Excerpt
“I think Mother Ross was aware of something being wrong too.” Caitlin took an arm from around Michael’s leg and clasped his hand, held it to her cheek. “She wasn’t her usual self.”
“She’s been busy, remember. She put in a lot of work for this day. She was probably just tired. She’s not as young as she was either.”
Caitlin stared into the fire again. The turf glowed red among the dove-coloured ash. “I wish I could see our future in the fire, Michael. That fierce redness there means passion or danger or both. A civil war, maybe, like the one we’ve all been waiting for.”
“I don’t want to see much further than the next half hour or so.”
Caitlin brightened as if the fire had burst into flame and the light danced in her eyes. “Is that all it’s going to take tonight—our wedding night? What a stud you are, Michael Carrick.” She turned her head slightly and chewed one of the finger-tips of the hand she held to her cheek.
Michael leaned forward, placed his other hand on her breast and kissed the top of her head.
They sat like that, in silence again, with little convulsions occurring below their ribs.
Poor Michael was always self-conscious in the MacLir house about his lack of formal education. Caitlin had taken it upon herself to make good this deficiency, as she had with Padraig, but Michael had neither the perseverance nor the zeal of his predecessor. He grew restless. His attention circled the room in search of escape and found it and was gone, away to the hills and the heather and the sheep, to the seashore and the rocks, to the clouds wind-driven across the sky. Michael would rather be doing things and making things than reading books or writing. Oh what a slow, laborious writer he was, with the pencil clenched tightly in his fist, and the tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips. And a scrawly, immature script was all that came from so much effort. Signing his name in the register at church that afternoon took more out of Michael than everything else that had happened.
And now it was late.
“Let’s go to bed,” Michael said.
“You see to the fire,” said Caitlin. “I’ll chain the dog.”
Caitlin lit an oil-lamp and crossed the yard to the outhouse. The rain had stopped, but the night was black and damp and it pressed down upon the world like the murderous device in a horror story. Caitlin shuddered, and a cold shiver rippled through her body from her stomach to her tingling scalp.
