Free Falling (21 page)

The feel of the rhythmic, thundering hooves as she galloped and the cold wind stinging her bare face mixed with her conviction that she would…she must…find John safe. The ride would end with her arms around her child, holding him safely and snugly to her heart. Time enough later—much, much later—to talk to him about his Dad. For now, she had to get back to him. The intensity and the craving to see him again was as vital and elementary as the need to take her next breath.

She was only a mile from home when she slowed Dan to a walk—just to catch her breath, and to give him a moment to gather himself for the mad gallop down the main drive of the cottage. It wouldn’t do to kill the poor horse and have to run the rest of the way on foot. She didn’t expect to be able to see any sign of the cottage from this distance. In all the times she’d ridden back from the village and strained for that first, welcoming sign—usually a thin needle of smoke to indicate a fire in the hearth—she had never caught a sign of it for another half mile or more.

Which is why, when she saw the long funnel of black smoke jutting up into the sky above where she knew the cottage should be she sat up suddenly straight in the saddle, stopping her horse dead in the road.

The house was burning.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sarah dug her heels hard into Dan’s side and the horse bolted from a walk into a gallop. Sarah never saw the ground rushing by beneath her in a blur of green and brown or the two small stonewalls that she and the horse vaulted over as easily as if they’d been puddles on a street. Her eyes strained to see the house appear on the horizon over the next hill. She willed the house to materialize intact and the smoke, which grew blacker and more pronounced the closer she came, to dissipate to reveal that the cottage still stood.

When she crested the final hill on the homeward drive to the cottage, she sucked in a hard breath. The sound more than anything startled her horse, who shied violently, nearly unseating her. And she never took her eyes off the sight at the end of the hill: Cairn Cottage, fully engulfed in flames, and the forecourt pocked with lifeless bodies scattered like sacks of grain carelessly dropped from a wagon.

 Her energy slowly seeped from her. Her nearly maniacal urgency to be at the cottage gave way to an involuntary hesitancy to confirm her worst suspicions. Was it hope or certainty that she would find him safe that fueled her on the crazy gut-wrenching miles from Balinagh? Her weight rested solidly in the saddle as she surveyed the terrible scene below. And Dan came to a halt.

She tried to control her breathing as she watched the forecourt with the motionless bodies and the raging fire. A part of her almost believed she could feel the heat. She stared, stunned and paralyzed. A sound came from just over her left shoulder but she didn’t turn.

Gavin was laboring up the hill with his horse and wagon.

“Cor, Missus,” he said, gasping for breath as if he’d run alongside the horses himself. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

His words shook her out of the moment and she gathered her reins tightly in her hands and pushed Dan down the hill with her legs. Once she was moving, she allowed herself to think the impossible:
maybe he was still alive
. The thought galvanized her into a full gallop down the hill toward the cottage, the appalled shouts of Gavin ringing in her ears behind her.

She dismounted before Dan even downshifted out of the canter. The closer she got to the farm, she could see that many of the lifeless forms were animals—mostly their sheep. From the looks of it, all of them.

Sarah stepped over several carcasses, each one mottled bright red against the dirty white of their wool, and went to the dead man lying face down in the center of the courtyard. Her gun in her hand, she made a quick scan of the forecourt before touching him. She knelt and turned him over. It was Seamus, his blue eyes open and unseeing, his throat cut in a bloodless white arc. Tears welled up in her eyes. She got a flashback of Seamus walking with John across the forecourt to the barn, his gait stooped and halting, his large hand resting lightly on her boy’s shoulder. She closed his eyes and saw her hand was shaking badly.

Sarah felt the heat from the terrible inferno at her back as she jumped up to run to the stable. She jerked open the door but the barn was empty except for the bodies of the two little goats that had helped sustain them for the weeks and months since they had arrived. The sight of the little dead goats, for some reason, triggered a feeling of blinding rage in Sarah. She left the barn and ran to the paddock. It was empty except for more dead sheep.

“John!” she screamed, her eyes scanning the entrance to the pasture and the little back courtyard outside the kitchen door. “John Matthew!”

Gavin brought the wagon into the forecourt but his horses panicked at the proximity of the fire and he fought to keep them calm. He leapt out, grabbed their bridles and led them to the far side of the barn, all the while looking over his shoulder at the carnage and the dead body in the middle of the courtyard.

Sarah approached the cottage. One of John’s dogs lay dead in her path.

 Quickly, Gavin unhooked the horses from the wagon, pushed them into the barn—not bothering to find a stall—and shut the door. He ran to Sarah who was kneeling by the little dog and looking at the burning cottage, her face a mask of unreadable agony.

“Missus,” he said, breathlessly, “they’ll’ve taken the boy.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the burning cottage.

“This is what they do,” she said tonelessly.

“No, they won’t have burned him in there,” Gavin said. He touched her arm gingerly. “You weren’t here when they came, so they’ll’ve taken him with them.”

A look of hope flashed across her face and she turned to him.

He nodded. “I’m sure of it,” he said. He looked at the burning house as a large piece of timber came crashing down in front of them, making them both take a step back. “He’s not in there.”

Sarah looked back at the cottage and then at the dead puppy on the ground. She shook her head.

“There’s also a woman,” she said. “Dierdre.”

“Mrs. McClenny?” Gavin looked back at Seamus lying on the ground. “Aye, well.” He shook his head and looked at the cottage. “That’s not good,” he admitted.

There was nothing they could do for the cottage but let it burn. They had nothing with which to put out the flames and it was too dangerous to attempt to retrieve any belongings from inside. Gavin went back to the horses, Dan included, and untacked and fed them. He put each of them in stalls, dragged the dead goats and the sheep to a small trench behind the barn, and began digging a larger trench for Seamus.

Sarah sat in the unharnessed wagon as if in a trance and watched the cottage burn. What sun there had ever been that day had long disappeared behind a cloud, not to return. She held the gun in her hands, tracing the lines, the numbers, the indentations on it like one would a treasured talisman. Her eyes never left the cottage.

She watched the outline of the porch crumble and she remembered sitting out on those steps just three months ago with David. She remembered watching the stars from those steps, and the feel of his warm lips on hers. Her eyes travelled to the chimney that jutted from the middle of the little cottage and she remembered the nights spent sitting around its hearth, the three of them laughing, playing cards, telling stories.

The frame around the smaller living room window in front gave way and broke into pieces on the ground. She expected to see angry tongues of flame emerge but instead, a plume of grey smoke belched out into the early evening air. As she watched, she realized she was praying. Praying for guidance, for relief from pain, for hope that her boy was alive.

She heard Gavin speaking from around the side of the barn but she couldn’t understand his words. He must have been speaking to her, she didn’t know. She had been staring at the house for a good ten minutes before she realized it had started to rain. She’d lived in Ireland so long she hardly noticed the sudden downpours any more. She watched as the flames slowly died and the air turned to a thick, stagnant layer of black fog.

She leaned over the side of the wagon and threw up into the bushes.

In all her nightmares of worry back home in the States about what could happen to her child, she had never come close to imagining the terror and agony of what she had experienced in the last hour. And while she lived with hope that, as Gavin suggested, John was not in the burning house, the knowledge that that meant he was with the murderous gypsies was nearly as unendurable. She held the gun to her chest like it had the power to change things. She finished her prayers with the plea to God Almighty that He keep John safe, that He help him say and do the right things while the gypsies had him to keep him alive, and that He help Sarah navigate the rest of this unfathomable nightmare.

Gavin spoke to her again, this time louder and closer. He was saying something about the rain and how, Saints be praised, it had come at a divine moment. Sarah couldn’t take her eyes off the cottage. They were coming to a moment, she knew, when the rain would put out the fire completely and enable them to enter the cottage. And then they would know for sure.

…And then they would know.

“Missus?”

Sarah dragged her eyes from the smoldering building to look at him. He looked tired and filthy. His face was black from the soot of the fire and sweat and rain and created rivulets down both his cheeks. It made him look like he’d been crying.

“I’ve built a wee fire,” he said, indicating with a jerk of his head the backcourt on the side of the barn. “The root cellar’s not been touched by the fire so I’ll check to see if there’s anything we can use to eat. Is that alright?”

Sarah shifted in her position in the wagon to look back at the house.

John was hungry all the time, too.

“Fine,” she said dully.

“I’ve buried the old man,” he said. “And me Da will be here soon. Maybe in an hour or so.”

Sarah didn’t respond so Gavin turned to find the root cellar.

She bowed her head and finished her prayers. It was all she could do.

When she heard the shout, she stood up so fast that the gun dropped to the floorboard of the wagon. Instead of snatching it up, she left it there and jumped to the ground, facing the direction of Gavin’s shout.

Something inside her just knew.

He came running from around the corner of the barn. In the fading light of the day, she saw him run toward her, his arms pumping at his side, his head up, his eyes locked onto hers.

“Mom!”

And that was when she started to weep. When he launched himself into her open arms, she crushed him so tightly to her that he squeaked and still she cried. She kissed his tousled brown hair, his filthy, tear-streaked cheeks, his sweet little-boy mouth that was talking and exclaiming all at once.

Thank you, God. Dear Lord in Heaven, thank you, thank you.

They found Dierdre in the house.

John told them that Seamus had made him run and hide in the root cellar when they heard the gypsies come. He had one of the puppies with him but couldn’t find the other. Seamus told him he’d come for him when it was all clear.

“But he never came, Mom.”

Seamus’s plan was for Dierdre to hold them off with the guns from inside the house. Then Seamus was to provide a distraction outside, facing down the gypsies, so that John could slip out the back.

“You’re a brave lad, young John,” Donovan said, nodding at John. “You’re Da would be proud.”

John nodded solemnly, but Sarah could tell Mike’s words were a balm to him. Donovan had come not forty minutes after John was found. He’d brought with him ten other people, five of them able-bodied men and the rest women and children.

Donovan had wasted no time in clearing away the dead animal carcasses and bringing some order to the devastation. His men found what remained of poor Dierdre. They buried both her and Seamus that very night. Afterward, it was too late to do anything but build a campfire and create a bit of shelter against the night. His people pitched their tents in the paddock and set up their bedrolls in the barn. The women, silent as wights, prepared steaming pots of small-animal stew that simmered on flat rocks in the campfire.

Sarah could not take her eyes off John. She watched him hungrily as he walked the camp, staying mostly with Donovan and Gavin. Her preference would have been to keep him wrapped in her arms. Her terror was too newly lived to be discounted by the fact of his existence. She now knew the sharp agony of the terrible loss of him and it was even worse than she’d ever imagined. Her joy to have him delivered back to her was tempered by the knowledge of how vulnerable they all were.

David.

She closed her eyes in exhaustion and held her hands to her face. She jerked her head up to see where John might be and discovered that Donovan had quietly sat down next to her.

“Whoa, didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. He was holding out a metal cup in his hands.

“You didn’t,” Sarah said. “I just…” She shook her head and nodded toward where John and Gavin squatted near the fire. “I’m never going to feel safe again.”

Donovan held out the cup to her and she drank from it without thinking. It was some kind of homemade alcohol and burned all the way down her throat. The pain felt good and almost instantly she felt some of the edge of the day creep away.

“Nor none of us, that’s the truth,” Donovan said with a heavy sigh. “I am so sorry we didn’t get here in time.”

Sarah turned to look at him.

“What a nice man you are,” she said.

That made him smile and he took a pull from a flask he’d been holding in his hand.

“You brought all these people here to help us.” She took another sip and let the alcohol do its work. She closed her eyes, willing the drink to calm her and not open up the floodgates of emotion as was all too likely.

“Well, to be honest, we’re family, you see,” he said. “All of us related in some way.”