Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (72 page)

“Indeed I did,” she answered swabbing Casey’s arm with some fragrant smelling concoction. “’Twas mostly men on the run, stray bullets that didn’t quite hit as close to the mark as was intended and some that did. I’ll need yer help here, the arm’ll have to be pulled taut, so’s not to risk trappin’ any nerves. Here,” she guided Jamie’s hands to a firm yet not untender grip just above Casey’s wrist. Jacob returned with the splints and a cloth covered bucket which held within it piping hot tea, a bit of sugar and fresh cream. He then unloaded what appeared to be a fuel box and from it arose the heady aromas of ham, fried a crispy, sweet brown, eggs done in butter and fresh bread. Jamie’s stomach rumbled loudly.

“Eat while it’s hot, lad,” she nodded toward the food as she tidily wrapped long lengths of plaster soaked gauze around Casey’s arm, “yer friend here’ll only be a minute an’ then he can tuck in as well.”

Jamie, abandoning all vestiges of his polite upbringing, dove into the food with the relish of the famished. Casey joined him only minutes later and attacked his food with only slightly less vigor.

When Jamie had devoured two eggs, three slices of ham and mopped it up with two slices of bread, then washed it down with two cups of hot tea, the woman looked at him with what seemed great relish and said, “It’s your turn laddy.”

“My turn,” Jamie said blankly trying to ignore the grin on Casey’s face.

“Come sit,” she authoritatively patted the stool upon which Casey had recently been enthroned. “Let’s have a look at that nose and ye’ve a score of thorns that need pulling an’ disinfectin’.”

He had to swallow an undignified scream as she pushed the bridge of his nose between her two thumbs. “Aye, ‘tis broke, must have been the helluva blow.”

“You could say that,” Jamie muttered shooting a black look at Casey’s shaking back.

“Well there’s not so much to be done for a broken nose, though I don’t think it’ll heal too badly on its own, ‘tis a pity though it looks to be a fine specimen of a nose but I’d need to put ye under te set it, an’ if I’m not mistaken ye lads don’t have that sort of time.”

“No, we don’t.” Jamie agreed wincing as she poured a clear colorless liquid onto his chest that stung like the fires of hell.

“Ye look like ye’ve had a tussle with a bramble bush man,” she said beginning to extract thorns and the myriad splinters of them from Jamie’s flesh. “Ye’ll have to stay low ‘til full dark, there’s been men about askin’ if anyone has seen two men on the run, possibly injured.”

Jamie stiffened perceptibly and she patted his shoulder gently, “Not to worry man, our sympathies lie on the right side of the blanket, ye’ve nothin’ to fear here. We’ll go about doin’ our daily bit an’ if anyone is watchin’ they’ll be none the wiser.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said gratefully, aware suddenly in every part of himself just how tired he was now that his belly was full.

“They’ll have noticed yer husband’s gun,” Casey said quietly.

“He keeps it inside the barn an’ is hardly fool enough to trot across the yard with it,” the woman replied shortly. Minutes later, she washed Jamie’s back down with the same burning liquid and set to work on it.

“
Iarr thu aithnich an amhran o amhran?”
Casey asked softly his eyes dark and opaque, fixed with a curious intensity on the woman. Jamie could feel a strange tension fill the space between the woman behind him and the man seated only feet in front of him.

O gradh tha an crocanach ni
an sin tha nicorp eolach gu leoir,
Do faigh a muigh uile a is an e.

She replied saying the words in a rusted voice that indicated it had been a very long time since she’d spoken Gaelic. Something in the words seemed to satisfy Casey however and he sighed expansively rubbing one hand over his stubbled face.

“If ye’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I think I’ll hit the hay, so to speak.”

“Sleep well, boy,” the woman said her voice softened by the odd exchange of a minute ago.

Jamie watched Casey make his way up the ladder and heard him rustle about like a dog and then there was complete silence.

The woman had moved to his hands, bathing them with a cloth then applying the clear liquid and beginning the arduous task of extracting the endless array of thorns from his fingers and palms.

“Ye’ve the hands of an idealist boy,” she said pushing down on the fleshy pad of Jamie’s thumb, “are ye new to all this then?”

“I suppose you could say that,” Jamie replied carefully.

She moved on to his index finger and Jamie drew in a sharp breath as she pulled out a deeply imbedded thorn. “It doesn’t sit on ye so well,” she said quietly as if she didn’t wish Casey, drowned in sleep, to hear.

“It doesn’t?”

“No, there’s somethin’ about ye, it’s as if yer a bit too fine for it.”

“It?” Jamie queried his voice automatically lowering to her own level.

“Aye, it. ‘Tis hardly a glamorous existence now, is it? Bein’ shot at, never certain if ye’ll live to see another dawn an’ many don’t ye know,” she eyed him sharply and then bent her head over his torn fingers again. “My first husband was in the Brotherhood, but it was in his people’s ways an’ mine as well, if yer born to it ye don’t think so much about it. I’ve seen a lot of men come an’ go, some dreamers, some saints, some plain murderers, an’ some who just didn’t fit. That’s you laddy, ye don’t seem to fit.” She sighed and straightened her back and reached for a dark, stoppered bottle, uncorked it and poured a little of it into his palm. It had a pungent smell, not unpleasant, and it took away the sting of the tiny holes in his hand. She smoothed it in with long, even strokes, running her stubby, work battled fingers down the tops and sides of his own fine, long-boned ones. She then turned to the palm, beginning at the center and working her way out in a sunburst motion.

“Ye’ve a strong life-line an’ a very deep heart one, ye know how to love that’s plain,” Jamie, who had begun to doze, started a little. She peered intently at his palm, tracing lines with the tops of her own fingers.

“Does that mean I’ll live a long and happy life?” Jamie asked, his tone rather more serious than he’d intended.

“I said ye knew how to love not that ye were wise about it,” she replied tartly, dabbing a dark-green foul smelling ointment on the worst of his cuts. “Yer destiny though, it’s entwined with his,” she indicated with a quirk of her head where Casey lay, soft snores floating down to them now.

“How can you tell that?” Jamie asked intrigued in spite of the exhaustion that was threatening to pull him to the floor any minute.

“Ye see enough hands ye learn where one person’s life line shows another, you an’ himself are important to each other somehow, linked through another person.” She laid cool strips of gauze across his palms. “A woman mayhap?” her blue eyes looked up under gray eyebrows.

“Mayhap,” Jamie replied with a small smile.

“I’m Nora,” she said and returned his smile with all the wisdom of a woman who has seen many years of life.

“I’m Jamie.”

“’Tis a nice name,” she said, “soft an’ yet a man’s name, it suits ye.” She turned and poured some hot water out of a pot, added drops from three small brown bottles and then put a pad of cotton in to soak. A heady aroma soon filled the air and Jamie found himself floating rather dreamily on the fumes. She wrung the cloth out a moment later and put it to the bump on his head, “’tis only a bit of lavender, geranium an’ rosemary, ‘twill help the swelling an’ draw out the bruise. The lavender will give ye a good sleep as well. It’s handy in a love potion too, though it’s said when lavender is mixed with rosemary it works te preserve a woman’s chastity an’ that hardly helps yer love problems. Anyhow, ye’d best have yerself a sleep an’ Jacob’ll wake ye shortly before dark.”

“Thank you again, for everything,’ Jamie said softly, amazed at the ease with which this couple had taken them in hand, treated their wounds, fed them and all it would seem without so much as a blink of the eye.

She fixed a bright blue eye on him, “Yer welcome lad.”

Jamie was halfway up the ladder when he turned and looking down asked, “Your husband, the first one, what happened to him?”

She looked up, startled, from where she had been carefully placing her oils and salves back into their case. “He died in the Border campaign, ‘twas one of those stray bullets ye know, it lodged near his spine an’ there was nothin’ I could do for him.” She returned to sorting her things and Jamie made his way at last into the straw, easing himself into the sunshine smelling hay.

He was in a heavy doze, helped along by the buzz of a bee droning in lazy whorls somewhere far above him and Casey’s snores, when Casey and Nora’s cryptic words came back to him.

“
Will ye know the song of songs?” Casey had asked, and Nora had replied in that tongue rusty with disuse:

O love is the crooked thing
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it.

He recognized it of course, it was the Yeats poem ‘Brown Penny’, what significance it held for Casey and Nora though he could only hazard a guess at. Some sort of code he supposed, but it had obviously relaxed Casey enough to feel they could safely sleep here.

A few lines from the poem swirled softly in his head before slipping like flotsam down the dark river of unconsciousness.

Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

Somewhere in the dark slipstream of first sleep he dreamed Pamela rising and falling, her hair coiling down over his hands, his body and he smiled. Nora’s words echoed far away, ‘
I said ye knew how to love not that ye were wise about it.’

And then all consciousness slipped away to the shores of the dark river and he slept.

Jamie awoke to a sky bruised with twilight, a head that felt extremely light and the comforting smell of burning tobacco wafting about him. Casey was already awake, sitting up and looking far healthier than he had some hours previous.

“Feeling better?” Jamie inquired sitting up on the breath of an expansive yawn.

“Much,” Casey said briefly, tapping his cigarette out carefully and folding the remainder of it up in a bit of cloth and tucking it in the pocket of his torn shirt.

He sat quite relaxed, on the head of an upturned barrel, watching the first, small stars, through gaps in the barn roof, as they began to blink in the sky.

“’Twill be a couple of hours before we can safely leave, Jacob’s been out an’ said supper’ll be along in a few minutes, after we eat ye might want to catch a bit more shut-eye, I can’t guarantee that ye’ll be able to get much in the next few days.”

“If they’ve already proved their point, whoever the hell they are,” Jamie said grumpily, “then why do we have to lurk about the country trying to elude them?”

“Because I’m not entirely certain they have proved their point or if this is just the opening gambit. Besides, I need to get back into Belfast without anyone knowing.”

“Why?”

Casey eyed him blackly, distrust still playing about his face, then he sighed and seemed to momentarily capitulate.

“In case it’s someone from our side that’s set us up.”

“Our side?” Jamie said raising his eyebrows and wincing as the cut across one of them opened up. “Your side you mean, I don’t even pretend to have a stake in this particular game.”

“Have it yer way,” Casey said cheerfully, “but yer part of it now whether ye were before or not.”

Jamie was about to deliver some stinging denial, which wouldn’t have convinced Casey in the slightest but would have gone a long way towards relieving his own overburdened conscience, he was stopped short however by the savory smell of supper entering the barn.

“Come on down lads,” Nora’s cheery voice said from directly below them. They navigated the ladder each in his own turn and sat down to a rough table of a board across two overturned buckets. The food was far from rough though. There was roast mutton, done tenderly in thyme and rosemary, potatoes mashed creamy and rich, carrots, peas and more of the bread, this batch still warm from the oven.

“I’ve packed yez lunches,” Nora said briskly pouring them out each a mugful of milk, “tisn’t much, just bread an’ cheese an such. Jacob says yer to take a bottle of the whiskey each,” she gave them both a look that turned their faces red, “an’ I’ve put a little jar of something each in yer bags. Yers will ease the pain an’ leave ye clearheaded,” she nodded towards Casey, “an’ yers,” she set a steaming bowl of pudding down by Jamie’s plate, “is to be taken externally only, it’ll keep the cuts an’ such from infection.”

Casey stopped briefly from forking food into his mouth to say, “We’re much obliged fer yer hospitality ma’am, an’ if there’s anythin’ we can do in return ye only have to say.”

She looked at Casey a long time as if memorizing something about his face then reached out and patted his hand, “Well then lad there’s not so much I wouldn’t do fer the grandson of Brendan Riordan, ‘tis an honor really.”

Casey almost choked on a swallow of milk.

“Did ye take me fer sheer daft then boy, yer the mirror image of yer grandda’ an’ there’s not so many people that knew that particular phrase ye threw at me before, did ye think I’d not know ye fer who ye are?”