Brigid did not answer that sally. She herself could not quite reconcile the reasoning behind the mass expatriation of the Irish army since the surrender of King James in his war with William of Orange for the English throne. The Protestants had won again; yet, the Protestants had won before, and many native sons born and dying Catholic had remained. Why now this sudden desertion of their homeland?
“’Tis no business of ours and certainly ye’ve no say in how Lord Fitzgerald conducts his affairs. Small wonder he would have his wife, small son, and daughter away for a time. There are stories about how the English are putting
both women and children to the sword for no more reason than the devil’s own pleasure of it. ’Tis enough reason for him to remove his dear ones.”
Without waiting for a reply, Brigid thrust her burdens at the footman and said, “Add them to the rest. Miss Deirdre will be back from the stables directly, and Lord Fitzgerald’s give the word we’re to be ready to leave when he arrives.”
She turned to the cook. “Do not be gaping at me, woman. Ye’ve food to provide for the journey to Cork, and his lordship will not take kindly to excuses.”
The cook’s mouth worked open and shut a few times but no sound came out of it. Giving up, she turned and walked away.
Brigid smiled, amazed at her own temerity. Under normal circumstances she would never have dared to speak in that manner to another servant. But there was nothing normal about packing to leave her homeland.
Until she had come to Liscarrol Castle with her kinswoman, Grainne Butler, who became Lord Fitzgerald’s second bride, she had never been more than two miles from her home in Kilkenny. Now, out of loyalty to her dead mistress and a sacred promise which bound her to the child, she was about to embark upon the open face of a sea she had never before seen. Crossing herself against the unknown, she stepped out into the day.
“Deirdre! Deirdre!” She clucked her tongue impatiently as she scanned the yard. “Now where has the lass gone?”
*
“Which shall it be then?” Deirdre questioned the orange, brown, and white tabby lying on her side as six balls of fur scrambled over her and one another, searching for nourishment.
She was alone except for the faint whistle of the breeze and the mewing of the tabby’s brood, but the silence did not disturb her. The stables had been emptied months earlier as the last of the Liscarrol horses had been sent for by Lord Fitzgerald to serve his army. She had long since become accustomed to entertaining herself when Brigid
was involved in other matters. The birth of Owen in the spring had divided the nurse’s attention between herself and the babe.
In fact, Deirdre decided, she often preferred her own company to that of the stern but loving Brigid. Her nurse discouraged her daydreaming, and her dreams were the most exciting part of her life now that her brothers were away.
She did, however, miss her cart pony. Her father had taught her to handle the reins at the age of five, and she was allowed to drive alone under the watchful eye of a groom. Now even the young grooms were gone, some dead, others grown into hard-eyed men who followed her father, Lord Fitzgerald, a brigadier in the Irish army.
No one would tell her, but she knew that the voyage which her family was about to undertake had something to do with the war that had raged through Ireland these last two years.
Deirdre sighed. Everyone said she was too young to understand. Yet, she was not too young to understand the tears of the people of the valley when they learned that another son or father or brother would not be returning from battle. Nor was she too young to notice how fear for her father and elder brothers was eating away at her stepmother’s beauty.
“If only they would talk to me,” Deirdre complained to her companions.
Getting down on her hands and knees in the straw, she reached out a tentative finger and lightly poked the kitten nearest her. Instantly the kitten rounded on her finger and pounced, digging its needle-sharp claws into her flesh.
“Ouch!”
Deirdre jerked back her hand, but the cottony-soft kitten held tight, adding the sting of its teeth to her discomfort.
“No! No!” she cried, torn between pain and giggles as the kitten clung determinedly to her. Finally she rose on her knees and shook her hand. The snap dislodged the kitten and sent it tumbling across the floor to land upside down against its mother’s haunches.
“Oh, poor kitty,” Deirdre crooned, instantly sorry that
she had used so much force. She quickly gathered the gray and white bundle into her palms and held it against her chest.
Unabashed by the rough handling, the kitten stood up in her hands, arched its back, and began a purring that shook its fragile body.
Deirdre tucked the kitten under her chin, enjoying the vibrations against her throat. “You’re not so fierce as you believe,” she told it. “You’re all head and fur. Naught but a whiff of breeze would blow you away. Brigid says we’ll need a good mouser, there being great rats aboard ship. But I do not think the mousies would be overly afeard of you.”
Deirdre lifted the kitten to look at it, and the silver-gray cat’s eyes met and locked with her gaze of soft gray-green.
Without even a whisper of wind to announce it, a huge cloud sailed before the sun, and the stable began to darken. The slipping away of sunlight did not startle Deirdre. She concentrated on the rhythmic purring within her palms and watching the kitten’s vertical pupils expand from slits to ellipses of midnight black.
The prickling of her scalp was a rare but familiar sensation. She had expected a vision to come upon her for days, ever since Brigid had told her that they would be leaving Liscarrol.
Now the ground beneath her seemed to dip and sway like the deck of a ship. A journey over water. Yes, she knew that. What else? The undulation ceased, and in its stead came the pulse of hooves pounding the ground. Riders, many of them. Soldiers? She closed her eyes as her heart began to hammer in a slow but frightened rhythm. Fear had never before been a part of the dreams which Brigid refused to acknowledge as real.
When Deirdre opened her eyes the darkness did not abate. The sound of horses disappeared as quickly as it had come, but the night—if it was night—reverberated with anticipation. Gradually she realized that her kitten had stopped purring. It stood in her hands, its back arched and its claws unsheathed. It, too, was afraid.
She saw him before she heard the distant whinny of his
steed; the dark silhouette of a horseman who came riding out of the night and straight toward her.
She did not think of screaming. What good were cries when a phantom bore down on her? When he reined in his horse with a scant yard of space between them, she felt a queer mixture of emotions. Clothed in a great black cloak and hat, he was forbidding, the very tilt of his shoulders a threat.
Yet, there was strength and assuredness in him, a determination in the handling of his horse which even she, a child, could admire. When he reached out a hand to her, this faceless rider swathed in uncanny silence, Deirdre extended hers.
At once he reared back, as if afraid of touching her. “Stay away!” he roared, his voice dark, deep, and edged with unspoken pain. “Stay away in fear of your life,
mo cuishle
!”
He turned his horse and galloped away as if borne on the back of a
púca
.
“Deirdre? Deirdre, lass! Where have ye hid yerself?”
Deirdre blinked and instantly was once again inside the stable, with daylight streaming in as she knelt in the moldy hay. The kitten leaped from her hands, landed on its feet, and scrambled away as Brigid appeared in the doorway.
“There ye are!” the nurse scolded. “Did not I say ye were to come straight back?”
Deirdre jumped to her feet. “Did you see him? ’Twas a grand horseman riding a great black fairy horse!”
Brigid folded her arms across her chest, accustomed to Deirdre’s spinning wild tales to divert her from her anger. “That I did not! Neither did ye. Ye were kneeling with yer eyes closed when I stepped in just now. The riders ye heard must be Lord Fitzgerald’s men, and not even himself will be forgiving ye if ye keep them waiting.”
Guiltily Deirdre beat the straw from her wrinkled skirts as she said, “But there was a man. I saw him.” She paused and looked up into her nurse’s face. “He held out his hand to me.”
Brigid read the truth of Deirdre’s words in her frank
gaze, and a tiny shiver sped through her. “Are ye telling me true, lass?” she demanded sharply.
Deirdre looked away. “Aye. I saw him. Real as you, he was, sitting there upon his fine horse, all black hair and wild eyes. Only I did not see his face properly. ’Twas too dark.” Her eyes widened in speculation. “Do you suppose the rider was a fairy too? ’Tis said a
piica
can turn himself into a horse and gallop off to hell with any unsuspecting soul who tries to ride him. Only another fairy could control him.”
Brigid blanched at the suggestion. The lass had claimed to have seen fairies before, but one never knew what to make of her stories. She was a child with a vivid imagination. As for the other, that was a matter to which few were privy and all were forbidden to mention.
“’Twas that tale I began,” Brigid mused aloud. “I should’ve known no good would come from the telling of it. Ye drive a body to sinful ways with yer wheedling.” She caught Deirdre by the arm and bent low to whisper, “Ye’re not to tell a soul ye’ve been visited by the fairies this day, do ye hear me? ’Twould be thought a bad omen, the little people coming to see ye off.”
“See me off to where?” Deirdre demanded. “No one will tell me where we’re going.”
“’Tis no concern of yers. Ye’ve a loose tongue, and these are dark days when a wrong word could hang us all. Be a good lass, else ye’ll answer for it!” Brigid released the girl’s arm and gave her a push. “Get back to the house and change. I’ll not have ye meet his lordship in them dirty skirts, and ’tis horses for sure I’m hearing in the yard.”
With Brigid on her heels, Deirdre hurried out into the day, thrilled by the thought that her father was home at last, then another thought made her stop and spin about. “I forgot me kitten!”
“Deirdre!” her nurse called in warning as the girl headed toward the dimly lit interior of the stable.
“’Twill only take a moment to find him,” Deirdre called reassuringly over her shoulder. “Tell Da I’m coming. We must have a cat for the voyage.”
With a sigh of resignation, Brigid turned back to the house. Lord Fitzgerald would forgive an errant daughter. He could not be counted on to be as lenient with an absent servant.
Deirdre found the mother cat still sprawled in a slat of sunlight pouring through a crack in the wall of the stall. The yellow and white kitten she had chosen was not among the ones tussling nearby. “He’s run away,” she exclaimed in dismay, and turned to search the next of the empty stalls. “Kitty? Here, kitty…kitty…kitty.”
The shadows lay deeper and darker at the back of the stable. As if afraid to disturb the heavy silence there, Deirdre rose on tiptoe as she neared and her call fell to a whisper. “Kitty? Psst! Puss?”
She spied the white fluff of a kitten’s tail at the edge of
the last stall. “There you are!” she squealed in delight and
pounced upon the object, expecting to come up with her
kitten. Instead, she trapped the tip of a white feather, attached to a wide-brimmed hat.
Surprised, Deirdre picked it up and looked at it. It was a man’s hat but not one that belonged to a servant at Liscarrol. It bore on its band a white ribbon cockade, symbol of the Irish army loyal to the defeated James II. But why was it here, stuck in the back of an unused stall?
Instinct made her drop the hat, but it was too late. Even as she turned to flee, a hand reached out of the darkness from the depths of the stall and clamped her ankle in a brutal grip.
“Scream and I’ll shoot you, I swear it!”
The startled cry that had risen in Deirdre’s throat died as she saw the threat of a pistol barrel materialize out of the gloom. She was afraid, certainly, but she was in her own home, and her father had just ridden in. Her attacker, she reasoned in childish simplicity, would not harm her with her father nearby. Besides, she was the daughter of a general and should be as brave as any of his men.
“I’ll not scream,” she said after a moment. “I’m a Fitzgerald and I’m not afeard of the likes of you!”
“There’s a fierce one you are, lass,” the disembodied voice answered, a brogue thickening his tone. “But I’m
that desperate that it matters little to me. The soldiers in the yard—what do they want?”
Deirdre bit her lip, her confidence fading as quickly as it had come. She strained her eyes against the shadows but could see nothing more than a black-cloaked figure lying on his side. The hand wrapped round her ankle was large and blood-smeared. Finally her eyes fell on the hat she had dropped, and a little of her confidence returned.
“You’re a King James man,” she said.
“Aye, that I am,” the gruff voice answered, more faintly this time, as if he strained for breath. “Does your house fly the standard of the Dutch jackal?”
“We do not! Me da is Lord Fitzgerald, brigadier in the service of King James.”
The grip on her ankle loosened as the man sighed again. “They—they…did not lie then,” he whispered hoarsely and then seemed to choke.