Erinsong (37 page)

Jorand’s lip twitched with
sup
pressed amusement. She let Murtaugh’s
backhanded compliment pass without comment. “Where will we
be finding the abbot?”

Murtaugh jerked his head
toward the open cottage
door.

Brenna spied Father Ambrose huddled over a
makeshift desk inside Murtaugh’s one-room croft. The sexton had
evidently been evicted and Father Ambrose had transformed the
gardener’s home into his private chambers until new ones were
prepared for him in the rebuilt abbey.

Father Ambrose looked up
when she stepped over
the threshold. He’d
dropped a stone or two in weight. His formerly pudgy cheeks now
hung in
flaccid jowls, making him look
like an aging hunting
dog. But his eyes
were clear, and he no longer had the
haunted look he’d worn when she’d last seen him. Father
Ambrose didn’t cross himself when Jorand followed her into the
cottage, though he might have surreptitiously made the sign against
evil with his left hand for a moment.

“Well, child.” He laid
aside the stylus he was writing with and fixed her with a hopeful
look. “Were ye
able to retrieve
it?”

“Aye, Father.” Brenna
placed the oilskin packet on
the desk as
carefully as if it contained Germanic glass. “We brought most of
it.”

“What do ye mean—most of
it?” A deep cleft
formed between his brows
as he tore open the pack
age and rifled
through the loose folios with a lack of
delicacy that made Brenna want to jerk the Codex back from
him. “Ah! The fiends! They’ve kept the jewels, then.”

“Aye,” Brenna said. “But we
have the most impor
tant part still
intact. The Word of God is surely the true treasure of the
Skellig-Michael Codex, and it is
restored
to ye entire. We must be thankful for God’s
mercy.”

“His mercy might spare the part that would
pay for rebuilding Clonmacnoise,” the abbot muttered under his
breath.

Brenna knew the Codex had
been an important
draw for pilgrims from
the whole of the island and a valuable focus for donations as well.
A look passed
over the abbot’s face, hard
as flint and, had it been anyone but Father Ambrose, Brenna would
have said she recognized the gleam of thwarted avarice. Then Father
Ambrose seemed to remember he was not alone and quickly recovered
himself. “Ye have
the right of it. Thank
ye, Brenna, and ye too, North
man. Go now
in God’s peace.”

He gathered up the Codex
and stashed it on one of
the shelves that
had lately held the sexton’s vines and seedlings. When he turned
around, he seemed startled to see Brenna and Jorand still there.
Father Ambrose sketched a hasty blessing.

“Off ye go then.” He
waggled his fingers in a ges
ture of
dismissal.

“Father, have ye forgotten
your promise? We brought ye back the Codex.” Brenna couldn’t
have
been more stunned if he’d slapped
her. “Ye must tell
me where to find
Sinead’s bairn.”

The abbot harrumphed loudly
and made a great
show of blowing his nose.
“Our agreement was con
ditional on the
return of the Skellig Michael Gospels.
Ye
must admit, the Codex is somewhat less than it once
was.”

Jorand closed the distance
to the abbot in a few
strides, snatching
up Father Ambrose by his cowled cassock and slamming him against
the back wall of
Murtaugh’s little house.
Dust jarred loose from the rafters and rained a spatter of mud
chips and old thatch on them. “You’ll tell her what she wants to
know and quickly. Or perhaps you’d like to be less than you once
were as well.”

Father Ambrose blanched,
and his eyes rolled un
certainly. Brenna
put a restraining hand on Jorand’s arm. In response to the
commotion, Murtaugh had slipped into the cottage behind them. The
abbot had reneged on his promise, so she didn’t have much sympathy
for him, but Brenna didn’t want to see Jorand do the sexton any
damage should Murtaugh decide to rush to Father Ambrose’s aid. But
Murtaugh just looked on, sucking on his pipe with an air of
expectancy on his wizened face.

“There’s no need for ye to do him harm,
husband,” she said, her voice mild as milk. “I’m sure the abbot
will see the wisdom of keeping to his part of the bargain.”

Jorand lowered the priest till his feet
touched the dirt floor once more. He stepped back a pace to give
Father Ambrose room to breathe, but Jorand’s eyes still glinted
with the promise of mayhem if his wishes were ignored.

“ “Tis not that, not at all.” Sweat popped
out on Father Ambrose’s broad forehead, and he mopped his brow
with a grimy kerchief. “I’d hoped to spare ye more grief, my
child.”

“Where is me sister’s bairn?”

“The babe is dead,” he said flatly.

“You lie. I’ll not believe it.” Brenna balled
her hands into fists, longing to lunge at the abbot herself.
White-hot anger flared inside her. If he were anyone else, she’d
have scratched his eyes out. “The bairn can’t be dead.”

Father Ambrose just looked at her, a mixture
of pity and suffering benevolence on his face.

“How could you send us in search of the Codex
if the child were not still alive?” she demanded.

The abbot’s gaze flicked to
Jorand. “You had a
Northman with you. I
saw the slimmest of chances
that the abbey
could recover one of its lost treasures. I regret that I had to
trick you into doing the right thing, but I’d do it again for the
good of the Clonmacnoise.”

No.
Brenna opened her mouth, but no sound came
out. She felt as though someone had kicked her in
the
ribs and knocked all the breath from
her lungs. Not trusting her wobbling knees to support her any
longer, she sank down on the three-legged stool by the abbot’s
desk.

“... never any real chance
at life, given its sire, so we might well consider its passing a
blessing. In
times like these, we must
call to mind ...”

The abbot droned on about
God’s mercy and the inscrutability of His perfect will, but Brenna
heard none of it. Only the echo of the child’s birth cry, a lusty
wail half remembered, like something from a
feverish dream, resounded in her ears.

A weight settled on her
shoulder—Jorand’s hand,
she realized. She
knew he was trying to console her,
but
like Rachel in Ramah, she would not be comforted, for the child
was not.

“Was it a boy or a girl?”
she asked, neither know
ing nor caring
that she interrupted Father Ambrose
as he
was working into the moral of his sermonette.

“There’s no need to trouble
yourself any furth—”
the abbot
began.

“Sinead bore a lad,”
Murtaugh said. “A bonnie wee
manikin with
a tuft of red on his little head.”

“Enough.” Father Ambrose scowled at the
sexton.

“But how? How did he die?” she asked.

The abbot’s eyes flared a warning at
Murtaugh, then turned back to Brenna. “Let the past be, my child.
No good will come from—”

“Where is he?” Brenna demanded. “Ye must at
least tell me that. Where does he lie?”

The abbot’s thick lips
flattened into a hard line. “All the indigent poor are gathered to
God in one place.” He turned around as though he couldn’t
bear
the sight of Brenna one moment
longer. “Grieve, if ye
must, at the
Potter’s Field.”

***

The graveyard of
Clonmacnoise was a peaceful place, rows of headstones and standing
crosses, some so covered with moss and weathered by rain
and time, the inscriptions had faded to no more
than
dimples in the stone.

There were many fresh
mounds, the loamy soil bare and dark against the green. Old
Murtaugh had been busy with burials for those whose bodies had not
been consigned to the flames. Mother Superior. Brother Bartolomeo.
Sister Mary Patrick. Brenna
ticked off the
names as she passed their final resting
places. Many of the cemetery’s new occupants had
been her friends, but she couldn’t think on that
now.

One grief at a time,
she told herself as she trudged
through the silent rows. If she let the enormity
of the
loss sink in, she’d be done
for.

She stopped before Sinead’s
grave. Brenna had
seen to it an ornate
cross was erected for her sister be
fore
she left Clonmacnoise to return to Donegal.
Grass covered the mound thickly now.

“Oh, Sinead,” she said with a sob. “I’m so
sorry.”

She’d failed her sister, and there was no way
to make amends. She had no flowers, nothing to leave at the
graveside. Then she reached up and clasped the silver cross
necklace that had belonged to their mother. She draped it over her
sister’s headstone.

“Ye were the first true bride among us,” she
said softly. “Mother sends this to ye.”

She turned away and continued her mourning
march. Her step slowed even further as she neared the far corner of
the patch of consecrated ground.

Potter’s Field.

It was a gaping mass grave, where the bodies
of the poor and unknown were stitched into shrouds and dropped in.
The pit reeked of the lye used to mask the miasma of putrefaction,
but a hint of the sweet stench of corruption reached her nostrils.
Brenna’s knees buckled and she sank to the ground near the lip of
the pit.

To end thus... unnamed... unloved...
unmourned. How could she have let Sinead’s babe come to this? The
lad may have had an ill-getting, but the blood of Sinead Ui Niall
flowed in his veins as well. If only she’d defied the abbot and
fought for the child when it was born....

“Sweet Jesus, forgive me,” she whispered,
praying as much to the little ghost that had hovered near her for
the past year and the memory of her beloved sister as to Christ.
Brenna wrapped her arms around herself to keep from flying in all
directions. Her pulse throbbed in her ears and she swayed in time
with the steady rhythm. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her breath came
in a rasping sob as she gave vent to her grief in a banshee’s
wail.

Jorand’s strong arms
wrapped around her. He knelt by her side, holding her as she cried.
His breath slid hot and comforting across the back of her neck and
she finally quieted in his embrace. He smelled of sun-warmed wool
and stiff sea breezes. Vibrant.
Alive.

She dissolved into fresh spasms of
despair.

“Brenna, my love, be easy.”
He stroked her hair,
pressing her to his
chest. “There’s naught you can do
for the
bairn now. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I
am
sick. Sick at heart.” She beat
her fists against her thighs, and he caught up her wrists to keep
her from hurting herself. “If only I’d fought to keep
him...”

“What? You think you could
have kept Death from
claiming
him?”

She met his steady gaze.
That was exactly what she
thought.

“My people believe a man’s
death is determined before he is even born, fixed by the Norns, the
three weavers of human fate. Run from Death on the sea and he will
find you in the forest,” Jorand said with
certainty. “Do Christians think they can cheat Death,
then?”

“No,” she said soberly.
“No, we cannot cheat
death.” She swiped
her cheeks. “But we live in hope.
I must
live in hope that in the resurrection, I will be allowed to hold
the babe. And I will place him in Sinead’s arms for the first
time.”

A pained expression flitted across Jorand’s
face, and she knew they were truly joined. He felt her grief.

“Brenna, let’s leave this
place,” he said, closing his
hands around
both of hers in a doubled gesture of
prayer. “Let me take you away from here. The world
is bigger than you can imagine. We can forget the
grief of this island and start fresh together
some
where else. We’ll go to the Hebrides
or the Faroes, or
even back to Sognefjord.
I’ll give you children, Brenna, a whole houseful of them, I
promise. Only say you’ll come away with me.”

She ran a knuckle over his
cheek. What was it she
recognized in his
anxious eyes? Fear? Not in a North
man,
surely. Then the truth stabbed her, a thin stiletto
to the heart. “Ye fear I’ll depart, like me
mother, into the deep darkness over the loss of the
bairn.”

He looked down and then back at her with a
swift nod.

“Ye must understand. A
small piece of me heart
will always be
here. It cannot be otherwise. I owe as
much to Sinead.” She clutched at her chest, feeling the
rhythm of her heartbeat under her breastbone. She was amazed it was
so steady. Despite all she’d been through, she still breathed,
still felt her regular heartbeat.