Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2)

by Cindy Brandner

  “What?” She snatched her hand away from the nape of his neck, as if it had suddenly become a flaming coal.

  Casey sighed. “Aye, must be my Catholic upbringin’ but I’m feelin’ the need to confess all. Are ye certain ye weren’t a priest in a former life, darlin’?”

  She pulled the sheets up to her neck, aware that it was a little late for such measures, and treated him to an icy green glare. “You’ll think I ran the Inquisition single-handedly if you don’t explain yourself quickly.”

  “Now darlin’, don’t go jumpin’ to any conclusions, Joe had invited a couple of ladies to join us for the evenin’, an’ I suppose if I’d proved to be susceptible to their charms, it would have been somethin’ to use against me later.”

  “Ladies?” Pamela said acidly, determined to stick to what she saw as the salient point.

  “Aye well, admittedly I’m applyin’ the term loosely, no pun intended,” he added, seeing the thunderclouds gathering on her brow.

  She sniffed the air delicately, eyes narrowing and nostrils flaring as she picked up a thread of cheap perfume. “Just how unsusceptible were you?” she asked, striving for a light tone and failing miserably.

  Casey turned sideways, to face her fully, eye to eye.

  “I’m a man, an’ I’ve the weaknesses of the flesh as certain as any other, but I made marriage vows to ye, woman, an’ I’ve never broken them.”

  “But you’ve wanted to?” she said tersely, feeling an unpleasant throbbing start in her temples.

  He gave her a hard look and she was uncomfortably aware of his nakedness and her own. “If I tell ye that I’ve felt base lust for another woman, but not in any way that matters to what there is between the two of us, will ye understand it?”

  “No,” she said, knowing even as she said it that her answer was purely reactionary, for she did understand what he meant. Desire was a thing of little space, and when it had no basis other than the purely physical its fire was quickly doused. At present, however, she found herself in no mood to give him the benefit of the philosophical doubt.

  “Do ye think so little of me then?” He asked, his own anger quick to rise and darken his face. “That I’d lust after anything in a skirt?”

  “Would you?”

  “What would ye like me to say,” he asked, grabbing her firmly by the upper arm, “that I feel no desire for any but you?”

  She made a vain effort to twist herself out of his grasp but he only hung on tighter.

  “Not if it’s a lie,” she gasped angrily, casting a narrow glance at his more vulnerable parts and judging the distance between them and her free hand.

  “Don’t even think it,” he said firmly. “I’d have ye flat on yer arse before ye could get yer hand on them.”

  “You’ve already had me there once tonight,” she said.

  “I’m thinkin’,” he said ominously, “ye’ll not enjoy the method I’ve in mind this time.” He was breathing heavily through his nose, eyes narrowed and lit with a pure black flame. “My da’ always used to say that people who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones.” His voice was mild as fresh-combed honey, but having heard the tone before, she knew it meant he was beyond fury and was feeling calmly homicidal.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She was tight in the grip of a seething fury herself.

  “There’s a mighty big glass house up on the hill an’ even a blind man can see through some walls. Can ye say ye haven’t desired him?”

  The air between them was so deeply charged that it seemed as if every atom were separate and visible, proton and electron doing their age-old dance limned in blue fire. In that turbulent whirl there seemed no space for lies.

  “No, I’ll not say I haven’t,” she said, holding his eyes steady, though a hot flush crept along her cheekbones.

  Casey flinched, his grip on her arm loosening considerably.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, “but you did ask.”

  “Aye, I asked,” he agreed wearily and took his hand from her altogether, the anger between them swiftly deflating. “But it’s one thing to think it an’ quite another to have it boldly stated to ye.”

  “So I guess,” she said, hand tentatively touching his forearm, “we’ve established that we’re both human.”

  “Can’t say I’m thrilled with the results of that conclusion,” Casey said, though he didn’t make any effort to dislodge her hand from his arm.

  “Casey,” she said, voice tight around the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat, “do you regret marrying me?”

  He closed his eyes and took a breath, face tight with emotion. “How can ye even ask such a question, Pamela?”

  “It’s only that I know it’s—I can be difficult.”

  He shook his head, opening his eyes to search her face and, she suspected, her heart. There was nothing, it seemed, that the damn man didn’t see when he really looked. And then, gently, he spoke.

  “Do ye not know what a wonder ye are to me woman? That ye should love me the way that ye do, that ye should forgive as ye have time an’ again. When ye come to me without reservation an’ lie in my arms it’s like holdin’ a miracle. It restores my faith just to be allowed to love you. There’s not a thing in this world that I’d risk that for. Not a thing, d’ye understand?”

  She nodded, unable to speak, feeling as thin-skinned and fragile as a soap bubble.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” he said, voice suddenly weary, “ye may not be so difficult but ye do wear a man out at times.” He rubbed his temples with both hands and sighed. “I’m goin’ to have a powerful hangover in the mornin’, an’ I’ve a feelin’,” he smiled ruefully, “I’m goin’ to get very little sympathy in the matter.”

  She leaned over kissing him gently on each temple before sliding down between the crumpled sheets, realizing just how exhausted she was herself. “I’ll bring you tea and aspirin first thing in the morning,” she promised, “and I won’t look reprovingly at you once.”

  “Don’t be after makin’ promises ye can’t keep, Jewel,” he said, pulling the quilt up over the both of them as he settled against her spoon-fashion, skin to skin, his warmth radiating out over her immediately, cocooning her against the chill of the room.

  “Casey,” she said softly, “you don’t have to worry about Jamie.”

  “Aye well,” he said sleepily, left arm firm around her, “ye know what they say.”

  “No what do they say?” she asked quietly, watching the soft pink light lay its glow on their entwined hands, the two silver bands, Casey’s slightly wider, side by side. Outside the snow had begun to fall again, flakes of it hissed softly against the window, melting into translucence at once.

  “That possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  Mine, he had said, mine and had meant it.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Hollow of Flowers

  A SAGGING, UNUSED LITTLE GATE HUNG between two elm trees. From there the land dropped sharply away from the main road, with steps cut into the hillside leading down to a small hollow.

  A straggling, weather-beaten stone wall banded the property and was all but smothered in rambling rose canes and dark, gloss-green ivy. In the base of the hollow sat an old neglected farmhouse. The roof was partially caved in, the thatch wearing a frowsy look like a woman with a bad permanent. The walls still stood straight, though all the windows were cracked or shattered. The chimney, which canted up the western wall of the house, was a crumbling ruin, sprouting luminous green ferns from its every crack.

  Casey took Pamela’s hand and led her down the steps with an air of barely suppressed excitement. Crocuses grew in golden abundance in the sunken ground, a cheery flash amongst the delicately mottled lichens.

  She heard a sound like that of someone whispering and then laughing softly to themself.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked, wondering how far they were in actual distance from civilization. Metaphysically speaking it seemed thousands of
miles and at least as many years.

  “’Tis a brook that cuts across the back corner of the property, it’s not very wide,” Casey gestured slightly more than a shoulder’s width, “but it’s a good-natured bit of water.”

  Pamela, belatedly, began to suspect there was more to this walk than stretching the legs. “So you’ve been here before?”

  “Aye,” he replied, “a time or two, out ramblin’ about an’ stumbled across the place. Literally, the first time, was dark an’ I fell over the stones there.” He nodded toward the crumbled foundation of an ancient outbuilding. He tugged her hand. “What I want to show ye is over this way, Jewel.”

  He led her down an overgrown path, a barely discernible thread in the tall grass, that was knotted with tree roots cracking the skein of the soil. The path faded into a heavy carpet of needles, springy and sharp-scented beneath their feet. The undergrowth was sparse here, the evergreen branches overhead like softly up-tilted umbrellas.

  “Here,” Casey said, halting in front of a huge tree, “is what I wanted to show ye.”

  In front of her stood a tree that soared above the others, its bottom-most branches far above the tops of the surrounding trees. “What in heavens name is that?” Pamela asked, craning her head back as far as it would go.

  “A sequoia,” Casey answered, the sound of a discoverer’s triumph in his words.

  “A sequoia? Isn’t that impossible?” Above her, eighty feet high, stretched the proof of his words though.

  “Well that’s what I thought too,” Casey said, one hand running down the rough bark of the tree. “So I asked Dacy’s brother-in-law, who belongs to the Belfast Naturalist Society, to come out an’ have a look. He’d a theory that seems to make it very possible. Ye see Jewel, Belfast is a city on stilts, which is something I did know. It’s also been at a much higher elevation in years gone past, an’ been swamped by the sea as well. About thirty feet down there’s a layer of peat bog that shows where the level of the land once lay. There would have been forests of Scotch pine, alders, willows an’ hazel with Finn MacCool’s red deer roamin’ through the thickets.” He made a broad sweeping gesture with his hand as though the ancient landscape were entirely visible around them.

  “When the last ice age retreated it cleared the Lagan valley, but choked off the Lough, so the entire area of Belfast would have been a huge lake. It would have been there for a good long time, with streams feedin’ layers of sediment into it, mostly red sand or red clay, which is where Belfast gets its penchant for red brick buildins’ I suppose. Then the land began to sink an’ all of what’s the city today was undersea an’ for thousands of years layers of sleech—‘tis a fine blue clay—built up. The blue clay is an adequate foundation for smaller buildins’ but when they started to put up larger ones they had to provide a good solid underpinnin’ an’ so they drove huge balks of timber down through the softer layers ‘til they hit the red sands or harder clay.”

  A suspicion was forming in Pamela’s mind as Casey waxed in his enthusiasm for Belfast’s geography, a subject for which he’d never before revealed a great passion. He was pointing to a drop in the land just beyond the tree now, where the earth had been sheared off some time in the past.

  ‘If ye look at the lay of the land, ye’ll note that there’s jagged escarpments here an’ there at the side of a broad, level plain. That would have been where the ancient seas hit the shore an’ left their mark. So if ye’d a bit of land that was high enough, it’s possible it would have escaped the floodin’. Effectively ye’d be standin’ on a wee bit of ground that was thousands of years older than what surrounded it even at a distance of a few feet. An’ the soil might be of a different consistency altogether, bein’ that sequoias prefer well-drained areas.”

  “So you’re saying this tree has been here for thousands of years?”

  “Well either that or some intrepid Californian dropped a seed out of his pocket several hundred years ago, which seems a little more far-fetched than my original thesis.”

  He took her hand and led her to the low stone wall. They sat on the crumbling stone, the damp of the moss instantly penetrating their clothing. Casey, however, warming to his subject, seemed oblivious to the elements.

  “There’s a strip of serpentine that shows up in the mountains of Scotland an’ then again in Ireland, an’ then picks up on the other side of the Atlantic in Newfoundland before runnin’ a strip down the eastern seaboard into the Appalachians. There’s a lot of controversy about the original landmass before the continents broke apart, but it makes sense in a romantic sort of a way, don’t ye think? That Ireland was part of what’s now the eastern North American coastline. Which would certainly explain why the Irish fled there like ‘twas the Hibernian version of Zion.”

  “Either that or it was the first place the boat docked,” she said dryly.

  “Ah, have ye no romance in yer soul, Jewel? Sometimes I have serious doubts about yer Irish blood. I think that Yankee practicality takes a high hand with it at times. Then ye give me a severe tongue lashin’ an’ I’ve no doubt that yer descended from the wild men that used to roam these hills.”

  “You’re waxing rather romantic yourself tonight.”

  “Aye,” a wistful note had crept into his voice. “’Tis this wee bit of land that does it. Stirs somethin’ in me that’s purely sentimental, I’ll admit. First night I came here it made me think of this man, Robert Praeger, who wrote a book called The Way That I Went, many years ago. He was a field botanist who’d spent a lifetime wanderin’ the hills an’ bogs, pokin’ into the burial mounds, swimmin’ in flooded caverns an’ diggin’ up fossils. It seemed a grand life. I wanted to do the same, just wander the ground for all my days. I could imagine him, the first time I saw this place, walkin’ through, stoppin’ for a pipe by the old chimney. It was almost as if I could see traces of a life I might have lived, here.”

  Pamela felt slightly nonplussed, Casey was generally very practical when it came to jobs, taking up whatever was to hand. He’d never expressed any unfulfilled dreams in this vein before. And yet land was his natural element, just as water was hers. It satisfied something primitive in him, that needed no expression other than the pure joy of having a stretch of it to himself.

  “Da’ read Praeger’s book to us when I was about eight years old,” Casey continued, “an’ I remember becomin’ obsessed by the fanciful notion the man had of a prehistoric Belfast under the foundations of the present one. That there would be primitive forests down there, with Neolithic men runnin’ through them in skins. I thought it’d be upside down though, a mirror image to the one I lived in, with the roots of their trees minglin’ with the roots of our own, an’ that if ye could find a wee hollow space by the roots of such a tree ye’d be able to wiggle through into this other world.”

  He laughed. “Well I scared myself half witless, thinkin’ somethin’ truly awful was goin’ to creep up past those roots an’ come straight for me. I think my brain must have mixed a few stories together an’ then couldn’t separate fact from fiction. My Granny Murphy used to tell us terrible tales about these wee red men called the Fir Deargs, an’ then Da’ had told us about the Firbolgs, which as ye know were the dark people that populated Ireland before the Celts came. Somehow I’d mixed the two together an’ come up with a nasty brew.”

  “Red leprechauns?” She raised an eyebrow, keeping a firm grip on her bottom lip with her teeth.

  “Aye,” Casey responded, looking blackly at her, “it may sound amusin’ but I assure ye it was anything but to an eight-year-old. An’ they weren’t leprechauns,” he added with some dignity, “but only cousins.”

  “Leprechaun cousins?” Her lips were twitching uncontrollably.

  “Aye, leprechauns have all sorts of relations—piskies, brownies, coblynaus, redcaps, boggarts an’ the like.”

  “Boggarts?”

  “Aye,” he said, in the tone of a reasonable man, “they’re brownies gone bad.”

  She took a deep breath
through her nose, knowing that to laugh would insult him. For a man whose pragmatism, at times, bordered on hardness, superstition seemed an inexplicable anomaly. Yet, she’d seen him eye small hummocks of earth with a deeply suspicious eye. And she knew he never walked the hills at night without his St. Christopher’s medal tucked between chest and shirt.

  “Did ye not have strange fears yerself as a child?”

  “UFOs,” she said.

  “UFOs? Where’d ye get such a notion?”

  “I read an article in a magazine that interviewed people who swore they’d been kidnapped by aliens and tortured in all sorts of unspeakable ways. I remember hardly being able to breathe while I read it, yet I couldn’t put it down. I was struck by this absolute conviction that aliens were coming for me and I’d lay in bed at night rigid, waiting for them to show up. It was awful. My father had a terrible time getting me to sleep for months afterwards.”

  “Ye must have been a sweet little thing, all green eyes an’ black curls.”

  She snorted. “Hardly, I’d a terrible temper, got in fights with the neighborhood boys all the time.”

  “Had a quarrelsome tongue, did ye?”

  “Fist fights,” she said with some dignity.

  “Fist fights?”

  “Oh yes, defender of the small and weak, friend to the underdog, that was me.”

  He cocked his head, perused her face for a moment, and then nodded as if he’d found the answer to a question that had been puzzling him for months.

  “What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at him.

  “It’s just that I can imagine it. I’ve seen it myself, haven’t I? Ye’ve a righteous anger about ye to be certain. Ye’ll not compromise on a point if ye really believe it, an’ I’ve reason to know the truth of it.”

  She eyed him shrewdly, taking in the air of barely contained excitement, and the way he looked about, as if this ramshackle little hollow were his own personal Camelot. Suspicion began to turn to misgiving. He jumped down off the wall and turned, placing his hands on the wall on either side of her.