A Christmas Grace Read online

  “Yes, Mrs. Radley, of course,” Maggie agreed a trifle stiffly, and, avoiding Daniel, she began to cut thin bread and butter for Susannah, carefully spreading the softened butter on the cut end of the loaf, and then slicing it so razor-thin it barely held together. Then she buttered and halved a second slice and a third, arranging them daintily on a blue-and-white plate.

  Emily thanked her and took the tray. She was extraordinarily pleased when Susannah sat up, a faint touch of color in her cheeks, and ate all of it. Emily decided she must remember how it was done and make it herself another time.

  An hour later Susannah was dozing and Emily went downstairs again to catch up on some of the household chores she was behind with, and which took her so much longer than it had Maggie.

  She stopped at the kitchen door when she heard voices, and then laughter, a man and a woman. It was a rich sound, a welling-up of a kind of happiness.

  “Really?” Maggie said with disbelief.

  “I swear,” Daniel replied. “Trouble is, I can’t remember how long ago it was, or why I was there.”

  “It sounds marvelous,” Maggie said wistfully. “I sometimes dream about going to places like that, but I don’t suppose I ever will.”

  “You could, if you wanted to,” Daniel assured her.

  Emily stood motionless, not making a sound. She could see Maggie’s face as she looked at Daniel. She was smiling, but there was a wistfulness in her eyes that betrayed her dreams, and that she believed them beyond her reach.

  “Not everything you want can be had for the asking,” she said to him. “It’s wise to know what to grasp for, and what will only hurt you.”

  “It’s not wise,” Daniel replied gently. “It’s owning defeat before you’ve even tried. How do you know what you can reach, if you don’t stretch out?”

  “You talk like a dreamer,” she said sadly. “One with his feet way off the ground, and no responsibilities.”

  “Is that what it is that holds your feet hard to the earth, then? Or is it Fergal’s feet you mean?” he questioned in return.

  Maggie hesitated.

  In the doorway Emily froze. Had Daniel been telling her stories of travel and adventure, disturbing her contentment with hunger that could never be fed?

  “Maybe you could go to Europe?” Daniel suggested. “Find a charm that would feed your heart forever afterwards. There are magic places, Maggie. Places where wonderful things happened, great battles, ideas to set the world alight, love stories to break your heart, and then mend it again all in a new shape. There’s music, and laughter till you can hardly breathe from the ache of it! There’s food you couldn’t imagine, and tales to carry with you to fill the winter nights for every year to come. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Emily came in quickly, intending to interrupt them, then she saw Maggie’s face and changed her mind. There was a vulnerability in it that was startling, but she was not looking at Daniel, rather into some thoughts of her own.

  Emily was suddenly chilled. She remembered how gentle Daniel had been with her when they were walking back from church, how soft his questions were, how natural. And yet they had dug more deeply than she wished, exposing weaknesses she had not acknowledged to herself. Now he was doing the same thing to Maggie, uncovering the loneliness in her, the disappointment. Emily had seen Fergal O’Bannion, a good man but without wings of the mind. He was possessive of her. Was that because he had seen her laugh with Connor Riordan, listen to him, join in his tales and his dreams? And now she was listening to Daniel, and so Fergal had commanded Maggie not to be in this house, and she had disobeyed him? To help Susannah, or to listen to Daniel?

  Emily recalled odd remarks, very slight, only glancing, but were they the ugly tips of fact? Had Maggie escaped the enclosing bounds of her life for a brief passion with Connor, and Fergal knew it? Was that why Connor had been killed? The oldest of reasons?

  Did Maggie know that? Or at least fear it?

  And yet Mrs. Flaherty feared it was Brendan who had killed Connor, and Brendan had disappeared.

  “Wouldn’t you like to, Maggie?” Daniel repeated, his voice gentle.

  Emily stepped forward and saw him. He was smiling and as he folded the sheet over, his slender hand lingered for a moment over Maggie’s.

  Emily felt the heat burn up inside her and drew in her breath to speak.

  “I have things to fill my winter nights, and dreams in plenty already,” Maggie replied. “There’s nothing I want you to add to them, Daniel. I like your tales of places you’ve been, and I hope by telling them perhaps you’ve recalled a thing or two of who you are. That’s all. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, I understand you,” he said quietly. “Perhaps I expected too much help in my own fancies. A dose of reality can do wonders.” He smiled at his own error, gently self-mocking, and Emily saw Maggie ease a little, smiling back. The moment of embarrassment passed.

  Daniel moved away, and as he left the kitchen he brushed by Emily, and realized that she must have overheard the conversation. He could not know how long she had been there, but at the very least she had seen Maggie rebuff him. He pulled a slightly rueful face as he caught her eye, and she was at that moment absolutely certain that he knew exactly what she was trying to do to solve the murder of Connor Riordan, and why she was driven to try. Even so, it made no difference. Emily went on into the kitchen as if she had merely passed him in the passage.

  “How is she?” Maggie asked, a faint flush on her cheeks all that there was left from her conversation with Daniel.

  “Definitely improving,” Emily said cheerfully. “I’m sure she is less anxious now that you are back. I’m grateful to you for returning.” She tried to soften her voice to rob the words of offense, but she had no hesitation in speaking them. “Did Daniel come to you yesterday and tell you how ill Susannah was?”

  “Yes,” Maggie answered. “I’m so sorry. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have stayed away even for a day.”

  There was such unhappiness in her face Emily did not doubt her. “It’s difficult to know how much to obey one’s husband, against the voice of one’s own conscience,” Emily responded with more honesty than she had expected. What would she do to please Jack, against her own judgment? How often had he asked her? She realized that the journey to Connemara was probably the first time. Except that it was not against her conscience so much as in response to his. It should have been she who wanted to come, and he who tried to dissuade her.

  But what if she had wanted to come, and he had been against it, what would she have done? Made obedience an excuse? Or love? She did love Jack, she hated quarreling with him. But they quarreled very seldom. Why was that? Could it be a lack of passion, or even of conviction? What did she care about enough to do, even if it cost her something? And if there were nothing, what did that say of her? Something too terrible to own.

  “Fergal is not a harsh man, Mrs. Radley,” Maggie was saying, stopping her work to try to explain. It mattered to her that Emily did not judge him coldly. “He didn’t know Mrs. Ross was so bad, and he took Daniel wrong. It all goes back to the other wreck. I daresay you don’t know much about that. Fergal got a wrong idea in his head, and it could be I was to blame for it.”

  Emily could not turn away from such a perfect chance. “You mean Daniel reminds Fergal of Connor Riordan, and he thought history was playing itself out all over again?” she asked.

  Maggie lowered her eyes. “Well, something like that.”

  Emily deliberately sat down at the kitchen table. “What was Connor like, really? Please be honest with me, Maggie. Is history repeating itself in Daniel?”

  Maggie put the linen down and bit her own lip as she weighed her answer. “Connor was funny and wise, like Daniel,” she answered. “He made us all laugh. We liked his tales of where he’d been, strange lands he’d visited…”

  “Like Daniel just now?” Emily interrupted.

  “Yes, I suppose so. And like Daniel, he was interested in everyone. He kept
on asking questions, and we answered because it seemed only kindness that made him say such things. You know how it is when you talk to someone, and they like you, want to know about you, what you like, what your dreams are? You get to thinking. It’s rare enough someone wants to know about you instead of it being all about themselves.”

  Emily admitted ruefully that that was true.

  “Connor was interested in everyone,” Maggie went on. “I liked him. He was different. He told us new stories, not the same old ones. He made me think, look at everything a bit differently. But I wasn’t the only one to feel at times as if he could look into my mind too easily, and too deep. There are things sometimes best not known.”

  “Things about love, and jealousy, and debts?” Emily asked.

  Maggie’s voice dropped. “I suppose so. And dreams that shouldn’t be told.”

  “We’d die without dreams,” Emily replied. “But you’re right, some of them shouldn’t be told to others.”

  “I love Fergal,” Maggie said quickly, and on that instant Emily knew that it was at least in part a lie.

  “But Connor had a fire of the mind,” Emily finished for her. “And Fergal was a bore by comparison, and he came to know it.” She was afraid now that she was too close to the truth, and that if she tore off the last covering it would destroy Maggie’s world.

  “Fergal is a good man,” Maggie repeated stubbornly, as if saying it could make it true. “Sure, I liked Connor’s tales, but that’s all. I didn’t love him. You’re wrong in that, Mrs. Radley. Like, that’s all, because he made me think, and made me laugh. He taught us all how to see a wider world than this village and its loves and hates.”

  “But he saw your loneliness, and he made Fergal see it too.” Emily could not let it go. The pictures were all becoming clearer.

  Maggie blinked away tears. “It can hurt very deep to have to face a truth you’ve been hiding from. It’s my fault too. I told Fergal what he wanted to hear, and then felt cheated when he believed me and looked no further. I suppose I let him think I was in love with Connor, and he with me. God forgive me for that.”

  So Maggie had allowed Fergal to think she was in love with Connor. Was she afraid that it was actually Fergal who had killed him, and inadvertently she had been responsible for it? And now she would protect him, because of her own guilt?

  Had she loved someone else? If not Connor, then who?

  How much of any of it had Susannah seen, or guessed? And was she telling the truth when she had claimed to be so certain Hugo Ross had known nothing of the passions and weaknesses of these people whose lives for good and ill were so woven with his own?

  Father Tyndale came to see Susannah again in the afternoon and stayed for over an hour. Emily walked most of the way home with him. The wind was gusty, and cold with the chill of the sea, but in spite of its violence she found that the salt and the smell of the weeds had a kind of bitter cleanness that pleased her.

  “I think she hasn’t long now,” Father Tyndale said gravely, forcing his voice to carry above the wind.

  “I know,” Emily agreed. “I hope it isn’t before Christmas.” Then she did not know why she had said that. It was not Christmas that was the issue, it was learning the truth about Connor Riordan, and whatever it proved to be, letting Susannah believe there was some resolution in it, a healing for the people she loved.

  “Tell me more about Hugo, Father,” she asked.

  He smiled as they walked down through the rough grass, still mounded with the debris of the storm, then into a clear stretch of the beach. It was a longer way to his house, but to take it felt right to both of them.

  “How hard it is to say anything of him that gives any idea of what he was really like,” Father Tyndale answered thoughtfully. “He was a big man, not just physically, with a big man’s gentleness, but he was broad of spirit. He loved this land and its people. But then his family have been here as long as even the legends tell. He made his money in business, but his pleasure was painting, and he might have been good enough to keep himself that way, if he’d tried. Heaven knows, Susannah never asked for wealth. She was happy just to be with him.”

  “And his faith?” she inquired.

  “You know,” he said with slight surprise, “I never asked him. I took it for granted from the way he was that he knew there was a greater power than all of mankind, and that it was a good power. Some people talk a lot about what they believe, and the laws they keep, the prayers they say. Hugo never did. He came to church most Sundays, but whatever guilts or griefs he had, he sorted them with God himself.”

  “Is that all right with you?” she questioned.

  “He loved his fellow men, without judgment,” he answered. “And he loved the earth in all its seasons. To me, that meant he loved God. Yes, that’s all right with me.”

  “You didn’t mind him marrying an Englishwoman?” she said, almost joking, but not quite.

  He laughed. “Yes, I did. Not that it made a ha’penny’s difference. His family weren’t happy either. They’d have liked him to find a nice young Catholic girl, and have lots of children. But he loved Susannah, and he never asked anyone else what they thought.”

  “But she became Catholic,” Emily pointed out.

  “Oh, yes, but not because he ever asked her to. She did it for his sake, and in time she came to believe.”

  She changed the subject. “What did Hugo think of Connor Riordan?” She had to ask, but she realized she was afraid of the answer. Surely the man Father Tyndale had known would have seen the damage Connor was doing, the secrets he seemed to understand too easily, the fears and hungers he awoke?

  They were walking along the shore, around the wreckage. Father Tyndale did not answer her.

  “Where has Brendan Flaherty gone, Father?” she asked. “And why? Was his father alive when Connor was killed?”

  “Seamus? No, he was dead by then. But even the dead have secrets. Some of his were uglier than Colleen guessed at.”

  “But Brendan knows?”

  “Yes. And Hugo knew. I think that was why he tried to take Connor back to Galway, but that winter the weather was bad. We had hard and heavy rain, with an edge of sleet on it. And Connor was too frail to go all that way. Five hours in an open cart would have all but killed him. He wasn’t as strong as Daniel. Swallowed more of the sea, I think, and half drowned in it for longer too. It’s a hard thing to come close to death. I’m not sure that his lungs ever got over it.”

  “Did he come from Galway?”

  “Connor? I don’t know if it was where he was born, or simply where his ship put out from. He spoke like a Galway man.”

  “And Hugo wanted to take him back there?”

  “Yes. But he knew he couldn’t, not until he was stronger, and the weather turned.”

  “Then it was too late?”

  “Yes.” His face crumpled in grief. “God forgive us.”

  They were the first ones to walk along the sand since the ebb. There were no footsteps ahead of them, just the bare, hard stretch between the waves and the tide line.

  “Was Hugo afraid even then that something would happen, Father?”

  He did not answer.

  “Were you?” she insisted.

  “God knows, I should have been,” he said heavily. “These are my people. I’ve known many of them all their lives. I hear their confessions, I speak to them every day, I see their loves and their quarrels, their illnesses, their hopes, and their disappointments. How could all this have happened, and I did not see it? God forgive me, I still don’t.” He continued a few paces in silence, then went on as if he had forgotten she was there. “I can’t even help them now. They are frightened, one of them is carrying a burden of guilt that is eating his soul, and yet none of them comes to me for intercession with God, for a chance to lay down the weight that is crushing the life out of them, and find absolution. Why not? How have I failed so completely?”

  Emily had no answer. Everyone had shame for something, at some ti
me in their lives. What could it have been that Connor Riordan had seen, or guessed? Did it threaten one of the people here whose frailty he knew, and could protect? Even Susannah?

  She did not want to hear. She wished she had never embarked on detecting. She was not equipped to succeed, or to deal with the inevitable tragedies that it would bring. She should have had the courage, and the humility, to tell Susannah that in the beginning. What arrogance of hers to imagine she could come in here, a stranger, and solve the grief of seven years!

  She looked at Father Tyndale’s bent shoulders and his sad face, and wished she could give him some comfort, some hand to grasp in the faith that should have buoyed him up. He believed he had failed his people; his lack of trust in God, or understanding His ways, had caused their failure too.

  She had nothing to say that would help.

  It was late afternoon, close to dusk, when Emily made her decision. She would need help not only from Father Tyndale, but from Maggie O’Bannion, and possibly from Fergal as well. There was no point in telling Susannah until she was sure the plan would work. She would much rather have waited until her aunt was a little better, but that might not happen. The weather could close in and make it impossible.

  Or worse than any of that, whoever had killed Connor might see in Daniel the past occurring again, and kill him too.

  She walked through the darkening evening, bright only in the west over the sea, which heaved gray like metal, scarlet from the sun pouring over it as if it were spilled blood. She knocked on Maggie’s door.

  Maggie answered, and when she saw Emily, the blood drained from her face.

  “No,” Emily said quickly. “She’s not worse. In fact, I think she’s quite a bit better. I want to take the chance to go to Galway. I’ll have to be there two nights, at the least. Will you stay in the house with Susannah, please? I can’t leave her alone. At night she’s too ill. And I can’t expect Daniel to care for her. Anyway, she should have a woman, someone she knows, and trusts. Please?”