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

by Cindy Brandner

  She took a breath of the cold air and walked toward her children, relishing the thought of the lamb stew she had left warming in the Aga and the fresh baked bread she had pulled from the oven before coming outside with the children. The fire was going and the smell of smoke was rich and inviting on the night. Something caught the corner of her eye—a flash of blue and not of the sort which naturally belonged to the landscape. She moved toward the edge of the wood and peered into the dark. She couldn’t see anything. She would have to go find the torch and come back and have a better look. She would ask Vanya to come with her.

  “Mama?” Conor, on his way into the house, turned back and looked at her. “Are you comin’?”

  There it was again—the flash—only higher this time, as if it was rising in the air. What on earth could it be?

  “I’ll be in in a minute,” she said, “Go on in and wash your hands and help Isabelle wash hers.”

  She stepped inside the tree line and the scent of pine resin rose around her. Pine trees had always smelled like Christmas to her. That was another thing she needed to think about—preparing for Christmas before this baby arrived. She was due in another week and so there was little time left as it was, particularly with her penchant for delivering babies early.

  There it was again—a flash of blue, low to the ground like something running. She walked a little way further into the wood, and the fairy house, which Casey had made and presented to her and the children this very time of year, hove into her peripheral vision.

  Behind her she could hear the children laughing with Vanya, and Conor calling to her once more. She turned to go back to the house and suddenly there was a blinding pain in her head and a sharp stab of something very cold in her shoulder. She grabbed her shoulder in shock and looked up. There was a woman standing in front of her with the strangest look on her face. Then the woman smiled and the world faded from view.

  She woke to confusion and pain. At first she thought she was dreaming because she recognized her surroundings after the first few dazed moments. She was in the workhouse. The one Noah had taken her to that long ago autumn day. She sat up and then clutched her head. There was an enormous goose bump on the back of it. Someone had hit her very hard. She looked around; the room was empty and she was sitting on a dirty mattress which looked like it had been chewed on by a league of rats. She was groggy and her mouth was so dry it felt like it was filled with cotton. She tried to move, drawing her legs up and hoping she could get them under her sufficiently so they would bear her across the room and down the stairs. One leg pulled up, the other did not. Confused, she looked down the length of it; her vision was blurred as if she was looking through a stereoscope, enlarging things in the center of her field of view and miniaturizing them on the edges. And so it was that the manacle around her ankle looked small, like a delicate bracelet in shimmering silver worn for decoration and not restraint. The chain was narrow and attached to something solid which was currently beyond the edges of her vision.

  She took three slow and careful breaths in an attempt to clear her head a little. It seemed to work for she felt a bit more stable. She had been drugged and hit—that much was clear. If she could remember what had happened then maybe she could figure out why she was here. There had been the smell of pine and the children laughing in the house. Oh God, what must the children be feeling? It had terrified them when the police carted her off, never mind her disappearing when she had been right behind them. Thank God Vanya had been in the house. Please God, let them all be safe. She put her hands to her belly then. What if the baby had been killed by the drugs? A reassuring thump of a small foot to her hand answered the pressure of her touch. She took another breath, this one of relief.

  The room she was in was the dormitory room—long, narrow and open. She was at the end near the big hearth. There was no fire in it, however, and the air was damp and cold. The light outside was that of morning she thought, though it was hard to tell from where she sat. She must have been unconscious for several hours.

  “Ye’re awake, are ye?”

  The woman had come into the room so quietly she hadn’t heard her. She was small and had hair the color of dishwater and eyes that were near to colorless too—a pale, watery blue. There was something wrong with them too for they bulged unnaturally and looked raw and sore.

  “Why am I here?”

  “For yer sins. That’s why ye’re here. Because ye took a good man an’ pried away at his weaknesses an’ then led him down the path to sinnin’.”

  “You wrote the letters, didn’t you?” she asked. She felt numb and cold but panic was spreading its dark wings in her chest.

  “Aye, I did. Did they frighten ye, whore?”

  “Yes, they did,” she said. There wasn’t much point in lying to the woman. “I don’t understand why you sent them, though.”

  “It’s because of what ye did to the father of that bastard ye carry in yer belly.”

  “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pamela said.

  “Are there so many men that ye don’t know who it is I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.

  “The most beloved man of God I know. The Reverend Lucien Broughton. I know that’s his baby in yer belly, whore. And I plan to take it from ye. I’ll raise it myself to be a child Lucien can be proud of. We’ll be a family—just the three of us.”

  “What?” she asked, so confused that she felt like she had tumbled down a rabbit hole into some strange universe where nothing made sense.

  The woman came across the floor and struck her across the face so hard that tears sprang immediately to her eyes.

  “Don’t lie to me, whore—he told me all about his weakness with ye. He told me how ye lured him with yer pretty hair an’ yer fine skin. He told me how ye brought him to yer bed with all the allurements of a serpent an’ its soft words. The child should not suffer for the sins of the mother though. I’ll care for it well.” She reached out a hand to touch the round of Pamela’s belly.

  Pamela shrunk back against the wall. She could not bear the thought of this woman touching her belly. This small mousy woman with the bulging watery eyes, seemed to believe, for reasons Pamela could not fathom, that the baby she carried belonged to the Reverend. She had encountered people who were unstable before, people who were on a fine edge or had toppled over it because of hatred or the blood-opiate of violence, but she knew she had never looked into the face of pure madness until today.

  The woman smiled at her and Pamela swallowed down an icy surge of nausea. The woman stood then and walked over to the other side of the room. That was when Pamela realized there were three men as well. One was young, maybe in his early twenties with dark hair and a lean face. The other two were middle-aged and looked like the stereotypical hard man. Balding heads, beer bellies and mean red faces. Watching them as they huddled together and talked, it was clear to her that the woman was the one giving the orders.

  The woman ignored her after that. Pamela took stock of her situation. She was shackled to the wall, firmly as it turned out for she couldn’t get the bolt to move and only succeeded in badly bruising her ankle in her efforts. The men must have helped to bring her here unconscious and carry her up the stairs. The thought that they had touched her made her cold all over. She wondered what story the woman had told the men and if they thought her a harlot worth punishing too. There were some fanatical fringe elements in the Protestant faith in Northern Ireland that made it possible the men too, would see her as just a Catholic whore, not worthy to live. If the woman wanted her baby, she would have to look after her for now. That bought her a little time, though there was no way of knowing how much. The Reverend was evil and cunning but she didn’t think he was crazy, at least not in the way this woman was. She didn’t see him accepting her baby as being his. Why he’d led this woman to believe they’d been lovers she could not fathom. He loved to play games; she knew that fact from past experience. Perhaps this was all part of some elaborate game which he f
elt he was playing with Jamie, even if Jamie was an unwilling participant. Overall taking stock left her feeling doubly bleak. The drug’s effects had passed and the baby was kicking furiously now, no doubt feeling the adrenaline flooding her mother’s body. She was going to need to calm herself. Not that she had a clue on where to begin.

  Later in the day the young dark-haired man gave her a cup of water and some bread and cheese. She drank the water too quickly and it spilled up the sides of her face and into her ears and hair. She slowed down after that, knowing she couldn’t afford to waste one precious drop. She didn’t know how often she would get fluids and needed to make certain to drink every bit that was given to her. She was allowed to relieve herself in a bucket a little while later. The young man had placed the bucket behind a screen of ivy which reached to the floor. It provided a bit of privacy, if not dignity.

  “Why is this happening? I don’t understand,” she said when she returned to her mattress. She looked him in the eyes as she asked, hoping he would find it in him to answer her.

  “It’s not you, ye’ve been taken as a lure,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked, fearing that they wanted Jamie. If the Reverend was involved then it was likely. She did not want Jamie at that man’s mercy and with the threat of her life and his unborn child’s, he most certainly would be.

  “Ye’ll find out soon enough,” he said and turned away from her.

  She sat, having little choice in the matter, and watched the light fade outside. She had been gone close to twenty-four hours now. She closed her eyes and imagined she was home. Supper started and cooking in the oven, the children playing around her, Vanya telling her about his day and all the village gossip, who was marrying who, who had to get married, who was ill, who was estranged from their sister since the last village social, and who was having an affair with the neighbor. She went through it in detail in her head, hoping it would stem the rising tide of panic in her body. She needed to think rationally and calmly to see if there was any way out of this. Any way at all.

  Her eye was caught by a remnant of newspaper on the windowsill, stuck there by some strange whim of fate, fluttering about its edges as if it, too, wished to flee this place. The word ‘passage’ was blazoned across it in big black letters. Passage on a steam ship to America, escape from this land of suffering and death. For the occupants of this workhouse it would have been too late, there wouldn’t have been money for a passage over the sea. Escape, if it was to be made, had to happen before walking through the gates of this place. This piece of paper would have been a mockery, or perhaps a ghostly reminder of those already gone, who were as good as dead, for most families would never see their emigrant sons and daughters again. Just as, she thought, feeling utterly bleak, her loved ones were unlikely to ever see her again. At least not alive. Hopefully there would be a body for them to bury. Her children shouldn’t have to wonder where their mother had disappeared to as well as their father. Casey, if you’re looking down on me from somewhere, help me, please help me. It was a small plea, a flickering flame thrown out into a darkness as vast as the universe, but somehow talking to him in her head steadied her a little and made the panic recede just enough so that she could breathe.

  There was noise on the stairs. Two of the men had gone out some time earlier. She shrank back into the corner as if the shadows could swallow her and render her invisible to whoever it was coming up those stairs. If the man had told the truth and she was here as a lure, then please God, let it not be Jamie whom her capture had been meant to draw in.

  Three men came into the long dormitory room, and there was, indeed, one man she did recognize. At first she felt an uprush of hope in her chest, and then she saw the expression on his face as his eyes met hers, and the flare of hope died as swiftly as it had been born.

  It was Noah.

  They brought him to her after the first beating. She had learned courage long ago and so she stifled her desire to look away and not see the damage they had inflicted on him.

  “What do they want?” she whispered to him when she thought he might be able to speak.

  “Vengeance. They say they want information about the IRA in Armagh, but it’s not true. The bald one with the blue eyes says I killed his brother five years back. It may be true. Either way, I can’t give him what he wants other than my death. If there’s something larger going on here, I don’t understand what it is. The woman is the one that frightens me the most. The men are here because of me, but she is here because of you.”

  “I know,” she said. They didn’t speak any more of it because there was nothing to say. One couldn’t really make sense of an upside down world of shadows and blood, and one could certainly not make it better by talking about it when it was far too late.

  Some little while later she asked the dark-haired man for a cloth and some water. “You can give me at least that much,” she said. “Please.”

  He walked away and she thought he was going to ignore her. But twenty minutes later he returned with a bowl of hot water and two cloths. He also brought a mug of beef broth.

  “Thank you,” she said. She was determined to stay on civil terms with this man as he was her only chance of humane treatment. The other two didn’t care if she lived or died, she understood that just in the way they looked at her. The one mercy of being pregnant was that they weren’t as likely to rape her. It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of the possible, but it brought the odds down far enough that she could put the fear of it to one side. It was still there, but it was not a primary fear.

  She used the water to wash away the worst of the blood. She was as gentle as she could manage but she could see it hurt Noah. There was no way not to hurt him. She bathed his face and neck and smoothed the dark hair back with a damp hand. It wouldn’t heal him but she would give him kindness to combat the violence their captors had unleashed upon him. It was a small gift between them. She took stock of his injuries like she was making a list of things she needed to fix—first the ribs and then the eye, and then bind the ankle and straighten the fingers and somehow do all of it without medical expertise and painkillers. It was like making a Christmas list for Santa and then burning it in the fire and thinking the ashes would wind up in the North Pole where Santa could magically put it back together and deliver on impossible wishes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She dabbed at a cut over his eye and he looked up at her. The gentian eyes were glazed with pain, but there was still an echo of his strength in them.

  “I am used to pain,” he said. “I can bear my own. If they hurt you then I’ll break.”

  “I don’t think they’ll hurt me,” she said. “The woman wants my baby, so until the baby is born, I’m safe.”

  “And after that?”

  “I can’t think that far or I’ll go mad,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact.

  She tried to get him to drink some of the beef broth but he refused.

  “Pamela, I don’t need food anymore. I’ll be dead in a few days at most. You drink it. Keep your strength up as much as you can.”

  She knew what she needed her strength for, and the thought of it terrified her. To give birth here in this haunted place without access to sterile tools and without medical help of any sort set loose the sort of panic in her body which she was doing everything to avoid.

  He slept after that. She lay on the filthy mattress, shackled like a phoenix in a fairy tale, one who would not rise from the ashes but would instead die in her own blood.

  She took stock of her physical self every other hour. They were feeding her well enough. The woman was worried about her nutritional needs but that would end once the baby was born. She found she was obsessing over every twinge of pain in her back or pelvic region. Being that she couldn’t move around properly there was plenty of discomfort. Thus far, however, none of it felt like real labor pain. She found herself uttering a short prayer over and over like a rosary which held only three words—Please be late, please be late, please be
late.

  Vanya would have alerted Jamie and Patrick immediately. If it was at all possible to find her, Jamie would do it. The problem of course was that no one knew about this workhouse and it wasn’t on any maps or lists either. It was so well hidden that it would be a challenge to find even if it had been marked on a map.

  The man had dumped the bloody water out and brought her fresh water along with another rag and a bit of soap with which to wash herself. He’d given her toothpaste and a toothbrush as well. She brushed her teeth first, spitting into the cup in which the beef broth had been. Then she had an abbreviated bath not daring to remove her shirt or bare any of her skin in order to be more thorough. After, she lay down beside Noah. She was so exhausted that she fell asleep almost immediately. She awoke what seemed only minutes later to shouts and lights and the woman shrieking at her. It was an assault on her sleep-drenched senses and it took her a few minutes to understand what the woman was screaming about. Noah was gone. He was missing and they were searching the entire building for him.

  The woman grabbed her hair and pulled her head back and then shone her torch directly in Pamela’s eyes. “Where is he, bitch? Where is yer little lover-boy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, blinking away the light the woman kept shining in her eyes. “I didn’t feel him leave.”

  He had to be in the building. She was certain his ankle was either broken, or at the very least, very badly sprained. He couldn’t get far even if he managed to get outside. And while it might be naïve of her, she had a bone-deep belief that he would not leave her here knowing that he couldn’t reach help in time. He would not leave her to the mercy of this madwoman who was clutching her hair so hard that Pamela felt as if a piece of her scalp was pulling away from her skull.

  The dark-haired man came in just then. “We found him on the stairs. Let go of her. Ye’re not goin’ to treat a pregnant woman like this while I’m here.”

  He poked the woman with his rifle and she snarled at him like a rabid dog, but she let go of Pamela’s hair. “Leave her be, or ye’ll damage the baby,” he said. This statement seemed to give the woman pause. “It’s true, my sister’s husband died when she was pregnant with their baby an’ the baby was deformed when it was born. The doctor said it was from stress. So if ye want a whole baby for the Reverend, ye need to take care of her and not hurt her.”