The Man on the Cliff

by Janice Macdonald

  Kate tried to keep her voice casual. “So Niall and Elizabeth…”

  “Sure, I’ve probably not said two words to the man since Moruadh died and there he was Monday night. Gave me quite a start, it did. No offense to you, Katie, but what was he doing arranging to meet a young girl late at night?”

  “Ah God, you’ve been nattering with Brigid Riley again, haven’t you?” Caitlin didn’t look up from the magazine. “Listening to the gossip. Just for your information, Katie, I think Mr. Maguire’s a gentleman. It was Elizabeth chasing after him, I know that. Just like she does over anything in trousers.”

  “Caitlin. She’s your friend,” Annie said.

  “I know that, but it doesn’t stop me from speaking the truth about her. And back to Mr. Maguire, as far as I’m concerned, Moruadh should have known better than to be up at the Leap, the wind blowing like it was that day. You wouldn’t catch me up there, I’ll tell you that.” She flipped a page. “What do you think about pink, Katie?”

  “Pink?” Kate refocused her thoughts and looked at Caitlin. “For the bridesmaids?”

  “No, for my dress. Pink wedding dresses are all the rage these days.”

  “Pink.” Annie measured flour into brown earthenware bowls. “When your da and I were married—”

  “You wore white.” Caitlin winked at Kate and went on turning pages. “Actually, I was thinking of red for myself. And maybe black for the bridesmaids. What d’you think? Elizabeth said it would be really sophisticated. Not that I’d trust her opinion, though. I don’t know why I have anything to do with her.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Annie protested. “The two of you are like sisters.”

  “We are not. She has the morals of a snake. The minute my back’s turned she’s all over Rory.” With the tips of her fingernails she’d just polished pale blue, Caitlin flipped the magazine shut. “Of course, he’ll have none of it.”

  Kate thought of the secret Rory had asked her to keep and got up from the table. Rory had insisted that nothing happened with Elizabeth, but she had an uneasy feeling. They were definitely due for a little chat, she decided.

  “Listen, love—” Annie came into the hallway as Kate was zipping up her parka to go to the castle “—I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you going to see Mr. Maguire, but how about if I have Patrick come and get you in an hour or so?”

  “For God’s sake, Mam,” Caitlin called from the kitchen. “Leave Katie be, will you. She’s safe as houses up there.”

  “THIS NEXT AREA takes a bit of getting used to.” Niall reached out to touch her shoulder. “When you go inside, stand still for a moment until your eyes get accustomed to the dark and stay very close to the wall. Hold on to me if you want to.”

  Kate took his hand, and the heavy door closed behind them. In the next instant, she was slapped in the face by a blast of cold wet air. Somewhere far beneath them, she heard rushing water. The sound echoed off the walls, filled her ears. Spray drenched her face and hair. The pressure of Maguire’s hand intensified slightly.

  “Are you all right?” His voice was almost lost in the roaring sound.

  She gulped an affirmative. At first there was nothing but pitch-black, then he shone the flashlight and, in the wavering beam of light, she saw that they stood on a narrow ledge that ran around two sides of an enormous room. A room with no floor.

  Hundreds of feet below them, the crashing ocean gleamed with a faint phosphorescent sheen. She swallowed, flattened herself against the wall, paralyzed with fear.

  “This was once a banquet hall,” he said. “As you can see, the center is gone. In 1640, I think it was, it crashed into the sea during a reception. The earl who owned the castle was carried off along with most of the servants. Apparently, the only survivor in the domestic quarters was a tinker who’d been off somewhere mending pots.”

  Kate mumbled something incoherent, felt her body sway slightly and tightened her grip on Maguire’s hand, his skin warm around her waxlike fingers. Her feet and nose were numb. The ocean seemed to be surging up at her.

  “Apparently the countess was never all that keen on this part of the castle,” he continued. “The waves beating all around unnerved her a bit. When the floor caved in, she went right off it altogether.”

  A bead of sweat rolled down Kate’s forehead, dripped into one eye. She blinked it away, too petrified to move. Sweat broke out on her upper lip. Heights had always terrified her. Nightmares had haunted her sleep for as long as she could remember. Nightmares exactly like this. A narrow ledge, churning ocean below and then falling, down through the bottomless dark with no one to catch her. Then she’d wake up screaming. It indicated her fear of losing control, someone had told her.

  “Over the years, more and more of it has fallen away,” Niall went on. “Now, all that’s left is this ledge, which goes around to Moruadh’s—”

  “Niall.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m gonna pass out.”

  IF SHE HAD DREAMED UP a way to put herself in a compromising position, Kate decided, she couldn’t have done better than this. Her clothes, already damp from the rain, then soaked by the west wing’s driving sea spray, were now drying in front of an electric heater, tatty cotton underwear tucked modestly out of sight beneath her jeans and sweater.

  Still shivering, she pulled the blanket up around her chin, clasped both hands around a tumbler of hot whiskey. Discombobulated, she thought. There was no other word for the way she felt. In Santa Monica, she followed certain commonsense rules. Life was dangerous enough without taking unnecessary risks. And while she’d never been invited by a suspected murderer to disrobe in his medieval castle, she was pretty sure what her answer would be. Of course, in Santa Monica she’d never been tempted to kiss a complete stranger on a cliff top. In Cragg’s Head normal rules didn’t seem to apply.

  “Are you all right?” Niall turned from the fireplace where he’d been coaxing the sullen flames. “You still look a bit shaky.”

  “I’m fine.” She eyed him over the glass. “Mostly I’m embarrassed for wimping out. I have this thing about heights.”

  He nodded and turned to attend to the fire. She watched as he crouched in front of the grate. His hair curled slightly over his shirt collar. When he leaned forward to strike a match to the pile, she could see the bones of his spine through the blue chambray of his shirt. Long and lean as a whittled stick. The fire caught, and he turned to look at her, his face illuminated by the flames.

  “We’re in luck,” he said with a serious expression. “There are demon cats living under the hearth rugs that come up straight from hell. They can make lighting fires awful hard sometimes, but I think Rufus has chased them off.” He glanced at the dog who was stretched out like a tattered rug in front of the fire. “He is a good dog for that sort of thing.”

  She grinned, struck again by the disparity between the two versions of Niall Maguire. This one, warm, attentive, quick to smile—a man she instinctively liked—and the Niall Maguire she’d heard about from others. She sipped the whiskey. As he’d led her shaking and trembling from the west tower, she’d decided that the villagers were definitely wrong about him. This was the real Niall Maguire, a man who couldn’t have killed his wife.

  Still, she had to concede that it could be just the chemistry screwing up her thought process. Everything about Niall intrigued and appealed to her. Even his voice aroused her. The lilting accent that turned her name into two syllables Keh-ayt, with a soft sigh at the end. Beneath the blanket, she felt her body stir. Nipples against rough wool, warmth in her stomach, her thighs. Fantasies of entwined limbs and romps on Irish bed linens. She blocked the thoughts.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “I’m always hungry.” She eyed her clothes. “But I should get back, I told Annie I wouldn’t be late. She’s made this meat pie for supper.”

  “Annie has you there for supper every night, I’d enjoy your company.”

  “Niall…” She bit her lip. “I r
ealize that it’s kind of ridiculous to be sitting here with no clothes on wondering whether I should trust you. My gut feeling tells me that I can, but my gut feeling also told me my boyfriend was teaching night school when he was actually screwing my best friend, so I’m not a great judge of these things and if I stay for dinner and…” She plucked at the blanket. “God, I have no idea what I’m trying to say.”

  He laughed. “That makes two of us. Will you stay for supper, though? I can’t match Annie’s meat pie, but I do have the things for that bouillabaisse I mentioned yesterday.”

  “Bouillabaisse?” She grinned. “What’s with this bouillabaisse thing?” A comment about corned beef and cabbage being more appropriate almost slipped out, but she remembered her caustic comment to Fitzpatrick about stereotyping and kept her mouth shut while she tried to think of reasons why she shouldn’t stay. None came to mind. “Bouillabaisse sounds pretty good,” she said.

  “Good.” He stood, grabbed her clothes and tossed them at her. “It’s not every day that I tell a woman to get dressed, but these are dry now and it might be a good idea.”

  “MMM, forget the bouillabaisse, listen to this.” Kate flipped through an old cookbook she’d taken from the kitchen dresser. “‘Carrigeen moss pudding,’” she read. “‘Take as much of the moss as will fit in your fist when almost clenched. Wash it in warm water for a few minutes, removing any grasses or other foreign bodies.’”

  Niall laughed. He stood at the long wooden deal table, cutting up onions as he watched Kate move around the kitchen, her curiosity imparting a new and exotic quality to the familiar. She’d touch something that caught her eye, stop to comment on it. A piece of blue-and-white glazed pottery on the dresser, the woven seats of the sugan chairs. She looked up to see him watching her and smiled.

  He was smitten. Gone. Besotted. She had on a pair of black corduroy trousers and a short wool jumper the color of marigolds. As she leaned over to pat Rufus, the top rode up to reveal a band of pale, freckled skin.

  He reached for another onion from the basket under the table. His head was full of her. Thoughts tumbled around, endless questions. Already, her return to America loomed like a dark cloud. Unable to tear his eyes from her, he watched as she peered inside the fireplace. Kate—with her freckles like grains of sand and great masses of red hair that escaped in tendrils from her ponytail and fell in wisps around her face. A long curl hung down the back of her neck. He stared at the onion in his hand and tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

  “God, a family of four could camp in here,” she said, her voice muffled from inside the fireplace.

  He glanced over at the massive bricked wall, blackened from the fires burned over the years. It held a spit that was once used for roasting meat. “It’s a bit too big to be practical, though. You saw how hard it was getting the fire started in the great hall. This one is a full-time job. Still, it would be handy if you ever feel like grilling an ox for dinner.”

  “Yeah, I bet you grill them all the time.” With a grin, she flicked a finger at the iron cauldron that hung from a crane. “And what about this? You make your porridge in it?”

  “I do. That and the gravy I serve up with the ox. And some days I even boil up the taties in it,” he added in an exaggerated brogue.

  Kate laughed and pushed back a strand of hair. Their eyes met and held. He heard the drip of water from the tap, the tree branches scratching against the window. A moment passed, and then with a self-conscious little shrug, she came across to the table and pulled up a chair opposite him. Elbows propped, she watched as he started on some green peppers.

  “I’m trying to imagine your life,” she said. “What do you do, walk around this place saying, ‘I’m the king of the castle?’”

  He laughed. “Hardly. More likely, I walk around wondering where I’m going to get the money to repair it. It’s not in very good shape. The west tower, for example. I’ll need to do something about it one of these days, but it’s prohibitively expensive.”

  “So you don’t have a pile of money?”

  He looked at her, tried not to smile.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I was just thinking that the Irish way of asking that question would be a lot more indirect,” he said. “Sure, we might wonder the same thing, but we’d swim slowly around it, gradually circling in to the main point and even then we would be less blunt. Something like, ‘Ah sure, it must be nice not to have worry about the cost of repair.’”

  She laughed. “I’ve only got a few days in Ireland. I need to work fast, but you still didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t have a pile of money.” He let a moment pass. “So you can cross off your list the theory that I pushed her to avoid paying her part of my fortune in alimony.”

  “You’re quite an enigma, you know that?”

  He shrugged, then returned his attention to the vegetables. A moment later, unable to resist, he looked up to find her watching him. Green eyed, in her sunshine sweater. Cinnamon-dusted face. If his life until now had been like one of those old black-and-white films, Kate had changed it to Technicolor. The kiss up on the cliffs had been as vivid, electrifying and as far removed from his real life as anything he’d ever seen in a cinema. It brought to mind the serials he’d watched as a boy. Every Saturday morning at the Odeon, mesmerized, his eyes glued to the screen, never sure until the very last minute how it was all going to turn out.

  The peppers chopped, he sent a thin sliver skidding in Kate’s direction.

  “Starters,” he said. “Or appetizers, as you Americans say.”

  “Do you often cook for women?”

  “Hardly ever. Do you cook for men?”

  “Hah. I don’t even cook for myself.”

  “Rich boyfriends take you out to expensive restaurants, do they?”

  “God, yes. Night after night. I know the best table at every Beverly Hills bistro.” She sighed theatrically. “It gets to be such a bore.”

  He looked at her.

  “I’m lying.”

  He smiled.

  “So what about you? What do people in Cragg’s Head do for fun?”

  He laughed. “Not an awful lot. You’d probably find it very dull.”

  “But you’re a photographer. Don’t you go off on location, take pictures of beautiful models, that sort of thing?”

  “I do a bit of it.”

  “A bit of it,” she said imitating his accent. “If I asked an American guy that question, he’d spend thirty minutes telling me all the places he went to and all the models he scored with.”

  “Maybe American men are more successful at that sort of thing.”

  She gave him a look that suggested she thought otherwise. A moment passed. He poured wine into their glasses.

  “Why are you so interested in Moruadh?”

  “It’s an assignment.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not exactly. Moruadh intrigued me. She used to call me. After the article I wrote on her, we became sort of long-distance phone pals. Mostly we talked about men. Or problems with men. We were both pretty much failures in the relationship department.” She paused. “Where were you married?”

  He hesitated. It was public record, if she wanted to find it she could. “In France. Nearly four years ago.”

  “Which would have been just before my article came out. Around the time she started calling me from Paris. She’d tell me about these disastrous love affairs and sound so desperate. She never mentioned you.”

  He brought the knife down on a strip of pepper he’d already chopped. Too vigorously. The pepper skidded off the table. He bent to pick it up, tossed it into the bin by the sink, looked over at her. She’d shifted on the chair and now sat on it backward, her arms around the backrest. Her face was small, triangular. Pointed chin and wide-spaced eyes. Long ribbons of red hair. He couldn’t look at her without posing her for the camera.

  From the refrigerator, he took out a waxed-paper-wrapped slab of bu
tter and brought it over to the table. “Let’s talk about you,” he said. “I’d find that much more interesting.”

  “God, I don’t believe it.” She drew her feet up on the chair, wrapped her arms around her knees. “A man who would rather listen than talk about himself. I should pinch you to see if you’re real.”

  He melted the butter in the pan, added olive oil and returned to the table. “Talk away.”

  “What would you like to know. Horror stories about failed relationships?”

  “How did you become so cynical?”

  “Mmm, let me see.” She wrinkled up her face. “Well, for years I swallowed all these rosy confections about true love and when I started gagging and throwing up, I realized something was wrong. You know how you’re just allergic to some things?”

  He smiled at her.

  “That was what fascinated me about Moruadh,” she said, her face serious now. “Here was this incredibly beautiful, successful woman with everything going for her. We really had nothing in common except that both of us kept flunking Love 101, or at least I thought she did.” She got up from the chair, paced the kitchen. “All her songs were so tragic. When she died, I wondered at first if she’d finally acted upon a thought that had been there all along.”

  He looked down at the shapes and colors of the vegetables he’d chopped. Squares of green. Slivers of white. A tomato, vivid red quarters reflected in the knife’s steel blade. Outside, the dark night. Branches scratching against the window. “Relationships go awry,” he finally said.

  “Yeah.” She picked at her thumbnail. “I’ve noticed. Personally, I’ve discovered that my life flows a lot more smoothly without men tramping around in it, so about a year ago, I took myself off the market.” She reached past him, picked up a head of garlic and began separating cloves. “Sort of like a house that doesn’t sell. The hell with a bunch of jerks tramping through it every weekend, not appreciating its fine architecture and great views.”