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by dispatching Robert Devereux, who paved the way for yet another fateful battle. When she decided to behead him the destiny of Ireland hung on a thread again: at Kinsale this time.’
    Neither the mildness of his manner nor his even, handsome features were ever disturbed by agitation. I mentioned Michael Collins to him, but he displayed no interest or curiosity in the revolutionary leader’s visits. If only people would remember Daniel O’Connell, he murmured, if only they honoured his pacific spirit. He spoke also of my great-grandmother, Anna Quinton of the Famine. In the drawing-room portrait she was shown to be plain but Father Kilgarriff, extolling her mercy, granted her beauty as well. He knew a lot about her tribulations. She had begged the officers at the nearby barracks to retail the misery and starvation they saw around them to the London government. She had begged her own family, in Woodcombe Park in England, to seek to influence that government. So passionate did she become in her condemnation of the authorities that in the end her letters were returned unopened. You spread calumny over our name , her irate father wrote. Since you will not cease in your absurd charges against this country, I have no choice left but to disown you. The returned letters were in my father’s possession, kept in the safe at the mill. Because he was interested, Father Kilgarriff had read them all. I don’t believe my father had ever bothered to.
    Occasionally I wondered if Father Kilgarriff was content, helping Tim Paddy with the cattle and teaching me in the drawing-room. I didn’t know what to think about the girl in Chicago, but he spoke so warmly of my great-grandmother’s compassion and drew my attention so often to the sadness of her eyes in the portrait that I came to feel she was almost alive for him—surely as alive as the girl in his confessional now was.
    ‘Oh, fool of fortune,’ my father commented when I tried to make him talk to me about Father Kilgarriff on one of our walks to the mill. He would say no more, and I had known him to apply that assessment to almost everyone at Kilneagh. It was his favourite expression, and one which at that particular time probably better defined Tim Paddy. ‘Does she ever mention me?’ Tim Paddy humbly asked, and I lied and said I’d heard Josephine say he was amusing. But it was the suave Johnny Lacy, with his dance-hall fox-trotting and his stories, who amused her more.
    In spite of Mrs Flynn’s disapproval he often now arrived in the kitchen. He and Josephine would go for walks in the evening, while Tim Paddy went off on his own and miserably set rabbit snares. In the end he didn’t speak to either Josephine or Johnny Lacy and would savagely brush water over the cobbles in the yard, not pausing once to take the Woodbine out of his mouth. ‘Oh, he does love her so!’ Deirdre cried after she and Geraldine had spent a whole morning following the unhappy youth about the garden. They said they’d seen him hitting his head against an apple tree, and that he’d cried, a wailing sound like a banshee’s howl. One Saturday night Johnny Lacy took Josephine to a dance in Fermoy and Tim Paddy got drunk in Sweeney’s and was found sprawled out in the backyard by Mr Derenzy. In spite of the anguish they claimed on his behalf my sisters delighted in enacting that moonlit scene: the prone Tim
    Paddy, Mr Derenzy bending over him, enquiring if he would care for a pinch of snuff.
    All around us there seemed to be this unsettling love, for even his polite courting of Aunt Pansy left Mr Derenzy occasionally looking wan. He was not made for love, I’d heard my father say, as Johnny Lacy so clearly was. Mr Derenzy had been borrowed from his ledgers and his invoices, from the solitary Protestant world of his upstairs room at Sweeney’s. Yet it was said that he had loved Aunt Pansy for thirty years.
    I didn’t want Tim Paddy to be unhappy, any more than I wanted Father Kilgarriff or Mr