Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

Time too was different here and there weren’t the usual ways by which to reckon it. Surely the sun must have shone, but he could not remember it ever overhead in that strange land, nor the moon either—it was as if the entire place existed in between in some odd twilit realm where enchantment was endless and trickery the order of the day.

  At times, it seemed that the castle and its environs were filled with lords and ladies richly dressed, with jeweled crowns upon their heads and the finest furs for cloaks, with scepters made of twined golden snakes topped with a silver apple that shone as bright as the full moon. At others they would be simply garbed, their clothes old and shabby, blending with the earth and the landscape, their scepters merely old gnarled sticks.

  Muireann became the locus of this odd world for him, and it was her hand he took to roam in meadows heavy with the loveliest of flowers, or to swim in the cool waters of the lake that lay along the border of the land. Sometimes he caught her watching him with a look of such sadness in her face that he felt bewildered by it, for what was there to be so very sad about in this lovely drifting land?

  When he was away from her he had an odd feeling of urgency, though it seemed as soon as one came over him, she would find him and take him by the hand once again, pulling him into the revelry or encouraging him to stay for just one more night, to sleep in the sweet bedding and dream the strange floating dreams that held the drift of the planets in their very core.

  It came to him one day that he no longer had any idea where the path out of this world lay, and wasn’t sure it mattered either. This last feeling disturbed him most, for if he had strayed so far from home and all that he loved, it should matter. He ought to have a great purpose for breaking his mother’s heart. He still needed to find the Crooked Man and take back his dreams, yet here in this strange land it seemed far less urgent than it had when he had begun his journey.

  Part Eight

  When the Road Bends…

  Ireland – May-December 1974

  London – November 1974

  Paris – November 1974

  Chapter Fifty-five

  May 15, 1974

  The Strike

  The pale man did not visually translate well on a black and white television set, but his roaring rhetoric wasn’t the least bit dimmed by the medium. With every statement he made, the crowd roared ever louder. It was a message of unmitigated hatred, a call to arms and the letting of blood. The blood of the enemy—two of whom were watching on their tiny television some remove from the city in which the man spoke, a city where a crowd of more than a thousand people were responding to his call.

  “We have been loyal to Queen and Crown. We have laid down our lives on British battlefields, on ships and land. We know the names of all those places. They live in our hearts, and the memory of all those we have lost: the Somme, Burma, Palestine and South Africa. We gave them the best of what we are and that is the finest any nation anywhere has to offer. And now they abandon us for some weak-willed deal with terrorists, with the Republic of Ireland! So that we may be ruled by Rome? I say… No!”

  The roar this time was almost deafening, even with the muffling of miles and the sporadic sound of their television set.

  “I am prepared to come out and shoot to kill. Let’s put all bluffing aside. I am prepared to spill the blood of the enemy and so are those behind me. We will not allow our province to fall into the hands of murderous terrorists and their allies across the border.”

  At this juncture, the crowd whipped up to a frenzy, he lifted one hand and struck a small knife across it. It wasn’t pure theater, for blood dripped thickly from his palm onto the pavement where he stood, and he managed, Pamela noted with no small cynicism, to get some on his vestments.

  “He’s just told them to go ahead and kill people, and that he’s happy to do so himself,” Pamela said, feeling as if her own blood were somewhere in the vicinity of her toes.

  “Well, it’s not like we don’t know what he is, Jewel.”

  She shivered. Knowing the Reverend was back and in nefarious business was one thing, seeing him in the flesh, if indeed he was flesh (which she begged leave to doubt) was another thing entirely. Northern Ireland, in its current state of a pot continually on the verge of boiling over, was a stage waiting for a man like Lucien Broughton.

  By the end of 1972, with the unmitigated disasters of Bloody Sunday and internment blackening the Stormont Parliament, Westminster had rather boldly suggested the notion of power sharing between the factions in Northern Ireland as well as a cross-border alliance with the Republic, thus allowing the Catholic/Nationalist community to feel as though they had not only a say, but a link to the Dàil in the Republic, just as the Unionists identified with Westminster and Britain. The Unionist Government flatly refused to countenance such a thing. The Westminster government had the wisdom to see that there was indeed an Irish dimension to the Ulster problem, and that the flames of Nationalism were not going to conveniently sputter and die away. They saw the possibility of power sharing as a triangle of sorts which would, they hoped, alleviate the tension enough on all sides to quell the violence that had seized the province for so long now. The Loyalist factions viewed this as political appeasement, not only to the Nationalist community but also to the hated and feared Provisional Republican Army. The Nationalists viewed it with justifiable suspicion, and the IRA outright refused to take it seriously. Time had taught them that the Unionists would not share power, and would grip it until their hands were raw and bleeding before giving one inch.

  The upshot now being that the Ulster Workers’ Council had done what it had threatened all along, shut the province down in an act of defiance against the Power Sharing Assembly. Though they had claimed there would be no intimidation to enforce the strike, word was that the eight thousand Protestant workers of Harland and Wolff had been told that if their cars were in the parking lot after the lunch break, they would be torched. Major industry began to shut down as did the small shops, sometimes with the threat of arson looming over them. Pamela got the call that power to the distillery would be cut the following day. Knowing this was a possibility, she had arranged for a power cut days before. Every day of production lost meant thousands upon thousands of dollars, something she could ill afford at present, for it would be another black mark against her, no matter that she had nothing to do with the strike or its consequences. With Kirkpatrick industries as shaky as they were at present, any setback became a major problem for her.

  It was the evening of the third day of the strike and it was looking like it would stick, with roads blockaded and power cut, no petrol, milk spoiling in farmer’s barns and cattle going hungry. That evening, car bombs were set off in Dublin and Monaghan during the evening rush hour, killing thirty-three people immediately and injuring a further hundred odd. It was the single worst day of atrocity in the Troubles, a dubious honor, but one some of the Loyalists seemed happy to embrace.

  It came as no surprise that the Reverend Lucien Broughton had chosen to use the strike as a platform to stir more violence and hatred.

  “What will it mean, do you think?” Pamela asked, looking at the shocked and angry faces on the television screen, the voices, stunned and agonized, that seemed to all run together.

  “If they can’t resolve it, it’ll be all out civil war,” Casey replied grimly.

  “You really think so?”

  “Aye, nothing less than dissolving the power sharing is goin’ to appease the bastards. If the government doesn’t give on that, there’ll be blood in the streets. But have no fear, they’ll get their way. The British inevitably crumble to it. We’ll be back to direct rule in no time at all.”

  “I wish it could be different. I don’t understand the hatred. Why can’t they countenance the Irish Government having some say? After all, the British Government rules every other damn thing here.”

  “It’s fear, darlin’. Fear of the unknown,
fear that things will change and the balance of power will shift. In reality, it wouldn’t be likely to change much, but the Loyalist community lives on the glory an’ traditions of the past and they see no reason to change that.”

  “Where do you see yourself in all this, Casey?” she asked quietly, for though they never spoke about it, she knew very well how much he had changed his life for her and for the sake of their home and family.

  “What do I wish or what is the reality that I see?”

  “Both,” she said.

  “What I wish is that we could finish this stumble into peace, but I think it’s clear that isn’t going to happen. The reality is that there are too many people on both sides of this war who want it to keep going on. They need it for some reason. I used to feel the reasons for the fight were clear. I believed in it, thought it was just and right and that the end justified the means, but when the end never comes, then the means are only unending bloodshed. As for my own self, Pamela, I am just tryin’ to keep my head down, and keep hopin’ for a day when everyone will see how mad all this is. And yet—” he paused and she saw something dark and hard in his face that caused her stomach to clench, “when I hear about yet another young man bein’ killed in the streets simply because he’s Catholic, I feel a fury that I don’t know where to put or what to do with. I feel as if I’m on the edge half the time, an’ in danger of tippin’ into some dark abyss. So perhaps I am no different than any of the mad bastards out there who keep this wee war goin’.”

  “I wonder sometimes if you miss it? If you regret changing everything, if the frustration makes you wish that you were still involved?”

  He gave her a look of disbelief. “Woman, not for a minute. What we have here—you, Conor, myself—it’s everything to me. What sort of fool would I have to be to think some bloody unending conflict was a good substitute for that?”

  “It’s only that when we met, you seemed so certain that you wouldn’t marry, wouldn’t have children. It seemed as though the Republican movement was simply in your blood.”

  He turned the television off and came to stand beside her. He plucked the tea towel off her shoulder and set to drying the dishes while he answered.

  “What ye say is true. It was the world I knew, Jewel. It was who I thought I was, so at the time, it felt inevitable. I remember standin’ there takin’ my oath over the Irish flag, havin’ memorized my Green Book, an’ feelin’ like at last I could be a man, that I could feel some sense of power. That whole growin’ up thing never quite works out the way ye think it will. My Da’ never wanted that for either Pat or me. He said it only perpetuated the blood cycle that Irish history has always looped through. He was right, but I didn’t want to hear him at the time, I figured it was the words of a man whose time had passed. Lord, what a fool I was. It’s a wonder my Da’ put up with me.”

  She reached up and kissed him, touching her hand to his jaw, leaving behind a line of bubbles in the dark of his whiskers.

  “You’re not so bad. I’m sure your Daddy knew you would end up alright. You had to get your stubborn nature from somewhere, after all.”

  He smiled at her. “Aye, that’s true enough, darlin’. The man was a mite stubborn himself.”

  “You don’t see an end to this—” she indicated the silent television with one soapy hand, “any time soon, do you?”

  “I don’t know, Pamela,” he said, his words troubled in both form and tone. “I don’t see how this is goin’ to be worked out. What it comes down to is this—no one has the right to impose their will upon another person, especially when that will is imposed with violence, an’ that is always the tool that is used here. Violence begets violence. I don’t know that I understand how we’re to get out of that cycle, without everyone agreein’ at the same time, an’ that is not goin’ to happen.”

  “Not ever? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I don’t know, darlin’,” he said softly. “Maybe I’m just tired an’ spoutin’ foolishness, only I’m feelin’ a wee bit sad about it all. The Assembly was our one shot at some sort of decent representation in our own country, but this will bring it down. They won’t stop until they get what they want. Which means we’re back to direct rule. We just keep cyclin’ through the same events, an’ every time it seems we’ve managed a step forward, something pushes the entire country back two.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and moved into his arms, giving him the anchor of the here and now in her physical presence.

  He sighed, and she felt the rise of his chest beneath her cheek, the thrum of his blood and heart sounding deep within her own body.

  “It’s what they say about the past, isn’t it? It’s another country, removed from this one an’ best not visited too often lest ye should find yerself stranded there. I fear that’s what Northern Ireland is though, stranded in the past.”

  He held her tightly and kissed the top of her head. Then they simply stood entwined, watching the sun sink into the west in shades of vermilion and gold. And she knew as she watched the movement of color and shadow play over the hills and spill soft through the hedgerows, that he saw something far different. He saw what might be, in a far country which existed only in the heart, a country to which she had no passport. It was her greatest fear—that one day he would finally cross that border and return home no more.

  He awoke in the wee hours, the dream still thick upon him so that he came up from sleep with the boy’s name on his lips. He sat up, half expecting him to still be there in front of him, for the boy to speak and to be alive and whole. He had felt the sun’s warmth on the boy’s head, smelled the sweet half-grown scent of him. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and put his feet down. Behind him, his wife slept deeply, the steady breath of her grounding him a bit more. He sighed and got up, found his clothes and put them on. He needed the night air to brush the last of the dream from him.

  The air outside was warm and thick with the scent of green things exhaling their watery breath. He took in a long steadying draught of it and headed toward the barn.

  He had all but torn down the original structure and made it taller, with a loft for the hay. It was like many of the barns they had seen in the New England countryside during their time in Boston. He had even painted it red—with white trim—to Pamela’s delight. It wasn’t quite finished inside but it was close to it. Now Pamela could bring her horse home from Jamie’s stable, should she choose to do so. Right now, Paudeen was the only occupant, curled up cosily on fresh hay. He looked up, uttered a small meeehhh, gave Casey the hairy eyeball and went back to sleep. The barn still smelled of freshly sawn wood and paint only just dried. It gave him a feeling of solidity to be here with beams he had hewn and walls he had raised himself, taking away the ephemeral disturbance of the dream.

  He fished behind the beam on which his spade hung and brought out a packet of cigarettes. It had been a week since he’d had one and he felt he could reward himself for his good behavior with just one. He was pretty certain Pamela knew exactly where he hid them but she pretended not to and he pretended not to know that she knew. He lit up with the matches he kept tucked inside the packet and took a long, sweet drag, sighing contentedly and letting out a stream of smoke.

  The dream had been of Lawrence. The boy had been standing on a gate, a meadow of wild-flowers behind him, the sun high in the sky lighting his hair to a gleaming copper penny. He had an apple in his hand in the dream, and was trying to tell Casey something, though the words had been lost the way they so often were in dreams. But there had been a sense that he was happy and that whatever he was trying to tell Casey wasn’t urgent. Casey had been about to ruffle his hair the way he had done in life when he had awakened. He could still feel the silky softness on his palm, the depth of it over the boy’s finely rounded skull.

  It wasn’t the first dream and he wondered sometimes if he dreamed as he did bec
ause he did not allow himself to think of Lawrence often. The lad was always there, of course, but Casey did not allow the memory of that tall, gangling frame and smart mouth to come to the surface any more than could be helped. It still had the slice of a scalpel to his heart, and he could not afford it. But sometimes, inevitably, there he was, as though he had appeared writ in the air, all limbs and elbows and sharp angles, food in his hand, for the child had always been hungry, and Finbar devotedly at his side.

  Casey knew he had agreed to the deal with Billy because he had hoped somehow to find vengeance for Lawrence. But after the birth of Conor, something changed inside him and he had known it was not the right thing. It would not honor the boy and it would not bring him back.

  Billy’s information had been hit and miss, and Casey had never really trusted the child entirely. He had known from the start that the boy was playing to his vulnerabilities by dragging Lawrence’s ghost into the situation. He had been careful about what he passed on to Dacy, who was his contact in the Republican world, knowing that the wrong information could backfire and cause a greater conflagration in the end. He had warned David too, but David was as wary as a caged hare in his own particular situation and careful with Billy too. He did not like to think about what David might be doing to keep his cover in that house of nightmares that he was attempting to bring down. The man was decent and Casey had come to have a grudging respect for him. Truth was, he trusted him. He laughed softly to himself and took another pull on the cigarette. He trusted a British agent. That and a dime could get you killed in this country.

  Their arrangement was working thus far, with Casey using Dacy as his line of communication into the upper echelons of the Republican movement. He knew who the British were willing to talk to and negotiate with and had made that approach first. It had gone well and there had been, he was made aware, a meeting in England with the Secretary of State and a few names he knew from the IRA. Maybe there was hope for some sort of tenuous bridge to be built. At least not all of Jamie’s work from the last few years would be destroyed. It made him laugh at himself to know he was holding down the fort for James Kirkpatrick, especially when he considered the hostility of their last meeting. The man had threatened to take his wife from him and Casey knew it had not been an idle threat. Mind, it had the exact effect on Casey that Jamie had intended it should, and he was bloody grateful to the highhanded bastard for the results of that.