The Hawk and the Dove (23 page)

O’Neill placed an arm about him and helped him to the water stairs by Blackfriars Bridge.

“Go on,” Shane gasped, “I’ll go home.”

O’Neill considered for long minutes, then said grudgingly, “I’ll take you to the baron.”

Shane, hearing the reluctance in his voice, laughed aloud, then promptly passed out in his father’s arms.

Sabre amused herself by trying on all her new gowns, preening before the oval cheval mirror. The pretty clothes lifted her heart, and as she hummed a tune and hung up a whole row of new and expensive finery it came to her that she hadn’t been this happy in a very long time. She wondered idly what was keeping Shane, then decided to take his pair of wolfhounds for a walk while she investigated the grounds of Thames View.

The dogs shot off into the shadowed twilight, and for one disastrous moment she thought they had run away; but to her relief she saw them circle back and streak past her, following the scent of some trail. Thank God he has them well trained, she thought. She rather expected to meet him returning up the river, but after lingering by the water’s edge for half an hour, she strolled back to the house, a slight frown marring her pretty features.

She went into his library and browsed through a shelf of fine books. Finally selecting one, she took it upstairs with her. As the time ticked past, she found herself unable to concentrate on the book. She arose and went to the window, but night had fallen and she stared out into blackness. Uneasy, she began to pace the chamber.

Sabre wasn’t the only one pacing at Thames View. The baron cursed himself for not having accompanied Shane. He knew he was able to handle himself in any situation, yet in all his dealings with the O’Neill, the baron’s unease persisted. It is a joy and curse to bear the blood of Erin,
he thought. Sometimes there is a dark morbidity that is the private hell of an Irish mind. He tried to shake off his fears, but his sixth sense persisted.

Sabre was becoming annoyed that so new a lover could neglect her so shamefully, and yet she admitted her annoyance masked her apprehension. Finally she faced it squarely. What did she fear? The answer came back that her fear was for him. Why should she care? Didn’t she want her revenge? Wasn’t she going to hurt him? The answer came back, yes, she wanted to hurt him, but inexplicably she didn’t want anyone else to hurt him!

She decided to seek out the baron. If Shane had gone on one of his secret adventures, perhaps he would be gone for days and she would have to return to Windsor tonight, late as it was. She heard raised voices from the east wing of the house and hurried in their direction.

“Wounds taken under the arm are fatal, man, and well ye know it!” shouted the red-haired giant Shane had told her was the earl of Tyrone. “I’m off … more time I cannot waste.”

The baron fixed him with a dark stare. “Waste? He’s your son!”

Sabre stood transfixed at the entrance to the baron’s chamber. The baron could speak after all, and the words he spoke were unbelievable, yet it was the other’s words that had constricted her heart. Her eyes flew to the still figure stretched across the table between the two men. “He’s dead!” she cried in anguish, rushing forward. She turned upon O’Neill wildly. “This is your doing— whether by your hand or another, you are to blame!”

The look he gave her was terrible to behold, but she stood her ground as the candles cast shadows across the ceiling’s beams.

He sneered, “The queen sets the pace for independence in Englishwomen. In Ireland we make good women by beating and bedding them regularly.”

The baron was rapidly divesting Shane of his clothes, oblivious to the others in the room. The unconscious man groaned and Sabre cried, “He lives! Let me help you.”

O’Neill picked up his cloak and said with scorn, “Now that his whore has arrived, ye won’t need my assistance.”

She watched the baron arrange knives, scissors, and strange surgeon’s instruments on the bedside table. He had a cabinet filled with bandages, potions, and unguents of every hue in strange bottles and boxes. She saw him sprinkle crystals into a silver bowl of hot water and it turned dark purple. Then he sponged the gaping wound, which still spewed blood.

“Will he live?” she breathed. Silence filled the room. “Speak, damn you. He lied to me—told me you couldn’t speak, yet I heard you.”

The baron’s voice was a thing of beauty when he finally spoke. Modulated, cultured, and kind, yet strong and reassuring. “He did not lie. He said, ‘The baron
does not
speak,’ not ‘The baron
cannot
speak.’” He paused. “O’Neill was right. Wounds taken deep in the armpit are nearly always mortal wounds, and yet he is the strongest man I have ever known.”

“Then you think there is a chance he can survive this?”

“It is up to you and me to see that he does,” he said with calm conviction. He packed the wound and bound him so tight, the pressure prevented him from expanding his lungs.

“He cannot breathe,” she protested.

Patiently he explained, “This is just while I carry him up to bed—else the last of his lifeblood would flow from
him.” When Shane was laid out in his own bed, the baron once again with sure, gentle hands repacked the wound and bound him tightly, only this time allowing the unconscious man to take shallow breaths.

“What can I do?” she asked humbly.

“Keep him in this bed,” he said simply. “I will go and brew up some herbs to strengthen him. Call me the moment he regains consciousness.”

Sabre gazed down at the man in the bed. He wore a death mask, so pale and still did he lie. Now she knew the real reason he was called Shane. He was Irish. He was a prince of Ireland. It all seemed so inevitable, as if she had known … their destinies bound together for good or ill since the dawn of time.

Suddenly he threw off the covers and thrashed about. He did not open his eyes, so she did not know if he had regained consciousness. She covered him and tried to hold him still but he would not. She began to croon to him, in a calming, loving voice, willing him to obey her soft commanding incantation, and he did begin to respond: calming when she crooned, thrashing when she stopped. The paleness had begun to leave him, but it was replaced by a flush, and when she laid her hands upon his body, she felt him burning.

The baron came in with a large goblet. He handed it to Sabre, then gently lifted Shane’s head from the pillows. She put it to his lips and they patiently waited until he had swallowed half the contents. She brought a ewer of cooled rosewater from the bathing room and gently sponged his face, neck, and chest. Then the baron lifted his head again and they tenderly coaxed the rest of the elixir into him. The baron stayed for two hours while the potion did its work to break the fever, and they held him
still, one on either side. When the crisis came and the dry fever broke, moisture poured from him until the bed sheets were saturated. Sabre took fresh linen and, with the baron’s help, remade the bed.

Shane opened his eyes, sighed her name, and closed his eyes again as if in sleep. “He needs rest and he needs you. I suggest you lie with him. I will come back every hour,” he promised.

Sabre undressed quietly, laid out a velvet bed robe for the times she would have to arise and see to his needs, and then, naked, slipped into the wide bed and lay with her arms about him. She quietly and steadily willed him to live. She did not know if it was possible to transfer her strength into his body, but she tried. She was alarmed, for his heartbeat, always so strong and steady when they had lain together before, was now erratic. She could not dispel the metallic scent of blood from her nostrils, and it filled her with dark dread. It seemed to her that in these long, still hours of the night she shared him with death. She feared if she closed her eyes in sleep for one unguarded moment, the Shadowy Lord of the Gates would snatch him to the other side.

Once she rose up with a scream in her throat, throwing her arms out to shield him, but it was only the cowled figure of the baron bending low to see if he still drew breath. She lay against him and examined her feelings for this man who for better or for worse was her husband. Her heart and her mind were opposed. Her innermost thoughts and emotions tangled hopelessly together and were a mystery to her, as deep as the mystery that surrounded this man beside her. She only knew that she was irrevocably, fervently involved and that there was no
turning back. At the end of the path lay a destiny … good or evil … win or lose … life or death!

Shane began to talk. Her heart lifted with joy that he was improved enough to speak, then plummeted as she realized he was out of his mind and thought them aboard ship. “Don’t be afraid, love, she’s made of solid English oak from Devon. She’s high-riding and I’ve struck the topmasts to ease the roll. Though we run with the wind we’ll not lose our rigging.” His good arm slipped about her and his lips brushed her temple. “We’ll be snug and dry down here as a dog’s buried bone all the while the black storm rages. Don’t be afraid, love.”

“I won’t be afraid if you won’t leave me. Stay close and be safe,” she implored.

“I promise never to leave you, Macushla. I must get the arms and ammunition to O’Neill…. I must swear you to secrecy.” His hold on her tightened and he threatened to rise up, so she soothed him with lies.

“I swear, love, you may trust me with your life…. I’ll keep your secrets forever.”

“It’s so good to have someone to share my thoughts with … someone I can trust…. I never had anyone before. I place my life in your hands without a second thought…. It is the others you must swear not to betray … O’Neill … Fitzgerald …”

She’d swear no such thing; she hated the O’Neill with a passion. “Who is Fitzgerald?”

His voice altered to a ragged whisper. “The baron is Fitzgerald, son of the great earl of Desmond…. I’m a bastard, but he’s the legitimate son of an earl. No one knows he lives … none must ever know. Sentence was passed on him … I read it….
‘Drawn upon a hurdle, through the open streets, to the place of execution, there to
be cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes, then your head to be struck off from your body, which shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the
queen’s pleasure!’”

“Hush, hush, my lord, I beg you.” She was being wicked to question him so in his delirium. She was learning of the horrors that awaited him if he were discovered a traitor to the crown, aye, and mayhap herself also, wedded to a traitor. All sacrificed for the queen’s pleasure, she thought wildly. “Hush, hush, my lord,” she soothed.

“I need to talk, my darling.”

“Then talk of gentler things. Tell me of your boyhood.”

He laughed hollowly, without mirth. “My mother sent me to O’Neill the summer I was ten. He took me on raids … not considered a man until I’d bloodied my sword and taken an English life. The atrocities I saw will stay with me forever. The English butchered half Munster … babies, children … women. When I was fourteen we came across three whole villages where every living soul had been slaughtered and burned. That night in retaliation we raided the Dublin garrison. Murdered all the officers.”

“Shane, stop!” she ordered with as much command as she could muster, and with relief she heard his words revert back to sailing.

“I love the sea … so clean … so free … it was my escape.”

“Your escape from O’Neill? Then why do you still help him? You’ll never be free of him!”

“Because I love him and I hate him. Can you understand such a thing?” he murmured.

She understood only too well. That exactly summed up her feelings for Shane Hawkhurst O’Neill. She loved him and she hated him.

She was grateful when the baron returned with another brimming goblet. She slipped on her bed robe and lit more fresh candles. “He’s been raving, and look, the bandages are soaked through. I fear he’s worse!”

“No,” he said quietly, “the poison must come out. Then he will heal.” Sabre knew he was referring to more than the wound. How many times they dressed his wound afresh and changed his linen and fed him the potion, she never counted, but at dawn of the third day he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber, never moving for fourteen hours.

The baron reassured her, “He will survive, there is no question of it now. No vital organs were touched, only the wound needs healing. Thank God he has so large a chest. On a smaller man such a thrust would have pierced the heart or lung.”

Sabre bathed and changed her clothing, and Mason brought her a delicious supper on a tray. She gave a fleeting thought to Kate Ashford and the court, then shrugged her shoulders. Some plausible excuse would spring to her mind when she returned, but for now she had enough to occupy her. She would keep him abed for a week one way or another.

On the fourth day he opened his eyes and smiled at them. He was weak as a kitten and forced to do their bidding for the first two hours. He suffered through broth and coddled eggs, but when it came to watered wine he
revolted and threw back the covers. “God’s death, clear the room, I’ll feed myself!”

“No, no. You will stay in bed if I have to tie you to the bedposts!” she vowed. “The baron and I have worked over you like two galley slaves. You’ll not start the bleeding again by your reckless male bravado!”

“The only way I’ll stay in this bed is with your warm body pressed to me beneath the covers.”

“Issue me no ultimatums, m’lord, I could lay you low with one hand.”

He leered. “I could lay you low with one finger.”

She blushed. “There is no need to be lewd. Faith, you must be improving if that’s all you can think of.”

He apologized with his eyes and pleaded softly, “Come lie with me, love.”

She relented. So great was her relief at his recovery that against the safe, solid heat of his body she drifted into slumber, and through half-closed, drowsy eyelids he watched her, content for the moment.

A magnificent barge was delivered to Thames View the following morning. Sabre viewed it from the upstairs windows of the house in all its luxurious splendor and could not resist rushing down to the river to inspect it firsthand. It was not overly large, but so well appointed, with brass rails and lamps, polished oaken deck, and even a dragon masthead upon its prow. It was fashioned with gold, white, and purple canopy and heavy curtains to draw against inclement weather. Piles of cushions were provided for comfort in either sitting or reclining, each embroidered with two S’s intertwined, for Shane and Sabre.