Editor's Note: This is the first installment of "Masques of Fortune" , which uses an alternative timeline, one which will change the end of Season One and beyond.

The author explains: I tweak a detail... and things change for the characters. "Owls By Night" answers the question, "What if Catherine had not glimpsed Vincent entering that ballroom on Halloween night?"

The question occurred to me because the staging cheated a bit in the episode. Catherine was standing with her back to the veranda when she first met Brigit. Then the camera cuts to Vincent outside. Then the camera cuts back to Catherine, and she's facing the veranda doors. Sure, Catherine and Brigit might have kind of shuffled around to change their position while they talked, off-camera, but I noticed the detail when I first saw the show, and it bugged me. So... it inspired me to start writing a tale about an alternative possibility.

Masques of Fortune: Owls By Night

by Zara Wilder

Part One

Death

To ache with unrest,

Stale-hearted, bored,

Oppressed by life, by the futile motions of people—

Their footless eagerness, their strife,

And their pale conversations—

This mood of death.

But that other thing called death,

Which crumbles us up into good rich soil,

And sprouts grass over the place

Or weeds—

What kind adjustment

That trues one nicely to the universe,

And bestows the good gift: the immortal insignificance

Of a leaf, or a grass blade,

Or one of the small stars!

— Viola Isabel Paradise

Through the eyeholes of her feathered mask, Brigit watched Eileen weave a new shoestring in and out through the eyelets of the empty boot. Eileen was frowning in concentration, her brown eyes intent, tiny lines wrinkling her forehead. She knelt beside Brigit, twisting her body within the royal blue satin gown she wore. Eileen’s domino mask, twinkling with rhinestones, had been shoved up above her greying hairline, stretching the mask’s black elastic band to its limit around her elaborately piled blonde hair—the better to resolve this newest vexation.

She lamented to Brigit, “If only you’d worn the shoes I picked out for you, we wouldn’t be in this fix at all.”

“Alas,” Brigit replied, all sweetness. “My bodyguard’s advice trumps even my publicist’s.”

Eileen glanced up quickly, then back down at the small, sturdy boot she held in her capable hands. An elegant black leather boot, to be sure. Also quite plain and functional, the heels solid and not too high. Eileen had insisted upon threading the boot lace for her favourite client. Now she shook her head.

“I have no doubt that your Thomas is an expert in matters of security. But he lacks any smidgen of fashion sense, my dear.”

Brigit sat at the top of her host’s — John Brennan’s — staircase, her gloved hands folded patiently across her knees.

“Thomas says fashion might well be the death of me, if the worst happened, and he had to spirit me away down stairwells and dark hallways — or down fire escape ladders — me poor ankles wobbling all the way. And besides: a night spent traipsing through a ballroom in Madison Avenue heels holds its own terrible risk of ankle-spraining and toe-crushing.” Brigit reconsidered her situation. “Not least when Thomas takes his turn at dancing with me.”

This last remark won her a full-grown version of the smile that had been sparking at the corners of Eileen Farwell’s mouth for the past quarter hour. The older woman poked the shoestring aglet through the final eyelet and held the repaired boot out to Brigit.

“Then consider your ankles and toes well-armoured for the evening.”

Careful not to catch the lacy trim of her gown upon either of her boots, Brigit slipped her stockinged foot inside. She thumped her heel flat on the marble step beneath her.

“With many thanks to you,” she said. “Broken laces so early in the evening! It must be sabotage!”

“Don’t let Thomas hear you say that,” Eileen told her, as she watched Brigit tighten the lacing and tie a solid knot that should, with luck, see her through the remainder of the night.

“Aye,” Brigit replied. “He’d take far too seriously any jest concerning sabotage.” She gave the knots of both boots a quick tug. Then she sighed.

“Feeling a little... micromanaged?” Eileen asked, still smiling.

Brigit touched Eileen’s hand. The woman might be her kind and faithful guide through the tedious process of presenting a public face to a hyperactive, media-saturated world— but Eileen was no confidante. The things Brigit felt could inveigh only alien intrusions upon Eileen’s highly organized internal landscape.

“I’m feeling ready to go back down to a fine All Hallows Eve party,” Brigit said, returning Eileen’s smile.

They stood up, keeping close watch over each other’s hems and heels, laughing a little at their victory. Eileen settled her mask into place and readjusted the elastic strap behind her ears.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Beautiful as ever,” Brigit assured her. “Off with you now. Our boys will look after me.”

“See they do it right,” Eileen said in parting. She waved her fingers over her shoulder and descended the staircase into the ballroom. The crowd swallowed her up, an ocean of colour absorbing a single sapphire dewdrop from the shore.

Brigit walked halfway down the stair, and there she paused. She looked out over the masked assembly from the relatively isolated shadows. A scene of enchantment and glamour swirled below her. Oh, my Ian, Brigit thought, the old pain twisting her heart anew. You’d have been the true life of this party.

The ballroom of socialite John Brennan’s lavish penthouse tingled with glitzy music and sparkled with crystalline light. Ornate geometric chandeliers hung, twinkling, from fourteen-foot electrical lines. The chandeliers glowed above the dance floor, where perhaps twenty couples were dancing, surrounded by twice that number of party-goers who stood or sat at the periphery in little clusters: talking, laughing, smoking, sipping champagne, munching hors d’oeuvres, and admiring one another’s costumes. Many in the room had arrived hoping to escape their financial woes for the evening, huddling together like recently rescued avalanche survivors in the aftermath of the stock market crash two weeks ago. Even as they gradually relaxed, the absent-minded dancing of the Wall Street folk expressed their scarcely disguised anxieties— fears surely not the least assuaged by the dainty musical offerings. The white-masked jazz quartet tucked against the exterior expanse of French doors played sterile, bright, fizzing tunes— stuff Ian would have called “mórgachtaí mórgachta muzak.” Beyond those doors lay John Brennan’s veranda garden. By the look of the city view outside the glass panes, dusk had at last given way to full dark.

Brigit turned her face away from her glimpse of those gleaming city lights outside. No sense indulging her longing for something she couldn’t have. Down on the ballroom floor, her host John Brennan caught her eye. He stood beside a tall, silver-haired man who had attired himself in an antique powder-grey soldier’s uniform. Both men seemed comfortable with one other, both pleased to find themselves in the company of an old friend. John himself wore the chain-mailed and tabarded costume of a medieval knight—save that his face had been painted silver to match his plumed helm. Perhaps he meant to be a living suit of armour, or else a chessman, or maybe a tin soldier. Brigit hadn’t asked. He raised his eyebrows at her, questioning.

Brigit smiled at him and nodded: Yes, John; shoestring problem solved.

John held up a gauntleted finger: One moment, I’ll be right back.

He spoke to the grey-clad officer and the two men moved across the floor toward a flamboyant huddle of younger people Brigit’s age. Brigit prepared herself to meet another set of Manhattan’s elite. She continued down the stairs, thinking John excelled at hosting upscale gatherings, and no mistake.

His décor generated an optimistically spooky atmosphere— life-sized plaster skeletons, ceramic jack o’ lanterns, fibrous polyester cobwebs, orange and purple mood lights, floating foil balloons, black table linens, and the like. A devil-faced bartender filled tray after tray of champagne flutes. Dignified waiters sporting inhuman plastic faces drifted serenely through the crowd, dispensing refreshments.

All the while, men and women wearing astonishing apparel continued to flood in from the two high-rise elevators in the entry gallery. As Brigit looked on, a fresh crowd, twenty strong, took turns submitting their engraved invitations to Andre, John’s currently blue-faced butler. The line of vetted newcomers filed in through the ballroom entrance. Another security measure, this. Only guests arriving with an original engraved invitation in hand could gain admittance to the most exclusive Halloween celebration on Central Park West.

Who’d ever have thought I’d find meself in such a place, on such a night as this? Brigit mused to herself. She marvelled that she had finally made it across the ocean, all the way from Derry to New York City. The shame of it being that John’s penthouse and its admittedly fine views of Manhattan were the most she could hope to see of the great metropolis during her visit.

It is enough, she reminded herself. We must take what we are given. And the gifts of this night already seemed grand and magnanimous.

At the foot of the stair, Thomas Cavanaugh stood waiting for her. Brigit knew he had not left his post during the time she and Eileen had spent acquiring and then installing the new bootlace. Good, stolid Thomas. She offered him her most reassuring smile— he never stopped worrying about her— and his broad shoulders relaxed the slightest bit. The man cut an imposing figure, dressed as he was in the historically ironic garb of a Viking warrior, horned helmet and all. No one in their right mind would dare face off against him to do Brigit harm.

But, of course, it was not the right-minded sort that troubled Thomas Cavanaugh.

John was returning now, bringing with him the grey officer and a delicate young woman in a flowery pink and green French gown, and— Brigit’s gaze sharpened— the woman wore a white owl mask. Brigit had also dressed as a fantasy owl, also selecting a period French style for her gown, although the two women had chosen fashions from separate centuries.

The other woman wore a (very) modestly cut imitation of an eighteenth-century robe de cour, bleached lace frothing at her sleeves and gathered into pert, bosom-concealing poufs at the front of her off-the-shoulder neckline. Embroidered pink, blue and violet blossoms unfurled across the gown’s narrow-waisted stomacher. Panniers worn beneath satin skirts produced a four-foot-wide frontal silhouette. The design of the woman’s long-beaked mask outshone Brigit’s. The other’s sequinned feathers were a soft, snowy white, a complement to her starched white petticoat.

Brigit’s owl mask featured lush burgundy and umber feathers, speckled about the eyes with tiny pearls, a bronze filigree brooch riding the bridge of the hooked beak. Her gown evoked the nineteenth-century Empire style, sewn from russet velvet, white taffeta, and creamy lace panels, embroidered and pearl-studded across the short puffed sleeves and the low scooped neckline and high waist. Brigit manifested her own sense of modesty (and her awareness of the autumnal weather) through the addition of a high-necked floral lace chemisette that matched her evening gloves. She felt the costume suited her.

So, an Irish owl shall meet an American owl, thought Brigit, bemused and intrigued. But we meet disguised as wisewomen spirits from the time of Empress Joséphine and the time of Queen Marie Antoinette. Times of tumult, times of grace. Brigit touched the cameo she wore at her throat, fingering the familiar contours of the carved shell. Fine ladies, we, for whom brave heroes would fight and die.

Her very own Viking warrior strode up to the grey officer— an American Civil War general, perhaps?—and he halted the mismatched trio with a warding hand.

“Hold up, there,” she heard Thomas say. “Let’s have a look here.”

He reached for the hilt of the sabre hanging from the officer’s striped belt below a gold tasselled sash. Brigit watched and waited, expecting nothing dangerous, happy when she saw her best expectations proven true.

Her bodyguard pulled the toy sword a few inches from its sheath. He tested the edges of the flimsy blade. Brigit could see from where she stood that the sabre was merely decorative. Still, as Thomas would doubtless tell her, better safe than dead. The pastel owl-woman frowned a little, watching. The officer submitted to the inspection, nonplussed.

“I’m terribly sorry, Charles,” John Brennan said in apology to his friend. “Mr. Cavanaugh here is one of Brigit’s bodyguards.” He pronounced her name the Scandinavian way. Bridj-it.

Thomas sheathed the sabre, saying, “No offence, sir, but there have been threats. Orangemen... Croppies...”

The officer, Charles, looked from Thomas to John. “Croppies, did he say?” Perhaps he mistrusted his ability to decipher the bodyguard’s thick northern Irish accent. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Brigit spoke up. “No reason you should,” she called. The foursome below turned to look at her. Brigit hastened down the last several steps, passing with a smile and a nod through a different grouping she had already met earlier in the evening: Nelson the rodeo cowboy, Daria the buxom genie, George the gawky fox hunter, and Kent the Tammany Hall era constable. They parted for her. Thomas, his duty for the moment fulfilled, slipped away to pace some distance behind Brigit, watching her back.

“It’s from an old war,” Brigit explained to the grey general and the pastel owl-woman. “An Irish-Catholic uprising against the British and their Protestant allies. The rebels had short-cropped hair, you see.” She tugged at a length of her own curling chestnut tresses, pinching a lock of her long hair at about the point where the old rebels would have shorn it away.

“That was, what, two hundred years ago?” asked the pastel owl-woman, smiling at the distance between the bygone age and the present day. “That’s a long time to remember a haircut.”

Brigit replied, “We Irish have long memories. My father taught me all the songs about the brave Croppy boys when I was still in the cradle. And every year we’d hear the Orangemen march past, banging their Lambeg drum and singing how they put the Croppies down.”

General Charles saluted Brigit with his champagne glass. “I stand instructed.” Then he deftly dismissed Brigit’s reminiscence, drawling, “I’m afraid history was never my subject. And most of what I did learn, I managed to forget.”

“Forgetting is a trick Ulster could stand to learn,” Brigit answered, sorrow softening her voice.

Predictably, John stepped in to change the subject. “Now, before I forget my responsibilities at this little soirée— Brigit, allow me to introduce my good friend, Charles Chandler.”

Brigit offered her hand, palm downward, which Charles took and pressed between his fingers, not quite performing a handshake, but not kissing her hand either. Brigit smiled and he let her go.

“And this is his daughter, Catherine Chandler,” said John. “Brigit, before you stand two of the finest attorneys in New York.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Catherine deflected with a little smile.

“I do!” Charles proclaimed. “I taught her everything she knows!”

They all laughed, although Catherine did so while gazing down into her champagne glass, meeting no one’s eyes. There’s a secret wound, Brigit thought. But the moment passed at once.

When Catherine looked up again, she did shake hands with her. Catherine wore fingerless lace gloves similar to Brigit’s, a fashion Madonna had made popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Catherine’s touch felt well-mannered as any woman’s from these circles, her grip was cool and firm. Professional. Brigit noted that from behind her spread of feathers, Catherine’s light green eyes regarded her with interest.

John reached to brush his friend’s coat sleeve. “Charles, there’s Samantha. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t take you over to say hello.”

Brigit thought Charles suppressed a grimace. It was difficult to be sure of his expression beneath the plain yellow mask he wore across his eyes.

“Duty beckons,” he said, turning away. He offered her a charming apologetic smile, and followed after John. The knight led him across the ballroom toward John’s ex-wife.

Catherine stepped close, standing between Brigit and the jazz band, filling the vacancy he two men left behind. She moved like a woman accustomed to full-skirted décolleté gowns, and she held her champagne glass with the unconscious polish of one who has received lifelong training in good manners and ladylike comportment. Her perfume was charismatic: dreamy floral and citrus notes chased by vanilla and vetiver. Classic pearl stud earrings were the only jewels she wore, glinting whitely through the wispy ringlets teased down from her temples. Her peach-toned skin was clear and smooth, her makeup minimal and moderate. Masked or not, she did not need to hide behind facial cosmetics, and she knew it. She was, quite simply, beautiful.

“I like your mask,” Brigit told her.

Catherine laughed and bowed her head. Brigit guessed she had not meant to wear a costume so strangely resonant with the Guest of Honour’s. Brigit also hoped that Catherine might be someone who could appreciate a magnificent coincidence. If coincidence it were. Brigit’s belief in coincidences had worn terribly thin during the most recent years of her life.

“I wrote a story about an owl-woman once,” Brigit commented companionably. “Just a little fable, for children.”

“Well, children of all ages,” Catherine replied. “I read it earlier this year, and I loved it.”

Brigit made no effort to hide her surprise. “Did you now?” she asked.

Fables and Fantasies had been Brigit’s first collection of stories, published while she was still a mere slip of a girl. The first edition, issued while her name was still Brigit O’Reilly, had been out of print for decades. A second edition had been published soon after her wedding, a limited run of eight hundred copies “by Brigit O’Donnell,” meant to advance the cause of children harmed by more recent violence in Ulster. Collectors now considered both editions rare.

“Well, it’s not easy to find, that one,” Brigit said.

“It was given to me by a friend.” Catherine’s voice became wistful. “A very special friend.”

Brigit felt a story looming behind those simple words. Perhaps a long story. A history that might have driven this slim echo of pre-Revolutionary decadence to identify herself with Brigit’s ghostly owl-woman.

Catherine sighed, saying nothing more about her special friend. “You have a real gift,” she said instead. “I only wish you wrote more children’s stories.”

“I wish I could. But there are darker things than ghosts in Ireland now. And you can’t hear the faerie music for the gunfire. Which is another way of saying: I’m not the innocent I was then.”

“Yes, it’s heartbreaking to see your world, your life, the people and places that you love, torn apart by violence and hatred. It’s so sad when innocence has to end that way.”

Brigit heard the pain behind her words. “You’ve known that heartbreak, first-hand?”

Catherine hesitated, deciding, Brigit knew from experience, whether to accept the invitation to deepen their talk, or whether to back away from the pain and retreat into safer conversational territory. She gave Brigit a taut, flattened smile.

“New York is a dangerous city,” Catherine said. “I didn’t understand just how dangerous until last year.” She sipped her champagne. “Long story. Anyway, these days, my job takes me into some pretty... grim... situations.”

Summary by way of understatement. It was safety Catherine wanted, then. Brigit took up the topical thread Catherine had left for her.

“Earlier, John said you’re an attorney?”

A more genuine smile returned to Catherine’s face. “Yes. I started out working for my father in his corporate law firm. Only last year— in July— I joined the legal ranks in the District Attorney’s office.”

“Let me think,” Brigit said. In her mind, she quickly reviewed the first six chapters of novelised NYC that she’d devoured yesterday. Six fascinating chapters from the new hardcover Eileen had handed to her as a welcome gift when she met Brigit at the airport: Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

“The District Attorney is your version of a Director of Public Prosecutions, right?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Catherine agreed. She quickly added, “I know. It’s a big change of scene.”

Brigit thought: She’s heard so many objections to her path, that she’s gone and spoken more of the same on my behalf in her own mind. And now here she’ll stand, defending herself to me out of habit.

Aloud, Brigit offered, “Change, big or small, can open new doors undreamed of.”

“It’s definitely been a good change for me,” Catherine said, earnest. She dipped her head in the direction Charles Chandler had gone. “Even though my father felt disappointed when I left his firm. And my friends were all surprised. Well, shocked, really.” Her laugh sounded as tight as her earlier smile had been.

Hence, her defensive outlook, Brigit privately observed.

Catherine sighed again. “But my father wants me to be happy. They all want me to be happy. This is what feels right. Satisfying.” Her shoulders lifted in a tense little shrug. Brigit saw that the chiffon folds accenting the costume’s bodice could not quite conceal several red marks on Catherine’s left shoulder. Mending cuts or scratches, perhaps.

Brigit had to wonder whether Catherine was trying to convince Brigit of her happy satisfaction, or the mórgachtaí mórgachta of New York— or Catherine Chandler herself.

“In a dangerous city,” Brigit said, “there must be a great deal of work for a public prosecutor to do.”

“Oh, there is! There’s no end to it.” Now Catherine flashed a quick, sharp grin. “I’m working harder than I ever did at Prasker, Chandler, and Coolige. I’ve never been worked so hard by anything or anyone. It can be daunting. Risky. It’s always exhausting.”

But proud you are that it is, in fact, honest work you’re doing now, Brigit thought.

Still smiling, Catherine said, “But it’s also exhilarating, in its way. I’ve realized that I have the power to bring down the criminals responsible for all the violence and hatred in this city. This job has required me to become strong enough to use that power.”

Her eyes shone bright with her enthusiasm. She spoke of her job, her source of new empowerment, with the same affectionate energy that other women displayed when they spoke of lovers, or children, or religious convictions.

“I love the work,” Catherine went on. “For the first time in my life, I feel that... what I do means something.”

“That’s a good feeling to have,” Brigit said carefully.

“That I’m making a difference,” Catherine continued as though Brigit had not spoken.

Catherine was gazing into the distance above Brigit’s head. A gust of cool air swept across the room from behind her. Brigit found the breeze invigorating, but Catherine only shivered. She tilted her head back a bit more. The long fall of beribboned brown hair she wore over her left shoulder slid away from her face, revealing a pale, curved scar, some three inches long, that scored her jawline below her ear.

“I think back over my cases during these past fifteen months,” Catherine said, thoughtful. “And at least I know that I put a lot of monsters out of commission. Got them off the street. Put them away.”

“Monsters?” Brigit repeated, unsettled by the word.

“Yes. Monsters.” Catherine’s contempt, though softly spoken, sounded cold and decisive. “Good people are a little safer now, because of what we do in the DA’s office,” she said. “My city, my world, is a better place. And I’m a part of that process, that... betterment. I have the responsibility to save the people and the places I love. So it’s important— vital— to use all my skills, all my strength and courage, all my resources, so that others can be spared from...”

She trailed off, refocusing her attention on Brigit. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear me ramble like this.”

Brigit knew her self-interruption was not mere civility, nor some sideways request to continue sharing a heavy-laden train of thought. Catherine’s certitude was real. She did not expect Brigit to understand.

Brigit felt— sudden pity for her.

This painfully familiar reaction to festering misery washed over her in a clammy wave. Yes, she felt pity for this passionate princess no older than herself—and sorrow as well. Sorrow that Catherine should feel such a desperate need to conceal some secret heartbreak from everyone she knew. And disappointment that Catherine should feel so sure that another woman— in particular another woman also striving to build peace and justice in an all too heartless world— would not want to hear anything she might have to say.

Gently, Brigit told her, “I’m listening to you, Catherine.”

They gazed at each other. And Brigit’s heart sank a little. She got the idea that, like all the other revellers tonight, Catherine was gazing at her in the hope of seeing an approving reflection of what Catherine looked like, not gazing to discover the potential sister behind the dark, pearl-speckled owl mask. And looking at Catherine, trying to receive her as she was, listening to the guarded complexity of Catherine’s passions, Brigit sensed anger and fear festering inside her —and great doubt, too. Great strength of will, yes, but also a brittleness, a rigid fragility. Without disconnecting her gaze from Catherine’s, Brigit began to wonder where Catherine had gotten the marks on her shoulder, and also the older scar that her stream of long hair and ribbons tried to hide from casual view.

“I’m sorry. I’m not usually this awkward,” Catherine finally confessed. “I guess it’s been a long week.” She sipped more champagne.

“And I’m thinking there have been many big changes in your life, these past fifteen months,” Brigit replied.

Those green eyes locked with hers.

In that moment, did Catherine’s true awareness begin to enter in? Did her wall between self and sister become permeable? Did a key turn, perhaps? A lock click softly open and a heavy door swing ajar? She stood, young and lovely, poised between politeness and possibility.

“Would you like to talk about it?” Brigit asked. She glanced at the French doors, and the city lights beckoning beyond them. “Come. Let’s go outside, where it’s quieter— away from the smoke and din.” She smiled. “Where a body can hear herself think, and listen to the music that plays within her own heart.”

Catherine looked around at the crowd, and then down again into her glass. “I really don’t believe it’s the right moment for that.”

A line Brigit had penned for her newest book rose immediately to her lips: “In truth, each present moment of our lives is the only moment that we have.”

Catherine smiled, recognizing the words. “I love the way you capture wisdom and share it with the world.”

She’d tactfully brought them back to the subject of their careers.

Brigit let that door close.

“If you’d like to know a secret,” she said, leaning closer, “that piece of wisdom was a thing my mother taught me. Her words, not mine.”

“She must be very proud of you.”

“I’d like to think so,” Brigit said, then provided by way of explanation: “She died when I was eleven years old.”

Catherine responded with instant sympathy. “Brigit,” she breathed. So, she had obviously read Three Hundred Days, but not Too Many Heroes. Her green eyes sad now, Catherine asked, “Was it... the conflict?”

“Aye. Near the beginning of our Troubles. UVF gunmen killed her.”

“I... I can’t imagine...” Catherine said. “I lost my mother when I was ten— but to a progressive illness, not to violence.”

Another twinning, then, owl to owl.

“Ah, but you can imagine some of it,” Brigit replied.

“Yes.”

“Your understanding is enough, and I thank you for it.”

Catherine nodded.

“I’m sorry you lost your own mother, and so young,” Brigit said. “What was she like?”

“Beautiful,” Catherine answered at once. “Generous and kind. She went by her middle name. ‘My parents call me Marian,’ she used to say. ‘But my friends call me Adele.’ It made people laugh. She loved to laugh. She loved holidays.”

“Halloween, as well?” Brigit asked with a smile.

“Oh, yes. Every year, the very best tricks and treats abounded at the Chandler house.”

“That’s as it should have been, then. I’m glad for you.”

They fell silent. Catherine seemed to have run out of things to say. Between remembered bloodshed, impassioned professions, absent special friends, and departed mothers, Brigit had exhausted Catherine’s curiosity within the first five minutes of meeting her. Which was twice as long as her father had lasted. Alas, a true owl-woman had that effect upon ordinary folk.

“Well,” Catherine managed at length. “I shouldn’t keep you from mingling with the other guests. I didn’t mean to monopolize your time.”

Brigit thought, but kept herself from saying, Does it look to you like any other guests are stampeding in this direction to have a private word with me?

Careful, my dear, Eileen would have told her. Your Irish is starting to show.

So Brigit only spoke a simpler truth. “Oh, no, Catherine. I’ve enjoyed our time together.”

“So have I,” said Catherine.

“I wish you the happiest of Halloweens,” Brigit said. She reached out to clasp Catherine by the hand.

For a second, Brigit wondered if she had committed some breach of New York soirée etiquette. But then Catherine’s fingers squeezed back and her smile warmed considerably. “Happy Halloween, Brigit.”

Catherine took her leave. She wended her graceful way toward the company of youngish people gathered near the bar. Brigit noticed she did not so much as glance in the direction John and Charles had taken. Brigit fairly heard her beloved Ian’s voice murmur to her, There walks a girl who knows not whether she’s coming or going. Brigit’s heart ached.

“And all who would follow her find a share in her doom,” she whispered to herself.

She stood where Catherine had left her, watching the festivities in silence. It was Rilke who had written: Ultimately, and precisely in the profoundest and most important matters, we are inexpressibly alone, and for one person to be able to advise or help another, many things must happen, many things must succeed, a whole constellation of circumstances must converge, for the effort even once to turn out happily.

On even this most magical night, the stars must not have aligned to lessen the loneliness of either owl in the company of the other.

So Brigit stayed where she was and did a thing her mother had taught to her, long ago. She looked upon the revelry before her and let compassion fill her soul to overflowing. She thanked God for these people, all these witty, white, wealthy, dazzling, dazzled men and women. People who knew nothing of hunger or thirst, nothing of the horrors of inbred war, nor of abject terror’s daily gnawing at the bones of human will. Let their dollars fund Ian’s Caer Mediation House in Derry, whether they spent their money to help Irish families— or merely to make a pious impression upon their costumed fellows. Let their fervour send Brigit’s writings to the top of their country’s bestseller lists— or let their boredom drive the works underground. Let them discuss her truths, and her mother’s and her father’s truths, and Ian’s truths— or not. Let them praise her work or condemn it, and let them repeat her message to the world, whether by rote, or by accident, or in remembrance. Let them drink and dance and laugh, free from as many of life’s miseries as they could manage to contrive. But let their joy be— above all— possible.

So let it be.

And yet: for one breathless moment, within a single quiet heartbeat that acknowledged her own need, Brigit found herself longing for someone among them— even if only one person—who could meet her mind-to-mind this night. Someone who did not shy away from the mention of unpleasant realities, Irish or otherwise. Someone who did not tell her what they wished she would write, but who understood— truly understood— the things she had already written. Someone who did not take their great city for granted, nor hold it in oblique contempt. Someone who could tell her many a fascinating and candid tale about New York and all its wonders. Someone brave and fun-loving and wise. Someone like her Ian.

Dear God, how she missed him.

Brigit thought, Life of the party indeed, my love.

She decided to amuse herself by studying each costumed caricature in the throng as her eye happened upon it, tucking little details away into the nooks and crannies of her storyteller’s imagination. A belly dancer and a parlour maid walked past her, giggling like schoolgirls over their champagne glasses. Frankenstein’s monster danced by, holding tight to a woman clad mostly in scarlet feathers. Dracula served himself at the buffet, mounding his plate high with gourmet delicacies. A skeleton couple pranced out to the centre of the room, stark black-and-white silhouettes at the heart of a cacophonous rainbow.

Life and death colliding in Manhattan, Brigit thought, and smiled.

The band concluded one song and began another. The saxophonist in the quartet had traded his large brass instrument for a shining silver flute. The already bland music changed, becoming outright saccharine, and also, well—odd. Fussy flautist ballroom jazz? Brigit had never heard of such a thing.

At that point, Thomas came to her side. “You’re looking a wee bit forlorn,” he told her.

“I’m far from home, is all,” Brigit replied.

Thomas nodded. “Well then, do you care to dance with me?”

“Only if you promise to pay half a mind to where you plant your great feet.”

She clasped his hand and Thomas led her out onto the polished dance floor. “Now, now, Brigit. I’ve practised my lurching since last time.”

“Practised! With whom?”

“That’d be David.”

Brigit laughed. She could scarcely imagine dear David Shaw, her second bodyguard, tromping cheek-to-cheek with Thomas for any reason. “I’ll believe that one when I see it with me own eyes,” she declared.

“All right, maybe I practised by myself, but David watched— and gave sound advice.”

“Put your practising to the test, then,” Brigit challenged him. “You just show me what you’ve got.”

“Fine. I will.”

Thomas grinned down at her and proceeded to thug his way around the room, he a heavyset man towing his full-figured charge along, in a bold emulation of two partners performing fleet-footed dance manoeuvres to the admiration of all.

After enduring perhaps a minute of this treatment, Brigit told him, “Thomas Cavanaugh, I do love you for trying.”

He chuckled. It did Brigit’s heart good to hear him laugh. He’d lived a hard life, had her Thomas, and looking after Brigit made things none the easier for him.

He turned her about. And all at once, a weight of certainty impressed itself upon Brigit’s consciousness. She was being watched, and watched intently. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a distant, solemn shape standing apart from all others in the ballroom.

She and Thomas turned again and she looked over her bodyguard’s shoulder toward the line of French doors. She’d made no mistake. A man stood there, hooded and cloaked. He stood quite still, in fact. A strange man, tall, frowning, his shadowed eyes fixed upon Brigit and Brigit alone.

It was difficult to look away from him. His presence pulled at her like gravity. She felt a brief unease and gripped her friend’s shoulder, drawing courage from her Viking warrior’s solid bulk. Gazing back at the stranger, she decided that her discomfort originated within herself. The man in the cloak presented no threat and no menace that Brigit could discern. He only stood, calm and grave. And when their eyes met across the room, he did not look away.

What costume is he wearing? Brigit asked herself. He did not seem quite one thing or the other. Flowing yellow hair spilled from beneath his hood; glittering eyes beheld her from an animal’s face; clean white ruffles cascaded down the front of a billowy Romance poet’s shirt; a knotted leather belt worn low, across the hips; dark leggings; high boots lashed to the thigh; fringed black leather gauntlets covered his hands and forearms. He continued to watch her.

The song ended. Brigit absently joined the polite applause. She and Thomas left the dance floor. Brigit couldn’t help but look back over her shoulder at the stranger. His gaze never faltered in the slightest.

Thomas held up his arm for her. Brigit rested her hand upon his wrist. He noticed the new focus of Brigit’s attention and saw the stranger at the back of the room.

“What is it, Brigit?” Thomas asked, alert and suspicious. “Is there trouble?”

Brigit decided right then that there was not. Or rather, not any sort of trouble she wanted Thomas to prevent. She recalled the way Thomas had embarrassed poor Charles Chandler over that shiny aluminium sword. She moved her hand away from his arm.

“Oh, no, Thomas. It’s all right. Go on with you, now. It’s a party! Not every man who’s looking at me is wanting to lay me in my grave.”

She walked away from her friend and approached the stranger. Did he want to stare? She’d stare right back at him!

Besides, she thought. It feels nice to be looked at so devotedly.

At least, she hoped it was devotion, or something closely akin to it.

The stranger turned to one side as she came near to him: a subtle welcome into his space which kept crowd and French doors alike within reach of the both of them— and a move that also kept himself and Brigit together in full view of Thomas. So he knew Thomas was watching them, and he also knew how to keep a protector’s sightlines clear. Which told Brigit that the stranger understood a great deal about her predicament— and that he had no desire to alarm her. The word Guardian rang like steel in her mind. Caomhnóir.

She stopped in front of him. “Brigit O’Donnell,” he said. He pronounced her name Brighid, and his voice sounded beautiful: thunder rolling in the hills, or a rumour of surf resounding from a headland.

“Herself,” Brigit confirmed. She smiled and offered him her hand.

He studied her gesture as though no one had ever before extended a hand to him in friendship. Then, tentative, curious, he bowed to accept her hand. His formal touch felt as light as moonbeams, his fleeting kiss upon her knuckles as warm, and as ephemeral, as breath. Something about his face softened into the semblance of a well-pleased smile.

…

Up close, Brigit saw nothing contrived in the stranger’s appearance. His clothes were plain in comparison to his peers in the ballroom, though well-tailored for his height and girth. The work had to be handmade, pieced and patched but not tattered.

The stranger was a big man, broad and leggy, but not blocky like Thomas, nor muscle-bound like David. For all his height, he seemed compact, somehow. Complete. Not an inch of flesh wasted or out of proportion to the rest of him.

He was done up as a lion, and the mask was unlike anything Brigit had yet seen, surely a modern theatrical affair, utterly seamless, perfect down the most minute detail. This fine craftsmanship left his face remarkably mobile. His hair was not a plain yellow mop of a wig, after all, but a fine curly mixture of white honey, warm amber, and spun gold. Very well-fashioned, for a hairpiece. The same sort of hair— or fur— that fell past his shoulders like a mane also bristled along his brows, and coated his flat nose and feline jaw in a thin layer of velvet.

If a lion could walk about on two legs and wear fanciful highwayman’s garb to a ball, then surely he would look exactly like this stranger.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your dancing,” he said.

“An act of mercy,” Brigit confided. She began to pull her hand away. The stranger released her the instant she moved. “Thomas is a good friend and a brave man, but a dancer he’s not.”

The stranger said nothing. Brigit realized that his centred composure set him even further apart from the other revellers. He kept his hood pulled forward, so that his mask remained in partial shadow. No hint of the exhibitionist could be found in his demeanour. No haughty glee in his All Hallows disguise. If anything, he stance seemed—humble. Steady. Not self-conscious but deeply self-aware. The stranger possessed an aura of dignity and hidden strength. Regal. Mysterious.

“Extraordinary,” Brigit said aloud in frank admiration. “You look as though you might have ridden with Cúchulainn, or sailed with Theseus. ”

He bowed his head the tiniest degree. “Only in my dreams,” he replied. Pointed white teeth glinted as he spoke. Although the down-turned mouth moved strangely, Brigit knew he meant his face to smile.

He continued in a soft, sincere cadence, “And sometimes in books like yours.”

Brigit received the compliment with her best smile set in place. But she relaxed as she watched him consider which words to speak next. This moment alone with her must be important to him.

Slowly, he said, “Your writing has helped me through dark times. You’ve touched me. Made me think.”

Brigit listened to him. He meant every word he uttered. She gazed into his deep-set eyes. Haunting eyes, bright and blue as a clear autumn sky after sunrise. Windows into an ancient, honest soul.

Her silence began to unnerve him. His speech became quieter. Hesitant. “I... just wanted... to tell you,” he concluded. “To thank you.”

Brigit knew true heartsong when she heard it. The tinkly faux jazz suddenly felt intrusive, an unwelcome distracting noise. Too many people voiced inane babble too loudly. Too many glasses clinked, too many dishes clattered. Too many perfumes and colognes collided in the air with too many brands of tobacco. Too many designer-shod feet trundled and scuffed across the floor.

My work has helped a man through dark times. Touched him, made him think. And he came here tonight to thank me, soulfully, in person.

Such gratitude must never be taken lightly.

“Come,” Brigit told him. “Thank me outside.”

He drew back a little, startled, and stopped moving altogether. Practically stopped breathing. At a complete loss, Brigit guessed. She abruptly understood that these refined party folk were not his people. He was not one of their herd. He was not sure how to behave correctly among them, nor how to respond to Brigit’s invitation. He, like Brigit, was a foreigner here. She empathized.

“Will you tell me your name?” she asked him more gently.

“Vincent,” he said.

No surname. Guileless as a boy. Succinct as a sage.

“Come outside with me, Vincent. Please.”

He must have realized that she meant what she offered; his frozen posture thawed, shoulders twisting a little in the direction of the doors. He shifted his weight, angling toward the outdoor space, silently acquiescing to her proposal. Brigit felt answered.

Vincent never took his eyes from her face as she gripped his arm at the elbow and guided him firmly toward the nearest pair of French doors. It was there his quiet confidence seemed to return to him. They walked together then, a gentleman escorting his lady to the veranda. He opened a door. She caught up her skirt in her free hand, so the small train would not catch on the building’s architecture. They crossed the threshold out into the night and Vincent mercifully shut the door behind them.

And here, out here, they found New York City waiting for them.

Brigit lifted her chin and breathed deep. “Do you know New York?” she asked him. “Do you live here?”

“Yes. I know it well. I was born here.”

Brigit spread her hands out to the skyline. “Long have I dreamed of beholding this sight.”

Vincent had stopped beside her. “The city?” he asked.

“The city. The new world. Strange lands across the sea.”

Brigit lowered her hands. She looked around John Brennan’s paved garden of potted bushes and saplings. Bronze or marble sculptures atop granite pedestals stood at intervals along the walk: pudgy cherubs and segmented globes and amorphous modernist things. Electric mini-lights glimmered along the boughs of the bare young birches and the Japanese maples that had thus far retained most of their leaves, and more lights glowed from within each manicured evergreen shrub. The place looked different after sundown. More welcoming, more secluded.

She took Vincent’s arm again. This time, her touch did not surprise him. They strolled down the walk outside the ballroom doors.

“The night has a special magic to it, don’t you think?” she asked. “This night especially.”

“Halloween.”

“In the old religion, they called it Samhain.”

They stopped at a gap in a low hedge. A narrow passage opened between two cement planter boxes. Brigit looked at her companion, then up at the city’s towers beyond the brink of the veranda. Releasing Vincent’s arm, she walked past the hedge, not hurrying. Vincent followed her.

“Tonight is the night when the walls ’tween the worlds grow thin,” she said, “and spirits of the underworld walk the earth. A night of masks and balefires, when anything is possible and nothing is quite as it seems.”

They came to the concrete parapet. Brigit pressed her hands to the man-made stone. The wind swept her hair back from her shoulders and whispered among fallen leaves strewn across the pavement behind them. Feathers tickled Brigit’s cheeks.

Vincent stood beside her, taking in the view, listening to her speak.

Brigit told him, “Your city has its own magic, as well.”

She reached back and unfastened the ribbon ties of her owl disguise, taking off her mask. The breeze felt wonderful on her hot forehead. She felt as though she had removed blinders. The city leaned near to her. Traffic honked and zoomed below. An aeroplane droned somewhere overhead. The fat waxing moon floated in the sky above, cold and glorious.

“Magic,” she heard Vincent whisper.

“The lights,” said Brigit. “The towers. Listen to it.”

They listened. Time passed. The sky blended indigo with violet and star-spangled black. Voices echoed up to them from the street. A police siren shrilled far away in the distance. Half-forgotten drumbeats filtered through the glass panes of John Brennan’s French doors. Behind them, the little trees swayed in the wind, sighing.

“A song of life,” Vincent murmured.

“Life? Yes.” The ache in Brigit’s heart swelled into something like a psychic bruise. “In Derry, the night has a darker music.” As she spoke, she heard the sounds: “Bombs. Gunfire. The screams of dying men.”

Night after night after night, she thought.

Vincent turned away from the magical vista. He leaned upon the parapet and watched her profile. His quiet words seemed a part of the city’s nightsong. “Yet you always return,” he said.

Brigit looked at him. “Oh, I’ve thought of leaving. The whole world’s open to me now. I could choose to live anywhere, export myself to anywhere. But Derry’s my home. And whatever else I might be, I’m still a Bogside girl, and me father’s daughter, and me husband Ian’s widow.”

She thought Vincent smiled a little. He looked out at the skyline again.

“When you wrote of Ian in Three Hundred Days... I almost felt as though I knew him. You made him live again with your words.”

“Thank you for that, Vincent,” she said softly.

The lights in the buildings on the other side of the street blurred in Brigit’s vision.

“Aye, he’s dead. But I will not forget him, nor let him be forgotten. It’s been two years since he got into that car, and not an hour has passed that I haven’t spoken of him, written of him, thought of him.”

“I don’t want to awaken painful memories.”

She could almost see Ian’s image in the pattern of light across the way. “No, it hurts,” she said. “It hurts.” Brigit smiled, looked into Vincent’s noble lion-face. “But it’s such a sweet pain.”

He listened. Deeply. Without flinching. Bearing her hurt with her. Calm. Receptive.

The words began to pour out. “Ian and I were born six streets apart, and yet in different worlds. A stiff-necked Orangeman and a Croppy girl from Bogside, we were.” Brigit realized she smiled a wide, stubborn smile, remembering.

“Ian O’Donnell and Brigit O’Reilly,” she went on. “Daft enough to fall in love, but not so big a pair o’ fools that we thought he could live in my world, or me in his. So we tried to create a new world that we could share together. Well, you know how that ended.”

“A beginning can be found in every ending,” Vincent said. “The work you began together will help to heal Ireland. The Ian you wrote of would think that as good a memorial as any man could want.”

Brigit’s voice hardened. “Sure, and he’d better. For it’s the only sort of memorial he’s likely to get.”

Vincent had spoken the truth, and Brigit knew it. But cruel and bitter seemed his truth as they stood side by side on this New York pinnacle. Only Ian’s love, still burning and alive inside her, kept his memory sweet and pure within her soul.

Vincent was still listening to her.

Brigit looked down at her hands, tying knots in the ribbons of her mask.

“Every time I raise a stone over Ian’s poor sweet head, some bastard knocks it to pieces.”

The tears returned and she had to quiet her hands, or risk dropping her mask over the side of the building.

“Even the dead are spared none of the hate,” she mourned.

The city drew her gaze once more. How beautiful it appeared. And how forbidden.

Brigit’s world had become a place where masked men lurked in shadows, waiting for the right moment to murder her. A million and one ways to die, and so short a span of years in which to try to live. A dangerous city, Catherine Chandler had called her hometown. But for Brigit, every city was a dangerous place, whether Derry or Belfast or Dublin or London or Paris or New York. Despite Thomas’s and David’s best efforts, any moment— every moment— even here, could be her last.

She had agreed to a suggestion of Eileen Farwell’s friend, John Brennan, to hold a merry masque (obliquely) in Ian’s honour, in no small part to dispel the spectres of the ski-masked sniper or bomber from Brigit’s nightmares. So she’d donned her owl-woman persona like a suit of feminine armour, wearing getaway boots at Thomas’s and David’s behest, striving to mingle with women like Daria Stern, who wanted her to submit an article about Irish politics to her prestigious magazine, and men like Kent Carmichael, who thought Brigit should try her hand at a book of poetry next, since she’d already “dabbled” in drama, fantasy, essay, and memoir.

At least none of Daria and Kent’s set had mentioned her book of fables. Brigit counted their oversight a mercy. They were not the sort of people who knew how to weigh the truths that fables offered.

No, she had abandoned all her old poetry manuscripts. Set them aside for later. Now, when she did write little poems to herself in her diary, they all revisited the same scene. The flaming furnace of a ruined automobile, and the charred corpse of the only passenger blasted clear. The broken body of her husband clasped to her breast, and the sound of her own keening like a banshee’s wail in her ears. She’d later had to burn the clothes she wore that day. No, not until the entire terror passed away would she inflict any of her poems upon the world. And then, she wanted to write poems of celebration, verses to commemorate a time of peace. She suspected that era might be long in coming, if ever it did.

Only yesterday, French customs officials had boarded the Eksund six miles off the coast of northern Brittany—and found the ship laden with a hundred and fifty tons of armaments, bound for Ireland, and manned by IRA weapons smugglers.

“An outrageous cargo like theirs— that’ll mean they got cocky,” David had commented angrily. “Means they’ve run other shipments through, previous, and stashed their rubbish everywhere without drawing attention. Thought they could do it again, with a bigger haul.”

Brigit hoped— prayed— that her father was not involved in the receiving end of the Eksund operation.

But she knew the man her father was. It would not astound her to learn that he’d landed himself in the thick of things. Again. Granted, from the day she and Ian had announced their engagement, Sean O’Reilly’s hitherto unchallenged prestige in the IRA had suffered a steep decline. Such a blow to his pride must have made him hate her all the more. Nevertheless, his zeal could not be doubted—and his skills as both a bomber and a funds-raiser were invaluable to the company he kept.

Bombs. Gunfire. The screams of dying men— and women, and children, too. An occupied land in torment. Brigit’s only home. And Ian—

Ian.

“It could have been me, you know,” she murmured to Vincent. Staring down at her mask, she admitted, “There are times I wish it had been.”

A tear fell onto the back of her right hand. Brigit let it glisten there like a precious jewel. She recited, “She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps...”

Her voice wavered. She thought of Ian’s unmarked grave, where both sides permitted no stone or plaque to name him, and where every wreath or bouquet she brought was always trampled flat, torn asunder, and scattered. Brigit O’Donnell fell silent.

And into her silence, Vincent’s gentle voice answered, “ And lovers are round her, sighing...”

Slowly, slowly, Brigit looked up at him.

“But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,

For her heart in his grave is lying.”

She listened. His eyes seemed wise and fey, the eyes of a soul well acquainted with sorrow, no stranger to pain. His mask seemed now more flesh than fantasy, for Brigit thought she saw in his expression the tender charity of all the saints her mother always revered. Even now, when their eyes met, Vincent did not look away.

“She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,

Every note which he loved awaking;

Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,

How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.”

Brigit whispered the final line of the stanza with him. He stopped speaking. She covered his gloved hand with her own.

“Thank you,” she said.

He bowed his head, moving his other hand to shelter hers beneath his benevolent touch. No prior condolence had lifted the burden of bereavement from her heart with such kindness. The wind gusted, crisp and sportive, tickling strands of their hair across their faces.

Brigit smiled through her tears. She retrieved her comforted hand to brush frisking curls and dampness out of her eyes.

“Tell me, Vincent,” she said, “what do you love best about your city?”

His eyes smiled at her again. “Must I choose one thing?” he asked.

Chancing a grin, Brigit declared, “Aye. You must.”

He thought about it. “I love the rooftops. I love to visit the homes of friends. But since I must choose, I believe I love Central Park the best.”

“Oh, I wish this garden had been built on t’other side of the building,” Brigit sighed. She rubbed the last of her tears from her skin. “We’d have a view of the park from there.”

“I know.”

“Do you visit your park often?” she asked.

“As often as I can, from the time I was very young.”

“What was it like to grow up in New York?”

Vincent considered, and shook his head. “It was the best of times... it was the worst of times.”

Brigit smiled. She turned to lean her back against the concrete wall. Vincent described things for her.

“I played with my friends in back alleys and train yards. We explored the docks and climbed fire escapes to find out what the tops of tall buildings could show us. We rode the carousel in the park and marked the passage of the years by the changing electric signs in Times Square. We discovered all the secrets of the public library and knew the schedules of all the subway trains. We ran wild through the snow. In summer, we climbed trees in the parks. My brother taught me to play stickball and hide-and-seek. My father taught me to love old books and great music and the artistic work of human hands.”

“The best of times,” Brigit agreed.

“Yes.”

“My father used to tell me of New York when I was just a little girl. He came here a dozen times. Never quite legally, of course.”

Spurred into motion by her memories, Brigit left the wall and strolled back the way she and Vincent had come. He straightened, followed her through the gap in the hedge, and then walked easily at her side.

“He was raising funds for the cause, you see. Collecting money for the widows and orphans...and the weapons. To make more of them. He always promised me that one day he would take me across the ocean with him.” Brigit rolled her eyes. “One day.”

“He never did?”

She realized she had begun swinging her mask across her thigh in an irritated, restless motion. She kept walking but held her arm still. She tried to think how to explain. This hurt still rankled— would, she guessed, hound her to the end of her days.

At last she blurted, “My father cast me out.”

Vincent kept listening.

“It was three years ago. My wedding day. He came to the church. Called me a traitor. And an Orangeman’s whore.”

They had reached the opposite end of the veranda. Vincent came to a stop, so Brigit stopped too. Light from the ballroom illuminated one half of his features. Leafy shadows absorbed the details of his dark form.

“I’ve not seen him since,” Brigit told him. “By rights, I ought to hate him.”

Vincent looked into her face for a while, silent. Perhaps he looked deeper than her face. Perhaps he saw into her heart and soul, for at last he said quietly, “You have no hate in you. Only grief.”

“Aye,” Brigit replied. “How can you hate the man who taught you what love meant?”

Ratten minger! You bloody traitorous gowl! You Orangeman’s whore!

Brigit shivered.

“Are you cold?” Vincent asked, concerned.

“Cold?” Brigit repeated. “No. Why, it’s naught but a brisk fall evening.”

The impulse struck her then, alighting like a night bird upon a branch of her all too wayward yearnings.

Brigit’s winged whimsy bade her say: “But I’d borrow your cloak, if you’re willing to lend it.”

She’d startled him again. Vincent blinked. “My cloak?”

“Thomas and the others, they’d give their very lives for me, and I love them for it. But sometimes, I want nothing more than to get away from them for a few hours.”

Vincent glanced at the brightness within the ballroom. “They’re only trying to keep you safe.”

M’aingeal coimhdeachta, and no mistake, Brigit thought. Damn, but he had to go and sympathize with her protectors, too. He also had to stay right and true in his thinking. Brigit groaned, eyeing the urban tableau hungrily.

“I’m sick unto death of their safety!” she objected, striding to the garden’s outer edge. “Oh, I look at the city out there, and I want to touch it. To walk its streets, meet its people, and listen to its music! I want to see all the things my father told me of— and I can’t!” She stopped and turned. Vincent remained halfway in shadow, looking pensive.

“Can you imagine how that feels?” she asked him.

He closed his eyes, as though he did feel it. “Yes,” he whispered.

He understood her. Somehow, Brigit felt certain he completely understood. She crossed the space between them, standing face to face with him. Mind to mind. He opened his eyes. He watched er, listened, held himself perfectly still.

Brigit took a glance of her own at the ballroom. And in that instant, her decision was made.

“To hell with the risks!”

Half-smiling, she said to her new friend, “Sometimes we must leave our safe places, Vincent, and walk open-handed among our enemies.”

She knew he would know the line. He who spoke so eloquently of Ian’s portrait in Three Hundred Days. Vincent’s mouth curved into its strange yet comely smile. Brigit saw the whimsical mischief kindle behind his eyes.

In reply, Vincent reached a hand up toward his head, hesitated, and seemed to arrive at his own decision. He pushed his hood back and drew his arms from out the sleeves of the heavy dark mantle he wore. Brigit grinned at him all the while. He gallantly whisked the garment about her shoulders. She found that it was not made from flimsy, ornamental stuff, but rather from common, serviceable materials, uncommonly combined.

It took some juggling and adjusting to hide her well within the wool and leather folds. Brigit had to catch up the train of her gown and grasp the front hems of the cloak, so she would not trip when she tried to walk— and all this clinching and grappling without dropping her mask. Vincent lifted the hood up and over the back of her head.

“Pull it lower,” Brigit directed.

He pulled it down over her forehead. Brigit peered out at him like a little owl nestled within the hollow of a venerable oak. They laughed. It felt perfectly natural to laugh with him.

“Gentle sir?” Brigit asked him.

“Yes, Brighid O’Donnell?”

“Will you be so kind as to introduce me to your great city this night?”

Vincent’s blue eyes danced. Now that he stood uncovered, she saw that his long golden hair had to be his own; no wig after all. He bowed to her, as courteous as you please.

“You do me honor to request it,” he answered her. “Yes. I will.”

“How shall we make our escape?” she asked.

He stood upright. “Go down to the front door,” he said. “I will meet you outside.”

There was nothing more to be said. Brigit lowered her head, sure she looked for all the world like a miniature monk secreted within a voluminous black habit. She hurried to the nearest door, turned the handle, and rushed inside.

Here I be! Brigit thought, feeling her heart perform wild pirouettes in her chest. Here I go, right here and now, setting meself free. I only needed a little nudge. A little extra courage. A little helpful generosity from a special friend.

Brigit dove into John’s Brennan’s spirited Samhain masque. She swept past a beefy, scowling clown stationed next to the jazz quartet. Past the musicians and the bar. Past Thomas, who paced and frowned along the length of French doors, awaiting owl-Brigit’s return from the veranda. She slipped around the whirlpool of dancers. She saw Eileen, twirling with a portly, pink-faced Sheik. She glimpsed Catherine Chandler’s French rosebud of a gown. The white-feathered owl-princess spun round and round in the arms of a handsome pirate. Brigit passed Sir John and General Charles, laughing with two other men, a Sherlock Holmes and a King Henry VIII. She passed half a dozen new couples, just arriving at the ball. No one stopped her. No one followed her. No one took any notice of her. She left them all behind.

Down the stairs into the gallery, around the corner, through a doorway, past Andre the blue-skinned Venusian butler, and into a lift. Brigit pressed the round button for the ground floor. The polished steel doors closed. She began her descent.

“Oh!” she whispered to herself. “Oh!”

She hugged Vincent’s mantle close about her. Just how long had it been since she’d worn a man-warmed coat around her shoulders? She remembered Vincent’s shining blue eyes, his locks of honey-amber-gold. The cloak was fragrant with the hot-blooded scent of him and of his life. Smoke and leather, subtle spices, good home cooking, virile earth and mossy stone, the fresh chill of the penthouse garden’s autumn wind. The cloth felt pliable in her hands, soft, well-worn.

Within his hood, the air grew warm from Brigit’s breath. She could tell Vincent wore no chemical fragrances of any kind, made no habit of chewing minty gum or subjecting this garment to artificially scented detergents. The thing had not been stored in plastic or near mothballs, nor was it recently dry cleaned, nor pressed, nor purchased from any shop. It had the feel of a common coat worn every day to stave off the chill. Or perhaps to conceal a mysterious body within its wrappings.

The cloak was, Brigit suddenly knew, no costume at all. Just as the lion-man’s mane could be no wig. Just as his rich, expressive voice emerged from no affectation. Just as he spoke past his long, sharp eyeteeth with the uncanny fluency of long habit. Everything about him bespoke a rare authenticity.

So: what lay behind his mask?

Samhain— when the walls between the worlds grow thin...

Or: what might not lie behind his mask?

“And spirits of the underworld walk the earth,” Brigit breathed.

Dear God, had she only dreamed him?

But if Vincent had been a dream, then where did this marvellous fringed and hooded cloak of veritable invisibility come from?

She imagined Ian telling her to keep her wits about her. The elevator coasted to a stop. The doors slid apart, opening onto the lobby. Brigit stepped out, clutching cloak and train and mask.

Wits, my love, she thought, rubbing at feathers with her thumb. She shook her head, shifting the lay of the hood over her hair. Her eye fell upon a marble-topped counter, behind which a uniformed concierge stood ready to fulfil the wishes of the building’s residents and guests. Brigit walked over to him.

“Good evening. May I help you?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. She held out the owl mask. “Please see that this is delivered to Mr. Thomas Cavanaugh, who is attending Mr. Brennan’s ball tonight.”

The man took the mask from her. “Very good, Miss.”

She did not bother to correct his form of address. “Would you be sure to tell him that Brigit said all is well, and she’ll see him in a few hours’ time?”

“All is well, and Brigit will see Mr. Cavanaugh in a few hours,” he repeated.

“Aye. That’s good.”

“I’ll see to it, right away,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

He inclined his head, asking no questions with his face.

Brigit backed away from the front desk and walked toward the outer aperture of the building. The automatic sliding glass doors had been locked open this evening, probably to accommodate the massive influx of party guests. Even as she approached the opening, two more late arrivals, costumed and displaying their paper invitations, strode past the doorman and headed toward the elevators.

Brigit hurried outside. She stopped on the empty sidewalk, holding her breath. Watching for him.

Spirits of the underworld...

She did not see or hear him approach. He simply materialized beside her. Brigit looked round and there he was, standing attentively at her right hand.

She let out her breath, and smiled at him in pure gratitude.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Brigit pushed the hood back, saying yes with her eyes. Vincent nodded toward the street corner. She touched his elbow, connecting the pair of them, urging him forward. He brought her to a pedestrian crossing and they walked swiftly to the opposite side of the street.

“And this will be Central Park?” Brigit whispered, excited as a child at Christmastime.

“Yes. We’re entering near the 65th Street Transverse, near the southern end of the park.”

“Marvellous,” Brigit replied.

“Magic,” Vincent said.

She laughed, delighted.

He looked back once. A single glance backward, and upward, turning his face to the penthouse and the sky. He might have sighed. If he did, it was too soft a sound for Brigit to be sure she’d heard it. Perhaps it was only the wind, playing tricks upon her ears.

Then Vincent gazed down into Brigit’s face. His eyes glittered in the darkness. He led her into the park.

…

He told her they passed the Tavern on the Green as they followed a footpath across another road and past the fenced edge of Sheep Meadow, travelling east. The sky spread out above them, the brightest stars piercing and silver-white. Glistering towers rose up outside the borders of the park, forming an angular backdrop to the uneven, tree-rooted fence for this great, grassy wonderland. A wonderland within which tiny plants grew and tiny people moved about. Brigit felt minuscule and immeasurable at the same time.

“Ah!” she cried out for sheer joy. “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / I am large, I contain multitudes!”

Vincent laughed softly. They stopped long enough for Brigit to insert her arms into the sleeves of the cloak— the right opening was but a leather-trimmed armhole, the left: a long bell of leather patchwork and fringe. She felt warm, and safe. Quite alive. Fully herself.

Brigit quieted, content now to walk with her companion, arm in arm. “I’m beholden to you, Vincent. You cannot know what this means to me.”

He matched her stride, saying nothing.

“Or perhaps you can, at that.” She smiled. “You had your own way in and out of that party, didn’t you?”

“Hmm. My own way.”

As noncommittal a statement as she’d ever heard.

“Well, I’m glad you came to me. A wish granted, you are.”

“And you are... a dream come true.”

The way he said it, the phrase did not come out tired and tawdry. He believed in every syllable. His heart still sang gently, eloquently to hers. Now that they’d spirited themselves away, perhaps they had a chance to create their own unforgettable music—performing a duet of heartsong with each other, and for each other.

Inspired, Brigit said, “We must share our stories tonight.”

“Stories?”

“Aye. You must tell me of all the things we see, and what they mean to you. And I must tell you the things they remind me of, and what that means to me. I intend to swallow this city whole.”

“Take care that this city does not swallow you,” Vincent said, his voice half concerned and half amused.

Brigit nodded. “Warning understood. Have we a bargain?”

“We do.”

Brigit surveyed the green lawn to their left, inaccessible on the other side of its chain-link fence. “This meadow, now...”

“— Was not always a meadow,” Vincent said. “Parade ground, sheep’s pasture, gathering place. A whole history of purposes. When I was a boy, I enjoyed picnics under the trees with my friends. Later this field became a blight of dust in summer and a quagmire in winter. Careless crowds destroyed the grass.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yes. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, the park, the city, teetered at the brink of ruin.” Vincent swept out a hand, including New York entire in his gesture. “Here is the proof of our resurrection.”

“It is possible, then,” said Brigit.

“Life is filled with possibilities.”

Brigit drew closer to him, and his beautiful truths. “In Derry, we have St. Columb’s Park. The oaks in fall whisper secrets to each other, if you know how to listen. When I was a little girl, my mother would take me, and sometimes my friends Maura and Lucy, and we’d go there to walk and play. I remember we four spent hours building tiny houses from twigs and bracken: way stations for the mice and squirrels. When it wasn’t raining, we might sit together on a bench and take turns reading books of riddles to each other.”

“Not fairy tales?” Vincent asked.

“Oh, no. Me mother saved those for bedtime, at home.”

Vincent nodded, affirming Anne O’Reilly’s right and proper conduct.

They walked on, turning with the path until they’d passed the meadow’s eastern border. They were not the only ones out celebrating the magic of the night. People walked or jogged around them, some following the paved drive, some dressed in costumes, some flocking together in groups, shouting and laughing. A man decked out in an expensive sweat suit ran past, accompanied by a large German Shepherd. The dog growled at Brigit and Vincent.

“Zane! Heel!” barked the man, giving the dog’s lead a sharp tug. The dog woofed but stopped its growling. The pair jogged away.

Brigit felt tension abate in Vincent’s arm. She remarked, “That one does well to keep a watchful protector beside him, journeying through a dangerous city by night.”

Vincent glanced at her.

The light here was too dim to read the expression in his eyes. “Tell me what is passing through your mind,” Brigit said.

He walked on a few more steps before he answered. “I am grateful the dog obeyed his master’s command. And that he was leashed.”

“You don’t like dogs?”

“Most dogs don’t like me,” came Vincent’s grim reply. Then he chuckled to himself.

“What is it?” asked Brigit.

“Come. I’ll show you a master and his dog who immortalize the bonds of friendship between men and beasts.”

He brought her to a bronze sculpture. As he had promised, the statue depicted a Native American hunter and his faithful canine partner, both caught at mid-stride, eyes forward, seeking out their prey. “My brother used to tell ten different stories about this pair,” Vincent murmured.

“Which tale was your favourite?” Brigit asked him.

Vincent stood tall, admiring the artistry. “The tale I later invented for myself,” he said. “Of how the Hunter raised his friend from puppyhood and taught him to track rabbits and deer, so they could feed and clothe their tribe.” He tipped his head to one side, still studying the statue. “My brother’s favourite story told how the Dog saved the Hunter from a bear.”

“Much more dramatic, your brother’s notions.”

Vincent smiled. “Always.”

Next he led her south, to see Christopher Columbus striking an exclamatory pose. After the perfection of the Hunter, Columbus seemed pompous and bloated. They went ’round a garden plot where knobs of flowering plants carpeted the earth. They stopped again in front of William Shakespeare—sculpted, Vincent informed Brigit, by the same man who had made the Indian Hunter. They stood there together for a while, looking up at the imposing figure on his pedestal.

“I’m thinking this might be a close friend of yours,” Brigit teased her companion.

Darkly, Vincent intoned, “A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron. Thunder. Enter the three Witches.”

“’Twould not be Halloween without witches,” Brigit replied. “Be they mystics, martyrs, or madwomen.”

He looked at her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “They’ve pegged me with all those labels. And more besides.”

“The shadowed side of fame.”

Brigit sighed. “To be scrutinized from every angle, but never truly seen, never known.”

“I wonder what he felt about it.” Vincent nodded at the Bard.

Brigit could not resist:

“O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand...”

This time, Vincent smiled broadly. “... Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed...”

She leaned against him. “I could grow quite fond of you, Vincent.”

He smiled in silence.

Shakespeare looked on, stern, intense, the bronze fingers of his right hand marking his place in the book he carried.

“I remember the day my father forbade me to read Shakespeare,” Brigit said.

Vincent tilted his head, questioning.

“Not one of his better days,” she continued. “He’d been conversing down at the pub and came home declaring that no daughter of his ought to waste her time poring over the scribblings of any Protestant Englishman, be he Shakespeare or no.”

“You did not stop reading Shakespeare,” Vincent said, stating it as incontestable fact.

“Father never forced me to choose between him and my reading. That day, my mother laughed aloud and told him not to be absurd. ‘You can exile Shakespeare from this house when you give up speakin’ the English tongue altogether, Sean y’fool,’ she told him. And as he’d never been —and never became— anything of an Irish scholar, that was the end of it.”

“Your mother had good sense.”

“Aye. She did.” Brigit stared hard at Shakespeare’s book. “A week later, she was murdered.”

Vincent was quiet a moment. “You were still a child.”

“I was eleven.”

“The pain must have been overwhelming.”

“Like the sinking of Hy-Breasail,” she said. “Some days, I felt myself drowning in mortality. My father never really resurfaced.”

“But you survived the loss.”

“I did. By reading her shelves of old books. Every last poem and fable. Every novel, every play. Even the ones written in Irish and French and German. I asked the help of a wise teacher at school, wore out dictionaries in the library. And when I had finished—years later, this was—I took up my pen. I’ve yet to put it down.”

He was gazing into her again. Brigit returned his gaze without fear.

“You’re remarkable,” Vincent said.

“Well,” Brigit replied, her mouth quirking into a lopsided shape, “I’m glad someone’s finally noticed.”

He blinked. Then he laughed. Truly laughed. It sounded for all the world like a great cat’s throaty purr.

Brigit thought, You derive your only mask from other people’s expectations. You are your face. You are your voice. And now, you are my friend.

They went on together.

They visited the great literary Scotsmen, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, then ventured up the Mall. Naked elms stretched high above them to either side. Along this formal thoroughfare, the people of New York gathered in earnest. Costumed merrymakers abounded.

The folk out here wore humbler raiment than those who’d attended the ball. Brigit saw a girl with frizzy neon pink hair wearing a 1950s blouse and sweater over a blue felt poodle skirt. She saw a mime in stripes and face paint, a karate kid, a bedsheet ghost, and a Jedi knight. Two men patted darbuka drums while a small crowd of young people danced.  A gauze-clad faerie adorned with chrysanthemum crown and a set of wire and nylon wings frisked over to Vincent and Brigit, beaming at them both. She waved with her hands, Come play, come dance!

Vincent hung back, reluctant and wary. Brigit thought about joining the faerie and her party, but after a moment, she only smiled and shook her head. These also were obviously not Vincent’s people, and Brigit preferred his company and his comfort. The faerie girl shrugged. Your loss.

They walked on and came to a barrier of flickering veladoras arranged on the pavement in concentric semicircles. Three tribal belly dancers shimmied and undulated within the rings of multicoloured candlelight, timing their movements to the rhythmic song supplied by a battery-powered boombox. Some leather-jacketed rovers wearing torn jeans and T-shirts and rolled bandanna headbands whistled and catcalled, until a huge dark brute brandishing a baseball bat stepped out from his place beside a park bench, tapping the hard wood of the bat against one meaty palm like a giant’s billy club. The obnoxious men melted back into the night and the ladies continued dancing. Vincent and Brigit moved on.

They passed by a neoclassical limestone bandshell, where boys riding skateboards skimmed a concrete expanse. Vincent told Brigit the city hosted summer concerts in the park there. It was his favourite place to hear the world’s greatest music performed.

They took the long way around the edge of the concert ground, paying their respects to the bronze busts of Dublin-born Herbert, the immortal Beethoven, and Goethe’s friend Schiller. Brigit discovered that Vincent was conversant in aesthetic philosophy. “Only through beauty’s morning gate / Didst thou the land of knowledge find,” he recalled for her. As they approached the north end of the Mall, Vincent became eager for Brigit to see Bethesda Terrace, its Fountain, the Arcade, and the sculpted balustrades.

“This has been closed off for a long time,” he said. “They needed to repair terrible damage done to the land and the buildings.”

“Elemental damage, or vandals?” Brigit asked.

“Both, unfortunately,” Vincent said with some disgust. “Conservationists just reopened this part of the park in late spring. During recent years, they restored the Fountain. The stonework was cleaned or replaced. New trees and flowers were planted. It’s very beautiful now.”

Brigit liked seeing him so animated. She understood more about his eagerness when they reached the Terrace. Vincent took her by the hand and led her up a stone staircase to the upper level concourse, overlooking a brick-paved plaza, the pool and Fountain, the Lake beyond, and a little woodland growing along the Lake’s farther shore. Brigit saw couples walking down below, people perched on stone benches, a young woman leaning down toward the pool to drag her fingers through the water. The woman, resembling a punk rock ballerina with glitter sprinkled across her smooth brown skin, flicked her hand up, splashing two of her nearby friends. They shrieked and lunged for her. The ballerina dodged backward, giggling, and the three of them sped a jolly chase out onto the grass.

Vincent had fallen silent again. He was drinking in the view, eyes wide and wondering. Brigit touched his sleeve.

“You look as though you’re storing away something precious for the winter,” she said.

When he spoke, his voice sounded sad. “I cannot come here often.”

“Why not?”

After a long pause: “It isn’t safe.”

He turned to her, and then he smiled, his melancholy mood retreating. “May I show you the carvings now?” he asked.

“What carvings?”

Taking her by the hand once more, he showed her.

Along every balustrade, upon the posts and railings, across the walls: intricate sandstone arabesques embellished the architecture. Leaves, berries, branches, birds, butterflies and bees, pine cones and blossoms. Brigit touched the lifelike stone carvings with her fingertips, amazed.

Vincent produced a matchbook, and began striking matches near each shaded point of interest to give Brigit a better look at the details.

“I know something of shaping stone,” he said. “Nothing like this. Not sculpture. But I can imagine the craftsmen forming these designs. I can feel the artist’s satisfaction with the work.”

They went up and down the granite staircases, stooping low or craning their necks.

“Oh, look at this stag, now!”

“Beautiful,” Vincent replied.

Brigit laughed lightly. “Here’s an owl!”

“And there’s another. Friends of yours?”

“Of course.”

“I think your mask resembled this tufted fellow.”

“A right comparison. All owls look alike by night.”

The roundels especially captivated Brigit.

“Vincent! Here’s a witch for you! Why, she has a broomstick, and she’s carved some jack o’lanterns!”

“Is the witch your favourite?”

“It’s impossible to choose a favourite.”

He only smiled.

“All right. Which one do you like best?” Brigit asked.

He brought her to one of the three-lobed hollows. A garland of stone roses graced the lower panel. The recess above the roses contained a single swallow in flight.

Vincent said, “The first time I saw this, I thought at once of the Happy Prince.”

“Ah,” Brigit sighed. “Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow. Do as I command you.”

“So,” said Vincent. “You understand.”

They went down to the Arcade beneath the motorway. Their footsteps made hollow echoes as they crossed the quarry-tile floor beneath the stone arches. Vincent said the city had taken away the patterned Minton panels from the now-bare chamber ceiling. He did not know whether they would be replaced.

“Perhaps, with time, it will happen,” he said. “I think the people of this city are rediscovering the wonders of their world, day by day. Public art has always been important here. But sometimes people forget why beauty is important.”

They walked outside, out to the Fountain, where the Angel of the Waters blessed the shimmering pool. Brigit thought of the armed Winged Victory at the top of the War Memorial in Derry. She told Vincent about the Diamond at the heart of her city, and about the time her father took her to the monument to read the names of Irishmen who died in the Great War, her grand-uncle among them. Brigit supposed Loyalists and Nationalists must both be listed there.

“We should dedicate more statues to the remembrance of people who bring clean water and fine art to our cities,” Brigit said, gazing up at Bethesda’s Angel. “For then we might need fewer monuments to our soldiers lost in old wars.”

“Soldiers. Fathers and brothers, comrades, sons. Sometimes mothers and daughters too.”

“Aye.” Brigit slipped her hand into the crook of Vincent’s arm. “Oh, this place, Vincent.”

“Yes.”

“This is a sight Ian would’ve loved to have seen.”

They continued walking, choosing a pathway along the Lake. Vincent said, “As long as you remember him, he will see it— does see it— with your eyes. Through your eyes.”

Brigit took these words into herself, and hallowed them in the treasure trove of her heart.

Vincent was looking out at the Lake. Wind riffled the placid water, drawing molten metallic lines across the dark surface. The Lake’s wet aroma conjured instinctual memories of deeper waterways elsewhere in the world. The sweep of the air wafted Vincent’s mane away from his neck and shoulders. His eyes gleamed beneath the moon. He appeared more regal than ever, with his lion’s face etched in silver light. And he seemed lonely.

Then he turned to Brigit, and his graven features grew friendly and loving again. His presence returned to her. The fullness of himself.

And Brigit knew what his trouble must be.

“Will you be telling me of her, then?” she asked him.

Vincent stopped short. He gave her a sharp look. “Of who?”

“Your lady. The one who’s breaking your heart.”

This time, he could not bear to hold her gaze. Vincent looked down at his feet. He resumed walking. Brigit went with him.

“Ah, Vincent,” she said, keeping her voice as gentle as a caress. “You didn’t come to me just to say you liked me books. Something about Ian and me struck close to home.”

He struggled for words. “She brings me... such joy... and such... pain... as I have never known.”

Brigit listened, receiving his wounded heart’s lament.

“I have no place in her world. She has none in mine. Our bond endangers... everything. People I love. Secrets I am sworn to keep. Beliefs I’ve lived by.”

“Aye. That sounds like Ian and me, sure enough.” She considered the lights of Manhattan’s towers, imagined all the people moving through the structures of the city. The ordinary folk. Splendid and oblivious.

“They don’t understand, do they?” she said. “How my father raged!”

“Yet you went on, despite everything.”

Brigit’s Irish broke free, and she let her most dearly purchased truth fly forth like a banner. “Oh, yes! We went on until he died for it!”

She stopped on the path. Vincent stopped too, his soul caught somewhere between hope and despair.

“Are you asking me for counsel, then?” Brigit asked, face to face with him, eye to eye.

He stood without speaking, and without refusing, which gave answer enough.

“Forget you ever knew her, and you’ll both be happier.”

He stared at her.

“If you want what’s best for her, take care you never see her again.”

He did not simply give way before Brigit’s ferocity. She admired him all the more for that. He went so far as to admonish her, “You wrote that the price of your love had been high, but that you would pay it willingly to the end of your days. That you would change nothing— regret nothing—”

She had to smile. “That’s damned unfair of you, y’know. Quoting me own words back at me again, after I gave you all that good advice.”

He smiled a little in return, but his eyes remained serious.

“The brain tells you all the sensible things to do,” Brigit said, “but the heart knows nothing about sense. And the heart is as stubborn as the Irish.”

“We can only follow where the heart leads,” Vincent replied. “With faith and courage, trusting fate to be kind.”

“True. And never more so than when the heart leads us astray. Worst of all when fate proves cruel beyond all imagining.”

“I love her,” Vincent said, not in protest, but in plain point of intractable fact.

Brigit took a deep breath. “Do you love her enough to let her go? Let go of the wonderful, intoxicating danger of loving her, and let her live separate and apart, she in her world, and you in yours?”

She waited while he listened for the answer to that question inside himself.

When at last that answer came to him, Vincent said, “I love her forever. Soul and mind, heart and will. I would give anything, do anything— offer all I can, all I have, all I am, all that I hope to become— anything to protect her life. Anything to ensure her happiness.”

He faced the southwest, the direction they had come from. “If her happiness required me to let her go her own way, even to lend speed to her going, though a part of me died at our parting, I would do it, to keep her safe. To rejoice in her possibilities, and so to find my own share in them. Yes, I would let her go. It is the only way I could ever truly be with her... always.”

Brigit detected an indwelt mysticism in his passionate outpouring. Whether Bohemian or Transcendental or some other mingled spiritual trail, she couldn’t quite tell. But he spoke from the depths of his vast and eternal soul. She was about to tell him that his answer proved he had the strength, then, to love his lady and love her well, and that Brigit blessed them both for their courage— but then Vincent said one thing more.

“And this I have done.”

Brigit frowned. “What do you mean?”

“From the beginning, I have always honoured her freedom. Always.” Listening, Brigit thought Vincent sounded like he was replying to an old, worn-out argument, perhaps by reflex.

He explained to her, “This year, there were... five pivotal moments... when I did not stop her from following her heart away from me. To try to stop someone from seeking their destiny— that would make a mockery of love. That is not the way my father taught me to live. Such captivity is not what I desire. I could never block her way, or hold her back, could never hinder her choices. And she has followed her own path. Away, into the world beyond mine. For moments, days, weeks. But five times she has returned to me.”

Brigit had to admit: now he had startled her. Indeed, he’d confounded her into a speechless state. And rare was the hour when Brigit O’Donnell found herself at a loss for words.

Five partings, she thought, when her surprise had abated somewhat. And a piece of him dying at every pass.

He had only sketched it out for her with the haziest of strokes, but Brigit saw something badly amiss with this picture.

“You tell me your lady’s choices have led her away from you. Has your path ever led you away from her?”

“Not until tonight.” He managed a faint smile. “For the time being.”

Brigit tried to look into Vincent, the way he seemed able to look into her. He did not close himself off from her scrutiny. He only waited patiently for her to speak again, standing calm and clear-eyed beside her. Yet his longing for his lady’s steadfast love rendered him terribly vulnerable— transparent, even. Brigit saw that something inside him was starving to death.

“Not until tonight,” she repeated. She thought about his backward glances, his orientation now on the lakeside path.

“She was at the ball too, wasn’t she?” Brigit asked.

His gaze remained steady.

Understanding unfurling as she spoke, Brigit said, “Yet you came... to see me. To talk with me, and offer your thanks. You... hearkened to me. And now... you’ve come out to this place, walking away from her... to give this night to me...”

“Yes,” he said. “Because it is your heart’s desire, and because it is a gift that I can give you. And it is a gift to her, for the sake of her pleasure amongst her friends at the ball. But I also hoped to give something beautiful to myself. And so my heart has led me here tonight. With you. I think this night of all nights is rich with blessings. For all of us.”

The enormity of his gift spread out before her like a valley orchard at the harvest. He loved his heartbreaking lady forever, and still he possessed a gracious willingness to comfort a widow he had just met— and a minor foreign celebrity to boot, with all the baggage that entailed —relieving Brigit’s isolated grief. Devoted to the woman he loved, to her dignity and freedom, to her ultimate happiness, he still had faith enough left over to entrust a sympathetic stranger with his heart’s direst burdens, seeking out that stranger’s help to learn how to further expand his care for his beloved. Brigit marvelled at him. And at the absent her.

A woman who could detach herself from such unstinting hospitality five times— what on earth can she be seeking elsewhere?

“Vincent?” Brigit asked. “Your lady... does she love you forever, as well?”

In his moonlit eyes Brigit saw such pain well up as she had never known. Her breath caught in her throat. The agony of his yearning and sorrow tore at her.

“She loves me,” Vincent whispered. He did not say, forever.

Brigit did not doubt his word. But five moments of division—

“Does she love you enough to let you go, for the sake of your safety and your happiness?” Brigit asked, also whispering.

Vincent closed his eyes. He told her the truth. “Not yet,” he said.

Because she’s never done that for him, Brigit realized. Five partings and five returns, all whittling at the sinews of a romantic bond. That’s not the forever-love Vincent feels. That’s something else. Craving, perhaps, or fear. A thing that might mature into true love, sure enough, given faith and time... but a thing that has never yet claimed that heavenly high reality. And in her turn, how much of the poor lady has died along the way?

Vincent opened his eyes and cocked his head. He watched her as though he heard an echo of her thoughts. For all Brigit knew, he could.

She began to walk again, thinking things through. Vincent fell into step beside her. “Can you tell me this, Vincent?” she asked. “What else does your lady love best, besides yourself?”

“Her work,” said Vincent, right off. “Her father. Friends who sweeten her life. A new suitor from her world.” He hesitated. “A lover from her past.”

(I love the work.)

Carefully, Brigit observed, “That’s rather a lengthy list of loves to divide your lady’s loyalty.”

“I know.”

Hence, much of Vincent’s suffering.

(My father wants me to be happy.)

Brigit shook her head, dispelling vague fragments of disquiet. “I’m thinking your bond with your lady is far more complicated than was mine with my Ian.” She reconsidered what she’d just said. “And, Vincent, that is saying something.”

He sighed. “We are something there has never been. The way is perilous.”

“Yet you’re wise enough to know it. That wisdom works to your advantage.”

“I pray that is so.”

They went north and east, leaving the lakeside and joining a wide road. East Drive, Vincent said it was. They walked uphill.

Brigit pondered stories she knew, tales of gods who fell in love with mortals, tales of angels who fell to earth for love of earthlings. Few such stories she brought to mind ended well for the lovers. But then, her ideas about love and wellness had continued to evolve since Ian’s death.

They crested the low hill. Vincent touched Brigit’s shoulder. She stopped and turned toward him. He pointed behind her, to a rocky outcrop above them.

“Look up,” he murmured.

She looked. And gasped. She must have jumped a foot off the ground. Her hands flew to her mouth.

Vincent’s smug voice rumbled in her ear, “Happy Halloween.”

Up on the rock, awash in moonlight, a panther glared down at her, crouched low and about to spring.

But then it did not twitch a whisker.

“Vincent, tell me that great beast is another bronze.”

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. It is.”

She saw that her friend grinned playfully. Brigit had to grin back at him. Vincent’s point-toothed smile was contagious.

“Still Hunt,” he said. “I’ve never approached her from this side before.”

“How do you know it’s a she-beast?”

Vincent thought about it. “Because we had many late night conversations, when I was a boy. And the Huntress spoke to me as an elder sister speaks to her favourite little brother.”

Brigit took her hands from her mouth. “To be sure, Vincent. I am definitely fond of you.”

He lowered his eyes, pleased and smirking.

The way down the little hill went faster than the way up. “Your park goes on forever,” Brigit said. She tried to keep track of her train and the cloak on the gentle downslope, so she wouldn’t catch any hems in her stride and fall.

“Do you want to see more?” Vincent asked.

Brigit laughed. “Of course I do. But the night won’t stay young for long. And there’s ever so much more city out there to be met.”

“Then we should go meet it,” Vincent said.

At the bottom of the rise, they left the road, finding a path that took them east. Brigit almost felt as if she had stepped onto a conveyor belt that rolled her swiftly and inexorably forward. She surged ahead and Vincent came with her, down the path, out of the park and onto the sidewalk of a busy avenue. Vincent nodded to the right. Brigit set out as he directed. The street seemed another world altogether. Clamorous, bustling.

Vincent became quiet again, and kept close to the edge of the sidewalk nearest the park.

“Are you all right?” Brigit asked him.

He said, “I’m not sure. I’ve never done this before.”

“Done what?”

“Walked empty-handed down Fifth Avenue.”

He looked the same way Brigit had felt while they stood on John Brennan’s veranda. A little giddy, a little defiant.

“The park is a safe place for you,” Brigit said.

“Yes. Usually.”

He doesn’t have many safe places in this world, Brigit thought.

She wondered where Vincent made his home.

“We’ve done and sent the risks to hell,” Brigit said. “Let’s be safe places for each other tonight.”

“We already are.”

Again: truth.

Brigit watched the progression of brightly lit buildings along the other side of the street. They walked past genteel residences and hotels and restaurants, where white-gloved doormen attended the elegant people coming in or going out. They passed the French Consulate, Art Deco condos, an art museum, and a monumental synagogue.

On the park’s side of the street, they passed a First World War memorial, where embroiled soldiers in their sharp-edged helmets brandished rifles and bayonets at passersby. They passed the Central Park Zoo, undergoing renovations and closed to the public. Meanwhile, on the east side of the avenue: even more exclusive apartment buildings, more of the finest hotels, a stately admixture of architectural influences.

All this time, Vincent had little to say. The grandeur seemed to interest him far less than the novelty of moving through their surroundings in her company.

“The Upper East Side,” was all he offered at first. “Where the wealthy and the powerful dwell.”

“Don’t they also dwell on t’other side of the park?” Brigit asked, thinking of John Brennan and the many magnificent edifices she had seen earlier today, as she rode in Eileen’s town car along Central Park West.

“They do live there. Though perhaps not with such a privileged sense of antiquity,” Vincent replied. “There was a time when the West Side was the ‘wrong side’ of the city. I have never understood that. The buildings there are just as beautiful, the people just as human.”

“But perhaps not necessarily ‘just as rich’?”

Vincent shrugged. “How can I judge? I know little of degrees of wealth in this world. I treasure many things. Contentment, quiet, safety. The help that friends give to one another. Family meals at table. A park to visit beneath the moon, a warm bed to sleep in, a book to read. A cloak to lend.” He smiled. “Anyone can live a rich life in this city. But to do so, one must learn to see wealth for what it is— and what it isn’t.”

“Some might call that a poor man’s philosophy,” Brigit said.

Vincent tipped his head at a conciliatory angle. “It is my father’s philosophy. And he has known wealth and poverty, and true riches restored.”

“He sounds like a wise man.”

Brigit thought Vincent smiled to himself. “He is.”

“Ian’s grandfather used to talk that way. About riches and love. The peace of a simple life.”

“You wrote of him in Three Hundred Days. He welcomed you home after your honeymoon, bringing a key and a kiss.”

“Yes. Someone broke into Ian’s flat while we were away. Daideó Ewing saw to the repairs and replaced the lock. Cleaned the place for us, too, although it aggravated his arthritis. I’ll never forget that kindness. Nor his generosity at our wedding.”

“You began your book with his funeral and wake.”

“It seemed fitting. Our ninety-two-year-old forefather encouraged me to keep writing—after my own father burned Too Many Heroes in public, and one of his boys sent me the ashes in a paper carton.”

Vincent slowed, bringing Brigit with him into a plaza at the southernmost corner of Central Park. Brigit barely noticed yet another war monument: the ever-popular Winged Victory guiding a golden horseman to glory. She and Vincent stopped beneath a street lamp. Brigit felt his compassion radiating love like a physical force: a bed of coals, or a ray of sunlight.

“Brigit,” he said, still honouring the old Irish pronunciation. “You’ve given so much.. .everything you had, everything you could... and you’ve gotten only violence in return, and grief, and pain.”

That this gentle spirit should be here, mourning for her— with her—

“How can people hate so?” Vincent asked, sorrowful.

“Hatred is a sickness,” Brigit told him. “That’s the only answer I know.”

“Your life has grown you like a lonely rose. A rose of late October. Even in the bitter wind...still you bloom.”

“There are times...” Brigit folded her arms. She clutched fistfuls of black cloth, needing Vincent’s cloak around her. “There are times I wonder how long the blooming can last.”

Her voice shrank until it sounded faint and small. Vincent bent his head to listen.

“It’s not death that worries me. I know we each owe a death, in the end. We must take what we are given: three hundred days, a few months, or a single night. I’ve made my peace with that. But the living of those days. The labour of turning ash into roses... It’s a birthing that never ends.”

Warming heartlight in his eyes. His supportive hand at her shoulder. An embracing silence that surpassed the city’s traffic sounds.

“And they won’t stop killing all the love they can find,” she said. “Won’t stop destroying the world for lovers, and children, and dreams...”

She shuddered.

“If Ian and I had never met... he might still be alive.”

Vincent’s gloved hand tightened on her shoulder, just enough to make Brigit look up at him. He slowly shook his head. “And he might not.”

More tears burned in Brigit’s eyes.

“When things happen to us, nothing happens in isolation,” Vincent said. “People make choices that touch other people, sometimes helpfully, sometimes hurtfully. But destiny itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which each thread is pulled by an infinitely tender hand and is laid alongside another thread and held up and borne along by a hundred others.”

Brigit’s small laugh could also have been a smothered cry— whatever it was, she felt grateful for Vincent’s words.

“Rilke,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I suppose every destiny is rife with unhatched might-have-beens.”

Vincent sighed. “If I had never met the woman I love, both of us would be dead now.”

Brigit tried to imagine what that might mean, tried to intuit what had happened to them. That must be a hard piece of history for the two of them to live with, Brigit thought. She took Vincent’s hand and held it.

“I’m told it’s a dangerous city,” she said.

“It’s a dangerous world.”

Nodding, Brigit blinked away her tears. “Aye, it is that.”

Vincent looked around, as though realizing where he was. His face brightened. “Come,” he said. “Can I make one last detour into the park? There’s something I’d like you to see.”

“Of course,” she said.

They did not need to go far. Past a pair of locals who lounged on the cement steps beneath the horseman’s plinth, and just outside the plaza, and a short distance down the path: one more bronze bust of an honoured man sat enshrined upon its granite pedestal. The letters across the front of the stone read simply: MOORE.

“Well, now,” said Brigit wonderingly.

“I’m thinking this might be a close friend of yours,” Vincent murmured to her.

She squeezed his hand. “And you’d be right. I heard his poems and songs while I lay in the cradle. When I was fifteen, Lalla Rookh so enchanted me, I read it twenty times over, and then wrote me first book, story by story. Fables, that was.” She squinted at the weathered metal face. “He did pass through New York in his day, didn’t he?”

“I believe he did.

“Éire’s Bard.”

“Mm-hm.”

It was a good thing to see. Thomas Moore’s works, good words to think on. His image, as much as Vincent’s favourite park, good to revisit under a bright autumn moon.

She did not expect the song to come, but awakening within her, it could not be denied. Brigit began to sing in a fair, low voice. A song she had not sung since Ian’s passing.

’Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone;

No flower of her kindred,

No rosebud is nigh,

To reflect back her blushes,

To give sigh for sigh.

Brigit meant to stop there, but from directly behind her, the mellow sound of a flute took up the melody. Looking back, she saw that Vincent had already noticed the pair from the plaza. A youth with shaggy dark hair and almond-shaped eyes stood on the opposite side of the path, playing a bamboo xiao. Beside him, a Black girl wearing a heavy denim jacket, threadbare jeans and stocking cap adjusted the strap of a guitar on her shoulder. She gazed coolly at Brigit for a few beats. The flautist began the next phrase. The girl joined him, strumming soft chords with nimble fingers.

Brigit turned, listened. She let the beauty fill her heart. And when the music was ready for her, she offered up the remaining verses.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!

To pine on the stem;

Since the lovely are sleeping,

Go, sleep thou with them.

Thus kindly I scatter

Thy leaves o’er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden

Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow,

When friendships decay,

And from Love’s shining circle

The gems drop away.

When true hearts lie withered

And fond ones are flown,

Oh! who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?

A few people had gathered. A smattering of applause greeted the ending of the song. Brigit nodded gravely and gratefully to the boy and girl. The guitarist jerked her chin up, not smiling, but respecting the moment they had shared. The boy gave Brigit a casual thumb-and-forefinger salute.

Brigit reached for Vincent, and he let her fasten herself to his arm once again. They strolled away, leaving the duo to play a sharper, faster tune for their new audience. The boy dropped an empty duffel bag on the ground in front of them. Someone tossed in a few coins as Vincent and Brigit returned to the plaza.

Vincent’s eyes were dark and deep. “How beautifully you sing,” he said.

Brigit felt Ian’s memory smiling upon her. “Our music is what keeps us human.”

…

She pointed out her lodgings as they crossed Central Park South. Park Lane Hotel, where David Shaw, no doubt, kept good watch over Brigit’s quarters in her absence. She did not tell Vincent about David, some perhaps childish part of her fearing that her honourable new friend might truncate their adventure and send her to bed early, where a trusted bodyguard could watch over her for the rest of the night. Foolish perhaps, but Brigit had to admit to herself that the possibility bothered her nonetheless. Not until they had left Central Park (and the prospect of David’s remonstrances) behind did Brigit understand exactly how stifled she had been feeling lately.

With Vincent, she could breathe again.

She enjoyed the feel of him beside her. The generous vitality of him. They walked without touching now, though still close together. Brigit noticed that Vincent’s steps were preternaturally quiet, often silent, his actions efficient and controlled— and habitually so. This was not any kind of artifice or personae that he must maintain through wilful concentration. He remained precisely as he had been when he came to her on the sidewalk outside John Brennan’s home. She guessed that if Vincent did not want someone to know he was nearby, that person would remain ignorant of his presence.

It seemed to her that his physical grace came to him as a natural quality; straightforward, wholly unstudied. A giftedness contained within his native being. Holding his arm during their time in the park had again brought faerie folk to the foreground of Brigit’s imagination. Or rather, it brought to mind the fullness of her true Irish inheritance: the áes síde. Vincent’s body felt warm and powerful on an alien scale. The untold strength in his arm and shoulder made a private joke of the modern fitness movement that held her dear David tightly in its weight-lifting thrall. For all that Vincent looked somewhat like a king of beasts, he moved like one too.

Truly, he made her feel strong and beautiful just by standing next to her. Proximity to Vincent gave. Like orchards and oceans. Like the moon and the stars and the soughing wind. Walking together beneath stars aligned for their benefit, Brigit hoped that she could honour Vincent’s giving as he deserved. And she hoped that she could somehow offer him the truths that he needed. Something to ease his hurting, if only for the duration of their time together.

She thought:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

If she could have her way, Brigit wanted to leave Vincent with something lasting, something he could hold onto in the inevitable days of adversity to come.

Brigit understood about days— and nights— of inevitable adversity.

I have only to trust in the magic of love, Brigit thought. For true love never fails.

And if spontaneous friendship did not prove the active presence of Love Eternal, alive and singing within the woven nest of the universe, then Brigit could not imagine what else would.

They ventured into Midtown. Brigit fairly tingled with the excitement of anticipation—or perhaps a kind of recognition. Her father had walked here, to be sure, and upon his returns to Ireland he had recalled for his travel-romanced daughter the glitzy promises of the shops and boutiques, the glassy heights of the towers and skyscrapers, and the blasé glamour of the New Yorkers as they plunged past those shoppers and the sightseers who dawdled on the sidewalks. Yet like an overlay of tissue paper, other myths coloured her vision as much as her father’s memories had done. Certain places in Manhattan were world-renowned.

Thus, when they came to Fifty-seventh Street, Brigit told her companion, “Vincent, I must cross to the other side of this avenue.”

He did not object. The traffic light changed, and he went with her across Fifth Avenue. “Must?” he asked her, amused. They stopped at the east side of the street, waiting for the next signal to interrupt the flow of motor vehicles in their favour.

“Dead ahead,” said Brigit with a nod in that direction. “Tiffany and Company.”

Vincent looked across the way. “Ah. They sell beautiful things.”

Brigit smiled at his turn of phrase. “Aye, they do.”

Outside the shop, they strolled past the five windows, observing each display of luxury wares. They saw a long strand of pearls drizzled over the rim of a globular crystal vase, the base of which nested in a swirl of silk scarves. In the next window, hollow glass apples ornamented a pile of red, orange, and gold autumn leaves. A little rake stood propped upright in one corner of the scene. Opposite the rake, a grey branch bare of all but a few lingering leaves rose up from a mound of smooth black pebbles. The two companions smiled to see a small metallic owl—silver? Platinum?— with deep gold hollows for eyes perched upon the miniature tree’s thickest twig, the little bird feathered in dark red gems that twinkled beneath the spotlights of the display.

Next, a pristine paper trick-or-treat bag held a bounty of rainbow-coloured candies wrapped in cellophane twists. Egg-shell blue gift boxes of various sizes lay interspersed throughout the haul of sweets. In the next window, two disembodied white mannequin hands reached up from a plane of black velvet, holding stretched between their slender fingers a cat’s cradle of silver chain. Along the length of the chain, tiny diamond pendants hung like dewdrops from a frosted spider’s web. Pale jewels lay strewn upon the velvet around those pale wrists. The jewels might be brooches or earrings. Their fasteners were hidden beneath their settings in the velvet. Each piece shone serenely in the low light like violets or clover blooming upon a quiet grave.

The final window contained a single glass bottle of topaz-coloured liquid set at the centre of an immaculate sterling silver tray. A narrow blue box stood just behind the bottle. Geometric simplicity.

“My local friend, Eileen, says your city has been celebrating the arrival of this perfume since autumn began,” Brigit commented.

“A jewel among perfumes?”

“Well, I’m told it retails at two hundred dollars an ounce.”

Vincent looked into the window. “For that price, someone could buy a dozen new copies of Three Hundred Days.”

“And what would anybody do with a dozen copies of the same book?” Brigit asked.

“Give them to loved ones,” Vincent said. “Perfume for the soul.”

His sentiment warmed her and surprised her in the same sweet moment. She smiled with pleasure, allowing herself to feel flattered because he had not meant it as mere flattery. Music to the ears of a writer’s mercurial ego, she thought.

“Do you want to go inside?” Vincent asked, gesturing toward the door of the shop.

Brigit shook her head. “Oh no, the windows out here are plenty for me. It’s an understanding I was after, and now one of Capote’s stories has found a new anchor in me own imagination.”

Vincent tilted his head again. “Capote?”

“Oh yes. This corner of your city was Holly Golightly’s special haunt.”

He did not recognize the name.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s?” Brigit asked. “You’ve never read it?”

“No.”

“A little gem which passes the time nicely, when you’ve an hour or two to spare. The book is better than the film they made of it. You’ve not seen that either?”

He shook his head.

“ ’Tis a showing that grants choice glimpses of New York to those of us who’ve never visited your grand city before. My dear Lucy’s favourite American film for, oh, almost twenty years, until An Unmarried Woman came out. A distant admirer of your city is my Lucy.”

They began to walk again. “You’re still friends with Lucy now?” Vincent asked.

Brigit smiled fondly. “Yes. And she’ll be impatient to hear about my visit. She wants to come here too, one day.”

He nodded, happy for her, Brigit supposed, because she still had a childhood friend in her life to offer tender homecomings.

“It’s strange,” Brigit told him. “In the story, Holly always went to visit Tiffany’s whenever she needed reassurance that nothing too terrible could happen in the world, so long as a shop like that existed, peddling its marvels and arbitrating civilized tastes.”

“Did the marvels in the windows make you feel that way?” Vincent asked.

“Not a bit.”

Brigit touched her fingertips to her cameo, her most cherished heirloom, and thought also of the pearl dangle earrings she was wearing, and the barrette of pearls and silver she wore in her hair— these latter treasures being nigh-sacred artefacts from her wedding day.

“Maybe it’s because I have no connection to the finery in those windows, however lovely it be,” she said. “No memories in my mind that attach me to those objects, and no reason to expect anything of them. They have no claim on me, so they offer no comfort to me. I know they don’t belong to me in any way. But perhaps Holly needed to believe that a bauble possesses its own inherent value. That prized metals and stones and pretty bits of glass can somehow make their owners—or their givers—more valuable to the world. Or at least more attractive.”

“Imputed beauty?”

“Jewels can only decorate beauty that already exists. They don’t create it where there is no beauty to begin with.”

“Is this character, Holly, beautiful?” Vincent asked.

Brigit thought about it. “She calls herself a wild thing,” she said. “Perhaps wildness grants a kind of raw beauty. Mostly, though, this woman is a tragic creature, so young and unsettled. She had no true safe places at all. She never let herself belong to anything or anyone for long. But she craved the security of belonging. She just couldn’t seem to find a difference between security and a cage. She kept mistaking one for t’other, and for all her strength of will, it made her unhappy.”

Brigit smiled sadly. “Whenever I feel restless, I try not to be someone like her; rootless rather than free. A soul divided against herself. Perhaps only the finest of lines separates desperate aimlessness from lively spontaneity—but a powerful difference there be. Holly’s tale makes that clear through its ironies.”

“I would like to read this book,” Vincent said. “I will look for it in the public library.”

“Ah, it’s good to have fallen in with a man who reads,” Brigit replied.

Vincent glanced at her, but said nothing.

They slowed while Brigit craned her neck to examine the blocks and angles of Trump Tower. She wondered that all of New York did not go blind at midday, considering the reflected glare those polished walls of mirror-glass must project. But perhaps the glass was tinted to avoid paining onlookers. The building appeared exactly as her father had described it to her, coming home from his final voyage before their falling-out. The tower had been brand-new, then. She recalled that he’d brought home for her Stephen Mitchell’s new translations of Rilke in hardcover. A prized addition to Brigit’s personal library. And Rilke’s poems had inspired her to write A Terrible Strength. Her most mythical work thus far.

“I’m wondering,” Brigit asked Vincent. “Did you first happen upon my books in the public library?”

“No,” he said, and they walked half a block in silence before he said anything more.

Then he told her, “It was... my godfather... who gave me Fables and Fantasies... when I was fifteen.”

Brigit listened, waiting for the rest of the memory.

“That was... a dark time... for me.” Vincent gave a ragged sigh. “The worst of times. A time that began with the deaths of sudden enemies— or, no, it began weeks before that, with the departure of the girl I loved— and... then the dark time ended— if it ended— more than a year later, after the death of another dear friend, whom I loved like a sister. And in between...”

Vincent looked into Brigit’s eyes. She felt the depth of courage required of him to speak of his past.

She listened.

“I was not well,” he said. “I was.. .lost. It was terrible.”

They walked, crossing streets as they came to them. They passed a narrow, green-glassed tower on their left; and on the west side of the avenue, a high-steepled Victorian Gothic sanctuary constructed from red sandstone; and further massive stone edifices— storefronts, offices, and hotels— beyond. As they walked, Brigit opened her heart wide to Vincent’s words, hearing the hollow places echo between mountainous syllables where cold memories loured. Mountains of madness, she thought, feeling an Antarctic chill slither across her shoulder blades.

“While I was... ill...” Vincent said, “my godfather sent me a book of stories for children. His wife had found it in a bookshop in Dublin, while she was travelling, and she brought it home for their daughter. But the girl was my age, and felt too old for fables, and so she gave the book to her father to give to me. Because I have always loved myths and folktales. And then my own father read your stories to me.”

Vincent slowed, and stopped. They stood near a stairway leading down into a subway station. Across the avenue, a spiny limestone cathedral ascended into the sky, flying United States and Episcopal Church flags. A couple pedestrians walking up behind them gave Brigit and Vincent a wide berth as they passed by.

Vincent said softly, “Your stories opened doors that I did not believe could exist for me. Doors to hope and new life. The night-fire tree. The castle of pearls beneath the waves of the sea. And the owl-woman, most of all.” He studied her face. “That is how I knew you tonight, the instant I saw you. I recognized the owl-woman who brought my soul back from the dead when I was a boy.”

Brigit found she felt a little short of breath. She reached for Vincent’s hand and clasped it tight. His fingers curled gently around hers.

“I have read your fables and your fantasies many times since then. It is always wonderful. Always life-giving. But last year... in late winter... there came a moment... the darkest since that gyre of death when I was young. Not even the owl-woman could show me a way out from under that shadow. But one day, a copy of A Terrible Strength came into my possession. Fresh sustenance. A bounty of love and courage. I read from it every day, for weeks, months. I had to read it. I needed the strength it gave me... to fight the smothering aloneness. Again, your words kept me alive, I think, until the night everything changed forever. The night I found the one I love.”

“Your lady,” Brigit whispered.

Vincent nodded. “And then... this year. It has been a time filled with things I had never dreamed of. A time of... stunning joy. But it has also been a time of terrors.” Looking into her eyes, he rooted his gaze there.

“Many very bad things have happened to me this year,” he said. “I have been struggling... to make sense of everything. To keep faith alive. To love truly. To bridge the divide between my world... and her world. Mùirne and Áinle, and your owl-woman, have guided me through the darkness many times.”

More people walked past them, a gaggle of individual wayfarers, loosely clustered. Brigit barely noticed their swarming. Vincent’s voice and eyes filled her galaxy to the brim.

“In May,” he was saying, “an enemy from my world’s past was wreaking havoc in... in my lady’s world, selling a poison he invented. Putting it into the hands of dangerous men. Wealthy drug dealers. People died. People went insane, their minds torn apart. Then our enemy murdered one of her friends. A police detective. That was... one of those pivotal moments between us.”

“One of the five?” Brigit asked.

“Yes. We had argued. More than once. About risks and responsibilities. This time we disagreed about how to stop our enemy from hurting people. We felt the conflict between the laws of her world and the laws of mine. She wanted—”

Vincent broke off and shook his head. “I trust her,” he said. “I understand what her conscience required her to do. And she gave me time to try to confront this enemy.” He lowered his eyes at last. “That went... badly.”

“What happened?”

He looked up, met Brigit’s gaze solidly once again. “He deceived me. He poisoned me. I... went... violently mad.” Vincent drew in a long shuddering breath. “It was like... before. When I was young. It was... in some ways, it was worse than that.”

Your darkest horror, Brigit thought. Your greatest fear.

“I threatened my friends. I attacked my father.” Vincent’s voice fell to a shaky murmur. “I hurt him. They sent... for her. My friends. My father. They didn’t know what else to do. And she came. And so she saw me... like that. Lost. Uncontrolled. Insane with terror, and rage.”

He closed his eyes in pain, in shame. Brigit held onto his hand and kept quiet. At last he opened his eyes and went on.

“But she went to me, into the dark, embraced me, brought me back to the light. She saved my life. I went out again and met the man who traded in evil and lies. We fought. His drugs were destroyed in a fire. He vanished into the smoke and the shadows. Our battle sickened me. But the city lost its newest poisoner. It was difficult for all of us to recover from that confrontation, but we did. My beloved and I returned to our lives, she still grieving the loss of her friend, and I—”

Vincent looked over Brigit’s head at the avenue behind her. Brigit heard a rising mechanical roar. Turning, she saw a leather-clad man ride past them on a blatting motorcycle, drowning out all other sounds on the street. Vincent waited until the noise had receded into the distance. Then he started walking again. Brigit walked beside him, still holding his hand, offering silent support through her touch.

“The demons that the enemy’s drug unleashed in me departed. I became myself again. But it was as if all the walls and screens inside my mind had been knocked down. All the windows broken. All the doors smashed in. Wounds, old and new, ripped open. I was exhausted. Powerless. I was no good to anyone. No use to myself. Or to her. During those murky days and nights, if she had needed me to protect—”

He stopped. He looked hard at Brigit. “Have I said too much?” he asked suddenly and quietly, like a man speaking to himself out of a frightening dream. Afraid, perhaps, of betraying some of those secrets he was sworn to keep.

Brigit thought again: Caomhnóir. And her heart whispered: Fénnid.

“You are saying what needs to be said,” she answered him. “And tonight I am here with you to listen. That is all.”

His big hand pressed her fingers. His eyes shone with his gratitude. Vincent took another steadying breath. They continued walking slowly forward.

“I did not know how to go on,” he said. “But my father understands what you’ve meant to me over the years. While I was adrift within myself, he brought your new book to me, and he left me alone with it.”

“Three Hundred Days,” she said.

“Yes. That book— you— you and Ian both— explained... everything. You understood. The desire and the terror. The danger. Hope and pain. Happiness. The necessity of creating safe places to share with the people we love. And the equal necessity of leaving our safe places at times, to foster peace and justice, to build trust, and to be alive— truly alive. When death is nearest...life finds a way. You reminded me of that. You’ve given hope to so many people. And to me. You give life to me. Your work, your art, channels pure love into the world. Pure... sanity. It is powerful. It is beautiful.”

Brigit was gazing out at the city through tears again.

“No, I’ve never found any of your books in a library. I’ve never needed to. Loving hands have always gifted your writing to me, during moments when I most needed to receive it.”

Brigit remembered his introductory words to her at the ball. You’ve touched me. Made me think. I just wanted to tell you. To thank you.

“God be thanked, then,” she said. “God be thanked for this marvellous convergence of constellations between our two selves, and within our lifetimes.”

They came to a new stop on the sidewalk. Across the avenue, Rockefeller Center’s titanic bronze Atlas bore the weight of the celestial sphere upon his mighty shoulders. And beside them, on their side of the street, rising up to Neo-Gothic heights under the Samhain stars—

“Saint Patrick’s cathedral,” said Vincent.

Brigit laughed aloud, wiping tears from her face. “Take care when thou call’st upon the name of thy God,” she said. “For comes a day, it may be His pleasure to answer thee.”

Vincent watched her with bright, gentle eyes. Brigit turned to him. She took both of his hands. He let her take them.

“Vincent, I had just been thinking that I wanted to give you some lasting truths tonight. But I know now that the gift is already given. Already accepted and made real in your heart. Your trust does perfect honour to my life’s work. Your life completes it, in your own history, and in this time and this place tonight. No author could ask for higher praise than that.”

He looked into her, his face becoming peaceful with the rare contentment he must be observing inside her.

“I think we are well met,” he said softly. Brigit said nothing. She knew she did not need to speak. They simply understood each other.

When Vincent glanced away toward the open cathedral doors, Brigit looked too. An old woman walked out of the church, tightening a brown scarf around her neck. She glanced at the costumed pair of them, a brief spark of curiosity flashing across her face.

As she walked past them, the woman said, “Better hurry, if you’re going inside. They close up in fifteen minutes.” Then she went on her way.

Vincent looked to Brigit, questioning.

Faerie legends, Brigit thought. Hesitant with him for the first time, she asked, “Can you go... inside a church?”

His smile was warm and a little impish. “We spirits of the underworld, you mean?”

Brigit smiled back.

“Let’s find out,” Vincent said.

So Brigit gathered her thoughts in her mind, and a fold of her skirt in her hand. They climbed the steps and entered the narthex. The bustle of the city fell away behind them, replaced by the heady acoustic quietness of the cathedral’s inner realm. Within, people moved through the nave and transepts, some clearly tourists, others looking more like parishioners at home in their sacred space. A few others wore what Brigit assumed were holiday costumes, but kept themselves to themselves as they walked along the aisles or sat praying in the pews. Brigit looked away from her fellow visitors to watch Vincent as his gaze traversed the central aisle toward the altar, then rose irresistibly upward beyond the golden arch to the massive vaulted ceiling soaring overhead.

This, too, he was collecting carefully into his memory. Storing it up. Treasuring everything.

Brigit found herself learning to love her companion’s quiet wonderment with the world.

Leaving Vincent to his private reflections, Brigit crossed the floor to a nearby marble font. She invoked the Trinity and received the blessing of the holy water, then lifted her own eyes to the distant altar and made Ian’s bow of veneration. This was a gesture she had offered in Ian’s stead ever since his death. It had been her husband’s way of honouring her church and her heritage. Now it had become a private custom that allowed her to honour her marriage, along with the potent, eternal faith she believed she and Ian continued to share within the hallowed shelter of their love.

She became aware of Vincent as he silently joined her beside the font. He halted so close to her that their sleeves touched. Looking up, Brigit saw he was considering the holy water. Did he need protocol advice? An explanation? An invitation?

No, none. He moved as though he wished to remove his glove, but stopped. Instead, he tentatively reached out his gloved right hand to the basin, touched the surface of the water so gently he barely made a ripple, and brought his damp fingertips to his chest. He touched the ruffled jabot above his heart. He stood there a moment, his head bowed. Then he lowered his hand to his side.

Moved by his reverence, Brigit breathed to him, “Do you pray, Vincent?”

He turned his head to look at her. His voice as soft as hers, he replied, “Yes.”

Brigit smiled, thinking, Only, to be sure, your prayers be not quite like any other’s.

He looked around again, standing very still now. This was a beautiful cathedral, all pillars and arches and hushed openness, inviting human hearts to open just as high and wide to the reverberating presence of Almighty God. And yet, Brigit guessed the physical openness was challenging her new friend’s courage. He said nothing. His posture remained tall and strong. It was his alert stillness that told her he was becoming uncomfortable. She herself wondered if anyone would notice their costumes, and hurry over to ask Vincent to remove his mask.

“Come,” she murmured. She touched his arm and began to walk, choosing a left-most route that took them toward alcoves glowing with candlelight beneath the high stained-glass windows. Vincent went with her. He seemed relieved to be moving toward an edge of the great room.

Brigit took her time with their little journey, welcoming the ambiance of the place. It was unlike the Long Tower Church she knew and loved at home. Saint Patrick’s seemed vast. And also whiter, stonier, exuding a kind of Manhattan elegance that intrigued her. She wondered what Patrick himself would have made of the building. An interesting what-if, that.

Oh dear, she thought ruefully, a story idea. She shook her head at herself. Tuck that one away now, my love. For later. Much later. She drew a thought-taming breath, turning her attention to prayer.

The first that came to mind was a prayer Maura’s grandmother had taught to her long ago. How well it suited Brigit’s present mood! Thou knowest how tenderness steals upon me when the sea is still and the wind is lown, she began. Yet, Father, for something more and more abiding do I pray. Even for a constancy of gentleness in myself. Teach me how I may win its secret: through faith in Thee: through faith in love: through Jesu born within my faith.

Her silent recitation brought them to a saint’s aisle altar, where a wide votive stand held rows of glass candle holders. Upon a small table beside the stand sat a box of white candles. Beyond a protective marble rail stood a statue of Saint Jude, gazing up into heaven, accompanied by two smaller white angels.

Brigit crossed herself. “Jude the Apostle,” she murmured to Vincent.

“Patron saint of impossible things,” he replied.

She glanced up at him. He gazed with longing at the apostle’s face.

Brigit did not ask any of the questions that occurred to her.

Vincent turned and looked at her again. She thought she saw kindly amusement in his eyes, as though he’d heard her questions anyway. He moved his hand, gesturing to the next alcove over.

“Did you see who waits for you there?” he whispered.

Brigit shook her head, no. Vincent stood aside. “I’ll stay here,” he said.

Curious, Brigit walked past him to the next gathering of candles shining in their little amber glasses. This chapel alcove was also beautiful, of course, the ecru-coloured marble exquisitely carved. A solar cross framed by Celtic knotwork crowned the altar area, crisply Irish in its tone, with a praying angel at the peak of the upper arch. Tall candles and a brass crucifix gleamed from their central position beneath the angel’s wings. Clustered green columns flanked the altar. Two saints shared this station, one to either side, each surrounded by more marble columns, these a mottled, golden hue. Saint Bernard stood on the right, and on the left stood— Saint Brigid.

Within her breast, Brigit’s heart leapt with joy.

The stars are aligned indeed, dear Sister, and perfectly, how perfectly, she thought.

She studied the graven folds of Brigid’s raiment, the flowering stem she held in her hand, the serene authority of her features. It should bring no surprise to find Saint Brigid inside a church dedicated to Saint Patrick. They followed each other about, these two, beloved as they were to Irish-loving souls worldwide. But still, how quick came the finding! And how dear the meeting, face to representative face, brief though it must be this night!

Brigit made Ian’s bow to both Saint Brigid and Saint Bernard in turn, asking their prayers for all who had shared the day with her. She hastened to find a fresh candle and a lighting taper, slipping the candle into an empty glass. She made the sign of the cross and lit her candle from the flame of its neighbour. A Thiarna Íosa Críost, a Mhic Dé, déan trócaire orainn. She returned the extinguished taper to the match holder. A Thiarna Íosa Críost, a Mhic Dé, déan trócaire orainn. She let her eyes rest upon the flame she had set burning, for fire had always been Brigid’s provenance. A Thiarna Íosa Críost, a Mhic Dé, déan trócaire orainn.

She knelt, letting her sense of the holy fire blaze up within her being. She willingly recalled the play of firelight upon the brass of the crucifix before her. She unwillingly recalled the cast of firelight that half-revealed and half-concealed the ruin of Ian’s bomb-scorched face. She prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lorica of Saint Patrick, and the Genealogy of Saint Brigid. The bountiful words drew her deeply inward, outward, forward. And when words ceased, she listened, waiting upon the ultimate Word’s pleasure.

She was herself now the lighted candle. A votive dancing within her skin of glass. A little star gleaming in the blessed darkness.

And, thus kindled, she found did not gleam alone.

She felt another glow pulsating near her. Steady and powerful. She felt his radiance like a tidal river of sweetness, flowing from purity into eternity. She fairly saw this soul-light—rich, bright, like moonlight of palest gold, as from the Harvest Moon.

A Voice came to her then. A Voice she recognized and trusted, speaksinging silken lines:

Arise now, my love, my lovely one, come.

O my dove, you in the clefts of the rock,

O you in the secret recesses of the crag,

Show me your face, let me hear your voice;

For sweet is your voice, and your face so beautiful.

Arise now, my love, my lovely one, come.

Show me your face, let me hear your voice,

For sweet is your voice, and your face so beautiful.

So beautiful.

Brigit’s breath caught in her throat. She raised her head. For the space of a single heartbeat she saw an image glimmer before her eyes. A graceful figure, pure, exotic. A wild thing both bold and shy that nonetheless longed to know itself both tamed and beloved. Griffin? Phoenix? Unicorn? She couldn’t tell. Something mythic. Something at once fierce and meek.

The figure resolved itself before her eyes. She saw that she was gazing up at the stone angel above the altar of Saint Brigid and Saint Bernard. Arise now, my love, my lovely one, come...

She glanced behind her. The soft sounds of calm human movement filled the cathedral. People were taking their leave, walking to the outer church doors.

It must be time to go.

Arise now, my love...

At peace, Brigit stood. She thanked—blessed—praised—Christ, His Mother, and His Saints. She touched the four endpoints of the cross upon her body. Turning, she walked to Vincent, who waited for her before the figure of Saint Jude.

She saw no new lights in the apostle’s votive stand.

“Would you like to light a candle before we go?” Brigit asked.

He did. Somehow, she knew he did. Vincent looked down at the locked offering box attached to the front of the candle stand.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful,” he whispered. He lifted his empty hands in a little shrug. “I have no money.”

Brigit realized she had no money either. At least, she’d brought no cash with her. She knew the suggested donation was an offering, not a fee. However, this was also not her parish, and she, too, did not want to be disrespectful. In truth, her soul was brimming over with gratitude for Saint Patrick’s hospitality.

Her inner whimsy fluttered its feathery wings again.

“Here then,” she said to Vincent, selecting a lighting taper and holding it out to him. He took the slender stick, tipping his head a little to one side as he looked from the taper to Brigit’s face. Brigit swiftly removed her earrings.

“One for your candle,” she said, “and one for mine.” The dangling pearls were a bit too large to slip through the donation slot. So she hooked the silver ear wires into the leftmost curve of the narrow opening. Her earrings rested now upon the scratched metal lid of the box. Vincent appeared much more than startled.

“Brigit—” he began.

She remembered adorning herself with all her lovely pearls on her wedding day. Day of bliss, day of betrayal. She remembered Ian’s sea-grey eyes filling her universe. The old, sweet pain moaned within her yet again. A worthy offering.

Brigit asked gently, “What is a pearl, Vincent, but an oyster’s prayer for relief?”

He received her words. He thought about them, and nodded his thanks. They stood close together while Vincent lit his prayer candle and deposited the taper into its metal cup. Quiet, he contemplated the flame.

“I felt you praying, I think,” Brigit whispered to him. “A moment ago.”

“Did you? What do my prayers feel like?”

“Honey by moonlight,” she answered.

He smiled, thoughtful. “Hmm.”

“What is it?” Brigit asked.

“I think I felt you praying, too.”

She raised both eyebrows, though she kept gazing at the tiny tongue of flame. “And what do my prayers feel like?”

“Like the gleaming of autumn stars, brought near enough to bestow warmth as well as light.”

She looked at him. He looked at her.

He could have been alluding to what she’d declared to her God about constellations outside the cathedral, before they entered. But Brigit knew Vincent’s experience had been more immediate than that. More intimate. More like her own impressions of him.

She heard this truth in his voice, felt it in something like a vibration growing ever more clear between them.

And she saw in his face that Vincent felt it too.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” he said.

“You make no intrusion. You’re just... frightfully accurate.”

His eyes held secrets long kept hidden in the clefts of undiscovered rocks.

“We should go,” Vincent said at last. “The others are leaving.”

“Aye.”

Brigit tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. They returned to the front doors, Brigit pausing to repeat her blessing at the font. Vincent did not touch the water a second time. They followed the departing folk out onto the the sidewalk. Manhattan’s worldly music enveloped them again.

“You’ve never been inside a cathedral before,” Brigit commented.

“No. Not one that wasn’t empty and abandoned.”

“And you’re not a Catholic, but you’re also no stranger to our ways.”

He chuckled. “No, no stranger. When I was a boy, one of my teachers was a devout Roman Catholic. He loved to talk about his faith and his church. I enjoyed listening to him.”

“Ah. And earlier you said you have a godfather. Are you a Christian?”

They strolled along the avenue for several paces, Vincent thinking how to answer.

“My father is a Christian,” he said. “He was once an Anglican but, as he puts it, his college years broadened his spiritual horizons. From the day of my birth, he’s wanted to include me in the best that his native tradition could offer. As for myself... I am...” He sighed. “I am uncertain whether any religion has saved some space for me within its borders.”

Brigit nodded, well-acquainted with a similar uncertainty. “Perhaps you find little perches and resting places within many religions,” she said. “Secret clefts among the rocks.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“Ian did.”

“Tell me about Ian’s perches,” Vincent invited.

Brigit obliged, pausing their stroll as she remembered.

“Well, he was excited by the work of Vietnamese peace advocates. He befriended Buddhist monks and explored the spiritual practices that empowered their activism. We both studied Gandhi, of course, and our political and religious forbears in Ireland, but it was Ian who introduced me to the legacy of America’s Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, Jr. Ian also wanted to better understand the Irish and Scottish traditions his Daideó Ewing and Nana Wynda handed down to him— the old legends and songs and prayers and faerie stories. Not as an academic discipline, mind. Ian abetted the linguists and folklorists with good will, but he wanted to do more with all the lore that scholars and artists were gathering for posterity. He talked about reaching for common roots into our Gaelic past. He hoped to find a new balance between faiths, and cultures, and political philosophies.”

“Ah. In the way Yeats worked with the traditions of his forefathers?” Vincent asked.

“No, not quite. Yeats was a stalwart nationalist, and he turned to the occult to filter and justify both his nationalism and his relationship to Irish ways. For all our unorthodox methods, even our mysticism, Ian and I both held fast to Christ above all. Occultism has no place in our work. We also rejected the merciless politics of both the hard-edged nationalists and the rabid colonialists. It only feeds the clannish madness. Aye, we were hated for refusing to take sides as the combatants define them, but we knew in our bones that all their extremes are cancerous.”

Vincent nodded, concurring. He asked, “Ian never achieved the balance he sought?”

Brigit shook her head sadly. “No. He never did. Not long after our engagement, we decided there was already too much religion embedded in the conflict. Too much competition ’tween past and future. We feared that publicly delving into the spiritual heritage would distract everyone too much, maybe even discredit our work. Ghosts? Faeries? Rustic holies? Mouldered stones? Superstitions? Shadowed myths? High romance? It strains even the long memories of the Irish to keep real faith with the old beliefs. Who in this modern, cynical world has the heart to listen anymore?”

“Who indeed?” Vincent murmured.

Brigit sighed. “It’s just as well. Right now too many churches are suspicious of anything they could call Pagan. They’re already disgusted with the rise of Wicca, and Anglophiles on both sides of the Irish Sea are deeply biased against ancient Celts, let alone revivalists. Then we’ve had some nasty rumours making the rounds in conservative circles— absurd rumours of neo-druids and devil-worshippers. They’re saying the youth are corrupt and the children corrupted. Well— more corrupt and corrupted than codgers always claim of any younger generation. They truly hate the new music scene that attracts the young people. I do a good deal of my work with the youth, and I can’t afford to spark unnecessary controversy among their parents and grandparents.”

Vincent frowned. “People would stop you from going among your young ones?”

“They’ve already tried.”

Vincent’s frown deepened.

“But our Caer Mediation House has been good for the youth themselves. Plenty of them come to us of their own accord. They think of it as a safe haven, and aren’t afraid to say so. Honest young voices make a mighty difference to a few of the more enlightened souls of Ulster.”

“Good.” Vincent still looked troubled. “I don’t understand a world that never listens to the voices of its children— that hates the things that interest young people, simply because the young ones enjoy those things.”

Brigit risked her first direct question about Vincent’s world. “You take care, then, to listen to the children of your world?” she asked.

He noticed her diplomatic tone. “We do,” he replied, entrusting her with the truth that, whatever his world was and wherever it was located, his present-day community included children. He offered no further comment. Brigit was aware that he had resumed the alert posture he had displayed in the cathedral, and also in the park when the man with the dog jogged past them.

He’s wary of exposure, Brigit thought. This is how he stands when he senses danger.

She wanted to pose no threat to him. Nor to his world. And never to his world’s children.

“Your world is wiser than mine,” she told him.

He looked down at the pavement between them, the frown fading from his face. Brigit took this for an expression of relief and modest agreement. She smiled warmly at his downturned countenance, so he would hear the smile in her voice.

“It was a joy to visit a dwelling place of me own patroness tonight, Vincent. That could not have happened, but for you.”

“It’s a city of many wonders. It gives me joy to explore it with you.” Vincent met her eyes again and also smiled.

“Is there any place you would like to visit next?” he asked.

Brigit thought about his question. Then she said, “I should like to see Times Square.”

Vincent turned and gazed in what Brigit presumed was the direction of her chosen landmark. He stood quietly for a moment. M’aingeal coimhdeachta, Brigit thought, assessing the risks.

He returned his active attention to her. “Times Square is not Fifth Avenue,” he warned. “It’s also not New Year’s Eve on television.”

“I understand.”

Vincent gave her a gracious nod and offered his arm. Brigit accepted it. They followed the sidewalk southward.

…

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO…

Owls By Night, Part One: Works Referenced

Brigit O’Donnell’s Published Writings [fictitious books written by this fictitious character]:

A Terrible Strength

Fables and Fantasies

Three Hundred Days

Too Many Heroes

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Emily Dickinson, “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking”

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Thomas Moore, Lalla Roohk

Thomas Moore, “She is Far from the Land”

Thomas Moore, “The Last Rose of Summer”

Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letters of 5 April 1903 & 23 April 1903 (Owls By Night adjusts phrasings from both Stephen Mitchell’s and K. W. Maurer’s translations)

Friedrich Schiller, “The Artists”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, scene 1

William Shakespeare, “Sonnet III”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Oscar Wilde, “The Happy Prince”

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities