Ruairí was leaning against the warm stone wall, one hand in his canvas pocket. He was long prepared for such a question, having been coached by Anraí. “There was very little money involved. The walls I put up myself, with the help of my kinsmen. In the carpentry I was aided by Turloch MacMaighion and his son, but I did not pay them in gold; rather, I am training their teams for them. The roof slates alone were bought by money, and that was something I inherited.”
Grover glanced out the window at the long eave of slates. “Poppycock you inherited it. You’re the servant of a little native stable keeper, and you’re a nationalist.”
Ruairí laughed aloud, as though there were no such thing as insult in the wide world. “I’m not sure that I am and I’m not sure that I’m not, for I have only the lightest idea of what a nationalist is. But Anraí Ó Reachtaire is not a stable keeper, and I am proud to act as his servant, for a while. That has no bearing on my own wealth or poverty.”
“Raftery,” mused Grover, and he scratched in his sideburn as though after a flea. “There’s a man we have evidence on. Him and the Popish priest.”
Ruairí put his weight evenly on his feet now and took his hand out of his pocket. “Who could have a thing to say against Anraí?”
Grover chortled. “The man’s own son. Signed statement. What do you think of that?”
Ruairí erased all emotion from his face. “I wish I had him here.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you do. But we’ll take care of him, don’t you worry. We have a long arm to protect those who help us in our cause.” Grover looked almost merry, and he slapped his hand against his thigh. He peered up from under his foxy hair at Ruairí, and there was new speculation in his eyes.
“Stanton has agreed to be helpful.”
Ruairí frowned. “Do you think he is a nationalist?”
“No. But he has boats and that fine house of his. It’s very hard to collect the tax in a primitive place like this, where half of all dealing is by barter. But it can be done. It will be done, but not in his case.
“You, too, could keep your house,” added Grover, with an almost kindly smile.
“I expect to keep it.”
“Then tell me about Raftery.”
Very quietly, as though to insure secrecy, Ruairí stepped up to Grover as he stood in the doorway. His hand struck upward, and the force of his slap slammed the little man into the door, which rang.
Grover was stunned for the second time. He remained flattened against the door, with his eyes fixed on Ruairí, and his face was pale as a squid. “You fool,” he whispered, and he put his hand to his broken lip. “You utter fool. Now you’ll spend the rest of your life in chains, if I can’t get you hung.”
“For hitting you with my open hand?”
“Yes! An agent of the Crown.” Grover sidled away and turned his face south, seeking his errant filly or other aid. The boggy fields were green and empty, with a gentle haze rising into the air. No one was along the road.
Ruairí’s face was knotted in thought. “A life in chains for me and prison for Anraí and the priest, too? That’s too bad for us. I prefer it to be too bad for you.”
And as the little man glanced back in new alarm, he was grabbed by his fox-colored hair. Around each of Ruairí’s brown-black eyes was a ring of white. He dragged Grover’s head down to the level of his own belt and he raised a fist like a stone hammer above his head. He broke the man’s spine and dropped him in a pile at the doorway. Then he stood still, staring at what he’d done.
The black king went up to him and nuzzled, wondering how Ruairí’s face came to be sweaty. Ruairí leaned against him with his whole weight. “My friend, I fear that I have broken a vow,” he whispered into the pony’s ear.
In this season the water was very low, but there were still spots of open bog amid the drying turf. Ruairí MacEibhir, bearing his burden, came to a ruddy, acid pool, surrounded by clarkia and green violets. It reflected the sky as white, and made Ruairí into a giant. “Take this,” said Ruairí. “Take him in and never give him back to the sight of men.” He flung the limp body easily into the center of the water, for Grover was not heavy.
The white mirror broke with a splash, and Grover floated for a moment on his back, his slack face upward and his hazel eyes staring sightlessly up at the sun. Then he sank beneath the surface. Ruairí tossed the hat in after.
There was a sliding noise and a disturbance beneath Ruairí’s feet, and then the mirror of day formed once again, and he stood beside the empty pool.
Tadhg Ó Murchú sat stunned, his head between his hands. “Dear God. Dear, dear God, it can’t be true. Not murder.”
Ruairí stood before him in the small, very private back parlor. “It was murder and my fault. This morning, it happened, but I couldn’t get to see you until now.”
Ó Murchú had heard the story in a hundred or so words, but he still shook his head against it, and his hands were over his ears.
“I have broken my vow, which I took only a few weeks ago.”
Pain and puzzlement wrinkled the priest’s smooth, round forehead. “Vow?”
“Not to kill. One of the ten.”
Ó Murchú looked into the earnest, pleasant face across the table from him, and he tried to understand “murder.” It seemed that could not be done. “You mean, you had a fight with this man Grover, and he died of injuries.”
Ruairí almost smiled. “You might as well say I had a fight with a rabbit and it died of the injuries sustained. Grover was a little rabbit, or weasel, perhaps. I killed him to prevent his bringing trouble to all, forgetting I had vowed against it.”
Ó Murchú sighed and sat upright, forcing his hands into his lap. At this moment he looked like a very old Welshman. “Trouble for whom?”
“For Anraí, and for you, and for myself, and even Seán Standún, whose foot …”
“Spare me!” cried Ó Murchú, slapping the table with his hand. “Spare me hearing that you murdered a man to save me trouble of any kind.”
Ruairí shrugged against this blast. “I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking of you at all, Priest of the Parish, but of Anraí, who should not die in a black prison.”
Ó Murchú flinched. “But …” His nails scratched across the varnish of the table. “What could Grover have had against Anraí?”
“A statement by his son that he was a nationalist criminal.”
For a moment Ó Murchú just stared, and then he came to his feet in such a rush of fury that his chair spun backward against the hearth and cracked into the fireplace guard. His eyes were black slate. “Seosamh gave him that?”
“Not for free,” replied Ruairí, and then fairness compelled him to add, “At least that is what I was told, by the weasel man. Usually I can tell if a man lies to me, but this one …”
Ó Murchú walked the confines of the little room. “And who else was mentioned, besides myself and Anraí and John Stanton?”
Ruairí scratched his neck and ruined his face with thought. “I remember no other names. It was not a long conversation.” He watched the priest around the table.
“And the paper itself, that he had been given by Seosamh. Where is it?”
Ruairí’s brow cleared. “I don’t know. If it was on him, then it is now hidden in bog water, where it will not be found again.”
“It wouldn’t be on him.” Ó Murchú returned to the table and sat down. He put his hands together and hid his face behind them and was quiet.
“What am I to do to redeem myself, if that can be done?” asked Ruairí.
“Sit down, for now. I don’t know.”
Very respectfully he did as told, for he knew the priest was talking to God. Ruairí himself had never spoken with anyone more exalted than the Dagda, unless it were the Tinker who had ridden him that once, and neither of these had been the sort to make him timorous. He folded his hands on the table, but if he prayed, it was only the prayer of patient waiting. He could hear the eight-day clock ticking above the mantle, very loudly.<
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When Ó Murchú took his hands away, his face was almost peaceful. “Ruairí,” he said. “It may have been my fault. I baptized one who was not made for baptism, and put you under constraints you cannot understand.”
“I know what it is to break an oath, Father.”
“Hmm. But is that only a breach of honor, or do you feel a true horror at having taken life away from a man in the midst of his sin? Now, though you repent, how can he?”
The fairy groaned heavily. “It’s true, Ó Murchú. I’ve known very few dead men who felt any repentance at all.”
Ó Murchú shivered. “Have you known many dead men, then?”
Ruairí lifted his innocent, animal eyes. “Oh, certainly. Fairies and ghosts, you know, are much the same. For they die once and we a hundred times—we are taken back into the earth, but the earth spews us out again. It is our nature. But on the other side of the black door we are much alike.”
“Other side of the black door? Do you mean heaven, hell, or just the grave, Ruairí?” Ó Murchú waited intently for the answer.
But Ruairí’s unaccustomed soberness slipped off him. “None of these, Priest of the Parish! On the other side of the black door is a world like this one, but in a mirror of the mind. And like this one, it is not forever. My people die back, and yours go onward. You know more about mine than I about yours, and that, I think, is because yours came first.”
Ó Murchú allowed himself to be distracted. “Yet yours are called ‘the ancient folk,’ and it is you who live so long.”
Ruairí smiled sweetly and sadly. “So I was taught, as a rowdy boy, by a father high in pride of his lineage. But I have run over the grass of this world a long time, and I believe that you are the older and that we were only the mists given by your dreams in the night.”
The priest leaned over the round table and set his hand on the other’s. “You are not a mist, Ruairí.”
“Hardly!” Ruairí sighed. “I am a Christian and a fool, and what can I do to redeem myself from this murder? Shall I give myself over to the Crown of which this man was a servant, and submit myself to their torments?”
Ó Murchú was not certain whether Ruairí was joking by this offer, but his broad face, for once, had no shadow of fun in it. “You should not, for it would be torment you received, and you could not be sure you wouldn’t break under it and be used to convict your dearest friends.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I have been in the hands of my enemies before, Tadhg.”
“Forget it. Turning yourself in will do no one any good. They may take you anyway, depending upon what this agent has left in the way of evidence.
“Ruairí, I have prayed for guidance and I think I have gotten it. I have a great penance for you, and it will take all of your life—or at least a human life—to fulfill it. I know you feel nothing toward the Gaelic people …”
“I feel no anger, anymore, at least,” Ruairí interrupted. “Though they burned my mother so bitterly she will not come back to our birthland, and turned my father against the world for these thousand years.”
Ó Murchú touched his hand again. “I am sorry for that. But those who killed her are dead and beyond dead, if I understand you correctly. These folk around us now, in An Cheathrú Rúa. Have you no feeling for them at all?”
Again the grin came up. “I like almost everybody I know. And my Máire is half of their kind, too. How should I not like them?”
“Good. Then this is your penance and your redemption, Ruairí. I name you shepherd to the entire flock of them. With your knowledge, your back, and your courage, you must attend them and take care of them.”
Ruairí braced his head on the heel of his hand. “Do you say again that I am to be everyone’s dray horse in the parish?”
Ó Murchú smiled grimly. “At least that. And their teacher and their consolation, also. Father and mother to them all.”
Ruairí remembered his own words to Toby, not twenty-four hours previously. “But isn’t all of this what you are to them, Priest of the Parish? Would you have me wear a black cassock, like you?”
“White báinín will do,” answered Ó Murchú, dryly. “And I will not be here to continue as mother and father to An Cheathrú Rúa much longer, I suspect. It is best to have another in training.”
“And … may I have no life of my own, Tadhg? Must I sleep in the barns of others for forty years?”
Slowly Ó Murchú stood. This interview had tired him, and his laugh had an edge on it. “You mean Máire. Can you ask her to share her life with you, when you might be hauled in irons any day from now? For the man Grover was not such a fool … Who would care for her and for your babies, if you were hung by a rope? Could you issue out of the earth the next day and return to your duties as though it hadn’t happened?”
Ruairí shrank into his chair. “I could not, in truth. Oh, woe! But in time this Crown shall give up sneaking around here and go home to England, or Dublin, or wherever it lives. Won’t it?”
“I pray each evening that it will,” said the priest.
After a fortnight Máire stopped wondering when Ruairí would next wait under her window, and then she began to get angry. She had known it, she told herself, watching the wind blow the moonlit curtains about her face. From the beginning she had made it clear to him that she understood he was only sporting with her, out for what fun he could find. It had been difficult, with his antique accent and his flights of poetry and his protestations of lasting love. But she must have understood him, inside, for she went on repulsing him when most of her soul wanted to give way to him. She herself had thought it her incurable sullenness, but in the end her sullenness had been proved right. Now she could enshrine that slimy, cold knowledge within her bosom. She had been right. Been right.
And where was he now? In the local, perhaps, playing the clown like young Seosamh Ó Reachtaire. Ó Reachtaire batted his blue eyes toward Eibhlín, and the girl was enough of a fool to bat hers back. Máire gave a glance toward her sister, who slept whole and blossoming and undisturbed. More beautiful than ever.
Máire lay down again and wrapped the thin quilt over her. She felt ugly and large and that people were pointing fingers at her.
Maybe he had found another girl to court and was standing as staunchly with his soft voice and broad shoulders in the shadows of her window. Telling her she was of fairy blood herself. (Was that a lie? Máire moved uneasily on her pillow. If one has to be a bastard, it was more pleasing to believe her father was a fairy than a butcher, a chandler, or a tramp.)
Or perhaps the fairy man was out over the meadows in horse form, dancing under the moon. Perhaps he had found a mare he preferred to Máire. He did so respect broodmares. This thought, which had begun as a bitter flight of fancy, swelled in her mind into horrible possibility.
She ought to confess the whole thing to the priest, except that the only priest around was Tadhg Ó Murchú. She would dearly have liked to tell Ó Murchú, too, but not at confession, and he would hear her at no other time.
What a terrible fate she had just barely escaped, being wed to a cheating fairy. An incubus! And how happy she should be that the temptation had at last passed her by. Máire hugged her happiness and her pillow to her breast, weeping soundlessly.
If James Blondell had no idea what had happened to Mr. Grover, Hermione had scarcely a doubt that seditionists had carried him off. She wrote as much to her sister in Kent, who was quite flurried by the news and pressed them all very strongly to come home for the duration of this unpleasantness.
She could not understand her husband’s reluctance, considering that it was all their lives at stake. He, in turn, could not explain that a bailiff could not be expected to maintain the affairs of an estate of nearly five hundred acres, through the heart of summer and into autumn harvest. He could not explain as much to Hermione because bailiffs did maintain most of the Irish estates in much this fashion. But the thought of deserting his place and his people for so long made Blondell’s heart beat erra
tically.
Besides, he was sure the filly had broken the man’s neck. She came home looking the image of a horse that had tossed its rider, with reins snapped off under her feet and her saddle hung over her left shoulder. They had had to put her out to pasture again, for she was not ridable.
And besides again, James Blondell had a race coming.
A major had come with eight soldiers to investigate. Grover’s disappearance. They had destroyed the peace of Carraroe and gone again. One of them had been accused of trying to force a girl on the main road, and that had been a day’s wonder and fury, but no lasting harm done. They had not found anything to account for the disappearance, or if they had, they hadn’t told Blondell.
But two weeks now, and no one had found the body. Blondell thought about this all during breakfast, and afterward wandered up to the room where Grover had stayed, the two nights he had been with him.
It was a very nice room; Hermione had chosen it and supervised the readying of it herself. It was sparely furnished, with post bed, dresser, and desk of mahogany, but the wood was very good and the outlook was east, toward the ha-ha and the birch copse. One could see sheep. A man’s room, and very pleasant in summer.
He sat himself in the light chair and looked out at the sheep, which was very restful. Why had he been so sure they in, Dublin would send him a gentleman, a man he could speak to frankly and who would understand what one could do in questioning the locals and what must never be done? Of course it wouldn’t be a gentleman doing this Paul Pry work for money. Grover had been (Blondell was certain he was dead) the sort of tool shaped to the purpose, but it was not an Irish west coast sort of purpose. Now the whole community was shut like a clam, against Blondell as much as Grover. He could not even be angry about it, but only very low.
He opened and closed the desk drawer idly, wondering that the man had left nothing behind him but his toiletry bag and a few shirts. Surely he had kept a notebook, for the bits of dirt he dug up.
Of course he had, and Blondell remembered seeing it in his coat pocket. It smacked against his side whenever he tried to sit the trot, and more than once his pencil had come popping out, to the terror of the horses. But that notebook and that pencil had vanished with the body.
The Grey Horse Page 20
