Read Chapter 33: The Truth of the Death

The parish hall smelled of tallow and damp wool, the air thick with the murmur of forty tenants pretending they had not gathered to watch a widow and a baronet circle each other like dogs over a bone. Maeve stood near the hearth, her mother at her elbow, and tried to remember the last time she had felt the weight of her own limbs.

Sir Godfrey had not come. Three days of waiting, of feeding false rumors through his informant that she meant to sell the northern fields to a drainage company, and he had not taken the bait. She had begun to think he would force her hand publicly, here, where the magistrates could not ignore him.

Then the door banged open.

Cormac stood in the frame, hatless, rain darkening his shoulders. His face was the color of old milk. He looked at Maeve once, then at their mother, and something in his chest seemed to collapse.

“I have to say it,” he said. The room went quiet as a grave. “I have to say it now, or I never will.”

Maeve crossed to him, her hand reaching for his arm. “Cormac, not here—“

“Here is exactly where it must be.” He shook her off, gentle but firm. His voice carried to the rafters. “I did not come home from Australia. I never went. I have been in Ireland this whole time, hiding like a rat in Cork and Limerick, working the docks, saving every coin I could.”

A woman near the back gasped. Her mother made a sound like a struck bell.

“The night Connell died,” Cormac said, and Maeve felt the words land in her stomach like stones, “I was with him. We fought over a gambling debt—he owed me money, and I had lost my temper, and I told him I would see him ruined. I shoved him. He stumbled near the cliff edge, and I grabbed him, and we struggled.”

He stopped. The silence stretched until Maeve thought she would suffocate in it.

“And then Sir Godfrey’s man appeared,” Cormac said. “Rourke. He came out of the dark with two others. They did not intend to break up our quarrel. They pushed Connell over the edge. I watched him fall.”

Maeve’s mother swayed. Catriona caught her, lowering her to a bench as murmurs rippled through the crowd. Someone shouted for a constable. Another man crossed himself.

“I ran,” Cormac said, and his voice broke on the word. “I ran like a coward, because I knew if I stayed and told the truth, Godfrey would have killed me too. I told everyone I was going to America. I let you all believe I had abandoned you. And when I finally scraped together enough to come home, I found my sister had already uncovered what I was too afraid to speak.”

Maeve’s throat was raw. “You let me believe Connell drowned. You let me mourn a man who was pushed.”

“I know.” Cormac sank to his knees on the flagstones. “I know what I did. And I will spend the rest of my life paying for it if you let me.”

A commotion at the door. The crowd parted like water, and Sir Godfrey strode through, two constables at his back, his face a mask of contempt.

“What entertainment,” he said, his voice loud and oily. “The widow’s brother confessing to murder, and in public, no less. Constables—arrest that man.”

The constables stepped forward. Maeve moved between them and her brother.

“He confessed to a fight and a shove,” she said, her voice ringing off the walls. “Not to murder. The murder was done on your orders, by a man named Rourke, who pushed my husband off the cliffs after you instructed him to silence Connell over his blackmail.”

Sir Godfrey’s smile did not waver. “The ramblings of a grieving widow and her guilt-ridden brother. No evidence. No witnesses who will speak.”

“I am a witness.” Cormac rose, his face wet. “I saw Rourke push him. I saw Rourke’s men drag Connell’s body to the water. I saw what they did with his coat, his boots, everything that would mark the death as an accident.”

Godfrey’s jaw tightened. “You were in America.”

“I was in Cork, you bastard, and I have a dockmaster’s ledger that proves I never left this island.”

The crowd erupted. The constables hesitated, looking between the baronet and the kneeling man. And then the doors opened again, and Ashworth stepped through, holding a woman by the arm—small, gray-faced, clutching a shawl.

Maeve knew her from the daguerreotype in the packet. Rourke’s widow.

“I have a letter,” the woman said, her voice thin as spider silk. “My husband wrote it before he died, God rest his soul. It says he pushed the Kelly man off the cliff on Sir Godfrey’s orders, for threatening to expose him over land he had no right to. He wrote it because he feared Godfrey would silence him too.”

Sir Godfrey’s face drained. “This is—this is a conspiracy. A plot by the widow and her English lover to—“

“She is not my lover,” Ashworth said quietly. “She is the woman who will see you hang.”

The senior constable cleared his throat. He was young, new to the district, not yet bought. He looked at Sir Godfrey, then at the weeping widow, then at the crowd of tenants who had stopped pretending to be anything but what they were—witnesses.

“Sir,” he said, “I am afraid I must ask you to come with us.”

Sir Godfrey laughed, but it was hollow, brittle. “On the word of dock rats and a dead man’s widow? You will regret this.”

“Perhaps,” the constable said. “But not as much as I would regret letting you walk out of here.”

He nodded to his men. They closed in. Sir Godfrey tried to pull back, to protest, but the crowd surged forward, and for a moment Maeve lost sight of him in the press of bodies. When the space cleared, he was being led out the door in irons.

Her mother wept.

Maeve turned to Cormac, who had not moved from where he stood, his hands hanging useless at his sides. She crossed to him and took his face in her hands.

“You ran,” she said. “You let me grieve alone, believing the worst of a man I had loved.”

“I know.”

“But you came back. You told the truth when it cost you everything.”

He blinked at her, a boy again, terrified. “Can you forgive me?”

Maeve looked at her mother, who wept silently into Catriona’s shoulder. At Ashworth, who stood by the widow like a stone sentinel. At the crowd of tenants who had seen their landlord dragged off in chains.

“Not yet,” she said. “But I will.”