“When?”

“A matter of days.”

“Oh, Father! It will be harder than Frank.”

“And for me harder than anything in my life. I have no consolation. You at least have your family.”

“You have your God.”

“Well said, Meggie! You are growing up!”

But, tenacious female, her mind had returned to the question she had ridden three miles without a chance to ask. He was leaving, it would be so hard to do without him, but the question had its own importance.

“Father, in the stables you said ‘ashes of roses.’ Did you mean the color of my dress?”

“In a way, perhaps. But I think really I meant something else.”

“What?”

“Nothing you’d understand, my Meggie. The dying of an idea which had no right to be born, let alone nurtured.”

“There is nothing which has no right to be born, even an idea.”

He turned his head to watch her. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Not everything born is good, Meggie.”

“No. But if it was born at all, it was meant to be.”

“You argue like a Jesuit. How old are you?”

“I’ll be seventeen in a month, Father.”

“And you’ve toiled all seventeen years of it. Well, hard work ages us ahead of our years. What do you think about, Meggie, when you’ve the time to think?”

“Oh, about Jims and Patsy and the rest of the boys, about Daddy and Mum, about Hal and Auntie Mary. Sometimes about growing babies. I’d like that very much. And riding, the sheep. All the things the men talk about. The weather, the rain, the vegetable garden, the hens, what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

“Do you dream of having a husband?”

“No, except I suppose I’ll have to have one if I want to grow babies. It isn’t nice for a baby to have no father.”

In spite of his pain he smiled; she was such a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. Then he swung sideways, took her chin in his hand and stared down at her. How to do it, what had to be done?

“Meggie, I realized something not long ago which I ought to have seen sooner. You weren’t being quite truthful when you told me what you thought about, were you?”

“I…”, she said, and fell silent.

“You didn’t say you thought about me, did you? If there was no guilt in it, you would have mentioned my name alongside your father’s. I think perhaps it’s a good thing I’m going away, don’t you? You’re a little old to be having schoolgirl crushes, but you’re not a very old almost-seventeen, are you? I like your lack of worldly wisdom, but I know how painful schoolgirl crushes can be; I’ve suffered enough of them.”

She seemed about to speak, but in the end her lids fell over tear-bright eyes, she shook her head free.

“Look, Meggie, it’s simply a phase, a marker on the road to being a woman. When you’ve become that woman, you’ll meet the man destined to be your husband and you’ll be far too busy getting on with your life to think of me, except as an old friend who helped you through some of the terrible spasms of growing up. What you mustn’t do is get into the habit of dreaming about me in any sort of romantic fashion. I can never regard you the way a husband will. I don’t think of you in that light at all, Meggie, do you understand me? When I say I love you, I don’t mean I love you as a man. I am a priest, not a man. So don’t fill your head with dreams of me. I’m going away, and I doubt very much that I’ll have time to come back, even on a visit.”

Her shoulders were bent as if the load was very heavy, but she lifted her head to look directly into his face.

“I won’t fill my head with dreams of you, don’t worry. I know you’re a priest.”

“I’m not convinced I chose my vocation wrongly. It fills a need in me no human being ever could, even you.”

“I know. I can see it when you say Mass. You have a power. I suppose you must feel like Our Lord.”

“I can feel every suspended breath in the church, Meggie! As each day goes on I die, and in each morning saying Mass I am reborn. But is it because I’m God’s chosen priest, or because I hear those awed breaths, know the power I have over every soul present?”

“Does it matter? It just is.”

“It would probably never matter to you, but it does to me. I doubt, I doubt.”

She switched the subject to what mattered to her. “I don’t know how I shall get on without you, Father. First Frank, now you. Somehow with Hal it’s different; I know he’s dead and can never come back. But you and Frank are alive! I’ll aways be wondering how you are, what you’re doing, if you’re all right, if there’s anything I could do to help you. I’ll even have to wonder if you’re still alive, won’t I?”

“I’ll be feeling the same, Meggie, and I’m sure that Frank does, too.”

“No. Frank’s forgotten us… You will, too.”

“I could never forget you, Meggie, not as long as I live. And for my punishment I’m going to live a long, long time.” He got up and pulled her to her feet, put his arms about her loosely and affectionately. “I think this is goodbye, Meggie. We can’t be alone again.”

“If you hadn’t been a priest, Father, would you have married me?”

The title jarred. “Don’t call me that all the time! My name is Ralph.” Which didn’t answer her question.

Though he held her, he did not have any intention of kissing her. The face raised to his was nearly invisible, for the moon had set and it was very dark. He could feel her small, pointed breasts low down on his chest; a curious sensation, disturbing. Even more so was the fact that as naturally as if she came into a man’s arms every day of her life, her arms had gone up around his neck, and linked tightly.

He had never kissed anyone as a lover, did not want to now; nor, he thought, did Meggie. A warm salute on the cheek, a quick hug, as she would demand of her father were he to go away. She was sensitive and proud; he must have hurt her deeply when he held up her precious dreams to dispassionate inspection. Undoubtedly she was as eager to be done with the farewell as he was. Would it comfort her to know his pain was far worse than hers? As he bent his head to come at her cheek she raised herself on tiptoe, and more by luck than good management touched his lips with her own. He jerked back as if he tasted the spider’s poison, then he tipped his head forward before he could lose her, tried to say something against the sweet shut mouth, and in trying to answer she parted it. Her body seemed to lose all its bones, become fluid, a warm melting darkness; one of his arms was clamped round her waist, the other across her back with its hand on her skull, in her hair, holding her face up to his as if frightened she would go from him in that very moment, before he could grasp and catalogue this unbelievable presence who was Meggie. Meggie, and not Meggie, too alien to be familiar, for his Meggie wasn’t a woman, didn’t feel like a woman, could never be a woman to him. Just as he couldn’t be a man to her.

The thought overcame his drowning senses; he wrenched her arms from about his neck, thrust her away and tried to see her face in the darkness. But her head was down, she wouldn’t look at him.

“It’s time we were going, Meggie,” he said.

Without a word she turned to her horse, mounted and waited for him; usually it was he who waited for her.

* * *

Father Ralph had been right. At this time of year Drogheda was awash with roses, so the house was smothered in them. By eight that morning hardly one bloom was left in the garden. The first of the mourners began to arrive not long after the final rose was plundered from its bush; a light breakfast of coffee and freshly baked, buttered rolls was laid out in the small dining room. After Mary Carson was deposited in the vault a more substantial repast would be served in the big dining room, to fortify the departing mourners on their long ways home. The word had got around; no need to doubt the efficiency of the Gilly grapevine, which was the party line. While lips shaped conventional phrases, eyes and the minds behind them speculated, deduced, smiled slyly.

“I hear we’re going to lose you, Father,” said Miss Carmichael nastily.

He had never looked so remote, so devoid of human feeling as he did that morning in his laceless alb and dull black chasuble with silver cross. It was as if he attended only in body, while his spirit moved far away. But he looked down at Miss Carmichael absently, seemed to recollect himself, and smiled with genuine mirth.

“God moves in strange ways, Miss Carmichael,” he said, and went to speak to someone else.

What was on his mind no one could have guessed; it was the coming confrontation with Paddy over the will, and his dread of seeing Paddy’s rage, his need of Paddy’s rage and contempt.

Before he began the Requiem Mass he turned to face his congregation; the room was jammed, and reeked so of roses that open windows could not dissipate their heavy perfume.

“I do not intend to make a long eulogy,” he said in his clear, almost Oxford diction with its faint Irish underlay. “Mary Carson was known to you all. A pillar of the community, a pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being.”

At that point there were those who swore his eyes mocked, but others who maintained just as stoutly that they were dulled with a real and abiding grief.

“A pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being,” he repeated more clearly still; he was not one to turn away, either. “In her last hour she was alone, yet she was not alone. For in the hour of our death Our Lord Jesus Christ is with us, within us, bearing the burden of our agony. Not the greatest nor the humblest living being dies alone, and death is sweet. We are gathered here to pray for her immortal soul, that she whom we loved in life shall enjoy her just and eternal reward. Let us pray.”