Sing Me Home (12 page)

The bloodied grin widened. “Would you mourn for me, Maura?”

“I don’t mourn for fools.”

He seized her by the hips. Her knees gave way, her boots skidded in the damp grass, and she fell atop him, bouncing against his hips.

“I missed you,” he murmured, “all those nights in the wet heather alone.”

She slapped her hands on his chest. “I was well rid of
you.”

But the words came out shaking, for the anger receded under the onslaught of another sensation, something deeper and fuller and far more troubling. His cloak smelled of damp earth and wood fires. His hands tightened on her hips. All those secret dreams rushed to her mind, when she was in just such a position but as naked as the day she was born.

He rumbled that maddening laugh, that maddening, all-knowing laugh.

“You promised to bring me to St. Patrick’s Purgatory.” She paused on a breath, trying to control her anger. “Fulfill your promise before you get yourself hanged.”

Then she leaned down and kissed him, tasting the blood in his mouth and the slickness of the mist on his bristled skin. She kissed him until he kissed her back, his fingers curling into her hair.

“Aye,
a stóirín.”
He pulled a fraction away. “That’s the kind of greeting worth a hanging.”

Chapter Nine

“
A
lors,”
Arnaud interrupted, “there will be enough time for this later, when we’re in Kilcolgan and safe from the English, eh?”

Maura sat up with a start. Then, realizing exactly what she was sitting on, she scrambled to her feet. Colin took his time rising, smiling at her with a look that made her blood roar in her ears. Knowing laughter came from behind them, where the troupe watched.

She should know better by now. A man like Colin would eat her up in one swallow and then be looking for another course by the break of day, but as she turned back to the road she knew she couldn’t lie. She did not regret kissing him like that.

“What does Arnaud mean," she stuttered, brushing the dirt of her tunic to avoid Colin's eye, "about being safe from the English in Kilcolgan?"

"The English have a custom." Humor lingered in his voice. "All comers to their fairs are given protection from arrest for previously committed crimes."

"Crimes, yes." She avoided Matilla's amused eye as she passed by. "It's lucky that you’re here then, living and breathing, after what you did. What were you thinking, wearing a bard’s robes and putting a curse on an Irishman who was sitting in the room?”

“That Irishman and I have an old grievance.”

“Did he cheat you out of your wagers in a fight? Steal the heart of a woman you had your mind set on?”

His smile flickered. “Jealousy becomes you, though there be no reason for it,
a stóirín
.”

My treasure.
She pretended not to hear him. She’d never been anyone’s only treasure, and she doubted she ever would.

“Some time ago,” he said, “O’Kelly chose the English over the Irish for his own profit. He needed to be reminded that some people haven’t forgotten what he’s done.”

Maura knew little of the fighting between the Irish and the English except that it seemed to be going on all the time. “O’Kelly isn’t the only Irishman who’s in league with the English.”

“He’s the one that mattered to me, and my family.”

“So now you tell me you have a family who holds grievances with Irish chieftains.”

“Having a family,” he said, “comes with obligations. Something you might measure against the weight of that little ring of yours.”

She dropped her gaze to her ring, then hid it in the folds of her tunic. Back in Tuam, he’d spoken to her gently about her foolish hunt for her mother, more gently than the Abbess ever did, more honestly than the Abbess, too. But somehow that made her shame at her own ignorance only deeper.

So she changed the subject. “Do you realize how you had everyone worried? I’d thought for sure that O’Kelly had run you through with his sword and left you bleeding to death in the rushes.”

“The only injury I suffered,” he said, patting his mouth with the back of his hand, “was a bruised lip.”

“I think you enjoy fighting.” She remembered his bloody grin and the light in his eye whenever an opponent approached. “Sometimes I think you’ve got your mind set on getting yourself killed.”

“Would you miss me, if I did?”

Yes.

During the few days he was away she’d missed him sorely. He confused her with his kisses and then his coldness, his whispered words and then the way he set her aside. Had any man come to the kitchen doors of the convent acting like this, she would have had nothing to do with him. She’d have dismissed him and forgotten him the minute his shadow slipped away from the door.

But she was changing in ways she didn’t understand. She felt it in the marrow of her bones. She used to mark the roll of her days by the clang of church bells, and now she hadn’t been to Mass in weeks. Back in the convent, she’d rarely walked farther than the hundred yards to the village and back, and now she measured her days by how many miles they’d put behind them. She’d been so afraid of all the uncertainties of the world when she first considered this path. She thought she’d miss the sound of stew bubbling in the pot over the hearth fire, or the scent of gravy simmering. She’d thought she’d always be cold on the roads without the warmth radiating from the stones, or she’d be hungry so far from a well-stocked larder. The truth was the exercise brought her to the pot with an edge to her appetite that made any plain roadside soup taste like a meal fit for kings. Every new road brought new music, for the sounds of the kitchen had been replaced by the sound of the wind in the trees, and Padraig’s piping, and Matilda’s hearty laughter, Mudman’s silly riddles, and the anticipation that came with the sound of hooves pounding on the road, wondering what new sight might round the bend.

But the changes in her went far, far deeper than that. On Sundays, she used to collect a list of her sins to be ready for confession—sins like anger at Sister Siobhan for forgetting to water the garden, vanity and covetousness for yearning for Lady Sabine’s comb, lapses in ritual like forgetting evening prayers after a long day cooking for Easter. How petty those immoralities seemed now that she’d abandoned the sisters, only to sing in thin silks in an alehouse and willingly sit spread-eagle atop a minstrel man for the sake of a desperate, wonderful, delicious kiss.

And yet, none of this felt like depravity. Deep in her heart she knew that something wonderful could happen if she gave herself to Colin. Something the nuns would call sinful, dangerous to her body and her soul. All her life she’d spent within smoke-tinged walls, safe inside from the rain and cold, taught the ways of the world from the pages of a Bible, only to realize when out and about on the roads that those ways of the world were odder and more complicated than in the stories.

Perhaps the larger sin was to hide oneself in ignorance, comfort, and safety rather than dare to live.

The thought stayed in her mind as Padraig piped them all toward Kilcolgan. The town itself was no more than a cluster of thatch-roofed houses lorded over by a stone castle. They traveled past it, following the river beyond a small stone chapel until they reached a makeshift alehouse close to the inlet shore. The people inside rose and shouted and clapped their hands at the sight of their approach. While Arnaud talked terms with the owner of the alehouse, she sat on a bench with the wind flapping the tarpaulin above her, putting Nutmeg through his paces for the children who’d gathered at the sight of him. The reddened rays of the sun cast the thatch overhang into shades of amber and gold as the sun sank like the wink of a great eye. Soon peat fires flared and darkness cast its blue-black hand upon the alehouse.

They all sat to a dinner of flaky cod and a plate of something buttery and salty from the depths of the sea, all washed down with honest ale that lit her belly with a glow. That queer warmth intensified as the dinner ended and Padraig set to his pipe, piping the sort of music that made a woman’s toes tap upon the ground and her fingers rap against her knees and her heart beat a little faster.

Maura urged a nervous Nutmeg back into his basket, and then searched for a sturdy peg to hang the basket for the night. Around her, the fishermen clapped, waiting for their turn to whirl with Matilda and the twins, their feet stomping upon the packed-earth floor, the wind snapping the tarpaulin above them to the beat of the tabor, and farther beyond, the tide rushing up the inlet to wash the muddy shore. Padraig’s pipe wailed through her. Maguire punctuated the music with his hoots and howls, the fishermen with the sounds of shouted Irish, and everyone pounded the beat with their feet.

Her gaze found Colin’s as if drawn by a force beyond her own will. He wove through the dancers to face her, his hair wild, his eyes gleaming with all the promises of the world. He showered her with a bouquet of primroses and cowslips, while around them the fishermen’s leathery faces crinkled into knowing folds.

He held out his hand.

The devil will tempt you,
Maura remembered the Abbess saying.
Out in the world, the devil will tempt you with music and mead and mirth, he’ll tempt you into a dance, and that’s the first step toward sin.

Maura put her hand in Colin’s. In her mind she saw those fires that lit the countryside during harvest time, when the day-laborers pitched camp just outside the convent fields. In her mind she heard their music, too. Somehow, at the end of the day, they always found the energy to dance with the girls of the kitchen—the girls the Abbess hired to help during those busy months, those girls who laughed and spun every morning into the kitchens red-cheeked with excitement, their feet tapping to the music still, their voices and their eyes full of secrets.

Colin drew her into the dance and she stopped making excuses for what every bone in her body ached to do. They danced in circles, changing partners and twirling in giddy abandon with hooked arms and flying feet. She didn’t know how to dance, so she was awkward with it all, tripping over herself—but the fishermen just laughed and helped her about. Wasn’t it strange to have strangers touch her and not want to slap their hands away, for surely the laughter seemed honest enough.

It was always Colin she came back to. With the tug of his fingers, she moved with him, she moved against him, she moved to his command. She came to him, she receded, she returned. This was nothing like the prancing she’d sometimes dared to do around the trestle table of the kitchen as she cleared up the remnants of the night’s dinner and made partners of the spoons and the tongs, of the knives and the ham bones.

As the excitement flowed through her, she began to understand what drew the women into the fields in the moonlight. She felt as buoyant as if she skipped upon water. She smiled back at the smiles in the shining faces around her. What a motley group of fishermen and alehouse wives and black-handed tanners. All men and women, no more, no less, caught in the bright joy of the moment.

Ah, there he was again, on the next change of partner—reaching out for her—and then she felt the brush of his palm against her waist, and the rough rasp of his hand as he closed it over hers. The rock-hard ball of his upper arm pressed so close to her breast. His face was only a breath away from her own, she could smell the hazel-mead he’d been drinking. The world whirled around them as he drew her about—so strong, so sure—as if her feet never brushed the ground. Her breath came fast through her lips and the heat of the fire singed her as she passed close. Above the sky twirled, the heavens winking down upon them. Laughter bubbled up inside her and filled her head with dizziness. She couldn’t stop—she wouldn’t stop—Heaven help her, she never wanted to stop dancing.

Time escaped her, or perhaps they danced in the crease of it. It was like Beltane, when the old stories said the season of darkness came to an end and the season of light commenced. But in the deep night, after one ended but before the other began, there was said to be a crack in time, a moment when this world and the other merged and the creatures of the Otherworld slipped between the veils and danced on earthly soil. Gazing around at these minstrels with their painted faces and bright silks, with their laughter and their music, it was not too far a stretch to think she’d been captured. Maybe in the morning she’d wake up alone on a knoll by the side of the road with only the throb of strange liquors in her head and wondrous fading memories of music too beautiful to bear.