Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (54 page)

Within two weeks, he wasn’t sure how he’d managed
before she came along. When he arrived on the days the center was open, there was already tea prepared, the mail sorted and the filing done.When he queried how she managed it, she explained that she wasn’t stone blind and could see things if brought up very close to her face… which made him wonder why she had allowed him to believe she couldn’t see a blessed thing upon their first meeting. However, he knew when a universal appeal was answered in such an efficient manner, one did not question it too closely, especially when the answer was—it was soon clear—far better equipped than he to sort out the riffraff from the people who genuinely needed his help. She did not suffer fools gladly, but had endless patience for those who needed assistance filling out paperwork, and the fortitude to push through all the bureaucratic red tape they encountered on a daily basis. She freed him to do what he did best, and that was get out into the community to deal with people face to face and decide how best to meet their needs.

They took to having afternoon tea together on the days when they were both in the office, sorting out the paperwork, answering each other’s questions and just generally decompressing from another day living in the wilds of Belfast.

It was on one of those afternoons, when the phone had managed not to ring in twenty minutes and they were both comfortably quiet over their afternoon biscuit and tea, that he asked her why she didn’t have a man in her life. A question which, he ought to have known, would cause her to bristle.

“You needn’t worry yourself on that score,” she said, in her straightforward manner. “I’m not in the market for a man, and if I were I wouldn’t set my sights on you.”

“Whyever not?” he asked, half to egg her on, and half out of real curiosity. Kate, lovely as she was, didn’t seem to have any sort of social life outside her secluded existence with her brother. There were obvious reasons for that, but he sensed there was more to it than what met the eye.

She gave him one of her crisp looks, as though she were assessing how big of an eejit he was just at the moment. At such times, it was hard to believe the woman could not see more than the vague outlines of things.

“Because I had a man I loved very much, but he’s gone now and I am not fool enough to think I’ll find his like again. As to why not yourself—well, it’s clear to me, Patrick Riordan, that your own heart is well and truly broken. I’d be an eejit dyed in the wool to take on such a thing.”

“Oh.” He nodded, nonplussed—mostly because it was baldly true. “May I ask what happened to yer man?”

“He was a Prod and a soldier, and he’s dead now—shot on duty.”

“My God. I’m sorry, Kate.” He thought it was a miracle the man had been killed on duty, and not tortured to death by her brother.

“I don’t need your pity, man, any more than you need mine.”

“Right,” he said briskly, feeling as though she had verbally smacked him in the head, not the first time he’d felt so and not, he was certain, the last either.

“Ye will have had yer own loss as well.” She said in a more conciliatory tone.

“An’ how do ye know she’s dead? Maybe she just left me.”

“Because her presence is everywhere that ye go but ye never speak her name. So I expect that she died, an’ did not merely leave ye. Besides, I suspect yer not the sort of man a woman leaves voluntarily.”

“Aye, she died,” Pat said quietly, “died by a car bomb that was meant to kill me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was tempted to bite back at her that he had no need of her sympathy either, but her tone was so sincere that he kept his tongue still.

In an odd way, they fit one another, he realized. They were both broken, both wanting to be left to get on with the tasks at hand, both keeping their heads down and moving forward as much as one could in this uncertain land.

In another odd way, he realized he didn’t feel quite so alone anymore.

Chapter Forty-one
March 1974
Finola

The cottage sat at the bottom of the Kirkpatrick estate
, buried in the surrounding woodland. It reminded Pamela somewhat of the quintessential crone’s cottage in fairytales. When she had first stumbled upon it, she had questioned Jamie as to the occupant. His rather cryptic answer had been that he was the tenant of the woman who lived there. She had her suspicions about the mysterious woman, though the cottage had sat empty for quite some time now. Today it looked as though someone had been around, if not in residence. She rode Phouka up to the low wall where a weathered gate hung between two ivy-clad posts.

She was not here on a pleasure ride today, as she had been that Christmas morning long ago. She thought it was high time she and the occupant met.

She slid down off Phouka, looping the reins over a gatepost.

“Can I help ye?” said a sharp voice directly behind her.

She let out a small yelp and clutched at her heart. “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that—“

“That anyone was home.”

“No,” she replied, tone tart enough to match the woman who faced her. “I just didn’t realize you were right behind me.” She turned. “I wasn’t snooping, I usually ride this way and this is the first time the cottage has been occupied.”

“Aye,” the woman said, narrowing her green eyes in assessment. “That’s true enough. I’ve been away for a time, and am only now come home.”

Pamela took the opportunity to study her features, looking for genetic traces of James Kirkpatrick, but saw few. She was small, but not with Jamie’s whip-like grace and her skin darker than Jamie’s simmered gold.

In the bones of her face, though, Pamela saw echoes of Jamie’s feline grace, distilled by time and sex into something softer but no less formidable. Her hair was a pale chestnut with a haze of silver hoarfrost glinting out here and there. And her eyes… there genetics had played its arrow straight, for she had eyes of dark jade, elongated and as capable of cold fire as were her grandson’s.

“You must be Jamie’s…?”

“Grandmother. Not that it’s any of yer business, one way or ‘tother, but yes, the man is my grandson on his mother’s side. Before ye ask—don’t deny it. Ye’ve yer lips pursed up to ask just that.”

Which rather, Pamela thought, put her in her place for she
had
been about to ask that very question.

“Well, as long as yer here,” the woman said, “ye might as well come in for a cup of tea.”

“I really shouldn’t—I—” she stuttered, completely unnerved by the sight of Jamie’s eyes looking out of an old woman’s face.

“Ye’ll come in for tea. It doesn’t take that long to drink a cup, an’ frankly ‘tisn’t anyone I ask in, so feel flattered that I have.”

Pamela was certain ‘flattered’ wasn’t how she felt. Terrified came close, but didn’t quite describe the array of emotions currently set loose in her stomach.

She followed the woman inside, her head almost grazing the lintel for it was low in the fashion of cottages built a hundred years before.

“Sit where ye please,” the woman said, putting down the leather bag she had been carrying.

Pamela sat on a low stool by the hearth and took a steadying breath.

“Have you been traveling?” she asked, sitting upright, hands folded in her lap as if she were back in Catholic school with a particularly strict nun for her teacher.

“Ye could call it that, I suppose.”

She wasn’t one to share more information than strictly necessary, Pamela saw.

“My name is Finola and you, I expect, will be Pamela.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, it’s past time we met then.” The tone of the woman’s voice indicated that while the meeting might be overdue, it was not necessarily one considered a pleasure.

Finola was silent while she made the tea, her movements quick and light but firmly no-nonsense.There was something of Jamie about her there too, for he also was a being of precision and grace. She wondered how much he saw of her when he was home. It struck her as very odd that he had never mentioned his grandmother other than the cryptic comment about tenancy, and Pamela had never chanced upon her in all the times she had stayed under Jamie’s roof.

“He comes for dinner most Saturday nights,” Finola said and handed her a steaming mug that smelled beautifully of catmint and lemon balm. “That’s what yer wonderin’, isn’t it? Why ye’ve not seen me before?”

The woman sat down across from her, tucking her neat little feet upon a low footstool.

“Are you a mind reader?” Pamela queried, starting to feel a tad nettled at having her thoughts so easily read. Jamie had the same annoying habit.

Finola laughed at that. “No, but every thought ye have shows in yer eyes, lass. Here, drink yer tea while it’s hot an’ save yer breath to cool yer porridge.”

Pamela obediently sipped her tea, which tasted lovely and had an immediately soothing effect. She looked about the tiny cottage with interest. It was rather spartan in its furnishings, and all the pieces that were in it were well made but not ornate. The hearth dominated the main room, and had a brisk fire crackling in it. Overlying the warm smell of burning peat was the scent of herbs, both fresh and dried. She could identify the sharp spike of rosemary and the oiled pleasantries of lavender, as well as something peppery and warm. A narrow set of twisting stairs led up to the second floor, where she assumed the bedrooms were.

“He doesn’t speak of his mother a great deal,” she ventured, thinking that someone had to start the conversation. “But I’ve seen pictures of her. She was lovely.”

“Yer not one for the small talk, I’ll see. Aye, my daughter was lovely, but she was a wild spirit from the day she was conceived. Always restless, always burning. She loved her wee lad to distraction, don’t get me wrong, but her mothering was of the hit and miss sort. Smother him with love one moment, flit off the next. It wasn’t good for him, but he had others in his life who kept things on a more even keel. Kathleen and I never saw eye to eye. She was an artist. If ye’ve seen the painting with the strange wee faces an’ such in Jamie’s bedroom, then ye’ll know she had a gift. Even that was unstable though. Sometimes she could paint an’ draw, but often she couldn’t settle herself enough to work at it.”

Pamela knew the painting Finola meant. She had liked it so much that she had moved it from the master bedroom to the study. The scene was of a bewitched hollow at night, with all the nocturnal creatures abroad and a full silver moon setting the scene aglow. Every leaf seemed a thing of trembling movement, the neat-faced foxes on the brink of putting a paw forward. But despite the moon, it was a work with a dark, diaphanous quality, enchanting one moment, chilling the next, depending on the light and the mood in which one viewed it. She had spent many long minutes studying it, for it seemed that no matter how often she looked, there was always some element she had missed before. A new face would show up as part of a leaf, or eyes seemed to be watching her though she could not locate the source amongst the small faces, some wizened as walnuts, others round as a wheel of cheese yet as mysterious as the depths of a lake.

“She was very talented.”

“Aye, talent she had but art is a demanding mistress, an’ Kathleen could never devote herself to one thing for more than a day or two at a time. I could understand that when it came to her art, an’ every other career she thought to pursue, but a husband and a wee child are a different kettle of fish altogether. That’s where Kathleen and I disagreed, an’ rather permanently, I might add. I lived away for a long time, an’ wasn’t here when she died.”

“I’m sorry,” Pamela said, meaning it.

“Aye well, ‘twas my own fault. I was stupidly stubborn an’ paid the price of it. I imagine though, yer here to speak of Jamie, not his mother.”

“Yes, I am,” Pamela said, aware she was a glass pane through which this woman could see very clearly.

The woman’s gaze was assessing, the green eyes sharp as a needle. Her hands, small and brown, cupped her mug of tea and when she spoke it was in a manner Pamela had not expected.

“I suppose grandparents always think their grandchildren are special, something beyond the ordinary. Jamie, though, truly was different. Most children have the ability to see into that next world—the one beyond, just over the hill or off the edge of the horizon—but what if that ability never left you? What if you still could see those other realms, no matter how dark many of them were? Because that is the world Jamie inhabits, one without the normal boundaries of the one most of us live in. Some call it a mental illness or think he’s crazy. Does he seem like a crazy person? No, he functions well within the boundaries that we all do. He even flourishes in a way most can only dream about.”

She leaned over and poked at the fire, stirring its flames, the peat crumbling and sending up a shower of cherry sparks.

“Ye know him, likely in ways that I do not, an’ so ye know that he’s handicapped in more ways than one. I expect yer aware of his particular difficulties.”

Pamela saw her thoughts must have been clear, for the woman said, “I don’t just mean the black moods that come upon him. Havin’ seen ye in the flesh now, I think perhaps ye know too well yerself that beyond a certain point beauty becomes more of a burden than a blessing. Jamie’s beauty has always been beyond that point. Perhaps if he had been stupid or mean or small-souled, it would have evened things out but, of course, he is none of those things.”