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she hair the colour of fire?’ the priest replied, and Patrick turned to him with a questioning expression.
    ‘You can see her?’
    ‘No,’ Eamon answered quietly. ‘But it must be Catherine Fitzgerald. She often haunts that queer place.’
    ‘She has hair the colour of fire,’ Patrick echoed as he turned to stare across the field at the girl. But just as he turned she disappeared along with the two hounds, into the trees. ‘Ah, she has gone now,’ he said with just a trace of disappointment.
    ‘A strange girl,’ Eamon commented as they turned away to continue their walk to the Fitzgerald house. ‘She is a love child. Poor girl was born out of wedlock.’ He paused, slightly embarrassed as he remembered the rumours he had heard after mass that morning. Even the breadth of the oceans that divided Australia and Ireland could not hold back gossip. It was rumoured Patrick himself was the result of an illicit union between Catholic boy and Protestant girl.
    A silence fell between the two men for a short time. They both realised what had brought the absence of conversation until Patrick broke the embarrassed silence with a question. ‘Who are her parents?’
    ‘Her mother was George Fitzgerald's daughter Elspeth. God rest her soul. Her father, well, no-one knows as she never did say. She died just after Catherine's birth. George raised her.’
    If ever there was a woman who could make Eamon forget his vow of celibacy it was Catherine Fitzgerald. Barely sixteen, she exuded a sensuality he had never before encountered. ‘Ah, but she is a wild one,’ he sighed. ‘She is neither Protestant in practice nor of the True Faith. In fact it is said she is not even Christian but a pagan believer of the old ways of Ireland.’
    There was something else Eamon could not quite understand but which disturbed him further. Something beyond the realms of all his religious training. He remembered the stories of the Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war, death and procreation. And Patrick? He would be the handsome Irish hero Cuchulainn. It was a strange thought which he shook from his head.
    Patrick was distracted by the flight of a raven that rose out of the fir trees on top of the hill where the girl had disappeared. Eamon was able to see the young man's eyes follow the flight and he shuddered. Had not the Morrigan turned into a raven and flown from Cuchulainn when they met? The warm mid-afternoon sunshine suddenly had a chill to it.
    The two men continued to walk past apple orchards and raspberry bushes until they saw the imposing Fitzgerald manor before them. A huge stone house with many rooms, windows of stained glass and ivy covered walls, it was the house of established Irish gentry of considerable power and old wealth.
    ‘Captain Duffy, your presence in the village has caused quite some speculation,’ George Fitzgerald said, as he eyed with just a hint of hostility and suspicion Patrick standing beside Eamon. ‘Some say you have come to resurrect the damned Fenians in these parts. That you come in the disguise of one of Her Majesty's officers in a Highland regiment.’
    ‘Speculation breeds on ignorance, Mister Fitzgerald,’ Patrick replied coolly, his eyes fixed on the man who had been brother to his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald. ‘I am indeed an officer of the Second Highland Regiment and no sympathiser to the Fenians.’
    Eamon O'Brien shifted uncomfortably. It was obvious that old hatreds did not diminish with time and that the tall, gaunt man absorbing the heat from the gentle flames licking at the logs in the huge open hearth still held bitter memories. Had it been a mistake to bring Patrick Duffy to meet his distant relative? ‘Captain Duffy is on leave from his regiment which may be sailing soon to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, George. He has also served with Sir Garnett Wolseley at Tel-el-Kibir,’ the young priest said to break the icy chill that had descended between the two men in the