Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online

Protestant church, had a cottage that was all covered with climbing roses – his wife spent from dawn to dusk gardening. To the outsider Mountfern looked a slow sleepy place, badly planned, straggling towards a river, but not having any real purpose.
    It had been an estate village of course, a collection of smallholdings which all depended on the big house. Thedays of a community depending on one family seat for livelihood and living quarters were long gone. But Mountfern had not died with the house.
    The farmers would always need somewhere to send their children to school, and shops where their wives could sell vegetables, eggs and poultry, where they could buy the essentials without having to travel to the big town, sixteen miles down the main road.
    The visitor might have thought Mountfern a backwater but there were few visitors to have such thoughts. It hadn’t anything to offer to the sightseer; you had to have some reason to come to Mountfern, otherwise you would think it was a place where nothing happened at all.
    Dara and Michael Ryan never thought of Mountfern like that. It was the centre of their world and always had been. They hardly ever left it except to go to the town maybe four times a year. They had been to Dublin of course with the school on educational tours, and once with Dad and Mam when they were very young and there had been an excursion to see Santa Claus in the various Dublin shops. Eddie always resented hearing about this excursion and wanted to know why it hadn’t been repeated for the rest of the family.
    ‘Because Santa Claus would vomit if he saw you,’ Dara had explained.
    This evening, however, they had forgotten what a thorn in the flesh their younger brother Eddie was. They were setting out with a purpose. To find out what was happening to Fernscourt. They had seen the men with the measuring instruments but had not wanted to ask them straight out – it was almost too direct. They felt without actually saying it to each other that they would find outwhat was the collective view first. Then armed with this knowledge they would face the people that Loretto thought were making a version of
The Quiet Man
(a tamer version, the scenery in this part of the Irish midlands wasn’t spectacular and there were very few Maureen O’Haras around the place).
    They passed Coyne’s motor works before they got to the bridge. Jack was working as he always seemed to be, day and night, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
    The twins had heard their father say that it was the mercy of God that Jack Coyne hadn’t set himself alight with all the petrol and oil around the place, and that one day he could well blow the whole of Mountfern sky high with his dangerous practices. Dara and Michael didn’t like Mr Coyne much, he always looked as if he were about to have a fight with someone. He was old of course, nearly as old as Mam and Dad, small and pointed-looking. He wasn’t married, and he always said that a man who voluntarily took on a wife to nag the life out of him, and spend all he earned, was a man on whom no sympathy should be wasted. Dara had once said to him that if everyone had felt the way he did, the world would have come to an end long ago. Jack Coyne said that everyone might have been better off if it had, and let Dara remember that when she grew up and her head got full of nonsense about love and the like.
    ‘Good evening, Mr Coyne.’ It didn’t matter that he might be an old grouch, they still had to be polite and salute him.
    ‘Out gallivanting,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Still I hear that they’ve big plans for Fernscourt. That’ll put a halt to your gallop, the lot of you.’
    ‘What plans?’ The twins ignored the gratuitous offence; they had never done anything to irritate Jack Coyne.
    To his own immense annoyance Jack Coyne didn’t know what plans were afoot. Those fellows doing a survey had been far from forthcoming. But he had his own views.
    ‘A big religious house I hear,