“It is a great matter,” Mrs. Murphy said, “and a matter of some urgency. If you could see your way to speak with the bishop sooner rather than later . . .”
“I’ll speak to him this very night,” Monsignor O’Reilly said. He meant it, too. The bishop was a great and terrible personage, but Mrs. Murphy was a close relative to the wrath of God.
For a shrinking moment he knew she would announce that she was coming with him to make sure he kept his word. But she nodded briskly and cocked a brow at the buxom lass who restrained his horse. The young woman let go the brown cob’s bridle and climbed into Mrs. Murphy’s buggy and took up the reins. Without another word spoken, she turned the buggy and sent the neat little bay at a fast trot toward Ballynasloe.
THE BISHOP’S MAN ARRIVED in the village on Sunday morning, just as people were walking or driving in ones and twos and families to morning Mass. He left his companions in the yard at the inn, entrust ing them to the capable hands of Pegeen’s father, and walked alone to the church.
No one knew who he was. He had a greatcoat over his soutane with its telltale red piping, and a big black umbrella to keep off the mist of rain. He looked much like everyone else on that soft day, hurrying toward a roof and a dry place to sit.
Father Timothy was blissfully unaware of the fly in his ointment. He looked out from the sacristy across a sea of faces—a church packed full, with people standing in the back and along the aisles—and knew the contentment of a man whose job is well done. The old pagan things were driven out. Ballynasloe was saved.
His vestments were waiting, with the server beside them, ready to help him into them. He did not just then recall the boy’s name. There were so many redheaded, freckle-faced, snub-nosed imps in the village. If he called out “Sean” or “Seamus” or “Patrick,” he had as good a chance as any of happening on the right one.
The boy greeted him with a gap-toothed grin. For a moment Father Timothy wondered how old he actually was. Those eyes were much too sly and knowing to belong to a child.
Children these days were abominably worldly and wise. Father Timothy nodded toward the vestments. “It’s time,” he said.
“Oh yes,” said the boy in the broadest brogue imaginable. “That indeed it is.”
A movement caught Father Timothy’s eye. He looked toward the corner and started.
The hermit was sitting there. He looked terribly young and pale, and in fact rather ill. He had a rose in his hand. Supernal sweetness wafted from it.
The hermit held out the rose. Father Timothy took it without suspicion. He was armored in the Lord. He had nothing to fear from any earthly thing.
A thorn pricked his finger. He hissed at the sting, and licked a drop of blood the exact same color as the rose. Its taste was supernally sweet. It made his head whirl.
Mass was beginning without him. He heard the voices of the choir. Had they ever sung so beautifully? They were like the voices of angels. The wheezy old organ lifted up the cry of trumpets and the shiver of harps.
He moved toward the door into the church. He had no memory of putting on any of it, but he was vested in shimmering white as befit a great celebration, a Mass of the Angels: the feast of the salvation of Ballynasloe.
The procession was waiting. They were all, like the server, vaguely familiar. They were dressed in white and carrying palms, considerably out of season but beautiful to see. Were those wings arching above their heads?
His heart swelled until it was ready to burst. Angels had come to celebrate with the mortal congregation. The church was full of them. They perched on the corbels of the arches and wreathed the pillars with heavenly garlands. They floated over the altar, a dense and whirling wheel of them, singing the Te Deum.
He lifted up his arms and sang with them, floating down the aisle in his escort of heavenly visitors. He danced and dipped and whirled, giddy with supernal joy.
FATHER TIMOTHY WAS STILL SINGING in his pleasant baritone as the monsignor’s companions helped him into the wagon. The straitjacket was just a precaution, the bespectacled medical man had assured the hermit. “It’s unlikely he’ll turn violent,” he said, “but the journey’s somewhat long, and he’s clearly not himself. Better be safe than sorry.”
“Do you think he’ll get better?” the hermit asked in honest concern.
The medical man shrugged. “Who’s to tell? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It’s in the hands of God.”
Maybe, thought the hermit, and maybe those hands had nothing to do with the Christian Deity in Whose name the priest had driven the faerie folk out of Ballynasloe. He said a prayer, and not just because it was his duty, that Father Timothy would come out of it in the Lord’s good time and be his old self again—without the urge to preach a crusade.
A good number of the priest’s former crusaders, now greatly chastened, stood watching the downfall of their leader. The Monsignor had taken them under his ample wing. The sermon he had preached while his men dealt with the priest had been short but powerfully effective. It had restored the people of Ballynasloe to sanity in a matter of minutes—and that was quite as magical as anything the hermit’s allies could have managed.
Those allies were coming back into the village, quietly and unobtrusively, but he was sensitized to them. He could feel them like a slow seep of water into a dry well. The people could feel it, too—they were standing a little straighter, breathing a little more freely. There was a strong strain of magic in the blood here.Without the old powers in the earth and water and air, they had been subtly and spiritually starved.
He would do penance for what he had helped to do. So would Pegeen and her Aunt Mary Margaret Murphy and maybe the Monsignor, too. Still he could not wish it undone. If that meant his soul was corrupted, then so it was.
It did not feel like corruption at all. It felt like such lightness and freedom and dizzy joy that he could barely keep his feet on the ground. He was lucky there were no men waiting for him with a straitjacket.
A warm hand slipped into his. The lady of the Sidhe stood beside him as easily as a mortal woman, watching as they all watched, while the Monsignor said good-bye to Mrs. Murphy and her brother the tavernkeeper. Pegeen had tried to get the hermit to put himself forward, but he would not. “You take the glory,” he had told her. “I’ll take the peace and quiet.”
“I suppose I will have that,” he said to Deirdre as the wagon rattled into motion. The priest was singing at the top of his lungs, as happy a madman as ever made his way to an asylum.“Now that all of you have your homes back.”
“I suppose you will,” she said, “if you wish it. Or . . .”
“Or?” he asked when she did not go on.
“Or you might have a visitor now and then,” she said. “Maybe more now than then.”
His heart beat in the old familiar rhythm, fast as a faerie dance under the moon. This time he did not want to stop it. The magic had possessed him. He was fully aware of it. He could cast it out—he knew how; Father Timothy had shown him. But he did not want to.
“In the old days,” Deirdre said, “a hermit could be a great friend to us. He could be a lover, too, with no fear of sin and no need of repentance. It was only long after that Rome turned all sour and narrow, and declared love a sin when it had been a sacrament.”
She could be lying or stretching a slippery truth. She could be tempting him with diabolical skill. But his heart insisted that this much she did truly mean: she loved him. And he loved her. In her presence he had forgotten even poetry. She was the living essence of it.
The wagon had gone away down the road, with the Monsignor in his buggy behind it. The crowd had melted away. The rain had stopped; the clouds were breaking.
The sun came out as the hermit began to walk toward his tower. His fingers were still laced with Deirdre’s. He did not answer her directly, but she could read his smile—none better. Her own smile exactly mirrored it.
They walked hand in hand through the village of Ballynasloe. As they wal
ked, they noticed that certain things had changed since the hermit came through that morning on his way to the church. The charms were back on the gateposts. And on every doorstep was a bowl of cream.
The Merrow
BY ELIZABETH HAYDON
J une 2, 1847
Like the other men in his family, young Patrick Michael Martin was color-blind.
Given that he could claim most of the small farming village of Glencar in County Kerry as family, Patrick was in good company in his inability to distinguish red, yellow, purple, or green from the miasma of grey tones that served as the landscape he saw out of his diminished eyes. Aside from the blue sky above, the world appeared to him as one long expanse of colorlessness in varying intensities. Having nothing to compare it to, however, he did not feel the loss.
In the early years of the Great Blight, just before the famine roared through, blackening fields and withering potatoes on the vine, the men of Glencar who worked those fields were at a unique disadvantage, because the initial signs of the scourge were subtle. The “white” Irish potato, originally brought back from the New World by the Spanish, revealed its disease first by going slightly green.
And the men of Glencar could not see the color green.
After many of them sickened and died from eating the blighted crop, the tenant farmers that remained gathered together one evening at dusk in Donovan McNamara’s barn to talk about the unthinkable—leaving Glencar and the rocky lands beneath Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, the tallest of Ireland’s mountains, where their families had farmed for centuries, both before and after the English came.
“The landlords are sending troops to evict anyone who’s in arrears in County Limerick,” said Oisin McGill nervously. “The village of Coyt is empty, the whole town of Ballincolly has gone to slave in the workhouses of Tipperary.”
“They are starvin’ down in County Cork, I hear,” whispered Eoin O’Connell. “The priests there said there were to be no more burials in coffins, to spare the money for food. Families are to put the dead in the ground in but the clothes they were wearing when they passed.”
“Landlord Payne says he will forgive our taxes and pay for our passage in exchange for leaving the lands,” McNamara said. “The crop may not be entirely lost yet, but how can we tell the good from the bad? Not one of us has color in his eyes. I’ve decided we will emigrate to America. I don’t know what else to do, and I won’t stay here to die on another man’s lands.”
“Nor will I,” Colm Martin, Patrick’s uncle, agreed. “I have children to think of.We leave after Mass on Sunday for Dingle. There are ships sailing from there every week or so now.”
Patrick’s father, Old Pat, cleared his throat. The noise in the barn fell away in the whine of the wind; Old Pat rarely spoke, and when he did, the men of Glencar listened carefully. Old Pat had been a sailor in his youth until two decades before,when he came home to farm his family’s ancestral land in Glencar. His wisdom was never doubted, especially regarding the sea.
“Those rickety ships be naught more than floating coffins,” he said, his voice gruff. “They’re packin’ three times the number they should be into ’em. You’ll be lucky if half of you live to see New York. I’d rather die here and be buried in the blighted soil of Ireland than be food for fish.” He rose slowly to leave, then turned back to his despairing neighbors and younger brother. “But then, that’s me. My son is grown, and can decide for himself. Aisling and I will stay. The rest of you, do what you must.”
The door of the barn creaked mournfully as it opened, and he was gone.
Patrick rose to follow him, only to be stopped by the hand of Donovan McNamara at his elbow. He looked down; Donovan’s hand had withered to arthritic bone covered with sagging skin.
“Young Pat,” Donovan said, “you must think of your mother.Ais-ling’s a young woman still; she’s not aged a day since your father brought her to Glencar before you were born. Old Pat may be ready to go to sod in Ireland’s arms, but your mother, now—”
Patrick nodded. He had been thinking the same.
All the way home in the darkness he wondered as he walked what he could say to his father that could possibly change the most stubborn mind in three counties, knowing full well that no such words existed. The stars winked bright above him in a sky that held no trace of moonlight.
The warm glow of the hearth fire shone in the windows as he came over the hill to his mother’s house where he still lived. Old Pat’s prized Irish draft horse, Fionnbar, was nowhere to be seen. Patrick opened the door quietly, in case his mother was already to bed.
Aisling sat before the fire, mending Fionnbar’s bridle. Her eyes sparkled upon beholding Patrick, and she smiled her customary slight smile, but she returned to her work without speaking. Both of his parents were given to using words sparingly.
Patrick hung his hat on the peg by the door and sat down on the stool near her feet. He watched her for a long time, her delicate hands weaving the leather strands back together seamlessly. Her face was thinner by a breath, no more, and Patrick noticed for the first time how much like the girls of Glencar she still looked, how beautifully shaped were her light eyes, how dark and thick her lashes. Donovan’s words came back to him as his eyes roamed over her long hair, freed from the ties that held it bound during daylight, now hanging in rippling waves to her waist.
Aisling’s a young woman still; she’s not aged a day since your father brought her to Glencar before you were born.
“Mother,” he said finally, reluctant to disturb her concentration, “the men concur. We must leave—the blight is spreading. Life, as hard as it may seem to believe, is about to worsen immensely. We should go to America with Uncle Colm and the others.”
“Your father will never agree to it,” Aisling said softly, her attention still fixed on her work.
“Aye, the Da is a stubborn man, but now stubbornness will lead to death, ’tis for certain,” Patrick pressed, gentle in his tone but insistent in his words. “You are hale,Mother; God willing, you have many years ahead of you—”
Aisling did not look up. “Your father will never agree to it,” she repeated. She finished her work in silence, then rose and went to the curtain that demarcated their bedchamber. “Good night, Patrick.”
Patrick moved to her chair and sat in the darkness, watching the fire die down to coals, until the door opened, and Old Pat came in. He left his boots by the door, hung his hat and neckerchief on a peg, and disappeared behind the curtain without more than a nod. Patrick exhaled deeply and continued to stare at the coals until sleep took him.
Dawn found him there still, in Aisling’s chair by the hearth. He woke, feeling the chill of morning, got up and stirred the ashes, hoping to warm the house a little for his parents before leaving to tend to Fionnbar and the last remaining hen. He was at the well drawing water when Old Pat emerged from the house.
His father glanced around but did not appear to see him. Patrick watched, first in surprise, then in curiosity, as Old Pat made his way furtively behind the house, across the fields out toward the thinly wooded foothills of the high mountain of Carrauntoohil. His curiosity piqued, Patrick followed him, cutting through the sparse glades and high grass in which he had loved to hide since childhood.
There was something about that tall grass that had always pleased his soul, the way it undulated in the wind, even as it gave way to lower, brushy scrub closer to the hills. He had always been able to pass through the grass as easily as swimming through the water of a pond; Patrick hurried through it now, maintaining his distance while trying to keep his father in sight.
He followed him into the forest, taking cover in a grove of alders when Old Pat finally stopped some distance away. Patrick’s eyes had always been keen, and he could see the older man’s movements, even at a great distance, from his hiding place.
His father glanced around again and, noting nothing untoward, bent at the base of a rock hidden within a ring of trees. Patrick watched as he dug near the base of t
he rock, then, satisfied, made his way back through the woods again toward home.
Once Old Pat had been gone long enough to assure Patrick that he was not about to return, he emerged from the alder grove and hurried to the place in the tree ring when his father had been digging. The disturbed earth had been carefully covered over with dry leaves and brush, making it all but indiscernible.
He looked with more careful eyes at the place. Around the tree ring a circle of mushrooms grew; Patrick’s hands began to sweat as he looked back at the trees, old Irish oaks that must have been miraculously spared from the Tudor axes that two hundred years before had stripped the land clean of them to build Queen Elizabeth’s navies, or sprung from the acorns of those trees. He crossed himself hastily.
“A faerie ring,” he whispered. “God’s nightgown, Da, what are you about here?”
His first impulse was to run. Then worry and curiosity, coupled with fear for his father and a sense that their doom might as well be shared, won out over impulse. Patrick crouched on the cold ground and dug hastily.
He had to burrow beneath more than a foot of earth before his hand struck something smooth and hard. Cautiously, he brushed away the soil.
Within the deep hole was a sailor’s chest, bound in tarnished brass.
Patrick’s stomach tightened as his fingers ran over the lid, knowing that he was trespassing on something sacred to his father, and at the same time unable to resist. Believing the chest might hold a clue to Old Pat’s redoubtable decision to brave the famine rather than leave for a chance at life in America, he swallowed his discomfort, pried the rusty catch open, and lifted the lid.
Inside the small chest were many layers of linen, strewn with tiny clods of earth. Patrick hesitated, then brushed away the dirt and carefully lifted the linen bundle from the chest, sitting back on the grass of the forest floor as he unwound the fabric.
His heart beat heavily in his chest; the wind blew through the glade, rustling the leaves ominously.
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