MARY-BRIGID STOOD IN THE CENTRE of their cottage. The wooden door lay smashed to smithereens and the dresser was cracked. Through the hole in the roof she could see the evening sky, where the first star was appearing. All their furniture lay in a heap together. Two panes of glass in the window were broken.
‘Tomorrow we’ll start to fix the place,’ assured her father.
She followed the rest of them outside. Nano was leaning on Michael’s arm and John carried Jodie on his shoulders. It was almost dark and the scraggy shadows of thorn bushes and furze danced wildly. The fields and low stone walls lay spread out, dark and mysterious, around them. In the distance she heard the soft whinny of a horse – a young horse.
‘Morning Boy! Will ye stop that or I’ll have Ormonde down here wanting to buy you too!’ laughed Michael.
‘I was afraid you’d sold him,’ murmured Mary-Brigid.
‘What makes you think I’d be so foolish as to sell one of the best racehorses Ireland’s ever likely to see?’ joked Michael. ‘’Tis going to be a lot of work looking after him, Mary-Brigid, now that his foster mother’s gone. And seeing I’ll be busy I’ll be needing some sort of a helper.’
‘Me, you mean?’ asked Mary-Brigid, her eyes sparkling.
Michael smiled at her delight.
‘Mary-Brigid, come over here to me,’ called Eily gently. ‘Look around you, Mary-Brigid.’ Her mother bent down and lifted up a heavy sod of earth. ‘Open your hands, pet.’
Eily placed the sod in Mary-Brigid’s open hands. The earth felt hard and heavy and damp. It smelt of peat and new grass and all the things that had grown in it for hundreds and hundreds of years.
‘Hold this sod, Mary-Brigid, and remember this day and this night! This is the day that these fields and this land and this hard-worked soil finally became ours!’
Mary-Brigid stood under the dark, spreading sky, and vowed never to forget.