Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “She was fond of My Lagan Love. She told me even I couldn’t sing it the way you could, boy.”

  Casey sat on a stool, his shirt open and cuffs rolled up. He’d abandoned both tie and cufflinks some time ago, and looked relaxed as he sat silent. He was always quiet for a moment before beginning a song. She knew he was bringing his focus down to a fine point, preparing to do honor to his grandmother’s memory.

  His voice started soft, needing no accompaniment. She had heard him sing any number of times. He often sang while he worked about the house, unaware that he was even doing so, for it was that natural a part of his life. Still, his voice could surprise her for the sheer raw pure power of it. She could see the effect of it on the faces around him already.

  Where Lagan stream sings lullaby

  There blows a lily fair

  The twilight gleam is in her eye

  The night is on her hair

  At the end of the first verse, Casey paused for a second and said. “Join me, Uncle.” Devlin nodded and followed Casey into the second verse. The two men sang well together, Devlin’s voice weaving a gossamer net under the falling stars of Casey’s pure Irish tones.

  And like a love-sick lennan-shee

  She has my heart in thrall

  Nor life I owe nor liberty

  For love is lord of all.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Deirdre come to stand in the doorway, still in the shadows, and knew that Casey would sense her there as well.

  Her father sails a running-barge

  ‘Twixt Leamh-beag and The Druim;

  And on the lonely river-marge

  She clears his hearth for him.

  When she was only fairy-high

  Her gentle mother died;

  But dew-Love keeps her memory

  Green on the Lagan side.

  For a moment, the barest fragment of time, his eyes met those of his mother and Pamela lost her breath, for she saw there no hostility, no guard, but only the boy who had missed this woman every day of his life. Deirdre stepped back from the look, for it must have felt like a knife in her chest just to witness it, and the guard came back down over Casey’s eyes. He turned his face away and continued the song, voice growing in strength like a flock of birds winging in ever closer across a winter sky.

  And often when the beetle’s horn

  Hath lulled the eve to sleep

  I steal unto her shieling lorn

  And thru the dooring peep.

  There on the cricket’s singing stone,

  She stirs the bogwood fire,

  And hums in sad sweet undertone

  The songs of heart’s desire

  The next verse he sang to his wife, dark eyes making certain contact with her own. His voice was soft and aching, pulling her by dint of his words alone, leaving her aching with the longing to take him to her bed, to soothe all the hurts of his past and shield him from the world.

  Her welcome, like her love for me,

  Is from her heart within:

  Her warm kiss is felicity

  That knows no taint of sin.

  And when I stir my foot to go,

  ‘Tis leaving Love and light

  To feel the wind of longing blow

  From out the dark of night.

  His throat trembled through the sweat-sheened skin of his neck, the chords standing out in sharp relief. Pamela spared a glance toward Deirdre, who stood as though she’d been shot, frozen in place, eyes riveted to her eldest son’s face and tears falling unchecked down her cheeks. She looked exactly as one might expect a woman to look whose heart had broken with a sudden and irrevocable snap. There was a space around her where none of the family came near, as though they did not want to feel her pain.

  Where Lagan stream sings lullaby

  There blows a lily fair

  The twilight gleam is in her eye

  The night is on her hair

  And like a love-sick lennan-shee

  She has my heart in thrall

  Nor life I owe nor liberty

  For love is lord of all.

  He had closed his eyes during the last verse and they remained so for a moment, as he breathed in deeply, bringing himself back to the present world. And then he spoke, so softly, Pamela could barely make out the words. “Slan leat, Grandmother.” Goodbye.

  He opened his eyes and stood, looking directly at Pamela. He gave her a weary smile, and she saw written clearly there what the day had cost him. He moved across the room slowly, his aunts and cousins reaching out with lingering hands to touch him in passing.

  Deirdre stood, still crying, a terrible thing of silence and loss, her face ravaged by the last few minutes.

  Casey paused just for a second and laid his hand on his mother’s shoulder, and then with neither word nor glance backward, he moved on through the strung silence toward his wife and son.

  Pamela didn’t dare look round, for a hush filled the place that spoke of emotion stirred to the point of physical pain, and tears still streamed down her own face.

  Casey leaned down, kissed her wet cheek and gently lifted their sleeping son from her arms, tucking the soft, boneless warmth of Conor tight into the curve of his own shoulder. Then he reached out a hand and took hers.

  “Come, Jewel, let’s away home then.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Autumn 1973

  The Dreaming Time

  Beneath her feet, the pine needles whispered softly of winter things. Of the coming cold and snow, of the dark half of the year when the quiet came down and enfolded the world in a mantle of calm. It was a time of year she had always loved, for the sense of the veil between worlds thinning was strong with her at such moments. This year that was a comfort, to think that perhaps of a chill night, Lawrence might come and warm himself beside the fire. Might sit beside Casey in spirit, if never again in the flesh, and they could once again be whole. That sometimes in the restless nights, perhaps when exhaustion bore him down, Pat might find solace in his dreams that Sylvie would be there for a moment, all light and lilacs.

  In such times, she knew, when the air is chill and the night longer than the day, one cannot avoid certain truths. For her this truth had sat like a seed deep inside, a small kernel of worry that was now leafing out into real fear. For Jamie had not come home with the spring or summer and she did not think to see him now that the frost was heavy on the ground and the spiderwebs deserted in the hedgerows.

  For this was the thin time when the earth laid bare her bones and showed her gems in the random berry left on the vine, the sheath of ice forming in perfect geometry across a pond and the black gleam of a naked birch branch. This was the threshold of winter, when the soil slept, harvests were put up, and life could hang by a thread. In this time, dreams came unbidden, rippling up from the dark wellsprings of the unconscious, murmuring things one would rather not know. These were the dreams that haunted during the daylight hours, spun fine as webbing round the senses, bringing hard questions into the light.

  She dreamed of a man cold and lost in a forest so deep it was surely sprung from a fairytale, one of the ancient nebulous ones with old truths at their core. She did not see the man clearly, but she did not need to—she would know him anywhere, for she dreamed of Jamie.

  The question that haunted her in the light of day was this—just where the hell was Lord James Kirkpatrick?

  Part Two

  Jamie

  Hong Kong – February 1973

  Chapter Seventeen

  February 1973

  The Flower-Smoke Room

  Hong Kong, it was said, was the only purely capitalist city on earth. The city where one could get anything the heart desired—and many things the heart didn’t know it desired—at any hour. Hong Kong was a city of endless rushing night, burning out hard in neon.

  The messenger stood beneath one such flaming arc of the modern age, a crumpled m
ap in his hand and a package beneath his arm. The sign, proclaiming the glories of carbonated sugar water, flashed alternatively in red and blue. The colors refracted against his spectacles, making him feel as if he were in church with light pouring through stained glass windows, spilling thick and terrible out of the glass heart of the bleeding Christ. He had to squelch the urge to genuflect.

  Frankly, he’d expected something grander, but the number on the battered blue door matched the one in his hand.

  The last flower-smoke room in the world was tucked behind a discreet address on one of the less traveled streets of Hong Kong, no more than a dark back lane overhung with crisscrossing arches of laundry. Directly above his head flapped a large variety of silken garments that his mother—good Presbyterian that she was—would have called unmentionables.

  Robert took a breath, straightened his tie and knocked on the door. It opened a crack, one dark almond eye looking through it at him.

  “What you want?” the eye barked at him.

  He cleared his throat. “I believe there’s a gentleman here expecting me.”

  The almond eye narrowed. “A gentleman? Wrong house. You go down street. We not got boys here.” The door slammed emphatically shut.

  Robert knocked again. The door opened again, a mere slit this time.

  “You again? I tell you no boys here,” the voice then continued on in a haranguing tone that Robert thought was likely the Chinese version of ranking him somewhere below the baser life forms that grew on top of pond water. He patiently waited the voice out, then smiling his no-nonsense smile said the magic words.

  “Mr. Kirkpatrick expects me. This is the address I was given. Is he here?” The door opened slightly wider, a wedge of moonlike face joining the almond eye.

  “Maybe he here, maybe he not. What business you got?”

  “Will you please just tell him that Robert MacDougall is here?”

  The voice mumbled something that sounded like ‘Robber Donkey’ and, giving him a gimlet glance, said, “You follow. Come. Come.” These last two words given emphasis by the tiny creature in front of him clapping its hands together sharply. He followed the creature, for so tiny and wizened it was, he could not place a gender upon the wrinkles and silk-capped head. The legs, like dried sticks emerging from embroidered pants, gave nothing away either.

  He was led up a set of stairs so narrow that his shoulders brushed the peacock-flocked walls on either side. At the top the landing broadened only slightly, dank, forbidding hallways leading off in either direction. The tiny creature clapped its hands again and Robert accordingly turned left. The entire floor was a warren of small rooms, miniscule dens for every decadence the East had to offer. Through partially opened doors Robert saw a variety of women in various states of undress, delicate amber sylphs, the Flowers of the Orient, for sale, for rent, for your delight. On his right a young girl stepped out, ageless in the way Oriental women are, her robe open down the front, breasts barely more than budding plums. She slipped her robe down to her elbows and waggled her shoulders at him.

  “You like?’ she asked in tongue-crowded English.

  Before he could answer, the creature in front of him took a step toward the girl, yipped something sharply in her face and continued on its way. The girl shrugged her robe up as if to say, ‘Your loss,” and turned back into her room.

  The door he sought was at the end of the corridor. Lacquer-red and brass-knobbed, it stood out in the murky atmosphere like a ruby in a pile of ordinary rock. The crone rapped on the door in a quick succession of birdlike taps and it was opened narrowly. A low, rapid, singing conversation followed, punctuated by the crone’s bony finger being jabbed in the vicinity of the doorkeeper’s nose. After several minutes of this, his erstwhile guide stepped aside and with a curt bow indicated he should proceed through the red portal.

  From one world into the next, he passed with a single step.

  The room seemed to be an antechamber of sorts, for a set of black-enameled double doors graced its north end, emblazoned with golden dragons, their eyes a flare of emerald. The doors, he suspected, guarded the man he had come here seeking.

  The doorkeeper, a sylph in jade green satin, indicated with a tilt of her head that he should sit in one of the highly ornate chairs positioned about the little room. He sat with great trepidation, for the furniture in the room looked as if it were only meant to bear the weight of butterflies and birds. Robert was neither.

  The sylph approached the double doors and pressing the eye of the dragon on the left hand side, entered the room beyond. The door closed behind her, the only sound that of her silk robe whispering against her skin.

  What, he wondered, would his stout, blue-rinsed, orthopedic-stockinged mother make of such a place? Robert shuddered to think. In one corner stood a spinet, his appraiser’s eye judged it to be of the Louis XV era, its value enough to make the most hardened dealer salivate. On the walls were a variety of paintings, some small prints in delicate, ornamental frames, others large canvasses. One was an impressionistic night view of Hong Kong’s harbor with its junks and light-oiled waters, done in a thousand shades of blue. Another was one of the infamous flower paintings by an American artist, a poppy opening its dark-flame heart in flowing crimson and scarlet. This artist had vanished twenty years ago into the cigar smoke and gambling lairs of Cuba with this particular painting in tow, or so legend had it. Robert stepped toward it, looking for the telltale over-perfection of the reproduction and found instead the fragile flaws of an original. He shivered slightly, a bead of sweat running down the groove of his backbone. What sort of place had Giacomo sent him to? And what business could the Father General of the Society of Jesus have with the sort of man who frequented such a place?

  Just then his doorkeeper re-emerged, inclining her head and one hand toward him. He started across the silk carpet, only to be stopped by a gentle smile.

  “If you would remove your shoes, please,” she said, her English a flawless ribbon of vowels and consonants.

  He removed his shoes, grimacing slightly at the black and grey Argyll socks that he wore for luck and followed the shimmering sylph through the dragon-guarded doors.

  He was escorted into a room of such opulence that his staid Scots heart thought he’d bypassed the road to Hell and gone directly to Its inner harbor. And if this was the Inferno, then the man upon whom his eyes had just lit would certainly qualify as Satan.

  His mother had always told him that if a situation proved too much to swallow all at once, he ought to take it in manageable bites. He doubted very much that the creature laid out before him on embroidered brocade was in any way manageable but Robert, stout of heart and Scots to his core, resolved to give it a game try.

  He decided to begin at the bottom and work his way up. Steam curled in elegant curlicues from the cusp of the toes. Steam, he told himself sternly, not the smoke of eternal fires. Long legs, well made, perfectly proportioned, a knee drawn up fine around opalescent bone. A scatter of golden fleece along the flanks and then a towel, likely for his own sense of propriety and not His Lordship’s. Robert had a feeling that modesty was not one of the man’s larger virtues.

  Narrow through the waist, broadening to chest and shoulder, all of it well muscled and gleaming like distilled sunflowers.

  A face, flawless in its execution and design, redeemed from perfection by a nose that had once been broken and, as a result, was slightly sharpened at the bridge. The hair, worn over-long, was gold and gilt as the proverbial prince.

  He looked squarely at the man and felt the breath dam up in his lungs. Eyes the color of a shattered iceberg, a green beyond emeralds, olives or aqua, a green so pure that one felt snared in it, unable to get enough oxygen in order to think clearly. And Robert was a great proponent of thinking clearly.

  “Robert, I presume,” said the voice, which held within it components of many thi
ngs: whiskey, butterscotch, dry ice, old schools, and money—great, crisp piles of it.

  Robert, girding up his remaining courage, attempted to smile, opened his mouth to speak and finding no words yet willing to make their way forth, settled for a nod of his head.

  “Well,” the voice continued, smooth as buttered silk, “I’ve heard the Scots are miserly with words but this is purely ridiculous. Old Rabbie seemed to manage though,” the lips, carnal by design, turned up at one corner,

  “Stay, my charmer, can you leave me!

  Cruel, cruel, to deceive me!

  Well you know how much you grieve me!’

  The accent was indefinable, Robert thought in the one small portion of his brain that wasn’t whirling. And what the hell was that burning on the brazier? It smelled like singed oranges and was making his thoughts drift dangerously.

  “Perhaps a drink would loosen your tongue,” the left hand, long-fingered, gestured gracefully to a narrow-necked crystal decanter. Robert, throat suddenly parched, nodded and then thought perhaps it was a mistake to imbibe during a job interview, even if one’s potential employer wore no more than a large emerald and a small towel. However, he hardly saw any way to back out gracefully so he accepted the tumbler of grain-colored liquid and took a tentative sip.

  “Gie him strong drink, until he wink,

  That’s sinking in despair;

  And liquor guid to fire his bluid,

  That’s prest wi’ grief and care;

  There let him bouse and deep carouse,

  Wi’ bumpers flowing o’er,

  Till he forgets his loves or debts,

  And minds his griefs no more.’

  The Rs, rolled with mocking precision, rollicked out in perfect imitation of his own High West Scotland tones. The man had all the mercy of a satiated cat playing with a wit-addled mouse. Even in watchful relaxation he’d the grace of a cat about him, something sleek and golden, a mountain lion perhaps. And the watchful stillness of a cat as well; Robert could almost feel him scenting the air, waiting to pounce. Robert took a larger, less tentative sip.