The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

thinking? What do they see when they look at you?
    And while she was thinking that, he mused, she was absorbing everything around her that she could see or hear. He doubted she knew it, but he’d seen it in her eyes.
    He thought he would take some time to find out what he thought of her, what he saw in her, and what was real.
    She’d already stirred his blood with those big sea goddess eyes of hers and that sternly bound hair. He liked her voice, the preciseness of it that seemed so intriguingly at odds with the shyness.
    What would she do, pretty Jude, he wondered, if he was to ramble over now and rap on her door?
    No point in frightening her to death, he decided, just because he was restless and something about her had made him want.
    “Sleep well, then,” he murmured, sliding his hands into his pockets as the wind whirled around him. “One night when I go walking it won’t be to the cliffs, but to your door. Then we’ll see what we see.”
    A shadow passed the window, and the curtain twitched aside. There she stood, almost as if she’d heard him. It was too far away for him to see more than the shape of her, outlined against the light.
    He thought she might see him as well, just a shadow on the cliffs.
    Then the curtain closed again, and moments later, the light went out.

FOUR
    R ELIABILITY , J UDE TOLD herself, began with responsibility. And both were rooted in discipline. With this short lecture in her head, she rose the next morning, prepared a simple breakfast, then took a pot of tea up to her office to settle down and work.
    She would not go outside and take a walk over the hills, though it was a perfectly gorgeous day. She would not wander out to dream over the flowers, no matter how pretty they looked out the window. And she certainly wasn’t going to drive into the village and spend an hour or two roaming the beach, however compelling the idea.
    Though many might consider her notion of exploring the legends handed down from generation to generation in Ireland a flighty idea at best, it was certainly viable work if approached properly and with clear thinking. The oral storytelling art, as well as the written word, was one of the cornerstones in the foundation of culture, after all.
    She couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that her mosthidden, most secret desire was to write. To write stories, books, to simply open that carefully locked chamber in her heart and let the words and images rush out.
    Whenever that lock rattled, she reminded herself it was an impractical, romantic, even foolish ambition. Ordinary people with average skills were better off contenting themselves with the sensible.
    Researching, detailing, analyzing were sensible, things she’d been trained to do. Things, she thought with only a whisper of resentment, she’d been expected to do. The subject matter she’d selected was rebellion enough. So she would explore the psychological reason for the formation and perpetuation of the generational myths particular to the country of her ancestors.
    Ireland was ripe with them.
    Ghosts and banshees, pookas and faeries. What a rich and imaginative wonder was the Celtic mind! They said the cottage stood on a faerie hill, one of the magic spots that hid the gleaming raft below.
    If memory served, she thought the legend went that a mortal could be lured, or even snatched, into the faerie world below the hill and kept there for a hundred years.
    And wasn’t that fascinating?
    Seemingly rational, ordinary people on the cusp of the twenty-first century could actually make such a statement without guile.
    That, she decided, was the power of the myth on the intellect, and the psyche.
    And it was strong enough, powerful enough, that for a little while, when she’d been alone in the night, she’d almost—almost believed it. The music of the wind chimes and the wind had added to it, she thought now. Songs, she mused, played by the air were meant to set the mind dreaming.
    Then that figure standing out on the cliffs. The shadow of a man etched against sky and sea had drawn her gaze and caused her heart to thunder. He might have been a man waiting for a lover, or mourning one. A faerie prince weaving magic into the sea.
    Very romantic, she decided, very powerful.
    And of course—obviously—whoever it had been, whoever would walk wind-whipped cliffs after midnight, was lunatic. But she hadn’t thought of that until morning, for the punch of the image had her sighing and shivering over it