Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  The Duke took a swig of port and wiped his fingers with a linen napkin.

  “And so you think Derry was merely the opening shot in a larger battle?”

  “Derry opened the ground up a crack and the Nationalists are seeing light for the first time in decades they aren’t going to allow anyone to snuff it out.”

  “And our more radical friends?”

  “Quiet, too quiet really,” Jamie idly toyed with a crystal ballerina he’d picked up, “it’s never a good sign when an underground organization isn’t making the slightest peep of protest.”

  “Larger things on their collective mind, perhaps?” The Duke tried to catch Jamie’s eyes and failed. “What’s bothering you, Jamie?”

  Jamie carefully replaced the little crystal dancer on her table before answering. “Percy surely you recognized the name of the young man Pamela is bringing to you.”

  “Yes, I did see the papers after that debacle. Is he our worry?”

  “No, he’s only getting his political feet wet and is for all his background and neighborhood a bit of an innocent. It’s his brother.”

  “Inheritor of the family legacy is he?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And you’re worried about her? I take it it’s the brother she shares a mattress with and not the pretty poster boy for the nationalist left?”

  “I think he’s planning to split the army.”

  “What?” The Duke leaned forward, as if he couldn’t believe his own words. “That’s insanity.”

  “I don’t suppose he sees it in quite that light. The army has stagnated, it needs change, schism is change. Dublin doesn’t understand Belfast and vice versa. He’s a man of action, not words. All the speeches and marches may only be a precursor of what they’ve always been in this country.”

  “Prologue to the gun and requiem to any real change.” The Duke eyed his guest shrewdly, “How’d you come across this tidbit? Surely she’s not spying for you?”

  “No, she’s not.” Jamie smiled deprecatingly, “I hear things, acuity of a bat, my curse and not your problem.”

  “Christ you are slippery,” the Duke said admiringly, “raised by Gypsies and Jesuits what else can one expect though? Tell me are you so intent on protecting her that you’d allow her to spy on yourself?”

  “No,” Jamie shook his head wearily, “it’s not her. I’m not quite so blinded by her charms as to not consider that as a possibility, but no Percy, I’ve not let the viper in through an open door.”

  “You do know who she is though, don’t you?”

  “My memory, despite occasionally bearing a resemblance to Swiss cheese, does have its solid spaces. Yes,” Jamie said softly, “I do know who she is.”

  “And yet you let her think you don’t remember, not terribly flattering to her,” the Duke said, regarding him with an eye that, despite the late hour, was sharp and shrewd.

  “I imagine if and when she’s ready to tell me she will, and if not perhaps there are reasons it’s better she doesn’t.” His words were said with a polite finality, indicating that this topic, by his measure, was exhausted.

  “And so we come to the real viper. What did you make of your dinner guest?”

  “He’s playing his hand very close to his chest.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing, I can’t make head nor tail of his animosity towards me.”

  “And who is in whose little orange pocket?”

  “I don’t think the Reverend takes well to confined spaces.”

  “So he’s the puppetmaster?”

  “And so skilled at it that not a one knows when he’s pulling the strings.”

  “He’s a real danger Jamie; you need to take care for yourself.”

  “I am,” Jamie said thinly, looking suddenly to the Duke’s acute gaze like a prince caught within the fired walls of his own castle.

  “You shouldn’t have chased her away Jamie, she’s good for you.”

  “Have we come so soon to the fatherly advice portion of the program?”

  “Your tongue doesn’t fool me the way it does most, James. You always did like to create difficulty where there wasn’t any though. Do you really think you can keep her safe at arm’s length?”

  “Safe from myself at least,” Jamie rose, an elegant blackbound courtier, face impassive.

  “One night in her bed boy would do you more good than a year’s worth of those pills you take, or are you taking them?”

  “I’m not in any danger of being locked up in a hospital,” Jamie said eliciting a stern look from the Duke. “I take them with my oats and evasion in the morning and my whiskey at night.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I do my best.” Jamie smiled, a flash of white amidst the gold and green of his countenance.

  “So, in summation, we are wedged rather tightly between the green of Scylla and the orange of Charbydis, with little room to breathe and even less to maneuver.”

  Jamie turned, firelight laying stars down the length of his lashes, slender costly form limned in dying embers. “Oh Percy, there’s always a backdoor if you know where to look, and I,” he winked and reached for the window latch, “do.”

  A breath of frosted air, a light displacement of currents and the tempest, with holy goats swirling, was gone.

  The Duke sighed and returned to his chicken.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Under Ben Bulben

  It was a Saturday, early winter bestowing its first lingering kiss hard on the trees and fields, when Casey woke Pamela in the dark hours in a manner enjoyed by both, then told her, as she snuggled back into the blankets, that it was time to get up.

  “Go away,” she said, pulling the blankets up over her head, “it can’t be more than five o’clock.”

  “Come on,” he threw the blankets back, “there’s someone I’m takin’ ye to meet today.”

  “At this unholy hour,” she said, swinging her legs over the bed, irritated at his alertness regardless where the hands of the clock were pointing.

  “Aye it’s a bit of a drive, an’ then it’s a matter of finding him as well.”

  “Who,” she paused to yawn and stretch, “are you taking me to see? And where did you get a car?”

  “Borrowed the car off Devlin an’ as for who I’m takin’ ye to see ye’ll see when we get there,” was his unenlightening response.

  They took the Antrim Coast Road, partnered on one side by green fields swiftly browning and on the other by a gunmetal gray sea, surging with bearded breakers over rocks, reflecting the pale sky imperfectly. They had breakfast in a small seaside village, a postcard painting silent in the dying of the year. Lobster pots lay like abandoned toys in the rocky harbor, the smell of fish and salt blending with the scent of frying eggs and sausage.

  After breakfast, they cut across country, through Ballymena, outskirting some towns, past Omagh, through Enniskillen, veering upcountry along Lough Erne, through Ballyshannon, down the high streets of tiny, depressed towns with poetic names forgotten moments later. She fell asleep in the early afternoon and was only awakened by the car coming to a soft halt some time later.

  “Where are we?” she asked groggily, peering through blurred eyes at what appeared to be miles of sand and endless ocean.

  “Donegal Bay,” Casey said, smiling softly as he smoothed her hair away from her face. “Come on,” he said and slid easily out of the car, tilting his face into the wind as he stood.

  “Daddy used to bring us here occasionally, to blow the city stink off he said.”

  “I’m sorry he’s gone,” she said, sliding naturally under the shelter of his arm, warming herself against his side. “I would have liked to have known him.”

  Casey didn’t answer at once but kissed the top of her head and rubbed his cheek in her hair. “He would have liked t
o have known ye as well, Jewel. He’d likely have warned ye off me as quick as he met ye.”

  “I wouldn’t have listened, not even to him.”

  Casey sighed, wrapping both arms around her, “Christ ye scare me when ye talk like that. I’m so afraid of hurtin’ ye an’ yet I’d rather die than do so.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you,” she said, laying her ear against his chest and listening to the rhythmic thumping.

  “I’d be lying if I said ye hadn’t, when ye went away in the summer I thought it likely ye’d never come back or if ye did it would be with himself. An’ the worst bit was I couldn’t have blamed ye a bit. The scales were weighted heavily in his favor.”

  “He was just a childhood dream, this light that got me through a lot of dark days. But I never factored in that he was a man, not some prince in a fairytale who was going to rescue me. This here, you and me, it’s real and it’s what I want.”

  “I can’t help but feel that I stole you away. It’s as if I stepped into a story where I had no part an’ grabbed the princess before the prince had time to make up his mind.”

  “You didn’t steal me I came of my own accord.”

  He looked down to where their hands were clasped, raised one of hers to his mouth and kissed it gently. “I cannot offer ye much, an’ ye know there are many reasons why ye should leave an’ not so many to stay.”

  “You are more than enough, Casey,” she said and kissed the hand that held her own. “Now who is this mysterious person you’ve brought me to meet?”

  “It’s my godfather but I’ll not be sure of his whereabouts until later this evening. He’s a man of some mystery but there are things about him that can be counted on with dead certainty.”

  “Such as?”

  “He’ll be tippin’ his elbow at Davy O’Brien’s pub by seven o’clock, if it were summer the time’d be somewhat more flexible but as it’s not he’ll be there on the dot of seven.”

  “Your godfather? I’m not certain I’m prepared for that after meeting your uncle.”

  “Devlin an’ Dezzy are worlds apart, ye’ve naught to worry about.” He squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “In the meantime there’s something I want to show ye.”

  “Is there indeed?” she said raising her eyebrows and smiling.

  “Ye’ve a dirty mind,” he grinned, “don’t ever lose it. However much the idea appeals though we’re on a public strand an’ there’s many windows overlookin’ it. I’ve no desire to have my hind-end on display for half the town.”

  “Pity,” she sighed, “it’s such a nice hind end.”

  “Come on with ye woman before ye have us both in the clink for indecency.”

  They headed north along the strand, whippets of foam rushing at their heels. Clambered up black rock, slick and rank with seaweed to emerge on a barren headland buffeted by autumn winds off the Atlantic.

  “This way,” Casey said and led her along a dirt road that ran parallel to the cliff’s edge. It ran for a goodly length and then abruptly petered out into a barbed wire fence. Several black-faced sheep peered curiously through the wire at them.

  “That’s a new addition,” Casey stopped and stared at the fence. “There used to be a path down to the second strand through here,” he shrugged, “I suppose we’ll have to take the shortcut.”

  “The shortcut?” Pamela eyed the narrow footpath that hugged precipitously close to the edge of the cliff with some trepidation.

  “Aye, wind’s strong enough to keep us upright,” Casey said and set off along the path, with an apparent lack of worry.

  The cliff edge was positively battered, with the wind whipping in at an increasingly alarming rate, Pamela could hardly see for hair blowing across her face and into her eyes. She followed nevertheless in Casey’s sure footsteps. Until they came to a deep gouge in the cliff head, a round hole whose maw ended some one hundred feet below in a throat of churning, freezing water.

  “What now?” she said not relishing the thought of the walk back nor the walk forward.

  “Fairy well,” he said mystifyingly.

  “Fairy well?”

  “Aye it’s what these holes are called, as a person could drop through them straight into another world.”

  “Yes, it’s called the grave,” she retorted, “only the Irish would call a suicidal opening in the earth a fairy well. We’ll have to turn back, there’s no way to skirt it.”

  “No need to skirt it,” he said and without so much as a running start, he leaped it in one easy, fluid jump. On the other side he held out his hands, nodding reassuringly to her.

  “Are you insane?” she yelled straining to be heard over the wind.

  “Completely,” he yelled back, “now jump.”

  She eyed the hole, measured it at around four feet across and knew there was no way on earth she could clear it.

  She met Casey’s encouraging look across the abyss and shook her head. “I can’t,” she said gripped suddenly by a paralyzing fear.

  “Ye can, Jewel, just trust me, I’d never let ye fall.”

  It seemed suddenly, standing here in freezing cold wind, a deathly whirlpool swirling beneath her feet, that the leap he was asking her to make was one of faith and that to walk from the brink now would be to irreparably damage the fragile fabric of what they were weaving together.

  She uttered a silent, terse prayer that consisted mostly of the words ‘please’ and ‘God’ and jumped. Beneath her, a horrible yawn of nothingness opened and the sense of falling a horrible distance to that child’s nightmare place of no bottom and then, as promised, he caught her.

  She balled his shirt front into her fists, sinking her face gratefully into his scent, letting go of a pent up exhalation.

  “There’s nothing to fear,” he said, “I said I wouldn’t let ye fall an’ I never will.”

  She nodded, wondering if the tears prickling her eyes and nose were those of relief or worry.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said shakily, “you hate horses, avoid the ocean and yet you think nothing of leaping out into space with nothing to catch you.” And then, quite unexpectedly she burst into noisy sobs, muffled by the wind and Casey’s proximity.

  “Shh, darlin’ it’s alright, yer safe.”

  “But are you, Casey?” she asked, hands still crushing the cloth of his shirt.

  “As safe as any man who leaves his bed every mornin’ and ventures out into this world. There are no guarantees in this life for any of us; we can only live the days as they come, moment by moment.”

  She tilted her head back, tears drying as the wind flew against them.

  Casey cradled one large hand against her cheek, sheltering her face.

  “I feel safe when I hold ye, I’m safe in the night when ye take me inside an’ the world just goes away, that’s as safe as I’ve ever known life to be. I can’t imagine askin’ God to do any better than that.”

  “I don’t see that God has much to do with what happens in our bed.”

  “Oh darlin’,” Casey smiled, “God has everything to do with that.”

  He kissed the last of the tears from her face, the salt absorbing into his own skin, the liquid evaporating to the elements and mutual warmth.

  “Come on,” he pulled her up and away from the fairy well, her legs still shaking with fear, “it’s goin’ to rain somethin’ fearful or I miss my guess. We’d best find shelter quick-like.”

  The wind had picked up considerably, the grass blowing horizontal to the ground and a great black mass of cloud scudding ominously in from the western sky. Below on the wide arcing beach with its coral- colored sand she saw the splintered remains of an old boat, washed up without passengers, half-drowned and tossed on lichen covered rocks, waiting for the next tide to regain some vestige of its former buoyancy. Caught between worlds, a thing of neither water nor land. She
felt a pang of sympathy for it as she always had for things neither alive nor dead but only caught, defenseless, upon the edge of two separately spinning planes.

  “This way,” Casey said some moments later. At first it appeared that they hung over yet another of the deadly holes that seemed to fester the cliff head. But leaning down as the first large drops of rain hit them, she saw that though the ground did indeed give way to the sea, there was a set of stairs, carved by some fickle whim of nature into the rock. Steep, and at present slick with spray, nevertheless they looked navigable. Casey’s black curls had already disappeared beneath the grass and skeletal remains of sea pinks that hung round about the rim’s opening.

  It was a treacherous climb, Pamela had to stop several times to take a breath and assure herself of her footing. Casey stayed only a few feet below her, guiding her by a light touch on her ankles to the next foothold. By the time they made bottom her feet ached as did the back of her calves and thighs. They were both sunk into sand over their feet and even now the ocean was rushing towards them, breaking hard against the shoreline rocks and flurrying onwards.

  “This way,” Casey pointed behind her and she turned to find an opening in the cliff. He had to turn sideways to slide through and even she had to hunch over, tilting her shoulders at an awkward angle.

  She felt his hand touch her arm to guide her into a darkness so complete that it felt like veiling encasing her skin.

  “Another few feet,” she heard him mutter to himself as if he wasn’t quite certain about the distance. Her entire body was prickling with the lack of light, small catpaws of panic dancing down her spine. In the heavy atmosphere, she could feel Casey disappear from in front of her as though he’d dropped soundlessly into a fissure in the earth. But just as quickly his hands reached back to guide her into the opening.

  She stumbled onto her feet, it was still impossible to see but there was a sense of a vast space around them. The air was dry and surprisingly warm. She felt the tension begin to leak out of her spine.