Anne Perry's Silent Nights_ Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries - Anne Perry [69]
His face filled with pity. “I know, my dear, but she is asking more than you can do, more than anyone can.”
She tightened her fingers on his arm. “What, Father? I can’t even try if I don’t know what it is.”
He gave a deep sigh. “Seven years ago there was another storm, like this one. Another ship was lost out in the bay; it too was trying to beat its way around to Galway. That night too, there was just one survivor, a young man called Connor Riordan. He was washed ashore half dead, and we took him in and nursed him. It was this time of the year, a couple of weeks before Christmas.” He blinked hard, as if the wind were in his eyes, except that he had his back to it.
“Yes?” Emily prompted. “What happened to him?”
“The weather was very bad,” Father Tyndale went on, speaking now as if to himself as much as to her. “He was a good-looking young man, not unlike this one. Black hair, dark eyes, something of the dreamer in him. Very quick, he was, interested in everything. And he could sing—oh, he could sing. Sad songs, all on the half note, the half beat. Gave it a kind of haunting sound. He made friends. Everyone liked him—to begin with.”
Emily felt a chill, but she did not interrupt him.
“He asked a lot of questions,” Father Tyndale went on, his voice lower. “Deep questions, that made you think of morality and belief, and just who and what you really were. That’s not always a comfortable thing to do.” He looked up at the sky and the shredded clouds streaming across it. “He disturbed both dreams and demons. Made people face dark things they weren’t ready for.”
“And then he left?” she asked, trying to read the tragedy in his face. “Why? Surely that wasn’t a bad thing? He went back home, then probably out in another ship.”
“No,” Father Tyndale said so quietly the wind all but swallowed his words. “No, he never left.”
She crushed on the fear rising inside her. “What do you mean? He’s still here?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Manner … what kind of manner?” Now that she had asked, she did not want to know. But it was too late.
“Over there.” He lifted his hand. “Out towards the point, his body’s buried. We’ll never forget him. We’ve tried, and we can’t.”
“His family didn’t … didn’t come and take his body?”
“No one knew he was here,” Father Tyndale said simply. “He came from the sea one night when every other soul in his ship was lost. It was winter, and the wind and rain were hard. No one from outside the village came here during those weeks, and we knew nothing of him except his name.”
The cold was enlarging inside her, ugly and painful. “How did he die, Father?”
“He drowned,” he replied, and there was a look on his face as if he were admitting to something so terrible he could not force himself to say it aloud.
There was only one thought in Emily’s mind, but she too would not say it. Connor Riordan had been murdered. The village knew it, and the secret had been poisoning them all these years.
“Who?” she said softly.
He could not have heard her voice above the wind in the grass. He read her lips, and her mind. It was the one thing anyone would ask.
“I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I’m the spiritual father of these people. I’m supposed to love them and keep them, comfort their griefs and heal their wounds, and absolve their sins. And I don’t know!” His voice dropped until it was hoarse, painful to hear. “I’ve asked myself every night since then, how can I have been in the presence of such passion and such darkness, and not know it?”
Emily ached to be able to answer him. She knew the subtle and terrible twists of murder, and how often nothing is what it seems to be. Long ago her own eldest sister had been a victim, and yet when the truth was known, she had felt more pity than rage for the one so tormented that they had killed again and