excerpt
“And die,” Caitlin had added.
“Death is a fact of life, Caitlin. We all have to face it sooner or later.”
Caitlin suffered from the pangs of suspecting that her father was facing it now, alone and stoically, as he faced everything in life. Her father’s stoicism was probably a legacy from his mother; “the foreign lady,” as the old people in the village used to call her. Some said she was the heiress of an aristocratic family from the heart of Europe. No one seemed to know for certain where. Switzerland, Bavaria, Bohemia, Salzburg: these and other places had been mentioned in connection with her. “She was a Bohemian like his wife,” the more malevolent used to say. “She had no more money or titles than the gypsy tramp he took to his bed.” But most agreed that, yes, she was a rich woman. Finn’s father had met her when he was a young adventurer—a mercenary soldier, many said—in Europe. Some said they met in a brothel; some that he rescued her in a mountaineering accident in the Tyrol; some that he won her in a gambling game in Vienna. There were so many stories. But Finn’s father brought the lady from the troubled European continent of the 1830s to Dublin first of all and then to his home in Carraghlin. She had her own coach and horses, the old people said, and lots of fine clothes and jewellery. She had money too. She bought the land near the village of Corrymore from the Hamilton family and built the big stone MacLir house between the mountains and the sea. The old folk remembered her dark-red hair, her long, oval face with its white, immaculate skin, her proud bearing on her fine horses—she always seemed to be on horseback—a strange, impulsive woman, whose money made the MacLirs the only Irish family in the area to own their own land. Everyone else rented from the Hamiltons. The foreign lady and her Irish husband became good friends of the English Hamiltons, constant visitors at the Big House, intimates of the family. Here began that mistrust of the house of MacLir that most of the villagers never lost. Finn’s father was the son of a common Carraghlin fisherman whose foreign wife’s money enabled him to hobnob with the “quality”, with those rich landlords and gentry who yoked the Irish to ploughs, fed them on potatoes and cabbage and stalled them in hovels no better than byres. The Irish lived like animals in the land that belonged to them.
Except the MacLirs. They lived well, as well as anyone could in an isolated Irish village. They had to live well, some people said, or the foreign lady would have left, returned to Dublin at least, or even back to the homeland she had fled from. But others said she loved the wildness and the isolation of the village, that her love of the mountains…
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 