by Susan Wiggs
“Then tell her the truth.”
“I can’t. A person’s life is at stake. My own and Caitlin’s, of course, but there is a third innocent who will be hurt if I tell all to Caitlin. To anyone.” He gazed out at the churning sea, the waves slapping down into shadowy troughs. “The truth would force her to make difficult choices. Besides, she’ll know soon enough.”
“Would you be after speaking of another woman?” Father Tully demanded, his thick eyebrows beetling.
“No! I swear before God, it’s not that.”
“Let no secrets come between you and your wife. Secrets can kill a marriage quicker than poison.”
Wesley studied the priest’s drawn and weary face. He recognized the look of troubled sympathy, for he, too, had borne the burden of confession. Putting a hand on Father Tully’s shoulder, he said, “When we make port, will you use Hammersmith’s safe conduct to return to Clonmuir?”
Father Tully smiled wistfully. “Ah, and isn’t it Clonmuir that brings my soul close to heaven?”
“It’s dangerous for you there. Hammersmith fears what I know about his slave trade and the taking of priests. He’ll stay away from Clonmuir for now, but he’s clever. Don’t gamble your safety.”
Father Tully combed his fingers through his black hair. “A priest goes where he’s needed.”
Wesley envied him at that moment, envied the certainty of his calling, the knowing that he had chosen the right path. For Wesley, the way was marked with torn loyalties, self-doubt, and now the agony of frustrated love.
* * *
“You made your confession today, didn’t you?” Wesley asked that night as he entered their quarters.
Caitlin bit her lip. “Father Tully abides by the seal of confession. Who told you?”
“I made a guess.”
“Guess yourself to Whitehall for all I care.” She chewed halfheartedly on a ship’s biscuit.
“I guessed when I went to make a confession of my own,” he added.
Caitlin inhaled a crumb. Clearing her throat with difficulty, she said, “I’m sure you bent his ear for hours, then, for you’re a black-hearted sinner.”
“I’m also your husband. Come here.”
“No.”
He sighed. “We wasted hours in argument last night when we could have been making love. Let’s not repeat that mistake tonight, or ever again.”
“Not make love ever again?” She dusted the crumbs from her skirt. “I agree completely.”
“I was speaking of arguing.”
“I was speaking of lovemaking.”
“Good. Let’s carry on with that topic.” Evening light streaming through the stern windows touched his eyes, transforming the gray-green tint to the diffuse color of magic. Framed by burnished hair, the bruise on his jaw contrasted with the healthy color of his face.
“How can you deny our passion,” he asked, propping his shoulder against the alcove support, “when I can look at your lovely face and see the yearning there?”
Resisting the urge to make a sign against enchantment, she planted her hands on her hips. “It’s Clonmuir that I yearn for, not you. You’ve forced me to marry you. The union has been consummated. What more do you want from me?”
“I want you as I had you last night, full of a woman’s desires, your face a picture of unguarded surprise and delight.” He reached up with his hand and made a lazy trail down the post with his fingers. The simple gesture raised a havoc of disquieting emotions.
She tried to block out Wesley’s words, but her heart listened as he went on, “I want you in every way a man can want a woman, and in ways we’ve yet to invent. Every single day and night. Now, come here.”
“No.”
“I’ll give you a son for Clonmuir.”
The suggestion shot her through with fear and longing. He stepped toward her. Only pride kept her from fleeing toward the door. “I want no sons from you,” she stated.
“I care for you.’
“Like a drover cares for a prize pig.”
He reached out, fingered a curl that had strayed from her braid. “Don’t you remember the passion? Don’t you remember the sweetness?”
She did, and too well. His nearness scattered her thoughts. Yet at the same time she saw that he, too, seemed discomfited, and the fact somehow endeared him to her.
“You’re trembling,” she said.
“You make me feel too much. I’m not used to this.”
“Then don’t.” She hated herself for being curious about him, for wondering about every aspect of his life and his past.
Taking her in his arms, he kissed her slowly, softly, drawing away her protests as a splinter is drawn from flesh. She leaned into him, loving the security of his arms around her, savoring the taste of him and marveling, as she had the night before, at the uncanny harmony of their bodies. He had turned her world upside down. He had taken her to heaven and to hell. And she would not have traded a moment of it for the very surety of her soul. God, if only he would disavow Cromwell, she would have a name for the things she felt when he kissed her like this. She would call it happiness.
He lifted his mouth from hers. “Caitlin.”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
Not now, she wanted to scream at him. How can I believe you now? She stepped back, shaking her head slowly. “Don’t say those words to me. I can never love the man you are.”
His face paled, but she forced herself to continue. “I have only contempt for a man who does Cromwell’s bidding. Don’t you understand, being married to you changes nothing! It’s Alonso I love!”
He let go of her as if she had burned him. He stepped back, and she saw that his face had changed into a visage she had never seen before. Agony, devastation, and finally rage contorted his features. With a jolt of fear, she realized that this was the first time she had seen him truly angry. At her.
“Very well.” His voice thrummed with carefully controlled fury. “So long as you deny what we are to one another, so long as you cling to dreams of your Spanish hero, I will leave you alone.”
She should have felt relieved. She tried very hard. All she felt was a black emptiness. “I think it’s for the best.”
He lifted his hand, stopped himself before touching her. “One day you’ll find the truth in your heart. And then you must come to me, for I won’t reach out again.”
London, June 1658
Caitlin craned her neck to peer out from beneath the canopy of the river barge. “I’ve never seen a paved street before. Even Galway doesn’t have a paved street.”
“Do you like it?” Wesley asked.
“Sure it seems a lot of trouble.”
“The paving’s necessary. The traffic would turn the streets into rivers of mud.” Wesley settled back, trying to appear composed. The ever-present MacKenzie rode astern with the waterman. Caitlin perched on the edge of her seat like a child on her first trip to a fair. The last thing Wesley had expected after their quarrel was that they would become friends. But it had happened. Perhaps it was better this way. Safe. Reasonably comfortable so long as he kept her at arm’s length.
“What building is that?” She pointed to the structure that shadowed St. Katherine’s Street along the wharf.
The thin slits of windows squinted menacingly from towers and turrets. The thick walls of pale limestone and hard, coarse ragstone brought on a rush of memories that nearly made him ill. “It’s the Tower of London,” he said.
Her interest sharpened. “Is it, then? You mean where the poor princes were murdered? Sure and didn’t Silken Thomas, our own Irish hero, wait out his last days there.”
“Indeed.”
“What’s it like, I wonder.”
“Hell on earth.” Wesley averted his glance to the river, where lighters vied for position along the quays. “There are holes called oubliettes so cramped that a man can neither stand nor lie down.”
Hearing the pain in his voice, Caitlin studied his pale face, his clammy
hands. “How do you know this?”
“I was there.”
“Visiting prisoners?”
“Caitlin, I was a prisoner.”
A cold wind of shock swept over her. “You were?”
“Aye.”
“Did they put you in an oubliette?”
“Aye.”
She remembered the scars that laced his back and shoulders, the horror that, in rare unguarded moments, haunted his eyes. He had suffered for the sake of his faith, probably more severely than he had ever told her.
She laid her hand on his. Since they had come to an accord regarding intimacy—or the lack of it—she was more comfortable touching him. “You should have told me before.”
He stared at her hand. “Don’t touch me unless you mean it.”
She hesitated, liking the rough texture of his hand beneath hers, yet knowing where it would lead if she refused to obey. She drew back her hand. “I wish you’d tell me, too, how a Catholic came to be an agent of the devil Cromwell.”
He leaned his head against the leather cushion. “Cromwell and I have been acquainted seven years. Since Worcester.”
“Did you fight with the royalists there?”
He nodded. “When we realized the battle was lost, I was with those who helped King Charles escape. We spent a long day in an oak tree in Boscobel wood. When the searchers drew close, I gave myself up as a decoy. King Charles escaped, and so did I, eventually. I went to the seminary at Douai.” He gave her a sideways glance. “Am I boring you yet?”
“If you were, I’d be after telling you directly.”
A smile pulled at one side of his mouth. “I was sent back to England. I acted as both priest and royalist messenger, but by that time I was neither. I didn’t know what I was. When the priest catchers finally took me, I was sentenced to die. But Cromwell’s man, Thurloe, stopped the execution.”
Gripping her knees, she leaned forward. “Why?”
“Because he realized I was the man Cromwell had been seeking for seven years.”
“How did he know it was you?”
To her amazement, a blush crept up to the tips of his ears. “It was the women who gave me away.”
“What?”
“The women.” He waved his hand in impatience. “At my execution. Some of them recognized me, by sight or reputation.”
Caitlin blinked, unable to envision the scene. “So why did Cromwell spare you?”
“He needed my skills as a thief taker.”
She braced her hands on the arms of the seat. “You were a thief taker, then a cavalier, then a novice to the priesthood?”
“Aye.”
“That’s more careers than most men pursue in one lifetime.”
He stared down at his hands, flexing his fingers. “I was...searching. Trying to find my place in the world.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And you found it with Cromwell, who spared a thief taker from the gallows to take me.”
“Aye.”
As evening gathered in the last rays of the sunset, the barge bumped to a halt at Whitehall Steps. A jumble of boxy buildings loomed over the water’s edge. Torches burned on each side of a doorway, and a footman came to help them disembark.
“Evenin’, gov’nor,” said the footman. “Pleasant voyage, was it?” He gaped at Caitlin in her soft, loose tunic. “Brought along a bit o’ the Irish, did you, sir?” The footman chuckled. “Where’s ’er leash, eh?”
“Around your gullet if you don’t shut that great trap,” Caitlin retorted.
His face as dark as a thundercloud, Wesley stepped from the barge. His booted foot landed squarely on the man’s instep.
“Ouch! ’Ave a care there, sir!”
“So sorry,” Wesley murmured. Reaching down, he took Caitlin’s hand and helped her to the stone quay.
She ignored the hapless footman. MacKenzie led the way along a passageway past the chapel and the Great Hall, across the broad courtyard and under the palace gate, and finally into the Outer Chamber, teeming with protectoral officials, dark-clad clerics, and foreign dignitaries. She fought an urge to hold onto Wesley’s arm for support. At the same time, her eyes combed the crowd. Possibly, just possibly...
“He wouldn’t be here,” Wesley muttered under his breath. “Your grandee wouldn’t mingle with commoners.”
Caitlin flushed, wondering at the ease with which he read her thoughts. She gave her attention to the Great Chamber and then the Presence Chamber. Opulence shimmered in the rooms, dripped from the crown of candles suspended by a chain from the ceiling, and glowed in the sober portraits that lined the walls.
Wesley’s gaze searched the busy room even more desperately than hers had. Whom did he seek? she wondered. A former lady love? For the first time, it struck her that she still knew little of his past, nothing of the people he had known.
“The Lord Protector is with his daughter Bettie, the Lady Claypole, at Hampton Court.” A liveried man hurried forward, extending his hand to Wesley. “He will be back within the week.”
Wesley swore under his breath.
MacKenzie blew the red bulb of his nose. “The puir lady’s still ailin’, is she?”
The messenger lowered his eyes. “Lost her baby son a fortnight ago. Oliver, he was called, after his grandsire.”
Caitlin pressed her lips together. She did not want to think of Cromwell as human, a grandfather grieving with his daughter over a baby’s death.
The official turned to Wesley. “You’re guests of the Protectorate.”
Two soldiers marched forward, swords slapping against their blousy trousers.
“We’re not guests at all,” she snapped, her heart catapulting to her throat. “We’re prisoners.”
* * *
For three days, Caitlin lived alone in guarded luxury. A snap of her fingers brought hot water for a bath. A nod of her head summoned a houseboy with firewood. The amount she ate at a single meal would have fed Mrs. Boyle and her entire brood.
Wesley sent a mercer, a clothier and a seamstress. Simply to escape the stultifying boredom, Caitlin submitted to their measuring and pin sticking.
Her heart ached with loneliness as she gazed out a high window at the cold stone buildings that housed the privy apartments of the Protectorate. She longed for the wild splendor of Connemara, the sharp smell of the sea in the summer air. She missed the evenings in the hall, listening to Magheen playing the harp or Tom Gandy spinning hero tales that grew more and more improbable with each cup of smoky, rye-flavored poteen.
And finally, she admitted to herself that she missed Wesley.
He had banished her from his heart because she would not yield her own to him.
He spent his days closed in a library, a room devoted entirely to books. He met daily with protectoral officials. Sometimes she heard the sound of hearty laughter and thought bitterly that they must consider it a grand joke that Wesley had taken an Irish bride. Other times she heard voices raised in anger and wondered if they would have her head, after all.
On the fourth day, the dressmaker arrived with her trunks and assistants. “The master wants you gowned straightaway.”
A frisson of fear sneaked down Caitlin’s spine. The summons could mean that Cromwell had arrived from Hampton Court. “I dislike these fashions.”
“Ladies of quality adore my designs.”
“As a game hen adores being trussed for the roasting spit,” Caitlin retorted, but she gave in. The sooner Wesley dragged her before Cromwell, the sooner she could go back to Clonmuir and be done with this farce. Besides, the rebel in her wanted to meet Cromwell, wanted to face the devil who murdered Irish babies because, as he put it, “Nits make lice.” She wanted to tell the Lord Protector of England to go to hell.
An hour later, Caitlin studied her wavy image in a tall standing mirror. Wicker farthingale hoops shaped an overskirt of emerald velvet, parted in the center to reveal a silk petticoat. Satin slippers with chunky high heels peeped from beneath the hem. Glittering with gold thread, t
he bone-stiffened bodice rose in a V from waist to shoulders. The dresser had swept her hair into a loose braid and pinned it up with shell combs.
What a stranger she looked. A Sassenach stranger.
A footman came to accompany her down the grand staircase to the broad foyer. Wesley stood at the bottom.
He, too, looked the stranger, dressed in loose black trousers cinched at the waist by his ornate belt, and cuffed knee boots polished to a high sheen. A flowing black cloak was drawn back to reveal a dress sword at his hip. A hat with the brim turned up jauntily on one side shadowed his face.
She caught her breath. Were she an artist, she would yearn to capture the picture he made—his easy pose, his insouciant grin and the riveting masculinity that emanated from him. Were she a poet, she would try to shape his appeal in words—the blithe charm on the surface, the undercurrent of pain and regret in his eyes, the nearly invisible world-weary lines about his smiling mouth.
She must be losing her mind. They were enemies. Her goal was to be rid of him and find Alonso, whose memory became more distant each day she spent with Wesley.
“I’m ready,” she stated.
He used one finger to tip back the brim of his hat. His expression changed from astonishment to delight, then finally to a frank lust that nearly propelled her into his arms.
Instead she fixed him with a frosty stare, swept out the door, and marched across the green quadrangle with no notion of where she was going. Wesley’s long, swift strides quickly brought him to her side. “You didn’t give me a chance to tell you how beautiful you look.”
She smoothed her hands over her skirts. “It’s the dress that’s beautiful, by English standards. Devil admire me, but I’m the same as I’ve always been.”
He reached across and cupped her face gently in his hands. “What you are, Cait, and what you have always been, is beautiful.” Leaning down, he kissed her, his lips lingering over hers until she clutched at him. He pulled back, a grin playing about his lips. “I’ve missed you, too,” he said. “But when you come back to me, I want all of you.”
“Forever is a long time.”
“I invited you to dine with me each evening. Why did you refuse?”
“I don’t like being summoned. Besides, England puts a great weariness upon me, and the food disagrees with me.”