The Maid of Ireland (28 page)

Tom took out a stylus and notch stick. “With the extra mouths to feed and the potato yield so poor, I’d say a week, give or take a day. Might have been more if it weren’t for that tinker. Fourteen children he has, and another in the oven.”

Magheen gave a loud sob and buried her face in her hands.

“We also need to do something about that one,” Tom said ruefully, “before she floods the hall with her tears. Faith, but she flings bad humors on the night.”

“I have an idea that could take care of both the refugees and Magheen,” said Wesley, leaning forward and lowering his voice: “Listen.”

* * *

“What did you say?” Caitlin’s eyebrows clashed in a frown. She had withdrawn to her chamber, and Wesley had followed her there.

“I said, I’m sleeping here with you.”

“Oh, no, you’re not.”

“I’m only behaving as a husband should.”

“Only until Father Tully can help us be done with this farce.”

“What about this morning on the beach?” His voice turned harsh. “Was that a farce?”

The memory warmed her cheeks. Discomfited, she walked to her three-legged dressing table and sat on the stool. “It was...something that shouldn’t have happened.”

She heard him draw an angry breath. “Why can’t you just accept it?”

“Do you really need an answer to that?”

“No,” he muttered. “Damn it.”

Her mother’s pedestal mirror stood before her. A boar-bristle brush and some wooden combs lay at hand. Glancing into the mirror, she saw Wesley’s face contort with a look of tension. “Something wrong?” she asked with sarcastic sweetness.

“Oh, no.” He gave a dry laugh. “However, I was just thinking. If the good-night wishes of your men had been poisoned darts, I’d be convulsing on the floor in my death throes. That should make you happy.”

“I could have ordered your execution any number of times. Sure it would have meant one less mouth to feed. I can’t think why I didn’t.”

He came up behind her. In the mirror, their eyes met, hers wary and confused, his angry and pained. “Is it because—”

“I said I don’t know why, so don’t you be after trying to have a dance of words. I’m tired. I’d like to go to sleep.”

He picked up one of the combs. “Something’s wrong here.”

“One of the few honest truths I’ve heard you utter.”

“I was speaking of your dressing table.”

“And what in the name of Saint Ita’s stag beetle is the matter with my table?”

“It lacks pomatums and beauty pastes. Patches, perfumes and such.”

“For a man who once studied for the priesthood, you seem to know a lot about the contents of a woman’s dressing table.”

“I know a lot about personal vanity. And you seem to have very little of that.”

“I haven’t time for frippery.” She pushed a stray curl behind her ear. “I’ve barely time to plait my hair, let alone paint my face.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you lack the leisure to primp?”

She remembered Alonso’s reaction to her, in English dress, hair done up and cheeks rouged. The devastating effect had given her a brief sense of power, a different sort of power than the one she wielded as the MacBride.

But Hawkins desired her whether she was dressed as an English lady or an Irish warrior.

She dodged the thought, for it flattered him. “The objects of my pride don’t sit on a dressing table. I need nothing more than my sword and helm to satisfy my personal vanity.”

“I understand. I do.” He untied the leather thong at the end of her braid.

“What are you doing?” She tried to jerk away but his free hand held her still.

“Let me,” he said softly, unweaving her braid. Their eyes met again in the mirror, distorted in the wavy glass. He took up the brush and stroked it through her hair.

“This isn’t necessary,” she began, but the tingle of the bristles over her scalp relaxed her, even when the brush caught a snag. With the dexterity of a fisherman mending his best seine, he separated the tangle and stroked the lock to silky smoothness.

He followed each motion of the brush with his other hand. “Your hair is so lovely. Did your mother used to brush it?”

The question brought on misty visions of bedtime tales and good-night kisses, childish prayers uttered in fervent voices, and bright linen ribbons around expertly woven braids. How simple times had been then, how sweet.

“Yes,” Caitlin said finally, grieving for the loss of the evening ritual. Now, bedtime meant falling exhausted onto her pallet and awaiting a restless sleep plagued by worries.

“Bend your head down,” he said. He brushed her hair forward, baring the nape of her neck. She felt his fingers unravel another tangle, felt the slide of the brush over her scalp.

Glancing through the fall of hair into the mirror, she saw that his face wore a look of deep tenderness. He was only brushing her hair, and yet the task held a sense of intimate familiarity.

He touched her neck softly, sending pixies dancing down her spine. And then his lips were there, kissing secret hollows usually concealed by her hair. His breath blew warm upon her flesh, making her shiver.

“I think you should be stopping that for now.” She shook back her hair and was annoyed to see a flush of color in her cheeks.

“Look at yourself, and tell me I’ve done you harm.” He tilted her chin so that she caught a full view of herself in the mirror. His patient attention had given her hair a sheen like the sun on bright water, a texture like silk. The waving curls seemed fuller, glossier. More feminine.

The idea brought back thoughts of her troubles. “I suppose I should thank you.” Carelessly she clubbed her hair at the nape with a bit of leather.

Annoyance flickered in Wesley’s eyes but still he smiled, and his hands massaged her shoulders until the tension melted from her. “Very well,” he said. “Pandering to your vanity won’t gain me your heart. I should have known that.”

“Yes, you should have.”

He pulled up a stool and turned her to face him. “Magheen seems worse for knowing you’ve gone and found yourself a husband.”

Caitlin smiled ruefully. “She despairs for lack of a husband, while I despair because I have one.” Her eyes narrowed. “I suppose you consider yourself an expert on women.”

“Were I an expert, we’d not be sitting on these stools but lying in that bed, doing shocking things to each other.”

She tried to shrug off the suggestion as lewd, but she had sampled his loving and learned that certain things were not lewd at all. “What makes you think you can help Magheen?”

“I can recognize a broken heart when I see one.”

“A one-eyed badger could see her heart’s been broken. I’ll not applaud you for that.”

“Would you applaud me for remedying the situation?”

The certainty in his voice rankled her. “It’s not your problem.”

“But it is.” He gripped her hands and held tight.

“Magheen’s too proud to pay for the privilege of being a man’s wife. Even the wife of a great lord.” Caitlin pulled her hands from his and rubbed her palms on the rough homespun fabric of her kirtle. “I never should have tried to keep the bride price a secret. She was bound to find out.”

“And that’s when she came home? When she found out about the bride price?”

“No. That’s when she refused her favors to Logan.”

A rueful grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. “You MacBride women.”

“We have standards.” She found herself struggling not to smile. And then the laughter burst from her, mirth as sweet and cleansing as water from a mountain spring. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to reach out and draw him into a hug.

“She wants to go back now, doesn’t she?” He spoke the question into the cloud of her hair.

“Aye, but the stubbornness is on her. To her mind, he must want her and her alone and have no thought of cattle and booley huts.”

He sat back, his hands lingering at her knees. “I think there’s a way to salvage Logan’s pride, find homes for some of the refugees, and get Magheen back where she belongs.”

Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. “Haven’t I pondered the problem for weeks, and—”

“Just listen. I want to help.”

“Why?”

“Because Magheen is your sister. Because her sadness tugs at your heart. I don’t want you to be sad.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “Sure and haven’t I been sad since the day I clapped eyes on you.”

“It was evening,” he corrected her. “And you didn’t seem at all sad. But we were speaking of my plan for Magheen.”

Caitlin realized she would not get a moment’s peace until she heard him out. “What is your plan?”

“I shall go to swear fealty to Logan Rafferty.”

Surprise knocked the breath from her. “What?”

“When a man comes new into a district, he must pledge himself to the ranking lord.”

“True, but—”

“Then it’s only right that I do so. In the company of you and Magheen. Rory and Tom should come along as well. Oh, and that tinker and his family. They eat like horses.”

She pictured Wesley striding into Logan’s keep, the two men facing off, Wesley as bright as a burnished blade, Logan as dark as shadows at midnight. Never, she reflected, were two men so clearly marked to be enemies as brash Wesley Hawkins and proud Logan Rafferty.

“He’d probably cut you down before you got a word out of your mouth,” she cautioned.

“I’ll risk it.”

“But what does swearing fealty have to do with reuniting Magheen and Logan?”

He grinned and told her.

“You’re mad,” she said when he’d finished, but she found herself smiling, recognizing the cleverness of his ploy. “But then, madness and determination sometimes wear the same mask, don’t they?”

* * *

The day dawned bright and cool, the sky a shattering shade of blue. Wesley and Caitlin accompanied by Tom, Rory and Magheen raced on horseback along the coast. The tinker’s family walked the distance. Wesley did not want them to arrive until later.

His spirits lifted. No one rode like the Irish, in saddles so slight they seemed a mere formality, with bits so dainty a teething baby would not feel them.

Wesley rode a tall brindled pony. Why the Irish called them ponies was beyond his ken, for the mare stood taller than most hunters from Kent.

Caitlin took the lead, setting the pace at an easy canter. The stallion’s hooves seemed to caress the uneven ground. Horse and rider united to become one, a creature of the wind, swifter than the kestrels that haunted the coastal bogs.

Wesley knew now where the black horse had come from, and why Caitlin treasured the beast so.

His mind jerked back to the days in London. What a fool he had been to imagine that seeing the truth about her Spanish hero would send Caitlin running to Wesley’s arms. Instead, the revelation had underscored her distrust in men and made her more wary than ever.

He forced his attention to the others. Rory Breslin rode in the manner in which he did all things: hard, blunt, and uncompromising. A crevice in the terrain or a rock in the path was nothing; winning the game against Cromwell would be easier than befriending Rory.

A distracted rider, Tom Gandy let his pony tarry behind the others while his gaze wandered over the passing landscape. Magheen rode gracefully, her ladylike mien duplicated by the smooth gait of her tall ivory pony.

Wesley absorbed the ruggedness of land and sea. Connemara might have been another world, untamed and alive with the pulsing of the waves on the shore and the song of the wind through the crags. The mountains reared to the east, great hulks of thinly wooded rock, brooding in ancient defiance at the pummeling sea.

The mist-shrouded magic of the land seeped into his soul, and he remembered something Tom had once told him. The Irish cannot be conquered. For centuries untold, Viking and Norman and English had battered her shores and tried to subdue her people. Rather than breaking the Irish to a new way of life, the victims became victors. The conquerors surrendered to the spirit of the Irish, absorbed their language and customs, and succumbed to their charm and their power.

England commanded Wesley’s loyalty. She needed Charles back on the throne, needed law and sanity pulled from the quagmire of intolerance Cromwell had made of the Commonwealth.

But Ireland. No man could compromise his sentiment about the vast, wild land. One loved it, or one hated it. No one shrugged an indifferent shoulder.

Wesley watched Caitlin racing on horseback across the heath. The wind made sport of her thick braid, unweaving her hair until the strands sailed out in a golden veil behind her.

She was the very essence of Ireland: strong, mysterious, unconquerable, her character a potent distillation of the warriors and heroes of generations. He had married her and come into her household. But he knew better than to deceive himself that he had broken her will.

With these thoughts moving his mind, he rode the remainder of the distance to Logan Rafferty’s ancestral home, Brocach. The stronghold crowned a steep hill, slender Norman towers piercing the sky, thick, pitted granite walls surrounding a square keep.

Sentries spied them a quarter mile from the hilltop castle. A horn blared. Caitlin slowed her horse to a canter, and Wesley drew up beside her. He glanced back at Magheen to see her reaction to the home she had left in a rage.

She held herself like a queen, only the high color in her pretty face and her white-knuckled grip on the reins betraying her nervousness.

“I’m still after thinking this is a crazy idea,” Caitlin said. “Logan is bound to see through your plan.”

“If he’s truly in love,” said Wesley, “then he’s as blind as a mole in broad daylight.” He lowered his voice. “I know I am.”

She lifted her chin. “I just hope you’re right about Logan.”

“If I am, will you swear to be appreciative?” he asked.

“In what way?”

He shrugged. “Oh, enough so as to give me a son.”

Her eyes widened in surprise; then she scowled. “I give no Englishman a son.”

Wesley laughed, for beneath her anger he recognized longing, and it gave him hope. “Very well. I’ll settle for a daughter...if she looks like Magheen.”

Four men-at-arms joined them on the road. They spoke little after Wesley stated their business. He occupied himself with studying the outlying lands.