“Oh, come now, I doubt that! It’s just that He’s altered His technique. These days He uses money.”

“What a cynic you are! Maybe that’s why I like you so much, Mrs. Carson.”

“My name is Mary. Please call me Mary.”

Minnie came in wheeling the tea trolley as Father de Bricassart said, “Thank you, Mary.”

Over fresh bannocks and anchovies on toast, Mary Carson sighed. “Dear Father, I want you to pray especially hard for me this morning.”

“Call me Ralph,” he said, then went on mischievously, “I doubt it’s possible for me to pray any harder for you than I normally do, but I’ll try.”

“Oh, you’re a charmer! Or was that remark innuendo? I don’t usually care for obviousness, but with you I’m never sure if the obviousness isn’t actually a cloak for something deeper. Like a carrot before a donkey. Just what do you really think of me, Father de Bricassart? I’ll never know, because you’ll never be tactless enough to tell me, will you? Fascinating, fascinating… But you must pray for me. I’m old, and I’ve sinned much.”

“Age creeps on us all, and I, too, have sinned.”

A dry chuckle escaped her. “I’d give a lot to know how you’ve sinned! Indeed, indeed I would.” She was silent for a moment, then changed the subject. “At this minute I’m minus a head stockman.”

“Again?”

“Five in the past year. It’s getting hard to find a decent man.”

“Well, rumor hath it you’re not exactly a generous or a considerate employer.”

“Oh, impudent!” she gasped, laughing. “Who bought you a brand-new Daimler so you wouldn’t have to ride?”

“Ah, but look how hard I pray for you!”

“If Michael had only had half your wit and character, I might have loved him,” she said abruptly. Her face changed, became spiteful. “Do you think I’m without a relative in the world and must leave my money and my land to Mother Church, is that it?”

“I have no idea,” he said tranquilly, pouring himself more tea.

“As a matter of fact, I have a brother with a large and thriving family of sons.”

“How nice for you,” he said demurely.

“When I married I was quite without worldly goods. I knew I’d never marry well in Ireland, where a woman has to have breeding and background to catch a rich husband. So I worked my fingers to the bone to save my passage money to a land where the rich men aren’t so fussy. All I had when I got here were a face and a figure and a better brain than women are supposed to have, and they were adequate to catch Michael Carson, who was a rich fool. He doted on me until the day he died.”

“And your brother?” he prompted, thinking she was going off at a tangent.

“My brother is eleven years younger than I am, which would make him fifty-four now. We’re the only two still alive. I hardly know him; he was a small child when I left Galway. At present he lives in New Zealand, though if he emigrated to make his fortune he hasn’t succeeded.

“But last night when the station hand brought me the news that Arthur Teviot had packed his traps and gone, I suddenly thought of Padraic. Here I am, not getting any younger, with no family around me. And it occurred to me that Paddy is an experienced man of the land, without the means to own land. Why not, I thought, write to him and ask him to bring himself and his sons here? When I die he’ll inherit Drogheda and Michar Limited, as he’s my only living relative closer than some unknown cousins back in Ireland.”

She smiled. “It seems silly to wait, doesn’t it? He might as well come now as later, get used to running sheep on the black soil plains, which I’m sure is quite different from sheep in New Zealand. Then when I’m gone he can step into my shoes without feeling the pinch.” Head lowered, she watched Father Ralph closely.

“I wonder you didn’t think of it earlier,” he said.

“Oh, I did. But until recently I thought the last thing I wanted was a lot of vultures waiting anxiously for me to breathe my last. Only lately the day of my demise seems a lot closer than is used to, and I feel… oh, I don’t know. As if it might be nice to be surrounded by people of my own flesh and blood.”

“What’s the matter, do you think you’re ill?” he asked quickly, a real concern in his eyes.

She shrugged. “I’m perfectly all right. Yet there’s something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.”

“I see what you mean, and you’re right. It will be very pleasant for you, hearing young voices in the house.”

“Oh, they won’t live here,” she said. “They can live in the head stockman’s house down by the creek, well away from me. I’m not fond of children or their voices.”

“Isn’t that a rather shabby way to treat your only brother, Mary? Even if your ages are so disparate?”

“He’ll inherit—let him earn it,” she said crudely.

* * *

Fiona Cleary was delivered of another boy six days before Meggie’s ninth birthday, counting herself lucky nothing but a couple of miscarriages had happened in the interim. At nine Meggie was old enough to be a real help. Fee herself was forty years old, too old to bear children without a great deal of strength-sapping pain. The child, named Harold, was a delicate baby; for the first time anyone could ever remember, the doctor came regularly to the house.

And as troubles do, the Cleary troubles multiplied. The aftermath of the war was not a boom, but a rural depression. Work became increasingly harder to get.

Old Angus MacWhirter delivered a telegram to the house one day just as they were finishing tea, and Paddy tore it open with trembling hands; telegrams never held good news. The boys gathered round, all save Frank, who took his cup of tea and left the table. Fee’s eyes followed him, then turned back as Paddy groaned.

“What is it?” she asked.

Paddy was staring at the piece of paper as if it held news of a death. “Archibald doesn’t want us.”

Bob pounded his fist on the table savagely; he had been so looking forward to going with his father as an apprentice shearer, and Archibald’s was to have been his first pen. “Why should he do a dirty thing like this to us, Daddy? We were due to start there tomorrow.”

“He doesn’t say why, Bob. I suppose some scab contractor undercut me.”

“Oh, Paddy!” Fee sighed.

Baby Hal began to cry from the big bassinet by the stove, but before Fee could move Meggie was up; Frank had come back inside the door and was standing, tea in hand, watching his father narrowly.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to go and see Archibald,” Paddy said at last. “It’s too late now to look for another shed to replace his, but I do think he owes me a better explanation than this. We’ll just have to hope we can find work milking until Willoughby’s shed starts in July.”

Meggie pulled a square of white towel from the huge pile sitting by the stove warming and spread it carefully on the work table, then lifted the crying child out of the wicker crib. The Cleary hair glittered sparsely on his little skull as Meggie changed his diaper swiftly, and as efficiently as her mother could have done.

“Little Mother Meggie,” Frank said, to tease her.

“I’m not!” she answered indignantly. “I’m just helping Mum.”

“I know,” he said gently. “You’re a good girl, wee Meggie.” He tugged at the white taffeta bow on the back of her head until it hung lopsided.

Up came the big grey eyes to his face adoringly; over the nodding head of the baby she might have been his own age, or older. There was a pain in his chest, that this should have fallen upon her at an age when the only baby she ought to be caring for was Agnes, now relegated forgotten to the bedroom. If it wasn’t for her and their mother, he would have been gone long since. He looked at his father sourly, the cause of the new life creating such chaos in the house. Served him right, getting done out of his shed.

Somehow the other boys and even Meggie had never intruded on his thoughts the way Hal did; but when Fee’s waistline began to swell this time, he was old enough himself to be married and a father. Everyone except little Meggie had been uncomfortable about it, his mother especially. The furtive glances of the boys made her shrink like a rabbit; she could not meet Frank’s eyes or quench the shame in her own. Nor should any woman go through that, Frank said to himself for the thousandth time, remembering the horrifying moans and cries which had come from her bedroom the night Hal was born; of age now, he hadn’t been packed off elsewhere like the others. Served Daddy right, losing his shed. A decent man would have left her alone.

His mother’s head in the new electric light was spun gold, the pure profile as she looked down the long table at Paddy unspeakably beautiful. How had someone as lovely and refined as she married an itinerant shearer from the bogs of Galway? Wasting herself and her Spode china, her damask table napery and her Persian rugs in the parlor that no one ever saw, because she didn’t fit in with the wives of Paddy’s peers. She made them too conscious of their vulgar loud voices, their bewilderment when faced with more than one fork.

Sometimes on a Sunday she would go into the lonely parlor, sit down at the spinet under the window and play, though her touch had long gone from want of time to practice and she could no longer manage any but the simplest pieces. He would sit beneath the window among the lilacs and the lilies, and close his eyes to listen. There was a sort of vision he had then, of his mother clad in a long bustled gown of palest pink shadow lace sitting at the spinet in a huge ivory room, great branches of candles all around her. It would make him long to weep, but he never wept anymore; not since that night in the barn after the police had brought him home.