Besieged

leaving Maguire's Ford, eh?'

'I'll stay unless I'm ordered to go,' the estate manager said. 'I don't know where the hell I would go anyways,' he admitted with a wry grin; then he sobered. 'But it will not be easy seeing her again.'

'Nay, I don't imagine it will,' the priest agreed, 'but ye'll do what ye must as ye did all those years ago, Rory Maguire, won't ye?'

Maguire sighed deeply. 'Aye,' he said, 'but then I'd do whatever I had to to please her, Father.'

The priest nodded, satisfied, and then draining his tumbler he stood up. 'I'll be on my way then. I've Vespers to oversee.' He set the crystal down on the sideboard. 'I'll be here to get ye through it all, Rory Maguire. God bless ye.' He made the sign of the cross over his host, and departed the little hall.

***

Rory Maguire sat staring into the fire. Jasmine was coming back to Maguire's Ford. He had fallen in love with her the moment he had first seen her in Dundeal, stepping gracefully down the gangway off the Cardiff Rose, on her husband's arm. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, then or since. She had taken that obsequious little royal estate agent, Eamon Feeny, quickly in hand. When they reached Maguire's Ford several days later, she learned Feeny had driven off the villagers because they were Catholics. Jasmine had dismissed him on the spot, and sent the vicious bastard packing back to Belfast.

But Eamon Feeny had returned several months later with evil in his black heart. He had attempted to kill Jasmine, but had murdered her husband instead. They had caught him that same day. Jasmine, fierce as any Celtic warrior, had hanged him on the spot. Only when the devil breathed his last did she collapse with her overwhelming grief. They thought she was going to die for she lay unconscious for several days. Then her servant, Adali, the Indian in his neat white turban, and the priest, her own cousin, had come to Rory. She was, they told him, calling out for her husband in her anguish and heartbreak; and they feared she would put herself into the grave unless she could be made to believe that Rowan Lindley came into her bed again.

He was shocked by their suggestion. It was bad enough the servant made it, but that the priest would condone such a thing! But they assured him that she would die otherwise, and perhaps she would anyway. Still, it was worth the chance they were all taking if they could save her. Rory Maguire had wrestled with his scruples,, but he had wanted her so desperately. He had known people, as well as creatures, who had willed themselves into the grave in grief. So he had slipped into the castle that night with the aid and complicity of his fellow conspirators. He had made tender love to the unconscious woman. Afterward, she fell into a deep and natural sleep. But he had gone on his way brokenhearted. Though Jasmine would now survive, she would have no knowledge of their single encounter. Nor was there any chance she would ever love him, or know how deeply he loved her.

It had been a terrible burden on his honest conscience all these years. The priest and Adali had borne the burden too, although it didn't really help him to know that. Their love for Jasmine had been of a different kind. His was the heaviest part of the guilt. He wondered what she would say if she ever learned that he had been her lover for that single hour. She would probably be horrified. He doubted her current husband would be too pleased either. Her ignorance had allowed him to remain in his family home, husbanding former Maguire lands all these years. Better she remain ignorant, and he behave like a man of fifty, and not some lovesick boy. Jasmine would never love him. It had not ever been meant to be. He knew it, and had long ago accepted it. The next few months, however, would be the hardest time of his life, but he would get through it. He had to-not just for himself, but for Jasmine too.

PART I

MAGUIRE’S FORD

SPRING 1630

“Drink isn’t the curse of the Iris. Religion is.”

– Kathleen Kennedy, marchioness of Hartford

Chapter 1

Lady Fortune Lindley drew her soft taupe wool cloak about her, and stared intently as the green hills of Ireland came slowly into view. The May wind was yet sharp, and ruffled the fur edging the hood of the garment against her face. Leaning against the ship's rail she watched as the early morning mists, like pale silver streamers, blew themselves out of existence, revealing a pale wash of blue-white sky. She wondered what Ireland would really be like, and if she would at last find love. Did love even exist for her?

Her gloved fingers tightened about the railing. What on earth was she thinking? Love? That sort of thing was for her mother, and for her sister, India. Fortune Mary Lindley was the practical one in the family. Her mother's history was both fascinating and appalling. Two husbands murdered, and one of them Fortune's own father. Her half-brother, Charlie, a royal bastard because her mother and the late Prince Henry had been lovers, but could never have wed because her own mother would have been considered a bastard by English royalty. In India, however, her mother had been a royal princess, courtesy of a grandmother who had been kidnapped, placed in a royal harem to bear the Indian emperor a child before being retrieved by her family, and sent back to her Scots husband.

And her own sister, India, who had attempted to elope with a young man, only to find the vessel upon which she was making her escape attacked and taken by Barbary pirates, had also ended up in a harem. Rescued, she had returned home enceinte with her Barbary master's child. Their stepfather had been furious, and had sent her up to the family's hunting lodge in the mountains to have the child. Fortune had gone with India to keep her company. The child had been taken from her sister upon its birth, and India had been married to an English milord. Love? Heaven forfend! She certainly didn't want her life filled with such melodrama!

Love was not practical. What a woman wanted was a pleasant man with whom she could live peaceably. He must be reasonably attractive, and have his own wealth, for she would certainly not share hers. That she would keep for her children. They would have their children at reasonable intervals. Two. A son to inherit his father's estate, and a daughter to inherit Maguire's Ford. It was the sensible thing to do. She hoped she would like Ireland, but even if she didn't, she would remain there. An estate of some three thousand acres was not to be sniffed at, and her mother's gift to her upon her marriage would make her not simply wealthy, but very, very wealthy. Wealth, she had observed, was far more preferable than bleak poverty.

'Are you thinking of William Devers?' her mother asked, coming to Fortune's side to look out over the water at the nearing land.

'I keep forgetting his name,' Fortune chuckled. 'William is not a name that is familiar to me, Mama.'