by Laura Parker
He wrapped his cloak tighter about himself. As for the dream, its effect would fade with the rising sun. It always did.
*
Southern Brittany was a low flat land, little of which was readily amenable to farming. It was on the coast that most Bretons made their home, and their livelihoods came from the sea. Nantes, on the banks of the Loire near its confluence with the Atlantic, was a center of trading where sailors and fishermen rubbed shoulders with the rest of the world. In good times, the streets of the city were lined with folk selling their catch. In bad times, it was filled with men offering their services for any price. Yet, good times or bad, the streets were filled with the disconsolate: the beggars, the lame, the abandoned.
Killian held his gaze above the milling throngs as his horse threaded a path through the streets. It was midsummer, the catch was going well, and the city prospered. The stink of fish and mussels and crabs filled the narrow, humid lanes as vendors cried out their wares.
“M’sieur! M’sieur!”
A tug on his pants leg made Killian look down into the filthy face of a child not more than twelve years of age. The urchin tightened his grip on Killian’s leg as he extended a grimy hand. “Un peu sous, m’sieur! Pour Mama et les bebes! Un peu sous!”
The coin was in his hand before Killian checked himself. The child’s dark hair was matted to his brow by mud, and the corners of his lips were crusted with oozing sores. Only his eyes were bright, so very bright and sly.
Deliberately, Killian bent in the saddle and wiped one corner of the child’s mouth with his gloved hand. The sores smeared, coming off on the leather covering his thumb. His eyes narrowed as he raised his glove for inspection. Fake. A bit of grease, flour, and fish blood had been fashioned into a very realistic resemblance of pox boils.
As the beggar turned to flee, Killian grabbed him by the collar. The child shrieked in alarm as he was lifted from the ground and hauled across the man’s saddle.
“Liar! Thief! Charlatan!” Killian growled in French, punctuating each word with a slap of his hand against the child’s buttocks.
“Tell…your…mama…to…put…you…to…honest…labor!” With a last rough shake, he set the urchin back onto the cobblestone street.
“Merde! Bastard!” the child yelled as tears made clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. When the man bent toward him again, he jumped back with a yelp of fear. The man did not reach for him a second time.
Killian opened his hand, palm up, and tossed a few coins at the boy, saying, “Use this to start your new life.”
Startled but recognizing the flash of money, the child grabbed them from the air, then turned and ran, spewing filthy words over his shoulder.
A crowd quickly gathered to assail him with well-wishes and to plead for further generosity, but Killian ignored them, quietly urging his horse past them.
Killian muttered when he had made his way onto another street. What had he thought to accomplish by making a spectacle of himself? Why had he not simply ignored the child? The boy was a professional beggar. No passerby would reform him.
He knew the answer. Despite the brutalizing forces of the last twelve years, the desire to make right the wrongs of this world had never left him. Once he had believed that those feelings represented a calling to the Church, but no longer. Now he distrusted the urgings that moved within him, for they left him vulnerable and he could not afford vulnerability. One mistake, one unguarded moment, and a soldier might become a corpse. How could he help others when he could barely keep his own body and soul together?
The duchesse would laugh at him when he told her of his foolhardiness this day. It was a grandiose, empty gesture unworthy of a man of sense and practicality. She would offer him wine, kiss his mouth, and laugh at his honor, his chivalry, his belief in right. Then she would wrap him in her arms and thighs and, for a short while, make him forget that he was a fool. He should have gone to Paris.
No, not Paris. The duchesse had need of his talents again, or so she had said in her most recent letter. But he had had more than enough of the duchesse’s brand of work. More than the others, she had used him for her own ends, and more than of any other he had a need to be free of her.
The summer sun shone brightly on the port city. Ships dotted the river Loire like horseflies on the surface of a pond, their sails tightly furled and their rigging swaying to the pitch and roll of the water. He paused on the quay, his eyes searching out the name of one ship—the Cygne—but she was not there. With a sigh, he turned back from the harbor. Once he had loved the sea, and as a boy he had thought he might run away to join the navy. More foolish dreams. The reality had been worse than a nightmare. Dreams. Always dreams.
Without stopping to ask directions, he wound his way back from the harbor, out of the narrow lanes, and once more into the countryside toward the more prosperous portion of the town. He knew where to go though he had never been there before. He knew much about the Fitzgeralds. He had made them his business this last year. The Fitzgeralds were Anglo-Irish nobility. Six centuries earlier their ancestors had been among the Norman conquerors of Ireland. Some had remained, intermarrying and becoming “more Irish than the Irish,” as the English had learned to their dismay. The present Lord Fitzgerald owed much of his success in France to family ties dating back to his Norman French connections with the de Quentins of Nantes. There was a daughter fresh from the convent and more than likely promised to the new comte.
He will take her to court and perhaps she will find favor with Le Roi Soleil and her success will be made, Killian mused cynically.
With French coins in their pockets and French blood mingling in their veins, the Anglo-Irish Fitzgeralds would soon forget their Irish homeland and their heritage. The only loyalty remaining in them was their preference for their countrymen. ’Twas said that any Irishman in need could count on finding shelter, at least temporarily, with the Fitzgeralds. Yet even that was a lie, as he had learned to his own detriment.
Killian’s thoughts drifted as he rode across the grounds of a modest estate. Butterflies danced above the carpet of green, their bright wings opening and closing with lazy flashes of yellow, blue, and white upon the dew-drenched lawn. The beauty of the day pleased him and he reined in. The morning was silent but for the chatter of nesting birds in the trees.
For a moment, he closed his eyes. How tired he was, how weary of riding. In the distance, the beckoning shade of a chestnut tree was too much to resist. What difference would an hour’s rest make?
The moment he leaned back against the tree trunk, he was asleep.
The galloping hooves sounded softly in the damp thick grass. Had he not been so recently at war, he doubted he would have heard them until the rider was much nearer.
He was on his feet in an instant. A blink of an eye later, he was hidden behind the tree trunk, his pistol drawn.
The horse and rider rode along a tree-lined lane across the meadow from where he stood. At first, they were too far away for him to judge much. The steed was a big dark roan with a deep chest and heavy hooves, a war horse. The rider was slight, perhaps a groom who had been sent out to exercise his master’s steed. Nothing threatening in that.
As Killian tucked his pistol back into his belt, the horse and rider suddenly swerved off the path and into the field of butterflies and sunshine, and he realized that this was no groom on the horse’s back. A girl rode the huge animal.
She rode astride, her feet bare of slippers, yet she had a commanding grip on the horse’s reins. She wore a plain dark blue gown, and a long tangle of bright golden hair flew out behind her like a windblown flame. As he continued to stare, the sound of her laughter, clear and sweet, rose above the thudding hooves.
“Go! Go, Lachtna!” she cried, digging her heels into the flanks of the sweating horse.
Horse and rider galloped past just feet from the tree by which he stood, splashing through the shallow stream that bordered the near side of the meadow.
For a moment, Killian sto
od transfixed. Her cheeks pinkened by exertion, her eyes wide with pleasure and quite green, the girl’s face had borne a strange, unearthly familiarity. That blend of strength and sweetness was worthy of a saint…or a dream.
Hers was the face of his dream!
In the time it took him to snatch the reins free of the tree and mount up, Killian realized how absurd his thoughts were. She was no ethereal spirit. No doubt she was some stablehand’s daughter stealing a ride from one of her master’s steeds. Yet, she could not be French, for she had spoken in Gaelic. An odd ripple of excitement sped through Killian as he urged his horse after the pair. Spirit or flesh and blood, he must find out for himself.
Deirdre did not turn to glance over her shoulder when she heard the approach of a rider. At dinner the night before, Darragh had bet her ten francs that she could not ride his charger, bareback, the length of the estate without a tumble. She had accepted at once with an eye toward improving the stakes. That was why she had set out an hour earlier than their agreed-upon time, leaving behind a note challenging Darragh to double or nothing if she returned astride.
Darragh had agreed that she could ride the course alone, at her own pace, but it seemed he had ridden after her. With a firm pressure on the reins, she turned the horse with surprising ease.
“A fine brother you are, that you don’t trust me!” she challenged the approaching rider.
At once, she realized her mistake. The rider was not Darragh or any other member of the Fitzgerald household.
The man was wrapped in a dark cape, though the morning was warming under the late June sun. His head was bare, and his long black mane, too carelessly waved to be a wig, moved on his shoulders with his horse’s gait.
“Good day to you, lass,” the stranger said in Gaelic as he halted his mount a few yards away.
Deirdre stared at him, offering him no words of greeting or challenge. His face, permanently blushed by the sun, was stern. His features were not those of a gentle man or a good-natured one. Black brows slashed the broad forehead and his bold nose and jutting chin spoke of a belligerent nature. Yet, he was not ugly. Of singular beauty were the bright blue eyes regarding her.
For an instant, recognition flirted with memory. He was familiar, yet…surely she would have remembered meeting such a man before.
Gaelic was a tongue rare in France, despite the daily influx of Irish who had escaped across the sea. The man was a stranger. There was determination in his posture and a tense readiness that made her wonder at his intent. Her gaze moved uneasily to the butt of the pistol outlined beneath his cloak. A port city was open to the freebooters of the world: sailors, adventurers, pirates, and thieves. That was why she always carried a skean in the left sleeve of her gown when she went out riding. Her right hand moved to grip the hilt of it and draw it free.
The stranger’s expression altered subtly into the suggestion of a smile as he casually flung back his cloak to expose his black coat and breeches. He lifted his arms high. “I will not harm you. You speak Irish. I heard you call your pony Lachtna.”
“He’s not a pony!” Deirdre responded indignantly, then blushed instantly. He had tricked her.
“Would you be in the employ of Lord Fitzgerald, by any chance?” he asked.
Deirdre did not allow surprise to stampede her into speech this time. She glanced at his upraised hands and a little of the tension went out of her. At least he was not bent on robbery.
She reached down to flick away a branch that had caught in her skirts. When she looked up again she saw that her gesture had drawn the stranger’s gaze to her bare ankles and feet.
“Have ye nae seen a lass’s feet afore?” she asked in an exaggerated brogue as she twitched her skirts lower.
“Aye,” the stranger answered, his lilting voice deep and caressing. “Aye, that and much more, lass.” He raised his eyes slowly to hers, and Deirdre felt her pulse quicken. “Truth, you look too young to know of love’s diversions, but your blush says ’tis not so!”
Deirdre stared at him, struck once more by the intensity of his blue stare. It was too much to bear and she shifted her gaze to the blue-black waves on his shoulders.
Who was he? He did not wear the soldierly green of the Irish Brigade. More likely he was a refugee looking for work. Whether refugee or soldier, she knew she should not be talking with him. She had flirted with danger quite enough for one morning.
“That way lies the Fitzgerald place!” she offered with a pointing finger and suddenly kicked Lachtna into a gallop.
Killian watched her flee, a rare smile touching his lips. He thought of himself as a man untouched by mortal comeliness, but he could not take his eyes off her. Dirty bare feet and a smudge on her nose had not diminished her beauty, for it was not that kind. There had even been a dusting of gold freckles on the bridge of her nose.
She was a real Irish lass, flesh and blood. No wonder he had mistaken her for a figment of his dream world. The pleasurable sensation surging through him was not altogether lust, and yet there was enough in it that he could not resist following her, albeit at a tactful distance.
Deirdre did not glance back over her shoulder to see if the stranger followed her. That would be encouraging him and she knew it. Yet, after several seconds passed and she did not hear the sound of his horse, disappointment eddied through the relief that washed over her.
She had allowed him to believe that he had frightened her into headlong flight, which is exactly what he had done.
“Shame on you, Deirdre Fitzgerald!” she muttered as her cheeks stung.
He was not the first handsome man she had encountered. To the contrary, he was not handsome at all. He had not even smiled. Perhaps he had bad teeth like Sean, the groom’s eldest son. That would explain why he had not smiled. What lass would find foul breath and rotted teeth fascinating?
There was in his forbidding expression something aloof, judgmental, and altogether critical. It was as if he had seen through her blushes and known her to be a silly young lady enjoying a flirtation with a stranger. He reminded her of the parish priest of Liscarrol during Lent. Each year the priest fasted for forty days until his cheekbones stood out in gaunt relief and his skin was gray. Only the fire of fanatical belief blazed in his eyes.
The stranger’s eyes held that same fierce light. Yet, self-denial did not seem an attribute of a man who so casually mentioned that he knew much more of women than their bare ankles. Nor was he gray-faced and gaunt. His complexion, burnt by the sun and wind, was not red like her brothers’ but golden. The contrast made his eyes seem lit from within.
No matter, she preferred a man of greater breadth and width, like Darragh or Conall. Even in the saddle, she judged that he was not as tall as her brothers. Indifferent in height and thin, that was what he was.
Well, perhaps not thin; the stranger was sinewy. In fact, what little she had seen of him was rather nicely formed: long thighs, broad shoulders, and a flat belly behind the butt of his pistol. He was arrogant, self-assured, and…and…and quite the most magnificent man she had ever encountered.
When Deirdre realized that her thoughts had once more circled back to ones of admiration, she could not help but laugh at herself. She had been dazzled, that’s what she had been, and was too proud to admit it.
With a sniff of self-disgust she rubbed the end of her nose to dislodge a fleck of mud that Lachtna’s hooves had kicked up. It was just as well that she had not revealed who she was. She looked like a rude country girl in her oldest gown.
When she glanced back over her shoulder the stranger was gone, vanished. Yet, an image remained with her of the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed Irishman.
Out of nowhere, a sudden chilling breeze sped across the meadow, lifting the edge of her skirts and raising goosebumps on her skin.
She shook her head, dismissing the disquieting shiver that traveled through her. He was a man, only that, and not a very polite one.
All at once she remembered her bet with Darragh. If she did not re
turn soon, she would lose.
With a slap on the horse’s rump, she cried, “Go, Lachtna! Go!” and they galloped off toward home.
*
When she reached the north lawn of the house, Deirdre saw her brothers standing on the drive, Conall’s red head easily discernible in the sunlight. She did not slow Lachtna until she was upon them, and then she slid from the horse’s back with a crow of triumph.
“I did it! I won!” she cried breathlessly, tossing the reins to Darragh
Instead of the chiding she expected, Darragh’s eyes grew round at the sight of her. “Dee, what happened? Were you tossed?”
She looked down. Her skirts were muddy and damp. She could feel the sweat running in rivulets down her back and between her breasts, pasting her bodice to her skin. She looked anything but ladylike, and she had never felt more alive. During her convent years she had been allowed to ride only sidesaddle on a pony within the nunnery walls.
With a grimy hand she pushed back the strand of hair sticking to her brow and smiled widely. “You did not say I could not exert myself in the effort to win, and that I’ve done.”
Darragh shook his head. “You’ve ridden without a saddle, and Lachtna’s not accustomed to that. You could have been killed!”
Deirdre shrugged, vaguely annoyed by his tone. “Once you’d have applauded me, now you scold me.”
“Now, Dee,” Conall inserted on his brother’s behalf. “You know we’re proud of you. Allow a brother to show a proper concern for his sister.”
Deirdre knew that none of the men under Conall’s command had ever heard so conciliatory a tone from him. Even so, it was Darragh who had scolded her and it was from him that she wanted an apology. Turning away, she began stroking the long smooth column of Lachtna’s neck. “’Tis a fine, beauteous horse. I cannot remember a faster ride. I wonder how I should spend my twenty francs.”