Besieged (24 page)

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Authors: Bertrice Small

BOOK: Besieged
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He turned her about so he might kiss her, but did not answer her. His bride did not know Jane Devers as he did. Even now her troublesome mind would be twisting and turning in an effort to find an excuse to make mischief of some sort for the Leslies of Glenkirk, and to justify that wicked behavior as right, based upon her religious beliefs. Not that the Catholics weren’t as bad; for they were. How they could all excuse their viciousness toward one another, and still claim God favored them alone defied logic, Kieran thought.
Toward the end of October Maeve Fitzgerald rode over from Lisnaskea to tell her half-brother that William Devers and his bride were expected home that same day. “Da says to be on your guard as that woman he’s wed to is surely plotting some deviltry.”
“I had heard Da wasn’t at Mallow Court a great deal now,” her brother remarked.
“He’s there enough,” Maeve said sharply.
Kieran put an arm about his half-sister. “What is it, lass?”
Maeve sighed deeply. “I don’t want to leave our mam, and yet she wants us to go with you in the spring, and the truth is that she is right. There is nothing here for us. We’re being driven from our home by the likes of Jane Devers, and her Protestant ilk. And what will happen to Mam when we are gone?”
“Da will protect her,” Kieran said in an effort to comfort his half-sister.
“And when Da is gone?
Do you think your younger brother will respect the fact that Da built Mam her house, and gave her an income? He’ll drive her from it, and send her from Lisnaskea, the only place she’s ever known, and all because she’s a Catholic. God help her!”
“We’ll make a plan,” Kieran promised her. “If that should ever happen, she will come to us in the New World, Maeve.”
“I hate the Protestants!” Maeve declared. “They may hold sway here in Ulster now, but they’ll all burn in the fiery pits of hell one day for their impiety and false religion. I’m glad for it!”
“My wife is a Protestant,” Kieran reminded Maeve.
“Fortune is different, and at least she was once baptized a Catholic. With your help, Kieran, she’ll return to the true church one day, especially when you have children,” Maeve reasoned.
“Don’t waste yourself in hating, little sister,” he told her. Then he sent her back to Lisnaskea, and went to tell his in-laws that William Devers would shortly be home.
He came early the next day, riding through Maguire’s Ford as if the devil himself was on his heels. He stormed into Erne Rock Castle, pushing past a startled servant. He found the family in the Great Hall, breaking their fast of the previous night. They did not see him until pointing a finger at Fortune he shouted at her,
“Whore!”
Before James Leslie, Kieran, or the two younger Leslies might respond, Fortune was on her feet, coming down from the high board to stand in front of William Devers. She slapped him with all her might. “How dare you insult me?” she demanded of him. “Who do you think you are, William Devers, to come into my mother’s house and slander me? You have no rights over me, and you certainly never did!”
“You were to marry me!” he cried, taken aback by her fury. His mother and his wife had spent all the previous evening telling him what an affront Fortune Lindley’s marriage to Kieran was. He had right on his side, damn it!
“There was no marriage contract between us, or our families, Master Devers. I came to Ireland to seek a husband, and you were the first candidate for my hand presented me. I refused you.”
“So you might whore with my bastard brother!”
he accused her. “All the time I courted you so tenderly, you were thinking of him!”
Fortune slapped him again to his surprise. “If you keep calling me foul names, and maligning my husband, Master Devers, I shall go to the local magistrate and register a complaint. Do not think that because Kieran is a Catholic I shall be ignored. I shall not. I am a Protestant, and my brother is the king’s well-loved nephew. As for the king, his wife is a Catholic. Whose side in such a matter as this one do you think the king will favor,
Master
Devers? That of a very unimportant Irish landowner’s son,
or mine?”
“I loved you, Fortune.” His voice was low.
“You were fascinated by me. What you loved, Will, whether you knew it or not, was Maguire’s Ford, and this castle. Even as your mother had taught you,” Fortune said with devastating effect.
“Kieran shall not have it,” William Devers said, his voice now hard, his eyes filled with anger and hate. “My bastard half-brother shall not have Maguire’s Ford and Erne Rock. I will not allow any Catholic to lord it over me, madame!”
“You know the disposition of this estate, Will,” Fortune said. “It is to be equally divided between my brothers who even now sit at the high board, their daggers at the ready to slit your throat,” she mocked. “Now, apologize to me, and to your brother, who is my husband. There is no reason for strife between us.”
“Go to hell, you bitch!” he snarled, and turned to go.
At that moment Kieran Devers leapt from the high board, and dashed across the floor to beard his younger brother. Grasping him by his doublet he said fiercely, “I’ll not kill you lest I have the sin of Cain upon me, Willy, and because I promised my wife I should not; but if you ever insult either of us again,
little brother,
I will forget my promises, and the consequences be damned. My father’s marriage to my mother was a legitimate one even as his marriage to your mother is. If I were the bigot you are I should claim otherwise for is not the Holy Catholic Church the one true church? Some say it is so, Willy, although the Protestants would disagree. Like Fortune and her family I desire no animosity between us, but so help me God I shall beat you senseless if you ever come to Erne Rock again uninvited to cause trouble!” He loosed his hold on the younger man. “Now, get the hell out of here, Willy!” Spinning William Devers about he applied his boot to the seat of his antagonist’s breeches, and pushed.
Stumbling, William Devers almost ran from the hall, but as he reached its entrance he turned, raising a fist to shake it at them. “You will be sorry for what you have done to me, Kieran! I’ll see you dead, and that witch you’ve married who haunts my dreams with you!” Then he was gone.
“He’s mad,” Fortune declared. “There was never anything but a possibility between us. Now he is a married man as I am a married woman, and he can still not let it go.”
“You were his first love, sweetheart,” Kieran said. “In a strange way I cannot blame him. How could any man love you, and then be married to another, Fortune?”
Hearing his words Fortune smiled up at her husband. “I do love you so,” she said softly.
At the high board James and Jasmine Leslie smiled fondly at the pair, but Adam Leslie and his brother, Duncan, rolled their eyes at each other, and snorted their derision.
Hearing them their sister turned about. “You’ll be just as bad one day, my laddies,” she told them.
“Never!” Adam swore. “We dinna like lassies.”
“You will,” chuckled his father, “and sooner, I fear, than later.”
“And make a fool of myself like that William Devers? I dinna think so,” Adam replied scathingly. Then he quickly apologized to his brother-in-law. “Yer pardon, Kieran. I know he’s yer brother, but . . .”
Kieran smiled at the boy. “I take no offense, Adam Leslie, for I fear you are wiser than Willy.”
“Poor William,” Jasmine said sympathetically.
But William Devers didn’t need the duchess of Glenkirk’s sympathy. Filled with righteous anger he returned to Mallow Court quite determined to see that his brother and Fortune were punished for what he had decided were their offenses against him. He was encouraged in this pursuit by his mother and his wife, for like her mother-in-law, Emily Anne Devers had little tolerance for Catholics.
“They must be rooted out of Lisnaskea for good and all,” she said to her husband. “Certainly your father can be made to see reason, William. These people are a danger to us all for they hate us.”
“I will speak with him,” William told her, but when he brought the subject up, Shane Devers was taken aback.
“What do you mean we must drive the Catholics from Lisnaskea?” he demanded of his son. “Are you mad? The peace between Protestant and Catholic is fragile enough as it is. And where are these people who have lived here in this place for centuries to go?”
“The Catholics put us all in peril, Da,” William answered him. “Their popish ways can taint our children.”
His father snorted with derision. He had just about had enough of his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and their bigotry. He had become a Protestant to gain Jane’s hand, and her fortune, but he had never discriminated against his Catholic neighbors.
But a passing servant heard the argument between father and son. He gossiped to his fellow servant, whose sweetheart, a maidservant in the house, had overheard a similar conversation between Lady Devers and the young mistress. The rumors began to fly from Mallow Court into Lisnaskea. Neighbor began to look upon neighbor with suspicion even though only the day before they had been friends.
The priest in Lisnaskea, Father Brendan, began preaching against those who would come into Ulster with its traditions of greatness and put that heritage with its wonderful myths and legends and history to scorn, calling the Irish barbarians, and papists who needed to be taught better. The Protestant minister, the Reverend Mr. Dundas, began to sermonize that only the Protestant faith was the true faith, and any who stood against it must be either brought forcibly to the truth, or destroyed. To worship other than in the proscribed manner was outright treason.
Then one evening as Shane Devers sat quietly with his mistress in her house, sipping his whiskey, the sound of cries reached their ears. Rising from his place by the hearth he went to the door, opened it, and looked out. To his shock he could see several fires burning in the village, and hear the shouts and cry of voices. “I had best go and see what is happening, Molly. Lock the door, and do not open it to any but me. I’ll be back.” He hurried off.
Molly Fitzgerald barred the door as she had been instructed, and called her daughters from their bedchamber, bringing them down into the parlor with Biddy, her servant. “There is some trouble in the village,” she said. “Your da has gone to investigate.”
“ ’Tis been coming all week,” Biddy muttered darkly.
“What have you heard?” her mistress asked.
“No more than you, but I can tell you that young William Devers has been going about stirring up the Protestants, telling them we’re a danger to them, and if we were gone ’twould be heaven on earth in Lisnaskea. And there are those who would listen, mistress.”
“Filthy dissenters! May they all burn in hell!” Maeve said angrily. “I wish I were a man so I might fight them for the true faith.”
“Don’t be a little fool,” her mother said impatiently. “This is William Devers’s outrage at his brother marrying Lady Fortune. He covets Maguire’s Ford.”
“But Kieran isn’t to have it,” Aine, her younger daughter, said. “Surely he knows that, Mam.”
“He won’t believe it, nor will his greedy mother until Kieran and Fortune are gone from Ulster,” Molly said fatalistically.
The sound of shouting seemed to be drawing nearer as the four women huddled by the fireside. Without a word Biddy got up, and drew the draperies shut. She had seen the shadowed figures of men moving toward the house in the light from the fires, but she said nothing, instead going to the front door of the house, and setting the heavy oak bar across it. Then she went to the back of the house, and did the same with the door into the pantry. Molly watched her elderly servant silently, exchanging a questioning look with Biddy who but shook her grizzled head cautioningly.
The smell of burning began to seep through into the house, but Molly was not concerned for her own house was made of brick with a fine slate roof. The angry yelling was close now, and the mistress of the house wondered where Sir Shane had gotten to, and if he was all right. She looked to her two daughters seated by the fireplace, their arms protectively about each other. They were unusually silent, even the usually outspoken Maeve. Suddenly a thunderous pounding came upon the front door. Biddy slid back into the shadows of the room while Molly put a warning finger to her lips as she caught her daughters attention.
Then the glass in one of the windows was smashed violently, and unable to help themselves the women screamed in fright as the draperies were yanked aside, and a man climbed into the room. He glared at them, but said nothing, and going into the hallway unbarred the front door to allow a mob of howling men into the house. They crowded into the elegant parlor, and Molly recognized many of them as her neighbors. The girls were sobbing, terrified.
“How dare you break into my house!” Molly said angrily. “What is this all about? You, Robert Morgan, and you, James Curran! Why I recognize most of you. What is going on?”
The two men she named looked shamefaced, but remained where they were. The others shuffled their feet uncomfortably.
“The whore is bold, is she not?” William Devers moved forward from the crowd of men who stepped aside to let him come. “My father’s Catholic whore thinks she can lord it over us all. Well, you cannot, whore, and you will not ever again.” Raising the pistol he had concealed in his hand William Devers shot Molly Fitzgerald through the heart, killing her instantly.

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