Free The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney Page A

Europe, sprinkling their Latin verses on the ground and watching them grow into culture. Was I not learning everywhere I went? And by sharing what I learned from the people of the countryside, was I not teaching? And isn’t that the true definition of a scholar?
    “Mustn’t a young man make of himself what he can?” Miss Fay had asked, and this Wandering Scholar image is what I chose—the river, I told myself, had now flowed down as far as me. But I kept it secret; I felt it was too fragile to put on show.
    I came to enjoy this new view of myself very much, and I believe you would have liked me in that mode. And indeed it was only when I dropped it, or became detached from it, that I drank too much and got into trouble. When I sobered up, and when the remorse kicked in, books became again my main recourse, and through which I again built up my picture of myself as a learned and learning young man, wandering from town to village, finding out what people had to tell me and offering them my own gifts in return.
    As this person, I often forgot my own misery. Sometimes, and for weeks at a time, I began to cease thinking about Venetia, and about death, and the day it would come to me, and I began to look in other directions for fresh things, a new life. But I couldn’t sustain it for long. The pattern, from the height of medieval dreaming to the depth of drunkenness, and back up again to a calm and respectful view of myself—that usually had a rhythm of about six to eight weeks.
    Soon, though, I began to identify it, and sometimes nipped it in the bud. But being able to avert the plunge depended upon the location in which the bad mood set in—and in some places I never got it under control.
    Consider Galway, because I had married there, young and full of hard-earned hope. How could my heart not crash there?
    Our momentum now increases, as Galway provides the next and very revealing stage in the story of Miss Begley—because from Galway we went onward with no way of stopping her.

22
    They call it the City of the Tribes, because the de Burgos from Normandy—today’s Burkes—conquered it, and invited in thirteen otherfamilies, Blakes, Joyces, Kirwans, Lynches, and others, who ruled the place for centuries like European fief lords. There’s a moment as you enter Galway when the city seems to float on the water, like Venice or Oslo, as the River Corrib mates with the sea.
    I went back there every year at the time of Venetia’s disappearance, to see whether such things as ghosts exist—or, indeed, miracles. My routine didn’t vary—a walk along the quays, inspecting every ship tied up at the dock; a searching look into every dinghy and longboat from the vessels that stood moored out there in the offing. I stopped people, showed them the photograph; I asked the same question, always the same: “Have you seen this lady?”
    By now, I was receiving the answer, “Didn’t you ask me that last year?” Or the year before? Or the year before? And yet I trudged on, not knowing whether I had hope or not.
    That year, though, I added something to my Galway inquiries; now I asked the question that had come to me out of the blue outside the dance hall in Killarney when I was fired up with aggression:
Do you know a man name of Raymond Cody?
    In Galway, I had no takers. Nobody knew this Cody, this slimy monster, this slug-white thug.
    Depressed, my mind’s voice a wooden bell, I walked around the city center, until a woman’s call, from a distance, roused me: “Ben! Hoi!”
    She had written to me at the post office in Dingle, “Meet me in Galway”—not a coincidence; she remembered my itinerary. And how precise she was with time and place; as she said in her note, “Twelve noon outside the main post office.”
    Not many women in Ireland wore hats, except on a Sunday going to Mass, and they certainly didn’t wear great straw creations big as a wheel, with false cherries bobbing at the brim. Miss Begley did, on a midweek