Chapter 23 Maeve
Maeve
The following week passed in a comfortable rhythm.
Maeve’s magic didn’t seek an outlet as she painted, which both concerned and soothed her.
She wasn’t sure if she was ready for another episode, but equally, she worried if the icon would work as she hoped if she did not.
It brought a skittishness to her thoughts, as if they didn’t know where to settle.
Coupled with the increasing desire to be around Jude as much as possible… she didn’t know how to feel.
She wondered if the restlessness under her skin was an effect of painting his icon. The connection between her and her work was there as usual, but the strung-out tension, the awareness that coloured their every interaction… that was new.
Something was changing in Jude, too, the longer they progressed. He smiled more often, touched her more easily, met her gaze for longer. Small acts of trust that didn’t go unnoticed.
They’d spent most of their days in her makeshift studio, a room she’d learned Jude had lived in during his earliest years at ánhaga.
She would paint while he read or watched her work, stopping only to eat or to stomp around the yard when he grew fed up with sitting still.
She’d insisted he sat for her each day despite not technically needing him in front of her to work.
Surprisingly, he hadn’t questioned her request, which worried her more than anything else.
She wished that was all she noticed about him.
Sometimes, between the smiles, there was a blankness behind his eyes that reminded her of Siobhan.
A stilted quality to his movements. More than once she’d caught him reaching for something only to stop halfway, or leave saying he was off to get a cup of tea or something to eat, only to return empty-handed hours later.
He was docile and softer than the Jude she had first met.
The strange behaviour wasn’t constant, but it was enough to give her pause. She wondered if the icon was to blame.
Not wondered… she knew it was. But yet, they’d both decided the risk was worth it, even if it pained her to see him with all his sharp edges sloughed away.
Maeve traced her way across the fields towards the orchard.
Her breath puffed out in white clouds, frost crackling under her feet.
In the distance, the moors were dusted with snow like powdered sugar.
The sun barely seemed to crest their slice of the world before setting again, leaving their post-lunch walks to take place in a soupy, bruised dusk more often than not.
Even on a morning walk like this one, the heat of the sun was weak and insubstantial on her skin.
She squinted towards Jude’s figure as he wove between the apple trees.
His coat swept against his ankles, catching on the patches of hardy grass that clung on through the frost. The low light of winter cast a long and meandering shadow behind him.
He’d been quiet today. Brooding, even more so than usual.
She didn’t want to admit how his stern glare affected her.
Maeve wondered how his contained intensity transcribed to other parts of his life, thoughts she hid like a stolen toffee, sweet under her tongue.
She pictured how the tendons in his neck would stretch tight, how his eyes would grow hazy with pleasure.
How she’d press her palms flat to his back and pull him closer, how he’d dig his fingers into her hip in a hold just the right side of pain.
Her dalliances back at the Abbey were hardly common occurrences, maybe a handful of times a year when she felt particularly trapped within its limestone halls and craved human connection.
They had never been more than a satiation of lust made thrilling by the fact they were so forbidden.
As an acolyte, celibacy was expected, even if it wasn’t always maintained – Maeve knew she hadn’t been the only one who occasionally sneaked out to sample what Whitebury had to offer.
The drifting heat she felt towards Jude was different.
She’d rarely experienced want directed at a specific person.
It was strange and unwieldy in its refusal to abate.
Not when he stretched his arms over his head at his desk to reveal a narrow strip of stomach marked with ink-black tattoos in symbols she couldn’t make out.
Nor when he tapped a pencil against his lips, the wood scored from his teeth.
Especially not one memorable time she’d been reaching for a flat of paint tubes that had somehow ended up on a high shelf, and he’d come close behind her, chest brushing her back as he stretched to retrieve it.
She felt the ghost of his touch for hours later.
Remembered it that night when she was alone with her face pressed into the pillow.
She ducked her chin into the collar of her coat to hide her flushed cheeks as he neared. All her belongings had begun to lose the salt-soaked, dusty smell of the Abbey and take on the scent of the house. Hearth-fire and windswept moors. Apples and sloe berries.
The tip of his nose was pink, lips reddened. His red scarf had unwound from his neck. Behind him, clouds tumbled through the sky on a far-off breeze, bringing the faintest strain of salt.
Maeve shivered, her teeth clacking together. As he brushed by her and headed back towards the house, he draped his scarf around her neck. It smelled of him, warm from his body.
She watched the hunched outline of his body as he stepped carefully over a half-frozen puddle, unable to stop her heart’s transformation into a warm, desirous thing. Made useless with hopeless longing.
She returned to her makeshift studio alone.
The scarf slid slowly off her neck to pool in a puddle of red wool on her lap.
Maeve stroked her fingers over it, thinking of hazel eyes turned bright, of the brush of fingertips over her pulse.
She draped it carefully over the stool Jude normally sat on and picked up her brush.
The icon was nearly complete, but something was missing.
A familiar sense of heady devotion found a home behind her sternum as she touched her brush to the canvas.
She’d missed this: the act of worship that was painting.
The most honest part of her, the truest commitment she would ever make.
More than the Abbey, more than her prayers offered up to saints, more, even than her desire for a hand guiding her as she walked through life, was Maeve’s love for painting.
Ever since she’d first begun studying iconography as a girl, as she’d moved through training and honed her abilities to a fine point, she’d known that her craft was entirely separate from her faith, despite the similarities.
There was a steadiness to her devotion, a surety.
She could sit in front of her easel and release every part of her to the canvas, knowing it would take her faith without judgement.
Her anger and her despair, her confidence and her joy.
Her work welcomed everything the same. And no matter where she found herself when her time with Jude had run its course, if she fell back to her knees at the foot of the altar or decided to fend for herself without the saints to guide her, she would always have her craft.
She couldn’t find it in her to be upset at the linking between her painting, her iconography, and her magic.
Picking up a brush had always felt like a transcendent experience.
And that was the difference between faith and devotion, Maeve thought as the first stirring of gold began in the corners of her eyes, as her fingers started the tell-tale tremble on the brush.
Her faith in the Abbey was the foundation she had been placed upon as a girl, its branches threading upwards into her thoughts, her beliefs, even her memories. Branches that helped her grow, yes – but also branches that choked.
Her devotion to her craft was her faith made manifest. A deep commitment that required action and intent. It was something she’d chosen again and again. Something that made her feel powerful. Capable. Accepted for who she was. A talent she had fought to make hers and hers alone.
The Abbey could rock her foundation, her very faith, but they could never take her devotion. She could hold tight to her art – what made it sacred, what made it divine – and call it entirely her own. Something the Abbey could never strip from her, as much as they may try.
With that thought swelling in her chest, she set her brush to the canvas and finally gave her magic the freedom to sweep her away into the vast and gold-hued unknown.