The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series), Page 3
Lisa Ann Verge
The boy held out a dirty hand. “I’ll take your horse for you, my lord.”
The boy he’d sent to spread the word spoke in uncertain English. For all his thinness, he looked strong, and he was as fleet-footed as the red deer Garrick had spotted in the woods through which he’d passed.
Through his woods, Garrick corrected.
The boy shuffled, uncertain in the silence. “The old master used me as a stable boy when it pleased him, my lord. I know the way of tending horses.”
Better than me, no doubt.
Garrick dismounted and tossed the reins to the boy. He quelled the urge to rub his backside. The crowd stood behind him. He sensed the weight of their stares. So he planted his hands on his hips and tried to look lordly while he stared up at the old square tower.
The tower had three stories, though what the third floor looked like with that collapsed roof was another question altogether. It appeared to be good, thick rock beneath all the ivy and lichen. Garrick’s gaze followed as the boy led his horse behind the castle, where he caught a glimpse of a number of outbuildings—stables, henhouses, and some sort of storage.
Then the door of the donjon squealed open on querulous female voices. Two women burst out. The younger, twisting her hands in her apron, lifted her head to greet him and stumbled to a halt.
She stuttered, “You.”
Garrick stood for a moment, struggling to take in the tumble of all that dark hair, the startled gray eyes, the luminescent skin. His first coherent thought was that she was as beautiful in the bright of day as she had been in the shimmer of the moonlight. She stared back at him, her expression a mirror of his shock.
No fairy, this. A fairy didn’t wear a ragged old apron, or walk about with flour staining her brow. A fairy’s cheeks didn’t flush dark with surprise. She was human, flesh and blood, and standing before him. After all that searching, fate had brought them together again.
He barked a laugh. Until now, he’d had nothing but a turnip-gourd, rumpled clothes and memories as proof that he’d lain with her that night. To prove to himself that this wasn’t another trick of the countryside, he took a step toward her. The panic in her eyes made him pause.
“Sir.” She dipped her head and dropped a quick curtsey. “They told me that you’re the new lord of Birr but there must be a mistake.”
“No mistake.” He could almost feel her pressed against him, his hands full with those hips, his face buried in that hair. “I am the new lord of Birr, and I’ve come to take possession.”
Her shoulders tensed. She bunched her apron in her hands. The news had struck her hard, but he could not read her downcast face.
When she spoke, her voice came out high-pitched, strained. “I am Maeve, the keeper of this house.”
“It’s about time I learned your real name.”
“We did not expect the new lord of Birr quite so soon.”
“The day is full of surprises.”
“I’ve kept this house in your absence.” She kept clenching and unclenching her apron, her brow furrowed. “On behalf of the people of Birr, I welcome you … my lord.”
She had secrets, this one. He’d suspected so on All Hallows’ Eve, when she’d left him lying alone on that hill feeling as daft as if he’d been stripped of his senses. Now every nerve of her sang with unease. He was of half a mind to destroy her pretense by publicly kissing her until she trembled with something other than anxiety. Yes, that’s what he would do. But before he could step toward her, he noticed the way her gaze darted between him and the silent crowd at his back. He sensed that if he reached for her now, she would fight and claw and scratch him like a trapped cat.
The thought took the edge off his lust.
“Come into the castle, my lord.” She flattened her palms, but her knuckles still went white. “You must be tired after your long journey.”
“It wasn’t the journey that wore me out.”
“The cold must have done it, then.” She turned and walked toward the donjon. “You’ll have to take your ease in the hall. We practice economies here whenever we can. We use very little wood. There are no other rooms heated.”
She swung the door open and left him to catch it as she strode inside. Garrick dipped his head beneath the arch of the door. The great hall was littered with reeds and hung with worn, faded tapestries. A pitiful spark of a fire crackled in the huge fireplace, where a gaggle of women fluttered to their seats as if they’d raced across the room at the sound of his arrival. The hall, furnished with only a rickety-looking trestle table and a few hearth chairs, echoed with hushed voices and the clatter of spindles.
“Had you sent word ahead,” Maeve said, “we would have had your chamber prepared properly.”
“I have no doubt you can prepare it for me.”
She startled, but regained her composure quickly. “Preparing bedchambers is not something I’m accustomed to doing.”
“Practice will take care of that.”
“In that, you know better than me, my lord.” Her voice tightened. “I’ll find someone else to do it, but it might take some time. Most of the servants are out threshing the grain or tending to the slaughter. We didn’t expect the lord of Birr for at least a month.” She finally met his eye, and the look she gave him was steady and assessing. “It’s strange that you’re here so soon.”
“You’ve been misinformed. My arrival was delayed only two days. I paused to search for a woman I met on All Hallows’ Eve—”
“Sorcha,” Maeve interrupted, her color rising as she tugged a spindle from a woman’s hand. “Don’t be standing there staring with your mouth open.”
“She just disappeared with the coming of day,” Garrick continued, “without a word of reason.”
“Disappeared, did she?” Maeve speared the spindle into a basket of wool. “Now there’s a trick I’d like to learn.”
“It worked for the two days I spent looking for her.”
“Talk like that, my lord, and my people will think you’re bewitched by a fairy.”
“She was no fairy, though she was as beautiful as one.”
“Surely it’s no concern of mine,” she stuttered, “such things as that.”
“Maybe it is. She could have come from these parts.”
“I know little about the fires, and want to know even less.”
“I’d say she was about your age. And she had hair as dark as soot. About as long as yours, as well.”
“What would you know of the color of her hair in the dark of night?” Maeve turned away sharply, and then barked at two girls gaping at them. “Sorcha, go to the kitchens and fetch some ale and bread for our lord. Surely he expects a better welcome. And Mona, have done with that sewing now.”
“And her eyes,” he mused, rubbing his chin. “I’m not sure I remember the color of her eyes.”
“Evelyn, Fianna— what’s our new lord going to think, with work to be done, and you two as idle as doves in the cote?”
“Ah, yes.” He reached out and captured her chin, turning her face toward his so he could meet that turbulent gaze. “Now I remember. They were the color of—”
“You’ll forgive me my boldness,” Maeve interrupted, “for saying that a man who frolics about those fires on a spirit-night gets no more than he deserves.”
“Oh, I got much more than I deserved.”
“Then you shouldn’t be asking for anything more.”
He felt the anger in her like a crackling in the air. Oh, yes, he would have to be patient. Very, very patient.
“You’ll want to see your lands.” She pulled away from his touch and strode toward the servant’s back entrance. “There’s not much to them. But by the time I’m done showing them to you, your food will be here to keep that chattering tongue of yours busy.”
The girls clustered by the servant’s door skittered back as they passed, smiling into their hands. He’d teased her, yes, but what of it? By sunset, he would soften her anger into a different kind of passion.
“This,” she said, thrusting out a hand to a sagging wreck of a building, “is the henhouse. Those are the kitchens. That,” she continued, thrusting out the other arm, “is the stable. And this,” she said, trudging into the coolness of an open building, “is the hay barn.”
He followed her into the dim building which smelled of cow and the sneezing perfume of chaff. She paced so fiercely that she whirled up clouds of it which had settled on the floor from a recent threshing. She peered up toward the second story searching for something, or someone, amid the piles of hay. Satisfied, she turned to face him.
“Now that we’re alone,” she said, “you can finish with this mockery.”
“I’ll agree with that.”
“You’re a brazen one to ride into this place and call yourself its lord.”
Garrick raised his brows. Well, what did he expect? The earl had granted him this land, but no gold to wrap his bastard son in the silken trappings of a highborn nobleman. “Is it so hard to believe that I’m your master now?”
“Please.” Maeve looked him over, all the way down to his dusty boots. “You didn’t even bother to speak English. You rode in without a single servant to attend you, on a horse that has seen stronger days. And the way you just talked to me in the hall…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “The people will suspect the truth before the sun sets. How long did you think you could stay here under this ruse before the real lord of Birr arrived?”
“A lifetime.” He hiked an elbow on the door of a milking stall. “But first it’s you who has explaining to do. It was you who lay with me under the moonlight on All Hallows’ Eve and then disappeared before dawn.”
Her hand shot to the laces of her tunic. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. It’s about you, riding here as bold as can be when I know who you are.”
“You don’t even know my name.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Garrick.” He slid his elbow off the door, crossed the distance that separated them, and seized her hand. “Garrick, late of Wexford, your humble servant, who has done nothing these past days but think about this.”
He pulled her to him. He buried his hand in her hair and forced that lovely face up to his. Her lips gave under his. It all came back to him, the fresh, sweet taste of her, virgin and innocent and hot-blooded. The fullness of her hips in his hands, and the fierce, undeniable yearning that only comes to a man once in a lifetime, if he has the luck.
She struggled in his grip and pulled away. “Don’t.”
“You want this as much as I do.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. It was best, leaving you. I never thought you’d come after me.”
“A man is never satisfied with one taste of heaven, a stór.”
“A man is supposed to want a woman to leave.” She paced unevenly in the dimness, running her fingers through her hair. “Men dream about such women who leave them willingly after such a night.”
“There are nights, lass, and then there are nights.”
“Don’t talk like that.” She dropped her hands and wrung them in her apron. “This cannot be.”
“You shouldn’t have run away from me.”
“Isn’t it time that a woman ran away from a man?” She backed away, stumbling over an empty pail set by a milking stall. “It’s always the man running away from a woman after he’s had his way.”
“You must have heard that rubbish from the same person who told you men grunt and have done with it.”
She hung the pail on a peg and then leaned her forehead against the wood. “Why couldn’t you be like other men?”
“Why couldn’t you be a woman who clings and demands more than a man could give? I searched for you for two days. I thought I’d lost you for good.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I might know more about you than any other, lass.”
“Maybe you know who I’d like to be, if I had been born into a different life.” She turned her back to him. “But you know nothing of me or of my place here in this castle.”
“We’ll have time enough for that.”
He wrapped his arms around her. This time she did not resist. Her hair smelled of sweet summer grass. The memory caused the blood to rush out of his head. He’d had plenty of women in his life. He’d enjoyed whores who worked the quays of Wexford, some hard-bitten by life, others soft-hearted despite the wear of their work. He’d kept one of his own for a while, a mite of a girl with big brown eyes, but the warmth he’d felt for her was like that of a distant young cousin. The time came when he stopped frolicking with her and set her up instead in a laundress’s establishment, so she wouldn’t have to ply her wares on the docks where a woman aged too swiftly. So, yes, his experiences were with work-hardened women, pleased to be having a man who took some pleasure in pleasing them. Not with a sensuous innocent who touched him with wonder in her eyes. Not with an Irishwoman of such soft hair, of such sweet scent, of such mystery.
He’d wanted her the minute he’d spied her across the heat of that All Hallows’ Eve fire. It was if she’d been standing there waiting for him for a lifetime. Now he found her on his own lands. If he hadn’t seen the surprise in her own eyes, if he didn’t sense her resisting him, even now, he would think the whole thing was a ruse. But he was never a man to question an unexpected gift.
He murmured, “We were fated, Maeve.”
“Don’t talk to me of fate.” She curled her fingers over his forearms. “We had an evening. A moment in the time between the times. But the world goes on.”
“Are you married?”
“You know that I am not.”
“Then all that matters is that you are free.”
“Marriage is not the only thing that can bind a woman.”
“I’m the lord of this place now. I can destroy any ties that bind you.”
“You’re talking foolishness, crazy foolishness.” She pushed out of the circle of his arms and edged away from him. “You’ve flattered me, Garrick, and for that I’m grateful more than you can possibly know. But this is a dangerous game you play. You must be moving on. At the breath of a whim the earl could decide to send another of his wretched sons-in-law to suck the life out of this place—”
“He sent a son this time.”
She sighed heavily. “Garrick, the earl has no sons.”
“Aye, he does. A bastard son.” He slapped his chest with a fist. “Not worth much to a great English earl, but enough to warrant giving me this place, if for no other reason than to stop my Irish mother from badgering him in the English courts.”
She froze in the dusky light flowing in through the barn door. Her eyes widened, disbelieving.
“Yes, the earl has recognized me, in his manner.” He trailed his gaze over the body he’d loved so thoroughly and knew exactly what he needed to say. “I’m the lord of this place now,” he said, “a lord who is in need of a wife.”
And in that instant he saw his life in the way his friends always joked about, in the way his own mother bewailed—as a series of mad, impetuous decisions. At thirteen he was offered a place on a merchant ship and he’d gone without a second thought on a year-long journey to the coast of Wales and Bordeaux and the shores of Assyria. When he decided many more voyages later that the sea was not for him, he’d returned only to find his mother guarding the promise of a lordship for him. He seized it without hesitation. So now here he was, in a manor house he knew nothing about running, about to tackle a life of rural husbandry he hadn’t a clue how to manage.
Yet luck had shown him a smiling face again. How bright fate had lit the path that had led him to her.
He said, spreading his
arms, “Maeve, be my wife.”
“You’re English.”
Her face contorted as if the word were something slimy on her tongue.
“The earl is English,” he said. “My mother is as Irish to the bone—”
“You—you deceived me.” She clutched her belly and then cupped a hand over her mouth. She sidled along the milk stalls until she shouldered into the wall of the barn. “My God … my God.”
Irritation rippled over him. He hadn’t asked to be the by-blow of an earl. And he hadn’t expected that she’d be the sort of woman too proud to take a bastard to her bed.
He said, “Did you not hear me? I asked you to be my wife.” He’d never asked a woman to be his wife, though he knew plenty who’d have fallen into his arms if he’d done so. “More than that: I’m asking you to be my lady of Birr.”
She shook her head at him. “Never will I consent to be an Englishman’s wife.”
***
Maeve stumbled across the fields as mud splashed under her skirts and soaked her hose. The woods loomed ahead, bare-branched and gray. She barreled toward them, seeking the home of her youth where all was simple and plain.
She had lain with an Englishman.
An Englishman.
It was Glenna’s fault. A fairy-woman was supposed to know such things. Glenna was supposed to guide her away from such catastrophes and see that all worked out right. Glenna had even led her to that village, telling her that this was the best place to go to have the wretched thing done. What good was a fairy-woman if Glenna couldn’t protect her from the very calamity Maeve feared the most?
Maeve broke into the woods and stumbled from tree trunk to tree trunk, tearing a path through the autumn leaves. When Maeve had first seen him standing in her yard her heart had swelled— he’s come for me. For a flicker of a moment, she’d thought that she could touch him again, she could kiss him again, and she could even lie with him again. He’s come for me! What a coincidence that he would find her after all the lengths she had taken to disappear. Perhaps he would be the man she could marry: An outsider, a strong and brave Irishman who would accept what and who she was. Because of course he was Irish: She’d seen the dirt of Ireland staining his broad worker’s fingers.
