At the Queen's Summons (32 page)

With an unsteady hand, Lark took out a small, sharp dagger with a jeweled hilt and slid it neatly into the sheath formed by the brooch. “Before me, it belonged to the Lady Juliana, your grandmother.”

Philippa nodded. “She used to sing to me. I remember snatches of a Russian song.”

Lark moved to hand back the brooch, but Philippa shook her head. “There was a time when that pin was the only thing I treasured. The only thing that belonged to me. The only thing I belonged to.”

Richard asked, “Were the jewels stolen from it?”

“I sold them. To survive.”

He reddened and looked down at his hands. Oliver made an anguished sound in his throat. “Philippa. My daughter. God, when I think how you have suffered, I despise myself. Somehow I should have sensed you were alive. Should have scoured all of England to find you.”

Her throat felt tight, yet she remained distant from these three lovely, well-fed, well-bred people. “You know nothing about me,” she said. “Nothing about the pain I suffered, nothing of the loneliness that ached inside me for so many years.”

“We ached, too, Philippa,” Lark said softly. “More than you know. We grieved for the daughter we thought we had lost.”

Philippa hardened her heart. Long habit made her resist loving them. “Circumstances, it seemed, were not kind to any of us.”

“We were deprived of each other's love,” Oliver said, “but a miracle brought us together again.”

“Not a miracle,” Philippa said. “Aidan O Donoghue.” It hurt just to speak his name. “My husband.”

Her pronouncement caused Lark's face to pale and Oliver's to redden. Richard raked a hand through his glossy golden hair. “So you married him.”

“An Irish rebel lord,” said Oliver.

“A Catholic,” said Lark.

“A man!” Philippa slapped her hands down on the table. “You speak to me of love simply as something that exists between us due to blood ties. That is not love. That is kinship. Love is something that is earned by constancy and caring and attention and devotion, the very things Aidan—not you—gave me.”

“Philippa,” Lark began, “we would have—”

“But you did not.” She felt no anger, just exasperation. “It was no one's fault. The point is, Aidan loved me when I was dead to you. He loved me when I was at my most unlovable. When I was poor and crude and homeless and hungry. When I cared about nothing save who my next gull was going to be.”

Lark wept, making no sound, the tears falling from eyes so like Philippa's that it was like looking in a mirror.

“I'm sorry for your grief,” Philippa said. “No one is to blame. I love my husband.” Aye, that was true. The shock of learning about the de Laceys had made her lash out at Aidan, but she knew she had never stopped loving him. “Nothing you can say will change that.”

Richard cleared his throat. “Then why were you on the lake, fleeing toward Killarney?”

His question made her blood run cold. She touched her throat and began to pace. She trembled inside, wondering if she had destroyed Aidan's love by leaving him with such bitter words.

Finally she faced her parents and brother. “He told me of your summons.”

“It was a summons of the heart,” Oliver said. “I wanted to see my daughter.” He smiled. That smile brought back all the magic of her earliest years. For a moment he was no stranger, but her loving Papa who made her laugh. He formed shadow puppets on the nursery wall at night. He showed her how to hide her porridge from Mama when she didn't want to eat it. He gave the most special good-night kisses in the world—cheek, cheek, lips and nose, always in that order.

“I haven't yet told you,” Oliver said, “how beautiful you look to me.”

The words tugged her heart in one direction, but thoughts of Aidan pulled her in the other. “Perhaps,” she said, “we will have plenty of time to visit one another in the future, but I must get back to Aidan. Your troops have threatened his people. I intend to stand at his side and fight—”

“My sweet,” Oliver said, coming around the table and holding out his hands for her, “I can't let you go back to him.”

“Don't touch me!” She snatched his dagger from its sheath.

He held out his hands, palms up in supplication and surrender. “Philippa, you misinterpret me. We have no objection to your marriage to Aidan O Donoghue, no more than we object to Richard's marriage to Shannon, hasty though it was. I admire your loyalty to the Irish.”

“Then why do you try to keep me from Aidan?” She set down the dagger. “I'm going to Ross Castle within the hour.”

“Philippa,” said her mother, “he isn't there. He isn't at Ross Castle.”

Dread pulsed at her temples. “What do you mean? What has happened? Have you killed him?”

It was Richard who spoke. He sank to one knee before her. “Philippa, the Browne family believes Aidan murdered his wife. Everyone knows Felicity was mad. She took her own life, but her father is demanding retribution. Fortitude sent Aidan an ultimatum. He was ordered to surrender Ross Castle to me and himself to Constable Browne.”

She lifted her chin. “Aidan would never capitulate to Fortitude Browne.”

Oliver clenched his jaw, then spoke with obvious distaste. “The constable promised to burn out one Irish family a day until the O Donoghue Mór surrendered.”

“Can't you do something?” she asked her father. “You're a lord, a noble. Intervene, restrain Mr. Browne—”

Oliver pressed his hands on the table and took a deep breath. “I have tried. I was up all night writing letters, sending riders to Cork and Dublin and London, but I have no authority here. In Browne's district, I have little more influence than a common soldier.”

Looking heartsick, Richard rose to his feet. “The O Donoghue Mór knows he is outnumbered, low on provisions, facing a starving winter.”

“What are you saying?” Philippa asked in a harsh voice she did not recognize.

Oliver clasped her hands in his. “My sweet, he had no choice. Last night he disbanded his army and surrendered to Fortitude Browne.”

She wrenched her hands from his and fled to a window seat, wishing she could curl up into a ball and make the world go away. “He knew,” she said, whispering to herself, beginning to shake. “He knew this would happen.”
Yesterday morning, she had almost guessed. He had loved her as if it were the last time.

She felt Lark's hand on her shoulder. “God,” Philippa said, “oh God, he wanted me to leave in anger, wanted me to come to you. He had it all planned. Why didn't I see it?”

“He didn't want you to guess,” Lark said.

Philippa looked up.
Make it better, Mama.
But no one could make this hurt go away. “What happens now?” she asked. “Will they send him to trial at Dublin Castle?”

Lark and Oliver exchanged a glance.

“Don't lie,” Philippa said. “I'll never forgive you if you lie.”

It was Oliver who told her what she had dreaded in her heart all along.

“They're going to hang him.”

 

The ominous pulsebeat of a drum broke the morning quiet. The air held a chill as Aidan walked along the
boreen
toward the scaffold on a hill a mile distant.

In deference to his rank, his hands and feet were unfettered, and he wore his deep blue mantle to ward off the early autumn cold. His hair blew long and loose over his shoulders.

A troop of twelve soldiers surrounded him: three in front, three in the rear, three on each side. Constable Browne rode in grave, black-clad Puritan dignity in the fore. There was no real danger of his trying to escape. With sharp, well-honed cruelty, Browne had ensured his cooperation.

Irish people lined the roadway, slowing the pace of the death march. Their weeping was loud and unabashed and filled with a uniquely Celtic mix of curses and blessings.

The sound of his grieving people was curiously affecting. He tried to feel nothing, but they made it so hard. He had done his best for them.

At least he would not have to face Pippa today. More than ever, he was certain he had made the right choice—forfeiting her love and driving her into the bosom of her family.

“God bless you, my lord!” The cries came from all quarters, each side of the road, in front and behind, even above, for a group of defiant youngsters had climbed the trees to call to him and to hurl beechnuts at the soldiers.

“And a blessing on all of you as well.” His voice rang strong and clear, and despite a bone-deep weariness he held himself tall. He had not slept the night before, had spent the entire time hammering out the terms of surrender.

Ross Castle and all its dominions were to fall under the jurisdiction of Richard de Lacey. Iago and Donal Og and the O Donoghue hundred were to be granted clemency and sent into exile. Iago swore he would find paradise. Donal Og challenged him to do so.

Fortitude Browne had agreed to all this readily enough. What he truly wanted was the death of the O Donoghue Mór.

And that was what he would get.

They were yet a quarter mile or so from the scaffold on a lonely hill high above Lough Leane when he heard the sound of galloping hooves.

He looked over the heads of his escort and saw a lone rider coursing toward him down a green hill. He knew of only one person who sat a horse and rode with such reckless clumsiness.

Pippa.

Ah, Christ, why had she come?

She barreled headlong through the crowd of onlookers. Fortitude reined his tall horse. “See here now—”

“Bugger off,” she said, plowing her mount boldly across the
boreen
and forcing the soldiers to halt. She dismounted in an awkward billow of skirts and pushed past the escort.

How lovely she looked, flushed and golden as a ripe peach, her eyes moist, her lips parted. She stopped before Aidan, choked out a wordless cry and flung her arms around his neck.

All the love he had ever felt for her came flooding back, rising through him like a fountain of sunshine. He kissed her and tasted her and called himself seven times a fool for loving her so much.

“Your trick didn't work,” she whispered against his mouth. “You tried to destroy our love. So losing you would not hurt me.”

As she spoke, the soldiers stopped, shuffling their feet and staring at the amazing spectacle. But Aidan forgot them, just as Pippa had seemed to.

“You should have known better than that, Aidan. I will love you till the end of time.”

Heat built in his throat, and his eyes smarted. He cupped her cheek in his palm and pressed her head to his chest. “What a selfish brute I am,” he said. “To hold you in my arms. One last time.” Yet he did not want her to see him die, to see the cart kicked out from beneath his feet, to see the noose tighten and his body jerk and his feet dancing helplessly in the empty air.

“Say farewell to me here and now. I beg you, don't finish this journey with me.”

She pulled back and stared up at him. “How can you do this? How can you choose death rather than running for your life?”

He gestured at the crowd of Irish people. “If I fled, they would pay the price.”

He could read on her face the words she would not speak:
Then let them pay!
And some small, selfish part of him agreed with her.

But he felt oddly invigorated now, holding the woman he loved. He even managed to smile.

“Beloved,” he said, “it's too late for us. Ironic, isn't it? When first we met it was too early. Now it is too late.”

She drew in a long, tremulous breath. “I begged my father and brother to intervene on your behalf.”

“It is useless. Do not hold the de Laceys responsible for this. They have no authority to stop Constable Browne.”

“So you have given up on everything. On Ross Castle. On us. On life. I won't let you!”

He skimmed his knuckles down her flushed cheek and nearly winced at the sweetness of touching her. “Not on us, beloved. Never on us. My faith has undergone many tests, but here's something I believe with all my heart. Love never dies. I'll never find a love so perfect as ours in this world or the next.”

“Oh God!” She turned her head and pressed her lips desperately to his palm.

“I will be with you always,” he said. “That is my pledge. That is my promise. I'll be in the warm breeze when it caresses your face. In the first scent of springtime, in the song of the meadowlark, in the flutter you get in your heart when you feel joy or sorrow.” His hand slid down to cup her chin. Bending, he laid his lips over hers solemnly, silently, while in the background his people sobbed.

“Do you trust me, Pippa?”

She stared at him, looking as if the slightest movement
would cause her to shatter. Yet deep in her eyes, deeper than the grief, deeper than the despair, he saw the strength of her love burning like a bright, steady flame.