The Ground She Walks Upon Page 6

  “Even a physician might not have been able to save her.”

  “Nonetheless, she should have had one. If I hadn’t sent her here, she would have had one.”

  “We have a physician now. You’ve done that much good for Lir.” The priest held out a shaking hand. “My son,” he whispered, “’tis time for healing. The people view you as one of the Ascendency, and ever since Helen’s death you’ve done your willful best to be as debauched and dissolute as possible, but living up to every wicked opinion of you is not the answer.”

  “What is the answer?”

  “My Lord Trevallyan … you know the answer.”

  Trevallyan’s laughter was dark and mirthless. “Ah, yes. The geis. My willful flaunting of it has been my damnation. Is that your point?”

  “I see a good man in you, Niall. You care for this county. No one starves in Lir. No one lacks a roof over their heads. Your patronage of this county is excellent, too excellent. Some, as you know, would not have it at all. But these villagers in their small little world don’t understand that it’s mostly because of you that they have avoided the squalor and disease so prevalent in most counties. Because you are not willing to abide such horrors, because you are not willing to look away, these things don’t occur in Lir. But they will. Someday, they will come here and knock on Lir’s door. If you don’t consider the geis.”

  “I will not consider it. The fate of Lir is in my hands, not the hands of a geis.” Trevallyan arrogantly, defiantly, resumed his preoccupation with the landscape.

  “Your pride is your greatness and your downfall, my lord,” the priest said gravely.

  “I thought the geis was to be my downfall?”

  Trevallyan’s sarcasm cut like a rapier. Father Nolan saw no point in answering.

  The carriage passed beneath the barbican and bumped across the castle courtyard. It rolled to a stop before the doors of the great hall, but no footmen came to open the door until Trevallyan signaled that the occupants of the carriage were through with their conversation.

  “Were you walking home when I picked you up, Father, or would you like a drink before my driver takes you where you were headed?” Trevallyan turned to the priest.

  “Don’t be marrying the girl.”

  Trevallyan froze with his knuckle poised to knock on the trap for the driver.

  He lowered his hand, anger simmering in his eyes. “I’ll be married in two weeks. Elizabeth is a beautiful woman. She’ll make me a fine wife. I mean to have her.”

  “You don’t love her.”

  “That is for me to discover on my wedding night, and such things I will not discuss with a priest.”

  “Four years ago when you were going to marry Mary Maureen Whelan, you got all the way to the altar before I could force a confession from you that you didn’t love her. When I asked if you would love Mary Maureen as your wife, you couldn’t lie to me. Don’t lie to me now, son. You don’t love this Elizabeth. You are courting tragedy.”

  Trevallyan’s anger boiled over. “I’m thirty-three years old. ’Tis my right to take a wife and no man shall stop me.”

  “Love will stop you, Trevallyan. You don’t love this girl. She’s not right for you and you know it.”

  “Let’s talk about the ‘right girl’ for me, shall we?” Niall’s voice dripped acid. “What is she now? Twelve? Thirteen? Would you have me marry the child and hear her screams on our wedding night? Is that your idea of love?”

  “You need to be patient. She will be a woman someday. And when she is, when you win her love, you will see you were waiting your whole life for this one blessed woman.”

  “If such happiness is to be mine, why not take her now?” Trevallyan said cruelly. “I’ll tell the child about the geis and force her to wed me.”

  “Telling her about the geis will get you nothing. You must win her love freely, without bonds and manipulations. If you tell Ravenna about the geis, she’ll marry you only to save County Lir from ruin.”

  “Ah, yes, the looming fate of Lir,” Trevallyan snapped. “Tell me, if this geis is true, why has Lir not fallen into ruin? Years have passed, and still the geis remains unfulfilled, and yet as you can see all around you, Lir is as bountiful and peaceful as it has been. So where is the truth in your geis after all?”

  “Luck will hold until Ravenna is of age. Right now she is just a child and a child cannot give a woman’s love. You can do nothing now, Niall. You can only wait.”

  “Let this torture end, Father,” Trevallyan said, the old anger seething like snakes in a tarpit. “I’ve been good to the child. Everything she has, I’ve been the one to give it to her. Brilliana’s daughter would have died had I not taken pity on the child and seen that she lived. Is there no one to take pity on me?”

  “You have not been overly generous, my lord. The girl runs with a band of hooligans because the other children look down upon her bastardy. Her face is always dirty, her feet bare. She has but the one small advantage of a tutor, so that she might be educated and keep from becoming like her mother, but that is all.”

  “The girl could have more, if she likes. The cost is inconsequential to me. If that is all the child has, blame Grania. The old witch won’t take my money except enough pennies for Ravenna’s sake.”

  The priest sat back in the plush velvet upholstery and released a sigh. “Call off the wedding, my lord. You must be patient.”

  “By the time the child Ravenna matures into the kind of woman who would make me a good companion, I’ll be in my forties. ’Tis a long time to wait for a maiden who may not want an old man for a husband.” Trevallyan knocked on the trap, his lips a taut, grim line. The driver clambered down. The footman opened the carriage door.

  “Call off the wedding, my son,” Father Nolan whispered, making no move to go with him. “You refuse to believe it, but the geis has already proven true. Tragedy will follow you if you wed a woman you cannot love.”

  “Take him home,” Trevallyan ordered to the coachman. He turned to the priest who remained within the carriage. “Hear me and hear me well, Father: The child Ravenna is not my problem.” He slammed the carriage door closed and watched it take off down the lane.

  Ravenna could barely find Trevallyan’s bedchambers in the massive number of castle rooms. There were rooms to display the Trevallyan medieval armaments, rooms for servants, for bathing, even modern velvet saloons for courting, but it took a long climb up a winding stone staircase to the north tower for Ravenna to finally find the master’s chambers.

  She knew it instantly. The doors were carved with the Trevallyan adder and shield, sending chills through her body. The Trevallyan crest held four shamrocks within a shield that was split with a bar sinister in the shape of an adder, the serpent. St. Patrick had driven all the snakes from Ireland, but the English Trevallyans had symbolically brought them in again in their crest. The Trevallyans had no motto. The crest spoke all.

  Taking a deep breath for courage, she opened the doors and peeked inside. The first room was an anteroom, a library actually, the walls covered with mahogany and gilt-bronze-mounted bookcases lined with leather-bound spines. Two chamois-covered chairs sat by the hearth, only one chair showing signs of wear on the bottle-green leather, indicating the room’s sole occupancy.

  Ravenna felt her heart skip with every damning creak of the hinges as she closed the door behind her. She stepped into the bedchamber. Trevallyan’s bed, an enormous four-post cavern carved of black oak and draped in green velvet, was a room unto itself. Scarred from hundreds of years of use, the past was written in its ancient wood, with one especially impressive cut hacked into one of the huge onion-shaped finials. She walked past the bed and wondered if the scars in the bed were caused by invaders to the castle in previous centuries. She was too young to think of jealous lovers and cuckolded husbands.

  A small doorway to the left caught her eye. She walked across the lush Axminster carpet, marveling at the way it kept her bare feet and the stone room toasty warm. She turned the
brass knob and found herself in the lord’s dressing chamber. Inlaid mahogany wardrobes stood sentinel on either side of the room. And beneath a shield-shaped shaving mirror, on a bureau with the carved feet of a lion, lay Trevallyan’s comb.

  She held the tortoiseshell comb to the light of a small mullioned window high in the stone wall of the dressing room. There were three blond hairs intertwined within the teeth. Triumphant, she pulled them out of the comb and curled them into her palm, marveling at the way they caught the light, like spun threads of gold, so different from her own.

  The sound of voices suddenly chilled her blood. She clutched the three hairs and stared at the dressing-room door. The voices came and went and she tried desperately to determine whether they were in the staircase to the tower or were just the echo of passing servants. The voices grew louder, and she was paralyzed by the creak of groaning hinges.

  “Kevin, tell Greeves to send up a bath and my dinner. I’ll be staying in my rooms tonight.” The male voice was well-mannered, even refined, but the underlying anger in it left Ravenna with a fear that stabbed through her like an icicle.

  “Very good, my lord. I’ll send the footman up to tend to the hearths. Your early arrival was unexpected, or we would have seen to it that the fires were lit.”

  “Fine. Fine,” the commanding voice answered absentmindedly.

  The doors creaked shut. There was silence.

  Ravenna didn’t dare breathe. Her worst terrors had come true. The master of Trevallyan stood in the bedchamber, and she was trapped, hidden in a corner of his dressing room.

  She climbed atop a chair beneath the small mullioned window and looked down. It was a hundred feet to the gravel-strewn courtyard, if not more. Certain death. Silently, she jumped back down to the floor on grubby bare feet. The only way out of the stone tower was the way she had come: through the bedroom and the antechamber and down the steep, winding staircase.

  She crept to the dressing-room door, her heart beating a heavy staccato in her chest. What would he do to her if she were caught? Thieves were sometimes hanged. Would he hang her, or take mercy upon her because she was merely a girl? She could feel the blood rushing from her face. Slowly, she peered into the bedroom to find her captor.

  Trevallyan stood by the bank of windows near his writing desk. She had seen the master rarely, perhaps only once or twice, but he had always left an impression. He was not an overly tall man, nor big, but there was something about him, a wickedness to his slant of eyebrows, a commanding, even cruel gleam in his fine blue-green eyes, that convinced her—nay, all the townfolk of Lir—that he could be spawn of the devil.

  His coat and black neckcloth were thrown across the bed. Clad in a fine batiste shirt, a black figured-silk vest, and wool trousers, he made a melancholy figure at the window as he stared around across the misty countryside to the ogham stone that stood directly in his view. She could almost feel pity for the lonely portrait he made: his black-trousered legs braced beneath him, his arms crossed over his chest, his profile—when he presented it—refined, yet manly, his nape-length wheat-colored hair slicked back as if it were common for him to run his fingers through it in frustration. And the expression in his eyes … bereft.

  She was barely thirteen and not sophisticated in the ways of reading emotions; still Ravenna found herself in the spell of the man’s mood. Power and melancholy made a heady mix. She felt herself drawn to him. She might have even said, “Please don’t be sad,” if not for the fear that froze her voice and the terror of that violent gaze finding her in his private room and proclaiming, “To the hangman!”

  She hugged the dressing-room wall and tried to think of an escape. The only way was to cross the bedroom and sneak out the door when the footman arrived to light the fires. The three golden hairs still clutched in her palm mocked her. It was a meager treasure for so great a risk. She’d been foolish to come here. The days of her childhood were finally drawing to a close. Never again would she stoop to such folly.

  She heard a rustling sound in the bedroom, then footsteps.

  Panicked, she backed away, her gaze clawing at every wardrobe and bureau for a hiding place. Her hand reached out for the last wardrobe’s door latch, and Trevallyan entered.

  “God save me,” she whispered. Her gaze met Trevallyan’s and her back slammed against the partly opened door of the wardrobe.

  Ravenna had never seen a man so shocked in her life. Trevallyan looked at her as if she were a shade, a ghost, one of many reputed to haunt the castle. It was a full minute before the stain of anger crept to his cheeks.

  “What are you doing here?” His words, deep with fury, gave strange emphasis. It seemed as if he were saying, “What are you doing here?”

  “I—I was not stealing from you, Lord Trevallyan, I swear upon my mother’s honor.” Her voice trembled. Wildly, she looked past him to see if she could break for the door.

  His lips hardened to a straight line, and his gaze pinned her to the wall. “’Tis a fine thing. You of all creatures to be swearing upon your mother’s honor.”

  “Nay,” she whispered, stung by his insult but too frightened to fight him fully. He was master of all Lir. Whatever punishment he wanted to dole out, the county would be hard-pressed to go against his wishes. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she blinked them away as she’d done most of her young life. Malachi hadn’t cried when a lord from Dublin shot his father dead right in front of him by outrageously claiming his father was a smuggler in cahoots with Daniel O’Connell. She would not cry either.

  “What do you have in your hand?”

  Trevallyan’s contemptuous gaze lowered to her small, dirty fist and Ravenna’s heart lurched as she realized how things looked. If she showed him the hair, he might think she was some kind of witch come to put a spell on him and he would force the magistrate to show her little pity. Yet if she refused to show him what was inside her hand, then his accusations of stealing would be cemented forever.

  “’Tis nothing, my lord. I was not stealing from you, I swear it. By all that is holy, I swear it,” she rambled, unsure of which course to take when both seemed to lead her to gaol.

  He stepped forward; she backed away. He was not a big man, but to a frightened young girl, he was a giant.

  “Show me what you have in your hand.”

  Witch! she could already hear him cry. There was no way to explain what she had in her hand, except to put the blame on Malachi, which she would never do.

  “’Tis nothing, my lord. ’Tis nothing of any value.” Her gaze flew to the doorway behind him. She would have to run. She could flee to the neighboring county and hide. Malachi would help her. There was always Malachi.

  “Show me. Now.” He took an ominous step toward her.

  Her heart was near to bursting with terror. The raw energy of flight took hold of her and she ran out of the dressing room. Her dingy blue gown caught on a chair and toppled it, but still, the carved double doors out of the apartment were almost within her sight. She held out her hands as if to reach them, but an arm lifted her by the waist and slammed her into the down mattress of the lord’s bedstead.

  “You bloody urchin! Show me what you’ve taken from here or, by God, I’ll bring you and your grandmother in front of the magistrate.”

  “’Tis nothing! ’Tis nothing!” she cried out as he grappled with her on the mattress. When he had her pinned, he forced open her grubby fingers and found the three damning blond hairs that clung to her palm.

  “What is this?” His eyes were the cold color of the Irish sea. “It looks like my hair…?”

  “I’m not a witch. I’m not … I’m not…” She sobbed.

  He looked down at her as if noticing her agony for the first time. The tears on her grimy cheeks left rivulets of clean skin in their wake and her worn blue gown, patched and dirty, seemed to disgust him. “Damned well you’re no witch. There is no such thing, you foolish girl.”

  She stared up at him, not comforted at all by the fact that he believed her, no
t when his face loomed terrifyingly above her, like Satan come to her in the night.

  “Come along. Confess. What were you going to do with my hair?” He shook her as if that would get the truth from her. “Were you thinking in that absurd head of yours that your grandmother could put a spell on me?”

  If she weren’t so terrified, she’d think he almost looked amused.

  “Nay,” she whispered, glancing at the palm he held open, “’tis just the opposite. My—my friends call you a warlock—”

  “Your friends. But not you?” He looked closely at her, demanding she speak the truth. He seemed to be truly curious of her answer.

  “I—I don’t believe you are, but they said they would prove that you were one if I gave them a lock of your hair.” She looked at him. Her answer seemed to take him aback.

  “You were here in defense of my honor?” he asked slowly.

  She nodded.

  He lifted his head and laughed as if unable to control it. The sound should have been pleasant, but it was harsh and mirthless, as if he knew no other way to laugh, as if he knew no joy in his life. With the devilish slant to his eyebrows, she suddenly could see how some people had acquired the notion that he was indeed a warlock.

  “Tell me, child, who these people are who dare to call me a warlock,” he said, taunting her.

  She stared up at him, silent, a mutinous set to her jaw.

  “Come on, tell me. Otherwise,” he drew closer until they were eye to eye; she, locked beneath him on the green velvet counterpane of the bed, unable to struggle. “Otherwise, I’ll call in the magistrate.”

  Her lower lip trembled only slightly. She would be jailed and punished for stealing. So be it. She would not betray her friends.

  “I’ll not tell you. Hang me if you must,” she answered, breathless with terror.

  “Hang you,” he scoffed as if he found the idea ridiculous. But because it played so well on her fears, he let his gaze flick down to the palm he still held with an iron grip and said, “Confess, you wild creature, or I’ll flay the skin from this hand if you don’t.”