Prologue

It was a dark and stormy night, far away and south of Cork. As south as you can be without falling into the black water itself. A woman hurried along the tall hedge path to the whitewashed house. It lit up with the moon when the clouds went racing by. She called to the dog but the dog wouldn’t come, frantic from the thunder or something. The woman went to the shed out in the back—it was no distance at all—then she took the kerosene barrel and heaved it to her hip and went into the house with it. She went in the back way. “Brownie!” she called again. The house was all shadows. And cold. She fumbled at the mud-room shelf for the sticks of matches and found them, lots of them, dry and ready in the Champs Élysées cylinder. She put some in her pocket. Into the kitchen she went, lugging the great thing, glad to be out of the rain. She took her time filling the stove, never spilling a drop, emptying the drum. The cat came silently up behind her and she went stiff with fright. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, pulling a match from its box. Then, out the window she noticed that girl, Jenny Rose, up the runny bracken on the hill. What a night to be out, she thought, even for her! The cat slinked around her ankles and she put the match in her teeth, picked up the cat with distaste, opened the door, threw it out onto the pebbly drive and shut the door. There was something wrong with that cat. “Lavender blue, dilly dilly,” she sang for no reason. She turned around and lit the match. The room, the house and she blew up. It was so quick that her thoughts were left without her there, still with the last of the house and the blue, teeming rain.