Away by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online Page A

appropriate church with regularity, this lack of judgement on their part came eventually to be ignored.
    The Black Nun upon whom Granville now mused was buried beneath the Friary’s portal because, in a moment of extreme humility, she had expressed a wish that, when dead, she be trodden upon by those entering and those leaving the religious house where she had lived. Why she inhabited a friary was never fully explained, though it may have had something to do with her role as a prophet. During her lifetime she had made a number of predictions, none of which had, as yet, come true, but all of which might, if one were merely to wait long enough. She predicted that Knocklaid Mountain would explode, causing a muddy flood for seven miles in all directions. She predicted that Rathlin Island would disappear into a dense fog and never be seen again. She predicted that Finn Mac Cumhail’s great dog Bran would return to Ireland in the form of a leopard hungry for British blood. And she predicted that Ireland’s liberation and independence would be announced by the appearance of a ship with sails of flame in Ballycastle Harbour. This last prediction fascinated Granville who had great sympathy for the cause of an independent Ireland. He intended to focus two stanzas of his lament on a description of this mythic ship – the sparks showering the sky, the fire reflected in the water, the Black Nun herself, her face glowing, joyfully haunting the prophesied event. Then, because this was, after all, a lament,he intended to have the whole scene evaporate before the poet’s very eyes, leaving him longing for,
    All days evermore,
The sails of sun, the victory won,
The joy upon the shore.
    Granville had given little thought to what might become of his family holdings were this grand liberation to take place. It seemed as vague and unlikely to him as his stuffed puffins and demesne seemed eternal. It was the myth of the desire for freedom that appealed to him – all the longing that filled the very air. The ongoing sense of emotional trouble. Ever since the first poem in his series – “A Lament on the 1704 Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery” – he was obsessed by the sorrow that seemed to be embedded in the stones beneath his feet. Resolution, he knew instinctively, would change the tone of the landscape, the faces of the cottiers, the melancholy of the people’s music, and the passion and stoicism of their survival – in short, all that he and his ancestors had come to love. And so, without being aware, he supported this delicate balance of injustice and defiance on the one hand and sorrow and poetry on the other. That, and the rich cloak of imagination and invented worlds that protected the peasants around him from the cold reality of their unchangeable lot.
    “How is it going at O’Malley’s school?” asked Osbert, bending down to reach the little pot of water that stood at his feet. “A damp season for it, I’d say.”
    Both brothers loved and supported the “little hedge academy,” as they called it, it being one of the few to survive the advent of state education, once it had become legal to educate Catholics at all. Osbert occasionally gave free drawing lessonsto the children, and Granville, who had written “A Lament on the Demise of the Bardic Schools of Ireland,” donated books. The children were invited once a year to Puffin Court and given the run of the Cave Walk while Granville and the hedge schoolmaster compared poems.
    “They’ve a fair bit of thatch,” said Granville, “it shouldn’t be too bad. Punic wars, is what they’re doing now, I think.” He paused and stared into the distance. “I wonder if this Black Nun had a youth?” he mused.
    “They say school’s been out for a couple of days. O’Malley’s gone to the island with the priest.”
    “Ah … the priest-philosopher. Was he here, then? Pity I hadn’t known. I could have asked him about the nun.” Granville began counting