Free The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney

told the local police of the two young men and wondered if they’d heard anything of a shipwreck. They told me that they’d go “down that way in a couple of days,” and they seemed neither suspicious nor concerned. That tells you a great deal about our neutrality and the state of “the Emergency.”
    What tells you a great deal about war, however, is the fact that, several months later, the slim and fit young bodies of those two German boys were found twenty miles along the coast in a disused shed. Their throats had been slit and their bodies bore the profane marks of torture.

21
    Now, while those young men are still in my mind, I must reveal something about myself. It connects to one of them and I saved my own life with it, and I must write it now because I want to heal myself a little after that sad recollection.
    During all the lonely years of searching, I had also been educating myself. Everywhere I went I carried books. (Had Miss Begley been aware of it she’d have said, “Books are the Storehouse of Wisdom”—or some such motto.)
    In general the books sprang from Miss Dora Fay, a friend to me since I was a little boy. She and her twin brother (whom I will not discuss, as his name would pollute the page) often rented the cottage that my parents owned on the bank of the river flowing through Goldenfields.
    I loved Miss Fay, her toothy, tortoiseshell-glasses awkwardness and her sweet nature. She gave me my first jigsaw; she introduced me to two of the most magical words in the English language,
William
and
Shakespeare
. From Miss Fay I learned how to make egg custard; and I learned how to tie my laces so that they lie flat across my footwear and never come undone.
    And then came a day when I discovered that James Clare, my protector, also knew Miss Fay. In fact, although they never married, they belonged in heart and soul to each other, and when Venetia disappeared,they became my spiritual parents. They guarded me from myself, never asked a probing question, accepted my dumb grief, and took me on up into adulthood as safely as I would permit.
    As part of this process, they gave me my first major reading list, and Miss Fay, with her teeth as ever in the way of her tongue, said, “Did you know that books can save your life?”
    How I wish that she had met the soldier who proved my savior. But at least I was later able to tell her the story of the scrawny little fellow, and it gave her the pleasure of saying, “You see, Ben—books truly can save your life.” Miss Fay loved to repeat herself.
    She had also asked rhetorically by what other means I intended continuing to learn, and at the same dinner table James Clare reminded me that many a good book would fit into a pocket of my greatcoat. So I took on every writer whom they recommended, from Chaucer to Dickens and Hardy, from Franklin to Hawthorne and Thoreau, from Balzac to de Maupassant and Zola.
    And then I went on to read ever more widely, finding all the while many new friends on the page. I read Plato and tried to understand what understanding is; I read Socrates and learned how to argue with myself; I read Ovid and wished that I had been the one to collect those legends.
    More important, I grew a kind of new skin—meaning, I gave myself a private identity. A librarian in a town where I’d been staying for two weeks introduced me to the work of a woman from Belfast, Helen Waddell, who had translated Chinese poems, some of which were written twelve centuries before the birth of Christ.
    Then, not long before I met Miss Begley, this Miss Waddell wrote the book that became my constant companion,
The Wandering Scholars:
“To the medieval scholar, with no sense of perspective, but with a strong sense of continuity, Virgil and Cicero are but the upper reaches of the river that flows past his door.”
    When I read that sentence I became a Wandering Scholar; I began to see myself as a latter-day member of that band of men who wandered through twelfth-century