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she awakened on the beach, he was gone. As she stood to return to her mother’s cabin, the world drew fractionally closer. She saw the ferry crossing from Ballycastle in the direction of Rue Point, her own island. It would dock, she knew, at Church Bay, only a few hundred yards from the spot that she used to call home.

 
    I NSIDE the not-so-picturesque ruins of Bunnamairge Friary, one mile east of Ballycastle, side by side on camp-stools, sat Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, bachelor sons of Henry Austin Sedgewick the Third. Osbert was making a watercolour of one of the Friary’s few remaining arches, and Granville was composing his forty-third lament concerning the sorrows of Ireland. Both were cold, damp, and generally uncomfortable, but unshaken in the belief that, despite the mud and water that filled their shoes and the wind that threatened to snatch their creations from their laps, they were communing happily with the spirit of their country’s past.
    Ever since the first Irish Sedgewick had been granted estates in Glen Taisie in the early seventeenth century, this family’s members, unlike many Anglo-Irish landed gentry, had exhibited nothing but surprise, delight, and a certain charmed mystification whenever they examined the details of their surroundings. Dedicated collectors of almost everything, they had dragged an extravagant amount of information and unprecedented numbers of specimens and objects into their damp, ill-lit halls, going about the task with such zeal it soon appeared they wanted all of County Antrim under glass. They scoured the coastal cliffs for birds’ eggs, flora and fauna, the moors for ancient carved stones, and the cabins of their tenants for quaint bits of folklore and songs. Their satchels bursting with the finest sketchbooks and round cakes of green watercolour paint, they committed hundreds of views to paper, andstairwell after stairwell of the ancestral home was filled with these fading efforts, the rest of the house being stuffed to capacity with cases and shelves.
    By Osbert and Granville’s time, the floorspace in the halls was as crowded as the rest of the house as a result of their father’s discovery of, and subsequent enthusiasm for, the art of taxidermy. One of every creature, great or small, that crept or ran or flew or swam in and around County Antrim was now on display at Puffin Court (so called because of Henry Austin the First’s obsession with this unusual bird which flourished on the nearby cliffs and which he was said to resemble to an uncanny degree). The puffin itself was well represented in the stuffed menagerie, appearing as guardian figures in cases filled with smaller, and more nervous, native birds. It also perched, or rather stood flat-footedly, on the backs of the horse and cow, the only two large beasts available in County Antrim since the demise of the Irish stag in prehistoric times. The puffin did not appear with the foxes but, for some inexplicable reason, a small example stood among the hounds, all of whom had been docile family pets, but who now exposed their yellowed teeth to full advantage.
    Henry Austin Sedgewick the First had authored a lengthy Latin text on the puffin –
Fratercula arctica Hibernica –
much of which was written from the puffin’s own point of view.
“Ego sum Fratercula arctica,”
it began.
“Habito in ora Hibernica.”
All ten copies still remained in Puffin Court’s vast and dusty library. Until quite recently, no further Sedgewicks had managed to get their musings into print, though many of the library’s shelves sagged under the weight of ancestral day books, scrapbooks, diaries, and handwritten, handbound odes and epics. Only the previous year, however, a London firm had published twenty of Granville’s laments in a small leatherboundedition, an encouragement that had inspired him to produce, in the following few months, over two dozen more.
    Granville could not compose at all, however, unless he sat, as he now