Aidan knew he was hardly the same man who’d left this land, either. He was older, yes. To reach fifty-four years had seemed incomprehensible when youth and foolishness had made his blood had run high and hot. But he was a better man now—tempered and improved by this woman who had never left his side, though the saints knew he’d given her good cause more than once.
Clearing the rise, he felt his heart suddenly began to pound in his chest, and it wasn’t due to the walk from Skibbereen. The place where they’d been born and had once expected to die spread before them. Farrell’s hand tightened around his.
“God in heaven,” she whispered, a kind of wonderment in her voice. “Will ye look at that?”
“Aye, look at that,” Aidan echoed. They moved closer, approaching the glen with the hushed respect and awe saved for a graveyard.
Since they they’d walked away from here that desolate winter of 1855, he’d nurtured the memory of how this place had looked. Not the day that Michael Kirwan had come to tear down his cottage, and paid with his life for the deed, but before famine had moved like a dark cloud over Ireland. The memory Aidan held bore a timeless sense of substance and belonging, a frozen, evergreen moment when youth had been his, and trouble lay on the far side of the future.
Now only rocks remained, in piles that had once been cottages, and in the zigzagging walls that snaked over the country’s valleys and meadows. Farther up the hillside, a flock of plump sheep grazed peacefully on what had been Jack McCready’s field.
“It’s all gone, Aidan, the houses—everything. And we waited so long to see it again.” He heard the sense of loss in Farrell’s voice.
“Aye. Nothing stays the same, but somehow . . . somehow I thought this would.” If he closed his eyes, it was easy to remember his da, Sean, still alive, younger than Aidan himself was now, coming home with a heavy sack of cut peat on his broad shoulders.
The rest of the family had scattered over the years, to Dublin, to Boston, and New York, and Chicago. But although some of the nieces and nephews had made it to America, Aidan and Farrell had never seen any of them again. Oh, they had talked about visiting in letters they sent back and forth, but time passed, and one thing or another had gotten in the way.
While Farrell stood in the yard, shading her eyes as she gazed across the deserted valley, he made his way to the remains of his brother Tommy’s cottage. The square of the foundation still stood, as did one wall, but grass grew on the floor. The hearth, positioned in the center of the cottage as tradition dictated, yet bore a few stones blackened by the eternal turf fire that had burned there. Turning, he reached out and beckoned her wordlessly. She joined him, and they stood side by side.
“This is where I took you to wife, remember? God, but you were angry.”
Farrell looked up into Aidan’s eyes, still dark blue, still intense. Lines framed their outer corners and fanned toward his temples, but they gave his face more character than it had had when he was a young man, handsome as he’d been. “Oh yes, I was. I didn’t know if I could ever forgive you for what you’d done.”
“But you did, céadsearc—in time, for which I am most grateful.” He fingered the thin, plain silver wedding band on her finger, then lifted her hand to his lips. “Are you sorry that you left Skibbereen?”
Farrell had yearned to visit since the day she’d stood on the deck of the Mary Fiona and watched their homeland grow smaller and smaller. She scanned the hills again, searching for something that matched the image in her memory, and found nothing. “I never thought we’d come back—it looks familiar but not the way I remembered. It seems smaller, somehow . . . I don’t know how to explain it.
“Go mbeannaí Dia duit,” Aidan murmured, as he had all those years ago. May God bless you. Then to her, he said, “Come on, Farrell. Let’s go home. Back to America.”
XXX
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The Irish Bride
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