Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was Friday.
Spring had come at last. The sky was the same shade of blue as Owen’s eyes and Donegal Bay and the wild Atlantic beyond it
had turned sapphire, with gently rolling waves topped with drifts of white lace for as far as the eye could see. Even the
seabirds seemed to embrace the mild weather. Instead of screaming and diving as they usually did, they soared gracefully above
the water. The surf itself had nothing more to say than gentle murmurings.
Moira and Joseph had just been laid to rest in the little cemetery on the hillside above the Church of Our Lady Star of the
Sea. From the look of it, every soul in Bundoran, as well as most who lived in the surrounding villages and the nearby countryside,
had turned out. The crowd of mourners was enormous. Anger and outrage mixed with the grief that hung heavy in the air.
Rynn was not part of that crowd. She stood with Owen on an even higher hillside some distance away, where they could see without
being seen. He was being careful with her, because, as he told her, although no word of her being wanted or searched for had
reached his ears, that didn’t mean she wasn’t being hunted. It might only mean the hunters were being quiet about it.
The blackened ruin that was all that was left of Ballyshannon Court was just visible from where they stood. She grieved its destruction, but the far greater loss of Moira and Joseph put it in perspective. Buildings could be rebuilt. Lives were lost forever.
Owen had stood with his head bowed and a face like stone throughout the service. The only time he’d shown emotion was when
the two coffins were lowered one after the other into side-by-side graves. With her hand curled around his arm she’d felt
him tense. If his eyes had glistened briefly, she’d been tactful enough to look away.
“Mick’s in the right of it,” Owen said as the service concluded. “There’s no negotiating with Churchill and his bloody band
of warmongers. I’ve let Mick know I’ll be throwing in with him. The only thing we can do with this murdering lot is treat
them like the snakes they are and drive them the hell out of Ireland.”
Rynn looked at him with worry in her eyes. Michael Collins’s tactics embraced guerilla warfare, ambushes, assassinations,
bombings, with no more than a few thousand warriors to throw themselves up against the might of the entire British Empire.
The odds against success were enormous. The cost of failure was . . . unimaginable.
“You’ll be going back to Dublin to work with Mick?” The fear that he would be putting his life at risk there made her throat
tighten.
“I will.”
A series of explosions in the distance jolted her out of her thoughts.
Plumes of smoke rose above the hills to the north.
The crowd at the funeral, almost to a person, turned to gape in that direction.
On the roads surrounding the cemetery, a rush of activity drew her gaze: the Crown forces, the soldiers and RIC officers and Tans and Auxies, all of them that were on hand to observe and harass and arrest, were leaping into their armored cars and machine-gun-fitted lorries and big saloons and tying themselves up in knots of traffic as they did their best to race toward what was obviously an attack.
“Finner Camp.” There was a wealth of satisfaction in Owen’s voice. “That’ll be the IRA, freeing those boys and their idiot
teacher and anyone else they’re keeping in their damned prison, and blowing the damned camp up while they’re at it.” A grim
smile just touched his mouth. “While the murdering bastards were all lined up here menacing us at Moira’s and Joseph’s funerals,
seemed like the perfect time to hit them.”
“That was brilliant.” Admiration for the ingenuity of it lightened her spirits a bit.
“It was. And that’s the kind of thinking that’s going to win this for us.” He looked down at her, and his tone changed. “Well,
Lady Thomas, what’s it to be? I can see you safe away to America, where you’ll be well out of this mess, or back to England,
if you prefer.” His face had turned expressionless, as she’d learned it tended to do when he spoke of things close to his
heart.
Their eyes met. She could read nothing in his.
But she knew him.
He was attempting to send her away just like he’d done with his nephews, to protect them from what was coming, to keep them
safe.
She would be smart to let him. But . . .
Once again it was time to choose.
A carefree existence in England or America or anywhere, basically, where Ireland wasn’t fighting for her life.
Or war, and the fear and pain and suffering that went along with it.
She chose.
Owen.
Ireland.
And the side of the angels.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m a nurse. I’ll be needed here,” she said.
“Is that so?” His eyes narrowed at her. Those light blue eyes that always made her think of the Irish Sea were shadowed with
grief and pain. But what she could see for her at their backs made her heart race.
“It is. And you can’t talk me out of it, or send me away.” Her gaze was as unyielding as his.
“There is an alternative, I suppose,” he said slowly. “If you’re dead set on charging into danger, you could always go home
with me.”
She smiled at him.
“I could,” she said.
And she did.
Because she knew, knew, with no help needed from the Sight at all, that this was the country, the cause and the man that were meant for her.
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