The Opal Seekers

by Patricia Shaw

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

A young Irishman's journey in the land of untold riches... The Opal Seekers is a rich and vibrant novel of triumph and loss, and the ambition of those who carved out an existence for themselves in the beautiful but unforgiving land of Australia. The perfect read for fans of Colleen McCullough and Tricia McGill. In 1898 poverty threatens to destroy Trella Court's beloved family. She is left with no choice: her brother-in-law, Brodie, must leave home so that there is one less mouth to feed. Bitter with resentment, Brodie travels to Dublin where he stumbles upon a wealthy employer who offers him passage to Australia, the land of untold riches. In Brisbane, Brodie is taken in by the owner of Fairlea cattle station. But before they leave he catches sight of a beautiful opal necklace glistening in a jeweller's window and vows that one day he will go in search of the dazzling stones and make his fortune. At Fairlea, Brodie finds favour when he saves the owner's life, but Vivien Holloway, the spoilt mistress, causes trouble when her harmless flirtation with Brodie turns into a passionate affair. Soon Brodie is looking for a way out of Fairlea and he finds his escape in the hunt for opals... What readers are saying about The Opal Seekers : 'A delightful tale of hard work and suffering, love and loss ' 'An outstanding story and one I couldn't put down ' ' Enthralling from start to finish '

Release date: October 27, 2011

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

1898

Trella Court was said to be a contrary woman.

‘If black was white she’d say it was yellow,’ her mother, Maisie Grogan, accorded, invoking her own brand of logic. She was still smarting from last week’s episode when Trella had argued with the priest in the middle of his sermon. And not for the first time, God help us!

That was about young Mary Best, who’d got herself pregnant and sent away to the nuns in Dublin to hide her shame.

‘Her absence is a lesson to all young women of the parish,’ Father Daly had thundered, in a hellfire sermon that would have done a missionary proud, ‘to keep themselves pure in body and mind! Fallen women are doomed in the eyes of God! The stain of their sinfulness can never be erased!’

He was going great guns, hammering away at the sin of lust that had driven Mary Best and others of her ilk from the holy portals of this church.

‘Good people of Tullymore, beware the sin of Eve. Beware these women who revel in lust . . .’

Then it was that Trella had stood and Maisie had almost fainted.

The holy father stopped mid-blast. His eyes bulged and his pink cheeks flamed, and he dug under the white lace for his handkerchief to snuffle and fume.

But he didn’t order her to sit down like last time. He waited for her to speak. And of course, she did.

‘We’ve heard enough of poor little Mary Best, Father,’ Trella called. ‘No one gets themselves pregnant. It takes two. So what about that young feller over there in the second row? Have you nothing to say to him?’

Maisie was leaning over Garth, her grandson, frantically poking at her daughter to sit down. She’d actually used the word ‘pregnant’ in a church, for God’s sake! Had she gone mad altogether? Beside her, Brodie Court was grinning. He would, seeing this as nothing but a bit of entertainment! So she fixed her eyes on Michael, her son-in-law, trying to compel him to shut his wife up, but he had his eyes cast down, avoiding her. Avoiding everyone, probably not knowing what to do.

‘Do you not have even a scold for him?’ Trella was persisting. ‘For the father of the child the young girl’s about to bear? Or is it not a sin for men?’

The parishioners sat like statues, with never so much as a nudge for fear Father Daly would note their shocked delight at this sudden fracture of a pious morn.

Then at the rear of the tiny church, Sergeant Clemens lumbered to his feet and all eyes swung in his direction.

He tiptoed, as much as a man of his bulk could, down the aisle and, leaning across Michael, beckoned to Trella, who had resumed her seat, expecting a reply from the priest.

‘Will ye come with me, Trella?’ he whispered.

She blinked. ‘Where to?’

‘Outside.’

‘Why?’

‘I want a word with you.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ Michael said, irritated.

‘It cannot. You must come with me, Trella.’

‘Why? What’s wrong?’ There was alarm in her voice. ‘Is something wrong?’

You could have heard a pin drop in the church. The Sergeant shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his shoes creaking their complaint.

‘It is an offence to interrupt divine service,’ he hissed.

‘Since when?’ she retorted.

‘Since always. Now will you come with me?’

Michael Court grasped his arm. ‘What’s this I’m hearing? Are you charging my wife?’

Clemens was now experiencing more discomfort than the priest, who stood in the pulpit in saintly pose, his eyes fixed on the circular stained-glass window over the front door.

The Sergeant faltered. Michael’s tone was ominous, and further down the pew, Brodie, glaring at him, was no longer amused. The Court brothers were hard men, and even though the Sergeant knew they were often confused and irritated when Trella sounded off about something that irked her in the village, they’d balk at her arrest. Big, bearded Brodie never minded a fight, and the thought of a fight in the church was giving Clemens palpitations. He should never have agreed to this.

‘It’s Father Daly,’ he whispered urgently to Michael, the quieter of the two. ‘He’s made a complaint. He can’t have these disagreements in his church.’

‘Is he the Pope then?’ Michael asked, loyal to his wife. ‘The man is infallible, is he?’

‘I’m not about knowing these things. The complaint’s been made and I have to act.’ He appealed to Trella: ‘Now be a good girl and come along with me. There’ll be no charges. We’ll just have a little talk outside.’

‘We’ll do no such thing,’ she snapped.

He wondered what tribe of renegades had spawned this one. She was only a farm girl, married to a farmer. She’d never been further than Limerick in her life but she was a born nonconformist, full of peculiar ideas. Agin everything.

He looked at her beseechingly, still hoping she’d step out from the pew and come with him, quiet-like, but the stern face under her black bonnet told him no such luck.

‘Father has to get on with the Mass,’ he said.

‘Then let him. It’s time he did, since he has no answer for me. Let him think more of what he’s saying in future.’ She picked up her prayer book. ‘Aren’t we all sitting waiting here? If I leave now, before the bells, I’ll be missing Sunday Mass, and that in itself is a sin, Rory Clemens, as well you know.’

The Sergeant heard Michael sigh, shaking his head at anyone foolish enough to take on his wife in an argument. He saw Brodie grin and move on to his knees as the altar bells intoned. Stunned, he looked up to see that the priest had left the pulpit and was continuing with the Mass, leaving him here floundering. Making a fool of him in front of everyone.

He genuflected and crept back to his pew, conspicuous still, head down then as if praying intensely, but with anger in his heart. Let the priest deal with Trella Court, he’d have no more of it. He mulled over what it was that she’d had to say in her outburst, and thought of little Mary Best. Her father had given her a belting when he’d found out she was in the family way, but he’d not dealt out the same punishment to her boyfriend. Nor had the priest blamed the lad, come to think of it.

Although he couldn’t approve of her timing, Clemens was inclined to believe that Trella was right.

But her mother did not. Maisie was outraged, and more so the following week when she heard that Trella was demanding that the fair be held elsewhere.

She rounded on her daughter in the kitchen of their small thatched cottage. ‘Who asked you to be telling the auctioneers where to hold the fair?’

‘It’s not a fair,’ Trella said. ‘’Tis a cattle sale. I could understand it if we had a square but Tullymore village is but one narrow street, from the church at the top of the hill to the undertaker down the bottom. When they bring the cattle in, all the shops have to be shuttered and the streets are awash with cattle pee and dung! The place stinks.’

‘Then keep out of it! ’Tis none of your business. I don’t know how Michael puts up with you, always going on about something.’

‘Then there’s a lot you don’t know,’ Trella flared, storming outside.

Her mother loved to criticise her, especially in front of the men. Sometimes Trella thought it was Maisie’s way of repaying them for taking her in when Dadda had passed on, because she fawned on them the whole time, running about after them like they were paralysed and could not pick up their own boots. Like she never had for Dadda even in his failing years. And the nagging and carping that Trella had to endure from her was all part of it. By belittling her daughter, Maisie felt she was showing herself in a better light.

‘Ah, the poor woman,’ Michael had said. ‘She means well. Don’t take it to heart.’

‘But it’s my home! She behaves as if I don’t count. I fear she’s trying to drive a wedge between us, Michael.’

He took her in his arms. ‘And how could that be done? Aren’t you still the love of my life?’

That was Michael. A good man. A loving husband. But not so Brodie. For all his outward charm he could be mean and unreasonable; you never knew which way he’d jump.

It was Maisie who’d started the row in the house after that business in the church, accusing her daughter of blasphemy.

‘That’s a bit strong,’ Michael had said.

‘Why is it?’ Brodie asked. ‘What do you call getting arrested in church? I couldn’t believe my ears.’

Trella rounded on him. ‘The cheek of you! I saw you grinning. ’Twas only the Sergeant wiped the smile off your face. There was nothing funny about what I had to say.’

Michael spoke quietly. ‘Maybe it would have been better for you to wait, Trella. To see Father Daly afterwards and tell him your grievance.’

‘What good would that do? Hiding in the vestry. It was him, up there blaming the girl and not the man, I had to stop him. It wasn’t as if I’d planned to say anything. I just got a shock listening to him.’

‘You got a shock!’ Maisie cried. ‘You’re as much a hussy as Mary Best, and you want the world to know it.’

‘Don’t speak like that to me in my house!’

Maisie drew herself up. She was inches taller than her daughter. ‘So! It’s your house, is it? And me a widow living on charity, never allowed to speak. I know my place. I’d be better off in the poorhouse the way you treat me.’

‘There’s no need for that, Maisie,’ Michael said. ‘You know you’re welcome here. Trella feels keenly about things, you ought to understand that.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes she gets a bit carried away, but her heart’s in the right place.’

‘Her heart’ll be in jail,’ Brodie snorted, ‘if she pulls the same stunt next week. The priest’s still mortified, they say, and in a fine old rage.’

‘Pity about him,’ Trella snapped. ‘Anyway we’ll all be in the poorhouse soon, the way we’re going.’

‘Where’s Garth?’ Michael asked, changing the subject.

‘He’s fishing,’ Trella told him. ‘Down at the deep hole.’

‘Then let’s me and you go for a walk and see what’s doing.’

As they walked across the fields, Michael took her hand and kissed it. ‘You worry too much, my darlin’.’

‘Because I have to do the worrying for all of us. We’ve hardly a penny to our name, Michael. The spuds are poor, the maize is showing a blight already, I don’t know how much longer we can hang on.’

‘It’s a bad year, that’s all. Times will pick up.’

‘That’s what you said last year. I want you to speak to Brodie. He leaves you to work the farm and goes off doing odd jobs, but he doesn’t bring the cash home.’

‘He only makes a few quid here and there. He’s a single man, he’s entitled to have a life outside the house. When he settles down he’ll be different.’

Will he? Trella thought. Michael meant marriage. She dreaded the day that Brodie brought a wife home to their already crowded cottage. For he’d nowhere else to go unless he married a rich girl and, not counting the Hadley-Jones family up on the hill, there weren’t too many of them about. As it was, Brodie shared with Garth, she and Michael had the other room, and Maisie slept in the kitchen, on a bed that doubled as a couch in the daytime. She could already see what would happen. Her son would be pushed out to the shed, where visitors slept.

They slid down the grassy slope to the river bank, surprising the lad.

‘Don’t make a noise,’ he told them. ‘You’ll frighten off the fish.’

‘Have you caught any yet?’ his father asked.

‘Not yet, but they’re there. I can see the varmints jumping. Maybe it’s too cloudy for them to see the bait. I wish the sun would come out.’

Michael laughed. ‘You’d have a wait, it’ll be raining soon.’

As she watched them together Trella softened. If only there could be just the three of them, life would be perfect. Garth was twelve now, and Maisie was clamouring for him to leave school and find a job. Brodie backed her, encouraging the lad to keep asking to leave, but on this point Michael was adamant and Trella greatly relieved. He would stay at school for two more years. She wished they had the money to send him on to higher education, but there was little hope of that.

She smiled, remembering the ructions at Garth’s christening, with everyone saying that ‘Garth’ was not a saint’s name and Father Daly, even to the last minute, trying to make the change.

‘What sort of a name is Garth anyway?’ her mother had asked.

‘It’s the name Trella has chosen,’ Michael said firmly. ‘She had the babe, she’s entitled to first go. I’ve given him the second name of James, so there’s your saint and I’ll hear no more of it.’

Garth, his mother thought fondly. It was deliberate. I wanted him to be different, to break out of this tiny village and be someone in his own right, not weighed down by blind prejudices. He was a stocky lad, with his father’s brooding good looks and soft brown eyes. Some said he was more like Brodie, but Trella wouldn’t have it. Brodie’s dark hair was curly and his eyes were blue, a twinkling blue when he was in a good mood but ice-blue when he was not.

Trella and Michael were proud of their son, and they loved him dearly. More so, for they’d lost three babies since he was born; the little angel boy had died at only one month and then there’d been two miscarriages.

‘You have to eat more,’ the doctor had said. ‘Feed yourself up, you’re as skinny as a rake.’

Easy for him to say, Trella thought listlessly, since the pigs are gone and we’re down to two cows for milking, and most of what the farm produces has to be sold. It can’t support five people any more and that’s the truth of it.

The rain brought with it cold winds that chilled them to the bone, and Michael came down with the bad cough again. But he would not go to bed until a steaming fever took hold and he was too weak to stand.

For days the women nursed him, until the fever broke, and with a little bit of sun glinting through the clouds, he was able to go outside and breathe the good air again.

‘I think he’s got consumption,’ Trella whispered to her mother.

‘It’s you’ve got consumption on the brain,’ Maisie retorted, ‘every time someone sniffs.’

‘They say it runs in families, and that’s how his parents died.’

‘Stop that talk. You’ll put a hex on the poor man. It’s the weather affects Michael, not your superstition. You make sure he wears the flannel in the cold and not be taking it off. Now that cold snap’s passed, he’ll be right as rain, you’ll see.’

And sure enough he was back in the fields in no time, working with Brodie to rescue the remnants of the potato crop from the mud.

With everything back to normal again, Trella took her basket and set off up the hill from the valley to deliver her preserves to the Hadley-Jones’ kitchen. She was feeling better now too, able to enjoy the brisk walk with the worry of Michael lifted from her shoulders.

She strode over the bridge and on through the town, past the church, until, puffing a little, she climbed to the crest of the hill to look back at Tullymore, with the wind whipping at her skirts. From up here the village was just a row of stone buildings crouched either side of the cobbled street, a grey incision in the rolling green countryside. The scene was neat, ordered. Hard to believe that anyone lived there at all. And harder still to know that the familiar spectre of poverty lurked within those solid walls and under the brown roofs of farmhouses that speckled the valley far below.

For these people, true to their lights, poverty was a hidden thing, kept out of sight for shame, spoken of only as ‘bad times’ as if it were a shabby cloak that could be thrown off when it pleased them.

When Trella tried to speak of it they hushed her. ‘Poverty!’ the old ’uns said. ‘You’d know poverty if you’d been alive in the great famine, with thousands starving to death in the streets, and little children dying in their mothers’ arms.’

That was the awful thing about it. They used the famine as a yardstick: these might be bad times, but they could be worse, so count your blessings. Never mind Johnny Adair, who was trying to open a co-operative store, or his new idea of paying an expert to come from Dublin to inspect and advise on the problems with the crops. Never listen to him! But out with the silver to buy a statue for the church or build a monument to some old hurling player.

And there in Tullymore there was that other danger, the furtive, sinister fight for a free Ireland, further complicated by the arguments of the Fenians and Sinn Fein. Michael walked with a limp, thanks to a bullet in his leg attained when he was only eighteen as a courier for the freedom fighters. Then it was that his mother, a strong-willed woman, had made Brodie pledge to keep out of it. These days the fight seemed to have moved on, Tullymore forgotten, but the uneasiness lingered, noted by villagers but never spoken of; when men held secret meetings and disappeared for weeks on end without comment.

Trella feared for her son. The prisons were full of patriots. She was no dreamer of dreams, she had no great vision for the future. She was simply clear-headed, seeing things as they were. Her priority was the survival of the Court family. She had no patience with talk of the ‘auld’ days, when the Courts had owned half the valley, generations ago. The glory days were well gone. Their holdings had dwindled to the one-acre farm now owned by Michael and Brodie, and God alone knew how long that would last.

‘We can get cash,’ Brodie had said. ‘I don’t know what you’re worrying about. We can raise a loan on the farm.’

‘Never!’ Michael had shouted. ‘That’s the road to ruin! I won’t be beholden to anyone. Haven’t we seen enough of mortgages in this valley? Farms sold up and families evicted.’

Trella agreed with her husband, but that left them in the same predicament, with barely enough to put food on the table.

‘Like it or not,’ she determined, ‘there’ll have to be some changes in our household.’

Angrily she pushed on over the hill towards the mansion owned by the Englishman, John Hadley-Jones, and occupied by more servants than family.

Trella admitted it had a grand view of the bay, but apart from that she found it an ugly business of a house. Everyone else saw it as a fine big place, boasting that it was designed by an architect from London, as if that made it right. ’Twas nothing but a two-storeyed square box, without even a portico to shelter a caller, and it was set in an ordered landscape of shrubs and lawns that looked as trim as if they’d been snipped with scissors. Inside, they said, were more rooms than a hotel, and all furnished grand, which Trella supposed made up for the cold grey exterior.

A man on horseback came trotting up the road, interrupting her musings, and when Trella saw who it was, in his tweedie coat and high hat, she jumped the ditch by the roadside and headed cross-country, avoiding the necessity of addressing him.

The villagers doffed their caps to Mr Hadley-Jones and called him ‘your honour’, which Trella steadfastly refused to do.

‘He’s nobody’s honour,’ she would say. ‘He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be a landlord and have a boodle of cash.’

She didn’t envy him, or his folk, their money. That was their good fortune and it had nothing to do with her. She doubted that a man like him was interested in the village talk where some said he was hard on his tenants and others claimed he was fair. Everyone had to get on with their own lives as best they could.

Nevertheless it was a pleasure to cross the courtyard and pass by the stables with all those beautiful horses nodding and pouting from their stalls.

The cook came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Ah, Trella. What have you today?’

‘Eggs. And potted eels. I thought you might take a jar or two.’

‘I’ll take the lot, eight jars, is it? They’ve got visitors and the little extras help. How much in all?’

‘Three shillings,’ Trella said hopefully, and the cook, being in a good mood today, probably too busy to haggle, paid up.

‘Here,’ she said, reaching into a nearby cupboard, ‘take this end of bacon. I’ll not be needing it.’

‘Are you sure?’ Trella asked nervously.

‘I am. They just killed a porker, I’ve plenty.’

‘Then I thank you. It will do us very well.’

Her spirits raised by this scrap of good fortune, she set off home with a definite plan in her head, and this time Michael would have to listen.

She found him bagging maize in the shed. ‘Michael, I have to talk to you.’

He stood up, stretching his back. ‘Here I am then. And aren’t you looking pretty today. What have you been up to?’

‘I sold some stuff up at the big house.’

‘Good. What did you want to talk about?’

‘Where’s Brodie?’ she asked, not wishing to be interrupted.

‘He’s gone over to Darcy’s place to help with the ploughing in exchange for spuds. We’ll get good seeds from them and have a better crop next year.’

‘If we can hang on that long. Michael, the way we’re going we’ll be living on turnips soon. We have to do something. The farm can’t support us.’

‘There you go worrying again. Things will get better, you’ll see.’

‘No, I don’t see. We have to think of Garth. There are too many of us scraping by on the farm. Someone has to go.’

He looked at her, amazed, and then he laughed. ‘If you’re thinking of sending your mother away I’ll be down at the pub when you tell her. But you couldn’t be thinking of that. Where would she go?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Maisie. It’s Brodie I’m looking at. He’s a full-grown man now, twenty-five he is. We can’t feed him properly. For his own sake, as well as ours, he has to go. If he takes a wife we’ll be further burdened.’

Michael threw the bag of cobs aside and turned on her. ‘You’d throw out my own brother? Is this what you want? Throw him off a farm that’s as much his as mine? Were he of a mind he could say the same thing to us. What’s got into you?’

‘Hush now, don’t be cross. This is the only way. I‘m not throwing him off, I‘m just suggesting that he takes a real job somewhere, for a while, until things get better.’

‘And where would he find a job? There are none hereabouts.’

‘In Dublin. Garth and I can help in the fields while he’s away. We could give him a few shillings to tide him over and find someone to give him a bed.’

‘What if he can’t find a job?’

‘More chance there than here.’ Trella shrugged. ‘If not, he comes home again, no harm done. It’s worth thinking about. And if he has a weekly paying job he could send you a little until the next harvest. Don’t you see, Michael, it’s worth the mentioning. If he doesn’t agree, so be it. He stays and we struggle on.’

‘Enough. Let me think about it. If anyone goes, I should. It’s my side of the family taking up the most, remember. He has never complained about that.’

‘You’re not well enough, Michael, and you know it. But if you go, we go too, and that hardly makes sense. It’s now we have to decide, before things get worse.’

‘I told you I’ll think about it,’ he said angrily.

She slipped a shilling into his hand. ‘You could take him to the pub and have a talk on the quiet.’

Grudgingly he pocketed the money. Time was, years back, that the Court brothers could retire to the pub after work most days. Now they could only visit the Erin of a Saturday night when they had a few spare pence. Trella shivered, kissed him on the cheek and trudged over to the house.

This was a Friday. Not a good day for decisions. A bad omen. She hadn’t thought of that in her rush to present her plan to Michael. But it was up to him now. The idea did sound cruel but Brodie wasn’t a kid. He should have been looking for a decent job long ago. It was time he got moving.

Maisie was surprised when Michael said they were going to the pub, but she made no comment, allowing that men could do as they wished.

‘This bacon,’ she told Trella, ‘will do for their supper.’

‘No it won’t. Put it in the stew, we’ll share.’ She retreated to her bedroom on the pretence of mending the quilt, but instead sat glumly staring out at the fog that was closing in on her. She felt like an outsider, as if she were standing outside the pub, staring in at the same old faces, intent on their talk in that shadowy interior. Weary men in their shabby coats and cloth caps, discussing the same old things over their pots, puffing and pointing with their pipes. Too early for the singing.

She worried that even if Michael had seen the sense of her idea, those men, so set in their ways, would talk him out of it. Sometimes, when she passed, she’d seen them peering at her, their grim faces disapproving of the Court woman and her habit of poking her nose into village affairs when no one needed her opinion. She’d fancied that she had a large brass key that she could turn in the heavy pub door to lock them all in. Then, a hundred years hence, she’d return to unlock the door and find them unchanged, still discussing and arguing and gossiping without noticing a century had passed.

In the back of her mind, where she didn’t wish to rummage, was a small clutter of guilt that there was more to her wishing Brodie would take himself off. More than she’d dare mention to Michael. She knew she’d be glad to be rid of his noisy, boisterous presence; Brodie seemed to take up more room than the rest of them put together. And he was so damned single-minded, always having his own way, with Michael looking on, not minding, for he loved his brother and enjoyed to see him happy.

‘The sooner he leaves, the better,’ Trella muttered to herself. ‘Even if he does own half the farm. Give us some elbow room for a change.’

Brodie didn’t need a second telling to join Michael at the pub, nor did he enquire as to the source of the wherewithal to pay for the pints. A quick wash and a good combing of his thick hair and he was out the door with a tickle on the neck for Maisie Grogan as he passed.

She laughed, with more humour in her than her daughter. ‘Get on with you, you young rascal.’

Rarely did the brothers drink together. They had their own pals and they saw enough of each other at home. But this time Michael called Brodie to the rear of the bar and stood the drinks.

Brodie was instantly suspicious. This was the spot Michael usually chose to give him one of his lectures about women, or spending, or missing Benediction too often, at the risk of his immortal soul. He grinned. There were times when his brother could deliver a better sermon than the priest. Making certain it wouldn’t last too long, he gave one of the lads a wink to rescue him after a while.

He was fond of his brother. Proud of him, though he’d never say so. Michael was a fair fellow, always trying to do the best for everyone, and he was also a handy knuckle man when it came to a fight. It had been a long time since any man would take on either of the Courts, because the other one was never far away.

They’d downed two pints before Brodie twigged that this was not to be a lecture. He was being buttered up for a reason. He began to enjoy himself, even reaching for a pork pie, which Michael paid for without a blink and took only a bite himself.

On the third round, the crux of this meeting began to emerge.

‘I was thinking,’ Michael said quietly, ‘with things so bad these days, of taking a job in Dublin.’

‘What’s this you’re saying?’ Brodie was stunned. ‘You’d take your family to Dublin! Are you mad?’

‘Not my family. Just me.’

Brodie gave this some thought. ‘I could handle the farm without you, but would you leave the wife and kid? And what would she have to say about that?’ He began to laugh. ‘I can’t imagine her letting you go off to that den of iniquity, a handsome gent like you! They say Dublin’s full of pretty girls. And wanton widows.’

Michael frowned. ‘We’re up against it, Brodie. We need to draw in some cash money.’

Feeling mellow now, Brodie leaned against the counter. ‘If that’s the case, you can’t be leavin’. You a family man and all. I’ll have a go at it.’

If ever a man’s face mirrored his soul, Michael was that man, and his brother could read it well. He saw the expression of relief on Michael’s face, and realised he’d been taken for a ride.

‘Do you want me to go?’ he asked, giving away nothing.

And he listened as Michael went into a detailed explanation of their finances, which was not new, and talked hopefully of opportunities that could still be found in Dublin, on the wharves or with roadworks. ‘’Tis not that I want you to go,’ he added. ‘But one of us has to. I think maybe you’re right. It would be best for me to stay to keep an eye on the family. Young Garth takes a bit of handling. Got a mind of his own, he has.’

It was too much for Brodie. He planted his pot on the counter and confronted Michael. ‘Why don’t you tell me straight up and stop beating about the bush. You had this planned from the start. You want to cut me loose.’

‘I’m just trying to work out what’s best, Brodie.’

‘Sure you are. And it wasn’t your idea, was it? That wife of yours is behind this. She wants the farm and the only way is to get rid of me!’

‘Will you listen? The way we’re going there’ll be no farm. And I’ll thank yo