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catastrophe most to be feared. Sarah will never forgive me if I cannot retrieve him from his folly. For she values this foolish, perilous animal. I am abandoned now to horror, because I can almost see his next move. I can see it before maybe he even thinks it, being an animal of the instant, of the fleeting moment. Or maybe he has plotted this for years, eyeing me with those evil eyes. Here it is, the leap, the flurry, the coiling of his energy, the fire in his rotund belly flaring - and he is away, away, towards Kiltegan, with only foolish me to prevent him.
    We run for a hundred yards and he gaily throws a shoe. The hardness of the road tears it from his hoof. It sails off over the hedges of Humewood, the old estate that was the centre of my forefathers’ lives. He pays it no heed. Then, out of the tangled low trees to the left emerges like a Chinese rocket what at first I think is a wild boar, thrusting tusks and all. It is like a vision - one moment there is the peaceful untended hedgerow, and the next a hole blown through it, and this creature unfolding onto the road ahead.
    But there are no wild boars in Ireland and anyway this creature calls and shouts and waves its arms. It lifts itself up and reveals its mysterious limbs and turns to my grateful amazement into Billy Kerr.
    Now he stands in the centre of the Kiltegan road and raises his arms aloft and jumps and hoo-hoos at the fierce horse. By way of a characteristic answer, the pony violently halts and rears up with his front hooves showing, and comes down heavily again by force of the trap, and bucks his hind quarters once or twice, and rears again, caterwauling from his mouth, his tense jaws opened as wide as ever horse can. The trap is plunged to the left, and pitches so far over I am thrown from my precarious nest and fetched into the dock leaves and whatnot of the ditch.
    ‘Get up if you can, Annie Dunne,’ shouts Billy Kerr, ‘and block his path behind. We’ll have him then.’
    So not knowing if I am dead or alive, I drag my old bones upright again and plant my feet on the ground and raise my arms. My whole body is trembling from fright and shock. My blue and white overdress is smeared with mud. My head bangs inside with blood, it feels like. Billy Kerr reaches up to grab at the flying mane of the pony, and grasps onto the halter, darkly growling, and suddenly is all soothing and soft.
    ‘Now, now, easy up, easy up, there’s the boy,’ he says.
    He caresses that pony like it was a little child humbled by catastrophe. Trembling himself, his very coat rippling and twitching, the pony calms at the honeyed words, stepping this way and that, like a drunk man. Billy Kerr rubs his broad neck.
    ‘The children,’ I say, and turn, and hobble back the road to where they dutifully have stayed.
    Old Kelsha bones cannot lie down and count their bruises, certainly.

Chapter Four
    We are lying, Sarah and me, like queens on a stone tomb. Night has fallen, and we are abed. The wind goes on with its counting of the leaves in the sycamores, a hundred and one, a hundred and two.
    I can sense but not share the ease in her long bones. Going to bed, reaching the haven of our bed, is as releasing for her as death. Every day she dies, you might venture to say, into bed. Even I am grateful for the slack in the endless rope of labours. Soon enough it will pull tight on us again.
    There she stretches, the clock of her heart tick-ticking, her blood with its thousand rivers under her mottled skin, her breasts rising and falling, lending the semblance of life to the country scene embroidered on the coverlet. It is a flock of deer depicted by her mother years ago, my mother’s sister. They are running across hillocks of grass pursued by a black-coated hunter on a dark, thin horse. The landscape undulates like an enormous sea. Her breath whistles out between long teeth, thin lips.
    Her big eyes are hooded, with a pattern of blue lines like tiny cups, and the coverlet hauled up as