His hand grasped her own and held it firmly. “You don’t need to hide tears from me,” he said. His words broke the small dam in her chest. The tears came in a hot salty rush without sound, the grief of them so deep that it seemed they came from an endless wellspring that she would never be able to stem.
Jamie simply leaned forward, took the mug from her shaking hand and then gathered her to him with his good arm and held her. His strength provided her a balance that allowed for both pain and guilt. When she was afraid to look down, he always seemed to provide ground for her to stand upon.
The storm of grief abated, dulling the edges of the pain and leaving a bone-deep weariness in its place. Jamie, feeling the lassitude in her body, eased her back onto the pillows.
“Do you want to get word to Casey?” he asked.
“No, he has enough to deal with. I won’t add this to it.”
“He’ll have to know eventually,” Jamie said gently.
“I know, but it’s not something I can tell him in a message. He feels helpless as it is, this might make him do something crazy.”
“He’s a strong man, you don’t need to protect him as much as you try to.”
She shook her head. “I know his strength, but I also know his spirit and what internment is doing to it. I can’t protect him, yet I can’t seem to stop trying to do just that. The least I can do is tell him to his face.”
“Drink your tea,” Jamie said, handing her the mug. “Brother Gilles said you need to rest as much as possible. You’ve lost a great deal of blood.”
She took a swallow of the tea, smelling the calming scent of passionflower and catnip. Herbs for soothing and sleeping, herbs for oblivion.
“Will you stay with me until I fall back to sleep?”
He nodded, taking the mug from her and readjusting the pillows more comfortably behind her head. He settled against the broad back of the bed, too tired to keep up the constructs of the walls he usually held fast around her. She settled her head in the crook of his shoulder, the way she had when he’d read to her as a child. And yet she was no longer a child, and he was not the man he’d been then.
“It was all for nothing—last night. Brother Gilles told me the man died.”
“Yes, about two hours after we got here. His throat was too swollen to talk, so I’m afraid we didn’t get any of the information he’d promised you.”
“It may have been a wild goose chase anyway. He was very elusive with his messages. This whole thing seems that way, a fragment here and there, but it never amounts to even a corner of the picture, never mind the whole thing. Maybe I’m not supposed to find out what happened to Casey’s father, at least it’s starting to feel that way.”
“I wish I believed that would be enough to stop you,” Jamie said wryly.
“Somehow it seems even more important now. He’s becoming real to me, not just as Casey and Patrick’s father but as a man in his own right. All the stories they’ve told me, and the way Casey and Pat live their lives tells me a lot about who he was. I feel I owe him this, because for some reason the information came to me.”
“Truth won’t always set you free, Pamela. I hope you bear that in mind while you pursue this. It won’t set Casey free either.”
“I know,” she said quietly, “but I have to do this, despite everyone’s fears, despite my own. I won’t hide my head in the sand or look the other way. Jamie, I can’t, surely of anyone you can understand that.”
“Why do you think that I, in particular, should understand your inability to stay clear of trouble for more than a day or two at a time?”
“Jamie, I know your secret. You know I know it, so let’s not play pretend with one another. I know what you risk on a daily basis and I think I’ve some small notion what it must cost you to maintain the charade.”
“Do you?” he asked quietly. “I don’t think I know myself what the cost is, or just what I’ll do should the bill come due one of these days.”
“It frightens me, Jamie, the thought of that. Of what could happen if someone other than myself and whoever it is you trust on the other end was to find out what you’re up to.”
“I can’t look the other way either, Pamela, I’ve spent too many years doing just that.”
“I know,” she said softly, “but I still worry.”
“So do I.”
It was very quiet in the infirmary, with only the faintest echo of the monks going about their daily chores to remind them that they were not the only two people left in the world. Leaf shadows quivered in the sunlight laid down on the floor. He felt drowsy, the pull of sleep near to irresistible here where he knew himself warm and safe for the time being. Against the curve of his shoulder, he could feel the pulse in Pamela’s neck slow and heavy, and wondered to himself why, even in the midst of crisis, he seemed destined to find his only moments of peace with this woman.
“Jamie, how do you keep hoping when this keeps happening?”
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly, “all I remember is the fear I felt. Father Lawrence told me in the boat on the way here what had happened, and it all came back to me, what it was to lose a child. It brought back the night my second son was born, it was much like last night, cold and clear, almost winter. He was born in the room you sleep in.”
“Alexander,” she said, not questioning for she held Jamie’s memories as carefully as he held hers. “Tell me about him.”
“There were a few minutes, after they took Colleen downstairs, when I was alone with him. I knew I didn’t have much time, so I wrapped him up in the pillowcase. Then I took him and stood by the window. It was the middle of the night, the very darkest part, when it seems as if morning will never come. It was forever and yet no time at all, a few minutes of the most perfect love and the most hellish loss. I don’t remember them coming to get us, but suddenly I was on the front drive and they were telling me I had to let him go. How long did they let you have your daughter?”
“A night,” she said, “as you say, forever and no time at all.”
He placed his hand over hers, a fleeting bitterness crossing his heart. Between them they had lost six children. It seemed a cruel joke to place them both upon such barren ground. And yet despite loss they were both still here, stumbling forward into an uncertain future in an unforgiving country.
“I think loving children is as close as we come to the love that Christ taught. My sons were strangers to me and yet I loved them all without restraint or condition. Given the choice I’d still trade my life for any of them, even if it meant I’d never know them or see their faces.”
“I feel the same about Deirdre. She was so beautiful, Jamie, like the most perfect gift I could have imagined, but wasn’t allowed to have. Sometimes I imagine she plays with your sons. That she’s not alone. It only makes what I did in London—the abortion—seem that much worse. There are times that I still wonder if it was a mortal sin, if I committed murder. And maybe this is how God has chosen to punish me for it, by taking any children I might conceive away.”
Jamie looked at her, startled. She was perfectly earnest, though, green eyes dark with pain. “No Pamela, it wasn’t a sin, it was heartbreak but not sin.”
“The Church says it’s murder.”
Jamie shook his head. As Catholic as his own conscience was, it enraged him that the Church had taught this woman that her tragedies were somehow of her own making. “Pamela, the Church is an imperfect institution. Many of the laws and mandates, and even systems of belief, are leftover from the Middle Ages. God is timeless, though; He knows your heart better than you know it yourself. I believe that’s enough, sometimes.”
“I’ve never confessed it, though many times I’ve thought I should. I think—” she faltered briefly, “I’m afraid if I confess it, I will be admitting that I did something unforgivable, that I really was wrong.”
“Confession isn’t only about sin, there was a time it meant a profession of one’s belief, the concession of an unavoidable truth. I u
sed to believe it was a secret you would only share with God.”
“An unavoidable truth,” she said quietly, “is a confession of the soul.”
As they spoke, shadows began to gather in the corners of the room, the lit rectangles on the floor stretching out, their edges blurring with evening’s encroach.
“Is the tea taking effect yet?” he asked, for she felt suddenly heavy against his arm.
She turned her head toward him. She was terribly pale, dark crescents bruised the skin beneath her eyes. “Yes, it’s working.”
“You need to sleep, Pamela.”
She nodded, all movements slowed by the herbs that were stealing through her blood. Her eyes closed, the lids smooth as carved ivory. Her breathing took on a deep and regular pattern. He eased himself from her side, then drew a soft wool blanket from the foot of the bed up under her chin. He walked quietly across the floor, feeling the sticky residue of blood on the soles of his feet.
Her voice stopped him in the doorway.
“Jamie.”
“Yes?”
“You’re my dearest friend. That’s my unavoidable truth.”
For a heartbeat, time stopped, and he allowed himself the gift of her words. The only thing he could give back was his own confession.
“And you mine,” he said softly, then stepped into the hall and closed the door between them.
Chapter Fifty-one
The White Doe
PAMELA, UNDER STERN ORDERS from both Father Gilles and Jamie, had been two days in bed. Both had stopped in at regular intervals with food that she had no appetite for, books that she couldn’t concentrate on, and talk that she only half heard.
Tonight restlessness had seized her, despite the heaviness that had invaded her very bones. She couldn’t bear the sight of the same stone walls and small arched window that looked inward toward the chapel. More than that, however, she could no longer bear to feel the small hollow in her womb that felt like a deep and permanent bruise.
She pulled a sweater over her nightdress, a white flannel shroud that looked like the sackcloth of a novice nun. Brother Gilles had left a pair of cloth slippers tucked under the bed in case she should rise. The monks would be at evening worship and there would be none to observe her walk in the night.
She glanced at herself in a basin of water that had been left for her to wash with. The candlelight cast odd shadows, both adding and taking away depth. Her face looked gaunt and strained and dreadfully white. She had the odd sensation that one got when looking down a well, that at the bottom of that dark, unfathomed depth there was another world, a place where light did not exist and the small slippery things that populated the edges of nightmares did.
The water shivered, tiny ripples gathering at its edges and dispersing the white face, with its smoke cloud of hair, as though it had never been more than a momentary illusion.
The mirror crack’d from side to side,
The curse is come upon me, cried
The Lady of Shallot.
The lines of Tennyson chilled her as they flitted through her head. She had always loved the poem and yet it seemed ominous now, as though she herself were the accursed Lady. Despite Jamie’s words of reassurance there was still a sense that she had been punished by God, for the murder of an innocent. Her mind could rationalize but her body could not. Inside was desolation, as though she were an autumn tree stripped bare of its leaves, but still able to hear the mournful tone of their papery rustle all about her.
She shivered, and gathering the bulky sweater tightly around her, stepped out through the door into the long corridor, off of which branched the guest rooms and small infirmary of the abbey.
The monastery had been built by the Cistercian order shortly after they landed in Ireland in 1142. The building and its grounds had largely escaped the pillage and plunder other religious orders had been subjected to when the Vikings had swept through Ireland like Greek fire, unquenchable and unstoppable. The thickly wooded isle, banded by water on all sides, had been too much trouble for invaders, it would seem, for the violence and burnings that had plagued the rest of the country had passed by this monastery. The site had been well chosen by the little band of monks, who had begun the order’s long history with a series of small daub and wattle buildings. Cistercians sought the peace of isolation from the world, and thus this spot had seemed ideal. However, the sweeping changes of the Reformation spared none, and the White Monks of the order had been forced to leave Ireland behind. The forty abbeys they’d established by 1500 had largely disappeared one hundred years later. The Cistercians would not return until after the Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
The entire atmosphere was one of peaceful contemplation that some part of her could not help but succumb to. She contrasted it with the fuss and scurry of Father Jim’s parish, and the madness the man was made to deal with on a daily basis. The day here was so simple—awake at dawn for the first vigil of prayer, then breakfast, then a time of quiet study, Lauds and mass, study again, Tierce, work, Sext, dinner, work... it gave the day a pleasing rotundness and she saw the appeal of it for these quiet, diligent men.
Along the east flank of the abbey ran a long open passageway. Here candles burned softly in the arms of the Gothic arches, lighting the way down to the path that ran along the perimeter of the lake. Beneath her slipper-clad feet, the stones were cool and mossy, smooth with the steps of the many pilgrims that had sojourned here over the last eight hundred years. The air was chill and smoky like very fine whiskey, stinging her eyes and spreading a burn along the expanses of skin that were bare to the night.
Movement caught her eye along the shoreline of the lake. It startled her, as she thought all the monks were in the chapel for Compline. The flash of white was not one of the good Brothers, though, but rather a small white deer who was looking at her with some curiosity. In this world of men, perhaps a woman was an oddity. Though not, Pamela thought, as much an oddity as a white deer with translucent pink eyes.
The deer held her gaze for a time-stopped moment, and a small shiver passed along Pamela’s spine as though some strange understanding had passed between the two of them. Suddenly something else caught the deer’s attention, for her ears pricked and she stepped forward, scenting the air.
Jamie stood farther along the shore, the pale fire of his hair identifying him at once. The deer walked toward him without hesitation and took the berries he held in his outstretched hand, eating with a slow gravity that told of how well she trusted the man who fed her. Jamie murmured to the doe while she ate, and Pamela could hear the silky fragments of the Irish language as it slipped from his tongue.
She walked slowly down to join him, careful not to startle the deer, who seemed entirely unconcerned at her approach, though the large ear closest to Pamela flicked the air every few seconds.
Jamie wore a ridiculously big shearling coat that certainly must be the garment of the large and gentle Brother Aloysius, whose height and width would have made even Casey look positively boyish in comparison. In the high-collared coat with its ruff of sheepskin, Jamie looked like a Russian prince freshly returned from the hunt. The deer however, now nosing at his pockets, didn’t seem to agree with this summation.
“Is she always so tame? Or is it just for you?”
Jamie shook his head. “There’s nothing to harm her here, she knows that. She’s known me since she was a baby. Even if she doesn’t see a great deal of me these days, still she remembers. Tcha Virginia,” he gently admonished the deer, who’d poked her head entirely under his arm in an effort to see what the smell in his pockets was.
“She’s yours?”
He laughed softly. “Well as far as a wild creature can belong to a man, I suppose you could say so. I found her on my land in Scotland, just up above the pond. Her mother had been killed and she’d either strayed from the herd or been rejected. Being albino isn’t the most advantageous thing in either the human world or the wild, and I knew she wasn’t likely to survive long without hel
p. So I brought her here, where she’d be safe and sheltered from harm. She’ll be ten years old this spring.”
“Why’d you name her Virginia?”
“I named her Virginia Dare for the first English child born in North America,” he answered, watching as the deer moved away from them to nose among the last of the green shoots at the lake’s edge.
“I know who she was,” Pamela said. “What made you name the deer after her?”
“For the Indian legend. You’ve never heard of it?”
“No. Will you tell it to me?”
He smiled above the ridiculous collar. “You always did like your stories. But it’s perishing out here and you’re not dressed for it. Take my coat.”
She shivered, her feet beginning to feel very penitential in their thin coverings. Jamie took the ludicrously large coat off and folded it around her shoulders. She cuddled gratefully into the warmth he’d left in its depths. The thick collar smelled of balsam and smoke and earth.
“You’ll freeze,” she said, even as she stuck her hands deep into the pockets, fingers encountering the oddment of small treasures Jamie seemed to accumulate wherever he happened to be. A bit of rock that had caught his fancy, two of the little aniseed balls that he liked to roll around his tongue when he was deep in thought and a pen with a small scrap of paper attached to its clip.
He smiled, rubbing his own hands together. “It’s good for the soul, or at least Brother Gilles would have me think so. I believe he intends to retrieve my soul for good and all before I leave here. Come, there’s a wee shelter amongst that thick stand of oaks, it’ll cut the chill from the wind.”
The shelter was hewn of wooden planks, three-sided, its front supports built right into the lake, providing an unbroken view of moonlit water to the darkly forested opposite shore. One could be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a crack in the seams of time, and landed smack-dab in the Middle Ages.
“Here, sit.” Jamie pointed to the bench that ran along the back wall of the shelter, while he rooted underneath it.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 60