“Lucan told me who my father really was—is. What he’d been accused of. He was kind to me, in his way.” Padraig vividly remembered sitting outside his own fishing hut that day in the frigid April wind, mending the net in his lap as if his life depended upon its completion in that moment, while the strange, proper, black-clad English knight had detailed the thing to him in a crisp, English tongue. Padraig remembered his shock. His anger. His initial resentment toward his father.
“And then Sir Lucan told me that, because me da and mam had married, I was Tommy’s only legitimate heir. That if anyone had a chance of winning Darlyrede from Vaughn Hargrave, ’twas I.”
“I can’t believe he would encourage you to come on your own into such a foreign, dangerous situation.” She seemed almost angered on Padraig’s behalf.
Padraig laughed. “Och, he didna. He told me to wait until he notified the kingof my coming.”
Beryl gave him that brief, rueful smile she held in reserve for when Padraig was doing something purposefully incorrect to serve hisown amusement.
“All your life, you had no idea,” she mused, “that your father was the third Baron Annesley.”
“Nae in a mad dream,” he said. “My father was Tommy Boyd, the hardiest Caedmaray man. He lived his life there as if he’d been born to it. Spoke the old tongue better than me grandda.”
“What happened to the man who turned him in? Dragan, I think you called him?”
“Aye, Dragan. He died that winter of the sweating sickness,” Padraig said, his jaw clenched. “I think he much have died happy, that he’d had his revenge on my da at last. Dragan’d been set on marrying me mother before Da cameto Caedmaray.”
“I’m sorry,” Beryl said.
He looked over at her. “None of your doing, lass.”
She was watching him closely now, almost as if she had something else to say, and soPadraig waited.
“Why did you come, though, Padraig? Really? Is it because you hope to inherit your father’s title?”
Now Padraig did look away, to the bare company of trees standing sentinel across the rushing brook. He barely noticed the white mass that was Satin, making his way stealthily across the boulders to explore that wooded darkness.
He spoke aloud his own deepest fear. “Do you think I’m nae capable of it?Of Darlyrede?”
“That’s notfor me to say.”
“My father has been wronged,” Padraig murmured at last. “He is a good man—I wish you knew him. If he never returns to Northumberland, if he has nae wish to, he doesna deserve to be remembered as amurderer.” He spat the absurdity from his lips. Then he looked at Beryl. “I’ll do whatever I must to bring him justice.”
She met his gaze evenly.“I understand.”
“Perhaps I’m a fool,” he said, suddenly self-conscious. He looked over at the ground near them and spied a bold red leaf tumbled there on the stiff breeze, leathery and moist from the rain. He picked it up and spun the stem between his fingers, watching the edges blur together. When he stopped he noticed the veiny pattern in the center: yellow-green, broken lines forming the symmetrical outline of a heartat its center.
He held it out toward Beryl suddenly.
Her delicate hand raised, hesitated, and then took hold of the leaf.
“But I believe that truth must always be spoken, even when it is of things that have long since passed,” he said. “For in that truth lies hope for the future.”
Beryl dropped her eyes to the miraculously random design in the center of the leaf, her perfect lips parted in wonder and surprise. When she looked back up, Padraig leaned his face toward hers.
She didn’t pull away as his lips brushed her mouth, and so Padraig brought his hand to the side of her face.
But she stopped him then, her fingers wrapping around his wrist.
“Padraig, look,” she whispered, her gaze focused on something over his shoulder.
He turned his head and saw the small figure of a child crouching at the edge of the wood, his little hand held out, as Satin crept toward him.
“One of Darlyrede’s?” he asked.
“I don’t think so—he’s not dressed as one of the village children.” She pulled away from him and stood, stepping around the oilskin toward the brook. “Hello, there! Hello! Is your mother with you?”
The boy’s head raised, and Padraig could see the surprise on his little oval face beneath his red hair from where he sat. Then the child skittered back into the shadows and was gone, leaving Satin standing in the berm between brook and forest, his tail slashing at the brisk breeze.
