Hot Whispers of an Irishman Read online

  “It’s an account page from a jeweler in Kilkenny,” Liam said. “It seems that a relative of mine sold him some gold.”

  She could imagine how Liam might see that as relevant in a hazy sort of way. “Treasure or none, it’s possible that a Rafferty might have possessed gold, you know.”

  “Possible, but why so much? This was an enormous sum he received—nearly enough to send a whole family to America, which it so happens that Edward Rafferty did that very same year.

  “And there’s more.” He flipped to the second sheet. “The jeweler also kept an inventory of the pieces he melted down, and their weights. That week he melted rings and brooches and the like, all of which might have been from his era. But look at this.” Liam tapped a finger over another bit of curlicued script. “He melted something he described as a neck-collar, Vi.”

  Now that was not so simple to discount. Gold neck-collars could hardly have been standard fare. Could the legend be truth? If so, according to her nan’s version, Vi was an heiress of sorts. Or at least the closest she would ever come to being one. Her heart beat faster, but she kept a calm demeanor before Liam.

  “You need more than that,” she said.

  “I’m sure I’ll be having more. I’ve contacted a woman at the National Museum. She says there’s much of the same type of records regarding the Mooghaun Hoard.

  “Muh-who?” came a voice from the stairway.

  Vi looked up to see Meghan sitting there, no longer in her uniform, but in a pair of tight pink and black plaid trousers with a silver-studded belt. Colorful, at least, but angling toward mini-tartlike, Vi concluded with a mental shrug.

  The girl strolled down the stairs. She moved like Liam, with the same sort of innate grace. But it would do Vi no good to slow and make these small discoveries. She should flow on like a stream through the difficult moments.

  “I’ve asked you not to wear those pants,” Liam said, “and you might be thinking about cutting back on the eavesdropping, too.”

  Meghan lingered at the bottom of the stairway, her arms crossed over her black T-shirted chest. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was coming downstairs for something to eat, okay?”

  “It’s Mooghaun,” Vi said, avoiding the intergenerational spat. “That’s the name of a place in County Clare where an amazing treasure of ancient gold jewelry was once unearthed. What pieces remain are in the National Museum in Dublin. I don’t think there’s a schoolchild within three hours drive of the display who hasn’t been there.”

  “Museums are boring,” the girl decreed.

  Vi found very little in life boring, with the exception of her accountant’s dire warnings regarding her level of savings. “And this from a girl whose family claims to have lost another such treasure? I’d think you’d be showing more interest.”

  “What treasure?” Meghan asked her father.

  Liam looked as though Vi had already slipped him one of Nan’s recipes. Whatever he was thinking he kept to himself as he tucked the papers back into his briefcase.

  “You’ve not shared the family tale?” Vi asked, really quite surprised. It had been a regular one when Liam’s grandda was still alive.

  “No.”

  “And with you stewing over it as you have?”

  “She—”

  Meghan issued a dramatic sigh. “She is over here and she doesn’t like being talked about like she’s not here, okay?”

  Vi was of the opinion that surly children were to be treated with firmness. Based on the tightness about his mouth, Liam appeared to consider them a source of aneurysm and best avoided.

  “Understandable,” she replied to Meghan, “though you could deliver the message with more manners. Let’s have a seat and see if your da is up to telling the tale.”

  “She’d not be interested,” Liam said.

  Vi gestured in the girl’s direction. “Is that so, Meghan?”

  She shrugged, a marginal movement of one shoulder. “I dunno.”

  “Well, Liam?” Vi asked. “Perhaps it will appeal to yet another generation. Shall you give her a chance to decide?”

  Time had an odd way of reeling back and smacking a man. Liam could recall sitting at his grandda’s feet and hearing the tale of Rafferty’s gold. Peat smoke had scented the front room in Grandda’s house and his words had played almost like a movie in Liam’s head. But he’d been a different child in a different world. His American daughter was about sound bites and images flashing dizzyingly quick on a flat-panel television screen.

  But in many ways he’d just described himself, too. He was no longer about the romance of the tale, but far more interested in its utility. His current assets of tugs, crane-barges, and high-tech diving equipment were substantially less liquid than gold. And liquidity was something he desperately needed.

  “The tale, Rafferty?” Vi prompted.

  “Do you want to hear it?” he asked his daughter.

  Her bored shrug was more of a positive answer than he’d expected. And while he’d prefer to let the whole idea of gold go silent until he’d completed his search, there was no graceful way out of this. Refusing to tell Meghan would only prompt her to ask one of her aunts or uncles, and that would spell disaster for discretion.

  “Fine, then,” he said. “Let’s go sit.”

  They settled on the sleek white furniture by the wall-mounted plasma television that Liam regretted spending a fool’s fortune on, and he worked his way into the tale. “My grandda told the story much better, but it went something like this….

  “Years ago, this land was a different place, occupied by rich and powerful outsiders with little connection to those who had lived here for generations. The English landlords paid so poorly for crops from a man’s own field that even those with good fields were starving. Your great-great…well, I’d not be knowing how many times great…randda Eoin Rafferty was one of the lucky few, for he still had strength to hold another job.

  “He’d been hired by the Dunhills of Castle Duneen to work on a road that was to run straight and true to Kilkenny so that the Ormond earls would not have so far to travel.” Liam thought it best not to tell Meghan that the road was being made shorter so Ormond could avail himself more quickly of Dunhill’s wife, whom he’d made a mistress.

  “Eoin had himself a sweetheart back in Duncarraig, so he was in a hurry to finish the road. It was his habit to work well ahead of the others. One afternoon, while he was digging from a trench to bring fresh soil for the roadbed, he hit upon something odd with his shovel. What do you think it was?”

  Meghan rolled her eyes. “A U2 greatest hits CD?”

  He laughed. “They’re not quite that old, love.” Except to a twelve-year-old. “Actually, your many-

  times-great-grandda Eoin hit upon gold.”

  “No lie?”

  “No lie,” Liam affirmed, using his daughter’s sharp American diction before slipping back into the cadence he’d not lost in fifteen years gone from Ireland. “It was a grand treasure of old, hammered pieces, the kind of wealth all of the Raffertys put together never had.”

  “That’s cool,” Meghan said. “So what happened to it? Something must have or we’d be rich.”

  “Compared to most of the world, you are,” Vi pointed out.

  “You need to get out more,” Meghan said to Vi, who looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or lecture.

  “Here’s what happened,” he said, drawing attention his way again. “Eoin slipped away from the others in the dead of the night, eluding thieves, liars, and friends turned foe. A wealth of gold was a hard test of loyalty, after all. Knowing that life would not be easy so long as their land was occupied, Eoin hid the treasure away somewhere in Duncarraig, vowing to use the pieces only to help another Rafferty when in need.”

  “Noble, indeed,” Vi said. “If a wee bit limited in scope.”

  Liam ignored the nip at the family conscience. “Through the years the treasure was passed down from firstborn son to firstborn son, and the responsi
bility of keeping it passed down, too,” he said. “The legend holds that pieces were smuggled away and sold to help a young Rafferty escape who’d been wrongly accused of killing an English soldier. When times grew even leaner, it’s said that the gold was used to aid those Raffertys ready to face the trials of emigration.

  “During the great hunger, what was left fell into the hands of a Rafferty who was always tugging at Authority’s tail. In fact, it got so bad that this particular Rafferty found it advisable to head west until those he’d angered found greater troubles to address.”

  Which, Liam supposed was much like his choice of departing America, except he’d gone against the Rafferty flow and headed east to Ireland again.

  “So then what?” Meghan asked.

  “This Rafferty was enchanted by a girl in the village who the story says was the boldest and most beautiful of all. I’ve heard said she had glorious red hair of a deeper hue than any fire. Rather like Vi’s.”

  “We’ve talked of flattery already,” Vi said. “On with the story.”

  She was a hard woman, Vi Kilbride. Liam continued. “Rafferty was to flee to Connemara, a land to the west viewed most savage and inaccessible by the English. Travel there was no easy thing, and he felt no comfort in leaving the family treasure behind. He entrusted it to his bewitching redhead, who promised to hand it back on his return. But—”

  “It was a shock to all when he came back with a wife heavy with child,” Vi said, most disapprovingly. “And—”

  “—with a wife and a child soon to care for, too, he begged the treasure back from the redheaded woman,” said Liam, wresting control of the tale back from the redhead in the room. “But this woman claimed no knowledge of it. She quickly married another man and lived out her life in Duncarraig—”

  “—and with no riches, either,” Vi cut in. “’Tis likely your faithless ancestor squandered the gold on drink and more women, then blamed my own blood.”

  “‘Your own blood?’” Meghan echoed. “You mean you’re related to that woman?”

  Vi nodded. “It’s said she was a grandmother—times removed—of mine.”

  Meghan sat a bit straighter, the bored adolescent slouch gone. “That’s cool, too.”

  Vi smiled. “As I felt at your age.”

  “So this gold’s, like, missing?” Meghan asked.

  “Exactly,” Liam replied. “The gold might be gone, but its tale stays with the Raffertys.”

  He hesitated before adding more, but he knew it would do no good to hide his activities from her. He’d heard Meghan snooping about the house at night often enough. Wanting to protect his daughter from his dire financial situation and this last-gasp search effort to repair it, Liam chose his words carefully.

  “And I don’t want you sharing this with the rest of the family,” he said, “but I’ve decided it would be fun to have a look for it, so long as we’re here.”

  “And if you find it, it’s ours?” she asked.

  Liam nodded. “Exactly, again.”

  “Not quite so,” said Vi.

  She was smiling, but Liam didn’t much like the look of it. It was beyond sharp-edged, bordering on lethal, in fact.

  “And why not quite so?”

  She rose from the sofa. “Step into the kitchen with me. Now.”

  Chapter Six

  A red-hot ember is easily rekindled.

  —IRISH PROVERB

  Had the man no sense at all?

  Once they’d rounded the corner to the kitchen, Vi closed her eyes and briefly tried the lavender-envisioning bit, hoping for an endless calming field, flowers swaying in a gentle breeze. No bloody luck, though. The best she was getting was a plain of razor-sharp steel pikes, which was either phallic or barbaric, and a sharp sign of her current feelings toward Rafferty.

  “You’re not readying to nap again, are you?” Liam asked.

  Vi opened her eyes and ignored his half-smile.

  “For argument’s sake—” she began.

  “You’ve always liked those well enough,” he said, strolling closer.

  “No baiting, Rafferty. For argument’s sake,” she repeated, giving him a narrow-eyed glare that she hoped made obvious the risk to his life should he cut in again, “let’s say you find the treasure, either on or off my land. By what right is it yours?”

  “I’m the eldest son of the eldest son, and so on.” He waved his hand as if brushing away the centuries like so much dust. “It would be mine to do with as I see fit.”

  “Really, now? Have you done ’way with your da?”

  “Of course not. I asked for the treasure as my twenty-first birthday gift. Da agreed, of course, for it was cost-free.”

  “Optimistic of you,” she said. “And there’s no one else who would have a claim, you’re thinking?”

  “No,” he replied with blunt certainty.

  Perhaps it was that she felt the weight of history more than most, which was possible given the years of Nan’s teachings. Or perhaps it was that Liam had decided in advance to be an eejit about this. Having witnessed his stroll with the radar-thing, Vi was leaning in favor of his eejit status.

  “Not, say, the eldest daughter next in line after Nan? The descendant of one who had been gifted the treasure?” she asked helpfully.

  “Now, Vi—” he began in a long-suffering tone.

  She drew a breath between clenched teeth. “A word of advice to you. A sentence begun with ‘now’ and immediately followed by a female’s name is one that’ll leave you with bloody stumps below your knees.”

  He laughed, which did nothing to aid his cause. “Much as I like my legs, I’ll have to risk them. Vi, should it be found, it’s Rafferty treasure and always has been. An act that was wrong isn’t made right by time.”

  Finally he’d said something that made sense, though they sat on opposite sides of the issue. “Exactly so. Which is why your hunt won’t be taking place beneath my nose.”

  Liam’s dark brows drew together, making him look nearly fierce. “What have you to fear if I’m on your grandmother’s land?”

  Fury pushed hard against her chest. “My grandmother’s? It’s my land. My land and my house and you’ve stolen enough from me already.”

  With that, Vi fell into a confused silence. That odd word—stolen—had come from some ill-aired corner of her brain. She prayed that Liam wouldn’t note it, for she had no explanation. But Vi knew he would pick it up because for all his faults he’d never been a poor listener.

  “Stolen?” he repeated.

  She turned her back to him, looking out the window above the sink at the ivory-stuccoed carriage house beyond. Meghan’s tower, he’d called it. Vi fancied a tower of her own, just then. Liam walked round so she couldn’t lose him from her vision.

  “Stolen?” he asked again.

  She forced herself to draw a deep breath. She had drifted so near the fringes of her personal universe, but now she was centered again.

  “My heart,” she said. “I once felt as though you stole my heart.” Yes, that had to be what had nudged the word loose. Of course it was.

  “And you think you didn’t steal mine?” he fired back, then shook his head as the anger eased from his features. “I’d forgotten how you can set me off, and with Meghan listening, too, I’m sure,” he said in a lower voice.

  She didn’t want to think of Meghan just now. “All I’m asking is that you admit nothing’s exactly so. The treasure’s neither exactly yours nor mine.”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “So long as you bar me from your land, the treasure’s exactly lost.”

  “What would you have me do?” she asked.

  He walked three long strides to the kitchen table, then swung round to face her again. “Let me look, at least. I need this, Vi. I need to move forward, to feel as though I’m making progress. I can’t be idle much longer without losing my mind.”

  There was a note of desperation in his voice that she’d never heard before. Vi smoothed her hands over the loose-fitting b
ronze top she wore, trying to lose a few wrinkles from that, at least. Aye, this treasure discussion was about nothing and everything, with the unspoken crying out loudest of all.

  “I’ll need to think about it,” she answered, buying time, which was all she could afford.

  In truth, until today she’d never considered the treasure as other than long-squandered. If it did exist, what would it mean to her? To Liam? And for that matter, to Nan and those who had come before them?

  Liam appeared to relax. “Fine, then. Think today and tomorrow you’ll tell me?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready. Now I’ll be walking back to the pub.”

  “I’ll run you back.”

  “My legs still work,” she replied.

  New voices sounded from the front room—booming male sorts that precipitated the heavy tread of Meghan’s feet upstairs. Vi quickly realized that she was hearing none other than her da, but with more enthusiasm than she was accustomed to. And with finer timing than usual, too.

  “You’ve found me,” she said as she reentered the room with Liam at her heels.

  “From what I’ve heard said today, all one ever had to do was look for Liam. Your nan never told me you were soft on a Rafferty, Violet.”

  Liam’s father nodded. “You’d no sooner drop her with your mother each summer than she’d be at our doorstep looking for my boy,” he said. “Regular as a clock, she was.”

  James Rafferty had the right of it, though Vi didn’t much appreciate the tidbit sharing with her father. Vi had indeed viewed Liam as a special gift, straight from Nan’s spirits to her. Even now, when she trusted him none, she also found herself desiring him—the very last thing she wanted to do. She looked about for a means of escape.