The Virgin's Spy (Tudor Legacy #2)(33)
Ailis, as always in the last four years, met the Kavanaughs’ household priest on equal footing with her uncle Finian. “Followed?” Finian asked.
Father Byrne snorted. “I was noted coming out of Wicklow. But even the English don’t care to stir too far from their warm fires in December. They’ll watch for me coming back. It’s not as if they don’t know I was coming here. They’ll only move if they think I’m staying too long.”
Waving him to a thickly padded settle, Finian took his own seat near the fire roaring in the medieval, five-foot-high fireplace and poured Father Byrne a drink from the table set to hand. Ailis sat straight-backed and sober where she could watch them both. It was always wise to watch Irishmen when drink was involved.
“And how are our guests?” Ailis asked the priest.
“Complaining. About the cold. The clouds. The rain. The poverty. The lack of cathedrals and church gold. God knows we need the Spanish. But if they don’t learn to shut their mouths, some of our men might do it for them.”
Ailis waved off that expected issue. “Work them all hard enough and both sides will be too tired to fight. We’re most curious about how quiet their location has been kept. We know the English are aware of the vanished Spanish soldiers.”
“Aware, but in disagreement as to the why,” Finian corrected. “A fair number of the English think they simply miscounted. And with the blood Pelham and Dane shed at Carrigafoyle, no one can be absolutely certain that the supposed missing soldiers weren’t among the slaughter victims. It was all set fire to after, so who’s to say for sure?”
Ailis made an impatient noise; she and her uncle had been disagreeing about this for months. “All it takes is one canny, careful Englishman who doesn’t trust to the easiest answer and has the wits to use his eyes and mind to undo all of that. But of course, we don’t intend to keep the secret forever. We would simply prefer to keep the advantage of surprise on our side until summer. Can the Spanish be controlled in the Wicklow Mountains until then?”
“They’ll be controlled,” Byrne promised, directly to her. He was smart enough to realize that, however nontraditional, Ailis was the strategist of Clan Kavanaugh. It was a position she had wormed her way to with a combination of native talent and careful exploitation of the injuries done to her in Kilmallock. No one could ever doubt the purity of her enmity, and she had given enough good counsel in the last years to earn her place at Finian’s side. And as his heir, more or less, whenever he died. That position she would have to fight for—and almost certainly she would have to finally choose the right Irish husband in order to hold onto it. But not just yet.
When talk of tactics for next summer had drifted into the laughter and stories of the two old men, Ailis left them to it and joined her daughter in the warmest part of the castle. This chamber was small and snug, low-ceilinged to keep in the heat, with heavy velvet curtains on the casement windows to add to the warmth. It was a luxury not found often in native Irish households, but the Kavanaughs had been fortunate in navigating the tricky political waters these last decades and had some of the English comforts to prove it.
And Finian had received a hefty dowry from Maisie’s brother in Edinburgh. Ailis suspected it was less that the brother valued his sister and more as a means to get her out of Scotland and off his hands with relative ease. If Maisie resented that fact, she never showed it. She never showed anything except a determinedly cheerful nature and an ease with every member of the household, which Ailis would never have expected.
But no one in the household was more taken with Mariota Sinclair Kavanaugh than Ailis’s daughter, Liadan. The girl had claimed Maisie as her own particular friend and companion from the first. Tonight, Ailis found the two of them at a round table in the—for lack of a better word—schoolroom, Maisie tutoring Liadan in the science of bookkeeping. It might seem an odd choice for an eleven-year-old, but Maisie herself was only fifteen and numbers and business and trade were in her blood. The Sinclairs of Edinburgh had been one of the wealthiest merchant families of Scotland for the last hundred years, and, female or not, Maisie had inherited the gifts of her forbears. Ailis respected that, being herself an unusual female.
“Mama!” Liadan crowed. “Maisie says if I study hard I could be a merchant like her when I grow up.” Her daughter jumped up from her chair, the child’s enthusiasm not yet constrained by the demands of young womanhood. Liadan had Ailis’s own black hair and deep blue-purple eyes, and showed promise of having her mother’s height as well. If there was anything of her father about Liadan, it was in the contemptuous twist of her mouth when she was in a temper.
“Is Maisie a merchant?” Ailis asked mildly. “I thought she was Uncle Finian’s wife.”
She repressed a smile when Liadan gave her a disdainful look that was a copy of her own. Her words were also repeated from her mother. “Being a wife is not an exclusive role.”
“Well said,” Maisie praised in her light voice that touched the Irish Gaelic with an occasional Scots inflection. “Do you know what exclusive means?”
Liadan said loftily, “It means I can do what I want, because I am of Clan Kavanaugh.”
“Close enough,” Ailis said. “Go and see Bridey, pet. You’ve had enough numbers for tonight.”
She took her daughter’s seat and scanned the paper before her. “You really are teaching her to trade,” she said to Maisie.