ANNE DOUGHTY is the author of A Few Late Roses, which was nominated for the longlist of the Irish Times Literature Prizes. Born in Armagh, she was educated at Armagh Girls’ High School and Queen’s University, Belfast. She has since lived in Belfast with her husband.

Also by Anne Doughty

The Girl from Galloway

The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

The Teacher at Donegal Bay

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published as Summer of the Hawthorn in 1999. This edition is published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Anne Doughty 2019

Anne Doughty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008328825

Praise for Anne Doughty

‘This book was immensely readable, I just couldn’t put it down’

‘An adventure story which lifts the spirit’

‘I have read all of Anne’s books – I have thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of them’

‘Anne is a true wordsmith and manages to both excite the reader whilst transporting them to another time and another world entirely’

‘A true Irish classic’

‘Anne’s writing makes you care about each character, even the minor ones’

For all those who have cherished

hope for peace in Ireland

‘Do what you can, do it in love and be sure that it

will be more than you ever imagined.’

Deara, fifth century healer from Emain

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Anne Doughty

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Publisher’s Note

Acknowledgement

Dear Reader

Excerpt

About the Publisher

1

ARMAGH, 1986

This morning, after the most ghastly ten minutes in Mother’s bedroom, I went to Emain. I just took off, as Sandy would say. And the moment I crossed the main road and set foot in the lane that weaves its way between the scatter of farms and strikes west to run along the foot of the great mound, I felt better, so much better I could hardly imagine the waves of nausea that almost overcame me the minute I’d pushed open her door.

I walked quickly, my eyes eagerly seeking out the familiar features, once the focus of my childhood imaginings: the oak where Robin Hood crouched ready to pounce on the Sheriff of Nottingham, the hazel bush whose fruit bestowed wisdom on those who partook of it, the twisted hawthorn beneath whose branches the little people danced on moonlit nights. Smiling to myself as the memories flooded back to me, I turned aside into McCreesh’s field and tramped through the rough grass by the hedgebank.

‘Oh wonderful,’ I said aloud, as I found the primroses, the patch I’d known for thirty of my thirty-five years. Last autumn the hedges had been brutally cut back by a machine that left the branches bruised and torn. I feared the primroses might have gone. But here they were in full flower, the pale leaves offering the faintest perfume to the morning sun as I bent to touch their soft petals.

The flutter and scuffle of birds followed me all the way down the lane. A blackbird was singing its heart out on the pointed gatepost of Toner’s farm. I glimpsed a wren, minute and secretive, hopping through the ground ivy at the foot of the hedgerow.

Had I not caught sight of a man perched on the low roof of a cottage painting the inside of the chimney stack, I would have danced for joy. I had been let out. I had escaped. From what I had escaped, or from where, I could not say, but the feeling of freedom buoyed me up like a following wind, my feet barely touched the ground as I sailed along the lane heading for the familiar green gate.

‘It’s because these are my hedgerows,’ I confided to a thrush, so absorbed in smashing a snailshell that he didn’t hear me coming. Other places were all very well. I could enjoy Hampstead Heath or St James’s Park, and Matthew’s home village in Norfolk was wonderful with those great skies arcing over the marshes and the heathlands. But this was my own place, this was part of me, and I had been lonely for it for so long.

As I closed the small, green gate carefully behind me, I wondered how I could possibly be lonely for a place I had had to visit regularly in the last eight years, even more often this last year, the year of my mother’s dying. But no answer came to me as I began the climb along the outer ramparts, across the ditch and up to the top of the great mound.

Every time I begin the climb, I feel just as excited as I did the very first time my father took me there. I’m so convinced that this time will be even more exciting than before that I forget how very steep the mound is. In my enthusiasm I move far too fast. By the time I reach the top, I’m always out of breath.

This morning, I pushed it so hard I had to flop down on the grass to recover myself. For ages, I just sat there, not quite believing it. Suddenly, summer had come and here was I, at Emain. The sun was warm on my skin, its brilliant light spilled over all the little fields and the patches of woodland spread out below me, bringing them alive, picking out every soft, new leaf, every fresh-painted farm and cottage.

The top of the mound is completely healed again after the excavations. For years, I longed for them to be over. I could not bear the nakedness of those scraped surfaces, the rubble walls dated and labelled, the post-holes numbered and colour-coded. Now I had my Emain back, soft and green, keeping its own secrets and sharing mine.

When finally I did get my breath back, I stood up and scanned the horizon. Whatever the weather, however clear or misty the day, I’m always aware how for millennia, men and women have stood on this high point. Here they have stood in pride and hope, in fear and expectation, century after century, their eyes turned north to the glitter of Lough Neagh, or west to the hills of Tyrone and Donegal, or south and east towards the lowlands of the Bann and the Lagan, where the old road goes through the mountains to Tara.

On my very first visit, my father had told me how the warrior princess Macha had traced in the dust with the pin of her brooch the outline of the citadel. For Emain was the heart of the country of the Ullaid, the old Kingdom of Ulster, the setting for the great stories about Cuchullain and the Knights of the Red Branch.

Intensely aware of the long past, I stood in sheer delight, watching the high white clouds stream out of the west against a pure blue sky, their fleeting shadows racing across the grass like companies of phantom horsemen summoned into battle.

‘You’ve a great imagination.’

I could hear my mother’s voice, as clearly as if she had been standing beside me. If you wrote the words on a page, they would look harmless enough. They might even be read as a compliment. But the written word can’t conjure up that characteristic intonation, that inflection of the voice, that habitual edge of criticism; nor can it show the tightening of the lips, the ironic smile, the upward movement of the chin and the dismissive shake of the head.

The last thing you ever did where Mother was concerned was take what she said at its face value.

And now she is gone. After all the months of waiting, of knowing the diagnosis she refused to acknowledge, the months of phoning and visiting hospital and then hospice, of trying to behave better than one felt. Yet when the end came, it was still a shock. I didn’t even suspect anything from Sandy’s tone when I picked up the phone last Friday evening.

‘I’ve been trying to get you since five-thirty. I tried Robert Fairclough’s, but you’d gone.’

‘Yes, I went for a drink with Pat at the Festival Hall. She’s over for the Tyroneweave Exhibition.’

The pause at the other end was only momentary.

‘Mother passed away at twenty-five past five.’

Passed away. To write that the men and women who once stood upon this mound had passed away was appropriate enough, but for my plain-speaking sister to use the words was more of a sudden shock than the news itself. But we choose our words to match our feelings and when it came to the point, Sandy’s feelings were clearly not what she had expected. Waiting in the queue for security at Heathrow next morning she still sounded totally distraught.

‘I’m sorry, Dee, I haven’t the remotest idea what to do at a time like this. There’s a Which paperback I meant to buy.’

She looked so uneasy and so unhappy I’d have liked to put my arms round her, but that’s not something you can do with Sandy. I couldn’t do it when she was nine, or nineteen, and I certainly couldn’t do it now she was twenty-nine.

Our mother’s fierce hostility to physical contact of any kind between women had gone deep with Sandy and this was no time to upset her any further. All I could do was reassure her that I knew the rules, the unwritten ones that guide the community at times like this. I knew every line that would have to be spoken and every gesture that would have to be made from years of observation and hours of listening to Mother as she assessed the relative success or otherwise of the many funerals she had attended.

‘I’m prepared to do it their way, if I can manage it,’ I said, as we crossed the wet and windy tarmac. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t,’ she shouted back over the whine of the engines. ‘Just let’s get it over with. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I won’t be happy till I’m walking back up that corridor.’

Sandy was as good as her word and Matthew, my husband, as reliable as ever. We performed the prescribed rituals in the prescribed fashion. Even Mother might have admitted that her funeral ‘went off very well.’ After it was all over I was left with no more than a handful of fragments and images flickering inside my head like the fleeing shadows on the grass.

I didn’t get much sleep in the two nights before the funeral, so on the day itself I seemed to see everything in the brightest Technicolor, with the sound turned up. The incredible noise of elderly relatives drinking tea or whiskey, according to sex, in the sitting room. The fallen petals from the wreaths tramped into the hall carpet. The bright green wing of Sandy’s eyeshadow. The frayed ends hanging down from the giant umbrella produced by the funeral director.

I felt slightly drunk most of the time, though I left the actual alcohol to Sandy and Matthew. Nevertheless, I felt very much in command of the situation. Like an anthropologist who has studied her tribe long and hard, I knew exactly what I should do at each point as the elaborate ritual unwound. I think I even managed to play my part with conviction. Matthew said I did it very well. Sandy was quite unambiguous in her praise: ‘You were just fantastic, Dee. Given how you really feel, you were incredible. I don’t know how you did it.’

In one way, it was all very easy. You simply didn’t allow your true feelings to get in the way. You let people have what they wanted, say what they wanted to say, believe what they wanted to believe, because that was what was important for them. Truth of any kind was the enemy, not to be allowed within the charmed circle of mourners and mourned.

In particular, Mother’s dying, lengthy, painful and diminishing, had to be rewritten to their liking. She had fought every step of the way, refused all the help and support the hospice had so richly offered, been critical and unpleasant to everyone she had come in contact with and repeated endlessly that her only wish was ‘to be out of this damn place and back to work’. But such facts, however true, are not relevant to those who gather to mourn.

The church was very full and very hushed. In contrast, the minister’s voice was very loud. It seemed to oscillate in harmony with the sudden drumming of rain on the roof and against the windows of the north aisle. I found its resonant boom strangely soothing. But the more it went on, the sleepier I got. I was listening to poetry in a foreign language. I was sure it was very good and no doubt apt to the occasion, but what was I supposed to say at the end of it all?

I sang the hymn vigorously, took deep breaths as I had been taught at choir practice and hoped that would help me to get through the address. We were asked to be seated. I composed myself.

‘Pearl Henderson, our dearly beloved sister in Christ, devout member of the church, unfailing servant of the Lord, whose triumph over death, whose courage in adversity was surely an inspiration to us all, goes before us into glory . . .’

As the words cascaded down upon me, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. I just kept looking at the toes of my new black patent shoes. Even though I had polished them the previous evening, they seemed to be very dusty. I wondered if it was the shininess that attracted the dust and whether they would have been less dusty if I hadn’t polished them.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the Lord doesn’t have her the devil must.’ I was in the school playground, on a March day, bright with sun, the dust blowing in a sudden breeze, the long arc of a skipping rope curving before me, the chant of children’s voices.

But it was not children’s voices I was hearing, it was still the minister. Quieter now, more conversational, he was reading from his notes: ‘Pearl Henderson was the youngest member of a churchgoing family. Hers was a home where Jesus Christ was known and loved and Pearl brought that knowledge to her family life here in Armagh after her marriage. It was the faith and care of Christ that sustained her when, with her two children still very young, she lost her husband and bravely took up the role of breadwinner.’

One of the undertaker’s men had a dreadful cough. I looked across at him as he tried to muffle it in a huge striped handkerchief, but the more he tried the worse it got. By the time he’d recovered himself, the well-articulated voice had reached the 1980s. Mother’s active phase of building up the business gives way to ‘the opportunity for further public service through the Business and Professional Women’s Club of which she was secretary for many years’.

‘Cheerfulness, industry and efficiency. These were the keynotes of Pearl’s personality. Whenever she did something she did it well, and the Church had good cause to be grateful for her gifts, for who but Pearl could have organised so efficiently the Christmas bazaar. She would long be remembered for her magnificent needlework and tapestry, for her Swiss rolls and her Christmas puddings.’

I had forgotten the Christmas puddings. We dreaded them. I could see so vividly before me the huge bowl of sticky ingredients, the row of ready-greased containers, and hear the sharp edge in her voice should either of us dare come into the kitchen while she was preparing them. There were boiled eggs for supper when she cooked the puddings for the bazaar. She’d had enough of cooking and washing up for one day, she always said.

I was quite upset when the voice telling me the story about this wonderful woman stopped and instructed me to lift up my heart and sing another hymn. Halfway through, the undertaker’s men smartly turned the coffin through 180 degrees like a military manoeuvre, summoned Matthew to take his place at its leading edge, and left Sandy and me to our own devices.

‘Come on, Deirdre,’ I said to myself, as the funeral director caught my eye. ‘You’re back on parade. Get Sandy moving down that aisle beside you. No one else can move till you do. Another two hours and it’ll all be over.’

It was raining more gently as we stood on the muddy, tramped grass by the open grave. A sheet of plastic grass covered the mound of excavated earth. Like a model of Emain itself, it dominated the wet ditch into which minute rivulets dripped and splashed.

The coffin bore a shiny, brass plaque: ‘Pearl Henderson, Born 21 January 1926, Died 16 May 1986’. The saturated earth fell upon it and obliterated her lifespan.

The funeral director moved us on. Behind us, the undertaker’s men in black coats and well-polished shoes, were filling in the grave as if they were hard at work in their own back gardens. As we reached the paved path at the edge of the churchyard, I saw the departing mourners pause, turn and adjust their face muscles ready to address a member of the immediate family with the customary, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Rather like going to church each Sunday, even if you never sang, never listened and left it to the minister to do all the praying, to speak these words now would ensure your presence had been noted, a tick entered in the register that mattered most to you – God’s or your neighbour’s.

After the words had been spoken, it was equally important to draw a response from the family member in question, preferably a comment the deceased had made in happier times. This comment would be repeated when the funeral was discussed in those circles where Mother was known, exchanged for similar comments, leaving the speakers confident that they had done justice to the event.

‘Miss Henderson, I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Those who knew me called me Deirdre, but those who didn’t followed the old custom of not allowing marriage to intervene between a daughter and the death of a parent. They lined up and said their piece as they shook my hand.

‘Parker. Fred and Mary. We knew your Mother very well. So sad. Such a loss to the Church. And what a wonderful new shop she made after the bombing. Such energy. I wish there, were more like her.’

I nodded and smiled, thinking of Malvolio. ‘Mother often spoke of you. You used to help on the cake stall, didn’t you?’

There were dozens of them, all ready to present the speech they’d prepared. I’ve always had a good memory for detail and as my mother was voluble about her activities and concerns, I found I could place nearly all of them. Unfortunately, so much of my life passed before me as I did so that I felt like the proverbial drowning man.

At some point, the minister excused himself for another engagement and I became aware of the fact that Sandy and Matthew were nowhere to be seen.

The last hands were shaken, and then, only then, did I realise that the funeral director had been standing behind me all this time, his huge umbrella angled into the drifting mizzle so that it didn’t get in the way, but still protected me from the worst of the rain.

‘It’s a hard day for you’n yer sister. She’s very upset, the young lady is. Yer good man thought he’d best take her back to the house. I daresay they’ll have a nice, hot cup of tea waitin’ for you. You’ll feel more yerself after that.’

That was the only time I lost hold of the proceedings. I mumbled my thanks and as he put me into the back seat of the funeral car I burst into tears and cried the whole way back to Anacarrig. Not for Mother. For a little man with a red nose and a country accent who had held an umbrella over me when he needn’t have bothered.

2

Beyond my bedroom window the swifts wheel and cry in a clear sky. Blackbirds are hunting on the lawn below. It has been a warm, sunny day and now, when my lamp would be lit if I were in London, it is still bright enough to read. I had forgotten how long the light lingers in Ulster. I am further north and further west. It feels like a different world.

A week now since I arrived with Matthew and Sandy, the house cold and dank, closed up since Sandy’s last visit, the rain pouring down as if it would go on for ever. I’ll never forget that Saturday evening with the phone ringing and visitors arriving and all the awfulness of the funeral still to be faced. Now it seems so far away. Even the person I was that evening, the one who said the right things to neighbours and relatives, who handed round cups of tea and glasses of whiskey, seems someone I hardly recognise.

I am beginning to feel different, but I’m not sure in what way. I do know I don’t feel so panic-stricken when I go into Mother’s room any more, certainly not like that first morning when I was determined to stick it out and then turned tail and ran. I don’t push my luck, I don’t stay in there very long at any one time, but I have been managing better.

I’ve made this long list of things I must do, most of which I dread having to do, but I bribe myself, just as I did during all those years of revision for exams, the mugging up of boring stuff for the sake of the results I needed.

My secret weapon is the garden. Two days after the funeral, I took a mug of tea outside and had a look around while it was cooling. I got a nasty shock. The lawns had been cut and the edges trimmed, but nothing else had been done. Mr Neill, who does the grass, was sure to have offered to keep things tidy, but Mother would have insisted she’d be home in no time, so there was no need at all to bother.

There were huge stems of groundsel poking up through the splashes of purple aubrietia and pink saxifrage. The rockery was full of buttercups and sprouting thistles. Before I quite realised it, I had a pile of weeds on the terrace and my tea was stone cold.

It was that first head of groundsel that did it. ‘Out you come,’ I said, as I tweaked it from the rain-softened earth. That’s what my father always said.

The garden had been Mother’s big thing. Even more than her baking, her tapestry, her pickles and preserves, the immaculateness of her garden was one more demonstration of her superiority over the locals. But it was my father who designed and laid it out.

I always assumed it was because she came from Belfast that she felt she had to show the locals she could do just as well as any country person, but maybe that’s not the reason at all. Certainly, however much anyone might argue for Armagh’s historic status as a city, Mother always insisted it was just a country town and its inhabitants were only country people. When my father commented that Armagh was the ancient capital of Ulster and the ecclesiastical capital of all Ireland, she only laughed. Big words and grand phrases were always ‘a lot o’ nonsense’.

My father, of course, was only a countryman, in her terms. She had been quick to forget that this particular countryman had designed and created both the house and its garden. Indeed, after all the years in which it was ‘her house’ and ‘her garden’, I had almost forgotten myself how much I loved the garden I had helped him to make. Since I stood looking over the familiar flowerbeds, the mug of tea still in my hand, I have wanted to be nowhere else. Through all the hours I’ve spent there, I’ve been so happy, working and listening, remembering things I haven’t thought of for years.

It was Great-aunt Minnie who used to tell me stories about my father. Back in the 1920s, he used to pass the site on which the house is built on his way from the small cottage where he lived to the primary school in Armagh. In the days before school buses, he had plenty of time to think as he walked. She said he started to plan a house on this hillside even then.

The year I was born, 1951, he bought the land. Steeply sloping and without planning permission, it was going cheap. Minnie said my mother thought he was mad. Even if he could ever afford to build on the land, the position was quite unsuitable. It was too far out of town, inconvenient for the shops and school. Worse still, it wasn’t among her own sort. All the neighbours would be Catholic. Later, when building did begin, she said her kitchen would be overlooked by cottages at the top of the hill and that the sitting room had a view of a dreadful old farmyard with a rusting, corrugated-iron hayshed. The other sort, of course. As one would expect.

He met her objections one by one. He bought her a small car and went on using his ancient bicycle to pedal to the shop in English Street where he sold seeds and fertilisers to men in big boots. He worked all the hours there were. If he wasn’t in the shop, he was in the garden. He terraced the slope to the road, built the stonewalls and the rockery, began planting trees and shrubs, laid out the rose garden and the vegetable plot, screened the cottages at the top with willows and the farm at the bottom with chestnuts and sycamores.

I learnt their names before I’d even started school. Sitting on the wheelbarrow drinking tea from his Thermos, I listened while he told me where all the different shrubs and trees were to go, what they liked, how they would grow and what a big girl I would be when they were all just right. That was before the building work started, of course. Once that began, we had our tea with the workmen in their stuffy wooden hut with its paraffin stove. One of them became a great friend of mine, an elderly Catholic called Mick from some unknown place called Mill Row. Until Mother found out, that was.

He was such a silent man, my father. Silent in himself, I mean. Beyond his work and Anacarrig, his greatest pleasure was his books. History and natural history were his great love, but he also enjoyed some poetry. I remember him reciting ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, one day when William Coulter from Tamlaght came to call and found us planting saplings down by the road.

The other thing my father enjoyed was talking to country people like William Coulter. He was slow to get started, and so indeed was William, but with a little encouragement they would tell the most marvellous stories. I had no greater delight in those days than to sit in William’s forge, or the garden, or some unfinished room in the new house and listen to them talk of ‘the olden days’. Never ‘the good old days’, always ‘the olden days’.

My mother hated it when my father told his stories. Whether it was about the olden days or the events of everyday, immediately she got irritated, behaved as if he was somehow wasting time, idling when there was work to be done, and not looking to the future, to a bigger shop with a greater turnover and a higher income. Yet all the time he was creating a house well ahead of its time, stocking seeds and tubers of the newest varieties and planting a garden that only the future would reveal in its full character.

I supposed then it was because she was such a townie and so proud of being brought up in the city with all its life and bustle, that she objected to what she thought were ‘country ways’, but I’m not sure any more. Her hostility seems too deep for that. Sometimes I think she was standing over against the man himself, rejecting the deep sense of self from which all his actions flowed. It’s one of the puzzles in my life that I may never resolve.

It is almost dark now and the cars on the road below me are using dipped headlights. I can see them only momentarily as they pass the bottom of the drive. The seclusion of the garden is complete, as he said it would be.

The house was finished in 1958, when I was seven and Sandy just two. A year later, at the beginning of June, with the garden full of blossom, apple, pear, damson, flowering cherry and hawthorn, he collapsed behind the wooden counter of his shop in English Street, packets of seeds still in his large, square hands. He was dead before the ambulance got down the hill from the hospital.

Mother never forgave him.

And now the garden blossoms again. Another week and it will have reached the same point of growth he left behind that June morning. Some sprays of flowering cherry are out already, and the apple trees in the shelter of the house, and the hawthorn, the May blossom, blooming late in the very last week of the month.

That was one of the worst rows they ever had. If you can call it a row with someone as silently imperturbable as my father. Over the three ancient hawthorns on the right-hand side of the front garden and the broad damp area in front of them. Mother insisted the hawthorns were making the whole corner wet. Nothing would ever grow there, she said, and the gnarled roots were unsightly. Why didn’t he cut them down and clear the place up? He wasn’t surely going to let some ridiculous old superstition stop him. She’d never heard worse, a man with a bit of education talking about fairy-thorns.

But he didn’t cut them down. For a long time he searched around, hoping to discover the source of the spring he was sure was there. But all he found were two large pieces of worked stone that might once have fitted together. So he sank the two pieces in the bare ground among the hawthorn roots to make a sitting place for me. Then he created a small water garden, planting fern and marsh marigold, irises and kingcups.

I have one of those kingcups on my table in the window where I write my letters to Matthew and scribble notes for my work, a brilliant golden eye, looking at me, unblinking, bringing back memories long hidden away. All through my childhood, that small marsh garden with its two smooth, worn pieces of stone was where I played. I had almost completely forgotten the long hours I would spend there absorbed in conversation with one of my ‘friends’.

These friends were seldom actual children from my class at school, or from the cottages and farms nearby. My mother didn’t encourage Sandy or me to bring playmates home. But not having a real person never seemed to trouble me. I’d settle myself on one stone and talk to whichever friend had come to sit on the one opposite to me.

Once there was a little Red Indian girl. That must have been after I’d read the story of Pochahontas and her journey to England. Later, there was a girl who’d been with the children of the New Forest, but who didn’t get into the story. Then there was a Scottish lass who served in the kitchens of Dunluce Castle where my father had taken us on a summer outing.

The more I thought about my stones, the more I recalled the peaceful hours I’d spent sitting lost in reverie. How precious those solitary hours had been. As precious in their special way as the comfort and joy brought by those imaginary friends. Out of sight of the house and my mother’s critical eye I felt safe, yes, but there was more to it than that. There was a calmness about that small corner that made it seem quieter than the rest of the garden. It had, too, a feeling of security that enfolded me without any sense of enclosure. Certainly, I was never happier than when I was there, talking to my friend or just sitting dreaming, wandering through an inner world all of my own making, a world that grew and extended with everything I read or saw and with every story I ever chanced to hear.

And indeed, the slope where my stones rested in the shade of the old thorns was as special to my father as it was to me. He had little cause to go there, there being no grass to mow and no shrubs to prune, but he had done one thing that left me in no doubt at all about his feelings. He had named the dwelling he had long dreamed of building ‘Anacarrig’, and in the tongue of the olden days, ‘Anacarrig’ is ‘the small marsh of the stones’.

3

On the night Mother died, I phoned my dear friend Joan to tell her the news. Joan lives in the ground floor flat below us – a sturdy, silver-haired lady who has lived through eight decades, but only owns up to the fact on rare occasions because she says people treat you as if you have lost your wits if they find out you are over eighty. And Joan is most certainly in full possession of hers. She is more shrewd and wise in her judgement of people and what happens to them than anyone I have ever known.

Matthew and I carried down all our houseplants for her to look after while we were away. We found her waiting for us by her door, a freshly opened bottle of whiskey in her hand.

‘Drink up, my dears, it’ll help you sleep,’ she insisted, pouring generous measures for us both. ‘The most important thing to do in the face of death is to celebrate life,’ she pronounced, as she eased her stiff limbs into her special upright armchair. ‘You must be willing to accept how you feel. There’s no use pretending you’re coping if you’re not. If misery is inevitable, relax and get on with it. It will pass. All things pass, however ghastly.’

With her strong voice and Cheltenham Ladies’ College accent, Joan could strike you as quite overbearing when she holds forth, but I had long ago grasped the true character of what lay behind the briskness of manner. Joan’s life had been full of difficulties and her struggles had left their mark, but she was a musician of great talent and when she played for you she revealed herself, a woman of deep sensitivity and compassion.

‘You’ll ring me, won’t you, Deirdre, if I can be any use whatever. Going through your mother’s things won’t be easy. You never know what’s going to come upon you, my dear, especially if it’s someone close. Things you’ve forgotten, or things you never knew, just pop up. You may find it very trying, especially as you’ll be on your own,’ she said firmly, as we stepped out into the hallway and said our goodbyes.

A week later, four hundred miles away, kneeling on a pink bedroom carpet, tears trickling down my face, I heard her words echo in my ears and longed for the comfort of her overcrowded sitting room and the hiss and bubble of its antiquated gas fire.

Armagh Gazette, it said, in Gothic script on the paper bag I held in my hands. ‘Newspaper and General Printing Offices, Office Requisites and Stationery Stockists, Largest stock of books in the City.’

At the bottom of the deepest drawer in Mother’s dressing table, hidden underneath a leather handbag full of receipts and the spare parts for her heated rollers, I’d found this paper bag: it contained two unused hardbacked notebooks. I had bought them with my prize money from the ‘Living in Armagh’ essay competition. The same paper bag the assistant slid them into, fresh and shiny as the day I bought them.

I wiped my eyes crossly and counted on my fingers. Yes, 1969. That would have been it. The Easter holiday before my A level. I could almost feel the chill of the early April day when I cycled into Armagh to see what I could find to spend my prize money on. I went into the Gazette office and at first I just couldn’t make up my mind. I was so confused by the array of exercise books, notebooks, files and folders laid out on the broad counters, I turned away and went and looked at the books instead.

I walked up and down the tall display cases where I had spent my tokens and chosen my prizes since I was old enough to read. And then, on a counter right at the furthest end of the shop, I saw the pile of blue notebooks. ‘Challenge’, they said, in gold lettering on the spine.

‘That’s what I want,’ I said out loud, and a woman buying paper doilies stared at me, as I pounced on one of them to find out how much they were. To my delight the prize money would pay for two.

My joy was unbounded. Those two shiny notebooks, full of smooth, unwritten pages, were a hope and a dream. I had such plans for filling all the space they offered me. As I cycled back to Anacarrig with the blustering east wind behind me, my jacket billowing, thinking of what I might write in them, my spirits soared so high that I felt I might take off into the dazzling sky and make a circuit of the city.

‘What kept you?’

I could see the anger in her face, because she thought I’d been gone too long. Then came the inquisition as to where I’d been, who I’d met. She hadn’t believed me when I said I’d just been looking at books and buying some notebooks.

‘Not surprising they disappeared, is it?’ I said to the empty room, as I wiped my eyes again. ‘That was in another country and besides the wench is dead.’ She was hardly a wench, but she was certainly dead.

Joan was right. You really couldn’t guess what was going to jump up and hit you and there was no use pretending it didn’t hurt. Here in my hands I held a dream that had been taken away, not just by the loss of my precious notebooks which I couldn’t afford to replace, but by all the pressures and obliqueness a mother can bring to bear on a daughter.

If I were being charitable I might try to justify her action by saying she was simply ensuring I had no possible distraction from my work for A level. But the facts wouldn’t support me even if I tried, for no matter what I wrote, she always found a way of suggesting that my writing, like my reading, was a self-indulgent activity even when school and exams were long behind me. It could have no value whatever, because she could never see any connection between it and earning my living.

‘Have a bit of sense, Deirdre. When did reading a book ever pay an electric bill? Tell me that? An’ where would you’n Sandy be today if I’d sat on my backside and scribbled at stories or read books?’

I put the notebooks down where my dripping tears could not spatter the bright covers and hunted in the pockets of my jeans for a hanky. There wasn’t one, only a screwed up pink tissue with a lipstick print on it. I unfolded it meticulously, wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

Then, suddenly, I heard my own voice echo in the empty room, a voice I barely recognised. Strong and firm, with no trace of tears or the choke I could still feel in my throat, it said: ‘So what are you going to do now, Deirdre Weston? You’ve got your notebooks back. You’ve got a life of your own. There’s no one to stop you now. What about it?’

I hadn’t got an answer, but I got to my feet, picked them up and carried them along the landing to the table in my own room. As I set them down, I nodded reassuringly to the golden eye of the kingcup I’d brought up from the small marsh of the stones. Something would come to help me.

4

I still don’t know what possessed me, whether I was overconfident, or curious, or prompted by some inner need I couldn’t explain, but on the Sunday morning after the funeral, I decided to do what I hadn’t done since I’d packed my bags and left home for good. I rang Mr Neill, our one and only Protestant neighbour and asked for a lift to church.

The short journey into the city was no problem. It was a beautiful sunny morning, the light spilling through the newly-leafed trees. William Neill is a retired farmer who knew my father well. He talked about the weather and the sudden surge of growth in the fields and gardens in just the way my father would have done. It was as we drove down the Mall, I realised I should never have come. It was seeing Mother’s parking space that did it.

The moment we drove past the spot, waves of nausea hit me, my light spring suit felt like tweed and the strong white shape of the Courthouse began to waver uncertainly. It was here, under the trees, by the side of the broad, green oblong that lies like an oasis in the heart of the city, close by the grey-faced church where she worshipped that we arrived well before the service was due to begin for the express purpose of ‘seeing all the style’. No one who passed within range escaped her comment. She knew everyone and everything about their affairs.

‘See you later, Deirdre. I’ll leave her parked opposite the Orange Hall in case you’re out first. I never lock her. The boyos would be afraid to steal her, she only goes for me.’

I just about managed to say a thank-you as William drove off to the parish church in a cloud of fumes, leaving me standing at the foot of the worn stone steps that led steeply up to the dark vestibule of the plain, square Presbyterian edifice I had been forced to visit week after week, month after month, for all the years I had lived at Anacarrig.

By the wrought-iron railings children were eyeing each other. Newly released from Sunday school, they shoved and pushed surreptitiously, while keeping a watchful eye out for their parents who would soon be arriving for the service.

‘If anyone speaks to you and asks you how you are or how you’re doing at school, just say, “Very well, thank you.” That’s quite enough. Don’t tell them any of your business. People only speak to you on account of me and they don’t want to listen to any of your nonsense, especially on a Sunday.’

No, it was absolutely no use telling myself Mother was dead. Her presence was as tangible as if she were alive and well. And she’d be there inside as well, waiting for me.

I still wonder why I didn’t turn and walk away then. Perhaps someone spoke to me, but it’s more likely I simply lost all power to act. I just went on into the building, walked down the aisle as I’d done so many hundred times before, and sat down in our family pew. I even bowed my head in prayer. ‘Only for a minute, of course. You don’t keep your head down and pray for this one and that one, you can do that at home. People will think you’re showing off if you do that. Just do what I do and you’ll be right.’

I jerked my head upright and stared at the wooden pulpit, the focus of all that went on in this particular rite. No cross, no candles, no stained glass. Just a large wooden box of a pulpit and behind it, blocking the east end, the pipes of the organ. As a child, my eye had gone round and round the church looking for some interesting feature to rest upon. There had been nothing then and there was nothing now, except the broad pastel spaces of the unadorned walls and ceiling. Through endless hours of boredom I had covered those spaces in drawings and paintings. Bigger than the biggest drawing book, or the generous sheets of grey paper for free expression in school, those spaces were my comfort, my defence against the torrent of angry words which poured down upon us, Sunday after Sunday.

At the age of twelve, when I learned that Michelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it came as no surprise to me. I simply assumed he had suffered as I had and had come up with the same solution to save his sanity.

A door clicked open at the foot of the pulpit and the choir filed in self-consciously. I had once been a member of that choir and a Sunday school teacher as well. I had read the lessons on Children’s Sunday and sung solos at Harvest. I had been complimented afterwards by various old ladies and the good-natured verger and then I had been stripped down by Mother.

‘You weren’t nearly loud enough, couldn’t hear you behind a wet newspaper. You must remember half those men at the back of the church are deaf.’

‘Then why don’t they sit at the front?’

‘Don’t you be cheeky with me. You know perfectly well that no one sits at the front.’

There were never any answers to Mother, only the answers she expected from you. And woe betide you when you couldn’t come up with them.

She would sit throughout the service, her large family Bible unopened on her knee, a look of concentration on her face. Once home again, over lunch, she would declare her verdict on the congregation. It always seemed to me she was more acutely aware of the sins of her fellow men and women than the Almighty. Had He been a member of her staff and fulfilled His promises of retribution so ineffectually, He would most certainly have been given the push.

‘I don’t know how that man can sit there on a Sunday with his shoes shining, the way he’s carrying on with your woman in Lonsdale Street. Bold as brass he is, goes in and out, doesn’t care who sees him. Brings her bunches of flowers. At her age. And him with two good-looking sons and one of them the manager of Lipton’s.’

A voluminous, black figure appeared at the foot of the pulpit stair, mounted purposefully, ran his eye over the congregation and threw his arms in the air.

‘Brethren, let us ask forgiveness for our manifold sins.’

I bowed my head gratefully. I prayed for the energy to stand up and slip noiselessly down the aisle, now, when no one could stare at me too obviously, because they were supposed to be bowed in prayer.

But my prayer went unanswered. My legs received no strengthening power and my hands began to sweat profusely. I could shield my eyes from this ranting figure, but about my ears I could do nothing.

How I got through that service I shall never know. I remember I kept hallucinating on the sight of William Neill’s battered car. I could see myself crossing the road, hurrying across the White Walk and along the side of the cricket pitch to where it would be parked, but instead I sat with my head throbbing for over an hour, unable to shut out anything going on around me or coming back to me from a past so painful I had been doing my best to forget it for years.

When the organ finally gave the signal to depart, I had to hold on to the pew in front of me as I got to my feet. Of walking back down the aisle, I remember nothing. A crush of bodies in the vestibule, words I couldn’t distinguish. And then, the miracle. I have never stopped believing in miracles. Parked at the foot of the steps where no one except the minister ever parks was William Neill’s car.

He’d spotted me before I was able to distinguish his bent figure among the departing worshippers.

‘In you get, Deirdre,’ he said as he opened the door for me. ‘You got good value this mornin’. Our man must have been wantin’ his lunch.’

Dear William Neill. The sight of his whiskery brown face did more to restore my faith in humanity than a visitation from a whole delegation of angels. I sat back in my seat and watched the dispersing crowds who wandered in front of the car as if we were parked in a pedestrian area rather than waiting at a stop line to cross the main Armagh to Portadown road.

‘They’re always like this on Sunday mornin’,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So full o’ the Holy Spirit they think nuthin can git them.’

I laughed then, but inside my head I added, ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with the belief business. That’s why I want no part of it.’ As far as I could see belief was all about insulating yourself from the reality of life and particularly from anything you’d rather not face up to. I was sure at that moment that nothing would ever get me back inside a church ever again.

‘Look, Deirdre, look.’

We lurched to a halt with a disregard for the cars behind us equal to that of the pedestrians who had strolled across in front of us. I followed the pointing finger into the brilliant triangle of sky between the roof of the Courthouse and the distant twin spires of the Roman Catholic cathedral.

He said they were pigeons, but I could see only doves. Pure white against the blue, they were circling in close formation, rising and falling in an aerial ballet that was a pure delight.

Suddenly, I saw another dove and remembered immediately the small church where I had found it. Back last March, working on an article for Travelling East, I had driven around Norfolk and Suffolk visiting churches from a list the editor had made for me. The church with the dove was not a grand one, rather small as East Anglian parish churches go, with no beautiful glass or carving, but full of a marvellously clear light and a deep stillness. In the south aisle, on a tomb chest, I found a stone statue of St Francis and the dove was in his hands. At his feet someone had arranged a handful of violets in a piece of bark filled with moss.

I looked around me. The church was full of flowers, as it would be, the week after Easter. There were sprays of blossom, jugs of daffodils, some irises and forsythia and beech leaves just beginning to unfurl. Nothing from shops or garden centres. Some of the arrangements were in clean jam pots, some in metal troughs full of chickenwire, where fronds of ivy had been used to cover up disintegrating, much-used oasis and spots of rust. Offerings made in love that meant something to the people who made them. I so envied them.

As I knelt down to take my pictures of the gentle saint, whose story I have always loved, I thought of the generations of knees that had worn the chancel step, the bottoms that had polished smooth the ancient wooden benches. I knew I envied them too.

When I stood up, a great shaft of sunlight pierced the piled white cloud and filled the south aisle with sudden brightness, picking out every detail of the bareheaded saint. I lingered as long as I could, reluctant to go, but I got very cold and began to feel anxious about all I still had to do. I returned the key, as I had been instructed, to the peg basket in the garden shed of the cottage directly across the road, and drove off rather faster than I should have done.

‘Home James and don’t spare the horses,’ said William as we drew up at the foot of the drive. ‘Are you sure you won’t come on down for a bit of lunch? There’ll be a roast an shure only the two of us to eat it.’

I thanked him as I got out, explained I was expecting a call from Sandy and walked as quickly as my high heels would let me up the steep drive.

It may have been the fumes from the car, or the thought of a Sunday roast, but as I turned the key in the front door I had to make a dash for it. I just made it to the downstairs loo.

After I was sick, I did feel better though I looked absolutely dreadful. I took some tablets for my head, got out of my suit and wandered round the house drinking tumblers of cold water. I couldn’t think what had brought on so bad a head.

The afternoon had clouded over and the empty rooms felt stuffy and chill at the same time. The dim light showed up the grubby windows and made the carpets look dull and cheerless. I felt my spirits droop. I knew I must find something to do.

That was when I got it wrong again. I went upstairs to my table, took up the first of the blue notebooks and filled my pen. I would write about what had happened in church. I would set it all down, describe all the people, all the unease in their manner and their being, the boom of the men who never looked at each other when they talked, the women who wore such elegant clothes and yet scurried into their pews as if they were doing their best not to be seen.

I sat and stared at the smooth page, the page which offered such promise only a day ago. Nausea overwhelmed me. How could I ever write about what I’d experienced, ever sort out the tangled feelings, the confusions that came upon me? How could I ever write about anything?

Pain oscillated in my head. The white page broke up into jagged fragments. I staggered to my feet, heard the crash as my chair fell over. ‘No, no,’ I cried. ‘I can’t write about it. I can’t think about it. I can’t bear what I see . . . Leave me alone . . . leave me alone.’

I ran from the room, tripped on the landing carpet and just managed not to fall downstairs. Ran through the hall and out of the house and on down the drive. Cars whizzed past continually on the main road but I scarcely noticed them as I ran on, not knowing what I was doing or where I was. The pain in my head was so bad nothing seemed to matter any more. I just kept on running.

5

The roar of the cars grew in my ears, louder and louder as I drew closer to the foot of the drive where the gates stood open to the road. I ran on. My chest felt tight, my breathing was hard and laboured, my head throbbed as if it were ready to explode. Suddenly, I turned aside and dived through the shrubbery, as if I’d hit an invisible wall, breaking twigs and scratching my hands as I fought my way through the overlapping branches. I pitched headlong out of their shadow and threw myself down on the sunken stones beneath the three ancient hawthorns my father refused to cut down.

I lay there sobbing violently, indifferent to the rub of the gnarled roots and the dampness of the grass. My tears dripped down on to one of the well-worn stones and blurred its familiar outline.

‘You fool, you fool,’ I whispered, despairingly. ‘You should never have come. It’s your own fault completely.’

Sandy and Matthew had urged me not to stay on at Anacarrig. The clearing-out could all be done in a week, they said, once Matthew was back from India, if the three of us did it together. But I’d had to cancel my flight to India because Mother was still with us and now she was gone I couldn’t get another. I had the time; they hadn’t. Besides, I argued, I’d masses of things I wanted to do as well as sort out the house. There were people I wanted to see, places I’d once known that I wanted to revisit and I was longing to spend time with Helen, my oldest friend. Besides, I said, I could work just as easily at Anacarrig as in London.

I meant every word I said, but neither Sandy nor Matthew were happy with my plan. Sandy simply announced I was mad to try it and left it at that; Matthew reasoned with me, as he would always do, questioned me closely and tried to understand why this staying on had suddenly become so important to me.

The night before he left, we lay awake in the moonlight after we’d made love. ‘Promise me you’ll be very careful, darling,’ he said, anxiously. ‘Promise me you won’t stick it out, if it really should go bad on you. Promise me you’ll just pack, go home and wait till I’m back.’

I turned in his arms and hugged him. Through all our time together I had suffered periods of depression, sometimes so bad I wasn’t able to work, because the simplest phone call was more than I could manage.

We did what we could ourselves, exploring old memories and all manner of painful, half-forgotten things. We’d taken advice and had real help from a close friend of Matthew’s – his contemporary at medical school. And with each year of our marriage, the depressions lessened in length and intensity. But they had never gone away completely. Matthew knew how vulnerable I still was. A word, a memory, a dream: it took so little to set the darkness going again.

‘I won’t do anything silly, love, you know I won’t,’ I reassured him. ‘You know I’ll never break my promise.’

I felt him shiver. I wished I hadn’t mentioned that particular promise. Some years earlier, in the midst of a really black depression, I admitted that often, when it gripped me, I just wanted to run out into the darkness and never come back, because the sheer pain of existing was more than I could bear. If it were not for him, I’d said, nothing in the world would stop me.

He had been quite beside himself and I’d ended up having to comfort him. It was then I had solemnly promised him that I would never, never harm myself however bad the pain.

‘Oh Matthew, my love,’ I whispered, my tears pouring down ever faster onto the bare stone beneath my cheek, ‘I promised you I’d be all right and I’ve got it all wrong. There’s no one else can help me but you and you’re far away.’

I clutched my aching head, racked by the violence of my sobs, absolutely at the end of my tether. ‘What shall I do? What ever shall I do?’

How long I lay there I don’t know, but after a time, I grew quieter and lay still, too exhausted to move, my cheek pressed to the surface of one piece of stone, my arm thrown out across the other. Quite suddenly, I had a sense that someone was watching me.

The idea was quite ridiculous. Besides, what did it matter if anyone did see me? No one could help me now. No one. But, despite my despair, my curiosity got the better of me. I rolled over and sat up, my eyes still wet with tears.

A girl stood looking down at me, her large, grey eyes full of concern. She was about sixteen or seventeen. She wore a light tunic of creamy-white fabric tied with a brightly-coloured woven girdle and she had long hair, as dark as my own but much longer. Her bare legs and arms were tanned to a warm honey colour. In the crook of her arm she carried a small pitcher and in her other hand she held a bunch of kingcups just like the ones coming into bloom a few yards from where I sat.

As our eyes met, she spoke to me, but I could make no sense of the words she used and nothing of what she said.

She went on talking to me, her voice light and pleasing, her tone reassuring. She must have thought I was troubled by her presence. But I wasn’t. Just puzzled and confused.

After a little while, she set down her pitcher, placed the flowers gently on the grass beside it and held out her hands to me, the palms spread wide to show me they were empty. I stared at her fascinated, watching every graceful movement and gesture. Everything about her – the tunic, the thonged sandals, the pitcher she had carried, the words she spoke – came out of another age, yet she herself seemed so familiar, like someone I knew well but could not for the moment place.

I wiped my eyes and told her who I was. I could see she didn’t understand me any more than I understood her, but as I watched, I saw her make up her mind about something and step towards me. To my astonishment, she put her hand on my forehead. It was so cool and comforting. Holding one hand steady on my forehead, she began to move the other gently across my neck and shoulders. She pressed lightly on the rigid muscles and worked her way down my spine to my waist.

The coolness of her hand eased the throbbing in my head so quickly I could scarcely believe it. Wherever she touched me there was a warm, tingling feeling which spread out as she went on talking to me. Although I still couldn’t understand her actual words, it was obvious she was telling me who she was and how she came to be here, today, when I had such need of her.

Sitting there, her hands on my head and back, I realised I felt perfectly calm and at ease while the pain in my head had simply melted away. I closed my eyes. Instantly, as if I were viewing a film, I began to see the girl whose hands rested upon me moving through scene after scene of her own life. As I followed the images, I grasped what she’d been trying to tell me. Not the details, of course, but enough. I looked up at her and smiled. Her life had been no easier than mine.

When she smiled back at me, it was such a gentle, warm smile, the smile of someone I felt I had always known. Looking up at her, it was just like meeting someone you know so well in a context where you don’t expect them. Once, in the Ladies at Euston Station I came face to face with a girl I’d been at school with. Instant recognition, but total puzzlement as to how and where we’d known each other.

Here and now, I just couldn’t place this girl. I could give her no name. At the same time, I was absolutely sure her presence was bringing back to me some shared experience I had somehow managed to forget.

She folded her hands together, laid her head against them and closed her eyes. When she opened them again and nodded to me, her meaning was quite clear. I ought to go and sleep. She was quite right. I was absolutely exhausted. But I couldn’t just get up and walk away when she had been so kind to me.

I stretched out my hand to touch her. To my surprise she drew back, a look of concern on her face. After a moment, she bent down, chose a bloom from the bunch of kingcups she had laid so carefully on the ground, and handed the flowering stem to me. Our fingers brushed and she was gone.

I sat quite still, alone in the quiet of the afternoon, the whizz of cars a distant mutter beyond the density of the shrubbery. I stared at the bright golden eye of the kingcup with the single unfolding bud at its side. I gazed around hopefully as if perhaps she might have moved into the shrubbery, though I knew perfectly well she had gone.

I made an enormous effort, got up and walked unsteadily back to the house, clutched the banisters as I climbed the stairs and went into my room. I must have fallen asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

The heat of noonday burned in a cloudless sky. On the great mound nothing moved but the shimmer of haze above the baked earth which had been worn bare in the preceding weeks by the movements of men and horses. Since the Festival of Beltane it had been fine. Day followed day of warmth and sunshine with only the slightest of showers in the night to settle the dust and bring freshness to the early dawn.

Deara had loved every moment of the unexpected fine spell. After the raw chill of the previous months, the confinement to hut and storeroom, the smoke of fires, the scratch of her heavy wool cloak and the lingering odours of horses and penned cattle, she revelled in the sudden freedom like the wild creatures themselves.

In the first weeks she covered miles everyday, doing the old woman’s bidding with pleasure. Coming back each evening footsore and wolf-hungry for the evening stew, her arms and satchel full of bark and flowers and leaves, she had trudged up the dusty path to the main gate and known herself happy. It was the first time such happiness had come to her. And it frightened her. Surely such joy was not given to mortal kind. Perhaps it was some jest of the gods to make her thus so happy that they might cast her down and humble her.

Now, as she reached the edge of the wood and began the short, steep climb again, she knew joy had gone. Today, the sun was no longer her friend. He, who had warmed her and brought flowers blossoming from the damp earth, was now an enemy, a cruel white eye, who mocked her sadness, who rejoiced at the end to her freedom, who would shine on through the months of her sixteenth summer, whether she were to survive the coming time or not.

She tossed back her long dark hair impatiently and ran a brown arm across her brow where beads of perspiration gleamed on her high, pale forehead. The flowers were wilting already though she had picked them only in the water-meadows beyond the wood. She cradled them in her right arm, pulled her tunic higher within her woven belt and stepped out of the cool shade of the wood.

Perhaps it was too late already, though she had been as quick as she could. Conor had said Merdaine would not see another sunset, and indeed, in the night, when she sat by the bedplace with her, she thought the old woman would not greet another dawn. But she had.

In the first dim light she had stirred and spoken to her, but Deara had not understood. The old woman seemed to be speaking another language, one she had never heard before. The words were perfectly clear, she was not wandering in her mind, like other old people she had seen die, nor was it like the wound fever of warriors when they called to comrades or lovers in their pain. No, Merdaine’s words had meaning and they were meant for her, she felt sure, but she could make nothing of them.

And neither could Conor. She could tell that from his face. Not that Conor would ever admit to such a thing. How could he, a Druid, a King’s Druid at that, skilled in all the knowledges of this world, the other world and the world beyond? How could he possibly admit that he did not understand?

Conor had simply pretended not to hear. He had busied himself with trimming the candles before the God, moving them so that the deep-set stone features took on their most benign aspect. Conor was a great believer in getting the patterns right. Merdaine was not and their wills had often clashed. ‘No,’ Merdaine would say, ‘that is not the way, not for this man, in this place, in this time.’ Yes, one must acknowledge the God and make due sacrifice, she would agree, but not all power lay in the hands of the God, even the mighty Nodons, the deity served by all who sought to heal men by words or deeds.

Deara toiled up the steep slope with all the speed she could manage. The guards on the gate were half asleep, but it was no matter. The air was so still and heavy you could feel the movement of a rider as far away as the river. Beyond the gate she threaded her way between crowded huts and empty cattle pens. Dogs stirred and went back to sleep again as she passed, her leather sandals making almost no noise in the deep dust. She looked neither to right nor left, her eyes firmly fixed on the low doorway of a larger wooden hut beyond and behind the King’s Hall. With a sigh of relief she saw that the door-hanging was still in place. It had not been tied back to let the spirit go. Merdaine yet lived.

Without a sound, Deara entered the hut and knelt by the low couch now pulled out into the centre of the dim room. The candles had burned low, but Conor was asleep, his head hung down on his chest. He snuffled rather than snored, like a sleeping dog hunting rabbits in a dream.

Deara took the old woman’s hand and laid the flowers below it. They were kingcups, broad and gold, the flowers she had asked for when she roused at mid-morning. They gleamed even in the dim light.

Merdaine stirred, her eyes flickered open.

‘Child, you are early back today, you cannot have finished your tasks, why is that?’

Deara looked at the dark eyes and saw in them a look she already knew. A look of slight preoccupation, as if already the eyes were fixed on something else, a person beyond this person, a place beyond this place.

To her great consternation Deara found her own eyes were full of tears. Tears. How could she? When Merdaine had taught her always to celebrate the going, to go herself as far as she might with the departing spirit, both for the sake of the departing one and for her own sake, that she should be wiser when the time of her own going should come to her.

Deara blinked in the vain hope that Merdaine would not have seen. But she knew that Merdaine had always been able to see whatever she chose to see. Even with her eyes closed, Merdaine could see with her heart.

Today the old woman did not rebuke her. Instead, she smiled a strange half smile and closed her fingers round the soft blooms, caressing them gently like something very precious to her.

‘He sleeps still?’ she asked softly.

Deara nodded.

‘Then come close to me and listen. Come, let me whisper to you like I did when you were a child, when you crept to your bedplace and wept by yourself because others had mocked you. Come, for you see true. My work is finished in this place. It will soon be time for Conor to stir himself and do his part. Come now, lie close.’

Deara stretched out on the rushes, her arms above her head, her slim body as close to the old woman as the wooden frame of the couch permitted. Thus she had lain for all her sixteen years, to sleep and to weep, for often the two had come together in that only time in the long, busy day when she might turn her back upon the world, a world where she had no place except as Merdaine’s handmaiden.

She felt the press of the rushes through her thin tunic. They were only a few days old and still had a smell of greenness about them. Like the water-meadows that morning. Tears once again welled in her eyes and she did not know whether it was the memory of all these golden days, now ended, or fear of the future, or the loss of the one person in all the world who had protected her.

‘Do not weep, child.’

Deara had made no sound, no body movement, but Merdaine had put out a thin hand and touched her hair.

‘Listen now, and hold to my words that they may guide you. Your heart is soft and quick to sorrow, but your head is strong and firm. Use your head as a warrior uses his shield. Harden it by use and by discipline as a warrior does, but never think it is the greatest part of you. For that which is weak and soft is your real strength. It will guide you in the darkest ways and in the strangest of unknown places. Remember when Emain is no more, when sword and fire seem masters of all the earth, that light grows out of darkness, that without evil we cannot know good. You are a child of light for you know darkness at noon. You will heal many, and many will speak the name of Emain with love for your sake. But a time will come when Emain will speak no longer . . . its kings and heroes gone . . .’

The voice faded to nothing and Deara felt the hand slip from her hair. She got up quickly and saw Merdaine struggle for breath.

‘Up, child, up.’

Merdaine’s hand jerked imperiously, a familiar gesture of a woman accustomed to being obeyed, now in contrast to the whispered tones of her command.

Deara lifted her to a sitting position and supported the frail body in her arms.

‘Two things more,’ she gasped.

With an effort of will Merdaine drew breath into her lungs. Deara heard the ominous bubble of fluid and knew clearly, as Merdaine herself did, how little time remained. She felt the pain as if it were her own pain, the choking tightness as if it were her own lungs struggling for air, and the urgency as if it were her own need to speak.

‘Gently, Merdaine, gently,’ she whispered, as she stroked the damp grey hair from the old woman’s brow.

‘The Gods protect your gentleness, child. If I have been too hard on you, you will come to understand why it was so. I have taught you all I know of healing and the world. To heal others you must heal yourself first. That will ever take you into danger. But if you have done as your heart speaks then help will come in your sorest need. But you must trust that it will come. Remember that above all things.’

Merdaine paused, her head hanging forward on her chest. Her eyes flickered round the room, taking in the squat, sleeping figure of the Druid, the candles burning straight and sharp, the dark stone eyes of the God. They came to rest on a wooden chest in the shadows. The metal clasp reflected one of the candle flames.

‘Take my brooch to Morrough. Tell him Merdaine asks that he keep his promise. He will make you an offer, or his brehon will. But do not let him frighten you. Whatever he says, make up your own mind.’

Deara felt the tension relax in the narrow shoulders. Something had moved. Something was different. A darkness had passed, though she knew not what it was. She bent to kiss the old woman. She had never kissed her before.

At her touch the half-closed eyes opened. They seemed to focus on her face and yet Deara could not feel sure that it was she whom Merdaine actually saw. But suddenly Merdaine’s eyes were smiling.

‘Have a good journey, my little one, both you and your friend in another time. Here, I give you a parting gift of what you already have. For you both, and for all of your kind, who have love in your hearts, I give you the sign of healing.’

Deara felt the soft touch of the kingcups against her wrist and watched the pale tide gently erase from the familiar face both the brown of wind and weather and the lines of wisdom and experience.

The weight in her arms grew heavy. The spirit had flown like a lark into a summer sky, but the frail body breathed a little and swallowed before it was finally still.

Only then did Deara lay the old woman gently back on the couch and gather up the blooms which had slid from her open hand and scattered across the woven rug. For a moment she cradled the flowers in her hands as she would a newborn child. Then, looking down at the sharpening lines of Merdaine’s face, she said over again to herself, ‘If you do as your heart speaks, then in your sorest need, help will come. But you must trust that it will come.’

She put the kingcups into a pitcher of spring water in the farthest corner of the hut. Then, taking a deep breath, she crossed to the doorway, took up the corner of the door-hanging and standing on tiptoe, tied it up by its leather thongs.

The sunlight, lower now, but still fierce, dazzled her as it poured round her, filling the hut with light. For a moment, she shut her eyes and heard her heart cry out its own farewell. Then, only half aware of what she did, she knelt in the dust to the left of the door, turned towards the west and began to recite in a voice she barely recognised, the welcome to Nodons, the giver of life within life, the bringer of life beyond life.

When I woke it was quite dark and yet my eyes felt dazzled as if by strong sunlight. For a moment, I had no idea what had happened or where I was.

Gradually the dim outlines of my room took shape around me. It was much too dark to see the face of my watch, but beyond the undrawn curtains the sky was pricked with stars. Faint moonlight made pale patches on the wallpaper and caught the bright petals of a kingcup in a glass vase on my table by the window.

Memory flowed back as I burrowed deeper into the soft hollow of the duvet where I had lain down, just as I was, when I staggered back from the garden exhausted after the throbbing pain of that fearsome headache. Startled, I realised that I’d had a full-blown migraine and not a trace of it was left. Not only had the pain completely vanished but there was no hint at all of the nausea that usually lingers long after the pain itself has gone. Apart from my cold arms, chilled by the flow of night air through the open window, I was so blissfully warm and comfortable that I felt I never wanted to move again.

For a little while I lay quite still just enjoying the wonderful sense of being free from pain. Then I began to recall the dream from which I’d woken, an intensely vivid dream full of detail still fresh in my mind. Unlike those dreams that evaporate the moment you wake up and try to catch them, this one was crystal clear and so absorbing I found I could rerun it like a video I had made.

‘Now I know what her name is,’ I said out loud, amazed that it had only just struck me.

Her name was Deara. She had just been bereaved, as I had. But how different her situation. She had loved the old woman who had died in her arms. With her gone, Deara would be lonely and vulnerable. I didn’t see myself as having those problems as a result of losing my mother.

The old woman’s name was Merdaine. I whispered it over and over again. I was sure I’d heard it before, somewhere. But nothing came to me. I always forget that the harder you try to remember something the less likely you are to succeed. So I tried to put it out of mind and hoped it would come of its own accord.

I still felt very reluctant to move and break the spell of comfort and well-being that enveloped me, but I had needs that would wait no longer. I was desperate for a pee and I was absolutely ravenous.

The fluorescent lights in the kitchen are hard on the eyes at the best of times. Tonight they were unbearable. Hastily, I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes, stuck it on a tray with a jug of milk and a spoon and carried it down the hall to the sitting room.

A small sliver of moon was rising above the trees down by the road. It cast long shadows across the lawn, as I stood by the window, munching devotedly. Outside, everything was still. Not a single car whizzed past on the road. Not even a bird rustled on its roost in the shrubbery. I thought of all that had happened since William Neill dropped me at the foot of the drive after church. I found it hard to believe I could have experienced so much, in such a short time, and feel so incredibly different at the end of it.

The sitting room clock struck twelve. I laughed aloud. No, my ball gown was not going to turn to rags. I felt quite clear in my mind that what I’d been given was not going to disappear. But I was equally sure that it was up to me to decide exactly what I did with it and whether I was willing to accept what might grow from my experience in the weeks to come, while I dealt with the business that had brought me back to this house and led me to re-encounter the life I had once lived within its limits.

Surprised at how very calm I felt, despite my rising sense of excitement at the prospect, I went back to the kitchen, made some coffee and spread a thick slice of bread with honey. I couldn’t remember when bread and honey had tasted so good. I drank my coffee, left cup and crumby plate on the draining board with the empty cornflake bowl, rinsed my fingers and ran back upstairs to my room.

As I went in, it was bright enough to see the blue notebooks sitting on my table. I paused only for a moment before I drew the curtains together, switched on my Anglepoise, unscrewed the top of my pen and began to write.

This time, there was no problem. I had something to set down that I couldn’t wait to begin. It must be written now, before even another minute should pass. The sharpness and vividness of what I had experienced today mustn’t be lost or allowed to dull with the passage of time. And the words came without deliberate thought and almost without any effort at all.

6

It was two o’clock in the morning when I put down my pen, pulled off my clothes and crawled back under the crumpled duvet, but when I woke next morning and saw what I had written I was so excited by it I ran downstairs full of a bubbling sense of joy. It was so strong that even the dreary list of jobs I jotted down while I drank my second cup of coffee could not extinguish it.

‘A touch of the Monday shit,’ my friend Sheila would say. She has three children under ten and a husband passionate about all kinds of do-it-yourself. She dreads Monday morning. Left to face the wreckage of the weekend, she steels herself for that moment, back from school, when she pushes open the front door, walks through the empty house and sizes up the full enormity of the task that faces her.

Today I would be keeping her company. The estate agent was coming on Wednesday, so the debris generated by the funeral and our attempts at a preliminary sort would have to be dealt with and the whole house made clean and tidy. And then, there was the woodwork.

I sighed. Beautifully painted only two years ago, the white woodwork throughout the house had suffered a year of Mother’s cigarette smoke and a year of neglect. Sandy and I had tried wiping a damp cloth over one of the worst bits. We’d produced a dirty streak and confirmed the source of the nasty smell we noticed the moment we stepped into the closed up rooms. There was masses of it; doors, skirtings, picture rails, banisters, windows, built-in shelves and assorted ledges.

I put on the immersion, heated up enough water for a home confinement and got stuck in. I really did surprise myself. Whether I was so far away inside my head that I didn’t notice what I was doing, or whether I had a sudden burst of energy, I don’t know, but by lunch time I’d done so well I reckoned I could allow myself to go out into the garden.

I’d already made a beginning, but the flowerbeds were still a sorry sight. Encouraged by the sudden warmth, weeds were growing even more vigorously than the carefully chosen perennials, tall plants leant at drunken angles or squashed less lofty specimens, while winter’s damage had left behind empty spaces and dead foliage. My fingers itched to put things right, to restore the shape and form my father had created, a shape and form my mother had never troubled herself to modify. Somehow I felt I owed it to my father to restore what he had so lovingly created.

Morning and evening I did whatever needed doing indoors, but through most of the long hours of daylight I worked in the garden, following the shadows on the flowerbeds so I could move plants that were overcrowded and fill up the empty spaces that spoilt the overall effect. And from the moment I picked up a trowel everything I had learnt from my father came back to me.

‘Yes, that’s all very well,’ he would say, when I read out the instructions on the back of a packet of seeds. ‘Not all plants have read the book, you know.’

That’s what he used always to say when some job needed doing at the wrong time of day, or in the wrong season, or to the wrong plant.

‘If you move a plant when it’s in flower, it will die,’ he would say cheerfully, as he dug it up and carried it carefully across the garden. ‘Seedlings should be potted up when they are two inches high,’ he would intone as he gently separated the roots from a flourishing boxful three times that height. ‘A plant is more interested in growth than in obeying the rules,’ he would say dryly. ‘Plants can’t read books, they just get on with what they need to do.’

He would have been proud of me those first few days when I pruned and moved and planted out with a gay abandon quite at odds with my normal caution. And not a single seedling wilted. Things grew as if they were grateful for being given the space they needed, the light and air they craved.

Everything I touched flourished as if by magic. And then the day the spirea bloomed, its branches weighed down with clusters of delicate white flowers, I suddenly remembered my old childhood fantasy.

‘One day,’ I said to myself, ‘I shall have a magic ring, a huge ring set with masses of small white stones.’

I had picked a single blossom from the small spirea bush and held it between my fingers. Pretending the cluster of tiny flowers was the boss of my magic ring, I walked solemnly round the garden.

‘Everything I point this ring at will grow especially well.’ I picked up a broken twig and continued on my way. ‘Everything I touch with this wand of willow will turn into whatever I want it to turn into and any one who’s ill whom I touch with my hands will immediately get better.’

I looked up at the magnificent spirea towering above me and laughed to myself. Would a child in the 1980s entertain such imaginings? Or was it only that their fantasy moved in different directions, into space or time travelling?

I had no answer, but all through the day as I tucked self-sown seedlings into spaces I made for them and stroked their leaves as I firmed in the soil around them – the way my father always did – I was acutely aware of what an imaginative child I must have been and how rudely my fantasy world was shattered when I lost my father’s sheltering presence.

For my mother had no time at all for imagination. Indeed, she was actively hostile to even the mildest flights of fancy. I could even remember her objecting to an essay I’d been given for homework: ‘A Day in the Life of a Penny.’ I hadn’t been much enamoured of it myself, but she had been quite virulent. Wasting time on such nonsense. That wasn’t what she’d sent us to the High School for.

So what on earth would she make of the experience I’d had yesterday, when this girl called Deara came and healed my migraine, and then by some means I still couldn’t even guess at, had begun to share her life with me through the images that came to me unbidden, asleep and awake?

As I worked my way round the garden, once more my mind filled with the images I’d had both sitting under the hawthorns and later while I slept. I found I could call them back so easily and as I went over them again and again I found I was asking questions of them, trying to fit together the fragments that had come to me. Who was this woman, Merdaine, for instance, of whom Deara seemed to be so fond? Clearly not her mother. So what had happened to her mother? And what about brothers and sisters? She seemed a solitary person and yet someone who could be very loving.

It was on my third afternoon in the garden that I started dropping things. I knocked the bloom off a plant I was tying carefully to a stake and was furious with myself. The more I tried to calm down, the more anxious and restless I became. Increasingly, I felt as if there was something terribly important I hadn’t done. Something awful would happen if I didn’t pay attention and do it right away.

I told myself to stop being silly. Things had been going well; the estate agent had come, spent two hours measuring and taking photographs and made a special note about the well-stocked garden. He’d even complimented me on how well the rockeries were looking. The house was immaculately tidy, the woodwork pristine and the only smell was a hint of lavender polish and the varied perfumes of jugs and vases of blossom and flowers.

In the end I put down my tools and walked straight across the lawn to the hawthorns. The moment I sat down on my stone under their shade, the agitation ceased. ‘It’s Deara,’ I said to myself. ‘She needs me. She’s in some kind of trouble and I must try to help her.’

Without giving any thought to what I was doing, I propped myself against the trunk of the largest hawthorn, shut my eyes and tried to bring her to mind.

Immediately, there she was, leaving the hut where I had first seen her with the old woman, Merdaine. She walked slowly uphill towards a much larger building near the top of the great mound. I could tell by the way she walked that she was uneasy, reluctant and fearful. At the same time it was clear to me she was determined to do whatever it was she had to do.

I leaned back and concentrated all my attention on the slim figure walking slowly away from me.

It was three days after Merdaine’s burial before the King held Council again. Although it was the custom to observe such a period of mourning on the death of a close relative, it was also Morrough’s custom to disregard any observance which was not to his liking. So although Merdaine had been mother’s sister to him, many were surprised that he made no attempt to go to the Hall of Council.

It was not only Morrough who acknowledged Merdaine’s passing. An unfamiliar hush lay over the whole encampment. Deara noticed it as she took up her usual tasks again, waiting as best she might to see what her future would be. There was turbulence, foreboding almost, which made her think of those days when the thunderclouds mass and the Gods vent their wrath upon human kind.

Yet on the surface there was no visible change in the pattern of daily life. The weather continued warm and fine, the cattle grew fat on the lush pastures and the cooking pots were full every day. Women span in the sunshine and ground barley out of doors, their shifts or tunics drawn high in their kirtles to benefit from the sun. But their chatter seemed less noisy, their glances less direct. Many of them feared Merdaine, for she had a sharp tongue and tolerated little foolishness; nevertheless, she was part of their life, stable and secure. Her going left a space which few of them had the slightest idea how to fill.

For Deara, the days passed with incredible slowness. From first light till sundown seemed an eternity of time. She found it hard to sleep in the empty hut and lay wide-eyed in the darkness, seeing again the days of her childhood, her meeting with Merdaine, and all the hours she had spent by her side learning the herblore, making infusions, grinding willow bark, blending spices, repeating and repeating all the recipes, mixtures, prescriptions and laws which Merdaine herself knew. Often her head had ached and the words tangled till she thought she would never understand anything. But it had come. Like the welcome to Nodons, the words had finally stood still. They were hers for ever. As were the parting words Merdaine had spoken to her. She had repeated them to herself as often as any poem or prayer.

The words would stay with her. She would have need of them and of all Merdaine’s wisdom, for on the third day after the burial fires she must go to the Hall of Council bearing Merdaine’s brooch to Morrough, the King.

Deara had never before entered the Hall of Council for it was not a place where women might go, unless, of course, they had a petition to make, or were party to a dispute. Today, as she joined the groups of people making their way between the King’s Hall and the storehouses, she felt full of dread. However much she had tried to master her feelings, she knew she was afraid. Lying awake in the short summer night, part of her wanted to run away, to slip out of the well-gate which was never guarded these days, and disappear into the Long Wood. Another part of her argued that it would be no use. There was nowhere to run to, no neighbouring encampment to shelter her. And besides, although she bore no slave mark, for Merdaine had refused to permit it, her situation would be obvious. A slave was a slave and the law tracts were quite specific as to how they were to be treated. No, there was no escape that way.

‘Cumail, where do you think you are going?’

Deara stopped short by the doorway of the hall and turned to face the man who had spoken. It was Conor. Only he would call her ‘slave’ instead of using the name the woman who had nursed her had given her, or even the commonly used word, ‘handmaiden’.

She looked him full in the face. ‘I go to petition the King.’

‘Oh ho, and by what right does a female cumail enter the Hall of Council?’

‘By the right of pledge and token given. I act as the Lady Merdaine instructed me.’

‘Pledge? Token?’

Conor’s face grew red and he spluttered in fury. These days everyone was challenging his authority. The King rarely consulted him and then ignored his advice, the brehon looked through him, the bard had taken to making jokes at his expense, and now this slip of a girl was quoting the law tracts at him, looking at him quite directly, not even shading her eyes as a woman should when addressing a King’s Druid.

‘Show me the pledge. Here, let me see it,’ he demanded angrily.

Deara regarded him steadily, her grey eyes taking in the deep flush which suffused his face, the pulsating veins at the side of his neck. This man was ill, wounded in spirit by his own weakness. But the illness could not be cured by medicine or healing. Only those disorders of spirit recognised by the sufferer could be treated. Conor would admit no weakness. So, like a wounded animal, he would defend himself by attacking anyone who crossed him.

‘I am bidden to show the pledge only to the King. It is not for a cumail to disobey even for Conor, son of Art, chief of the Druids of the Ullaid.’

She cast her eyes to the ground and hoped the gesture might appease him. But the heavy body did not move aside. Not till a quiet, world-weary voice intervened.

‘Let the girl go, Conor. The Council will deal with her.’

She looked up and saw a thin hand wave her past. Sennach, the brehon, a tall, emaciated man, pale like a plant grown in deep shade, an unsmiling man, meticulous, moderate in all things. She wondered how a man could live with so little joy.

The Hall was full as she took her place on the lowest bench, nearest the door. The heat was intense already and the smell of men and hounds made her long for the woods and fields. Almost immediately her thin linen tunic began to stick to her back where it touched the wall behind her. She fingered the brooch in the woven purse tied to her kirtle and settled to wait.

Because of the heat, the door of the Hall stood open and a broad shaft of sunlight fell amongst the gathering. It picked out the gold ornaments of the warriors, the worn clothes of the freedmen and the brindled fur of the hunting hounds who lay at the King’s feet. As the morning moved on, so the beam of light moved from left to right. Deara thought of Merdaine’s finger pointing at the patterns she had drawn in the ash with a piece of stick.

‘Come now, child, the brehon sits on the King’s right hand, the Druid on his left. Now who is this? And this? And this?’

Deara had learned their names, their ranks and titles, the position which each must occupy. She knew who might address the King, what decisions he would be asked to make, how agreements were made, sureties given, how the law was to be enforced. When other children played at seven stones or touch-and-run, Deara had moved stones in battles and raids fought long ago, had drawn in the dust the heroes and kings of every part of Ireland. She had sailed in willow bark ships to Albi and Gaul, Dalriada and the land of the Bretons, and always Merdaine was there asking her questions, punishing her if she forgot the genealogy of Niall, or Cui Roy, or Maeve of Connaught, the names of the tribes of Albi, or the rank order at a King’s Council.

At noon, a woman left a pitcher of water by the door and a warrior took a drinking horn to the King. The heat grew steadily stronger as the Hall became less crowded. Throughout the morning clients had stated their cases. As time passed, the King had grown steadily more irritable. A big, heavy man, he sat with his head half-turned from his petitioners, as if his mind was somewhere else. From time to time he would interrupt, ask a question, pretend he had not understood what was said. Then he would shout and abuse both plaintiff and defendant, threatening what he would have done to such troublesome clients. The punishments he described were brutal, but they did not in themselves alarm Deara. Not only was it part of Morrough’s usual way of behaving, it was a tradition, a reminder of bloodier times past and a restatement of the King’s enormous power. But it did remind Deara, if reminder she needed, that there was little in either law tract or tradition to protect a female slave.

It was late afternoon by the time her turn came. The water from the pitcher had long gone and her left arm was burning from where the sun had caught it as it moved across the open door. But she was grateful as she rose to her feet and crossed the now empty Hall to kneel before the King.

‘The handmaiden of the Lady Merdaine begs by pledge and token to petition her Lord and King, Morrough, son of Ferdagh, ruler . . .’

‘Enough girl, enough. The day has been long. What do you want of me?’

Deara bent to take the brooch from its place at her waist, and saw that Conor, who had dozed most of the afternoon, had stirred himself. He was now looking at her intently.

‘Sire, the Lady Merdaine bade me give you this as token of the pledge made between you and her last Samain.’

‘Pledge, what pledge?’

Morrough turned to look at her, as she held the inlaid brooch towards him.

‘What’s your name, girl?’

‘Deara, my Lord.’

‘No, my Lord it is not, the girl lies, as cumail always lie, her name is Deirdre.’

It was Conor who had spoken. Deara saw the familiar flush suffuse his face.

‘Deirdre? What of it, Druid?’

‘If my Lord would but give me leave to speak, then it would be clear to him. Was it not Art, my father, that warned Carrig Dhu, my Lord’s brother, of the doom that awaited him in the wood of Carore? And was it not I that prophesied my Lord’s taking of Emain and all the lands of the Ullaid?’

Deara watched the King’s face, the brooch in her hand still proffered towards him.

‘Speak then, Druid. Tell me what enchantment this Deirdre is to bring upon us.’

Morrough snatched the brooch from her and turned it over in his fingers, his body turned towards the Druid, his eyes still upon her.

‘Lord, at your command I tended the Lady in her sickness that I might perform those rites which would restore her to health. But, Lord, I was defeated in my purposes. I, Conor, who have served at all the shrines and brought peace and prosperity to Emain these many years, I was defeated by this Deirdre who has lied in the Hall of Council. This girl bewitched the Lady Merdaine with hand passes and with potions so that she was spirit lost. Then she tied back the hanging and called the God. I could not stop her for I was powerless to resist, held immobile as was the Lady by her wicked powers. And since the Lady’s untimely death my Lord has had news, dark news I think, for my powers are not fully restored to me. Lord, this girl bears the name of sorrow. Sorrow she has brought and yet more will she bring. Evil she has done to the Lady Merdaine, evil she will bring to this place and to my Lord if she be not cast out. The Lady, sister to your good mother, nourished in her bosom a snake. Out of goodness, she took this outcast, a child spawned on a hillside, by a woman whose wickedness brought sorrow to Tara, death to our warriors and the breaking of a treaty, joined again only with the greatest of toil by the King and his loyal servants.

‘Sire, I beg of you, for the vengeance of the Lady Merdaine and the safety of your people, do now what should have been done at birth.’ Conor paused, his face livid with colour, a light in his eye that Deara had seen only in animals crazed with pain, in labour or mortally wounded. She felt sweat trickle between her shoulder blades. Yet somehow, now it had come, she breathed easier, as if there were some comfort in seeing the danger and facing it rather than anxiously wondering from whence and in what manner the threat would come.

‘You would kill her, Druid? And what manner would you favour?’

The King turned his eyes from Deara and began to outline both torture and modes of death. As he spoke, so his large frame seemed to grow more ominous, his dark voice becoming yet more threatening.

‘Come, Druid, what manner would you favour?’

‘’Tis of no matter, Lord, but that it were done quickly.’

‘This evening, perhaps? Or shall you despatch her now? Fergus, your weapon, my friend.’

The King reached behind him and a warrior drew his sword and put it in his outstretched hand.

‘Here, Druid, here is a sword.’

‘This evening would do very well.’

Conor spoke hastily, his words muffled like a man who is parched. The light in his eye dimmed and he seemed to draw back from both the powerful questioning presence of the King and the proffered sword.

‘This evening will do as well as any. Is that so, Druid?’

The King balanced the sword in his hand, narrowing his eyes as if he were testing its trueness. For a moment he looked at the inlay of the handgrip, examining the delicate workmanship in the beasts entwined there. When he spoke again, he spoke softly.

‘And where would you suggest you kill this woman?’

Deara did not hear Conor’s reply. She was watching the King’s face, her body taut with tension. In the silence, she became aware of men moving like shadows along the walls. She waited for Conor to speak, to name the place of her execution. But Conor paused again.

Suddenly, it was the King’s voice that thundered out. Warm and welcoming, free of the dark menace which had chilled her heart as he consulted the Druid about her death, it roared down the Hall.

‘Welcome back, my brave warriors. Come, draw closer. I forgive you for leaving me thus to the business of Council. You would not have left me had I a sword in my hand and an enemy at my back. I know that well. Come, come closer and let you judge this case.’

The King rose to his feet and pointed the sword at Deara, as the men drew closer.

‘Here is this girl, a slave, the handmaiden of the Lady Merdaine. She is accused by Conor, chief of the Druids in the Ullaid, of witchcraft, of causing the death of that Lady. He wishes her death, for all your sakes, to keep you safe from evil.’

The King paused. Deara felt at that moment, that if she took her eyes away from his face, he would toss her aside like a bone to his hound.

‘Do not let him frighten you.’

As if the words had been spoken by someone present, Deara felt the memory touch her. She held her gaze and it was the King’s eyes that moved away.

‘What think you, my warriors?’

There was not a murmur from the warriors. They knew their King too well to answer a question that was purely rhetorical.

He raised the sword and looked at her again. Then he spoke once more, addressing himself to her in a strangely quiet manner.

‘A rare thing is it not, handmaiden, for a Druid, a Druid of such mighty power and knowledge of magic, to require your death so unceremoniously? Think you not it more seemly for him to make sacrifice to the Gods, to ascertain the most auspicious time for your despatch, the most auspicious place, and the most pleasing method? Surely there are proper observances for the purification of the evil caused by one such as you – a witch?’

The warriors murmured. Even the slower-witted amongst them had seen the drift of the King’s words. They had no love for Conor and his self-important ways, but, even if they had, it would be enough that the King’s favour had turned against him.

‘What say you, witch? Shall your King become your Druid? Shall I consult the magic lore and tell you what I see?’

The warriors roared their approval, and Morrough, smiling broadly, held out his hands to them.

‘I see a fat man, and a long road,’ he whispered loudly. ‘And I see hounds baying and footsteps fleeing – and – I do believe – ah, the mists, the mists dim my vision, I cannot see as I should. My powers are dimmed by a slavegirl – oh, what mischief is this . . . I am asleep again by her spells.’

There was laughter now, and the slapping of hands on thighs. Conor’s face, Deara could not see, but within her grew a seed of hope. If only she kept her eyes on the King she might yet live.

The laughter died away as the King made a dramatic gesture with his raised arms. He closed his eyes.

‘Ah, but hold, all is revealed to me. Why, it is Conor. Conor, the fat man, who boasts of the past and listens at doorcurtains, who feasts on the sacrifices the poor bring him out of fear. What say you, men, to my prediction? Shall I not be your Druid?’

‘Surely, surely. Morrough, our Druid and our King.’

The Hall filled with noise, the bang of weapons on wooden benches and walls, the hammer of fist on collar and belt, the stamp of feet, the chanting shout: ‘Morrough, Morrough.’

From the corner of her eye Deara glimpsed Conor’s hasty movement as he ran from the chamber. The men, still laughing, drifted away.

Morrough filled his drinking horn and lowered it, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. He wiped his mouth with his hairy arm and threw himself back in his chair.

‘So, brehon, what pledge did I give the Lady Merdaine? I have forgot.’

‘Sire, I have the deed here and your mark upon it.’

‘Get on then, man, would you have us here till Connaught wished us well?’

‘Item, that the Lady Merdaine doth give all her property to the King for his sole use upon one condition.’

‘Condition? I agreed to no condition. You are mistaken, man. You cannot make out your own marks.’

‘Sire, it is not writ in my marks; the script is in the lady’s hand.’

‘Then how can you read it? Her hand she conned from a trader in my father’s time. A rogue he kept about the place to play fidchell with.’

The brehon, who had throughout the day tolerated the King’s irritability, seemed at last to lose patience.

‘My Lord, the times are changing and we must change with them. It would not do if all of the King’s servants dozed by the fire and lined their pockets. In these three winters, Lord, I too have conned this language that can be written down more easily than our own. By your leave, I read you the words you spoke to the Lady Merdaine:

‘By the brooch of my mother brought in token, I swear that I will free the girl, Deara, give her dowry of twenty milk cows that she may be betrothed, or, if it be her wish, dowry in gold that she may pursue her studies with Alcelcius of Ard Macha into whose household she may enter.’

‘Twenty milk cows!’

The King bellowed as if he had been stung by a wasp, his face dark with anger.

‘Where in the name of all the Gods, man, would I find the price of twenty milk cows to dower a slave-girl? Had I a daughter of my own I might be hard-pressed to do as well.’

‘Sire, may I remind you of the kist the Lady Merdaine left to you. It was her wish that you would benefit by her gift.’

The beam of sunlight that had filled the chamber all day finally moved westwards. Shadows sprang up in all the corners. Deara, still standing before the King, felt again the sense of desolation that had come to her as she tied back the hanging after Merdaine’s death. Then, she had faced the blinding light of day with no protection from its strength, now, what strength she had seemed to be draining away with the light, as the King and brehon argued.

‘Well, then, open it. If you have no key, let Fergus fetch Ulrann and his hammer from the forge.’

The brehon, however, had already produced the key. Like everything he had done, all day, he proceeded meticulously. Watching him, Deara realised that his manner was both a defence against the King’s turbulence and a compliment to it. These two men, opposite as they seemed, were in some way bound to each other. It was not a bond of love, such as she saw amongst the young warriors. It was a bond of need, a defence against a loneliness which neither colleagues, nor warriors, wifes or concubine, could take away. In the midst of her own need, intensely aware of her own unprotected isolation, suddenly she saw a need just as great in two men who, it seemed, had everything that she lacked. They, who had position and power, who could dispose of her life by a word to a warrior, or a mark on a tablet, were in a way she could only dimly grasp, as weak, as vulnerable, as unsure of their place in the world, as she herself was.

‘By all the Gods.’

The King turned to Deara from the open kist behind which the brehon still knelt.

‘What do you know of this, girl?’

‘Of what, my Lord?’

By way of answer, the King leaned down and showered at her feet a handful of coins and a cluster of armbands, beaten in gold and inlaid with bronze. In the dim light they gleamed like pale flowers at dusk.

The thin hands of the brehon set down on his table a silver drinking cup, a set of gold torcs, a terracotta figurine and a jewelled belt.

Deara looked from one to the other.

‘Well, then, what do you say?’

‘My Lord, it is the custom to bring an offering to the God when one comes to ask for his healing.’

‘And do my people bring such gifts as these that I, their King, have not the least of them?’

‘No, my Lord, the people of Emain bring food and drink, and neighbouring peoples bring cloth or skins. Only the traders bring such gifts as these.’

‘Traders? The Lady Merdaine traded? With what?’

‘Wound salves, sire.’

‘To salve the wounds of our enemies?’

‘No, my Lord. All that I could make went to Albi.’

‘You? You made them?’

‘Yes, my Lord, at the Lady’s bidding. They are very good wound salves, the same as we use ourselves.’

The King sat down suddenly, filled the silver drinking horn from a pitcher of beer and downed it in one long swallow. He wiped his face and began to laugh.

It was a real laugh, not the hard, uneasy laugh Deara had heard so often that day. She glanced at the brehon, but his face had not relaxed its habitual close scrutiny. He was examining the final items from the bottom of the box and marking their value on a tally.

‘Well, then?’

‘Between 200 and 300 milk cows, Sire. I must consult to be sure.’

‘So, Deara – that was your name, was it not?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘So, you shall have your dowry. How say you to Marban, son of Dairmid, a brave young warrior? He lacks nothing but a wife to furnish him with new weapons, a good horse and a handful of sons.’

Deara’s heart sank. She knew little of the young warriors, for the Lady never spared her to serve with the other young women in the King’s Hall, so much was there to do in preparation for the coming of the traders. But Marban she knew of by repute, as did all in Emain. A small, swarthy man, boastful even beyond the custom of warriors, a man who took pleasure in cruelty to any weak creature, be it child or hound puppy. The thought of Marban made her tremble more than the threat of Conor.

The King was staring at her again, fiddling impatiently with the brooch she had brought as a token.

‘Come then, girl, your word, and let Sennach draw up the agreement.’

‘If it please my Lord, I would ask my dowry in gold, that I may enter the house of Alcelcius.’

‘Alcelcius? What manner of man is this, Sennach, with such a name. Is he a trader?’

‘No, my Lord, he is not of our people. He came here from Dalriada and was once a surgeon with the legions from Gaul.’

‘And you would go to be his concubine?’

‘No, my Lord, Alcelcius is an old man, who takes pleasure in books and writings. I would go to learn what the Lady Merdaine would not teach me.’

‘And what was that?’

‘To read and write, that I might set things down as she did.’

‘And make wound salves?’

‘If they are needed.’

The King swung away from her and thrust the sword by his chair into the earthen floor at its owner’s feet. The man started and the King laughed, short and hard.

‘Make your wound salves, Deara, aye and learn well to bind and splint – but pray to Lug that they will not be needed. D’ye hear, girl?’

Deara dropped her eyes from the King’s face in acknowledgement of his command. She saw the glint of jewels at her feet. When she looked up again her fear disappeared, for in the King’s eyes she saw a fear far greater than her own. Not for himself, but for his people, for all that was entrusted to him.

Morrough, the strong and mighty Morrough, King of Emain, ruler of all the Ullaid, sat in his carved chair, fondling the muzzle of his hound bitch and looking at her. What she had seen in his eyes was something she knew with her heart. This man stood alone. Alone in spirit and every bit as unprotected as she had known herself to be. She felt herself shiver and knew the flesh had roughened on her bare arms, though the Hall was thick with heat.

‘D’ye hear me, girl?’ he repeated more insistently. ‘Pray to Lug. Wear this for the Lady Merdaine.’

Morrough pushed the brooch into her hand, roused a sleeping hound with his toe and left the chamber without a backward glance, followed by the dogs, the chief of the guard and a small group of warriors on duty by the door.

Deara stood staring at the precious object in her hands, unable to grasp what had happened to her.

She had entered the Hall of Council, a slave, a fearful slave, knowing that her life might be forfeited without the protection of Merdaine. And now in her hands, she held the Royal brooch of Emain. Worn by the Princesses of the Ullaid for as long as bard or Druid could remember, worn by the King’s mother, and mother’s mother and by his mother’s youngest sister, Merdaine. Now hers. This thing of power and beauty and protection. No man of the Ullaid would dare raise a hand against her. Even the enemies of the tribe would heed such a token, if only in hope of the ransom money such a captive might bring.

‘Deara.’

The sound of her name seemed to come from a long way away. She looked up, her eyes still held in the swirling tracery of the brooch. The Hall of Council was empty, except for one pale face, Sennach, the brehon. He sat at his table looking at her.

‘You serve Nodons?’

She bowed her head in acknowledgement, for words seemed to have deserted her.

‘Your God has been kind.’

His statement was matter-of-fact. The voice he used was no different from the voice he had used all day, to question, to clarify, to record. But something in his eyes spoke louder, less dispassionately. It told her what she was already coming to recognise, that something had come to help her in her deepest need. She had no idea what it was, but it had come, just as Merdaine had promised. Some would call it a miracle.

She looked at the brehon steadily and saw the weariness which dragged at his body. It looked as if his life was draining away. She who had been given back life, could not bear what she saw.

‘Sir, I thank you for your kindness to me . . .’

She paused and grasped more firmly the brooch in her right hand.

‘Sir, I would take an offering to the God and bring you back a draught from the well.’

The brehon laughed. The sound was short and brittle.

‘Would you heal me then of the cares of office? Will you give me back sleep and pleasure in food? Have you a wound salve for the heart, then?’

‘The God has all these things.’

‘And he will give them to you, if the offering is large enough?’

‘No, sir. The God gives, the God takes away. It is His wisdom, not the offering, but we who serve are permitted to ask, for those who will give us leave.’

The brehon glanced round the empty hall as if he were making an inventory of the blackened rafters, the wooden benches and the empty drinking horns.

‘And if I say yes, what offering will you take?’

‘I do not know, Sir. When I have held your need in my heart, the God may tell me what he wishes, and then I will go to the well.’

‘And bring back healing in a pitcher?’

‘If the God wishes.’

The brehon repeated the words thoughtfully and considered them, as he considered everything. On the face of it, it was quite obvious. The girl believed a traditional set of superstitions known to the tribe for centuries. Most women did. Quite unfounded in the face of any real danger, but no doubt useful for day-to-day ailments. One had to admit some of these things worked. Some didn’t. One could see that quite clearly. The girl herself was a different matter. Not clear at all. There was something unusual about her. She was almost enough to make one imagine the unimaginable.

‘If I say yes, when will you go?’

‘Tomorrow, Sir, as soon after the noon hour as I can finish my tasks.’

‘Very well, then. Come to me at this hour and we shall see if your pitcher brings back my appetite. Go now and eat. May your food bring you strength.’

‘Thank you, Sir. May your sleep bring you peace.’

Deara smiled at the brehon and bowed her head as she returned the evening greeting. Then she walked from the Hall of Council into the swirling woodsmoke of the cooking fires and the red flame of the sunset, carrying in her left hand the Royal brooch of Emain.

7

When I saw Deara walk from the Hall of Council, a free woman under the protection of the King himself, after all the anxiety she had suffered throughout that long day, I was so relieved and so excited I wanted to stand up and cheer. I wanted to run after her and throw my arms round her and challenge anyone who might have slighted her, and tell them to their face, ‘There, I told you so’.

What actually happened was very different. I opened my eyes only to find myself under the hawthorns, exactly where I’d sat myself down when the awful agitation came upon me and I’d started making a mess of everything I tried to do.

Plainly, I couldn’t chase after Deara, so I made no move at all, just went on sitting in the dappled shade, looking out over the lawn and enjoying the splashes and patches of colour in the flourishing borders. But I was so grateful something had come to help Deara in her need. At the same time, I couldn’t help being totally absorbed and enthralled by the remote world in which she lived. I found I was running through the whole of her time in the Hall of Council once again, minute by minute, detail by detail.

I was intrigued by the unwritten law Morrough administered in such an extraordinary fashion and the customs and practices of the people over whom he ruled. I was appalled by Conor the Druid, curious about this person, Alcelcius, whose home was soon to be Deara’s, and absolutely intrigued by Sennach the brehon with his tally system for reckoning wealth and his new language he had taught himself over the last three winters.

There was so much more I wanted to know, so many questions I was dying to ask. How I wished I’d been able to see those documents on his table, particularly the one in Merdaine’s hand. I love old documents of any kind. Regardless of their content, I feel they bring you so close to the person who wrote them. I’ve often imagined how exciting it would be to touch something really old and precious, the kind of thing now kept behind security glass with alarm systems like the Lindisfarne Gospels, or the Book of Kells, or the one I should like to handle most of all, the Book of Armagh itself.

Sennach was such a precise character, meticulous and methodical. His long, pale face reminded me of a man who used to work with Daddy in the shop. Poor man, he never looked well, but he was still alive, able to dig his garden despite his eight decades while Daddy was long gone.

I sat on and on, with so much going through my head I couldn’t begin to sort it all out. Suddenly, everything cleared and words took shape just as if someone had spoken them out loud. It was the advice Merdaine had given to Deara just before she died. ‘If you do as your heart speaks, then in your sorest need, help will come. But you must trust that it will come.’

I repeated the words aloud to myself. They made perfect sense, however many centuries might have passed since Merdaine herself had spoken them. Help would come for Deara, but only if she believed that it would. And if it would come for Deara, then it would come for me were I to believe that it would. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me Merdaine’s advice applied as much to me as to Deara. I had to confess to myself that I’d lost my hopefulness over the years, my confidence that things really would or could come out right for me. Oh yes, I’d achieved many things. I was successful after the fashion of my own world. I had a decent job and earned a reasonable income. But so much potential happiness was marred by my doubts and anxiety.

Suddenly and very sharply, I saw that Merdaine’s words were telling me it would be better for me to cherish hope, to develop new confidence and take a chance on failure, than to go on in my normal, cautious and considered way.

As the shadows lengthened across the lawn, reluctantly I went back into the house. As I came through the kitchen into the hall I stopped in my tracks and stared at a striking, arched arrangement of pear blossom and dark petalled tulips, set against the well-polished mirror above the hall table, as if I’d never laid eyes on it before. I laughed at myself.

For days now, all I could think of was getting through the cleaning jobs in the house so I’d be free to go out into the garden. And without being quite aware of what I was up to, I’d brought the garden back in with me. All the rooms were fresh and full of light. With the windows open, the smell of blossom and flowers outdoors mingled with the perfume from the branches and posies I’d arranged and placed in every possible corner.

‘No wonder the estate agent was so complimentary,’ I said aloud, as I passed down the hall. I pushed wide the sitting room door. Gone was the electric fire Mother had parked in the hearth, the clutter of small tables that fell over at the slightest provocation, the assorted ashtrays and piles of product catalogues that were her constant companions. Out in the garage I’d found the wrought iron companion set from the hearth and the old willow basket that once served the open fire. Filled with turf and logs from a dusty corner of the garden shed, it now stood ready for a wet afternoon or a chilly evening. To my amazement, I realised I was actually looking forward to sitting here, by a fire, in the lamplight.

Then I walked through the whole house and I wondered how I could ever have seen it as dark and dreary. I was amazed the effect a few well-placed objects retrieved from cupboards and drawers had had. I’d found them, stacked away like the fire irons and the log basket, things I’d once known and loved. Old-fashioned. Dustcatchers. Those were the words to describe any object that didn’t meet with Mother’s approval. Well, I’d certainly shifted plenty of dust, but as I stood looking over the banisters down into the heart of the house, it seemed to me that the light, warm summer breeze had swept something much more pervasive than dust out of Anacarrig, once and for all.

In the few dark hours of the short May night, Deara lay awake yet again. Despite the help the day had brought and the reassuring shape of Merdaine’s brooch in a pouch beneath her pillow, she felt uneasy. The hut seemed strange and empty, bereft of Merdaine’s spirit, untenanted, as if cold ash lay unswept in the hearth, food bowls stood unscoured and the strewn rushes browned with age as she had seen them often enough in homes abandoned after plague.

She looked up into the darkness. Through the smoke hole a single star shone in the deep midnight sky. Outside there were myriads of stars, so still and perfect the night, but from her bed she could see but one, solitary, in all that great gathering.

That was exactly how she felt. She was surrounded by people, she was close enough to touch them, speak to them, to share food with them, but all the time she remained separate. Isolated. She wondered if anyone in all Emain felt as she did, lying wide-eyed on her narrow wooden couch.

She turned onto her side, curling the woollen rug around her, seeking comfort more than warmth. She closed her eyes. Immediately she stood again in the Hall of Council. She heard Conor’s voice.

‘You lie. Your name is not Deara. It is Deirdre.’

She shivered, the memory as fearful as the moment itself had been. Yes, she was Deirdre. She bore a name given to no girl-child in all the tribes of the land. Deirdre. Deirdre of the Sorrows. Any child old enough to sit by a campfire could tell you the tale by heart. It was not the name itself but the manner of her name-giving that called up anxiety and despair within her, an aching pain, which Merdaine herself had not been able to heal, the hurt of memories which Conor would never allow to rest.

Her mind began to fill with images. Now they had begun she had no power to stop them. She felt her body stiffen, her fingernails bite the softness of her palms, her chest tighten as if to restrain her racing heart.

The horses’ hooves were drumming in her ears. Faster and faster they came, clods of earth thrown back as they galloped towards Emain and the safety of the stockades. But it was too far. With weapons flashing in the moonlight the warriors turned aside to the grove on the far hillside to make what defence they could against the assailants who had lain in wait for them almost at the entrance to their own encampment. They gathered close around a woman in their midst. Half-crazed by fear and noise the white mare crashed between the trees and stopped abruptly in the small clearing which surrounded the stone altar to the God. The woman, white as the mare she rode, half slid, half fell to the ground. She lay there writhing in pain as the warriors made what brief defence they could against the encircling host.

Tears streamed down Deara’s face, her body began to shake uncontrollably. Let it come, said Merdaine. To heal the pain you must let yourself feel it. You must accept it. Do not fight it, do not deny it. Deny it and you give it power. Accept it and it becomes part of you, subject to your own power.

She had not understood. Nor did she understand now. And now there was no Merdaine to comfort her, to wipe away her tears and assure her that one day the images would go, that remembrance would no longer be like a knife in her heart.

She could see the woman now. She lay exhausted against the God’s altar beyond the fallen lords of Emain. Across the valley horns rang out, the alarm was raised, but above the noise of warriors riding out in pursuit of the raiders came a far more menacing sound.

‘There she is, there is the evil of which I warned you. The one for whom our best warriors have given their lives so worthlessly, their honour ensnared by her evil spells. Kill her, my friends. Avenge your dead comrades.’

Conor, his staff raised in his hands, his eyes glittering, burst into the clearing, a group of young warriors at his elbow. Swords drawn, ready to do battle with the whole host of Tara, they faltered as they saw in the moonlight the dark, still shapes which lay before them and the deadly-white face of a woman in a blood-soaked gown. In that moment of stillness they heard, as Deara now did, the tiny mewing cry of a newborn child.

‘Why do you pause? Think you this is a woman? Nay, no woman this, but evil itself in woman’s garb. See she spawns evil as she has spawned death on this hillside. Come despatch her and her cub. Let us make them a sacrifice to Lug that he will give us vengeance for Tagganath and all our brave kin. What use this Nodons, this mealy-mouthed God who cures warts for hags and protects not our bravest and best? Away with them.’

The warriors surged forward. The woman raised her head. Her voice was but a whisper, but there was no fear in it. All there heard her speak.

‘Kill me if you will – gladly I go – but not this child. Here do I name her Deirdre. Sorrow is her birthright and sorrow she shall know, but the greatest sorrow of all comes to him that shall wish her harm.’

With enormous effort the woman gathered herself, so that she sat upright, her back against the stone altar in front of the well, the child cradled in her lap.

‘Send me a woman of your tribe.’

‘Woman? To be your slave? A slave’s slave?’

Conor roared in fury. He stepped from the darkness of the encircling trees into the moonlight, his dark shadow enlarged by the flicker of torches which had now been brought.

‘Stand aside, Conor.’

It was Merdaine who spoke. It was she who wrapped the child in her cloak and waved the warriors away.

‘This woman’s blood is spilt already. Go home and comfort your wives and mothers. There are dead enough to carry to the fires.’

Deara wept.

She wept for her mother who died in Merdaine’s arms. And she wept for Merdaine. She wept for the women who knelt by the bodies of husband, or son. She wept for the sorrow in the face of the brehon, the fear in the eyes of the King. She wept till her arms were damp with tears and the star had faded from the smoke hole. Then she fell asleep.

Long after dawn had broken she woke, her dream still alive in her memory. She had been walking in sunshine, across fields of kingcups. Green and gold. The colours beloved of the God. It was a sign. She knew now what she must do. Merdaine’s parting gift, the kingcups, refreshed now in the cool shadows of the hut, must be offered for Sennach, for the healing of his spirit. She must make haste with her morning duties.

The God’s well was not far from Emain. Beyond the outer rampart it lay just across the valley in a small hawthorn grove, the surviving trees of a wood which once covered the whole hillside.

At one time, individuals as well as those who served the God would visit the well. They would leave an offering, tie a scrap of fabric to the branches and ask for healing for the person from whose tunic the fragment had been cut. Merdaine could remember a time when the thorns had blossomed with tokens all the year round. Now, few people went there except herself.

Deara went often, either to fetch water for infusions, for the water from the God’s well was pure and clear and had never failed, or to pray for the sick. It was many years now since Merdaine had come with her. As soon as Deara was strong enough to bear the water pitcher by herself she had sent her alone, saying that she would worship in her own place. So Deara had come to know hours of quiet, the only times in the crowded life of the encampment when she was alone. Alone, and yet never troubled by the loneliness which was her companion in the midst of the crowded encampment. Her visits to the God’s well were always welcome. Today was no exception.

As she set off down the dusty path, Deara was aware of a sense of excitement. Some flicker of happiness had rekindled within her. Drawing warmth from the brilliant sunshine and power from the upturned faces of buttercups and daisies strewn amid the grass of the wayside, it grew stronger as she crossed the valley and made her way up the slope beyond.

It was five days since she had brought back the full pitcher to wash Merdaine’s body. Now the hawthorns carried the first touch of blossom. The familiar heavy scent drifted towards her on heat-shimmered air as she followed the thread of a path through the encircling trees. The place was deserted and full of deep stillness. Before her lay the stone altar on which she would offer Merdaine’s parting gift.

She bowed her head, closed her eyes and repeated the prayer of greeting. Its words were so very familiar. She had learnt them when she was seven years old, when Brega, wife of Dairmid, her foster-mother, had brought her to Merdaine to begin her service. On that very first day, she had stood at this spot and repeated them line by line after Merdaine. Today, it seemed as if she heard them for the first time. She asked the God for help, knowing without doubt that in some way her request would be granted.

She opened her eyes, then blinked them again in amazement. The altar had gone. The encircling thorn trees had gone. Everything known and familiar had disappeared. Where the wall had been there stood three old thorns. Beneath them, stretched out across a piece of stone lay a woman in strange clothes, her dark hair tangled about her. She was crying in sore distress, the fierceness of her sobs shaking her narrow shoulders.

Deara’s first thought was of her mother.

But how could her mother wear such strange clothing? Besides, this woman was not with child. Her body was slim, her long, dark hair had not been braided as it would be were she betrothed or married. She wore the frayed and sun-bleached breeches that slaves usually wear, but her feet, which were bare like a slave’s, were neither brown from the sun, nor broken from toil. Above the waist she wore a tunic, so short she had to put it inside the breeches, and of so fine a stuff that she could see the fine tracery of some undergarment that enfolded the woman’s breasts.

Deara took a step forward. As she watched, the woman rolled over, sat up and wiped her eyes. Her face was red and blotched with crying. On her left wrist the woman wore a gold band set with a colourless gem. There were two rings on a finger of the same hand: one plain, one set with small blue gems. She couldn’t possibly be a slave, for it was forbidden by law for a slave to wear gold. Indeed, it was even forbidden for them to carry gold for their master or mistress.

The woman’s tears caught at Deara’s heart. What could she do to heal such distress?

‘Ask your heart what to do.’

Merdaine’s words came to Deara just as they had come in the Hall of Council. She stepped forward. ‘Have you come to be healed?’ she asked softly.

The woman looked up, startled, her grey eyes full of amazement. She was much older than Deara had imagined from the shape of her body. The body was that of a maiden, but the lines in her face suggested that she was in her fourth decade.

Deara looked around the unfamiliar place as if it might somehow explain the presence of the woman. But there was not a single thing she recognised. Apart from the warmth of the sun and the blossom on the trees, everything seemed strange. Near the crest of the hill beyond the thorns was a building unlike any she had ever seen. The walls were of square red stones, all the same size, and they were pierced by dark shapes in which she could see not only reflections of trees which were behind her, but also objects which lay beyond the walls. Between her and this place was a shorn meadow. It had stripes upon it as when the wind blows, but they ran in contrary directions. Not a single wildflower grew on this space, which was the size of two cattle pens.

Beyond, there were flowers. Great, brilliant splashes of purple and white and gold. But all the flowers grew among boulders. How could there be nourishment for such profusion?

She looked down again at the woman. She had taken her hands from her face and had stopped crying. It was clear now what was wrong. The half-closed eyes were always a sign. She knew now what she must do.

She laid down the pitcher and the offering she was carrying and showed the woman her empty hands. Then she moved gently towards her, careful not to startle her. The woman did not move. The grey eyes regarded her steadily but without fear. Deara smiled and put her hand on the woman’s forehead. No wonder she had cried. Beneath her hand, she felt the pain oscillate, pulsing and contracting. She put her other hand at the back of the woman’s neck, closed her eyes, and began to pray to the God.

As she prayed she followed the lines of pain from temple, to neck and to shoulders. The lines were red and deep. Her fingers traced them, pressing gently, always keeping the body steady, the balance even, like a cup of wine that one carries over unraked rushes. The lines went all the way to the woman’s waist. It was some time before they responded to her touch and she felt the patterns change. The hard, sore places began to dissolve, she felt them disperse as the darkness that had invaded the body dissolved and its own light grew again.

An image flickered into Deara’s mind as it always did when she healed. However often it happened, it could still take her by surprise. The skill of release Merdaine had taught her and made her practice till she was able to read a back like a plan of a country, tracing out which paths led to which centres, which paths were near the surface, which buried deep, which revealed the pain and which concealed it. Reading the images that came as the pain went, however, was a very different matter. Reading these could not be taught, Merdaine had said, because they were the gift of the God. They could only be used with the guidance that came from her own heart.

She had tried to be open to what was given. Already she knew that what she saw was always related to the source of pain. If she spoke of her seeing to the one in pain, at first the pain would grow stronger, but then, if they could bear the distress and speak of what was revealed to them when the pain increased, the pain would fade away. Often it did not return.

Deara opened her eyes and looked down at the woman whose body she touched. She sat quite still, head slightly bowed, eyes closed. There were traces of blue eyepaint on her lids and dark smudges below her eyes. But the red swelling had gone, the skin was soft and smooth – not young, but not hardened as many women’s faces were by hardship or bitterness.

She closed her eyes once again and let the images come.

A child. Running across the shorn meadow, in its hands a piece of blue parchment. The child kneels by the boulders, tears the parchment. From it drops seeds. One by one, with great care, the child makes holes with its finger, drops one seed into each hole, for there is after all soil between the boulders. Now a woman comes. Speaks words in anger. Sends the child away, scratches in the earth, finds the seeds and takes away the blue parchment.

The image fades. Another shapes. It is the same child grown taller. She is sitting by herself beneath trees talking to someone. But there is no playmate to be seen. The woman appears again. She moves silently behind the trees and listens to what the child is saying. Then she steps out. The child jumps in fright and the woman laughs, becomes angry, speaks quickly, and sends her away.

Deara lifted her right hand from the woman’s shoulder and opened her eyes. The images she could not understand. Clearly the child was she who was in pain. The woman had harmed her in some way. But in what way she could not tell, for she could not share the image. She had no words this woman would understand, for she was of another tribe.

The pain, however, would go now. She could do no more. She addressed the God, spoke the prayer of thanksgiving, made the sign of the coiled snake for the woman’s protection and took her left hand away.

The woman looked up, smiled and spoke.

They were words of thanks. Deara was quite clear about that. But the words themselves were quite unfamiliar. She thought of traders and travellers she had met, but not even they had spoken in this manner. She felt sad. Sad that this woman was not her mother, that she could not speak to her, or give her a draught from the God’s well to speed her recovery.

She made a sign of lying down to sleep.

The woman nodded, but did not go on her way to her sleeping place. She had stretched out a hand towards her. It came to Deara that perhaps the woman needed a token from the God. She picked up the flowers of her offering, chose a bloom that had both a flower and a bud, and handed it to her.

For a moment she was intensely aware of this woman on whom she had laid her hands. She saw her as if from a very long way away, sensing a great space between them. But at the same time, she was also intensely aware that she knew this woman. She felt a familiarity, an intimacy, that she had never before known with any other person. It was as if her hands had touched some secret part of the woman’s being, known to few, perhaps not even to the woman herself.

Deara watched the woman’s hand reach out for the token she offered. She was aware of the grey eyes smiling, the touch of the woman’s fingertips. In the same moment she experienced a strange, shimmering weariness and then knew herself to be alone.

She sighed and looked around her. Gone. Yes, she had gone. And everything else as well. The old trees, the stone on which she had sat, the shorn meadow and the strange dwelling place. In front of her stood the familiar worn stone coping of the God’s well. The fading flowers of her last offering dropped their petals around the base of the small earthenware jug which held them. Driven by the warm breeze they fluttered into the lush grass which grew where the water always splashed down from newly drawn pitchers.

For a few moments Deara stood, poised between joy and sorrow, elated by hope and possibility, yet saddened by the brevity of this strange meeting.

Then, into the stillness of the deserted grove, where only birdsong broke the heavy somnolence of the afternoon, came words of comfort. Merdaine’s words, spoken in this place, when she had talked to Deara about joy.

‘Joy, true joy, comes but rarely, but when it does, cherish it. Cherish the moments you have without longing for others.’

Deara took the flowers of her offering and looked at them. It was the moments she had just been given that she must cherish. For them she would give thanks.

8

Two days after the estate agent’s visit to Anacarrig, a lengthy communication dropped through the letterbox. He thanked me for my kind instructions, repeated all he’d said about the state of the market, the possibility of finding the right kind of buyer and the likelihood of achieving a satisfactory sale. He named a selling price which amazed me. But it was his final paragraph that left me feeling agitated and upset for the rest of the morning.

He regretted he’d been unable to advertise in this week’s local papers because the photographs of the property were not available until Thursday afternoon. However, he’d gone ahead with putting the house in the Belfast Telegraph, as we’d agreed. Their weekend property guide had a wide circulation, he assured me, and as his firm’s offices remained open all day on Saturdays he would no doubt be in touch with me to arrange viewing for this coming weekend.

Working so hard all week to get the house ready for viewing, it just hadn’t struck me I could end up having to show people round so soon. The thought appalled me. I realised with a shock that I wanted to see no one here at Anacarrig.

For a whole week I’d hardly spoken to a soul. Apart from the estate agent, the only other person was the mechanic who was working on Mother’s car. He’d called in on his way home from work to let me know why it was taking so long. A matter of a part that hadn’t been sent when it was ordered. Mr Neill had rung to ask if I needed anything from the shops in Armagh, but I’d reassured him that Sandy had filled the freezer so full I’d have a job eating it all up before it was time to leave.

I would have phoned my dear friend, Helen, but she was still in Oxford on her course. Joan had gone to visit a cousin in Rye, Sandy was somewhere in France buying old farmhouses and my beloved Matthew was visiting hill villages north of Maharajpur a dozen miles at least from the nearest telephone.

I hadn’t been aware of my solitariness at all. In fact, I had actually enjoyed being on my own. Tears of disappointment and frustration sprang to my eyes as I read the letter a second time and imagined what would happen when the phone started to ring.

And, of course, I had a rotten morning as a consequence, the kind where nothing you begin to do can be carried through. Some tool, or code number, or critical piece of information just isn’t available and you can’t get on without it. It got so bad at one point and I felt so irritable that I just couldn’t keep going. I took myself off across the lawn and down to the hawthorns. I hoped if I sat down and composed myself something might come to comfort or inspire me. But nothing happened. All I was aware of was the scratch of the worn stone against the seat of my jeans, the buzz of an insect swooping around behind me, the clacking racket of some new piece of machinery in the farmyard across the road and a dull throb in my lower back. Of my friend, Deara, there was no trace. I simply couldn’t reach her.

I gave up eventually, tramped back to the kitchen feeling thoroughly upset, climbed awkwardly up onto the work surface, took down the curtains and put them in the washing machine. After the morning’s record of disasters, I could hardly believe my luck when I pulled the switch and it actually worked. I watched the curtains swoop and fall, swoop and fall, and was strangely comforted by the rhythmic swish of the rotating drum.

‘All things pass, however ghastly.’ The words took shape of their own accord. Yes, it was true. There was no doubt I’d feel better in an hour, or a day, or a couple of days. What I did while they did their passing was the problem.

Not surprisingly, I ended up in the garden and although I worked much more slowly than usual I made some progress. I trimmed my way along the sandstone path at the foot of the rockery, taking out the dead leaves from the flourishing succulents that spread over the warm flagstones. I touched their bright rosettes, each fat point tipped with red. I began to feel it was far better to get on like this and do what I could manage than to strain after something way beyond my present capacity.

After a time, I leaned back on my kneelers, stretched my aching neck and turned it towards the sun, so its warmth would be like a gentle hand on the tight muscles. The thought of Deara and the brooch she had carried from the Hall of Council came into my mind. I’d caught only a glimpse of it: dark, gleaming metal inset with bright points of colour.

I spread some loosened soil on the path in front of me and traced its circular outline with my finger, hoping I might recall the pattern of its subtle, intertwining spirals. But what happened was very different. My finger bit deeper into the soil, but it was not the soil of the Anacarrig garden.

Startled, I looked around me. The path had gone. There was no garden around me, no house perched on the terrace above me. I was kneeling on the soft, dusty edge of a small, sloping vineyard through which a stony path led upwards to the hilltop. A low colonnaded villa with a tiled roof stood silent in the warm sun. There was no sign of anyone about.

I stood up and ran my eyes around the countryside spread out below me, hoping to find some familiar landmark. But there were none. Apart from the pink and gold touch of autumn on a cluster of chestnut trees nearby, there was nothing remotely familiar in the whole landscape to tell me where I might be.

The valley below was densely wooded. Only in the distance where I saw the gleam of water did the woodland give way to lush green meadows. Cattle were grazing there – angular, bony creatures, shaggy and hollow-chested, a far cry from the plump Frisians and the well-fed Shorthorns on the farms close to Anacarrig.

Apart from the villa, there were no other signs of human habitation, though there were trackways, criss-crossing the water-meadows and disappearing into the woodland. From where I stood, the path ran downhill and joined a more substantial causeway at the bottom. This stony track skirted the hill, cut through the woodland to the water-meadows and then disappeared again into more woodland away to my left.

Suddenly, a flash of light caught my eye. To my right, as far as the causeway reached before being enveloped in the woodland, a party of horsemen had just come into view and the sun glinted on their metal collars and the weapons they carried. They were moving fast. Moments later, over the thud of hooves, I heard the jingle of harness as they drew nearer.

Wanting to get a better look, I moved towards the rosemary hedge which bounded the vineyard. It was then I heard a rustle behind me. I turned and saw a young woman walking towards me, a wicker basket hung over one brown arm.

To be honest, I didn’t recognise her, but the moment she saw me, she held out her hands and smiled. With those grey eyes, it could be no one else. She seemed taller, less waif-like, more confident than I had remembered her. Pinned to the left shoulder of her pale olive green tunic was the brooch.

‘So you have come again as I prayed you would. You are so welcome. I hope the migraine troubles you no more.’

I was completely taken aback for the words she spoke were perfectly comprehensible.

‘Thank you, it went away when I slept. It hasn’t come back,’ I heard myself reply, to my amazement, as easily as she had spoken. And then I realised why: it was neither Italian, nor Greek, of which I have only a smattering – it was Latin. Not exactly the Latin of Tacitus or Pliny I know well, closer to the late Latin poetry I’d loved so much, and a form I could certainly follow. And it was clear from her cry of delight that she had understood what I had said.

‘But now you speak the tongue of Rome as I do. How is this? Come, let us sit in the shade. I have been waiting so long for you to come. But I had not thought we might speak words to each other that we might understand.’

She took my hand and led me to a stone bench below the colonnade. On either side of its fine-grained marble surface, two great wine amphora held single-petalled roses, one pink and one red. As I sat down I brushed against one of them and some petals fell, bright red splashes on the flagged terrace. I could see the veins in the rose, the grain in the quarried stone and feel the warmth of a brown hand holding mine.

Sitting there in the sunshine, her familiar-looking wicker basket at my feet, I felt both easy and excited. Easy, as with an old friend like Helen, whom I’ve known since our very first day at grammar school, and yet excited, like the first meetings with Matthew when it was so obvious to us both that all we wanted to do was be together.

There seemed so much we had to say to each other and yet a strange sense that we had shared so much already, as if we had been friends for a long time, but had been separated and now lived in different countries.

‘Please, how is it that you speak the Roman tongue?’

‘I learnt it at school in Ireland a long time ago.’

I thought my words sounded very stiff, rather like one of those guide books for eighteenth century travellers with phrases like: ‘My postilion has been struck by lightning.’ But if I was, it seemed not to bother her.

‘But we are in Ireland now, not far from the God’s well where I first met you. Do you not recognise this place? Over there to the west is Emain, and behind us is the town, Ard Macha, where the traders live. This is the villa of Alcelcius, my teacher.’

‘Is Alcelcius a Roman?’

I could not conceal my curiosity or my excitement. I so hoped she would say he was.

‘Yes, Alcelcius was a surgeon with the legions in Albi, but he came to Ireland disguised as an eye-doctor to spy for his general, who thought to conquer us. But Ireland conquered Alcelcius instead. He made his home here when he was discharged with honours.’

I laughed with delight. I knew it. I always knew it. I had been right after all. I was back at school, the soft voice of Miss Barbour in my ear. I had liked Miss Barbour very much, she was kind, hard-working and very fair. Without her, I would probably never have won my scholarship to university. But she would never accept a statement unless I could produce concrete evidence. I could still hear her steady, unperturbable tone.

‘Well, yes, Deirdre, I can see the reasoning behind your suggestion. The Romans were indeed adventurous, they do show a decided tendency to explore and document, but we have no evidence at all that they came to Ireland. It is true, Agricola did calculate that he could subdue the country with two legions, but the attempt was never made. As we all know, he shortly had to give his mind to more pressing problems.’

And with those quiet, bleak phrases, quite unknowingly she had snuffed out some possibility that was beginning to grow in my mind. I had felt such loss, such disappointment, and now suddenly that old hope returned.

‘And are you also Roman?’ I asked quickly, the words coming to me more easily now, in spite of my haste.

Her face, so full of pleasure and enthusiasm, changed instantly and I glimpsed a different Deara, vulnerable and ill at ease.

‘I know nothing of my family,’ she said uneasily. ‘I was brought up by the Lady Merdaine of Emain, but she died some four years ago, a few days before you first came to me. After her death I came to study with Alcelcius. He is such a good, kind man. He has taught me Latin and Greek, as well as medicine and the ways and customs of the Romans. Have you come from Rome?’

I shook my head and smiled.

‘No, I’m not a Roman. I’ve been to Rome once, many years ago, but there haven’t been Romans in Britain for a very long time. I think you and I live in different ages rather than in different places. Can you tell me what year it is, here, at this moment?’

The grey eyes widened and she nodded slowly.

‘This is the fourteenth year of the reign of Niall, son of Laoghaire, King of Tara and the tenth year of the reign of Morrough, son of Ferdagh, King of Emain.’

I shook my head and laughed, none the wiser.

‘That sounds like a long time ago. Presumably the Romans are still in Britain?’

‘Britain? Where is that, please?’

I tried to think what Britain was called in Roman times, but I just couldn’t remember.

‘Where Londinium is,’ I offered helpfully.

‘Ah yes, Londinium. Alcelcius served there before he went north to Eboracum. You know Londinium?’

‘Yes, I live and work there, but it’s rather larger now than it was in Alcelcius’s day . . . or rather, I mean . . .’

‘You mean that you have come from the future?’

‘It looks like it. I know quite a lot about the Roman Empire and I’ve read Agricola, but his world was about nineteen centuries before the time in which I live.’

‘So, how have you come? Why have you come?’ she asked earnestly, pressing my hand, as if my answer was of the greatest importance to her.

‘I don’t know. Why did you come to me six days ago when I was sitting crying with my migraine?’

She shook her head gently and smiled, that lovely warm smile which banished all anxiety.

‘My friend, for you the time was but six days, for me, four years and four months. It seems there is much we do not know. But some things are clear to us.’

‘Such as?’

‘Who we are. That we are friends.’

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I was terribly taken aback. Until I met my sister-in-law, Diana, I’d never been kissed by a woman. She’s one of those Anglican clergy wives who kisses everyone, so it shouldn’t have been a problem, particularly as I happen to like her. But it was. Every time Matthew and I went to visit I d get worried I might react in spite of myself. Eventually we managed to work out what lay behind it. Mother, of course. As if we couldn’t have guessed. She’d never held or kissed either Sandy or me, even when we were very little, and her comments were always quite vicious if she ever saw two women kiss each other.

‘Please, tell me your name,’ she said earnestly.

‘Deirdre.’

‘Oh . . . so . . .’

Her eyes grew round with amazement.

‘What’s so strange about that?’ I asked, as I saw her begin to smile.

‘I too am Deirdre, but only a few people know that, a Druid who bears me ill will and my foster-mother, who gave me the name Deara.’

‘But why did she do that?’

‘Because Deirdre was a name too hard to bear.’

She said it so softly that I wasn’t sure I had heard her properly, and yet I felt it was the most important thing she could have said. Yes, it was too hard to bear, being Deirdre. Often enough, just existing could be too hard to bear.

I thought of the strange scenes and images I’d experienced when Deara had laid her hands upon me and all that had come to me in the days that had followed. Her life had been as full of anxious thoughts as mine seemed to be. I wanted to understand how and why this had happened to her. I asked her about the woman who had died by the God’s well, about the Druid who had tried to have her executed. And she answered all my questions, quite easily and steadily, explaining both what had happened on the night of her birth and how Conor had behaved towards her as she was growing up.

‘But, Deirdre, how is it you know these things about my life when we have not spoken of them until now?’

I was about to explain, when suddenly the warm stillness of the afternoon was broken by the most appalling noise, a kind of high-pitched scream, followed by shouts and a fierce metallic banging like the dustbin lid protests up the Falls Road in the early days of The Troubles.

I jumped and went rigid. Her hand tightened around mine and she said softly: ‘It’s all right, Deirdre. The King has arrived back at Emain with the ambassadors from Tara. That was the guard shout and the warrior greeting. I hate it too. When I’m up there and it happens, I hide in my workplace till the speeches begin. They go on a long time, but they’re quiet. Did you see the King’s party pass by?’

I nodded, not yet trusting my voice, for my heart had leapt into my mouth at the sudden jarring noise.

‘Just a glimpse, before I saw you,’ I managed to reply, my mouth suddenly dry. ‘Was that the King at the front?’

‘Yes, it would have been. He is always so happy to ride home. He’s not overfond of Tara and he hates negotiations, but that is the only way to keep the peace. Without going to Tara, it would be easy for enemies to make trouble between Emain and Tara. Then many suffer, not just warriors. Do you live in a time of peace, Deirdre?’

I shook my head wearily. I could not bear to tell her of the killings, the car bombs, the ambushes and the thousands of innocent people the last years of bitterness and hatred had claimed.

Again, a violent clamour erupted from the west. I felt it like a physical blow, but before I could react she took my other hand. I saw the look of concern on her face as she explained gently and patiently, as one does to a frightened child, that the guest cup is offered to the ambassadors, and it is the children who make the noise with blunt swords and broken shields, a tradition which would not go on for more than a few minutes.

I seem always to have hated loud noises. Long before The Troubles began, with their real threat from bombs and bullets, I had jumped out of my skin at fireworks, or cars backfiring, or even some child bursting its paper bag at lunchtime. The racket had now died away. I took a deep breath and tried to forget it.

‘Is it impolite if I ask what age you are, Deara?’ I asked, knowing that I sounded formal again because I couldn’t find a word for ‘rude’, only one for ‘vulgar’ and another for ‘obscene’.

‘Surely not. I was twenty-one in the fifth month of this year. And you, my friend?’

‘I shall be thirty-five in a few months’ time.’

‘By then we shall have known each other a long time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t exactly know what I mean, but that is how it seems to me. We shall be good friends, shall we not?’

She looked at me with the warm smile which I found so utterly appealing. I was about to speak of the hope that was beginning to grow in me, born out of the strange situation in which we found ourselves. But I didn’t manage it. Without any warning, a huge noise away to my right broke in on me, a noise that filled up all the space inside my head.

‘That noise, Deara, that awful noise. Whatever is it? Make it stop. Oh, please make it stop. I can’t bear it. It feels as if it will make my head burst.’

I covered my ears with my hands and felt tears spring to my eyes. She couldn’t hear it. I knew she couldn’t hear it. And she wouldn’t believe me if she couldn’t hear it. Nothing I could say would make her believe me. I wanted to scream and scream, but no sound would come. Everything was blotted out by pulsing waves of pressure. I couldn’t even see her any more. Then I felt her hands on my wrists.

‘Deirdre, my dear friend, I am here. Give me your hands. Do not shut out the noise. Listen to it. Let it speak to you. I will not let it harm you.’

There was a strength in her voice I had not heard before. It was firmer than reassurance, much firmer, it was the strength of one who speaks to command. She drew my hands away from my ears and held them firmly in her own.

‘Listen, listen to it,’ she insisted quietly. ‘It cannot harm you now.’

As suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. I could see her face again. She was watching me with enormous concentration. She released my hand as I moved to get my hanky out of my pocket. I blew my nose and mopped up my tears.

‘Are you all right now? Has the noise gone?’

‘Yes, it’s gone. I’m so sorry, I can’t think what happened to me. It’s so silly. Please forgive me.’

‘Forgive you? What is there to forgive between us? It is you who must forgive the woman who harmed you in this way.’

‘Woman? What woman?’

‘A woman with glass in front of her eyes who crept up behind you when you were sitting on the stones by the God’s well and talking to yourself. The same woman in a long bedgown who found you walking in your sleep and scolded you, and when you spoke of hearing a noise she said you were telling lies. A woman who did not comfort you when you wept.’

‘That’s my mother. She died the week before last.’

‘Such women leave great burdens on the spirit. You must rest and pray to your God.’

‘I have no God.’

‘Then I shall pray to mine. It makes no difference,’ she said, as she touched my cheek with her hand. ‘You are very pale. Will you drink a cup of wine? It would help you.’

Suddenly I became so aware of the blue threads in my jeans, the fallen petals of the rose and the soft, brown hand still holding mine.

‘Thank you,’ I said, nodding and looking up at her.

But she was gone. I was sitting on my stone under the hawthorns. Indoors, the phone was ringing. I didn’t move. I let it ring until it stopped.

I sat on for quite a while, letting myself absorb what had happened. Then I realised how thirsty I was. I got up and walked across the garden to the path along the bottom edge of the rockery. There was the circle I had begun and not completed. I bent down and drew my finger through the soil to close it.

The phone rang again, that fierce, strident ring I could identify as the Anacarrig phone from wherever in the world I might hear it. I went in and picked it up.

‘Deirdre Weston speaking.’

I heard my name as if it were the first time I’d ever used it. It was the estate agent with a query about the rateable value. I told him what he wanted to know and wished all queries could be dealt with so easily. And yet, as I filled the kettle, I felt sure that finding answers to the questions that were really important to me was going to be a whole lot easier. If there was something I had to do while I was here, then I was being helped to do it. There was no point asking for it all to be clear to me now: I just had to get on and do the best I could.

9

Despite the optimism of the estate agent, no prospective purchasers arrived to view Anacarrig the weekend after my meeting with Deara in Alcelcius’s vineyard. I had a blissful two days. It was warm and sunny and working in the garden was a delight. I read a lot, wrote a massive letter to Matthew and short notes to some of my local friends suggesting that we meet.

More than once, I caught myself just sitting, lost in my own thoughts, beside a flowerbed I had set out to weed or a bookcase I had decided to sort and pack. Once, I even found myself sitting on the low wall near the back door unable to remember what I was supposed to be doing there until I saw the neatly tied bag of rubbish at my feet.

To my amazement, the peaceful quality of the weekend persisted into the following week. We all have good hours and good days, times when things go right beyond all reasonable expectation, but that whole week it appeared I could do no wrong. Whatever I put my hand to, some tedious job in the house or some piece of executor business, the problems just melted. Like the child who had once walked round the garden with a magic ring, making things happen, I appeared to be mistress of all I surveyed.

Entirely new to me was the sense of steadiness and purpose I felt. Sometimes I just marvelled at my good fortune; at other times, I found I was looking around for new worlds to conquer and had to laugh at myself.

I was able to finish a routine piece of work for Robert Fairclough in record time and I had lively phone calls from the friends to whom I’d written. I wrote page after page in my blue notebooks, sketched out thoughts for short stories, and developed an idea for a longer work. As if this were not joy enough, early one morning I even had a call from Matthew in Maharajpur.

We tripped over each other and said the most banal things in the few minutes that could be spared on the up-country hospital’s one and only phone. There would be another opportunity for us to go to India together and work on the project we’d had to set aside this summer, he said. He sounded so excited at the prospect and both pleased and relieved that I was in such good spirits with things going so well at Anacarrig.

But beyond and behind all the objective things that had lifted my spirits, there was Deara. Unlike any friend I had ever had, however dear, her presence seemed to reassure me in a way I could not put words to as yet.

When I tried to puzzle it out, I told myself it was because she had survived a situation far, far more dangerous than anything I had ever experienced. With no one to care what happened to her, she had been totally vulnerable after Merdaine died. The actual threat from the Druid I would have found terrifying. And yet, despite everything being against her, she had won through, she had kept her nerve and ended up with Alcelcius, a man who was not only kind but one she could be sure would never let her down.

Day after day as I went on with the work in the garden, I thought about her, going over in my mind all I knew of her, putting together everything that first meeting had offered with what she herself had told me when we discovered we could talk to each other. I longed to see her again, and yet, as I moved through those memorable days, I felt she was with me, an active presence in my life, steadying me, showing me ways of being that were new to me, bringing me hope and confidence.

Whether it was thinking of Deara or the happy chance of Mother’s car having arrived back from the garage, I really don’t know, but on the Friday afternoon, I suddenly put down my trowel, abandoned my bucket of weeds, scrubbed my fingernails at the kitchen sink and set off for the library in Armagh.

The magic of the week was still at work when I got there. I almost burst out laughing when the librarian looked up from her filing in the empty reading room. It was Maureen Purdy. Years ago, at primary school, when we came top of the class in reading, Maureen and I had had the job of going to the library and choosing the weekly box of books for our class.

‘Deirdre Henderson, how are you? When did I last see you?’

The reading room was unusually quiet that afternoon, so Maureen was free to talk to me. We spoke about our schooldays and she filled me in on the lives of school friends I hadn’t heard of for years. Then I told her I’d got interested in the fifth century. By the time I left, she’d made me a list of titles for the early Christian era and suggested I go round and meet the curator of the museum who had made a special study of that period.

When I did track him down in his minute, congested office, I discovered his wife had been at Queen’s with Sandy. I’d been working in London so long I’d almost forgotten what a close and intimate community I’d once been part of. As I watched him raiding his shelves and extracting material from his own files to photocopy for me, I felt quite overwhelmed by his generosity and his willingness to help. This responsiveness, this kindness, was once a familiar part of my experience. It was a part with which I had completely lost touch.

Back at Anacarrig I staggered into the house with my arms full and caught sight of myself in the hall mirror. I was wearing such a broad grin I reckoned I must look like the lucky winner of one of the ‘Biggest Ever Prize Draws’ that kept dropping through Mother’s letterbox despite all my efforts to turn them off.

I laid out all my stuff in the sitting room, books and photocopies and lists of forthcoming publications. I was tempted to sit down and begin reading there and then, but I remembered I’d just dropped my tools and gone off into town, so I went back out into the garden.

The mixed perfumes of the newly opened perennials and the very first rosebuds lay on the warm air. All was quiet. I went on where I’d left off and when I tired I fetched some of my new books and sat under the hawthorns in the last of the sunshine. Soon I was so absorbed, had the phone not rung I’d probably have been there till it was too dark to see the print.

It was Helen, safely back from Oxford and looking forward to our meeting the next evening. As I put the phone down I thought of the calls I’d been putting off. I’m happy enough to talk on the phone once I get started, but I’m often reluctant about actually making them. I brought a chair into the hall and settled down to make up for my delays.

I rang the rectory in Norfolk, spoke to John and passed on Matthew’s news from Maharajpur. Then a marvellous talk with my sister-in-law, Diana, which included her account of the latest episode in the long-running row among the flower ladies over the colour scheme for the patronal festival.

Still smiling, I rang Tanza Road and heard Joan’s familiar voice. She had some really exciting news. Her great-niece Sarah had just been accepted for the Purcell School; the scholarship would give her the best possible opportunity to become the clarinet player she wanted to be. Joan questioned me most carefully and sympathetically about the trials of clearing the house. I felt so grateful I had a friend of her wisdom and experience, one who would actually speak about mortality and its effects upon you instead of merely uttering the conventional platitudes and cliches which made her feel comfortable.

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