Free Dark Rosaleen by OBE Michael Nicholson Page A

faces.
    ‘Who are these men?’ she asked. ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘They are friends. And I am going with them. I will be hung if the Redcoats take me. Your father knows my part in this. Martineau will have told him. I am a wanted man, Miss Kathryn. I am a criminal.’
    ‘Moran, I must help you. I must do something.’
    The two horsemen crossed the bridge and one edged closer. ‘You can do nothing, Miss Macaulay, but go to your father and stay out of this business of ours. The road is safe for you from here to the city. I’ll vouch for that. Say your goodbye to Moran for you’ll not see him again.’
    Moran held out his hand and dropped something into hers. It was a pendant. ‘It is silver, Miss Kathryn. It belonged to my sister. Have it to remember me by. Others know me by it. Show it and you will not be hurt. We have been friends, you and I, and I do not believe that will ever change, whatever is ahead of us. Goodbye and may God always be with you.’
    Kate watched the three canter away and soon they were lost in the half light. She listened until she could hear the pounding hooves no more. Then she too followed their path and left the river behind.
    That night she cried herself to sleep. In her dreams he came to her once again, the ragged orphan in the flames, the boy with the despairing eyes. But this time she did not burn her hands trying to save him. He was reaching out for her instead.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Sir William was shaken by Moran’s sudden departure and Martineau’s evidence that the quiet and respectful butler had been an agent of the Queen’s enemies. More shocking still was the sudden capture and killing of Captain Shelley. Sir William had not expected it to end that way. It had not been his wish. He knew the man to be a traitor and he would most certainly have been executed for his treachery, but whatever a man’s crime, he was deserving of a fair trial. That was British justice.
    He had asked Martineau to find out why the outlaws had not been taken prisoner and who it was who had given the order to fire on the unarmed gang. Martineau assured him he would enquire and report his findings, but as time passed, he made no mention of it again and if Sir William had his own suspicions he did not pursue them. It was eventually agreed that, as Shelley’s desertion and the killings had only a muted response from Whitehall, it was in everyone’s interests to let the matter rest.

    It had been a bright and perky April. A warm, still May followed. With their seed potatoes in the ground, women guarded them as jealously as a miser guards his pennies. In the daylight hours they stood like sentinels on their plots to scare away the crows that dared to snatch at a juicy leaf. Their children patrolled the ridges, pulling up the weeds, throwing away the stones and crumbling the soft earth between their fingers so that not a single clod might delay a shoot’s rise. Along the coastline, boys scoured the beaches and brought back baskets of seaweed and worked its goodness into the ground. Their sisters carried handfuls of soot, scraped from the hearths and chimneys of their razed cottages and spread it around the plants to ward off the beetles and worms. There was much labour earnestly given.
    In better times it was the tradition to give the priest a fat chicken or a basket of duck eggs that he might bless the fields and sprinkle them with holy water. At planting time they were overly respectful towards him and never failed to attend Mass, crossing themselves a dozen times as they stumbled through the Act of Contrition. Special homage was paid to St Bridget so that she too might bless the little seeds snug in their holes.
    April heralded the beginning of the season of mean and hungry months. Now Ireland would again swarm with armies of roaming men searching for food or work, begging, stealing, resting wherever there was a space, crowding into towns and cities, dirty, ragged and hungry, each looking out for himself.