Nobody bothered to point out that Brainard himself was playing in a strange city, for cash.
“C’mon, Acey,” said Waterman. “Let’s go, match tomorrow.”
“Match every damned day!” Brainard snapped. “They think we’re machines, use us however it suits ’em—which means scramble for every dime in sight—and we’re supposed to turn out and bow and grin. And never lose. All so Champion can make speeches and ride in parades. Well, I ain’t playing tomorrow, that’s it.”
“C’mon, Acey.” Waterman practically lifted him from his chair.
“Harry knows better.” Brainard waggled his finger at us as Waterman pulled him to the door. “His brother skips practice or shows late for a train, what happens? Nothing! But you heard him today. He’ll keep my money if I so much as say something he don’t care to hear. Is that how gents go about their sport? Harry knows—” The closing door cut him off.
Andy and I looked at each other. “What do you make of it?” I said.
“Jealous, mainly. Acey figures it should be his time on top.”
I nodded. “But something else is bugging him, too.”
“I think the same,” said Andy. “But I don’t know what it could be.”
This time she opened the door readily. “Hello, Samuel,” she said matter-of-factly, as if I dropped by every night at ten. “I’m missing Tim and feeling alone in this big house. I’m glad for your company.”
“Are your boarders still away?”
“Yes, it happens sometimes. They’ll be back tomorrow night, I believe.”
“And Timmy?”
“Tim also. Would you like tea?”
She took me to her kitchen, where I sat next to an iron wood stove. Pans were suspended overhead. I watched as she prescalded a teapot and added three spoonfuls of black tea to water.
“One for the pot,” she said. “The Irish always make it the same—strong enough to trot a mouse on, Father said.”
While it steeped, she showed me her tea cozy; it was white with blue embroidered flowers and had come over with the family, one of the few possessions she had from that distant life.
I watched her graceful movements. The oil lamp in the room made her skin almost amber. As she pushed strands of hair back from her cheek I realized I didn’t even know what her bare arms looked like; I had never seen them. God, what a repressed age.
“You’re lovely,” I said.
She did not reply, her head bent as she poured milk into cups and then added the tea. My vision was caught by her thick, luxuriant black hair, then by the flash of metal on her hand.
“Let me see your ring,” I said, taking her hand. I bent and looked closely at the design. Worked into the worn silver, a heart was framed by two hands and topped by a crown. Her fingers trembled feather light in my hand; she withdrew them.
“It was from Colm,” she said softly. “I’m sorry for this morning. Your gift touched me, for a certainty, but . . .”
Yes?”
“Samuel, there are two doves on it.”
“And?”
She lowered her head. “Oh, this is so hard. Colm means ‘dove’ in Gaelic, Samuel.”
“I see.” I felt as if something had hit me. “Well, I’m sorry about that. Unfortunate coincidence.”
“There’s more to be told,” she said, “but I never thought I would.”
“Do you want to?”
“I think I must tell you.” Her eyes rose to mine, unfathomable as whorls of serpentine. “Some weeks after Colm died, there came a pale gray mourning dove. . . .”
It appeared on her windowsill each day and looked in at her, its shadings muted and delicate. She put crumbs out; they were not taken. She tried to coax it inside, but it stayed calmly where it was. The idea that it wanted something from her, or wanted her to understand something, began to haunt her.
“Then one day it was gone. It never came back. Another light in my life had gone out. I felt I’d failed the poor creature, as I’d failed Colm.”
“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t Colm die in the war?”
“Yes, but I didn’t stop him from going, don’t you see? I couldn’t hold him, even when I gave him my body—for which I believed God would surely punish me.”
“But if you loved him, and you did everything you could—”
“I know that now, Samuel, but then everything was so confused. Colm had been the whole of my world. For him to leave me forever, and then the dove, his namesake, to leave too. . . . Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“It devastated me again. Tim was still several months away. I was big as a cow, and hysterical. Mother took me to a spiritualist—”
“Was her name Clara Antonia?”
She looked at me quizzically. “How did you know?”
I tried to gather my thoughts. Somewhere a composite picture must exist. All I had were fragments. “Andy mentioned her,” I said.
“Oh, Andy. He and Brighid, always the practical ones. Twas Mother and me respected the Old Knowledge—we’d have burned as witches in other times.”
“What did Clara Antonia say?”
“That the dove was truly Colm, and that my suffering had brought him great distances. She said it was hard to believe he stayed as long as he had. The message he brought must have driven him through unimaginable hardship.”
“And could she tell you his message?”
She shook her head. “But he’d delivered it, she said, and I should search my heart, for it was there.”
“Did you?”
“Ah, God, I tried.” A tremor edged her voice. “Everything I seemed to receive involved Colm’s perishing, his being dead. It was too painful.”
The ghost figure of the soldier appeared in my mind, arm beckoning or pointing.
“I became frantic, thinking I’d failed yet again. I was desperate to try anything. So that when Fearghus and John O’Neill wanted to bring me here to start a new life, I insisted on journeying first to the ground where Colm fell.”
“To the battlefield?”
“In Maryland,
