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“Would you?” Surprised, she angled her head. “Well, you’re welcome any time. I’ll give you the direction. Do you mind me saying I didn’t expect you to be as friendly a sort of man as you seem to be.”
“What did you expect?”
“More of a shark, and I hope that doesn’t offend you.”
“It doesn’t. And it depends on the waters where I’m swimming.” He glanced over, and his face warmed as Aidan’s wife came up to the table. But when he started to rise, Jude waved him down again.
“No, I’m not joining you, but thanks.” She rested a hand on her very pregnant belly. “Hello, I’m Jude Frances and I’ll be your server today.”
“You shouldn’t be on your feet like this, carrying trays.”
Jude sighed as she took out her order pad. “He sounds like Aidan. I put my feet up when I need to, and I don’t carry anything heavy. Sinead can’t handle things on her own.”
“Not to worry, Trevor. Why me own blessed mother dug potatoes on the day I was born, then went back to roast them after the delivery.” At Trevor’s narrowed glance, Brenna chuckled. “Well, maybe not, but I’ll wager she could have. I’ll have today’s soup, if you don’t mind, Jude, and a glass of milk,” she added with a wicked smile for Trevor.
“The same,” he said, “plus the sandwich.”
“A fine choice. I’ll be right back with it.”
“She’s stronger than she looks,” Brenna told him when Jude moved to another table. “And more stubborn. Now that she’s found her direction, so to speak, she’ll only work harder to prove she can do what you tell her she shouldn’t. Aidan won’t let her overdo, I promise you. The man adores her.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed. The Gallagher men seem to be devoted to their women.”
“So they better be, or their women will know why.” Relaxed, she kicked back, pulled off her cap. Those red curls tumbled down. “So you aren’t finding it, I guess we’d say, too rustic for you out in the countryside here after being used to New York City?”
He thought of the job sites he’d experienced: mud slides, floods, blistering heat, petty vandalism and sabotage. “Not at all. The village is exactly what I expected after Finkle’s reports.”
“Ah, yes, Finkle.” She remembered Trevor’s scout very well. “Now there’s a man I believe prefers urban conveniences. But you’re not so . . . particular then.”
“I’m very particular, depending. That’s why I incorporated most of your design into the theater project.”
“Now that’s a fine and sneaky compliment.” And nothing could have pleased her more. “I suppose I was angling more toward the personal. I have a special fondness for the cottage on Faerie Hill, and I wasn’t sure you’d find the place to your liking. Thinking, I suppose, a man with your background and wherewithal would be more inclined to settle at the cliff hotel with maid service and the restaurant and so forth.”
“Hotel rooms become confining. And I find it interesting to stay in the house where the woman who was engaged to one of my ancestors was born, and lived, and died.”
“She was a fine woman, Old Maude. A wise woman.” Brenna kept her eyes on Trevor’s face as she spoke. “Her grave’s up near the well of Saint Declan, and it’s there you can feel her. She’s not the one in the cottage now.”
“Who is?”
Brenna lifted her eyebrows. “You don’t know the legend then? Your grandfather was born here, and your father as well, though he was a babe when they sailed to America. Still he visited many years back. Did neither of them tell you the story of Lady Gwen and Prince Carrick.”
“No. So it would be Lady Gwen who haunts the cottage?”
“Have you seen her?”
“No.” Trevor hadn’t been raised on legends and myths, but there was more than enough Irish in his blood to cause him to wonder about them. “But there’s a feminine feel to the place, almost a fragrance, so odds are for the lady.”
“You’d be right about that.”
“Who was she? I figure if I’m sharing quarters with a ghost, I should know something about her.”
No careless dismissal of the subject, no amused indulgence of the Irish and their legends, Brenna noted. Just cool interest. “You surprise me again. Let me see to something first. I’ll be right back.”
Fascinating, Trevor mused. He had himself a ghost.
He’d felt things before. In old buildings, empty lots,deserted fields. It wasn’t the kind of thing a man generally talked about at a board meeting or over a cold one with the crew after a sweaty day’s work. Not usually. But this was a different place with a different tone. More, he wanted to know.
Everything to do with Ardmore and the area was of interest to him now. A good ghost story could draw people in, just as successfully as a well run pub. It was all atmosphere.
Gallagher’s was exactly the kind of atmosphere he’d been looking for as a segue into his theater. The old wood, blackened by time and smoke and grease mated comfortably with the cream-colored walls, the stone hearth, the low tables and benches.
The bar itself was a beauty, an aged chestnut he already noted the Gallaghers kept wiped and polished. The age of customers ranged from a baby in arms to the oldest man Trevor believed he’d ever seen who was balanced on a stool at the far end of the bar.
There were several others he took as locals just from the way they sat or smoked or sipped, and three times that many who could be nothing other than tourists with their camera bags under their tables and their maps and guidebooks out.
The conversations were a mix of accents, but predominate was that lovely lilt he’d heard in his grandparents’ voices until the day they died.
He wondered if they missed hearing it themselves, why they’d never had a driving urge to come to Ireland again. What bitter memories had kept them away, skipped over a generation and caused him to come back and see for himself.
More, why he should have recognized Ardmore and the view from the cottage and even now know what he would see when he climbed the cliffs. It was as if he carried a picture in his mind of this place, one someone else had taken and tucked away for him.
They’d had no pictures to show him. His father had visited once, when he’d been younger than Trevor was now himself, but his descriptions had been sketchy at best.
The reports of co
urse. There had been detailed photographs and descriptions in the reports Finkle had brought back to New York. But he’d known, before he’d opened the first file, he’d already known.
Inherited memory? he mused, though he didn’t put much stock in that sort of thing. Inheriting his father’s eyes, the clear gray color, the long-lidded shape of them was one matter. And he was told he had his grandfather’s hands, and his mind for business. But how did a memory pass down through the blood?
He toyed with the idea as he continued to scan the room. It didn’t occur to him that he looked more the local than the tourist as he sat there in his work clothes, his dark blond hair tousled from the morning’s labor. He had a narrow, raw-boned face that would put most in mind of a warrior, or perhaps a scholar, rather than a businessman. The woman he’d nearly married had said it looked to be honed and sculpted by some wild genius. The faintest of scars marred his chin, a result of a storm of flying glass during a tornado in Houston, and added to the overall impression of toughness.
It was a face that rarely gave anything away. Unless it was to Trevor Magee’s advantage.
At the moment it held a cool and remote expression, but it shifted into easy friendliness when Brenna came back toward the table with Jude. Brenna, he noted, carried the tray.
“I’ve asked Jude to take a few moments to sit and tell you about Lady Gwen,” Brenna began and was already unloading the order. “She’s a seanachais .”
At Trevor’s raised eyebrow, Jude shook her head. “It’s Gaelic for storyteller. I’m not really, I’m just—”
“And who has a book being published, and another she’s writing. Jude’s book’ll be out at the end of this very summer,” Brenna went on. “It’ll make a lovely gift, so I’d keep it in mind when you’re out shopping.”
“Brenna.” Jude rolled her eyes.
“I’ll look for it. Some of Shawn’s song lyrics are stories. It’s an old and honored tradition.”
“Oh, he’ll like that one.” Beaming now, Brenna scooped up the tray. “I’ll deal with this, Jude, and give Sinead a bit of a goose for you. Go ahead and get started. I’ve heard it often enough before.”
“She has enough energy for twenty people.” A little tired now, Jude picked up her cup of tea.
“I’m glad I found her for this project. Or that she found me.”
“I’d say it was a bit of both, since you’re both operators.” She caught herself, winced. “I didn’t mean that in a negative way.”
“Wasn’t taken in one. Baby kicking? It puts a look in your eye,” Trevor explained. “My sister just had her third.”
“Third?” Jude blew out a breath. “There are moments I wonder how I’m going to manage the one. He’s active. But he’s just going to have to wait another couple months.” She ran a hand in slow circles over the mound of her belly, soothing as she sipped. “You may not know it but I lived in Chicago until just over a year ago.”
He made a noncommittal sound. Of course he knew, he had extensive reports.
“My plan was to come here for six months, to live in the cottage where my grandmother lived after she lost her parents. She’d inherited it from her cousin Maude, who’d died shortly before I came here.”
“The woman my great-uncle was engaged to.”
“Yes. The day I arrived, it was raining. I thought I was lost. I had been lost, and not just geographically. Everything unnerved me.”
“You came alone, to another country?” Trevor cocked his head. “That doesn’t sound like a woman easily unnerved.”
“That’s something Aidan would say.” And because it was, she found herself very comfortable. “I suppose it’s more that I didn’t know my own nerve at that point. In any case, I pulled into the street, the driveway actually, of this little thatched roof cottage. And in the upstairs window I saw a woman. She had a lovely, sad face, and pale blond hair that fell around her shoulders. She looked at me, our eyes connected. Then Brenna drove up. It seems I’d stumbled across my own cottage, and the woman I’d seen in the window was Lady Gwen.”
“The ghost?”
“That’s right, yes. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Or certainly unreasonable. But I can tell you exactly what she looked like. I’ve sketched her. And I knew no more of the legend when I came here than you appear to know now.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“Then I’ll tell you.” Jude paused as Brenna came back, sat, and tucked into her meal.
She had an easy way with a story, Trevor noted. A smooth and natural rhythm that put the listener into the tale. She told him of a young maid who’d lived in the cottage on the faerie hill. A woman who cared for her father as her mother had been lost in childbirth, who tended the cottage and its gardens and who carried herself with pride.
Beneath the green slope of the hill was the silver glory of the faerie raft,
