I sighed. My friends in India had advised me to do so. I could have stayed there as part of the circle who were carrying on the work of Madame Blavatsky, but ever since I had read W.B. Yeats' first book of poems, I had been fascinated by the old lore of Ireland. He was a Sligo man himself, I had heard, and his writings filled me with a longing to learn about the magic of my own land.
He nodded to Luke, and the younger man began to rein the pony around. He was, I gathered, about my own age, with a shock of reddish-fair hair and bright blue eyes. But even if our stations in life had been the same, there was an innocence in his face that I had lost when my father died. In spirit, he was far younger than I.
"We'd best be getting back to the village," his father said. "Ye can sit snug by my fire until time for the Dublin train—"
I shook my head, for the money I had left would not keep me long in town, and besides, I was wearied of journeying. "Is there no place here where I can stay?"
"There's no inn, and no gentleman's house I can take ye to, for Lord Skein's place is all closed up while he is in London, but—" he looked at me narrowly. "Ye seem a brave lady, to have come all this way from India and have lived with those black savages they have out there."
I thought of the wise brown face of my old teacher and suppressed an ancient exasperation at McMurtry's insular prejudice.
"There's the priest's house. It's on your own land, lady. Ye might stay there."
I raised one eyebrow. My father had never mentioned this, but he had been sent away to school young and then joined the Army. "What happened to the priest?"
"He... died," said McMurtry, "and we are a small place here, so the bishop has not sent us another man."
"And why," I went on, "should I need to be brave?"
"Well—" he eyed me uneasily, "There may be ghosts. Father Roderic was a strange man, always after digging up old stones. There've been some odd stories about the cottage since he was taken. But my old woman has kept the place dusted, and the roof is sound. And there are the books—he was a great reader of old tales and collector of dusty volumes. It seems a pity to have them mouldering away for lack of care."
I grinned. When I was a child I had visited Madame Blavatsky's house, and heard spectral singing and seen spoons dance through the air. I did not think one Irish ghost would trouble me. And there were the books. I wondered how the old man had known the very thought of them would draw me, even if there had been anywhere else for me to go.
As we turned up the lane, another vehicle, a two-wheeled trap being driven far too quickly for the road, flashed in front of us. Luke McMurtry hauled back on the reins, swearing, and the old horse half reared in the traces.
"An' the same to you, me bucko, if ye'll not learn to give way when your betters have the road!" The driver of the trap drew breath to continue, then stopped, having noticed me at last.
"This is Miss Erne, Bailey, and I'm thinking that even the lackey o' an English lord'll acknowledge that she is your better, and grant her the right o' way!" Young McMurtry's voice thinned, then steadied as the other man, a thickset fellow with a brush of black hair and a striped scarf tucked into the neck of his tweed jacket flushed red.
"Ma'am—" he lifted his hat to me. Luke slapped the reins on the pony's neck and we trotted smartly past.
"And who might that be?" I asked as we left the stranger behind.
"A da—" the lad recalled to whom he was speaking, blushed in turn, and tried again, "a dirty, misbegotten rascal—"
"He is Lord Skein's factor," interrupted his father.
"And not much liked in these parts, I see—" I replied.
"Man or master, there's not much choosing between them," McMurtry sighed. "His lordship will not mourn if we're all driven from our homes by one more bad harvest. He's been buying up land all around here for the sheep, ye understand. No doubt ye'll be hearing from him as well."
I nodded. The remnants of my family's lands were rented out to local farmers, and brought in barely enough to pay the taxes. My father's agent had written already with an offer from Lord Skein. Common sense counseled me to accept, for what use was the land to me when I could not afford to rebuild the hall? But the beauty of those green fields was like a sword to the heart. How could I let them be trampled by this John Bull?
McMurtry had spoken truly. The cottage, though it had the musty smell of a place long disused, had been cared for as if its owner might at any time return. At first I was surprised that McMurtry, who carried the post as well as running the taproom and seemed to function as village headman here, had suggested I live there, but my family, though less prominent than that of Lord Skein, the biggest landowner in the district, had been longer on the land. I supposed it comforted him to have an Erne, even a sallow, skinny girl who seemed destined to be an old maid, living here. Then I found the trunk into which they had carefully packed the former occupant's books, and I began to suspect that perhaps the place had been tended so carefully because they were afraid.
The old priest—or perhaps I should say the former priest, for Father Michael Roderic had been in his thirties—had been a man of catholic tastes, and not in the sense used by the Church. It was fortunate, I thought as I turned the pages of a Latin treatise on magic, that I was not pious. My family were of the old gentry that held to the Roman faith, but when my mother died my father had abandoned his religion, and I had grown up learning more of my amah's Hindu gods than of Christianity. The trunk was a treasure trove for me. In addition to the grimoires, there were a number of volumes published by the Irish text society, and several tattered issues of Bealoideas, Eriu, the Archivium Hibernicum, and other journals of folklore.
During the lengthening evenings I pored over them eagerly, out during those days it was not raining I took long walks, learning the countryside. It would have been misleading to call any part of Ireland truly prosperous in these days, but the land around Carricknahorna had a curious air of desolation, as if all the luck had gone out of it a long time ago. It had been a little over a dozen years since the harvests had begun to fail here, in some seasons a little better, but in others disastrous.