka took his head and ran with it.

They might have crossed the invisible boundary into Faerie Land, so otherworldly was the dawn. The trees, diamond-edged chiascuros against air, seemed dimensionless and without weight. Everything—trees, stars, and the very morning itself, hung high in the ringing crystal air. She laughed aloud with the pure perfection of the moment and Phouka, catching her excitement, ran faster.

She had no idea how much time had passed when she realized her surroundings were no longer familiar. Both the trees and underbrush looked foreign, the oaks having changed to thick growths of hazel, their smooth trunks black and misted, their roots spread with small milk-capped fungi. She slowed Phouka down to a canter and then to a walk, gazing about her in confusion.

The cottage was small, and so immured into its surroundings that she was almost on top of it before she realized it was there. It was only Phouka’s stomach, which had detected some withered corn stalks in the garden, that stopped them before they collided with a stone wall, overgrown with masses of ivy.

She got down off the horse, looping his reins over the wooden gatepost that led into the garden. She frowned trying to get her bearings. She had ridden that bridle path dozens of times, but had never before come across this small cottage and she had the eerie thought that it only existed in some alternate reality, and that she would wake shortly to find herself one hundred years older. She thought she well knew the borders of Jamie’s land. She shivered. The morning felt suddenly cold.

The cottage was shuttered, and looked like it had been abandoned for the winter. The thatch on the roof was relatively fresh, though, and must have been replaced as recently as the spring.

Inside the wall was a garden. In it, the winter skeletons of lavender and rosemary stood stark and brown. Heads of dill weed were crowned with puffs of snow and the dry pods of poppies rattled in the chill December wind. Vines grew round the thatch-eaves, and apple trees with mossy trunks crowded up to the low and deep embrasure of the back door.

She approached the door and knocked on the heavy wood, painted a deep green that looked as though it, unlike the thatch, had seen many a season. There was no response.

A small window, thick-glassed and square, sat divided into four equal leaded panes in the upper half of the door. She rubbed away the frost crystals on one of the lower squares and peered in, cupping her hands to the sides of her face to block the outdoor light.

The cottage was simple and neat, composed of three small rooms. The main room that she looked in upon was both kitchen and parlor. The furniture was spartan and hand-hewn, bare of linens which would have been folded away to save it from damp and mildew. Small muslin bags hung suspended from the thatch, and she knew they would hold the dried contents of the garden. The counters were neat, no sign of occupation upon them. Saving for a long white envelope that looked as though it had sat waiting for some time for someone to come and open it. She narrowed her eyes, for there was writing on the envelope, just the one word stroked in a heavy, black hand. Five letters and a symbol. She tilted her head and squinted in an effort to bring the word into focus. Quite suddenly it did, and her heart began to thump painfully in her chest.

She stepped back, crushing the leaves of a comfrey plant that crept round about the doorstep. The hair on the back of her neck prickled unpleasantly, and though the silence was still complete beyond Phouka’s nosing amongst dry-leaved plants, there was a sense of something having moved amongst the trees.

Most likely an animal she thought, trying to calm her pounding pulse. She turned and walked toward the horse, realizing that she was holding her breath, waiting for that sound that was no sound at all.

She had no reason to be poking about this cottage, other than the oddity of it being upon Kirkpatrick land and Jamie never having mentioned its existence. Even that, she admitted, did not give her the right to trespass. And that was what she was feeling now, a sense of trespass, despite what she had just seen in that cottage.

Phouka raised his head from the edges of the winter-shorn garden, his gaze bright and inquisitive. She hurried toward him, wanting nothing more than to be away from this place with its desolate garden and shuttered windows.

She gave Phouka his head once again, trusting that he would lead the way home without mistake. His ears pricked; the light was now clear and the sky above pale with full morning.

The forked path became plain as they approached it, the wood once again turned comfortingly to oak and ash. In the distance, she could hear the ringing of church bells greeting the morning of Christ’s birth. When she turned back the path was no longer visible, though, and she could not see where it forked. She shivered and gave Phouka a nudge with her knees.

Within minutes they came up on the edge of the lawn. Christmas lights glowed comfortingly through the windows, and she hoped that she hadn’t missed Lawrence waking.

Jamie was in the stable, rationing out the small, winter morning feed of oats and corn. She knew he often did this chore himself, relishing the quiet company of the horses in the early hours, when no one else was about and there were no immediate demands on his attention.

The stable was warm, smelling of fresh hay and well-oiled leather. The feeling of otherworldliness shed itself in such prosaic surroundings. Phouka followed her to his stall, where his breakfast waited.

“Well then,” Jamie asked, looking up from the hay cube he’d just cut the twine from, “how was he?”

“He’s perfect,” she said softly, still half tranced from the weird magic of the morning.

Jamie tossed her a currycomb as he unbuckled the saddle from Phouka and hung it over the stall gate. He grabbed another comb and set to work on Phouka’s right hand side. Pamela worked her way from the silky mane, the color of polished pewter, to the gleaming sides as the horse breathed out in noisome content.

“Jamie, who lives in the cottage down at the bottom of your land?”

He looked up startled, a flash of fear rippling through his eyes, and then gone so that she wasn’t certain if she had only imagined it.

“An old lady,” he said, “whose family has been on this land for many generations.”

“Is she a tenant then?” she asked, disturbed by the sharpness of his tone.

“No. In fact you might say I’m her tenant,” he moved off to grab a soft cloth to finish Phouka’s grooming, but she had the strong feeling the action was more to avoid her eyes than anything else.

“Her tenant? What on earth do you mean, Jamie?”

“Nothing—a silly joke—ignore me. Just don’t venture down there again, alright? There’s an old well or two that needs tending to and I’d rather you stayed away. The old woman doesn’t welcome company, I’ve not spoken with her in years. She wasn’t there, was she?”

“No, the cottage was empty.”

“Well just stick to the horse path from now on.”

“I thought I had, but I must have made a wrong turning somewhere along the way.”

“Just stay away, it’s not safe.”

She nodded.

“I mean it Pamela, it’s not safe. A fall down one of those old wells would kill you.”

“I promise I won’t go back there,” she said with some exasperation, knowing instinctively that it was not ancient wells that had Jamie so troubled, but rather the idea that she’d stumbled across the cottage.

She watched him out of the corner of her eye, as she gave Phouka his final strokes with the comb. Much, she realized, as he had watched her now for the last weeks, worry over the miscarriage and its effect on her clouding his eyes. This morning he had tried to take some of that pain away for her. For the last hour she had managed to forget the darkness inside, the echoing hollow at the center of her being filled instead with the pure physical pleasure of taking a horse through its paces. And she understood that Jamie had meant for the horse to do exactly that.

“Thank you—for the horse, but for everything else as well. Taking us in, caring for us. Mostly, though, I want to say thank you for being my friend.”

Jamie paused, hands full of hay as he broke apart another cube for Grainne, who was awake and rumbling in her stall. “It’s my pleasure.” He smiled, one of those quicksilver flashes that was heart stopping, his green eyes faceted as emeralds in the half-light of the stable. “It always has been.”

“Now,” he continued brightly, “we should head back to the house. Lawrence will be up soon and Maggie will have my head if I’m not ready to cut the pudding when it comes off the stove.”

Jamie chatted all the way up to the house, about the events that lay in the day ahead, conferring with her about the wine and food, and basically filling the questioning silence as fully as he could. She recognized the form of avoidance, and decided that for now she would respect it.

And so she did not ask him why a woman, to whom he’d not spoken in years, had left an envelope with his name written across it, along with two interlocking rings drawn in the same dark hand in the topmost left hand corner.

CHRISTMAS ON BOARD A PRISON SHIP wasn’t likely high on the list of how people would choose to celebrate the season but it wasn’t, Casey thought, altogether the worst Christmas he’d experienced either.

He looked about him, neck still somewhat stiff but no longer painful. Matty was building wee stickmen from yarn and matchsticks, between taking nips off a bottle of cherry wine. Everyone had shared in his largesse earlier in the day, and as a result a fug of mellow peace hung over them. Declan was industriously knitting away at a puce colored balaclava. When ribbed about this particular occupation he’d merely said ‘twouldn’t be his ears fallin’ off when the cold came.’ Roland was still sleeping off the previous evening’s rampage, knobby shoulder blades just poking above the blanket, and Shane was re-reading his wee pile of Christmas cards for about the hundredth time that day.

Despite his refusal to allow visits, Pamela had left a Christmas parcel earlier in the week. Around Casey was arrayed the plunder. Declan who always found the cold perishing, had a pair of football socks, tucked up over his jeans, their broad green and white stripes finishing gaily at his knees. Matty his own bottle of Connemara Mist, which he was wont to pat lovingly now and again. Roland a book of the saints, and Shane the component parts (inventively smuggled in in a fruitcake) of a small transistor radio.

For himself there was a letter from Pamela full of all the bits of news she knew he’d long to hear, an array of goodies that he’d immediately shared out amongst the men, and a bright red muffler she’d knit herself, which, were he inclined to lay down and roll himself up in it, might have served nicely as a blanket. It was warm, though, and smelled sweetly of her perfume. He’d not removed it, other than to wash, since he’d opened the package. She’d also included toothpaste and new brushes for everyone.

Lawrence had sent a scrawled note, full of misspellings and assurances that he was ‘looking after tings’. Pat had sent a letter and a book, Sylvie some baking. From Jamie there was the requisite bottle, warm socks and a curtly coded note that gave him the lay of the land, both politically and personally. The thing he’d most wanted, though, had been at first conspicuous by its absence. However, realizing the bastard was never one to make things easy, he re-read the note several times, turning it round and perusing it from every angle. Still no joy though, he couldn’t find anything beyond what he’d already deciphered.