Page 11 of The Pirate Queen

“Strike the topsails,” Grace orders, and their speed reduces as they approach the bay. Once they glide into the calm waters near the half-moon circle of white sand, she gives her final command: “Stand by anchor!”

Within twenty minutes, Sivney has rowed them to shore and she and Donal are back at the castle and he is kissing his nap-drunk wife and daughter on their soft, warm foreheads.

“Can I convince you to stay the night?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “We must be off.”

There is nothing for it, then, but to say their goodbyes. Donal first, and then her niece, and finally Nora, this sister she never knew she needed. When she pulls Nora into an embrace, they both laugh at the cumbersome girth of her swollen belly.

“How many bábs have you stuffed in there?”

“Just the one, I hope.” Nora laughs, then pulls Grace closer to whisper in her ear, “I left a gift on your pillow.”

Grace walks them down to the beach and watches them row back to Niamh, and out of her life again. Then, just when tears threaten to burn her eyes once more, she hears the jolly tune of pipes echo across the water. It is one of those ribald drinking songs her brother loves to play.

She laughs.

Then mumbles along to the first verse, because she cannot help herself. “Oh, as I went home on Monday night, as drunk as drunk could be, I saw a horse outside the door where my old horse should be…”

Grace stands there, her bare feet growing cold in the lapping waves, and watches until the ship is a dot against the horizon, until the sound of pipes is lost on the wind.

“You promised me joy,” she accuses Manannán.

And did I not deliver it right to your feet?

“Only to steal it away again,” she says, then turns back to the dark castle on the hill.

There is a letter on her pillow.

This one, however, is not from Finola. There is no wax seal. The handwriting is different. And not pretty. The writer struggled with the angle of his wrist and how to hold a quill so as not to smudge the ink. Like Grace, the sender is left-handed.

Richard Bourke.

She looks to the door as though about to be caught in some great infidelity. But her husband is away. Bunowen Castle is silent. And the servants are asleep.

So she sits on the edge of her empty bed and reads the letter.

It is dry—no declarations of love or longing. There is only Richard’s bland greeting scratched out in his frustrated handwriting, followed by a single page updating her on all that has happened over the last four years. The minutiae of his days—mostly spent training with his father’s soldiers, and about his time fishing and hunting in the hills around Rockfleet Castle. If he misses her, he does not say. He closes the letter simply:

Yours, Richard in Iron.

She laughs, thinking of that chainmail shirt.

Then her laughter collapses into a sigh at the reminder that he will never, in fact, be hers. Yet she does wonder if he has grown into that armor.

Then Grace sees the postscript and the breath catches in her throat.

Ego te expectabo.

The words he told her the last time she saw him.

I will wait for you.

Latin.

He has written the words in their language. Not a secret one, but a dead one. Lifeless, like the romance they barely had time to start.

“No,” she tells herself, startled. Then, more firmly, “No. You are married, Gráinne Ní Mháille, and not to him.”