Page 105 (1/2)

PART ONE

The Apple

1

Ireland, 1849

THE HOUSEKEEPER HAD BROUGHT Lavinia to the ree where the peat bog finished in a sharp edge, sliced away like a layer cake The housekeeper’s sister had married a peatcutter whose stone and peat hut crouched resolute against the unforgiving elereat famine

It was spring and the squares of turf sitting in piles on the new grass of the returning bog exuded a rich slanced back at the hut The housekeeper, her wispy grey hair tucked firmly under a woollen bonnet, was in intense conversation with her sister, pushing the bound food parcels into her claw-like hands Starvation had reduced the woed dress

Behind her, Lavinia heard the thud of a slean, then ringing as the iron turf-spade found a hidden rock She kneas the boy He looked to be a good three or four years older than her, with a fudge of curling black hair over the wind-burnt oval of his sole towards the s by the split peat, scowling at the approaching cart Here was ht hi loose hair, the ribbons of her bonnet, the extraordinary whiteness of her clean hands, her fresh face

Without thinking, Lavinia ran towards hi indifference, knelt to carve a rectangle with the slean

‘Do you like it here?’ She kicked at the soil beside him

Squinting up, he paused, watching the play of her fingers against the scarlet wool of her cloak

‘It’s a living…but you wouldn’t know anything about that, a flash wee missy like yourself’

She skipped around to the other side of his patch of peat, turning the word ‘flash’ around in her ar pluht her from Dublin for Christmas The idea made her heart and stomach flutter

‘You think me flash?’

‘Flash and pretty, like the sun, like a golden statue that belongs in church’ He sat back, surprised at how the observation had suddenly hter of a Protestant vicar, near gentry, and now he found that he resented the pristine naivety of the child, the plumpness of her forearms visible beyond the sleeves of her pinafore It was almost as if he could eat the child herself

Picking up a sod of peat, he threw it at a crow—the bird’s cawing scribbled across the pewter sky Standing, the boy wiped his hs then looked back to where the torossed in conversation

‘If you like, I can show you soic—an elvin’s cave’

Lavinia hesitated She knerong to walk off unescorted with a boy, but he looked har, his face asshe had when he looked at her

‘We cannot be long Mrs O’Brien orry if I aht’

But he was already leading her away fro fro down a hidden ravine beyond the bog

Looking around, Lavinia panicked at their isolation ‘Where is the cave?’

The boy walked across to a clump of low bush and pulled it aside to reveal the darkened er’s den, Lavinia thought, annoyed that he could believe her so gullible; but she still wanted to see it, just in case—against all the logic her father had taught her—elvins e, she would be able to tell the story to her whispering box, so that her mother could hear her up there in Paradise

She hoisted her skirt above her knickerbockers and dropped to the spongy heather to crawl into the cave