Irish Lady (21 page)

The door opened and the physician stepped inside my room. He watched, smiling faintly, as I nestled the babe into my arms and leaned against the pillow. “Are you comfortable, my lady?” he asked.

“Very.” I was annoyed that he had interrupted me. “Is something wrong?” I asked in the frosty, no-nonsense tone that meant I wanted the truth quickly.

He hesitated. “I thought it best to speak to your husband first.”

“Yes?” The man was truly beset. What could Rory have said to make him so agitated?

“You have come to childbed ten times, my lady. Perhaps,” he stopped and fiddled with the lace at his sleeve, “perhaps 'tis time for you to thank God for the son you have and try no more.”

The man was shockingly presumptuous. Bracing myself on my elbow, I sat up. “Surely that is a matter for my husband and me to decide.”

“You will be choosing death.”

I felt the color leave my cheeks. “What are you saying?”

He came closer to the bed. “My lady, I beg of you. Do not attempt to bear more children lest the one who lies beside you be left without his mother.”

At last I understood the full intent of his words. To even consider such a possibility was unthinkable. Rory would be childless. There would be no heir for Tirconnaill. A thousand years of unbroken O'Donnell succession would end because of me. No more fair-haired sons and daughters to laugh and tumble in the courtyard, bringing a smile to their father's lips. Horror filled my soul. No more long winter nights curled close to my husband's side while his hands and lips rekindled the magic that flamed between us, stronger, richer, and bolder as the years passed. No more soft laughter and intimate conversation after the first rash of desire had been satisfied. No more rides through summer sunlight into shadowed glens where I would listen, barefoot, as Rory played his lute and together we searched for faerie toadstools.

He would put me away. I knew him as surely as I knew myself. I was his wife and he loved me. But he would not disobey the physician and risk my life. He would never seek to annul our marriage or demand that I leave Tirconnaill. He would find another woman to warm his bed and bear his sons. He would apply to Rome for a dispensation to legitimize his heirs, a common practice for a peer.

I clenched my fists and something inside me hardened. There was no hope. That fool of a physician had already told him. I would not stay and watch Rory love another woman. I would leave Tirconnaill when my son was weaned.

Courage gave me dignity. I lifted my chin. “You may dismiss the wet nurse,” I said to the physician. “I shall feed my son alone.”

The man bowed. “As you wish, my lady. Shall I send in your husband?”

“Is he here?”

“Aye.”

“For how long?”

“Throughout the birth, my lady. We were afraid for your life.”

I looked for my hand mirror and found it on the side table. “Pray, give me my brush and mirror, sir, and engage my husband in conversation for a time.”

“Aye, lass,” the physician replied. “Perhaps I should send for your maid.”

“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “Take the child with you. I need only a moment.”

A glance told me all I needed to know. I looked dreadful, as if someone had taken a rolling pin to my head. My hair was matted and tangled like a wild woman's, and the shadows beneath my eyes were giant purple bruises against the paleness of my skin.

Never before had I considered my appearance after a birthing. Rory had been grateful for every babe I'd given him. He demanded nothing more. This time would be different.

When he entered the room, my hair lay smooth and shining against the bedclothes and I had pinched the color back into my cheeks. Rory appeared agitated, as if he had never before entered a woman's chamber.

“Welcome, my lord,” I said steadily.

He took my hand and sat down beside me on the bed. “Are you well, Nuala?”

“Aye.”

“The birth was brutal. I heard your cries.” He lifted my hand to his lips. “My God, Nuala, I almost lost you.”

My heart lifted. Perhaps the physician hadn't told him everything.

His jaw was hard under my caress. It had been so very long. “I will soon be well again, Rory. There is nothing to fear.”

“Until the next time. The man's words ring true, my love. You must never give birth again.”

I swallowed to keep the tears back and watched him play with my fingers. “You have no heir,” I reminded him.

“Keeping you alive is more important to me than having an heir.”

I knew my husband. He was a man of appetite and would take a woman to warm his bed and to heal his soul. I could do no more than bite my lip and turn away from the concern in his eyes.

Belfast, 1994

Recognition came slowly, comfortably, awakened from a long sleep where bits of reality focus into consciousness one piece at a time so as not to jar the delicate psyche of its subject. Because of the way it came Meghann couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when she first knew the identity of the woman she had seen at significant moments of her life. One morning she woke up and just knew.

Looking back, she wondered why she hadn't seen the resemblance before, in the red-haired child with bare feet, in the woman who had known her name on the beach at Donegal, in the faceless stranger who led her out of danger through the streets of Belfast.

She closed her eyes and rubbed the oval at her throat, savoring the delicate edges and the feel of warm metal between her fingers. Nuala's form materialized before her. Red hair, dimmed slightly with age but still gloriously long and thick, framed a face as lovely as the likeness of the Virgin Mary burned immortally into the glass panels of Westminster Cathedral.

Meghann sat up on the edge of the bed and opened her eyes. Nuala disappeared. She closed them again and her image reappeared. “Why can't I see you in the light?” Meghann whispered.

“I'm not comfortable there,” replied a soft, strangely accented voice.

Meghann knew that voice. She'd heard it in the burned-out skeleton of what was once her home on Cupar Street. She'd heard it in Donegal and again last night when the lights went out in Andrew Maguire's meeting room. She wanted to hear it again. “Tell me your name.”

“Nuala O'Donnell.”

“Why are you here?”

The woman sighed impatiently. “I expected more of you, Meghann McCarthy. I'm here to help you and that impossible young man who keeps you awake at night.”

“Will you disappear when I open my eyes?”

There was a slight hesitation before Nuala spoke. “The light is difficult for me.”

“Once before I saw you in the light, it was early morning and you were playing a melody.”

“And you were fleeing from the English.”

“How did you know?”

“You asked if there was another way into Donegal. Everyone who asks that is looking for a way around the checkpoints.”

“In Donegal you were standing in the light,” Meghann remembered.

“Aye, but the light in the west is soft and fey. It does no damage to the aged.”

Meghann kept her eyes closed. “I'll dim the lights.”

Again, Nuala sighed. “That won't be necessary. Open your eyes. I won't go away.”

Meghann opened her eyes. Nuala stood near the curtains, her white gown blending with the white around her, enveloped like a cloud. She was small, almost frail-looking, with light, compassion-filled eyes.

“I know you,” Meghann's voice cracked. “I've always known you.”

Nuala nodded. “Aye. I've been with you, child, many times.”

“You've been following me all my life.”

“Aye, and I've shared mine with you.”

Meghann rubbed her temples. “I don't understand.”

“Perhaps not now. But if you think for a bit you'll find that you have an unusual understanding of the events that occurred in those last days when Ireland belonged to the Irish. An understanding you could never have learned from any present-day source because there simply isn't one.”

“Why do I know this?”

Nuala moved closer. “I've allowed you the knowledge, Meghann. I've re-created it all in your mind so that you would see what I did and follow my example.”

“But your life was dreadful,” Meghann burst out. “You lost your husband, your children and, according to what I've read, your land. What could I possibly learn from a woman who lived in the sixteenth century?”

Nuala drew herself up to her full height. “I did not lose my husband, you foolish girl. 'Tis true, the land was lost, but I saved our lives, that and a great deal of gold that did much to soften our banishment. As for my children,” she crossed herself, “they are in a better place. But know this, Meghann McCarthy. I did not lose them all.”

“What does all this have to do with me?”

“You are of my race, Meghann. You are a descendant of Irish chieftains. My blood flows through your body. Ireland needs you as she once needed me. After five hundred years of English dominion there is a chance for freedom to prevail. Yon must take up the standard, Meghann. Show the world what it has never seen.”

Meghann watched as Nuala fingered the pages of a book on the nightstand. It was a volume of poetry authored by Michael Devlin. “What is it that I'm supposed to do?” she asked softly.

“Save this rebel, this Irish warrior,” Nuala continued in her low, firm voice. “When this voice speaks of what it means to be Irish, the world will listen.”

Caught up in the moment, Meghann thrilled to her words. She would save Michael and he would write passionate, heart-breaking words, words that would open the eyes of the Western world and shock it into condemning the British presence in Northern Ireland. In her mind she could see it happen.

Just as suddenly her enthusiasm disappeared. Wearily, she pushed her hair away from her forehead and lifted red-rimmed eyes to Nuala's face. Meghann blinked. Nothing changed. She blinked again and rubbed her eyes. Had sleep deprivation blurred her mind to the point where she could no longer define where her subconscious ended and reality began? Was this an absurd nightmare, or was she really having a conversation with a woman who claimed to be her ancestor, a woman, history said, who had died four hundred years before?

Somehow Meghann's mind had twisted into itself, losing its direction. Her waking hours were filled with concern, divided between worry over Michael's safety and planning his defense. Sleep took her back nearly half a millennium to a world where a woman battled multiple enemies, invaders, nature's cruelty and, most insidious of all, a man she had no wish to come up against.

“How do you suggest I perform such a miracle?” Meghann asked the white-robed apparition.

Nuala tapped her bottom lip with her forefinger. “Elizabeth was a formidable opponent. She was also very English.”

Meghann laughed. “Really?”

“Aye.” Nuala nodded, completely ignoring Meghann's sarcasm. “She was a strong ruler, but a ruthless one. It was her weakness, that and her vanity. She was Henry's daughter and she displayed many of his qualities. But she couldn't bear to have anyone think she was less than feminine. Public humiliation was unthinkable. She would do anything to avoid it.”

Meghann stopped listening.
Public
humiliation.
The flicker of an idea grew in her mind. It meant something. Blood pulsed in her temples. Her lethargy was gone. On the coffee table, the screen saver of her portable computer flashed green, then blue, then green again. She slid her feet into fleece-lined slippers and walked to the sitting room couch. Tucking her legs beneath her, she rested the computer on her knees, moved her mouse to the Internet connection and typed in her password. She bypassed her mail, world news, and the chat rooms, moved to the American media bulletin boards and began to type.

One hour later her in-box contained forty messages. She answered them all. Two hours later the number two hundred flashed in the lower left corner of her screen. Again she answered, this time to names familiar to every household throughout the world with a television set.

It was nearly dawn before she finished. Meghann closed down the computer, stretched and smiled, satisfied with her night's work. There would be no Diplock court for Michael Devlin, not after the reactions of the American press corps. The prosecution would be forced to fight fairly.

She looked around. Nuala was gone. Or maybe she had never been here at all. Meghann shivered and rubbed her arms. Of course she hadn't. Nuala, the Nuala who materialized when Meghann needed her, spoke to her and guided her through the power of suggestion, was a figment of her imagination, most likely summoned because Meghann was spending too much time alone.

Light crept through the lined draperies. She stood and walked into the bedroom, every bone-weary movement protesting her sleepless night. Meghann stared at the bed. For some reason, shutting herself off in the mindless cocoon of darkness and the vivid images that came with it did not appeal to her. She picked up the telephone and dialed Annie's number, smiling when her familiar voice answered.

“Annie? It's Meghann. I've good news.”

“Then you'd better come down. I'll fix us a bite of breakfast.”

Thirty minutes later Meghann hailed a loyalist taxi with its identifying red poppy in the window to take her to the Ormeau Road. There she flagged down a black nationalist taxi the size of a hearse for the mile-and-a-half trek to the Devlin house.

True to her word, Annie moved about the kitchen preparing her usual Irish breakfast of oats, eggs, bacon, potatoes, and wheat bread. No one in Ireland considered their cholesterol intake. Life was too hard and too short to worry about heart disease.

Meghann sat down at the small table in the kitchen. The larger dining room was rarely used except on holidays. Years ago when she had first come to live with the Devlins, meals were served in three shifts to accommodate a large family with a small kitchen. Annie was up long before dawn cooking hot food for her brood. Meghann looked at the table, which was set for two. “Isn't anyone home today?” she asked. It was impossible to imagine Annie Devlin without a child attached to her hip or clinging to her leg.

“Only yourself,” Annie answered, ladling the steaming oatmeal into bowls. “Add a wee pinch of salt, Meggie darlin'. Don't wait for me. Oats are best at their hottest.”

Meghann stared at the array of food before her and swallowed. Had she ever eaten such stupendous amounts of food? “I can't do justice to all this, Annie. London forever cured me of large meals. My stomach can't possibly manage it.”

Annie surveyed her figure critically. “You are a narrow bit of a thing. A larger appetite would round out y'r angles.”

“I'm healthy. That's all that matters.”

“I suppose,” Annie remarked doubtfully, “although I wonder if you could carry children at that weight.”

Meghann laughed. After years of living alone, it was comforting to have someone worry about her. “I'm a thirty-five-year-old widow, Annie. It isn't likely that I'll have children.” She saw the frown gathering on Annie's brow and continued hastily, “Don't you want to hear my news?”

“Of course. I was just waitin' until y' were ready t' tell it.”

“Last night I emailed every news correspondent who wrote an article about the Troubles.”

Annie's forehead wrinkled. “I don't understand.”

“It means publicity in the American press.” Meghann forced herself to curb her excitement and speak coherently. “Don't you see? No government in its right mind would offer a biased jury to a world-renowned political prisoner. Britain would make the front pages of every large newspaper in the world.”

Annie thought about it. The prospect of a condemned England cheered her. “Y're clever, Meggie. I knew that long before I asked you t' help Michael.” She sipped her tea, leaving the cooling oats untouched. “He wasn't happy about it, you know. But I convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

Meghann pleated the layers of napkin protecting her lap. “Why do you think he didn't want me to come?”

Widening her eyes innocently, Annie pretended to ignore the color staining Meghann's cheeks. “It isn't that he thought you weren't competent,” she said. “We've known for a long time how successful you'd become.”

“Then, why?”

Annie shrugged, picked up a fork, and stirred the eggs around on her plate. “I'm not sure really. Something about the two of you parting in a bad way.”

The corners of Meghann's mouth turned up. “It wasn't such a bad way, really. He wanted to marry me and I refused because of his politics. I couldn't imagine living that kind of life.”

Annie sighed. “No, I suppose y' couldn't, not after what y' saw at such a tender age. Most of us learn such news through a phone call or a knock on the door, days after the deed is done. It must have been a dreadful shock for such a small girl, the sight of all that death and the night that followed.”

Meghann thought back to those terrifying hours after finding her parents lying in the destruction of Cupar Street. Some of the horror had diminished, leaving memories of a different sort. A woman dressed in white offering comfort, a boy leading a small girl to safely through burning streets, his body warm and solid, pressing her into the ancient stone floor of the monastery, a priest, the first of his kind to climb down from the fence and take a stand, a family who had offered an orphan their home. She swallowed and breathed deeply. “The pain lasted a very long time, but it's over now.”

“Have y' come t' terms with the past, Meggie?”

Meghann nodded. “Aye. These recent months have opened my eyes. Running away from Belfast did no good at all.”

Annie ran her finger across the fragile edge of her cup. “I wouldn't say it was entirely for nothing. Where would my son be now if y' were someone other than y' are?”

Meghann reached across the table and covered the older woman's hand with her own. “Oh, Annie. Would Michael be who he is if I had stayed?”

“No one determines another's fate, Meggie. Even God says we have free will. Michael made his choices just as you did. Never blame y'rself. We're all very glad to have y' home. Now, tell me what t' do.”

The windows were open. Lace curtains, Annie's favorite, caught the breeze and billowed like ladies' panniers, those absurd wide-hipped petticoats fashionable centuries before. Dust, caught in the light of a milk-colored sun, filtered in through the screens. Except for the measured ticking of the clock, the silence was absolute. Meghann rested her finger against her lips and listened. Where were the street noises, the bantering voices exchanging gossip over a shared fence, lads playing at hurling, shouting cheerful vulgarities when a ball missed its goal? Where were the prams crowded with babbling, rosy-cheeked children, the drone of a telly, a baby's cry, the bark of a dog, the slurred conversational hum of men who'd stayed too long in the pubs?