“He’s gone fishing in deep waters,” Seamus said. “We don’t expect him back for a few days.”
May he drown and save me the trouble.
“The two of ye will stay at the castle until I can sort this out with your father,” Alex said. “We’ll go get Ùna and your things now.”
“I don’t know if she’ll come,” Seamus said. “Men frighten her. Best let me talk with her first.”
“I’ll bring my wife,” Alex said. “She’ll be able to persuade Ùna.”
“But ye promised ye would tell no one!” Seamus’s eyes were panicked. “Ye gave me your word.”
“All right, I won’t tell my wife just yet,” Alex said, putting his hand up to calm the lad. “Go home and talk to Ùna, and I’ll come get the two of ye after supper.”
With their father out to sea, waiting a couple of hours should make no difference.
CHAPTER 42
I must see to a matter with one of the tenants,” Alex said at the end of supper. He got up and kissed his wife’s forehead. “It shouldn’t take long, but don’t wait up.”
The wind swept over the tall grass, making it move like an amber sea, as Alex crossed through it in the growing darkness. Ahead of him, weak candlelight shone through the window of the small cottage at the edge of the sea. Sadness seemed to weigh down its sagging thatched roof.
Alex knocked on the cottage’s weathered door. When his knock was met by silence, he knocked again. “Seamus, it’s me, open up.”
Silence again. Unease settled in Alex’s gut. He gave them another moment, and then he opened the door.
Alex was a warrior, and he’d fought since he was almost as young as Seamus. And yet, he stood staring for a long moment at the chaos in the one-room cottage before he could take it in. Questions flooded his mind as his gaze traveled over the broken crockery strewn across the floor, the broken table and overturned benches, before coming to rest on the body.
Seamus’s father lay on his back in a pool of blood with a knife stuck in the middle of his chest.
The smell of burning herring finally penetrated Alex’s thoughts. As he crossed the small room to the hearth, he wrapped his shirt around his hand, then lifted the flaming pan from its hook over the fire and set it on the dirt floor. The pan hissed and smoked as he doused the flame with a jug of water that had miraculously survived the maelstrom.
Alex waved the smoke away from his face and looked about the cottage again. Mother, Mary of God, where were the children?
His heart missed a beat when he saw a still, bare foot under the edge of the bed. When he dropped to his knees amid the broken crockery, he saw a tangle of arms and legs under the bed. He prayed hard for a sign of life.
“’Tis safe to come out,” he said, speaking in a low voice. “It’s me, Alex.”
When Seamus’s head and shoulders popped out from under the bed, relief coursed through Alex’s body. He pulled Seamus out and held him on his lap as if he were a bairn Sorcha’s age.
Ùna rolled out from under the bed with a fire poker in her hand. The lass was covered in blood. When she saw Alex holding her brother, she blinked several times and then slowly dropped her arm with the poker to her side.
“I did it, not Seamus,” she said. “I killed him.”
“Ye had good cause, lass,” Alex said. “No one who knows what your father did to ye will blame ye.” Whether everyone would believe it was another question.
“I would die of shame if anyone knew,” Ùna said. “I don’t want anyone to know what he did. Not ever.”
Ùna had started shaking, and Alex did not have the heart to cause the lass any more suffering. He took a deep breath as it became clear what he would have to do.
“If you and your brother can pretend that none of this happened,” he said, “then no one need know that ye killed your father or why.”
Both of them nodded. Keeping secrets about what happened in this house was not new to them.
“I’ll take his body out to sea in his boat,” Alex said. “Fishermen are lost all the time. When he fails to return home in a week or two, folks will assume he drowned.”
Seamus and Ùna looked at Alex as if he were the second coming.
“Can ye clean up here while I’m gone?”
