Oliver wanted to stop her there, mostly because he preferred not to think about that first incident. He’d been but a lad of eight summers with more of a mouth on him than was appropriate and a finely honed sense of fairness that tended to inspire more words than he should have said. That first time had led to regular visits to the headmaster’s office.
There were times he wondered how he’d managed to wind up as any decent sort of man.
Perhaps the answer was there in front of him.
Then he remembered, suddenly and with a clarity that left him completely unbalanced, what had happened to him on his eleventh birthday.
“Tell me.”
He looked at her. “I’ll weep.”
“I will weep with you.”
He pushed himself to his feet and decided that perhaps he could be forgiven if he spent a few minutes doing everything in his power to avoid thinking about that day. He walked over to the kitchen, poured himself a substantial glass from a bottle of whisky he was actually surprised to find lurking behind a curtain under the sink, then tossed it back without flinching. It cleared his head, but it did absolutely nothing for the state of his heart.He set the glass in the sink, then leaned on the worn wooden counter and looked out the window.
He couldn’t see anything, of course, because it was pitch black outside. He imagined that was exacerbated by the fact that Moraig’s was surrounded by trees, but the sight of the dark chilled him just the same.
He should have seen how many men there had been there all those centuries ago. He should have known ahead of time that Mairead’s kin wouldn’t give up their prey that easily. Hadn’t Patrick warned him? Hadn’tJamiewarned him? He supposed he could take the coldest of comforts in the knowledge that Mairead would have lost her life even if he hadn’t intervened.
But he couldn’t bear being the cause of her death.
He pushed away from the sink and walked back across the little cottage to pull up a stool and sit down in front of the fire. He looked at the woman sitting there, looking as corporeal and real as anyone else would have, and wished he’d done things better.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly.
She shook her head and smiled, a gentle, beatific smile that held no bitterness at all. “No need, my love. It was a gift to be there for you during your youth.”
He rifled back through his memories and was stunned to realize that at the worst of times when he’d thought he’d been all alone, he hadn’t been.
That woman there had been with him.
“On my eleventh birthday,” he said, grasping frantically for the thread of what they’d started to discuss and hoping the mere act of giving voice to his memories would keep him from weeping over them. “On my eleventh birthday,” he repeated carefully, “I had snuck out the back of school, expecting to see my governess’s sign that the way to her house was clear and I wouldn’t be marked as missing.”
“You went there often.”
“She stocked my favorite chips in her pantry,” he said with an attempt at a smile, “and she was a first-rate chess player.”
She had also been a fabulous conversationalist with a head stuffed full of an esoteric knowledge of history and philosophy and other things that had led him to his own study of things that had completely changed the way he viewed life and what he valued.
“She was a very accomplished woman,” Mairead agreed. “As well as being cannier than everyone around her.”
“Especially my headmaster,” Oliver said, coming close to taking a bit of pleasure in that thought. “She somehow always managed to make it so he had no choice but to engage her over whatever bait she’d set before him, which had the benefit of distracting him long enough for me to slip past him and back inside the gates.” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “On that day, though, our sign wasn’t there, which for some reason seemed unsettling.”
“And?”
“I bolted toward the school’s front gates only to find her neighbor speaking to the headmaster. My governess had died that morning and her neighbor had come to tell me. The headmaster sent me away immediately, insisting that I go back inside and attend to my studies.” He paused. “But you know that. You were standing behind me when I heard the news.”
She nodded. “Aye, I was.”
“I think he wanted to beat me the next week for skivving off to attend her funeral.”
“He did,” Mairead said mildly. “I believe he brought to mind the threats your governess had casually dropped in conversation, ones about how he was being watched in ways he would never discover.”
Oliver found it in him to smile faintly. “I wondered why he seemed to leave most of us alone—” He looked at her in surprise. “How do you know that?”
“How do you think I know that?”
He would have smiled, but his heart was in shreds and all he could do was ignore the tears rolling down his cheeks. “Thank you.”
