"You are my father?" It was Maurice who spoke now. He was very pale. He had been watching Eva; now he turned to Sean.

"I am." Sean smiled. He seemed delighted.

"But why?" Eva's voice was a cry of pain. She couldn't help it. "Why in God's name would you have your own son by another woman to live in my house all these years, under my very nose, and never a word to me about who he was? You watched me look after him and love him like my own.

And it was all a lie! A lie to make a fool of me. Was it for that you did it, Sean? For my humiliation? In the name of God, when I think of the good wife I've been to you, why would you do such a thing?" She paused, staring at him. "You were planning this for years."

And now, as he looked at her with the blandest of smiles on his handsome face, she saw, also, a little gleam of angry triumph in his eye.

"It was you who brought the friar here and made me swear upon the Saint Kevin." He paused and she saw his fingers close upon the arms of the oak chair as his body leaned forward in the seat. "It was you that humiliated me, Eva, in front of the friar and the priest," his voice was rising in suppressed fury, "in my own house." He threw himself back in his seat. Then he smiled. "You've done a good job looking after my son. I'll say that."

And in a terrible, searing flash, Eva understood as she had never understood before the vanity of a man, and the long, cold reach of his vengeance.

Just then, Maurice ran out of the hall.

Sean and Eva ate in silence that night. The brehon, having gone to visit Father Donal, had sent word that he would remain with the priest and his family until his departure early in the morning. Maurice had gone to the barn to be alone. Though Eva had asked him to come back in, he had requested, politely as always, that he might be allowed to remain alone with his thoughts; and so, after giving his arm an awkward but affectionate squeeze, Eva had left him there.

Sean had already announced that he would be going up to the high pasture again in the morning. The two of them sat-he apparently satisfied, she in stony silence-until at last, when the meal was done, she remarked to him: "I shall never get over this, you know."

"You will in time." He had an apple in his hand. He cut it into four pieces with his knife, leaving the seeds in, and ate one of the quarters, swallowing the seeds. "What's done is done," he observed.

"You love him anyway. He's a fine boy."

"Oh, he is fine," she acknowledged. "It is amazing to me only," she added bitterly, "that someone so fine could be your son."

"Do you think so?" He nodded thoughtfully. "Well, it would seem that with his mother I could make a finer son than I could with you." And he picked up another piece of the quartered apple.

Her head went forward. The pain of the cruel words was so great, it was like a dagger stabbed into her stomach. She thought of Fintan.

"Do you love anybody?" she asked at last.

"Other than yourself?"

"I do." He let the words dangle like a bait before a fish in the stream, but she had wisdom enough to turn away.

They remained in silence for as long as it took him, at his calculated leisure, to eat the other two quarters of the apple.

"He must go," she said.

"You're a great one for throwing people out of my house," he remarked. "Is it my own son you're wanting to be rid of now?"

"He must go, Sean. You say that I love him, and it's true. But I can't stand it. He must go."

"My son will stay in his father's house," he replied with finality; and with that he got up and went to bed, leaving her sitting in the hall, wondering what she should do.

She sat there all night.

Did she really want him gone? She thought of all that Maurice had meant to her. Certainly none of this was the boy's fault. How must he be feeling now, out there in the barn, thinking about the deception that everyone had practised upon himself all these years. Was she re-enacting the business with the Brennan girl, insisting that he go? Wasn't it just the same battle with her husband's will? Wasn't it the same, all over again, except that now he had increased the pain and the humiliation? Now he had even made her love the boy, the cause of her pain, and then poisoned that love. Oh, he had been clever.

You had to give him that. He'd made her drain a bitter cup.

And that was why she couldn't bear to have Maurice there anymore. It seemed to her, as the dawn broke, that she had no way out.

But a few hours later the decision was taken out of their hands by Maurice himself who, for the first time in the years he had been with them, quietly but firmly refused to obey the man that he now knew was his father.

He told them he wanted to leave.

"I will visit you often, Father," he said, "and you, too, if I may," he added to Eva, with a gentle look of sadness in those wonderful eyes of his, so strange and emerald green.

"You needn't go, Maurice," she cried. "You don't have to go."

But his determination was absolute. "It's for the best," he said.

"Where will you go?" Sean asked him, a little heavily.

"To Munster?"

"To see the mother who betrayed me and her husband who doesn't want me?" He shook his head sadly.

"If I see my mother I might curse her."

"Where, then?"

"I have decided, Father," he said, "to go to Dublin."

MacGowan was most surprised when Maurice arrived at his house. And he was even more astonished when Maurice told him his story. It wasn't often that the grey merchant discovered a long-standing secret, however intimate, that he didn't already know.

"And you're asking me to take you on as an apprentice?" he confirmed.

"I am. I'm sure that my father-Sean O'Byrne, that is-will pay the apprenticeship fee."

"No doubt."

"If you would consider me."

MacGowan did consider, but he had no need to do so for long. It was clear to him that with his knowledge of life with the O'Byrnes and his courtly education and manners, the young man would be the ideal grey merchant, welcomed beyond the Pale and in the best Dublin circles, too. He could go far, MacGowan thought, farther even than I.

"There is a problem," he said.

"What is that?" Your name.

Maurice Fitzgerald. What a name to possess.

There would be a splendid dash, even effrontery in a young grey merchant owning such an aristocratic name; but given the present political climate in Dublin, it might be unwise.

"The name of Fitzgerald might put you in some danger now," he said.

"It's not my name anymore," Maurice answered with a wry smile. "You forget that I'm an O'Byrne."

"So you are." MacGowan nodded thoughtfully. "So you are." He paused. "That also, in Dublin, could be a problem." He smiled sadly. "It's too Irish."

Given the young man's character and manners, he would probably overcome any prejudice in time. But nonetheless, to advertise oneself as the son of Sean O'Byrne-the Irish friend of Fitzgerald, who had tried to kidnap the wife of Alderman Doyle-was not, he gently pointed out to Maurice, the best way to begin. "And you'll want the freedom one day," he predicted. "Be sure of that."

"In that case, since to be truthful with you, I feel more like an orphan than any man's son, and I mean to make a life of my own, I'd be glad enough to take another name. I really don't care." The young man stared at MacGowan for a few moments and then smiled. "Your own name, for instance.

MacGowan in English would be Smith."

"It would. Near enough."

"Well then, if you'll have me as an apprentice, let me be Maurice Smith. Would that do?"

"It would do very well," said MacGowan with a laugh.

"You shall be Maurice Smith."

And so it was, early in the autumn of 1535, while Silken Thomas was on the perilous sea to London, that a descendant of the princely O'Byrnes and the noble Walshes, and, though he did not know it, of Deirdre and of Conall and of old Fergus himself, came down to live in Dublin under the English name of Maurice Smith.

One week later, to his great surprise, Maurice received a visitor. It was his father.

It had taken Sean a little while to find his son.

He had supposed that Maurice might have gone to MacGowan, but when he first approached the merchant's house and asked if there was a young man named O'Byrne living there, he had been told by the neighbours that there was not. He did not seem particularly put out by Maurice's decision not to use his proper name.

"You've been living under another name for so many years, that I expect it has become a habit," Sean told him with a smile.

He did not stay long, but with him he had brought a square box.

"You may not choose to live at Rathconan," he said, "but you may as well have something to remember your family by."

Then he left.

After his father had gone, Maurice opened the box.

To his surprise and delight, he found that it contained the drinking skull of old Fergus.

In the Irish Parliament that met from May of 1536 until December of the following year, no member was more assiduous in his efforts to please the king than William Walsh the lawyer.

Acting under the direction of the king's council in London, the Irish Parliament passed measures to centralise the rule of Ireland in England, to raise taxes, and, of course, to recognise King Henry, and not the Pope, as Supreme Head of the Irish Church, while allowing his divorce and remarriage to be valid.

And whether William Walsh and his fellow Members of Parliament liked all these measures or not, they passed them because they had to.

The fall of the Fitzgeralds was terrifying. Silken Thomas, having first been politely received at the English court as promised, had been suddenly transferred to the Tower. Then his five uncles, including the two who had actually been on the English side, were taken to London and sent to the Tower, too. "We are to accuse them all of treason," Walsh told his wife grimly when he returned from the Parliament one day. In the depths of that winter, the six Fitzgeralds were taken to London's public gallows at Tyburn and brutally executed. It was vicious, it broke assurances given, it had been legalised by Parliament: it was pure Henry.

Meanwhile, seventy-five of the principal men in Ireland who had acted with Silken Thomas were sentenced to execution. It sent a shudder through the community. And the lesser gentry, like William Walsh, who had gone along with the Fitzgeralds, were told that, depending upon the royal will, they might be able to get a pardon in return for a fine. "Thank God," Walsh remarked, "that I had witnesses to prove that I took that damned oath under duress. But what the fine will be I don't yet know, and half the men in Parliament are in a similar position." Henry was keeping them waiting until they had passed all his legislation. "He has us,"

Walsh confessed, "exactly where he wants us."

Some opposition there was, from gentlemen not under threat. When Henry demanded a harsh new tax on income, these loyal men were able to persuade him to be more lenient. "By the grace of God," Walsh reported back to his family, "the tax will only be paid by the clergy." But this was one of the few concessions that Henry made; and so that no one should doubt his determination to be Ireland's lord and master, his lieutenants continued the forays around the edge of the Pale to subdue the territories and implacably hunted down any remaining members of the Kildare family who could give any trouble.

Even so, it rather surprised Margaret that there was not more protest about Henry's taking over the Church and his attack on the Pope. "Some of the clerical members have protested," William told her. "But some of the strongest voices were so involved with Silken Thomas that they've either been deprived of their benefices or fled abroad. The fact is," he added, "that although Henry has put himself in place of the Pope-which is an outrage, of course-there's little sign that he means to make any changes to the forms and doctrines of the faith." A new archbishop named Browne appeared in Dublin, who was said to have Protestant leanings, but so far he hadn't said or done anything offensive. "The real question is what Henry means to do about the monasteries."

In England, the great process had already begun. Under the guise of a religious reform, the Tudor king, who always spent money faster than he got it, was planning to take all the rich lands and possessions of England's medieval monasteries into his own hands and to sell them. Would he do the same in Ireland?

"One effect of the business in England," Walsh told his son Richard at the family meal one day, "is that it's creating a huge amount of work for lawyers. Every monastery wants to be legally represented and to argue its case." Working closely with his father, Richard had already made himself well liked by a number of the monastic houses. "For lawyers like ourselves, Richard," his father continued, "the fees could be lucrative."

Though she said nothing, Margaret was secretly a little shocked by this attitude. Whatever their faults, surely the ancient monasteries of Ireland merited better treatment than this? When a measure to close just thirteen of the Irish monasteries was set before the Parliament, she was glad to hear that there had finally been some opposition. And when William, who had been away at the debates for several days, returned to the house one afternoon, she questioned him quite eagerly.

"I was sure, in the end, our people wouldn't stand for it," she said.

But William only chuckled.

"That isn't it at all," he let her know. "The problem is who gets the land. The fear is that it will go to the king's men and the Butlers. Some of your friends, the Fingal gentry, are going to Henry to demand their share.

Doyle and his fellow aldermen have already been promised one of the monasteries to reward the city for opposing Silken Thomas."

"You make it sound as if it's all about money," she objected.

"I'm afraid," the lawyer sighed, "that it usually is."

The subject of money could never be far from Walsh's mind at this time. Not only was the question of his royal pardon and fine an unresolved issue for many months but there was also the debt to Joan Doyle which remained unpd. "And yet," he remarked upon several occasions to Margaret, "these difficulties have also been a kind of blessing." This was because of the effect they had on young Richard.

For if Richard Walsh had cost his family more than they could afford while he lived as a young gentleman in London, he was only too painfully conscious of the fact now. If he had lost none of his boyhood charm, if with his mother's dark red hair he possessed the most striking good looks, he was also a tolerably good lawyer and as determined as any young man could be to repay to his family what he believed he owed them, and then to make for himself a fortune in the world. Side by side with his father, he worked assiduously. He himself made any journey that he thought might tire his father; if William at day's end needed to pore over ancient documents, he'd sit up all night with them so that his father would awake to find the job already done. He sought out new business, covered for William when he was busy in Parliament, learned everything he could about Ireland's law.

"I have to tell him, sometimes, to stop," his father said proudly. "But he's young and strong, these efforts will do him no harm."

Despite all these efforts, however, the Walshes were so far only able to pay the interest on Dame Doyle's loan and put a little aside towards the coming royal fine.

If he hadn't been aware of the transaction before, the alderman himself was clearly aware of his wife's loan now. Walsh knew this for a certainty one morning when he encountered Doyle on his way to a parliamentary session. He had heard the day before that the alderman's daughter Mary had just been granted the freedom of the city and so he politely congratulated him on this event, which Doyle received with affability. Then, falling in beside Walsh, the alderman genially murmured, "Here's the fellow that's borrowed a fortune from my wife." Seeing Walsh wince, he grinned. "She told me all about it. I haven't the least objection, you know."

It was easy enough for Doyle to be sanguine, Walsh thought a little enviously. As a loyal alderman who'd opposed Silken Thomas, with a wife connected to the Butlers and who'd even been attacked by O'Byrne, the rich merchant was high in royal favour and likely to profit from any monastic property or royal offices that might be going.

"I can pay the interest," William had answered, "but repaying the principal is going to take a time.

I've the royal fine to consider, too."

"They say your son Richard is helping you."

"He is," Walsh added with a little flush of pride, and told him of the young man's efforts.

"As to your loan," Doyle said when Walsh had finished, "I'd just as soon she lent to you as any other borrower. You're sounder than most." He paused. "As to the fine, I'll be glad to speak to the royal officials on your behalf. I have some credit there at present." And a week later, encountering him again, Doyle had told him, "Your fine will be a token payment only. They know you're not to blame."

When William related these conversations back to Margaret, she greeted the good news with a smile.

But she still trembled inwardly. No word of her involvement in the kidnap attempt had ever been heard, so that she supposed that O'Byrne had kept silent or that, if he had told MacGowan, the grey merchant had for his own reasons decided to say nothing. But he could change his mind, or O'Byrne could talk. And hardly a day went by when, in her imagination, she didn't find herself confronted by the memory of MacGowan's terrible, cold, accusing eye, or the echo of the last words she had spoken to O'Byrne when he asked her what to do with Joan Doyle if he couldn't complete the kidnap. "Kill her."

It was in the autumn of 1537, with the Parliament still in full deliberation, that Richard Walsh called at the house of Alderman Doyle to deliver a payment to his wife. He had only meant to remain there for as long as it took her to check the amount, and as he had been busy investigating some records in Christ Church that morning, he was in a rather dusty state. He was a little disconcerted, therefore, on being ushered into the parlour to find several of the Doyle family there.

Besides Dame Doyle, there was the alderman, looking resplendent in a tunic of red and gold, one of his sons, his daughter Mary, and a younger sister. They might, he thought, have been taken for the family of a rich merchant or courtier in fashionable London whereas he, now, looked like a dusty clerk. It was a little humiliating, but it couldn't be helped. They eyed him curiously.