Sing Me Home (27 page)

Now that gold ring still lay heavy upon her finger, a weight of a mystery unsolved—a mystery that might never be solved, if she didn’t set out to resolve it before taking up the new responsibilities of the Lady MacEgan.

“You once made me a promise, Colin.”

She blinked up at her lover. His smile was slow and warm.

“I did, didn’t I?”

***

“A pilgrimage! But the wedding is in
ten days.”

Maura tried not to flinch at Lord William’s roar. Her false father stood behind a great desk, littered with books in tooled leather bindings and bristling with white quills and inkstands. The air of this room smelled of sweet scented beeswax, of great men in silk tunics discussing matters beyond the knowledge of a common girl.

Then Lord William glanced at Colin, who’d slipped his hip upon the desk. A strange smile flickered on his face.

The Englishman said, “Am I to assume you have agreed to this nonsense, MacEgan?”

Colin shrugged. “It’s only St. Patrick’s Purgatory. Less than a week’s travel in good weather.”

“You’d risk missing your own wedding day.”

“Only by a few days. I know how to be quick upon the roads.”

“And what sins,” the Englishman said, tapping a seal upon its dish, “does a girl of that age have that hang so heavy upon her shoulders that she feels the need to go to a shrine and delay a wedding for which all of Connacht awaits?”

“Sins aplenty, Lord William,” she said, forcing him to face her, “as you very well know.”

Lord William tsked and waved a ringed hand. “Rather than take a pilgrimage, why don’t you find a matron to give you a talking-to. Whatever sins you wish to confess don’t need to be confessed on pilgrimage—”

“You mistake me.” She cocked a brow at him. “I have little need of counsel in the matters of swiving.”

Lord William’s expression stilled. He glanced at MacEgan, who offered nothing but upturned palms.

“It’s best I leave today,” she said. “You can send guards if you wish to have us chaperoned. Though I’d prefer to travel with the minstrels.”

Dancing and singing and piping their way along the roads.

“The minstrels indeed.” The Englishman pointed to the window. “And what are we to do with the guests gathering in my fields outside? In the midst of harvest time, no less?”

“You could always make up a play yourself,” she said. “You’re very good at that.”

Lord William sighed. “MacEgan, put an end to this foolishness. Take her on pilgrimage when the marriage is done.”

“After the marriage,” she said, once again drawing his attention, “I will have many responsibilities and little time for travel.”

“Why St. Patrick’s Purgatory?” he asked sharply.

She hesitated, her spine stiffening. She had woven such pretty fantasies about the purgatory. She had imagined herself arriving and falling at the bedside of some elderly clergyman whose body ailed, though his mind remained sharp—some golden-hearted priest who would clutch her hands, recognize her instantly, and finally gasp out the twenty-two-year-old secret of a mother’s terrible confession, before slipping off to Paradise while she sobbed by his bedside.

Well, she wasn’t that foolish little dreamer anymore, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need to put the fantasy to rest.

“Certain pilgrims passed by my convent around the time of my birth,” she said, lifting her hand so that her ring winked by the light sifting through the narrow window. “I was told they were coming back from St. Patrick’s Purgatory.” She glanced at the guard by the door, carefully weighing her words, as she’d done every day since she’d returned to this castle. “I vowed I would go someday, too, in respect for those good people. That vow has remained unfulfilled.”

Lord Caddell’s face darkened. A muscle moved in his cheek. He glared at Colin. “Why are you encouraging this?”

“I made a promise.”

“You also made a bargain with me.” The Englishman fluttered a white hand toward the window. “Two hundred and seven people are coming to witness it. Yet you wish your future wife to set out on a quest whose motive—” he lowered his voice “—risks all these well-laid plans.”

She said, “It’s just a pilgrimage, my lord.”

“You’ll find nothing at St. Patrick’s Purgatory,” the Englishman insisted. “Nothing but barefoot, fasting pilgrims preparing themselves to enter the cave. Nothing but strips of linen fluttering from the tip of every branch of every bush, flags marking the visits. And no priest old enough to remember one set of pilgrims from the thousands and thousands and thousands that have passed through, in the twenty-three years since
my wife’s
nursemaid left you on the convent stairs.”

Ever sticking to the play, this false father of hers. “Do you ever visit your late wife’s grave, my lord?”

“Every year,” he snapped. “On her name day. What of it?”

“You’re fortunate to have someplace to pay your respects to the one you loved. For me,” she added, raising her ringed finger, “this is all I’ll ever have.”

Maura watched as a measure of understanding flickered in those eyes. For so long she felt as if she lived somewhere in-between—knowing that she had parents who cared enough about her to swaddle her and leave her a treasure, but not knowing who those parents were. It had been a purgatory, of sorts. But she understood now that she would never know who her parents were. Before she started her new life, she needed to say good-bye to the old.

The Englishman placed his hands on his desk, resting his weight so his fingertips turned white.

“There’s no use in going to St. Patrick’s Purgatory. But I can tell you something about that damn ring.”

His words were like a blow to the ears. She was sure she hadn’t heard them right, and so it took her a moment to understand. When she did, her body went very still, very numb. A throbbing began in her head, a relentless dull pressure. She wondered if, when she emerged from this fog, she would be able to forgive men who took a strange, morbid pleasure in spinning webs of intrigues.

“I’m surprised, with all your travels,” Caddell said, raising a brow at Colin, “that you didn’t recognize it, too, MacEgan.”

Colin glared at Caddell with a face full of questions.

“That insignia,” William Caddell began, “is much faded, but I’ve seen that design before, when I was a young man traveling on the continent. A hundred thousand peddlers sold trinkets like that, tokens that a pilgrim could take home as proof that a certain journey had been made. Thousands of pilgrims wear that insignia, my dear. It’s from the church of St. James of Compostela.”

Suddenly Colin was beside her, taking her hand in is, uncurling the fingers she’d tightened into a fist, as if he was untying the strings of a bound guinea fowl.

Colin traced the lines that projected to the edge of the ring face. “We once worked among the Pyrenean passes—part of the road to St. James. The symbol of that church is a cockleshell.” Colin flattened his hand over the smudged, faded lower half of the ring, so that only the rays were visible. “I should have recognized this,” he said. “It’s a seashell insignia. But the ring is so worn.”

“Sabine wore it all her life.” The men looked at her in question, that’s how she realized she’d spoken aloud. “Sabine was a laywoman in the convent.”

Colin said, “Why was she wearing your ring?”

“I’m not sure.” The Abbess had been vague about that, waving away Maura’s questions with the comment,
you know how Sabine was about pretty things.
“Sabine had always been partial to baubles. Since I was too young to have it, I just supposed the Abbess let her wear it.” Maura frowned as the memories flooded through her. “Nutmeg was hers before she gave him to me, too.”

Colin tightened his grip on her hand. “And Sabine—or the Abbess—never told you this was a token from St. James?”

Maura shook her head. His words gave her pause. Even
she
had heard about that church on the shores of Spain. Some of the wealthier novices talked about having made the pilgrimage with their families. It ranked third in the great pilgrimages—behind Jerusalem and Rome.

“This Sabine,” William Caddell said, with a darkness in his voice, “is she still living?”

“No.”

Relief spread across Lord William’s face. That sight, more than anything else, caused the back of her neck to tingle. She couldn’t believe—no, it couldn’t be true—not Sabine, silly Sabine, growing ever fatter in her bed overflowing with pillows, the laywoman who’d loved to comb Maura’s hair when she was a child but lost interest as she grew into a woman … no, it couldn’t be. She could not have lived in that convent all her life and heard no whisper of such a secret. Not even by the Abbess after Sabine’s death.

The Abbess, who’d come to Ireland from Avignon, who must have been familiar with the insignia of St. James of Compostela.

“Lord William,” Colin said. “We shall forgo the trip to St. Patrick’s Purgatory.”

“I knew you were a man of good sense—”

“The wedding will be delayed a little longer.” Colin threaded his warm fingers through hers. “Tomorrow we’re off to Killeigh.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
he minstrels danced into Killeigh. Padraig Smallpipe led the way, his tunic twirling, his bare feet slapping upon the mud, rat-tatting his tabor while the Mudman piped a wheeling jig. The twins tumbled on either side of a donkey, flashing bare thighs for all the world to see. Arnaud followed behind, trailing a donkey that carried Matilda nursing her newborn son. The two guards that Caddell had insisted chaperone them swept off their horses the minute they came within sight of an alehouse. They waved them off with barely a good-bye.

Maura clutched the pommel of her saddle and drank in the sight of her home village. Everything looked the same, and yet everything looked different, the muddy little houses and the crooked little lanes, the sheep that scattered away at their approach, the barefoot children who watched from doorways with their fingers in their mouths. It looked like a toy village, a miniature that Sabine would have played with, not the sprawling dangerous streets she’d been constantly warned about.

The Mudman paused by her horse, stopping his piping long enough to give her a sooty grin. “We’ll be off to the square,” he said, making a deep bow. “Best of luck, your highnesses.”

Then with a wink he was gone, following the twins down another street. She had an irrepressible urge to follow him and leave this quest behind.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Colin said. “To come back home?”

She cast her handsome soon-to-be husband a wavering smile. “I can hardly believe I’ve spent my whole life here.”

“Coming home gives you double vision,” he said. “You see the place how you remember it … but you also see it how it actually is.”

She knew he was thinking about the MacEgans, and the long war, and how his expectations had been upended by an Englishman who’d had enough of fighting and a clan that had grown weary of bitter-enders.

“Maura.” He held his hand out to her. “Whatever you discover, I’ll still be here, and so will our new life.”

She brushed her fingertips against his until the horses bumped apart. She felt the buzzing sensation that warmed between them, remembering last night’s tussle in the grass. She held the memory close until her nervousness ebbed.

Then the convent of Killoughy came into view. She and Colin nudged their horses through the archway into the courtyard. Everything looked smaller than she remembered here, as well, probably because she’d never observed it from the high seat of a fine, caparisoned palfrey.

A nun skittered out of the convent proper and paced across the yard. Maura suppressed a shout of surprised recognition. Here was Sister Agnes, as round as ever, running toward them as if she were late for Mass.

The nun said, “My lord and my lady MacEgan?”

“I am MacEgan,” Colin said, shifting off his horse and handing the reins to a stable boy. “This is my betrothed, the lady Maura Caddell.”

Sister Agnes glanced at her, then startled in mid-curtsy. Maura gave her an apologetic shrug. It was no surprise Sister Agnes hadn’t recognized her. Maura had never visited the convent in a rose-colored kirtle edged in rich silver thread.