Paula Reed - [Caribbean]

by Nobodys Saint

“Sooner or later you must learn to bend my girl, or you will surely break.”

  Mary Kate put her elbows on the pew in front of her and dropped her head into her hands. “I can’t help it.”

  “What will you be doing now?”

  “With Diego safely out of the way, ‘tis an easy thing to promise to sin no more.”

  “I’m not talking about that. What will you be doing with your life?”

  She sighed. These days it seemed like she was always on the brink of tears. “I’m helping out at home. As Bridget gets further along, it will be better if she doesn’t have to do so much. Da and Conor do just fine on their own, but they don’t mind help in the fields, and I can visit the tenants so the men have more time for our crops.”

  “But you’re not happy.”

  “Was I ever? I don’t remember. I thought I was.”

  “You’ve always been a different sort of girl.”

  She ignored the little twinge of pain that caused and rolled her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t give me that look. You went out of your way to be different, even difficult at times. The Mary Katherine I remembered was often angry, but it was like you were always at your best when you were in a rage.”

  “I know what to do with anger, Father. I just take it out on the next handy person and feel better in no time.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of help at home, and less responsibility. On the whole, I’d think there’s far less to pique your temper.”

  “You’ve the right of it there, Father. ‘Tis sad I am, and I don’t know what to do with that. I can’t take any of it back. I’ve no money to go to Havana, and even if I did, he’s at sea so much. It might be months before he showed himself there. What would I do to earn my keep while I waited? I speak so little of the language.”

  “Then set your sights here. Take your time. You’re young yet.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Trust me.”

  She sighed. “Thank you, Father.”

  “Give yourself time, Mary Kate.”

  She nodded and left, but she hadn’t found any comfort. It had been five months since she had left Jamaica, and the pain hadn’t dulled. All the time in the world would never ease the sure and certain knowledge that she had made a mistake. It wasn’t just Diego, although it was losing him that kept her up at night and weighed her heart down all day. She missed the sea so badly it ached inside her, and some nights she would rock back and forth in her bed. She missed the Caribbean, and every time clouds filled the Irish sky, as they so often did, she pined for warm sunshine.

  She didn’t go far, just to the graveyard behind the chapel. Her mother’s grave was there, under a tall oak and marked by a small headstone, with space for her father next to it. She sat down next to the moss-covered dip in the dark, cool earth.

  “I wish you were here. I wish you’d been here all along.” Then she looked up at the sky through the leaves of the ancient oak. “Magdalena,” she whispered, “help me.”

  *

  Diego sat down at his desk in his new office. It wasn’t a terribly large room, no sense wasting rent on a space he would use so seldom, but its furnishings glowed and the floor was made of the highest quality tile. It was an office that spoke of success.

  He opened a ledger book filled with entries, accounts of several years’ worth of lucrative voyages. The largest plantations figured prominently. Everyone knew Diego Montoya was a man who could be trusted, relied upon.

  His clothes were of the finest cloth and the latest style, and in his purse he had more than enough money for a sumptuous dinner. But he wasn’t hungry, and there was no one he cared to have admire the cut of his coat. The office was impressive, but it was empty.

  The door opened, and a woman entered. She was a stranger, and she wore strange clothes. Her hair was straight and of the darkest brown, as were her slightly exotic eyes, and she had a lovely olive complexion. She wore an odd shirt with sleeves that cut straight from her wrist to her waist. What appeared at first to be a skirt, was actually a floor-length pair of wide breeches. She smiled at him, and although he was certain he had never seen her before, he felt he knew her.

  “You have a fine office, Diego.”

  “Forgive me, madam, do I know you?”

  “Certainly you do. Come now, Diego, you know exactly who I am.”

  “Magdalena?”

  “I have missed you.”

  He gestured openly. “I am always here. It is you who comes and goes upon a whim.”

  “Yes, but I think that we must both agree I have interfered a bit too much in your life. I have been reminded that my role is intercession.”

  Sweat broke across his brow. “I require intercession? Have I so angered God?”

  Magdalena laughed and looked around her. “So this is how you imagine your office to be.”

  “I am imagining this? Is that why you do not look as you have before?”

  “The office and the success it represents are your dreams. They can be yours, but they will take time and hard work, and I am afraid I have learned my lesson, so you will not be getting them from me. As for why I look different, what do you think?”

  “I think that you looked as you did before because you wanted me to know that María Catalina was the one.”

  “I thought she was a good choice.”

  “Thought?”

  “What I think does not matter, does it?”

  “She was not a gift from you?”

  “Good heavens! She is a person, Diego, not a box of chocolates!”

  “I do not understand. I did not say that she was a box of chocolate…”

  “Forgive me; I forget that you have no frame of reference. She is not a trinket. I cannot make a human being into a gift. My gift was a nasty English shipbuilder and a certain fortuitous pirate ship. The choices remained hers and yours. Now, I appear to you as I was when I lived upon the earth.”

  Diego’s eyes widened. “You wore breeches?”

  Magdalena laughed again. “I do like you. No, these are a little something women will be wearing in a few centuries.”

  Diego frowned. What would become of the world?

  Then he bowed his head. “Then you know we did not choose as you wished us to.”

  “It is not for me to say how you should have chosen. Stitches weave in and out of the fabric of time and space. If a stitch is too long, then it is weak. There are small steps that must be taken in the journey. To skip them is to weaken the bond.”

  “Then why have you come?”

  “I told you. I am here to intercede. Not between you and God. If you perceive a distance between you and God, it is an illusion. We are not yet in the age of miracles, there is no instant communication, so I find myself in the position of having to ask you something. Has it not occurred to you that Mary Kate has had as much time as you to consider the course of action she has taken? She, too, has been reunited with her family. Do you think you are the only one to whom revelations have come?”

  She was gone. Diego bolted from the chair and looked around him. “Wait! We are not finished! What am I supposed to do? She lives in an area controlled by the English. I do not know where her village is. I am to set sail southwest to La Habana tomorrow; Ireland is not exactly on the way! I have duties, responsibilities, a schedule!”

  He didn’t hear her voice so much as feel it. “A man who faces so many obstacles should get out of bed.”

  When he opened his eyes, there was still no sign of dawn. The sun would not rise for a while, but Diego lit a lamp and unrolled his charts. He had to chart a course for Londonderry.

  *

  “Nicely done,” the Blessed Mother said as she and Magdalene watched Diego in the lamplight.

  “So we can agree that that was intercession, not interference?”

  “I think we can agree on that.”

  “And if I were to make it a little easier for him to make port in Londonderry or grant him brisk winds the whole way so he can make up for l
ost time?”

  “Anything worth having is worth working for,” Mother Mary said.

  “He’d still have to work.”

  “And taking risks for. You have done your part. Let it go, Mary Magdalene.”

  “Do you ever tire of being right?”

  Mother Mary smiled. “Never.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  After visiting the fishmonger for mussels, Mary Kate stopped in Jack Roche’s tavern for the weekly post. The package she had sent to Londonderry for had arrived, and she slipped it into her apron pocket. Saffron was not an easy spice to obtain in her village. Along with the small parcel for her was a letter addressed to Bridget and Conor from Sir Calder. Her own name was conspicuously absent. She wondered if that was because he assumed her to be safely tucked away in Jamaica or because he knew she wasn’t and he would not deign to include her. On the long walk from the village to her house, she contemplated breaking the seal. Bridget wouldn’t mind, would she?

  Of course, one never knew what Bridget would mind, these days. Honestly! Everyone had told her how much Bridget had grown up and settled down since Mary Kate had left for England. Ha! Conor insisted that his wife’s unpredictability was due to her pregnancy, but Dylan O’Reilly had shaken his head and chuckled.

  “She’s had to keep that temper of hers on a leash ever since she set her sights on him. The baby’s just given her an excuse to let go again.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Bridget was still emotional, to be sure, but she had grown up a good bit. She was a decent accountant (although Mary Kate had gleefully found several errors in her sister’s ciphering). She was a competent housekeeper, and her food was quite edible. Oh, she still snapped at people plenty, but she was more likely than ever before to think someone might have a different view or needs of their own. Conor, God love him, had the patience of a saint, and if Mary Kate ever wondered what it was he saw in her quick-tempered sister, she had only to keep her ears open at night. And Bridget six months pregnant for goodness sake!

  She walked through the garden gate and up the path to the front door, where Bridget stood waiting. “You took your sweet time. You said that you’d make dinner tonight.”

  Good thing she hadn’t broken the seal, Mary Kate thought. Bridget was in a mood. She handed her the letter. “Maybe you’d rather walk into town on your own, next time.”

  “Just wait. Someday you’ll have a stomach like a cow, and you’ll feel so sorry you weren’t kinder to me. Besides, you went for your own package. Did it come?” Mary Kate pulled it from the pocket of her apron. “Saffron!” Bridget scoffed. “And what’s wrong with plain old salt, I’d like to know?”

  Mary Kate ignored her and headed into the kitchen. If her family was no longer in desperate need of her, then it seemed to follow that she might have hoped for a bit more harmony. She opened a bin on the kitchen floor, pulled out several potatoes, and began to cut them and put them into a pot on the kitchen table.

  “Make yourself useful,” she said to Bridget, who had followed her, “and put more peat on the fire.”

  Bridget sneaked a slice of raw potato and said, “My back aches, and besides, don’t you think I should read the letter?”

  Mary Kate rolled her eyes and did the chore herself, then resumed her work with the potatoes.

  “Oh, my!” Bridget said. “Sir Calder has only now heard that your ship was taken by pirates. He’s assuming you dead.”

  “He’d like to think so,” Mary Kate retorted.

  “It says here that if Conor and I have a son, he’s willing to pass the title along to him.”

  “Well, isn’t that a grand thing?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Your son will inherit the title of baronet. And what does that mean? Will he get the house and all the land?”

  “Aye! It says so right here.” She pointed to the letter.

  Mary Kate ladled water from a bucket into the pot. “Well, that’s something.”

  “I’m not refilling that bucket,” Bridget snapped.

  “Did I ask you to?”

  Bridget worried at her lower lip with her teeth. “What do you suppose he’ll do when he finds out what you’ve gone and done?”

  “What I’ve gone and done? And I suppose you’d have me married to that lout of an Englishman?”

  Bridget softened immediately. It was a reaction that Mary Kate still wasn’t accustomed to. “I’d never have that. You know I wouldn’t. I’m just worried, so.”

  Mary Kate hung the pot on a hook over the fire. “I know. I am, too.”

  Bridget folded the letter up and began to tap it against the table, irritating Mary Kate. She glared at Bridget, but it had no effect.

  “Well, I suppose the lout of an Englishman will write to Sir Calder,” Bridget said.

  “I should think so.”

  “And he would tell him when you had left and when you might have arrived.”

  “Not all that. Remember? I found passage in Tortuga. He’s no idea what ship I took nor when.”

  A slow smile spread over Bridget’s face. “Well, a hundred things might have happened, don’t you think? Your ship could have sunk or been taken by pirates again. Those men you sailed with might have raped and murdered you or sold you into marriage in some pirate town.”

  “Lovely thoughts, all.”

  “Well, if he knows you’re alive, he’s sure to go back to trying for an heir with an English father, but if he’s thinking you’re dead…”

  Mary Kate smiled. “Then we keep the house and lands with no one the wiser. Sir Calder won’t trouble himself to visit any of his holdings so long as there’s a steady profit from them.”

  “And you can marry yourself your fisherman or whoever suits your fancy.”

  “Aye,” Mary Kate agreed, but inside she felt sadder than ever. A fisherman was a poor substitute for a sea captain. Of course, with Bridget and Da all set, she could truly marry where she would. Even if this child wasn’t a boy, the way Bridget and Conor filled their nights would keep Bridget’s belly full for any number of years. There was sure to be a strapping lad in the brood. She tried hard not to think of how they had lost their mother. It was one of the risks of being a woman, and that was that.

  Bridget went to put her feet up, and Mary Kate continued to work on dinner. She had saved a bit of chicken from the night before and a little sausage from breakfast, and she cut them into bite-sized pieces. She was taking extensive liberties with the original recipe, but before long the kitchen was filled with a soothing aroma. While dinner cooked, she tidied up the sitting room, moving around Bridget. For a woman who had managed so competently while Mary Kate was in England, she was fast becoming helpless again, and Mary Kate wished she knew whether that was truly due to her pregnancy. She knew tenants’ wives with babes at their breasts who cared for entire broods and still worked well into their pregnancies.

  Was she just repeating a past mistake? Was she trapping herself again? She went to the front door and looked out over the verdant fields where crops grew and flocks of sheep grazed. ‘Twas a fine sight, no doubt, but ‘twas not the sea.

  Less than an hour later, the family gathered around the dining room table, each member eyeing suspiciously the pile of yellow-tinged potatoes, meat and mussels piled on their plates.

  “Well, this is something new, Mary Kate,” Conor said.

  “Aye, ‘tis. I learned this recipe on my travels.”

  “Why are the potatoes yellow?” Dylan asked his daughter.

  “Saffron,” Bridget said, stabbing a potato and examining it closely.

  Mary Kate took a bite of her own potato and did her best not to frown. “Well, I had to make a few changes.”

  Conor ate some of his, chewing and swallowing slowly. “What’s it called?”

  “Paella.”

  Dylan took a bite and shrugged. “A mite strange, but not terrible.”

  “Don’t eat any,” Mary Kate said to Bridget. “‘Tis no concern of mine if you give your husband a weak and puny babe.
”

  Predictably, Bridget stuffed the bit of potato in her mouth. “Those Spaniards don’t know a thing about potatoes.”

  Mary Kate stiffened. “They discovered potatoes, Bridget. Sir Walter Raleigh brought them to Ireland long after they’d been growing them in Spain. ‘Tis just that, well, this particular dish is supposed to be made with rice.”

  “Rice!” Dylan said. “Whatever possessed you to make it with potatoes?”

  “Where am I supposed to get rice?” Mary Kate felt her cheeks grow hot. Maybe it was an odd substitution, but they could at least be a little grateful that she was trying to make them something a little more exotic.

  “She has a point,” Bridget said. “You can’t get rice here. Malaria infests the air in the paddies, everyone knows.”

  “Diego says that’s nonsense. They grow it in Spain.”

  “This is Ireland,” Bridget said, “not Spain.”

  “D’you think I don’t know that?” Mary Kate snapped.

  Conor blandly pulled a mussel from its shell. “‘Tis not bad really. Different, to be sure, but not bad.”

  Mary Kate took another mouthful, but she had lost her appetite. He was right, it wasn’t bad, but neither was it paella. There were so many things she’d never taste again. Not even in Londonderry would she find coconuts or bananas or plantains or most of the foods she had found so delicious in the Caribbean.

  After dinner, she retreated into what had once been her father’s drinking room. She sat at his desk and idly opened the drawers. She already knew they contained nothing but accounting ledgers.

  “The whole place is as dry as a bone. If you’re looking for me whiskey, you’ll find none of it in here,” Dylan said to her from the doorway. His thick hair had gone salt and pepper over the years, but his face looked fuller and younger with the weight he had gained. Drink had left deep lines there, but he smiled more now, and that eased them.

  “I’m not driven to drink, yet,” she said.

  “Keep torturing yourself and you will be.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He sat across from her on top of the desk. “Nay, you’re not. You’re pining for what’s long gone. Holding on won’t do you any good, lass.”