Whitethorn Woods (44 page)

   Father Flynn thought to himself that she had better come fairly quickly if she wanted to see the well and he examined his diary to get a suitable early date for the wedding.

Eddie Flynn was nowhere to be found when the decision to build the new road was announced. The vote in the council had been satisfactorily in favor of building the bypass. Eddie's syndicate had bought every piece of property that might have been central to this plan except the Nolans' farm. The plan said the road would go straight through this property and up through the woods in a straight line, taking the well and the shrine with it.

   Eddie had assured the others that buying land from Neddy Nolan was like taking candy from a baby. Yes, true, it was Neddy who was the loser. The compulsory purchase order would not pay anything like what he had been offered by the syndicate. But Neddy had always been soft in the head. The real problem was that Eddie Flynn had not delivered. So he had disappeared.

   Kitty and the children barely noticed that he was gone. Naomi, however, was very distressed. She had fabric for bridesmaids and flower girls, and she needed to talk to him about it. Why had he done this now? And he had left her no money to be getting on with, and the flat was only paid for for the next two months. It was vexing in the extreme . . .

Lilly Ryan had heard from her cousin Pearl over in the north of England. Pearl was married to this really sweet fellow, Bob, and they had two grown-up children. It appeared that something good had happened in their lives. Their children, who used to be quite cold and distant and maybe a bit ashamed of them, had been much nicer of late. Pearl always wrote very honestly, not pretending or putting on airs. She wondered, could she and Bob come and spend a long weekend in Rossmore? Now Lilly was to say if it was difficult, and she would quite understand.

   So Lilly sat down and wrote everything, all about Aidan and his accusations, and how he couldn't cope and that despite his violence he was a weak man, and that he would be in jail for another eighteen months and how she, Lilly, would just love them to visit. When she posted the letter she felt much better, as if she had needed to write out the whole story to make some kind of sense of it. She said that she and Pearl would go up to St. Ann's Well for old times' sake when she arrived.

Clare and Neddy sat one on either side of the table. Clare didn't even look at the papers spread out all over the place. She was about to have her first and last row with Neddy Nolan on the day she had been going to tell him that her period was three weeks late and they might possibly be looking at the pregnancy they both had longed for. Now it was too late.

   Neddy spoke very quietly.

   "The permission for the road has been given today, Clare. As we thought, it's going straight through here and on up to the well."

   "We knew that would happen, but you refused to sell to Eddie Flynn just at a time when you might actually need money more than any other time of your life." Clare's voice was cold.

   "But I couldn't sell to them or we'd have had no control," he said, as if explaining it to a toddler.

   "And what control do you have now? Less money, that's all . . ."

   "No, Clare, that's not true, we have all this . . ." He waved at the papers and maps on the kitchen table.

   "This?"

   "I took advice, I got experts to draw up an alternative plan, another way the road would go so that it wouldn't take away St. Ann's shrine. It involved architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, and cost a fortune. Clare, I had to borrow from Cathal Chambers and he thinks I'm into heroin or gambling or something."

   Suddenly she knew that this was indeed what he was doing with the money, rather than feathering a little love nest for himself in the converted flour mills. Her relief was followed by a wave of resentment.

   "And why didn't you tell him and tell me, for God's sake?"

   "I had to keep it very quiet, have meetings where no one would see me."

   "In the old flour mills?" she guessed.

   Neddy laughed sheepishly. "There's me thinking no one knew!"

   He patted her hand and kissed her fingers, as he often did. The resentment had gone. Clare felt only the relief that he still loved her. She hadn't known until now just how much she would dread the thought of losing him.

   "Will it work, Neddy?" she asked weakly.

   Neddy Nolan had hired all these people to make maps and surveys. It was unbelievable.

   "I think it will," Neddy said calmly. "You see, I hired a public relations expert as well to show us how to get public sympathy. And he will get us a media coach for the two of us for television."

"For television?"

   "If you agree, we can go on a big news program and debate it with the developers."

   "We can?" Clare whispered.

   "Oh yes, we can explain how so many people here feel grateful to St. Ann and want to keep the well and the shrine. It would make no sense now for anyone to oppose us."

   "But Neddy, couldn't we have done that without you having to hire all these experts?"

   "No, that's just the point," Neddy cried. "Then we'd only have been pious, old-fashioned, superstitious people standing in the way of progress. We'd only have looked like the old Ireland rooted in history and traditions against the good modern Ireland, which wanted to improve life for everyone . . ."

   "And now?"

   "Now we have a perfectly possible alternative plan. A plan that you and I paid for with our own money, refusing huge financial offers from syndicates and the like." He nodded over at the little oak cabinet. "I have every detail of it recorded there. They'll know we are telling the truth and putting our money where our mouth is."

   "And where will the road go?"

   She bent over the map with him and he stroked her hair with one hand as he pointed with the other. The new road would still go through the Nolan farm, but would then follow a route that would allow a sizable part of the woods to remain, the part that held the shrine. There would be a big parking lot there and a side road from the new road to bring visitors directly to the shrine instead of going through Rossmore. And yet the local people could walk there through what remained of the woods, as always.

   Clare looked at him with admiration. It could well work. A government heading for a general election, a local council fearful of being accused of taking bribes, might well want to take this chance of avoiding the huge confrontation that seemed to be brewing. Neddy's solution seemed a perfect way out for everybody.

   "I wish you'd told me," she said.

   "Yes, I was going to, but you looked tired, and you have to go into a classroom every day. I just stay here. I have a much easier life."

   She looked around the gleaming house that he kept so well for the three of them. It was not such an easy life, and she knew it. But Neddy never complained.

   "Hey, you said you had something to tell me—what was it?" he asked.

   She told him that there was an outside chance she might be pregnant. Neddy got up and held her in his arms.

   "I was up there at the shrine today and I know it's nonsense but I did say that it was something we both wanted badly," he said into her hair.

   "Well, she had to do something for the man who saved her well," Clare said.

   They were still standing there, arms around each other, when Marty Nolan came in.

   "Father Flynn arrived and he couldn't get any answer so I came in to see were you two all right." He was indignant that he had to be woken from his chair.

   As they had their tea and homemade biscuits, the birds started to gather on the trees for the night. And the sun began to set over the woods that Neddy Nolan had almost certainly saved.

   And the priest knew that his sister, Judy, was up there at the well, thanking St. Ann and saying she hadn't expected that it would all work so quickly.

   So Father Flynn listened, as it got dark, to Neddy's plans.

   He was going to buy a house much nearer Rossmore, and then maybe Father Flynn's mother and the canon could come to stay. It would not be like moving too far from the town, he had seen a grand place with a garden that the canon would like. Neddy would look after them all.

   And if by any chance they were to get a little baby, he would look after the baby too. It would be nice for older people to have a new young life around the place.

   And for once Father Flynn could find nothing to say. What he liked to think of as his comforting supply of meaningless clichés had dried up.

   He looked at the good, honest man in front of him and for the first time in a long time he saw some purpose in a life that had recently been confused and contradictory on every front.

   He looked back up at the ever-darkening woods.

   And it wasn't fanciful to think of them as a very special place, where so many voices had been heard and so many dreams answered.

I w ould like t o thank very sincerely my editor, Carole Baron, and my agent, Christine Green, for all their support and advice.

   Also the many generous people who told me about their hopes and dreams, priests who trusted me with some of their anxieties and kind Frank MacDonald the journalist who tried to explain to me the complexities of constructing a bypass road.

A Note about the author

A note on the type

This book was set in Adobe Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach, the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffrey Tory and is believed to have followed the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letter we now know as "old style." He gave to his letters a certain elegance and feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.

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