Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (128 page)

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I’ll grow old with you Casey Riordan, I’ll take you in bad times as well as good. I don’t think that’s the question though, I think the real question here is will
you
grow old with me?”

“I know I’ve given ye ample reason to doubt any words I say, but I can only give ye the answer of any man with the frailties of bein’ human. All the days of my allotment on this earth are yours.” His eyes held her own, the light making it impossible to hide the tears that stood in them. “On our weddin’ night I told ye that as long as there was breath in my body an’ blood in my veins it was yers for the askin’.”

“I remember,” she said softly, giving his hands a gentle squeeze, which he returned with a strength that seemed to promise something or all things.

“I meant it, ye know, it wasn’t just idle words said in the heat of passion. I meant it then an’ I failed to keep that promise. But I make it again tonight, an’ I intend to live up to it this time.” He said the words, the grit of emotion darkening them and making her shiver slightly. It sounded in the night like something that couldn’t be reversed, a blood oath, the sort his ancestors would have made thousands of years ago, before they went out to do battle. And she heard what was left unspoken,
‘show me that you believe me, for words have never been our kingdom...’

She sought his mouth there in the abandoned cottage, with the ghosts of a nation thick about them. Gave to him once again her trust and all the intangibles that went with it, her heart, her soul, her very life, relinquished anew into his safekeeping.

“I once told you that you were my shelter, you were my home,” she said, feeling the shiver of his hands as they bared her skin to the night and his touch.

“Aye, I too remember,” he said as the rhythm of his breathing changed, accelerated, drew out.

She arched against him, length to length, their hands, interlaced in prayer or promise, caught between them. She breathed softly against his mouth and gave him back his vow.

“It’s still true.”

OUTSIDE, THE LITTLE HOUSE seemed no less haunted. Once its roof had sheltered laughter and tears, joy and pain, love and hate. Once it had known life. Now it merely seemed a crumbling monument to desolation. The white-washed stones had long ago given over to the forces of nature. Lichen, deep and squelchy green, filled the cracks and smoothed the gnarled stones to a velvet finish. The dirt track they had walked in on seemed, in the still light, only to lead away, to another world and another time. The hills surrounding them glowed a soft dull pink, their tops rimed with a fine dusting of snow. Winter had come early this year and she felt the chill of it down to her marrow. Casey often joked that she froze in October and didn’t feel the hint of a thaw until late May. Somehow it was different this year though, a subterranean cold that seemed to emanate from the inside out. Beneath her feet, she could feel the earth itself shiver.

She remembered suddenly the words of an astronomer she had read recently.

‘Some night you’ll look out there and you will feel the planet beneath your feet as you have never felt it before, you will know the flow and stretch of it, and feel the roundness of its bones, you will know we hang by a single thread, this pale blue accident on the shores of infinity, held up by God’s grace alone.’

One atom, he had said, one atom in the infinite. That is what we are.

“A ripple,” Casey said behind her, his voice seeming part of the night, echoing her thoughts, “an’ yet it matters greatly.” His arms came around her, strong and secure, her port in every storm. He smelled of smoke and damp and the fresh cut of the season’s first snow. The urgency of the flesh was there, magnified by denial, but for the moment, it would wait.

“When it’s like this it seems as if the whole world is alive an’ breathin’, the trees an’ the stars, the grass an’ even the dirt beneath my feet. An’ I wish I knew the right prayer, a blessin’ that fit with the night an’ its rhythms.”

She tipped her face up to the strange still light, felt a chill breeze ripple across her skin like slow moving champagne, and smiled.

“I know one,” she said.

“Do ye?”

“I do.”

His hands moved along her forearms, down until they covered her own, pressing her fingers into the crumbling stone. “Will ye speak it to me then?”

“I will,” she said and took a deep breath, closing her eyes, seeking the one ripple in the river of memory that held a childhood prayer. She found it, shimmering softly like a flash of silver, heard in memory her father’s voice warming and wrapping the words, even as she spoke them.

“Goodnight moon,” She began and her voice continued on, weaving quietly through the story, each phrase accompanied by small puffs of purling fog.

Silence held them softly in the wake of the words, the scent of the pines sharp on the air. Against the sky, the trees were a soft delineation, smudges of dry ink, weary sentinels of a hundred years duty.

His hand drifted from hers and touched, gently, the side of her face, his head bent into the cloud of her hair. “Tis a lovely prayer, thank you.”

She turned and slid her arms around his waist, breathing deep of the night and his sudden warmth, grateful to her very pores for this moment, where it seemed the world spun separately from them around a fixed axis. For them, in this one minute, time was stopped, moved neither forward nor back, was a thing neither looking over its shoulder nor trying to grasp the future. It was merely, in and of itself, whole and perfect.

He rested his chin on her head, the stubble of his beard rasping on the sensitive skin of her scalp. “Say goodnight to the moon, darlin’,” he whispered, “an’ then take my hand, for I’m takin’ ye home.”

Above them, like a candle melting down one side, hung the moon one week after its fertile fullness, now waning and gibbous. She could make out the bare edge of the great illuminated darkness of Mare Tranquillatis and to the left the blast site of Kepler’s crater, so lucent that it seemed it might have been struck only moments ago rather than eight hundred years before. And all the unending oceans and seas, valleys and mountains. Purveyor of time and blood, it hung weary, shedding light as its orbit diminished the viewable surface. And suddenly the silver light, at first eerie, seemed a blessing bestowed by a hand of ancient and indefinable wisdom, by one who had seen too much of the affairs of man to truly believe in happiness, and yet would wish him luck despite the fact.

“Goodnight moon,” she said and took the hand of her husband, turning towards home.

A ripple, and yet it matters greatly.

DAVID HAD NEVER APPROACHED THE HOUSE in daylight. Their meetings, through the necessity for secrecy, had always taken place at night, and only rarely in the man’s house. Those two occasions had been unqualified emergencies or neither of them would have risked it.

The fog was beginning to dissipate, though shreds of it still wound through the lower branches of the trees, higher up it was shot through with the rare sun of a November morning. The house wore the aspect of a cathedral in the diaphanous gold light. It was as though he’d stepped out of time as soon as he’d come up through the garden gate. The somnolent hush of the morning was broken only by the occasional soft croak of a crow and the muffled crunch of pine needles beneath his thick-soled shoes. Summer’s birds had long flown.

The grounds were immaculate, flower beds banked, the more delicate shrubs covered, the amber stones of the house muted to beige under lowering winter skies.

He went to the servant’s entrance and rang the bell, he was expected.

“Yer to go in the study,” Maggie said, and pointed toward the set of double doors that led off the end of the long hall. David nodded and thanked her.

The room was empty and far tidier than David was used to seeing it. The books had been replaced on the shelves, the papers tidied away into cabinets and drawers. The desk itself was empty, except for a solitary sheet of stationary, propped against a full bottle of whiskey. On the neck of the bottle was a silver ring, David didn’t need to look to know the initials that would be carved into its face.

He drew near the table with reluctance. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to be happy with whatever that piece of paper had to say. There was an absence of energy in the air, as though the light had shrunk and become less substantial than before.

The stationary was Jamie’s own, thick and watermarked with the graceful scrawling
K
of the House of Kirkpatrick. It contained only two words. David read them and smiled in spite of himself. Bloody Irish bastard, the man was as unpredictable as any of them.

He recognized the absence of light and energy now for what it truly was. This room and all the rest of the house seemed to understand in some way that its master was gone, and was not likely to return any time soon.

A light breeze, stirred by the closing of the door, lifted the paper and swept it from the table. It drifted across the floor, coming to rest by the ashes in the fireplace. It landed facedown, but the words remained unchanged, just two of them.

Gone fishing
.

Cindy Brandner lives in the interior of British Columbia with her husband and three children, as well as a plethora of pets. She is currently working on the continuation of the Exit Unicorns series.

Here is a riveting read filled with the politics of conflict, the drama of the human condition, the depth of character, and the story of mid-twentieth century Northern Ireland struggling from freedom and peace amidst the rubble of armed conflict and the politics of terrorism and suppression.

- Midwest Book Review

‘Exit Unicorns’, unlike many contemporary books on the subject, brings colour and energy to the Irish struggle... The reader is caught up in the intertwined lives of these characters, each of which pursues their own agenda in the struggle for personal, religious and cultural freedom.

- The Cariboo Observer

The contrast of these wonderful characters propels the one story forward from many interesting directions - book-smart and street-smart, rich and poor, old and young, Irish and American. Regardless, the dreams of freedom and equality remain the same. This is a story of passion and loyalty to one another, to ones heritage and to a country. Mix in a bit of warmth and humor, Celtic legends, exquisite poetry and you've got one hell of a book.

- Amazon reader reviews

‘Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears’ quickly immerses you into the vicious inner circle of 1969 Irish-American politics of South Boston, leaving you desperate for the shores of a gem across the Atlantic; those of the Emerald Isle.  However, Ireland remains much the same as generations past, presenting beloved characters with trials and tribulations of love, life and fierce reality.  Cindy Brandner skillfully plays an emotional tug-of-war with your heart strings on Irish and American shores, creating a roller coaster ride that you will not soon forget.

- Shannon Curtis, Shamrocks and Stones

Winner of the Dan Poynter's 2012 Global Ebook Awards

Cindy Brandner has written Exit Unicorns, Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears and now Flights of Angels in this Irish series and I am already anxiously awaiting the fourth book. You MUST read the first two books if you have not already! Flights of Angels is a novel to be cherished not only for the authentic portrayal of the struggles of Ireland and Russia as nations, but also the personal, emotional, and mental struggles and triumphs of each of the beloved characters - in particular Jamie Kirkpatrick, Casey Riordan, Pamela Riordan and Patrick Riordan. Cindy writes with such a wonderful, descriptive fluency that minutes of reading turns into hours of reading and without knowing, you are whisked away to a gulag in Russia or a cottage in Ireland. You will enjoy how the history and politics of Ireland and Russia are weaved throughout the story and lives of the characters along with the intrigue of how enemies and friends play amongst each other in high stakes games. Cindy Brandner's writing is masterful and I highly recommend Flights of Angels for the captivating page-turner it is. The only downfall in the reading experience is that you will not want the story to end!