Read The Fall of Light for Free Online Page A

daughter. He sat by her bed and talked her into sleep. And just so, between
     her waking and her dreams there walked on the mud floors of their two-room cottage Apollo and Artemis, and Pallas Athene,
     Hermes, Dionysus, such figures. She had been born in Virgo, and when in the spring and summer her stars could be seen, Marcus
     recounted to her the legends of the winged virgin. She was the queen of the stars, he said, the goddess of the corn. She loved
     one who was cut down in his prime, and she had to travel through winter to the Underworld to bring him back. But she did.
     For, see, the winter ends and she returns with him every spring. The master told her there were many names for her, the lovers
     were Venus and Adonis, or Isis and Osiris, but whichever there was always the grief and the journey and the promised return.
    Like Virgo, then, the independent and free, Emer grew more beautiful and fiery still. She sat at the classes her father held
     in an open cabin whose thatch leaked drowsily, and sometimes she taught the very youngest ones. Then her father died. The
     school like a figment or a thing of air vanished overnight, its students gone. Emer lived on with her mother and then for
     her living took work washing in the house of a landlord, Taylor. Her childhood and girlhood were like linen, taken up and
     folded away.
    She was a young woman beautiful and proud and silent unless provoked. Then her anger would flash out in fierce indignation.
     Her mother caught fever in the wet autumn of Emer’s twentieth year and died before Christmas. She was alone. For the natural
     elegance of herbearing she was moved into the position of dining maid and given a small room in the attic. She lived there some years and
     attended the table of those genteel who ate lavish feasts served from silver tureens and platters and drank from goblets of
     crystal. There was a sorrow in her manner that beguiled the gentlemen. They spoke of her when she left the room. Some tried
     to draw her with remarks and soft flatteries, but always she turned them away.
    In the April of a year, Francis Foley saw her in the market of Carlow town. She was standing at a stall. Her hair blew about
     her in the breeze. He did not speak to her. He studied her until she turned and took her purchases and went back through the
     town and out along the road to the big house. Briskly he was behind her. He left his horse and went on foot and was a short
     distance back, as if it were she leading him, like a tame pony, leading him out of one life into another.
    As a young man Francis Foley had been outlaw and rebel for his country. His father had been hung for participating in plots
     treasonous and bloody. He had grown up hiding in woods, taking instruction from white-faced thin fellows who arranged attacks
     on magistrates and agents and spies. He had lived seemingly without life of his own, yet he was strong and powerful. He assisted
     at the assassination of plump men scented with cologne. In his youth, he had walked in the footsteps of his father, grandfather,
     and more great-grandfathers than he knew. He rode with his brother, Aengus, taking vengeance to be justice and thinking they
     were righting what was wrong in the history of the country. Then, on a failed raid on a barracks in Tipperary, Aengus was
     shot and died afterwards beneath a hedge in a field wet with rain. Francis Foley lost his spirit then. He grew silent and
     went off by himself and did not again meet with those who promised freedom was near. He took work for short term in season
     of harvest or spring. Anger still rose and bloomed within him sometimes. Sometimes he saw inequity and injustice and had to
     keep his chin set and knuckles deep in his pockets. Such times when he thought he should return to the life of a rebel, he
     thought of Aengus in the field, and the anger did not so much pass as turn into grief. So his life was, working itinerant
     and travelling between farms and estates,