Page 106 of The Pirate Queen

“It isn’t fucking he’s after. Not really,” Finn says.

“What, then?”

“Marriage.”

“They tend to be one and the same,” she says dryly. “But it would gain him nothing.”

Finn looks around the Great Hall. “It would gain him this.”

“I’ll not be giving my father’s home to any man. You ought to know me better than that.”

“I thought I knew you well enough before. And then you brought a damned Leinster man home.”

She is displeased. That’s clear enough. But Finn doesn’t care. Someone needs to say it.

“You do not like him?” she asks.

“You miss my point, Gráinne. I do not trust him.”

She snorts. “You only trust me and your own brother.”

“And that is one person too many.”

“I am not going to marry him,” she says.

“Then hurry up and tire of that fool before he causes some trouble you will regret.”

Gráinne promises nothing, and Finn leaves her to what remains of her breakfast. Once he’s out of the stuffy confines of Clare Castle, he goes in search of Gutty. The boy must be near thirty by now, but Finn still thinks of him as the dirty child who used to keep the fires at Bunowen.

He finds Gutty in the byre, chancing his arm with one of the dairy maids. The girl is plain, but lively. It’s the same girl he’s been talking to for months, with little success. Finn has yet to catch them doing anything but making eyes and talking about the weather.

“I need to go across the bay,” Finn tells him. “Quickly.”

“Not my problem.”

Finn stares at the dairy maid for so long that she jumps off her stool and says, “Oh! I didn’t realize…I’ll just be”—a quick, shy look at Gutty—“back shortly.” Then she wipes her hands on her apron and hurries from the byre.

Gutty takes a step toward him. “You fecking eejit, I’ll—”

“That dirty cunt de Lacy just left,” Finn interrupts. “I think he’s up to something. I’m going to follow.”

The boy’s face clouds over. He might be the only person Finn knows who hates de Lacy more than he does. Gutty spits a wad of phlegm to the dirt beside Finn’s boot. “I’ll come with you.”

Gutty doesn’t care that his Bean an Tí is flirting with the idea of taking a stranger to bed. He knows well enough what she endured being married to O’Flaherty. Long absences. Cold words. Hard fists. Finn knows that well enough too, but he is so blinded by jealousy, by his unrequited love for Gráinne, that he cannot accept this is how she is choosing to heal old wounds. Besides, Gutty doesn’t think it will last. There is no love in Gráinne’s eyes when she looks at de Lacy. A bit of lust, sure, but doesn’t every woman in the castle have that same look about them whenever de Lacy is in the room?

The reason Gutty despises the stranger is because he has lied to Gráinne from his very first words.

“What is your name?” she’d asked him that first day as they sailed back to Clare.

“Hugh de Lacy,” he’d answered without a waver in his voice.

Gutty is illiterate. Has never even held a book. But even he knows the name Hugh de Lacy. Fecking twelfth-century Norman invader spreading his seed between two wives and littering the entire country with his fecking tower houses and his ten fecking children.

The shipwrecked man could have chosen any other name. But he picked one known to every Irishman. No doubt he’d thought it so common as to be believable. But he was lying.

Gutty knows when men are lying. He was forced to learn that skill at too young an age. And now he can catch lies in the smallest gestures. Things most people don’t notice. One man blinks too quickly. Another avoids eye contact. Sometimes they shift or squirm. Smile with too many teeth. Gutty even met a man once whose voice rose at the end of a sentence every time he lied, like he was asking a question.

It was easier with de Lacy. He taps his right thumb three times. That day, on Niamh, while he lay there half drowned, he tapped his thumb on the damp deck boards. But Gutty has seen him do it since on tables and gunwales, sword hilts and flagons.