‘I’m just happy.’
And I was. Almost ridiculously happy, in a way that couldn’t be stamped out by anything. Not Fergal’s grumbling, nor the gnawing in my stomach that reminded me I hadn’t eaten breakfast, nor the fact the sun lay hidden by a bank of cheerless cloud. The world was beautiful this morning, because Daniel Butler liked me.
I’d replayed the moment several times since waking, to be sure, and every time I had replayed it I’d been more convinced it hadn’t been imagined. He had liked me. And he’d wanted me. And that – to use a phrase he’d used himself – was a beginning.
So this morning seemed a miracle, no matter what the weather or the moods of those around me, or the fact that Daniel wasn’t even here.
He’d gone out just after daybreak. I knew because I’d been awake myself, my own mind racing, and I’d heard him walking back and forth across the creaking floorboards in the next room, heard him twice approach the locked connecting door, then stop, and turn away again. And in the end he had gone out and down the stairs and in a little while I’d heard the sound of hoofbeats passing from the stables to the road, and they had faded up the hill and left the wind alone behind.
That same wind brushed my face now as I looked at Fergal. Jack had been asleep and snoring loudly when I’d passed his door upstairs on my way out, and at this distance from the house there wasn’t much chance of my being overheard, but still I kept my voice as quiet as I could when I asked, ‘Do you know where Daniel’s gone this morning?’
‘No.’ The axe swung down again as Fergal shot another glance my way that held more interest than the first. ‘There’s no one tells me anything these days, it seems.’
The axe stuck in the stump again and this time when he yanked it free he turned the blade and ran his thumb across a small nick in the metal, frowning.
‘Is it broken?’ I asked.
‘Sadly, no. ’Tis indestructible, this relic. It belonged to Danny’s uncle, and is doubly as cantankerous.’
I smiled at the thought of Fergal being bested by a thing as stubborn as himself, and then I thought of something else, and asked him, ‘What was Daniel’s uncle’s name? Was he a Butler, too?’
‘A Pritchard. Why?’
‘I only wondered. There aren’t many Butler graves up in the churchyard, that’s all, only Ann’s and—’ Just in time I caught myself and stopped before I gave away a bit of knowledge Fergal shouldn’t have. Not that I knew how Jack had died, or when, except that it would happen twenty years or more from now, but still …
Fergal, true to form, missed nothing. ‘Have you walked over my grave as well?’
‘Fergal.’
Setting more wood on the stump, he shrugged. ‘You needn’t fear. I’ve no great wish to know my future. No man should.’ Then a thought seemed to strike him. He glanced at me sideways. ‘Nor should anyone, I’m thinking, know what lies in store for someone else, for that would be a burden, would it not?’ His eyes met mine with understanding. ‘Take this whole rebellion, now, that Danny’s got himself involved in. If you were to know that it would fail and could not tell us so, I’m guessing that would cause you to be troubled in your mind.’
He knew already, I could see that. He knew as surely as I did that nothing would come of the venture.
‘And,’ he said, ‘if that were how you felt, I’d have to tell you not to waste your worries. Anyone with any wits at all knows well enough the Duke of Ormonde cannot carry through his plans.’ He turned his head away and calmly spat upon the ground, a gesture that I took to be a sign of his opinion of the duke. ‘And Danny knows it, too, believe me.’
‘Then why does he … ?’
‘Why does he take part in it?’ He shrugged. ‘’Tis how he’s made, and how he reasons things. To Danny, knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile to fight.’ He swung the axe with forceful certainty. ‘I’m only saying. What you know or do not know, you needn’t let it be a burden. Things will happen as they will.’ With a sweep of the axe blade he cleared the cut wood from the stump and looked round for a new length of log to be split. There was none.
‘You could always cut down that one,’ I suggested with a nod towards the slender, deeply leaning tree behind him. ‘It looks like it’s ready to fall over all on its own.’
‘What, the rowan?’ He glanced back himself to confirm it. ‘I’ll never touch that one.’
‘Why not?’
‘’Tis the whispering tree, is the rowan. The witches’ tree. Show it your axe without asking permission and you’ll have bad luck all your days.’
I thought of the great ancient oak tree that stood in the way of the road in this time, and had vanished somehow by my own. Daniel had told me I ought to ask Fergal sometime about oak trees, and lone trees, and Celtic beliefs, and since Fergal seemed talkative I asked him now.
‘Well, the oak is more sacred again than the rowan,’ said Fergal. ‘Legend says that its roots are well bound in the otherworld, and that the tree itself serves as a doorway between the two realms of the shadows and light. Never fall asleep under a lone oak, they say, else you’ll wake …’ He broke off.
‘Where?’ I prompted him.
‘Somewhere you never were meant to be.’
As though on cue the wind chased lightly through the trees that edged this corner of the stable yard, and suddenly I heard the sound of heavy rolling wheels approaching, and a horse’s clopping steps, and a man drove around from the side of the house in a cart being drawn by a sturdily built chestnut mare. The cart rolled to a stop just in front of us as Fergal set down his axe and stepped forwards to shake the man’s hand. ‘Morrow, Peter.’
‘O’Cleary.’ The man gave a nod, and then angled it round to include me, too.
Fergal said, ‘You’ll have met my sister yesterday, I’m thinking.’
Then I realised why the man’s face seemed familiar. He’d been one of the men on the road with the constable. I remembered him best because he’d been the one who had spoken to Daniel before riding off with the others, the one who’d said, ‘’Twas not our doing.’
He looked as though the episode still shamed him as he gave another nod to me and said, ‘Mistress O’Cleary.’ Then taking a sack from the seat of the cart he told Fergal, ‘I’m just off to market. I thought you could find a good use for this.’
‘Did you, now?’ Fergal took the sack and looked inside. ‘You know me too well, Peter. Wasn’t I saying this morning I fancied a conger pie?’ Thanking the man, he said, ‘But you’ve no need to be giving me anything.’
‘Well.’ The man looked to the side. ‘’Twas a bad business yesterday. And you had to make your dinner stretch to extra mouths and all, because of it. I minded that you had a taste for conger.’ With another nod, he wished us both good day and turned the cart around and headed off.
The sack was wet and smelt of fish, and peering in I saw the coiled body of a large, dead eel.
Fergal said, ‘It may be ugly, but it makes a grand pie, conger does.’
I might have made a comment, but just then the back door opened and Jack Butler took a few unsteady steps into the daylight. He stopped as though he’d hit a wall, and then came on towards us, walking gingerly, his head held in both hands.
‘Christ,’ he said, with his eyes shut as though even the sound of his own footsteps caused him pain. ‘Where the devil is Daniel to?’
Fergal held back his answer until he had sauntered a few paces forwards himself to stand close beside Jack, and he spoke at full volume. ‘Left this morning, didn’t he, though where he’s gone I couldn’t say.’
‘Jesus.’ Gripping his temples more tightly, Jack let his eyes open a fraction and squinted at Fergal. ‘You bloody old—’
‘None of that now,’ Fergal warned. ‘Not in front of my sister.’
Jack turned his head a fraction, wincing at the movement, till he saw me, too. ‘Eva. Good morrow.’
As I nodded in reply I saw a flicker of r
emembrance cross his face. He said, ‘Do you know, I had the most unlikely dream of you last night …’
I’d been dreading this, but Fergal had apparently been waiting for it. ‘Did you, now? And will I have to mind you to recall your manners?’
‘No, it was nothing improper.’ Jack made the mistake of forgetting his hangover and the small shake of his head made him wince again. ‘She was speaking.’
The Irishman shot him down there on the spot with one dry look. ‘Oh, ay? In what language?’
‘In English, of course. She was speaking to Daniel.’
‘How hard were you hit on the head, then?’ asked Fergal. ‘Or was it the rum?’
‘It seemed real.’
‘Ay, I’m sure that it did.’ Fergal’s tone was indulgent. ‘And I’m all the time seeing little wee men when I’ve drunk too much whisky, myself.’ He handed the wet sack to Jack and the younger man blanched at the smell.
‘What,’ he asked in a weak voice, ‘is that?’
‘’Tis your dinner,’ was Fergal’s reply. ‘Or it will be, when Eva and I are done gutting it. Take it on into the house for me, will you?’
Jack turned whiter, if that could be possible, and the bruising on his face stood out sickly. ‘Take it yourself, you great bastard. I’m going back up to my bed.’ He threw down the bag at his tormentor’s feet and with one final glare of reproach turned and headed back into the house.
Fergal grinned as I looked at him.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Would you deny me entertainment?’ Hoisting the heavy wet sack full of eel he followed after Jack and asked me, ‘Bring the axe, if you can manage it.’
Which sounded to my ears more like a challenge than a mere request, and with a smile I went back to the stump to fetch the axe. For a short-handled tool it was heavier than I’d expected. It took me a moment to manage a comfortable grip on the handle, and by the time I turned and started back across the yard both Jack and Fergal were already in the house.
And then I heard the rider, coming down the hill.
I couldn’t see the road from where I stood, but I could tell there was no cart this time, only a single rider, turning now to come around the house at such a leisured pace I knew it must be Daniel, and I stopped there in the stable yard and quelled the nervous flutter in my stomach as I turned my head expectantly to welcome him.
The dark bay horse stepped round the corner with a certain arrogance, well-suited to the black-garbed man who rode him. I was unsure which of us was more surprised to see the other, but my fingers tightened round the handle of the axe instinctively, an action that did not escape his notice.
With a smile that bordered on a sneer he brought the horse between the house and me, and reined it to a halt. ‘Mistress O’Cleary,’ said the constable. ‘Good morrow.’
I nodded and lowered my eyes, a false show of respect, before lifting my chin again so I could meet his gaze squarely and show him I wasn’t afraid. My acting skills weren’t in a league with Katrina’s, I knew, but I must have pulled it off with some success because his eyebrows lifted slightly in response.
His dark gaze slid down to the axe in my hand and returned to my face, and he murmured, ‘Well, well. A show of spirit, is it? Very inadvisable.’ He briefly glanced towards the house, then leaning forward in his saddle told me confidentially, ‘In fact, I should be careful altogether were I in your place, lest it occur to me to use a different bait to draw your lover out. A more … attractive bait, perhaps, than I have used before?’
He slowly looked me up and down. I felt that look as though he’d put his hands upon my body, and I had to steel myself to stand there while he did it, and not move.
The back door banged, and Fergal’s voice called, ‘Eva!’
Still I couldn’t move. My legs seemed weighted to the ground.
‘Eva!’ Fergal’s voice was firmer. ‘Come to me.’
I found a little of my courage then, and with a death-grip on the handle of the axe I forced myself to move out of the shadow of the tall bay horse and step around so I could cross the stable yard to Fergal. I walked carefully, and did not run, aware that Creed was watching.
More than watching – he was following, his horse’s steps deliberate.
Fergal asked him, ‘Have you business here?’
The constable shrugged the question aside. ‘Your sister,’ he told Fergal, ‘wants to have a care when carrying that axe. I might mistake it for a weapon.’
‘Would you, now?’ The words held open insolence.
As I reached Fergal’s side he held out one hand for the axe and I gave it to him gratefully. He turned it in his fist to take a firmer grip and said to Creed, ‘’Tis best, then, that I carry it myself, so you’ll have no mistake.’
The threat was boldly made, even for Fergal, and I held my breath beside him as the two men glared at one another. And then Fergal glanced at me and told me, ‘Eva, get inside.’
Surely, I thought, he wasn’t about to take on the constable? Openly fighting a man of the law wasn’t something a man could just do without paying a price, and though Fergal was fierce I would never have thought him so reckless.
I hesitated, showing my uncertainty, and with impatience in his eyes he turned his head again and said more forcefully, ‘You’re looking pale. You need to go on in the house. Now.’
He was looking pale himself. Or rather, grey.
And then I understood.
I felt the change beginning, saw the landscape start to waver and reform, and in a kind of frozen limbo I watched Creed’s head start to turn, as well, towards me.
And then suddenly the rhythm of hard hoofbeats sounded further up the hill, and Fergal said, ‘Here’s Danny coming now,’ and Creed, distracted, turned the other way to look towards the road.
I did run, then.
I ran the few steps to the back door of the house and swung myself inside the darkened corridor in panic, as the walls around me melted into fading, shifting shadows and dissolved as though they’d scattered on a breath of wind.
Time blinked. And I was walking down the shaded road outside Trelowarth House, still in the lovely flowered dress whose thin and fraying hem now brushed the gravel of the drive where I stopped, my legs now trembling much too violently to carry me.
The small dog Samson bounded with his usual exuberance around the corner of the house, tail wagging, but a few feet off he paused, and laid his ears back slightly.
‘It’s all right,’ I reassured him as I crouched and held my fingers out towards him. They were shaking, and I couldn’t make them stop, just as I couldn’t stop the coldness that had started creeping through my body, settling in my bones. I drew a breath and once again, but this time for myself and not the dog, I whispered, ‘It’s all right.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The room beside my own was bright with midday sunshine, but I still felt cold. I’d started to think I might never feel warm again. Each time I started relaxing, the thought of how close I had come to disaster this morning would set off a new round of shivers.
A burst of hard wind from the sea set the windowpanes rattling as I moved further in, stirring dust from the floorboards with each careful step. No one knew I was in here. The door to the passage was closed; I’d come through the connecting door from my own bedroom, with Ann Butler’s flowered gown bunched in my arms.
This was the second of her gowns that I had taken from the time where it belonged, and it seemed right somehow to bring it here to hide, inside this room that had been hers.
Against the far wall, in the space below the attic stairs, a sloping built-in cupboard held the out-of-season clothes. that no one needed till the winter. Shoving the mass of woven sleeves and woolly things aside, I tugged a hanger free and slipped the flowered gown onto it carefully, then slid the hanger back in place behind the other clothing where the faded blue gown and the banyan hung already, quietly concealed.
My fingers lightly brushed the silk of Daniel’s banyan, and I closed my ey
es. I felt his presence here more strongly than I had before, so strongly that it almost seemed that if I were to close my eyes and wish with all my heart, then maybe … maybe …
‘So you’re back.’ Claire’s voice, approving. Coming through the open doorway from my bedroom she asked, ‘Did you have a nice walk?’
I closed the cupboard door as nonchalantly as I could and turned, my eardrums buzzing from the sudden surge of guilty blood pressure. I gave a nod and told Claire, ‘Yes, I went up to the church.’ It seemed an age ago, to me. I cleared my throat and added, ‘Mr Teague was there. He hasn’t changed.’
Claire smiled. ‘He never will, you know. I’ve no doubt when he finally passes over he’ll keep walking through that churchyard every day in spirit, keeping things in order. Was he pleased to see you? I expect he was. He likes a bit of company, does Mr Teague.’ Her keen glance swept the little room. ‘God, look at all this dust. I must have words with Mark and Susan’s cleaner when she comes. I’m sure that cupboard wants a clearing out as well.’
I forced a shrug. ‘You’re better off to leave that till the winter, aren’t you? When you take the coats out and put all the summer things away.’
‘Well, I suppose.’ She turned her gaze on me instead. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you with your hair up, Eva. What a lovely way to do it.’
I was taken by surprise. I had forgotten. In my hurry to get safely back inside the house before somebody saw me, and to change into my proper clothes, I’d overlooked my hair. Reaching up to make certain, I fingered a hairpin and said, ‘It’s a little bit fussy …’
‘No, leave it up. You’ll want to look your best for lunch.’ She smiled. ‘You have a visitor.’
Following Claire through the door to the kitchen I heard a knife’s blade striking on the cutting board and thought at first, Oh, Fergal’s cooking something, and for that brief moment following, while my mind adjusted to the modern room instead, I felt a bit off balance. Out of step.