“And that would be?”
“Her child,” came the devastating reply.
“Jesu, yer a bad one, Cavan FitzGerald!” swore the old man, “but what’s even better, yer smart. I said ye were like yer mother, but by Jesu, yer not! Ye’d hold her bairn for ransom then?”
“I’d marry her, uncle.”
“
What?
The lass is already wed. Has yer stay in the hot Spanish sun addled yer wits?”
“Aidan St. Michael was married by the English queen’s own chaplain, and yet she was baptized, and raised in the Holy Mother Church. Therefore her marriage is no true marriage here in Ireland, or for that matter anywhere else but England, and a few of the German states. I, however, dear uncle, would marry her in the faith of her birth, the only true faith. Even the O’Malleys of Innisfana cannot deny the truth of that, and so when Master Conn O’Malley comes calling he will be alone, and I will kill him. Then there will be no doubt as to whose wife Aidan St. Michael really is, dear uncle. As my wife her wealth becomes mine. Simple, is it not?”
Rogan FitzGerald was openmouthed with astonishment. “By God, nephew, yer a bloody genius! ’Tis a perfect plan, and ’tis foolproof besides! I wish ye’d thought of it in the first place, and we could have dispensed with the damned Spanish. We’ve but to wait until she’s been brought to childbed, and recovered.”
“Did she write ye when the child was due?”
“Sometime in the late winter, or the early spring,” came the reply.
“So come the summer, when the seas are smooth for travel, I’ll go to England,” said Cavan, “and bring ye back yer great-grandchild for a visit, uncle. I’ve not a doubt its mother will be right behind me,” and he laughed. “Have ye written back to Aidan?”
“Nay.”
“Then fetch the priest, and do so. Show our dear little Aidan how concerned ye are for her, and how happy ye are too.”
Rogan FitzGerald sent for his second son, Barra, named after his brother, and like his brother, a priest. Rogan had given two other children to the church besides Barra. His second youngest son, Fearghal, was a monk; and his oldest daughter, Sorcha, was a cloistered nun. Of his three other living children, his sons, Ruisart, Dalach, and Carra, they had had the good instinct to find wives with small fortunes, and simple natures who were happy to marry with one of the handsome FitzGerald sons. All, however, including the two churchmen, were hard, sharp, and greedy men although they had not the subtle cleverness of their cousin, Cavan.
Informed of the plan to bring Aidan St. Michael to Ireland, Father Barra FitzGerald had said in a pious voice, “The church could hardly disagree with yer plans to make Aidan St. Michael an honest woman, cousin Cavan. Never fear for I shall marry ye myself. The banns will be posted and read even before she arrives so there will be no need for delay.” Then he smiled coldly. “The church will expect a generous stipend for its cooperation, cousin.”
“Ye’ll have it,” came the equally cold reply.
“Not too great a stipend,” put in old Rogan FitzGerald. “Remember that my granddaughter’s wealth is for Ireland. It is Aidan’s gold that will help us to buy arms, and mercenaries to fight the English.”
“Of course, uncle,” soothed Cavan. “Of course.”
So Barra FitzGerald wrote to his English niece on his father’s behalf, and Aidan reading the letter was somewhat astounded by this sudden interest in her welfare shown by her mother’s family who for years had ignored her very existence. True she had written to her grandfather telling him of her return to England, and her expected child, but she had only done so at the instigation of Conn and his family who hoped to smoke out the whereabouts of Cavan FitzGerald. She hadn’t really expected to receive such a solicitous reply. Conn was suspicious for their past dealings with the FitzGeralds had made him wary of them. No mention, however, was made of Cavan’s return to Ireland, and the agents of the O’Malley family searching for him in Spain had come to a dead end when reaching the village belonging to Cavan’s holding, they learned that he was gone in search of his wayward wife, and neither of them had come back yet.
“I’m not surprised that she ran away from him,” said Aidan. “Cavan FitzGerald was not, after all, a particularly nice fellow. She must be rich if he’s chasing after her, or possibly,” she continued with a small attempt at dark humor, “she is salable in the slave markets of Algiers.”
“If she was smart enough to run from FitzGerald,” remarked Conn, “she will no doubt be smart enough not to be caught by him again.”
“Don’t speak of my bastard cousin any longer, Conn. I don’t want to think of him. Not ever! Particularly not today on our second wedding anniversary. Thanks to Cavan we did not get to celebrate our first anniversary, and I will not have him intruding now on such a happy occasion!”
They were comfortably ensconced in their bed on this cold and bright February morning, and now Conn leaned over, and caressed his wife’s swollen belly. “Yer wish, madame, is absolutely my command. How can I dispute the mother of my son?”
“Daughter,” she corrected him. “I know it is a daughter I carry, my lord, and ye cannot argue with me otherwise.”
He chuckled. “How can ye be so certain?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, “but I am. I am absolutely positive that we will soon be the parents of a daughter.”
“What shall we call our daughter, madame?” His lips found hers in a quick kiss. “Ummm,” he said, “as always, yer delicious, my darling.”
Aidan smiled. She was feeling more content and happy than she had felt in months. For a while until her body had become too bulky they had resumed their marital relationship, but as much as she loved him, that body refused to cooperate with her heart, and she continued to feel nothing of the sweet, hot passion that she had once felt with him, and with Javid Khan. It saddened her for she felt that she somehow was cheating him as well as she cheated herself; but Conn had brushed those concerns aside.
“Once the child is born,” he promised her, “it will be again with us as it once was, Aidan, my love.”
A small tear had slipped down her cheek, and she had asked him, “How can ye be so certain, Conn? I am not,” but he had dismissed her fears with soft words, gentle kisses, and tender caresses.
“And what do ye plan to call our daughter?” he repeated, bringing her back to the present.
“There is a Latin name, Valentinus, which comes from the verb,
valere,
meaning to be strong. I have learned that to survive in this world, Conn, a woman must be strong. I would therefore name our daughter, Valentina, the feminine of Valentinus. Perhaps the name will bring her luck.”
“She is already lucky in having ye for her mother,” said Conn gallantly, “and me for her father,” he finished.
Aidan laughed, then growing serious caressed his cheek saying, “What a good man ye are, Conn.”
He flushed. “Madame, what would all my fine friends at court think if they could hear ye praising me with such tender words? My reputation would be in tatters.”
“Yer reputation,” she teased him, “was in tatters years ago else the queen would not have wed ye to me!”
He began to tickle her in retaliation for her remark, and Aidan not to be bullied tickled him back until they both collapsed into gales of laughter, wheezing and gasping until the tears ran down their faces. Finally he regained control of himself, and leaning over her outstretched body he bent down to kiss her. His green eyes warm with the deep love he felt for her.
“Ohhh, I am so happy,” Aidan declared with a deep sigh. “Is it wrong, Conn, to be so happy?”
“Nay, sweeting, it is never wrong to be happy.”
“I love ye,” she said simply.
“I know,” he replied, “and I love ye,” and then his big hand caressed her belly again, and he could feel the child stirring beneath his fingers, and it excited him. Would it indeed be the daughter Aidan insisted it was? What would she look like? Was it really his child that his wife carried, and would he be able to tell once the child was born who its father really was?
When Aidan was brought to bed on the twenty-first day of March in the year fifteen eighty, and delivered of the daughter she had said she would bear; Conn, looking into the baby’s face could not for the life of him tell whether it was his own child or not, but it mattered not for he already loved her. Valentina St. Michael was a pink and white baby with the blue eyes of all newborns, and a faint fuzz of copper-colored hair upon her head. In the next few months those eyes became a wonderful violet shade, and she grew more hair which remained the copper color of her maternal parent.
“She looks like my mother,” declared Aidan. “She is going to be far prettier than I ever was.”
“Blurp,” said Valentina St. Michael as she pushed her face into her mother’s breast, and clamped her mouth around the nipple which was already seeping milk.
“She is absolutely thriving,” remarked Skye who was sitting with her sister-in-law upon the camomile lawn that early July afternoon. “Ye’ve got rich milk, Aidan, and ye had such an easy confinement that I do believe yer meant to bear several more healthy babes before yer through. Considering yer age ’tis truly amazing.”
“I’d like a lot more children!” said Aidan enthusiastically. “Look at me, Skye! For the first time in my life I’ve a bit of weight on my bones. I look at myself in the pier glass, and I am positively voluptuous. I can’t believe it!”
“And do ye feel better now, Aidan? Is yer body responding once more to Conn?”
Here Aidan’s face grew somber, and sighing she shook her head. “Nay, Skye. I still feel nothing, and I cannot understand it. I love Conn, and I thought surely when the child came my body would once more behave as it did before my cousin kidnapped me, and sold me into slavery; but alas, there is no change! I don’t know why, but oh, how it saddens me. It is the one flaw in our happiness. Conn keeps saying that in time all will be well between us, but how long must we wait, Skye?”
“I don’t know, Aidan, but one thing I learned in the East was that the human spirit is a strange thing. It is almost as if it possesses a secret life totally separate from what we can know and feel. Remember, my dear, that ye were really the most sheltered of girls yer whole life. Yer parents shielded ye, then the queen, and finally Conn. It wasn’t until ye were faced with Cavan FitzGerald that ye truly learned what the face of evil looked like. That, and the year that followed must have been a terrible shock to yer poor soul.”
“I think that ye are right,” Aidan agreed slowly, and finishing nursing Valentina she handed the baby to its nursemaid, Wenda, “but how do I heal myself now?”
“I don’t know,” replied Skye, “how do ye? Think on it, Aidan. Something yet frightens ye. What is it?”
“Cavan FitzGerald,” came the quick reply. “I keep dreaming that he is coming back to get me, Skye. I think it’s not knowing where he is that frightens me most of all. There has been no trace of him since he disappeared from Spain. I keep thinking he might come to England. Foolish, isn’t it? England is the one place Cavan FitzGerald dare not show his face for fear of arrest, and yet I cannot shake the feeling that he is near, is watching.”
She turned her face to the nearby hills, and seeing her through his spyglass Cavan FitzGerald smiled cruelly, and shifted his cramped position. He had been watching
Pearroc Royal
for several days now in order to learn the routine of the family, and the servants. He had seen Conn going about his duties as the estate’s master, and he smiled to himself. He intended doing exactly as he had told his uncle. He would kidnap the St. Michaels’ child, and force her mother into following after them into Ireland. Conn would, of course, follow after his wife, and the trap would then be sprung. Once his rival was dead he would sell
Pearroc Royal,
and all its lands. The monies from that sale he would use to buy lands in Ireland. His estates would be far larger than his uncle’s, and the old man would not be able to oppose him. Soon his sons, the sons that Aidan would give him, his sons and his daughters would overshadow the FitzGeralds of Ballycoille. And if anyone tried to stop him, he’d see them dead! As for Conn O’Malley’s brat whether she lived or died was of no consequence to him. He needed her only to lure her mother to him, and after that . . .
He had already begun to effect his scheme by spying upon the estate. He knew when Conn was out; when Aidan spent time in her gardens; and most importantly, he knew when the nursemaid brought the baby out for airing, and which way she walked, carrying her charge into the clover fields near the house by the woods. Once in the fields she would spread a coverlet upon the ground, and placing the baby upon it she would play with the child in the sunshine until the baby fell asleep. Then the girl amused herself weaving daisy chains. She was not, Cavan had concluded, very bright, and she would be easy to frighten, and keep in line for he would need her to come along to care for the child.
He had not yet decided when to take the child, and then fate played into his hands. He had been having an ale at the local inn when the gamekeeper from
Pearroc Royal
had come in to refresh himself. Young Harry Beal was both known and liked, and the conversation flowed readily and openly. Nursing his ale Cavan was able to learn that Lord Bliss would be going to a horse fair in Hereford to purchase new stock, and would be gone for several days. This, Cavan knew, was the ideal time for him to put into operation his plan to kidnap Aidan’s child. It would be several days before Conn would be able to return, and if Cavan knew Aidan as well as he believed he did, she would not wait for her husband to return before following after her child. He would have her, and the baby in his power before Conn could get to either of them which would allow him to lie in wait for his rival without distraction, making his kill an easy one.
He was going to enjoy killing Conn, he thought. Conn O’Malley who his whole life had had everything that Cavan FitzGerald had been denied. A loving father and mother, brothers and sisters, a family, a respectable place in society, a
name.
Why should Conn have had all those things, and not he? Why should Conn have been given a rich heiress, a title, and a great estate? Did he deserve it any more than Cavan did? By rights Aidan St. Michael should have been his wife in the first place, his twisted mind reasoned. She was
his
cousin, and it had been common practice since the beginning of time that families kept their wealth by intermarrying amongst each other. Conn had stolen what was rightfully his, and now he was going to get it back!