The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) (4 page)

“This,” she said, thrusting out
a hand to a sagging wreck of a building, “is the henhouse. Those are the kitchens. That,” she continued, thrusting out the other arm, “is the stable. And this,” she said, trudging into the coolness of an open building, “is the hay barn.”

He followed
her into the dim building which smelled of cow and the sneezing perfume of chaff. She paced so fiercely that she whirled up clouds of it which had settled on the floor from a recent threshing. She peered up toward the second story searching for something, or someone, amid the piles of hay. Satisfied, she turned to face him.

“Now that we’re alone,” she said, “you can
finish with this mockery.”

“I’ll agree with that.”

“You’re a brazen one to ride into this place and call yourself its lord.” 

Garrick raised his brows
. Well, what did he expect? The earl had granted him this land, but no gold to wrap his bastard son in the silken trappings of a highborn nobleman. “Is it so hard to believe that I’m your master now?”

“
Please.”  Maeve looked him over, all the way down to his dusty boots. “You didn’t even bother to speak English. You rode in without a single servant to attend you, on a horse that has seen stronger days. And the way you just talked to me in the hall. . .”  She squeezed her eyes shut. “The people will suspect the truth before the sun sets. How long did you think you could stay here under this ruse before the real lord of Birr arrived?”

“A lifetime.”
  He hiked an elbow on the door of a milking stall. “But first it’s you who has explaining to do. It was you who lay with me under the moonlight on All Hallows’ Eve and then disappeared before dawn.”

Her hand shot to the laces of her tunic. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No
. It’s about you, riding here as bold as can be when I know who you are.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Garrick.” He
slid his elbow off the door, crossed the distance that separated them, and seized her hand. “Garrick, late of Wexford, your humble servant, who has done nothing these past days but think about this.”

He p
ulled her to him. He buried his hand in her hair and forced that lovely face up to his. Her lips gave under his. It all came back to him, the fresh, sweet taste of her, virgin and innocent and hot-blooded. The fullness of her hips in his hands, and the fierce, undeniable yearning that only comes to a man once in a lifetime, if he has the luck.

She struggled in his grip and pulled away. “Don’t.”

“You want this as much as I do.”

“It d
oesn’t matter what I want. It was best, leaving you. I never thought you’d come after me.”

“A man is never satisfied with one taste of heaven,
a stór
.”

“A man is supposed to want
a woman to leave.” She paced unevenly in the dimness, running her fingers through her hair. “Men dream about such women who leave them willingly after such a night.”

“There are nights, lass, and then there are
nights
.”

“
Don’t talk like that.” She dropped her hands and wrung them in her apron. “This cannot be.”

“You shouldn’t have run away from me.”

“Isn’t it time that a woman ran away from a man?” She backed away, stumbling over an empty pail set by a milking stall. “It’s always the man running away from a woman after he’s had his way.”

“You must have heard that rubbish from the same person who told you men grunt and have done with it.”

She hung the pail on a peg
and then leaned her forehead against the wood. “Why couldn’t you be like other men?”

“Why couldn’t y
ou be a woman who clings and demands more than a man could give? I searched for you for two days. I thought I’d lost you for good.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I might know more about you than any other, lass.”

“M
aybe you know who I’d
like
to be, if I had been born into a different life.”  She turned her back to him. “But you know nothing of me or of my place here in this castle.”

“
We’ll have time enough for that.”

He
wrapped his arms around her. This time she did not resist. Her hair smelled of sweet summer grass. The memory caused the blood to rush out of his head. He’d had plenty of women in his life. He’d enjoyed whores who worked the quays of Wexford, some hard-bitten by life, others soft-hearted despite the wear of their work. He’d kept one of his own for a while, a mite of a girl with big brown eyes, but the warmth he’d felt for her was like that of a distant young cousin. The time came when he stopped frolicking with her and set her up instead in a laundress’s establishment, so she wouldn’t have to ply her wares on the docks where a woman aged too swiftly. So, yes, his experiences were with work-hardened women, pleased to be having a man who took some pleasure in pleasing them. Not with a sensuous innocent who touched him with wonder in her eyes. Not with an Irishwoman of such soft hair, of such sweet scent, of such mystery.

He’d wanted
her the minute he’d spied her across the heat of that All Hallows’ Eve fire. It was if she’d been standing there waiting for him for a lifetime. Now he found her on his own lands. If he hadn’t seen the surprise in her own eyes, if he didn’t sense her resisting him, even now, he would think the whole thing was a ruse. But he was never a man to question an unexpected gift.

He murmured,
“We were fated, Maeve.”

“Don’t talk to me of fate.” She curled her fingers over his fo
rearms. “We had an evening. A moment in the time between the times. But the world goes on.”

“Are you married?”

“You know that I am not.”

“Then all that
matters is that you are free.”

“Marriage is not the only thing that can bind a woman.”

“I’m the lord of this place now. I can destroy any ties that bind you.”

“
You’re talking foolishness, crazy foolishness.” She pushed out of the circle of his arms and edged away from him. “You’ve flattered me, Garrick, and for that I’m grateful more than you can possibly know. But this is a dangerous game you play. You must be moving on. At the breath of a whim the earl could decide to send another of his wretched sons-in-law to suck the life out of this place—”

“He sent
a son this time.”

She sighed heavily
. “Garrick, the earl has no sons.”

“Aye, he does.
A bastard son.” He slapped his chest with a fist. “Not worth much to a great English earl, but enough to warrant giving me this place, if for no other reason than to stop my Irish mother from badgering him in the English courts.”

She froze in the dusky light flowing in through the barn door
. Her eyes widened, disbelieving.

“Yes, the earl
has recognized me, in his manner.” He trailed his gaze over the body he’d loved so thoroughly and knew exactly what he needed to say. “I’m the lord of this place now,” he said, “a lord who is in need of a wife.”

And in that instant he saw his life
in the way his friends always joked about, in the way his own mother bewailed—as a series of mad, impetuous decisions. At thirteen he was offered a place on a merchant ship and he’d gone without a second thought on a year-long journey to the coast of Wales and Bordeaux and the shores of Assyria. When he decided many more voyages later that the sea was not for him, he’d returned only to find his mother guarding the promise of a lordship for him. He seized it without hesitation. So now here he was, in a manor house he knew nothing about running, about to tackle a life of rural husbandry he hadn’t a clue how to manage.

Yet luck had shown him a smi
ling face again. How bright fate had lit the path that had led him to her.

He said,
spreading his arms, “Maeve, be my wife.”

“You’re
English
.” 

Her face contorted as if the word
were something slimy on her tongue.

“The
earl is English,” he said. “My mother is as Irish to the bone—”

“You—you deceived me.
” She clutched her belly and then cupped a hand over her mouth. She sidled along the milk stalls until she shouldered into the wall of the barn. “My God . . . my God.”

Irritation rippled over him. He hadn’t asked to be the by-blow of an earl. And he hadn’t expected that she’d be the sort of woman too proud to take a bastard to her bed.

He said,
“Did you not hear me? I asked you to be my
wife
.” He’d never asked a woman to be his wife, though he knew plenty who’d have fallen into his arms if he’d done so. “More than that:  I’m asking you to be my lady of Birr.”

She
shook her head at him. “
Never
will I consent to be an Englishman’s wife.”

***

Maeve stumbled across the fields
as mud splashed under her skirts and soaked her hose. The woods loomed ahead, bare-branched and gray. She barreled toward them, seeking the home of her youth where all was simple and plain.

She had lain with an Englishman.

An Englishman
.

It was Glenna’s fault. A fairy-
woman was supposed to know such things. Glenna was supposed to guide her away from such catastrophes and see that all worked out right. Glenna had even led her to that village, telling her that this was the best place to go to have the wretched thing done. What good was a fairy-woman if Glenna couldn’t protect her from the very calamity Maeve feared the most?

Maeve broke into the
woods and stumbled from tree trunk to tree trunk, tearing a path through the autumn leaves. When Maeve had first seen him standing in her yard her heart had swelled—
he’s come for me
. For a flicker of a moment, she’d thought that she could touch him again, she could kiss him again, and she could even lie with him again.
He’s come for me!
What a coincidence that he would find her after all the lengths she had taken to disappear. Perhaps he would be the man she could marry: An outsider, a strong and brave Irishman who would accept what and who she was. Because of course he was Irish: She’d seen the dirt of Ireland staining his broad worker’s fingers.

An Englishman
.

She glimpsed Glenna’s hut ahead
. It hugged the base of a giant oak tree which sheltered the thatch. Maeve hurtled toward it and shoved open the door.

“Glenna!”

The door slammed open to silence. The scent of boiled herbs and the pungency of dried reeds assaulted her. But the ashes of a fire lay cold in the hearth. Maeve leaned against the trestle table. Where could she be? It was far too late in the season for Glenna to be herb-gathering, and Maeve had passed Glenna’s cow chewing grass, its udder already emptied.

Wasn’t it
just like Glenna to flutter off when Maeve needed her most?

Sh
e whirled out of the hut and planted herself on the stump just outside the door. In her youth she used to sit by Glenna’s feet while the older woman twisted her fingers around the spinning as she twisted her tongue around a tale. Here, Maeve had grown to womanhood learning the old Irish stories and the history of her people. Here, she’d been taught her life’s duty.

Now
sitting in this clearing where she’d spent so many years of her childhood, she willed herself to be calm. She had journeyed halfway to the sea, to another village’s Samhain fires, just to choose a lover. She had been so careful. In the nights since, she had even come to imagine that they’d been chosen to be together, drawn by some Otherworldly force.

If so, it
had been an evil force. The mischievous creatures of the Otherworld now laughed at her, piling curse upon curse.

Maeve pulled her cloak
tight around her. She stood up and wiped away the tears she hadn’t known she’d shed. This half-blooded Englishman must leave Birr, like every other full-blooded Englishmen before him. The curse was specific and clear.

She heade
d home more slowly than she had fled, hating the fates that would force her to drive off the man who haunted her dreams.

Garrick stumbled out of the castle into the cold slap of morning. He yanked his cloak closed against the chill. Pale pink clouds fingered the eastern horizon, driving back the deep blue of night. The air rang with an inhuman caterwauling which had torn him from an uncomfortable sleep.

He rounded the castle
seeking the source of the noise. He saw a milkmaid shriek across the yard and vault herself through the open door of the kitchens. He planted his fists on his hips and turned to the source of her terror. Cows. There were a dozen of them, trailing in an uneven line out from the hay barn. He’d never known cattle could make such an annoying wail. Then again, he’d never known cattle.

He trudged across the yard. One of the cows turned its head and rolled an eye at him. He slowed his pace. Th
e closest he’d ever gotten to a cow was a tepid pail of milk his mother bartered for with the red-faced farmer who drove it into Wexford every morning. Stupid-looking beasts. Bigger than any he’d seen driven through the town of his youth. It was the bulls one had to beware of . . . wasn’t it?

Garrick edged around the portal into the musky shadows of the barn. He skidded through something wet,
then stubbed his foot on a milk pail and sent it cartwheeling. Milk splattered across the ground.

At least
he thought it was milk. He crouched down. The familiar smell of it wafted up, musky and warm. He trailed a finger through the fluid and then frowned at the liquid clinging to his fingertips.

“It’s green today.”

Garrick looked up at the sound of her voice. She swept in, her black hair a cloud against the spill of the morning light. Four servants skittered around her banging pails against their knees. They bobbed at the sight of him and then rushed to crouch down beside a cow.

“Aye, as green as the hills,” Maeve mused, staring at the milk se
eping into the dirt floor. “At least it isn’t blood-red. That gave us quite a scare last time. We thought the cows might have been taken by a bloody flux.”

The green clung to
his hands like tar. He knew milk wasn’t supposed to be green. But his groping, sleep-fogged senses were focused on something more visceral: the bright-cheeked woman standing over him, clear-eyed, clear-skinned, and radiating energy. The woman he’d not seen since she’d torn out of this very barn yesterday, spurning his marriage proposal.

Maeve strode past him as he rose from his crouch
. “We’ll have to milk the cows anyway, else they’ll stop making milk altogether.” She slid back the bolt of the opposite door and pushed it open. Morning light poured through the barn. “The girl who usually milks the cows ran off without a word this morning. By the time we realized the cows weren’t being milked, we’d already sent out another milkmaid who knew nothing of the curse. It gave her quite a scare.”

“The curse.”

“Aye. It has begun again.” She leveled him with a gray-eyed stare. “I’ll send a girl to buy some milk from the villagers. They’ll have enough to spare, for now. Unless you have a taste for cursed green milk.”

She swiveled on a heel
and disappeared around the edge of the portal. Garrick moved to run his fingers through his hair but caught himself. He stared at his splayed hand, rubbed the green milk on his cloak, and then stepped out into the light. He caught sight of Maeve striding straight-backed toward the henhouse.

He let his gaze trail over
the curving lines of her lovely figure as at least one part of his body stirred from a fitful sleep. It had been a restless night for more than one reason. Now he’d woken to discover her behaving as if a marriage proposal from the castle’s lord was as unremarkable as cows giving green milk.

He strode into the pen and clacked the gate closed behind him. Her s
houlders flinched at the sound. “So,” he began, leaning back against the loose post of the hurdle. “Tell me about this curse.”

She flung open the doors to the
henhouse and the birds burst out in a flurry of feathers and clucks. “Didn’t your father see fit to warn you?” 

Garrick swallowed a bitter laugh
. The earl saw fit to visit his by-blow once a year or so. For the fleeting moments of the Earl’s critical perusal, Garrick as a boy had to undergo days of scrubbing, snipping, and coaching. Mostly, Garrick remembered the way the Earl’s man had shoved the documents for these lands into his mother’s hands— then galloped away, peering nervously into every dark alley of that part of Wexford that rarely saw such a fat mark.

“The Earl,” he
said drily, “was remarkably unforthcoming on the details of this manor.”

“Then you don’t know about The O’Madden.”

“Who?”

“The person destined to break the curse
and drive the last Englishman off this land.”

Garrick straightened
. He could stomach a tumbled-down wreck of a castle. He could stomach a tiny glitch of a village, a bow-backed herd of cattle. Those things could be changed and improved. A manor could grow. But he’d had no inkling that the ownership of this land was contested.

“These lands are
mine now.” Garrick braced himself in the portal of the henhouse as Maeve stepped inside to peruse the nests. “Any man who contests my hold will have to deal with me.”

“Steel is
useless against a widow’s curse.” She slipped a basket off a hook just inside the door and slung it over her elbow. “I see I will have to tell you the full of it.”

“It’s
high time you told me the truth about something.”

She flinched. Her gaze skittered away as she groped for eggs
in one of the nests. “I never lied to you.”

“Didn’t you,
Maire
?”

“I had
good reasons for that.”

“I
t’s those reasons I’m still seeking. No.” He could tell she was summoning up another half-truth. In love and fighting all was the same: There were times to attack, and there were times to retreat to better ground. “You’ll tell me when it pleases you. That’s the way of women and I have more patience than most. For now, tell me more of this O’Madden.”

She had the dignity to blush. She rolled an egg into her basket. “
Before the English came,” she said, “these lands were ruled by the O’Maddens. It was a fine clan, a strong clan, and the lands were healthy and fertile.”

Garrick
knew something of history. His father had paid a priest to teach Garrick his letters, an Irish priest who’d been happy to take English coin and then teach a half-breed whelp the bloody history in his own particular way. The priest had talked to him of the brave O’Donnell’s of Tirconnel, the mighty O’Neill’s of Ulster, the fierce Maguire’s of Fermanagh—heads of the great clans. Over the years, the English had tried to destroy them and the loyalty of their people. The English had, for the most part, failed. The blood of the tribal clans ran deep.

Garrick remembered no talk of O’Maddens.

“The last O’Madden,” she continued, “built this castle when the English first threatened, nearly thirty years ago. He was sure a stone castle would hold out against them. It did, for some few years. But when the English came to conquer for good, the O’Madden ultimately lost the battle and he was murdered for rebelling.”

“Such a story is common enough.”

“I’m not done with it, Garrick of Wexford.” Her fine-boned features hardened. “The English were so frightened that another O’Madden would rise to take the dead one’s place that they decided to take all of the O’Madden’s sons—every last one of them—and hang them on the trees of the yard.” She rolled an egg into the basket. “The O’Madden’s widow cried for mercy. She fasted at the earl’s door in protest. But the Englishman ignored her.”  She paused and her jaw trembled. “They say the youngest cried for his mother as they dropped the rope around his neck. He was three years of age.”

Garrick
glanced at the trees scattered around the castle, imagining those branches hung heavy with bitter fruit, not able to fathom it. “Time can twist the truth into something it never was.”

“Does it ease
your conscience to think so?” She gripped an egg tight in her fist. “Some still live to bear witness.”

He
tightened his jaw. He couldn’t deny he’d heard worse stories. He knew little of the Earl, and nothing of the Earl’s own father, who had probably been the one to order the hangings. But how could he denounce that blood, when it was only through that blood he claimed this place?

“The English,” she argued, placing the egg with exaggerated care into her basket, “are remembered for what they’ve done
. Take it as a blessing, my lord, that I didn’t accept your proposal and mix your proud blood any further.”

He stifled a
flash of anger. “You shouldn’t judge a whole of a race of men by the sum of its rotten parts.”

“
Then think of the Statutes of Kilkenny. The English are forbidden to marry the Irish without royal dispensation. Even half-blooded English.” Her skirt snagged on a nail protruding from the henhouse wall. She yanked at it. “You’re not even supposed to be speaking the Irish, yet I’ve not heard a word of English out of you yet.”

“I’ve never had much of a mind for the King’s rules.”

“Well, there’s proof there’s a little Irish in you.” She pulled her skirts free on the sound of a tear. “Alas, not enough to give me any hope.”

“
But I have hope. Hope you’ll come to your senses and be with me.”

“
Stop talking like that.”

“W
e’ve got more than a bit of talking to do about All Hallows’ Eve.”

She shouldered by him so close
that he felt the give of her breast against his arm. His gaze dropped to her belly, taut and flat, and he wondered if a bit of himself was still in there, growing already. No doubt it was too early to tell.

“The less said about that night, the better, by my way of thinking.
” She brushed her gaze over him as he fell into pace beside her. “There’s no changing the past. And I would never have recognized you as his son. You’re not like the others the earl sent, mincing and prancing about in silks and stinking of perfume.”

“The English don’t treat their bastards as generously as the Irish do.”

“You have this manor. That should be enough for you.” She slung the basket of eggs to her other elbow. “I’ll not be anything but your servant for the short time you’re here.”

“I’ll be here until I’m buried under the dust.”

She stopped mid-yard and glared at him. “Did you sleep well last night, my lord of Birr?”

He drank in the sight of her
, flush-faced, bright-eyed, and fierce. “I would have slept better, had I a hot-blooded, silver-eyed woman in my bed.”

“No doubt you can find a woman willing to do your bidding for the price of a few coi
ns. We’re a poor enough people here.” Color crept higher up her cheeks. “But are you going to pretend that you didn’t hear the footsteps last night? The moans or the wailing? Not even the most starving woman could be tempted to sleep in that bed of yours for a night, whether you’re in it or not.”

Garrick hesitated
. Last night, he’d been awakened three times by the sound of someone stomping around above his chamber. Each time, he had climbed the only set of stairs to the third floor of the castle. By the light of the stars, he’d searched the area open below the ruin of the roof. He’d found no one. Not a living soul. The floorboards were so rotted with weather that he hadn’t dared to clamber across them, lest the floor cave onto his room below.

“She haunts the place,” Maeve said, clutching the basket to her side. “She won’t rest until justice is done.”

“The castle is haunted by birds and neglect, no more.”

“It’s haunted by the
widow who cast a curse upon this land. The wife of the last O’Madden.”

Garrick knew
the old saying well.
Shun it as you would shun a widow’s curse.
Not even a priest’s curse carried as much potency as that of a widow betrayed.

“So,” he said, “her curse was to turn the milk green?”

Maeve narrowed those silver eyes at him.
“She vowed that there would be no prosperity in these lands until the last Englishman was driven out, and an O’Madden of pure Irish blood ruled at Birr.”

“You said that all her sons were killed.”

“Aye.”

“Then she cursed the land forever.”

“Not so.”  Maeve tilted her chin. “Everything is normal when there are no English about. Now that you’re here, the curse has returned.”

“There are worse things than green milk.”

She fished an egg out of her basket and dropped it at his feet. The jelly splattered on his boot. It wobbled a bright robin’s-egg blue.

Maeve
raised a brow. “The last lord of Birr left after a week. I’m told he saw blood oozing from the walls on All Hallows’ Eve.”

“More likely he drank too much ale
—”

“Not a single English lord has remained on this land
for more than a month. I’ve no doubt I’ll see your back soon enough.”