The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle (10 page)

Meg was so tired she could have slept for a couple of days; the fresh island air and the exhausting schedule they had kept the day before could have easily seen to that. But they had to get to Inishbofin. When Meg’s mom woke her up at the crack of dawn, Meg’s head was still foggy with a new dream from the night past: She was riding in a motorboat at high speed, and she did not feel comfortable because of her vow to ride only in sailboats. The motorboat was racing over wave after wave, and water was crashing all over her. She had to get somewhere and it had to be quickly, but she was woken up before she knew where she was going in the dream. Just dreaming about riding on a motorboat bugged Meg the entire time she was getting dressed and gathering her things for the day ahead.

A
fter getting packed up, Meg and her mom went downstairs to a breakfast of fried eggs, potatoes, and something called a
rasher
, what the woman at the Bed and Breakfast said was supposed to be bacon but looked more like ham. Meg tried to make a sandwich out of the rasher but it was just not the same as her favorite breakfast sandwich at home. Irish food was something she was going to have to get used to. After breakfast mother and daughter made their way down to the pier and boarded the
Cailín Mo Chroí.

The sun was out and the sea was a little calmer than it
had been when they came in the day before. Shay and Meg cast off from the pier. They raised the mainsail and sailed their way towards their ancestral home. The course they charted up the Connemara coast would get them to Inishbofin before the day was over, depending on the wind, which did not seem to be a problem in these waters. Shay called out orders to Meg in a much nicer way than she did the previous day, and Meg carried them out with precision.

“Hoist the
foresail.” Meg trotted up the deck and pulled on the line attached to the red sail until it fluttered and then filled with wind.

“Let out that line.”
By the time her mom called out that order, Meg had already noticed that the sail needed to be let out and was loosening the line attached to the long wood pole that held the bottom of the sail.

“Watch the spar.”

“Prepare to tack.” Meg dropped to the deck getting ready for her mom to swing the boat and its sails for the wind to come from the other direction.

“Tack
ho!” Shay turned the tiller and the spar and sail swung gently over her.

Meg loved to watch her
mom sail. Shay was so confident and commanding at the helm of a sailboat that, even when they took friends out on the
Muirín
back home, they all often just naturally followed whatever she said. Meg’s mom was that way on land, as well, and was the center of attention wherever they went. Her confidence and demeanor outshone her short stature. Shay was everything Meg wanted to be, but wasn’t—at least not yet.

Meg had never been
one of the popular girls at school. Her small size had led her to being very shy around other kids her age, and she found it hard to make friends. She didn’t dance like her sister and, because she sometimes felt short of breath, had never got into sports, two activities that helped Eileen gain a lot of friends. Meg could never find anyone who would just play by the water and pretend the same way she did. Her days were spent in her own little world with her imagination always keeping her company.

Like most other little girls, there was a time when Meg wanted nothing more than to be a princess. When out playing in the surf, she was always the Little Mermaid, splashing her feet together like a fin.
Her mom said she had no fear of the water when they first took her to a beach, and would have walked right out into the sound and drowned if they hadn’t stopped her. As a toddler, whenever Meg took a bath, she would always try to stick her face in the water, a habit that drove her parents crazy. Meg was convinced she could breathe underwater like her princess hero Ariel.

After
Meg had outgrown the princess stage, some days she pretended to be a famous sea explorer combing the ocean floor for new kinds of fish. When she was out on her mom’s boat she was always a pirate captain sailing to find buried treasure. Shay and Mark found it unusual that Meg was always by herself, so they often tried to pair her up with some of their friends’ daughters and sons. Meg tried to play with them, but no lasting friendship ever bloomed as a result. The problem was that the other kids never wanted to do things Meg’s way, and Meg was stubborn and only wanted things her way.

Compared to her sister Eileen,
the social butterfly who was always on the go, Meg was a hermit. She never wanted to leave the vicinity of her home and its surroundings. Of course, Meg had to go to school like all kids do. In fact, school was kind of easy for Meg because she always loved to read. Meg’s big problem was doing her homework. After coming home from a long day at school, especially when it was nice out, she went straight to the docks or to the shore to play. When it wasn’t nice outside, she stayed up in her room snuggled up with Finn and reading.

While Meg’s test scores in school were always good, her grades suffered because her after-school activities took up the time she really should have spent doing school work, so she lost homework points almost every day.
Her parents never punished her for her bad grades because they knew she was smart, but they often told her how disappointed they were with her school work. The last thing Meg wanted to do was disappoint her parents, but since they were usually still out on their boats when she got home from school, she found it hard to sit down and concentrate on her homework when there were so many other worlds to discover on her own in a book or outside in her backyard. The course Meg plotted was her own, but like most sailing trips, she had to either follow the way the wind carried her or beat against it in the direction she wanted, and she almost always chose the latter.

As they sailed up the coast
, Meg and Shay marveled at the strange beauty of the west coast of Ireland. Off the side of the boat they saw sweeping vistas of green fields perched upon cliffs and sandy beaches. Meg wondered if those beaches ever saw sunbathers because of the spotty weather in Ireland. The land was rocky and so was the shoreline, and there were numerous islands and coves scattered everywhere. It would have been rough sailing in these waters without the charts that showed the subsurface rocks everywhere. At times, the landscape before them looked more like the moon than a place on earth because it was so barren and rocky. They viewed land and water scenery that few tourists ever got to experience, and they knew it. In spite of the challenging sea conditions, Meg and Shay were really enjoying sailing past peaceful fields and the weather-beaten coastline.

The boat rose and fell on great swells of water
, and Meg thought that the Atlantic Ocean seemed harsher on this side than it did at home. Sure, Meg had encountered some big waves sailing with her mom past Montauk, New York, but they were not as powerful as the ones she was experiencing here. The sailing was hard and their skill was being challenged with every swell.

They had been sailing hard for a
few hours when Shay decided that they should take a break and have some lunch. She steered the boat into a sheltered cove on the lee side of a rocky island sheltered from the wind and dropped anchor. They had packed a couple of sandwiches and, while they ate, Shay told Meg more about this part of Ireland where their family was from.

In the seventeenth century,
England made numerous attempts to conquer Ireland, outlawing the customs and language of the Irish. Ireland was divided into four provinces: Ulster in the north, Leinster in the east, Munster in the south, and Connacht in the west. During one invasion of the English under Oliver Cromwell, now considered a cruel and tyrannical leader, the English adopted his “to hell or Connacht” saying for use when subduing the Irish. Cromwell’s campaign of subjugation drove the Irish from the fertile farmland of the other provinces to the rocky land of the west. But even there the Irish were not safe. A murderous crusade raged across the land, with punitive laws being enforced on the mainland. As a consequence, the Irish were forced to escape to the islands to preserve the language and the culture they loved.

In the long
term, even after Ireland gained its independence from England in the 1920s, the damage to the language had been done, with only a small number of Irish people still using Irish as their primary language. The number of people who continue to speak mainly Irish grows smaller each year. Irish, or Gaelic, as it is also called, can still be heard in tiny pockets in the country and scattered along the coast in places like the Aran Islands. These areas are called the
Gaeltacht
(pronounced
gale-takt
). Although learning Irish is mandatory in all schools in Ireland, and the language will never completely die, its time as a common language has long passed.

“Mom, I want to learn Irish to keep it from dying.”

“That is very noble, Meg. You know, since I only know just a little, maybe we can learn it together.”

“I would really love that
, Mom.”

The thought of spending more time with her mother made Meg very happy.
They finished their lunch and were soon sailing fast up the coast. They passed another rocky cliff with a scraggily green field on top, and Meg imagined how hard it must have been for people to live on such inhospitable land. Just the thought of a family needing a way to grow crops and figuring how to “build” farmland with seaweed and sand on top of rocks made her proud of the kind of people who were her family’s ancestors.

“What did Nanny tell you about our family’s history?”

“Not much, actually. I’ve learned more this week than I have in my entire life. She would just say that we came from the islands off the west coast of Ireland and were once great sea captains.”

“You would have to be great sea captains to sail these waters, huh
, Mom”

“This is definitely not Fishers Island Sound
, Meg,” her mother said with a smile.

Looking at the coast of Connacht from the rocking boat, Meg’s mind drifted off. She was daydreaming of sea captains and ships and escaping from invaders to save a heritage. Her existence
seemed so childish up to this point; all she had ever done was play and read. Meg thought of the compendium that was hanging around her neck and had a newfound goal for her life. It was up to her to save the family legacy, become a great sea captain, and to travel the world. It was an easy dream to have at this moment, sailing up an unknown shore in a sailboat with billowing red sails.

They were
enjoying the sail on a broad reach, almost running with the wind. Suddenly, the wind changed direction. In an instant, the sheets back-winded and the boom that held the main sail swung violently across the hooker throwing the
Cailín Mo Chroí
on its side. Shay was caught off guard, as she was not fully used to the boat, and did not release the lines in time to stop it. Like a rag doll, Meg was thrown overboard into the cold water.

“Meg!” she heard her mom scream.

The shock of the cold water hit Meg like a wall, taking her breath away. She fought to catch her breath and righted herself in the water. The ocean swells were huge, and she struggled to swim back towards the boat, “Mommy!”

Meg was heaved up and down, water crashing over
her, but her lifejacket kept her head above the water. She swam as hard as she could, but despite all of her efforts the boat kept getting farther and farther away.

Swim
, Meg, swim
, she thought to herself. Meg saw her mom swing the boat around to come back towards her, but it seemed that she was caught in a current opposite the wind. The current swept her out to sea while the wind pushed the hooker and her mom away from her.

In between the waves she could see the boat and
also the cliffs that she had seen earlier. But with every rise and fall of the waves, they became smaller. Meg was breathing so hard and was so cold that she could not think straight.

All right
, Meg, fifty-degree water should give me about thirty minutes before hypothermia…, or is it fifteen minutes?
As she thrashed against the massive swells, Meg tried to remember the boating safety course she had taken when she was nine. No matter how hard she swam, she was unable to change how fast she was drifting away from land and her mother.

In what seemed to be an eternity, she
finally stopped swimming to see if she could get her bearings. When she looked up she could no longer see the cliffs on the shore. Her inability to see land scared her to death, but she easily made the red sails out from the grey-green ocean and swam harder.

Come on
, Mom. Get that boat moving.
Meg could see that Shay was forced to tack the boat back and forth against the wind to follow the current that was dragging Meg. The wind was strong, and Shay was tacking quickly, but the distance between Meg and the boat grew by the minute. Unlike the boat, Meg had no wind resistance and her little body was being carried away with the strong current at a rapid pace.

Between swells, when she was at the bottom of a wave, fear overtook her
. But then, on the up swell, she would get a glimpse of red triangles in the distance, and felt hope. The roar of the waves filled her ears with white noise. Up and down, comforted and terrorized, wave after wave, she agonizingly watched the sails shrink from the peaks of water, until finally, after emerging from the bottom of a large swell, she could no longer see the boat.