Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (127 page)

“An’ likely cuff me upside the head just to be sure the point had gotten across.”

“Aye, well a man might see the temptation. Yer a stubborn laddie.”

“I suppose I am at that,” he admitted ruefully.

“There’s stubborn an’ then there’s just plain stupid, make certain ye know the difference, son.”

“I’m trying,Matty.”

Matty reached across and patted his hand. “I know ye are laddie, just don’t be too long about it, though.”

SEPTEMBER BECAME OCTOBER and the days slipped from soft fog and slow sun to chill frost and early nights. And still there was no word from Casey, and still Jamie would say to her sleepless eyes and overstrained nerves, ‘He’ll come.’ But as the days of October melted off the calendar and drew themselves down toward November, her doubts took over and she began to believe Casey had made his decision and by not coming was telling her just what that decision was. So when the bell rang in the early evening of a late October night she thought very little of it.

“Will you get that or shall I?” she asked, stretching lazily, the print of the book in her lap beginning to swim in front of her eyes.

“I believe it’s for you,” Jamie said, calmly turning the page in his own book.

“How do you know—” she began and then stopped just as suddenly, a constriction in her throat. There was only one way he could be certain. She stood, the book falling to the floor unheeded, her pulse suddenly throbbing in her ears. Her legs felt as insubstantial as blown glass, as if they could not possibly make the short trip to the hall, and yet they did so, moving of their own accord across the polished floor and along the Turkish runner. The door seemed a mile away and far too close at the same time. She put her hand upon the great carved knob and taking a deep breath, opened it.

He stood on the doorstep, hands rammed in his pockets, nerves apparent in every line of him. She stood wordless. Confronted with his physical presence, common sense took its leave gracefully and small talk seemed utterly beyond her abilities.

“The night is fine,” he said softly, “will ye walk with me?”

Silence gripped her throat in a painful vise. This was the moment she had wanted and yet now that it was here it terrified her.

“Please,” he added, and it was the uncertainty in his voice that broke the spell for her.

“Yes,” she nodded, hand gripping the doorknob tightly still, afraid her legs would not support her if she let go.

“Ye’ll want a coat, it’s cold,” he said, the proof of his words displaying itself in small puffing clouds of breath.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she said, awkward in the face of the man who knew her better than any other, who’d seen her at her finest and at her very worst.

“I’ll wait,” he replied, and she understood that the words extended far past their immediate implication.

She headed towards the stairs, meaning to fly up them, only to halt, uncertain, in the doorway of the study, knowing there weren’t any words to properly express the jumble of violent emotion that had her shivering and burning all at once.

Jamie looked up, green eyes bemused, the recently lit fire sparking gold off his hair and the ring on his finger. “Take a sweater,” he said gently, “it’s chilly in the evenings now.”

“Jamie I—thank you.”

He gave a wry smile. “That, as they say, is what friends are for. Now go, don’t keep the poor man waiting any longer.”

Casey, as he’d promised, waited just beyond the stairs where the garden lights made shallow ivoried pools in the hollows between fallen leaves and dew-iced grass.

“It’s good to see ye,” he said as she drew near, his tone that of a hesitant half-stranger.

“It’s good to see you too.” His awkwardness had translated itself to her and she found her hands flapping uselessly at her sides, then realized it was because she was used to slipping one automatically into his. And now did not know if she could, or should.

“I’ve a place in mind that I’d like to take ye, if ye’ll allow it.” She understood the words that lay unspoken between them, ‘trust me this little,’ he was saying.

“That would be grand,” she said softly.

He’d left the car at the bottom of the drive, near the cypress gate. The gate where he’d waited for her in the early days of their courtship. He gave her a hand into the car and she could feel the burn of his touch. She was awash with the need to touch him suddenly, to be able to bridge the abyss that had widened to an impasse on the night Robin had told him about Love Hagerty. She knew, though, the move would have to be his.

The ride was quiet, both painfully aware they were far beyond the point in their relationship where small talk was an option for smoothing ruffled nerves. Casey drove quickly, eyes on the road, face set in the lines that meant he was deep inside his own mind. Soon they left the lights of Belfast far behind, to turn down a country lane that was heavily overhung with ragged hedgerows and brown, wilted fuchsia. The lane was so constricted that the trees bent back against the sides of the car and after a few minutes of this, Casey stopped the car and turned off the engine.

“We’ll have to walk, the car can’t go any further,” he said and squeezed out his side into the pitch-black tunnel of leaves.

She joined him in front of the car, still rubbing at a stinging spot on her scalp where a particularly vindictive branch had tried to extract a generous patch of hair.

The silence was absolute, the night creatures burrowed down against the chill of winter. Under her feet, the ground was hard as tempered steel.

“Are ye alright, then?” Casey asked, his voice almost a shock in the dark.

“I’m fine,” she murmured, tucking her hands into her pockets and following as he set off purposefully up the narrow rutted pathway.

He walked a little ahead of her, visible only in flashes where the moon’s light, chill and thick as hoarfrost, penetrated the murk of the surrounding flora. His time away had changed him. So attuned was she to his variety of nuances that she could sense it even in the way he held his shoulders, the way the deep groove of his backbone was apparent through his shirt. She remembered the last time she’d run her fingertips in that hollow, each vertebrae round and smooth beneath her hands, the odd silkiness of old scars, pale against the brown of his skin. She remembered the heat and damp of their two bodies and felt the familiar rush of weakness that always came with the thought of what that body could do to her, had done to her.

She stumbled slightly, a loose stone in the pathway catching her unawares. He reached back a hand and caught her, giving her his hand to guide her through the tangle of frostbitten broom and gorse that cluttered the path in front of them. The feel of his palm, smooth and hard with calluses, was like coming home after a particularly long absence, slightly unfamiliar and yet entirely comforting.

They came upon the cottage suddenly, around a bend in the narrow track. Here the moonlight was dense, delineating the smallest blade of grass and the finest whisper of breath, the white so stark that all it touched seemed without weight or depth. The cottage appeared to be floating on top of a slight knoll, half-hidden by the bare bones of the trees that emerged from the whitened landscape like rheumatic bones. The little house seemed to hunch in on itself, as if trying to elude the grasp of the curving tree branches.

That it was abandoned was at once apparent, it had the oddly blind look of a house with its windows broken out. The ancient reeds of the roof were rotted, and gaping holes like untended wounds, perforated the little building.

She looked at him, the question clearly written upon her face.

He responded as though she had spoken aloud. “It’s neither your territory nor mine, it belongs only to ghosts. I thought neutral ground was only fair. Come,” he gestured towards the door, his voice no more than a whisper, as if he felt the need not to disturb any spirits that might be lingering.

Inside the cottage, moonlight poured through the rotten reeds of the roof—molten and lambent, it lay thickly over every surface. The white light bent around dust-shrouded shelves, a table that still held a bowl and cup and a stub of a candle. The strange stillness was here as well, only heavier, as if this sad, abandoned home were the source of its emanation. She moved carefully, hardly daring to breathe, to take that strange, still light into her lungs.

“You’d think no one had been here in a hundred years,” she whispered, and even that low tone sounded like a shout to her ears. Dust stirred in a delicate eddy under her fingertips as she passed them above the table. The light was such that each mote was limned as though it danced its spiral dance in broad rays of sunlight.

“It’s like that no one has been,” Casey said, voice somber. “There’s houses like this all about the country, Jewel, families that just up an’ left an’ wee houses that wait forever for their people to come back.”

“Just left, with food still on the table?” She gestured towards the bowl and cup, thickly shrouded in cobweb.

“Aye, at times. Not that there was likely much food to be had.”

“But what could drive a family so quickly from their home?”

“Despair,” he said simply, “do ye not feel it? Yer usually extra sensitive to it. The wee house feels it, aye?”

She was silent for a moment, allowing thought and feeling to flow in rather than out. Her eyes absorbed each object, its angles and shades, the way the cobweb lay in fragile sheets, overlaid by years of grime, glimmering like fairy dust in the moonlight. She took a deep breath, smelling the disuse, the mildew, the rot. It was almost palpable, the little house had felt disappointment which over the days, months and years had become despair. The pain was very nearly physical, a deep empty void just below her ribcage.

“Why did they go, do you think?”

Casey shook his head, moonlight painting him in silver and black. “The Famine maybe, so many left then an’ so many after because they could not feed their children, nor themselves. Can ye imagine what it was to look into yer child’s face an’ know ye’d not a bite to feed them, while grain lay rotting in the harbors? There’s a poem by Jack Stuart aye, perhaps ye’ll know it? It’s called
An Gorta Mor
an’ it lists the things that were sent to England in one year—

‘Four thousand ships they say,
Left for a land that year
Salmon and honey flowed from
A Land that could not feed its own...’

Casey quoted quietly, his dark eyes far away, as though he saw the wretched people even now as they died on the roadsides and in the shelter of their own homes, which had become prisons of pestilence and agony.

‘Wheat and barley by the sheaves,
Sailing down in Shannon’s lee...’

She continued for him, her voice low as though she spoke in the presence of death.“Ah, so ye do know it?” Casey’s face was unfathomable in the odd light, his eyes the only point of color, and they an impenetrable black. “My da’ always thought that ‘twas the Famine more than anything that made peace between England an’ Ireland impossible, he said ‘twas like a sword that lay between the two, an’ it would cut from either side.”

“What do you think it is that makes peace so impossible?”

He shook his head, one lock of hair catching the light and laying it like a kiss against his forehead. “It’s that the English memory is very short an’ the Irish very long. They don’t want us an’ yet they won’t acknowledge that we are separate, a people apart from them, but then England will hold tight even when the holdin’ is blisterin’ her palms. They have never understood us, they’ve never assimilated nor subdued us—conquered us, aye, an’ almost succeeded in wipin’ us off the face of the earth, but never made us British. An’ I think maybe that’s what they hate about us, that we have no desire to be them. An’ yet,” he sighed, “I’ve known many a good Englishman in my life an’ many an Irishman that I’d not dare turn my back on. But I suppose the conquered are never in a position to feel charitable toward the conqueror.”

“No,” she agreed quietly, “I don’t suppose they are.”

Casey took a step toward her, the still light suddenly broken by his movement. She could feel the displacement of air, aware to the last fiber of her being of his presence. As things were, she thought wryly, so they shall be again.

“Do ye suppose there is any charity left between the two of us?” he asked quietly, voice constrained, though not without emotion.

“It depends,” she responded, her own voice tart with nerves, “upon how you define charity, I imagine.”

“Well, as I remember, the dictionary had a few things to say about it, but the one that comes to mind at present is makin’ allowances for other’s shortcomins’ an’ a disposition to think favorably of men in general.”

“Mankind,” she corrected primly, “I believe you are taking liberties with the text.”

“I’d rather,” he said, with a ghost of his old grin, “be takin’ liberties with you.” The look she gave him was enough to freeze the grin in place. “I didn’t mean to make a joke of things, darlin’, only I don’t know,” he rubbed his temples in frustration, “how to be around ye anymore. I feel like a schoolboy standin’ out in the rain on some disapprovin’ father’s doorstep.”

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked, voice slightly less hostile.

He took a deep breath and stepped forward, reaching out, his hands palm up, white as bone in the stark light. She understood the choice he was giving her by not taking her hands himself.

‘Not impassable
,’ Jamie had said, ‘
you only have to find the way across, one step, one oar stroke at a time. He’ll meet you halfway.’

And her question in response, syllables built entirely of fear.
‘And if he doesn’t?’
And Jamie had given the answer that had likely cost him more than she could count.

‘He will.’

She laid her hands, open, in his own, felt the strength of his fingers, and how the strength was held in check.

A tremor shook him, the broad shoulders trembling visibly. “I was so afraid ye’d given up on me.”

She shook her head. “No, never that.”

He took a long, shaky breath, fought for mastery of his emotions, eyes on the hands that rested quietly in his own. “When my mam an’ da’ fought he used to say to her, ‘will ye still grow old with me, Deirdre?’ It was his way of makin’ it up, of askin’ would she still have him, through the bad as well as the good. An’ I suppose,” he glanced up from her hands, his dark eyes tired and afraid, “that’s what I’m askin’ ye now, Jewel, is will ye still grow old with me? Will ye take me durin’ the bad as well as the good?” His hands gripped her own tightly, his body still, so still, as if all the moments that had gone and all the ones to come were weighed in her answer.