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cover the pale, soft surface, the brush making a noise of tumbling straw, up and down, across and back. Now and then she dips the brush in salted water, and away again, her bared arms bleakly flashing.
    It is eloquent enough, but of what I do not know. I resolve to question her later in bed, before the cover goes up over her face, and she is at her ease. I have a great respect for her silence. I do not like to badger her. Whenever by chance I do, the door of her face bangs in the wind, you might say, and she will talk nonsense then, frightened nonsense.
    ‘I think I will bring the children with me down to Kiltegan and fetch our packet of tea.’
    ‘You might have put up with the help of Billy Kerr so,’ she says, conversationally.
    ‘Ah, well,’ I say. ‘It will interest the children to assist me. Let him walk back the way he came.’
    ‘It is all the same to me whether he walks or drives,’ she says. ‘I was thinking of your back.’
    ‘My back is fine,’ I say, blushing to the roots of my hair.
    ‘It is of course,’ she says.
    ‘Will I get sugar also?’
    ‘Don’t,‘ she says. ’We have done well enough with that.‘
    ‘Sugar and tea. Don’t we live like lords, Sarah, indeed and we do.’
    Sarah laughs. Her laugh is thick and chesty, like blackberries beginning to bubble in the big pot, when we are making preserves in the autumn. As for myself, it was the opinion of old Thomas Byrne, that swept the castle yard long ago, that I have a laugh like a sheepdog’s bark.
    She stands in the kitchen, straight as a bittern, wielding the scrubbing brush. She is laughing again.
    ‘You know, Annie, the only people that live like lords are lords,’ she says.
    She sets the scrubbing brush down on the table and puts her hands on her upper knees and is laughing. Her whole form is bent over as she does so, in a perfect show of lightness and gaiety. The children are shocked into delight and begin to laugh also, looking up at me. And I do not fail the moment, I laugh heartily, highly, laughing, laughing, yes, yes, as Thomas Byrne said, like a blessed sheepdog, ‘Wher, wher, wher.’

    The truth is, there is not much between the characters of Billy Kerr and Billy the pony, only I don’t have to hitch the former to the trap, which is a job of some difficulty.
    Myself and the little ones pass the muddled mess of Shep, asleep in a suntrap on the yard. He barely stirs his addled snout. He is more slothful than a sloth and we have no sheep for him anyway.
    We reach the dark rectangle of the byre entrance and the children peer in at Billy with admiration. They do not understand his true nature, but that is the mercy of children. He looks back at them from the glooms of the byre, his blunt front-face smeared with a sort of dampened anger.
    He is a strong Welsh cob of small stature that Sarah bought at the fair in Baltinglass, and she reveres him because it was actual money she gave for him, pound notes that her mother left her. He is a grey, a pure grey, to give him his due, without a hint or a speckle of anything else. But of late I have begun to fear his strength. He brims with a kind of inconvenient hatred.
    It is in his eyes, the black stone of them. His life with us, it seems, whatever his ambitions were, does not suit him. Perhaps we do not take him out often enough. Perhaps it is the countryside offends him.
    Gingerly I heave the heavy gear onto his back, conscious I admit of the help I have foregone from Billy Kerr, in my arrogance.
    ‘There is a slime all over the leather,’ says the girl.
    ‘No,’ I say, panting, my back hurting. ‘It is a preserving grease is on it, against the rain.’
    ‘It is dirty,’ she says, ‘and it is on my cardigan.’
    ‘Do you not want to drive in the trap?’ I say, rebuking her only because I am in pain.
    ‘Oh, I do,’ she says. ‘I do.’
    It is lovely all the same how the harness sits on Billy. It is well moulded to him, over the years. I relish the fatness of his girth,