Page 86 of Beauty and the Thief

Aoife rose. “Thank you for the wine. It’s gone a bit to my head. I think I’d better go have a lie down.”

Bridget rose, too hastily, but she was eager to be away from the woman. “It’s understandable. Come back tomorrow. We can laugh over our worries.”

Aoife nodded and slipped back out the door.

Bridget sank back into the chair. She could hear Callahan’s voice in her mind, repeating what the man in the cellar had said.

Innishfree is death.

The seers look into men’s hearts.

She didn’t know if Aoife could be adequately termed a seer, but she had certainly seemed to look deep into Bridget’s heart.

Whatever she had seen, Bridget and Callahan were in danger.

***

CLONTARF WAS TO THE north of Dublin and on the coast. The Irish name was Cluain Tarbh, which meant meadow of the bull in English. MacDonald told him that the protestors had chosen Clontarf because of the symbolism. It had been the site of the Viking defeat at the hands of the Irish in 1014. Several years before a rally against the Act of Union had been planned here but called off when Peel banned it and the leaders of the movement had not wanted to risk bloodshed.

But with people dying by the droves from famine and more likely to die because of another bad potato crop, the protestors now had little to live for. The thought did not reassure Cal.

Even though Cal had grown up in Belfast, he’d left at the age of six and had few memories of it. He’d always imagined Ireland as this vast, green land, but so far he’d seen cities that reminded him far more of London than the Ireland from the stories his mam had told him to lull him to sleep. The trip to Clontarf had shown him some of that idyllic landscape.

The rally had been another awakening. Standing in the midst of hundreds of his countrymen, chanting about the rights of the Irish, Cal had felt, for the first time, as though he belonged. He’d never been English. They’d never treated him as an equal. Here he was with his countrymen. They saw him as an equal. And they wanted to determine their destiny, not be forever trapped under the thumb of the Queen and the British Empire.

Callahan yelled as loudly and fervently as any of the other men. And when the soldiers rushed the rally, he fought back as hard as any man.

It was MacDonald who had grasped his shoulder and pulled him away from the soldier he’d beaten to the ground and was kicking about the torso. MacDonald had told him to run and, when Cal had looked about helplessly, led Cal past the soldiers and away from the square. They finally stopped running when the sounds of the skirmish had died away and Cal heard birdsong just above. He paused and looked about a residential area of tree-lined streets and shuttered houses.

“Sure and we’re safe now,” MacDonald said, looking at him.

“Not if any of the nobs here sees us.” He gestured to MacDonald’s nose, which was still bleeding. “You look like a ruffian.”

“You’re not much better. Another inch and you would have needed a surgeon to stitch you up.”

Cal touched the skin below his eye. He’d taken a blow there and had been trying to ignore the sting and blurry vision. “Hurts like the devil. I wouldn’t mind a glass of something strong.”

“Neither would I, but we’d be better served if we left Clontarf as quickly as possible.”

Cal had known MacDonald would say this. They couldn’t walk into so much as a coffee house now without all but guaranteeing arrest. But Cal did need a moment. A moment to catch his breath and a moment to organize his thoughts. He was losing sight of his role in this swindle. He might be working for the English, but he couldn’t deny that stomping on that British soldier had felt good. How could he not sympathize with the Irish calls for independence? Was he supposed to work to quiet those?

He couldn’t do that, no matter how much Baron paid him or Bridget tempted him. On the other hand, Donnelly was dead. The British hadn’t killed him. Unless Cal was mistaken, Innishfree had killed Patrick Donnelly, and Cal wasn’t certain whether, even in the name of independence, he could support murder.

He gestured to a bench under a cluster of trees. It was sunny today but still chilly. The trees would block the wind. “Give me just a moment, then I’ll be right at your heels.” Cal and MacDonald took a seat, both men groaning with the new aches that made themselves known as they shifted position.

“You’re a good fighter,” MacDonald said after a few minutes of silence.

“Learned on the streets of Belfast then honed me skills in London.”

“So you had the best teachers then.”

Cal smiled, though it hurt his puffy cheek. “You could say that.”

“I wondered, since you spent so much time in London, whether that might make you soft. Give you a heart for the British.”

Cal’s smile faded. Now MacDonald was coming to the meat of the matter. This moment was why Cal had stepped on that train, why he’d crawled on his belly in the snow and mud, why he’d boarded the boat with Bridget. He hadn’t known it then, but he knew it now.

The problem was he no longer knew whose side he was on.

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