by Nora Roberts
To celebrate she put on the kettle for tea and treated herself to a handful of cookies from the tin.
The cottage was tidy. Her cottage was tidy, she corrected. Everything was in place, the laundry was going so . . . Now there was no excuse not to think about what she’d seen the night before.
The woman at the window. Lady Gwen.
Her ghost.
There was no reasonable way to deny she’d seen that figure twice now. It had been too clear. So clear she knew she could, even with her rudimentary skills, sketch the face that had watched her from the window.
Ghosts. They weren’t something she’d been brought up to believe in, though part of her had always loved the fancy of her grandmother’s tales. But unless she had suddenly become prone to hallucinations, she’d seen a ghost twice now.
Could it be she’d tumbled off the edge of the breakdown that had been so worrying her when she left Chicago?
But she didn’t feel so unsteady now. She hadn’t had a tension headache or a queasy stomach or felt the smothering weight of oncoming depression in days.
Not since she’d stepped over the threshold of Faerie Hill Cottage for the first time.
She felt . . . good, she decided after a quick mental check. Alert, calm, healthy. Even happy.
So, she thought, either she’d seen a ghost and such things did exist, which meant readjusting her thinking to quite an extent . . .
Or she’d had a breakdown and the result of it was contentment.
She nibbled thoughtfully on another cookie and decided she could live with either situation.
At the knock on the front door she quickly brushed crumbs from her sweater and glanced at the clock. She had no idea where the morning had gone, and she had deliberately put Aidan’s promised visit out of her head.
Apparently he was here now. That was fine. They’d work in the kitchen, she decided, shoving pins back into her hair as she walked down the hall to the door. Despite her initial, well, chemical reaction to him, her interest in him was purely professional. A man who fought with drunks on the street and flirted so outrageously with women he barely knew had no appeal to her whatsoever.
She was a civilized woman who believed in using reason, diplomacy, and compromise to solve disputes. She could only pity someone who preferred using force and bunched fists.
Even if he did have a beautiful face and muscles that just rippled when put into use.
She was much too sensible to be blinded by the physical.
She would record his stories, thank him for his cooperation. And that would be that.
Then she opened the door, and he was standing in the rain, his hair gleaming with it, his smile warm as summer and just as lazy. And she felt about as sensible as a puppy.
“Good day to you, Jude.”
“Hello.” It was a testament to his effect on her that it took her a full ten seconds to so much as notice the enormous man beside him clutching flowers in his huge hand. He looked miserable, she noted, the rain dripping off the bill of his soaked cap, his wide face pale as moonlight, his truck-grill shoulders slumped.
He only sighed when Aidan rammed an elbow hard into his ribs.
“Ah, good day to you, Miss Murray. I’m Jack Brennan. Aidan here tells me I behaved badly last night, in your presence. I’m sorry for that and hope to beg your pardon.”
He shoved the flowers at her, with a pitiful look in his bloodshot eyes. “I’d had a bit too much of the drink,” he went on. “But that’s no excuse for using strong language in front of a lady—though I didn’t know you were there, did I?” He said that with a slide of his eyes toward Aidan and a mutinous set to his mouth.
“No.” She kept her voice stern, though the wet flowers were so pathetic they melted her heart. “You were too busy trying to hit your friend.”
“Oh, well, sure Aidan’s too fast for me to plant a good one on him when I’m under the influence, so to speak.” His lips curved, for just a moment, into a surprisingly sweet smile, then he hung his great head again. “But despite circumstances being what they were, it’s no excuse for behaving in such a manner in front of a lady. So I’m after begging your pardon and hoping you don’t think too poorly of me.”
“There now.” Aidan gave his friend a hearty slap on the back. “Well done, Jack. Miss Murray’s too kindhearted to hold a grudge after so pretty an apology.” He looked back at her, as if they were sharing a lovely little joke. “Aren’t you, Jude Frances?”
Actually she was, but it irritated her to be so well pegged. Ignoring Aidan, she nodded at Jack. “I don’t think poorly of you, Mr. Brennan. It was very considerate of you to come by and bring me flowers. Would you like to come in and have some tea?”
His face brightened. “That’s kind of you. I wouldn’t mind—”
“You’ve got places to go, Jack.”
Jack’s brows drew together. “I don’t. Particularly.”
“Aye, you do. This and the other. You take my car and be about it. You’ll remember I told you Miss Murray and I have business to tend to.”
“All right, then,” he muttered. “But I don’t see how one bloody cup of tea would matter. Good day, Miss Murray.” Shoulders hunched, cap dripping, he lumbered back to the car.
“You might have let him come in out of the rain,” Jude commented.
“You don’t seem to be in any great hurry to ask me in out of it.” Aidan angled his head as he studied her face. “Maybe you hold a grudge after all.”
“You didn’t bring me flowers.” But she stepped back to let him come inside and drip.
“I’ll see that I do next time. You’ve been cleaning. The house smells of lemon oil, a nice, homey scent. If you get me a rag, I’ll wipe up this wet I’m tracking in to your nice, clean house.”
“I’ll take care of it. I have to go up and get my tape recorder and so forth. We’ll work in the kitchen. You can just go ahead back.”
“All right, then.” His hand closed over hers, making her frown. Then he slipped the flowers out of her fingers. “I’ll put these in something for you so they don’t look quite so pitiful.”
“Thank you.” The stiffly polite tone was the only defense she could come up with against six feet of wet, charming male in her hallway. “I’ll only be a minute.”
She was barely longer than that, but when she walked into the kitchen he already had the flowers in one of Maude’s bottles and was handily brewing a pot of tea.
“I started a fire there in your hearth to take the chill off. That all right, then?”
“Of course.” And she tried not to be annoyed that every one of the tasks he’d done took her three times as long to accomplish. “Have a seat. I’ll pour the tea.”
“Ah, it needs to steep a bit yet.”
“I knew that.” She mumbled it as she opened a cupboard for cups and saucers. “We make tea in America, too.” She turned back, set the cups on the table, then hissed out a breath. “Stop staring at me.”
“Sorry, but you’re pretty when you’re all flustered and your hair’s falling down.”
Mutiny ripe in her eyes, she jammed pins back in violently enough to drill them into her scalp. “Perhaps I should make myself clear. This is an intellectual arrangement.”
“Intellectual.” Wisely he controlled the grin and kept his face sober. “Sure it’s a fine thing to have an interest in each other’s minds. You’ve a strong one, I suspect. Telling you you’re pretty doesn’t change that a bit, does it?”
“I’m not pretty and I don’t need to hear it. So if we can just get started?”
He took a seat because she did, then cocked his head again. “You believe that, don’t you? Well, now, that’s interesting, on an intellectual level.”
“We’re not here to talk about me. My impression was that you have a certain skill as a storyteller and are familiar with some of the myths and legends particular to this area.”
“I know some tales.” When her voice went prim that way it just made him want to lap at her,
starting anywhere at all. So he leaned back in his chair. If it was intellectual she wanted, he figured they could begin with that . . . then move along.
“Some you may know already, in one form or another. The oral history of a place may shift here and there from teller to teller, but the heart of it remains steady. The shape-shifter is told one way by the Native Americans, another by the villagers of Romania, and still another by the people of Ireland. But the same threads weave through.”
While she continued to frown, he lifted the pot to pour the tea himself. “You have Santa and Father Christmas and Kris Kringle—one may come down the chimney, another fills shoes with candy, but the basis of the legend has its roots in the same place. Because it does, time after time, country after country, the intellect comes to the conclusion that the myth has its core in fact.”
“You believe in Santa Claus.”
His eyes met hers as he set the pot down again. “I believe in magic, and that the best of it, the most true of it, is in the heart. You’ve been here some days now, Jude Frances. Have you felt no magic?”
“Atmosphere,” she began, and turned her recorder on. “The atmosphere in this country is certainly conducive to the forming of myths and the perpetuation of them, from paganism with its small shrines and sacrifices to the gods, Celtic folklore with its warnings and rewards and the addition of culture seeded in through the invasions of the Vikings, the Normans, and so on.”
“It’s the place,” Aidan disagreed. “Not the people who tried to conquer it. It’s the land, the hills and rock. It’s the air. And the blood that seeped into all of it in the fight to keep it. ’Tis the Irish who absorbed the Vikings, the Normans, and so on, not the other way around.”
There was pride there that she understood and respected. “The fact remains that these people came to this island, that they mated with the women here, passed down their seed, and brought with them their superstitions and beliefs. Ireland absorbed them, too.”
“Which came first, the tale or the teller? Is that part of your study then?”
He was quick, she thought. A sharp mind and a clever tongue. “You can’t study one without studying the other. Who tells and why, as much as what’s told.”
“All right, I’ll tell you a story that was told to me by my grandda, and to him by his father, and his by his for as far back as any knows, for there have been Gallaghers on this coast and in these hills for longer than time remembers.”
“The story came down paternally?” Jude interrupted and was met with that quirked brow. “Very often stories come down the generations through the mother.”
“True enough, but the bards and harpists of Ireland were traditionally male, and it’s said one was a Gallagher who wandered to this place singing his stories for coin and ale, that he saw some of what I’ll tell you with his own eyes, heard the rest from the lips of Carrick, prince of the faeries, and from that told the story himself to all who cared to listen.”
He paused, noting the amused interest in Jude’s eyes. Then began. “There was a maid known as Gwen. She was of humble birth but a lady in her heart and in her manner. She had hair as pale as winter sunlight, and eyes as green as moss. Her beauty was known throughout the land, and though she carried herself with pride, for she had a slim and pleasing form, she was a modest maid who, as her blessed mother had died in the birthing of her, kept the tidy cottage for her aging father. She did as she was bid and what was expected and was never heard to complain. Though she was seen, from time to time, walking on the cliffs of an evening and staring out over the sea as if she wished to grow wings and fly.”
As he spoke, a silent stream of sunlight shimmered through the rain, through the window, to lie quietly on the table between them.
“I can’t say what was in her heart,” Aidan continued. “Perhaps this is something she didn’t know herself. But she kept the cottage, cared for her father, and walked the cliffs alone. One day, when she was taking flowers to the grave of her mother, for she was buried near the well of Saint Declan, she met a man—what she thought was a man. He was tall and straight, with dark hair waving to his shoulders and eyes as blue as the bluebells she carried in her arms. By her name he called her, and his voice was like music in her head and set her heart to dancing. And in a flash like a lightning strike, they fell in love over her dear mother’s grave with the breeze sighing through the tall grass like faeries whispering.”
“Love at first sight,” Jude commented. “It’s a device often used in fables.”
“Don’t you believe that heart recognizes heart?”
An odd and poetic way to put it, she thought, and was glad she’d have the question recorded. “I believe in attraction at first sight. Love takes more.”
“You’ve had the Irish all but drummed out of you,” he said with a shake of his head.
“Not so much I don’t appreciate the romance of a good story.” She sent him a smile, a hint of dimples. “What happened next?”
“Well, however heart recognized heart, it was not the simple matter of a maid and a man taking hands and joining lives, for he was Carrick, the faerie prince who lived in the silver palace under the hill where her cottage sat. She feared a spell, and she doubted both his heart and her own. And more her heart yearned, more she doubted, for she’d been taught to beware of the faeries and the rafts where they gathered.”
His voice, rising and falling like music on the words, lulled Jude into propping her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her fists.
“Even so one night, when the moon was ripe and full, Carrick lured Gwen from the cottage and onto his great winged horse to fly with her over the land and the sea and show her the wonders he would give her if only she would pledge to him. His heart was hers and all he had he would give her.
“And it happened that her father, wakeful with aches in his bones, saw his young Gwen swirl out of the sky on the white winged horse with the faerie prince behind her. In his fear and lack of understanding he thought only to save her from the spell he was sure she was under. So he forbade her to have truck with Carrick again, and to ensure her safety he betrothed her to a steady young man who made his living on the water. And Lady Gwen, a maid with great respect for her father, dutifully tucked her heart away, ceased her walking, and prepared to be wed as was bid her.”
Now, the little slash of sunlight that danced across the table between them vanished, and the kitchen plunged into gloom lit only by the simmering fire.
Aidan kept his eyes on Jude’s, fascinated by what he saw in them. Dreams and sadness and wishes.
“On first hearing, Carrick gave way to a black temper and sent the lightning and thunder and wind to whip and crash over the hills and down to the sea. And the villagers, the farmers and fishermen trembled, but Lady Gwen sat quiet in her cottage and saw to her mending.”
“He could have just taken her into the raft,” Jude interrupted, “and kept her for a hundred years.”
“Ah, so you know something of how it’s done.” Those blue eyes warmed with approval. “True enough he could have snatched her away, but in his pride he wanted her to come to him willing. In this way the gentry aren’t so very different from ordinary people.”
He angled his head, studying her face. “Would you rather be snatched up and away without a choice or romanced and courted?”
“Since I don’t think one of the Good People is going to come along and do either in my case, I don’t have to decide. I’d rather know what Carrick did.”
“All right, then, I’ll tell you. At dawn Carrick mounted his winged horse and flew up to the sun. He gathered fire from it, formed dazzling diamonds from it, and put them in a silver sack. And these flaming and magic jewels he brought to her at her cottage. When she went out to meet him, he spilled them at her feet, and said to her, ‘I’ve brought you jewels from the sun. These are my passion for you. Take them, and me, for I will give you all I have, and more.’ But she refused, telling him she was promised to another. Duty held her and pride
him as they parted, leaving the jewels lying among the flowers.
“And so they became flowers.”
When Jude shuddered, Aidan reached for her hand. “Are you cold, then?”
“No.” She forced a smile, deliberately freed her hand and picked up her tea, sipping slowly to soothe away the flutter in her throat.
She knew the story. She could see it, the magnificent horse, the lovely woman, the man who wasn’t a man, and the fiery blaze of diamonds on the ground.
She had seen it, all of it, in her dreams.
“No, I’m fine. I think my grandmother must have told me some version of this.”
“There’s more yet.”
“Oh.” She sipped again, made an effort to relax. “What happened next?”
“On the day she married the fisherman, her father died. It was as if he’d held on to his life, with all its pains, until he was assured his Gwen was safe and cared for. So, her husband moved into the cottage, and left her before the sun rose every day to go out and cast his nets. And their life settled into a contentment and order.”
When he paused, Jude frowned. “But that can’t be all.”
Aidan smiled, sampled his tea. Like any good storyteller, he knew how to change rhythm to hold interest. “Did I say it was? No, indeed, it’s not all. For you see, Carrick, he could not forget her. She was in his heart. While Gwen was living her life as was expected of her, Carrick lost his joy in music and in laughter. One night, in great despair, he mounted his horse once again and flew up to the moon, gathering its light, which turned to pearls in his silver bag. Once more he went to her, and though she carried her first child in her womb, she slipped out of her husband’s bed to meet him.
“ ‘These are tears of the moon,’ he told her. ‘They are my longing for you. Take them, and me, for I will give you all I have, and more.’ Again, though tears of her own spilled onto her cheeks, she refused him. For she belonged to another, had his child inside her, and would not betray her vow. Once more they parted, duty and pride, and the pearls that lay on the ground became moonflowers.