The Sixth Labyrinth (The Child of the Erinyes Book 4) (91 page)

Diorbhail said nothing for a moment. She just looked at Morrigan in that way she had, making Morrigan feel like her secrets were displayed on her forehead.

“Maybe you lived there once, in another body,” she said finally, “and that’s why you want to go there.”

“I promised Lily and Richard that we would check on their cottage, that’s all,” Morrigan said. “What’s on that hill over there? A ruin? Let’s go see.”

* * * *

“I don’t like this place,” Diorbhail said, low.

Morrigan felt too ill to reply, and could only shake her head.

Stones were scattered around the hilltop haphazardly, many still blackened with old soot stains. The wind sounded like soft, mournful wailing.

Both jumped when someone behind them spoke. “What are you doing?” It was their housekeeper, staring at them coldly. “None come here, unless they prefer the company of ghosts to men.”

“Ghosts?” Morrigan asked.

“Here, where the murders took place.” Faith wore an odd, satisfied expression, but there was something else there, as well. “My daughter was butchered, and my grandchildren.”

Morrigan felt more than heard Diorbhail’s gasp. With each passing moment, she felt more nauseated, and had to resist the urge to rub her throat, which had begun to itch and burn. Sparkles burst before her eyes and she felt the ground rush towards her face. Diorbhail seized her arms and supported her.

“Aye,” Faith said, narrow-eyed. “My youngest grandchild was but four.”

“Don’t… don’t,” Morrigan whispered.

Ignoring her, the woman said, “They burned the house. This is all that’s left. Go away. This place is no’ for outsiders. You defile it by coming here.”

Diorbhail pulled Morrigan off that sad, awful hill. Morrigan looked back once, and saw Faith swipe at her eyes.

* * * *

Seaghan lectured Morrigan as the boat passed the castle in the bay and headed into open water. “Your husband left you in my care,” he said. “I’ll thank you to no’ make my work harder.” When she said nothing, he put his hand on her forearm. “D’you understand? You will tell me where you’re going from now on.”

“Aye, Seaghan.”

Their captain, Mr. Cameron, spoke only Gaelic, so Seaghan had to translate. Apparently the man seldom saw such calm seas around Mingulay, and said the Virgin Mary must be blessing their visit. He suggested a boat tour of the island, promising they would never forget the western cliffs.

Up and up and up Morrigan stared, transfixed. Mr. Cameron laughed, quite gratified.
Bual na Creige
, he called the rock face, sheer, black, ominous, like something from myth. Only the kittiwakes and guillemots dared touch it. The water was so soft he decided to venture into the sharp cleft slicing into the island; they dropped into deep, cold shadow beneath the towering ebony wall.

“I want to stand on the summit and look down,” she said.

The grizzled old man laughed again, and uttered something.

“He says to make certain you haven’t been drinking,” Seaghan told her. “He hates to think how many have fallen off.”

Their guide carried them past several towering sea stacks:
Lianamuil,
with its mysterious yawning caves, and
Arnamuil
, and through the chilly narrow arch separating the island from another stack he called
Gunamuil
.

She imagined being in a small boat like this when the waters were not calm. No doubt the boat and its passengers would be shattered to bits against the rock and sucked into fathomless graves. Tales abounded of lighthouse keepers and fishermen, lost mysteriously, leaving no clues as to what might have happened.

Mr. Cameron dropped his dinghy on the east side and they put to shore without incident beside a white sandy beach. They asked him to point out the Donaghue house and he did, with the stem of his pipe. It was hard to miss, a multicolored fieldstone cottage with a slate roof, perched in solitary magnificence above the humble village, halfway up a steep hill where green beach grass and sea holly turned to moorland scrub and peat.

When he mentioned it was locally called Taigh na Gaoithe, “Windy House,” a sharp shock coursed through Morrigan, causing her breath to catch. She saw again the woman smashing a bottle of champagne against those stones and wiping her wet, sticky hands on Aodhàn Mackinnon’s face.

Her vision degenerated into wildly bursting spots of color; her ears hummed so loudly she hardly heard Mr. Cameron telling them they would have no trouble finding women to clean and cook.

Two village lasses, eager to earn extra coin, led the group up the hill to their new home and went about dusting and digging out the teapot and cups. It was as Lily had described, a pleasant cottage with four bedrooms, two parlors, and a well-equipped kitchen, the whole drawing in light from large casement windows. Stuffed couches, chairs, and loveseats were preserved beneath sheets, which the hired women whisked away. Ibby and Beatrice took the east bedroom, Diorbhail chose one in the middle for herself and Olivia, and Seaghan the next, leaving Morrigan and Curran the largest, with the biggest bed, at the west end. A fire was soon burning cheerily in the west parlor, chasing away the chill that lingered from being shut up and empty for so long.

The interior of the cottage didn’t seem familiar. Morrigan told herself she was giving an old dream too much importance and was no doubt wrong about the name she remembered hearing.

In the morning, with only starlight to guide her, she stole out of Taigh na Gaoithe. Seaghan would be angry, but she knew she could get around him. To ward off the worst of a lecture, she scribbled a note. He had only demanded she tell him where she was, and she’d done so.

Knowing already where she wanted to go, she paused no more than a moment on the slope outside the house. She meant to be on those western cliffs when the sun came up. Summiting the hill wasn’t difficult; before long she was descending again. She detoured briefly to explore an abandoned shepherd’s hut, but as dawn pushed back the blackness of night, she made her way to the precipice she’d seen the day before, and looked down. It was dizzying, like staring into a bottomless abyss, and she heard Seaghan’s voice as he translated Mr. Cameron’s warning.
I hate to think how many have fallen off.

She perused the coastline, noting the nearby promontory called
Dùn Mhiughalaigh
, hazy with morning mist. She walked to it and crossed to the far end, where she could look out as if she were at the prow of a ship, over unbroken ocean. The rising sun lit the endless expanse, catching on the wings of the kittiwakes. The sea was loud as it threw itself against these rock walls, and the cry of birds seemed in the thousands. She walked from one side to the other and turned her head up, staring into the depthless blue sky at an eagle circling over her head.

Though she’d halfway convinced herself she was wrong about the cottage, there remained a conviction that she’d been here before. She saw herself breathing this air, scented of salt sea and bird droppings, and walking these high crags, holding hands with Aodhàn Mackinnon, but not as she knew him now. The man in her imagination was young.

Something moved at the edge of her sight. She turned with a gasp, expecting Seaghan, but it was not the grizzled giant. This form, almost in silhouette with the sun behind him, was taller, leaner. She blinked, and blinked again.

“Morrigan,” he said, stopping a few steps away.

It was Aodhàn Mackinnon.

* * * *

Beatrice Stewart settled into a rocking chair by the window and clumsily tried to separate red yarn from blue.

“I was a prince,” she muttered. “I sacked cities. I killed legions. I bathed in blood. Now look at me.”

She peered at the tangled yarn, wondering if anyone would notice if Beatrice, who had always enjoyed needlework, suddenly gave it up.

Females and their daft, useless occupations. All the menial tasks, the world’s free labor. They were like slaves, but stupider. Slaves knew they were slaves. Women didn’t seem to grasp that fact.

Why couldn’t a man have happened by the ruin outside Glenelg? Anyone other than this ugly, stumpy witch with legs like telegraph poles.

There was some amusement in imagining Ibby’s horror if she were to find out she was changing her clothes and sleeping with a man in truth, rather than her sister-in-law’s sister.

Harpalycus snickered.

He had determined many things through the centuries. Early on, he’d observed that neither Aridela nor Menoetius retained any memories of their previous lives. But, for some reason, Chrysaleon did, and that made him formidable.

A knock interrupted his plotting. “Who is it?” he barked.

The door was thrust open with such force it thudded against the wall. Seaghan MacAnaugh stood there, looking hard, almost dangerous.

Finally. A diversion. Though he had made the body of this stinking female his, Harpalycus could still call out Beatrice’s memories, and he had none of that woman’s reticence.

He slipped into character. “What d’you want with your banging and scowling?”

“Morrigan, you old crone. Have you seen her?”

“So far, Seaghan, you’ve done a bloody poor job of watching her. What will the master say?”

“Have you seen her or not?” Seaghan’s hands clenched.

“Ask that whore from Stranraer where she’s gone. They have no secrets from each other.”

“Morrigan left before she woke.”

Beatrice shrugged. “Maybe she caught the eye of one of the village men and went off for a bit of enjoyment. But you’d know more about such things than me, wouldn’t you?”

He hardly blinked. “Now that you bring it up, there’s something that’s been troubling me. Why is it you’ve let her believe these many years that Douglas was her father?”

“Who would her father be in your eyes, then?”

“I am. You know it. And I also want to know why Hannah ran away with him.”

She laughed, and laughed again at the anguish he didn’t quite manage to disguise. “What pretty wee notions you’ve got rolling around in your head. Hannah was near her time to deliver when you sailed to Nova Scotia to begin a new life.”

“Which proves what I say. They hadn’t been together six months, but Hannah looked to be full term.”

“Women are different, some carry high, some low. Some women grow large and some don’t. If you were so certain the wean was yours, why did you board the ship without her?”

“You know Douglas tricked me. You were there. I thought all of you were getting on the ferry right behind me. I tried to stay, when I saw what Douglas was doing.” Flicking a hand impatiently towards his cheek, he added, “And received a truncheon in the face.”

“I know nothing but how she wept when you sailed away. Thank God Douglas was there to care for her.”

“Aye. He took such good care of her she died that night.”

“At least he was there. There’s more to being a father, you know, than planting seed in soil. Douglas cared for the child when you wanted nothing to do with her or her mam. Hannah wrote to you, asking your forgiveness, begging you to come for her. If you had, she’d be alive today and you’d have your precious Morrigan. You’d have had her all along. But you chose to let Hannah suffer, and Morrigan as well. Hannah’s death is on your shoulders, and I will never help you with Morrigan, or with anything else in this life.”

“Wrote to me? When? What are you talking about?”

“What daft game d’you think to play now? I helped her write that letter. I posted it. Lies won’t serve you, not with me.”

“What letter? Damn you! She wrote to me? When?”

Beatrice shook her head. “You don’t fool me.”

Seaghan slammed his fist into the wall. “I never got any letter from Hannah!”

Beatrice saw the truth in his face. This was amusing. Hannah had believed Seaghan purposely didn’t answer, that he hated her and was leaving her to her fate. But he’d never received the letter that told him he was Morrigan’s father, the letter beseeching him to save her, the letter begging his forgiveness.

She rubbed her hand over her mouth to hide a smirk. “Well, she sent you one, from Ireland. She quickened, and went to see the midwife, who told her she was five months gone. That’s when Hannah realized it was your child she was bringing into the world, and not a rapist’s.”

“Rapist’s?” Seaghan’s face paled.

“Aye, she claimed she was attacked and forced.” Harpalycus remembered the night he had assaulted Seaghan’s lovely betrothed. He’d been Charles Kelly then, a homeless vagabond.

Following that mad sense of his, the one that always led him to the triad, he’d journeyed to Glenelg, but not one of them had been there and none ever appeared, though he waited a good three months. It had simply been a crime of opportunity when he’d come across Hannah and Seaghan having one of their trysts in the forest on a warm night in June. He’d watched and waited, and when Hannah went off, telling Seaghan she didn’t need an escort to get home safely, he’d proven her wrong. He might not have done it, but Seaghan MacAnaugh had been rude to him on more than one occasion, and Harpalycus never let a slight go unpunished. Afterward, he deserted Glenelg and consumed another man, the fiery religious zealot, Owen Anderson. Following a new inner call, he caught a boat to Barra, and there found success at last: Chrysaleon, Aridela, and a long-overdue night of revenge.

He pushed Beatrice to the forefront again. “Of course, Hannah was not exactly virtuous, was she? So it’s anyone’s guess on that detail.”

Now, so many years later, and with Beatrice Stewart’s memories, Harpalycus was able to see the rest of that story.

A devastated and bloody Hannah had staggered home, where Beatrice met her and gave her comfort. Believing she was ruined for Seaghan, Hannah had turned to Douglas Lawton. She’d made up a story of being overwhelmed by love for him, and convinced him to run away with her.

“She… she was raped?” Seaghan wilted. “Who in Glenelg would do such a thing?”

When Harpalycus found Chrysaleon and Aridela, living as Aodhàn Mackinnon and his wife, Lilith, he’d employed one of his favorite, most effective pastimes— a carefully plotted destruction, which culminated in November of the same year. Harpalycus convinced twelve devout men that the Mackinnon house was a haven to Satan and the black arts. When they were good and drunk he sent them in, inflamed and ready to slaughter. The children were easily dispatched; Aridela, hidden away in the body of Lilith Mackinnon, took surprisingly more effort. His men bound Aodhàn, threw him in a fishing boat, stabbed him, and dumped him overboard off the cliffs of Berneray. But fate, or Athene, intervened, sending Seaghan MacAnaugh to pluck the man out of the water and save his life.