Forests of the Heart (19 page)

She took the mask halves from him. Placing them back on the cloth, she refolded it into a bundle and tied it closed with the leather thongs. Her guest took the cigarette from behind his ear and rolled it back and forth between his fingers.

“But she’s a busy woman,” he said after a moment. “Easily distracted.”

“She’ll do fine.”

“Last night there was a man sniffing around her.”

Musgrave sighed. “She’s a young, attractive woman. What would you expect? Of course men would be interested in her. And what does it matter?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Why? Because it’s not one of you Gentry doing the sniffing?”

He gave her a hard gaze, but she only laughed at him.

“Give it a rest,” she told him. “And leave her alone. There’s no need for you to keep watch over her anymore. Go get drunk and listen to that music you fancy so much.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What? The drinking, or the music?”

He shrugged. “Either. It’s hard, living as we do, and grows harder every year. The music takes us away. There’s a promise in it, of all we never had.”

Musgrave laid her hand upon the bundled mask. “When this is done, you will have whatever you want.”

“Perhaps. If only she weren’t human.”

“We need her to make the mask,” Musgrave said. “Not wear it.”

He nodded, his dark eyes growing thoughtful.

“I don’t trust the little bugger you have in mind for that job,” he said, his voice soft. “I don’t trust him at all.”

“The trick is to use someone we can control.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Let me worry about him,” she told him, with more confidence than she felt.

“It’ll be on your head.”

Didn’t she know that, Musgrave thought.

“So you’ll leave the girl alone until she’s done her job?” she asked.

He gave another nod and rose to his feet. Musgrave remained at the table as he crossed the room and left the cabin. He had no word of parting for her and she kept her own peace. The lack of amenities between them didn’t surprise her. They’d been uneasy allies from the first.

Outside the window, she saw him pause to light his cigarette, then slip off into the woods behind her cabin. A faint intuition prickled up the length of her spine.

Something was coming, she knew. She could taste it in the air, feel the weight of it in her bones. A change, certainly. Perhaps danger as well. But she couldn’t place its source. It could come from the native spirits whose land the Gentry wished to claim for their own. It could come from the Gentry themselves. It could even come from a player who had yet to step onto the game board.

She thought of the young woman with the fierce aura of
geasan
that her body was unable to contain, thought of Ellie’s innocence and the task they had set for her. Musgrave sighed.

No one was to be trusted. Not even herself.

The back door of the main house opened just as Ellie stepped up onto its low stone stoop. Bettina appeared in the doorway, a glimpse of the kitchen showing behind her. She smiled at Ellie’s startled look.

“I saw you coming,” she explained before Ellie could ask.

Stepping aside, she ushered Ellie in out of the cold.

I like this place, Ellie thought as she stepped inside. The kitchen was a big, comfortable room, warm and filled with the smell of baking bread and something savory—soup or stew, Ellie wasn’t sure which. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious and made her stomach rumble. At a large wooden table by the window, Donal lifted a lazy arm in greeting. He had a bowl of soup in front of him, a thick chunk of bread beside it.

“We were just having some lunch,” Bettina said. “Are you hungry?”

“Famished. But I don’t want to impose.”

“I’ve just invited you.
Por eso,
it’s no imposition.”

Regarding her, Ellie was struck again by the wonderful character in the other woman’s features. Maybe there’d be time to capture them in a small sculpture, if Bettina would be willing to sit for her.

“Then, yes,” Ellie said. “Thank you. It smells so good.”

“Doesn’t it? It’s one of Nuala’s soups—she’s the housekeeper and cook here. Chantal says she must have gone to chef school.”

“And graduated at the head of her class,” Donal put in. He pointed at his bowl with a spoon. “This stuff is bloody poetry.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows. Compliments from Donal? What was the world coming to?

“Can I meet her?” Ellie asked.

Bettina shook her head. “Not this afternoon.”

She waved Ellie to the table as she spoke. Crossing to the stove, she filled a third bowl, cut a generous slice of the fresh-baked bread, and brought them back to the table with her. Ellie inhaled the steam from the soup when the bowl was put in front of her, breathing in a heady mixture of spices, herbs, and vegetables.

“Nuala’s gone into town for the day,” Bettina explained as she regained her own seat. “I don’t think she’ll be back before supper. Did you want to leave a message?”

Ellie shook her head. “No, I just thought it would be nice to meet her before tomorrow. It seems….” She looked at Donal and grinned. “I’m going to be working here for a few weeks.”

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” Donal said. “Get away.”

“No, it’s true. Ms. Wood gave me a commission.”

“What good news,” Bettina told her. “That means we’ll have the chance to get to know each other better.”

Ellie returned the other woman’s happy smile.

“So give,” Donal said. “All the gory details.”

“Well, it’s a little odd, really. She wants me to cast a mask for her. A copy of a wooden one she already has that’s broken …”

She gave a brief rundown of her visit with Musgrave Wood while they ate their soup. At first she was going to joke about the story behind the older woman’s name and some of the other odd things that had come up in their conversation, but then found she couldn’t. Wood had been so nice after the awkward way they’d started off that it felt as though it would be too much of a betrayal. In the end she didn’t even mention the slightly schizoid aspect of Wood’s personality, although that was something she meant to discuss with Bettina at the first opportune moment. While she was sure she’d blown it out of proportion, it wouldn’t hurt to be certain.

“What’s this ‘green man’ in the mask?” Bettina asked.

Ellie described the mask in more detail, adding, “All I really know about them is that they’ve got something to do with British folklore. I remember seeing them all over the place when I was backpacking in England a few years ago.”

“Excuse me?” Donal put in. “Green Men belong to the Brits?”

“Well, don’t they?”

“As if. Your man in the woods is just something else that they stole from the Celts.”

“I didn’t know they had Green Men in Ireland as well.”

“The Celts didn’t come from Ireland,” Donal pointed out. “Ireland’s only the last place we were driven into—before we sailed over here. But at one time we were all over Britain.”

Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”

“Of course our Green Man wasn’t some little gargoyle bugger looking out at you from a mess of twigs and vines, and he bloody well didn’t have anything to do with churches. He was a man for the drink and the
craic
—a great big stag-horned man, fierce and wild. Not the kind of creature the churchmen could tame, I’ll tell you that. I’ve heard him called Cernunnos, but only by scholars. The old folks didn’t have a name for him, or if they did, they didn’t use it. He was one of that pack of seasonal hero-king gods that your man Campbell liked to go on about.” Donal grinned. “Liked to drink himself mad and sleep with the Moon, don’t you know. Had himself a grand time until they’d hang him on a tree at the end of the year. At Samhain time—you know, Halloween.”

“Whatever for?” Ellie asked.

Donal shrugged. “A way of closing the year, I suppose. They’d cut him down in his prime, at harvest time, but no worries. Every spring he’d return to give life to the crops. Beltane Eve—that was the big day when he’d be welcomed back, randy as a bloody goat and ready to party.”

Trust Donal to know so much about this sort of a deity, Ellie thought.

“And this is a belief of the Irish?” Bettina asked.

Donal got an odd look at the question.

“Well, of some of the people I knew back home, and they were Gaeltacht Irish, so yeah, I suppose. But it’s not like it was on everybody’s mind or anything. There was a brother of my granddad—what would that make him to me?”

“A great-uncle?” Ellie tried.

“Whatever. Fergus was his name. He used to tell me these tales, that’s all. He had all sorts of stories about how things were.”

“Did he talk about the Gentry?” Bettina asked.

“Oh, sure. The original hard men.” He gave her a curious look. “Where’d you hear that term?”

Bettina shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

Something about the overly casual way Bettina replied made Ellie think that she did remember, but she didn’t want to say. Well, it was none of her business what Bettina wanted to keep to herself. Ellie turned back to Donal.

“You mean like those men who beat you up outside the pub that night?” she asked.

He hesitated for a moment. “Well, no. Language gets all tangled up on the Irish tongue—look at your man Joyce. Different words can mean the same thing; one word can mean different things—same as here, I suppose. So sometimes a hard man’s a term of affection and sometimes it’s meant literally, to describe the kind of man who likes to break heads for sport. Now these Gentry that Bettina was asking about, they were supernatural beings.” He smiled when Ellie pulled a face. “Oh, yes, Ellie—your favorite sort of creature. Big bad fairies who were mean-tempered when you crossed them—and anything could be taken for an insult with that lot, if the stories are anything to go by.”

“Fairies,” Ellie repeated, putting a volume of feeling into the one word.

“Well, I don’t mean your little bottom-of-the-garden variety, living in a flower, drinking dew out of an acorn cup and such shite. The Gentry were supposed to be our size or taller. Only more bad-tempered.”

Ellie rolled her eyes, but when she looked over at Bettina hoping to find an ally, the other woman appeared to be quite intrigued.

“Why were they so bad-tempered?” Bettina wanted to know.

“Ah, you know how it is,” Donal said. “It’s like some people you meet— they always have a chip on their shoulder. The Gentry are like that, except instead of just giving you a bang on the ear when they’re ticked off, they’ll turn you into a lump of coal, or a bloody moth or something. Charming fellas, really.”

Ellie could only shake her head. “I swear half this stuff he just makes up.”

“It’s true. I do. But not this half. I’m just repeating folklore.”

Bettina looked as though she wanted to ask more about the Gentry. Instead, she smiled and offered them refills of the soup instead. Ellie and Donal both declined. There was some more small talk before Ellie bullied Donal out of his seat and into his coat. Left to his own devices, he’d sit there for the rest of the day, mooching meals and flirting with Bettina.

“I’ve got to get stuff ready for tomorrow,” she explained.

“Of course,” Bettina said. “Do you know where you’ll be working?”

“No. Ms. Wood says that Nuala will show me tomorrow.”

“I think you’ll like it here.”

“Jaysus,” Donal said. “Who wouldn’t? Grand food, grand company—”

“And grand fools,” Ellie broke in. “Come on. We’ve taken up enough of Bettina’s time.”

“¿Y bien?”
Bettina said. “It was my pleasure.”

“I like her,” Ellie said as they drove away.

Bettina had walked them out to the minibus and stood at the top of the driveway to watch them go. Looking out the back window, Ellie could still see her there, a small dark-haired figure, Kellygnow rearing up behind her out of the snow-covered lawns.

“Me, too,” Donal said. He glanced in the rearview mirror before returning his gaze to the driveway. “And I think she fancies me.”

Ellie laughed.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” she had to ask.

Donal shrugged. “A man just learns to read that kind of thing.”

“Does he now?”

“Besides, did you not see her hanging on my every word?”

“I think she just likes fairy tales.”

“Not like you.”

Ellie smiled. “It’s not that I don’t like them. I just don’t take them seriously. Between you and Jilly and Tommy’s aunts … well, someone has to be sensible.”

“Is that how you see it?”

She looked at him. “Why? How do you see it?”

“That you’re afraid there really might be more to the world than you can see.”

“Why would that frighten me?”

Donal shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Ellie sighed and slouched in her seat. Maybe it was time she filled her life with some more normal people instead of all the half-mad artists and the like that currently inhabited it. The sort of people who’d see a mask as a mask, a folktale as just that—a story. Like Hunter Cole.
He
didn’t strike her as the type to be looking for fairies under every bush.

“I don’t know why I bother with you,” she said.

“It’s my Gaelic charm. The same as won Bettina’s heart.”

“You wish.”

“Don’t be harsh, Ellie. It doesn’t suit you.”

When he gave her one of those disarming smiles of his, she punched him in the shoulder.

“Hey, watch it. I’m driving.”

“I’ll drive you,” she growled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Donal in a good mood was impossible to resist.

Playing CDs by singer-songwriters on the store’s sound system was normally somewhat of a challenge for Hunter. If one of his employees didn’t complain, as often as not at interminable length, then another did. Usually he simply didn’t feel it was worth the argument. He was the boss, but he liked to keep matters on a somewhat democratic scale when he could, otherwise all you got were unhappy employees and that didn’t sell records.

Except for “The Goddess” as she liked to call Ani DiFranco, Miki preferred instrumental music, or something sung in a language she couldn’t understand, because she’d rather “make up my own stories as to what the songs’re about.” The members of the Goth bands that Fiona liked wrote their own material, but she didn’t have much patience for what she considered the navel gazing of singer-songwriters. Hunter never had the heart to point out the irony of that notion. So far as he was concerned, Morrissey alone called up more angst in one song than most artists did in their whole body of work. As for Titus and Adam, their only criterion was how cool the artist in question was, which translated into who was playing on the album, or more importantly, who’d produced it.