The Maid of Ireland (5 page)

“So there are.” Sarcasm edged her voice. “Pagan runes.”

“Who put them here?”

“Probably the first MacBride to leave his cave and proclaim this the Rock of Muir, his throne. Come along, Mr. Hawkins. We’re almost to the stronghold.”

Clonmuir crouched like a great beast on a cliff overlooking the sea. Its west-facing walls resembled a set of teeth bared at the snarling breakers. To the east rose rocky hills that disappeared into the haze of the night. In the distance, moonlight glimmered around the high gable of a church topped with a heart-shaped finial.

They entered the stronghold through the main gate and walked across a broad yard of packed earth, empty save for a few weeds straggling along the walls and chickens roosting in nests of dried kelp. Wesley could make out the humped shape of a small forge barn and several thatched outbuildings, a cluster of beehives, and a cloistered walkway leading to a kitchen.

“Wait here.” Caitlin left him standing by an ancient stone well while she crossed to a long, low fieldstone building with a stout door. She opened the door and a chorus of equine noises greeted her. The famed ponies of Clonmuir, Wesley realized.

A man’s voice spoke in Gaelic and Caitlin replied in low tones. Wesley strained his ears but could not hear the words. A small girl with long braids crept around the side of the stable, gaped at him briefly, then darted back into the shadows. The years of conquest, Wesley realized, had taught all Irish to be cautious, even in their own homes. A flash of shame heated his face. He had come here under false pretenses to coax secrets from Caitlin MacBride—secrets that could force her to forfeit her home. The idea sat like a hot rock in his gut.

She rejoined him in the yard. “Come along,” she said briskly. “We deny hospitality to no one—even an Englishman.” They made their way to the donjon, a tall, rounded structure with walls pierced by arrow loops and tiny windows. She pushed the heavy main door open.

Sharp-scented peat smoke struck Wesley in the face, stinging his eyes. A translucent gray fog shrouded the scene in layers, from the woven rushes on the floor to the blackened ceiling beams. The great hall had no chimney, only a louvered opening in the roof to draw out the smoke.

Children cavorted with a lanky wolfhound in a straw-carpeted corner. A group of women sat knitting skeins of chunky wool on fat wooden needles. Most of them conversed blithely in Irish, but the youngest was silent, sulky, and dazzlingly beautiful.

At a round table a group of men drank from horn mugs and cracked nuts in their bare hands, throwing the shells to the rush mats. The eldest wore a knitted cap on his head and had a waist-length white beard. Beside him sat the dwarf Wesley had seen with Caitlin. The fellow spoke rapid, colloquial Gaelic and swung his legs as he talked, for his feet did not reach the floor.

Caitlin headed for the table. Wesley watched her face but she held it set, the pure, sharp lines of her features scrubbed clean of sentiment. “We’ve a visitor,” she announced.

A dozen inquisitive faces turned toward Wesley. He wondered if these rough-hewn Irishmen belonged to the Fianna. On the heels of that thought came a sudden, sharp ache. Too many years had passed since he had enjoyed the company of good friends.

He tried to take in their expressions all at once, but got caught on the dwarf. His face was a picture of such pure delight that Wesley couldn’t help smiling, even as he wondered why his appearance so pleased the man.

“He says his name is John Wesley Hawkins,” Caitlin explained. “He’s English.”

Gasps and grumbles colored the smoky air. Large hands closed around knife handles. Women gathered small children to their skirts. Wesley carefully kept his smile in place.

“Is he an idiot?” a big man asked in Gaelic. He had hair the color of West Indies yams and a face that resembled a well-cured ham. He held his horn mug in two great, red-furred paws. “Look at that grin,” the giant said, tossing a nutmeat into his maw. “I say he’s an idiot.”

Wesley made no indication that he understood the foreign, lilting tongue. He was not here to challenge a taunt, but to infiltrate the Fianna, to find out their secrets, and to capture their leader.

“You could be right, Rory,” said Caitlin. “But he’s our guest, and we’ll give him a meal and a place to sleep. Lord knows, Daida has made certain there’s plenty to eat.”

“And why should we be opening hearth and home to a
seonin?
” Rory demanded. “It’s the business of his kind to take the very food out of our mouths.”

Caitlin’s shoulders stiffened. “I didn’t know having an Englishman under the roof frightened you, Rory.”

He shook his shaggy head. “’Tis not that, Caitlin, but—”

“Then we’ll treat him as a guest.”

Enmity blazed in the huge man’s eyes. “If he makes one false move, I’ll put that gawm of an Englishman right through the wall with one great clout.”

Wesley kept a courteous smile on his face when every instinct told him to lunge for the door.

“You’re such a Goth, Rory,” grumbled the dwarf.

“He doesn’t look like an idiot to me,” the white-bearded man said in English. “He looks properly Irish, save for that naked face of his.”

“Don’t insult us,” said another man, dark-haired and nearly as large as Rory. “An English bastard would never fill the fine, wide boots of an Irishman.”

A roar of agreement thundered from others. Horn mugs banged on the tabletop. “Well put, Conn,” shouted Rory, then turned to the man on his other side. “What think you we should do with our guest, Brian?”

Brian had a quick smile, merry blue eyes, and a deadly looking shortsword at his hip. “I say we give him the same reception Jamie Lynch gave his son in Galway all those years ago.”

Shouts of approval met the suggestion. James Lynch Fitzstephen, Wesley remembered with a chill, had hanged his own son from the window of his house.

Caitlin waited for the uproar to subside. Desperately Wesley searched her face for some hint of mercy. He saw unadorned beauty and strong character, but no sign of whether or not she would let the men do their will with him.

The room quieted, and she spoke in a voice that trembled with grief. “Has it come to murdering strangers, then?” Her soft words captured everyone’s attention. “Have we learned to hate so much?”

“I suppose we might see what he’s about,” Rory grumbled into his mug.

Only when he let out his breath with a whoosh did Wesley realize he had been holding it. Squaring his shoulders, he approached the table and held out his hand to the eldest man. “I assure you, sir, I am English, but I don’t necessarily regard that as a virtue.” He clasped the man’s hand briefly, and their eyes met. The Irishman was handsome, with unusually soft skin and strongly defined facial bones. His eyes were light, the color of damp sand. “You’re the MacBride?” Wesley guessed.

“Aye, Seamus MacBride of Clonmuir, by the grace of God and several high saints. You are welcome by me, although I cannot speak for the others.”

“Devil admire me, but I like him,” piped the dwarf, bobbing his head. “Fortune brought him here.”

Caitlin’s gaze snapped to him. “And what would you be knowing that you’re not telling us, Tom Gandy?”

Tom Gandy’s eyes rounded into circles of innocence and he dropped to the floor. In his beautiful green doublet, silk pantaloons, and tiny buckle shoes, he would not look out of place in a portrait of the Spanish royal family.

Disregarding Caitlin’s question, Tom said, “Don’t we all know that it’d bring the bad luck on us to treat a stranger ill?” Rory slapped his forehead. Caitlin rolled her eyes.

Wesley looked back at Gandy only to find that the man had vanished. “Where did he go?” Wesley asked.

“He can go to the devil for all I care,” grumbled Rory. He scowled up at Caitlin. “You went off alone again. How many times must I tell you, it’s dangerous.”

“You are not my keeper, Rory Breslin,” she replied.

“Not for want of trying,” said Brian with a knowing wink.

Wesley observed the tension in her body, the pause no longer than a heartbeat during which she looked to her father. But Seamus MacBride didn’t notice; he had lifted his gaze to the patch of star-silvered sky visible through a high window.

Suddenly, Wesley understood her problem. He didn’t know which to credit—his experience with women or his experience as a cleric—but he had insights into female hearts, and he was rarely wrong.

Caitlin MacBride wanted her father to be a father, not an old man reminiscing over a mug of rough brew.

Furthermore, Seamus MacBride was completely unaware of his daughter’s needs.

Interesting, Wesley thought. And perhaps useful.

He paid close attention as Caitlin introduced some of the others, rattling off names like a general calling roll. Liam the smith, as wide and thick as an evergreen oak; young Curran Healy whose eyes spoke the hunger of a boy longing to be treated as a man; a surly villager called Mudge; and a host of others united in their loyalty to Clonmuir and their suspicion of their English visitor. In addition, there were wayfaring families who huddled around the fire and ate with the avid concentration of those who had known the ache of hunger.

Wesley told them he was a deserter from Titus Hammersmith’s Roundhead army.

The men of Clonmuir told him they were fishermen and farmers, shepherds and sawyers.

Wesley thought they were lying.

They thought he was lying.

“Our visitor’s got a thirst on him,” Conn O’Donnell announced with a wolfish grin.

To Wesley’s surprise and pleasure, it was Caitlin herself who held out a mug. Their fingers brushed as he took it. The contact sent a shock of heat through him. He sought her eyes to see if she, too, had felt the quick fire.

Her momentary look of confusion told him she had. She drew her hand away, tossing her head as if to shake away the spell. “Drink your poteen, Mr. Hawkins.”

He sniffed suspiciously at the contents of the mug. “Poteen, is it?”

Taking a mug of her own, she dropped to the bench beside him. An almost-smile flirted with her lips. “It’s not usually fatal to drink the poteen.”

Still Wesley hesitated. “What’s it made of?”

“’Tisn’t polite to be asking,” she retorted, taking a slow sip from her cup. Her lips came away moist and shiny. “Just barley roasted over slow-burning peat and distilled. Savor it well, Mr. Hawkins, for you English have burned the barley fields since we brewed this last batch of courage.”

Goaded by the reminder and by the gleam in her eyes, Wesley lifted his mug and drank deeply.

The liquid shot down his gullet and exploded in his gut. A fire roared over the path the poteen had taken. Tears sizzled in his eyes. An army of leprechauns bearing torches paraded through his veins. “Barley, you say?” he rasped.

“Aye.” All innocence, Caitlin took a careful second sip. “Also pig meal, treacle and a bit of soap to give it body.”

Wesley quickly learned the art of judicious sipping. Avoiding questions, he took supper in the hall, then retired with a cup of tame ale to the hearth. The meal of stale bread and something gray and soupy he dared not inquire about cavorted with the poteen in his stomach. He thought longingly of the sumptuous suppers he had enjoyed with England’s underground Catholics and royalists. White-skinned ladies had delighted in teaching Laura her table manners. His former life had been fraught with danger, but he had known occasional comforts.

As the men spoke of an upcoming feast, Wesley expected Caitlin to withdraw to the women’s corner. But she stayed at the central hearth, staring from time to time into the glowing heart of the turf fire as if she saw something there that no one else could see. Wesley wondered what visions lurked behind those fierce, sad eyes. Someday he would ask her.

* * *

“What are you looking at,
seonin?
” asked Rory. He and Wesley stood in a thatch-roofed outbuilding at Clonmuir. Rory held a broken cartwheel in one hand and a vise in the other.

“Your arm,” said Wesley, eyeing the intimidating bulge of muscle beneath Rory’s tan hide. Lord, they grew men big and tough in these Irish parts. He wore a broad silver armlet engraved with Celtic knots. From elbow to shoulder ran a long, shiny scar. “How did you hurt yourself?”

Rory tried to work a stave around the wheel. The iron hoop slipped. Patiently he set it back in place. “I cut it while sharpening a plowshare.”

And my mother’s the Holy Roman Empress, thought Wesley, propping his elbow on a stone jutting from the rough wall. It was a sword cut if he’d ever seen one, and he had seen plenty, some on his own body. He must remember to ask Titus Hammersmith if he recalled wounding one of the warriors of the Fianna.

Rory Breslin was certainly big enough to make a formidable fighting man. But Wesley doubted he could be their fabled leader. Though strong as a bullock, Rory was also as simple as one of the shaggy beasts that used to graze over the hills of Ireland. He didn’t possess the guile to lead men into battle and out so successfully, time and time again.

“Why don’t you drive a nail into the stave to hold it while you secure the other end?” Wesley suggested.

Rory’s thick eyebrows lifted eloquently. “I’ll not be needing your English advice.”

“I wonder,” Wesley said carefully, “why you and the men aren’t out fishing. It appears Clonmuir could use the food.”

“Because the
Sassenach
burned our fleet,” Rory snapped. “Every vessel’s gone save a curragh and the leaky hooker.”

Hearing the pain in the big man’s voice, Wesley flinched. “I don’t hold with such practices.”

Rory gave a dissatisfied grunt and went back to his work.

“Why aren’t you at prayers with the rest of them?” Wesley inquired.

“You ask a lot of questions, English.”

“Very well, I’ll leave you to your chores.” Wesley stepped toward the door.

“Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be—” Rory broke off.

“Keeping an eye on me,” Wesley said with a breezy grin. “Don’t blame you a bit, my friend. Seems you’ve ample cause to distrust an Englishman.” He gazed out the doorway. Beyond the walls lay the tiny village of thatched huts clustered shoulder-to-shoulder around the church, bleached white by the wind. Behind them the land rose up, hills scored by deep clefts and clad in budding heather.