To come to a workhouse at all meant the end of something, it was clinging to a vain hope that a family might survive by surrendering everything that had kept them together—home, land, love, dignity and the simple autonomy of living together as a unit, as a family. Of course the crowded quarters of workhouses and the subsistence diet which was doled out each day meant that if fever took hold, it swept through the houses like wildfire. Smallpox, dysentery, typhus and the most dread disease of all—cholera. It had been estimated that ten times more people died of famine diseases than of actual starvation. It was likely that within these haunted stones hundreds, if not thousands, had died terrible deaths.
She shivered again, rubbing her arms as if she could take away the atmosphere of the building with the solidity of her own touch. “The ghosts are thick in here,” she said, “and not particularly welcoming.”
“Ye believe in ghosts?” he asked, giving her a hand to help her over a gap in the floor.
“Yes, even if it’s only a certain energy that’s left behind, we are always haunted by past events and people. Great tragedy resounds in the places it occurs, I believe, forever.
“An’ personal tragedy too?” he asked.
“I think that, too, resounds forever, only the place it echoes is in our own hearts.”
Noah had a strange intensity to him today and it burned in the midst of this sad, shadowed room. She was more afraid of what his intentions were in bringing her to the workhouse, than she was of the ghosts that moved against the vines and eyeless windows, sighing and waiting for something that would not return. She understood such ghosts, and the sort of longing that would hold you in place for hundreds of years. She did not want to understand what was causing the flame in Noah’s eyes. He opened his mouth and she willed him to stop, not to say whatever it was he had wanted to say all this day. Just then something moved in the ancient hearth that stood guardian along one wall, and a small puff of ash and smoke was released into the air. There had been a fire in the hearth recently.
Noah turned at once, his eyes taking in every corner of the room and searching the shadows behind her. She moved toward him out of instinct, even though he was likely more dangerous than any stranger who might have stopped here to light a fire and seek shelter for a night.
“The ashes don’t look old,” Noah said, his eyes narrowing as he looked down at the hearth. “Someone has been stayin’ in here.”
He knelt down and put his hand to the ashes, poking them around with one finger. A fine mist rose on the air, like a ghost had breathed out from the spent fire.
“It’s still warm,” he said, and now she knew she wasn’t mistaken about the upset in his voice. The question was why he should be upset about someone trespassing here? Unless this building had a larger meaning to him than just some abandoned point in the long road of Irish history.
She looked back across the long room to where the door yawned into darkness. Someone could be standing there right now and neither she nor Noah would be any the wiser. She wanted to leave. She wanted light and a warm fire and something hot to drink. She wanted Isabelle asking her to read the same story for the twelfth time, anything to banish the chill this place had put in her core.
She turned to say so to Noah, and knew with a sudden certainty that someone was standing in the shadows of the door, someone was watching the two of them. She turned back and walked slowly toward the top of the stairs, certain now that there were eyes in the dark which could see her as clearly as if she was outlined in ink against a white sheet. She didn’t feel fear, only a strange pull, as though she were a thread drawn fine through a needle. It was stupid, it could be a wild animal or a dog gone feral and here she was walking toward it, she might just as well bare her throat and invite it to taste. She stepped closer, a raw ache in her chest, a wave of something coming at her from the stairs as if longing had been transmuted into corporeal form, the force of it so great that it had crossed the divide between the realm of pure emotion and that of the physical. She had the odd sense that time didn’t exist here, at least not in the normal fashion of the workaday world.
“Pamela, where are ye goin’?” Noah’s voice broke the spell, shattering the strange web that had been woven around her. She felt both relief and anger in equal parts. She turned back, the strange sensation gone as abruptly as Noah’s words had been uttered.
“I just thought I heard something,” she said quickly. She felt oddly worried about the entity on the stairs. She didn’t want Noah to know someone had been there. “Probably just a fox,” she said, though she thought it had been a man standing there. A man swift and light on his feet and now gone. But she did not want Noah chasing after him for fear of what might happen. She wondered who he was—some homeless wanderer, a wraith that lived in the spaces in between this world and that? She had felt something strange, like a silent communication was taking place between them, but she did not know the words of it, could not translate what it was the silence was saying. She stood at the top of the stairs looking down. There was a strange scent, a little like something burning with just the ghost traces of it left upon the air. There was something both disturbing and familiar about it at the same time.
Noah went down the stairs first and she followed carefully in the spots he had used. She had the odd sense that something had been ruined for him up in that room, only she didn’t know what and was hesitant to ask him.
She was relieved to be out of the claustrophobia of the building, and took a long breath in. It was relief and regret both to leave the grounds, for she had the sensation that she had left something behind, something that belonged to her.
“Horse feathers,” she said out loud, as if uttering the word would dispel the disturbing enchantment which had settled around her like a coating on her skin.
“What?” Noah turned to look at her, a bit of ivy casting shadow over him, so that she could only see one side of his face.
“Nothing,” she said, flushing, “just talking to myself.”
She turned back and looked up at the windows just before they ducked under the last fall of ivy that would separate the workhouse from their view. For a moment she thought she saw movement there, on the second floor, where the coals of a recent fire had still been warm to the touch.
On the drive back, Noah slowed his truck some distance from her home, in an area she wasn’t familiar with. It was the sort of beautiful, bucolic countryside that could lure a person into thinking that this was, indeed, the land of myth and legend, the green land rich with fairies and tales and mysticism. It was the first great lie she told, this country, for beneath that lush green beauty was an unending wellspring of blood. Noah pulled to the side, in a lay-by cut into a hedgerow.
“Are ye in a rush to get back? I brought some lunch along an’ I know a nice spot to stop an’ sit a while.”
“All right,” she said, in no hurry to return to her columns of numbers and her empty house.
He pulled down a narrow track and they bumped along until the lane ended in a small meadow ringed in huge old oaks interspersed with ash. The meadow was green still, the dusty deeper green of late summer, but the trees knew it was truly early autumn, for the light and shade they cast held tinges of gold and crimson, as though those colors were the blood that ran beneath the green which still infused the skin of the leaves. A narrow stream, the color of peat in its depths, cut across the field. They sat down beside it with the water running dark and murmurous past their feet. Noah doled out the food—ham sandwiches and a flask of tea and some of Kate’s molasses cookies.
“Ye look well,” he said. “Yer summer did ye good.”
She nodded, and swallowed a bite of sandwich before replying. “It did. How about you, how was the summer for you?”
He laughed. “Oh, ye know, gun runnin’ an’ terrorizin’ the countryside is always good for relaxation.”
She laughed, slightly shocked that he was joking about it.
“Ye needn’t look like that, Miss Pamela. I
behaved myself all summer, spent a week in the Canary Islands, an’ worked the farm, didn’t even smuggle so much as a pig over the border.”
“Not even one pig?” she said teasingly.
“Not so much as a rasher of bacon,” he replied.
The day had turned hot and she skimmed off her shoes and socks and put her feet in the water. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so. Noah followed suit, and they sat quietly for a time soaking up the sun and pleasant chill of the water.
“I hope ye don’t mind if I make an observation,” he said suddenly.
“Go ahead.”
“Ye seem less anxious, less strained maybe, like ye crossed some divide these last few months an’ ye’re maybe more able to move forward now, even if ye will always want to look back as well.”
“I just came to a realization that Casey is not coming back to us. Logic told me it was the reality before, but I think my heart is starting to understand it as well.”
It was a very weak explanation compared to the reality of what she had felt that day on the sailboat with Jamie, like her very heart was being torn from her chest and she might actually die from the acceptance of what her mind knew and her heart could not bear.
“I’m sorry for that, Pamela. I know it’s a step ye were goin’ to have to take eventually but each step away from who ye were with him is a painful one.”
She nodded, unable to speak. It might be knowledge she now had, but it was still too hard to put words to it most days.
“Do ye wish me to keep lookin’ an’ askin’ questions then? Or would ye rather I stopped?”
“I wish I could give you a straight answer, Noah. Part of me feels like the hope I cling to isn’t healthy any more—not for me, not for the children. But the other part of me—that part will always want to know what happened to him, good or bad. I don’t want to come to the end of my life and still be haunted by not knowing his fate. So yes, if you ever find out I would want you to tell me. Even if it’s something you think I can’t bear, I still want to know.”
“Aye,” he said. “I thought ye might feel so.”
“Now it’s my turn to ask you something.”
He smiled. “Ah, ye’re scarin’ me now, but ask away.”
“How did you get started down the path that landed you where you are now?”
“D’ye mean bein’ the godfather of the South Armagh IRA?” he asked drily.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
He shrugged. “I was young, really young when the farm landed on me with my mam an’ da’ dyin’ within months of each other. I don’t know what ye know of Kate an’ my lives at that time, but it wasn’t easy for us an’ suddenly there I was responsible for the land an’ my sister’s survival.”
Kate’s words from long ago echoed in her mind. ‘After we lost our entire family he changed, he became someone I didn’t always recognize, someone who frightened me.’
“I was angry for a long time, so angry that there were times I thought I’d explode with it. I was like a bomb waitin’ to go off an’ just lookin’ for the opportunity to explode in a very bad way. Fortunately, there was a man in my life who saw that an’ taught me how to funnel it properly, how to channel all that energy into a long game.”
“And is that what it is, a long game?” she asked.
He turned to look at her, shading his eyes with his hand. “Aye, a long war, a long game, a long campaign. Don’t mistake my wordin’ to mean that I take it anythin’ less than deadly serious.”
“Noah, I think I know you better than that by now. I wouldn’t underestimate your dedication to your cause or country. Who was the man?”
“Mickey Devine,” he said. She knew the name, Mickey Devine had been legendary as much for his ruthless leadership as for his cold-blooded ability to offer up his own men when the cause demanded blood sacrifice as its due. “He passed the command down to me when he got lung cancer. He was an honest man, and he saw me for what I was, an’ didn’t hate me for it.”
“You sound like that surprised you,” she said quietly, aware that some small crack had opened in the ground of their friendship, and that the narrow chasm of it was both dark and alluring at the same time.
“It did. I had little experience of anythin’ else to that point in my life. Other than Kate, but she was my wee sister an’ there were times I thought she loved me out of duty an’ necessity, not just for myself.”
“She understands you far better than you might believe, Noah. She does love you for yourself.”
“I know that now, but a young man can be short-sighted about others at times.” He cleared his throat as if he was slightly uncomfortable. “I think that about you, that ye like me for myself an’ not only what I might do for ye.”
“I do,” she said.
They sat quietly for a bit after that, watching the sunlight play through the trees and onto the surface of the stream, dancing in diamond bits and then skittering away, much like the summer that was now past. The water held a cold in its deeps which heralded the turn of the planet. Waterweed, soft as fairy down, tickled the soles of her feet and she felt slightly drowsy. The strange atmosphere of the workhouse had washed off her, though the yearning she’d felt so strongly there still ached a little in her chest. It occurred to her that she hadn’t taken so much as a single picture. She thought she might like to go back and photograph the place properly, if she could find the courage to do so on her own.
She looked over at Noah. He was in profile to her, his dark hair flickering with notes of red in the sunlight, lean face relaxed. A smile played about his mouth and he seemed rather lighthearted suddenly with no trace of the strange intensity that had fairly crackled off him in the workhouse.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said. She was curious as to what had him looking so pleased.
He smiled and flicked a droplet of water in her direction. “It’s only that it’s pleasant, bein’ here with ye. I missed yer company,” he said, “an’ don’t think that doesn’t surprise me.”
She laughed. “I’m not sure how to take that, Mr. Murray, but I missed your company, too.”
It was true, she had. There was a simplicity to being friends with this man which was both reassuring and easy.
“I didn’t know that I’d see ye again once ye came back from Maine.”
She looked at him, surprised. “Whyever not?”
He gave her one of his extremely candid looks and said, “Because, I expected that ye might find somethin’ while ye were gone that would make our relationship unnecessary.”
“And what would that be exactly?” she asked, voice tart.
“Only that I thought perhaps ye may have found yerself closer with Mr. Kirkpatrick, an’ I daresay the man doesn’t like my relationship with ye.”
“He doesn’t,” she said bluntly, “but I am in charge of making my own decisions about just whom I associate with.”
“Aye, I suppose that’s true enough. I’ve rarely met such a willful woman.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Really? I’ve met more than a few Irish women and I know how feisty most of them are.”
Noah gave her a wry look. “Ye’re quiet about it, Pamela, but ye’re incredibly headstrong. Yer husband was clearly a man of some fortitude.”
“Casey appreciated a strong woman, though he often didn’t appreciate what he viewed as my ‘fockin’ reckless disregard for the well-being of my own neck,’ or words to that general effect.”
Noah laughed and then, like quicksilver on a flat surface, his mood changed direction again.
“What are we exactly, Pamela?”
The question surprised her a little, though Noah seemed to be in an odd mood today.
“Friends, I would have thought. Aren’t we?”
“Aye, we are,” he said, “but will that serve ye well enough when I don’t have anything to offer ye?”
“I don’t expect anything from you other than your friendship,” she said.
“Don’t ye? Do
ye not want any sort of protection anymore?”
She hesitated before she gave him an answer. The truth was she was still afraid, and with good reason. There had been two letters waiting for her upon her arrival home. They were not any kinder than the several that had preceded them. In fact, she was worried that she was dealing with someone who was mentally unstable to a terrifying degree. But did she have the right to ask this man for anything more? He had killed on her behalf already. He had told her at their first meeting there would be an expectation of a return for whatever he did for her. She wasn’t naïve or vain enough to believe that he would continue protecting her without her giving him something back.
“I want to be fair, Noah,” she said at last. “I don’t take for granted all that you’ve done for me these last two years. Would I like your protection? If I’m being totally honest, yes, I would. Too much has happened in our little corner of the world, and most of it has been random. There’s no way to anticipate or prevent such a thing happening to me and my children. I have been able to sleep at night and occasionally relax my own vigilance because of you. But what can I do in return? You’ve only put men up at my place a few times and that hardly seems like a fair exchange.”
“Is it that ye don’t want to be indebted to me, an’ so ye feel ye must always balance the scales between us?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head. “Noah, if I were worried about that, I would have ended our arrangement long ago. It’s only that I feel the parameters of my life have shifted a little, and I want to be certain you don’t feel the account between us is out of balance.”
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 75