Lamma's Night (anthology)

Lady of the Rock

Diana L. Paxson

'Like I was tellin' ye, Mistress Erne, there's not much left of the old place now—' Sean McMurtry's voice grated on the words. His son Luke hauled back on the reins and the pony halted.

My fingers clenched in the folds of my traveling cape as I looked at the ruins of Carricknahorna Hall, trying to reconcile these rotting timbers with my father's stories of the warm and welcoming house in which he had been born. Blackened timbers rose from a rubble of masonry, stark against the gray stone of the escarpment from which the place took its name. On my left, to the west, the land fell away into a tangle of wood and farmland, and to the east I could see the blue glitter of Lough Arrow through the trees.

My poor father, I thought with a sorrow worn to a dull ache in the months since I had left India, perhaps it was a mercy you died without seeing what has become of your home. But Carricknahorna was all he had possessed to leave me. With neither the beauty nor the wealth to attract a suitable husband even had I desired one, what was I to do now? I could feel McMurtry's concern like the slow warmth of a peat fire, and the hotter flare of his son's sympathy.

'The agent wrote there had been a fire,' I said carefully, using disciplines I had learned in the East to banish panic. 'But I thought that the rest of the house—'

McMurtry shook his head. 'It was seven years ago, and what the fire left the weather's done for. The coasts of Sligo can breed fierce storms, though you might not think it now with the sky so smiling. It's been over a dozen years since we've had such a wet summer, and if the harvest fails again—but such talk is foolish...' he broke off, shaking his head.

I looked at him and shivered. My father's fellow officers had joked about how cold they found Ireland when they came home on leave. I, who had been born and raised in India, felt chilly even in June. This land was green as India during the monsoons, but instead of the hot embrace of the sun, a veil of silver mist wrapped the land. I had come here eager to learn what mysteries that veil might conceal. But at this moment the cold was all I could feel.

'A blackguard the agent is not to have told ye, but he's not been here himself in many a year.' McMurtry grimaced. 'And you are the last of the Family. I suppose now you'll be selling off the land....'

I sighed. My friends in India had advised me to do so. I could have stayed there as part of the circle who were carrying on the work of Madame Blavatsky, but ever since I had read W.B. Yeats' first book of poems, I had been fascinated by the old lore of Ireland. He was a Sligo man himself, I had heard, and his writings filled me with a longing to learn about the magic of my own land.

He nodded to Luke, and the younger man began to rein the pony around. He was, I gathered, about my own age, with a shock of reddish-fair hair and bright blue eyes. But even if our stations in life had been the same, there was an innocence in his face that I had lost when my father died. In spirit, he was far younger than I.

'We'd best be getting back to the village,' his father said. 'Ye can sit snug by my fire until time for the Dublin train—'

I shook my head, for the money I had left would not keep me long in town, and besides, I was wearied of journeying. 'Is there no place here where I can stay?'

'There's no inn, and no gentleman's house I can take ye to, for Lord Skein's place is all closed up while he is in London, but—' he looked at me narrowly. 'Ye seem a brave lady, to have come all this way from India and have lived with those black savages they have out there.'

I thought of the wise brown face of my old teacher and suppressed an ancient exasperation at McMurtry's insular prejudice.

'There's the priest's house. It's on your own land, lady. Ye might stay there.'

I raised one eyebrow. My father had never mentioned this, but he had been sent away to school young and then joined the Army. 'What happened to the priest?'

'He... died,' said McMurtry, 'and we are a small place here, so the bishop has not sent us another man.'

'And why,' I went on, 'should I need to be brave?'

'Well—' he eyed me uneasily, 'There may be ghosts. Father Roderic was a strange man, always after digging up old stones. There've been some odd stories about the cottage since he was taken. But my old woman has kept the place dusted, and the roof is sound. And there are the books—he was a great reader of old tales and collector of dusty volumes. It seems a pity to have them mouldering away for lack of care.'

I grinned. When I was a child I had visited Madame Blavatsky's house, and heard spectral singing and seen spoons dance through the air. I did not think one Irish ghost would trouble me. And there were the books. I wondered how the old man had known the very thought of them would draw me, even if there had been anywhere else for me to go.

As we turned up the lane, another vehicle, a two-wheeled trap being driven far too quickly for the road, flashed in front of us. Luke McMurtry hauled back on the reins, swearing, and the old horse half reared in the traces.

'An' the same to you, me bucko, if ye'll not learn to give way when your betters have the road!' The driver of the trap drew breath to continue, then stopped, having noticed me at last.

'This is Miss Erne, Bailey, and I'm thinking that even the lackey o' an English lord'll acknowledge that she is your better, and grant her the right o' way!' Young McMurtry's voice thinned, then steadied as the other man, a thickset fellow with a brush of black hair and a striped scarf tucked into the neck of his tweed jacket flushed red.

'Ma'am—' he lifted his hat to me. Luke slapped the reins on the pony's neck and we trotted smartly past.

'And who might that be?' I asked as we left the stranger behind.

'A da—' the lad recalled to whom he was speaking, blushed in turn, and tried again, 'a dirty, misbegotten rascal—'