Chapter Ten

Colin held Maura until she stopped trembling, until he felt her breathing ease and slow, though his body still ached for release. He took a measure of satisfaction for having given her pleasure without saddling her with potential consequences. Of course, a better man would never have tempted such an innocent, no matter how strongly Maura had asked for this with her eyes.

But he’d had ten years to accept that he was not a better man.

Now he distracted himself from the softness of her body by noting the summer constellations spread like milky drawings in the sky above—the bull, the twins, the crab—listing them by rote until his head ached, a dull throb to match his still-aching cock. He breathed in the scent that clung to her hair and tried not to imagine what it would be like to sleep next to this woman every night, to live a normal man’s life.

He slipped his arm from under her and inched away. She didn’t move as he laid his mantle over her. He shuffled down to the edge of the cart and slid off. His feet sank into the mud as he followed the gleam of moonlight to the edge of the shore and let the water lap over his boots. The black expanse of the river shone with strange light, winking here and there on the ripples of current.

Maybe it had something to do with the scent of the sea, the softness of the air, or the blue-white quality of the starlight, but standing on this familiar shore all the old poems rushed to his mind in full clarity as surely as if he were a young man reciting them for his father’s approval: To Fergus, nephew of Tadhg, son of Uilliam, nephew of Fionna … He could recite his genealogy back to the King of Ulster, still farther to the nephew of the King of Connacht, every name shrouded in the martyrdom of death on the battlefield. It was a story of jealous Irish tribes competing for a slippery high kingship, defeating themselves with their own divisiveness, fighting for pride rather than uniting to fight against a powerful mutual enemy.

He glared over his shoulder at the town of Kilcolgan. The stone donjon loomed, a black shadow against the stars. The English knew how to conquer and subdue. They came as one army and seized land and built a castle to guard every port, to take tolls upon every road, to watch the land from on high. In the years since he’d been gone, Ireland lay like a pincushion under their dominion, making the Irish kingship nothing but legend. The poems he had spent his youth memorizing no longer mattered, yet here he was, drawn back to this bloody ground like a vengeful ghost, no wiser than his own ancestors.

He wandered back to the cart and the woman sprawled upon it. He hung his hands over the creaking side and pressed his chin against the salt-stained wood. He had nothing to give this innocent but an evening’s fleeting pleasure. Even masked, he’d taken a reckless chance at Tuam by satirizing O’Kelly. He wondered how long it would take before someone figured out his identity and came looking for the price upon his head.

His father wouldn’t wait to be caught. He’d attack now and preserve the element of surprise.

But he was not his father.

Then he reached out to bury his fingers in Maura’s hair, wondering how much longer he could pretend this was his life.

***

Maura emerged from the shadow of the church into the bustle and whirl of the fair of Kilcolgan. An onion-seller hawked her wares nearby. A stray dog yipped, then darted out of the path of a broomstick. People milled about the stalls in the square. Coins clinked, trades were bartered, bickered and shouted, English farthings changed hands for pasties and pies. She leaned against a carved stone column, staring at Colin.

He stood as still as a roof-tree as he stared at the looming donjon that lorded over the town. A devil’s mask hung from the ties at his neck, upside-down and askew on his back. He sported a tunic of horsehair on his lanky frame. Apparently he’d taken Maguire’s place this morning, playing the wild man among the crowd, to draw the fairgoers into the alehouse this day. But he played no wild man now, standing as still as stone.

She approached, her heart in her throat, staring up at the castle, too. “It’s a fine day to be sightseeing.”

He flinched. She took some satisfaction in that. For he’d left her to wake up alone to the cool light of morning, dazed, her whole body aching and strangely tender-sore.

“So it’s you, lass.”

So it’s you, lass, as if they hadn’t spent the night entwined on a fisherman’s cart doing things she’d spent the morning confessing to the local priest, sinning twice over because she still wasn’t sure she was repentant.

“In my grandfather’s father’s time,” he said, “that castle wasn’t there. It was a hunting lodge, winter lodgings for the O’Maddens, so they would have fresh fish for the forty days of Lent.”

She mumbled, “A hunting lodge.”

“The MacEgans stayed there often, as well. The clans were close, cousins.”

“Is this the way you usually put off your women,” she stuttered, “chattering nonsense the morning after you've had your way with them?”

Heat rose to her face. As she squinted up at the castle she thought that starlight was far kinder than the bright light of day. A woman could hide in the night what secret parts of her the glare of morning exposed.

Colin’s gaze flickered to the church behind her. “You’re straight from the confession box. Newly anointed and ruing last night’s passion?”

“You’ll tease me now?”

He had the grace to look chastised.

“I told the priest,” she continued, “that I wouldn’t put off my pilgrimage any longer, that I’d be setting off in a day or two, for penance,” she said. “And truly, I’m trying to go to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, but it seems that you keep making us change directions. Are you such a vagabond that you can’t even stay in a woman’s bed till the morning?”

“If I’d stayed any longer,” he said, “you’d have lost that lovely innocence, and likely would have ended up like Matilda.”

Flushing anew, she cast her gaze away from the glamour of him. She’d suspected that he hadn’t finished the act, but she didn’t have the courage to ask. If what Colin said was true, then last night she had skirted along the edge of sin—tasted the icing upon the honey cake—but did not actually take a bite. She hadn’t known that a woman could feel pleasure and not pay the price.

The knowledge tingled a new awareness along her spine.

And then she looked back at him, and he was smiling at her, a soft strange smile, and her heart stumbled. She could smell him—clean and cold as if he’d bathed in the sea. She noticed the water dripping from his culans, the dampness of his hair against his neck and the water stain on the front of the horsehair shirt.

He reached out to tug one of her curls. “Tell me, Maura. What would a fine lass like you want with a penniless vagabond like me?”

Now there was a question she couldn’t answer. Truth be told, she hadn’t thought it all through. Her mind and heart had turned to Colin with as much impulsiveness as when she’d set out of Killeigh with the idea of finding her long-lost mother, with no more guidance than a scratched old ring. But while she searched those eyes of blue, she knew instinctively what she wanted. She felt it clear through to her bones. She wanted to dance with Colin again. She wanted to taste his kiss again. She wanted to journey to the land they’d visited last night—and go farther—without guilt and without regret.

He raised his eyebrows as if he heard her thoughts. “Is it marriage that you’re after, then?”

The back of her throat dried up and a new ache was born in her chest. Why should she be surprised he’d know such a thing, when she’d hardly grasped it herself? It wasn’t as if she’d fought in his embrace last night. Like every other maiden, she found herself looking upon his battered nose and his strong shoulders and dreaming of things she had no business dreaming of, wanting things she had no right to want.

“I want what any woman wants,” she whispered, wishing the fair would swallow her up. “I want to be an honest woman.”

“You want a name,” he said. “A name for a nameless foundling.”

“No.”

He raised his brows at her.

“I wasn’t dropped from the sky onto the convent steps.” Her throat was impossibly tight. These past weeks she’d done nothing but pinch farthings into thieves’ hands to get nothing but lies in return, and grow ever more ashamed of her former foolishness. “I have a name,” she persisted, “I just haven’t found it yet.”

He upped her chin in the palm of his hand. “And yet you stand before me willing to take a name you don’t even know.”

She knew that Colin wasn’t all that he seemed, that there lay some hurt within him, a powerful guilt or shame that made him put himself in the way of blacksmiths’ fists, that made him hungry for quick pleasures that never satisfied and thus must always be fed, a guilt or shame that made him mock high ranking men while hiding behind a mask and pushing the troupe hither and yon for reasons he did not disclose.

She still wanted his kiss.

Here I go again, she thought. Here I go, playing the wayward woman in the shadow of the church, succumbing to glamour. But the thought passed like a breeze. Nothing mattered under the power of Colin’s touch, now that she understood the joy that could come of it.

“It’s the man I want,” she heard herself say. “Not necessarily the name.”

Colin’s expression shifted. Suddenly, he said, “Leave with me, Maura.”

She startled. “Leave?”

“Right now,” he said. “Right this moment.”

“But Arnaud—”

“—has run this troupe for decades, he can do well enough without us.”

He eased her back against the limestone of the cloth maker’s hut and then caught her mouth with his own. Water dripped from his hair and trailed between her breasts.

A sharp, sweet ache speared through her. His kiss was never enough, never enough, never enough.

Then, suddenly, they were racing through the crowd, through alleys where the sun beamed a streak of golden light between the thatched roofs. They danced across the center gutter, rounded a peddler’s stubborn donkey, and dodged a stray dog tearing at a captured hen near the poulterer’s shop. Her heart slammed against her ribs as he tugged her in his wake, his grip tight on her hand. The devil’s mask banged against his back, smiling and mocking her. She swept up her skirts to free her feet from their tangle, but she stumbled and Colin caught her.

He laughed as he caught her—a strange, wild laugh that should have given her pause, because it brought to her mind a flash of a memory of him grinning through bloodied teeth as he faced a fighter—and maybe she would have paused if he hadn’t at that moment twisted her back into the shadows to make her senseless with more kisses.

She didn’t know how long they’d been kissing when a voice cut through the bustle of the fair.

“Colin?”

Colin ignored the deep, questioning voice, not even pausing to raise his face from her throat.

The voice again. “Brother?”

At that word, Maura blinked her eyes open. She saw, beyond Colin’s head, a beggar stepping out of the crowd. He wore a patched tunic and gripped a walking stick. A silvery scar trailed across his cheek, then disappeared under a headdress of rags that covered one eye. Tall but thin, the beggar stood with his mouth gaping, an alms bowl hanging from his neck.

“Brother,” the man repeated, raising a hand against the sun. “Brother, turn and look at me.”

Colin raised his head from her throat, fixing his unseeing gaze on the limestone wall behind her.

“Murtough.” Colin’s jaw went tight. “Then it was you that I saw begging back there at the church steps.”

“Ten years.” The beggar ventured a trembling smile beneath the rags—a madman’s twitching grin. “It’s a long time to make us all wait.”

Colin’s attention shifted to her face, his bright blue gaze becoming as brittle as the colored glass she’d seen in the cathedral at Athlone.

The beggar said, “You’re the only one left of us, Colin.”

“I know.”

Colin turned to face the beggar. Maura, breathless, came to realize that a hush had fallen along the street. The place had gone so quiet that she could hear the wind rustling in the thatch above her head. Though most of the English people flowing through the street couldn’t possibly understand the Irish language, many stopped at the sight of the beggar, holding out a trembling hand to the minstrel playing the wild man, as if what was happening before them was nothing but a play.

“You’ve finally come,” the beggar said, making the sign of the cross. “Finally, you’ll take your place as the true MacEgan.”