And Watched the Dead Bury the Live

By Ron Duffy

The story of the lives of four generations of a Northern Irish family is told against the background of the country’s turbulent history. Theirs is a story of treachery, cruelty and destruction, but also of love,kindness and in the end a hope that the Troubles are coming to an end. In this novel Northern Ireland's past has never been made more comprehensible; its future more reassuring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Duffy
• Release date: Sep 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452379920

Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England.  HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography. Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary. Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt.  As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.

Book preview

PART ONE: CAITLIN

1919-1923

1

A stone, loosened by the rain, rolled from under the priest’s unsteady step. The priest stumbled and almost fell. His foot came down heavily in the deep, muddy rut of the road, and his ankle twisted under his slight weight. He cried out with the pain and limped forward, his face contorted in a grimace. The bag he carried fell from his hand.

God-forsaken place!

His curse was silent. The greedy wind, sweeping across the starved, winter land, snatched his words away, raced off with them into the whining dark to devour them. The jealous, empty-bellied night threw rain in his face. The rain smacked of salt. The wind smelt of sea-wrack. Out of the blackness of the night thundered the pounding of surf.

The priest picked up his bag and hobbled along the rutted road, his shoes muddy, his overcoat wet, his hat dripping like thatch-eaves in a storm. His nose itched. He twitched it like a rabbit, then drew his damp sleeve across it. The relief was fleeting; his nose itched again almost at once.

He reached the top of a low, steep rise and paused for breath. In front of him a faint light defied the dark.

‘Thank God for that,’ he muttered. ‘I thought I was never going to reach it. If it please You, God, let there be a warm fire and a hearty meal to greet your servant.’

The light brightened as he trudged towards it. It squared into the window of a large stone house set back from the road, large for this part of the world. Beyond the house a few other lights glimmered feebly, but most of the village lay in the midnight dark, asleep in the tawny arms of the bay.

The priest walked the pebbled path to the house, the beach-gravel crunching under his feet. He banged on the door and waited. No one answered. He heard only the patter of the rain and the doleful moaning of the wind around the house. The priest turned a large wrought-iron handle and pushed. The door opened ponderously, admitting him into a small, dark porch. An inner glass door stood ajar. He prodded it open with his bag, stepped into a long, stone-flagged hall and placed his bag on the floor.

‘Anyone awake?’ he called.

He removed his hat and coat. The rack on the wall was so full of coats and hats that there was no room for his. He tossed them in a sodden heap on the floor.

No one answered his call. The silence shook like a curtain in a draught, then stilled again.

Halfway down the hall, which led to a kitchen at the back of the house, a broad flight of stairs climbed to the upper floor. To the right a door stood open, but the sitting room beyond it was as black as the night outside. To the left the door into the dining room was closed, but a sliver of light slid from below it. He crossed to this door and opened it.

A rosewood table, surrounded by chairs and covered with the sloppy remnants of a feast, almost filled the room. The air was stale with the smell of alcoholic drink. The lamp that was still burning stood on a large sideboard behind the open door. Its light shone on dirty plates and half-emptied dishes, on pottery mugs, glasses, and bottles, many with wine and porter in them. To the priest’s left, white lace curtains draped the deep-set window. In corner niches across the room gleamed the glass doors of two tall cabinets full of books, separated by the fireplace and chimney. In the hearth the turf had burned to ash, and the room was chilly. The long hand of the grandfather clock, that stood between one of the corner cabinets and the door leading into the kitchen, clicked forward to twenty-two minutes past two.

‘Nothing has changed,’ muttered the priest. ‘Nothing here will ever change.’

He took a few halting steps to the table, picked up and broke open a thick, round bap and stuffed it with slices of roast beef and cheese. As he munched his hastily prepared roll, he looked at the porcelain copy of the Victory of Samothrace that was the only ornament on the mantelpiece.

Finn’s pride, he remembered.

With the bap in one hand and the lamp in the other, the priest re-crossed the hall, silently as a cat, and entered the sitting room. It smelled of drink and smoke and snuffled with the heavy breathing of a stout, grizzled man who lay on his back on the sofa.

Seamus Slattery, you gross sinner. I might have known you’d be here.

Two persons sprawled on armchairs. One was a broad shouldered young man whom the priest did not know; the other was Joe Carney, a stocky fisherman from the village. Two others stretched their long, thin bodies on the woollen rug in front of the fireplace. The older man with straight, short, towy hair was the village gourmand, Ignatius Sweeney. The second had black hair sleeked down with brilliantine. He was young, a couple of years past twenty, and the priest had to think for a moment before recognising him as Clifford Hamilton, son of the late landowner, Arthur Hamilton.

So you’ve joined Finn MacLir’s carousers, you stupid young fool, the priest thought with shaking head. Is this where your ambitious nature has led you?

Over in a corner, half hidden by an armchair, another young man lay with his thin, pale face in a pool of vomit.

Oh no, not you as well, Liam Dooley. The priest looked at Liam with such sad disappointment that he seemed about to weep. Why, Liam? Why? This is no place for a quiet lad like you. Is this the kind of behaviour you learned in London?

The priest placed the lamp and his half-eaten bap on a table, knelt down and moved the young man away from the smelly mess. Liam groaned in his drunken sleep but did not waken. The priest pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sickly face.

I expected so much more from you than this, Liam Dooley. Are you still competing with Clifford Hamilton when there’s no need for you to do anything of the kind?

The priest stood up stiffly and lifted the lamp. He left the remains of the bap on the table and retreated to the hall. Then he climbed the stairs. His ankle throbbed. His knees and back ached. He was a young man, but his long journey and the last five miles that he walked through sleety rain had wearied him. He felt closer to fifty than to thirty. And he looked older. The hollow, ascetic cheeks; the sallow skin; the sunken, wild, distracted eyes: these belonged to a man whom time had ravaged.

‘Time stole two years from me,’ the priest used to say, ‘for every one it stole from others.’

At the top of the stairs an old, grey sea-trunk stood on the landing. On the wall above it hung an oil-painting of a trim, three-masted clipper running under a panoply of topgallant, royal sails, skysails and moonrakers. The priest held the lamp high to see again the picture he had loved to study as a boy. How many times had his imagination raced him to Australia on that swift craft?

‘That’s the Gypsy Lady,’ Finn had told him once. ‘She was built in Boston the year I was born. And I saw her to her grave in the year I became a man.’

Two doors opened off this part of the landing. One led to Caitlin’s room. The other had led to Nora’s room, but Nora was married now and had a home of her own in the village. Caitlin and Nora, night and day, his sisters in all but blood.

The priest turned sharply to the right and followed the landing alongside the stairwell to the front of the house. The old, brown wood of a large cupboard glowed in the lamplight. The door of the bedroom to the right of the cupboard stood half-open, and heavy, catarrhal breathing rasped in the dark interior.

Old Finn has feasted well and sleeps like a king, thought the tired priest. Better not disturb him.

The priest turned to the door of the bedroom to the left of the cupboard. His old room. The room in which he had lived as a boy, laboured over his books with the patient Caitlin, grew to be a man, a young, raw man, dedicated to God. Was the room the same as when he had left it? Yes, it would be. Nothing ever changed here. Tonight, or what was left of the night, he would sleep again in the old iron bed with the patchwork quilt. Nostalgic remembrance pierced the priest’s heart. The blood drained out into his belly and down into his loins. The hot blood chilled and made him shiver. The hair rose on the nape of his neck.

Seven years ago last September. Seven momentous years. Seven long strides from aspiring youth to zealous priest.

He turned the handle, and the door opened without a sound. He stepped inside, pushed the door shut behind him, and walked with silent tread across the polished wooden floor to the bed. He set the lamp down on the dresser.

‘Caitlin,’ he said in involuntary surprise.

She lay in a cloud of eiderdown. Gleaming even in the dark, her black hair trailed across the pillow, across the shoulder of her green-flowered nightgown. Her arm lay outside the shiny green covers. The priest leaned forward and touched the cool back of her hand. The body turned. The black cirrus stirred on the pillow.

Caitlin, the priest thought. My God, what a beautiful woman you are.

He had come unwittingly to the wrong room. Caitlin had given up her own old room and moved in here for some reason. Yet little beyond the bedclothes had changed from the way he remembered it. Caitlin had changed, though. She looked more mature, more beautiful, but without the loss of the defiant set to her chin that distinguished her from her gentler twin sister. Having seen her, he felt he had to talk to her.

‘Caitlin,’ he whispered.

The whisper almost choked in the priest’s throat. His body shook strangely. The hand reaching again towards the half-awakened woman trembled. The woman suddenly withdrew her arm and pulled the bedclothes tight around her.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes. ‘Is that you, Michael?’

‘Caitlin …’ The priest was struck speechless. He stood with his mouth open, his hand still stretched towards the body in the bed. ‘Caitlin, it’s me, Padraig.’

The woman sat up in bed. The priest could see her face, skull-like in the light from the lamp, the shadows above the prominent cheekbones making black sockets of the eyes, almost as if death had claimed already this beauty as his own. She clutched the eiderdown to her chin, and the ends of her long hair tressed the green silk with black.

‘Padraig, you startled me,’ she said. ‘We ... we thought you weren’t coming.’

‘I sent a letter.’

‘Yes. It came, but you didn’t. We planned a feast for you. Half the village was here. But the guest of honour failed to show.’ ‘It was an arduous journey with many delays,’ Padraig explained. ‘And the weather was so intemperate.’

‘We’re proud of you, Padraig.’ A look of admiration and affection softened Caitlin’s gaze.

‘Are you truly, Caitlin? Do you mean that?’ The priest’s voice was anxious.

‘Yes, I mean it.’ Caitlin paused as if she were going to say something else but changed her mind. Instead she added, ‘After all, if I may make so bold as to remind you, your success is partly my success also.’

‘That is very true,’ Padraig admitted. ‘Without you I never would have made it. I know that.’

The priest’s deep voice trailed off into the silence of the bedroom. He too wanted to say something difficult, but unlike Caitlin he eventually brought the words out. ‘Finn is not proud of me, though, is he?’

‘Oh, Padraig,’ Caitlin scolded lightly. ‘That’s a silly thing to say. You should chase any thoughts like that out of your head at once. Obviously you can’t expect a man like Finn MacLir to be pleased that his adopted son entered the priesthood. But Padraig, he is full of admiration for what you did. To go from farmhand to priest by your own efforts and determination is exactly the kind of achievement that my father would most admire. Oh no, Padraig. In his own way he’s very proud of you.’

‘I am glad, Caitlin.’ Padraig sat down like a doctor on the edge of her bed. Caitlin no longer held the eiderdown under her chin; she had it drawn across her breasts and tucked under her arms. The priest took the woman’s hand and pressed it to his lips.

‘Do you take me for His Holiness, Padraig?’ Caitlin asked with a mocking smile. ‘Is this how priests must greet a woman too?’

‘Caitlin. Please. I am tired. I had to see you. I …’ Padraig lost his words. He struggled like an actor with his lines, straining to hear the unseen prompter. His heart pounded, drowned the sounds and sense of what he sought to say. His wild eyes scanned the room that he remembered so well. The room had become part of his psyche. ‘Why did you move in here?’ he asked.

Caitlin looked at him for a moment in silence before replying, as if she were thinking of something other than the question Padraig had put to her. ‘I like it better than my own old room. I love to look out at the sea first thing in the morning. See it sparkle when the sun shines on it. See it angry and dark under storms.’

‘You didn’t change much in here,’ Padraig noted.

‘No. I liked it the way you had it.’

‘Am I to have your room then?’

‘If you wish. Mine or Nora’s. They are both empty now. You can sleep in either one until you move to the rectory.’

Padraig stared at his white, slim hands in a perturbed silence. Then, as if emboldened he asked, ‘Who is Michael?’

‘Bill Neely’s successor,’ Caitlin replied.

‘Bill’s gone?’

‘A year since. He inherited his grandfather’s farm up Strangford way.’

‘I was never much help around the farm, was I?’ Padraig said.

‘You did what you could, Padraig. You were no ploughman, that’s a fact, but you were hard to beat when it came to grubbing potatoes. When the plough opened up a potato drill, no one could fill a basket of purties faster than you.’ Caitlin smiled. ‘Nor a pail of blackberries either. You had nimble fingers when you were a young buck, Padraig.’

Padraig looked down at his long, pale fingers. They played piano keys now; no more pulling potatoes out of freshly turned soil nor picking blackberries from thorny brambles.

‘Willy John Thornton used to pay me half a crown for a stone of blackberries,’ Padraig said, looking at Caitlin with a reminiscent smile. ‘That money went into my savings.’

‘You must’ve sold him more blackberries than anyone else in Corrymore,’ Caitlin remarked. ‘You were fearless when it came to forcing your way into those bramble bushes. You didn’t care about the thorns and the scratches, I remember. You used to come home with your pail full, and your legs and arms and hands all scratched and bloody. It’s as if you never felt the thorns. Yes, you were good at the blackberrying.’

‘I was not much good at anything else around the farm.’

‘You did well enough,’ Caitlin said. ‘You may not have been much of a farmer, but you’d have been an even worse fisherman.’ She smiled again. ‘That’s one thing you and Michael have in common. You are both definitely land-lubbers. Michael is one of the Carricks from Kildarragh. Valley people. Farmers all since time began.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘In the Neely’s old house up the loaning. He comes in here for his meals. Or I bring sandwiches and buttermilk out to him in the fields. Mother Ross spoils him. The way she used to spoil you, Padraig.’

‘He comes in for more than his meals, I gather.’

Caitlin’s face darkened. ‘Don’t be talking like a priest, Padraig. It won’t do in this house. You know that.’

‘I am a priest, Caitlin, and I shall talk like one if I feel I have to.’

‘Your priesty words will fall on deaf ears here.’ Caitlin frowned. That tone in Padraig’s voice was new, that peremptory assertiveness that came no doubt from his education and his training in Rome. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, you’re a priest now.’

He made no reply. He still held Caitlin’s hand in his. He looked at both of them: his a thin, bony, delicate hand for a man; hers a large, inelegant hand for a woman. Even as a teenage girl, Padraig remembered, Caitlin had big hands. Big but dexterous. He recalled how this particular hand used to hold the thin, chewed pencil with which she and he filled so many jotters. His memory hovered over those days like a dragonfly over a sunlit stream. How quickly they had flowed away below him. Then out of the dark, turbulent waters of the present something forced itself into the consciousness from which he had let it fall.

‘I hope it is your intention to marry this Michael Carrick, Caitlin?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ Caitlin’s eyes were troubled.

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes, in a way.’ She spoke quietly and slowly, her words and her thoughts parting company. Then she rushed after and caught up with her thoughts. ‘He’s a kind, good-natured, generous big cratur,’ she said. ‘He’s hard working and dependable and he’s straight as a die. He’d make a good husband. I’m sure of that.’

‘And yet you hesitate,’ said Padraig. ‘Is there someone else?’

‘No one who’d have me,’ Caitlin replied modestly. She smiled—ruefully, Padraig thought—and placed her free hand on his. ‘I’m glad you’ve come back to us, Padraig.’

‘I doubt if everyone in the village will be saying that.’ Foreboding flickered in the priest’s eyes. ‘Many, I am sure, are not too happy to have me, above all people, back among them as their priest.’

‘Your task won’t be an easy one, Padraig, I’ll grant you that. But you have that streak of MacLir defiance in you that is our family’s greatest protection against malice.’

‘And how is Finn MacLir these days?’

‘As much of an old rogue as ever. He gets even worse with age, if that’s possible.’

‘I am looking forward to seeing him again,’ Padraig said, but with a tinge of apprehension in his voice. Slowly he released Caitlin’s hand. ‘And Mother Ross? How is she?’

‘Hail and hearty. Same old Mother Ross.’ Caitlin gazed intently at the pale face of the priest,,at his long, thin body. Mother Ross always said that her greatest disappointment in life was failing to put an ounce of flesh on Padraig’s spindly rack of bones.

‘And Nora?’

‘Doting wife and mother. She and Flynn are very happy in their wee house. Little Dermot is the spitting image of his father. Curly reddish hair and all.’

‘How old is Dermot now?’

‘Two and a bit.’

Padraig paused, then pensively he said. ‘How time flies. And yet it seems like no time at all since I went away. Caitlin, I have been looking forward so much to seeing all of you again. Looking forward to coming home. Looking forward to being in the village again. I want to gaze at the hills and the sea, to walk the beach again at midnight. I have been so long away. I have missed you all so much. Missed you more than I can say. It is good to be home again, Caitlin. But it is not going to be easy.’

Padraig stood up. Then he leaned forward, kissed the woman on the forehead, and picking up the lamp, quietly left the room.

‘Come in, Padraig. Come in and sit down and meet some old friends of yours.’

Finn MacLir sat at the head of the thick rosewood table, round which a number of men were drinking. They were talking loudly and laughing when Padraig entered the room, but the sounds of conviviality ceased respectfully when Finn boomed out his greeting. The guests welcomed Padraig. He responded in his own deep voice, nodding to each in turn and finally to Finn MacLir himself. The old man had grown much older since they had last seen one another. The once tight, darkly tanned skin, cracked like old leather, was more cracked and looser now. The once dark, wavy hair was grey as gulls’ wings, yet thick still, receding only slightly at the temples. But he appeared to have lost some of that animal strength, that seething vitality, with which he had rammed his way through life.

Padraig, sitting down opposite Finn MacLir, knew that in Finn’s old eyes he was a failure. He prayed to God for strength that Finn maintained must come from deep within himself. But when Padraig looked deep within himself he found not will but weakness, not flint but flesh. Padraig needed the help he received from God. Without it he was but a leaf in a gale. For that reason he admired Finn’s stoic courage, but feared his flaunted disrespect for God. Finn would suffer for it.

‘Michael, pour Padraig a glass of wine and pass the jug down here,’ Finn said. ‘My brimming glass no longer brims; it’s sunk like a sheugh in summer.’

The large young man with hair the colour of straw, whom Padraig had seen asleep in the armchair the night before, poured a glass of red wine from an earthenware decanter, brown and coarse like the weathered hands that held it. He reached the glass to Padraig.

‘It’s none of your fancy Palatine wines,’ said Finn, brimming his glass again. ‘No palatable Roman nectar. But in a pagan household in a pagan place what refinements can one expect? I drink to your continued good fortune, Father Padraig.’ Finn raised his large, round glass and drank. ‘We were expecting you last night,’ he said, shifting his weight in his high-backed, leather chair.

On the mantelpiece behind his head gleamed the white porcelain of the Victory of Samothrace. Finn remembered the excitement that the first engraving of the statue had aroused in him as a young man. The page containing the engraving he tore from its book and carried it with him on his travels. Later he bought this copy of the statue in an antique shop in Liverpool and proudly brought it home, assigning it a place of honour in his house. He drew inspiration from its purposeful forward stride, its body braced as if against fierce winds or climbing waves, its wings thrust back from powerful, defiant shoulders. To Finn the statue was a triumph. It represented for him man’s victory, not over human enemies, but over the forces of nature, over the elements, the Fates, the Furies, over the most implacable foe of all: Death itself.

‘We had a grand feast last night to welcome you home, Padraig,’ Finn declared. ‘We slew the fatted calf and uncasked the vatted wine. We had, in fact, one hell of a good time—if you’ll pardon the expression, Father Padraig. But our prodigal priest came late and missed it all. So we’ll have another feast tonight. Gentlemen, drink up.’

Finn raised the decanter of wine in one big hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other, and held them up. ‘And there’s porter there on the table, and some of old Jimeen Doherty’s poteen, all the way from Aghadoe Lough above Mullaghbrae. Good stuff it is, too. Who’s going to join me? Seamus?’

‘I’ve enough here, thank you, Finn. I can’t drink too much tonight.’

‘Sweeney?’

‘Just a little more whiskey, Finn. Easy.’

‘What a crew we have on this trip,’ Finn said. ‘Not a drinking midshipman left. The world’s going soft, Padraig. This God of yours doesn’t make men any more. Or he’s run out of his old materials. Clifford, you’re a young buck. You’re a university student. You’ll have a refill.’

‘No more for me thanks, Mister MacLir.’

‘Listen to the whelp. Can’t drink wine or whiskey and calls me Mister. Mister MacLir. The name’s Finn, boy. Just because the priest is here you needn’t feel you have to show respect for elders and betters. We don’t recognise betters here. Nor do we make distinctions on account of age.’

‘But you called Clifford a young buck and a boy, Finn,’ Seamus Slattery pointed out. He was a purple-faced, paunchy man with ponderous jowls and red-rimmed eyes. He looked round the table with a begging grin.

‘What I mean is that we don’t make any distinction of status between ages here,’ Finn explained, pausing with the decanter in his hand. ‘Differences there are, of course. Young bucks have energy, fresh ideas, enthusiasm. Or should have. Old bucks temper those with moderation, wisdom and the knowledge born of long experience. Or should do. A nation advances, regresses or stagnates according to the respective strength of each. And according to whether old and young are prepared to antagonise or tolerate each other. In this house we believe in tolerance and cooperation.’

Finn reached the bottle of whiskey towards the blond young man on his right. ‘Now here, Michael, let me fill your glass. You, I know, won’t say me nay. Ha! You and I will welcome home our gentle priest, eh? You and I are the only men left in this land of Christians and other women.’

Padraig had never before heard the sharp edge of bitterness that he noticed now in old Finn’s thunderous voice. Was it the vocal equivalent of that silver hair? Was this the bitterness of causes lost, the cynicism that betrays the unadmitted defeat? A stab of sorrow panged the young priest’s heart. He began to pity this hulking, moral wreck of a man whom once he had feared and loved as God Himself.

‘Michael here has taken your place, Padraig,’ Finn told him. ‘He’s my hairy wild man of the mountains now. Not that you, poor Devil’s child, were ever wild or hairy. But you did watch my sheep and feed the hens and you were a good man in the garden and the potato field. So that’s the work that Michael does for me now. And a lot more besides. Handles the plough like two men. Shears sheep like he was born to it. Which he was, of course.’

Finn paused to drink. He watched Padraig over the rim of his glass. And that mischievous glance that Padraig knew of old vivified his eyes like a draught on dying coals. ‘Ay, and he’s taken your place in our lusher, fertile meadow too, the rascal. Reaping hay that could have been yours, Padraig. If ever you had wanted it.’

Finn glanced at Clifford who had reddened slightly.

The draught subsided. The coals darkened again. The creases beside the eyes smoothed out; they reappeared as wrinkles on the old man’s forehead. Padraig thought of the wind shivering a calm sea. Then Finn’s eyelids drooped, covering the dying coals.

‘You’ve been a great disappointment to me, Padraig,’ Finn said in a slow, sad voice.

Silence. Seamus and Sweeney drank wine and stared at their glasses. Michael watched Finn vacantly, as if his mind were on something else. Clifford felt so uncomfortable that he wanted to leave. He was unnaturally pale. His head still suffered the ache behind his eyes that he had wakened with. He fixed his eyes on the window behind Michael’s untidy, straw-coloured head and wished that he had stayed at home like Liam Dooley. Last night had been so good. Last night Finn MacLir had been his buoyant and boisterous self, booming out stories from a past as unfathomable as the black night beyond the window. But tonight was different. Tonight the heavy, unmoving air grew stagnant; it weighed upon the room unstirred by old Finn’s gusty tales. Tonight the old sailor’s verbal gales had died to barely audible sighs.

Finn appeared to be unaware of the deepening depression that had settled over the homecoming party. His mind was on the day many years ago when he first saw Padraig: a skinny boy in short pants, writhing on the cobbles of a village square, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Never would he forget the sight. The crowd pushed back, staring in ignorance and horror at the boy’s convulsions. Two mongrel pups snapped at his legs and arms, and a sheepdog snarled and barked, its vicious teeth bared as if ready to rush in and chomp them into the boy’s neck.

‘The whelp with the trousers isn’t putting up much of a fight,’ someone said, and the crowd started to laugh. Ignorance and horror relaxed into mirth.

‘I wonder what he’d do with a bitch in heat,’ said another.

Finn waded through the crowd as through a field of barley, pushing the people aside in anger. He burst into the clearing where the boy was lying still now, his face in the muck that covered the cobbles of the square. Finn kicked the sheepdog hard; it ran off into the crowd with a howl of pain. The pups pranced around him, yelping still, as Finn knelt down, rolled the boy over and picked him up in his arms.

‘I spit on you all,’ he shouted to the crowd and carried the boy away down the sloping street to where his fishing boat was moored in the harbour.

Now the Devil’s child, his own adopted son, was home again, a priest.

‘I hoped to make a man of you, Padraig.’ Finn was rising out of his reverie. ‘And I made a monk. Well, I suppose that’s not a bad accomplishment, considering what I had to work with. Come now, gentlemen, let’s not look as if we’re at a Presbyterian wake. Let’s drink. Let’s eat.’ He turned towards the door that led into the kitchen. ‘Caitie! Jinnie! Bring us some supper. We’re half a dozen hungry men in here.’

Supper revived the company. Even Clifford forgot his headache and his queasy stomach. He enjoyed the food, the conversation, the dark red wine that everyone started drinking again in large measures. The more they drank, the more convivial they became. Only Finn MacLir seemed more subdued than usual.

‘We had many more people here to welcome you last night, Padraig.’ Slattery’s purple face was taking on a crimson cast like a spectacular sunset.

‘But they couldn’t all stick the pace,’ Sweeney said and sank his face in his glass.

Nothing could stay the gourmandising pace of Ignatius Sweeney who, like most men in the village, combined fishing and farming and kept a flock of black-faced sheep in the hills. He was tall and thin as a mast. Finn described him as a fathom of rope with a knot for a head and the end unravelled for hair. His thick, fair hair stuck out around his head; it was twisted and tangled and rarely suffered a comb. But in spite of his extreme thinness Sweeney was a monstrous guzzler of food, Guinness and whiskey. If gluttony was indeed a mortal sin, Sweeney was marked as the Devil’s own.

‘Liam Dooley even composed a poem for the occasion,’ Michael said. ‘He’d been working on it for months.’

‘It’s true,’ said Slattery. ‘Every time I bumped into Liam in the village he was mumbling to himself: Hail, Father, home from abroad, come to bring us the word of God. Hail... something or other. I can’t remember. It was full of love and dove and Jesus and cheeses. It was terrible stuff.’

‘Seamus, you’re a desperate man,’ said Sweeney, his face bright with whiskey and laughter. ‘It was not a bit like that.’ He turned to Padraig. ‘It was a grand poem of welcome to you, Padraig. I’m sorry that you missed it.’

‘You mean he read it when I wasn’t here,’ Padraig said.

‘Oh yes. We all demanded it,’ said Seamus. ‘As far as we were concerned you were present in spirit.’

They were probably well into their own spirits, Padraig thought, and drunk as Friday night farmers.

‘Where the devil were you, Padraig?’ Finn demanded. ‘If you don’t mind my expressing it that way.’

‘I was delayed in the city. I had to see the bishop, but the bishop was out in the country. I had to wait for his return. I knew I would be late but I had no choice.’

‘Well, better late than never,’ said Finn. ‘All you missed was a good supper and Liam’s poem.’

‘I hear he’s a bright gossoon, is young Liam,’ Sweeney said with more seriousness.

‘Some say he’ll be the next Catholic schoolmaster in the village,’ Seamus added.

‘Seems like our young bucks are excelling themselves,’ Finn remarked as he poured more wine for everyone. ‘Doing a hell of a lot better than their parents, grandparents and protectors. Liam Dooley heading to be a schoolmaster, trained at a big college in London. Writing a book too, I believe. And Clifford Hamilton here, already doctoring at the university and going to be a great specialist someday. Remarkable that a village the size of Corrymore could produce not one but two such brilliant young men. Then there’s Michael here. He will own the biggest and best farm for miles around and maybe a fleet of fishing boats as well. Clifford already owns most of the land east of the Shannagh. Are you going to sell it, Clifford, now that your father has passed on?’

‘No, Finn,’ Clifford replied. ‘I’ll continue to rent it out. Too many farmers and their families depend on it.’

‘A noble and generous sentiment, young Clifford,’ Finn said.

Finn himself, once a fisherman, a traveller, an adventurer, became what the locals regarded as a gentleman farmer, when he, like Clifford Hamilton, inherited his father’s farm at the age of forty-two. His land then stretched from the mountains to the shore, a lot bigger than the average Drumard farm. He kept the two labourers who had worked twenty years and more for his father and for his brothers after his father’s death. The farm workers lived with their wives and several children in two cottages, owned by the MacLir family, and situated higher on the heathery mountainsides with unimpeded views of the sea and the green patchwork of stone-fenced fields that spread away to the east like a rumpled patchwork quilt. When Finn sold the eastern half of his land he kept one house, the cottage up the rough, stony track where Bill Neely and his family lived. Michael, his new farmhand, now lived alone in the same house.

‘And last but not least, our Padraig is a priest already. Traded a flock of sheep for a flock of people—which may be the same thing in the end. Now he’s destined to be a great archbishop, maybe even a pope, and sit on the right hand of God.’

‘That’s where Jesus sits, Finn,’ Seamus pointed out.

‘Well, Jesus will just have to move over then, won’t he?’

‘Meanwhile, Finn, we grow old and step off stage.’

‘You can grow old, Sweeney, and step off stage if you like.’ Finn spread his thick, brown arms in a theatrical gesture. ‘I’ve decided to stay where I am. I like this stage. And the play is fun. Much better to take part in than to watch. Clifford. Back to you, my boy. How long before you’re able to rip out people’s guts and saw off arms and legs and heads and things?’

‘Oh not for years yet,’ said the slim, young medical student whose slick of oiled black hair gleamed in the lamplight. ‘And longer still to do what I want to do.’

‘Longer still,’ cried Finn. ‘What do you want to do? Make people out of spare parts.’

Clifford smiled shyly. ‘No, Finn. I want to be a brain surgeon.’ He was a handsome, well-dressed young man, with a long face, a long, straight nose, a high forehead and a thin pencil moustache. He stood out from those around this table in that he wore a red bow tie, a starched, white shirt and a grey suit. Clifford Hamilton was something of a dandy.

The brain had fascinated Clifford since he started his medical studies in Belfast. All those intricate, inner-whorled convolutions that controlled the human body, that controlled man, that controlled the future, that controlled destiny. A million years lay furled below the thick skull of a human being. There, behind the eyes, lurked the knowledge of the universe, skulking from the surgeon’s probe, hidden there by a jealous God, like Caliban in his rock, and bidden not to scream. But scream it did. And Clifford heard it. It shrilled in his head and would not give him rest. He would defy God. He would smash the granite rock of the skull, look in deeper than the wells of the eyes and probe the innermost labyrinths of the brain. He would unleash the secrets of the mind, the soul, the solar system and salvation. He would seize hold of the brain and squeeze it dry, wring every last drop of knowledge from it. He knew that control of the human brain was the ultimate source of power.

‘To be a brain surgeon is highly ambitious, Clifford.’ Padraig sounded more like an adult addressing a twelve-year-old boy than a young man talking to his peer. ‘Do you think you will ever realise it.’

‘Yes. I have no doubt about it. I don’t think that my becoming a brain surgeon is any less realisable than your becoming a priest. Or Liam Dooley a schoolmaster.’

Finn’s eyes flicked from Padraig to Clifford. ‘You must be careful, Clifford,’ he said, ‘that when you are rooting about in people’s heads you don’t come upon their souls. And maybe damage them.’ He glanced down the table at Padraig. ‘What would your God say to a soul with a hole in it, Padraig? What would he say to a soul with a shade or two removed accidentally by a surgeon’s blade?’

‘The soul is inviolable, Finn,’ Padraig declared with a frown. ‘It cannot be touched.’

‘But aren’t you trying to change souls with your sermons? Aren’t you trying to make them more acceptable to your God?’ Finn leaned forward on the table, his massive hands cupped around his glass of wine. ‘The soul cannot be so untouchable.’

‘With the word of God one can indeed reach into the soul,’ Padraig consented. ‘But no instrument devised by man has the same power.’

‘Ah, we have a conflict here,’ said Finn. ‘Sweeney, fill up my glass and top up your own. Any of you others care to join us, help yourselves to whatever you want. That stage is getting set again. See why I prefer to act than to watch?’

‘You don’t act, Finn,’ Sweeney observed; ‘you direct.’

He poured the wine for Finn. The last drops from the decanter he shook into his own glass. His sunset face was blazing crimson, with purple only in the shadows. He replaced the empty decanter in the centre of the table and turned up the wick of the low-burning lamp. Shadows flickered on the walls, on the dark sideboard and the cabinets, on the tall clock and the pale porcelain of the Victory.

‘So, Padraig,’ Finn went on, ‘you think the word is mightier than the surgeon’s knife.’

‘The Word that was in the beginning, yes; the Word of God that was made flesh as Jesus Christ.’

‘What do you say to that, young Clifford?’ Finn asked. ‘Does the Word of God tell us more of man and nature, life and death, than your brain and blade will ever reveal?’

‘You’re confusing two separate realms, Finn,’ Clifford argued in a precise, dry voice. ‘The brain is a material thing. We probe into it, repair it, understand it, with the aid of material instruments. The soul is immaterial. We change it, if we change it at all, with immaterial instruments: with words, thoughts, ideas, emotions, that reach it through the mind.’

‘Body and mind; matter and spirit; material, immaterial.’ Finn repeated the words reflectively. ‘That sounds reasonable enough. Conflict resolved.’ He sipped some wine, then looked at Clifford. ‘You say that the soul is reached through the mind. So you separate mind and soul?’

Clifford looked around the table self-consciously. Michael was asleep with his head fallen forward on his chest. Seamus and Sweeney stared at their wine and looked as though they wished they too were asleep. Only Padraig, facing Finn across the length of the dish-and-bottle-laden table, stayed alert, leaning back in his chair with his left hand dangling and his right hand holding a half-emptied glass of wine.

‘It’s probably fanciful,’ Clifford began, ‘but I think the soul lies in that shadowy region between the brain and the mind, that dark transition between the material and the immaterial, an area we may perhaps never fathom.’

‘Why must the soul be in the head?’ Sweeney asked, looking for an opening that might admit some light into a conversation that he thought had become too opaque.

‘Where else would you put it?’ Finn wanted to know. ‘In your belly? In your knee-caps?’

‘Maybe it’s hanging down between your legs,’ said Slattery and he burst into uproarious laughter.

The unexpectedness of Slattery’s remark struck Finn as the funniest thing he had heard in a long time. He thumped the table and exploded into an uncontrollable fit of laughing. Sweeney joined in. So did Clifford. Even Michael woke up and grinned without knowing what he was grinning at. Padraig alone was not amused. He ascribed the laughter more to Finn’s wine than to Slattery’s words.

Tears began to roll down Finn’s wrinkled cheeks. ‘What a cod you are, Slattery,’ he said, trying to catch his breath. ‘Maybe it’s hanging...’ And again he yielded to a fit of laughing so loud it made the dirty plates and bowls and smeared wine glasses shake on the table. For four or five minutes the laughter rose and subsided like billows on the sea. Then calm.

‘What about women then?’ Sweeney asked.

‘Women have no souls,’ Finn declared. ‘They have to get theirs from a man. That’s why virgins go to hell.’

‘Except the Virgin Mary,’ Slattery pointed out.

‘The Virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin,’ Finn contradicted. ‘If old Joseph couldn’t give it to her—and I doubt if he could—God himself saw she didn’t go without. It’s the only thing I admire your God for, Padraig. It shows he was human.’

A brief pause. Finn and Sweeney wiped laughter’s tears from their cheeks. Padraig and Clifford drained the wine out of their glasses. Michael stood up and brushed crumbs from his lap to the floor. He was a big man, tall almost as Ignatius Sweeney but twice his width. Like Finn MacLir, Michael wore grey woollen trousers and a grey-striped, white shirt without a collar. The sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, showing off his hefty, muscular arms.

‘I’m going up to the cottage, Finn,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘I’m going home too, Finn,’ Sweeney said. ‘I don’t care for another night on your floor.’

The guests bestirred themselves and took their leave in a general movement and scraping of chairs.

Finn MacLir saw them out. ‘May your soul not be laggard tonight, Slattery,’ he boomed out into the silence of the night.

CHAPTER 2

Michael, wearing a warm, knitted jacket, left the house by the back door and crossed the cobbled yard to a high, iron gate. He opened the gate, stepped out into a dark loaning, then slammed the bolt of the gate into a crack between two stones of the wide, circular, conical-topped gate-pier. He turned to the left. The loaning was rocky and steep and darker than the inside of a well. Over the walls old brambles trailed, and whin bushes grew in places, their yellow flowers, sparse at this time of year, glowing even in the dark. The black sky held no stars, no moon; only a thick canopy of cloud. The cloud probably rested on the breasts of the mountains invisible in front of him. Equally invisible behind him the sea rolled over in her sleep with a long, deep sigh.

At the top of the track, beyond the last walled fields and the rowan tree, the high, open hillside snuggled under covers of heather, thyme, and blaeberry. It pulled the covers tight under its jutting, rocky chin and did not feel the chill February breeze. Up there the sheep huddled in the lee of rocks. Occasionally Michael heard the bleat of one more restless than the others.

Here where the dark loaning opened on to the hills a low, stone cottage stood with whitewashed walls and a roof of weathered thatch. The roof had been thatched so many times, the chimney had almost disappeared. In one of the two windows a light flittered like a dying butterfly’s wings. Michael stopped. His heart pounded so loudly he was sure the noise of it would waken and scatter all the sheep on the mountain.

I left no fire, he thought. And if I had, it would have burned itself out long since.

He looked back down the narrow track, half resolved to return to Finn’s house. But now the blackness between the walls spooked him. A few flowers of whin glowed like eyes in the dark.

Finn would laugh till his head fell off if I was to go back to the house, Michael told himself. Caught in the trap of old superstitious fear of the dark, he looked again at the lonely cottage. The night crept closer round it. Then the light flared in one small window and dimmed as suddenly.

Some traveller has found his way to the cottage, he thought; some shepherd caught by darkness on the hills.

He stepped irresolutely forward. He wanted to shout a brave hello to the visitor, but his voice was coward. He took a deep breath and in his mind heard Finn’s laughter die away. He wished he had brought Jipsie, the sheepdog, with him from the house. Then he grew bold enough to approach the window and peep in through the lace curtains. There on the sheepskins by the hearth, huddled in a rug that covered all but her head, Caitlin sat. She was gazing at the burning turf which every now and then she prodded absent-mindedly with a stick. In the light of the fire her black hair gleamed with the sheen of a magpie’s wings.

Michael’s heart leaped at the sight of her so violently he was almost sick. Shivers tingled through his flesh from scalp to groin. Then he felt ashamed for the fright his mind had moved him to.

Oh Caitlin, you don’t know what you did to me just now.’

Michael was loath to startle Caitlin out of her reverie. He stepped back half a dozen paces and re-approached the cottage, whistling loudly a fiddle-tune she knew. He scraped his feet on the granite slab before the door and lowered his head to enter the two-roomed cottage. A table and chairs stood against one wall, with an old armchair to the side of the hearth, where a crook and crane held a blackened kettle above the fire. Against the wall beside the door to the bedroom an open dresser held blue-and-white-ringed plates and bowls, and ill-assorted mugs and cups hanging from cup hooks.

Michael closed the door. ‘Caitlin, it’s yourself as has the fire burning,’ he said brightly. ‘What brings you up here?’

She looked at him and smiled but did not rise. ‘I couldn’t sleep in the house. I had a lot of things on my mind. So I slipped outside and came up here. I thought you might like a warm room tonight.’

He knelt behind her, placed his arms over her shoulders and clasped her hands as they held the rug snugly under her chin.

‘That was kind of you,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘But what would you have done had I stayed at the house in the same drunken sleep as last night?’ He rubbed his cheek against her silken hair.

‘No matter. I’d have slept here alone.’ Caitlin slowly tipped her head back against the pressure of Michael’s cheek and chin, like a kitten. He kissed her on the forehead. Her skin was warm from the fire.

‘And what would you have done,’ she asked, ‘if you had gone to my room and found an empty bed?’

Michael paused. He smiled to himself and said, ‘No matter. I’d have slept in it anyway.’

‘Even if I wasn’t there?’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re teasing, Michael Carrick. Wouldn’t you come to find me?’

‘How would I know where to look? I would never have guessed you were up here all alone on this dark hillside.’

‘I told Mother Ross. She was listening for you. She knows your tread on the stairs.’

‘Weren’t you afraid?’

‘Oh no. Mother Ross knows all about us now.’

‘No; I mean, weren’t you afraid coming up here alone?’

‘What is there to be afraid of, Michael? I was born on this farm. I grew up in these hills. I know them as I know my own body. I know every stone, every boulder, every thorn bush and clump of whin.’

Caitlin’s arm came out from under the rug, and she raked the ashes with the blackened stick. ‘The whin bushes are getting more flowers,’ she said. ‘In a couple of months the whole hillside will be blazing with them. Did you smell them in the air when you came up the loaning?’

‘No. There aren’t enough yet to give out a smell.’

Caitlin tapped the glowing end of the stick on the hearth-stone and watched the fluster of sparks disappear. ‘They don’t smell like flowers even when there’s a lot of them,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever noticed that.’

Michael sat with his chin on her shoulder, his cheek pressed against hers. ‘What do they smell like?’

‘They smell like bodies,’ Caitlin replied. ‘They smell like love-making.’

Michael let his hands run down along the line of Caitlin’s arms and then held her round the waist. The rug rumpled up, baring her feet and her knees. He kissed her neck and her ear.

She twisted her body below the rug and kissed him on the lips.

‘What were the things you had on your mind tonight?’ Michael asked nervously as Caitlin turned her face back to the fire.

Her eyes stared at the yellow flames. ‘Padraig. You. My father. The future.’

‘And the past?’

Caitlin looked round again at Michael with eyes that seemed to him to be a little distraught. ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.

‘Doesn’t Padraig’s return bring some of the past back with him?’

‘Yes, I suppose it does. But it’s a past that has been dragged forward into the present. It’s been broken and battered and bruised on the way. Parts of it smashed completely. I hardly recognise it. You can’t drag the past around, like a toy on the end of a string, and expect it to remain undamaged.’

‘What about Padraig?’ Michael’s voice hinted at the unease he was feeling. ‘Has he remained undamaged?’

‘Oh he’s changed utterly,’ Caitlin declared. ‘He left here a young man, one once possessed of the Devil. He returns a priest, possessed of God. What greater change could there be in anyone?’

‘Do you think the Devil has really left him?’

‘Yes, years ago. Long before he went off to university in Belfast the Devil stopped possessing him.’ Caitlin paused, and a shudder trembled through her body. ‘It used to frighten me so much at first. I’d see him fall and roll around. His eyes would go all funny, and his mouth would open and shut and he’d slobber and … It was awful, Michael. But I learned from my father, and from Padraig himself, not to be frightened by poor Padraig’s fits. I was even able to help him after a while. And then they stopped.’

‘And he started hearing voices instead?’

‘Yes, poor Padraig. What a strange, strange boy. He would sit up there among the rocks on Donevan. You know Slieve Donevan, where the big hollow is below the tors and it makes a kind of shelter? He used to sit up there all night. Sometimes two or three nights and days at a time, not moving, not eating, just staring out into space. He said he could see Jesus on the cross hanging in the sky away out in front of him over the sea. And he used to stare at the bowed head of Christ, stare at it without moving an eyelash. Then one night there was just the cross, bright like the full moon. And it came towards him through the sky and spoke to him. It said, I am the Lord God Almighty. From you have I cast out all evil. Go you now and cleanse the souls of all mankind, for they have departed from my ways. Padraig told me all about it when he came down. I’ve never forgotten his words. He said he had to tell someone or his skull would split open. And he knew I’d believe him and wouldn’t laugh.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Yes, of course. And I still do. I mean, I believe he had that experience. Just as I believe the experience of myself dreaming dreams. But to him it was real. And it drove him away.’

‘You loved him, didn’t you?’ Michael’s slow, hesitant voice betrayed the jealous apprehension that was clawing at his mind.

‘He was my brother, Michael,’ Caitlin replied, aware of his growing anxiety. ‘My father adopted him. He was living with a doctor and his wife in Scotland when my father found him.’

‘Why was he living with them?’

Still tightly clutching the edges of the rug, Caitlin ringed her arms around her raised knees and leaned forward. ‘That’s quite a story, Michael. We don’t know to this day how much of it is true. But Padraig and I talked about it so often, and he repeated it so often, and he never changed a word. It is carved into his mind like an inscription into a gravestone. It will never leave him.’

‘What did he tell you?’ Michael asked, then quickly changed his tone. ‘Do you mind? I know it’s late and you’re probably tired, but …’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ Caitlin said. ‘I’ve been turning it over in my mind again. I don’t think I could sleep anyway.’ She paused, a captive of her own thoughts.

‘So?’

Caitlin looked at Michael with a serious expression, wondering if Padraig would approve of her relating these stories. ‘One day a ragged, dirty, exhausted, starving little boy, nine years old, arrived in a fishing port on the west coast of Scotland. My father called it Kyle of something. I’ve forgotten. His boots barely had leather left on them. A local doctor was the first person he met. Or at least the first person who talked to him. The doctor brought the boy home, and his wife gave him a bath and a meal and insisted that he stay with them. They had no children of their own. He told her he had been tramping the rough tracks and moors for several days in cold, sleety, October rain, not knowing where he was going. But he refused to tell them where he had come from in case the doctor sent him back.’

‘He had run away from home?’ Michael said.

Caitlin released her knees, leaned over and tossed another lump of turf on the fire. Sparks flared up into the maw of the chimney, and the room brightened. Caitlin hugged her knees again.

‘It wasn’t much of a home,’ she replied. ‘Not if we are to believe Padraig. He had no father. Or rather he never knew who his father was. His unmarried mother was a schoolteacher in a village called Plockton, or Stockton. No Stockton sounds too English, doesn’t it? Anyway, hers was a well-to-do family as Padraig learned from his mother. When she became pregnant out of wedlock she lost her job as a teacher, and her father threw her out of the house. Bought her a train ticket, gave her some money and sent her away to live with her brother, her only other relative across the country in Dingwall. He was a grocer with a wife and three children, all older than Padraig. He was a rigid Christian, but showed little Christian charity where Padraig and his mother were concerned. He and his wife, who thoroughly resented Padraig’s mother being in the house, used and abused her as no more than a servant. Even as her pregnancy advanced. The children wanted to know how Padraig’s mother was having a baby when she didn’t have a husband. As Padraig grew, the children at home and at school made his life a misery. Then Padraig started having his fits. That was the last straw. His uncle accused Padraig’s mother of having slept with the Devil and produced a son of Satan. He ordered her out of the house, with a small bag of personal belongings and no money. The Devil looks after his own, Padraig remembers him saying.’

‘So what did she do?’ Michael asked. ‘Alone and penniless with a nine-year old boy who suffered seizures.’

‘She took to the roads on foot,’ Caitlin replied. ‘Looking back on it later, Padraig thinks she was trying to make it back to Plockton, only this time she had no train ticket. Together they simply headed west, sleeping rough in fields or barns or hay sheds, begging for food like gypsies. She didn’t make it. She was not healthy. Padraig remembers her coughing up blood.’

‘Consumption?’

‘Yes. And it killed her. Padraig doesn’t know where she died. He was so young and afraid and he ran away. What he was afraid of, I never did find out, and Padraig didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to press him to tell me in case it brought on a seizure.’

‘So Padraig made it on his own to … what did you call it?’

‘Plockton,’ Caitlin said. ‘I think he must have got lost or missed the way because, according to my father, he turned up in this other Kyle place, where the doctor took him in.’

‘What a story,’ Michael said. ‘It’s hard to believe. Are you sure Padraig isn’t making it up?’

‘That’s not the end of it,’ Caitlin declared. ‘Because of his fits, the people in Kyle-whatever were afraid of Padraig. They said, as many did, that he was a child of Satan who had come straight from Hell. They said that his physical condition when he arrived in the village was the result of his torment in hell.’

‘In one way they were right,’ Michael interrupted.

‘Yes, that’s true enough,’ Caitlin agreed. ‘The doctor tried to tell the people it was epilepsy, but they said that epilepsy was just a doctor’s big word for seizure by the Devil. Then a fishing boat went down in a storm with the loss of all hands. The people in