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

by Cindy Brandner

  Casey looked at him blankly. “How is it my fault?”

  Finn waggled one of his grizzled eyebrows at him. “Well lad I’ll not say ye’re to blame but the women of the village have been actin’ up something fierce since ye arrived. Me sister says ye’re one of them lads as turns the females soft in the head.”

  Casey snorted. “It’s not like I encourage any of them.”

  “No, ye don’t. Frankly that only seems to make ye that much more attractive to them.”

  “Well, I’m not sure how I’m meant to fix that. I’m only goin’ about my business, livin’ life as best as I can manage.”

  “Why is it that ye don’t take up with one of them?” Finn asked.

  “Ye’re never shy with the questions are ye?” Casey said, hanging his coat up on a peg behind the door and setting his boots on the drip tray below.

  Finn laughed. “No, I’m a nosy beggar an’ not ashamed of it either, so ye won’t sidestep the question quite so neatly there, boy. Truth is ye don’t seem the sort to go without female companionship.” He gave a delicate cough at this juncture, leaving Casey in no doubt just what he meant by companionship.

  Casey considered not answering; as nosy as the man might be, he didn’t take offense if a body didn’t answer.

  “There is a woman, or was, but for me I suspect it will always be a present thing. I suppose I am just a one-woman man.”

  “An’ where is she, this woman?” Finn asked, lighting the gas ring on the stove and then filling the kettle. He indicated that Casey should sit down at the table. Casey sat and then answered the man’s question.

  “Well, there’s the rub,” Casey said, “I don’t know.” He sighed, for Finn was looking more curious by the moment, with a gleam in the bright blue eyes that said he wasn’t going to get away from telling this story.

  And so he told him, because it was quiet and there was no one about and because he felt the need, after all this time, to talk about it. He told it as well as a man could who still felt that his memory was as holey as a sieve. He told Finn his real name too, and it was the first time he’d said it out loud to another person. It felt good to acknowledge it as if by saying the name it became his once again.

  “So ye came back here to see if the country would give ye back who ye once were?”

  “Aye, I suppose I did.”

  “It hasn’t done the job ye hoped it would?”

  “Not yet, though I feel that I’m on more solid ground since I came home.”

  “An’ what if ye don’t find her?”

  Casey shrugged his shoulders; the question was one that had haunted him many a night. What indeed?

  “I’ve not given up on that happenin’ just yet. I’m hopin’ time does its work an’ gives me back enough of my mind so that I can find my way home one day.” Before it’s too late, he added to himself, not wanting to say it out loud, for fear of bringing it into the light and making it fact.

  “If ye don’t go soon, man, ye’ll end up breakin’ Claudia’s heart, an’ she can’t afford that. There are men around here who’d be happy to pay court to the woman, but she won’t ever see past you to them, as long as ye’re here.”

  “I know that, Finn. It’s only that I’ve found a bit of a home here, an’ I think I’m afraid to leave it without an’ understandin’ of where it is I’m headin’.”

  “Oh, laddie, we’re all walkin’ blind in the dark, that’s just life. Somewhere, there’s maybe a family that’s missin’ ye, ye have to at least find out.”

  “I’m afraid, Finn. No, that’s not even true; I’m fockin’ terrified. What if I never remember things properly, what if I get there an’ they’ve moved on with their lives, an’ there is no room nor place for me? I’m not sure I could bear it.”

  Finn gave him a long look, the blue eyes candid. “I think ye’re not a coward, in fact I suspect ye’re anything but, so quit behavin’ like one. If ye want help, I can ask my cousin who is the solicitor up in Belfast to have a quiet word about, an’ see if he can find out if anyone matchin’ yer description is missin’ in that area. It means ye’ll have to stay on a week or two more. Ye’re welcome to my spare room in the meantime. So what do ye say, boy? Will ye let me ask my cousin if he can find some information for ye?”

  Casey felt a little sick at the notion, but it might be a start and maybe with Finn’s help he could find a path that would lead him in out of the dark forest which was his absent memory.

  “Aye,” he said, “go ahead an’ ask him. It’s likely it won’t lead anywhere, still, I suppose it’s worth a try.”

  Part Eight

  The Undefended Heart

  September 1977-September 1978

  Chapter Sixty-six

  The Workhouse

  September 1977

  THOMAS WOLFE HAD ONCE famously said ‘You can’t go home again.’ Pamela had always thought he meant that after a long absence, one could not go home again without finding it, and oneself, utterly changed. After only two months away, she was finding a painful truth to the simple statement. She was irrevocably changed by her time away and by the things she had come to accept in that time. Acceptance, she had found, was a double-edged sword, and coming home without the hope of Casey one day returning had made the house seem particularly empty and foreign to her. It was like she was a visitor, here temporarily and uncertain of where things were placed, and what the rituals were that had once made this house a home. It wasn’t uncommon to feel unsettled when a house had been empty for some time, but she felt like this was a bigger shift than merely recovering the normal rhythm of her daily life.

  Gert and Owen had picked up the children early this morning, with the plan of keeping them for the day and overnight. The children had been very excited to see them and had gone off without a qualm. It would give her the time to sort her paperwork and get the house in order, though there wasn’t much to do. The yard had been well tended, the garden free of weeds and near ready to harvest. The byre had been cleared out and restocked with fresh hay for the winter season. Gert and Owen had collected her mail, and kept Rusty, Finbar and Paudeen with them for the summer. Gert claimed ignorance as to who had done all the work.

  “Owen and me, ve vould have happily done the weeding and hoeing, but it is always done when we get here.” Gert added a little hmmphmm at the end of this sentence, telling Pamela that Gert knew exactly who had done the work, just as Pamela did.

  After cleaning up the detritus from breakfast, sweeping up toast crumbs and wiping away sticky golden handprints made with honey, she assembled her piles of paperwork. Pamela sat, trying to imbue herself with a brisk feeling of getting down to business. She had a longing to run outside and down to the sea, even though here the sea was distant and not an eternal lullaby out her windows. Her thoughts drifted to Jamie, as they so often did. She missed him already, missed his daily presence and their meals together and their talks late at night when the rest of the house slept around them. He had left for Brussels shortly after their return to Belfast, for he had an entire summer’s worth of business meetings to catch up on.

  She had only seen him once before he left and it had been strangely awkward, as if she were holding herself in check to keep from running into his arms. She had been a fool to imagine it could be otherwise, they knew each other in a different way now and could not just fall back into their old routines as if nothing had changed between them. She wanted her old Jamie back, still she could not find regret in her for that night in his arms, with the sea singing to them outside the windows.

  Pamela sighed and turned back to her paperwork. The company had stayed afloat over the summer, but just barely. There were still outstanding bills to be both paid and collected, and she needed to go over all the invoices for various materials and work done. The sheaves of paper on her table lay thicker than the reaped hay in the fields that dotted the countryside.

  She had worked her way steadily through two piles of paper and was just rising to make a pot of tea when there was
a knock at the door. She went to answer it, her hand on the latch before she realized that her summer in Maine had made her far less wary. She stretched up and peered through the small peephole Casey had built into the door. Noah stood on the doorstep, nattily clad in a pale blue sweater and impeccably-ironed navy pants. She opened the door.

  “Hello,” she said, and found that she was pleased to see him, even though she felt suddenly nervous as she recalled their last conversation before she had departed for Maine. Noah was in some ways rather old-fashioned, and Ireland was still a very conservative country. To one who didn’t understand the dynamics of her long relationship with Jamie, she knew it looked odd from the outside, the way they often lived in one another’s pockets and functioned as a family. Though the truth was that dynamic had changed and shifted forever and she suddenly felt like that change was as clear as a scarlet ‘A’ on her chest.

  Noah, however, was not here to discuss her tangled web of relations with Jamie.

  “I’ve somewhere I’d planned on goin’ today. Would ye care to come along?”

  She looked at him blankly, she wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but a jaunt around the countryside had not been on the list.

  “Go where?”

  “Just a place out in the country. It will be a quiet sort of day but the scenery along the way is grand. I think ye might like to see the place I’m goin’. Ye’ll want to bring yer camera along.”

  She understood that he was offering her an olive branch and knew it was wisest to take it while the offer was there. Besides, her head was beginning to ache and she knew she could sit here all day, fretting over the long columns of numbers, but it wasn’t going to come out in a way that made her happy. The thought of being outdoors for a few hours and taking pictures of the countryside was greatly appealing.

  “I’d like that. Just let me get a sweater and my camera.”

  Upstairs she collected her things. The sweater was a thick cream one she had bought a few years back and loved for its silky weight. The day was nice, but she knew the weather was likely to turn chilly as there was a stiff breeze blowing through the tree tops already, and that usually portended rain on its way. She took a glance in the mirror and gave her hair a cursory tidying. It had grown out so that it almost touched her shoulders now, the curls framing her face in a mad cluster. She sighed; there was only so much to be done with it, other than scraping it up into a tie.

  The ride was a pleasant one through the winding green countryside, the sun playing fitfully across the pastures and through the trees and over the bramble-laden stone walls and hedgerows. It was a beautiful day and she shed her sweater and relaxed back into the seat. They talked a little, but mostly passed the drive in a comfortable silence. Noah pulled his truck over and parked it in a grassy field what seemed only a few moments later.

  “We have to walk from here,” he said, “it’s a bit of a ways in, but worth the effort.” He explained no further, so she got out of the truck, shouldered her camera bag, and prepared to follow his lead. The countryside was deep here with no sign of other humans nearby. Ireland, despite its size, had many such pockets, places where it could easily be the present or two hundred years ago.

  It was an effort, too, for it wasn’t long before the track narrowed to a mere trail not even a body’s width across. The vegetation was so thick that the air was dank and heavy and slightly oppressive. She had the sense that there were eyes watching her from the cover of the woods, furtive and wanting something, something inexplicable that she did not have the ability to give.

  She stopped a second later, startled, for there was a face there in the woods, looking steadily at her. It was a statue of the Virgin Mary, covered partially in moss and almost obscured in the rampant ivy that was smothering everything around. Good, if lapsed, Catholic girl that she was, the prayer started automatically in her head.

  ‘Holy Mary, pray for us…’

  A simple plea and it felt apt here, as if something was asking the universe for help. She crossed herself reflexively and moved on.

  A few more feet down the trail and she stopped, a terrible cold enveloping her. She looked around but there was no one near, except Noah walking ahead of her, swinging the stick he carried. He turned back when he realized she was no longer right behind him.

  “What is it?” he asked, narrowing his eyes to better see her in the thick gloom of this strange forest.

  “I don’t know. I just got a terrible chill there.” She rubbed her arms and walked toward him. “It’s gone now.”

  “This is Famine ground,” he said, rather cryptically. Much of Ireland was Famine ground, and she knew some areas had been hit much harder than others, though most of those were deep in the Republic or far out west.

  “Casey used to say he believed the Famine was one of the things that seeded the Troubles.”

  Noah nodded. “I wouldn’t argue with the man on that, it contributed greatly to be certain. Ye don’t speak his name often,” he said, as they continued to pick their way through the long grass and undergrowth.

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to talk about him. History to him was just a part of his life. It’s in the air here in a way it wasn’t in America. My father taught me Irish history from the time I was just wee. He was Irish, too.”

  “Is that how ye ended up here—yer da?”

  “No, I came here to see Jamie. I knew him when I was a young girl. He was a good friend to me when I was young and alone and, I admit, I had a terrible crush on him. My father died when I was sixteen. I stuck it out in New York for a few years and then made my way here. Then I met Casey and the rest is history.”

  He nodded, and turned back to the narrow track to continue walking. She followed along directly in his wake, for the trail was so overgrown and thickly hedged that Noah was holding back bramble and branches for her every few feet. It was claustrophobic and she wondered where on earth he was leading her. She put a hand to her throat, hoping to stem the rising tide of panic. It wasn’t just the remoteness of the location nor the deep, thick vegetation, there was something dark about this land, about this path they walked upon.

  Then suddenly the land opened a bit, and she saw that they were under a great stone arch which had been completely invisible from even a few feet away. As it was Noah had to push aside a curtain of ivy so that they could walk through. She took a breath, trying to will away the sense of suffocation she’d had inside all that vegetation. It didn’t dissipate, though, and if anything she felt the weight in her lungs increase, like wet sand was moving through them rather than the oxygen she was straining for.

  “Ye’re sensitive to it, aren’t ye?” he asked, a look on his face as if she had just answered a question for him to which he had known the answer.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m sensitive to it, though if you’d tell me just what it is, I’d appreciate it.”

  “‘Tis the cosan na marbh,” Noah said, his voice quiet but as startling as a shout in the still atmosphere, “the pathway of the dead. A third of the people who took this road in, would come back down it in their shroud.”

  The sense of dread was like a snake gripping her belly now. She had always had this strange sensitivity to such places. Casey would have said it was because she could sense the ghosts that lingered and all their longing and sorrow.

  “Have I made a mistake bringin’ ye?” he asked. “It’s only that I wanted ye to see it. I stumbled across it long ago, an’ though it spooked me, I felt peaceful here. I know ye like old places that no one knows anymore, an’,” he shrugged, “I just felt I should show it to ye.”

  “No, you haven’t made a mistake. It’s just that,” she took a breath into lungs that still felt constricted, “there’s so much sadness in the air.”

  “Aye, there is. Life is such a mix of both, more joy at times, an’ then, as ye know well enough, sorrow will come in a heavy dose. Ye’re the sort who understands that better than most, an’ it’s made somethin’ both stronger an’ yet finer of y
e. Come, the buildin’ is this way.” He reached a hand to her and she took it, needing to feel the solidity of warm flesh which still held coursing blood beneath the skin.

  She might have missed the building all together if he hadn’t led her to it. Ruined walls were thick with brambles and ivy and ferns and moss. Even the windows were shrouded, small openings here and there in the ivy like sly eyes peeking out, eyes that belonged to no earthly being. Buildings held to their spirit, buildings were the energy of those who had passed through them and had lived and loved within their walls. This building had held only sorrow and pain, only anger and fear.

  She followed Noah in by a narrow door with a low-beamed lintel. Inside, there was no sound, no movement, and yet the silence had a weight to it, as if someone listened and waited. Fear feathered down her backbone, light as an early frost creeping outward along her nerves. She felt oddly weightless as she climbed the stairs behind Noah, as though she belonged to the ghosts that dwelt here and not the solid realm of humans. It was like she was drifting through both time and space and when she finished the climb she would have made the transition from flesh to spirit entirely.

  They came out onto the top floor a few moments later and she took her camera bag off her shoulder and set it down as she looked around. The window sills were deep and vines and moss grew over the faded paint. The window panes had been broken out a long time ago, and a breeze blew through the empty spaces. She could feel the sadness of the place, though knowing the history of the workhouses in the smallest part would give a person that understanding. But here it was as if the despair and pain were soaked into the very stones. The things that had happened in this place were beyond human ken. Husbands and wives separated and not allowed to speak to one another, small babies ripped from their mothers’ arms and their mothers never allowed to touch nor see them again and never to know the fate of their child. Many of those children would have been carried down that road—that pathway of the dead of which Noah had spoken. It made her own arms ache for the feel of her babies, of Conor, solid and warm, smelling of plants, earth and water and crayons and humbugs and of Isabelle, wiggly and running at a higher temperature just like her daddy always had, her scent that of sunshine and jam and talcum powder.