And the reason his footsteps had sounded unsteady outside became obvious as the men started to climb the stairs – Jack must have been so drunk that he could barely stand, and from the swearing going on I gathered it was taking a bit of work for Daniel to keep his brother upright.
‘Left foot … left foot. There you go,’ said Daniel.
Jack hushed him with an exaggerated ‘Shh,’ and, ‘do you want to wake the house?’ And then he fell into another fit of laughter.
Something slammed against my door with an almighty thump and scuffle and the laughter stopped abruptly.
Daniel swore.
I pulled my door half-open and looked out into the corridor to find Jack lying senseless like a barrier in front of me and Daniel reaching down to take Jack’s shoulders in a firm grip as he hauled his brother upright.
The smells of a night at the pub hadn’t changed much in three hundred years. Rank tobacco and hard liquor mingled in all the stale scents that assailed me, and Jack was so completely gone that I decided I’d be safe to speak. Keeping my voice low, I asked Daniel, ‘Is he all right?’
Briefly startled, he glanced round. ‘What? Oh, he’s fine. You can go back to bed,’ he assured me. ‘I’ll have him out of your way in a minute.’
I pulled my door all the way open and folded my arms in the warmth of my blanket-shawl, looking at Jack, who had slumped to the side again and would have fallen if not for his brother’s strong arm. ‘Are you sure he’s all right? He looks sort of … well, sort of …’ The word ‘dead’ came to mind, but I stopped short of actually saying it.
‘Ay,’ Daniel told me, ‘I know how he looks, but there’s no need to worry. I’ve seen him look worse.’
‘If you say so.’ I would have gone back in my room, but Jack’s eyes had come open, and from his suspended position he stared at me, trying to focus his thoughts.
‘Eva?’
Damn, I thought. He’d heard me speaking. Heard my voice.
Jack pushed clear of his brother’s hands, making an effort to stand on his own, his expression incredulous. ‘Eva,’ he said, ‘you can—’
That was the most he got out before losing his balance again. He swayed once and pitched forward to land like a fallen log, stretched on the carpet before me, unconscious.
I stood in my doorway, not sure what to say, feeling awful I’d opened my mouth in the first place, and knowing that I should have stayed in my room and just let them go by. I watched Daniel, waiting, expecting a lecture.
And after a moment he thoughtfully raised one hand, rubbing the back of his neck. Then giving a nod to his brother’s prone figure, he said, ‘There now, didn’t I tell you I’d seen him look worse?’
Which was so far from what I had thought he would say that it caught me off guard, and I laughed without thinking.
Which caused us more trouble.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘What the bleeding Jesus are you doing?’ Fergal’s exasperated words shot down the passageway like shrapnel as he came towards us, shrugging on his shirt and looking none too pleased to have his sleep disturbed. ‘As if a man in his condition is a sight a woman needs to see,’ he chastised Daniel, firing him a dark look as he nodded at Jack’s crumpled form. ‘What were you thinking, Danny, dragging Eva from her bed at this hour?’
I thought of stepping in to say that I’d already been awake, but Fergal didn’t look in any mood to hear it and Daniel didn’t need me to defend him. He stood calm against the onslaught, bending down again to lift his brother up and sling him senseless half across one shoulder.
Fergal studied Jack, frowning, and asked, ‘Was he into the rum?’
‘Ay.’
‘And fighting, I see.’
I looked at Jack, too. In the dark I had missed seeing how the one side of his face was all bruised.
‘Well,’ said Daniel, ‘I would think that was for reputation more than anything. ’Twas a wound to his pride, being taken by Creed’s men in daylight – he purposely looked for a fight at the Spaniard to show that he was not so weak.’
‘Ay, for he’s looking the picture of strength, so he is, at the moment.’
‘He won the fight,’ said Daniel.
‘Was he standing when he did it?’
Daniel smiled at that. ‘He was. He was using his feet well enough till we came up the stairs just now. Then he fell.’
Fergal assured us he’d heard it. ‘The same as I heard you two laughing. And what would have happened if Jack had heard Eva?’
‘He already had,’ Daniel said. ‘’Twas an accident.’
Fergal shot a glance between us, swore beneath his breath, and raised his shoulders as though bracing for a load before the movement altered slightly to a shrug. Resigned, he told us, ‘Well, there’s nothing to be done for it. With luck the drink will keep it from his memory.’ Stepping closer he expertly shifted Jack’s weight from Daniel’s back to his and said, ‘I’ll see him to his room myself,’ and waved off Daniel’s protests with, ‘You’ve done enough already.’
There was no arguing with Fergal, when he’d set his mind to something.
Daniel let him go, and turned to me instead.
I said, ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘You did nothing wrong. And Fergal is not truly angry, he is only—’
‘Worried. Yes, I know.’
I’d started shivering a little and my voice had changed because of it, and Daniel looked beyond me to the darkness of my bedroom.
With a slight frown he remarked, ‘You have no fire.’
‘I didn’t think I’d need one when I went to bed, it only got cold afterwards, and Fergal was asleep by then, and I’m afraid I’m not too good yet with the tinderbox,’ I said. ‘I know the theory, but it never seems to work for me.’
‘It only takes a bit of practice. Shall I show you?’
I was torn. On the one hand I was cold, and that was obvious. Not only would a fire be very welcome, but it probably would seem a little odd if, after standing here and shivering and telling him I couldn’t start a fire myself, I told him not to bother. But the problem was that if I told him yes, then he would come into my room and I would have to try to act as though I weren’t the least affected by it, and if I was already this nervous and aware just standing near him in the doorway, who knew what kind of a fool I might make of myself if I had to stand next to him here in my bedroom. At night. In the dark. But there really was no other answer to give, so I told him, ‘Yes, please.’
Daniel must have been into the rum himself, down at the Spaniard. I caught the faint scent of it on his breath as he stepped into the room, but the drink didn’t seem to have had an effect on him. Free of Jack’s weight he moved surely and easily, taking the tinderbox down from the mantel and crouching beside the cold hearth of my fireplace. I followed, and did likewise.
Through the window on the eastern wall the moonlight cast a slanting square of pale light onto Daniel’s hands, so I could see what he was doing.
Choosing a piece of charred cloth from the box he set it on the hearth and said, ‘You hold the steel like this.’ He slid his fingers through the oval ring until it reached his knuckles, then made a fist to secure it. ‘And the flint in your other hand, and strike the two together, thusly.’ Steel met stone, a sharply ringing sound, and raised a single spark that scudded sideways on the hearth and quickly died.
He held his hand out, straightening his fingers in the steel ring so that I could take it from him. ‘Try it now.’
I hesitated. ‘Couldn’t you …?’
‘’Tis better learnt by doing,’ he insisted, with his hand still stretched toward me, waiting.
Silently I took the steel, amazed at how that brief and sliding contact of our fingers made my insides leap. The steel itself was cold but where he’d held it I could feel faint warmth, and shifting my own grip I tried to hold on to that small sense of shared contact while he handed me the flint.
I tried to strike the two together in the way he ha
d, but my attempt was clumsy. Adjusting the angle at which I was striking, I tried again.
‘Patience,’ he said. ‘It is never done quickly.’
‘I’m learning that.’ The edge of my frustration made my words come out more sharply than I’d meant them to, and Daniel’s own tone grew indulgent, in the way an expert tries to make an amateur feel better.
‘You’ll soon have the way of it,’ he told me. As my efforts went on he asked, ‘What do you use in your own time, then?’
‘Matches.’
‘Matches?’ I’d somehow astonished him.
‘What’s wrong with matches?’
‘Nothing, if you seek to fire a cannon, but I would not think them practical for household use.’
I paused for a moment to send him a puzzled frown. ‘Sorry? I mean, what do you call a match?’
He described what a match was, in detail, and smiling I nodded with new understanding.
‘We’d call that a fuse,’ I said. ‘No, modern matches are like …’ I tried to remember what he called the match-like lengths of tightly twisted paper that they used here to transfer a flame from one source to another. Spills, that’s what they were. ‘Well, they’re like little spills,’ I told him, ‘only with their ends dipped in chemicals that self-ignite when you strike them on something rough.’
‘Indeed.’ I’d forgotten that he had a very scientific mind that would find certain things intriguing. ‘Spills that light themselves,’ he mused. ‘What are the chemicals you use to make this happen?’
‘I don’t know. I … ow!’ I’d hit the flint too wildly and the steel had bashed my thumb instead. I took a breath against the sudden pain and said, ‘You see? I’m hopeless.’
He fell silent for a moment while he watched me in the darkness. Then his hands reached out to close around mine calmingly. His quiet voice assured me, ‘’Tis not such a complicated thing.’
I couldn’t have replied if I had wanted to. The breath I’d drawn had somehow lodged within my chest and I could only sit there being glad that in the dark he wouldn’t see the foolish way that I’d reacted to his touch.
He carried on, ‘It wants some effort, yes, and patience, but then …’ Tightening his hold he moved my hands for me, his fingers curving slightly round my knuckles and the steel. ‘… but then, what in this life that is of any worth does not?’
I couldn’t answer that one, either. Get a grip, I urged myself, but Daniel’s touch was sending all my senses into overdrive. He’d shifted closer in the dark until our shoulders almost brushed, until his words came close against my ear when he said, ‘If you give them time, the flint and steel will make a spark. They cannot help but do so.’
I knew just how they were feeling. Flint and steel were not the only things in this room striking sparks off one another, though I doubted Daniel noticed the effect that he was having on me. He was only being nice, I told myself. For all that he might flirt with me from time to time by daylight, that was all it ever was with him – flirtation – and he was too much the gentleman to try the same game on with me here in the darkness of my bedroom, at this hour, with us alone.
If he was sitting close to me it was because he had to sit that close to hold my hands the way he needed to, and that touch was itself a light and helpful one, designed to show me what to do and nothing more.
I was being a terrible student, I knew. My head bent lower still, my focus narrowing more fiercely on the task as I tried shutting out the knowledge of his nearness. But it wasn’t any use. Each time he breathed, the faintly mingled scents of rum and pipe tobacco warmly brushed my hair, and it occurred to me that if I turned my own head just a little bit towards him, we’d be close enough to … close enough to …
‘There,’ he said.
From our joined hands a shower of small sparks cascaded to the hearth, and two of them fell squarely on the piece of charred cloth kindling where they glowed like tiny eyes against the dark.
Releasing my hands, Daniel bent forward, shielding the cloth with his cupped hands while he breathed on the growing sparks. They glowed more surely now, their reddish light cast upwards to illuminate the hard edge of his jawline. And then suddenly the light turned golden, dancing up between his fingers as though he’d created it by magic. When he took his hands away there was a proper curling flame along the charred cloth.
‘You see? ’Tis as I said. A simple thing,’ he told me.
Taking up a bit of splintered wood he held it to the cloth until it caught the fire as well, before he carefully positioned it beneath a larger length of log.
I found my voice. ‘And what’s the trick to doing that?’
‘There is no trick. ’Tis only patience, once again.’
I watched him while he crouched there by my hearth and brought the fire to life with expert and unhurried movements, shifting this bit here and that bit there and sitting back to wait for the result, his focus idle on the flames.
I found I couldn’t take my eyes from him. We were no longer touching but I still could feel his hands on mine, and still my heart was beating much more loudly than it should have been.
Each bit of wood that caught the spreading fire on the hearth threw more light out to chase the shadows from our corner of the room, but I saw nothing more than Daniel’s now familiar features, nothing more than that, and I could only sit and stare like some infatuated schoolgirl.
A simple thing, he’d said, and so it was. A random meeting and a touch – that’s all it took to make a spark that could, with care and time, become a flame …
‘Here, try it for yourself,’ said Daniel, shifting to make space for me and holding out a sturdy length of stick. ‘Or do you fear to burn your fingers?’
My imagination could have read a double meaning in those words of his, but pushing those romantic fancies firmly to one side I met the challenge in his face and took the stick from Daniel’s hand and concentrated on the hearth until the fire leapt to the largest log and raised a dancing blue along its length.
Approving, Daniel turned his head to me and I could see those flames reflected in his smiling eyes.
I should have looked away. I should have smiled back and looked away, but the emotion I’d been feeling surfaced suddenly, betraying me before I could conceal it, and whatever he had been about to tell me fell forgotten in the silence as the smile in his eyes took on a faintly puzzled aspect, and then finally shuttered over into something that I couldn’t read.
The large log cracked and settled on the smaller ones beneath it, and I pulled my gaze away and strove for something normal. ‘So,’ I said, with no idea what came after that.
After a moment Daniel filled the pause himself. ‘You have your fire,’ he said, and standing to his full height stretched his shoulders.
I stood too, before he had a chance to offer me a helping hand. I didn’t trust my own reactions to his touch just now. Lowering my head I mumbled, ‘Thank you’, and I would have stepped away except my foot caught in the trailing blanket I’d wrapped round me and I half-tripped as I tried to pass him.
Daniel moved to steady me – a gentlemanly gesture, just one hand around my arm, but all that did was knock me more off balance.
‘Sorry,’ I said, putting out both hands from instinct.
He’d reached out as well. My fingers landed on his chest as his clamped firmly round my elbows and I closed my eyes without exactly knowing why. Maybe because I was trying to keep my composure, to behave like a twenty-first century woman instead of some swooning Victorian heroine, to not let him see just how incredibly, hopelessly, helplessly hard I was falling in love with him.
‘Eva.’
Opening my eyes, I met his own and found them not quite as unreadable as they had been before.
In fact, they weren’t unreadable at all.
We looked at one another for so long I started wondering if time, instead of flinging me from place to place, had stopped completely. The air grew charged between us with a thousand things unsaid, and wi
th a growing sense of wonderment I thought, He feels it, too. My God, he feels the same way I do.
And he did. I sensed it in the subtle change in how he held me, in the way his fingers shifted on my arms, and all at once I felt uncertain in a way I’d never felt before. I wanted him to kiss me and I feared it at the same time without really knowing why. I felt a mix of joy and dread and everything between, as though someone had thrown a switch and scrambled all my circuits.
When his hands slid to my shoulders I believe I held my breath; and then he took hold of the edges of the blanket that had slipped and with a careful touch rewrapped me in the woollen folds, his features set in studied concentration as he crossed the blanket’s ends and tucked them under.
There was an instant just before he let me go when I felt sure he meant to say something, but in the end he only gave a nod. ‘Good night,’ he said, his measured tone the same as it had ever been.
The doorway that connected his room to my own stood partway open and I watched him cross towards it. Halfway through with his hand on the latch he turned back to say over his shoulder, ‘And Eva?’
It astonished me I had a voice at all. ‘Yes?’
‘Lock your door.’
With which advice he pulled it shut behind him, leaving me hugging the blanket around me and feeling a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘You’re in a rare fine mood this morning.’ Fergal somehow made that seem an accusation. I had found him at the far end of the yard beside the stables, chopping firewood, and although he hadn’t asked to have my company I’d plonked myself down happily upon a nearby log to watch. He swung the axe so hard it cleaved the length of wood in one blow and stuck deep into the broad scarred stump beneath, so that he had to wrest it out again. As he straightened he glanced sideways at me, openly suspicious. ‘What’s the cause of it, I wonder?’
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