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the dark days only recently lifted. He, of course, was of two minds about the self-martyred hermits. To him, at times, it had seemed that with their denial of worldly pleasures, with their commitment to eat only what the barren ground would grow and what the sea and the sky might yield, they had brought into Ireland not the expected blessings, but a curse that had condemned people less eager for denial to experience—willingly or not—the same deprivations they themselves had so greedily embraced.
    So pleased, apparently, was the Heavenly Father with the hermits’ atonements that He decreed that the entire people from whom they’d sprung should be given an unending opportunity to replicate their extravagant austerity. When Skellig Michael had exploded into the air from the rock bottom of the sea, it had been too hasty in its eagerness for the sky to collect fertile sediments from the ocean floor, and too exultant by its expulsion from the netherworld to allow the watery sea time to erode its craggy stones to a scape more homely if not more hospitable.
    That Skellig Michael was a holy place none could argue, but to Declan, living in the land that had made possible its sanctity, born a recipient of its example and a child of the enforced replications of its hardships, all Ireland was, by indisputable logic, equally holy—but with a holiness it had not invited and a blessing that could easily pass as a curse.
    These unavoidable thoughts, moving at a measured pace through his distressed mind, prompted him to shorten his gaze and observe the great gaping space before him, where there had once been a house and where a garden had grown. It had belonged to an impossible woman, one Kitty McCloud, a writer of some repute. Her fame derived from an uncanny gift for both exciting and assuaging the suppressed libidos of unsuspecting females (and not a few males as well), convincing them in English, Irish, and languages that spanned the globe that they were simply indulging in a well-told tale, the adult equivalent of a bedtime story, when in truth they were submitting themselves to an onslaught against their most protected secrets. Declan had often wondered if Kitty herself was fully aware of her unique achievements. In his pride, he preferred to think he was the only one.
    Mediated by her books, these truths descended into regions where the subconscious, in all innocence, engaged in deeds the day would quake to look on. The readers’ conscious equipment assured them that these were fantasies, whereas in reality they were excursions into the seven secret places where the reader could range rampant and unconcerned among forbidden truths, thinking them no more than the crafty manipulations of an unscrupulous hack.
    Declan had read Kitty McCloud’s work, first out of mild curiosity—she was, after all, a conquest of his earliest urges—then with actual interest, then in awe. He considered himself one of the few people who had deciphered the code and found his way into the inner temple where this votary of the truth labored away, secure in the knowledge that no one knew who she really was, where she had come from, and where she was leading them. Declan knew, but he would never tell—either about the code or about his youthful conquest.
    And now her house and the garden had been taken into the sea, leaving behind an emptiness into which had rushed the giddy waves, reveling in this newly gouged cove. Gone, too, was the grave he’d dug in her garden, the grave into which he had placed with a tenderness uncommon to him the boy—sixteen? seventeen?—who’d been his apprentice, a cheerful and eager young man who had begged to be taught the thatcher’s trade. The boy’s name was Michael, and he’d come from an island in the north, which island Declan would never know. When he’d name one, the boy would always answer, “No. Not that one. Another one. To the north.” When