Free Black Heather by Virginia Coffman Page A

name and resented it more from him than I would have minded Patrick’s use of it, for the Irishman was a free-spoken man whom one need not take seriously.
    Patrick grinned, but I saw that his tawny eyes were very still, unreadable, as he and Sir Nicholas gazed at each other over my head, and I remembered with a chill that both men had loved Patrick’s dead wife, Megan Sedley Kelleher. Was it possible that Patrick’s “tasteless joke” had been a hint to me of the baronet’s guilt in the awful crime that others laid to Patrick himself? I had a strange, crushed sensation entirely foreign to me, as though I did not know which way to turn for help.
    Sir Nicholas left me no such problem. When he took my reluctant, resisting arm, I noticed how quickly everyone dropped away from me, once my connection with him was discovered. I noted too that there was in their manner more than the respect normally accorded to the local squire—there was a scarcely hidden fear, a hesitancy to touch him. Or perhaps that was only my fancy, for I had just learned, through Patrick’s barbed joke, that when I said “good day” to the Irishman and went out with Sir Nicholas, I might still be walking with a murderer. It was easy enough to dismiss the Irishman’s accusation as an old jealousy, but these men and women in the Owl of York shared a common fear of the aristocrat, and their sharing of it spread it to me. From all I had heard and observed of the men of Yorkshire, it would take something rather astounding and fearful to produce in them any terror, much less a sense of the superiority of the squire over the workman!
    Once we reached the cobblestones and what I conceived to be the cold safety of the moorland wind, I said, with an attempt at recovering my self - assurance, “I was just leaving when you spoke, but in any case, thank you. Good day.”
    It was hard to keep any dignity with this man. Before I could leave him—and this was something I did at his chosen time, not mine—he managed to enrage me all over again.
    “You are undoubtedly the most foolish child I have encountered in a lifetime of foolish females!”
    “Indeed!” I said, drawing myself to my full height and looking up at him with what he afterward told me was a good deal of murderous fury. The difficulty was, I could not think of anything bad enough to say to him after that first “indeed” except to add another, ending a trifle lamely, “Well, indeed, sir!”
    To my complete chagrin, he laughed aloud at this, uncovering to me an entirely new facet of his personality and one I was to find much more dangerous. This grim aristocrat with the bitter dark eyes could find amusement in the world. It was not surprising, however, that his amusement came at the cost of another person’s discomfiture. And I had to recall that vigorously; otherwise, I would have observed, to my own defeat, that when he did smile, he was even more handsome than the impossible man I had first met in the Hag’s Head. It is always confusing to be so undone by one’s dearest enemy!
    “Come along up to Mrs. Sedley’s, like a good girl, and do not put me to the trouble of rescuing you another time—not, at least, today.”
    But as we walked, I was already thinking hard, trying to imagine some way of disconcerting him. One idea, perhaps a trifle drastic, occurred to me. I could give serious consideration to the purchase of the Hag’s Head. That would avenge me and in fine style!
    I became so obsessed with this delightful method of infuriating him that by the time we reached Sedley House and I saw Meg Markham waving to me to hurry, could be civil and pleasant to the aristocrat, not letting him suspect what was in my mind.
    “You have been most kind, Sir Nicholas. I hope to repay you one day.”
    “I’m sure that you do!” he said with the grim smile I remembered from yesterday and had wondered at then.
    Now I thought I understood a little of its grimness. He had loved someone who had been