Another was the time she spent with her grandmother. She’s tough as shoe leather, Scarlett thought with pride, and she fancied that her grandmother’s blood in her veins was what had gotten her through the desperate times in her life. She ran over to the little cottage often, and if Old Katie Scarlett was awake and willing to talk, she’d sit on a stool and ask for stories about her Pa growing up.

Eventually she’d give in to Colum’s urgings and climb up into the trap for the day’s adventure. Warm in her wool skirts, protected by cloak and hood, she learned within a few days to pay no attention to the gusting wind from the west or the brief light rains that so often rode on it.

Just such a rain was falling when Colum took her to “the real Tara.” Scarlett’s cloak billowed around her when she reached the top of the uneven stone steps up the side of the low hill where Ireland’s High Kings had ruled and made music, and loved and hated, and feasted and battled and, in the end, been defeated.

There’s not even a castle. Scarlett looked around her and saw nothing except a scattering of grazing sheep. Their fleece looked gray under the gray sky in the gray light. She shivered, surprising herself. A goose walked over my grave. The childhood explanation flickered in her mind, making her smile.

“It pleases you?” asked Colum.

“Um, yes, it’s very pretty.”

“Don’t lie, Scarlett darling, and don’t search for prettiness at Tara. Come with me.” He held out his hand and Scarlett put hers in it.

Together they walked slowly across the rich grass to an uneven area of what looked to her like grassy lumps in the earth. Colum walked over some of them and stopped. “Saint Patrick himself stood where we are standing now. He was a man then, a simple missionary, no bigger, likely, than I am. Sainthood came later and he grew in people’s minds to a giant of a man, invincible, armed with God’s Holy Word. It’s better, I believe, to remember that he was a man first. He must have been frightened—alone, in his sandals and frieze cloak, facing the power of the High King and his magicians. Patrick had only his faith and his mission of truth and the need to tell it. The wind must have been cold. His need must have been like a consuming flame. He had already broken the High King’s law, lighting a great bonfire on a night when it was the law that all fires should be put out. He could have been killed for the trespass, he knew that. He had purposed the great risk to draw the eye of the King and prove to him the magnitude of the message he, Patrick, bore. He did not fear death; he feared only that he would fail God. That he did not do. King Laoghaire, from his ancient jewelled throne, gave the bold missionary the right to preach without hindrance. And Ireland became Christian.”

There was, in Colum’s quiet voice, something that compelled Scarlett to listen and to try to understand what he was saying and something more besides. She’d never thought about saints as people, as able to be afraid. She’d never really thought about saints at all; they were just names of holy days. Now, looking at Colum’s short stocky figure and ordinary face and graying hair tousled by the wind, she could imagine the face and figure of another ordinary-looking man, in the same stance of readiness. He wasn’t afraid to die. How could anyone not be afraid to die? What must it be like? She felt a human wrench of envy of Saint Patrick, of all the saints, even, somehow, of Colum. I don’t understand, and I never will, she thought. The realization came slowly, a heavy weight. She had learned a great and painful and stirring truth. There are things too deep, too complex, too conflicted for explanation or everyday understanding. Scarlett felt alone and exposed to the western wind.

Colum walked on, leading her. It was only a few dozen paces to the place where he stopped. “There,” he said, “that row of low mounds, do you see it?” Scarlett nodded.

“You should have music and a glass of whiskey to stave off the wind and open your eyes, but I have none to give you, so perhaps you should close them to see. That is all we have left of the banqueting hall of the thousand candles. The O’Haras were there, Scarlett darling, and the Scarletts, and everyone you know—Monaghan, Mahoney, MacMahon, O’Gorman, O’Brien, Danaher, Donahue, Carmody—others you’ve yet to meet, as well. All the heroes were there. The food, it was grand and plentiful, and the drink. And music to lift the heart right out of your body. A thousand guests it held, lit by the thousand candles. Can you see it, Scarlett? The flames glowing twice, thrice, ten times over, reflected as they were in the gold bracelets on their arms and in the gold cups that travelled to their mouths, and in the deep reds and greens and blues of the great gold-clasped jewels that held their carmine cloaks across their shoulders. What mighty appetites they had—for the venison and boar and roast goose gleaming in its fat—for the mead and the poteen—for the music that brought their fists to pounding on the tables with gold plates jouncing and rattling one upon the next. Can you see your Pa? And Jamie? And that rascal young Brian with his side-looking gaze at the women? Ach, what revelry! Can you see it, Scarlett?”

She laughed with Colum. Yes, Pa would have been bellowing out “Peg in a Low Back’d Car” and calling for his cup to be filled just one more time because singing put such a terrible thirst on a man. How he would have loved it. “There’d be horses,” she said confidently. “Pa always had to have a horse.”

“Horses as strong and beautiful as great waves rushing at the shore.”

“And somebody patient to put him to bed after.”

Colum laughed. He put his arms around her and hugged her, then let her go. “I knew you’d feel the glorious fact of it,” he said. There was pride in his words, pride in her. Scarlett smiled at him, her eyes like living emeralds.

The wind blew her hood onto her shoulders, and warmth touched her bare head. The shower was past. She looked up at the clean-washed blue sky; clouds, dazzling white, moved like dancers before the gusting winds. So close they seemed, so warm and sheltering the Irish sky.

Then her gaze fell and she saw Ireland before her, green upon green of fresh-growth fields and tender new leaves and hedgerows thick with life. She could see so far, to the mist-edged curve of the earth. Something ancient and pagan stirred deep within her, and the barely tamed wildness that was her hidden being surged hotly through her blood. This was what it was to be a king, this height above the world, this nearness to the sun and the sky. She threw her arms wide to embrace being alive, on this hill, with the world at her feet.

“Tara,” said Colum.


“I felt so strange, Colum, not like me at all.” Scarlett stepped on one of the wheel’s yellow spokes and then up onto the seat of the trap.

“It’s the centuries, Scarlett darling. All the life lived there, all the joy and all the sorrow, all the feasts and battles, they’re in the air around and the land beneath you. It’s time, years beyond our counting, weighing without weight on the earth. You cannot see it or smell it or hear it or touch it, but you feel it brushing your skin and speaking without sound. Time. And mystery.”

Scarlett pulled her cloak close around her in the warm sun. “It was like at the river, it made me feel peculiar, too, somehow. I almost could put a word to it, but then I lost it.” She told him about the Earl’s garden and the river and the view of the tower.

“ ‘The best gardens have views,’ do they?” Colum’s voice was terrible with anger. “Is that what Molly said?”

Scarlett drew her body deeper into the cloak. What had she said that was so wrong? She’d never seen Colum like this, he was a stranger, not Colum at all.

He turned to her and smiled, and she saw that she’d been mistaken. “How would you like to encourage me in my weakness, Scarlett darling? They’ll be introducing the horses to the race course in Trim today. I’d like to look them over and choose one to carry a small wager for me in Sunday’s race.”

She’d like that very much.


It was almost ten miles to Trim—not far, Scarlett thought. But the road twisted and turned and veered off from time to time, in directions away from the one they wanted, only to twist and turn some more until finally they were going again where they wanted to go. Scarlett agreed enthusiastically when Colum suggested they stop in a village for a cup of tea and a bite. Back in the trap they went a short way to a crossroads, then turned onto a wider, straighter road. He whipped up the pony to a smart pace. A few minutes later he whipped it again, harder, and they raced through a large village so quickly that the trap teetered on its high wheels.

“That place looked deserted,” she said when they slowed again. “Why is that, Colum?”

“No one will live in Ballyhara; it has a bad history.”

“What a waste. It looked right handsome.”

“Have you ever been horse racing, Scarlett?”

“Only once to a real one, in Charleston, but at home we had pick-up races all the time. Pa was the worst. He couldn’t bear just to ride along and talk to the rider next to him. He made a race out of every mile of road.”

“And why not?”

Scarlett laughed. Colum was so like Pa sometimes. “They must have closed Trim down,” Scarlett commented when she saw the crowds at the race course. “Everybody’s here.” She saw a lot of familiar faces. “They’ve closed Adamstown, too, I reckon.” The O’Hara boys waved and smiled. She didn’t envy them if Old Daniel happened to see them. The ditching wasn’t done yet.


The packed-earth oval was three miles long. Workmen were just completing installation of the final jump. The race would be a steeplechase. Colum hitched the pony to a tree some distance from the track, and they worked their way into the crowd.