Bean Sidhe

“The banshee (from ban [bean], a woman,

and shee [sidhe], a fairy)

is an attendant fairy that follows the old families,

and none but them,

and wails before a death.”

W.B. Y eats

Fairy and Folk Tales
Of the Irish Peasantry



T HE SIGHT OF K IERAN S TAFFORD ambling toward him, made Niall want to hit something. Especially given that the man managed to look as though he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he wasn’t cutting swaths through Niall’s team and family like rot eating at roots, inch by insidious inch. Nodding vaguely at what Gemma was saying about the orientation lectures, Niall shifted over, ready to extricate himself.

“I’m sorry, Gem. I always seem to be ducking out on you when new volunteers are about to arrive, but I really do need to go. I’m sure whatever you arrange will be fine—you and Liam did a grand job the last time. If something comes up, just—well, no. That won’t work. Even if the phones were halfway reliable, I didn’t even think to bring mine.”

“Take mine, boss.” Gemma reached into her pocket and dug her mobile out for him.

“Thanks, but you keep it. You can try ringing Adam’s number. I’ll text you from it once we’re on the mainland. Right now, I’m needing to have a wee word with Kieran before I go.”

“Might have figured. Is he at the bottom of all this, then?”

Niall ignored that, because Gemma didn’t need more ammunition where Kieran was concerned. “Will you thank Liam for pitching in, and James? I’ll bring round a bottle for you later to make it up.”

“Hold on, boss.” Gemma laid a hand on his arm as he started off. “Go easy on Kieran, eh? Not because he deserves any kindness, but you’ll be lucky enough not to have Adam up on charges without adding to your problems.”

“Charges?” Niall did a double take. Gemma stood with the morning light spilling around her, catching in the fine mist that the churn of the sea sent up from the cliffs, and there was no hint in her expression that she was joking. “You think they’d have Adam on assault?”

“I didn’t see it all, but it looked bad. It’s probably good you’re taking the poor girl to the hospital, that’s all I’m saying, so have a care with Kieran. He’s already looking for ammunition to use against you.”

The warning poured memories like cold water down Niall’s spine. He knew from his own experience how easy it was, at Adam’s age and with far less than Adam’s troubles, to make a mistake that changed the course of an entire life.

Which was the very reason he couldn’t ignore what either Adam or Kieran were doing. If he didn’t stop Kieran winding Adam up, they’d end up with even worse than the poor girl standing on the ramp with bloody tissues pressed against her face. Shoving a woman? Raising his fist to Mary Elizabeth and kicking one of her dogs? None of that was excusable under any circumstances. Instead of getting better, Adam seemed to be struggling more and more, like a swimmer caught in low tide with crosscurrents pushing at him and sending him tumbling until he didn’t know where to put his feet.

Meg Cameron. Niall turned back to look at her. From this distance, she was a slip of a thing with dark hair in a braid down her back, but it was her eyes he remembered. Solemn gray and wide eyes as clear as windows that seemed to swallow her entire face.

He knew who she was, of course. He’d had to approve her as a volunteer two weeks ago as a last-minute addition, and—given what Gemma had said just now—he realized abruptly how much trouble she could cause. Not only was her mother a friend of the dig’s single largest financial contributor, which in itself carried an expectation of preferential treatment, but Meg Cameron was a presenter for one of the biggest morning shows in the States. Gemma and Liam had already been laying odds the past two weeks on what sort of daft American celebrity habits she’d be bringing with her—yoga at three in the morning or eating only a certain colored food on specific days. Still, she’d been a good sport about the injury so far. With any luck, for both her sake and Adam’s, there wouldn’t be any lasting damage.

Niall glanced back at the cable car to check its position. He still had time—it was barely to the station on the mainland. Until it came back to Dursey, there was nothing he could do to get Meg Cameron to the hospital any faster. He could, though, at least try to do something about bloody Kieran.

Adam was off-limits. He had to be.

“Problems?” Kieran smiled warily as Niall approached.

Niall gestured back to the platform where Adam and Meg Cameron waited. “Does it bring you some perverse sense of pleasure to use Adam to wind me up? Or are you simply too thick to grasp the effect you have on him?”

Kieran’s face went red. “Hang on, you can’t talk to me like that—”

“You far and away crossed the line from a professional relationship when you brought Adam into this.” The last of Niall’s hard-won patience swept away on a tide of red, and he closed the distance between them. “This is me speaking as Adam’s guardian, not your supervisor. That’s the line you’ve crossed. I asked you—begged you—to stay clear of him, Kieran. He’s grieving, and he’s hurt and angry. He needs family he can trust, but even that can’t keep you from undermining me with him at every opportunity. Is it really so important to you that he see you as some sort of hero? Your ego’s that fragile?”

“ My ego?” Kieran stepped back and his expression hardened. “You’d be the last person to lecture me on that. You’ve ignored every suggestion I’ve made because it’s James who sings your praises from morning to night.”

There was a place inside Niall, a calm, deep place, where he’d learned to stand apart from the stream of life when things got to be too much. He dove into the sanctuary of it now, trying to control his temper. Still, he had to jam his fists into his pockets before they could connect with Kieran’s jaw. “I’m not discussing this with you again. We’ll get to St. Michael’s when we get to it. Keep away from Adam. Understand?”

“You’ve never thought I might just feel sorry for the boy, have you?” Kieran called after him as Niall turned to go. “My mother died when I was fifteen. I know the kind of turmoil he’s in, and I know what it’s like when no one understands. He doesn’t even have his mates here for company. Soren Johansen doesn’t count. They hardly have two words to say to each other, and the closest thing to hardship Soren’s ever faced is deciding which brand of cereal to eat. Adam has no interest in archaeology. He’s here with nothing to do, and you’ve no time for him. I’d have thought you’d be grateful if I talked to him, kept an eye out—”

“Telling him you would have let him drive your Porsche but I wouldn’t let you? That’s your idea of keeping an eye out?”

“I didn’t want him to think I was rejecting him, too, did I?” Kieran glared back at Niall with his breath coming sharply. “He already feels everyone hates him, like he’s here with you on sufferance. You have any idea how that hurts? Knowing the one adult left in your life always has something else he needs to be doing. Something more important.”

Niall’s mouth opened to refute that, but he couldn’t. Right or wrong, wasn’t that exactly how Adam felt?

To a teenager, truth was about feelings instead of facts, about what they knew by instinct. It made no difference that what Kieran said wasn’t true, and no amount of telling Adam otherwise would change how he felt.

Niall would never in a hundred years have imagined he could feel sorry for Kieran, but thinking of what he’d seen of Callum Stafford, he could imagine how hard it must have been for a motherless boy growing up in the shadow of a man like that. Kieran had the polished manners, the veneer of confidence, but underneath it, there was a vacuum of need that made it hard to like him.

Did Kieran even know how much hollowness he lived with every day? Possibly using Adam to lash back at Niall was entirely unconscious. It was possible, Niall conceded, that Kieran was also telling the truth as he saw it when it came to befriending Adam. It could be Kieran genuinely saw something of himself in Adam and was trying to reach out.

That was the basic problem with Kieran. Consciously or unconsciously, he managed to sniff out and exploit vulnerabilities with consummate skill. Niall’d seen him do that with both Adam and James, and he’d tried it with Gemma, too. Niall had to find a way to make him stop.

He studied Kieran, and—not for the first time—he wished it was easier to set aside his own resentment. No matter how many times he told himself it had been his own decision to let Siobhan drive down to Dursey on her own, though, he couldn’t help wondering if she might still be alive if Kieran’s attitude hadn’t sent Gemma into a temper or James into a quiet sulk. Which wasn’t fair, he knew that, but blaming someone else was always easier than accepting one’s own guilt.

“I want to believe you, Kieran. I do,” he said, running a shaky hand across the back of his neck. “And if you are genuinely trying to help, then give Adam time to heal. Give the two of us time to find our footing without inserting yourself into the mix. There’s work enough for you to do without insisting you get your way all the time, and I promise that the rest of the staff will meet you halfway if you’ll only make an effort. Your father can make it hard to fire you, but he can’t make you part of the team. That’s the one thing you have to do yourself.”

Not waiting for Kieran to answer, he turned and headed back toward the platform where Adam stood sullenly by himself watching Meg Cameron talking to her mother. Mary Elizabeth and the dogs had herded the sheep back down toward the bottom of the ramp, where the dogs circled, keeping them from wandering off.

“I’ll let you and that poor girl take the next car over,” Mary Elizabeth said to him as he jogged past her. “With the drive to Cork, it’ll be long enough before she’s seen to, and it’d be a shame if she ended with a scar for her troubles. Now, you make sure to have her wash it out properly before you set off. Eamon at the caravan will have what you need.” She peered at Niall with a motherly mixture of pity and amusement, then patted him on the arm. “She’s a lovely thing, isn’t she? Won’t be a hardship for you to spend some time with your head out of the dirt for a change. And don’t you worry about Adam. He may drive you to drink a while yet, like, but it’s only natural it’ll take time to see him right after all he’s been through. I saw worse with my own boys, and now look at them. Both back here farming on the island and bringing their own sons up on Beara. Was a time I couldn’t go a half hour without hearing how much they hated me—and this place. Now off you go. I’ll stop around tomorrow for a cuppa, and you can tell me all about it.”

Niall couldn’t help smiling at Mary Elizabeth’s phrasing, given that she’d gotten into the habit, these past couple of weeks, of bringing a thermos of tea and a sweet to share with him every other day. That and a tidbit of local history or folklore she’d dredged up from somewhere or remembered from growing up on the island before her parents had moved the family off. She had a sharp eye as well—too sharp, often enough.

“We all need help now and then.” She patted his arm. “No shame in that, Niall. Don’t you worry about feeling overwhelmed, and don’t go doubting yourself. There’s plenty of help to be had for the asking.”

The cable car pulled up to the platform, and the door opened to disgorge the second batch of volunteers for the day. Niall squeezed Mary Elizabeth’s hand and mumbled, “Thank you.”

“I know, I know. Away with you,” she said.

Niall jogged up the ramp and was waiting on the platform beside Meg and Adam by the time the last of the volunteers climbed out of the cable car. The three of them managed to duck inside and sit down before the box wobbled back into motion. Adam slid down to the corner, as far away from him as possible, with the sort of stubborn guilty desperation of a dog who’s made a mess on the carpet and knows he deserves to get in trouble. Meg, meanwhile, still held a tissue to her cheek, and the bloom of blood on it continued to spread.

“Mary Elizabeth suggested we see Eamon at the fish and chips caravan before we set off. It’s a good idea,” Niall said to Meg. “We could get a snack for the road.”

“Isn’t it a little early for fish and chips?”

Niall swallowed back a laugh. “Eamon can offer something sweeter than fish, I promise, and he’ll have salt and water so we can do a better job flushing out the wound. Unless you’d rather go back to your hotel and do it there.” He cleared his throat as he said that, as she continued looking at him. “Clean the wound, I mean.”

“Of course.” She sat back further on the bench across from him. “The caravan is better. We’re at the Bay Point, and Fergal’s wonderful, but I think he’s the kind to make a fuss.”

“Oh, him and Ari both.” Niall shifted in his seat so he wasn’t staring at her. “But they’re brilliant, aren’t they? Nearly all the locals have stopped by the dig out of curiosity, but Fergal and Ari are regulars. They come by with cake or biscuits for the volunteers a couple of times a week, and Fergal’s even been known to do a bit of digging.”

“And singing,” Adam said. “He makes the volunteers sing while they work. It’s deadly.”

Meg laughed—a good laugh, the kind that was natural and made a person happy to hear it. “He had us singing last night. My mother and I were ready to drop into our beds after the trip, but before we knew what hit us, we were in the bar instead. He even had my mother singing, and that’s saying something. I haven’t seen her enjoy herself like that in years.”

Niall tried to imagine the aggressively elegant Ailsa Cameron letting loose at one of Fergal’s bothántaíocht, but it wasn’t an image that conjured easily. The type of woman who wore heavy silver jewelry with a top-of-the-range, neatly pressed all-weather camping shirt was more likely to be the sort who played at archaeology the way it had been conducted in the nineteenth century, when it had been the province of the adventurous rich traveling with sterling place settings, bone china, and native bearers. The sort who didn’t play well outside her class.

“Fergal insists Adam and I should come out for his musical evenings, but we’re hostage to the weather and the cable car schedule out here. I’ve heard great things, though. He ran a music school in Australia for years, which is where he and Ari met, then his mum died and left him the family sheep farm near Castletownbere, but he couldn’t bear having to sell the animals off—and he felt sorry for the sheep when they were sheered—in case they got cold.”

Meg laughed again, and Niall found himself searching for something else to say to make her continue laughing. “I picture him chasing after them with blankets,” he said. “And staying up all night bottle-feeding lambs to make certain the ewes get a good night’s rest.”

“I can imagine that,” Meg said.

Niall glanced at Adam, who was scowling insistently. Maybe a little too insistently.

“Anyway,” Niall continued, “they sold the farm after a year and bought the bed-and-breakfast, and they’ve been fixing that up ever since. The evenings are Fergal’s way of keeping people and music in their lives, somewhere between a pub night and the traditional gatherings at a neighbor’s house that used to be a staple in the area. That and they’re both smart enough to know tourists expect the ‘Oirish’ to be full of singing and drinking, eating corned beef and cabbage, and everyone saying ‘Top of the Morning’ to each other.”

Meg laughed as he’d hoped. “You disappoint me. You mean that’s not how it really is?”

“Sorry to be the bearer of truths, but there you have it. There’s no such dish as corned beef and cabbage in Ireland, at least there didn’t used to be, and if you say, ‘Top of the Morning,’ it’s only one step up from asking if we’ve ever seen a wee leprechaun.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that. I was expecting one at the end of every rainbow—right beside the fairy forts and banshees.”

“Fairy forts we have aplenty,” Niall said. “No worries, there. About 45,000 of them, only in my profession we call them raths or hill forts. There’s one on Dursey, come to that. Not much left, but I’ll show you, if you like.”

“And bean sidhe are real,” Adam piped in, his eyes glittering with something between wistfulness and defiance. “I’ve heard one myself, singing on the island, haven’t I? Seen her, too, in a gray dress walking in the field beside the cliff.”