“Joe’s beef is with Casey, not yerself. Joe’s many things, most of them not admirable, but I don’t think he’d harm ye.”
“He certainly seems to hate Casey,” she said, realizing it was quite likely Robin knew the reason for that as well as Casey himself did.
“Aye well the history there goes back some way, an’ none of it friendly. He’s never told ye what happened?”
“No, he doesn’t talk about the man, other than to tell me to keep clear of him.”
Robin’s lip quirked up. “Likely what he told ye about myself as well.”
“He may have mentioned something in that vein,” she smiled, but she wanted him to know she was wary of him. He needn’t think he could make himself too comfortable around her.
“Joe’s been aimin’ to take over the leadership of the Army here since the split in ’69. He’s a hawk, aye, likes the fightin’ an’ the violence. He’s not a brain nor an orator, nor does he instill a great deal of respect. What he has is the fear he stirs in others, an’ it’s a powerful enough weapon to have given him a great deal of authority. Casey’s not afraid of him, an’ Joe don’t like that one little bit.”
“The thing that started it, though, was a boy named Danny Greavey. Every neighborhood has a Danny Greavey. Danny wasn’t quite right in the head. He wasn’t retarded as such, just a bit slow. We’d all looked after him in our own rough fashion, growin’ up together as lads. Admittedly ‘twas a bad mistake he’d made, stealin’ on Joe’s territory. But he’d not a real notion of right an’ wrong, least not in the fashion you or I would. He was a bit like a crow, really, if he saw somethin’ shiny he couldn’t resist it. But one of us, or one of his brothers, would always return the thing, so that it was more borrowed than stolen. But Joe wasn’t given to tolerance, not even for Danny, so when Danny made the mistake of stealin’ the hubcaps off his car, Joe made it clear he wasn’t goin’ to make an exception for him, though Casey an’ myself had put the hubcaps back, polished an’ all.”
He paused to take another swig off the flask.
“Joe said it was time someone taught Danny that he couldn’t take as he liked. We knew what that meant, but Casey wasn’t havin’ any of it. Christ,” Robin laughed, “we spent days shadowin’ bloody Danny. Got in trouble with Casey’s da’ after old lady McLeod called him sayin’ we were lurkin’ about her window near dark. She thought we were tryin’ to get a peek at her naked. Seventy if she was a day,” Robin laughed. “’Twas only that Brian was certain even a couple of teenaged boys couldn’t be that hard up that saved us from a good hidin’.”
“It’s my impression neither of you had to look far for female companionship anyway,” Pamela said, with a smile.
Robin grinned. “He’ll have told ye a bit about how it was with the girls back then?”
“Oh aye,” she replied dryly, “he’ll have told me a bit about how it was.”
Robin had the grace to blush. He swallowed the last of his own tea and brandy and continued on with his tale. “When the moment finally arrived it felt like a scene out of High Noon in the end. Middle of the day, right in the street, an’ Joe had come upon Danny. Casey an’ I were right behind him an’ managed to catch up, an’ then Casey just moves in between Joe an’ Danny.”
Pamela could well imagine it, Casey had never been one to stand by while any sort of inequity existed. He'd taken her to task over putting her own feet in the fire more than once, but paid no heed when it was his shoes in the flames.
“He just stood there in front of Danny an’ wouldn’t move—imagine it, fifteen years old an’ standin’ down this man thirteen years his senior. He never flinched, never blinked, an’ so I came up an’ flanked his side. Joe just looked at him an’ said ‘yer makin’ a very bad mistake here boy.’ Casey said ‘twas his mistake to make. I can still see that day clear as if it happened last week, an’ how I felt. I could hear my blood rushin’ in my ears an’ feel the wind like it was cuttin’ right through me. I was terrified, an’ yet I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive. Needless to say Joe blinked first an’ walked away, though not before tellin’ Casey that he’d best watch his back—fell a little flat after what Casey’d just done though.”
Robin shook his head. “I knew then that he was born to lead, some men just are, ye know?”
“And if he doesn’t want to lead?” she asked quietly.
“I think ye know it’s got little to do with want.”
She did know, understood that men saw something in her husband that she often turned a blind eye to, because this thing they saw in him was a thing that would lead him away from her and into danger.
“It was what kept me goin’,” Robin said softly, “knowin’ he always had my back no matter the fight.”
“You’ve missed him,” she said.
“Aye, I will have missed him a good deal over the years, more I’m certain than he will have missed me.”
“You were his best friend too.”
“Didn’t act much like a friend to him. Will he have told ye the story?”
“About Melissa? Yes he told me.”
“Well then ye’ll know I’d not much honor as a friend.”
While she agreed that he’d not exercised a great deal of integrity as a friend, still he’d been a boy. She could forgive that if Casey had. However, it remained to be seen if he had honor as a man. She wondered, looking at him now across from her, blue eyes soft with memory, why she really hoped that he did. Likely because if he didn’t, despite protestations to the contrary, Casey was going to get hurt.
“Ye’ll be wantin’ to get back to yer bed. I’ll stay down here, if ye’ve no objections. I doubt the wee bastard will come back, but I’d as soon make certain of it.”
Sleep came with the dawn, when the rigors of the previous day and night caught up with her. Before she drifted into unconsciousness, it occurred to her, matters of honor notwithstanding, that while she might have formed a grudging liking for Robin Temple, she didn’t trust him in the least.
Chapter Forty-three
History Lessons
BY MID-SEPTEMBER DAVID KENDALL knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d taken complete leave of his senses. For if he hadn’t, there really wasn’t any explanation for the insanity that had provoked him to sneak the big, black Irishman named Pat to the showers for a respite from the filth of his surroundings and the hellish shell of the overalls.
Taking the hood off and feeding him had merely become an accepted rite between the two of them. He could do no less, and it was little enough, considering what the man endured each and every day. Somewhere around the fourth meal they’d shared, David, against his own better judgement, took the man’s cuffs off as well. He’d merely said ‘thank you’ in that polite manner that was quite disarming, and did not refer to it again.
Pat had mentioned casually two days before that he’d give a decade or so of his life for a hot bath and David had immediately begun to consider how he might arrange exactly that. Having spent all his adult years in the British military, David was nothing if not resourceful. Two carefully placed bribes, an extra shift, and a carton of cigarettes had gotten him all the averted eyes and closed lips he needed. And had gotten him here, closed in a small space with a man of whom he was half-afraid, and wholly attracted to. Not, David was wise enough to know, a good combination for anyone.
There was a sense of immediacy to the man that David had never encountered elsewhere. Of raw and barely leashed savagery, held in check by a gentle civility that was profound in its parameters.
He stood at the sink, back to David, which, David knew, was a sign of unprecedented trust. He’d not seen the man turn his back to anyone, unless forced, since he’d been brought in. Recent events considered, it was only natural that the man should be distrustful and yet here he stood, bare from the waist up, carefully and leisurely shaving his face. He was a dichotomy, that much was certain.
His stubble was blue-black and heavy, the bruises around his eyes fading from bla
ck to a deep purple. His hair, slick as an otter’s pelt from his recent shower, gleamed in the same shade. And against all this darkness his shoulders and back seemed uncommonly fine, like ivory carved to fierce perfection; his backbone a deep line between smooth planes of muscle, falling from broad shoulders into a narrow waist, stomach flat and hard. The thoracic line well defined, ending in a fine strip of black hair that led down—David wrenched his thoughts back abruptly, aware that the other man was suddenly still, muscles like cut silk under the smooth expanse of skin, his gaze black and hard in the mirror. He flushed and glanced away quickly, cursing his fair English skin for the truth it always told. He’d broken too many rules tonight and the ground under his feet was becoming increasingly unstable.
“Your fiancée, what’s her name?” he asked suddenly, wanting only to break the unbearable tension that hung in the air.
Pat’s eyes narrowed, the separation between pupil and iris hardly discernible. “How d’ye know I have a fiancée?”
“I—well I—,” David realized his gaffe immediately, “you must have mentioned her in conversation.”
“No, I don’t think I have,” Pat said quietly, body still as that of a predator smelling weakness. The air around him was charged, ready for the slice of sudden movement. But rather than attacking he turned back to the sink and resumed his careful shaving. “So they’re keeping a file on me, are they? Must have made for a scintillatin’ read.” He tilted his head back, the razor beheading whiskers in a slow moving arc under his chin. “Ye must be more important than ye let on, Corporal Kendall, if they’re allowin’ ye access to such information.” He glanced at David in the mirror, though David knew the man had never taken his eyes off of him. “Or did they allow ye?”
David could feel beads of sweat begin to form under his collar. How much did the man actually know and how much was lucky guesswork on his part?
“I’m a soldier,” he said stiffly. “I do as commanded.”
“Like tonight?” Pat said, and laughed, a soft menacing sound.
“I was simply trying to do a good turn for you,” David said, hearing the uptight, upper class inflections of his background coating all the syllables.
“Don’t do me any favors, Englishman,” Pat said, wiping the cut whiskers off the grubby porcelain of the sink.
“Is that what I am to you—an Englishman?” David asked, aware his tone was inappropriate. He knew he was treading a fault line he could fall into permanently if he wasn’t careful.
“Ye wear the uniform of a Queen’s man, do ye not?”
“It’s hardly that simple,” David responded, the remark cutting into the thin skin of his emotions like a whip tipped with steel.
“It’s a line, an’ for all it’s invisible, it’s there an’ ye cannot deny it.”
David fought to control his temper, thinking the man might have shown some small hint of gratitude rather than being antagonistic.
“It all seems rather silly, don’t you think? Hundreds of years of fighting and what have either of us got to show for it?”
“Perhaps,” Pat said sharply, “you an’ yer fellow countrymen ought to have read yer history before ye came here.”
“Do you propose to give me a history lesson? You Irish,” David said hotly, forgetting his vow not to rise to the man’s bait, “seem to think you have a lock on the making of it.”
“Ach, forget it,” Pat said dismissively, packing the razor away after carefully rinsing and drying it. “We might have our feet on the earth of the same country, but we’re speakin’ different languages.”
“Ha,” David said triumphantly, “you don't even know what it’s about, do you?”
Pat turned, face dark as a thundercloud. “Don't I then? Well I’ve a few bruises and bumps compliments of yer fine an’ upstandin’ British boys that go a fair way toward explainin’ it.”
“I'm sorry,” David said, instantly repentant. He’d forgotten for a moment how the two of them had come to be here, together, in this room.
“Oh yer sorry, are ye? Well doesn’t that just make it all better? Eight hundred years of occupation an’ subjection when all we wanted was to be left in peace. We never asked ye for anything, never exploited nor oppressed ye as others did. Never invaded ye, never stole yer land an’ parcelled it out to our own people as war booty, never let yer people starve while food rotted in the harbors. We’ve never put yer women an’ children to the sword, nor massacred or transported yer men to foreign lands where they’d no more notion of how to survive than a wee child, where everything was foreign, an’ all ye were was another goddamn paddy, a mick, a fockin’ bogtrottin’ Fenian bastard.’
His breath was coming in uneven savage bursts and David saw the capability for quick, brutal murder deep in his eyes. “Ye took our language, our schools, our priests had to flee or die, ye took our culture, an’ even after ye’d stripped us of everything we’d ever been or known, ye mocked us— stupid Paddy, with his backward ways. Oh aye, look away, there’s a thousand Irish jokes an’ don’t tell me ye haven’t laughed at them yerself. An’ then when we’ve the temerity to stand up against ye, when we rise from the fire an’ say enough, ye call us terrorists. The goddamn Irish, they say, all they know is hate. Well I ask ye, Corporal, who taught it to us, who made sure it was bred deep into the bone an’ blood of us?”
“Do you hate me, then?” David asked quietly, frightened by how deeply the answer mattered to him.
Pat gave him a long look and shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose I do, hardly matters in the broader picture here, though, does it?”
“It matters to me,” David said, knowing his face showed all he was feeling and suddenly not giving a damn.
Pat braced his hands against the sink, lashes dark against the hollows under his eyes. Despair was evident in his lines. “All I wanted,” he whispered as though he spoke only for himself, “was to do good work, to help find and provide housing for people who have come to see such a thing as not a right, but a luxury. I went about it as quietly as I could, I never wanted to stir up trouble. I’m a simple man with simple dreams, but history will not leave me be. That’s the curse of bein’ an Irishman who stays in his own country, though, history will not leave any of us be.”
Emotion, David was to reflect later, always made him foolhardy—a fact his father had pointed out to him a number of times. Managing to infer that emotion was a particularly undesirable quality in a son. But his father was not present, and neither, apparently, was his own common sense. There was only the air, heavy with the last of night, and the soft light of the man’s skin and the pain that seemed to reach across the space dividing them. He reached out and touched Pat just below the shoulder, in the shadowed groove of the backbone.
The man moved like lightning, there was no time for thought between the half second during which David touched his back and the next when he found himself smashed against the wall, arm halfway up his spine, his own gun pressed tight to the corner of his mouth.
David felt the muzzle of the gun click sharply against his teeth as hysterical laughter rose in the back of his throat, his commanding officer’s words ringing in his head. ‘Rule number one of any tour of duty in Northern Ireland is don’t let down your guard around the bastards.’
“Do they not teach ye to never to turn yer back, Englishman? Do they not say how unpredictable an’ untrustworthy the lot of us are? How an Irishman will cut yer throat as soon as look at ye? Or were ye absent from psyops that day? Hmm David?”
The muzzle had insinuated itself between his teeth, the gunmetal tasting oddly like blood against his tongue, sharp and salty. The man’s forearm was like a bolt of steel across his throat, already things were going black and fuzzy about their edges. Despite several tricks he’d been taught, he knew he’d never be able to get the jump on him. There were worse ways to die, he knew for he’d seen many of them, than at the hands of a blackly murderous Irishman. He thought, in his proper British way, that he ought to pray, tried for the doxol
ogist version of the Lord’s Prayer and found he’d an incomplete recollection of it.
“Here’s history for ye, Englishman, my daddy died because of this silly little eight hundred year war, my brother spent five years in one of yer prisons an’ will never be the same because of it. My granddad was shot like a dog in the street in front of his own son, an’ I’ve been ripped from my home an’ my woman merely because I’m tryin’ to change the status quo in a system that’s kept me an’ mine on our knees for centuries. That’s Irish history.” The hammer of the gun clicked neatly, reverberating with the force of thunder in David’s ear. Then suddenly it was gone—gun, arm and man, the voice behind him no longer angry, just very weary. “Ye’ll not touch me again.”
David, gasping in equal parts oxygen and relief, slid to the floor, knees having turned the consistency of unset jelly.
“Oh Christ—Christ—I’m sorry man, I don’t what possessed me. Oh God, what am I becomin’?” Beside him Pat slid to the floor, the pistol laying slick on the tile.
“It’s o-kay,” David managed to wheeze out.
“No it’s not,” Pat said wearily, “ye’ve shown me nothin’ but kindness an’ at great risk to yerself, an’ this is how I repay ye.”
David merely shook his head, too exhausted to even reach for his gun and not caring a great deal at the present moment. The silence between them was heavy, laden with the apologies for which neither knew the words. Feeling he had little to lose, David put himself into the breach.
“What did you want,” he swallowed, his throat swollen and thick, “before all this?”
Pat turned his head to the side, exhaustion pulling at the corners of his mouth and eyes.
“Sometimes I don’t remember, the present seems so all occupyin’. But what I really wanted, I suppose, was to be an astronomer. Wanted to be somewhere that it didn’t rain nine days out of ten, an’ just study the sky at night. I wanted a quiet life, y’know, a wife an’ kids an’ a house with a bit of a yard.”
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 50