A Woman's Heart

by JoAnn Ross

  “Grandmother!” Mary shot a desperate look at Nora. “Would you please explain that these days only the wretched homely girls destined for spinsterhood go to dances alone?”

  “I doubt you’re destined for spinsterhood,” Nora replied mildly as she noted the black trails of mascara running down her sister’s cheeks.

  While she understood a teenager’s natural impulse for rebellion, she did wish that Mary hadn’t taken to emulating what had become known in Dublin as the Gothic look. The black tortured-artist’s clothing, white Kabuki-dancer powder and maroon-painted lips Mary favored on weekends away from school detracted from her natural beauty.

  At least the nuns had forbidden the fluorescent green or orange spiked hair sported by the city teenagers. And, needless to say, body piercing was out of the question. Nora decided to be grateful for small favors.

  “I realize it hurts,” she tried again. “But it’s not the end of the world, darling. There are still three weeks until the dance, and perhaps Jack will change his mind—”

  “He’s not going to change his mind,” Mary sniffed. “Because the only reason he dropped me for Sharon is ’cause she puts out. She’s probably slept with half the boys in school.”

  There it was again. That ever-threatening sex issue. Lately, Nora had finally come to understand all too well why her mother had worried so during the days she’d been stealing off to hidden meadows with Devlin Monohan.

  “A man won’t buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” Fionna said sagely. “You’re right to hold on to your virginity, Mary, dear. When you’re with your husband on your wedding night, you’ll look back on this day and be glad you held firm.”

  “I’m never going to get married!”

  “Of course you will.” Nora handed her a tissue.

  “No, I’m not.” Mary blew her nose with a loud unfeminine honk. “I’ve decided to become a nun.”

  “You’ve certainly got the wardrobe for it,” Fionna muttered, casting a derisive look at the flowing black skirt and ebony tunic sweater.

  “You can’t be a nun,” seven-year-old Celia, who was coloring in a book of Irish Grand National winners, piped up. “You have to have a vocation. Then you go off to be a missionary in the Congo.”

  The kettle whistled, allowing Nora to turn away to hide her smile. The Nun’s Story was a perennial favorite on television, broadcast every season during Lent.

  Mary turned on the youngest Joyce sister. “That’s just a stupid movie.”

  “I know that.” Celia lifted her small pointed chin. “But Sister Mary Anthony is reading us the lives of the saints, and they all had vocations. Like Saint Theresa who walked on thorns and didn’t flinch. And Joan of Arc who was burned at the stake and never even cried.”

  “And let’s not be forgetting Saint Maria Goretti who died rather than submit to a man,” Fionna said pointedly. “She didn’t even lose courage when her attacker started stabbing her with his dagger. Now that’s a vocation.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to be a bloody saint!” Mary’s palm hit the kitchen table with enough force to send crayons rolling off onto the floor. “I said I was going to be a nun.”

  “There’s no need to swear.” Nora put the teapot on the table.

  “You just don’t understand!” Mary jumped up, knocking over her chair with a loud clatter. “None of you understand!” she cried as she ran from the room.

  There was the sound of footfalls on the stairs. Moments later the slam of a door reverberated through the farmhouse, causing the calendar from Monohan’s Mercantile, with the lovely photograph of wildflowers, to tilt on the wall like a drunkard.

  Appearing unfazed by the histrionics, Celia returned to her coloring, carefully filling in the lines of a flowing mane with a crayon that was nearly the same color as her russet braids. “When I’m a teenager, I’m not going to have anything to do with boys,” she vowed.

  “I, for one, would be very grateful if you stick to that decision,” Nora said, even though she knew it would never happen. Boys and tears were just part of growing up.

  Wanting to calm things down before the American writer arrived, Nora followed the pitiful sound of sobbing upstairs. Although she tried her best to sympathize with Mary’s upsets, it was difficult when they occurred so often. Granted, Jack’s behavior was just cause, but usually Mary’s bleak moods were triggered by far less.

  But then again, Nora reminded herself, she hadn’t lost her mother at the tender age of nine as Mary had. She’d been all of eighteen and had had Conor to offer comfort and love during that sad time.

  As she rapped on the closed bedroom door, Nora thought that Sheila Monohan had definitely been right about one thing. Raising her mother’s three children along with her own—not to mention worrying about her father, who was little more than an overgrown child himself—was far from easy.

  Nora lifted her eyes upward, which, unfortunately made her notice the new brown water stain on the ceiling. She really was going to have to get the roof rethatched.

  “It would certainly be nice, Mam,” she murmured, “if you could give me a little help with this one.”

  Chapter Four

  Smoke and Strong Whiskey

  As Quinn drove past the butcher shop, the rows of meat and dressed chickens displayed in the storefront window reminded him of how many hours it had been since he’d eaten. Spotting the hanging sign across the square advertising The Irish Rose pub, he decided to stop.

  “Some food and a couple cups of coffee should stave off jet lag.” And ease the headache that had begun to throb while he’d been driving around in circles.

  This would also give him an opportunity to ask directions to the Joyce farm. He’d been assured by the rental agent who handled the transaction that the farm was on the road directly out of Castlelough. However, having already discovered the vagaries of the Irish roadway system, Quinn feared the agent’s assurances would prove to be overly optimistic.

  He allowed himself a smile when he read the words burned into the piece of wood nailed to the pub door: Here when we’re open. Gone when we’re closed.

  The interior of The Irish Rose could have been lifted directly from the set of The Quiet Man. Quinn suspected it had looked much the same when the town of Castlelough had been founded more than five hundred years earlier.

  The dark-paneled walls had shelves filled with bottles of whiskey gleaming like a pirate’s bounty in the light from the brass-hooded lamps. Behind the bar, a mirror advertised Guinness in fancy gold script.

  A turf fire burned in the large open hearth at one end of the room, warding off the chill; a cloud of smoke hung in the air. Wooden tables had been crowded onto the hand-pegged floor and heavy benches resembling church pews had been placed along the wall. The only anachronism was the television, bolted above the bar and currently tuned to a hurling match.

  When his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Quinn could see three men seated at the bar, more men scattered around at the tables smoking pipes and reading newspapers, and a pair of teenage boys playing darts. A man and woman were eating a late lunch of pub grub while a pair of carrot-haired toddlers Quinn took for twins happily munched on crunchy chips.

  All eyes immediately turned toward him as he crossed the floor and sat down on a stool in front of the scarred wooden bar.

  “Lovely day,” a small spry leprechaun-like man remarked.

  “A bit chilly,” Quinn replied. Only yesterday he’d been basking in the California sun.

  “Aye.” The man nodded. “Though myself, I don’t care for it when it’s warm. Then you’ve got nothing to complain about, after all. It’s no good for the talk…” His words trailed off. Abruptly he said, “You’d be Quinn Gallagher.”

  “That was either one helluva guess or you’re psychic.”

  “Now, there have been some who’ve accused me of that over the years, but it’s not how I knew you.” A smile brightened the apple-cheeked face; still-young blue eyes twinkled merrily. “I recognized y
ou from the photograph on the back of your books. Hasn’t my youngest son, John, read them all? He especially liked the one about the banshee.”

  “That was one of my favorites, as well.” It was his first published novel, written during a blaze of inspiration the likes of which Quinn had never experienced since. His muse was a fickle mistress.

  “Brady’s seen a banshee,” the second man, who appeared to be nearing the century mark, revealed. His bulbous red nose suggested he’d spent several of those many years indulging a fondness for the bottle.

  “Brady?” It was undoubtedly a common enough name, Quinn told himself.

  “Brady Joyce, at your service,” the first man said. “And isn’t this the divil’s own luck, you stopping by The Rose on your way out to the farm?”

  “It’s quite a coincidence.”

  “Not so much of one,” the second man alleged. “The Rose is the only pub this side of the river. It’s also the first one on the road into town, which made it likely it’d be the one you chose to stop at.

  “And whenever The Irish Rose is open—” he took a long drink of the dark beer in front of him and wiped the creamy tracing of foam off his top lip with the back of his hand “—isn’t it sure you’ll find Brady Joyce sitting right on that very stool, spinning his tales. He’s the finest seanachie in the county.”

  “Oh, I’m not nearly as fine a storyteller as Mr. Gallagher,” Brady said with what Quinn suspected was more than a little false modesty.

  “That may be the case, indeed, but the banshee story is a grand fearful tale,” the old man countered. “It never fails to give me gooseflesh.” He cast Quinn an appraising look. “You’d be one of those movie people.”

  “I am.”

  “Brady was telling me about you staying at the farm. We were thinking you might want to make a movie outta one of his tales.”

  “Oh, it was Fergus here who was thinking that,” Brady said quickly. A bit too quickly, Quinn thought. “I told him it was foolishness.”

  “Getting a movie made is a real long shot,” Quinn said carefully, afraid of offending his host by suggesting he might not consider Brady Joyce’s stories worthy of consideration.

  The rest of the cast and crew was already booked into every spare room in the village; if Joyce decided to welsh on the rental agreement, Quinn would have no choice but to take Laura up on her offer. A situation he was determined to avoid.

  “And isn’t that just what I was telling Fergus?” Brady nodded. “A long shot.”

  “And wouldn’t one consider getting a movie made about a lake creature in a small Irish town few have ever heard of a long shot?” the man named Fergus suggested slyly.

  “Good point… So, you’ve actually seen a banshee?” Quinn asked Joyce. Although he’d enjoyed writing the story of the keening fairy woman, he considered such a thing on a par with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

  “Aye, that I have,” Brady agreed cheerfully. “I’ve also seen the lovely Lady who brings all you movie people to Castlelough. But those are tales for another time. First we need to get you something to drink.

  “Publican, a pint for my guest,” he called out robustly to the man who was drying glasses not two feet away. “I’ll stand a round for the room, as well. And bottles of orange for the boys.

  “And while Brendan pulls your pint, you can tell us all about yourself,” Brady invited, turning back to Quinn.

  “There’s not that much to tell.” Never one to talk about his past, Quinn was definitely not eager to discuss it here, among strangers.

  “Of course there is. As a storyteller yourself, you should know there’s no one else like you. No story like your own. And there’s always the fact that,” Brady tacked on impishly, “if you don’t tell us, we’ll have no choice but to make things up.”

  Before Quinn could respond to that, a large man at the end of the bar abruptly stood and announced, “I’ll not be drinking to the likes of him.”

  The room suddenly went deathly still. Glasses lowered to wooden tables.

  “Now, Cadel,” Brady said cajolingly, “is that any way to be talking to a visitor?”

  “Did I ask him to come here?” His hands were curled at his sides. The meaty fists and the murder in his dark eyes reminded Quinn of a heavyweight boxer. “I don’t recall inviting any focking Yanks to Castlelough,” the man growled. He shot a lethal glare Quinn’s way. “Why don’t you bloody Americans stay home where you belong?”

  Quinn decided the question was a rhetorical one, designed to start a fight. And although he’d gotten into his share of bar brawls in his younger days, he had no intention of allowing himself to be baited now.

  When Quinn didn’t answer, his red-faced challenger turned back to Brady. “And aren’t you’re just as bad, Brady Joyce, letting this focking rich tourist into your house for the price of a few pounds? The bloody foreigners are overrunning this country, flashing their Yank money, buying up our land, destroying tradition. Ireland’s a beautiful woman. And some people—” his hard-as-stone eyes raked both the old man and Quinn “—are focking pimps.”

  That said, he tossed back the rest of his whiskey and strode from the pub, slamming the heavy oak door behind him. A thick silence lingered in his wake.

  “Now don’t be paying any mind to the likes of Cadel O’Sullivan,” Brady advised Quinn with unfailing cheer. “He’s been in a sour mood for most of his thirty-three years.”

  All the men in the room laughed on cue. The tension dissolved.

  A tall glass was placed in front of Quinn. Brady raised his own. “Slainte! To your health!” he translated helpfully.

  “Slainte,” Quinn returned the toast. As the hum of conversation resumed, he took a long swallow of the lacy-headed, velvety dark brew and felt the headache that had escalated during the brief confrontation with Cadel O’Sullivan begin to ease.

  Brady next launched into a long introduction of his drinking mate, Fergus, that went back several generations and included an ancestor alleged to be a silkie—one of the seal women of Irish myth. Quinn listened, surrendering to the alchemy of the Guinness.

  Although she was not a worrier by nature, Nora grew concerned when the evening passed with no sign of Quinn Gallagher or Brady. She wasn’t all that surprised about her father; after all, the pub didn’t close for another hour. But most of the Americans she’d met over the years appeared wed to the clock. It seemed unlikely that the writer would be so late without at least trying to notify her.

  Rory and Celia had gone to bed some time ago. Mary, who’d finally stopped her weeping, seemed to have fallen asleep, as well, and the faint sound of music drifting from John’s room suggested that her brother was studying, as he did late into every night.

  She’d finally taken the stew off the stove and put it in the refrigerator, and now she was pacing the floor of the small front parlor, stopping every so often to peer through the rain-streaked window at the well of darkness surrounding the farmhouse.

  “His plane landed hours ago,” she told Fionna after she rang the airport. “And Ellen down at Flannery House said that several of the Americans who arrived at Shannon on the same flight checked in this afternoon.”

  Fionna glanced up from her knitting. “Perhaps he went sight-seeing.”

  “Perhaps.” Nora frowned and wondered if she should put more peat on the fire or just go upstairs to bed. “But you’d think that he would notify us if he’d changed his plans.”

  The click of needles didn’t stop as the older woman continued working on the thick sweater destined to go to university in the fall with John. The sound provided an accompaniment to Waylon Jennings’s deep voice coming from the radio upstairs, the steady tick-tick-tick of the mantel clock as it counted off the minutes and hours, and the rat-a-tat-tat of wind-driven rain against the windowpanes.

  “The man is certainly starting off on the wrong foot,” Fionna allowed. Her expression turned thoughtful. “Do you think he could have had an accident on the roadway?
After all, Americans aren’t accustomed to driving on the left-hand side of the road, and what with all this rain…”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” A tiny shiver of icy fear skimmed up Nora’s spine. “I wonder if I should ring the hospital?”

  “Or the Garda, perhaps,” Fionna suggested.

  Although Nora was not at all eager to involve the police, she was headed for the phone again when she saw a flash of headlights through the leaded front window.

  “Finally!” She ran to open the front door. The porch light cast a yellow, rain-shimmered glow on the white car with black markings parked in the driveway. “It’s Sergeant O’Neill.”

  Fionna tossed her knitting aside and hurried to stand beside her. “I’m certain it’s nothing, darling. The sergeant probably found the American broken down alongside the roadway and—”

  “It’s Da.” Nora watched Brady stagger from the back seat of the police car.

  “Oh dear. It’s been a while since he drank too much to drive,” Fionna said with a sigh.

  “I hope he didn’t crash the car.” It would take more eggs than even her musically stimulated hens could lay to buy a new one.

  “Good evening to you, Fionna.” The sergeant touched his fingers to the brim of his dark hat. “Nora. My cousin Brendan was working the bar at The Rose and rang me up to say that Brady and his friend needed a ride home.”

  “His friend?”

  “The writer. As I told Brendan, I was happy to oblige. We wouldn’t want a famous Yank crashing his car his first day in the country, now, would we?”

  Nora watched as a second man climbed out of the back seat. Straightening his back, he began walking toward the house with the exaggerated care of someone who was drunk to the gills.

  “No,” she agreed faintly, “we certainly wouldn’t want that.” How in the name of heaven had the American and Brady met up? “Thank you, Gerry, for bringing them home.”

  “No problem, Nora.” Gerry O’Neill put the bags he’d fetched from the American’s car inside the open door. “I was just doing my job. Good night, all.” Touching his hat again, the policeman folded his tall lean body into the car, backed up and drove away into the night.