Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (84 page)

“Did you or did you not kill him?” The Duke leaned across the desk he sat behind, lines of perspiration gathering under his hairline, worry beads his wife called them.

“Are you going to become dogmatic? How boring.” His guest glanced at one pale, delicate wrist and yawned. “I must go Percy, places to go, people to see as they say.”

“You’re leaving?” The Duke’s face was red with fury, “We’ve not concluded our business here, not by a long shot.” He fought for a breath as his throat constricted involuntarily again. He wondered briefly if he was having a heart attack for he felt suddenly as if a large fist was squeezing his heart between clenched fingers.

His guest, face calm, rose with delicate ease from the chair.

“Oh I’d say our business is concluded, wouldn’t you? Percy, are you familiar with the structure of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
?”

“Of course,” he wheezed, groping around in the pocket of his coat for his heart pills, “Though why you always ask such confoundedly inane questions I’ll never know.”

“It’s just that the play is layered rather cunningly, a play within a play, where the imaginary world overlaps the real one, so that one cannot distinguish between reality and illusion.”

The Duke looked in sudden horror at his teacup, his throat so tight now not even a whisper of air was getting through to his starved lungs.

“Cyanide,” his guest now even with him, whispered, “has such a distinctive scent, bitter almonds, quite strong against the background of the tea, wouldn’t you say? It’s a rare talent you know, the ability to smell it, how unfortunate for you that I’m one of the select few. I prefer subtler poisons, something that takes more time, don’t you Percy? Cat got your tongue? Pity. I really wanted to hear your response to what I’m about to tell you.” His guest leaned closer and whispered a message, brief and to the point, that caused the Duke’s eyes to bulge out of his head.

“Thought you’d enjoy that, well I’d best go, wouldn’t do to get caught here with your corpse would it? Besides, I’ve eight crates of guns awaiting my attention. Oh yes, I’ve got the weapons Percy, had them all along. And the IRA paid for them, there’s a very sweet irony in that wouldn’t you say? For the revolution is coming and I,” the Reverend smiled, “am prepared for it.”

The Duke, eyes now closing, felt the stir of a passing breeze from an open window and knew his guest had departed. It was his last conscious thought.

For the good of one’s soul, he’d been taught as a child, one ought not to have all one desires. Now as far as the drink and consumption of food went, Casey could see the merits in such advice, in fact he believed his Grandma Murphy had been the one to say it to him when he’d reached his hand across the table for his fourth jam bun in fifteen minutes. She’d rapped his knuckles sharply and when her back was turned, he’d grabbed it and ran outside to eat it. He’d had a godawful tummy ache later and she’d been full of sage ‘I told you so’s.’ However, he didn’t think such doctrine extended itself to the act of love with one’s own wife.

The difficulty lay not in the element of desire but rather in the environment. He could not, regardless of his body’s enthusiastic signals to the contrary, make love to his wife under Jamie Kirkpatrick’s roof. And the woman hadn’t made the situation any easier. She’d insisted that a man so recently wounded, particularly in such a delicate area, ought to proceed with exceeding caution. The dainty nature of his wound notwithstanding, and being a man of somewhat stubborn nature, Casey had tried in a variety of ways to convince Pamela otherwise. However, the humiliation of being caught by Maggie in the back hall with his hand up his wife’s shirt, had the effect of dampening his ardor somewhat. Maggie, being Maggie, had merely cocked her eyebrow and said,

“Ye might want to find a door to do that behind.”

A door was not what he had in mind however. A blanket and a bit of grass uncluttered by people would suit him fine.

He waited until the house was quiet, until the very night itself seemed to breathe in and out with the darkness. He nudged her awake, and she grumbled a bit then squinted at him through a tangle of hair.

“The night is fine, will ye come for a walk with me?” he asked.

She closed her eyes and then opening them again, nodded.

Outside the world was suspended in silver blue, like a miniature in a glass ball held by a trembling hand. The dew beneath their feet was chill, the sky above swiftly turning its cheek toward autumn, the air hushed and clear with cold.

Hand in hand they ran down the hill, breathless and laughing like two children without permission to be out in the dark. Against the sky, the pines stood like dark sentinels their scent sharp amber and heady as wine. Inside the stand of pine, the light was fainter, ribbons of it running in and out of the trees against a star-strained sky.

“Here,” Casey said, stopping in a small ring of trees, the ground underneath springy and fragrant with needles. He lay the blanket he’d brought with him down over the bed of needles then faced her in the moonlit space and cleared his throat, suddenly nervous.

“A walk, you said,” she smiled, her words accompanied by a slipstream of frosted air.

“If ye don’t mind, I’d like to make love to ye,” he said with the air of a man who has made up his mind and intends to follow it.

“And if I do mind?” her voice trembled with either cold or suppressed laughter.

“Then ye’ll have to close yer eyes an’ think of England or whatever it is good wives do, because yer lookin’ at a desperate man here.”

“Well,” she said, “we can’t have that, can we?” In one fluid motion, she pulled her sweater up over her head and tossed it to the ground, then unbuttoned her jeans and shimmied out of them. In the dark she stood out like blue-dipped ivory, her edges outlined by the distant hand of the moon.

“Touch me, Casey,” she whispered.

He leaned in and their fingertips met in tryst, her mouth warm and sweet under his own. He ran his hands down her back, felt her shiver and the skin that rose in goosebumps under the wake of his fingers. He lowered her to the ground then, safe within the soft couch of pine needles below and the hard shelter of his body above.

“Are you certain you’re up for this?” she asked, one hand running lightly along the stitches in his upper thigh.

Casey, with the proof that he was indeed up for it rather plentifully in evidence, merely put his mouth over hers.

His fingers traveled down her ribcage, bumping along the road of tender flesh and shivering bone, carried light above a whirlpool of blood and then there was the sweet press of rude, blind muscle, a sighing parting of swollen tissues and he was home and gone. Creating madness from movement, a dilation of the senses that was all exquisite agony.

“I have pitch in my hair,” she said drowsily some time later.

“Sorry about the roughness of the surroundins’,” he murmured, “but a bit of oil will take it out.”

“An Thou beside me singing in the wilderness

And wilderness is Paradise enow.”
She replied rather cryptically.

“Ye want me to sing?” Casey said, cracking open an eye to the night.

“No,” she laughed softly, “I’m just saying any surroundings are home when I’m with you.”

“I hope to provide ye with better than stars for a roof an’ leaves for a pillow someday.”

“You’re my shelter Casey, don’t you know that yet? I don’t need walls and ceilings and pots and pans, I just need you.”

“Aye, ye say that now but wait ‘til it snows.”

“You’re a terribly practical man,” she said.

“I feel anything but practical when ye touch me like that,” he gasped as she took him firmly in hand. “Talk about ice an’ fire, yer hands are frozen.”

“Isn’t there a poem about that by Dante, something about beyond the ice and the fire?”

“Mmmnn,” he said, “not Dante, Jack Stuart an’ it’s
‘between heaven an’ hell, betwixt the ice and the fire, you an’ I shall drown in the well of desire.”

“That man,” said Pamela, “does have a way with words.”

They awoke to see Vega declining into the western sky, its blue-white fire making the journey down to where summer skies slept.

“Do you know the story of the Lyre?” Pamela asked, knowing where his gaze had fallen.

“My Daddy told me long ago, but I can’t remember,” he replied, “will ye tell it to me?”

“Well it’s said that after Orpheus’ wife died he grieved terribly. He wandered about lost, unable to play his music any longer, denied the one solace he might have found. The Thracian maids saw him and wanted him, desired his beauty for themselves and tried to lure him with their charms. He rejected them, though, and this made them very angry, they shrieked and howled abuse and threw their weapons at him. But Orpheus had found his music again and their weapons were as dust before the sweetness of it. This enraged the maidens further so that their howling increased and rose and rose until the darkness of it drowned out even Orpheus’ music and the weapons mortally wounded him. The maidens dragged him back to their lair and tore him limb from limb, casting his head and his lyre into the river. Orpheus, torn apart, floated down, down the river until the muses gathered all the parts of him together and buried him at Libertra. And Jupiter, sorely grieved, took the lyre and knowing it was Orpheus’ soul cast it into the face of heaven, where it could shine forever.”

“Bit of a bloodthirsty tale, isn’t it?”

“I think what it’s really about,” she said, sitting up and hugging her knees to her, “is eternity.”

“Eternity?” Casey said, running a leaf idly down the groove of her spine, “I’m not certain I see that, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned an’ all that, but eternity?”

“Think about it. No matter what happens to us, the tragedy, the pain, the uglinesses of life, when that all falls away we’re left with what’s true and beautiful, even after we’re gone.”

“That sounds like somethin’ my father would have said, he’d have thought ye a wise woman ye know. Vega was his star. When I was in Parkhurst, I’d try to find it through the bars of my window at night an’ when I could I’d pretend it was him watchin’ over me. An’ I knew I could survive another day because he’d watch my back for me. In the winter I felt so alone because without his star he was gone for another season.”

“What do you remember of your mother?” she asked softly and turned to look at him. His eyes shied away from her, down to the leaf he held between his fingers.

“Not so much really; she wasn’t like the other mums, I suppose that’s the one thing I knew clearly even then. She didn’t bake bread or make chat about the menfolk while scrubbin’ down the pavin’ stones, she didn’t leave the door open to the rest of the street the way everyone else did. She was quiet an’ pretty, dark-eyed an’ fine skinned. Ye’d never know Devlin was her brother to look at the two of them. She’d grown up soft compared to my Da’, there was only her an’ Dev. Her parents had money, they weren’t rich, but they always had a car an’ holidays in the summer. I remember that she smelled good, like somethin’ expensive. An’when she left, there was a hole in my Daddy an’ he never learned how to fill it. Pat an’ I tried to putty it up the way children will, ‘cause ye don’t know any better.” He took a deep breath, “We couldn’t know that a woman leaves a loneliness behind that nothin’ cures.” He sat up beside her, “But I understand that now.” He took her hand, turned it palm up and kissed it. “Because ye hold my soul right there in the palm of yer little white hand.”

“I’m not leaving though.”

“A day could come when ye might see it as the only sensible option.”

“Never,” she said vehemently.

“When I thought ye’d died in the fire,” he said quietly, “I wanted to walk into it myself, to be consumed by flame an’ have my ashes join yer own. Nothin’ seemed to matter then for how was I to care about anythin’ properly again without ye there. An’ I remembered somethin’ a wee wise man in a bar had said, he said ‘a man must go where the road takes him,’ an’ it seems to me now that perhaps my road has changed, without my fully knowin’ it.”

“And where does this new road lead?”

“I don’t entirely know,” he said ruefully, “I only know I’m standin’ at a crossroads an’ the sign isn’t clear just yet. My Daddy used to say that the decisions ye made at the forks in the road were the ones that defined ye as a man an’ ye had to weigh yer options carefully in such moments so as not to regret the choice later.”

“Well as long as you take me along with you when you decide which way you’re turning,” she said and shivered, reaching for her sweater.

“Don’t,” Casey said, “not yet. I just want to see ye so for a few more minutes.”

“But I’m freezing,” she protested.

“Then I’ll warm ye,” he put his arms around her from behind, wrapping the blanket about the both of them. “Better then?”

“Better,” she agreed relaxing back into his warmth, feeling the rasp of his whiskers against her neck.

“If I ask ye a question will ye answer me honestly?”

“Is that why you wanted me naked? Because it’s harder to lie when you’re naked?”