“And to think,” Shay said, heaving a mock sigh as he splashed more whiskey into Donagh’s cup, “of your poor and chaste self never destined to know it.”
He looked over at Bria and now deep laughter lit up his eyes.
“It’s a frightful lot of nattering you lasses must have been doing this day while at your spinning.”
“Nattering, is it? And what do you call what you lads’ve been doing this night—grand philosophical discussions, I’ll be supposing.”
She had gotten up from her chair with the bowl of sliced apples, to sugar them, when she noticed a strange silence now seemed to be coming from the table where the men were. And when she turned around, she caught odd looks on their faces, as well, guilty looks. Or rather, her brother looked guilty. When Shay turned all stony-mouthed, as he was now, that was when she knew she should start to worry.
“What mischief are the pair of you up to?” she said.
Shay’s answer was light and teasing, but there was an edge to his smile. “Sure and if I tell you, m’love, you’ll give me a great clout on my ear.”
Gorgeous chose that moment to break into a loud, raucous purr as he kneaded Shay’s thigh with his huge, soft paws. Shay lifted his hand to stroke the cat’s head, and that was when Bria noticed for the first time the bloody scrapes and purpling bruises on his knuckles.
She set the bowl of apples carefully down on the slopstone and went to him. It wasn’t in Shay’s nature to get involved in a saloon brawl. But she knew of only one other thing that could do such damage to a man’s fists—a punching bag filled with thirty pounds of sand.
She picked up his hand and he let her have it, and she thought she should be feeling angry or sad or disappointed, but all she had was this sick churning in the pit of her stomach, as if she’d eaten too much green fruit.
She pressed her lips to her man’s bruised and bleeding flesh. Then threw his hand back down into his lap so hard it hit Gorgeous, and the cat jumped off with a squawk.
“You swore to me never again,” she said. “On the grave of your mother, you swore.”
He raised his head and met her eyes squarely, but he said nothing. All of their lives she had known him, and always he’d had a hardness buried in him, a place in him she could never reach and where he made his choices alone.
She jerked around to point a stiff finger at her brother. “And you, you’ve a part in this . . . this . . . whatever it is. Don’t tell me you haven’t, what with that devil of a look you’re wearing all over the face of you—”
Donagh reached up and snagged her wrist. “Bria, for mercy’s sake. Will you take hold of your temper and open your ears for a wee bit of a listen?”
She pulled free of him with such force she took a stumbling step backward. She crossed her arms tightly beneath her breasts. She couldn’t look at Shay anymore. She wouldn’t look at him.
“Tell me a tale then, Donagh, my brother.”
He unbuttoned the front of his cassock and reached inside to pull out a news sheet printed on pink-tinted paper. “You’ll have heard of this scandal rag, the
Police Gazette
?”
Bria nodded stiffly. She’d heard of it, and seen it, and although she couldn’t read, she knew the likes of it. The one her brother, the priest, now held in his hand sported a picture of a buxom showgirl wearing nothing but spangled tights and a cheesy smile.
“Aye, well . . .” Donagh said, flushing a little when he realized what she was looking at. He folded the paper so that the scandalous showgirl was tucked out of sight. “The publisher, a boyo by the name of Richard Fox—he’s spent a good part of the last ten years looking for a challenger to beat John L. Sullivan, the great American fisticuffs champion. He’s even put up a prize for the man who does so. A belt made all over of gold and silver and diamonds.”
“Hunh. And why would a man want such a grand thing for holding up a pair of old worn-out corduroy britches?”
Donagh’s gaze shifted from her to Shay, and a look passed between them charged with something she didn’t understand. She thought she hated men sometimes, especially these two whom she loved most of all.
“This Mr. Fox,” Donagh went on, “he already has a fellow he believes can win his prize—some blue-blooded Yankee, who attends Harvard University and wears trousers made of fine worsted and more suitable, surely, for a belt of diamonds. But before Sullivan will agree to fight him, the Yankee first needs to prove he’s a serious contender by coming up to scratch against a worthy opponent . . .”
His voice trailed off, and again his gaze shifted over to Shay. But Bria wouldn’t look at the man herself; maybe she’d never look at him again.
She stared hard at her brother, her eyes burning. “Would you pity the man, then—coming to the end of all his fine words and just when his tale was getting lively.”
“Ah, Bria . . .” Donagh rubbed his hands over his face, sighing. “Mr. Fox came to hear of how himself there”—he waved his hand at Shay—“was once the bare-knuckle champion of Ireland, and so a thought came into his head that Seamus and his Yankee boy could make a good match of it. They would be holding it here, during Bristol’s famous Fourth of July celebration, and there you have it . . . Most of it.”
Donagh snatched up the jug, emptied the whiskey into his cup, and downed nearly all of it in one swallow. His chin sank into his chest, as he pretended to give the bottom of his cup a deep study, and Bria realized that’s all she would get from her brother.
Shay, of course, had given her nothing.
Slowly she turned to face him. He didn’t flinch or look shamed before her, and whatever his thoughts were she couldn’t see them on his face.
She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, as if she had to physically hold herself together. “Do you have a small dab of a
word you want to say to me yourself, Seamus McKenna? Or did the fairies come and carry off your tongue when I wasn’t looking?”
He reached up with both his hands to take her arms, unfolding them, pulling her to him, and she hated him for touching her because, God help her, she loved him so much.
He let go of her arms and cupped her hips in his big hands. He looked up at her, and his eyes burned fever bright. It had always hurt her to know that the fire in him had nothing to do with her.
“Maybe this word will please you, wife:
dollars.
One hundred of them to me, and the clan gets another one hundred for serving as my sponsor. And all I have to do for it is spar enough with this Yankee challenger to put on a good show and go down to the canvas sometime in the third or fourth round.”
Somehow she was pressed against his thighs now, and her hands were in his hair. His hair sprang soft and warm against her fingers, as if it had captured all of the shine from the day’s sun.
“It’s an outlaw sport,” she said, hating the quaver she heard in her voice. The surrender. “You could be put into prison for it.”
“They’ll be calling it an exhibition of the science of bare-knuckle boxing,” Donagh said from behind her. “Which are lawful things.”
Her fingers tightened in Shay’s hair, and she pushed herself away from him. “So they’ll pay you to lose to this Yankee contender. And what honor will you have to call your own at the end of it?”
He’d always been able to move quickly, big as he was. He was up and standing at the open door, and all she’d felt was the breath of the air he stirred as he’d passed her. He leaned against the jamb, his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his britches, his eyes on the world beyond. The fiddle and pipes were wailing fast and furious now.
She realized that shadows of dusk were lying long across the yard. The light beyond the door was the color of golden syrup, but inside their small house it was already growing dark. She thought she ought to light a lantern and yet she stood unmoving. His voice came to her, a rough whisper, like sand scraping over stone.
“There’s a thing or two worse a man can suffer than the loss of his honor. Do I need to name them for you, Bria darlin’? Do I need to tell you of digging for potatoes in a stubble field and having them come up black and rotten, and your loved ones with the mouths on them stained green from the grass they’re eating off the side of the road? Do I need to tell you of living in a stone hovel with a roof cut from the sod of a land that can never be yours, for all that it’s been fed for centuries with the blood and bones of those who bore your name before you?”
He pushed off the wall and turned to her, lost still in the shadows just inside the door. But she didn’t need to see his face, for she had known him all her life. Known the need in his eyes when he took her in bed, known the touch of his lips, urgent and hot on her bare skin. She knew his heart, so brave and defiant, so filled with that desperate dream of finding the great, good place and making it his own.
“Do I need to tell you,” he said, “of the woman who kneels, keening, in dirt made into mud with the blood spilling from her man’s guts? . . . Or the wife who is forced to watch her husband choke out his life at the end of a magistrate’s rope?”
She pressed her fist hard to her mouth as if she would scream, though she made no sound.
Don’t.
“Do I need to tell you, Bria darlin’?”
She covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
She didn’t know he had come to her until she felt his fingers grasp her wrists to pull down her hands, and then he was spanning her neck with his fingers, his thumbs caressing her cheeks as if he would kiss her. He had never been anything but gentle to her with those hands.
He tilted her head back, forcing her to meet his eyes. “What should a man care for honor,” he said, “when it can be sold to put food in the bellies of his wife and children and guns in the hands of his Irish brothers—”
She wrenched away from him, shouting, “Ah,
Dhia
, Ireland! It’s always for Ireland!” Her voice quieted, thick now with tears held back. “There was never anything for us in Ireland. There’s nothing there.”
Shay swung his arm in a wide arc. “And is this so grand a place then? You think because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter, things are breaking even for us both, and we’re all equal here in your America and in the sight of your God?”
Bria felt the anger drain from her and a dreadful tiredness take its place. She had never been able either to argue or woo him away from any of his grand and glorious causes. She’d always known he loved her, just as she knew he would never love her enough.
Her brother, the priest, scraped back his chair and got slowly to his feet. He went up to Shay, and his hand fell heavily on the other man’s shoulder. “He’s your God as well, Seamus.”
Shay stared back at him, giving up nothing, this time not even a breath.
When Shay was born the only one of five sons to come out of the womb breathing, his mother had dedicated his life to God. Of the two friends, her brother had been the wild one in those early years, and in the later years, too—tippling and wenching and up to all manner of mischief. Even as a boy, Shay had been serious and intense, a fierce fanatic in his faith. He had been studying Latin at the knee of the village priest when the other lads in the
clachan
couldn’t even write their own names.
But then life had happened to Seamus McKenna.
She
had happened to him one storm-tossed day on a rocky beach. The constables with their guns and hanging rope had happened.
And God, as if not to be denied, had sent His calling to Donagh instead. Or it was as if, Bria had often thought, her brother hadn’t been able to compete against Shay for God’s attention. Donagh hadn’t been able to see what he was meant to do until Shay had gotten out of his way.
Donagh sighed now and gave the other man’s shoulder a rough shake before letting him go. He went to the wall hook for his black priest’s hat. He paused with it in his hands, shifting it around and around by the brim, then he turned to face her. The color was high in his face, his mouth set in a rueful slant. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
Bria’s voice shook with feelings she couldn’t have described even to herself. “Was it not a miracle, Father—how this newspaper man came to hear of our Seamus once being the Irish champion? Or was it you who maybe put a bit of a word in his ear? Did you say to him how Shay McKenna wouldn’t break a promise for himself, nor even for his wife and his wee little ones. But for Ireland and the clan . . .
och
, for Ireland the man would sell his very soul.”
“Bria, don’t . . .” Donagh pushed out a ragged sigh, shaking his head and studying the hat in his hands. “It’s thinking, I am, that I should be getting on back to the rectory before Mrs. Daly loses her dear temper and serves me my slippers for supper.”
He put on his hat and came up to her. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then drew her against him and held her tightly for a moment. “
Dia is maire dhuit,
” he said.
She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his chest. The wool of his cassock was rough beneath her cheek and smelled just a bit of incense and whiskey.
God and Mary be with you, too, Donagh.
She went with her brother to the door, where he paused to bless himself at their little font of holy water. In the street, the frolic had indeed turned into a true bit of Irish crack as jugs of
poitín
were being passed from hand to hand. She watched Donagh make his way through the crowd, stopping to administer admonishments and blessings with equal measure. But she didn’t think tomorrow’s sermon would be on the evils of the devil’s brew, for he’d tippled a bit of it himself this night.