Pamela was up when he came in, preparing a breakfast of oatmeal, leftover scones and piping hot tea.
“Fog’s thick as cotton out there,” Casey said, depositing the coal by the fire and wiping droplets of mist from his face.
“We were shut in a good part of yesterday as well,” she said, giving the porridge a vigorous stir and wrinkling her nose over it. “Damn, I’ve scorched it.”
“Drench it in cream an’ a spoonful of sugar, I’ll not notice the difference. I could eat a moldy sheep this mornin’ an’ not complain, I’m that famished.” He gave his hands a quick wash then settled himself at the table.
She ladled him up a healthy serving, dropping a kiss on his head as she placed his bowl in front of him. “Speaking of moldy sheep,” she said, “you’d best give me that sweater, it stinks to high heaven.”
“’Tisn’t the sweater,” he said, pouring cream over the steaming oatmeal and adding a dollop to his mug for good measure. “It’s me. Did my best to scrub the butter off but the damn stuff must of leaked into every crevice an’ crease I’ve got. I’ve only had cold washes, in a couple of streams an’ such. I think I need to steam it off.”
“Butter?” she asked, pouring his tea and then her own.
“Aye, we all slathered ourselves with butter packets to keep from freezin’ when we took our swim.” He cut two scones, covered them both thickly with butter, and took a long swallow of tea.
“Ah, that’s heaven, I could inhale the stuff. Ye may not be the world’s greatest cook, darlin’, but ye have a hand with tea like nobody else.”
This compliment earned him an arched eyebrow. “Tell me how you all managed,” she said, topping up his mug and tipping another scone onto his plate. “The telly was non-stop with the story, but the details weren’t too clear.”
She busied herself with spooning up porridge and re-filling the cream jug, but Casey knew her well enough to understand that she was avoiding his eyes for fear he’d see what all those news reports had cost her.
“’Twas a bit mad, really,” he said quietly, “the papers an’ such made it sound a lark, but it wasn’t. We were sittin’ in a pub in the Murph when the report came down that the British had us in custody. We’d a bit of a laugh over that. I called ye from there but no one answered. After that we were on the run an’ there was no opportunity to call, an’ I was afraid to risk it. I’d no idea if they were watchin’ ye or if the phone might be tapped.” He reached across the table to take her hand, but she curled her fingers under, tight around the butter knife, head down over her untouched breakfast.
“Don’t,” she said, still staring fixedly at her plate, “just tell me what happened, don’t make excuses for why I didn’t know if you were dead or alive for the last two weeks.”
He nodded, withdrawing his hand, knowing they’d lost whatever small ground they’d gained last night. How to explain to her what these last months had been like? How he’d been certain several times that he’d never see home, nor hold her in his arms again. How he’d written a phantom letter in his mind many nights, telling her goodbye, then written another to Jamie asking him to care for her—how much the thought of asking that of the man galled him. It was purely impossible and seemed slightly unreal, sitting here with food and hot tea, and her across from him in his shirt, hair tousled, skin still sleep flushed, like any normal morning.
So he told her the facts, without embellishment or embroidery. The capture, the beating, the arrest by the British soldiers, his time on the ship, the men who’d become friends over the dark, stagnant weeks. Under his tongue, bald as he tried to make it, the men came alive for her. Roland’s religious fervor, Declan’s taciturn nature, Matty’s care of him after the beating, Shane’s foolish innocence.
“How do you do that?” she asked quietly, after he’d finished telling her of the escape off the ship, the flight on the stolen bus and the heart stopping journey that had finally landed them all in Dublin.
“Do what?” he asked.
“Gather a bunch of ragtags around you and turn them into a cohesive group.”
He shook his head. “All most people need is a little direction. Maybe I’m a bit more clearheaded in a crisis an’ can see my way through things. That’s all it is. My Daddy taught both Pat and I to think on our feet.”
“Damn you,” she said, tears bright in her eyes.
“What have I done now?” he said in bewilderment.
“Made it impossible to be angry or resentful with you.”
“Well I don’t know what I’ve said or done, but if it’s made ye feel kindly towards me I’ll not regret it.”
She stood and walked to his side of the table, taking his head to her breast and laying her cheek upon his hair. “You break my heart, Casey Riordan, and the worst of it is you don’t even know that you’re doing it.”
They stayed thus for several moments, grateful for the peace and warmth that surrounded them.
“I am sorry, Pamela.” His hand came up and wrapped tightly around her own, “For all of it.”
“I know,” she replied, and found that in the morning light, with him here solid and real, it was enough. “Casey.”
“Aye?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
It was enough.
Chapter Fifty-nine
Nuala
THE WESTERN SHORE OF INISHMORE bore little resemblance to the eastern side. Worn limestone cliffs soared skyward, glistening blackly in the odd light of the sea. The light seemed possessed with a life of its own, breaking stone into rainbow parts, shattering the sea into infinite patterns that changed every second. It was an empty wind-scoured world, where one could not help but be completely aware of the elements.
Above was a glassy sky, and below, the ocean—snorting white sea horses galloping into shore from America, tossing their tangled red-brown manes of seaweed, slick and oily and deep as a man was high. On the sand, oystercatchers danced in awkward hops with the delicate-legged sandpipers. It was evening and the light was fading from the land, shadow filling up the hollows and dips, clustering near the foot of rock walls and gathering softly against the base of the monuments to drowned fishermen that dotted the island.
“It’s going to storm,” Pamela said, stooping to fish a length of shipboard out of the grasping seaweed. They had spent much of the day in a narrow cove that protected them from the worst of the wind, even if it had been a precipitous climb to reach the small haven of sand and rock.
“How can ye tell?” Casey asked, giving the rolling breakers a suspicious look, as though he suspected the waves of harboring a force ten gale.
“I always get a metallic taste in my mouth when it’s going to storm. Right now my tongue tastes like iron.”
An uneasy mmphmm was Casey’s only reply. He was sitting on a large rock, intent on keeping his feet dry, casting mumbled aspersions at the water occasionally, and sketching the small shorebirds as they sorted amongst the grains of sand for avian treasure.
It was a rare day of fine weather and they were happy to leave the cottage, where the weather had confined them for the last four days. Casey had brought along paper and a pencil to make sketches of birds, from which he’d carve small figures so like that they would seem to be caught in the moment before flight, or in the cautious watchfulness they displayed around humans.
Pamela had occupied herself with the small wonders an ebb tide always left behind; the small, scuttling things, the diaphanous jellied creatures, the strange flotsam that was as foreign as vegetation from a distant planet. Now, tired but happy, lungs filled with briny air, lips tasting of salt, she watched Casey as he drew a solitary plover.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to your back?” she asked softly, resting her chin on his shoulder, fascinated as always by how he could render the essence of any bird in a few bold lines.
“Ye know what happened,” he said, squinting at the black-bellied bird that regarded him with its soft, large eyes, utte
ring a inquisitive pee-a-wee every few seconds.
“I know what,” she said, “but I don’t know why.”
“His name was Shane,” he began.
“Ah,” she said, beginning to see the why very clearly.
He paused to blow some warm air onto his fingers. “He was young an’ stupid. Lord above knows I’ve been in that state myself, an’ more than the once. I thought if I could spare him an experience of that sort it’d be no bad thing.”
“It was an incredibly foolish and brave thing to do.”
He shook his head, resuming the fine pencil strokes that conveyed the ephemeral quality of the bird in the half-light. “There’s some that could take it an’ be stronger for it an’ then there’s others it would break permanently. I knew the lad was of the latter school an’ I’d not rest easy with myself if I let it happen.”
“And you of the former school,” she said, watching another timber make its way toward the foaming shore.
He gave an eloquent shrug. “A man is made how he is, an’ there’s only so much he can do about it.”
“Don’t you ever feel fear?”
“Aye, plenty, but ye can use it to yer advantage most times. It’s when ye let it go to yer head that yer in trouble. But I know the taste of it, to be certain,” he said grimly.
“What does it taste like?”
“Tastes a wee bit like blood, actually,” he said, rolling up his paper and tucking it along with the pencil inside of his coat. “Salty an’ coppery. Bit like yer storm tongue. Speakin’ of which we’d best head back, I don’t like the look of those clouds.” He nodded toward the western sky, which had gone from a soft, goosedown gray to an ominous ochre black. He jumped down from his perch. “Come on with ye woman, let’s collect yer bits of wood an’ go.”
She’d left the planking neatly piled at one end of the small cove, knowing it would do nicely to keep the cottage warm, should the coal run out before the next boat was due in to the island.
“I can’t help but think that our gain is someone’s loss,” she said, hefting three of the broken spars into Casey’s outstretched arms.
“Sometimes I think that’s the way of all life, Jewel,” he replied seriously, “that a gain for one man is always a loss for another.”
She looked down at the timber, flecks of green paint still visible in the grain. “Do you think they drowned or were rescued?”
Casey didn’t answer, for just then the metallic taste on his wife’s tongue bore itself out and a swathe of rain-filled wind smacked into them.
“We’d best move quick,” he said, shouldering the timber and starting up the narrow ravine that led off the strand onto the stark headland above. She followed behind him, feet feeling for the worn grooves in the limestone, as the darkness had moved in with such startling suddenness that they couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of them.
By the time they reached the top of the cliff the storm had trebled in intensity, the wind a vicious scour that turned the rain into stinging stones, their clothes a soaked mass that dragged at their limbs.
“We’ll have to dump the wood,” Casey yelled, “an’ make a run for shelter.”
They soon lost all sense of direction as the wind lashed ever harder, throwing the rain in vicious horizontal streams, visibility down to a scant few inches and the possibility of finding their cottage in the uproar quickly taking on the appearance of insanity.
The wind had become a living thing, a screaming legion of witches abroad on the night, kicking up sand and dirt and swirling it in a mad dance that choked the very breath from their lungs. Disaster and confusion loomed on all sides, and Pamela knew they wouldn’t be the first to stumble off the cliffs to a sure death in such a storm. Panic clutched at her intestines, starting a shaking along her skin that she couldn’t control. She stopped suddenly, causing Casey to lurch, his coat still clutched tight in her grasp.
He put his mouth to her ear and yelled, the force of the wind such that it was only half-intelligible, “—is it? We can’t stop—or we—”
She shook her head mutely, terrified to move another step for fear they’d step out into nothing, blind and senseless. He wrapped his arms around her tightly, no doubt sensing her fear, giving her what small shelter his body could provide.
She saw them suddenly as if from above, two fragile creatures at the mercy of the elements, small and inconsequential within such an ancient landscape. And in the midst of all the darkness and fear, two words, “Trust me.” She swallowed over the taste of fear and nodded. Casey must have felt her movement, for he took her hand tightly in his own and pulled her along as they continued on their perilous journey.
It might have been a minute or an hour later, when he halted abruptly and yelled over the clamor, “There’s a light, at least I think it is—keeps blinkin’ in an’ out. We’ll head that way, best as I can manage. Don’t let go of my hand whatever ye do!”
Pamela held on for dear life, stumbling across the stone strewn field behind him, wind shoving at their backs like an angry beast that would not be satisfied until it had driven them completely from the land.
They almost missed the cottage, and if Casey hadn’t walked straight into the tiny outbuilding that lay behind it, they likely would have stumbled clear across to the eastern shore. They had to feel their way back to the main cottage. There were no windows in back and so no telltale light shone forth. There was merely an impression of something of substance and form looming in the dark ahead of them. They found the north wall and followed it around to the west face to be presented with a door.
“Thank Christ,” Casey said with great sincerity. He knocked hard against the door. It flew back suddenly, startling them both, though hardly more than the apparition that stood beneath the lintel. She was eye level with Casey, long bony feet bare, iron-streaked hair whipping about her face. Pamela recognized her from her own nightly walks. A ghostly figure that stood on the cliff tops looking out to sea each and every night. She had frightened Pamela half out of her wits the first time she saw her. Her voice however, acidic as over steeped tea, soon banished any notion of pale seaweedy wraiths.
“Will ye stand there all night, or do ye intend to come in?” she asked, as if it were a mild Sunday and they’d been expected for tea hours ago. Casey pulled Pamela by the hand in over the doorstep.
The interior of the cottage was small, but its warmth and light was welcome to their thoroughly chilled skins. The wind still shrieked like a mad thing against the doors and windows, but the thick walls paid little mind.
“Come, yez had best get yer wet things off an’ sit close in to the fire,” the woman said, placing two reed-backed chairs in front of the roaring hearth. “Here, give me yer sweaters, I’ll hang them to dry.”
They handed over their sopping sweaters gratefully and sat in the proffered chairs. The fire was built high and bellowed heat into the tiny room. Their clothes began to let off wisps of steam immediately. Pamela chanced a look around the tiny room, curiosity about the old woman who walked the cliffs at night taking the upper hand over the receding fear.
Softly furred shapes moved in the corners, stretched and retracted to their nests on cushions and bits of furniture. One cat, missing both an eye and an ear, sat, orange fur puffed out, on the top of an upturned barrel. He winked his one big golden eye at Pamela, looking for all the world like a battered pirate king. The firelight threw wavering, distorted shadows on the walls, making the atmosphere fitting to a woman the villagers called witch. A china cabinet stood against one wall, filled with broken crockery and what looked like a wide variety of bent and rusted fish hooks.
“Ye’ll take tea,” the woman said emphatically, startling Pamela. “Ye’ll need it to take the frost out yer bones. I’m Nuala,” she added, as a kitten leaped from atop a highboy onto her shoulder, its yellow eyes gleaming out from the shanks of her hair.
“Aye, we’ll take the tea an’ be grateful for it. I’m Casey an’ this is my wife Pamela. We’re m
uch obliged to ye for lettin’ us in out of the storm.”
“And what do be the name of yer people?”
Casey had barely opened his mouth to reply when Nuala fixed them with a hard gimlet eye, as though she suspected them of having come to thieve and pillage.
“Yer not Bean people, are ye? I hold no truck with such folk.”
Nuala must belong to the O’Bradaigh side of the island war, Pamela thought. It dated back more than a hundred years to the wreck of a Spanish galleon, and just who had the rights to the spoils. The two families had been in a mostly silent but deadly serious war since then. Pamela, having been filled in vigorously by Mrs. Sparks, whose two stout legs held firmly to the Bean side of the Island’s divide, had told Casey the story in its entirety the night before. To which his reply had been, “Jaysus Murphy, an’ they call us Northmen crazy.” However, he chose to exercise more tact at present and replied in a tone that could leave no doubt upon the matter, “No, we are not.”
“Well that’s good then. I’d not let them as is drink from my cups, but as yer not ye’ll do.” She rattled the kettle vigorously, as if to say that had they the grievous misfortune to be Bean people, she’d have finished them off here and now, with a good wallop from the copper-bottomed pot.
“Michael,” she called out suddenly, “I’m puttin’ on the tea, for we’ve company, will ye be wantin’ a jot of something warmer in yer own, man?”
Pamela looked about bewildered, the cottage appeared empty but for the three of them. Casey bit his bottom lip and shook his head ever-so-slightly at her. This only served to mystify her further, but she held her tongue, not wanting to offend, nor ask questions that didn’t seem likely to have a simple answer.
From the rear, Nuala looked like an angular and exotic bird, all flapping multi-colored cloth and sharp bones. Above her head, the light and shadow mingled like goblins dancing round about a bonfire. Pamela was reminded sharply of the image she’d always held of Yeats’s Crazy Jane in her head.
The kettle was merrily upon the boil, but Nuala poured out a mugful of a suspiciously dark liquid from a pot occupying the other half of the stove. To this, she added the ingredients of two different bottles that lined the shelf above the ancient cooker.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 68