Chapter Three #2
As Donal and Seamus stamped into the brogues they’d left behind on the boat when they’d gone into the water, she steeled herself
and looked down at Paddy again. Dark as it was, she could see that his mouth was slack, his skin the gray white of death.
Brushing her hand over Paddy’s now-sightless eyes, she caught her breath as she realized she had just closed them forever.
When he’d stepped aboard the Merrow earlier that evening he’d had no idea that this would be the result, that his life would end, that he would never go home again.
Would the rest of them make it home? Would she?
Suddenly the small stone cottage on the outskirts of Bundoran where she’d grown up with Granny and Glenna, her younger sister, seemed impossibly dear.
Would her family wait in vain for her to come home?
Please God, no.
With a lump in her throat, she said a silent goodbye to her childhood friend.
“Rynn. Here.” Voice ragged with grief, Fergus passed her a blanket.
“Instead of my coat,” Donal said, and she nodded. The temptation to shed her sodden garments in the blanket’s favor was almost
overwhelming, but with so many men around and no knowledge about what was to come—no. Anyway, her hands were too cold to work
the tiny buttons, and there was no time. Shivering, she wrapped the blanket around herself and was thankful for what protection
it provided as the men took them alongside the Reaper.
Moments later, ropes had been thrown down and the Merrow was secured to the trawler. Positioned between them and the ocean, the bigger boat now took the brunt of the wind and waves.
Cocooned in the tattered blanket, blood rinsed from her person as well as she could manage, dripping skirts wrung out and
hair twisted into a knot at her nape, Rynn watched uneasily from what had once been Paddy’s seat as a man descended the ladder
to jump aboard the Merrow.
“O’Reilly.” Voice deep and curt, the man greeted Seamus, who’d caught his arm to steady him as the boat lurched with the force
of his landing. He was a big man, well north of six feet tall and broad in his black fisherman’s coat, with a heavy beard
and a knit cap pulled low over his forehead. More than that, it was too dark to tell.
There was, however, little doubt in Rynn’s mind that this was, indeed, the Maguire.
His air of command, the deference shown him by Seamus, and the fact that at least four men now watching from the trawler’s rail had rifles trained on the occupants of the currach and appeared ready to fire on them at need told her everything she needed to know.
“Major.” With that, Seamus confirmed what Rynn had already guessed. Though promotions through the ranks for Irishmen were
rare—Donal, Seamus, Fergus and Paddy had remained privates all—Maguire had been an exception, and each rise had been touted
with pride by the local newspaper.
“Who’s that?” Maguire’s gaze lit on Paddy’s still body. The moon sailed out of hiding just then, spilling its light over the
currach and everyone in it.
“Paddy Colgan,” Seamus answered, while Fergus, having taken Rynn’s place at Paddy’s side, broke off in the middle of the Act
of Contrition he’d been muttering over the body to look up. Tears streaming down his cheeks gleamed in the moonlight. Under
Maguire’s frowning regard, he dashed a self-conscious hand across his eyes.
“Dead?” Maguire asked.
“He is,” Seamus replied.
Maguire grunted and cast an assessing look around that stopped on Rynn.
“You brought a woman into this bloody mess you’ve made?”
“Nobody brought me. I came,” Rynn said.
For a pregnant moment, Maguire’s eyes met hers.
“Then you’ve got about as much sense as the rest of these idiots, which put together is less than a bloody sheep’s.” With
that brutal pronouncement, which left her bristling right along with, she was sure, the men he disparaged, he dismissed her
by turning back to Seamus. “Where are the guns?”
Seamus hesitated.
Maquire said, “I’m going to tell you straight, you’ve two choices here.
You can give me the guns and come aboard my boat and pray I can get you out of this with your lives, or I can go on my way, and you can take your chances.
While you’re deciding, you should know that there’s a Royal Navy gunboat heading this way that’s already captured your supplier.
Last I heard of them, they weren’t in a mood to be gentle with whoever bought these guns. ”
“Haney’s been taken?” Seamus’s obvious alarm sent quivers of panic through Rynn, while Donal stiffened and even Fergus looked
around big-eyed, the prayers he’d been mumbling over Paddy dying on his lips.
“He has. A fortunate circumstance, if you think about it, because it might just give you time to get away. But only if you’re
smart—and quick.” His tone conveyed his conviction that they were neither.
“How do you know this? Any of this?” Rynn burst out. The key to what they should do next boiled down to a single question:
Could they trust him? If not, going aboard his boat was about as smart as trying to smuggle in the guns to begin with. All
right, maybe she agreed with him about that.
“Ah, that would be telling, now, wouldn’t it?” His eyes, disconcertingly colorless in the silvery light, met hers again. “Let’s
just say, a little birdie told me.”
Rynn’s lips thinned. “Christmas night seems an odd time to be out fishing.”
“Consider it your lucky day—or night.” Maguire looked around at the men. “I’m going to ask you one more time, where are the
guns?”
With the air of one having made up his mind, Donal put his hand on the oilcloth covering them. “Here.”
“Donal—” Seamus protested.
“We’ve no choice,” Donal replied.
“The Sullivans—”
“To hell with the Sullivans.” Donal stood up, careful to keep a hand on the cargo for balance as a particularly large wave set the Reaper to bobbing and sent a substantial ripple beneath the Merrow. “I’d rather be dealing with them later than a gunboat full of Brits now.”
“You know he’s right,” Rynn said to Seamus in an undertone when he still hesitated. She’d been settling disputes between the
pair of them since they were young. Brave and strong and enterprising as the cousins were, they could be impetuous to a fault.
Or, as her granny was wont to put it, they could be a right pair of sap skulls with seemingly half a brain between them.
Seamus slanted a reproachful look at her. He didn’t have to say aloud what he often complained of: You always take his side. Then he grimaced, and his gaze shifted to Donal.
“Have it your own way,” he said.
Maguire’s arm went above his head in a twirling gesture aimed at the men watching from the rail of the Reaper. Despite the distance, Rynn could almost feel the gunmen’s tension ease.
“Go on aboard, then,” Maguire said. “We need to be getting under way as quick as we can. That gunboat’s not far off.”
“Seamus. Donal.” Fergus crouched over Paddy, pulling one of the dead man’s limp arms around his shoulders and struggling to
get to his feet with his burden. “I could use some help here.” Unlike Fergus, who was undersized and thin, Paddy was—had been—barrel-chested
and stocky. Rynn’s heart broke as she remembered the unlikely pair when they were all children together, them a gang of four
inseparable boys with her, small but determined, tagging after them whenever and wherever she could. Until one day not long
after she turned sixteen, Donal looked at her in a different way and everything changed.
“Leave him where he is,” Maguire said as both Donal and Seamus moved to aid Fergus. “My men will see to him, do what needs
to be done. Go on aboard, the lot of you. There’s no more time to waste.”