by Sara Seale
“Are you looking for your future husband again with the stream for a mirror?” asked a voice behind her, and she jumped.
She had not heard him come, for the noise of the stream was loud in her ears. He took out a clean handkerchief and gently wiped her wet face and hands.
“Did you know I was here?” she asked.
“I guessed you might be. Grania’s Cave is one of your special places, isn’t it?” She nodded and he sat down in the heather beside her. “I think it’s special for me, too. I want to talk to you, Clancy, and I want to talk to you here, where once, I think, I unwittingly hurt you.”
But he did not continue for some time, but sat looking into the stream, and Clancy, watching him, noted the tired lines at the corners of his eyes and wanted to touch the little fine, fair hairs which grew at his temples.
Suddenly he turned and looked at her, a long, direct look which caught her off her guard.
“That day up here, I’m afraid you mistook what I said to you,” he said. “I think I said that certain things a man might say are best forgotten for a little while. I was clumsy, but I only meant that then I thought the time wasn’t right, that you were not ready, but you thought I didn’t want you, didn’t you?”
All the unhappiness of the past weeks welled up within her and kept her dumb, and he took her hands in his.
“Do you remember, Clancy, I once told you that one day it would no longer matter to you that your father had wanted you to be a boy?”
“No.”
“You asked me when that would be, and I told you when you married—when some man would thank heaven you were born a girl and not a boy.” She remembered now, and tried to pull away her hands, but he held them more tightly. “Don’t you think I told you the truth now?”
The colour came into her pale cheeks.
“Why now?” she asked.
“Because—Clancy, you little rebel, do you think you could ever make an alliance with the English?”
She sat very still and her strange smoky eyes focused on something far away.
“Grania O’Malley made an alliance with the English,” she said gravely. “She came to Galway—perhaps to this very cave, and offered Sir Henry Sidney her fleet of three galleys and two hundred men in the service of England, and that after the English had proclaimed her an outlaw and put a price of five hundred pounds on her head.”
His eyes twinkled suddenly.
“That was certainly magnanimous of her. Could you be as generous, do you think?”
She looked at him with great and unexpected tenderness. “I could always be generous to you, Mark,” she said. “What do you want of me?”
For a moment he was shaken out of his intention not to hurry her. He was humble and demanding and fiercely protective together, and he pulled her roughly into his arms and kissed her upturned mouth.
“I want you,” he told her. “I want to look after you for the rest of my life and teach you what you can mean to at least one man.”
She turned to him with sudden passion.
“I only want to learn what I mean to you,” she said. “Oh, Mark, I’ve been so wretched thinking of you going away. I knew you had to go—you would never be like Conn, turning his back on his calling for Clodagh. When,” she asked with shyness, “when did you begin to love me?”
“So long ago,” he said, “when you looked in the mirror on New Year’s Eve and were so startled when you saw me—no, on your birthday, when you were so gallant and so hurt—perhaps even when you were a tiresome little girl in the schoolroom, abusing the English—I don’t know. And then you were so ill and I thought I might lose you, and—”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked, and ran exploratory fingers over his face.
“Because—” He caught her fingers and kissed them. “Oh, so many reasons! Could you live in England, my darling? Could you leave Kilmallin?”
“I think so,” she said gravely. “I think I could live anywhere with you, Mark.”
“And be a schoolmaster’s wife, behaving decorously with parents and scrubby little boys? Clancy darling—” he began to laugh “—do you think you could ever bear to change your name to Cromwell?”
She snuggled her head into his shoulder as she had seen Clodagh do last night with Conn, and a great peace filled her and she knew that she had come home. She paused a moment, then said primly:
“It’s a cross I’ll have to bear.”
She lifted her face again to his.
“I love you,” she said simply.
Above them a lark had risen, trilling in perpetual gladness, and the stream ran with noisy chatter at their feet.
THE END