There was a lamp on the table outside the door. Retrieving it, grateful that it was lit, she scuttled back into the drawing room, making sure to close the door behind her.
The jib was easy to find from memory. The door sprung open and she descended the damp, winding staircase, her nerves rattled by the sound of tiny feet that scurried below.
“Malachi?” she whispered to the darkness.
Not a sound answered.
“Malachi?” she said again, this time much louder.
“Aye,” came a voice, muffled by distance. She took the stairs two at a time and descended far enough into the earth so that she could see the light of his lantern.
“There you are,” she exclaimed, relieved to see his familiar face.
“Ravenna. How goes it?” His mouth was hard and disapproving. He was clearly jealous.
“We’ll be done soon. Trevallyan had to leave me to check on Seamus.”
“Seamus is dead.”
His words froze her. The shock of it felt like the sting of ice. She knew the man had been terribly wounded, but somehow she couldn’t believe the incident had ended in a death. She had always hoped the boy-os would see the trouble they were entering into, and quit before something this terrible happened. “How—how do you know?” she asked numbly.
“Everyone knows by now.”
She detected his own horror and fear in his voice. Weakened, she lowered herself to the stairs, unmindful of the damp ruining her best wool gown. “Why did they do it, Malachi? Why? Tell me why?” She couldn’t run from the question. The incident had gained nothing; it had only lost. No one was better off for it. No one.
“You know why it was done,” he answered distantly.
“But what did it accomplish?”
His silence was testament to his own confusion. Finally, in a shaky voice he said, “Come with me to Galway. We’ll forget about the boy-os and put this mess behind us. You can dream of Trevallyan all you want, and I’ll never complain, just come with me, Ravenna, come and be my wife and … and … and … save me…” He grew deathly silent. Then she heard the harsh, raspy sound of a man’s sobs.
Her heart seemed wrenched in two. Malachi had grown into a man, but here, weeping at her feet was the young boy she had known, the little urchin who had stood up to others in her defense, who had in his noble, childish way, clung to the shreds of honor his father had left him before he had been killed.
Slowly, she put down the lamp and wrapped him in her arms. He cried on her breast for a long time while she held him and pressed her smooth cheek to his wet one. He quieted finally; the grief purged. Yet in the absence of tears was a silence that spoke of confusion and blame and death.
“You must leave here,” she said softly when he raised his head.
“Aye, but not alone.…”
“Yes, alone. I’ve got to stay and find out about my father. You must leave the county and never see the boy-os again. You can go to Galway without me.”
“I won’t.”
“You must.”
“I love you.”
She closed her eyes. Slowly she lowered her head to his shoulder, despair eating away at her insides. She didn’t love him in return, and the words to tell him seemed unspeakable.
His brawny, meaty arms wrapped around her like steel bands. They alone seemed enough to protect her from the storms seething around her, but as she was coming to find out, brute strength lied. He couldn’t protect himself, let alone her.
“Go to the next county, at least. Perhaps one day—if things change—I will join you,” she whispered at last, unable to offer him anything better.
“But what must change?” he asked, dragging his lips across the top of her head.
My feelings, my desires, for you, for Trevallyan. “I don’t know,” she fibbed.
He held her close, as if unwilling to let her go, as if he somehow knew they might never be together again. Gradually, she succumbed to him, holding him close as well, enjoying the bittersweet kinship, if only because she knew it was destined to be so brief.
And brief it was.
A shuffling noise startled them. They looked up the winding stairs. The shadow of a man loomed over them.
“Get up, MacCumhal, so that I may see your face when I kill you.”
The voice shattered the tender moment. Terror traced through her veins as she lifted her head from Malachi’s shoulder. Trevallyan stood above them on the staircase. He was all but hidden in the darkness save for the gleam of lamplight on the pistol he held tightly in his hand.
“No—this is all wrong—” she stuttered, gasping for the breath to still her pounding heart.
“You killed Seamus, you bloody, incompetent bastard, and you shall pay for it.” Trevallyan lowered himself to another step. Then another. The light played off his angry features. “He worked for me all his life. He was like my own family, and you murdered him.… And for what? What?” His shout echoed through the stone staircase like the moan of a phantom.
“He didn’t kill Seamus. I told you that,” Ravenna pleaded, still clutching Malachi.
Trevallyan reached the step just above their entwined figures. He gazed down at their embrace. Even in the flickering shadows of lamplight, she could see the rage burn in his eyes.
Slowly, deliberately, he placed the pistol to one side of Malachi’s head. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled back the hammer.
Malachi stiffened within her arms. She released a ragged gasp.
“Stand up so that I may kill you like a man. I’m not like the coward who killed Seamus.”
“Trevallyan—no! My God, no!” She reached up and grasped the pistol’s muzzle, turning it toward her.
“Would you have me shoot you both?” Trevallyan asked. Too quietly.
“How did you know I was here?” she cried out, searching for any delay.
“The lamp was missing on the table outside. When I entered the drawing room, I saw light beneath the jib.” His face bore pain. “These stairs lead to a cave beneath the castle. That was how I knew you were meeting…” he growled some unintelligible oath and pointed the pistol back toward Malachi, “him.”
She pressed her cheek against the muzzle. When the initial surge of fear ebbed, she whispered, “Would you shoot me too, Niall?”
She had never before used his Christian name. It seemed to move him. She prayed it moved him. The seconds passed.
He caressed her hair, wrapping a lock around his palm like a bandage, the black tresses in stark contrast to his strong white hand. She watched him closely in the darkness. A bitter smile touched his lips. “I think this geis might make me shoot myself before you, Ravenna.”
She stifled a bout of nerves. “Then let Malachi go. I promise you he did not pull the trigger this afternoon.” She held Malachi tight. He felt like a fence post in her arms, as tense and straight-backed as a wooden soldier. He was terrified. Even in the cold damp of the stair, she could feel the perspiration drip from his temple.
The pistol was a rod of cold death against her cheek.
“You beg for his life, my love?” Trevallyan whispered.
“Yes, yes. Let him go and I swear you shall never see his face in this county again.”
“Promises that are never kept.”
She leaned the pistol to her cheek, terror locked in her heart. Malachi had begun to tremble, but he said not a word in his defense.
“Let him go,” she pleaded. “I would rather you kill us both than see him die for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“Do you care for this bastard that much?”
“Yes,” she said truthfully, unable and unwilling to explain where her feelings for Malachi began and ended.
Trevallyan’s anger broke free of its chain. He unwound his hand from her hair and shoved a booted leg at Malachi. Entwined as they were, both she and Malachi tumbled down several steps. She felt Malachi scramble to help her to her feet when Trevallyan butted the pistol point right in the young man’s face.
“
Don’t touch her,” he growled. “Leave this place and never ever return. Do you hear me, boy-o?”
Malachi nodded. Even in the darkness Ravenna could see he was white as a sheet.
“You’re not worthy of her regard,” Trevallyan spat like a curse. “So begone. Run like the spineless cur you are, and know that I’d have seen your brains dripping from these walls before I’d have let you go, if she had not begged me to spare your wretched life.” He booted Malachi once more and sent him tumbling farther down the stairs.
In the cover of shadows, Malachi stood. In his shabby clothes and shabby dignity, he raised his fist and clear voiced, said, “This isn’t over, Trevallyan. You can’t take everything from the likes of me without paying a price. Just you wait. There’ll be many a dry eye at your funeral.” With that, he took his leave. He jumped down the stone treads three at a time and disappeared in the blackness below. Deep in the darkened bowels of the keep, she heard him curse like a hell-bound sinner.
And then there was silence in the tower, and the patter of rats’ feet echoed once more off the walls, and the metallic drip of water on stone continued as if there had never been an incident.
Painfully, Ravenna clawed at the damp stones to aright herself. She rose to her feet, her heart heavy with dread. Now she had to face Trevallyan all alone. Now she would feel the brunt of his fury over Seamus’s death.
“Come here,” he said hoarsely.
As if she were Grania, she took the two treads slowly, each reluctant movement costing her in strength and resilience.
In the light flickering from Malachi’s abandoned lantern, she found his expression dark with betrayal, and something else, an emotion that exquisitely straddled love and pain.
“I only came here to find out about my father, not to meet Malachi,” she whispered futilely to him.
As if it caused him untold agony, he took her by the waist and pulled her against him. In a raw, low voice, he said, “Did you know they were going to try to kill me?”
The question hit her like a slap across the cheek. “No. I didn’t know about it. On my mother’s grave, I swear to you I didn’t.” She stared at him, her heart drumming in her chest. It looked bad. There was no denying it.
From his waistcoat, he removed the small note he had shown her earlier. Further damnation. “Do you know anything about this? Anything?”
She shook her head, unable to accept that her name on that small piece of paper had become the vehicle of the day’s tragedy. “I know nothing about any of this except that I know Malachi is not capable of killing. He is simply not capable of it,” she whispered, her voice quavering with fear.
A repressed rage contorted his features. “You’re all blameless, isn’t that right? The whole bloody lot of you. And you, you, claim the most innocence of all. Yet time and again, I find you in a clandestine meeting with MacCumhal. I find you holding him and probably even…” He didn’t seem able to finish.
“I wouldn’t hurt anyone, my lord.” Her entire body trembled. “Malachi was my friend from childhood. I understand him, ’tis all.”
“But you refuse to understand his need to destroy me.” His voice lowered to a growl. “To murder Seamus, God rest his soul.”
“No.” She grabbed the lapels of his topcoat. “Malachi wasn’t the triggerman. I know he’s sorry for what happened to Seamus. He was not the man to kill him, and I’d lay down my life to prove it.”
He stared at her. With a surge in her stomach, she knew he didn’t completely believe her. Finally, in monotones, he spoke as if tired of fighting a war he could not see, nor understand.
“When I was a young man, I held a babe in my hands—a beautiful baby—a child who held nothing but promise.” He rested his cheek against the top of her head as if he were praying for her soul. “I was told this child was to be my bride and I ridiculed the idea. But I found I couldn’t abandon her. She was a life to be molded, her promise had yet to bloom. Even though I didn’t want her, I was compelled to help her. I saw to it she had everything.…”
Her breath caught in her throat. His words hypnotized her. He couldn’t be telling her what she thought he was saying, but the shocking truth of it seemed like the final piece in a long-held puzzle.
“The babe grew up to be a woman. A beautiful woman. And even though I had provided her everything, shaped her life as I wished, I told myself I didn’t want her.” His cheek was warm against her hair, his embrace warm and almost comforting. “Yet one day, as fate threw her at me time and again, I stumbled upon the fact that the beauty had a soul. She possessed a wit that I found distracting, and a heart that seemed as lonely and wanting as mine. I found myself thinking about her, worrying about her, wondering about her. Soon she was all I thought about.”
The embrace turned into the cold steel bands of a trap. His hand clamped in her hair and she cried out more from the shock of his revelations than from the roughness of his touch. What he was saying couldn’t be true, but deep in her heart, she feared it was. He was her provider, not her long-lost father. It had been Trevallyan all along.
He tilted her head back so she’d be forced to look up at him. Behind her, she could hear her wooden hairpins scatter down the stone stairs like grapeshot. “But here I find she is in thick with murderers and thieves. All my schooling,” he shook her, “yes, my schooling, and my cottage, and my silverware, and my money, has not kept her away from the wrong kind. I thought to make a lady of her and here I find instead…” He couldn’t seem to speak the word.
“Don’t,” she begged in an anguished whisper.
“And the thought of him…” His voice trembled. “The thought of him…”
The idea seemed like a dagger twisting in his gut. He closed his eyes as if shutting out the pain. “… the thought of MacCumhal … fucking you is enough to kill me.”
A sob caught in her throat. Writhing beneath the shame of his words, she couldn’t even look at him.
“No more thoughts, however. No more.” He held her hard, ignoring her struggles to be free.
“Don’t ever speak such terrible words to me again,” she cried, fighting off tears and struggling with his unwanted hold. It shocked and hurt to think his money had been governing her all her life without her ever knowing it, but it hurt worse that he thought her nothing but a whore in need of salvation.
“Terrible? Terrible?” He seemed to laugh. “Nay, words are not terrible. Seamus being murdered is terrible.”
His anger erupted, and his dark, furious expression was a fearful sight in the suffocating dimness. She yearned to run from him and return to the warm safety of her cottage, but it was impossible to flee him now. His angry grasp was like an iron shackle. He had stolen everything from her this night, even her home. The cottage wasn’t hers to run to anymore. It had been his all along. Her world had been ripped apart.
With a moan of defeat, she quit fighting him. Despondent, she murmured, “I only came here to find out about my father. You must believe me that I had nothing to do with the shooting today. I promise you that if you tell me what you know about my father, I will leave here and never bother you again.”
“Griffen told me the story about a man who died twenty years ago in Antrim.”
“Who was this man?”
His expression turned hard. “Who? I’ll tell you who. But not here. Oh, no, definitely not here.”
She nodded, then came upon a cold realization. Her gaze locked with his. “I won’t—”
“You won’t, eh? For him, but not me.” His laughter rang in her ears. “No doubt the thought of this old man pushing up inside your young sweet flesh is too distasteful.”
“How you speak is distasteful,” she said violently.
In an ominous tone, he said, “Distasteful or not, it’s time. They threw you at me. Well, I’ll tell them all: I’ve caught you. Do you hear me? I’ve caught you.”
Panic made her mouth go dry. She stared at him, unwilling to accept the meaning of his words. “I’m not a prize you’ve f
inally won,” she whispered.
“No?” His lips twisted in the mockery of a smile. “But what are you then? A princess? A peeress? A fine lady whom I should court on bended knee? You’re a fraud. My fraud. Your education—or rather my education—enlightens you, but not well enough. You seem unable to grasp the fact that you were born a bastard child, alone and penniless, who’d probably be dead by now without my tender mercies.”
“Tender mercies,” she accused softly. “Is that what you’ve shown me?”
A tiny glimmer of guilt flashed in his eyes but he seemed determined to ignore his better self. In a husky voice, he said, “Without me, you’d be digging the fields for praties … or worse. I’m your salvation and always have been. You fail to understand that.”
“I understand everything too well, my lord. I’ve no delusions. How can I, when you’ve always seen to it that I be made brutally aware of my lowly circumstance?” Tears came unbidden to her eyes. “Fear not that you’ve ever mistaken me for a lady, for you haven’t, but still I’m not your slave. You can’t do with me as you wish. If you are my salvation, then I’ll defy all those who would have me saved.”
“But who’s to stop me, Ravenna?” He calmly looked down into the black hole of the bottom of the staircase. “Your one mangy knight has fled. Your meager protection is gone.” He looked back at her, his gaze burning. “Now it is time.”
“I’ll tell you only once: I want nothing of this and nothing of you.”
“Ah. ’Tis good to finally hear the words you should have told MacCumhal.”
She released a moan and ground her fists into his chest. He took her waist in a viselike grip and again pushed her against the stair wall. With excruciating slowness, he lowered his head to hers.
“Don’t do this.” Her voice quavered with sorrow. “Don’t take everything from me in the name of salvation because you fear a geis and want to prove it wrong.”
The Ground She Walks Upon Page 25
