CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wesley stood bare chested in a waist-deep hole, a plain wooden shield in one hand and an arm’s length of hazel wood in the other. His hair had been intricately braided close to the scalp and woven with leather and beads.
Tom had explained in unsparing detail what must be done. Wesley had prepared for the trials to come. He had girded himself with prayers and self-confidence.
The rite smacked of paganism, and always at the back of his mind lurked the reality of Hammersmith and Cromwell. If this savage rite didn’t kill him, Wesley would find himself committing the ultimate betrayal against Clonmuir and Caitlin. He prayed his plan to thwart the English would work.
Nine warriors armed with sharpened spears formed a circle around Wesley. Rory posed the greatest threat, his red hair wild and his long beard flaming on the wind.
“God’s grace be with you,” said Father Tully.
Wesley nodded in thanks but his eyes stayed fastened upward on the pointed weapons. A spear hurled by a brawny Irish warrior could stave him through like a spitted pig.
A stir of movement caught his eye. Caitlin joined the circle of warriors. She wore her hair loose, and a tunic bearing the golden harp of Clonmuir encased her figure. As regal as a queen and as mysterious as an angel, she regarded him solemnly.
Their gazes locked and held. And then a miracle occurred.
She smiled at him. It was a smile such as he had never seen grace the countenance of Caitlin MacBride. There was something fresh and new about it, soft as mist, compelling as a whispered endearment.
She mouthed the words “Good luck.”
Wesley knew then that he would succeed.
A goatskin bodhran rattled. The warriors turned their backs on Wesley, measured off nine paces, and faced him.
He gripped the hazel branch and shield. Gandy shouted something in Gaelic. Nine spears sailed down at Wesley.
Time seemed to slow. The sharpened tips drove toward his heart. His shield came up to deflect them.
The sound of cracking wood burst in his ears. Wesley moved by instinct, seeming somehow to know the paths of the spears before they flew. The branch met them and turned their flight. Moments later, he found himself surrounded by broken spears and grinning faces.
Feeling as proud as he had the day he had first held Laura in his arms, Wesley climbed over spent and splintered spears. He caught Caitlin’s eye and gave a jaunty salute. The peculiar glow still lighted her face. She reminded him of a woman who guarded a delicious secret. He longed to take her in his arms and kiss the mysteries from her lips.
Instead he turned his mind to the next trial, a pursuit through the murky forest. Mounted on his pony, Tom trotted along at Wesley’s side. “Mind you follow the path we laid out last night,” he said. “And do be remembering you’ll have to jump a branch as high as your head, and pass under one level with your belt. Neither branch nor twig must disturb the weave of your lovely braids.”
“I’ll remember.” With mock vanity, Wesley patted his hair.
“If even one of the warriors draws blood,” Tom went on, “you’ll fail.”
The warriors girded themselves for the chase, strapping on sword belts and gripping new spears. The fire in Rory’s skeptical eyes seared Wesley with fortitude. “I’ll outrun them,” he vowed.
“Hold a minute,” said Tom. “I’ll be having those boots from you. You’re to run the gauntlet barefoot.”
Wesley drew off his boots and handed them over. The sandy earth of the yard felt soft under his feet. If anyone had told him a few months earlier that he would be running half-naked through the mountains of Connemara, he would have declared him touched in the head.
But then again, if anyone had told him he would lose his heart to an Irish warrior woman, he would have declared himself touched in the head.
He stopped at the fringe of woods. He sensed a magic in the moment, in the land that unfolded before him, full of sun and shadow and the secrets of warriors whose courage had been molded by half a millennium of fighting.
What vanity to think himself worthy of the giants who had taken their strength from the rugged land, their music from the sharp plaints of seabirds swooping over the fells, their poetry from the song of the wind through the green-draped vales.
“They were all just men,” said Tom, sensing Wesley’s thoughts. “Their power came from their human hearts.”
Wesley nodded. Already he had begun to empty his mind, as he had learned to do long ago on the eve of battle, when the Parliamentarians and the Royalists were fated to meet at Worcester. Determination sharpened his instincts to a blade edge.
“Ready?” asked Tom.
Wesley made the sign of the cross.
Caitlin drew up on the black stallion. Bright hope danced in her eyes. “Luck be with you, Wesley,” she said.
The bodhran drummed a rolling tattoo. Pipes whistled in crescendo and peaked at an earsplitting note.
Casting one last look at Caitlin, Wesley plunged into the forest. Sharp rocks cut into his feet. Thorny branches whipped past his face. And from behind, drawing closer, sounded the dread thunder of pursuit.
A hand ax sailed by, slicing the air dangerously close to his ear. “Jesus!” Wesley gasped.
The path rose steeper, littered with stones. Ahead loomed the alderwood branch that would test his agility.
He felt himself flagging, the agony in his bleeding feet rising like fire through his body. The branch drew closer…unassailable, impossibly high. A mere length of wood became the measure of his character.
He could not leap it.
In his mind’s eye he saw himself slamming into the stout wood, dropping like a wounded deer, entangled in brambles and thorns. He would forfeit all, lose Caitlin and Laura.
The pain of that thought lashed at him like a spiked whip. And then a flash of blinding light cleaved through his consciousness. He was lost, sucked into a burning white nothingness.
Cantering along with the pursuing warriors, Caitlin felt fear pressing at her. Wesley had reached the limit of his strength; she could tell from the labored movements of his powerful legs and the loud sound of his breathing. She thanked God he was fleeter than any of the warriors, even Conn who won all the foot races at Beltane.
But Wesley left bright smudges of blood in his path. Winded and bleeding, the wound on his shoulder still puffy and livid, he would never make that jump.
When he was several feet in front of the branch, she noticed a change in him. His breathing evened out and he said something. His legs coiled and extended. In a leap that would have daunted the most gifted of athletes, he sailed over the branch. Caitlin blinked and shook her head. For a moment, it had seemed that a bright glow moved with him, gilding the leaves and branches in his path.
Tom cantered up beside her. “Saints of heaven, have you ever in your born and natural life seen the likes of that?”
Wesley landed on the path. He made no sound as his bloodied feet struck the rocky ground.
Tom lowered his voice. “Caitlin, did you see…?” For once, the bard of Clonmuir was at a loss for words.
Rory loosed a bellow and plunged after his quarry. He let fly with his spear. Without looking back, Wesley ducked. He was a man possessed by some demon and yet divinely protected; he was wild and fey, no quarry of mortals. Again Caitlin sensed some strangeness about him and at first she could not place it. And then she realized. As Wesley ran, his feet seemed to skim the ground; his passing did not stir a single leaf or branch.
“Faith, he’s not clear in his head,” Tom said wonderingly.
Awe shone in the warriors’ eyes. Liam chewed his thumb against evil. The back of Caitlin’s neck prickled. Some unnatural spirit had taken hold of Wesley. Like Ruath of legend, he had harnessed an invisible wind horse.
The race continued another quarter mile. Wesley possessed a surging power that daunted his pursuers and baffled his observers. He seemed more than human as he dodged, ducked, and vaulted the obstacles without slackening his pace, and sped to the end of the course.
As he approached the fluttering pennon that marked the end of the gauntlet, Wesley sensed that something extraordinary had happened. The blinding whiteness of oblivion deepened to the shades of reality. The pain rushed back, screaming through his chest and shooting up his legs. With amazement he realized that the murderous course lay behind him.
He stopped at the pennon, grasped the pole, and fell to his knees. His hand came up to touch his hair. The braids lay neatly in place.
“You made it,” cried Tom, trotting up on his pony. “Saints be praised and sinners be damned, you did it, lad!”
“You’re a true champion,” Curran Healy crowed.
The sweat crawled in rivulets down Wesley’s face and back and shoulders. “No, Curran,” he said. “I…” He accepted a flask from Brigid and took a drink, then spat it out. “Water? By God, what must a man do to get beer?”
The girl handed him a second flask. “Tickle your throat with this, sir,” she said, her face wreathed in smiles.
Wesley drained the flask, then turned to Caitlin, who had ridden up on the black. “I have the oddest feeling that it was not my doing.”
He heard a nervous edge to her laughter as she tossed her head. “And who then did every last one of us watch moving like the Second Coming through the woods?”
Before Wesley could answer, Rory Breslin stepped forward, tugging at his gorget and puffing with exertion. “Never in my born days have I seen the like.”
“I see the hand of a wise and just God in this,” Seamus declared. “He’s one of us, else he’d not have survived.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Rory.
Wesley sent him a lopsided grin. “Yes, that I’m mortal, after all. The Fianna asks much of a man.”
“I was speaking of the poetic composition.” Slipping into Irish, Rory said, “The body might be fit—though I hold certain parts of it in grave doubt—but what of the mind and tongue?”
Still in the grip of pain and guilt, Wesley reached for more beer.
“Is it true he must make songs and recitations in Irish?” Curran asked worriedly.
“Aye,” said Tom Gandy. “So it be written.”
The large party started back toward the stronghold. Clearing his throat, Wesley hesitated. Rory glared at him.
“Nature’s call.” Wesley jumped down a slope to the shelter of the bushes.
“Me, too.” Rory joined him.
Wesley rolled his eyes. “Will you not trust me to take a piss?”
“After what I saw today, I’d sooner trust the Bad One himself.” Rory whistled through his teeth as he unlaced his trews.
Wesley couldn’t help himself. After all his bold talk, Rory Breslin invited attention. Those who bray loudest usually had the least to bray about.
Wesley blinked. His jaw dropped. For the boastful Irishman had a member that made a full-grown bullock’s look like a lapdog’s.
Wesley glanced away quickly. “Christ, no wonder you’re not married,” he muttered.
Rory chuckled. In Irish, he said, “You’ll not keep her happy for long with that.”
Filled with a long-denied yearning for retribution, Wesley took his time lacing his trews.
As he did so, he said in flawless Irish, “Pardon me, a chara. But I’m after thinking that ’tis not the size of the weapon that matters, but the fury of the thrust.”
* * *
A ceremonial hush closed over the assembly in the hall. Flanked by Seamus and Tom, Caitlin sat at the round table. She tensed with anticipation, her nerves burning and her heart beating fast.
The last phase of the initiation was crucial. A warrior could not be accepted until he had proven the power of his mind as well as that of his body.
Seamus toyed with the ends of his beard. “Sure I’d like to see the man become one of us. But the poor soul doesn’t know the Irish.”
Rory took a long drink of his poteen and chuckled richly. “I’d not be after worrying myself on that, Seamus. Hawkins has the touch of the green on him.”
A sadness welled up in Caitlin. She, too, wanted Wesley to succeed. How simple it would be if he gave his whole heart to Ireland. Then she would be free to open her soul to him as a wife should do.
Then she would be free to love him.
But John Wesley Hawkins was a born Englishman with no talent for the Irish. She felt the melancholy conviction that, after tonight, he would leave her. And she would be left with bittersweet memories of a love that she had been too stubborn, too proud to reach out and grasp with both hands.
The main door banged open to the gathering evening. Twilight had turned the world blue and cold. The distant bleating of Mudge’s flock of black-faced sheep sounded with the noise of the battering sea and the song of the wind.
Wesley appeared in the doorway. The hush in the hall deepened. Caitlin caught her breath.
The torchlight magnified his size. He was, in that breath-held moment, bigger than a legend, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, moving with clean-limbed grace down the length of the hall. He gave no sign that his torn feet pained him. The subtle surge of his ropy muscles beneath a loose white tunic drew the eye and held it captive.
His red hair, freed of the braids, fanned out in a magnificent mane around a face that, once glimpsed, could never be forgotten. The austere lines of nose and cheekbones were softened by his wide, full-lipped mouth. His eyes possessed hidden depths that urged a woman to plumb his soul and discover the miracles hidden there.
Caitlin felt the secret woman inside her stir to life. The ancient believer wanted to run forward and embrace the approaching man, to mesh herself, body and soul, with his sumptuous handsomeness and extraordinary strength.
His soft leather knee boots scuffed lightly against the flagged floor. The simple costume of tunic and trews, his waist cinched by the wide belt, gave him the look of a postulant about to take vows.
As indeed he had, Caitlin remembered with a jolt of discomfort. She pictured him lying prostrate before an altar lit by candles. And said a silent, shocked word of thanks that he had not found a vocation.
He reached the table and went down on one knee before her. Despite the obeisance, Caitlin could detect nothing even remotely humble in the man bowed down before her.
Following the dictates of tradition, she said, “Rise and tell us the poems of the ancients.” She spoke in the Irish tongue and did not expect him to understand the words.
He straightened. She fought to keep her face expressionless, but the emotions shining in his eyes made indifference impossible.
What did he see when he looked at her?
God, I love her so.
He had whispered the words like a prayer in the chapel.
Now his eyes spoke the same message to her.
Her woman’s heart heard and believed. A beautiful smile softened her lips. Wesley’s answering smile warmed her heart.
“If I may begin,” he said.
Her spirits dropped, for he spoke in English. In the language of her enemies. She forced herself to nod.
He took a step backward. His gaze moved over the entire assembly. His presence filled the room like firelight.
Wesley began to speak.
Beautiful Irish words flowed like warm honey from his throat. Every syllable, every inflection, every roll of the tongue sang like the wind through the vales of Connemara, like the cry of a bird over the heaths, like the chiming of distant church bells.
“He would have made a good priest,” Tom whispered.
The entire assembly sat spellbound by his mastery, by the long grave looks he sent about the room, by the vibrating timbre of his voice.
The voice of Wesley speaking Irish, sounding like an ancient Celt.
“Faith, I’ll be out of a job,” Tom muttered.
Wesley told of battles won and fortunes lost, of strong women and valiant men. Of a love that was as bright and deep as the very soul of Eireann.
When the recitation ended on a vibrant, irresistible note, grown men wept. Women sighed and lifted their eyes to heaven.
“How the devil did you learn our tongue?” Conn asked wonderingly.
Wesley’s unfocused stare fixed itself on the low-burning fire, as if he were looking into the very distant past. “I was fostered with Irish monks at Louvain. They put me to work at the presses, printing works in Irish that had been banned here.” His shoulders drooped a fraction of an inch. “I must go, my friends. This day has taken the heart out of me.” He left the hall amid a babble of amazement.
Scarcely aware of herself, Caitlin rose from the table. Tom said something but she didn’t hear. The lodestone of Wesley’s magnetism drew her inexorably from the hall.
Unashamed, she opened the door to their chamber and stepped inside.
* * *
He stood warming his hands at the brazier and did not turn or acknowledge her approach. His head was bent, his face grave and unreadable. Yet still that terrible, beautiful glow hovered around him, illuminating the red-gold sheen of his hair and the quiet majesty of his form.
Full of awe and longing and fear, Caitlin stepped up beside him. He made no reaction; it was as if the trials of the day had drained his energy and Caitlin’s constant refusals had sapped his spirit. Aye, for months he had endured her scorn, had forgiven her distrust, had accepted her condemnations.
She prayed she had not come too late.
In silence, she went and filled a basin with water and healing herbs, setting it on the floor in front of him.
“You’ll be wanting to bathe your feet,” she murmured.
He lifted one brow in faint surprise, then lowered himself to a stool. He reached for the laces of his boot.
She put her hand on his wrist. “No. Let me.”
The eyebrow went up a notch, but he shrugged and settled back while she removed his boot and eased his feet into the water. Her fingers moved gently over the tender and broken flesh. She winced as she remembered his wild race through the woods.
“Were you put through the ordeal, too?”
“Of course.” She kept her gaze focused on the basin. “But for me—for all of us—it was different. There were allowances that weren’t extended to you.”
“Because I’m English.”
“Aye.”
He stood, wiping his feet on a towel and then going to the window, gazing out at the night. Caitlin studied his broad back, the ruddy hair curling over his neckline, the tense pressure of his hand on the embrasure.
Oh, Wesley, am I too late?
She approached him softly, hoping he would turn, hoping he would smile. And then, for the first time since a wish made on a wild rose had summoned him, she reached out.
Her arms went around him from behind. She rested her cheek against his back, hard the sharp intake of his breath and the forceful beating of his heart.
A hundred times he had begged her to let him love her.
A hundred times she had denied him.
Now the asking was up to her.
She did not know where to begin. And then she remembered his recitation in the hall, the simplicity of words sprung from a yearning heart a thousand years old. “‘His touch did enslave my soul and did gild my heart with splendor…’”
He turned slowly, and his hands came up to grip her shoulders. “Caitlin…?”
A smile hovered tentatively about her lips. “‘Come, my love,’” she recited, “‘move soft with me, to where the wild birds call…’”
“‘…and the land reaches out to kiss the sea,’” he finished, his voice quiet and deep with wonderment.
Caitlin wound her arms around his neck and drew his head close to hers. “Aye, you are the sea, my Wesley,” she whispered. “As terrible and deep and beautiful as the sea struck by God’s own hand. And so here I am, coming to you, asking you…”
“Asking what?” Anger flashed in his eyes. “My God, woman, what more can I give you?”
She raised up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his cheek. “I can only hope I’m not too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To tell you that I love you.”
A sound of joy and pain and yearning burst from him. He swept her up into his arms and laid his lips on hers. They shared a deep, open-mouthed kiss, and the taste of him flooded her, probed her soul with fingers of light.
Caitlin wanted to whisper the words that were in her heart, but this was not a moment for talking. It was instead an eternity of light and darkness, a timeless moment when all things became clear.
Desire poured like warm rain through her. An answering passion flared in Wesley; she felt the bright heat emanating from his skin.
Of one heart, one soul, and one accord, they shed their clothing and stood bathed in the low golden light of the brazier.
Wesley’s eyes adored her; his tender regard transported her to a realm where the past was forgotten, the future a golden promise.
“You make me feel like a wild spirit who’s found a home,” he whispered. He covered her breast with his hand. Her flesh sprang to vivid life, and she stepped into his caress, a begging sound escaping her lips and a heady throb of rapture moving through her.
“Wesley.” She murmured his name between tastes of his lips, his throat, his shoulders. “You once said you would write poetry on my skin.”
His smile moved against her temple. “Are you asking me?”
She rested the palms of her hands on his slim, hard hips. “No, I’m begging you.”
He pulled her into his arms. She reveled in his crushing embrace, in the hungry, urgent kisses he rained over her mouth, her throat, her breasts. She loved the roughness of it, the frank lust barely tempered by tenderness. Her old dreams of a stiff, courtly lover fled before the storm of his passion. This was what she wanted, what the woman inside her craved—to be swept away on a whirlwind.
She inhaled his scent; he smelled of the woods at midnight, of heather soap, and of mysterious essences unique to him alone.
He laid her on the bed linens and held back a moment, struggling visibly for control, and then he came to rest beside her. His eyes contained depths of wonder and desire and uncertainty. His hands beguiled her flesh with caresses as soft as the passing wing of a moth. His touch brought her to a state of unbearable sensitivity.
“Caitlin, agradh.” The Irish sounded mellifluous on his tongue, strange and yet wholly right. “’Tis a miracle that you have come to me at last.”
She twined her fingers in his hair. “The miracle happened ages ago when I held a rose and wished for you, and you came to me.”
“Sometimes I think I was sent.”
She held very still for a moment, wondering at his words. “Magic or happenstance,” she said, “it matters not.” And then she touched him, marveling at the way his flesh heated and leapt to life under her questing hand.
He made a strangled sound in his throat. “Jesus! Slow down, woman!”
She laughed in delight and slowed, but did not stop her caresses. “Am I a bother to you?”
He rose up on his knees. “Yes, by God, and I love you like this. Brazen and lusty and honest. But wasn’t it you who begged for poetry?”
She nodded, staring at the languid play of fire glow over his body.
“Good,” he said, “because the inspiration is on me.”
His large rough hands moved over her breasts and belly and hips. She arched upward into his embrace, reaching, clinging, breathless with wanting him. His mouth followed the path of his hands, delving into warm secret places, and Caitlin was lost, no longer aware of anything beyond the undefined promise of the man wrapping her in his soft spell. She whirled like a grain of sand in an hourglass, spinning inexorably toward warmth and completion.
“Wesley,” she gasped.
Her breath fanned the passion flaming through him. He felt open and raw, his nerves ragged with tension. He was not accustomed to feeling so intensely, so deeply. To loving so desperately.
He told her so in English and then in Irish. He told her with his hands and with his lips. And after a while, they spoke a secret lover’s language that neither remembered learning.
He had looked at her a thousand times, and yet her eyes never ceased to startle him. The amber depths held the glow of sunshine rippling through a field of ripe wheat.
Adoration flowed through him, as warm and slow moving as a river in high summer.
“I love you.” His hand traced the line of her thigh, from the knee upward, to find her flesh softened and ready.
“I love you,” he said again and surged against her, burning for her but aware every moment that she was fragile, that he did not want to hurt her.
His kisses fell like soft rain upon her upturned face. He pressed himself into her moist cleft, and then deeper still to the silken depths that embraced him with a pulsing heat.
She made a small sound in her throat. He moved to pull back, but she arched toward him, her hands clutching his shoulders and her lips reaching for his.
Her sweet sigh gusted over him like a blessing. He felt her rising, saw her eyes flutter shut, saw her lips part in surprise and delight.
Her rapture was a subtle rhythm that probed an answering throb in him. A vast pulse of bliss ran through his body, and he spent himself with a feeling of utter contentment. Release had claimed his body, but, like sunlight stealing through the greenwood vales of Connemara, Caitlin MacBride had invaded his soul. He had been transformed, linked heart and mind to his lovely Irish warlord.
He kissed her long and hard and tried to beat back the thoughts that came upon him, thoughts of the betrayal he must commit before dawn broke over the horizon.
He should tell her.
Tell her he intended to give Clonmuir horses to Titus Hammersmith.
She would freeze her heart to him more quickly than a sudden frost. If he explained his plan to thwart the Roundheads, she might forgive him. But, as the MacBride, she would insist on participating. And that he could not let her do. The mission was too dangerous. He had not won her heart only to lose her in battle.
He would act in secret with the men who were now loyal to him. Caitlin need never know the horses had disappeared in the first place.
He need never test the fragile bond of their new love.
For Laura, he must betray Caitlin just one more time.
She looked at him through half-lidded eyes, a slumbrous smile of contentment soft upon her lips. “That was splendid. Poetry, it was.”
Fatigue spread through him. The day had been long, the trial arduous and emotionally draining. Tomorrow would bring more trials, he thought, kissing a curl of golden hair at her temple. He shaped his body around hers and marveled at the fact that he could not remember sleeping any other way.
He had come a long way from his hanging at Tyburn Tree. But if tomorrow went as he’d planned, he would soon be home. Like the folding wings of an angel, sleep closed over him.
Caitlin felt him relax in her arms. “I love you,” she whispered, knowing she had spoken too late, for he was oblivious to her pledge. But she didn’t mind, for they had all their tomorrows ahead of them.
And tomorrow she would stare into his deep, mysterious, shadowy eyes and tell him a hundred more times that she loved him.
But in the morning he was gone.