Chapter Ten
“You’re bearing up like a true O’Brien, my dotey pet,” Granny whispered to Rynn as they joined the procession following Molly’s
coffin to her fresh-dug grave. Overhead, seabirds circled and dived, their cries as doleful as the assembled company. Underfoot,
the thick grass, worn down by several days of rain, was slick and treacherous. Black robe flapping in the wind, Father Doherty
led the way to what would be Molly’s final resting place high on the hillside behind the Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea,
where her funeral mass had just concluded. It was Wednesday, January 8, 1919, but there was no heart in anyone for celebrating
the turn of a new, war-less year. The atmosphere in Bundoran had never been so tense. Passions ran high. Tempers quivered
on a hair trigger. The death of Molly Kincaid and the uncertainty over the fate of the missing men of the Merrow had brought the forces of the Crown and the residents of the area into all-but-open conflict. “O’Briens have never lacked
for courage, and never will, come what may.”
Granny’s thin hand gripped Rynn’s arm for support.
Even through the wool of her loose black coat, Rynn could feel the strength in her gnarled fingers.
Nearing her seventy-fifth year, Granny was finding the climb arduous, although she’d never admit it.
A small woman even in her youth, she was tiny now—scrawny as a plucked chicken, was how she described herself—with her once-black hair turned stark white and her thick eyebrows gone gray and wild and fine wrinkles etched into her fair skin.
But her eyes that were so like Rynn’s own were as sharp as ever, as were her mind and especially her tongue.
The three of them—her sister, Glenna, was on Rynn’s other side—were somewhere in the middle of the throng of mourners, the
service having been attended by what seemed like the entire population of Bundoran along with many from the surrounding farms
and villages. The murder of a local young woman out on the Strand, with rumors running wild about who might be responsible,
brought forth the curious along with the sorrowful. Organ music from the church followed them up the hill, adding its own
lament to the shrieks of the birds and the weeping of the bereaved.
“I know, Granny.” Rynn spoke with only the merest trace of resignation. Being called a true O’Brien was the highest compliment
Granny could bestow, given that O’Brien was her matriarchal clan and the bloodline she honored. Never mind that Granny’s own
father’s name of Dolan or her married name of Shaughnessy—Cliona Shaughnessy she was—or the name of Carmichael bestowed by
their father on her two granddaughters, were the names of record. Having been lectured for as long as she could remember on
the superiority of the O’Brien bloodline, whose number included both the legendary Brian Boru and the great-great-grandmother
whose dark eyes and gift of the Sight Rynn was held by her to possess, Rynn accepted the compliment in the spirit it was meant.
“Sure, she’s bearing up. There’s no need for her to despair.
We don’t know that Donal was on Seamus O’Reilly’s boat.
Not for certain.” Her own whisper fierce, Glenna spoke across Rynn to their grandmother.
Unlike Granny, whose head barely topped Rynn’s shoulder, nineteen-year-old Glenna was only a little shorter than her sister.
She was blessed, moreover, with a curvier figure of which she was pardonably proud.
Her hair, currently twisted up in a high knot as was Rynn’s, was a soft auburn, her eyes were a bright hazel and her complexion warmly cream in comparison with the pale porcelain skin that, coupled with her raven hair, dark eyes, fine-boned features and tall, slender figure, had seen a much younger Rynn taunted by some of the village girls as the Banshee’s get.
In her first year as a teacher at the local school, Glenna was held to be quite the beauty in her own right.
She’d had several suitors although no one for whom she had expressed a particular preference.
Now that the war had taken the lives of half the men in her generation and left much of the other half, as she put it, “damaged,” she openly despaired that she would ever find “the one” as Rynn had found with Donal.
Both Granny and Glenna, in their own way, were doing their best to support her through what they thought were the soul-crushing emotions she was experiencing as she waited to learn Donal’s fate.
The Merrow had begun washing up, in pieces, not long after Paddy’s body had been pulled from the surf. As Seamus’s boat would hardly
go out without him, and him nowhere to be found, Seamus was counted most likely dead along with Paddy, who was presumed to
have been aboard. With Donal known to be close with Seamus, and Fergus known to be inseparable from Paddy, and all four missing
over the same time frame, they, too, were presumed to have been on the Merrow when it went down. The discovery that Paddy had been shot to death and the Merrow riddled with bullet holes was held by many, including the Brits, to be proof positive that Seamus and Paddy, at least, had
been aboard the boat the soldiers had exchanged gunfire with on Christmas night and thus guilty of gunrunning just as suspected.
The longer Donal and Fergus were missing the more likely it was thought to be that they had been a part of it, too. Although
no one could say precisely how, Molly’s brutal death was felt to tie into that as well.
And each side blamed the other for it all.
“Hush, now. We’re here to say our goodbyes to Molly.” Rynn quashed the conversation as they reached the growing semicircle
of friends, relatives, neighbors and acquaintances gathering around the grave.
Except for the expected weeping of the close relatives, the crowd went respectfully silent as the coffin arrived graveside
and Father Doherty began the usual prayers. Rynn lowered her head along with everyone else, but besides uttering the rote
responses she’d known from childhood she mentally removed herself from the proceedings.
Fear, grief, dread—they were only the most identifiable of the feelings that threatened to overwhelm her. The autopsies that
had seen the bodies held long after the proper time for burial, the ongoing investigations, the descent upon their town of
a small army of Crown forces, were a nightmare in and of themselves. The twin wakes, first for Paddy and then for Molly, with
their songs and weeping reminisces of the deceased, their covered mirrors and long tables laden with food and drink and small
rooms packed with black-shrouded mourners, had been an almost unbearable ordeal. She was barely eating, barely sleeping—but
she was functioning. Bearing up, as Granny said.
The sounds and sights around her no longer touched her as they should, and that would be, she knew, because she had deliberately
closed herself off from them. And she did that by focusing on small things, like how much the fluttering veils that covered
nearly all the women’s heads including her own looked like blackbirds taking wing. Or how worn many of the women looked—was
she, too, so pale and thin, with haunted eyes and a tight mouth?—and how shabby were their clothes. The war had left its mark
on the men as well. Gaunt, with hardened faces and twitchy hands, those who’d newly returned from the fighting were easy to
separate from the rest. As for the others . . .
Her wandering gaze hit on Owen Maguire and stopped short.
Somber in a black overcoat over a tweed suit, his height making him impossible to overlook, he stood among the mourners a short distance away.
His hat was in his hand, his dark head was bowed and, unlike most of those around him, he looked well-fed and prosperous.
At his side was a woman who appeared to be about a decade older, whose red hair was just visible beneath her black veil.
She looked vaguely familiar, but Rynn couldn’t quite place her.
Tim, the helmsman, stood on his other side, his uncovered hair a bright beacon in the sea of black.
A boy of about sixteen, two other boys who were younger and two little girls were with them, all with hair in varying shades of red.
Surprise kept her focus on Maguire. She’d had no thought of seeing him here or, indeed, ever again. Whether he felt her looking
at him or not she couldn’t have said, but he glanced up just then and their eyes met. After the briefest of pregnant moments,
he inclined his head in acknowledgment. She looked away.
Her pulse quickened and her chest felt tight. Seeing Maguire brought memories of her last moments with Donal rushing back.
Sometimes, like now, when thoughts of Donal caught her unaware, she felt as if some vital part of herself had been ripped
away.
What have I done?
Should she have gone with him? The conviction that had driven her to say no seemed to have dissipated. Conscious of Granny’s hand
on her arm, of Glenna pressing close, of the uncertain future Donal had represented and the trouble he always seemed to find,
she told herself she’d made the right choice. Then she took a deep breath and pushed the unsettling doubts from her mind.
What was too late to fix should not be fretted over. Wisdom, again, from Granny.