In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  It was money, a lot of money. Money of the sort she and Casey did not have. She took it out and checked the bag to see if there was anything else in it. There wasn’t.

  She fanned the money; at a quick glance it looked to be about two thousand pounds. Enough, she realized to keep the wolf from her door for a little bit longer. She didn’t know where the money had come from and so thought perhaps she shouldn’t use it. She laughed, though it was a laugh with a manic edge to it. She had been worried about paying her next mortgage payment an hour ago and now she had two thousand pounds in hand, and a check for ten thousand more. All of this money, and a strange certainty that she mustn’t use any of it. It was then that the words of the intelligence operative echoed in her head.

  Your husband had no trouble taking money from British coffers.

  No, she could not believe it. Not Casey, he wouldn’t have done it. They had not been rich, but they hadn’t been struggling or in a bind at the time. Unless he had been more frightened by the graft than he’d let on, though being that it had almost gotten him beaten to death at one point, it was possible it had.

  She looked to the chair where Casey had always sat for meals, for talks, for late night tea and the comfort of each other at the end of the day. It seemed there were many things she had not known, though it was possible he had wanted to tell her but she would not listen. It was also possible that his male stubbornness had told him she didn’t need to know, that he was protecting her by not telling her. She felt anger bubbling up through her veins, what else hadn’t he told her? What other small traps lay in wait for her, things he hadn’t found the time, nor courage to tell her? Sometimes it felt like her future was mined, and just when she was settling into an ordinary day, week, or month, something would explode—something small, or maybe looming out there was the thing that would rip her life apart at the seams, though the seams felt pretty ragged and pocked with big gaping holes already.

  “You bastard!” She spoke to the empty chair, the words tearing her throat as they emerged, each one ragged and painful. “You bastard—why didn’t you tell me?”

  She put her forehead to the door of the cupboard, the polished oak cool and solid against her skin. She could hear the ticking of the clock, the hum of the Aga, the twitter of an excited sparrow that had nested in the eaves of the house, and the sound of Finbar’s breathing, warm on her ankles as he gazed up at her.

  From the chair there was only silence.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  If Wishes Were Horses…

  SUMMER ARRIVED IN a series of fine days, setting the countryside to blooming in the green of both hedgerow and garden, and the wild flowers that grew in the ditches and along the hillsides. The lambs and calves had grown strong and were gamboling through the fields away from their mothers. And still Pamela counted days and weeks, and felt as if the calendar with the days all neatly squared away was a personal affront.

  Tonight, despite a fine day, a heavy rain drummed on the roof and slapped at the windows, the wind screeching around the corners of the house like a scorned woman. Pamela was tired; it had been a long day of it. Isabelle had been cranky much of the afternoon, and even the normally unflappable Conor had only eaten half of his supper and then fallen asleep on the couch while she wiped up the dishes. He felt warmer than usual when she carried him up the stairs to his bed and she was worried that both children were coming down with something. She couldn’t afford them to be ill, not with the way things were going at the construction site. Murphy’s Law was reigning supreme there, with every last bloody little thing that could possibly go wrong having done so in the last two weeks. Even Frank, her imperturbable foreman, who rarely got upset no matter how awry the world was and who never swore, no matter how pressed, had said damn in her presence and then apologized profusely for it.

  It was Friday though, and so she could look forward to two entire days without the pressures of the business. She would have to do the books on Sunday night, but until then she intended not to think about wood orders, recalcitrant stone masons, or ugly columns of figures that seemed to bleed red at the slightest touch. Tomorrow, God willing, Isabelle would sleep past six A.M. and then they were invited to Jamie’s for the day. He had recently acquired a pony and had asked if Conor would like to come riding. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and she missed him. Just being in his presence tended to relieve a lot of the stress she operated under almost constantly.

  She had one foot on the stairs, ready to head up to bed and a few hours of oblivion when a knock came on the side door. A knock on the door in any town or country this late at night was disconcerting, but here in the murder triangle it was downright terrifying. She fought the desire to crouch low on the landing and put her head down until whomever was at the door went away. Only two weeks ago there had been another shooting, this time of a newly-married couple who were working on renovations on a cottage they had bought as their first home.

  Hiding was a luxury she did not have. She was the only protection her children had. She took a breath, and turning from the stairs, went to the cupboard by the Aga. The second knock came just as she retrieved the pistol she kept hidden high upon the top shelf, in an ancient tea tin. The rifle was too long at close quarters, the pistol would be more accurate should it be needed. A certain cold stillness came over her, even if her hands trembled as she slotted the bullets into their respective chambers. She put her thumb on the hammer, ready to pull it back.

  “Who is it?” she asked, trying to steel her voice so that her fear wouldn’t be too apparent to the person on the other side.

  “Pamela, it’s me, ‘tis all right, ye can open the door, an’ put the gun down too.”

  A wave of relief went over her and she opened the door. She wasn’t putting the gun away until she was certain she wouldn’t need to use it. Right now, she thought she might like to brain Noah over the head with it for scaring her.

  There was an old man standing in the rain with a hat literally in his hands, the wild wind blowing thick white hair around his face. He looked like the shadow of an oak tree, ancient and strong but twisted and bent hard by time. Noah stood beside him, rain dripping from the brim of his cap. He nodded at her, but allowed the old man to speak for himself.

  “Beggin’ yer pardon, I’ve no wish to impose upon ye, lass, but if ye could spare me a fire for a few hours it would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Please, come in out of the rain,” she said, flicking Noah a questioning look over the man’s shoulder.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t dare call ye. Ye’ll understand why in a moment.”

  She tucked the gun away, noting that there was an odd tension between the two men, invisible but as present as a wire strung taut and thrumming between them. Not for the first time she wondered why so many of these men sought out Noah when they needed help. There were men, hard men, even in the Belfast command who walked in fear of him, after all. Then again, needs must when the devil drives, she thought, for she had been terrified of him and yet had sought out his help too.

  She pulled an old armchair beside the fire so that the man might dry off properly. Looking at him she saw that he had a very advanced case of rheumatism, his hands were clawed inward so that she could hardly see how he could use them to any effect and he walked carefully, as if his feet hurt him terribly. If he had been on the run for some time, sleeping rough in byres and damp sheds and whatever else passed for a night’s shelter had likely exacerbated it badly.

  She saw the old man seated comfortably, as Noah pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his coat and unscrewed the lid. She brought him a glass and he poured in a generous amount. The scent of it wafted up to her nose, making her eyes water and causing her to sneeze.

  “Not a whiskey drinker, lass?” The old man asked, smiling at her, an action that transformed his face and she found herself smiling back. She could see he had once been a fine-looking man, broad of shoulder and long of limb, with a genial expression hidden amongst the lines
that incessant pain had carved into his face and body.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” she replied, handing him the glass and trying not to breathe in.

  Noah took her to the side, his hair slick with rain despite the cap he’d had on. She handed him a towel from the stack she kept in the boot room and he gave his face and hair a perfunctory and rough rub down before handing the towel back to her.

  “Here ‘tis then—he’s been in exile in America for the last thirty years, but his sister is dyin’ an’ he’s on his way through to Derry to say his goodbyes. He doesn’t dare go to the funeral, for the police will be keepin’ a look out for him. They still have him on their files, an’ it would be no small coup for them to capture him. He doesn’t require more than the warmth of the fire, as he said, an’ the bottle is his. He likes a drop for his rheumatism before sleep. I’ll be back in the mornin’ to move him on.”

  “Who is he?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

  “Dan Connelly,” he said. “He’s a bit of a legend in the republican world.”

  Her eyebrows shot up toward her hairline.

  “Aye,” he said, “that Dan Connelly. Mind, where he used to be fire he’s now a simmering bed of coals, but trust me when I say his was a name once feared throughout the land. Just let him stay by the fire, an’ keep his whiskey glass filled. He’d never touch a woman, so if ye don’t mind I would as soon ye didn’t banish him to the shed, as I’ve advised with most of the men I send yer way.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said, thinking of the damp in the shed.

  “I’m away then,” Noah said, and merely nodded to the old man and then was gone again into the night, into the mad wind and lashing rain, leaving her alone with a total stranger by her fire. And yet, in the strange way that history and an illegal rebel organization formed intimacies and connections, he wasn’t a total stranger.

  Casey had told her about him, and she knew her Irish history well enough to understand that she was, indeed, in the presence of a legend. Dan Connelly was famous for his rebellious stand against the British occupation of his country. He had an infamous personal history as well, having been married three times and fathered seven children. He had been living in New York for the last thirty years, and moving about the United States when it looked like his history might catch up to him at a few points. His first wife had died, the second up and left him when she realized she couldn’t hack the life of a rebel’s wife and the third one was still married to him, for all the good it did her. Before he left Ireland he had been in prison more than he had been out. This wasn’t uncommon for an Irish rebel, not of that time, and not of this one either. Songs had been composed about him, and were still sung in pubs at closing time. He had given his life to the cause, and lost almost everything to it.

  He had witnessed the Easter Rising, though he had only been a young man of fifteen at the time. The massacre of many of the men who had been part of the Rising had left its mark upon him as it had so many of his countrymen at the time. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood shortly after that, and stuck with it through all its various incarnations.

  The second time he was jailed he went on a hunger strike, in the long held Irish tradition. His jailors had put him in a straightjacket and tried to force-feed him through a tube. It took six men to hold him down, and two more to force the tube down his throat and into his stomach. He had suffered through beatings and humiliations beyond count, and yet his spirit had remained unbowed. The British could not break him, though heaven and its saints knew they kept on trying.

  One by one, the men who had brutalized him in the jail disappeared as if the wind had taken them away. But everyone knew it wasn’t the wind, and that each man’s end had not been a pleasant one. It wasn’t that she felt that such men deserved mercy, only that it took a certain sort of ruthlessness to act as this man had done throughout his life.

  Yes, she understood just who it was sitting in the chair beside her hearth.

  She readied the fire for the night, smooring it expertly so that the flames would burn low yet the peat would throw out a good heat for hours. She then set a blanket to warm near the fire, arranging its folds neatly in an effort to appear calm and collected in front of her company. She knew she ought to make conversation, though where one began to small talk with a famed rebel such as this man, she did not have a clue. He saved her the effort by speaking first.

  “Ye’re goin’ to have to forgive me for I’ve been a blunt sod all me life an’ that’s not goin’ to change now, an’ so I will say this, grateful as I am to ye for the fire an’ shelter, I do wonder what sort of business ye have with Noah Murray that ye owe him favors?”

  She looked up from the blanket to find the old man’s gaze keen and sharp upon her.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said ruminatively, the whiskey in his hand glowing a soft amber in the firelight. “Only I wonder what a woman such as yerself is doin’ with the likes of him. Ye remind me of a tale my nan used to tell, of a woman who was part mermaid, part human. It’s as if someone as lovely as yerself can’t really be fully of the human world.”

  “I’m not involved with him romantically,” she said, and put a jot more whiskey into the old man’s glass, then left the bottle near to hand for him so that he might help himself.

  “Maybe not, but it’s a bit more complicated than merely doin’ his biddin’ in return for whatever hold it is the man has over ye, isn’t it?”

  “He has no hold over me,” she said, aware that her tone was far more defensive than it ought to be.

  “Has he not?” The old man looked at her with some sympathy in his face. “My mistake then, an’ ye’ll forgive me for it, I hope.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, and took the blanket from the back of the chair. It was hot to the touch already, and along with the flow of whiskey, it ought to ease the old man’s bones.

  “Thank ye, dear girl,” he said as she tucked it around him. He sighed, as if breathing a bit of his pain out.

  She straightened up at the sound of small feet on the stairs. Conor stood on the landing, one hand rubbing his eyes, the other clutched around his tatty yellow bunny that he’d had from the day he was born. He came down the final two stairs and padded directly to her side.

  “Mama, who’s this?” Conor asked, staring wide-eyed at the old bent man by the fire.

  “He’s our guest, his name is Mr. Connelly,” she said, picking up Conor and settling him in her lap. He would be next to impossible to get to bed now that he knew there was a stranger in the house. There was no harm, she thought, in allowing him to stay awhile. Conor was fascinated by old men for some reason. Perhaps, she thought, because he did not have a grandfather.

  Dan Connelly winked at her and then looked at Conor with great seriousness.

  “Ye’ll not want to stay up too late, boyo, for night is the realm of the Good Folk, an’ it won’t do to get caught awake by them. Why they’ll take ye by the hand, just as ye are, in yer nightwear an’ barefoot an’ away ye’ll go, no more to see yer mammy, nor any bit of this world.”

  “Do you believe in fairies?” Conor asked.

  “Oh, boyo, ‘tisn’t a matter of believin’ or not, fairies don’t need our belief to exist, they just do. Shall I tell ye a story of a night when I met with the Queen of the Good Folk herself?”

  “Aye,” Conor said and leaned forward eagerly, so that Pamela had to hold on to his pajama top to keep him from tumbling from her lap to the floor.

  Pamela watched the old man, feeling the shiver of anticipation in her son, and the echo of it in her own body. Such a night lent itself naturally to the telling of tales, for the wind was moaning eerily round about the chimney top, and the rose canes scratching against the windows had the sound of spectral fingers, tap-tap-tapping at the windowpanes.

  Like a true seanachie, the old man pulled a wisp of reverie from the night, from the elements of fire and air and then took a swallow of his
whiskey in a manner that said he was going to get down to the serious business of storytelling. He leaned forward a little, crabbed hands inscribing the air about him with another time and another place.

  “The world was different then, ’twas as if the doors were open between this world an’ that one, particularly of a moonless autumn night. People believed an’ so they saw, now people are blind because they don’t believe. But I’ve seen the Good Folk, an’ no man will ever make me doubt the sight of them.

  “’Twas the dark of the moon, an’ the night so thick a man could barely see his hand upon his own nose. I’d been down the pub, havin’ a pint an’ a bit of craic with my friends. I was a young man, not yet married to either woman or cause. It was autumn, an’ near to All Hallows’ Eve. The night had felt ordinary enough when I went into the pub an’ the sun was settin’ on as fine a day as a man is like to see. It was harvest time an’ I’d had a full day of it, an’ maybe just the wee bit too much to drink for I was tired an’ wantin’ to get home to my bed. So I took a shortcut, past a patch of bog land that I normally would’ve avoided that time of night. It was the sort of land that seemed haunted even on a fair day—wee twisted trees grew here an’ there upon it an’ the water was a dull color, like bronze clouded by time an’ dirt. It put the hairs up on the back of my neck at the best of times, an’ it could only have been the drink cloudin’ my judgement that made me decide to go past the beaten old path that ran along its edge.

  “I was halfway along its rim when I heard somethin’, a strange high sound that I thought was a bird at first, maybe somethin’ hurt an’ trapped in the bog.”

  The old man’s eyes were lit with memory, and Pamela shivered slightly despite the heat of the fire, for she could feel the night as he described it, and smell the smoke and earth of the bog under an autumn sky.

  “I stopped, so that I might hear better an’ know which direction the noise came from an’ if there was some desperate creature in need of assistance. It took a moment or two to realize it was voices I were hearin’, but like no voices I’d ever known before. It was as though the wind could suddenly speak in words, or the waves of the sea rose up an’ told ye a secret. Ye’ll know,” he tilted his head toward Pamela, “what I mean, for I daresay with those eyes, the sea does whisper its secrets to you.”