A Rebel Without a Rogue (24 page)

“What an optimist you are, Christian Pennington! Only you would leap from writing Papa’s biography to Catholic emancipation as if the two were no farther apart than the banks of a lazy country stream.”

Another laugh bubbled up beside his ear, sending his blood fizzing beneath his skin. Kit pulled back and opened his eyes.

His breath caught in his throat at the wondrous sight of a Fianna in full smile. He watched as his finger rose, tracing the unfamiliar lines laughter had wrought on her brow. Laughter that he, Kit Pennington, had inspired.

Win a seat in Parliament; gain Catholics and other unfairly disenfranchised men the right to vote; make Fianna Cameron laugh at least once a day. All eminently worthy goals to which a man might aspire.

He tapped a finger lightly against her lip. “And only you would berate a poor fellow instead of giving him the kiss you so clearly owe him.”

She would have bestowed only a quick peck if Kit had not caught her back when she moved to pull away and kissed her until her pulse pounded as fiercely as his own.

“Ah, no more of your distractions, Kit,” she said, ducking under his arm as he bent to take the kiss deeper. “We should be able to finish the first section in good time, but I’m concerned about the latter ones. We’ve not been able to speak with anyone who knew
Dadaí
during the actual rebellion. Or at least anyone brave enough to admit it. How am I to give an accurate account of that time in his life if I have no facts about it?”

Kit frowned as Fianna moved back to the table and began again to rearrange the piles of foolscap. He knew at least one man who could tell Fianna something about those last days of her father’s. But the trust he and Fianna had begun to build between them would crumble faster than a week-old biscuit if she found out he’d lied about Uncle Christopher being dead.

Might he visit the Colonel alone, though, on the pretext of needing more information about the United Irishmen and their purported assassination plot, and ease the old man into discussing McCracken’s last days? It wouldn’t be a pretext, not truly, since all the inquiries he’d made on his uncle’s behalf to date had come to naught.

How, though, would he explain to Fianna how he’d come by such new intelligence?

“Oh!” A cascade of foolscap fluttered to the floor as Fianna’s hands clapped over her mouth. Her green eyes looked up at him in mute appeal, as if it were she, not he, who was guilty of some betrayal. “I’m so very sorry, Kit!” she whispered between her fingers.

“Well you should be, throwing my rooms into such an untidy state.” He kicked at a paper that had fallen close to his boot.

“No, not the papers. The letters!”

“What letters?” But by the time he had finished speaking, she had already dashed from the room.

When she returned, she walked with a far more decorous gait, though the hand that held out a packet of letters to him was not entirely steady. “That day your brother sketched me, while I unpacked the boxes he had brought—I found them then. But I didn’t read them, not with Benedict there watching, and later, after we returned from the political meeting at the coffeehouse and we—”

No blush, but there, that rise of the chin, the quickness of her words—had that evening affected her as deeply as it had him?

“Well, I must have forgotten them, is all,” she said, pinching her lips tight.

Kit smiled. “And what does a packet of the late Lord Saybrook’s letters have to do with your father?”

“They’re addressed to your father, yes. But they were written by your uncle Christopher,” she said, her eyes meeting his without wavering. “While he was in Spain, and Ireland before that. I’m sorry for keeping them from you.” With a shove, she pushed the packet into his unresisting hands.

 
The yellowing paper crinkled between his fingers. He traced a thumb over one red seal, the Saybrook family crest over Uncle Christopher’s monogram pressed into the wax. The same design in the signet Uncle Christopher had given to him.

“Of course, I wouldn’t want to impinge upon your privacy, or that of anyone in your family,” Fianna said, her voice low and tentative. “But perhaps, if you could read through them, and discover what he wrote of those days, whether he ever mentioned my father—”

Kit stared at the folded sheets, lost for words. Reading the correspondence of the dead was one thing. But prying into that of the still living?

He looked up at her, the negation forming on his lips. Fianna had no idea that Christopher Pennington was still alive, but still, she expected him to refuse. The very stillness of her body, her shoulders already set as if anticipating an expected, familiar blow, all spelled “rejection” as clearly as if she’d spoken the word aloud. No one who saw her tight, drawn expression could ever imagine it could glow with such splendid delight as it had only a few moments before.

Fianna needed to prove her loyalty to her father, and to her father’s family. But she couldn’t do it, not unless he first proved his own loyalty to her.
 

“It might take me some time to read through all of these,” Kit said, taking a seat at the dining table and setting the letters down on its polished surface. “A pot of tea would not come amiss.”

No laugh this time. But before she left the room, she gave his shoulder a quick, hard squeeze, a touch he felt all the way down to his toes.

How could the mere touch of her fingers make him feel as tall as the oldest oak on the Saybrook estate?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kit was deeply engrossed in the letters when Fianna returned from the kitchen. Small lines rayed out from the corners of his eyes as he squinted to make out the cramped handwriting that crossed and recrossed the sheets. Good thing she had a tray in her hands, else she might have given in to the ridiculously sentimental impulse to smooth them away with the tip of her finger.

As she poured out, she stole glimpses of his mobile features, gauging the differing emotions that his uncle’s letters evoked.
 
She’d hardly envisioned Major Pennington an agreeable correspondent, but the frequency of Kit’s smiles suggested that if his uncle’s handwriting was not entirely legible, at least he’d taken pains to make what could be deciphered as entertaining as possible.

She prepared Kit’s tea just as he liked it—no sugar, just a touch of milk—then set the cup down beside his elbow. He nodded, but seemed far too engrossed by his reading to pay it much heed. One letter in particular seemed to catch his attention; he read and reread it several times before setting it aside from the others.

Not until the day’s light began to wane did he lay down the final letter. He shook his head, as if waking from a deep dream, then looked up and started, as if he’d not expected to discover her still sitting at the table beside him.

“Did you find anything of interest?” she asked, careful to keep her tone even.

“To me and to my family, of course. But I’m not certain if anything here will be of much use to you,” he said, his brow furrowing. “Most of them date from the time my uncle was posted in the Peninsula, not in Ireland.”

 
Fianna frowned. Another profitless endeavor, then.

His hand reached out, stilling her fingers as they tapped against her teacup. Taking the saucer from her hand, he replaced it with the stack of letters. “But you might recognize names of people or places that would mean nothing to me.”
 

She looked up at the sound of Kit’s laughter. How ridiculous a picture she must look, her mouth gaping open, the letters dropping from her suddenly numb fingers. But she’d simply never imagined he’d ever trust her enough to lay his uncle’s private correspondence open to her.

She donned her most haughty expression as she raked the letters back into a neat pile. But it no longer seemed to daunt him, that expression, if it ever really had. He reached out a finger and tapped it against the nose she’d stuck so far up in the air, and she simply couldn’t help it: she found herself laughing along with him, the sound strange but surprisingly warm in her own ears.

“He mentions no names, but the incident he describes in this note, here on the top—it sounds quite remarkably like something your father would have done.”

How would Kit think her father likely to have acted? For good? Or for ill?
 

Instead of taking up the letter in question, Fianna leafed quickly at each note in the pile, rearranging them so they fell in chronological order. Better to be methodical, and read from start to finish, rather than allow emotion to overrun her better sense.

August 1797

Dear Brother

Belfast holds little beside the beauty of its situation to recommend it. A practical little town, with few architectural graces to draw the eye. Only the belfry of the Market House, the slender spire of the Poorhouse, and the cupola of a Papist church break the low line of the sky. Oh, and the masts of the ships in port, which you can see, all the way from the opposite end of the High Street. The older streets are ill lighted and badly kept, with pigs wandering at will. Come market days, the main thoroughfares grow crowded with booths and stalls, making it difficult for my men to conduct their patrols.

September 1797

You will laugh when I tell you that some of the city’s inhabitants propose to begin a subscription, aimed at funding the revival and perpetuation of the Ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland. I wonder they need any funds at all, given the dearth of culture this land of barbarians can claim. Needless to say, I did not contribute.

October 1797

I thank you for the reminder that in no part of Ireland are the Catholics so sparse as in Antrim and Down. But it is a common saying that the Country will never know peace ’til Belfast is in ashes. With its prevalence of thatched roofs, the town could be burned to the ground in as little as an hour. As it is, we must rush out to stamp out a fire nearly every fortnight; just last night, one flamed up in a barn beside the barracks. The men of Belfast seem diligent about answering the alarms, but the town’s poor water supplies could easily be overtaxed by a few well-placed tinders. The Irish agitators, of course, are too dull to hatch such a plan, but if the French should send aid. . .

January 1798

Many of the Dissenters here seem almost as rabid for “relief” as do the Papists. One of the Presbyterian societies even suggests that persons of every religious persuasion should unite to agitate for political reforms. Presbyterians, tolerant of other religions? When icicles embellish hell, mayhap. . .

February 1798

More rumors of a French invasion, each more fearful than the next. Some say there is not one Papist in a hundred who had not confederated with the Frenchies under the most solemn sanction to extirpate the whole race of heretics (Protestants) from the island, and well I believe it. The unabashed admiration of the Irish for the rebellious French, and the colonists in the Americas, too—how can such admiration not be deemed traitorous?

For hundred of years, Englishmen have spared no efforts to civilize these Gaelic Calibans, but their incorrigible predisposition to insurrection has made every attempt come to naught. Savages, the lot of them.
 

Fianna fought back a bitter laugh. The Major, of course, did not include himself in that lot. He wrote nothing about the barbaric actions British troops had taken: nothing about the men whipped on mere suspicion of insurgent sentiment, or taken up for transportation without even a trial; nothing about the houses of innocent peasants burned to the ground when they protested against intrusive searches for hidden caches of arms; nothing about the barbarous murders English soldiers were granted free reign to commit, all in the name of peace.

Hardly surprising, that a man who would slander an enemy’s reputation would gloss over the barbarities committed by his own side. But how could that same man fill his letters instead with such detailed inquiries about and advice to his three young nephews?

August 1797

I am not at all dismayed that my namesake did not take me much into liking at our first introduction. Christian is full young, and a babe does not retain much affection for every visitor by whom he is flattered and caressed. When he is older, we will be the best of friends, I am certain of it.
 

September 1797

Does Benedict still tend toward taciturnity? He is not a dull child, be assured, only a thoughtful one. Do not forget to offer praise and affection when he tells you his thoughts, and to assist him when he seems lost for words.

November 1797

Remind Theo that no boy learns his numbers without proper attention and diligence. A boy who is firm and collected, and not depressed by adversity, will soon be a man of great and noble deeds, worthy of the Pennington name.

Fianna ran a finger over the crease in this last note, pressing it back into a tight square. Not the polite family generalities she’d expected from a man taken up with military concerns, these frequent lines about Kit and his brothers. No, Major Pennington’s questions and counsels suggested not only a deep affection for, but also an intimate knowledge of, each of his nephews’ characters and interests.