The Irish Bride (31 page)

“
How do you
mean?”

“
I have a job that needs
doing, and I need a man with your connections and knowledge of
O’Rourke’s operation to accomplish it.” It wasn’t true—Noel’s
purpose in involving Richards had nothing to do with those
blandishments. But my, my, didn’t Richards just
bask
in Noel’s line of
bunkum.

The man leaned back in his chair.
“Well, I might be able to help you,” he agreed expansively. “It all
depends on what you have in mind and how much you’re willing to
pay.”

Noel smiled. “And isn’t that the crux
of any agreement, Richards?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Farrell was dressed and sitting by the
fireplace in the McLoughlins’ parlor when she looked out the window
and saw Aidan pull their wagon around to the front of the house.
Her heart gave a joyful leap at the sight of him. She had missed
him these past four days, although she had not forgiven him for
anything. Watching him come up the walk, she still admired the
broad shoulders and straight back, but he looked as pale and drawn
as the leafless December trees. The thin winter afternoon sun
settled over him like an old gray shroud.

The serving girl answered his knock,
then discreetly left the room to give them privacy.

Aidan drew up a footstool and sat
before her. He began to reach for her hand, then didn’t. “How are
ye feeling, Farrell?”

“
The doctor says I’ll be
fine in time, and this morning he told me that I’m free to go home
if I want.” This close, she could see how tired and worn-looking he
really was. The firelight played up his haggard features. Red-eyed
and with a bristle of day-old beard, he looked uncared
for.

“
And do you want that?” he
asked.

She found she couldn’t look at him too
closely. The bitterness in her heart had not faded in the few short
days that she’d been here. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever
recover from the loss of their child. “I don’t know.”

He nodded, as if he’d been expecting
nothing more from her.

“
Have ye been working
hard?”

He shrugged. “Aye. There’s not much
else to do. Now.” He took a deep breath and went on, as if from a
speech he’d rehearsed in his head many times. “Farrell, I’m sorry
for, well, for everything. That night—the night I brought you here,
you told me I must choose between you and the mill. I’ve had a lot
of time to think about everything while you’ve been gone.” He hung
his hands between his knees. “I never should have taken ye away
from Ireland. It was wrong of me. I should have seen you settled
there in another town where none could find you, just as you’d
asked, and then left for America on my own.” Farrell’s heart
chilled in her chest. “I thought we could build a life, and I’ve
given you everything I can think to give, but—“ He shook his head.
“I didn’t do what I should have to begin with, so now I want to
make it right. I’ll give you an annulment, and that will be my
final gift to you. I’ll swear we never consummated the marriage and
you can go home to Ireland. I’ll pay your passage and provide money
so you can live your life there, in safety, then send you more as
long as you need it.”

Icy-handed and dry-mouthed,
she asked, “This is what you want?
This
is your choice?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then
looked at her. “It’s for the best. Too much has happened between
us. I thought I was doing you a favor by bringing you to America.
But I wasn’t. Stay here until spring, when the sailing is better,
or—or if you’d rather, we can find a boardinghouse where you can
live until then.” He searched her face, as if waiting for a
particular response. But she couldn’t speak.

So much for Dr. McLoughlin’s
notion that Aidan needed her. Maybe Aidan was right. Maybe there
were too many hurt feelings to ever get over. So he’d chosen the
mill. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was, and oh, God,
so
crushed
. How
strange, she thought woodenly, that his dreams had not broken his
heart, as his family had predicted, but hers instead.

Once again, Liam’s words
came back to haunt her.
I love ye, lass,
but in God’s truth, I don’t love you well enough.
Neither, it seemed, did Aidan.

She swallowed the hard lump in her
throat, the one that threatened to cause tears to begin flowing.
“All right, Aidan,” she said at last. “I’ll come home—I mean, back
to the house, until I decide what I want to do. Just let me collect
my things here and thank the McLoughlins.”

When they got back to the house, Aidan
remained in the kitchen while Farrell walked through the rooms. She
saw that he’d replaced the tick in the bedroom with a new one and
removed every trace of what had happened that night. The floors
were clean, the bloodstains cleaned away. Even the cradle was gone.
It was as if nothing had happened here. As if the baby had never
existed. Grief welled up within her again, as strong as ever. It
seemed that he would just sweep away all vestiges of Farrell and
their child.

It appeared that he had been sleeping
in one of the other bedrooms. There, the bed was unmade. Clothes
were flung here and there, and his other good suit laid in a heap
in a corner. Dirty dishes and a half-empty whiskey bottle stood on
the floor next to the bed. God, what a mess, she
thought.

She made her way back downstairs to
the kitchen, where he was drinking a cup of tea. “The ladies from
church came to help clean up. They send their
condolences.”

“
Thank you.” Afraid to ask,
she finally had to. “Where—what did you—” She took a deep breath
and tried again. “What about the babe?”

“
I buried it out in back.
I’ll take you there if you’d like.”

She let her hand trail over the work
table. “Later, maybe.”

Aidan left his tea mug on that table
and went out then, saying he had business to attend to. Of course.
When had he not?

* * *

Christmas was only a few days away,
and as the sun set on this Friday afternoon, people in town were
hurrying home with gifts and provisions for Christmas dinners. But
Aidan had one goal as he rode over the frosted landscape to
Kelleher’s saloon, and that was to get roaring drunk. It had been
his goal every night since Farrell had first gone to the
McLoughlins’s. This afternoon, that seemed to be an especially
important task, since he couldn’t face staying in the house with
Farrell there, knowing that she would soon be gone.

It had all seemed so logical when he’d
worked it out in his head, this gut-wrenching decision to send her
away. But when he’d first set eyes upon her that afternoon, it had
taken all the strength he had to keep from dropping to his knees in
front of her, begging her for another chance, and blubbering like a
child in her lap. Then he’d mustered that waning strength to make
his little speech. She’d already been pale, but when he’d uttered
his words, any color left in her face faded away.

He tied his horse to the rail in front
of Kelleher’s and walked into the saloon. After stopping at the bar
to get a bottle and a glass, he found a table in the back and
flopped into a chair. The questions that had plagued him all the
way into town were still buzzing around his brain like a bee
trapped in a jar. Had he done a stupid thing with Farrell? Had he
done the right thing? Was there yet hope? Did he even know anything
at all anymore? He’d been utterly miserable the entire time she was
across town—how would he feel when he knew she was gone forever,
ten thousand miles across the world?

He uncorked the bottle, poured a
drink, and bolted it in one swallow, hoping to numb the pain in his
heart and to silence those questions before they made his head
burst. He drank three in quick succession, gasping for a breath
between each. The kindly fire of the alcohol was beginning to dull
his brain when, across the saloon, he spotted Jacob Richards’s
woozy, bloated countenance. Aidan knew he’d made an enemy of the
man when he’d discharged him. It was perfectly acceptable for a man
to sit in a saloon and soak his troubles when he had just told the
only woman he’d ever loved to seek an annulment, hoped that she
wouldn’t, and was scared to death that she would. It was just fine
to get stinking drunk when a man felt like he was the biggest idiot
and most successful failure on God’s earth. But he couldn’t have a
someone gone with the drink working in a place with machinery and
saw blades. If Geoffrey Brother had ignored the problem, or hadn’t
recognized it, that wasn’t Aidan’s fault.

Then he noticed that Richards was
sitting with Seth Fitch, that scheming spalpeen. An alarm bell went
off in his head—something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what.
They saw him as well but didn’t acknowledge him. They merely put
their heads closer and spoke in tones too low for him to hear. Now
and then, one or the other would glance up at him.

Suddenly, the idea of getting drunk in
this place didn’t seem like a good one to Aidan. Oh, he yearned for
the oblivion of the whiskey, but he worried that in his
intoxication, his oblivion might become permanent when one of those
men smashed his head in. He wasn’t about to die at the hands of
such low men. Fitch meant him no good, and he’d probably enlisted
the aid of Richards, who also bore him a grudge. Surely this had to
be about something besides some money lost on a gambling table, but
he didn’t know what.

He put the cork back in the bottle,
tucked it under his arm and threw two dollars on the table. Then he
left through Kelleher’s back door, intent on heading back to the
mill where he could drink in peace.

* * *

The next morning, Farrell was already
up and sitting at the kitchen table when Aidan came downstairs.
Outside, dawn was just beginning to light the gloom of the overcast
sky. He wore one of his suits, but he moved carefully and without
the usual bounce in his step, as if he feared his head might roll
off his shoulders. She had heard him come in late and had known
from the sound of his gait that he was drunk. He’d bounced along
the hallway walls, shushing himself when he thought he’d made too
much noise. If it hadn’t been so sad, she would have laughed. But
there was nothing funny about this.

“
You’re up early,” he
commented. “Did ye sleep at all?”

She rose from the table and wrapped
her shawl around her shoulders. “I want to see the baby’s
grave.”

He looked at her with red-edged eyes
and she saw the heartache in his eyes before he glanced away. How
had they come to such a dreadful pass? she wondered.

“
Ye’re sure?”

She glared at him.

He nodded. “All right.” He walked to
the door and opened it, then waited for her to pass. She detected
the scents she’d come to love about him, including a whiff of
fresh-cut wood. She might hate the mill that stole him from her as
surely as she would hate another woman who tried to take him, but
she loved the clean smell of its perfume.

She walked down the steps and he
followed her. “It’s this way.” He led her over the wet grass to a
small grove of bare-branched hazelnut trees, halfway down the lawn
to the river. They were planted in a semi-circle and seemed to
embrace and protect the charge that had been laid at the base of
their trunks. She could see where the earth had been turned, but
she wasn’t prepared for what she found when she got to the little
mound. She sank to her knees, and a sob rose in her
throat.

“
Oh, God,” she mourned. “Oh,
God.”

He knelt beside her, heedless of the
mud grinding into the knees of his suit pants. “I’ll order a
headstone, but for now, I thought this would be all right. She’ll
watch over the babe.”

On top of the tiny grave sat Farrell’s
little figure of St. Brigit, the one she’d abandoned the night
she’d gone to Dr. McLoughlin’s house. She bowed her head and
sobbed, her heart breaking as she rocked on her knees.

“
I’m sorry, Farrell,” she
heard Aidan say, his voice shaking. “I didn’t know what else to do.
D’ye want me to take it away?”

She felt him beside her and she wanted
to fall into his embrace. But they’d wounded each other so badly.
“N-no. It’s fitting, Aidan.” She stretched out a tentative finger
tip to the head of the little figure Aidan’s father had carved for
her so many years ago. “It’s fitting that she take care of the poor
wee thing. I couldn’t.”

* * *

Late that night Farrell lay in the bed
she shared with Aidan, listening to every creak and groan the house
made in the chill wind that blew under the eaves and whistled
around the windows. She knew that it was far past ten o’clock, and
although she’d been tired and sleeping a lot since the miscarriage,
tonight she was tense and wide awake.

Aidan was still not home.

She supposed that what he did now was
his business, but she felt fairly certain that he wasn’t working
late in the mill office. She had gone to the front window several
times and looked out at the building, quiet for the night,
searching for a light in even one window. But she saw not even a
candle glimmer.

At last, when she was about to put on
her shawl and go looking for him around the yard, she heard the
door open downstairs. His unsteady footsteps sounded across the
hardwood floors and she heard him utter a sharp curse when he
bumped into something and knocked it over. He was drunk again. Then
he was on the stairs, and she lay rigid under the quilts, wondering
if despite everything he’d said, that he would now try to come back
to this bed. He reached the top step and staggered down the
hallway. Though her room was dark, she felt him standing at the
doorway, as if trying to see her in the bed. She smelled the
alcohol on him, even from here.