by Laura Parker
Now the ground beneath her seemed to dip and sway like the deck of a ship. A journey over water. Yes, she knew that. What else? The undulation ceased, and in its stead came the pulse of hooves pounding the ground. Riders, many of them. Soldiers? She closed her eyes as her heart began to hammer in a slow but frightened rhythm. Fear had never before been a part of the dreams which Brigid refused to acknowledge as real.
When Deirdre opened her eyes the darkness did not abate. The sound of horses disappeared as quickly as it had come, but the night—if it was night—reverberated with anticipation. Gradually she realized that her kitten had stopped purring. It stood in her hands, its back arched and its claws unsheathed. It, too, was afraid.
She saw him before she heard the distant whinny of his steed; the dark silhouette of a horseman who came riding out of the night and straight toward her.
She did not think of screaming. What good were cries when a phantom bore down on her? When he reined in his horse with a scant yard of space between them, she felt a queer mixture of emotions. Clothed in a great black cloak and hat, he was forbidding, the very tilt of his shoulders a threat.
Yet, there was strength and assuredness in him, a determination in the handling of his horse which even she, a child, could admire. When he reached out a hand to her, this faceless rider swathed in uncanny silence, Deirdre extended hers.
At once he reared back, as if afraid of touching her. “Stay away!” he roared, his voice dark, deep, and edged with unspoken pain. “Stay away in fear of your life, mo cuishle!”
He turned his horse and galloped away as if borne on the back of a púca.
“Deirdre? Deirdre, lass! Where have ye hid yerself?”
Deirdre blinked and instantly was once again inside the stable, with daylight streaming in as she knelt in the moldy hay. The kitten leaped from her hands, landed on its feet, and scrambled away as Brigid appeared in the doorway.
“There ye are!” the nurse scolded. “Did not I say ye were to come straight back?”
Deirdre jumped to her feet. “Did you see him? ’Twas a grand horseman riding a great black fairy horse!”
Brigid folded her arms across her chest, accustomed to Deirdre’s spinning wild tales to divert her from her anger. “That I did not! Neither did ye. Ye were kneeling with yer eyes closed when I stepped in just now. The riders ye heard must be Lord Fitzgerald’s men, and not even himself will be forgiving ye if ye keep them waiting.”
Guiltily Deirdre beat the straw from her wrinkled skirts as she said, “But there was a man. I saw him.” She paused and looked up into her nurse’s face. “He held out his hand to me.”
Brigid read the truth of Deirdre’s words in her frank gaze, and a tiny shiver sped through her. “Are ye telling me true, lass?” she demanded sharply.
Deirdre looked away. “Aye. I saw him. Real as you, he was, sitting there upon his fine horse, all black hair and wild eyes. Only I did not see his face properly. ’Twas too dark.” Her eyes widened in speculation. “Do you suppose the rider was a fairy too? ’Tis said a piica can turn himself into a horse and gallop off to hell with any unsuspecting soul who tries to ride him. Only another fairy could control him.”
Brigid blanched at the suggestion. The lass had claimed to have seen fairies before, but one never knew what to make of her stories. She was a child with a vivid imagination. As for the other, that was a matter to which few were privy and all were forbidden to mention.
“’Twas that tale I began,” Brigid mused aloud. “I should’ve known no good would come from the telling of it. Ye drive a body to sinful ways with yer wheedling.” She caught Deirdre by the arm and bent low to whisper, “Ye’re not to tell a soul ye’ve been visited by the fairies this day, do ye hear me? ’Twould be thought a bad omen, the little people coming to see ye off.”
“See me off to where?” Deirdre demanded. “No one will tell me where we’re going.”
“’Tis no concern of yers. Ye’ve a loose tongue, and these are dark days when a wrong word could hang us all. Be a good lass, else ye’ll answer for it!” Brigid released the girl’s arm and gave her a push. “Get back to the house and change. I’ll not have ye meet his lordship in them dirty skirts, and ’tis horses for sure I’m hearing in the yard.”
With Brigid on her heels, Deirdre hurried out into the day, thrilled by the thought that her father was home at last, then another thought made her stop and spin about. “I forgot me kitten!”
“Deirdre!” her nurse called in warning as the girl headed toward the dimly lit interior of the stable.
“’Twill only take a moment to find him,” Deirdre called reassuringly over her shoulder. “Tell Da I’m coming. We must have a cat for the voyage.”
With a sigh of resignation, Brigid turned back to the house. Lord Fitzgerald would forgive an errant daughter. He could not be counted on to be as lenient with an absent servant.
Deirdre found the mother cat still sprawled in a slat of sunlight pouring through a crack in the wall of the stall. The yellow and white kitten she had chosen was not among the ones tussling nearby. “He’s run away,” she exclaimed in dismay, and turned to search the next of the empty stalls. “Kitty? Here, kitty…kitty…kitty.”
The shadows lay deeper and darker at the back of the stable. As if afraid to disturb the heavy silence there, Deirdre rose on tiptoe as she neared and her call fell to a whisper. “Kitty? Psst! Puss?”
She spied the white fluff of a kitten’s tail at the edge of the last stall. “There you are!” she squealed in delight and pounced upon the object, expecting to come up with her kitten. Instead, she trapped the tip of a white feather, attached to a wide-brimmed hat.
Surprised, Deirdre picked it up and looked at it. It was a man’s hat but not one that belonged to a servant at Liscarrol. It bore on its band a white ribbon cockade, symbol of the Irish army loyal to the defeated James II. But why was it here, stuck in the back of an unused stall?
Instinct made her drop the hat, but it was too late. Even as she turned to flee, a hand reached out of the darkness from the depths of the stall and clamped her ankle in a brutal grip.
“Scream and I’ll shoot you, I swear it!”
The startled cry that had risen in Deirdre’s throat died as she saw the threat of a pistol barrel materialize out of the gloom. She was afraid, certainly, but she was in her own home, and her father had just ridden in. Her attacker, she reasoned in childish simplicity, would not harm her with her father nearby. Besides, she was the daughter of a general and should be as brave as any of his men.
“I’ll not scream,” she said after a moment. “I’m a Fitzgerald and I’m not afeard of the likes of you!”
“There’s a fierce one you are, lass,” the disembodied voice answered, a brogue thickening his tone. “But I’m that desperate that it matters little to me. The soldiers in the yard—what do they want?”
Deirdre bit her lip, her confidence fading as quickly as it had come. She strained her eyes against the shadows but could see nothing more than a black-cloaked figure lying on his side. The hand wrapped round her ankle was large and blood-smeared. Finally her eyes fell on the hat she had dropped, and a little of her confidence returned.
“You’re a King James man,” she said.
“Aye, that I am,” the gruff voice answered, more faintly this time, as if he strained for breath. “Does your house fly the standard of the Dutch jackal?”
“We do not! Me da is Lord Fitzgerald, brigadier in the service of King James.”
The grip on her ankle loosened as the man sighed again. “They—they…did not lie then,” he whispered hoarsely and then seemed to choke.
Deirdre watched spellbound as the pistol fell from the man’s grasp as he coughed. The spasms racked his body and he curled up into a ball. Common sense told her run, for she was free, but fascination held her rooted to the spot.
Finally, when the racking stopped, she bent and picked up the pistol. It was a cold, heavy weapon, the same as her father’s pistol.
>
“Careful, you’ll blow your lovely nose away,” the man said suddenly.
Deirdre jumped and took a step back. She had thought him dead or asleep. When he moved to sit up, she took another step backward and his hand shot out toward her. “Give it to me, lass. I’d not like to harm…so fair a bairn…but I will…. Give me me pistol!” he rasped.
Deirdre took another careful step backward. He was still cloaked in shadow but his harsh breathing betrayed his condition. “You’re hurt.”
He did not answer but with a terrible groan hoisted himself to his feet. The breeze caught at his cloak and it unfolded, billowing out like the black wings of a nightmarish creature.
Magnified by her fear and the broad sweep of his cloak, it seemed to Deirdre that he rose to a height of ten feet and filled the confines of the tiny stall. “You’re a fairy! A demon!” she cried.
Clutching his middle, he staggered into the slanted light from the open stable doors. Then, like a puppet whose strings have been snipped, his legs folded under him and he collapsed in a single, fluid movement.
Deirdre dropped the pistol and clamped her hands over her mouth to keep back a cry. He lay now in dim light and she saw that he was, indeed, a man. He wore heavy, scarred, muddy jack boots. His face was turned away and the tangle of long black hair at the back of his head was matted with blood.
Unable to resist any wounded thing, Deirdre took a step closer. Was he dead? She could not tell, for he lay so still. She moved another step closer, wondering what to do. If he were one of her father’s men or only a soldier of King James, he would not have hidden himself in the home of sympathizers. No, something else had brought him here.
Deirdre glanced at the pistol lying nearby. Perhaps he was a highwayman. They were as prevalent as soldiers these days. If her father came in and found a highwayman, he would have him hanged summarily.
Greatly daring, she knelt down beside the fallen man and shook his shoulder. She felt relief mingled with trepidation when he stirred slightly and moaned under her prodding.
“If you’re a thief, then you should know we’ve nothing to steal,” she whispered anxiously. “The silver’s gone and the gold plate. There’s not so much as a pearl in me mother’s jewel box.” Too late, she realized that perhaps she should not have mentioned her mother’s jewel case, for the man slowly lifted his head.
The first thing she noticed were startling blue eyes in a face drained of all color by pain. Then rapidly she noticed the dark bruises beneath his eyes, the thin scraggly beard which matched the shaggy blue-black mane of curls that fell across his brow, and the smear of bright red blood trailing from his mouth.
White skin, raven-black hair, and bloodred lips: he bore the colors of the mythical Deirdre’s lover.
Deirdre jumped to her feet, her small body trembling so hard that she could barely stand. It was a fairy’s trick. Hadn’t Brigid warned her that the people of the otherworld did not like to be mocked? The fairies must have heard her boast of the man she would marry and had deliberately set about to frighten her by conjuring up this ghost from her daydreams.
“Do not hurt me, please!” she begged. “I did not mean to mock you. ’Twas a joke. I’ll never mock the stories again, I swear it!”
The man blinked and shook his head slightly, as if he did not understand her. “Help me,” he said, his voice scarcely audible.
“Aye, anything, only do not hurt me!”
He winced as he reached out a trembling hand to her. “There’s the soul of Ireland in your misty green eyes.”
He closed his eyes, as if musing on a far-distant thought. When his eyes opened again, his gaze had changed. There was helplessness there, and his voice was edged with desperation. “Are you, I’m wondering, as gentle and kind as your gaze?”
Deirdre nodded slowly, unable to look away from his pain-ravaged face. She had never seen a man so badly hurt, nor had she ever heard a voice like his. It wrapped her in a warmth that was both pleasing and discomforting. She reached out to take his hand and was again amazed by his strong-fingered grasp. “I’ll help you.”
“Dee!” came a sudden call just outside the stable doors. “Dee, where are ye, daughter?”
“Da!” Deirdre cried joyously. “No, do not move,” she scolded as the stranger pushed feebly against the ground in an effort to rise. Squatting, she put a hand to his face. His skin was icy to the touch, as though he had just come out of a winter wind. “’Tis me Da. He’ll help you.”
*
Lord Fitzgerald had spent the better part of a day and half in the saddle, leading a wretched band of war-weary soldiers on what for many of them would be their last ride through their homeland. Having signed the terms of surrender in the Treaty of Limerick a few days earlier, he, along with more than thirteen thousand other men of the Irish army, had chosen expatriation rather than submit to English rule. France promised a freedom that they would not now have here in their Irish homeland.
It was a hard decision, made worse for the families of the soldiers. As an officer, Lord Fitzgerald was one of the lucky few who had been given the freedom to carry his family with him. Most of the regular troops had been summarily herded aboard ships and shipped across the Channel without even a glimpse of the families they were leaving behind.
“Damn their English souls!” Lord Fitzgerald tossed off automatically in sympathy with his thoughts.
It was left to officers like himself to inform the soldiers’ families of where their menfolk had gone. Times were hard. It would be months, perhaps years, before some families could follow their stout-hearted fathers, sons, and lovers.
As he made his way toward the entrance of his stables, he rubbed his eyes, which ached from road grit and lack of sleep. He smelled of horses, gunpowder, and sweat. Beneath his dust-powdered periwig, his scalp itched from flea bites. Had this been any other day, he would have ordered up a bath, a full meal, and several glasses of port before retiring for a sound sleep. Now he barely had time to gather his family together and race for the docks at Cork, where a French ship awaited them.
No doubt his famous ancestor, Gerald Fitzgerald, would spin in his grave to know that he had handed Liscarrol over to the care of a Protestant, even if he was a Fitzgerald, but his cousin Neil Fitzgerald, because of his religion, would be able to ensure that he would not lose his home. The English had promised no retribution against the Catholic families who had surrendered at Limerick, but only a fool or one too young to remember the atrocities carried out by the Englishman Cromwell would rely on such pledges.
With Liscarrol in Protestant hands, even if they were Irish Protestant hands, the government could not readily confiscate it.
A bitter vetch it was, leaving his homeland in defeat. Well, there was no turning back now. His decision was made, and if his family was bewildered and frightened, they would follow him…as soon as he located his only daughter.
“Dee! Where are ye, me darlin’? Why do ye not—?”
When he turned in to the stable and saw his daughter kneeling on the ground beside a fallen man, his first thought was that it was one of his own soldiers. Then reason asserted itself. His men had not been dismissed from the yard. This was a stranger. Trained to note details in an instant, he saw the jack boots of a fighting man and the pistol lying nearby. Though he lay inordinately still, the stranger’s chest rose and fell with the rapidity of a man in distress.
Lord Fitzgerald’s heart lurched. The outbreak of the plague had taken away thousands of souls a year earlier. War always brought pestilence and disease. Yet, here was his darling daughter trying to comfort the strange man as she would a wounded bird or lamb.
“Dee, lass. Come away. Let him be.” He spoke in the calm, authoritative voice that had made many a man under his command keep a clear head in battle, but the sweat of anxiousness glazed his brow in the moments it took him to reach Deirdre and snatch her up into his arms.
“Da!” Deirdre squealed in delight as her father’s arms closed around her and lifte
d her up high. The strength of his embrace nearly crushed the breath from her, but the pain had a joy in it that she did not mind.
“Dee, lass, what are ye doing here?” her father questioned.
Deirdre reared back from the smothering confines of his chest, her young face clouded with worry. “You must help the man. He’s running from the English. They wounded him. I said we’d help him, but he’s afraid. He thinks you mean to hang him, Da.”
“Does he now?” Lord Fitzgerald murmured, his gaze moving from his daughter’s troubled expression to the man sprawled a few feet away. Wounded. Thank God! Injuries would heal…or not. At least his daughter had not been exposed to disease.
He noticed now the hat and its white cockade and sighed. No doubt the man had been on the run since the battle for Limerick. Perhaps he lived nearby and could be carried home before they left for Cork.
He set his daughter down carefully. “Go fetch me the sergeant, lass. O’Conner’s his name.”
“But, Da—” Deirdre protested, only to be turned about by her father’s hands on her shoulders.
“Do not disobey an order from yer superior, lass! Fetch the sergeant. I’ll keep watch over yer wounded lad. There’s a good lass,” he encouraged as she started for the doorway.
When he turned back, he picked up the pistol and pocketed it before bending over the ailing man. With strong but gentle hands he turned him over. When he saw the stranger’s face, Lord Fitzgerald muttered an oath. Despite the dirt and blood, there was no disguising his youth. This was no seasoned soldier. This boy with peach fuzz for a beard could be no more than seventeen.
The lad groaned and his eyes flew open. “Who…who are you?”
“Ye’re in no condition to care overmuch,” Lord Fitzgerald answered gruffly, but he cradled the young man’s head against his knees. “Who are ye, lad, and where’s yer company?”
The boy shook his head slightly. “No company.”
“All dead?” the brigadier asked gently.
Again he shook his head. “Not a…soldier. Rapparee.”