A Christmas Grace (10 page)

Susannah touched her softly, just with the tips of her fingers. “It is probably of little importance. It does not mean it is anything ugly, but the fact that you do not know suggests that it frightens you. I don't believe it is that you don't care. If you love him, all that he is matters to you.”

“He never speaks of it,” Emily said quietly. “So I do not ask. I made my family serve for both of us.” She looked up at Susannah. “You love Hugo's people, don't you? This village, this wild country, the shore, even the sea.”

“Yes,” Susannah answered. “At first I found it hard, and strange, but I became used to it, and then as its beauty wove itself into my life, I began to love it. Now I wouldn't like to live anywhere else. And not just because Hugo lived and died here, but for itself. The people have been good to me. They have allowed me to become one of them and belong. I don't want to leave them with this unresolved, whatever the answer is. I don't want to go with it unfinished.”

“Then help me, and I will do anything I can to find the answer,” Emily promised.

E
mily started to think about it seriously that evening, but she was too tired after so much missed sleep with the storm, and it was the following morning before she felt her mind was clear enough to be sensible.

She went for a brisk walk, this time not towards the village but in the opposite direction, along the shore and around where the rock pools were, and the wind rustling in the grass.

After seven years the questions of means and opportunity to kill Connor Riordan would be difficult, or even impossible to answer. The only clues would lie in motive. Whose secrets could Connor Riordan have known that were dangerous enough, and painful enough for him to be killed? Had he known anyone in the village before he was washed up that night?

When Maggie O'Bannion came to clear out the fires, and do some of the other heavy jobs, such as the bed linen, Emily decided to help her, partly because she felt uncomfortable doing nothing, but actually more to give her the chance to speak naturally with Maggie as they worked together.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Radley, I can do it myself for sure,” Maggie protested at first, but when Emily insisted she was happy enough. Emily did not tell her how long it was since she had done any housework of her own, although Maggie might have guessed from her clumsiness to begin with.

“Daniel seems to be recovering,” Emily remarked as they put the towels into the big copper boiler in the laundry room, and added the soap. “Although it's taking time.”

“'Course it is, poor boy,” Maggie agreed, smiling when she saw Emily's surprise that it was bought soap, not homemade.

Emily blushed. “I can remember making it,” she said, although Maggie had made no remark.

“Mr. Ross always did things very nicely,” Maggie replied. “Went to Galway once a fortnight at least, and got the best things for her, right up until he died.”

“He wasn't ill?” Emily asked.

“No. All of a sudden, it was. Heart attack, out there on the hillside. Died where he'd have wanted to. And a better man you'll never meet.”

“His family is from around here?” Now Emily was sweeping the floor with the broom, a job she could hardly mishandle. Maggie was busy mixing ingredients to make more furniture polish. It smelled of lavender, and something else, sharper and extremely pleasant.

“Oh, yes,” Maggie said enthusiastically. “A cousin of Humanity Dick Martin, he was.”

“Humanity Dick?” Emily was amused, but had no idea who she was talking about. A local hero, presumably.

“King of Connemara, they called him,” Maggie said with a smile, her shoulders a little straighter. “Spent his whole life saving animals from cruelty. Over in London, most of the time.”

“Are they worse to animals in London than here?” Emily tried to keep the offense out of her voice.

“Not at all. He was a Member of Parliament, and that's where they change the laws.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” She made a mental note to ask Jack if he had heard of Humanity Dick. But now she must bring the conversation back to the thing she needed to know. “Daniel still hasn't any memory yet.” She felt as if she were being ungraciously obvious, but she could think of no subtler way of approaching it. “Do you suppose the ship was making for Galway? Where would it have come from?”

“You're thinking we should see what we can do to help him,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Thing is, it could have been anywhere: Sligo, Donegal, or even farther than that.”

“Does his accent tell you nothing?” Emily asked. “I don't know in Ireland, but at home I might have an idea. I would at least know Lancashire from Northumberland.”

“And would that help you, then?” Maggie said with interest. “I heard England was a very big place, with millions of people.”

Emily sighed. “Yes, of course you're right. It wouldn't help much. But Ireland has far fewer, hasn't it?” That was only a polite question. She knew the answer.

“Yes, but it's different being a seaman. They pick up expressions from all over the place, and accents too, sometimes. I'm not good at it. I can hear he's not from this bit of coast, but it doesn't even have to be north that he's from, does it? It could be anywhere. Cork, or Killarny, or even Dublin.”

Emily bent and brushed up the dirt into a dustpan, not that there was much. It was a gesture rather than a real task. “No, you are right. He could be from anywhere. Were most of the people in the village born here?”

“Just about all. Mr. Yorke comes from Galway, I think, but I daresay his family are from one of the villages closer. His roots are deep. If you want to know the history, he's the man to ask. It's not just the tales he can tell you, but the meanings behind them.” She smiled a little ruefully. “All the old feuds between the Flahertys and the Conneeleys, the good works of the Rosses and the Martins—and the bad too—and the love stories and the fights going back to the days of the Kings of Ireland in the time before history.”

“Really? Then I must see if he will tell me.” Emily accepted the idea, although it was not the ancient past she was seeking. Again she tried to bring the conversation back to the present. “The Flahertys seem interesting. What was Seamus Flaherty like? I gather Brendan takes after him a lot?”

Maggie avoided her eyes and started to watch what she was doing with great care. “Oh, I suppose so,” she said casually, but there was a tension in her voice. “In a superficial sort of way. He certainly looks like him. Same eyes, same way of walking, as if he owned the world, but was happy for you to have a share in it.”

Emily smiled. “Did you like him?” she asked.

Maggie was silent, her back stiff, her hands moving more slowly.

“Seamus, I mean,” Emily clarified.

“Oh, well enough, I suppose.” Maggie started to move briskly again. “As long as you didn't take him too seriously, he was fine enough.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, you couldn't trust him,” Maggie elaborated. “Charm the birds out of the sky, he could, and make you laugh till you couldn't get your breath. But half of what he said was nonsense. Got the moon in his eyes, that one. And drank most men under the table.”

“An eye for the women?” Emily asked bluntly.

Maggie blushed. “Oh, for sure. That was one thing you could rely on. That, and a fistfight.”

Emily did not need to ask if Mrs. Flaherty had loved him; she had seen it in her face. Behind the overprotection of her son, the slight distance she placed between herself and others, there was a deep vulnerability. Now its explanation was easy to see.

But Emily also heard in Maggie's voice a tenderness, a self-consciousness that betrayed her too, not for the father, but for the son. Was that also a defense of one of their own, a man too easily misunderstood by an English stranger? Or was it more than that?

She bent her attention to helping complete the household tasks. Maggie did the ironing, quite a skilled work when the two flatirons had to be heated alternately on the stove, and used at a narrow range of temperatures, not so hot so it scorched the linen, nor too cool to press out the creases.

Emily peeled and sliced vegetables and set them in cold water until Maggie was ready to make the stew.

I
n the afternoon Emily walked along the shore to the shop. They needed more tea, sugar, and a few other things. The air was fresh and crisp, but with no sting of ice in it, as there would have been in London. It was still westerly off the ocean, and the salt and kelp were in every breath. The sky was clouded far out to sea, but overhead it was clear blue with only a few thunderclouds towering in bright drifts, moving slowly, dazzling white.

The shore itself was uneven, sand obliterating some of the old grass and flower-strewn stretches, dunes moved from one place to another as if she had mistaken where they had been. Here and there were tangles of weed, some kelp torn up from the deep beds and left dark and untidy on the sand. She could not help seeing the jagged ends of wood poking out of them, splinters of the ship that had gone down, as if the sea could not digest it but had cast it back. It was a kind of monument to human daring, and grief.

It was when she stopped to stare at one of the larger pieces, pale, raw ends of wood jutting up through the black tangle of weed, that she became aware of Padraic Yorke standing a little behind her. She turned and looked into his eyes, and saw a reflection of the same overwhelming sadness that she felt, and of the fear that the power and beauty of the sea gives rise to when one lives through all its moods.

“Do you get wrecks like this every winter?” she asked.

“Not only winter,” he replied. “But the storms are very rarely as bad as this one was.” His face looked pinched, hollow around the eyes, and she wondered if he too was thinking of that other storm, seven years ago, and the young man who had been washed up then, and had never left.

“Daniel still can't remember anything,” she said impulsively. “Do you think anyone here could help?”

“How?” He was puzzled. “No one knows him, if that's what you mean? He isn't related to anyone in the village, or any of the other villages around.” He smiled bleakly. “Everyone is related to everyone else, or knows who is. It's a wild country. Its people belong. They have to. He isn't from anywhere in the west of Connemara, Mrs. Radley.”

It seemed a preposterous thing to say, an assumption he could not have reason to make. And yet she believed him. “You know the land well enough to say that?”

His face lit. “Yes, I do. I know the land, and all the people who live here, and their history.” He gazed around him, narrowing his eyes a little as he looked across the high tussock grasses where the wind knifed through them, tugging, swaying, and rippling all the way to the hills against the horizon. The colors changed, moving with every shadow. One moment paler, the next undershot with darkness, then a faint patina of gold.

Perhaps he saw some momentary wonder in her face, or possibly he had been going to speak anyway. “Before you leave, you must go to the bog,” he told her. “At first it'll seem desolate to you, but the longer you look, the more you will see that every yard of it shows you some flower, some leaf, a beauty that'll haunt you always after that.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “I'd like to. Thank you. But tell me about the people. I can't understand the land without knowing some of the people it shaped.”

They had left the splintered wood and tangles of weed, but she was happy to walk slowly. She had all afternoon, and she wanted to learn what he had to say.

“Is Brendan Flaherty really so wild?” she said with a slight smile. “Of course I only saw the charming side of him, when he and his mother visited Susannah.”

Mr. Yorke gave a shrug, lifting one shoulder more than the other, making the gesture oddly humorous. “He used to be, but there's no harm in him. He pushed the rules to the limit, and beyond, when he was younger. No scrape in the village he wasn't involved in, one way or another. And no pretty girl he didn't flirt with. How far any of that went I don't know, and I didn't ask. I suppose he was over the edge, at times. But that's what happens when you're young.”