The Ground She Walks Upon

by Meagan Mckinney

  She turned away and abruptly began to walk out of town. It was all she could do not to run. The strange urge to rush to Trevallyan, to touch him, feel his warm arms and see the life still in his clear blue-green eyes was like a fire burning within her, a fire she couldn’t understand and wanted desperately to extinguish. Now she just wanted to go home. The potatoes and O’Shea forgotten, she now just wanted to forget her fears and the confusing flood of emotion that had surged when she thought Trevallyan murdered, and she never wanted to think of them again.

  “Are you sorry they didn’t get me?”

  Trevallyan’s words were spoken evenly, with perhaps only a hint of malice. A strong hand gripped her arm. Right in the middle of the road out of Lir, he forced her to look at him. She wanted to pummel him with her fists, her fears, her shame, her relief, made her hate him anew.

  “I had nothing to do with this and you know it. You know it!” she fairly screamed at him.

  “I know.”

  Only two words, yet they instantly disarmed her. She looked up at him and fought the desire to bury her head in his chest and have a good long cry.

  “Who did do it?” she whispered, afraid to hear the answer and yet desperate to know.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see them,” Trevallyan whispered, drawing her near.

  “’Twas not Malachi. I know he could not—”

  “Quit your blathering. He doesn’t need your excuses.” The anger flared in his eyes once more. She could see the old Celtic blood-lust had been ignited in him. “If he did this, I shall see that he pays.”

  “And if he did not do this?” she choked out.

  “Then I shall make him tell me who did.”

  She stared at him, unable to think of a defense. Even she believed Malachi would know who had staged the ambush.

  She gazed down at the hold on her arm. Suddenly flustered, she said, “Please—let—let me go. I’m glad that you weren’t hurt—truly—and I shall say prayers for Seamus. Now you must let me return home.” She tugged on her arm. He dropped his hand. With fire in his eyes, he watched her leave.

  “Griffen told me about your father. Things you don’t even know.”

  The words stopped her. She glanced at him and saw the sincerity on his face.

  “Tell me. What did he say?” she almost gasped in her haste to know.

  A wicked little smile turned one corner of Trevallyan’s mouth. “All in good time. I shall expect you at the castle for dinner tonight so that we may discuss it.”

  His ploy was ingenious. If there was one thing that could bring her back to the castle, it was news about her father.

  In awe and frustration, she stared at him. He’d just made a mess of all her plans. She had vowed never to see him again, yet now she was expected for dinner. He didn’t care about her, save what information he presumed she could give him about the boy-os, but she wasn’t going to be able to turn him down, for she would do almost anything to find out about her father.

  “I don’t wish to see you anymore, my lord,” she said, her words stiff, helpless.

  “Come at seven o’clock. We can have a sherry in the library before we eat.” The wicked smile still shone in his eyes. “Now you’ll have to excuse me. I must find out how Seamus fares.” He bowed to her as if he were in court dress and not standing on a boggy road, his shirt and coat torn at the arm where a bright red bandage signaled his wound.

  Infuriated, she ran back to the cottage. She threw herself on her bed and begged for the courage to spurn his knowledge of her father. Yet she knew, most painfully, that she would be at the castle gates well before seven o’clock.

  Ravenna walked the dark and lonely road to the castle even though she had no doubt Trevallyan would be sending a carriage for her. The outing was a form of rebellion, of independence. She had kissed Grania good night and struck out on her own, half hoping the Trevallyan carriage would pass her along the way so she could stick her nose up at it. But before long, she regretted her decision. A quarter of the way to the castle, a large shadowed figure crossed the road and blocked her passage. A salt wind kicked up from the east, blowing her hair and the hood of her cape into her eyes, and making it difficult for her to distinguish who it was who stopped her.

  Her throat was dry and tight with fear when she called out, “Who goes there? What business have you with me?”

  “Why do you head to the castle at this hour, Ravenna?” the man said. His voice possessed an aching familiarity.

  “Malachi,” she whispered. Running to him, she was glad there was no moonlight to reveal the suspicion and fear that crossed her face. “What are you doing here? Everyone is looking for you—they think—well, they think you’ve been up to something terrible.”

  “I’ve been hiding. But I had to see you. It was worth all risk.”

  He touched her face, and his gentleness moved her. He wanted so much to please her, yet nothing he did pleased her.

  “Do you know who tried to kill Trevallyan, Malachi?” She knew her voice was cold. It seemed to bring him upright.

  “I wouldn’t be shootin’ Seamus if I were wantin’ to kill Trevallyan.” Bitterness ate at each word.

  “Well, someone made a mess of it, to be sure. So tell me who it was? You must tell me.”

  “I can’t be doin’ that.”

  She slumped in despair. His reaction was not so much unexpected, as disappointing. “Please, Malachi, in the name of God, you cannot be doing such awful things. The men you’re with are killing innocents.”

  “The Ascendency have no innocents.”

  “And Kathleen Quinn, is she not innocent?”

  His silence grew ominous. “What does she have to do with this?”

  She took his rough, work-worn hand in her own soft one. “I remember how you were once. She passed in her carriage. We all admired her, but you—you wouldn’t even look at her—it was too painful. I could tell you worshipped her.”

  “It’s you I worship. I only worship you.” He hung his head. “Why do you go to the castle, Ravenna? Why?”

  “I…” She lost her tongue. There didn’t seem any way to explain it all to him, about her father and her long stay at the castle while she recuperated, and the way Trevallyan looked at her that made her want to flee and succumb at the same moment. “I don’t love him,” she finally whispered. And it was the truth. She didn’t love him. There was only a strange growing attraction she felt for him, and she was determined to overcome it.

  “Then come with me. I want to marry you. We can go to Galway. Me uncle lives there—I can be a fisherman, and we can forget all about Lir and the Ascendency … and the boy-os.”

  “Tell me who tried to kill Trevallyan. They should be brought to justice, and you know they should be,” she pleaded.

  “Justice! There is none here!” He raised his fist to the window-lit castle in the distance. “And all because that man has taken everything that should be ours! But tell me he won’t take you. You must tell me so, Ravenna.”

  “He may only take what I choose to give,” she said softly.

  “Then give him nothing. Come. Go with me now.”

  She was at a loss. Her friendship with Malachi would always exist, no matter what, because of their childhoods, because of the letters that had held her together in London. But she didn’t love him. She had no way to explain to him that she was changed from the girl he used to know. Her education had ruined her, exiled her from all the expectations of her class. She would be unhappy being a fisherman’s wife, and yet she knew in her mind that his offer was the best a girl such as she could hope for. She couldn’t accept it, however. It was now not enough. So her only choice was to do nothing, to be no one, to live in the limbo of her self-imposed exile forever.

  “Trevallyan says he knows information about my father. That is why I’m going to the castle and why I must go now.” Unshed tears caught in her throat. She was hurting him, and the last thing she had ever wanted to do was hurt him.

  “He lies. H
e only wants to—”

  “No!” She fought the urge to cover her ears. “No, Malachi, it isn’t like that. He’s been a gentleman. Always a gentleman.”

  “He can afford to be.” The hatred in his voice was clear.

  “Please, you must go.” She looked both ways down the darkened road. “If someone should come and recognize you, the peelers’ll put you in the gaol. I don’t want to see you come to that.” She turned to him. “Please stay out of trouble. And tell them to leave Trevallyan alone. He’s done nothing wrong but be born to a legacy you cannot abide.”

  “If he takes you from me, I’ll do him.”

  She gasped. “Don’t say such things.”

  “Aye, but it’s true.” His voice was hoarse with emotion. “I’ll not abide him takin’ you from me. I love you. I’ve always loved you. You’re what I live for, Ravenna. You’re me beautiful girl, and I pined for you all the years you were at the English school. He cannot be takin’ you away from me. I can’t live with losin’ you to him.”

  “You aren’t losing me to him,” she said.

  “But I’m losin’ you, and if not to him, then to who?”

  She released a small sob, knowing he wouldn’t understand. Knowing she would hurt him. “To me, Malachi. You’re losing me to me.”

  His silence gave testament to his pain. A light broke the hills in the foreground, and Ravenna wondered if it was a carriage from the castle, come to pick her up at the cottage.

  “Be off now, before they find you.” Her voice wavered with tears. She touched his face in a tender gesture of farewell.

  “I’ll win you. Whatever it takes.”

  His words sent a chill through her blood. “Don’t do anything foolish, Malachi. If you picture Trevallyan’s blood running, then remember that his is no different from Kathleen Quinn’s. I don’t believe you could hurt her.”

  “She was an angel. With her clean face … and her velvet dress.” He crushed Ravenna to his broad chest. His voice was hoarse with pleas. “But don’t you see? Kathleen Quinn is not real. You are real. You’re the earth that I walk upon, the ancient ogham stones that cross Lir’s fields. I worship you, Ravenna. Don’t you see it? Don’t you care?”

  The lights from the carriage were growing stronger. Fear and concern caught her breath. “Please, you must go—”

  “Then meet me. After your dinner with Trevallyan. There is a servants’ passage from the drawing room that is hardly used. Take it, and meet me at the bottom of the stair. All that I ask is that you meet me.”

  “All right. I’ll meet you. But now you must fly.”

  Before the words left her tongue, he was gone, merely a shadow in the night.

  Chapter 19

  THE COACH drew near, and she was caught in the light of its lanterns. As she thought, it was the carriage sent from the castle. Ravenna allowed the man who had replaced Seamus to help her ascend the vehicle, and before she knew it, Greeves was showing her to the library.

  Malachi’s encounter left her rattled, but she was more so within the castle, in the clutches of Lir’s esteemed member of the Ascendency, magistrate and king. She had wanted to forget him, and yet if what Trevallyan told her proved to be the truth, if he did truly help her find out who her father was, she would be indebted to him for the rest of her life.

  She warmed her hands at the fire, refusing the chair Greeves offered her. He bowed and left. When Trevallyan didn’t show, it occurred to her that the mischievous one-armed butler might have played another trick on her and put her in the wrong room, but then she heard a noise at the entrance, and Trevallyan was there.

  He gave little indication he’d been wounded. The bandage, if he still wore it, was hidden beneath the arm of his frock coat. He looked fit and rested, dressed in his usual somber attire, dark coat and trousers, relieved only by a glimpse of stark white shirt that peeked through a black neckcloth. Miraculously, he had eluded death, a fate Seamus now wrestled with.

  “Sherry?” He raised one aristocratic eyebrow.

  “Yes,” she answered, irked that he always deemed it acceptable to dispense with a proper greeting and farewell in her company. She was nothing but a peasant to him, and would always be such. She marveled at how infuriatingly supercilious he could be. To him, the attitude was clearly a birthright.

  He walked to the mixing table and handed her a tiny glass of the amber-red liquid. She took a sip, willing it to have quick effect on her nerves.

  “How is Seamus?” she asked quietly.

  His eyes hardened to ice. “He is barely alive. I fear only a miracle can save him.”

  “Miracles have been known to happen.”

  His gaze slid to hers. Without premeditation, he reached out and ran the back of his hand down her smooth cheek. “Yes,” was all he said before he turned away and sat in the large leather chair by the fire.

  “So tell me about my father. That is, after all, why I’ve come.” She walked toward him, again irritated that he would seat himself before seating her.

  “I fear if I tell you now I shall be lacking company at dinner.” He glanced at her, the same old disparaging, amused glance that was somehow inbred into the peerage. In one lightning moment, he’d expressed disdain for her cheap clothes, her low social position, and her suspect manners.

  Bristling, she said, “’Tis unfair of you to keep me on tenterhooks, waiting to hear—”

  “’Tis unfair of you,” he interrupted, “to be … to look … so…” His angry gaze drifted to her figure. He became inexplicably angrier.

  “You must tell me about him. I need to know,” she implored quietly.

  “After dinner.”

  She stared at him. He watched the flames in the hearth, his posture implacable.

  “You know I desire to know about my father. You leave me no choice but to wait.” Her voice never wavered. “It seems I am at your mercy.”

  “How quickly you forget it.”

  She forced herself to swallow the scathing comment on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she said, “This pretense is preposterous. Shall I return when you are feeling better, my lord?”

  He finally looked at her, and there was a slight quirk to his mouth, as if he enjoyed her standing up to him. “No, stay. Forgive my ill temper. ’Tis not every day I am shot. Especially by a felon who would as soon see me hanging by the neck from my own tree as lying by the roadside in a puddle of blood.”

  “I promise you and Seamus that I’ll do my best to find out the man who did this.”

  His eyes gleamed more dangerously. “Indeed?” He took a small folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and threw it on the table beside her.

  She reached for it and read it with a slow, building horror.

  Finished, all she could do was leave it on the table and place her shaking hands in her lap. “You know I didn’t send that message to you,” she whispered. “I don’t know why they used my name.”

  “Because they knew I would come,” he said quietly. He watched her, and his mood turned morose. “My man O’Donovan saw you talking to MacCumhal. Were you with him, perchance, before you went to town today to find Seamus carried off like a corpse?”

  “Malachi didn’t do it, I know he didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know?” he challenged.

  “I just know, ’tis all. You must take my word for it.”

  His lips twisted in an all-knowing, cynical smile. The contempt in his glance was like the flick of a whip. She knew he was remembering the night she’d gone with Malachi to the Briney Cliffs; the night he’d found her lying in the road in her sodden night rail.

  “I do believe I hear Greeves’s footsteps.” Coldly, he stood and offered his arm to her. “Come, dine with me.”

  Being without recourse, she allowed him to escort her.

  Greeves took them to a small, cozy eating room off the parlor that she had never seen before. It was hung with threadbare medieval tapestries of indigo and gold. Long ago, it must have served as some sort of dressi
ng room for the Celtic king who had built the castle. Now, since it was off the modern kitchen, it was furnished with a small mahogany table and old-fashioned Chippendale chairs from Trevallyan’s ancestors. Trevallyan, no doubt, took most of his meals in this little room. It both pleased and chagrined her that he felt no compulsion to entertain her in a grand, distant manner. She wondered why he was so comfortable with the intimacy of her presence in his lair. Especially since he didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind how he felt about her. He was either angry at her, lusting after her, or mercilessly reminding her of her inferior social position—all of which managed to inflict pain.

  With little conversation, they sat and ate Fiona’s tempting meal. The mutton was delicate, the peas fresh, the bread white and crusty. Afterward, they were served an exotic drink made with mint, sugar, and whiskey called a julep. Trevallyan explained that the recipe had come from a plantation in Mississippi where some Ulstermen he knew had struck it rich in cotton.

  She sipped her drink, sated on the good food and watched him from across the small table. The places Trevallyan had gone, the world he had seen, she envied it. She might have even told him so, except that Greeves entered the room and told him the physician would like to speak to him.

  “Would you care to retire to the library while I check on Seamus?”

  She stood and clutched her napkin. “All right. Then will you tell me about my father?”

  “In good time. He might not be your father, you know.”

  “I know he is. I can feel it.”

  He quirked his lips, then departed.

  She told Greeves not to bother escorting her to the parlor, that she could find it on her own. Greeves nodded and began to clear the table for Fiona. He didn’t watch her as she left.

  In the passage, Ravenna decided to take the moment to meet Malachi. It made her nervous thinking of him waiting for her inside the castle while Trevallyan blamed him for the shooting. Determined to tell him to leave before Trevallyan returned from Seamus’s, she darted past the parlor to where she remembered the drawing room to be. Opening one door after another, she finally stumbled upon the correct room, but this time there wasn’t a fire in the hearth to light her way.