Sing Me Home by Lisa Ann Verge Page B

She did not regret kissing him like that.
    “What does Arnaud mean," she stuttered, brushing the dirt of her tunic to avoid Colin's eye, "about being safe from the English in Kilcolgan?"
    "The English have a custom." Humor lingered in his voice. "All comers to their fairs are given protection from arrest for previously committed crimes."
    "Crimes, yes." She avoided Matilla's amused eye as she passed by. "It's lucky that you’re here then, living and breathing, after what you did. What were you thinking, wearing a bard’s robes and putting a curse on an Irishman who was sitting in the room?”
    “That Irishman and I have an old grievance.”
    “Did he cheat you out of your wagers in a fight? Steal the heart of a woman you had your mind set on?”
    His smile flickered. “Jealousy becomes you, though there be no reason for it, a stóirín .”
    My treasure. She pretended not to hear him. She’d never been anyone’s only treasure, and she doubted she ever would.
    “Some time ago,” he said, “O’Kelly chose the English over the Irish for his own profit. He needed to be reminded that some people haven’t forgotten what he’s done.”
    Maura knew little of the fighting between the Irish and the English except that it seemed to be going on all the time. “O’Kelly isn’t the only Irishman who’s in league with the English.”
    “He’s the one that mattered to me, and my family.”
    “So now you tell me you have a family who holds grievances with Irish chieftains.”
    “Having a family,” he said, “comes with obligations. Something you might measure against the weight of that little ring of yours.”
    She dropped her gaze to her ring, then hid it in the folds of her tunic. Back in Tuam, he’d spoken to her gently about her foolish hunt for her mother, more gently than the Abbess ever did, more honestly than the Abbess, too. But somehow that made her shame at her own ignorance only deeper.
    So she changed the subject. “Do you realize how you had everyone worried? I’d thought for sure that O’Kelly had run you through with his sword and left you bleeding to death in the rushes.”
    “The only injury I suffered,” he said, patting his mouth with the back of his hand, “was a bruised lip.”
    “I think you enjoy fighting.” She remembered his bloody grin and the light in his eye whenever an opponent approached. “Sometimes I think you’ve got your mind set on getting yourself killed.”
    “Would you miss me, if I did?”
    Yes.
    During the few days he was away she’d missed him sorely. He confused her with his kisses and then his coldness, his whispered words and then the way he set her aside. Had any man come to the kitchen doors of the convent acting like this, she would have had nothing to do with him. She’d have dismissed him and forgotten him the minute his shadow slipped away from the door.
    But she was changing in ways she didn’t understand. She felt it in the marrow of her bones. She used to mark the roll of her days by the clang of church bells, and now she hadn’t been to Mass in weeks. Back in the convent, she’d rarely walked farther than the hundred yards to the village and back, and now she measured her days by how many miles they’d put behind them. She’d been so afraid of all the uncertainties of the world when she first considered this path. She thought she’d miss the sound of stew bubbling in the pot over the hearth fire, or the scent of gravy simmering. She’d thought she’d always be cold on the roads without the warmth radiating from the stones, or she’d be hungry so far from a well-stocked larder. The truth was the exercise brought her to the pot with an edge to her appetite that made any plain roadside soup taste like a meal fit for kings. Every new road brought new music, for the sounds of the kitchen had been replaced by the sound of the wind in the trees, and Padraig’s piping, and Matilda’s hearty laughter, Mudman’s silly riddles, and the anticipation