‘Of course, I can’t accept it.’

  Elizabeth couldn’t believe she was hearing right. ‘Course you can.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Sarah said, with a regretful sigh. ‘To accept such a thing would be in the nature of a promise.’

  ‘You wrote to him in prison,’ Elizabeth pointed out. ‘Wasn’t that a promise?’

  ‘No,’ Sarah declared. ‘That was just to cheer him up. Don’t forget, we never thought they’d be released, then, did we? What do you think, Mammy?’

  Connie smiled and said grimly, ‘I think, cutie dear, you must do what your heart tells you, even if your head tells you different. But don’t accept the shawl if the man means nothing to you.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Sarah declared, packing the shawl away decidedly. ‘I shall return it to him tomorrow after Mass.’

  She tried, Rosie knew, for she’d seen Sarah remonstrating with Sam outside the chapel. She had no time to watch the outcome, the day was too cold to linger and she had to hurry home to look after Bernadette and see to the dinner so that Connie could go up to the later Mass with the men, but she did, however, see Sarah sneaking in the door later, still holding the box.

  That evening, friends and neighbours called around for the usual Christmas jollification and Sam was amongst them. When, later, Sarah and Sam went for a walk, Rosie noticed the shawl around Sarah’s shoulders. ‘She’s kept it then,’ Elizabeth remarked beside Rosie. ‘If she didn’t want it, she could have given it to me. It wouldn’t have offended my sensitivities one jot.’

  Rosie gave her a push and they laughed together but then Rosie caught Danny’s eyes on her, morose and brooding. She tried to repress the sigh of impatience as she made her way towards him.

  He’d snapped at her already quite a few times that evening, Rosie recalled, and many times had brought the eyes of the company upon them both. He contrasted badly with Sam, doing his level best to woo Sarah. Rosie felt saddened and frustrated by Danny’s behaviour.

  She didn’t know what could be done about it. She’d married him and that was that, she had to make the best of it. Crying and complaining would hardly rectify matters. And that is what she had told Phelan that day in the barn. ‘It’s of no matter,’ she said, brushing the tears from her eyes with her hands. ‘I’m silly to let Danny upset me. Sure, don’t I know he means nothing half the time?’

  Phelan said nothing more, but he felt sorry for Rosie and he knew his parents did too. He was glad they were more or less back on their earlier footing for when Rosie had returned from Dublin after seeing Danny that one time, she’d seemed to hate him, and with reason, he thought, but for some time he’d felt the difference in her.

  Rosie could have told him, eight months was a long time to keep hold of a hatred of someone she shared a house with.

  No-one could have been unaware either how sorry and filled with shame the boy was. He did everything he could to make amends and Matt often praised the amount of work he did for one so young. Nothing seemed too much trouble for him and he did everything he could to lift the heavy work of the farm from his father’s shoulders.

  But his saving grace, as far as Rosie was concerned, was the way he was with Bernadette and just as importantly how the child loved him. She knew Connie would be happy if they at least drew some sort of truce and as time went on, Rosie was able to view the whole thing differently and see that Phelan had made a mistake and had only seen the glory of war. He’d been unprepared for the blood and the carnage and the swift and overwhelming British response. He’d also been unprepared for Danny’s intervention and he’d told Rosie this. By then, even he’d thought the mini rebellion was doomed but there had been nothing he could have done to stop Danny taking the place of him and Niall for he’d been determined to get them released. Rosie knew what manner of man Danny was and that Phelan spoke the truth and gradually the animosity between them lessened.

  Sam became a regular visitor at the farmhouse as the year progressed. Sarah was now officially walking out with him and he was full of charm and good manners when he appeared at the house. In contrast, Danny was often silent and miserable looking and seldom had a good word for anyone except Bernadette, though sometimes his attitude unnerved her too. When he shouted, she was often frightened and her eyes would grow large with alarm, and sometimes she’d shake for she’d seldom heard a raised voice in the whole of her young life. But when he wasn’t cross, she’d often seek his company and he always made time for her. One February evening, Rosie was returning home from her mother’s house. Bad weather had kept her from visiting since the week after Christmas and she’d left Bernadette with Connie for she had a streaming cold. She came around the corner of the barn she was surprised to hear muted voices inside there and the sheen of a light beneath the door.

  She recognised Shay’s and Danny’s voices as she approached and felt filled with apprehension. Why would Shay be skulking about the barn, talking secretly to Danny, instead of sitting up in the room like any other body? She crept nearer the door to listen.

  ‘I don’t care about the bloody meeting,’ she heard Danny say. ‘I want no more part in it.’

  ‘You signed the allegiance, Danny.’

  ‘Aye, fool that I was,’ Danny said. ‘You know why I was forced to do that, Shay.’

  ‘Danny, for Christ’s sake will you listen to me?’ Shay cried. ‘It doesn’t matter a tinker’s cuss why you signed, the fact was you did. It’s for your own good I’m saying this, Danny. It’s just a meeting, that’s all, and if you’re not there a very dim view will be taken of it altogether.’

  The blood in Rosie’s veins seemed to run like ice. Dear God! Was it starting up again? She’d not stand it. She had the urge to burst into the barn and demand an explanation, order Shay from the farm and forbid Danny to listen to him. But this Danny, returned to her from Kilmainham Jail, was like an unexploded bomb, and she wasn’t at all sure how he would react if she did any of those things.

  She turned away regretfully and made her way to the house, and once there was glad of Connie’s chatter for it covered her worried silence. When Danny eventually came in, he refused to even look at Rosie.

  Why didn’t she ask what manner of meeting it was that Shay was so insistent he attend? But this Danny could not be asked questions like that.

  She thought maybe he’d tell her when they were alone in bed, but Danny said not a word. But then, she told herself, he hadn’t been aware that she had overheard anything, and Rosie almost wished she hadn’t.

  The following night, after the evening meal, Danny, instead of following his father to the other side of the fire for a smoke, made instead for the door. He took his jacket from the hook behind it and said. ‘I’m away out.’

  ‘Out!’ Connie repeated in surprise, while Matt asked, ‘Out where?’

  Rosie said not a word. She wasn’t able to speak, the roof of her mouth had gone uncommonly dry and her limbs had begun to tremble. Danny glanced from his parents to her, but it was to his father he spoke. ‘Just out,’ he said. ‘I’m a grown man, not a wean to be questioned.’

  ‘It was a civil question.’

  ‘Aye, and you got a civil answer,’ Danny replied, as he opened the door and let the winter air in. He looked across at Rosie and said, ‘Don’t wait up, I don’t know what time I’ll be in, but I’ll likely be late.’

  Rosie couldn’t even nod her head. She stood as if frozen to the spot and not until the door closed behind Danny did she feel she could move. ‘Do you know where he’s bound for, lass?’ Connie asked, and Rosie shook her head.

  ‘No, but I think he’s going to a meeting. I heard him talking to Shay out in the barn,’ she said, and turning to Phelan asked, ‘Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘How would I?’ Phelan asked. ‘Danny barely bids me the time of day.’

  But Phelan did know. At least, he knew that the meeting was in O’Connor’s in Blessington, for Niall had overheard his brother say so and had told Phelan that it was called by a man nicknamed Red McCullough, because of his shock of ginger hair. He remembered Red from his own time in the Brotherhood and knew him to be a dynamic and persuasive man with a pure hatred for the English. Phelan was deeply worried for his brother. But to tell his family any of it would not help and might cause them further worry and he didn’t know how any of it was to be resolved.

  Danny strode along the road with a determined step. He wondered why Rosie had not said a word to him about where he intended to go that night. She couldn’t know anything, surely? And yet she acted so strangely. Anyway, he thought determinedly, she needn’t fret, none of them needed to, for this was the finish of it – he was going to tell them this night that he’d done his share and was going to do no more.

  ‘I was forced into it, in order to release two young boys who should never have been allowed to join in the first place,’ Danny tried to explain to Red McCullough later that evening.

  Red looked at him dispassionately and replied, ‘That’s neither here nor there.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘What you think doesn’t count,’ Red said ominously. ‘Once you join up, it’s for life. You can’t pick and choose.’ He glanced at Danny contemptuously and went on, ‘What manner of man are you at all, to fall at the first post?’

  Danny grabbed Red McCullough by the neck, but two other men pulled him away and held him by the arms as he yelled, ‘First post? That foolhardy plan for a few illtrained and badly equipped men to take on the might of the British Army was doomed from the start. I knew that. And yet I gave it my best shot and brought down as many soldiers as the next man, so don’t you try and say now I lacked courage.

  ‘And then, for this ill-fated exercise, I lost eight months in jail, as you did I know,’ he added as Red held up his hand as if to interrupt. ‘Now my wife is nervous of the man I’ve become, my child terrified of the stranger in her house, and my brother does the lion’s share of the work on the farm that will one day be mine because I’ve not regained the health and strength I once took for granted.

  ‘So,’ he finished. ‘Don’t talk to me about first posts. That was the last post as far as I am concerned and I want nothing more to do with all this again.’

  ‘Sit down, man.’

  ‘I’ll not,’ Danny said. ‘I’m not staying.’

  Immediately the grip the two men had on his arms tightened. A chair was brought and Danny manhandled into it. He would have sprung up from it again, but he took a look around the room and knew if he tried he would be forced back down, for every man in the room was ringed against him, even Shay and Sam. Added to that, the outburst had taken it out of him and so he sat in the chair and wished he was anywhere but in that room listening to Red McCullough’s plans for the regrouping of the Brotherhood to plan their next strategy.

  Rosie was woken in the early hours of the morning and lay for a short while wondering what had roused her while Bernadette slumbered on. Then she heard the noise again. Looking across, she saw that the space beside her was empty and with a sick feeling consuming her, she slipped from her bed, grabbing a shawl for her shoulders.

  Danny, always a moderate drinker, was as drunk as she had ever seen anybody and stumbling about the kitchen. She didn’t know what that meant at all, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it. She had to get him into the bedroom and his bed before he roused the house. ‘Come away in, Danny,’ she pleaded, catching his arm. ‘Come on, the morning will be on top of us before we know it.’

  Danny gazed at Rosie, bleary-eyed. This was his wife, the woman he had promised to love above all others, whom he did love above all others. He had no wish to be separated from her again, not for any reason.

  He allowed himself to be led into the room, and sat on the bed. ‘I told them, Rosie, I wanted no part of it.’

  ‘Hush,’ Rosie cautioned as she bent to unfasten Danny’s boots, ‘the wean’s sleeping.’

  ‘Aye,’ Danny said, ‘the wean. I told them she was terrified of me. They wouldn’t listen. They don’t care.’

  Rosie barely heard Danny’s words. He continued to mutter as she fought to remove as many of his clothes as she could. Suddenly he said, ‘They’re mad, the lot of them.’

  He began to cry then, the great gulping sobs of the maudlin drunk, and Rosie pushed him down onto the bed and put her arms around him. Anxious only to keep him quiet, she soothed him, ‘Hush, Danny pet, hush.’

  Danny felt a stirring inside himself with the nearness of his wife that he had worried he’d lost forever. The old Danny would have taken time to arouse her too, but this Danny hadn’t time for such niceties and so when he entered her she was far from ready and bit her lip to prevent a cry of pain escaping. Danny, however, was well-satisfied and quickly, and as he lay spent on top of her he said softly, ‘Rosie, my lovely Rosie.’

  It was the first gentle thing he’d said, Rosie thought, but he had needed to get drunk to say it. Suddenly compassion for this confused and unhappy man rose in her and as she eased herself away from him with difficulty as he was now a dead weight, she said softly, ‘Hush now, and go to sleep.’ But she was talking to herself for Danny was already dead to the world.

  The next morning Danny was slow to rise, and Rosie left him in bed, thinking a cup of tea might help him wake up. She was sluggish with lack of sleep herself, for she’d lain awake long after Danny had fallen into his stupor. She had been wondering if this was to be the pattern of her life now, and hoped to God it wasn’t.

  She’d just wet the tea when Danny entered the kitchen and at the look in his red-rimmed eyes, she felt sympathy for him. Not so Matt, who crashed in through the cottage door minutes later and surveyed his son across the kitchen, an angry scowl on his face. ‘So, you’re up at last.’

  Danny took the cup of tea Rosie handed him and had a scalding gulp of it before he answered his father. ‘Aye, I’m up.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you,’ Matt said scathingly. ‘Your free time is your own, while it stays your free time. When it eats into your work time, it begins to be my business. I suggest you sluice your thick head under the pump and get away to the byre where your brother has been working alone this last hour.’

  Matt waited for no reply, but went out through the door again. Rosie didn’t know how to break the uneasy silence. The only sounds in the room were the ticking clock, the peat settling in the hearth and the gulps of tea that must have been scalding the mouth off Danny.

  When he eventually left, Rosie sighed in relief. ‘We know the state he was in last night,’ Connie said, having entered the kitchen. ‘We heard him and we heard you trying to quieten him. I’ve never seen Danny that way. Did he give you any reason for it?’

  Rosie thought there was no point in worrying Connie by repeating the ramblings of Danny the previous night. ‘What drunk man says anything sensible at all?’ she said. ‘He said a lot of blathering nonsense that I paid no heed to.’

  ‘I’m heart sore for you, girl.’ Connie said. ‘And I hope this isn’t going to be the way of it from now on. His father will never stand for it.’

  Nor I, Rosie thought, but she knew she’d have to stand it, for she was married to Danny and had promised to obey him for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

  Rosie hoped Danny would talk to her about where he’d gone the previous night and what had caused him to drink so much, but he’d said nothing, so later that night in bed she asked tentatively, ‘Where did you go last night?’

  Danny, having no memory of his ramblings the night before, thought briefly about not telling her. Why worry her? But maybe it would be best if she knew. ‘O’Connor’s,’ he said briefly. ‘We had a back room there.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘It’s what’s left of the Brotherhood that Phelan got mixed up in. Most of them I shared the jail with. Red McCullough runs the whole show. He was a good friend of Michael Collins.’

  Rosie had heard of Michael Collins from the Dublin Express. ‘Was he there too?’

  ‘No, he’s still in jail,’ Danny said. ‘He wasn’t in Kilmainham Jail. He was sent Richmond Barracks and then to some place in Wales and is still there apparently.’

  ‘Danny, I don’t want you mixed up in anything like this again,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Nor I. I told them that.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  Danny sighed. ‘They reminded me I signed the allegiance and that it’s for life. I can’t get out of it.’

  ‘But you must be able to,’ Rosie cried, alarmed. ‘If you want to have nothing more to do with them, surely to God you can say so?’

  ‘I tried saying so,’ Danny said. ‘I tried till I was blue in the face.’

  ‘So what does it mean? What stupid thing are they planning now?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you even if I knew,’ Danny said. ‘It wouldn’t be safe for you to know. But last night was just a pep talk – nothing was decided.’

  But something had been decided, Danny knew, and it was that he realised he had no idea how he was going to get out of this organization before he was dragged into it again. That was the reason he’d drunk himself stupid.

  All through the remaining weeks of February and into March, Danny went to meetings every week, sometimes twice, and always returned the worse for wear. He could tell Rosie little of what went on, and so she ceased to ask, but worry ate at her every time.

  Connie and Matt had a good idea what Danny was up to and Connie urged Rosie to give him a talking to, but Rosie knew Danny was haunted himself by the whole thing and said nothing.

  Danny didn’t need to tell her how interest had been rekindled in the Brotherhood since the executions in Kilmainham Jail. She knew the rebels had become martyrs and the Catholic Church itself had had an upswing because of the monks’ descriptions of the pious way each man had met his death. This had swung the Church’s sympathy a little to the fight for Home Rule, so now the numbers attending the meetings had risen dramatically in that little room behind O’Connor’s pub, and Red McCullough began talking of guerrilla warfare, just as Danny remembered Michael Collins had. ‘First we need weapons,’ he said at a meeting in early April, and none could argue with that. The few weapons they’d once had had been seized.