Free The Good People by Hannah Kent

extending a twisted foot or breathing through a congested lung. ‘’Tis the evil eye,’ they said. ‘’Tis the Good People.’
    It was mainly the men who came for herbs. Those who worked in the fields and were less used to the sight of their own blood. Those who did not trust the doctor or could not afford his labelled tinctures. Men of the earth, they took comfort in seeing their sores stemmed by plants they had played with as boys, by a hand as wrinkled as the grandmothers they remembered by the fires of their childhoods.
    But Nance knew that most of her patients did not come for herbs at all. Those with broken bodies came in the light of day in the company of family. Those who sought other advice, who found something deeply amiss, who could not lay a finger on the origin of their suffering, came in the shifting hours of dawn and twilight, when there was time for secrecy and they would not be missed. They came alone, wrapped against the cold, their faces ashen with anxiety. Nance knew that, for all her stoppered teas and mixtures of fat and ragwort, it was these visits that allowed her to remain in her cabin. They wanted her time. They wanted her voice, and her hands holding their own. They saw in her age and loneliness the proof of her cure.
    What woman lives on her own with a goat and a low roof of drying herbs? What woman keeps company with the birds and the creatures that belonged to the dappled places? What woman finds contentment in such a solitary life, has no need of children or the comfort of a man? One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.
    Nance took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and, nodding towards the fairy ráth , returned inside to her thistles.

    Nóra set out to the Killarney fair early, a skiff over her arm to carry her shoes and save them from the mud of the road. The dark dawned to a white-knuckled day as she walked, the jackdaws shrieking at the November morning.
    How odd to think that she would be returning with a stranger. Someone to live with and talk to, and who would share the heat of her fire. Someone who might help whittle the long winter days away until spring came with its comforts of birdsong and work.
    It had been Peg O’Shea who had given her the idea to hire a maid. After Samhain Eve, Nóra’s grief had sharpened into righteous anger and she had stormed into Peg’s cabin.
    ‘I’ve a mind to make a harness out of your boy, John,’ Nóra had announced. ‘Running around after dark, putting the fear into widows and children and disturbing my sleep. Here I am with no husband, himself fresh in the grave, and only myself and my nephews to work the ground, and now I have John and his spalpeens battering down the door in masks.’
    Nóra winced as she walked along the road, remembering her words to Peg.
    ‘He’s gallows-bound with that larking. Do they want to be seeing me in my grave? Is that what they were after with their badness?’
    ‘Ah, that’s not it at all.’ Peg had taken one of Nóra’s hands and held it lightly in her own. ‘I tell you, them boys scare more than widows. ’Tis a good thing they had their masks on or you would have been crying louder. Have you seen the face on our John? Like a flitch of bacon on the turn. You should see the girls running from the sight. Ah, Nóra. Come now. We’re kin and all. I’ll have a word with him.’
    It was then that Peg had gently advised Nóra to find some kind of company. When she had pulled a face at Peg’s suggestion that she move in with Daniel and Brigid, the older woman had encouraged her to look for someone at the November hiring fair.
    ‘Get a girl, just to see you through winter,’ she had said. ‘’Twould be a grand help to you, what with Micheál and all. ’Twill be hard looking after a wee cripple on your own. Was it that your man was in the fields and running errands,