Sing Me Home (18 page)

The song trailed off in her throat. Fingar halted mid-strum and an expectant silence engulfed the room. Maura stared at this older man, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped severely above the shoulder, waiting for him to say something. His lips were wine-stained, and as he took a step closer she was overwhelmed with the sickly scent of cloves.

She waited with her heart pounding for an arrowhead to burst from beneath his tunic, for blood to bathe the fine silk.

“My senses must be leaving me.” The Englishman spoke in a whisper, then he raised his voice. “Richard, come here.”

A young man emerged from the shadows, a man who sported a long mustache in the Irish way. “Father?”

“Does she remind you of anyone?”

The young man gave her a cursory look. “No, Father.”

“She is the very image of Eleanor,” the nobleman said. “It is as if your mother has risen from the dead.”

She felt a spurt of panic as gasps rippled through the crowd. The man must be slipping into a forgetful dotage. As his son took him by the arm, Maura lowered her gaze and began to back away from him, but the nobleman called for her to wait. His voice bellowed through the uproar, belying all thoughts of senility.

“Milord?”

“That tale the Gascon told,” he said, “about you being a foundling. Is it true? Or did he tell it for amusement’s sake?”

“I am a foundling, milord.”

“What convent took you in?”

She hesitated. She had told no one the name, lest the tale find its way back to the Abbess or the sisters. They would be devastated to know she worked as a common player with a traveling troupe. They would wear their knees out in prayer for her redemption—a redemption she wasn’t sure she wanted anymore.

But this baron waited for an answer, and the whole hall listened, and it came to her that Colin might be holding back from shooting an arrow only because she stood so close to his enemy.

That was something, at least. “I was found at the Convent of Killoughy,” she said. “Outside of Killeigh.”

Lord William’s brows twitched. “How old are you, child?”

“I was found in the harvest time in the Year of Our Lord 1285.”

“The same year you were born,” Lord William said, glancing at his son. Disappointment rippled across his features. “This cannot be then.”

Sympathy speared through her.
He’s just an old man. A man like any other
.

“Forgive me, my dear girl.” Lord William reached for her hand as if to kiss it. “These past years I’m full of imaginings—” His words ended on a swallow. He yanked at her hand. “By God! This is Eleanor's ring!”

Then the whole room was full of shouts and exclamations, and the son stepped in to grasp her hand, the two of them tugging on her finger to better see her ring. Her heart dropped and her throat closed up and it was as if the smoke of the rush lights choked her along with the stench of cloves.

“It’s stolen,” the son Richard said, eyeballing her. “It’s a trick, Father, it’s a minstrel’s trick.”

“It’s
not
stolen,” she said, surprised at her own audacity. “It was in my swaddling clothing.”

Then amid a rustling of activity, cries of surprise and angry curses, out of the shadows barreled an older woman. Her veil flew off her graying hair as she looked at Maura and then flung herself at Lord William’s feet.

“Forgive an old woman, my lord.”

“Have you gone mad?” Lord William bellowed. “Up, woman, and off with you—”

“Hear me,” the woman cried, rising to her knees as guards surrounded her. “By the blood of the Virgin Mary, I will swear to this. This foundling, this songstress—she is your daughter, and Lord Richard’s twin.”

Chapter Fourteen

C
olin had once witnessed the spectacle of the taking of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, played in a Gascon noble’s home by a group of Italian mummers. Complete with a pool of water, roaring lions, flowers springing from meadows, grapevines growing long to mark the passage of time, and showers of scented water and sweetmeats. A spectacle so rich in machinations that he’d spent hours with the men as they dismantled the pieces, trying to figure out the magic of it all.

Yet no troupe of Italian mummers could match the drama taking place in the hall below. No guild actors could play these parts better: the stunned, long-lost daughter; the teary, amazed father; the weeping maidservant, prostrate, blurting out an impossible tale of a babe hurried away in the midst of night, of a dying mother so fervid in her religious beliefs that she’d chosen to secretly send away the second-born of her newborn twins rather than be thought of as a woman who had lain with two men.

And he himself, the thwarted avenger, standing just off the stage with his bow half-strung, flexing his fists as he watched his enemy claim his lover as flesh and blood—as he watched the chance for his vengeance snatched away.

Colin tightened his grip on the bow. It was not too late. Caddell stood there—as straight-backed and proud as the day he led his Englishmen into MacEgan lands. Caddell stood there, just in range of his arrow, and so stood the end of ten long years of delay.

He slid the arrow back, pulled the sinew tight. One single arrow. Through the heart. The vow would be fulfilled. His father would be avenged. He would be worthy of the name MacEgan. It all would be over, finally.

And Maura would lose the father she’d just met, and then curse his name for the rest of her days.

No.
No
. This was all a scripted farce, it had to be. Yet his fingers paused on the sinew. He crouched in the shadow of the stairwell, above the heads of the crowd. The haze of the smoke settled like a transparent blue cloud. She stood as still as stone, listening to the maidservant’s babbling, her hands still caught in Caddell’s grip. Her hair shimmered like dark gold in the rush light, and he found himself remembering the feel of it against his cheek.

A bubble of laughter threatened in his chest. He choked it down, for he knew it for what it was. If he barked it aloud, he’d tumble off the tight rope he’d been walking on for too many years and there was no telling where madness would bring him.

What difference did it make? He yanked the sinew back again and squinted down the length of the slender arrow. Maura could curse him to Hell, because she would believe this impossible story that she was Caddell’s daughter. But he wouldn’t hear her curses, for he’d be hanging on a gibbet before tomorrow at sundown. He pulled the bow taut. He fixed his sight upon the lower tip of the embroidered neck-slit of William the Black’s surcoat, the cloth that covered his black beating heart.

He willed the old memory back to him. The acrid stench of blood. The cries of wounded men and horses. The sight of his father laid low in the mud. Fergus’s blazing blue eyes defying the coming of death, his father’s fist curled in Colin’s boiled leather tunic, willing him with his last bit of strength to vow a death upon William the Black Caddell, the man who had stolen everything from the MacEgans, who had blinded one brother and killed all the rest and stolen what should be theirs.

The man whose life hung at the tip of Colin’s iron-tipped arrow. The man who stood there in the hall claiming he’d spawned one such as Maura.

Shoot him.

The sinew cut into his fingers.

One single arrow.

Through the heart. A kinder death than the Englishman deserved.

Shoot him.

And all would know that Colin MacEgan had returned from ten years of exile to avenge the death of Fergus MacEgan, to avenge the injustices rained upon all the MacEgans, to make a man of himself.

His fingertips tingled.

Do it.

His work would be done, and so would his life.

And so would Maura’s.

With a muffled curse, he raised the arrow off the bow. The sinew snapped against his bare wrist. In four quick strides he descended the stairs, then pushed the door of the castle open to the night, ignoring the guards he startled into wakefulness, not bothering to hide his face with the minstrel’s mask he’d used to slip into the castle without being recognized.

He marched blindly, conscious only of the balm of the air rushing in and out of his lungs, the mocking gleam of the stars above, the burn in his chest. He stomped over the inner moat, through the portcullis, over another trough, through a break in another wall, into the dark maze of the streets and into the blackness of his thoughts.

He’d lost his one opportunity to fulfill an old vow.

So what was he now? A man without pride, without honor.

Not a man at all.

***

Maura let herself be led up into the darkness at the top of the stairs while below, in the hall, the guests of William Caddell murmured in excited whispers as they found their way to their rooms, their pallets, their horses. The servant girl who Maura followed raised her candle as they passed the shadow of several doors. Maura expected Colin to jump out at any moment, to confront her, to take her away. Where was Colin with his iron-tipped arrow and his silent resolve? What was he thinking about this turn of events? She needed someone to pinch her out of this strange dream.

At the end of the hall, the servant pushed open a heavy door. Maura stepped into the room and gazed at a canopied bed with rich damask hangings, the kind of bed the laywoman Sabine would have loved.

The servant closed the door and placed the candle on the mantel. “My lord asked me to fetch for you some of Lady Elizabeth’s—your sister’s—nightshifts.” She gestured to some gossamer fabric lying across the bed. “I’ll help you undress.”

Everything about this girl was neat, from the pressed sweep of her wimple to the scrubbed pinkness of her cheeks. Though the servant’s face remained impassive, Maura sensed an element of scorn, as though the servant knew that she had been forced to wait upon a guest well beneath the stature of those she was accustomed to serving.

Maura turned away from her. She didn’t want to change clothes—she wanted to sneak away and seek out Colin and try to make sense of all this—but she found herself raising her arms as she was bid, turning at the servant’s urging, letting herself be stripped of Matilda’s borrowed silks until she was bare and shivering with something more than the kiss of a cool draft. When the servant tossed the silks on the bed, the MacEgan brooch fell out of a pocket and winked at her from the bedclothes.

Suddenly she felt like two women in one body. One wanted to race screaming out of this room. The other was determined to stay and meet the sisters and brother she hadn’t known existed until this very night.

Colin had insisted that things like this didn’t happen. He said that noble infants weren’t whisked away by maidservants and left on the convent steps. Yet in front of a room full of guests, Lord William Caddell had claimed her as his own. It all rained upon her head again, the whole impossibility of it: Lord William’s over-bright eyes, the teary confession of the nursemaid, the excited din of the crowd, the eye-smarting smoke of rush lights, the chill of a golden chalice in her hands, the vinegary taste of Gascon wine, the swelling urge to shake her head, to back away, to say
no, no, this can’t be.

She’d been searching for an Irish
mother
.

A soft knock on the door made her start. The servant pulled a shift over her head, then wrapped her in a robe that was stiff and warmly quilted. As the heavy door swung open, she felt her heart stumble with hope to see Colin, but it was Lord William Caddell who stood in the frame, looking her over with those rheumy eyes.

She couldn’t help herself. She searched his face, taking in the stubborn shape of his chin, the wrinkled span of his brow, the pale color of his cheek, seeking some common feature that she could set upon and say, yes, yes, and then feel a deep tug of familiarity, a sense of homecoming.

“Wait outside,” Lord William ordered the servant. “I want a moment alone with my daughter.”

She winced at the word and then hid her shaking hands in the sleeves of the robe. She must be calm, she must be wise. She mustn’t let this man who claimed to be her father know that only hours ago she’d made love with an Irishman who wanted him dead.