by Clare Austin
At the mention of her brother, Muireann cleared her throat. “Mam…we should be going,” Muireann said as she stood to leave. “I’ve a whole day’s work to finish. Simon will be waiting on me.”
The sharp edge to her words didn’t begin to mask her distress.
“Sure, now, I’ll walk back with you.” Tynan offered a hand to Dervla. “Lovely to chat with you. I hope to visit again before I leave for home.”
“And when will that be?” she queried.
“I planned a couple of weeks here. My sister has a wee one due and I’d better not miss the event.”
Muireann’s heels sounded hard on the plank floor as she marched the three steps to the front door. “I’m for leaving now,” she announced without preamble.
Whatever caused Muireann’s sudden need to depart, Ty decided he’d best not question the expediency of it. Something had her sensibilities singed and he knew there was no benefit in waiting until she ignited full on. “We’re off then,” he said, nodded his goodbyes to Dervla and followed Muireann out the door.
She was halfway to the post box before Ty caught her.
But catch her he did, grabbed at the sleeve of her jumper, and unbalanced her enough to slip on the wet grass.
Muireann fell back against him and they both hit the turf with a thud. “Dammit. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, tried to stand and slipped again.
“Feckin’ stop right there.” He got to his feet, pulled her up, and locked his arms around her so she couldn’t move. “What was that all about back there?”
She wiggled and struggled but couldn’t break free. “I cannot talk to someone who has got me like a fuckin’ Greco-Roman wrestler!”
“You’ll bolt.” His grip tightened.
“I will not.” Muireann stopped squirming, but he could feel her hold her breath in preparation for something.
“Promise?” He loosened his grip.
“Promises are for friends and family. You don’t qualify.” She pulled away and he lost his hold.
“I’d like to.”
“You don’t have a clue what’s at stake here, Tynan.” Muireann cocked her head to the side as though considering him. “What’s the use? As soon as you finish what you really came here to do, you’ll be gone.”
“Listen.” He swallowed the dry lump in his throat and tried to make sense. “So many years have gone by. We’re not children anymore. You’re a mystery to me. I want to…well…dammit. I want to know the woman you’ve become.”
“You almost got to that last night.”
He let go of her just long enough to run a hand over his face in frustration. “Yeah…sorry about all that.” So far as Ty remembered, they had never discussed anything or agreed on ground rules. The silent assent to intimacy had been mutual with little, if any, forethought.
“Sorry? Like you now think it was a bad idea?” She grimaced. “Now, there’s a compliment a woman wants to hear the morning after an almost night before.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He was losing this battle and it was going to hurt. “Please let me explain.”
“Okay, explain if you must.” She started to step away. “But I’ve got work to do. You can talk while we walk…or not. Your choice.”
“Why can’t you make this easy?” Easy? Dream on. Never in his experience had any woman made his life easy. “Okay, not easy, just reasonable.”
“Not my problem.” Muireann tossed her hair over her shoulder with a snap of her head and kept her eyes on the path.
Ty had not mastered the art of measured response when his emotions became involved.
“I like you, Muireann O’Malley.” There, he’d said it.
“Yeah, what’s not to like?” she shouted over her shoulder.
Ty jogged to catch up with her. “Do you believe in fate?”
“No, I don’t,” she snapped, picked up her pace, and mumbled, “eegit.”
“After what your mam said…well, I think it’s fate that brought me back here,” Ty insisted.
She stopped and shook her head. Her hair flew in her face like a veil. “You’re insane.” Her hand came up and swept her mane back.
“No. I’m an honest man, Muireann. We’re rare as hen’s teeth,” he said in his own defense. “I find you fascinating.”
Muireann’s expression had morphed from disdain to astonishment. “If you find me so damn interesting, what do you want to know?”
“You can start with why you didn’t want your mother to talk to me about the seanchaí, Bertie O’Malley. Who is he to you?” And, what does that mean for us?
“Why bother?” She shrugged and took off again. “You’re temporary.”
He lengthened his stride. “Maybe not.”
She stopped. Ty nearly ran her over with his momentum.
She whirled on him. “Do you know who I am, who the Ó Conghaile are?”
“I’ve got all day, Muireann.” He reached for her and lifted her face with a finger under her chin. She didn’t push him away and he saw tears glisten on her long dark eyelashes.
She looked away. “It’s not simple.”
“Nothing worthwhile ever is.”
“Come with me then,” she said as she led him across the road and over a stile. The field was knee-deep grass, bright yellow gorse, and wild thyme. Muireann headed in the direction of the cliffs.
After the first few hundred meters, the level grassy pasture gave way to a bog with closely spaced pointed rocks, slowing their progress. “This looks almost intentional,” Ty commented as he maneuvered his way through and over the field of boulders.
Muireann stepped over the terrain as though she had done so hundreds of times. “This? Sure, now, it was quite intentional.”
“Chevaux-de-frise?” He had seen one before, but not exactly like this.
“This is near taken over by the bog now, but in its day it would have been an impressive deterrent.” She stopped and pointed to the horizon. “With the cliffs, a sea invasion was near impossible, and horses couldn’t come through these sharp rocks from the land side.”
“How old is this?”
“Who knows? A thousand years? Maybe only a few hundred. Point is, there was something worth protecting.”
Ty shaded his eyes with his hand as he took in the western horizon.
Why hadn’t he noticed it sooner?
A whitethorn tree, its branches heavily laden with bits and bobs, bent as though by the weight of Ballinacurragh’s dreams and wishes.
“Come on.” He took Muireann by her hand and started to walk. They reached the road and he now saw the connection. “I hadn’t seen this from the east.” This was where he had driven yesterday.
Ty crossed the dirt track and turned his back to the cliffs. His two hectares were on a high point. From this tree, he could see three hundred sixty degrees: the sea, Muireann’s cottage, Dervla’s garden and house, Mary’s B&B, and the village of Ballinacurragh were all visible.
She stepped up beside him. “You’ve been in Boston too long. You only saw the pieces, not the whole picture.”
Muireann sat on a substantial horizontal root extending from the tree. “Join me?”
He did and they sat in silence for several minutes. Ty waited, listened to the rhythmic rush of the sea and smelled the scent of Muireann, heady and sweet like morning grass, beside him in the warm day. She was a wonder to him. If time had suspended in this moment to last a lifetime, he could have felt content. This rare calm was not one he experienced often in the rush of life in Boston.
“When I was a girl,” she began out of the silence, “I came here nearly every day. Lately, I’ve found other distractions. Life is like that if you aren’t careful.”
Ty didn’t want to seem impatient or rush her, but he didn’t see where this was going. She’d think he was thick as a short plank if he came right out and asked, so he tried to be quiet and let her talk.
“This whitethorn tree has been here as long as I have memory. My mam says
it was here when her grandmam was a wee girl. No one remembers it not being here.”
“Ah, now, are you about to tell me this is a true ‘fairy tree’? That it’s sitting over a thin place and we need to be respectful of the Others or…”
Muireann laughed. “I’ll not be the first to speak ill of the Gentry. All I’m saying is this particular tree could be hundreds of years old.” Then she became serious. “This place, this undignified pile of stones, you might say, is all that remains of the Ó Mháille fortress.”
“The home of the chieftain? It can’t be,” Ty protested. “It would be protected by the OPW. There would be signs and a little kiosk with a wizened old woman charging two euro to everyone who passed by.”
“The Office of Public Works deemed this insignificant. But it is worth saving, if for no other reason than it’s the last few stones blocking outside interests from destroying what little we have left of our heritage.” Muireann’s jaw line stiffened in resolve. “I’m the one who’s going to see that done.”
“If every pile of rocks in Ireland was protected by the government, you wouldn’t have a straight road in the entire country.”
“That’s ex-pat logic.” She shook her head. “Who needs straight roads, anyway? It just makes you go faster past the beautiful places.”
She might be right about his logic, but it still hurt to hear it from her lips.
“Stop thinking and start letting yourself feel what happened here.”
He was feeling lots of things with her so close, mostly from below the belt, but he was sure his carnal stirrings were not what she was referring to. “What I feel right now is uncommon contentment. Is there something else?”
“There is, but it might take time.” She studied her hands as though she might find an answer there. “Every Irish child knows the story of the selkie and the fisherman.”
“A staple of the seanchaí repertoire. Sure, we all know the story. The fisherman finds a beautiful woman, no one knows where she came from, they marry, have a family, the children find a pelt, mam puts it on, and disappears into the sea.”
“That’s the gist of it, though you’ve given the ‘Celtic stories for dummies’ version there.” She closed her eyes and tipped her face toward the sunlight.
Tynan’s breath caught and his blood surged to his lower parts leaving his brain starved and dizzy. Compelled to touch her, feel the smooth texture of her skin against his, he reached for her hand. Muireann did not pull away as he thought she might. Instead, she let him weave his fingers into hers.
“Bertie sat here with me a few days before he passed. He told me a different ending to that old story.” She glanced down at their intertwined hands. “It goes like this…Once upon a time in the West Counties of Ireland, Padraig Ó Conghaile made a desperate decision…”
Chapter Twelve
“…then, Padraig sealed the box with tar and walked off into the night.” Muireann closed her eyes and turned her face to the afternoon light.
Tynan waited. He didn’t want to break the fragile threads Muireann had woven into her story by asking her to continue before she was ready. Questions spun in his head like feathers in a crosswind.
She was silent, her eyes closed, her face a mask of calm. Only the hum of bees and the whisper of the wind through the grass accompanied her breathing.
“And?” he finally asked.
“That’s all I know,” she added, shrugging her shoulders in resignation.
“It can’t be,” he urged. “Where did he go with the damn box?”
“Hey, I’m only telling you what’s been passed on to me,” she snapped. “Do you think if I knew the rest, I’d be here day and night trying to sort it out?”
“What happened to Padraig Conneely after that?”
“I suppose he went home, raised his children, had grandchildren.” She threw her arms wide. “Voilà, here we all are!”
“What makes you think this isn’t simply a story—a legend—like a million other fables that have no roots in reality?” He was a gobshite, making that suggestion, but how much of this did she really believe?
“When you say stuff like that, I can’t believe you have an Irish gene in your entire body.” She shook her head and gave him a crooked grin. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Tynan gave a short laugh.
“My brother liked that one.” Her smile faded and a veil of pain crossed her face. “He was always quoting some writer, philosopher, or scientist to make his point.”
Tynan tried to swallow back the question on his mind but couldn’t. “Muireann, tell me what happened to your brother.”
Her jaw tightened. She swiped at her eyes and turned her face away from him.
Ty immediately regretted the intrusion into her pain. “I’m sorry. If you’d rather not—”
Her body shook as though a battle raged in her chest. “No…you may as well know.” Muireann stood and walked over to the base of the whitethorn tree.
As though he had his eye to a camera, a flash melded this scene with the picture in the newspaper. What was so desperately vital to Muireann that she chained herself to this tree and defied the man who had Ballinacurragh by its financial throat? If losing her brother was part of the puzzle that made her who she was today, he had to understand.
“Ronan was three years older than me,” she continued. “We were different in many ways, but close, perhaps closer than most siblings. I’m not sure. I don’t have anything else to compare to.”
Tynan thought about how close he was with his fraternal twin. He and Kerry had finished each other’s sentences until they agreed to cut it out.
“Anyway, our plan was to save the harbor seals and set up a sanctuary. Ronan was better at the planning, and I was the one who didn’t mind getting my hands dirty.” She swallowed tears and continued. “It was late. He rang me and said he’d got a call and someone had asked to meet him out past the tidal island…to show him something. Sometimes people call because they’ve found a lone baby seal or one tangled in nets. Ronan needed to take a boat and wanted me to go with him.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I was—well, with someone and I didn’t want to go. I thought it could wait until morning.” Lines of pain crossed her forehead. “He took Bertie’s currach and went without me.” She gazed past him, out to the sea. “I didn’t think he’d risk it.”
Ty studied her face. The pain of loss made her look simultaneously childlike and wizened.
“The boat was found on the rocks up the coast.” She swallowed hard. “But…my brother’s body was never recovered.”
“Oh God, Muireann. I’m so sorry.” Tynan slipped his hand around hers. “Your mam, she hasn’t accepted it?”
Muireann’s fingers were cold. “Sometimes she seems to remember. Other times she’s just lost.”
Tynan was trying to put the picture together, but like a puzzle with pieces missing, it made little sense. What did Ronan’s death have to do with this whitethorn tree, this old fortress, the selkie legend? “Did you ever find out who called Ronan or why he took the boat?”
“I really can’t even guess. But Bertie told me again and again I needed see the big picture. That’s how he put it ‘the big picture.’” She stood, stepped to the whitethorn tree, and ran her fingers across the pendant she had hung there; the one she had created solely for this purpose. “He knew something here was the key to saving what I loved…perhaps something Ronan died for. It has to be here somewhere.”
“You said yourself, he was losing his memory. Perhaps this is part of his dementia.”
Muireann didn’t turn to face him. “And then Feeney gets involved because of the back taxes.” She shook her head and her hair fanned out like a bird’s wing in flight. “Go figure. Like things aren’t complicated enough without that money-grubbing shitehawk added to this porridge pot.”
Ty avoided dragging Feeney into the conversation. Soon enough he would have to tell the banker his decision over the land sale. “Do yo
u have any idea where Padraig’s cottage was?”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said today?” Muireann turned and the light hit her eyes making them flash with golden sparks among the chocolate depths. “If you had been paying attention to me, you would have realized I grew up in the Conneely cottage.” She pointed a straight line from where they had left the road. “Picture it about half the size it stands now and with a thatch roof.”
“How do you know?” That cottage would be hundreds of years old, built and re-built countless times, unrecognizable.
“Everyone knows. It’s just a fact, like the time of the tides or when to plant potatoes.”
Her hands accentuated each word. It reminded Tynan of the Italians he knew around Boston’s North end, struck dumb if their hands were tied.
But it wasn’t only her hands, the toss of her head, or the fire in her eyes. Muireann was sure of everything. Usually he didn’t like that in a woman. Now, for some inexplicable reason, in this woman, he found the propensity riveting.
If Tynan were offered a lineup of women and given his pick, he might not have chosen Muireann straight away. Nearly everything about her was contrary to his long-held list of requirements. She was not only opinionated and devotedly rural Irish, but she liked to swim in the sea, stand on the edges of precipitous cliffs, and had a dog with an appetite for expensive shoes.
Had he completely lost perspective? All he knew was he couldn’t imagine booking it back to Boston until he understood what it was about this selkie. How could she pull him into her gravitational sphere and refuse to let him escape?
He rose and stepped behind her. Though they stood in shadow, the heat of her body warmed him. He breathed in her scent and tried to keep from touching her.
Resisting her was not possible. He placed his hands on her shoulders and let his lips tickle the back of her neck.
She trembled.
“Sorry, did I startle you?” he whispered.
“No.” She turned to face him. “Let’s forget this for awhile.”