She realized she was clutching the little horse like it could tell her exactly how it had found its way into her son’s bedroom if only she squeezed it hard enough. She put it down and stood up, smoothing down the front of her sweater as if she could order her world by such a small gesture.
“Conor, let’s go out to the fairy house. I want you to show me where you found each of these things.”
He put his coat on, the beautiful brown shearling one Jamie had given him last Christmas. It was too warm for it really, but he loved it so much she didn’t have the heart to make him change it for something lighter. Isabelle ought to sleep for at least another half hour which was more than ample time to go out to the fairy house and back.
They walked out into the brisk autumn afternoon; the wind had an edge to it and the scent of peat smoke was held in its threads. It had been cold enough to keep the fires lit today, the first day she had needed to this season. By the time the cold winter rains were falling, making fires necessary every day, she and her children would be living in Noah’s house.
Here in the woods, the frost hadn’t melted away with the morning’s sun and the ground seemed to exhale cold air, thick with the scent of rotted leaves and chilled earth. She shivered, and pulled her sweater more snugly around her body. She hadn’t been out to the fairy house in some time. It was one of those innumerable things that made her heart feel like it was filled with lead, merely by its existence. Casey had taken time and care with it and it had been such a beautiful surprise the evening he had presented it to them, that she couldn’t bear the sight of it.
It rose out of the woods surrounding it, silvered with rain and wind, and the outside thick with moss and lichen. Skiffs of veined silver touched it here and there, where the morning’s frost remained.
“Show me where you found all the things.”
Conor glanced up at her, worry printed on his small face. She made an effort to change her tone to one that was soothing.
“Mama is just curious; just point out where you found each gift.”
He pointed out the tiny shell sink and said, “That’s where I found the aggie.” Then he put a finger to the crooked stairs. “An’ that’s where I found the bark—it’s special from the big cedar tree. An’ there,” he pointed under a delicate bed canopied with leaf skeletons, “is where the feather was.”
“There’s nothing new at all?” she asked, not certain whether she hoped there would or wouldn’t be.
“No,” he said quickly, too quickly she thought.
“Conor, are you sure? It’s important that you tell me the truth.”
“There could be something behind the trap door,” he said reluctantly.
“The what?”
“The trap door,” he repeated. “Daddy showed it to me, he said it was a secret an’ that if I had anything special that I needed to hide, I could put it behind the trap door.”
It was something Casey would do, so that Conor might feel they had a special thing only they knew about and that he was trusted by his father like no other person.
“Can you show me the trap door?”
He looked up at her, small face troubled. “I don’t know, Daddy said it was only for him an’ I to know.”
“Damn you, Casey Riordan,” she muttered under her breath, though Conor, who had ears like a bat, looked up at her in disapproval.
“You swore, Mama.”
“Yes, I did, I’m sorry. Conor, your daddy wouldn’t want you to keep secrets if they were maybe going to hurt someone.”
He took a breath and seemed to weigh her words and then he stepped forward reaching his small hand into the room in the fairy house which was designated as the library. She leaned down so that she could see more clearly, watching as her son pulled lightly on one of the bookcases which Casey had constructed from twisted bits of driftwood, the shelves aslant but cunningly fashioned so that they looked as if they had grown rather than been built. It swung away from the rough bark-lined walls with ease and she realized that the shelf was mounted on a well-hidden hinge. There was a small cubbyhole behind the shelf, rendered invisible by the fact that the very structure of the house made it impossible to tell where spaces and hollows might exist. She wondered if Casey had only built it as something for Conor, or if he had other reasons for making sure he had a safe drop.
“There’s somethin’ in here, Mama,” Conor said, wiggling his hand in further, the tip of his tongue stuck out between his teeth, in the same manner that Casey had when he was focused on something. He removed it and then held it out to her. She hesitated to take it, suddenly frightened at what it might contain.
“I think it’s for you, Mama.”
“Why would you say that, sweetie?” she asked.
He gave an expressive shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t know, it just feels like it is.”
It was a piece of paper, neatly folded in four. She took it and though she was afraid, she unfolded it. It was a drawing, simple in its lines yet beautifully detailed and very accurate. It was a cottage, if such a humble dwelling could be called so—shepherd’s hut was probably the more accurate term. A simple one room dwelling, but graceful in its lines. She stood looking at the drawing trying to understand why it would have been left in the fairy house for Conor to find.
“Mama?”
She looked down at Conor, and realized several moments had gone by while she held the paper, taking in every detail of the drawing. She stood there in the chilly afternoon and heard the wind lamenting through the trees as if it had lost something long ago, but could not stop searching despite the hopelessness of it. She wondered how long the drawing had been tucked away inside this fairy house. The paper was damp, but it would be, sitting inside a hole in the tree. There was no telling how old it was, and if it had been placed there a week ago or three years ago. There was no telling anything, except what logic dictated.
She tucked the paper into her pocket and took her son’s hand. And then, hand in hand, they walked back toward the house.
“My letters are gone,” he said, and sounded pleased.
“What letters?”
“The letters I wrote for Daddy. I would put them in there, just like he said, if I had something special to tell him. So that’s what I did. Mostly I just drew him pictures, but sometimes I put words, too.”
“And they’re all gone?” She glanced behind her, and shivered. The woods seemed suddenly alive, boughs whispering to and fro in the wind, the trees holding their secrets tight and watching, ever watching.
“Aye,” he said, “all of them. That’s why I think he’s coming home soon, because he finally got all my letters an’ I asked him to come home.”
Patrick came over the next afternoon. In a complete act of bribery, she brought out a set of building blocks that she had been saving to give to Conor when they moved. She needed the privacy to speak with Pat without Conor present.
Pat looked at her, worry clearly written over his features. The poor man was probably wondering what she could spring on him at this point, between her pregnancy and impending marriage, she was sure he’d had enough shocks from her to last a few more years.
She came directly to the point. “Have you been leaving wee gifts in the fairy house for Conor?” she asked.
He frowned, clearly startled by her question. “Have I what?”
Her heart beat a little faster. “Gifts for Conor—someone has been leaving him small items in the fairy house that Casey built. I thought it might be you.”
“No, ‘tisn’t me. What sort of gifts?” he asked.
“I’ll show you,” she said, wanting another adult with whom to share this knowledge and this worry. Only Pat would understand properly.
She fetched the small bag from where Conor had left it on the couch and then spread the items out on the table. She set the horse down last, and Pat drew in a sharp breath at the sight of it.
He picked it up in his big hands and turned it over, his touch as ginger as if he were handling blown
glass. She watched his face, though in this way he was like his brother; he could shut his expressions down so that he was as readable as a stone wall. His hands trembled just the slightest bit and so she knew he saw what she had—that no hand, other than Casey’s, could have carved that little grey horse.
“He might have carved it before—” Pat halted like his words had come up against a brick wall, neither he nor she could say the words still, “before he disappeared.”
“He might have,” she admitted, “but that still begs the question of just who left it in Conor’s bedroom.”
“Aye,” Pat sighed and set the horse back upon the table as if it was an incendiary device. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t like the idea of someone bein’ in the house that you don’t know about.”
“Also, Conor left a bunch of letters and pictures in the cubbyhole for Casey, and they are all gone. He said they were there for a long time and now, suddenly, they’re gone.”
Pat’s eyebrows shot up at this. “Who else knew about the wee door in the house?”
She shook her head and sat down, her knees wobbly.
“As far as I know, just Conor and Casey. Casey didn’t even tell me, it was a secret he had with Conor, something special for the two of them.”
He gave her an assessing look, one similar to the ones his brother had given her just before he delivered a bit of bad news. She wondered if they had both inherited it from their father.
“Just spit it out and save your spleen, Patrick,” she said tartly.
He raised an eyebrow. “Ye’re truly a Riordan when ye’re using my daddy’s sayins’.”
She returned his raised eyebrow with a green look of her own. “Patrick.”
“I don’t know what to say, Pamela.” He put his big hands up in bewilderment. “I can’t fathom where these things have come from. As ye said, it would be no stretch to explain the wee bits an’ bobs in the fairy house, but this,” he touched a finger to the arched neck of the horse, “this was carved by my brother’s hand, I’d swear to that. But I…I have to believe that he carved it before he disappeared an’ he found a way—found someone—to make these deliveries to give Conor a bit of magic, in case he was ever gone.”
“Well, I would think that the obvious person for that would be you.”
Pat shook his head slowly, his face troubled. “No, I got mad with the man every time he mentioned somethin’ happenin’ to him, or him not bein’ here to look after you all one day. I regret that now; I regret it a great deal. ”
She reached out a hand and put it over one of Pat’s.
“I have the same regrets. It is only because neither of us could bear the thought of a world without him.”
“Aye, I know he understood that. It’s only that I sometimes feel he knew an’ he was tryin’ to prepare the both of us for what was comin’. An’ frankly that pisses me off too, because if he knew then why didn’t he stop it an’ take you an’ the children an’ leave, move to the south. He might have just kept all of yez down in Kerry that last summer.”
“He might have, Patrick but you and I both know him well enough to understand that was never a possibility. He had built a life here for us—the business, the house and his roots were here in the North. He couldn’t change that about himself any more than he could have changed the color of his eyes. It was part of what I loved about him—his stubbornness and how he knew exactly who he was. He made me feel the same, as if I knew exactly who I was.”
“An’ who is that?” Pat asked, softly.
“The woman who loves him and is loved by him. The mother of his children, the woman he was meant to grow old with. The knowledge of that was what centered me and gave me a foundation from which to start each day and to end it as well.”
“Ye were that for him as well. If ye could have seen him before he met ye, ye would hardly countenance he could settle down with the one woman an’ be so happy that ye knew it was his destiny to be so. He was, as my daddy used to say, the one to give a man the grey hairs.”
“It feels unfair to me, sometimes, as selfish as that sounds. To find him, for the two of us to find a way through all the hurt and trouble, and to really have a life together, with all the things we had dreamed about—our own wee house, two happy healthy children and each other at the end of the day—only to lose it and never to understand why.”
“That doesn’t sound selfish to me,” Pat said and squeezed her hand softly.
“But it does in this country, Pat. I mean look at the Widow Coston down the road—she’s lost her husband and both her sons to this messy little war we’re all involved in.”
“Aye, but the fact of that doesn’t make less of yer own sorrow, Pamela.”
“There’s one other thing,” she said, and took the paper from her pocket where she had carried it since Conor had handed it to her.
Pat unfolded the paper slowly and she could hear the quick thumping of her heart in her ears. Pat looked down at the sheet of paper in his hands, an odd expression on his face. She felt her vision blur slightly and blinked, fighting to catch her breath.
“Pat, do…do you recognize it?” she asked, wishing her voice wouldn’t shake so, but knowing it didn’t matter in front of Patrick.
“Aye, I do,” he said slowly, eyes still on the paper.
“Where is it?” she asked, irritated anxiety making her words sharp.
Pat looked up. “It’s a hut the men in my family used to go to sometimes in the summers. My daddy an’ my granddad. Casey an’ me one summer. It’s high up in the Wicklow Mountains.”
“Why would he leave a picture of that hut?” she asked.
Pat shook his head, his face truly troubled now. “Damned if I know. I will say this—my brother drew it, but I haven’t a notion in hell of why. Do ye know when it showed up there in the wee hole? The paper doesn’t look new, though it doesn’t really seem as if it sat in a damp hole for three years either.”
“You’re certain he drew it?”
“Aye, aren’t you, Pamela?”
“Yes, I am. But it’s likely he did it years ago, and left it there for Conor to find one day. It probably got shoved to the bottom of the cubbyhole, under all of Conor’s letters to him.”
“Aye, well there’s the thing—where the hell did Conor’s letters go?”
“I know,” she said, and found she was suddenly fighting tears.
“I’m goin’ to make a wee trip down to Wicklow. I think it’s worth havin’ a look at the hut. I’ll call ye as soon as I know when I can manage to make the trip. I’d ask ye to come, but it’s a good hike in, an’ I don’t know that I remember exactly where it is.”
“Be careful, Pat. We don’t know who put this picture in there, it could be some sort of a trap.”
Pat nodded. “Aye, though I don’t see how anyone could know about the hut. And this picture was drawn by him, ye know his hand for such things as well as I do, Pamela.”
Yes, she knew, but it frightened her all the same. It was that such a small thing could set her back months, could spark hope in her heart again just when she had managed to snuff it out. And she couldn’t afford it anymore, because logic dictated that Casey had been dead for a very long time now and she was committed to marrying another man in a few short weeks.
“Pamela?” he said, and because she knew he understood all the emotions that were warring within her, she knew just what it was he was asking.
“Yes, go,” she said.
Chapter Eighty-two
…And Did But Half Remember Human Words
WHAT WITH ONE THING and another, it was mid-October when Pat made the promised trip to Wicklow. He found himself oddly nervous on the ride down, though he couldn’t have said why. He drove into the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains and then took a small byroad he knew, hoping to God that he could still find his way up to the hut. It had been many years since he’d been here, for neither he nor Casey had any desire to visit the place after their daddy died. From here, if he re
membered correctly, it ought be about a two-hour walk. He wondered if it was madness, making this trip, the pure madness which was the distillation of hope. Heaven knew he had enough to do at present, and he would have loved to spend a day at home, painting the nursery for their impending child. But Kate, after he had told her about the picture and everything that Pamela had related to him, had said, “Ye have to go see for yerself, Patrick.”
She was right, as she so often was; he wouldn’t rest until he went and looked for himself and that had brought him here on this chilly October day. It was sunny at least, so hopefully he wouldn’t encounter snow. It wasn’t unheard of to get a sudden squall of foul weather up in these mountains at this time of the year.
It was a pleasant walk, with the landscape changing around him as the altitude rose. It was beautiful through the oak lands, with their understory of holly and hazel, the hollies growing to the height of a large house here. Ivy grew thickly up trunks and over shrubs, always grasping and climbing its way toward the light, lending the woodland a slightly exotic jungle air. Autumn had strewn its bountiful hand thickly along the forest floor with a vast array of mushrooms and toadstools, pricking the dun and smoke of the ground with lively spots of red and yellow, and the softer palettes of rust and grey. He spotted several he knew: tall shaggy ink caps, spongy yellow boletus, the aptly named Beechwood Sickeners and the cheery clusters of the flower-like chanterelles. Small whiffs of smoke arose each time he glanced a puffball with his shoes. Occasionally amongst the plants and fallen leaves and nuts he would spot the flash of a red squirrel, brisk about its business, gathering up winter stores. The woods smelled smoky, the way they often did in autumn, with the rich loam of decay an earthy base note. He breathed it in deeply, filling up his lungs, and removing his jacket as his body warmed from the exercise.
A bit of poetry from Synge came to his mind, something quoted to them by his daddy during one of their summers here.
‘I knew the stars, the flowers and the birds,
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 93
