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until the noon he saw Emer O’Suilleabhain at the market.
    He followed her.
    “Ailinn,”
he called after her when she turned in at the gates of the house.
Beauty.
    She stopped in the road. She had known he was following her. She had already weighed the possibilities of the moment like
     pebbles in her palm and, with the intuition gifted her by a grandmother who spoke with fairies, knew that her life would roll
     from her fingers into those of this stranger.
    “Is it me?” she said in Irish, turning her face into the fall of her fair hair.
    When he came to her, Francis Foley fell into the first reverence of his adult life. He lost at once the hoop of words he had
     expected to throw over her. He said nothing. Emer smiled. The soft April noontime touched them both, then she said: “I suppose
     I shall see you tomorrow on this road.”
    There was no reply, though the air between them was already eloquent. Emer walked on. Francis lay himself in against the weeds
     in the ditch. The following day he awaited her there. When she arrived a thin rain was drizzling and a scarlet headscarf covered
     her hair. Without slowing her walk, she passed along by where he stood and then felt the presence of him in her stride. It
     was as if she had collected him, and he her, and they were in each other’s air already. So, without words, they walked off
     the road to the town and into the damp new grass coming in the meadows.
    From the first, Francis Foley gave her his dreams. The dreams he had once dreamed for his country now became the condensed
     but powerful dream of a perfect place for this woman to live and bear their children. He imagined it fiercely. He told Emer
     the home he would make for her. He described it as if it were its own republic, as if he hoped now to step outside the reality
     of history and find a place only theirs. Emer raised her eyebrows at him yet loved the way he made her feel again a queen.
     When she went out with him in the nighttimes after the dining was done and the ware washed, he made her forget the disappointments
     of her life.
    She lay back on his coat in a field under the night sky.
    “Do you know the stars?” she asked him.
    “Some of them I know.”
    “My father told me their names and stories,” she said, and then told him something of the old master and of the stars’ names
     in Latin.
    He listened and loved her more still and the following days went and inquired of a schoolmaster thereabouts names of further
     constellations, and these he brought to Emer like the gifts of that courtship.
    “I want a place for us,” he said to her.
    “There are many places. Where will we go?”
    “We’ll have a house of our own.”
    “Yes,” she said. “A fine house. A house with a yard and garden and hens.”
    “I will make it for you. I will make the finest house any man ever made.”
    “You won’t be able to.”
    “I will.”
    She angled herself on her elbow and looked into his face, pale in the night.
    “You are a man who thinks he can change the world.”
    “Of course I can,” he told her, and took her in his arms.
    They married in May. Emer ran to him at the end of the avenue when the sky was releasing its stars and the night sweetening
     with scent of almond from the furze. The May night was warm syrup. The tenderness of the air, the hushed green of the world
     that was luscious, sensual, primordial, the soft low light, the sighing breaths of beasts in the fields, all these entered
     their memories that night as if such things were themselves the guests at the wedding. They met the priest at the roofless
     ruined chapel of Saint Martin’s and were married with a twist of Latin over their heads like a cheap, invisible corona. When
     the priest had slipped batlike into the shadows, Francis Foley and Emer clung to each other. It was long moments before they
     moved. Then they ran down the road and across the nighttime fields to a stone cabin for cattle, empty now, and which was the