Chapter Fourteen

Colin had once witnessed the spectacle of the taking of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, played in a Gascon noble’s home by a group of Italian mummers. Complete with a pool of water, roaring lions, flowers springing from meadows, grapevines growing long to mark the passage of time, and showers of scented water and sweetmeats. A spectacle so rich in machinations that he’d spent hours with the men as they dismantled the pieces, trying to figure out the magic of it all.

Yet no troupe of Italian mummers could match the drama taking place in the hall below. No guild actors could play these parts better: the stunned, long-lost daughter; the teary, amazed father; the weeping maidservant, prostrate, blurting out an impossible tale of a babe hurried away in the midst of night, of a dying mother so fervid in her religious beliefs that she’d chosen to secretly send away the second-born of her newborn twins rather than be thought of as a woman who had lain with two men.

And he himself, the thwarted avenger, standing just off the stage with his bow half-strung, flexing his fists as he watched his enemy claim his lover as flesh and blood—as he watched the chance for his vengeance snatched away.

Colin tightened his grip on the bow. It was not too late. Caddell stood there—as straight-backed and proud as the day he led his Englishmen into MacEgan lands. Caddell stood there, just in range of his arrow, and so stood the end of ten long years of delay.

He slid the arrow back, pulled the sinew tight. One single arrow. Through the heart. The vow would be fulfilled. His father would be avenged. He would be worthy of the name MacEgan. It all would be over, finally.

And Maura would lose the father she’d just met, and then curse his name for the rest of her days.

No. No. This was all a scripted farce, it had to be. Yet his fingers paused on the sinew. He crouched in the shadow of the stairwell, above the heads of the crowd. The haze of the smoke settled like a transparent blue cloud. She stood as still as stone, listening to the maidservant’s babbling, her hands still caught in Caddell’s grip. Her hair shimmered like dark gold in the rush light, and he found himself remembering the feel of it against his cheek.

A bubble of laughter threatened in his chest. He choked it down, for he knew it for what it was. If he barked it aloud, he’d tumble off the tight rope he’d been walking on for too many years and there was no telling where madness would bring him.

What difference did it make? He yanked the sinew back again and squinted down the length of the slender arrow. Maura could curse him to Hell, because she would believe this impossible story that she was Caddell’s daughter. But he wouldn’t hear her curses, for he’d be hanging on a gibbet before tomorrow at sundown. He pulled the bow taut. He fixed his sight upon the lower tip of the embroidered neck-slit of William the Black’s surcoat, the cloth that covered his black beating heart.

He willed the old memory back to him. The acrid stench of blood. The cries of wounded men and horses. The sight of his father laid low in the mud. Fergus’s blazing blue eyes defying the coming of death, his father’s fist curled in Colin’s boiled leather tunic, willing him with his last bit of strength to vow a death upon William the Black Caddell, the man who had stolen everything from the MacEgans, who had blinded one brother and killed all the rest and stolen what should be theirs.

The man whose life hung at the tip of Colin’s iron-tipped arrow. The man who stood there in the hall claiming he’d spawned one such as Maura.

Shoot him.

The sinew cut into his fingers.

One single arrow.

Through the heart. A kinder death than the Englishman deserved.

Shoot him.

And all would know that Colin MacEgan had returned from ten years of exile to avenge the death of Fergus MacEgan, to avenge the injustices rained upon all the MacEgans, to make a man of himself.

His fingertips tingled.

Do it.

His work would be done, and so would his life.

And so would Maura’s.

With a muffled curse, he raised the arrow off the bow. The sinew snapped against his bare wrist. In four quick strides he descended the stairs, then pushed the door of the castle open to the night, ignoring the guards he startled into wakefulness, not bothering to hide his face with the minstrel’s mask he’d used to slip into the castle without being recognized.

He marched blindly, conscious only of the balm of the air rushing in and out of his lungs, the mocking gleam of the stars above, the burn in his chest. He stomped over the inner moat, through the portcullis, over another trough, through a break in another wall, into the dark maze of the streets and into the blackness of his thoughts.

He’d lost his one opportunity to fulfill an old vow.

So what was he now? A man without pride, without honor.

Not a man at all.

***

Maura let herself be led up into the darkness at the top of the stairs while below, in the hall, the guests of William Caddell murmured in excited whispers as they found their way to their rooms, their pallets, their horses. The servant girl who Maura followed raised her candle as they passed the shadow of several doors. Maura expected Colin to jump out at any moment, to confront her, to take her away. Where was Colin with his iron-tipped arrow and his silent resolve? What was he thinking about this turn of events? She needed someone to pinch her out of this strange dream.

At the end of the hall, the servant pushed open a heavy door. Maura stepped into the room and gazed at a canopied bed with rich damask hangings, the kind of bed the laywoman Sabine would have loved.

The servant closed the door and placed the candle on the mantel. “My lord asked me to fetch for you some of Lady Elizabeth’s—your sister’s—nightshifts.” She gestured to some gossamer fabric lying across the bed. “I’ll help you undress.”

Everything about this girl was neat, from the pressed sweep of her wimple to the scrubbed pinkness of her cheeks. Though the servant’s face remained impassive, Maura sensed an element of scorn, as though the servant knew that she had been forced to wait upon a guest well beneath the stature of those she was accustomed to serving.

Maura turned away from her. She didn’t want to change clothes—she wanted to sneak away and seek out Colin and try to make sense of all this—but she found herself raising her arms as she was bid, turning at the servant’s urging, letting herself be stripped of Matilda’s borrowed silks until she was bare and shivering with something more than the kiss of a cool draft. When the servant tossed the silks on the bed, the MacEgan brooch fell out of a pocket and winked at her from the bedclothes.

Suddenly she felt like two women in one body. One wanted to race screaming out of this room. The other was determined to stay and meet the sisters and brother she hadn’t known existed until this very night.

Colin had insisted that things like this didn’t happen. He said that noble infants weren’t whisked away by maidservants and left on the convent steps. Yet in front of a room full of guests, Lord William Caddell had claimed her as his own. It all rained upon her head again, the whole impossibility of it: Lord William’s over-bright eyes, the teary confession of the nursemaid, the excited din of the crowd, the eye-smarting smoke of rush lights, the chill of a golden chalice in her hands, the vinegary taste of Gascon wine, the swelling urge to shake her head, to back away, to say no, no, this can’t be.

She’d been searching for an Irish mother.

A soft knock on the door made her start. The servant pulled a shift over her head, then wrapped her in a robe that was stiff and warmly quilted. As the heavy door swung open, she felt her heart stumble with hope to see Colin, but it was Lord William Caddell who stood in the frame, looking her over with those rheumy eyes.

She couldn’t help herself. She searched his face, taking in the stubborn shape of his chin, the wrinkled span of his brow, the pale color of his cheek, seeking some common feature that she could set upon and say, yes, yes, and then feel a deep tug of familiarity, a sense of homecoming.

“Wait outside,” Lord William ordered the servant. “I want a moment alone with my daughter.”

She winced at the word and then hid her shaking hands in the sleeves of the robe. She must be calm, she must be wise. She mustn’t let this man who claimed to be her father know that only hours ago she’d made love with an Irishman who wanted him dead.

The door closed quietly behind him. He took a few steps deeper into the room and gave her an assessing look very unlike the bewildered gaze he'd turned on her when he first laid eyes upon her in the hall.

“I understand,” he said, folding his fingers together, “that you may be as shocked by tonight’s revelation as I am.”

Speechless, she twisted her ring around her finger.

“In the days to come, there will be many people questioning the truth of the story. You understand that, yes?”

“I will be first among them,” she confessed. “I can scarcely believe it myself.”

“Oh, but I need you to believe, Maura.”

His lips lifted in a half-smile, and one bushy eyebrow arched above his eye, and Maura wondered how he could be so at ease when her whole world had upended.

“We’ll begin with a little honesty. I expect you will tell me everything I need to know. Your position here depends upon it.”

“My position?”

“Your position in this house, as my long-lost daughter, a young woman worthy to carry the name Caddell and all the benefits that go along with that.”

“Benefits.”

“Come, you are not so innocent, I think.” He splayed his fingers to indicate the warm, well-appointed room. “Many might take advantage of such a situation. I am a rich man, as you can plainly see.”

Lord William Caddell. Protector of Kilcolgan, Lord of Athenry, the Baron of Shrule. The man her lover had sworn to kill.

“Come,” he urged into the silence. “You must understand what I’m saying. I know you haven’t lived in such fine lodgings while traveling the roads with a minstrel troupe.”

“I’ve only been among them a few weeks, my lord.”

“Is that so?”

“I grew up in a convent, and before these last weeks, I hadn’t been beyond my village, not ever.”

He raised an amused brow. “Make sure to speak of that in the coming days. It’ll serve you well.”

She blinked, not understanding.

“To silence the naysayers,” he explained. “There will be many. That’s why my advisers will insist that I seek verification for the story that you are the foundling of which that nursemaid spoke. I’ll be writing to the Abbess at Killoughy tomorrow morning. Will she confirm everything you’ve told me?”

Maura couldn’t imagine how the Abbess would react upon receiving a parchment with an English baron’s seal, one that asked about her, no less. “The lady Abbess will confirm it. I’m sure they’re all still worrying about me, I left the convent without warning.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

She wondered why he was questioning her when it was he who’d claimed her as his daughter. “My lord—”

“Father,” he corrected sharply. “Best you start calling me that.”

She bit her lip and wondered why he didn’t speak with more warmth than authority, like he had in the hall below. Maybe this whole evening was a cruel farce. Maybe he suffered from bouts of madness. Maybe his son would be the next person through the door, asking her to gather her things and leave with the minstrels in the morning, when Lord William was sure to forget the drama of the night.

Her heart leapt at the thought of leaving with Colin, even as she silently scolded herself for not paying more mind to what was being offered to her.

“Father,” she began, the word sticking in her throat, “it seems you may have some doubts about my provenance yourself.”

“I have no doubts.” He didn’t seem in the least bit dull-witted as he combed his fingers through the pointed tuft of his beard. “You are my daughter, I have proclaimed it so.”

She twisted the ring again, anxious for him to leave so she could seek out Colin or the minstrels in the stables.

“So to start,” he said, “you must begin living like a daughter of a baron. Dressed,” he continued, “in the finest clothes, fed at my own table, and tended by many servants. You will find your stay exceedingly comfortable.”

She spread her arms to indicate the warm robe. “I thank you for your kindness.”

“In return for that kindness,” he continued, “you must behave like the daughter of a baron.”

Maura blinked. There had been no daughters of barons at the convent, but there had been many daughters of the lesser aristocracy. She had been closest to Sabine, a laywoman who adored pretty things, like birds and squirrels and jewels and ivory combs and making pets of little girls.

“You must be modest,” he continued, his voice gravelly. “No more of those obscene silks, no more rouging your cheeks. No minstrel stories, or bawdy puns or language not fit for church.”

She thought of Maguire Mudman and his riddles, Matilda and her painted lips, the twins and their easy laughter, and felt a strange tug in her heart.

“My dear,” he exclaimed, nodding his head. “You play the innocent well, I’m quite impressed.”

“Innocent?”

“Indeed. Remember, though, I have eyes in all places—in the castle, the stables, in churches, on the bridges, and everywhere on the road.” He made a grunting noise that he stifled by clearing his throat. “I’m not the failing old man my son wishes me to be.”

“I … I don’t understand.”

“I suspect you do, despite your protestations.” He turned and headed toward the door. “It may take a while for you to adjust to your new position, but I think you’ll find that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.”

“Drawbacks?”

He paused, clearly irritated. “You’re carrying my name, and my protection, and I expect a certain amount of decorum.”

“Decorum.”

“Must I be blunt?” He curled his fingers over the edge of the door. “As of today, Maura of Killeigh, there will be no more swiving in the fields with minstrels.”

He closed the door behind him, bolting it from the outside.