The Maid of Ireland (17 page)

She opened her eyes. Hawkins stared at her with a stark yearning that caught at her heart.

“What is it now?”

“I would forfeit the very surety of my soul to be the man who brings that look upon your face.”

“That’s a high price to pay.”

“It’s useless anyway. You’ve obviously conjured up some hero no mere mortal could ever rival. The man you dream about doesn’t exist.”

He does, she thought with an ache in her chest. He does. “Let’s be about our business.” She went outside.

She needn’t have worried about his skill with the horse. The hot shoe bedded into the horn of the hoof. A little cloud of blue smoke arose, neither worrying nor hurting the horse. Hawkins tapped the shoe on with a few swift, sure strokes, then cooled it with water.

A few moments later, they led the stallion across the yard.

“I’m going riding,” said Caitlin.

“Let me come with you.”

Ah, she wanted him to. They were so easy together, the two of them. Such an ill-matched pair, enemies who spoke together as old friends. “No,” she forced herself to say.

“I won’t try to escape.”

“I have only your word on that. And an Englishman’s word has no more substance than spindrift.” Grasping the black’s mane, she swung onto his back. Hawkins’s gaze caressed her bare leg and foot.

“Are you sure you’ll be warm enough?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Caitlin, I was born to worry about you.”

“Fag an bealach!”
came a cry from the gate. Children playing in the yard cleared the way.

Perched like a king atop Rory’s cart laden with seaweed, and pulled by Curran Healy, Tom Gandy appeared through the main gate. “Got the beast shod again, have you?” he asked.

Startled, Caitlin said, “You’ve been out on the strand all day. How did you know?”

“A leprechaun told me.” Tom tipped his hat, and the cart rolled past, leaving the fishy stench of
dulse
in its wake.

Hawkins scratched his head. “How
did
he know?”

“I’ve learned not to be after questioning Tom Gandy.”

She rode off, but could not ride fast enough to escape the remembered burn of the Englishman’s touch, the musical timbre of his voice, and the secrets he guarded in his eyes.

* * *

“Dying! I’m dying! Ach,
musha, yerra,
and bedad, Jesus save me!”

Alarmed by the pitiful cry, Caitlin sped through the hall, past silent huddled men and women who wept loudly and prayed desperately. In the passage behind the hall were offices and private apartments. She entered one that blazed with oil lamps and reeked of the peat smoke that wafted from a brazier.

On a pallet in the middle of the room lay a small figure, wailing in agony. “God, I’m dying of this cruel griping in me!”

Caitlin dropped to her knees beside him. The sight of his flushed face and glazed eyes filled her with terror and pity. “Tom? It’s me, Caitlin. Curran said you took sick after eating the
dulse.
”

“I be past sick.” His head rolled to and fro on her father’s best gullsdown pillow. “It’s dying I am, my girleen. Strangled for all time in the big gut. St. Dympha pity me!”

Tears scorched Caitlin’s eyes and blurred her view of Aileen Breslin, who knelt on the other side of the pallet. “Here, Tom.” Aileen held out a cup. “Have a bit of the senna.”

With a grimace, Tom turned his head away. “I’ll not touch it, woman. You’ve put sheep scour in that!”

“Just a wee dropeen of the purgative,” Aileen cajoled, “to give the drink strength.”

“Please, Tom,” said Caitlin. “Just a sip.”

“
Yerra,
let me die in peace!” He turned his face into the pillow and doubled himself into a ball of agony. “Aye, ’tis strangled in the big gut I am, and no way to save myself. Soon the sidhe will come to frolic with my poor dead soul.”

“Sure the Little People will think him one of their own,” Rory said mournfully, stepping into the room.

Tom’s terrible cries swept through Clonmuir, echoing in the stone corridors and coiling stairwells. Before long, the entire household had gathered in the sickroom and in the hall outside.

“Dying!” Tom burst out again and again. “I’m dying, and there is no priest to ease my poor soul into eternity. It’s damned, I am. Damned to the high fires for all time.”

“That’s for the Almighty to decide,” Aileen assured him.

“Tom, no,” said Caitlin. A devastating helplessness closed over her. Sickness was no enemy she could vanquish with lightning raids. “You’re ailing, but you’ll recover.”

“Ach,
musha,
the end is hard upon me.” His fever-bright eyes swam with sorrow and despair. His hot hand clung to Caitlin’s. “For the love of God, I need a priest. Caitlin,
a stor,
if ever I’ve meant something to you, you’ll find me a cleric.”

“The priests are all gone from Ireland. But we shall pray for you, dear Tom. We’ll pray very hard.”

A tear slipped down his cheek. “Let them all come to me one last time, Caitlin,” he said. “I would look upon the good folk of Clonmuir before I face judgment.”

With a bleak and empty heart, Caitlin moved out into the passageway and motioned for the others to enter by turns. Women and children, even some of the men, sobbed with unabashed, heartfelt gusts.

Loudest of all was Rory Breslin, who snorted into a handkerchief and said, “The stubborn little imp. I’m sorry for every foul word I said to him. I never should have let him use my cart...”

“A priest,” Tom wailed once again. “My soul from the devil, but I need a cleric!”

Her shoulders sagging with sorrow and frustration, Caitlin hurried into the chapel. The alcove nestled in a curve of the ancient curtain wall. Here she had prayed for her mother’s soul. Here she had prayed for Alonso’s return.

And now she came to beg mercy for Tom. Her hand shook as she lit a candle. Shadows flickered in the corners, uncertain company for her unquiet soul. She knelt before a statue of the Virgin, carved by her great-grandsire many years before.

The musty smells of damp stone and forgotten incense tinged the air. She pressed her palms together. The carved Virgin stared serenely down at her.

“Blessed Mother, help me,” she whispered. “My darling Tom is dying, and he needs a cleric to ease his way to heaven. I don’t know what to do.”

“Is there truly no hope?” Hawkins knelt beside her.

She shot to her feet in a fury. “And what would an Englishman be caring about a dying Irishman? Sure if the Roundheads hadn’t burned our fleet and fields, Tom would be feasting on peppered buttermilk and fresh meat instead of choking himself on seaweed!”

Hawkins’s face paled. “I feel nothing but shame for what my countrymen have done to yours.”

“Tom is leaving me,” she snapped, not wanting to hear the sincerity in his voice, “and I cannot even do him the final favor of bringing a priest to cleanse his poor soul.”

“Is it really so important, having a cleric?”

She rubbed a finger along the bridge of her nose. “You wouldn’t understand. An Irishman’s faith is his most precious possession. We endure a life of toil, but the hardships are bearable because of our faith. Knowing he’ll pass on to a greater reward is Tom’s only comfort.”

Pain and mystery glimmered in Hawkins’s shadowy regard. His shoulders sloped downward, weighted by invisible burdens. Her fury subsided into misery.

“Being shriven is important to Tom, then.”

How did Hawkins know about the shriving? “Tom is a good man, but he’s human and fallible. He has sinned and must answer for those sins. A final confession will cleanse him. But we have no one. No one.” She pressed her hands to her eyes. “Why couldn’t Daida have returned? I took wisdom and encouragement from Tom all my life. But I cannot fulfill his last request.”

* * *

Wesley recognized the desolation in her face, in her posture as she stood before the Virgin. He’d seen the fear of death too many times. And he’d seen the ease the shriving had given to the survivors of the loved one.

His heart ached. He remembered the whispered confessions he’d heard in secret during his travels through England. He felt again the weight of the faith the people had placed in him. But with Caitlin the burden pressed harder, because she was so strong, because he cared so much. Because she needed him.

“Come here.” He pressed her cheek to his chest, stroking her hair. She submitted willingly, shuddering a little with a quiet sob. The manipulative rogue inside him told him to seize the moment. She was vulnerable now, vulnerable to the betrayal he had conceived for her. The magic that had bound them from the very start revived the liberating, soul-deep conviction that he was never meant to be a priest.
Come away with me, Caitlin MacBride...

Her need probed a soft spot in him. Despite his dire situation, despite his fear for Laura, he could not let Caitlin suffer. A decision rose within him, pushing through doubt and hesitation.

“Caitlin, if Tom were to be shriven your heart would be easier.”

“Aye.” Her breath fanned his neck. “Mine, and every other heart at Clonmuir.”

It was madness to reveal even a part of his secret to the warrior woman who held him captive. Yet he heard himself saying, “I can help you.”

She drew back. The evening sunlight slanted through a high cruciform window and found a warm, sparkling home in her sad eyes. “How?” she asked. “He needs a cleric, and you’re obviously not—”

“I am.” He took her face between his hands. Caitlin laughing was a sight to delight a man’s spirit. Caitlin weeping was a sight to compel a man to sell his soul.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m a Catholic.”

“Sure aren’t we all—” Her mouth dropped open as she apprehended his meaning. “No.”

“Aye, and was once a novice of the Holy Faith—”

“You’re a hard and cruel liar.”

“—trained at the seminary of Douai in France.”

She swallowed, her throat rippling smoothly. “Douai. Isn’t that where they train English priests to return to England and minister to Catholics?”

“Precisely.”

She pulled away, looking him over as if seeing him with new eyes. “Then what were you doing with Hammersmith’s army?”

Trying to save my daughter,
he wanted to say. But Cromwell’s threat hung like a thundercloud in his mind. He could not risk Laura’s safety, not even for the sake of telling Caitlin the truth.

“Fighting for the Commonwealth.” He tried to draw her back into his embrace.

She jumped away. “You sinner! You’ve taken sacred vows!”

“That’s true.”

“And yet you—you hold me and kiss me with lust in your heart. You make a sinner of me!” She fled toward the door.

He followed, grasping her by the arm. “I sinned long ago when I chose the seminary, for I had no true vocation. I went to Douai to test my faith, and faith failed the test.” He paused, grappling with the words. “Look at me. I am years past the age of a novice. I could not bring myself to make the final submission to the Church.” Even if Laura had not appeared in his life and changed it irrevocably, he would not have taken holy offices. The religious passion of his youth had been eclipsed by a true lust for living. He had come to realize that his purpose was to be a good man here and now, in this life.

He touched Caitlin’s cheek, loving the feel of her soft skin under his finger. “At last I have found what I sought, Cait. Not in the Church, but in you.”

“But it’s wrong, it’s—”

“Ah, the darkness is after me!” Tom’s far-off wail swept into the chapel.

Yanking her arm from him, she said, “Can a novice administer last rites?”

“When a patient is
in extremis,
and there is no priest available, it is permitted.”

“Can I believe you, Englishman?”

“I have no credentials to give you save my word, and the scars of torture.” He touched his back to remind her of the healed lacerations that branded him.

“You were tortured for your faith? But I thought—” More loud wails drifted in through the passageway. Caitlin winced as if Tom’s pain had found a way into her heart.

“Where did your chaplain keep his vestments?”

She tensed, hesitating. Another surge of grief keened through the castle. Her features took on the firmness of sudden decision. “This way.”

A few minutes later, clad in a white cassock and smoke-colored robes, and armed with vials of holy water and olive oil, Wesley stepped into the sickroom.

For a moment no sound stirred the astonished silence. Then whispers erupted, hisses of outrage and disbelief.

“How dare he profane a priest’s vestments?” “Heresy!” “Blasphemy!” “He should be clifted like a diseased sheep!”

“Hush,” said Caitlin. Quickly she related his tale. “We have no choice but to trust in his word.” She faced Wesley with fire in her eyes. “The Almighty will exact a price if he’s played us false.”

Tom lay weaker than ever on the pallet. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and sweat beaded his forehead.

Wesley stood at the foot of the pallet. The torches and braziers haloed him in warm light.

Tom dashed the sweat from his eyes. “Ach,
musha,
my prayers be answered. A high miracle, it is!”

Wesley handed a globe-shaped censer to Curran, who had been the chaplain’s acolyte. The spicy aroma of incense filled the room.

The sea lapped with a distant swish at the walls of Clonmuir. Rooks called through the twilight, and badgers chittered in the wood. Wesley studied the dying man, and a familiar futility welled inside him. The power and mystery of God beckoned, but dangled just out of his reach. Forbidden fruit.

A leaden weight descended on him. He was charged with accepting a man’s sins and saving his soul. He did not know if he had the heart, the strength, to do so. His own soul was soot black with sins.

But for Caitlin MacBride he would attempt the impossible. He breathed in the incense. “We’ll need privacy for—”

“Not so!” Tom interrupted. “They’ve been my friends in life. Would you have them abandon me as I die?”

“Of course not,” said Wesley. “Whatever comforts you, Tom.”

“Almighty God bless me, for I have sinned.” Tom Gandy launched into his confession, his voice gathering strength as he spoke. “All my life I have been a vain and wicked man, and greedy, too. Why, time was, Red Niall and I caught seven nets full of herring, and him with his wife and the wee ones hungering so, and I did not give up my share.”