The Ground She Walks Upon

by Meagan Mckinney

  The crone smiled at him, a strangely sad smile, one that showed her only two remaining teeth. “I am Grania, a seer, Lord Trevallyan. I know many things that others do not.”

  Trevallyan gave the priest a discreet look of disbelief, but Father Nolan was staring at Grania as if he were in awe of her every word.

  “Come sit down to the fire.” The crone waved to the only chair in the small keeping room. It was a sturdy, oak, three-legged chair black with age and smoke.

  Trevallyan refused. “Your hospitality is generous, Mistress Grania, but we won’t be staying long.”

  “This business will not take ye long, I wager.” Grania looked at him, studying his face with the same fervor as she might inspect a golden chalice. “Ye be a growed man now, Lord Trevallyan. And ye’ve come here to seek a bride.”

  “I’ve come to indulge my elders,” he corrected, his expression lean and rational even in the distorting shadows. “I don’t believe in the Trevallyan geis.”

  Grania nodded, as if she understood. “And yet ye are here. And ye want to meet her.”

  “They tell me you have a daughter.”

  “Brilliana was conceived of magic. The faeries took hold of my womb and gave me a child when all reason said I was too old to have one.”

  Trevallyan gave Father Nolan another glance of incredulity. This time the father saw it, and he shifted his feet as if suddenly uncomfortable.

  “How old is Brilliana?” he asked, wanting fervently to quit this business with all expediency.

  “Brilliana turned twenty a month before.”

  “Is she here?” Trevallyan’s gaze wandered to a moldering curtain that divided the hovel.

  Grania took his hand in her own twisted one. He was surprised that it felt gentle and warm despite its knobs and calluses.

  “My Lord Trevallyan, let me show ye my daughter. I want ye to see her beauty.”

  There were tears in the hag’s eyes as she spoke.

  Niall’s expression grew sober. “Introduce me to your daughter, old woman, but don’t harbor false hopes in your breast, for I cannot promise to marry her. I’ll only marry a woman I love.”

  The crone smiled. “Have they told ye the fourth part of the geis, my lord?”

  Trevallyan shook his head.

  “’Tis not ye who have the choice of love. No, the fourth part of the geis states that ye must win her love. Whether ye love her or not, ’tis a cruelty for ye alone to bear.” Her smile widened. She held his hand tight as she led him through the curtain.

  One lone candle sputtered in a pool of wax, keeping a weak vigil in the dark bedroom. There was a pile of rotting rags in one corner, the stench of the chamberpot, and a small rope bed shoved into the corner with a woman lying upon it.

  “Here is my daughter, Lord Trevallyan. Take the candle and judge her beauty for yeself.” Grania handed him the pewter candleholder.

  For some strange reason, Niall was hesitant to go forth. The firelight from the keeping room flickered behind him, and he knew the old men had opened the curtain to watch this hallowed meeting. He studied the supine figure on the bed, uncomfortable with the notion that Grania was offering up her daughter for his perusal while she lay sleeping.

  Distaste twisted his features. He was not in the habit of disturbing a young woman’s slumber, nor to look upon her as if she were a common Belfast prostitute. Not in Lir. He wanted to refuse, but to do so would only prolong this hysteria. And the old crone’s hope of a match between him and her daughter.

  He stepped toward the girl. She slept with no covers and wore only a sheer oatmeal-colored night rail that molded to her body. She was full-breasted and rounded in the hips. Even in the dimness, he knew she possessed a pleasing female form.

  He held the candle to her face.

  The blood bled from his own.

  “Is she not beautiful, Lord Trevallyan?” Grania rasped behind him.

  “Aye,” he whispered, truly moved by the beauty of the girl. She was porcelain pale with black hair that hallowed around her shoulders in erotic disarray. Her nose was slim, even regal, and placed perfectly in an oval face of heartbreaking delicacy. Her lips were full, sweetly curved, impossibly red; gruesomely tempting a kiss, even though…

  Trevallyan crossed himself and stared into the girl’s vacant velvet-blue eyes. She was indeed a beauty, an incomparable beauty. No doubt, there had been a time when this woman had laughed and run in Lir’s sweet clover. He had dreamed of a woman like her once. She had come to him in the mists, her ethereal beauty untouchable, unforgettable. Still, in his dream, he had reached out his hand to feel her warmth and make her real, but she had hid from him in the mist, and his fury had mounted, for the hand that he so desperately sought was always just out of reach. Never did he imagine he would finally hold it. Only to realize it was stone-cold.

  The young woman had been dead perhaps two days.

  He touched her cold cheek, running his thumb down skin as smooth as cream, as lifeless as marble. Her unblinking, sightless stare tore at him, and he cursed Death that had laid waste to such youth and beauty. She was perfection; raven-haired and creamy-skinned; the kind of woman praised by the bards. It was difficult to believe she was gone, her eyes never more to sparkle with warmth, to hold a man captive to the gypsy soul within.

  Niall hadn’t wanted to go along with this foolish geis, and yet now, staring at the impoverished beauty, lying like a statue on the pathetic rope bed, he felt an unwelcome and irrational bitterness. As absurd and foolish as it was, he felt a strange regret, as if somehow fate had cheated him. He could now go on with the rest of his life, unhampered by imagined witchery and the silly superstitions of old men, but he had no doubt that the memory of this beautiful girl would haunt him for a very long time.

  He stared down at her one last time, unable to drag his sight away. A chill ran down his spine as his imagination took hold. He couldn’t shake the vision of her alive, her eyes filled with fire as he chased her through the standing stones, caught her, and kissed her in a shimmering lake of blue flax. The fourth part of the geis said that he must win her love, and in Brilliana’s case, he could see relishing that task.

  And that he would have won her, he had no doubt, for he was young and even he knew he was pleasing to the female eye. She might have been the woman he’d been looking for, the woman to be his wife, his lover, his companion, the woman to carry and nurture his children. He might have had all of that. Instead, he couldn’t shake the dreaded notion that it all was taken from him. Brilliana, the woman the geis had brought him to see, was dead, removed from this earth forever. All chances, all hope, spent and gone.

  Driven by forces he little understood, he leaned down and brushed her cold lips with his, as if for once wishing for faerie tales and the life-giving magic of kisses.

  He straightened, and her eyes still stared soullessly toward the leaking thatch. Resigned, he covered her cold, implacable face with a tattered blanket.

  “How did she die?” His words were oddly dispassionate. A lie. He looked back at Grania who had started to weep into her gnarled old hands.

  “’Twas a long and suffering death, my lord. I saw it once in a vision, and though I did all to prevent it, her will was her own.” She wiped her eyes with her dirty black apron.

  “How did she die?” he asked again, his voice emotionless, drained. He longed for the solitude of his library where he could ponder the reasons and toast the poor maid who lay so still beside him. And curse the men who had brought him out this night.

  “She was beautiful, was she not? And the lads thought she was beautiful too. So beautiful…” The crone began to weep in earnest.

  Abruptly Trevallyan turned around. He stared in anger at the four old men who gathered at the grimy curtain, the shock still on their faces.

  “Let us leave this woman with her grief. We should not have come.” The old woman’s tears were like pins in his heart, more powerful than the rain that shook the hovel.

  “But—but what
of the geis?”

  “This foolishness is over. The geis is no more.” The thought should have comforted him. Tomorrow, when he was gone from this wretched place, he was adamant that it would.

  “But the cross! It still burns with an unearthly light!” Reverend Drummond held out the Celtic amulet. Lightning seemed to shoot from the large fist-sized jewel. The entire piece glowed, though the cottage’s interior was quite dark.

  Father Nolan gasped and stepped back from the cross. Griffen O’Rooney shielded his eyes. Maguire genuflected.

  Trevallyan watched the men cower before the amulet. In disgust, he grabbed the cross and shook it at them. “’Tis nothing but the firelight reflecting in the stone! This cross did not bring you here, you brought you here! You want so hard to believe in this geis that you see signs that aren’t there!” He nearly threw the cross on the ground in his contempt for them all. “This Celtic amulet is nothing more than metal and rock, and because of the asinine ideas of men long dead and gone, we’ve come here on a fool’s errand and disturbed this woman’s mourning for her daughter!”

  “Is this so? Was the geis nothing but cruel shenanigans played on us by our fathers?” Father Nolan cried out, fear and confusion in his voice.

  “Yes!” Trevallyan raged, soul-weary of the quest that had merely led them to the grave of a woman whose lost, beautiful face he wanted desperately to forget, but seemed burned forever into his memory.

  “No,” said an old woman’s voice.

  They all turned to look at Grania. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she had ceased her crying. Overhead, thunder ripped the heavens and released more buckets of rain. Water dripped from the thatch, forming mud puddles on the floor.

  “Your bride is here, Trevallyan. She is here.”

  Trevallyan looked into the crone’s muddy eyes. Slowly he said, “Your daughter is dead. And you, Grania, are not a consideration, for even if our age difference was not an obstacle, you are too old a woman to give me an heir. So who else is there in this bloody cottage?”

  The thunder broke anew, and a blast of wind ripped open the hovel’s door. The mayor shoved it closed and sealed it with the crossbar. Still, the wind seemed to scream around the cottage, until the thunder and wind turned into a baby’s wail.

  Grania hobbled over to the pile of rags next to the cold, silent Brilliana. From the midst of the tattered, soiled cloths, she lifted a newborn babe; a small, pink-skinned, raven-haired girl. Grania looked down at the babe with love and sadness. “My good Lord Trevallyan, I’ve no milk for the babe, and she will die if ye cannot find it within ye heart to help me.”

  Trevallyan glanced between the dark-haired babe and Brilliana. “Is this her child?”

  “I told ye. The men thought my daughter beautiful, Lord Trevallyan. I know not the father. Her death was slow and terrible, but at least she left me this.” Grania held the wailing newborn out to him.

  Trevallyan did not take her.

  Quietly he said, “If you need milk for the child, I’ll see to it a wet-nurse is brought here tonight. The Trevallyans have never allowed a child to starve in Lir.” He looked around accusingly at the faces of Maguire, Griffen, the father, and Drummond. “I think I understand now. This was a hoax to get me here, wasn’t it? But you could have told me the truth—that a child is in need—and I would have seen to it that the babe was well cared for. This theatrical production was unnecessary. So answer me! Was this whole night set up to extract my charity toward this bastard child?”

  “I came here because of the geis, Lord Trevallyan,” Peter Maguire said, his voice quiet and full of respect. “My father instructed me on the geis when I was a young boy. He pledged my secrecy. If this is a hoax, I played no part in it.”

  “’Tis not a hoax, Lord Trevallyan,” Grania answered, the babe squalling in her arms. “I have foreseen the future. I knew ye would come here this night. The geis must be fulfilled.”

  “And how is that to come about?” Trevallyan scoffed. “Would you see me wed to this babe? Is that how you see it? Bloody hell, I will.”

  “Take her, my lord. Hold this precious babe in yer arms and think no more of the geis for now.” Grania thrust the newborn into Niall’s arms. Trevallyan took the child, if only to keep her from being dropped on the hard earthen floor.

  “’Twill be a while before ye wed, my lord. I have seen it in my visions. If ye ignore the geis, tragedy will follow.” Grania hobbled over to the hearth and stood by the fire, as if the damp and cold bothered her old bones.

  “Old woman,” Trevallyan whispered, struggling with the wailing baby. “All of you.” He turned to the four old men. “I tell you all that this is folly. I will not be a part of it any longer. You may have your geis, but this Trevallyan will not take part in it.”

  “My son! Look at the cross!” Drummond cried out, holding the Celtic amulet to the fire once more. It released an ethereal purple glow.

  “’Tis all in our minds!” Trevallyan shouted, adamant that they were seeing things that weren’t there. He thrust the baby back into Grania’s feeble arms and exclaimed, “I tell you, all of you, I will not go along with this any longer. You’re asking me to wait almost twenty years for a bride—to wed a woman I don’t know and might end up despising. I will not do it.”

  “Ye have no choice, my lord.” Grania’s voice sang above the thunder and rain overhead. “The geis will be fulfilled by yer will or not. If ye defy it, ye will suffer. The English did not take our lands without a price. This is the price of being a Trevallyan.”

  “All of you are mad.”

  “This is not something that must be done now, Trevallyan,” Father Nolan said, his frightened gaze darting to the glowing cross. “You’ve many a year to get used to this arrangement.”

  “There is no arrangement and there never will be. The Trevallyans will not pay for the land by my blood. I swear upon my grave that I’ll be wed within the year and that my own children will be not much younger than this babe!” Thunder cracked overhead, making his words even more foreboding than they already were.

  “My lord, don’t do it!” Father Nolan begged, the rain drumming down upon the thatch overhead like Armageddon.

  “’Twas our fathers that bade us participate, Lord Trevallyan. ’Tis not something to be dismissed lightly. This has been generations in the making!” Maguire interjected.

  “I will not go along with this. I shall marry the first woman I fall in love with, and this babe will play with my children.” Trevallyan took one last look at the black-haired newborn wailing in Grania’s arms, then he swung his cape around his shoulders and departed in the storm for the waiting hack.

  “My God, what will happen to the boy?” Drummond wondered aloud when the door slammed.

  “’Tis surely tragedy waitin’ ’round the corner,” Maguire moaned.

  “I’d hoped he would choose to avoid the future I have seen for him,” Grania whispered.

  “The Trevallyan destiny has always been a dark one,” said Father Nolan.

  “He has chosen his path.”

  Ashen-faced, they looked to Griffen O’Rooney.

  O’Rooney only nodded and clasped his palsied hands. “So be it.”

  PART TWO

  The Gimmal

  I was a child and she was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea …

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  (1809–1849)

  “Annabel Lee”

  Chapter 5

  COUNTY LIR 1841

  HE’S A warlock! He sits up there in his castle a-thinkin’ of spells to put upon our fair town!” The grubby-faced boy skipped a stone across the small lake in front of Trevallyan Castle. His companions sat upon the rotting trunk of a fallen oak tree.

  “Aye. He goes to London nigh every season and he don’t come back for weeks.” A redheaded boy stood up and looked in the direction of the castle. “Me mam says he’s the divil himself livin’ in County Lir.”

  “He murdered his own wife!” A shrill cry came fro
m the rear of the young crowd. A tall, thin boy emerged, his white features turned toward the castle. “He done put her in the grave hisself!”

  “That’s why he visits her every day!” Another young boy cried out. “The guilt cuts into him.”

  “Nonsense,” said a black-haired girl who sat in their midst. “If he’s the devil, he can’t be feeling any guilt.”

  “Still, he murdered his own wife!”

  “Grania said she died because she was with child,” the girl retorted, using much better English than the hooligans around her.

  “Then why does he scare the townfolk near to death ever’ time he comes to town?”

  “That’s right!” chimed another urchin. “Trevallyan goes a-runnin’ his stallion through our fields like he be a-runnin’ on the divil’s heels. He nigh killed me babby sister, Janey, when he was chasin’ that fox with his friends, drunker than a priest on Sunday eve. If he’s not the divil, I don’t know who he is.”

  “Grania says not to be afraid of him. So I’m not.” The girl crossed her arms over her budding chest and put her nose in the air, as if she were far superior to the ragtag bunch around her.

  “Ravenna,” the redheaded boy said, “he’s the divil, I tell ye, and Grania ought to know ’cause she’s a witch.”

  “She is not!” the dark-haired girl, Ravenna, shouted back, her fine black brows knitted together in a furious scowl. “Grania is no witch! And I know that for a fact.”

  “You hold your head high above us, and you look down upon us ’cause we don’t talk in fine words like yourself, but that don’t change the townfolk from thinkin’ yer grandmother’s a witch.”

  “The townfolk are fools.” Ravenna turned her wrath on Malachi, the redheaded boy. “And what have you to say for yourself that you believe such lies?”

  “The townfolk call Grania a witch and Trevallyan a warlock. I’ll not be sayin’ different without proof.”

  “Proof! Proof! I’ll give you proof! Grania raised me as her own. I love her as I would love my own ma. If she were a witch, I’d be knowin’ it. For I’d be a witch, too!”