Born in Fire Read Free Page B

beating hard and fast in his own ears. But he felt something inside him breaking, bursting and slipping away. “Don’t harden yourself, Maggie. Promise me. You’ll never lose what’s inside you. You’ll take care of your sister. And your mother. You’ll promise me that.”
    “You’ve got to get up.” She dragged at him, fighting off fear. The thrash of the sea sounded now like a storm breaking, a nightmare storm that would sweep them both off the cliff and onto the spearing rocks. “Do you hear me, Da? You’ve got to get up now.”
    “Promise me.”
    “Aye, I promise. I swear it before God, I’ll see to both of them, always.” Her teeth were chattering; stinging tears already ran down her cheeks.
    “I need a priest,” he gasped out.
    “No, no, you need only to get out of this cold.” But she knew it was a lie as she said it. He was slipping away from her; no more how tightly she held his body, what was inside him was slipping away. “Don’t leave me like this. Not like this.” Desperate, she scanned the fields, the beaten paths where people walked year after year to stand as they had stood. But there was nothing, no one, so she bit back a scream for help. “Try, Da, come and try now to get up. We’ll get you to a doctor.”
    He rested his head on her shoulder and sighed. There was no pain now, only numbness. “Maggie,” he said. Then he whispered another name, a stranger’s name, and that was all.
    “No.” As if to protect him from the wind he no longer felt, she wrapped her arms tight around him, rocking, rocking, rocking as she sobbed.
    And the wind trumpeted down to the sea and brought with it the first needles of icy rain.

Chapter Two
    T HOMAS Concannon’s wake would be talked about for years. There was fine food and fine music, as he’d planned for his daughter’s celebration party. The house where he’d lived out his last years was crowded with people.
    Tom hadn’t been a rich man, some would say, but he was a man who’d been wealthy in friends.
    They came from the village, and the village beyond that. From the farms and shops and cottages. They brought food, as neighbors do for such occasions, and the kitchen was quickly stocked with breads and meats and cakes. They drank to his life and serenaded his passing.
    The fires burned warm to stave off the gale that rattled the windows and the chill of mourning.
    But Maggie was sure she’d never be warm again. She sat near the fire in the tidy parlor while the company filled the house around her. In the flames she saw the cliffs, the boiling sea—and herself, alone, holding her dying father.
    “Maggie.”
    Startled, she turned and saw Murphy crouched in front of her. He pressed a steaming mug into her hands.
    “What is it?”
    “Mostly whiskey, with a bit of tea to warm it up.” His eyes were kind and grieving. “Drink it down now. There’s a girl. Won’t you eat a little? It would do you good.”
    “I can’t,” she said, but did as he asked and drank. She’d have sworn she felt each fiery drop slide down her throat. “I shouldn’t have taken him out there, Murphy. I should have seen he was sick.”
    “That’s nonsense, and you know it. He looked fine and fit when he left the pub. Why, he’d been dancing, hadn’t he?”
    Dancing, she thought. She’d danced with her father on the day he died. Would she, someday, find comfort in that? “But if we hadn’t been so far away. So alone…”
    “The doctor told you plain, Maggie. It would have made no difference. The aneurysm killed him, and it was mercifully quick.”
    “Aye, it was quick.” Her hand trembled, so she drank again. It was the time afterward that had been slow. The dreadful time when she had driven his body away from the sea, with her breath wheezing in her throat and her hands frozen on the wheel.
    “I’ve never seen a man so proud as he was of you.” Murphy hesitated, looked down at his hands. “He was like a second father to me, Maggie.”
    “I know