Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [41]
He came perilously close to hugging her, but her dignity was much too formidable for any such liberties. He settled for a broad smile and a delighted greeting. “A fine day to you,Mrs.Murphy, and aren’t we God’s favorite children?”
“You are, I’m sure, Father,” she said with no sign that she noticed his ebullience. “I’ll be leaving early this evening, Father, if you don’t terribly mind.”
“Oh, yes!” he cried. “Yes, you can go. It’s your daughter, isn’t it? I’ll be baptizing another soul for the parish soon, I’m sure, and God bless her and the child, too.”
Her nostrils thinned slightly at the indelicacy of a man referring to a woman’s lying-in, but she thanked him civilly.
“You are very welcome,” he said. “Go on now, I’m sure you’re eager to be by her side. I can watch the cake until it’s done, and feed myself, too.”
It was a measure of her concern for her daughter that she did not bridle at the suggestion. She left him with most particular instructions, which he promised to follow to the letter. By the time he had repeated them once, then again, the cake was done; she set it on the table to cool, hung up her apron with unruffled tidiness, and excused herself.
He went to bed that night a happy man, replete with cake and stew and the sweet savor of victory. In the morning, he thought, he would begin the next phase of his campaign: going from door to door and taking down the charms, and calling the rest of the strays back to the fold. He fell asleep with a smile on his face and a heart full of anticipation. It would be a glorious morning, and an even more glorious week, in which Ballynasloe at last, for the first time in its existence, became truly a Christian village.
IT WAS RAINING that Monday morning, with a raw edge to it that spoke all too clearly of winter. The hermit had been up all night burning the volumes of his sonnets—which served, quite incidentally, to keep him warm in the unexpected chill. Pegeen had brought his daily meal while he snatched a bit of sleep: he found the pail and the jar and the basket of bread and apples by the hearth when he woke. The bread and the stew were as substantial as ever, but the ale had fallen off dreadfully. It was thin and horribly bitter. He gagged on the first unsuspecting swallow, and spat it explosively into the fire. The flames hissed and glowed briefly green.
“William,” said a voice as sweet as honey in the comb. “William Thorne.”
He started at the sound of the name that he had left behind with the rest of his worldly life, and scowled as he spun. “My name is Brother Columbanus!”
“William Thorne,” said the uninvited guest. She was sitting on the bench by the wall. He had not heard her open or shut the door, which even after Pegeen’s ministrations had a noticeable squeak in the hinges. She was simply sitting there, smiling slightly, dressed in something shimmering and white.
He did not, except for the first fraction of a second, mistake her for an angel. Angels, as any hermit should know, had no gender. This was a female beyond any shadow of a doubt. She looked rather like Pegeen, in fact,with her hair as black as black ever was, and her skin as white as snow on the mountain, and her eyes the color of the sapphire that his lost beloved’s husband had given her on their wedding day.
That memory, once so piercingly painful, now barely rippled the surface of his calm. He knew his Plato; he was a Cambridge man. To the blurred and faded shadow that was Pegeen, this was the luminous reality. His memory of the yellow-haired Englishwoman had dwindled away to nothing. Before this vision of glory, he had forgotten even her name.
“William Thorne,” said the vision a third time, as if to seal the spell. “A good morning to you, and a fair meeting on this fine wild day.”
“Good—good morning,” the hermit stammered. He tried to scrape together the fragments of his dignity, but they were lost beyond recall. “How do you know my name? How did you get