Away by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online

did, in close proximity to some crumbling evidence of Ireland’s former glory, and hence his portable lap desk, which he kept in his knapsack, was one of his most cherished possessions. It had travelled with him to all of North Antrim’s most interesting locations; from the Giant’s Causeway to Bruce’s Cave on Rathlin Island, from Oisín’s Grave to Doonfort at Fair Head, from Dunseverick Castle to Carrick-A-Reed. Now, while his brother applied another grey wash to the old stones depicted in his watercolour, Granville was writing his lament for Bunnamairge Friary and the Black Nun he knew was buried under its threshold.
    The Sedgewicks were a fair-minded if eccentric family and Osbert and Granville were as well loved by the peasantry as any pair of landlords could ever hope to be. The tenants had given up trying to understand the family during the incumbency of Henry Austin the First and had lapsed into a kind of bemused acceptance of what was termed “the antics of themselves.” Several of the older men in the community kept their minds busy inventing new folklore to relate at their firesides during Osbert’s and Granville’s note-taking visits so as not to disappoint the young masters whom much of the male peasantry had come to know, thirty years before, during the Great Walk Making Employment – a project conceived by Henry Austin the Third when Osbert and Granville were small boys.
    In a particularly ambitious attempt to get yet another facet of County Antrim onto his demesne, if not into the house itself, the father of the boys hired fifty of his tenants to help him create suitably romantic and lengthy walks for his children. One of these promenades, two miles long and liberallyscattered with man-made grottos of every description, was known as the Cave Walk. Its crowning glory was a structure made with thousands of bottles from the Ballycastle Glass Factory inserted into mud and wattles so that their necks and mouths were exposed to the air in hopes that the wind might blow into them and create “a symphony of sound.” The Cliff Walk was never completed owing to the difficulty of getting rocks large enough and precipitous enough and in sufficient quantity onto the property. Many arbours, however, sprang up at this time, as did fountains of varying intensities. Three or four artificial lakes were created, complete with the man-made islands called crannogs. Osbert’s and Granville’s creative careers had begun at the ages of six and eight when their father had commanded them to sketch, and then compose a sonnet about, one of the little crannogs. Although’s Osbert’s drawing was far superior to Granville’s, despite the former’s younger age, Granville displayed a natural aptitude for poetry. From that day on they pursued their chosen gifts, happily, never once intruding into the other’s territory, but almost always working together.
    The old Friary was a great favourite with the brothers for several reasons. First, it could be reached easily, after a pleasant hour-and-a-half stroll, downhill, from Puffin Court towards the sea. Second, its history was undeniably tragic as well as undeniably finished – a requisite for Granville’s laments if not for Osbert’s watercolours – and third, it was, of course, connected to the Roman Catholic Church for which all of the Sedgewicks, who were, naturally, Protestant, had great affection. They were charmed by their tenants’ passionate faith, by their beads and Hail Marys and crucifixes. At the time of the Catholic emancipation in 1829, bonfires were lit and torches were waved at Puffin Court in response to those glowingall over the neighbouring hills. As might be expected, this gave rise to great suspicion in the minds of the other Protestant gentry and Presbyterian farmers in the region, but as the years went by, and the Sedgewicks goodnaturedly went on with the business of collecting gulls’ eggs and mineral specimens, and as they appeared in the