Hot Whispers of an Irishman

by Dorien Kelly

  When they made the sidewalk again, Meghan looked one way, then the other. “Where’s the car?” she asked her father.

  “In a parking garage,” Liam replied.

  “Then a cab?”

  “We’re a matter of a few blocks from Kildare Street. One foot in front of the other, if you please,” her father replied.

  By the time they’d arrived at the museum, Vi made a mental note that when dealing with Meghan, every detail must be considered. She’d put one foot in front of the other, all right, but at a pace that would be foot-dragging even among snails. Now, headphones in place, she’d roamed off and sat on a bench at the perimeter of the room while Liam and Vi headed to the information desk.

  “I’m looking for Nuala Manion,” he said to the woman behind the desk. “I’m Liam Rafferty, and we have an appointment.”

  “I’ll ring her,” the woman replied, then began a chase-by-phone that didn’t want to end.

  Standing next to Liam, Vi waited as patiently as she knew how, which admittedly was saying little this morning. She glanced toward Meghan to see what the girl was doing. She was no longer seated and appeared to be making a nonchalant wander toward the door.

  Vi touched Liam’s shoulder. “I’ll be right back,” she said when she had his attention.

  Meghan was three steps from the exit when Vi snared her. “Taking a stroll?” she asked the girl.

  “This place gives me the creeps. It’s like a church.”

  Vi looked about the grand rotunda with its marble columns and mosaic-decorated floor. It was so far removed from tiny St. Brendan’s waiting for her back in Ballymuir that she had to smile.

  “You must have some grand churches in Atlanta to be thinking this looks like one,” she said. As for churches upsetting the girl, that was another matter an objective outsider could simply leave for a professional. “And creeps or none, you should have a look with us. This is your heritage, too.”

  “Whatever,” Meghan said with that roll of the eyes that Vi was beginning to weary of.

  “No, that specifically. Now it looks as though the curator your father’s been waiting for is here. Let’s go have a chat.” She stepped behind Meghan and guided her much as a Kerry sheepdog would a stubborn lamb, except the dog would be showing sharp teeth where Vi was fighting hard not to bare hers.

  They rejoined Liam at the information desk in time to be introduced to Nuala Manion without needing to give any explanations about out-of-sorts preteens. The curator was Vi’s age or a bit younger, she guessed. She was slight, businesslike, and yet genial. She took Vi’s handshake, met her eyes, and asked to be called Nuala. She also glossed past Meghan’s bored expression with an ease Vi was beginning to wish for.

  At the curator’s suggestion, they were first going to have a look at the gold exhibit. Meghan was about to clamp her headphones back in place when her father held out a hand, clearly demanding that they be relinquished. She did so, and kept her level of sulk elevated. Vi was pleased, though, to see Liam set at least one boundary for the girl.

  “How much do you know about Ireland’s gold?” Nuala asked them as they entered the room holding the Ór exhibit.

  “Some more than others,” Liam said, with a nod toward Meghan. “This is my daughter’s first visit to the museum.”

  “I see. Well then, let me feed you a bit of history,” Nuala said to the girl. “I’ll try to make it tasty.”

  “Sure,” Meghan said after giving the curator a disbelieving look.

  “The first pieces we’ll see come from the Late Bronze Age…things that were made over twenty-seven hundred years ago.”

  “I’ll bet my dad remembers the Late Bronze Age,” Meghan said.

  “Ah, yes, those were the good old days,” Liam agreed. “Back then, misbehaving children were fed to the vast packs of starving lions roaming the isle. Right, Nuala?”

  “I’m not so very sure about the starving lions, but we had gold aplenty,” the curator said, trying not to smile. “In fact, here at the museum we have over eighteen kilos from that era, but we believe that one hundred times that amount once existed.”

  “So where’s the rest of it?” Meghan asked, and Vi did smile at the way the girl was fighting her own innate curiosity.

  “Some is in private collections…family heirlooms and the like. A great deal was melted down, and some we’re sure is yet to be discovered. And we have this…”

  They entered a dimly lit room with cases backlit to glow with the treasure they held. Vi smiled at Meghan’s sharply indrawn breath. Whatever, indeed.

  The curator stood beside Meghan, looking into a central case heaped with a small mountain of gold rings and other pieces. “This represents the gold found in County Clare, at Mooghaun. Not all in the display is real, as much of the hoard was melted down. We’ve had to fill in to give you the sense of what the original finders happened upon. Amazing all the same, isn’t it?”

  Meghan nodded, seeming unable to take her eyes away from the sight. When the curator began to tell the tale of how the gold was found, Vi moved along to a smaller case in which several individual artifacts from other finds sat. There was a neck-ring of gold that looked as though it had been twisted from each end into a sharp-edged spiral. Smaller flat wrist bands rested to either side of the piece, and on either side of them sat two collars, these hammered like flat crescent moons. She wasn’t the diamond-and-jewels sort, but this bit of history made her blood rush faster. She could almost feel the cold weight of the central neck-ring as though it sat against her skin.

  Meghan and the curator moved on to another display in the room, but Vi stayed where she was. Liam came to stand behind her, close enough that their bodies brushed.

  “Coveting?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Sinfully so,” she replied, thinking of more than just the gold before her. If Meghan weren’t there, Vi would have leaned against him, reveling in the contact. Because she was, Vi moved marginally closer to the case.

  Tempted beyond restraint, she lightly touched her fingers to the case’s glass wall, then increased the contact as an odd sensation drew her in. It was almost as though she could hear the pieces talking to each other…a buzz of conversation, some words angry, some bloody bored, and others lost and sad.

  This was no lack of breakfast at work, for she’d risen early and eaten endless toast and jam and yogurt with her da. No, this was very real and utterly unexpected. She shivered at the pagan hum, feeling dizzy as she tried to pick one message from the next. When it became overwhelming, Vi broke contact with the case. The sound immediately stopped.

  The gift she’d gotten from Nan—this way of seeing—had always seemed tied to people, not things. Lost sets of car keys could not tell her of their owners, but lost souls could be heard. Admittedly the gift would be of greater practical utility could she be a key-locator.

  She touched the case again, starting slightly as the sound returned. Fine, then…the gold was having a wee chat. Vi knew better than to question the unanswerable. She could, though, toy with it.

  Touch…release…touch…release.

  She smiled as the buzz cut in and out. It was more entertaining than watching Da play with the television’s remote control when in the mood to irk Mam.

  Liam leaned closer. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked quietly.

  “Fine,” Vi replied. “Grand.”

  She reached out to touch again, and Liam closed his hand over hers. “Nuala’s looking a bit worried about fingerprints.”

  Vi glanced to her right and found Nuala and Meghan both watching her as though she were a mad-woman. As she was without rational explanation for her activities, she gave them a bold smile instead.

  Meghan muttered, “Yeah, right.”

  Nuala cleared her throat in the Irish way of saying “you’re mad” without actually having to say it.

  “Now,” she said, “if you don’t mind, I’ve something I’d like to show all of you.” She led them from the main display area down a flo
or to museum offices. There, she had a guard unlock the door to a small meeting room.

  “The questions in your e-mails piqued my curiosity, so I’ve been having a look in the museum’s database to see if we have anything that might have to do with your Kilkenny jeweler,” she said to Liam. “And as it turns out, we do.”

  She donned a pair of white silken gloves, then opened a putty-gray box that had been sitting on the table. While Vi and the Raffertys watched, she pulled out an item and set it on a piece of dark cloth near the box. “This was left to the museum decades ago, and isn’t the sort of thing we keep on exhibit, but I thought you might enjoy a look.”

  Nuala had brought out a pale golden sculpture of a large crescent-moon-shaped collar similar to the gold one in the exhibit upstairs, except this one had round shieldlike pieces with raised concentric circles that would rest at the back of the wearer’s neck.

  “That’s not even gold,” Meghan said, sounding gravely disappointed.

  “No, it’s a wax cast of a gorget made by a jeweler in Kilkenny,” the curator said. She smiled at Liam. “It seems that your long-ago jeweler found certain pieces curious enough that he made molds of them before melting them down. His descendants, however, found no practical use for his work. I’ve brought out this one because it’s the most unusual of the lot. Look at the decorative bosses on each terminus of the piece.”

  “They’re lovely,” Vi said, buoyed by the first thought that had struck her: I can use that pattern in my art. It had been some time since art had come into her thoughts in anything other than a negative context.

  Nuala nodded. “Quite, aren’t they? And while we have many lunulae—meaning this style of hammered gold necklace but without the bosses—gorgets are much rarer, indeed. It would be of great value. It’s a pity the jeweler chose this to melt, but I suspect it also had the greatest weight of gold, and he was a man with work to be done.”

  “Supposing we had a piece like this, how would the State go about acquiring it, should it be interested?” Liam asked.

  The curator returned the wax model to its box and closed it. “Assuming you can trace ownership so we have no automatic claim under the National Monuments Act, and you’re not in a position to give it as a gift, we’d be bidding on it at auction, same as any private collector.”

  “And you have a budget for this?” Vi asked.

  “I’m afraid that with the downturn in the economy, not as much as we once did, and almost never enough then to compete with private bids.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and another woman stuck her head in the room to tell Nuala that she was soon needed elsewhere.

  “Well, thank you for your time,” Liam said, offering the curator his hand once she’d peeled off her gloves.

  “It was my pleasure,” she said. “Do let me know if you turn up anything else.”

  Vi noted the way Liam smiled instead of giving any specific promise. It was a ploy he’d perfected as a youth. He’d used it with great success on her while she’d yattered on about their brilliant future together, and he’d been quietly packing his bags for a move to America.

  “I’ll be sure he does,” Vi said for him, earning a downturn of the brows from Liam. The curator escorted them back into the public area, then said a final goodbye.

  “So we go shopping now, right?” Meghan asked a mere hair of a second later. At her father’s silence, she added, “You promised.”

  Liam rubbed his forehead, showing all the signs of a man in full regret. “I did.”

  Vi moved quickly, before she could be snared in a mall-trap. “Why don’t you two have a fine afternoon together? Shopping, perhaps some lunch…some real da-and-daughter time? I’ll be fine enough on my own. I’d like to visit the rest of the museum and even pop over to the art gallery.”

  Without so much as a farewell, Meghan turned heel toward the exit. She’d cleared half the distance to the door when she wheeled around and gave an impatient sigh. “Can’t we move it along?”

  “Think carefully or you’ll be going nowhere,” Liam warned, then focused again on Vi. “Dinner tonight, then?” he asked. “I might make her so weary that it will be the two of us.”

  Vi laughed at his brash confidence. “You’re underestimating the power of youth.”

  “And you’re underestimating the incentive in front of me,” he said, then leaned forward and kissed her.

  “Come on,” his daughter called. “Hurry up.”

  He kissed Vi again, softly, and she wished for more, though not in a marble rotunda with Meghan’s running commentary of “gag me” and the like playing through the kiss.

  “Six or so, in the lounge, then?” he asked when they parted.

  “Six,” she agreed, and the time could not come soon enough.

  Hapless sailors had their sirens and Liam had Vi Kilbride. It was not yet five when Liam walked past the now crowded little bar in Bramley’s Hotel. He knew the reason for the crowd the instant he heard it, for the same voice had lured him to a rocky fate years before. It was the sound of Vi Kilbride singing clear and true.

  The summer she’d turned sixteen, he’d heard her sing sean nos—unaccompanied, in the old style—for the very first time in a sessiun at his da’s pub. She had captured the room with a voice that was old beyond her years. Liam had been nineteen, and already drawn to her adventurous spirit that matched his. When hit with her sensual confidence, he had wanted her in ways that she couldn’t have begun to imagine. Though in retrospect, he thought with a smile, perhaps she could have, after all. He’d fought the inevitable for a full year, then made her his the very first day she’d returned to Duncarraig the next summer.

  “Come on,” Meghan said to him, tugging on his arm already weighed down with her vast purchases. “I want to go through my stuff.”

  Her “stuff,” as she put it, had set him back nearly three hundred euros, a sum which for his own peace of mind he refused to convert into dollars. She was exhausted, filled with food she’d not had in weeks, and clearly ready to sleep. Thus in Liam’s estimation, it was money very well spent.

  He forced himself to move from the doorway and to the front desk, where he retrieved a key for the suite. In mere minutes, Meghan was settled in her bedroom, ripping through her bags of clothing and sorting them into piles that made no sense at all to Liam. Not that he cared, so long as she was occupied.

  “I’m going to meet Vi downstairs for a drink and a meal,” he said, checking his watch. “Would you like to join us?”

  “Not hardly,” his daughter said. “I want to see if they get MTV here.”

  “Fine, then. No leaving the room, and I’ll check on you later.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Can I order room service if I get hungry?”

  “Of course you can.” The price of peace was high, but Liam was willing to pay. He stopped at the door. “Remember, no leaving the room.”

  “You just said that,” his daughter replied, already bonding with the television set.

  Liam left, then checked to be sure the door had locked behind him. Da duties accomplished, he took a deep breath and moved on. He’d worn his willpower thin this morning, first in the drive to Dublin, then at the museum. Being close to Vi but unable to touch her had been torture of the worst sort. Too impatient to wait for the lift, he jogged the winding staircase from the fourth floor to the first, slowing only when he reached the bar’s doorway.

  The crowd appeared to be a mix of regular patrons and hotel guests, but Liam had eyes only for the singer. Vi sat on a barstool that had been moved to the center of the room. She was singing an old folk song, this one in English. Liam very nearly wished it were in Irish, for he didn’t like fully understanding the lyrics about a man who’d left his lover to cross the sea and never come back again.

  He stuck to the fringes of the small crowd around her, waiting for this particular song to end. True, they were a nation of emigrants and he’d hardly been the first to leave, but this felt so bloody personal, coming to him in he
r voice. And it seemed personal to her, too, the way she sang with eyes closed, telling how the woman died, never to love again. When she was finished, she was met by silence, then loud applause.

  She thanked her listeners, then said, “Fine tune, but stupid woman never to love again, don’t you think?”

  Liam joined in the laughter, not quite sure if he should be insulted or relieved. When the couple in front of him left, taking with them his anonymity, his gaze met Vi’s.

  Smiling, she slipped from her stool and told her admirers that she was well and truly sung out. She looped her arm through Liam’s and said, “You’re early, and I’m glad for it.”

  As was he. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “A bottled water, I think. Our bartender’s been plying me with wine to get me to sing. Little did he know I’d do it for free, eh?”

  They were to the bar then. Vi got her water and Liam a whiskey, neat. With her still smiling and chatting as though among old friends, they wove through the remaining crowd and found a seat on a small sofa in the far corner of the dark, wood-paneled room.

  While he’d been out supporting the Dublin economy with what was left of his failed one, she’d changed into a sleek black skirt and a low-cut silk top of black that also seemed to shine dark red where the light from the brass chandelier overhead hit it. She also smelled wonderful, of exotic spices whose names he’d probably never know. Liam felt himself rising to the occasion. Ah, she was still his siren, and his alone.

  “So your shopping trip went well?” Vi asked.

  He focused on giving a lucid answer when reason was bolting for the door. “Well enough that all Meghan wants is room service and MTV Europe.”

  “Grand,” she said, then shook her hair, which she wore loose this evening, back over her shoulders.

  She took a swallow of water, and Liam shifted uncomfortably. God, he was in desperate straits if the sight of her swallowing could make him ache even harder. He kept a smile in place and one leg crossed at the knee in a poor effort of camouflage as yet more admirers came to chat with Vi.