The Ground She Walks Upon (24 page)

Fiona looked at the green bottle next to the old man, her eyes wide and innocent. "I can't imagine what you mean, my lord. What bottle? Not here in the kitchen."

"It suffices to say that you heard me." Trevallyan looked down at Griffen. The old gravedigger looked tired. "Enjoy yourself, O'Rooney. Take my hospitality and heed Fiona's care. If you need anything, tell Greeves."

"My lord, there has been mischief done to the keep. It seems someone tried to start a small fire there. The south door is charred. Curran saw the flames and put it out. We're fortunate it was not worse." Greeves handed Trevallyan a gold salver with a note upon it.

Grim-faced, Trevallyan looked up from his library desk and took the note. He read it and put it down.

"May I be of assistance, my lord?" Greeves asked, tucking his one useless sleeve into the pocket of his frock coat.

"What a day this has been...." Trevallyan stood. "I'll be going to Antrim, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Right now I have the need to go into Lir. Tell Seamus to ready the carriage." Almost as an afterthought, he said, "Oh, and give Curran a gold piece for his loyalty, and have the damage to the keep repaired."

"Yes, my lord." Greeves paused at the door. "May I ask... was the fire expected?"

Trevallyan released a long, melancholy sigh. "Not the fire, but the mischief. Yes, I would have to say it was expected. Thank you, Greeves. That is all."

"Thank you, my lord."

Meet me at the market today.

He balled the note in his fist. Damned if he could tell whether it was Ravenna's handwriting or not. He had read the fragment of her story, but her script hadn't left as much an impression on him as the words.

His eyes darkened as he thought of the fire in the keep. It was obvious the note could be a ruse. Malachi and the rare lot of slummy bastards he ran with were not beyond such diabolics. If it was a fraud, it was a good one, for he was driven to meet her. As much as his instincts told him to stay at the castle, he knew he would go to the market. He would do it only to hold on to the slim thread that Ravenna—the beauty he had dreamed about last night with erotic fervor— had truly desired to summon him.

R
avenna hadn't
wanted to walk to 0'Shea's for their potatoes, but word was out about the blight. O'Shea's crop had to be eaten or it was forever lost. As many a soul had tragically learned, once blight took hold of a field, even the apparently healthy potatoes could not be stored, for they, too, would mildew. Thousands had starved in dear Ireland learning this fact.

So she and Grania had decided to throw their lot in with the other townsfolk and buy out O'Shea. Even if they never got around to eating all those potatoes, O'Shea would be salvaged and, if they were lucky, the blight could be stopped at his field. If they all stuck together, Grania had sagely advised Ravenna, the agony that had occurred elsewhere might not happen in Lir.

With several silver coins in her purse, Ravenna struck out on the high road to help bail poor Michael O'Shea and his sons out of their misery. The day was appropriately gray and misty, befitting her mood. Yet for all her preoccupation with the news of the blight in Lir, for all that she deeply empathized with her neighbors' sufferings, she couldn't shake her despondency over what had transpired several nights before at the castle.

Trevallyan.

She couldn't even think the name without feeling a jab to her heart. On the outside, she had vowed to present a cool crust of dispassion whenever the master's name should be mentioned, but inside, with every passing hour, she knew she was lying to herself. She felt anything but dispassion. He had humiliated her. In as many words, he'd all but agreed that he viewed her as little better than a possession to him. And the rancor over Malachi, it was nothing more than jealousy that someone lower in status than the great earl of Trevallyan was sampling his wares.

She thought of her kiss and died a little more inside herself at remembrance of the display she had made. It boggled her now why she had kissed him. At the moment, she had wanted to kiss him desperately, but now she could see it had been stupid, dangerous, and altogether utter folly. A man such as Trevallyan would never love her. She had surrendered to the honesty of her emotions, and he had slapped her in the face with the pretensions of the Ascendency; she had melted for him, and he had told her she was a loose woman.

Even if there was a
geis
and all of Lir was to fall prey to blight, famine, and anarchy without her following its command to marry Trevallyan, she now knew she could not love the man. She couldn't see being able to love someone who had treated her as he had, who had toyed with her life and her feelings as if she were nothing but an expendable peasant girl whose use was physical and not spiritual, never spiritual. After all, it was surely his belief that only the Ascendency had souls and desires and feelings above those of an animal.

She felt tears sneak up on her. Trevallyan seemed to have broken her. She'd outlasted the torture of the years at the English school, but Trevallyan's treatment, while much more brief, had scarred her more deeply. To kiss a man, to trust him and desire him so intimately she wanted to submit body and soul to his every wish, made a woman too fragile. He should have trod softly, with care; instead, he'd been callous, and brutally forthright. It was like a knife to her gut to think that even after their kiss he viewed her no better than those terrible girls at Weymouth-Hampstead had. She was mere Irish, of ignoble birth. And somehow that gave all and sundry the right to flay her feelings the way a whip flayed bare skin.

She wiped her tears with the corner of her shawl. She was not like Malachi, ready to die for Home Rule and fight the Ascendency at any cost, but she had a better understanding of the Malachis of her oppressed land with each year that she felt the sting of her lowly status.

At the crossroads to O'Shea's field, she looked down the opposite road toward town and toward the castle beyond. People were gathering around a cart or some kind of vehicle in the center of town, a strange occurrence, but not so unusual if a tinker had come to town. The castle stood in the backdrop. She didn't want to look at it, but she did.

Almost nothing was visible in the mist except the crenellations of the old keep. One single light in the window that said someone, perhaps the master himself, was in the master's bedchamber. What was he doing, she wondered, as she stood stock-still in the road, her gaze fixed to the distant keep as if it—or its occupant—held a mystic power over her. Was he sitting in his chair with a blazing hearth chasing away the gloom of the day? Was he reading a novel, a glass of cognac held lazily in his hand? Or was he thinking? Did she cross his mind? Or did the memory of their encounters go with her when she fled the castle?

Tears threatened again. With an iron will, she forced them back and her face grew placid, as placid as the marble face of the Virgin Mary. Vowing to forget him, she spun on her heels and turned toward O'Shea's.

But then she stopped.

Her brow furrowed. The group in the town. There had been something not quite right about the gathering. From the corner of her eye, she'd seen a figure rush to the group. What was it about that figure that disturbed her? She grew still.

It was the black bag he held in his hand. The man was the physician.

A black, terrible foreboding engulfed her. Someone had been hurt in the middle of town. Someone who had driven through in a cart... or carriage. There weren't many who owned such vehicles in Lir.

She clutched the willow basket to her chest and began an anxious run-walk in the direction of Lir. The closer she got, the more she could see the cause of the gathering was indeed a tragedy. Men with grim, lined faces looked on while women held their children in shacklelike grips so they would not disturb those who were assisting.

She roughly pushed through the crowd without thought or bother of manners. A strange panic gripped her, as if she knew whatever she might find in the middle of the crowd was somehow inevitable. Like sorrow amidst a plague.

"Is he dead? Is the poor boy-o dead?" she heard several call out. She pushed through some men, and with a sickening lurch to her heart, she realized that she stood in front of a black carriage with the Trevallyan crest lacquered on the door.

"Easy with him.... easy there, lads," a man said softly next to her.

Trevallyan,
her mind cried. Desperately, she clutched at the men who had moved in front of her. She again pushed her way to the front of the carriage. A body was being lifted from it, scarlet drops of fresh blood spattered across the chest.

Trevallyan,
she moaned silently, not yet able to see the face, unable to see whether he was dead or alive.

Numbness crept through her. Above, the body moved from one set of hands to another and another and in the background, somewhere, a woman wept. The scene seemed to play out in minutes instead of seconds, as if slowed by the hand of God. It took every bit of her strength to push through the crowd one last time.

The men lowered the figure onto a wagon. She pushed through to the wooden sides of the vehicle, her heart pounding like a hammer. The face. She had to see the face.

"Seamus! Seamus!" a woman behind her wailed. Ravenna looked down at the wounded man. It truly was Seamus, Trevallyan's carriage driver, who lay in the wagon. His face was deathly pale, his mouth slack, his eyes squeezed shut. He'd been shot through the chest and now clung to life by the thinnest of threads.

The crowd thronged around him, easing him out of her view. For a long moment, she simply stood where she was, unable to move. It wasn't Trevallyan.
It wasn't Trevallyan,
she kept telling herself, despising the odd relief she felt every time she repeated the realization. Yet, horribly, another thought came to her.

She turned around and stared at the abandoned carriage. With renewed anxiety, she saw the holes and raw wood where shots had entered it. The door was off its hinge and the interior was dark and despairing, as if no life lingered there.

Was Trevallyan still inside the carriage? Had he been left in there, because... he was now beyond human help?

Choking back the sudden rush of emotion, she stepped to the carriage to peer inside. Her mind rebelled at the thought of what she might find in there, but she still clawed at the door to open it. She had to know what had happened to him. She had to see for herself. There was almost a spiritual need to see him. If he was dead, she would always wonder whether in some mystical realm, the realm of
geise,
she hadn't been the one who had somehow gotten him killed.

"He's no longer there, miss," Drummond, the Anglican minister, told her as she twisted the metal latch on the carriage door.

"Where—where is he?" she stuttered, staring at the old man. Had they already taken him away? He couldn't possibly be worse off than Seamus and still be alive. So had they laid him out alongside the road? And was there anyone at his side? To hold his hand, a hand that might soon grow cold?

The panic inside her swelled. She didn't love Trevallyan. Indeed, she had vowed to never bother with him again. So perhaps it was the sight of Seamus, or the blood, or the terrible notion that Malachi, even if he was not the trigger-man, surely knew who the man was that sent this scene into such a spiral of despair. But deep down, she knew it wasn't any of these things.
Trevallyan. Trevallyan.
His name kept ringing in her mind like a druid chant, beckoning her to find him. She must find him.

"Look yonder, miss." Drummond pointed behind her to Doyle's tavern.

Sickened, she turned around.

Their gazes locked instantly.

Trevallyan stood beneath the tavern sign with Father Nolan. He held his right arm to his side, and she could see blood on the makeshift bandage. The wound was obviously superficial and didn't seem to hurt him. Indeed, there was not pain in his eyes, but anger. Fury. She pitied those who had done this to him.

Every man, woman, and child in the crowd fell silent as they watched them. She looked away from Trevallyan for a second and found all eyes turned on her. The townsfolk were gauging her reaction. Even Trevallyan, she thought, as she stared at him once more, was assessing her. Did everyone in Lir know about the ridiculous, trumped-up
geis?
And did they blame her for what had happened? Did Trevallyan believe the
geis
now, and believe her to be the indirect cause of this mischief the boy-os had done?

She turned away and abruptly began to walk out of town. It was all she could do not to run. The strange urge to rush to Trevallyan, to touch him, feel his warm arms and see the life still in his clear blue-green eyes was like a fire burning within her, a fire she couldn't understand and wanted desperately to extinguish. Now she just wanted to go home. The potatoes and O'Shea forgotten, she now just wanted to forget her fears and the confusing flood of emotion that had surged when she thought Trevallyan murdered, and she never wanted to think of them again.

"Are you sorry they didn't get me?"

Trevallyan's words were spoken evenly, with perhaps only a hint of malice. A strong hand gripped her arm. Right in the middle of the road out of Lir, he forced her to look at him. She wanted to pummel him with her fists, her fears, her shame, her relief, made her hate him anew.

"I had nothing to do with this and you know it. You know it!" she fairly screamed at him.

"I know."

Only two words, yet they instantly disarmed her. She looked up at him and fought the desire to bury her head in his chest and have a good long cry.

"Who did do it?" she whispered, afraid to hear the answer and yet desperate to know.

"I don't know. I didn't see them," Trevallyan whispered, drawing her near.

" 'Twas not Malachi. I know he could not—"

"Quit your blathering. He doesn't need your excuses." The anger flared in his eyes once more. She could see the old Celtic blood-lust had been ignited in him. "If he did this, I shall see that he pays."

"And if he did not do this?" she choked out.

"Then I shall make him tell me who did."

She stared at him, unable to think of a defense. Even she believed Malachi would know who had staged the ambush.

She gazed down at the hold on her arm. Suddenly flustered, she said, "Please—let—let me go. I'm glad that you weren't hurt—truly—and I shall say prayers for Seamus. Now you must let me return home." She tugged on her arm. He dropped his hand. With fire in his eyes, he watched her leave.

"Griffen told me about your father. Things you don't even know."

The words stopped her. She glanced at him and saw the sincerity on his face.

"Tell me. What did he say?" she almost gasped in her haste to know.

A wicked little smile turned one corner of Trevallyan's mouth. "All in good time. I shall expect you at the castle for dinner tonight so that we may discuss it."

His ploy was ingenious. If there was one thing that could bring her back to the castle, it was news about her father.

In awe and frustration, she stared at him. He'd just made a mess of all her plans. She had vowed never to see him again, yet now she was expected for dinner. He didn't care about her, save what information he presumed she could give him about the boy-os, but she wasn't going to be able to turn him down, for she would do almost anything to find out about her father.

"I don't wish to see you anymore, my lord," she said, her words stiff, helpless.