Stormfire (22 page)

Catherine felt cold. If Sean Culhane was shipping arms all over Ireland, national rebellion might be imminent. A disquieting coincidence strengthened that possibility. In the past two weeks, most of the male faces at Shelan had changed. Only about thirty men, who appeared to be hardened mercenaries, looked familiar. What if Culhane was training rebel guerrillas in rotating groups and sending them back home to wait a signal for national insurrection? How many such vipers' nests were secreted about the country?

Pandora's Box

Sean sighed as Fiona worked fatigue from his neck and shoulders with her strong, well-shaped hands. His worn chair was comfortable, the fire low on the stone hearth of her Donegal Bay cottage, reminding him of long-ago peaceful evenings in Kenlo. A few miles above the bay, the Kenlo hut and its village companions had been settled like handfuls of debris pitched amid bleak coastal crevices and ravines where the sea droned and flickered with long, rushing strings of froth that raked toward shore.

By day, he and his mother had lived like peasants, but nightfall brought a metamorphosis as secretive as a butterfly's emergence from its gray, common husk. Dinner was a formal ceremony, which provided Sean's social training and gave substance to his heritage. Conversation usually concerned either Irish politics and ruling families, or world affairs that related to Ireland. By the light of a towering gold candelabrum, bronze-haired Megan taught her son how to be a king. When dinner was ended and its trappings—the candelabrum, the fine porcelain and silver- hidden away, the Irishwoman would take out her lute and seat herself before the fire. As she thoughtfully plucked the lute strings, making small adjustments in pitch, her son impatiently dropped cross-legged at her feet. When she glanced at him through her lashes, he caught a gleam of amusement and thought, as he often had, that she deliberately teased him. Still, her seel tales, the sagas of the boy hero Cu Culainn, and the fantastic
Courtship of Etaine
were well worth the wait.

As she bent over the lute, the firelight gave the highlights of Megan O'Neill's auburn hair the intensity of stained glass. Her fine-bridged nose and smoothly carved features were the heritage of royal Gaelic lineage mingled with the Hispano-Moorish strain. Her smoldering green eyes suggested sensuality equal to her almost Satanic pride. Megan was carelessly aloof from the villagers, but when alone with her son, her pealing laughter was the release of utter freedom. She was purely woman then, as she would never be again if she ever assumed her rightful place in the world beyond the village, and with a sense of guilt, Sean had been secretly glad of their obscurity.

Megan's voice began low, then rose imperceptibly to a keening cry as she sang the first of the ancient Gaelic songs. Songs from the du6t of shattered -Rome. Of mist- locked secrets and the Old Ones. Of tribal savagery and clash of arms in forgotten wars. Of fire and death and mourning in pagan chants forbidden by the Church for centuries. Then sagas of heroes bold on sojourns to the world's end, and lays of
amour courtois,
richly tapestried with knights and ladies and fabulous beasts.

Try as he might, Sean could remember few of the ancient chants. Gaelic was his native tongue, but when Megan sang of Ireland's obscure origins, she seemed to have a pact with the past that excluded him, perhaps because she knew herself born to be an Irish queen, while he often felt like a prince of shadows. He did not know who he was.

Once, a village bully had foolishly called him a bastard. The insult had trembled between them until Sean rammed headfirst into the boy's stomach. The battle was a brief, violent encounter. Sean had the O'Neill nerve and the black side too; before he had been beaten senseless by the bully's cronies, he had bitten off the boy's ear. No one named him bastard again; they simply avoided him.

Finally one night, the last candle in Kenlo had gone out, the village stopped looking like a cheery spatter of lighted dollhouses, and the British-led Orangemen had come. Most were Irish Protestant Militia, members of the recently formed Volunteers. Because most of the British occupation forces had been siphoned to America to suppress the revolution and abroad to face imminent war with France, Irish Protestants had seized the opportunity to force concessions from the lord lieutenant of Ireland. In spite of a recent wave of religious liberalism, the most radical Protestants intended to ensure by terrorism that their Catholic brethren should entertain no ideas of rebellion in the weakened circumstances of national security. Of the Kenlo raiders, only their chief lieutenant and a handful of noncommissioned "advisers" were British. Their commander, General John Enderly, adjutant to the viceroy, knew massacres were more apt to start trouble than to end it. Sean learned yeiars later he had meant to stir up rebellion to line his own pockets with confiscated property. The raiders were to leave no survivors, no evidence of his machinations, but the night they had swarmed with their torches like deadly fireflies among the sleeping huts of Kenlo, they had left one alive. To carry the guilt of obeying Megan's order to run. To remember. To hate.

Feeling the reality of Fiona's fingers at his shoulders, Sean opened his eyes, deliberately cutting off the nightmare memories that always came with fatigue. And he was deathly tired. His workdays averaged sixteen hours, often with but a few hours' sleep. The company of his quarrelsome young mistress gave him little respite. In the two weeks since the letter opener incident, he and Catherine had bickered more than they had lain together. Frustrated by her resumption of stubborn apathy in his bed, Sean spent most of his nights in the village. Fiona gave him the peace Catherine's arms denied, and she was Irish: those two things were all he required at the moment—those and her earthy, uncomplicated eagerness for his body. As his head fell back, she kissed his lips, hair in a pale red-gold curtain about his face. Lazily he kissed her back, then roused as her breasts under her chemise brushed his shoulder. Her mouth moved on his, tongue probing until his blood simmered. Pulling her around onto his lap, he tugged at the chemise lacings.

*
   
*
   
*

Silence gathered about the limp, exhausted lovers as they lay side by side on the bed. Opening his eyes when Fiona's lips brushed his cheek, Sean grinned with drowsy satisfaction and she obligingly plumped the pillow behind his head, then snuggled back onto his shoulder. "You talk less and bed a man better than any female in Donegal," he observed sleepily. "That sterling virtue will take you far."

Cynical amber eyes flashed at him. "Oh, I wouldn't be knowin' about that, bucko. I've never even got as far as yer fine house at Shelan."

"It's nothing but a dusty museum," he replied calmly, knowing what she angled after.

"You're there, and too damned far away! Ye've come to me nearly every night of late, each time later and more bone weary than the last. One night ye'll say the devil with it and I'll be seein' no more of yer scowlin' mug. 'Tisn't fair to either of us."

"We've known each other a long time. Is that telling you nothing?"

"Aye, it's been a long time since ye was fourteen. A hot- blood virgin with the devil in his eyes and a form like pure sin." Her eyes softened with remembrance. "I was a dreamin' chit o' twelve who thought she'd met up with the Dark Prince. I gave in to the serpent, and lo, Paradise!"

"You're the closest I've had to a permanent woman," he murmured against her hair, "but we both know I'll never marry." '

"Ye've always been hard, Sean," she whispered, "never needin' anybody."

Her face was hidden against his shoulder, but he could guess at the tears. He tightened his arm about her. "It's you who doesn't need me, Fiona. You'd be unhappy at Shelan."

"Like that girl?" She bit out the words.

"That girl?" he asked, not altering his voice.

"Did ye think ye could keep a woman long without some she-cat tellin' me the good news?" Fiona sniffed openly.

"What did this she-cat tell you?"

"That ye've an English prisoner who's a grand lady, and pretty, and sleeps in yer bed."

"While I sleep with you." Sean turned on his side and kissed her into silence, then took her again. Long after she slept, he stared into the fire.

Before sunup, Fiona walked with him to the jetty that served Pier Harbor. The stars were melting in the blue- gray light and silvering waves curled peacefully, rushing over the rocks and receding monotonously. A shawl about her head and shoulders, she watched as Sean boarded his boat, quickly made ready, cast off the stern line, and ran up the sails; they slapped the swaying mast as the boat swung into the wind. When he rejoined her on the jetty, she reached up to turn his jacket collar higher against the chill. He caught her fingers gently. "Fiona, I won't be back."

Her amber eyes widened and turned fearfully up to his green ones, now dark as running storm seas. "I'll not plague ye about Shelan again," she pleaded in stunned panic. "I'll wait, as long as ye like . . ."

He shook his head. "You've waited long enough. You ought to have a man all your own, and children. You're too beautiful, too fine to be wasting your life watching for a night sail."

"But, it's me lot," she protested, tears filling her eyes. "There's naught for seafarers' women but waitin'! If not for ye, then another."

He lifted her strong face to his. "Then another, Fiona. Don't throw your love away on me."

Her amber eyes gilded. "I . . . I never said I loved ye," she blustered. "Never, ye cheeky rogue. Why, 'tis but a bit of a toss I expect. . ."

His lips brushed hers. "Good-by, sweet lass. It's glad I am you don't love me." He smoothed a tendril back from her face, then turned away.

Fiona stood, frozen in pain, as he cast off and tightened the sheets of the sloop-rigged yacht to catch the first puffs of offshore breeze. She was still standing there when, well out into the harbor, he turned to wave.

Sean was glad to be at sea, glad to have his mind occupied. The trim thirty-four-foot yacht demanded all his attention. A smaller version of the graceful
Sylvie,
her teak decks and brass running gear glistened with spray above the spanking white of a sheared hull. Sails cupping the breeze, the yacht heeled over with wake dancing high. As she skimmed across the bay with the wind over her windward beam, depression settled over the Irishman. His last haven was gone and he had been right to leave it, yet the loneliness Fiona had eased for so many years seemed overwhelming.

Already, like ghostly butterflies, sails of fishing craft hovered over the bay, some well past the headland. Casting an eye to the wind, he tightened the foresail a notch. Against a sky rapidly paling to mauve, seabirds shrieked over the waves. As a sense of peace swept him, Sean realized part of the reason for his nightly sail was love of the quiet hours of evening and early dawn at sea. Fiona had been part of that love, part of his restless youth.

At the moment he changed tack to clear the point, the coast guard cutter
Stag,
150 miles away, surprised the smuggling ship
Pandora
napping peacefully near the same English coastal creek where her unlucky sister ship had been seized. While
Pandora
had rocked at anchor during the night, one of Culhane's Windemere agents had silently swum up to her stern, tightly tangled a weighted leather pouch into the rudder chains, and departed. As dawn lightened the sky, marines sprouted from the marsh cattails on both sides of the
Pandora
and captured her, crew and all. When the British prize crew attempted to sail her away from her mooring, they found her rudder fouled; a check of the stern discovered the incriminating pouch, "obviously" thrown overboard when the crew was surprised. Like her legendary namesake,
Pandora's
pouch released all manner of evil sprites in the form of secret running orders and contraband cargo lists forged with the signatures of League, Tunney and Briskell.

By the time Sean secured his yacht to cork buoys off Shelan and rowed the dinghy ashore,
Pandora's
crew was being prodded ashore by bayonets wielded by marines who, in their leafy camouflage crowns, resembled a band of bacchanalian revelers.