The Sixth Labyrinth (The Child of the Erinyes Book 4) (24 page)

Beatrice pried at his hand. Ibby grabbed his other arm, half-sobbing. “Dear Lord, I’m to blame for this. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Douglas shook his head and grimaced, much like a bull tormented from too many directions. His shoulders hunched. He released Morrigan and staggered. “What the devil….”

His eyes rolled up. He groaned and pitched forward, slamming into Morrigan and knocking her into the window. Glass exploded like a shotgun blast, drowning Ibby’s screams.

Awareness faded in and out as her father’s weight bore down on Morrigan’s spine and pressed her into glass splinters on the windowsill. He lay motionless, his arms hanging limp on either side of her head. She pushed at him but he was so heavy, and she had no balance, no strength. Vertigo swirled through her head, making everything spin drunkenly.

A large, triangular-shaped chunk of glass swung above him, shooting out reflections of candlelight.
Free me,
Morrigan thought; before the words finished forming, the shard dropped, swift and silent as a dagger blade into Douglas’s spine.

His body jerked. Blood trickled over Morrigan’s throat.

She couldn’t hold her head up any longer, and closed her eyes against pelting rain. Had he not been on top of her, the shard would have pierced her, and possibly the babe inside her. But if Douglas hadn’t begun this sorry attack, the window wouldn’t have broken. She wouldn’t be here. She’d be asleep.

“Help,” she gasped, without any hope.

“I’m getting him.” Was that a man’s voice?

The suffocating weight vanished. Morrigan slid off the sill and onto the bedroom floor, drawing in lungfuls of air. The circulation of blood slowly returned to her legs, making them sting.

Strong arms picked her up and placed her on the bed. Gentle fingers removed bits of glass from her hair.

“What happened here?” Again, she heard a man speak.

“It was an accident,” Beatrice replied.

“My eye… oh, it hurts.” Morrigan hardly recognized her voice.

“Hold still.”

A heavy weight settled beside her and a face bent over her. This must be a nightmare. Could it really be Matthew Weir, the minister? “Bring the candle closer,” he said, and there was Beatrice, holding a glaring light.

“There’s a bit of glass in there,” he said. “Hold still, aye still. Don’t blink. There, I’ve got it. You’re in need of a surgeon.”

An awful rattling sound brought her head up. Every breath burned, grinding over the damage in her throat.

Ibby stood in the doorway, wringing a handkerchief as she sobbed, for once making no effort to appear polished.

Beatrice set the candle down and knelt beside Douglas. His eyes bulged. The odd rattling noise was coming from him.

“He’s hurt.” Morrigan coughed. She remembered the glass falling, piercing him. Yet he was still alive, still breathing. Here was proof of what she’d always suspected. Her father was indestructible.

“It’s his heart, I think,” the minister said. “My wife’s gone for the surgeon, but… I fear, Miss Lawton….” He clasped her hand. “He’s asking for you, lass.”

“No,” Ibby cried. “Keep him away from her! He’s a beast! A beast!”

Beatrice rose swiftly. She grabbed Ibby’s arm and dragged her out of the room, hissing something in her ear.

“Aye,” Morrigan tried to swallow. “Please help me.”

Supported in Matthew Weir’s steady arms, she dropped to her knees beside Douglas. Glass imbedded in her hair and skin made her feel she was scoured raw everywhere. It hurt like the devil when she blinked, but if she didn’t, she couldn’t see through the blood. Without the minister holding her, she thought the shuddering, the chattering of her teeth, might tear her apart.

Beatrice returned alone and knelt on Douglas’s other side. She picked up his limp hand and caressed it.

“I thought it was her,” he said faintly, his face bloody from the grooves she’d scraped into his cheek. “Hannah. The painting. Seaghan…. Mocking me. I… I know I’ve sinned.” His free hand found and seized Morrigan’s in a surprisingly strong grip. “I wasn’t always this way. Don’t let anyone make you forget….
Beannachd leat,
mo nighean
.”

Air whistled from his lungs. The guttural breathing choked and stopped. His eyes went blank. Empty. No longer terrible. No longer anything.

Beatrice fell upon him. “No,” she cried. “Don’t leave me, Douglas.”

Matthew Weir pried Morrigan’s hand from her father’s. Raising her, he said, “There, child,” and patted her forearm.

Morrigan’s heart was hammering. “He hated me,” she whispered.

“Oh, lass. The man was ill. I saw he didn’t want to leave you.”

Morrigan stared at her father’s face. It still scowled, even in death. “You can’t die.”

Beatrice worked her way to her feet. “It isn’t so easy letting him go, is it? Never let anyone tell you otherwise. Douglas Lawton was your father.”

“Come to the kitchen,” the minister said. “I’ll brew you both a cup of tea.”

“Tea?” Morrigan laughed. “Tea.” God had abandoned her, but there would always be tea.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

NO MATTER HOW
many hundreds of times she pictured him gone, she could not accept it.

Douglas, Nicky, Hannah… her father, her mother, her brother, all dead. She had no kin left but her two aunts.

Yet whenever she retched into her washbasin, she was forcibly reminded that another life was coming.

Since he couldn’t forbid it as he had with Nicky, Beatrice placed Douglas on a board in the Highland manner. She covered his body with scalloped linen and set a wooden platter on his chest holding two mounds, one of earth, the other salt.

“The earth is his body,” she told Morrigan. “The salt his indestructible spirit.”

Ibby refused to see Douglas, much less give him honor, so it was left to Beatrice to sit with him through the night in the candlelit parlor singing his eulogy, her voice eerie and unsettling. It was odd how the woman so suddenly returned to the language and customs she had long discarded. The only Gaelic Morrigan had ever heard from her were a few rare endearments, and all she’d ever said about the Highlands was dismissive and rude.

White cloth shrouded the mirrors and windows. The grandfather clock stood silent, stopped at the hour of death.

Any moment Papa would open his eyes. He would scowl and demand to know why she hadn’t finished her chores. Irritation flamed as Morrigan brushed her fingers against his temple. His flesh was cold, a rotting shell, all that remained of what she’d believed eternal. Trembling settled in her muscles, spiraling inward, digging a chasm she feared might swallow her.

“He’s dead.” She said it, over and over. Yet the words were meaningless. She tried to see death on the person of Douglas Lawton, but the picture wouldn’t form. Death couldn’t sit on his body. In truth, wouldn’t it be feared to try?

He was the force that pushed her from bed each morning, directed her every movement, even her thoughts, more often than not. Tall and dark, always scowling, he had created her world, and never allowed her to forget his supremacy. He was the possessor of knowledge she could never hope to understand, of beginnings, the first ray of earth’s sunlight, the initial gasp of human lungs. His death was incomprehensible. She could more easily believe he’d simply deserted them to lord over some other realm. From the moment of her birth his had been a force as powerful, as uncontrollable, as a blast of wind. If he could die, what did that say about everything else? Perhaps tomorrow she would wake to find all of life a fantasy… the sun, the moon, the ground she walked upon.

Yet at the same time, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had murdered her father by wishing the glass shard to fall.

The surgeon assured her, and a hovering, anxious Ibby, that her eye would heal. Had the glass punctured her cornea, he said, it might have gone differently; she should thank providence it hadn’t. He bandaged it, telling her she could remove the gauze in three days, after the funeral. The bruises on her throat caused his brows to lift and his gaze to meet hers searchingly, but he said nothing other than to advise the application of cold water and vinegar, combined with rest, and promised her voice would soon return. He tended her cuts and scratches, accepted a cup of tea and slice of cake, and left them to their dreary business.

“Morrigan,” her aunt said when he was gone, “we think it best Curran not be told what happened. We’ll say you tripped on a floorboard that wasn’t properly nailed and fell into the window. I’ll make you more collars to cover your neck if necessary, and we’ll wait until after the funeral to send him a message.”

Morrigan took a deep breath and met Ibby’s troubled gaze, knowing her aunt was afraid Curran would withdraw his proposal if he discerned the truth.

For the second time in one month, the residents of Stranraer gathered at the Wren’s Egg for a funeral. Morrigan felt their curious stares and overheard some of the careless gossip.
Why does the daughter stand so stiff and silent, with no’ a tear for her father? What are those cuts? Why is her eye covered?
Morrigan sensed malicious gratification beneath their conjectures.
You’ve heard the rumors… what goes on at this godforsaken inn. Didn’t the son run off? The minister’s wife told me the daughter has never entered a kirk in her life, ever!

Matthew Weir didn’t once ask about that night. He and his wife had been taking their customary predawn stroll, discussing additions to his sermon, when he’d heard the screaming. He’d broken the door to get in.

He visited Morrigan after the funeral. As he prepared to leave, he grasped her hand, closed his eyes, and spoke a prayer. His sincerity left her tongue-tied, shamed at her ignorance of religion.

Beatrice sent a letter to Sir MacAndrew, asking for his instructions, and another to Curran.

Workmen repaired the broken door and replaced the window. No doubt they would go home, and over tea would help spread tales about the devil’s lair on Neptune Street.

Ibby took the bandage off Morrigan’s eye. “It’s no’ so bad,” she said, adding, “You’d be surprised how quickly folk will forget this.”

Each day in the cusp of dawn, Morrigan walked. Sometimes she saddled Widdie and rode to Finnarts Hill or the other way, to the Corsewall lighthouse, astounded at the realization Papa could never again punish her for taking a morning ride. But the world of newfound freedom remained indistinct. Douglas’s voice drowned it.
Your brother would be alive but for you.

If she hadn’t fought him, would he still be here? Should she have let him kill her? When she considered such questions, the bruises around her neck, in the shape of her father’s fingers, throbbed, and it hurt to breathe.

She lived in a fog where nothing existed but endlessly circling impressions. Ibby and Beatrice had to sit her down to eat— she never felt the slightest pang of hunger or thirst. Neither attempted to stop her from walking or riding. At Finnarts Hill she relived stolen mornings when she and Nicky watched the sun rise or played at war with their wooden swords. He had listened to her read from her mythology book until he knew the stories as well as she, and he’d accused her of believing in them like they were fashioned from true history.

She sat on the slope above Loch Ryan, staring at one brilliant, poppy-colored sunrise after another.

Nicky wouldn’t have been pushed into fleeing had I not run away to the woods in a fit of rage. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t intend to cause it, or that Papa was wrong in his vengeance. Nicky is dead. Papa is dead. Both died because of me, and I can never make it right
.

Widdie grazed and Morrigan plucked wildflowers. She tore the petals without looking at them, then gazed, confused, at her damp, stained fingers.

At sunset of the seventh day after Douglas died, she returned to the inn and glimpsed a hazy figure sitting on the front steps. His head was down, arms resting in a weary manner upon his knees. She stopped. Gloaming’s shadows made the figure nebulous, a phantom… a ghost. Blood rushed from her head, leaving her dizzy and breathless. She reached out to the rock wall to keep herself from falling.
Is he going to drive me mad for what I did to him?

The figure’s head lifted. He rose and approached her. “Morrigan.”

A hard, aching lump formed in her throat. “You’ve come.”

“I have.” Curran folded her in against him. “And I’ll never leave you again.”

* * * *

Tenderly scolding, he urged her to eat. “Feed my son,
a nighean
. I want him strong and healthy.”

“What does that mean…
a nighean?
” she asked, a memory sparking.

“‘My lass,’” he said. “Do you not know any Gaelic?”

“Hardly any. But Papa… he said that word,
nighean
, before he died.”

“From him, it would’ve meant ‘daughter.’” Curran frowned.

“He said something else. ‘Byan-ach lat.’ What does that mean?”

“He was blessing you, telling you goodbye.”

Douglas’s last words, as kind and out of character as they were, didn’t soften Curran’s ill will. He quickly steered them back to baked halibut and barley bread, and how important it was that she have some.

Was a child truly growing inside her? Her corset fit no differently, and her abdomen seemed as flat as ever. If it weren’t for the nausea, the cessation of her monthly courses, the tenderness in her breasts, and the fact that she could no longer bear the smell of cigar or pipe smoke, she’d never believe it. Yet wasn’t Curran dear, the way he touched her, kissed her hand and stroked her hair— like he found her extraordinary. As though he believed her the only woman on earth capable of providing his offspring.

To please him, she ate.

Thankfully, by the time he came, most of the superficial cuts and scratches left by particles of glass had healed over, and the injury to her eye had improved. The bruises on her neck had turned an ugly greenish-yellow, but that didn’t matter, as they were hidden beneath her collars and he never saw them. The three women kept to their tale of her falling into the window, and he accepted her peculiar clumsiness.