Laura Kinsale

by Uncertain Magic

  She broke away. “Nonsense,” she exclaimed. “Nonsense.” She drove her heels into the gray’s sides.

  “Remember the horses,” Senach called after, and the words lingered in the ocean air like an ancient, mocking curse.

  She and Faelan came to the unpretentious slate-roofed house of their temporary hosts not long before sunset. Hidden beyond the great hill from the incursion of the new road, Doire Fhionain, the O’Connell family home, emanated welcoming candlelight and the sharp smell of burning peat.

  It seemed a very human place amidst the wilds. The door opened the moment they rode into the yard, spilling light into the cool evening air, and a man strode out, tall—powdered and distinguished, like her father. He came directly to Roddy and reached to help her from her mount.

  “Our fairy queen,” he said grandly. He set her on the ground, and looked down his long nose at her. “Welcome, welcome, brave child. This villain has dragged you through half the county, has he not? Well, you’ve come to the right place now. Come in, then. Get you down, Iveragh, and come inside.”

  Three hours later, she sat at a long table laden with bacon and fowls and cabbage, with a large roast turkey on one side and a leg of mutton on the other. Boiled salmon, boiled cod, lobster, peas, potatoes…she closed her eyes, unwilling to take another bite.

  The grand old matron at the foot of the table noticed the tiny gesture on the instant. Maire O’Connell raised her querulous voice and informed her son and the rest of the large company that it was time for a song.

  In a great shuffle and thumping of chairs, they gathered around the fire at one end of the room. Roddy sat in the chair she was offered, keeping her eyes cast down. Her gift was overly sensitive, throbbing, caught in a confusion of Gaelic and English. Hospitality and distrust swirled around and eluded her. She could not tell who thought what, or why.

  The tall man who’d greeted her thrust a glass of the fruity dinner wine into her hand as someone began plucking random notes on the huge harp in the corner. Maurice, the tall man’s name was. He smiled often. She noted, uneasily, that he was less glad to see Faelan than outward appearances indicated.

  It wasn’t a concrete thing: more caution than rooted dislike. No one was quite certain of this prodigal son. The divisions in Irish society began to sink into Roddy’s consciousness. Catholic, this family was. It radiated from them—a creed, a way of life, as much as a religion. They began to sing songs and tell stories in Irish while proud, sharp-witted Maire guided the talk, gathering her family around her.

  Roddy and Faelan sat alone amid the company. English. Landlords. There were older, darker memories of Faelan in Maire’s and Maurice’s minds. They remembered his father; remembered his death. They looked at Faelan and wondered, trying to match the boy to the man.

  The others just looked, never having known the boy.

  Roddy picked one fact out of the muddle of curiosity and Irish song. Faelan’s father had been Catholic, too.

  Which seemed an odd thing. A very odd thing.

  The songs went soft and haunting. Roddy sat in her chair, held straight by will alone. Every muscle in her back cried out from the long ride in carriage and saddle. She closed her eyes and let the music fill her with its plaintive beauty. Behind her eyelids, a dream took shape—a lady in the moonlight, whose face was made of winter stars.

  “Little girl.” Faelan’s voice was warm at her ear. She opened her eyes to find his hand on her shoulder. “You’re exhausted. Go with Senach.”

  Roddy sat up with a start. “Senach—”

  Faelan was making her apologies and pulling her bodily to her feet. He seemed to interpret her drawing back as simple weariness. When she saw Senach waiting at the door and began to protest, Faelan lifted her and carried her out in front of everyone, up the stairs behind the old man’s measured steps. Faelan set her down at the top of the stairs and laid her hand in Senach’s cool, thin palm. “Go on to bed. I’ll be along when I can.”

  “But…” She trailed off, finding no words to express her fear. Faelan was halfway down the stairs when she called his name.

  He turned, a touch of impatience in the set of his mouth. “What is it?”

  Senach’s fingers moved like spiders in her hand. She jerked it away. “Wait! I—Can’t you come now?”

  His frown told her no. “We’re guests here, Roddy.”

  “I’ll come back down, too.” She took a step toward him.

  “Go to bed,” he said. “You look ready to fall down.”

  “Faelan.” It was a plea, a cry for help. “Don’t leave me.”

  He looked baffled. After a moment, he climbed the stairs and took her hand. “What is it, little girl? Lord, you’re shaking like death.” His arm came suddenly around her shoulder and he spread his palm across her forehead. “Pray God—No, you don’t feel warm. Perhaps you ate something…”

  She leaned against him. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered into his coat. “Don’t leave me with Senach.”

  She felt his surprise in the tightening of his body. “Whatever are you talking about?” He put her away from him, and reached again to join her hand with Senach’s.

  In spite of herself, she flinched. “He’s blind,” she whispered. It was all she could say to explain her fear. He was blind, and yet he could see, and he sucked her talent away, down into a black vortex of silence.

  Faelan looked into her face, and suddenly his mouth went hard. “You hold a good man’s disability against him?” he asked roughly. “You think he can’t take care of you, as well as I ever could? Go on, Roddy. You disappoint me.” He glanced at Senach, still standing with a slight smile on his ancient face, as if nothing they said touched him. “You disappoint me, little girl.”

  With that, he turned away from her, and did not look back as he thudded down the wooden stairs and disappeared into the parlor.

  Roddy stood still, frozen in misery and terror. When Senach touched her again, she clenched her teeth together to endure it.

  “Ye might be freein’ him,” Senach said. “Ye might be.”

  “What?” Roddy said uncertainly.

  “Ye could know him, if ye would do it. But ye be fearin’. Him and me.”

  His light contact burned into her arm. She was afraid to look up, afraid to meet his empty eyes. “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, aye, child. Ye do know it. I’ll be tellin’ ye till ye listen.” He stroked the back of her hand.

  “I don’t like this,” she said brokenly. Tears of strain and agony blurred her vision.

  “No. Ye won’t look to me, like the folk dursn’t look straight at you all your life. Folk know the truth. What they hear in their hearts, they dursn’t say aloud. They look the other way, they do. But I be thinkin’ ye’ve known all that.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”

  “Ah. Ah. Leave ye alone, will I? Leave ye in the dark? ’Twould hurt me to do it, an’ ye alone there, all afeared.”

  His hand closed lightly around her arm, and he led her into the dark hall. They came to a door; without fumbling, he found the knob and opened it. Inside, a single candle illuminated the curtained bed and a fine Oriental rug.

  Roddy stepped quickly inside. She wanted to fling the door shut in Senach’s face, but from somewhere came a modicum of politeness. She turned, and mumbled a hasty good night.

  “God bless,” Senach said. “Trust be the key.”

  He closed the door.

  Roddy stared at the wood and listened to his light steps down the hall. The man who knew her secret. The man who shared her talent. Who drank her gift and left her empty and alone.

  Her soul was bared and open to another’s mind. It was a fearful thing to comprehend.

  Chapter 15

  In the dining room the breakfast was laid of remnants from the night before: minced turkey and warm potatoes on the side table, and the men sitting down to a dram before their boiled eggs.

  Faelan sat in his earlier place
one chair down from Maurice. There was a touch of coolness in her husband’s greeting when Roddy joined him there, but no one noticed except herself. If her husband had come to her bed and gone the night before, she never knew it. The talk was of wine and customs men, and a shipment expected that night in the little bay of Derrynane. She remembered Faelan, with a teasing glint in his eye, informing her before they’d arrived that their hosts were in the import-export business.

  It dawned on her, belatedly, that this genteel, comfortable family were smugglers by profession.

  “You’ve put us to shame now, Iveragh, with your grand fairy ball,” Maurice complained. He spoke with good nature, but there was a question, a delicate probing, in his next words. “And a fine diversion it was, but a terrible waste, to my mind. To be movin’ a lot of cold steel when I had a good cache of tobacco and spirits that was wanted by the lads in Cork a wee bit more than guns.”

  Faelan finished off his dram. “The bluff is yours to use again. Make it an annual affair.” He smiled briefly at his host over the tiny glass. “You needn’t worry that I’m going into competition.”

  Maurice inclined his head. He’d abandoned his powder this morning; his graying hair was dressed in rolls at the temples and clubbed back over his collar. In the whole room, Faelan was one of only two males who wore their hair cropped and free of curls or powder. A la rèvolution, someone in the company called it to themselves, and Roddy was puzzled by the significance such a minor thing seemed to carry.

  “Will our good friends from Paris be following their guns?” Maurice asked.

  Faelan shrugged. “I fear I’m not privy to their councils.”

  “Yet you move their muskets in the dead of night,” said the young man with the cropped hair. His fair skin flushed a little. “With our help.”

  “I thank you for it.” Faelan leveled his blue gaze on his questioner. “But ’twould be a mistake for you to think I favor an Irish invasion by your good friends the French. They’re no friends of mine.”

  “Why, then?” Maurice asked quietly.

  “The guns,” Faelan said, “were an inconvenience to me. So I had them removed.” He offered no explanations of how they had arrived in the first place.

  The faint touch of arrogance in his voice did nothing to conciliate his hosts. Roddy sensed that they were puzzled. Although a week ago they had casually opened their small hidden harbor to land and dispatch Faelan’s counterfeit fairies, he was still suspect in their eyes. He ran rebel guns with Irish flair, but he was English-schooled, Protestant; he fit no mold, and as a landowner he would wield great power in the district. Beneath the age-old traditions of Gaelic hospitality, they regarded him with all the respect and affection they might have felt for a loaded powder keg.

  “’Twas only a thought of ours,” Maurice said softly, “that a man with French muskets comes with the fleet close behind.”

  Faelan laughed without humor. “Ah, but how close—that’s the thing you might wonder. The Frogs missed their chance in ’96 when the headwinds kept them out of Bantry Bay. They missed it again this spring, when Britain lay helpless as a babe for weeks with her navy in the hands of mutineers.” He sat back in his chair with his fingers locked and raised one dark brow at Maurice. “The east wind doesn’t love the French, it would appear.”

  O’Connell decided to drop the subject. “Here,” he said in a tone of melodramatic resignation, “we only wish to mind our own affairs.”

  “Just so.” Faelan’s glance took in the comfortable room and imported furnishings, the well-filled decanters of wine and spirits. “And you do it so well.”

  Maurice nodded in modest assent, ratifying the mutual, unspoken agreement to stay out of one another’s business. In a sudden reversion to formality, he said, “We welcome Your Lordship, for as long as you and your bride will stay.”

  Faelan took a sip from his glass. “Thank you. But we won’t impose on Mrs. O’Connell’s hospitality for long. I have a lease which has fallen in—there’ll be a house available as soon as we have our first eviction.”

  A quick, sharp tension thickened instantly in the room. Faelan looked around with no visible emotion at the suddenly hostile faces surrounding the table.

  “You disapprove,” he said dryly. “Do you think I would move my wife into a cottier’s hovel? ’Tis Willis who’ll be vacating.”

  “John Willis.” Maurice sat up straight. “By the saints—do you mean that, man?”

  Faelan’s lips drew back in a wry half-smile. “Not by your saints, perhaps. But yes. I do mean it.”

  “And who’s to replace him?”

  “Myself,” Faelan said simply.

  They all stared.

  “You mean to live there?” the flushed young man exclaimed. “I can’t credit that.”

  Faelan looked toward Roddy, reaching across the corner of the table to take her hand. “Do you like this house, Lady Iveragh? Do you find it sufficient for your ease?”

  “Of course,” she said quickly, and hoped it was the right answer. The level of emotion in the room was running high, consternation and glee shifting too fast and wildly for her to make sense with her gift.

  “Then you’ll like the one John Willis has built for himself even better. He’s a man who knows his worldly comforts, I hear.”

  She wet her lips. “But—my lord…you wouldn’t turn a man out of his home—”

  The young man snorted. “Aye. John Willis’ll burn the place down first.”

  “Not if he wishes reimbursement for his improvements,” Faelan said. “I’ll give him fair price.”

  “Will you now?” The youth made a rude sound. “That’s more than Christian, then. He can take his miserable pack of hounds and go hunt in hell and welcome.”

  “Davan.” Maurice addressed his young cousin in faint reproof and looked at Faelan. “Have you other changes in mind, Your Lordship?”

  “Yes.” Her husband ran his forefinger around the rim of his glass. “The Farrissy lease is also at an end.”

  The approval that had gathered dissipated, gone in an instant at this news.

  “He’s a good man, Farrissy,” Maurice said with careful neutrality. “A good neighbor with a promising family.”

  “And hunting a pack of skinny hounds the equal of Willis’, I’m certain. No, Mr. O’Connell—I’ll not support a crowd of petty gentlemen at their leisure, Catholic or Protestant.” Faelan’s mouth set hard as he returned his host’s look. “Who leases my land will work it. Under my supervision. The countryside’s poor enough—there’ll be no subletting five-deep and living off the rents. As for Farrissy’s promising family, I know that kind of promise. All to become priests, or schoolmasters, or French officers, no doubt.”

  “Honorable professions, my lord,” Maurice said stiffly.

  “Leeches. Living off beggarly peasants and giving nothing back but a sorry smattering of bog Latin.”

  “That’s not the remark of a gentleman, sir.” Offense pulled the lines tight across Maurice’s cheekbones. “Your father had better manners.”

  Faelan stood up. Though his face remained cold and utterly neutral, Roddy could see the tendons in his hand flex. “Of course I’m no gentleman,” he said softly. “I’m not my father. I have no manners and no morals and no heart, but I have title to my land, and I’ll make it produce. Those who choose to help me may stay and share in the results. The rest may find another place to pass the time. Be it in the alehouse or in the church, they’ll have no support from me.”

  Roddy was glad to escape the uneasy atmosphere of Doire Fhionain. Only the grip of tradition kept Maurice from bidding Faelan leave the O’Connells’ roof that very day; tradition, and their host’s determination not to lower himself to Faelan’s level by putting a well-bred English gentlewoman out of shelter. But Roddy would rather have slept as she had the past week—on the ground beneath the sky—than endure the concealed animosity and the memories of Faelan’s past that her husband’s abrupt declaration of his intentions had invoked.


  Faelan seemed insensible to the tension. As they rode out in the crisp morning, sea-cooled and sharp-aired, he was smiling the way he had smiled in Gunther’s pastry shop: like a small boy let loose from hated lessons.

  He led the way back over the high road they had taken the day before. At the top, he halted and swept his arm wide over the long valley spread before them, the magical country with the sea on the west and the misted mountain passes on the east. It seemed empty of human habitation, and yet full of some presence, some welcoming song that the mind heard, though the ear could not.

  “Iveragh,” he said, in a tone that echoed with love and pride. He looked sideways at her, and shrugged with a trace of self-consciousness. “There isn’t much here yet, I know.” The wind billowed his black cape as he reined his horse and turned to point down the ridge on which they’d paused toward a sheltered bay. “Down there—we’ll build a pier,” he said with studied casualness. “I think that will be the place, at any event; I have an engineer from Aberdeen coming in December to begin sketches.”

  He stared intently at the spot, as if he could see the pier in all its detail. “’Twill be next fall before it’s finished, at that rate,” he added suddenly. “I wanted the damned fellow sooner, but he’s the best man in the field and in high demand. It took a king’s ransom to draw him off at all.”

  The trace of impatience, the eagerness which he could not quite hide, made Roddy want to smile. “And what will we ship, my lord?”

  “Butter,” he said seriously. He pointed again, this time up to the east, where Roddy could see several small black dots on one hillside. “The native upland cattle yield fine milk-fat on this scant pasturage. I want to consolidate a herd for improvement, and do some careful crossing with English imports. If we could make some enclosures, isolate the dairy herd—cull out the poorer milk producers and cross them with English imports—luck might have it that we’d gain better hardiness in a beef cow, too.”