Free Dark Rosaleen by OBE Michael Nicholson Page B

And they would all share the same longing for the day when their tubers were big and round in the earth and they could go home again.
    In their mind’s eye they could see them ripening, the stout green stems pushing their way up towards the sunlight, the fields glorious in the first blossoming, the dimpled ridges covered in delicate, shallow forests of yellow and white flowers. As they tightened their belts yet another notch, they would tell each other how, come early autumn, they would rip open the ground and gorge themselves.
    It was their belief, sacrosanct and taught by their fathers and their fathers before them, that plenty always followed scarcity, that God first punished and then blessed. They had somehow survived a terrible blight and a fearful winter but surely there would now follow a glorious summer and a bumper crop.
    In those wandering, hungry months of spring and summer, men were certain of only one thing. This time they must harvest well. They and their families had come through one famished winter. They could not expect to survive a second.

    Kate no longer pined for England, not even when she was most depressed. In those first months after arriving in Ireland, her father’s promise that she would go home within a year had been her one salvation, an ever-present consolation and comfort. But now Lincolnshire seemed far away and as foreign as any distant land could be. She was becoming part of the life around her and the more she became engrossed in it, the more she demanded of it. She was content and yet there lingered in her mind a dread of the future, a contradiction that frightened her. She could not explain it, not to herself, not to Keegan.
    She visited him now as often as she could. She had promised him that Edward Ogilvie would not take revenge on the village for what she had done. She had said that her visits would keep him and his bullwhip away and this had proved true. The bare little schoolroom had now become more a home for her than her father’s house in Cork and the boys and girls who came every day so quietly and shyly to sit on the stone floor were her new friends.
    Eugene’s wounds had healed but the scars rose from his skin in hard white ridges and so they would always remain. He was small, clean and neat in his ways and Keegan had taught him simple words in English. After many days of gentle coaxing and with Keegan’s help translating, Kate persuaded him to talk to her.
    He said he did not know how old he was; he thought perhaps eleven. He had thirteen brothers and sisters and he was somewhere in the middle. His mother had died that January. The cottage had been tumbled and with his father away on the road, there was no one strong enough to build a shelter. A stranger had taken the two older girls away and had given him sixpence for each of them. His brothers had gone to an uncle in Galway and he did not expect to ever see them again.
    ‘Why didn’t you go with them?’ Kate asked.
    ‘I sat with mother.’
    ‘But you said she was dead.’
    ‘No one to bury her.’
    ‘You stayed with her? By her body?’
    ‘Yes.’ He began to speak in Irish and looked to Keegan to translate. ‘I sat four days with my mother to keep the dogs and rats away. I went back and gathered as much straw from the thatch as I could carry and covered her. I set it on fire and when it was cool I collected her bones from the ash, put them in a sack and buried them in a hole in the churchyard under the roots of the big tree. There is no cross but I know the place. I go to speak to her every Sunday. She knows I am there.’
    Kate listened and wept. But it was all past for him. There was no longer any sorrow in remembering. He put his arm around her. She was no longer a stranger.
    On every journey to the school she brought something from Cork. Fruit, pies, slates and crayons, picture books and always the Bible. She brought a Hessian rug to give warmth to the schoolroom floor, pinned cloth to the single window to