Hot Whispers of an Irishman (8 page)

“I do, now,” Liam replied.

Vi’s hand in his, he made for the pub door before his brother had picked him to the bones.

As Vi sat in Liam’s car, she was glad for the meal she’d eaten, but not the way it was now lurching about in her stomach. Liam had gone inside the drab beige-painted parish school to collect his daughter while Vi focused on collecting herself. Earlier at the pub when she’d asked Liam whether they’d be alone, this was Vi’s concern, not some antiquated notion of propriety. Absorbing the knowledge that Liam had a child was a far simpler task than seeing her. Vi had faced down much in life, but never anything that hit quite so personally.

She watched as Liam and his daughter walked down the steps from the school building. Meghan was petite, yet even in the school’s blue and green plaid skirt and oversized green jumper, she was far older looking than Vi had thought of a standard twelve-year-old as being.

They were nearly to the car now. On the surface of things, Meghan looked very little like her father. She was dark blond where he was dark. Her eyes were brown and had only a hint of his eyes’ shape to them. All of this came as welcome news. Had Vi seen more of Liam, she’d have been less able to maintain the semblance of a pleasant calm.

Meghan opened the back passenger door, flung her book bag inside, then followed herself. It was an act of high drama, with sulky glares and the car door slamming loudly behind her.

“Meghan, this is Vi Kilbride, an old family friend,” Liam said as he started the car.

A family friend? That would be poor news indeed to Liam’s mam,
Vi thought. She moved the best she could in the confines of her seat belt and held out her hand to Meghan.

“It’s grand to meet you,” she said, accepting Meghan’s limp and unwilling shake in return.

Meghan’s mumbled response could have been a politeness or a go to hell, for all Vi could interpret. She turned back about, facing the windshield, satisfied that at least she’d done her duty.

Meghan’s school had sat on the outskirts of town. Vi wasn’t at all sure where Liam might have a house, but in a matter of moments, they were slowing in front of a tall, three-storied home, the ground floor of which appeared to have once been a shop. Liam pulled down a short brickwork drive to the house’s left, then parked in a courtyard between the back of the house and a small two-storied carriage house.

Liam scarcely had the car switched off before Meghan grabbed her bag and bolted for the carriage house. Liam flung open his door.

“No running to your tower,” he called.

Meghan pulled up short. She turned and glared at her father, who had exited the car. Vi had stopped, too, curious about this particular show.

Liam motioned toward the house’s back door. “That way. And no foot-dragging, either,” he added when she apparently paused an instant too long for his taste. All three of them were in the kitchen when he gave his next edict to Meghan. “Two aspirin and then to bed.”

“But I’m feeling a lot better,” his daughter replied. Vi marveled that she’d made the words sound so much like a threat. Amazing talent, that.

“I’m sure you are. And from here on, unless you can produce verifiable symptoms like a burning fever or a missing limb, don’t be asking to come home again.”

Meghan left the room. Vi hid a smile as she listened to the girl pound her way upstairs, feet dramatically heavy. Liam appeared less amused.

“Sorry about that. I’m easy game, yet,” he said. “I figure we’ll have worked our way through her repertoire about the time her mother returns for her.”

“A manufactured headache is nothing too dire,” Vi said.

“Yet. She’s crafty.”

This time Vi did laugh. “I wonder where she might be getting that? Speaking of which, now that your daughter’s settled, would you care to show me your grand treasure map? For all the good it will do you without access to the land.”

“It’s no map,” Liam replied. “But come this way.”

He led her from the crisp new kitchen to a combination dining room and living room that would be lovely, indeed, if someone introduced some color to it. The floors were pale wood, unrelieved by carpet, as was the open stairway leading to the upper floors. The sofa and chairs in the living room were square-edged and made of cold leather of a colder white.

“So you like white?” she asked as he riffled through a briefcase on the dining room table.

“I like it well enough,” he said.

Vi rubbed the fingers of her left hand together as she thought how fine the room would look with a smoky crimson on one wall, and the ceiling a buttery color. She started as she realized that this was the first time in weeks she’d thought about color as though it was a living thing, something to be stroked like a sleek cat.

Her mouth quirked at the image, for she’d always thought of Liam as a cat, too—cat’s eyes, agile body, and hot to her touch.

“Ah! Found it.” He pulled out a sheet of paper. “Come here, Vi, and have a look. This one first.”

Vi stood beside him, forcing herself to focus less on the inviting warmth she sensed coming off him, and more on what he wanted her to look at.

The paper was modern, the same as what spat from her hated, eternally uncooperative computer back home. The contents of the paper, however, came from years past. Vi took a moment to adjust to the photocopy of a page from a ledger of some sort. The writing was strongly embellished, lovely in an illegible sort of way. A few things did stand out. The first was a date of 1837 and the second was a notation for a sum paid to…She frowned, trying to make out more. It appeared to be a sum paid to an Edward Rafferty.

“It’s an account page from a jeweler in Kilkenny,” Liam said. “It seems that a relative of mine sold him some gold.”

She could imagine how Liam might see that as relevant in a hazy sort of way. “Treasure or none, it’s possible that a Rafferty might have possessed gold, you know.”

“Possible, but why so much? This was an enormous sum he received—nearly enough to send a whole family to America, which it so happens that Edward Rafferty did that very same year.

“And there’s more.” He flipped to the second sheet. “The jeweler also kept an inventory of the pieces he melted down, and their weights. That week he melted rings and brooches and the like, all of which might have been from his era. But look at this.” Liam tapped a finger over another bit of curlicued script. “He melted something he described as a neck-collar, Vi.”

Now that was not so simple to discount. Gold neck-collars could hardly have been standard fare. Could the legend be truth? If so, according to her nan’s version, Vi was an heiress of sorts. Or at least the closest she would ever come to being one. Her heart beat faster, but she kept a calm demeanor before Liam.

“You need more than that,” she said.

“I’m sure I’ll be having more. I’ve contacted a woman at the National Museum. She says there’s much of the same type of records regarding the Mooghaun Hoard.

“Muh-who?” came a voice from the stairway.

Vi looked up to see Meghan sitting there, no longer in her uniform, but in a pair of tight pink and black plaid trousers with a silver-studded belt. Colorful, at least, but angling toward mini-tartlike, Vi concluded with a mental shrug.

The girl strolled down the stairs. She moved like Liam, with the same sort of innate grace. But it would do Vi no good to slow and make these small discoveries. She should flow on like a stream through the difficult moments.

“I’ve asked you not to wear those pants,” Liam said, “and you might be thinking about cutting back on the eavesdropping, too.”

Meghan lingered at the bottom of the stairway, her arms crossed over her black T-shirted chest. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was coming downstairs for something to eat, okay?”

“It’s Mooghaun,” Vi said, avoiding the intergenerational spat. “That’s the name of a place in County Clare where an amazing treasure of ancient gold jewelry was once unearthed. What pieces remain are in the National Museum in Dublin. I don’t think there’s a schoolchild within three hours drive of the display who hasn’t been there.”

“Museums are boring,” the girl decreed.

Vi found very little in life boring, with the exception of her accountant’s dire warnings regarding her level of savings. “And this from a girl whose family claims to have lost another such treasure? I’d think you’d be showing more interest.”

“What treasure?” Meghan asked her father.

Liam looked as though Vi had already slipped him one of Nan’s recipes. Whatever he was thinking he kept to himself as he tucked the papers back into his briefcase.

“You’ve not shared the family tale?” Vi asked, really quite surprised. It had been a regular one when Liam’s grandda was still alive.

“No.”

“And with you stewing over it as you have?”

“She—”

Meghan issued a dramatic sigh. “
She
is over here and
she
doesn’t like being talked about like she’s not here, okay?”

Vi was of the opinion that surly children were to be treated with firmness. Based on the tightness about his mouth, Liam appeared to consider them a source of aneurysm and best avoided.

“Understandable,” she replied to Meghan, “though you could deliver the message with more manners. Let’s have a seat and see if your da is up to telling the tale.”

“She’d not be interested,” Liam said.

Vi gestured in the girl’s direction. “Is that so, Meghan?”

She shrugged, a marginal movement of one shoulder. “I dunno.”

“Well, Liam?” Vi asked. “Perhaps it will appeal to yet another generation. Shall you give her a chance to decide?”

Time had an odd way of reeling back and smacking a man. Liam could recall sitting at his grandda’s feet and hearing the tale of Rafferty’s gold. Peat smoke had scented the front room in Grandda’s house and his words had played almost like a movie in Liam’s head. But he’d been a different child in a different world. His American daughter was about sound bites and images flashing dizzyingly quick on a flat-panel television screen.

But in many ways he’d just described himself, too. He was no longer about the romance of the tale, but far more interested in its utility. His current assets of tugs, crane-barges, and high-tech diving equipment were substantially less liquid than gold. And liquidity was something he desperately needed.

“The tale, Rafferty?” Vi prompted.

“Do you want to hear it?” he asked his daughter.

Her bored shrug was more of a positive answer than he’d expected. And while he’d prefer to let the whole idea of gold go silent until he’d completed his search, there was no graceful way out of this. Refusing to tell Meghan would only prompt her to ask one of her aunts or uncles, and that would spell disaster for discretion.

“Fine, then,” he said. “Let’s go sit.”

They settled on the sleek white furniture by the wall-mounted plasma television that Liam regretted spending a fool’s fortune on, and he worked his way into the tale. “My grandda told the story much better, but it went something like this….

“Years ago, this land was a different place, occupied by rich and powerful outsiders with little connection to those who had lived here for generations. The English landlords paid so poorly for crops from a man’s own field that even those with good fields were starving. Your great-great…well, I’d not be knowing how many times great…randda Eoin Rafferty was one of the lucky few, for he still had strength to hold another job.

“He’d been hired by the Dunhills of Castle Duneen to work on a road that was to run straight and true to Kilkenny so that the Ormond earls would not have so far to travel.” Liam thought it best not to tell Meghan that the road was being made shorter so Ormond could avail himself more quickly of Dunhill’s wife, whom he’d made a mistress.

“Eoin had himself a sweetheart back in Duncarraig, so he was in a hurry to finish the road. It was his habit to work well ahead of the others. One afternoon, while he was digging from a trench to bring fresh soil for the roadbed, he hit upon something odd with his shovel. What do you think it was?”

Meghan rolled her eyes. “A U2 greatest hits CD?”

He laughed. “They’re not quite that old, love.” Except to a twelve-year-old. “Actually, your many-
times-great-grandda Eoin hit upon gold.”

“No lie?”

“No lie,” Liam affirmed, using his daughter’s sharp American diction before slipping back into the cadence he’d not lost in fifteen years gone from Ireland. “It was a grand treasure of old, hammered pieces, the kind of wealth all of the Raffertys put together never had.”

“That’s cool,” Meghan said. “So what happened to it? Something must have or we’d be rich.”

“Compared to most of the world, you are,” Vi pointed out.

“You need to get out more,” Meghan said to Vi, who looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or lecture.

“Here’s what happened,” he said, drawing attention his way again. “Eoin slipped away from the others in the dead of the night, eluding thieves, liars, and friends turned foe. A wealth of gold was a hard test of loyalty, after all. Knowing that life would not be easy so long as their land was occupied, Eoin hid the treasure away somewhere in Duncarraig, vowing to use the pieces only to help another Rafferty when in need.”