The Irish Bride

by Alexis Harrington

  The serving girl answered his knock, then discreetly left the room to give them privacy.

  Aidan drew up a footstool and sat before her. He began to reach for her hand, then didn’t. “How are ye feeling, Farrell?”

  “The doctor says I’ll be fine in time, and this morning he told me that I’m free to go home if I want.” This close, she could see how tired and worn-looking he really was. The firelight played up his haggard features. Red-eyed and with a bristle of day-old beard, he looked uncared for.

  “And do you want that?” he asked.

  She found she couldn’t look at him too closely. The bitterness in her heart had not faded in the few short days that she’d been here. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever recover from the loss of their child. “I don’t know.”

  He nodded, as if he’d been expecting nothing more from her.

  “Have ye been working hard?”

  He shrugged. “Aye. There’s not much else to do. Now.” He took a deep breath and went on, as if from a speech he’d rehearsed in his head many times. “Farrell, I’m sorry for, well, for everything. That night—the night I brought you here, you told me I must choose between you and the mill. I’ve had a lot of time to think about everything while you’ve been gone.” He hung his hands between his knees. “I never should have taken ye away from Ireland. It was wrong of me. I should have seen you settled there in another town where none could find you, just as you’d asked, and then left for America on my own.” Farrell’s heart chilled in her chest. “I thought we could build a life, and I’ve given you everything I can think to give, but—“ He shook his head. “I didn’t do what I should have to begin with, so now I want to make it right. I’ll give you an annulment, and that will be my final gift to you. I’ll swear we never consummated the marriage and you can go home to Ireland. I’ll pay your passage and provide money so you can live your life there, in safety, then send you more as long as you need it.”

  Icy-handed and dry-mouthed, she asked, “This is what you want? This is your choice?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked at her. “It’s for the best. Too much has happened between us. I thought I was doing you a favor by bringing you to America. But I wasn’t. Stay here until spring, when the sailing is better, or—or if you’d rather, we can find a boardinghouse where you can live until then.” He searched her face, as if waiting for a particular response. But she couldn’t speak.

  So much for Dr. McLoughlin’s notion that Aidan needed her. Maybe Aidan was right. Maybe there were too many hurt feelings to ever get over. So he’d chosen the mill. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was, and oh, God, so crushed. How strange, she thought woodenly, that his dreams had not broken his heart, as his family had predicted, but hers instead.

  Once again, Liam’s words came back to haunt her. I love ye, lass, but in God’s truth, I don’t love you well enough. Neither, it seemed, did Aidan.

  She swallowed the hard lump in her throat, the one that threatened to cause tears to begin flowing. “All right, Aidan,” she said at last. “I’ll come home—I mean, back to the house, until I decide what I want to do. Just let me collect my things here and thank the McLoughlins.”

  When they got back to the house, Aidan remained in the kitchen while Farrell walked through the rooms. She saw that he’d replaced the tick in the bedroom with a new one and removed every trace of what had happened that night. The floors were clean, the bloodstains cleaned away. Even the cradle was gone. It was as if nothing had happened here. As if the baby had never existed. Grief welled up within her again, as strong as ever. It seemed that he would just sweep away all vestiges of Farrell and their child.

  It appeared that he had been sleeping in one of the other bedrooms. There, the bed was unmade. Clothes were flung here and there, and his other good suit laid in a heap in a corner. Dirty dishes and a half-empty whiskey bottle stood on the floor next to the bed. God, what a mess, she thought.

  She made her way back downstairs to the kitchen, where he was drinking a cup of tea. “The ladies from church came to help clean up. They send their condolences.”

  “Thank you.” Afraid to ask, she finally had to. “Where—what did you—” She took a deep breath and tried again. “What about the babe?”

  “I buried it out in back. I’ll take you there if you’d like.”

  She let her hand trail over the work table. “Later, maybe.”

  Aidan left his tea mug on that table and went out then, saying he had business to attend to. Of course. When had he not?

  * * *

  Christmas was only a few days away, and as the sun set on this Friday afternoon, people in town were hurrying home with gifts and provisions for Christmas dinners. But Aidan had one goal as he rode over the frosted landscape to Kelleher’s saloon, and that was to get roaring drunk. It had been his goal every night since Farrell had first gone to the McLoughlins’s. This afternoon, that seemed to be an especially important task, since he couldn’t face staying in the house with Farrell there, knowing that she would soon be gone.

  It had all seemed so logical when he’d worked it out in his head, this gut-wrenching decision to send her away. But when he’d first set eyes upon her that afternoon, it had taken all the strength he had to keep from dropping to his knees in front of her, begging her for another chance, and blubbering like a child in her lap. Then he’d mustered that waning strength to make his little speech. She’d already been pale, but when he’d uttered his words, any color left in her face faded away.

  He tied his horse to the rail in front of Kelleher’s and walked into the saloon. After stopping at the bar to get a bottle and a glass, he found a table in the back and flopped into a chair. The questions that had plagued him all the way into town were still buzzing around his brain like a bee trapped in a jar. Had he done a stupid thing with Farrell? Had he done the right thing? Was there yet hope? Did he even know anything at all anymore? He’d been utterly miserable the entire time she was across town—how would he feel when he knew she was gone forever, ten thousand miles across the world?

  He uncorked the bottle, poured a drink, and bolted it in one swallow, hoping to numb the pain in his heart and to silence those questions before they made his head burst. He drank three in quick succession, gasping for a breath between each. The kindly fire of the alcohol was beginning to dull his brain when, across the saloon, he spotted Jacob Richards’s woozy, bloated countenance. Aidan knew he’d made an enemy of the man when he’d discharged him. It was perfectly acceptable for a man to sit in a saloon and soak his troubles when he had just told the only woman he’d ever loved to seek an annulment, hoped that she wouldn’t, and was scared to death that she would. It was just fine to get stinking drunk when a man felt like he was the biggest idiot and most successful failure on God’s earth. But he couldn’t have a someone gone with the drink working in a place with machinery and saw blades. If Geoffrey Brother had ignored the problem, or hadn’t recognized it, that wasn’t Aidan’s fault.

  Then he noticed that Richards was sitting with Seth Fitch, that scheming spalpeen. An alarm bell went off in his head—something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what. They saw him as well but didn’t acknowledge him. They merely put their heads closer and spoke in tones too low for him to hear. Now and then, one or the other would glance up at him.

  Suddenly, the idea of getting drunk in this place didn’t seem like a good one to Aidan. Oh, he yearned for the oblivion of the whiskey, but he worried that in his intoxication, his oblivion might become permanent when one of those men smashed his head in. He wasn’t about to die at the hands of such low men. Fitch meant him no good, and he’d probably enlisted the aid of Richards, who also bore him a grudge. Surely this had to be about something besides some money lost on a gambling table, but he didn’t know what.

  He put the cork back in the bottle, tucked it under his arm and threw two dollars on the table. Then he left through Kelleher’s back door, intent on heading back to the mill wher
e he could drink in peace.

  * * *

  The next morning, Farrell was already up and sitting at the kitchen table when Aidan came downstairs. Outside, dawn was just beginning to light the gloom of the overcast sky. He wore one of his suits, but he moved carefully and without the usual bounce in his step, as if he feared his head might roll off his shoulders. She had heard him come in late and had known from the sound of his gait that he was drunk. He’d bounced along the hallway walls, shushing himself when he thought he’d made too much noise. If it hadn’t been so sad, she would have laughed. But there was nothing funny about this.

  “You’re up early,” he commented. “Did ye sleep at all?”

  She rose from the table and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. “I want to see the baby’s grave.”

  He looked at her with red-edged eyes and she saw the heartache in his eyes before he glanced away. How had they come to such a dreadful pass? she wondered.

  “Ye’re sure?”

  She glared at him.

  He nodded. “All right.” He walked to the door and opened it, then waited for her to pass. She detected the scents she’d come to love about him, including a whiff of fresh-cut wood. She might hate the mill that stole him from her as surely as she would hate another woman who tried to take him, but she loved the clean smell of its perfume.

  She walked down the steps and he followed her. “It’s this way.” He led her over the wet grass to a small grove of bare-branched hazelnut trees, halfway down the lawn to the river. They were planted in a semi-circle and seemed to embrace and protect the charge that had been laid at the base of their trunks. She could see where the earth had been turned, but she wasn’t prepared for what she found when she got to the little mound. She sank to her knees, and a sob rose in her throat.

  “Oh, God,” she mourned. “Oh, God.”

  He knelt beside her, heedless of the mud grinding into the knees of his suit pants. “I’ll order a headstone, but for now, I thought this would be all right. She’ll watch over the babe.”

  On top of the tiny grave sat Farrell’s little figure of St. Brigit, the one she’d abandoned the night she’d gone to Dr. McLoughlin’s house. She bowed her head and sobbed, her heart breaking as she rocked on her knees.

  “I’m sorry, Farrell,” she heard Aidan say, his voice shaking. “I didn’t know what else to do. D’ye want me to take it away?”

  She felt him beside her and she wanted to fall into his embrace. But they’d wounded each other so badly. “N-no. It’s fitting, Aidan.” She stretched out a tentative finger tip to the head of the little figure Aidan’s father had carved for her so many years ago. “It’s fitting that she take care of the poor wee thing. I couldn’t.”

  * * *

  Late that night Farrell lay in the bed she shared with Aidan, listening to every creak and groan the house made in the chill wind that blew under the eaves and whistled around the windows. She knew that it was far past ten o’clock, and although she’d been tired and sleeping a lot since the miscarriage, tonight she was tense and wide awake.

  Aidan was still not home.

  She supposed that what he did now was his business, but she felt fairly certain that he wasn’t working late in the mill office. She had gone to the front window several times and looked out at the building, quiet for the night, searching for a light in even one window. But she saw not even a candle glimmer.

  At last, when she was about to put on her shawl and go looking for him around the yard, she heard the door open downstairs. His unsteady footsteps sounded across the hardwood floors and she heard him utter a sharp curse when he bumped into something and knocked it over. He was drunk again. Then he was on the stairs, and she lay rigid under the quilts, wondering if despite everything he’d said, that he would now try to come back to this bed. He reached the top step and staggered down the hallway. Though her room was dark, she felt him standing at the doorway, as if trying to see her in the bed. She smelled the alcohol on him, even from here.

  Then he turned and stumbled back to the other bedroom where he’d been sleeping. In a few moments, she heard him snoring.

  She rolled onto her side and wept for them both.

  * * *

  “They’ve parted? You know this for certain?” Noel stared at Fitch across a table in the Linn City saloon that had become their meeting place.

  “Yes, your lordship, that’s the story going around. Richards has seen O’Rourke with his own eyes at Kelleher’s every night, putting away the better part of a bottle. Servants’ chatter says that Farrell O’Rourke has been staying with the McLoughlins.”

  This was working out better than Noel could have hoped for. He’d imagined Farrell and Aidan O’Rourke to be a happily married, parvenu couple in the new home that must seem like a castle to people accustomed to living in a thatched-roof hovel. But apparently there was trouble in their fool’s paradise, and that would make things so much easier for Noel. Once he’d had O’Rourke disposed of, he could step in as a magnanimous, kind-hearted old acquaintance, ready to take Farrell back to Ireland. Thank God this miserable odyssey was almost over. She might even be glad to see him, after all was said and done.

  “Richards has turned out to be a valuable asset, for all that he’s a drunken sot. All right, then. Wait right here, Fitch. I’m going to write a message for you to deliver to O’Rourke.” He rose from the table to walk back to his room, then turned. “And Fitch—good job.”

  The man beamed and bobbed like the well-trained lackey that Noel had made of him. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  * * *

  “Mr. O’Rourke?” Tom Fitzgerald knocked on the door to Aidan’s office and poked his head inside, letting in the din of the mill beyond. “Someone to see you, sir.” Aidan noticed that Fitzgerald had been a bit happier since he’d been promoted to mill foreman. He’d taken Farrell’s words to heart about how his men felt. What good would it do if they despised him? He’d come to realize what he’d always known—a resentful, unhappy worker wasn’t likely to produce much. Fitzgerald was a good man, and Aidan was willing to reward his efforts.

  Aidan signaled to him to let the visitor in. He looked up from his account books and found himself face to face with Seth Fitch, who closed the door behind him.

  “I have a message for you from an old acquaintance.” He threw an envelope on top of the open ledger. He didn’t trouble to hide his cold hostility, and Aidan knew his instincts about the man were right.

  Aidan looked at the paper where it laid. “Oh? And who would that acquaintance be?”

  Fitch gave him a lizardlike smile and walked out again. Aidan picked up the envelope and opened it.

  O’Rourke—

  You and I have some business to attend to. Meet me at your sawmill Saturday night, eight o’clock, if cowardice does not overcome you first.

  Cardwell

  So Cardwell was the special client Fitch had mentioned. Astonished and furious, Aidan wadded up the note. Had Cardwell really come this far, all these thousands of miles, just to confront him for the death of a man he knew Cardwell cared nothing about? If he had, he was stark, raving mad. Meet him, hell, Aidan thought.

  Then, reconsidering, he smoothed it out again and put it in his pocket. He was sick to death of Noel Cardwell, that foolishly decorated popinjay, following him around the world. And fop or no, he was a dangerous man with enough hired lackeys to do his bidding. Maybe it was best to get this over with once and for all.

  He looked at the note again. The arrogance of this bastard, he thought. Aidan decided that he would meet him at the appointed time, for good or ill. In the back of his mind, all this time he’d worried that Noel would take him back to Ireland to face murder charges. But he’d finally come to recognize that Noel had no authority in America. Even if he had, Aidan had never run from a fight in his life, and he was going to run from this no longer.

  He looked up at the wall clock. It not quite five, and if he moved quickly, he’d still have time to run an errand
in town before the stores closed. He might be willing to meet Cardwell, but he wouldn’t walk into a possible trap empty-handed.

  He closed the ledgers and locked them in his desk. Then put on his coat and strode out into the chill winter evening, determined to be ready for whatever fate brought to him next.

  * * *

  Farrell stared morosely into the flames of the fire she’d lighted in the parlor. The clock had just chimed seven o’clock and she didn’t know if Aidan would come up from the mill or not. She had seen him this morning in the kitchen, and he’d looked terrible. Oh, he’d washed, combed, and shaved, but plainly he’d been paying for his drinking. Beyond the obvious signs of his dissolute activity, she thought she saw a yearning in his eyes, an aching, silent appeal to her that had been so strong, she’d almost gone to him to rest his head on her shoulder. But he’d turned and left for work, and aside from the most painfully polite of greetings, they had not spoken. How could she stay here under these circumstances? Yet there were things that she sensed were going unsaid, and without talking to him first, really sitting down and talking, she didn’t feel as if she could go.

  She couldn’t speak that morning at the grave. She’d been so overwhelmed with grief, she could think of nothing else. But strangely, the visit had comforted her too. She’d begun to believe that she might heal from her loss, with the help of St. Brigit. But what she really wanted was Aidan’s help.

  The idea of going back to Ireland frightened her. The trip over here had been bad enough, but she’d had him with her. To go alone, to be stuck down in steerage, would be miserable. And where would she go? What city? She didn’t know anyone outside of Skibbereen. Both sides of her family had spent generations there and none had ventured to other places. Would she end up working for a man like Noel Cardwell, in a big house where she would be as inconsequential and open to abuse as a dog in the yard? It wasn’t that she feared hard work—she never had. And she didn’t crave special privilege or esteem—she hadn’t even liked having a housekeeper. But such a life would be so dreary, and worse than farming in Skibbereen. Still, she didn’t know how to do anything else but keep house and work the land.