"Tell me it all," she ordered, "and we'll see what we can do."

She listened carefully as he gave her all the details of his transactions, then announced: "I shall be your partner, and want a third of the profits from now on, but we'll pay off all your creditors. In six months, the debts will be cancelled. Take it or leave it."

"I'd take it," he answered nervously, "but . . ."

"But what?"

"The debt is large. I don't see how we'll pay it off."

Then Barbara Doyle smiled.

"I shall talk to your creditors. We'll come to an agreement. Who says," she asked quietly, "that we shall repay it all?"

1744 In the autumn of 1744, George Walsh and Georgiana Law were married-an event that seemed as natural and inevitable as the long peace that Ireland had now enjoyed for nearly a lifetime. Yet a certain anxiety hung over the proceedings, as if a wicked witch had been spotted in the distance, making her way towards the wedding feast.

"The French are coming." That was the rumour.

Of course, rumours of invasion were hardly new. In the never-ending rivalries between the European powers, Britain was now in league with France's enemies, and naturally, therefore, the French would be tempted to invade Ireland to annoy the English. Such was the way of the world in the eighteenth century. But now another rumour was growing. The heir to the lost Stuart crown, a vain young man whom the Scots liked to call Bonnie Prince Charlie-and whom the French had been protecting for years-was planning to come to Scotland to claim his birthright. A Jacobite rising in Scotland and a French invasion of Ireland: it was exactly the combination the London government dreaded.

For once, even the unflappable Duke of Devonshire was rattled. Orders flew. The troops in the Irish garrisons were to be readied. Any suspicious characters were to be reported. Any suspect priests were to be rounded up. And all Ireland waited. Would the threatening clouds on the horizon disperse, as they had always done in the decades before? Or would they gather together into a single dark mass and come racing across the sea towards the Irish shore?

O'Toole rested his back against the wall and felt the sun on his face. There were a dozen children sitting on the grass in front of him. He handed over the book-Caesar's Wars, in Latin-to one of the boys. in Latin-to one of the boys.

"Construe."

The boy began. He wasn't bad. But after a minute or two, he floundered. O'Toole winced.

"No. Anybody?" Another boy offered. "Worse." Silence. "Conall." Reluctantly, the boy answered. "Very good."

The dark, tousle-haired boy with the wide-set green eyes never offered unless he was asked. O'Toole didn't blame him. While the others were all on the grass, Conall Smith had perched himself on a small, flat outcrop of grey stone. Any attempt by one of the others, whatever their size, to dislodge him from that spot and they would have been sent sprawling, because nowadays young Conall was unusually strong. But it embarrassed him that he always had the answer to the master's questions when his friends did not, and sometimes he would pretend he couldn't answer, and O'Toole would stare at him, knowing very well that he knew, and finally shrug his shoulders and move on.

O'Toole loved the boy almost as much as he loved his own granddaughter. That was what made today's lesson so difficult.

The hedge school. Sometimes it was, indeed, a master and a few children huddled behind a hedge, or in a hidden clearing in the trees, or in a peasant's cottage-or, in this case, behind a stone wall with a delightful view down from the Wicklow Mountains towards the Irish sea. The hedge school was illegal, of course, because giving an education to Catholic children was illegal. But they were all over the country, hundreds of them.

It was soon after his visit to Quilca, almost twenty years ago, that O'Toole had become the hedge schoolmaster at Rathconan. He was considered a good master, but not one of the very best. For although his knowledge of the classical languages, of English, and of history and geography was excellent, his knowledge of philosophy was only moderate, and his mathematics no more than adequate. And it was mathematics, above all, that the native Irish prized: arithmetic for keeping accounts; geometry for surveying and even astronomy. The best hedge schoolmaster mathematicians would proudly write "Philomath" after their names. One old man he'd met, named O'Brien, had a reputation for mathematics that spread even to Italy, and he was known all over Ireland as The Great O'Brien. Such was the illegal education system for Catholics all over Ireland.

If O'Toole was only a moderate mathematician, he had other strengths. His poetry and music had brought him a reputation, if not quite on a level with blind Carolan, as an important figure all the same. When his pupils translated from Latin, they had to give their version first in Irish, then in English. He even taught them a good deal of English law, since it would be useful to them. Already, he had produced three pupils who were making their way successfully in the merchant communities of Dublin and Wicklow, and another who had gone to France to study for the priesthood-not a bad record, he considered, for a little village up in the mountains.

Not that all his pupils did so well. With the Brennans, for instance, he found he could do practically nothing. But he must try. He sighed.

"Conall. Go and stand on watch."

As long as the little school kept out of sight, Budge generally left it alone. But as the local landlord and magistrate, he would sometimes ride out and see if he could spot their proceedings-of which he strongly disapproved-and if he caught sight of them, there would certainly be trouble. Like most hedge schools, therefore, when O'Toole taught, he usually posted a watch.

"Now then, Patrick," he said, as kindly as he could, to the eldest of the Brennan boys, "let me hear you read."

As the boy stumbled his way through a simple passage-O'Toole had sent Conall off to watch so that he would not have to listen to this painful process-the master could only marvel: how was it possible that young Conall Smith, the child with a mind as fine as, perhaps finer than, his own, could be half a Brennan?

Sometimes he wished he had intervened to prevent Conall's birth. It was a foolish idea, no doubt, but was it possible that he could have said something to persuade the boy's father to lead a different life and choose another wife?

There was just one day, it seemed to him, when he might have had the chance to do so. That day, almost twenty years ago, up at Quilca. He'd marked out young Garret Smith at once as a fellow with genius. He'd guessed the young man's anger and his frustration, too. How could an intelligent Catholic boy like that feel any other way? But if only he'd guessed what was in Garret's mind when he'd asked if he knew the Brennans, and then informed him, as he was leaving in the morning, that he'd come to see him at Rathconan. If only he'd known.

What could he have done? Used any influence he had, begged the young man, at least, to follow another course. Anything to prevent him running off after that illiterate girl and making himself part of the worthless Brennan family up at Rathconan. Had he been able to do that, then Garret Smith would surely not have fallen into his present wretched condition; and Conall-another Conall, of course, perhaps even a finer one-would have been born to a different mother, and under far different family circumstances.

But by the time he'd returned to Rathconan that autumn, he'd found young Garret already there, living with the Brennans, his heart dark with anger and contempt for Nary, who'd sent her away, for Sheridan, the Walshes and all their kind, believing foolishly that up there in a hut in the mountains, he would be somehow a freer, purer man than he would be working for MacGowan the grocer in Dublin. Had it just been a question of living in the mountains, he might have been right. A man might find himself up in the wild and open spaces, or in the great sanctuary of Glendalough. But in a hut with the Brennans? O'Toole didn't think so. Within a year, the slut of a girl had given him a child; then another. Young Smith should have walked out on them all, in the high old way, in O'Toole's opinion. But Garret was too good for that. He'd gone before a priest and married her. After that, he was doomed.

He should have become a hedge schoolmaster. He'd have had to study more, but he had the brain to do it. I'd have helped him, O'Toole thought. But he'd have had to move, since the position in Rathconan was filled and there was no need for another. A local priest had given him some work. But then he had quarrelled with the priest. Was there something in the man that craved his own destruction? It had often seemed to the schoolmaster that there was. For look at the man now. A labourer. A carpenter and carver of images, commissioned but never delivered; a maker of poems never finished; a dreamer of Jacobite dreams that had no chance of becoming real. A drinker. Every year, more of a drinker. A husband of a wife he'd buried now, and whose family, in his heart, he must have come to despise-for they were dirty, lazy, and stupid. A father of children left unkempt, while he talked to them of the Jacobite cause and the shabby way he'd been treated, or cursed them and sank into moroseness.

There had been three daughters that lived. Two, sluts like their mother, in O'Toole's opinion, had married down the valley. The third was a servant in Wicklow. Two little boys had died in infancy. And then, miraculously, had come Conall.

"He'll die like the other boys, I fear," the priest who'd performed the baptism had said to O'Toole. And most people in Rathconan had thought so, too. He remembered him when he was three-so pale and fragile, with those wonderful green eyes. Such a poetic-looking little fellow that it broke your heart to think how little time he probably had to know life. When his own little granddaughter Deirdre, who was only months younger than the boy, had become his friend, O'Toole had tried gently to discourage her from becoming too close, for fear of the pain it would cause her when the boy died. But he could hardly stop her playing with him, or walking with him hand in hand when he wandered up the mountain to where the sheep were grazing, or sitting beside him on a rock overlooking a pool formed by the mountain stream, sharing her food with him, and talking by the hour.

"What do you talk about, Deirdre?" he had asked her once.

"Oh, everything," she had answered. "He tells me stories sometimes," she had added, "about the fish in the stream, and the birds, and the deer in the woods. I do love him so." And though his heart had sunk, he had not known what to say.

It had been Garret who had brought the boy to him, when Conall was six. Surprisingly, he had even come with the requisite money.

"Teach him," he had asked O'Toole simply. "Teach him all you know."

"You could teach him yourself, for the moment," O'Toole had pointed out, "for nothing."

"No," Smith had shot back with sudden vehemence. And then, after a pause: "I'm not fit to teach him." A terrible admission, but what could the schoolmaster say?

So he had started to teach the boy. And he had been astonished. The little fellow's memory was astounding. Tell him a thing once, and he remembered it forever. His thought process, O'Toole soon realised, was also entirely out of the ordinary. He would listen quietly, then ask a question that showed he had considered every aspect of the matter already and found the thing that, for the time being, you had thought it simpler to leave out. What delighted O'Toole most, however-and this was a gift that could never be taught-was the boy's use of language: his strange, half-playful formulations which, you suddenly realised, contained an observation that was new yet stunningly accurate. How could he do such a thing at such a tender age? As well ask, how can a bird fly, or a salmon leap?

He also noticed that his young pupil had a busy inner life. There would be days when he seemed moody and preoccupied during the lesson. On these days, often as not, O'Toole would see him afterwards wandering off alone, enjoying some communion with the scene around him that no one could share. By the time the pale little fellow was eight years old, the schoolmaster loved him almost as much as Deirdre did.

If only it had not been for those other days, when Conall would fail to come to the hedge school and word would come that he was sickly; and O'Toole would go to Garret Smith's house and find little Deirdre sitting by his side, feeding Conall broth, or quietly singing to him, while the little boy lay there so pale it seemed as if he might be taken from them within the day.

But then, suddenly, two years ago, he had started to get stronger. A year later, he seemed as robust as the other children; soon after that, one of the toughest. And now, he could physically dominate them all. At the same time, O'Toole detected a new toughness in the boy's growing mind. He did not just excel at his lessons; he stormed through them, so that the schoolmaster was often challenged himself to set work that Conall wouldn't find too easy.

Little Deirdre also watched these developments with evident delight. "Isn't he strong?" she would cry. And it seemed to O'Toole that his granddaughter felt she could take a personal responsibility for Conall's new condition. At the same time, from her looks, and from occasional words that she let fall, her grandfather could guess that she still saw the same, pale little boy that she had loved beneath this new incarnation; and indeed, Conall would still sometimes fall into his strange, melancholic moods, and the two of them would still go off for walks together in the mountain passes.

Deirdre was Conall's only close friend. He was often with the other children, and joined in all their games. But it was clear that he did not share his confidences with them. There were only two other people nowadays to whom he might be close. One, perhaps, thought O'Toole, was himself. In their studies together, master and pupil had developed a degree of intimacy. The other was his father.

O'Toole suspected that Garret Smith had little enough to live for these days but his son. The man's drinking was getting worse, and he looked twenty years older than he actually was; but if it hadn't been for the boy, he'd surely have been far worse. And if this love did not always extend to paying the modest fees for the hedge school on time, he usually managed to make them up sooner or later. In the evenings, when he was sober, he would sometimes spend hours in deep conversation with the boy. O'Toole had often wondered what it was they talked about, and once he had asked Deirdre if she knew. But she didn't. All she knew was that Conall had once told her: "My father and your grandfather are the only two men I truly admire."

Did the boy know that his father was not held in high regard? The villagers were usually polite about his father to his face. "Your father's a great reader," they'd say. "He knows many things." But if, behind his back, they added, "He knows more than he works and less than he drinks," Conall was beginning to guess it. Once, when a boy was rude about his father, he knocked him down. Though afterwards, when no one could see, he burst into tears. And to Deirdre he sadly remarked: "No one understands him but me."

So it was only his father and Deirdre that Conall really loved and trusted. And after them, O'Toole considered, I dare say it would be me.

And so now, as Conall kept watch for the hedge school, and the schoolmaster thought of the conversation he'd had the day before, he felt a terrible sense of guilt.

It weighed heavily on his conscience that he might have to betray the boy.

At shortly after noon, Robert Budge, landowner and magistrate, set out from his house to see Garret Smith. When Walter Smith's family had been dispossessed, the Rathconan estate had been offered for sale at a knockdown price. Benjamin Budge had had no desire to return there, but his younger brother, who was made of sterner stuff, had been glad to buy it. The Budges could claim to have been at Rathconan for four generations now.

He hadn't decided what to do about the Smith boy yet. O'Toole wouldn't give any trouble. He'd already seen to that. As for the boy's father . . .

But the boy could wait. Today he had other business with Garret Smith. It concerned Rathconan House.

If the old chiefs of the place could have seen Rathconan now, they might have been rather surprised. They might even have found it comical. Yet it was like scores of other old houses in Ireland. For, finding the accommodation of the old tower house insufficient, Budge's father had added, across the front of it, a modest, rectangular house, five windows wide. The house was of no particular style, though the plain windows might have been called Georgian. No attempt had been made to alter either the house or the old keep that loomed up behind it, so that they would blend together. The new Rathconan looked like what it was: a house stuck onto the front of an old fort.

But it was where Robert Budge had been born and raised, and he was proud of it.

He'd been only twenty when his father had died, five years ago, leaving him lord and master of the place, and, with a young man's vanity, he had even considered changing the house's name. He had thought, as some of the grander settlers had done, of calling it Castle Budge, but that seemed overreaching. More reasonable might have been another English formula favoured in Ireland: Budgetown. But that was hardly euphonious. Better-sounding was the Irish version: Ballybudge. In the end, however, considering the fact that the Budges had hardly built the place, and fearing the mockery of the local Irish and his neighbours, he had thought better of it and left the name as it was-Rathconan-to which he liked to add the appellation "House," to make it sound more like an English manor.

To Robert Budge, Rathconan House was home. True, like all the rest of the Cromwellian settlers, he was still viewed by the native Irish as an unwanted colonist. True, also, that he was proudly English and Protestant. For if the Cromwellian families were not there to uphold the Protestant faith and occupy the confiscated estates of the former Catholic owners, then what was their justification for being in Ireland in the first place? Indeed, his father, a man of far less religious conviction than old Barnaby Budge, had firmly taken his more or less Presbyterian family into the royal Church of Ireland exactly because, as he had put it: "We must all stick together."

"Always remember," he had advised Robert shortly before he died, "the good people here have known you all your life, they work your land, and they'll probably call you 'Your Honour' and give you a daily greeting. But if ever our order breaks down, my son, they'll put a knife between your ribs. And don't you forget it."

All the same, it was nearly a century since Robert's great-grandfather Barnaby had first come there. And during that time, the Anglo-Irish settlers had evolved to blend, in certain ways, with the surrounding environment. If the men in the Irish Parliament felt themselves treated as a different breed by their compatriots in London, out here in the country, the lesser Anglo-Irish landlords had produced a type that was entirely their own.

His own father had exemplified the breed. He'd lived almost all his life at Rathconan and knew all its ways. He spoke English with a pronounced Irish intonation, and he treated many of the details of his life, including his children's education, with a certain fine carelessness. In this he had been joined by his wife, who came from a similar family with identical views.

Some Anglo-Irish families, of course, sent their sons to Oxford, Cambridge, or Trinity College in Dublin. But not the Budges. Basic education the children were given, boys and girls, but much more was considered superfluous.

"My father had a whistle which he would blow to summon his dogs," Robert would cheerfully tell his friends. "But if he blew two blasts, that meant he wanted me." When his mother had caught his sister reading a book when she could have been healthily out of doors, she had locked her in a dark closet for two hours and told her she'd give her a whipping if she caught her behaving like that again. The Budge children were brought up to be strong, to run estates, and, if need be, to fight. In their love of the open air, the Budges had something in common with the Irish chiefs who had gone before them. It would have surprised them to know that they were less educated.

It was a matter of education that had caused him to speak to O'Toole so firmly.

Robert Budge was only twenty-five, but he was often treated like an older man. Perhaps it was his large, imposing presence, but as the owner of Rathconan, he was considered a useful local man by the authorities, and a year ago he had been made a magistrate. So long as he could stay in the country at Rathconan, he was glad to cut a bold figure in this local world, and he had recently been a guest at several houses in Counties Wexford and Kildare to look out for a suitable wife; he had also been to Dublin a few times, so that the people at the Castle and the Parliament should know his face.

His reason for visiting Dublin the previous week had been to obtain the latest news on the threat of invasion from France. The garrisons at Wicklow and Wexford were all in readiness, he knew very well. And he was impressed with the numbers of smart, red-coated troops with their muskets that he saw in the handsome streets of the capital. Like every other magistrate, he had been on the lookout for suspicious characters or signs of sedition at Rathconan, but he couldn't honestly say that he'd found any-a pity really, as he'd have been glad to have something to bring himself to the attention of the authorities.

He hadn't learned anything particularly new in Dublin about the threat from overseas, but towards the end of his visit, he had gained one quite interesting piece of information. He'd been standing in a group of similar fellows around the Member of Parliament Fortunatus Walsh when he'd heard it.

"There's a growing feeling," Walsh had told them, "that something has to be done about our education of Catholics. The hedge schools are everywhere, as we all know, but our own Church of Ireland has made only the most pitiful attempts to challenge them. We've started Protestant Charter Schools for poor children in some parishes, but as we all know, they have attracted few pupils."

"The Catholic families won't send their children to them," someone remarked.

"Exactly. But there are some in the government who are recommending that a new method be tried. Take some promising young Catholic children from other areas, and place them, away from home, in the better Charter Schools."

"So they become Protestants?"

"That is the hope, certainly. I am not sure it would work, but the idea is to help the gradual spread of Protestantism that our penal system and our Church of Ireland have so far entirely failed to accomplish."

"An interesting idea," said Budge, not because he thought so, but so that Fortunatus would take note of him.

"Well, Mr. Budge," Walsh smiled, "if you have any candidates for such a project, you will find at least some at the Castle who will be grateful to you."

Budge had said nothing, but he had made further enquiries in Dublin, visited a school, and pondered the matter all the way back to Rathconan.

If he were to do such a thing, there was only one possible candidate.

"I'm thinking of sending young Conall Smith," he had told O'Toole. "And," he had given the schoolmaster a careful look, "I shall be expecting your support."

"But . . ." O'Toole was about to say, "He's my best pupil," then remembered that this would be admitting the existence of the hedge school. "Why would I support such a thing?"

"You know very well that he's practically an orphan. His father's not fit to look after him."

"But he's still his father. And he has family besides."

"The Brennans? Fit guardians for a boy of such intelligence?" Since O'Toole's opinion of the Brennans was, if anything, even lower than the landlord's, the schoolmaster found it difficult to say anything to this.

"But to force a boy away from his family and into a Protestant school at such a time," O'Toole said carefully, "would create bad feeling."

"Is that a threat?" Budge gazed at him evenly.

"It isn't. But I believe it's the truth," O'Toole said frankly.

"That is why," Budge answered with equal care, "I am counting upon your support. Your word carries influence here. As much as if you were the priest."

It was a curious fact that in villages all over Ireland, the Protestant landlords often relied upon the Catholic priests to help them keep order. Not that the priests were happy about it. If they were unlicensed, however, the landlords could always have them expelled; and even if they were entirely legal, any sedition or trouble-which was never going to do their parishioners any good anyway-could always be imputed to their influence and lay them open to prosecution. By and large, therefore, the priests encouraged their flocks to stay out of trouble.

Up in Rathconan, where the nearest priest lived some miles away, O'Toole, as the most educated man, had a similar influence. His own religious convictions were not strong, but he dutifully taught his pupils their catechism and gave them a good grounding in the Catholic religion. The priest would soon have made life difficult for him if he didn't.

"And the penalties for teaching a hedge school," Budge added, "as we both know, are severe."

There was the threat, delivered quietly, well understood.

If the hedge schools were everywhere, they were still illegal; and if the magistrate chose to find the hedge school and prosecute the master, O'Toole could be in serious trouble. In theory, he could even be transported to the American colonies.

"Are you decided upon this?" O'Toole asked.

"No. But I am thinking about it."

In fact, Budge was still uncertain. Did his conscience trouble him about taking the boy from his father? He wasn't sure that it did. He hesitated to cause bad feeling in the area at such an uncertain time politically-O'Toole was right to warn him about that. And while he had no doubt that the Smith boy, of whose talents he was aware, would be welcomed as a promising pupil, he also had another minor concern. What if the boy, bright though he was, should turn out badly like his father? That would reflect poorly upon himself. He meant to weigh the matter for a few more days before he finally decided.

"My conscience troubles me," the schoolmaster said quietly.

"It shouldn't. I am right, you know."

"I am troubled, but not for the reason you think."

Now what, the landlord wondered, did he mean by that?

As he strolled towards Garret Smith's small dwelling, he passed several others. They were all mostly the same-low, stone-built cabins with turf roofs. Some had only two rooms, one of which was often shared with the livestock; but most of the inhabitants of Rathconan had a low-ceilinged room with a fire and some wooden furniture-a table, benches, and stools-together with one or two other rooms. Some even had a bed, though nobody would have thought twice about sleeping on straw. Their fires, in which they burned wood or turf, sometimes had a rudimentary chimney, but usually, the rooms filled with smoke until it escaped under the eaves. To the eyes of English visitors, these low and narrow shacks seemed to be filthy and degraded-although they observed that the women and barefooted children who emerged from them were surprisingly clean. But they would have observed more accurately had they realised that the conditions before them were simply those which had been prevalent in much of Europe through the Middle Ages. To Budge, the dwellings didn't look especially mean. He knew places a lot worse.

He passed the house of Dermot O'Byrne. God knows how many O'Byrnes there were in the Wicklow region, but he felt sure that even if he met them all, he'd still like Dermot the least.