Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (63 page)

“That’s poteen, darlin’,” Casey said with a smile “it hardly bears sippin’ much less tossin’ the whole thing back.” He took her hand and pulled her over to him, placing her between his knees and putting his large hands on her hips firmly. “There’s nothin’ to be afraid of, ‘tis only you an’ I, we’ve many nights ahead of us, if it’s too soon for you then we’ll just hold each other, there’s time.”

“You would give me that—time?” she asked looking down into his face and brushing an errant curl from the tangle of his lashes.

“Forever and then a bit more darlin’, as long as there’s breath in my body and blood in my veins it’s yers for the askin’.”

“I want you now,” she said, “tonight I want you to do all the things your eyes have been saying all day. I want you to make me your wife in the flesh as well as the word.” She felt her soul rise and break and begin again on the words and knew her body would have no fear this night or any of the nights and slow, sweet dawns to follow.

He raised a hand and trembling traced the contours of her face, her neck and then laid his fingers to rest briefly in the hollow of her collarbone where the blood of her heart pulsed deeply.

“No one is ever going to make ye fear again,” he said and she couldn’t tell if it was the reflection of firelight or tears that glistened in his eyes. “
Macushla
,” he whispered. Beloved.

The dress he took from her with reverence, his eyes never once breaking the faith they held with hers. Then he took her chemise and underwear ‘til she stood bare to him, outlined by fire, shivering with want.

He drank her in inch by inch with his eyes as though a hunger lay there in the dark of them that would never be satisfied.

“Ah darlin’,” he said at last, “even if I’d slept a thousand years I’d not of had a dream as fine an’ lovely as the reality of you.”

He made love to her that night that sang his soul into her own, as if all the poetry that he professed not to understand lay there within his own body, expressed more eloquently and with a depth the carving of ink could never attain. Beloved, he whispered with his hands, beloved he sang with his skin as it brushed her own, beloved with lips and tongue, until all the whispers built within her blood and became a high, humming threnody that invaded all the corners dark and ugly, that burned the fear with the whiteness of its heat and sank the ashes with this water of retribution he fed her with every touch. Until finally she cried his name over and over like litany, a private prayer that was the final blessing on the day.

“Lord I feel grand,” Casey said sometime later blowing frowzy edged smoke rings into the air above their heads. Father Terry had procured from some unknown source a true Cuban cigar and Casey had saved it for what he perceived as the perfect moment.

“I forgot Peg’s fancy French lingerie,” Pamela said feeling bone-meltingly satiated and in no way inclined to be dressed from her cozy nest of rumpled sheets and the long warm expanse of her husband’s body. “I feel a bit guilty really, your grandfather gave it to her and she never got the chance to wear it. She thought at least one Riordan ought to have the pleasure of it.”

“Pleasure I’ve had,” said Casey “an’ sure it had little to do with what you were wearin’. She loved him, then?” he asked.

“I think she mourns him still or mourns what she thinks might have been. She meant no disrespect to your grandmother, I hope you know that.”

Casey nodded, “Aye Father Terry told me a bit about it. My Da’ always said his parents had a love that was about endurin’ all the bad that life had handed them, perhaps my Granda’ knew that was not the life for Margaret MacBride. A man can’t live with divided loyalties, my father used to tell Pat and I and yet he did every day of his own life and so it would seem did his father before him.”

“And his son after him?” she asked not really knowing if she cared for him to answer.

He rolled to his side and turned her face up to his own, “ I never intended to marry that’s true, I was born with my destiny there inside,” he touched his hand over her heart, “there was never any real doubt what path I would eventually follow and my Da’s death only hastened my journey, but then I never planned on you and I could no more stop the inevitability of loving you than I could stop a train with my bare hands. Life hands ye gifts when ye least expect it an’ sometimes there’s no choice but to simply take it with both hands and be thankful for it. I think my father and grandfather would both understand that.”

“Doesn’t it ever frighten you, the sheer weight of all that history bearing down on you from the moment you’re born?”

“I’d be a fool if it didn’t but, darlin’, haven’t ye learned yet that there is not much more we Irish have to pass on to the next generation, our history, our resistance to oppression, the fight to live free as a man should be born, to call our land our own, to make the rules and have the freedom to break them and make better ones from the foundations of the old. Sometimes it’s as simple as wantin’ the dignity of a job and the ability to provide for one’s own family. It isn’t just about me and my Da’ and Grandda an’ all the Riordans that came before him, it’s for Pat and any number of Pats that I will never know, so that they might have somethin’ better and not have to leave their own land to do so.”

“And would you pay for the freedom of strangers with your own life?” she asked, trying and failing to keep the anger from skewing her voice.

He looked long into her eyes with a tenderness and sadness melding there that bewildered and frightened her.

“Aye I would,” he answered simply. And she knew then with a finality that her youth could hardly bear that in those three simple words was an enormity of belief and despair that she could never hope to fight. Eight hundred years of weight and blood filled those words, his very DNA twisted into strands that marked him out for this, this intangible thing, and forced him to live in a world where hope was a luxury and a word could kill a man. Yet to use his own words she could no more stop the loving of him than she could halt a train with her bare hands. And for now he lay within her own sights and this night was for their making alone, the world outside with all its cries of need and pain could go hang.

She turned to him this time making her need known with a ferocity she had never before displayed and he responded in kind as though if this baptism were fiery enough and shed enough heat and light it would keep them safe and warm even if only for this one night.

Margaret MacBride, more commonly known as Peg, was having the very devil of a time trying to sleep and had, after tossing and turning and cursing at sheets, bed, room and finally in utter frustration, the moon, had given up and rose from her tangle of abused linen to make herself a cup of chocolate. It was hardly a guaranteed sleep aid but it was pleasant and passed the time. Waiting for dawn to come had ceased to be an exercise in angst years ago and had quite simply, she supposed, now become the affliction of the old, a simple inability to sleep.

In the tiny kitchen with its north and west-facing windows, she had not bothered to turn the lights on, but boiled the kettle and mixed the chocolate and cream by the fitful light of the moon. There wasn’t much gumption left in the wind anymore, it’d be a soft day of it tomorrow. She hoped the sun would make its appearance again, the chill, mist-laden days that had once seemed like so much manna to her romantic soul now seeped insidiously into her bones and stiffened her joints and there was simply nothing romantic about that. It rather reminded one far too sharply of one’s age, she thought, taking her chocolate and walking painfully into the sunporch she’d had built, (in some fit of lunacy as the sun was rather a rare player in these climes) five years ago. Arthur had left her a great deal of money though, rather a shocking amount really for a man who had lived such a simple, uncomplicated life, and she’d really nothing to spend it on. Siddy and his uptight wife, Clarice, had been well shot of her years ago and hardly needed her assistance in matters financial. So when she had taken a hankering for a posh car, she’d had a second hand Bentley shipped over from England and when she’d wanted to see Paris once more she had simply put cash on the barrelhead and gone and when she had, one particularly glittery day, thought a sunporch would be just the thing she had called the contractor the next day and two months later there had been her sunporch. She’d felt a bit foolish about it at first, but then Terry had declared it perfectly grand and they’d taken to having their tea in it and she to sitting in it on sleepless nights, like tonight.

Overhead there was a great tangled snarl of stars, like the string of a child’s kite caught hopelessly in the branches of an unforgiving tree. The night sky was comforting at times and at others so remote as to seem Godless. It took a moment or two to settle herself in her chair; an act that had once seemed so perfunctory now took a merciless toll on her body. But at last she was settled, if not comfortably, then at least bearably. One learned to live with what small graces life extended and was thankful for them. She sniffed the dark perfume of her chocolate and enjoyed the warmth the steam of it provided for the tip of her nose. She took a large swallow and sighed gratefully as the heat spread outward from her stomach to the extremities of her anatomy. Then she sighed again and set the chocolate on the small table beside her. This sigh contained no satisfaction and certainly no relief to the heavy weight straddling her chest. She had lied to Terry, Terry who just happened to have another life as a priest. She could not altogether shed the trappings of her Catholic childhood and supposed this would require attendance at mass at least twice and a substantial offering to the poorbox. Would that all sins, she thought wearily, be cast off so easily. Some sins were unforgivable though and she had lived long enough to know it for truth. And she had committed hers long ago, though she still could not feel a true regret for it. Perhaps regret would come when she felt the fires of hell at her feet but she had burned on earth, burned for fifty years for a man who’d turned to dust more than thirty years ago. Perhaps that would count, that earthly torture or perhaps, and this was not a new thought to her, maybe this was hell, right here, and humans just didn’t know it.

She
had
known Brian, for a brief time granted, but he’d never been ‘just Marie’s son’ to her though it was hardly something she could tell Terry. Brian had come to see her in England, a long time past now, must have been ’37 just before war broke across Europe. He had been sitting on her front stairs one morning when she arrived home from doing the marketing. He’d risen up in one long fluid line, the grace of his father present in his movement and taken her bags from her wordlessly.

‘Ye’ll know who I am then?” he asked quietly as she fumbled with the key.

‘Aye, I’ll know,” she replied finding her Irish slipping back into her speech, thick and clotting, a sure sign of nervousness. “Though what yer doin’ here is something I’ll be less certain about.”

He didn’t answer at once but brought her bags into the house and set them down in the kitchen. She offered him tea but he replied that a cool glass of water would do him just fine. She settled for the same and then faced him across the kitchen.

“Well Brian, what have ye come for?” She nervously lit herself a cigarette and offered him one, which he politely declined.

“Don’t usually indulge myself,” she said, “Arthur doesn’t like the smell of it about.”

Brian nodded and she could see him appraising her across the cheery, sunlit room, the shadow of a willow rippling and rustling on the floor.

She knew she was still a fine looking woman, men’s eyes being the mirror of affirmation. Closing in on forty-five and the wrinkles only just beginning. Her waist still no more than a large man’s handspan, her hair, with help from a hairdresser in London, still fiery red, deepening into auburn glints. Arthur, she knew, still had his moments of disbelief that she had ever agreed to be his wife. Poor Arthur. Yes, still a woman who could turn heads in the street, but how, she wondered, did she look to this boy sitting in her kitchen? Old, most likely, old and ridiculous and hardly the flame-haired temptress that had lured his father away from his marital bed.

“I just wanted to see ye,” Brian said, “I wanted to see the woman my Da’ spent years agonizin’ over. I wanted to know what it was that pulled him like a madman to ye.”

“Bit disappointed, aren’t ye?” she said angrily and ground her cigarette out in the sink. She busied herself with the groceries then, tossing things into cupboards willy-nilly, so that she’d find apples in the potato bin and nutmeg in the fridge the next day.

“No,” he said, “yer fine as any woman I’ve ever seen, but if my Daddy loved ye it had little to do with what he saw on the outside.”

“I’m sorry,” she said and collapsed into a chair. “What is it that ye want from me then?”

Brian didn’t answer for a moment, he looked down at his hands loosely clasped on the table in front of him and when he replied his answer was so quiet she had to lean forward to hear.