Janice Macdonald - The Man On The Cliff

“What’s the matter with that?” Caitlin asked, wide-eyed. “I’m just saying he has nice manners.”

“Sure, Caitlin,” Rory said quietly, his head bowed, “if he’s got nice manners, he couldn’t possibly have pushed Moruadh down the cliffs, could he? Not without saying ‘pardon me’ as he shoved her over.”

“Rory.” Caitlin slapped his arm. “That’s terrible, no one knows that for sure.”

“I’m no fan of Maguire, mind you, but in my opinion, Moruadh fell,” Patrick said. “She was a great one for the outdoors. Out there every day she was, in all weather, going for her walks. For years, people have been clamoring at the council to put a fence up. ’Tis a tragedy that it took this to make it happen.”

“He’s right.” Caitlin looked at Kate. “People should stop all this gossip about Mr. Maguire. It isn’t nice. Wait till you meet him, Kate. You’ll fall in love with him, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, but Kate’s married,” Annie said, smiling. “Aren’t you, Kate?”

Kate and the bartender exchanged glances. Time for her to bow out, she decided.

“No.” She grinned. “I like to play the field. Love ’em and leave ’em, that’s my motto.” She stood and put her teacup on the tray. “I’m going to say goodnight. I’m about to fall asleep on my feet.”

BUT AS TIRED as she’d felt downstairs, when she got to her room Kate was suddenly wide-awake. Fully dressed, she stretched out on the bed, her eyes fixed on the repeating pattern of the wallpaper. Tiny sprigs of white flowers against a yellow background. Her thoughts drifted back to Moruadh. At home, she would listen to Moruadh’s clear high voice as she drove. Haunting and ephemeral, the music weaving its spell as it conjured visions of mists and hills, yearning and heartache. Of sadness too unbearable to endure.

“And tell the world,” Moruadh sang. “That I died for love.”

After Kate’s article came out, Moruadh had called her a few times from Ireland and Paris. Usually in the early hours of the morning. For the most part, Moruadh talked while Kate listened. Inevitably, the topic turned to men and relationships and love. Moruadh fell in and out of love with a succession of men. Nothing lasted, and she would talk about the howling-in-the-wilderness bouts of loneliness that gripped her in the early hours. “Ah God, I could die of it,” Moruadh said once. “I’ve crawled into the beds of men who meant nothing at all, just to have someone’s arms around me.”

Her last call had been short and perfunctory. She was marrying a man by the name of Niall Maguire, she’d told Kate. No time to talk, but she would call again soon.

But she never had. Kate had read about Moruadh’s death in the obituary section of the Times. A small reference just a couple of paragraphs summing up Moruadh’s career. While walking along the cliffs near her home in Cragg’s Head, the article said, Moruadh Maguire had fallen some three hundred feet to her death. Ruling it an accident, the Gardai had blamed wind and rain and the unstable cliffs. Kate had thought about love and loneliness and had been unable to get Moruadh off her mind.

Restless now, she got up to examine the framed prints that hung on the walls. Sylphs and sprites in a field of bluebells. A gnome on a toadstool. More sprites and bluebells. Everything felt oddly unreal and slightly off-kilter, as though she’d been dropped into the middle of another world that bore a superficial resemblance to her own but functioned in a way she didn’t entirely understand. Unanswered questions. Confused directions and screwed-up road signs. The shadowy figure up on the cliffs. The young Garda in the car. The way the gray-eyed man had suddenly appeared out of the fog.

The sensation was similar to the way she felt after she’d taken her car to be washed at one of those full-service places. She’d get back in and find that everything—radio, seats, mirrors—had been slightly changed. Not enough that she couldn’t drive, but sufficient to send her neuroses into overdrive. Kind of the way she felt right now. Just a little thrown off. She yawned again and moved back to the bed. On the other hand, maybe she’d just overdosed on Celtic intrigue.

Through the closed door, she could hear the soft murmur of conversation from the sitting room below. Like a video, images of the evening ran through her head. The play of firelight on the faces around the room. The clink of flowered china teacups and saucers, the crackle of flames. Patrick dozing in his chair. The smells of baking and fresh flowers.

Annie bustling around. Smiling, urging food on everyone. Annie had a natural warmth—an openness that instantly turned strangers into friends. A quality Kate envied but couldn’t master herself. Probably because it required a certain willingness to let yourself be vulnerable. Her own defense mechanisms were too finely honed to allow that. Compared to Annie, she felt world-weary and a little jaded.

A fleeting childhood memory drifted across her consciousness. A night spent at a friend’s house. A girl with lots of brothers and sisters. The house was full of warmth and light and people laughing and talking. It had seemed perfect, like a page from a storybook. When she grew up, Kate had vowed, she would have a house just like it. Full of happy children. A smiling husband.

More memories, dim and fragmentary. Herself at ten, wakened from sleep by raised voices coming from downstairs. Her father’s voice, cold, dispassionate. No, he wouldn’t be back. He had fallen in love. A student in one of his classes. Her mother’s sobs.

A memory of walking home from school after her parents divorced. Looking through brightly lit windows of other houses. The little rituals she had developed that, if followed exactly, would make everything all right again. If she touched every mailbox on her street as she passed, her mother wouldn’t be crying when she walked in. If she skipped for four blocks, she would smell cookies baking when she opened the front door. If she held her breath for two minutes, her mother would be sober.

She got up, dug out a robe and toilet bag from her suitcase and walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was after her mother committed suicide that she’d pretty much stopped believing in magic. Or love.

TO CALL BUNCARROCH CASTLE gloomy, she decided the next morning, would be like calling Trump Tower upscale. She stood in the damp air, craning her neck to look up.

Niall Maguire’s ancestral home stood at the crest of a small hill, surrounded on three sides by the ocean. Massive and vaguely misshapen, it sprouted various architectural embellishments that she guessed had been added over the years. Battlements, gargoyles, wartlike turrets. One wing, jutting awkwardly like a broken limb, seemed in imminent danger of crashing into the ocean.

Niall Maguire was not home. Or at least he wasn’t answering the doorbell. She rang it again, glanced around the graveled circular driveway. No cars, but she wasn’t sure what that meant. Did castles have garages? Again she rang the doorbell and waited. After a few moments she walked back across the gravel, climbed onto Annie’s elderly Raleigh and pedaled down the hill again.

She would try later, she decided as she rode through a waste of rock-and-boulder-smattered heather into the village. Although Maguire had ignored her letters, which suggested he didn’t want to talk to her, he might be less inclined to turn her down if they actually met face-to-face. On the other hand, if he was as aloof and detached as Patrick and Rory had described him, maybe not.

She thought of what Hugh Fitzpatrick had told her about Maguire’s attractiveness to women. Objectivity was becoming difficult. Her tendency was always to root for the underdog, and Niall Maguire with his castle and money and fawning women appeared to be anything but.