1744

In the autumn of 1744, George Walsh and Georgiana Law were married—an event that seemed as natural and inevitable as the long peace that Ireland had now enjoyed for nearly a lifetime. Yet a certain anxiety hung over the proceedings, as if a wicked witch had been spotted in the distance, making her way towards the wedding feast.

“The French are coming.” That was the rumour.

Of course, rumours of invasion were hardly new. In the never-ending rivalries between the European powers, Britain was now in league with France’s enemies, and naturally, therefore, the French would be tempted to invade Ireland to annoy the English. Such was the way of the world in the eighteenth century. But now another rumour was growing. The heir to the lost Stuart crown, a vain young man whom the Scots liked to call Bonnie Prince Charlie—and whom the French had been protecting for years—was planning to come to Scotland to claim his birthright. A Jacobite rising in Scotland and a French invasion of Ireland: it was exactly the combination the London government dreaded.

For once, even the unflappable Duke of Devonshire was rattled. Orders flew. The troops in the Irish garrisons were to be readied. Any suspicious characters were to be reported. Any suspect priests were to be rounded up. And all Ireland waited. Would the threatening clouds on the horizon disperse, as they had always done in the decades before? Or would they gather together into a single dark mass and come racing across the sea towards the Irish shore?

O’Toole rested his back against the wall and felt the sun on his face. There were a dozen children sitting on the grass in front of him. He handed over the book—Caesar’s Wars, in Latin—to one of the boys.

“Construe.”

The boy began. He wasn’t bad. But after a minute or two, he floundered. O’Toole winced.

“No. Anybody?” Another boy offered. “Worse.” Silence. “Conall.” Reluctantly, the boy answered. “Very good.”

The dark, tousle-haired boy with the wide-set green eyes never offered unless he was asked. O’Toole didn’t blame him. While the others were all on the grass, Conall Smith had perched himself on a small, flat outcrop of grey stone. Any attempt by one of the others, whatever their size, to dislodge him from that spot and they would have been sent sprawling, because nowadays young Conall was unusually strong. But it embarrassed him that he always had the answer to the master’s questions when his friends did not, and sometimes he would pretend he couldn’t answer, and O’Toole would stare at him, knowing very well that he knew, and finally shrug his shoulders and move on.

O’Toole loved the boy almost as much as he loved his own granddaughter. That was what made today’s lesson so difficult.

The hedge school. Sometimes it was, indeed, a master and a few children huddled behind a hedge, or in a hidden clearing in the trees, or in a peasant’s cottage—or, in this case, behind a stone wall with a delightful view down from the Wicklow Mountains towards the Irish sea. The hedge school was illegal, of course, because giving an education to Catholic children was illegal. But they were all over the country, hundreds of them.

It was soon after his visit to Quilca, almost twenty years ago, that O’Toole had become the hedge schoolmaster at Rathconan. He was considered a good master, but not one of the very best. For although his knowledge of the classical languages, of English, and of history and geography was excellent, his knowledge of philosophy was only moderate, and his mathematics no more than adequate. And it was mathematics, above all, that the native Irish prized: arithmetic for keeping accounts; geometry for surveying and even astronomy. The best hedge schoolmaster mathematicians would proudly write “Philomath” after their names. One old man he’d met, named O’Brien, had a reputation for mathematics that spread even to Italy, and he was known all over Ireland as The Great O’Brien. Such was the illegal education system for Catholics all over Ireland.

If O’Toole was only a moderate mathematician, he had other strengths. His poetry and music had brought him a reputation, if not quite on a level with blind Carolan, as an important figure all the same. When his pupils translated from Latin, they had to give their version first in Irish, then in English. He even taught them a good deal of English law, since it would be useful to them. Already, he had produced three pupils who were making their way successfully in the merchant communities of Dublin and Wicklow, and another who had gone to France to study for the priesthood—not a bad record, he considered, for a little village up in the mountains.

Not that all his pupils did so well. With the Brennans, for instance, he found he could do practically nothing. But he must try. He sighed.

“Conall. Go and stand on watch.”

As long as the little school kept out of sight, Budge generally left it alone. But as the local landlord and magistrate, he would sometimes ride out and see if he could spot their proceedings—of which he strongly disapproved—and if he caught sight of them, there would certainly be trouble. Like most hedge schools, therefore, when O’Toole taught, he usually posted a watch.

“Now then, Patrick,” he said, as kindly as he could, to the eldest of the Brennan boys, “let me hear you read.”

As the boy stumbled his way through a simple passage—O’Toole had sent Conall off to watch so that he would not have to listen to this painful process—the master could only marvel: how was it possible that young Conall Smith, the child with a mind as fine as, perhaps finer than, his own, could be half a Brennan?

Sometimes he wished he had intervened to prevent Conall’s birth. It was a foolish idea, no doubt, but was it possible that he could have said something to persuade the boy’s father to lead a different life and choose another wife?

There was just one day, it seemed to him, when he might have had the chance to do so. That day, almost twenty years ago, up at Quilca. He’d marked out young Garret Smith at once as a fellow with genius. He’d guessed the young man’s anger and his frustration, too. How could an intelligent Catholic boy like that feel any other way? But if only he’d guessed what was in Garret’s mind when he’d asked if he knew the Brennans, and then informed him, as he was leaving in the morning, that he’d come to see him at Rathconan. If only he’d known.

What could he have done? Used any influence he had, begged the young man, at least, to follow another course. Anything to prevent him running off after that illiterate girl and making himself part of the worthless Brennan family up at Rathconan. Had he been able to do that, then Garret Smith would surely not have fallen into his present wretched condition; and Conall—another Conall, of course, perhaps even a finer one—would have been born to a different mother, and under far different family circumstances.

But by the time he’d returned to Rathconan that autumn, he’d found young Garret already there, living with the Brennans, his heart dark with anger and contempt for Nary, who’d sent her away, for Sheridan, the Walshes and all their kind, believing foolishly that up there in a hut in the mountains, he would be somehow a freer, purer man than he would be working for MacGowan the grocer in Dublin. Had it just been a question of living in the mountains, he might have been right. A man might find himself up in the wild and open spaces, or in the great sanctuary of Glendalough. But in a hut with the Brennans? O’Toole didn’t think so. Within a year, the slut of a girl had given him a child; then another. Young Smith should have walked out on them all, in the high old way, in O’Toole’s opinion. But Garret was too good for that. He’d gone before a priest and married her. After that, he was doomed.

He should have become a hedge schoolmaster. He’d have had to study more, but he had the brain to do it. I’d have helped him, O’Toole thought. But he’d have had to move, since the position in Rathconan was filled and there was no need for another. A local priest had given him some work. But then he had quarrelled with the priest. Was there something in the man that craved his own destruction? It had often seemed to the schoolmaster that there was. For look at the man now. A labourer. A carpenter and carver of images, commissioned but never delivered; a maker of poems never finished; a dreamer of Jacobite dreams that had no chance of becoming real. A drinker. Every year, more of a drinker. A husband of a wife he’d buried now, and whose family, in his heart, he must have come to despise—for they were dirty, lazy, and stupid. A father of children left unkempt, while he talked to them of the Jacobite cause and the shabby way he’d been treated, or cursed them and sank into moroseness.

There had been three daughters that lived. Two, sluts like their mother, in O’Toole’s opinion, had married down the valley. The third was a servant in Wicklow. Two little boys had died in infancy. And then, miraculously, had come Conall.

“He’ll die like the other boys, I fear,” the priest who’d performed the baptism had said to O’Toole. And most people in Rathconan had thought so, too. He remembered him when he was three—so pale and fragile, with those wonderful green eyes. Such a poetic-looking little fellow that it broke your heart to think how little time he probably had to know life. When his own little granddaughter Deirdre, who was only months younger than the boy, had become his friend, O’Toole had tried gently to discourage her from becoming too close, for fear of the pain it would cause her when the boy died. But he could hardly stop her playing with him, or walking with him hand in hand when he wandered up the mountain to where the sheep were grazing, or sitting beside him on a rock overlooking a pool formed by the mountain stream, sharing her food with him, and talking by the hour.

“What do you talk about, Deirdre?” he had asked her once.

“Oh, everything,” she had answered. “He tells me stories sometimes,” she had added, “about the fish in the stream, and the birds, and the deer in the woods. I do love him so.” And though his heart had sunk, he had not known what to say.

It had been Garret who had brought the boy to him, when Conall was six. Surprisingly, he had even come with the requisite money.

“Teach him,” he had asked O’Toole simply. “Teach him all you know.”

“You could teach him yourself, for the moment,” O’Toole had pointed out, “for nothing.”

“No,” Smith had shot back with sudden vehemence. And then, after a pause: “I’m not fit to teach him.” A terrible admission, but what could the schoolmaster say?

So he had started to teach the boy. And he had been astonished. The little fellow’s memory was astounding. Tell him a thing once, and he remembered it forever. His thought process, O’Toole soon realised, was also entirely out of the ordinary. He would listen quietly, then ask a question that showed he had considered every aspect of the matter already and found the thing that, for the time being, you had thought it simpler to leave out. What delighted O’Toole most, however—and this was a gift that could never be taught—was the boy’s use of language: his strange, half-playful formulations which, you suddenly realised, contained an observation that was new yet stunningly accurate. How could he do such a thing at such a tender age? As well ask, how can a bird fly, or a salmon leap?

He also noticed that his young pupil had a busy inner life. There would be days when he seemed moody and preoccupied during the lesson. On these days, often as not, O’Toole would see him afterwards wandering off alone, enjoying some communion with the scene around him that no one could share. By the time the pale little fellow was eight years old, the schoolmaster loved him almost as much as Deirdre did.

If only it had not been for those other days, when Conall would fail to come to the hedge school and word would come that he was sickly; and O’Toole would go to Garret Smith’s house and find little Deirdre sitting by his side, feeding Conall broth, or quietly singing to him, while the little boy lay there so pale it seemed as if he might be taken from them within the day.

But then, suddenly, two years ago, he had started to get stronger. A year later, he seemed as robust as the other children; soon after that, one of the toughest. And now, he could physically dominate them all. At the same time, O’Toole detected a new toughness in the boy’s growing mind. He did not just excel at his lessons; he stormed through them, so that the schoolmaster was often challenged himself to set work that Conall wouldn’t find too easy.

Little Deirdre also watched these developments with evident delight. “Isn’t he strong?” she would cry. And it seemed to O’Toole that his granddaughter felt she could take a personal responsibility for Conall’s new condition. At the same time, from her looks, and from occasional words that she let fall, her grandfather could guess that she still saw the same, pale little boy that she had loved beneath this new incarnation; and indeed, Conall would still sometimes fall into his strange, melancholic moods, and the two of them would still go off for walks together in the mountain passes.

Deirdre was Conall’s only close friend. He was often with the other children, and joined in all their games. But it was clear that he did not share his confidences with them. There were only two other people nowadays to whom he might be close. One, perhaps, thought O’Toole, was himself. In their studies together, master and pupil had developed a degree of intimacy. The other was his father.

O’Toole suspected that Garret Smith had little enough to live for these days but his son. The man’s drinking was getting worse, and he looked twenty years older than he actually was; but if it hadn’t been for the boy, he’d surely have been far worse. And if this love did not always extend to paying the modest fees for the hedge school on time, he usually managed to make them up sooner or later. In the evenings, when he was sober, he would sometimes spend hours in deep conversation with the boy. O’Toole had often wondered what it was they talked about, and once he had asked Deirdre if she knew. But she didn’t. All she knew was that Conall had once told her: “My father and your grandfather are the only two men I truly admire.”

Did the boy know that his father was not held in high regard? The villagers were usually polite about his father to his face. “Your father’s a great reader,” they’d say. “He knows many things.” But if, behind his back, they added, “He knows more than he works and less than he drinks,” Conall was beginning to guess it. Once, when a boy was rude about his father, he knocked him down. Though afterwards, when no one could see, he burst into tears. And to Deirdre he sadly remarked: “No one understands him but me.”

So it was only his father and Deirdre that Conall really loved and trusted. And after them, O’Toole considered, I dare say it would be me.

And so now, as Conall kept watch for the hedge school, and the schoolmaster thought of the conversation he’d had the day before, he felt a terrible sense of guilt.

It weighed heavily on his conscience that he might have to betray the boy.

At shortly after noon, Robert Budge, landowner and magistrate, set out from his house to see Garret Smith. When Walter Smith’s family had been dispossessed, the Rathconan estate had been offered for sale at a knockdown price. Benjamin Budge had had no desire to return there, but his younger brother, who was made of sterner stuff, had been glad to buy it. The Budges could claim to have been at Rathconan for four generations now.

He hadn’t decided what to do about the Smith boy yet. O’Toole wouldn’t give any trouble. He’d already seen to that. As for the boy’s father . . .

But the boy could wait. Today he had other business with Garret Smith. It concerned Rathconan House.

If the old chiefs of the place could have seen Rathconan now, they might have been rather surprised. They might even have found it comical. Yet it was like scores of other old houses in Ireland. For, finding the accommodation of the old tower house insufficient, Budge’s father had added, across the front of it, a modest, rectangular house, five windows wide. The house was of no particular style, though the plain windows might have been called Georgian. No attempt had been made to alter either the house or the old keep that loomed up behind it, so that they would blend together. The new Rathconan looked like what it was: a house stuck onto the front of an old fort.

But it was where Robert Budge had been born and raised, and he was proud of it.

He’d been only twenty when his father had died, five years ago, leaving him lord and master of the place, and, with a young man’s vanity, he had even considered changing the house’s name. He had thought, as some of the grander settlers had done, of calling it Castle Budge, but that seemed overreaching. More reasonable might have been another English formula favoured in Ireland: Budgetown. But that was hardly euphonious. Better-sounding was the Irish version: Ballybudge. In the end, however, considering the fact that the Budges had hardly built the place, and fearing the mockery of the local Irish and his neighbours, he had thought better of it and left the name as it was—Rathconan—to which he liked to add the appellation “House,” to make it sound more like an English manor.

To Robert Budge, Rathconan House was home. True, like all the rest of the Cromwellian settlers, he was still viewed by the native Irish as an unwanted colonist. True, also, that he was proudly English and Protestant. For if the Cromwellian families were not there to uphold the Protestant faith and occupy the confiscated estates of the former Catholic owners, then what was their justification for being in Ireland in the first place? Indeed, his father, a man of far less religious conviction than old Barnaby Budge, had firmly taken his more or less Presbyterian family into the royal Church of Ireland exactly because, as he had put it: “We must all stick together.”

“Always remember,” he had advised Robert shortly before he died, “the good people here have known you all your life, they work your land, and they’ll probably call you ‘Your Honour’ and give you a daily greeting. But if ever our order breaks down, my son, they’ll put a knife between your ribs. And don’t you forget it.”

All the same, it was nearly a century since Robert’s great-grandfather Barnaby had first come there. And during that time, the Anglo-Irish settlers had evolved to blend, in certain ways, with the surrounding environment. If the men in the Irish Parliament felt themselves treated as a different breed by their compatriots in London, out here in the country, the lesser Anglo-Irish landlords had produced a type that was entirely their own.

His own father had exemplified the breed. He’d lived almost all his life at Rathconan and knew all its ways. He spoke English with a pronounced Irish intonation, and he treated many of the details of his life, including his children’s education, with a certain fine carelessness. In this he had been joined by his wife, who came from a similar family with identical views.

Some Anglo-Irish families, of course, sent their sons to Oxford, Cambridge, or Trinity College in Dublin. But not the Budges. Basic education the children were given, boys and girls, but much more was considered superfluous.

“My father had a whistle which he would blow to summon his dogs,” Robert would cheerfully tell his friends. “But if he blew two blasts, that meant he wanted me.” When his mother had caught his sister reading a book when she could have been healthily out of doors, she had locked her in a dark closet for two hours and told her she’d give her a whipping if she caught her behaving like that again. The Budge children were brought up to be strong, to run estates, and, if need be, to fight. In their love of the open air, the Budges had something in common with the Irish chiefs who had gone before them. It would have surprised them to know that they were less educated.

It was a matter of education that had caused him to speak to O’Toole so firmly.

Robert Budge was only twenty-five, but he was often treated like an older man. Perhaps it was his large, imposing presence, but as the owner of Rathconan, he was considered a useful local man by the authorities, and a year ago he had been made a magistrate. So long as he could stay in the country at Rathconan, he was glad to cut a bold figure in this local world, and he had recently been a guest at several houses in Counties Wexford and Kildare to look out for a suitable wife; he had also been to Dublin a few times, so that the people at the Castle and the Parliament should know his face.

His reason for visiting Dublin the previous week had been to obtain the latest news on the threat of invasion from France. The garrisons at Wicklow and Wexford were all in readiness, he knew very well. And he was impressed with the numbers of smart, red-coated troops with their muskets that he saw in the handsome streets of the capital. Like every other magistrate, he had been on the lookout for suspicious characters or signs of sedition at Rathconan, but he couldn’t honestly say that he’d found any—a pity really, as he’d have been glad to have something to bring himself to the attention of the authorities.

He hadn’t learned anything particularly new in Dublin about the threat from overseas, but towards the end of his visit, he had gained one quite interesting piece of information. He’d been standing in a group of similar fellows around the Member of Parliament Fortunatus Walsh when he’d heard it.

“There’s a growing feeling,” Walsh had told them, “that something has to be done about our education of Catholics. The hedge schools are everywhere, as we all know, but our own Church of Ireland has made only the most pitiful attempts to challenge them. We’ve started Protestant Charter Schools for poor children in some parishes, but as we all know, they have attracted few pupils.”

“The Catholic families won’t send their children to them,” someone remarked.

“Exactly. But there are some in the government who are recommending that a new method be tried. Take some promising young Catholic children from other areas, and place them, away from home, in the better Charter Schools.”

“So they become Protestants?”

“That is the hope, certainly. I am not sure it would work, but the idea is to help the gradual spread of Protestantism that our penal system and our Church of Ireland have so far entirely failed to accomplish.”

“An interesting idea,” said Budge, not because he thought so, but so that Fortunatus would take note of him.

“Well, Mr. Budge,” Walsh smiled, “if you have any candidates for such a project, you will find at least some at the Castle who will be grateful to you.”

Budge had said nothing, but he had made further enquiries in Dublin, visited a school, and pondered the matter all the way back to Rathconan.

If he were to do such a thing, there was only one possible candidate.

“I’m thinking of sending young Conall Smith,” he had told O’Toole. “And,” he had given the schoolmaster a careful look, “I shall be expecting your support.”

“But . . .” O’Toole was about to say, “He’s my best pupil,” then remembered that this would be admitting the existence of the hedge school. “Why would I support such a thing?”

“You know very well that he’s practically an orphan. His father’s not fit to look after him.”

“But he’s still his father. And he has family besides.”

“The Brennans? Fit guardians for a boy of such intelligence?” Since O’Toole’s opinion of the Brennans was, if anything, even lower than the landlord’s, the schoolmaster found it difficult to say anything to this.

“But to force a boy away from his family and into a Protestant school at such a time,” O’Toole said carefully, “would create bad feeling.”

“Is that a threat?” Budge gazed at him evenly.

“It isn’t. But I believe it’s the truth,” O’Toole said frankly.

“That is why,” Budge answered with equal care, “I am counting upon your support. Your word carries influence here. As much as if you were the priest.”

It was a curious fact that in villages all over Ireland, the Protestant landlords often relied upon the Catholic priests to help them keep order. Not that the priests were happy about it. If they were unlicensed, however, the landlords could always have them expelled; and even if they were entirely legal, any sedition or trouble—which was never going to do their parishioners any good anyway—could always be imputed to their influence and lay them open to prosecution. By and large, therefore, the priests encouraged their flocks to stay out of trouble.

Up in Rathconan, where the nearest priest lived some miles away, O’Toole, as the most educated man, had a similar influence. His own religious convictions were not strong, but he dutifully taught his pupils their catechism and gave them a good grounding in the Catholic religion. The priest would soon have made life difficult for him if he didn’t.

“And the penalties for teaching a hedge school,” Budge added, “as we both know, are severe.”

There was the threat, delivered quietly, well understood.

If the hedge schools were everywhere, they were still illegal; and if the magistrate chose to find the hedge school and prosecute the master, O’Toole could be in serious trouble. In theory, he could even be transported to the American colonies.

“Are you decided upon this?” O’Toole asked.

“No. But I am thinking about it.”

In fact, Budge was still uncertain. Did his conscience trouble him about taking the boy from his father? He wasn’t sure that it did. He hesitated to cause bad feeling in the area at such an uncertain time politically—O’Toole was right to warn him about that. And while he had no doubt that the Smith boy, of whose talents he was aware, would be welcomed as a promising pupil, he also had another minor concern. What if the boy, bright though he was, should turn out badly like his father? That would reflect poorly upon himself. He meant to weigh the matter for a few more days before he finally decided.

“My conscience troubles me,” the schoolmaster said quietly.

“It shouldn’t. I am right, you know.”

“I am troubled, but not for the reason you think.”

Now what, the landlord wondered, did he mean by that?

As he strolled towards Garret Smith’s small dwelling, he passed several others. They were all mostly the same—low, stone-built cabins with turf roofs. Some had only two rooms, one of which was often shared with the livestock; but most of the inhabitants of Rathconan had a low-ceilinged room with a fire and some wooden furniture—a table, benches, and stools—together with one or two other rooms. Some even had a bed, though nobody would have thought twice about sleeping on straw. Their fires, in which they burned wood or turf, sometimes had a rudimentary chimney, but usually, the rooms filled with smoke until it escaped under the eaves. To the eyes of English visitors, these low and narrow shacks seemed to be filthy and degraded—although they observed that the women and barefooted children who emerged from them were surprisingly clean. But they would have observed more accurately had they realised that the conditions before them were simply those which had been prevalent in much of Europe through the Middle Ages. To Budge, the dwellings didn’t look especially mean. He knew places a lot worse.

He passed the house of Dermot O’Byrne. God knows how many O’Byrnes there were in the Wicklow region, but he felt sure that even if he met them all, he’d still like Dermot the least.

For a start, he never paid his rent.

It was not unusual in Ireland for rents to go unpaid. The fault lay mainly with the English settler landlords who had continued to demand rents that were far too high. To keep what they could of their native land, the Irish would agree to pay and then inevitably fall short. Some landlords blamed the primitive agricultural methods of the island. Down in Dublin, some well-meaning gentlemen had formed a society to raise Irish standards to those of England, where, it was true, farms had recently become far more productive. Budge had heard of some interesting experiments with new crop rotations up in County Meath. But the basic problem stemmed from the settlers’ original fear and greed, and they had no one but themselves to blame.

Up here at Rathconan, however, the situation was different. “My grandfather Barnaby,” his father had told him, “undoubtedly demanded rents that were too high. But I’ve lowered them all, and you’ll find our tenants mostly pay.” Not Dermot O’Byrne, though. He would promise anything, with expressions of loyal emotion so fulsome and insincere as to be insulting. Excuses would follow, and finally, long overdue and delivered grudgingly, just enough of the rent to keep Budge from throwing him off the land. “The truth is,” his father had once remarked, “he doesn’t think he should be paying us anything at all.”

Robert Budge sighed. He would never like Dermot O’Byrne.

And now there was Garret Smith’s house, just ahead of him.

If his ancestor Barnaby Budge had considered the Irish slow and unreliable—if many gentlemen in London believed that now—the Budges had been in Ireland far too many generations to hold such foolish notions themselves. If an Irish craftsman said he would come to work on the door of your house, you did not necessarily ask him to name the day. He would come upon a day that seemed good to him, but he would come, and the work would be well done.

So when Robert Budge had agreed with Garret Smith that the latter would make him a new front door to his house—which was demonstrably in need of it—and when Smith had taken careful measurements and stated that he would return with the door, and fit the same, Budge expected after six weeks that the work would be in progress. When he had gently reminded Smith of this, the latter had agreed, and assured him that he’d have it soon. Another six weeks later, another reminder had been given. Thereafter, plain questions. “Where’s my door?” Six months had now passed, and Budge had had enough.

He arrived at the house.

It was a pity that, there being no particular work to occupy them that afternoon, two of Rathconan’s older inhabitants should have come to join Garret Smith and that, early though it was, all three of them had been drinking for some time—Garret Smith more than the others. They were sitting at the single table in his cottage.

As he quite often did when the drink began to hit him, Smith had reverted to the subject of the Jacobite cause and had given it as his opinion that if, as the government seemed to fear, the French came, and Bonnie Prince Charlie raised an army of Scots, Ireland might see a return of the Stuarts and of Catholicism before the year was out.

“So you say.” Fergal Brennan had heard all this before. He had been impressed by the education and the fervent politics of the young man who had married his little sister twenty years ago, but the years had passed and nothing much had come of Smith and his fine words.

Dermot O’Byrne, however, nodded in agreement.

“And when that day comes,” he said darkly, “it will be myself back in Rathconan, where I’ve the right to be, and Budge with his throat slit.”

Fergal Brennan sighed. In a century and a half, the resentment of Dermot’s branch of the huge O’Byrne family against the ruling chiefs at Rathconan had never abated. They still believed, in some way, this inheritance should have been their own. With Dermot, it was an article of faith. But it irritated Fergal that because of this nonsense O’Byrne seemed to imagine he was superior to the Brennans.

“The O’Byrnes of Rathconan flew away with the Wild Geese,” he said quietly. “It’s they who’ll be lords here, if they ever return. It’s he,” he indicated Garret Smith, “who has more of a right to it than you.” It was not much spoken of, but perfectly known in the village, that the forbears of Garret Smith had briefly owned Rathconan— and also that, albeit illegitimately, the blood of the O’Byrne chiefs flowed in their veins. “His family paid for it with good money, too,” he added mischievously, “which wouldn’t have been the case with your family, I believe.”

“It was stolen from us. That’s the truth of it, whether you like it or not,” Dermot O’Byrne said grumpily, and took another drink.

And here this foolish conversation might have ended, as the three men drank on in silence. Several minutes passed before Garret Smith, who in an attitude he often adopted when a little heavy with drink, was bent forward, leaning his ribs against the table and staring down at it, suddenly gave a small laugh.

“What’s that?” asked Brennan.

“I was only thinking of the absurdity of the thing,” answered Smith, and shook his head with amusement. “I looked into O’Byrne’s claim once, you know. Years ago. There’s not a shred of a case he can make in either English or Irish law. His ancestors were passed over because they were worthless. And the O’Byrnes of Rathconan had a perfectly valid English charter for their land.”

Dermot O’Byrne glanced at him, then spat on the floor.

But Garret wasn’t done. There were times, when he was somewhat drunk, when the arrogance of his youth would still return to him. At this moment, though his tousled hair was grey and his face mottled with drink, he still resembled the self-absorbed young man who had gone to Quilca.

“So I just find it funny to hear two ignorant peasants arguing over whether one of them should be lord of Rathconan.”

And now Brennan and O’Byrne looked at each other.

If Garret Smith was not entirely liked by his neighbours, it was not just on account of his unreliability and his drinking. It sometimes seemed to them that there was a pride in him that was unpleasing. Because of his learning, which was far less than O’Toole’s anyway, he appeared to think he was better than they.

A silence followed this last statement, therefore, while the two men pondered.

It was Brennan who finally spoke.

“We were not so delighted, Garret, when you married my sister.” He paused to let this sink in. “You seemed to have a great opinion of yourself. But we were not delighted. For it’s certain that you did little enough to provide for my sister once you’d married her, God rest her soul.”

“It’s true, Garret.” O’Byrne saw the chance now to take his own revenge. “You were never a worker. Nothing you do is ever finished. It’s a wonder to me you can pay the schoolmaster what’s owed.”

“Not that he always does,” muttered Brennan. “He has only the one son at home, and he takes no care of him at all. You’d think the boy meant nothing to him, the way he drinks and does no work.”

And now he had struck home. He saw Garret, in his half-slumped position, wince as though he had been hit in the stomach. Brennan didn’t care. So much the better, he thought. He half expected an outburst—for Garret could lose his temper sometimes— or a cutting remark. God knows the man had a cutting tongue when he wanted. But there was nothing. Garret reached for his drink in silence. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it to himself. His head hung a little lower. His shoulders hunched.

There was a knock at the door.

If he heard it, which he must have, Garret Smith didn’t move.

The knock was repeated, louder, more peremptory.

“Garret Smith.”

Budge’s voice. Brennan and O’Byrne glanced at each other. Why would he be calling? Brennan picked up the beakers and the bottle and placed them discreetly in a corner. It looked better that way, he considered. O’Byrne, however much he despised the landlord, also straightened up. Garret remained as he was.

“Better let him in,” said O’Byrne, and went to the door.

“Is Garret there?” Budge’s voice again.

“He is, Your Honour. Come in and welcome,” said O’Byrne with a warning look back at Garret, who still hadn’t moved.

Budge bent his head and stepped through the low doorway into the room. He stared towards Garret, who didn’t look up at him. Under normal circumstances, Budge would have asked Garret to speak with him alone, but the apparent rudeness of Garret’s manner annoyed him. He began politely enough all the same.

“I came to ask about the door, Garret. Do you have it for me?”

He noticed the other two men exchange glances.

“I do not.” Garret’s voice seemed a little slurred. He was still staring down at the table.

“It’s been six months.” Budge’s voice was one of reasonable complaint rather than anger. Again, he saw the two other men look at each other. They appeared to be enjoying Smith’s discomfort. “You must be nearly finished by now.”

“You are assuming,” Smith said, thickly but calmly, “that I have started.”

“Started?” This was too much. “Good God, man, what are you thinking of?”

“These gentlemen will tell you,” Garret said coolly, “that I never finish anything.”

“You mean you have deliberately kept me waiting this half year with not the least intention of completing the work?” Budge was becoming heated. “Is that what you mean?”

“To tell you the truth,” Garret answered, “I cannot now recall whether I intended to finish it or not.” Budge stared at him. There being no way that he could possibly guess at the secret anger, self-loathing, and despair that lay behind these words in the soul of Garret Smith, he could only think that the man was either drunk, mad, or, for reasons beyond his understanding, deliberately trying to provoke him. Well, the reasons didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to stand for it.

“You are a useless and a worthless man, Garret Smith,” he shouted. “Is this an example to set your son?”

He could not know that he had just probed the same distressful nerve again. But now, stung twice, Garret suddenly leaped up.

“The only lesson my son needs now, damn you,” he cried, “is how to fire a musket for the French when they come!”

Budge became very still.

“I see,” he said. Then he turned upon his heel and, stooping quickly, went out the cottage door.

Inside, all three men remained silent. Then Brennan spoke.

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in shock and awe. “Whatever made you say that?”

It was two days later that O’Toole watched Budge take Conall Smith away. It was only his assurances that Garret had been drunk when he spoke that had prevented Budge arresting Smith as a dangerous person and sending him in chains down to the garrison in Wicklow. The boy’s fate had been sealed entirely. “You can choose,” Budge had told Garret firmly. “The boy goes to Dublin or you go to Wicklow.”

“He is not a fit person to bring up the boy, anyway,” the landlord had announced so that several of the villagers had heard it. Whatever they thought of the landlord and his Protestant school, there were not a few of Garret’s enemies who were glad to say, “He brought it on himself.”

And on the boy, thought O’Toole. For in their different ways, it seemed to him, both he and Garret Smith had betrayed the boy. Garret by his drunken carelessness. And he himself? What else could he have done?

He answered that question by asking another. What if it had been Deirdre, rather than Conall, who was threatened? Wouldn’t he have found a way to protect her? Relations elsewhere to whom she might quickly have been sent? Indeed, knowing what he did, he hadn’t even warned Garret Smith of the danger.

And why? That was where his conscience troubled him. He knew very well.

Deirdre. She loved Conall. How could she fail to love him? There wasn’t another boy in Rathconan, or in the whole area, like Conall. The boy was princely, magical. But also the son of drunken Garret Smith and the Brennan slut. Bad blood. He feared it. He’d seen such things before—a brilliant early promise followed by a disastrous manhood. No, he did not want his little Deirdre growing any closer to young Conall and one day—he could see it all too well—becoming his partner for life. He did not want it. He’d sacrificed the boy. It had to be done.

“It will all work out for the best,” he’d told Conall when the boy came to bid him farewell. “Trust me that it will be so.” A lie. “You’ll only be in Dublin, you know, and be back to see us often.” Two more.

And now, dear God, he was witnessing the boy depart. And suddenly Conall looked younger, and he was crying out like a little boy, clinging to his father, with Garret himself looking like a man before the gallows, so pale and in despair—worse than death, for certain, worse than death—and little Conall was crying out, “Don’t take me from my da, I want my da.” But the men were pulling him away, dragging him to the cart that was to carry him to Dublin, placing him in it and holding him there while he turned round, his green eyes wide and streaming tears, looking pleadingly at his father, who could only stand there, stone cold sober, watching him like a dead man.

Then they flicked the pony with a little whip and the cart went down the track.

It was as the cart began to move that Deirdre stepped away from her grandfather’s side. He’d been holding her hand, but as the cart started, she slipped her hand from his and walked alone, quite slowly, down the track behind the cart. At the first bend, there was rock beside the track, and she stood upon it, watching the cart’s slow progress down the valley, standing very still, never taking her eyes off it, but watching, as it wound slowly away, until it was out of sight.

But even then, the little girl with her long dark hair stayed where she was, moving not at all, staring into the distance, and the great mountain silence, and the nothingness that was her future. And she remained there, as if she, too, had turned to stone, for over an hour.