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So much for getting in a
decent day’s harvesting.
He closed his
legs around his horse, feeling the wet leather squeak in protest.
Of the four men out by the fence, he was the only one mounted.
Gilhooley, Declan, and Gavin walked the length of the north fence,
which was constructed of wood and some remnant barbwire. Mike knew
it wouldn’t keep anything but cows out of the camp but it clearly
stood as a message to the outside world to stay out.

Declan had insisted
Gilhooley come with them. The big gypsy and the newcomer walked
together, shoulder to shoulder, down the line of fencing and Mike
found himself wondering what they saw in each other. By Gilhooley’s
speech, he was clearly a Dubliner and, if a few of the facial
expressions Mike had seen him make meant anything, probably a
racist, too.

In truth, there were few
in the United Kingdom or Ireland who didn’t hold judgment against
gypsies.

Mike watched them stop fifty yards away. He
could see Declan gesturing beyond the fence and then turn and point
to the camp.

Whatever the feck they had
in mind,
he thought
, they could just forget it.
He’d
see the entire camp fenced before the end of the year or know the
reason why.

Gavin trotted over to where
Mike sat on his horse. He looked winded as if he’d run the entire
perimeter.
Silly eejit. He probably
had.

“Da, you won’t believe how many breaks there
are in the fence. It must be fifty percent holes and gaps. It’ll
take a year to plug ‘em.”

Mike didn’t answer. He
knew he was spitting in the wind with this argument. But he
couldn’t help think it wasn’t the wisdom of his idea people were
having trouble with. It was the work involved to pull it
off.

Gilhooley and Declan had
turned around and were making their way back toward him. His eye
caught the motion of Iain running across the field to intercept
them. Something about the way he ran made Mike think he had
information. He frowned when he saw the three men stop and
confer.

Obviously, information he
doesn’t feel necessary to bring to me first.

“Da? Did you talk to Mr. Gilhooley about his
idea on fortifying the perimeter without having to dig pits or
stringing new wire?”

Mike looked up at the sky.
It had been raining all morning which was the main reason the men
were examining the fence line instead of finishing the harvest. One
of the women in camp swore she’d seen a wolf skulking about the
edge of the woods. There hadn’t been a wolf in Ireland since the
late seventeen hundreds.

The gray clouds overhead
were billowing high in the sky, forming dark and threatening
thunderheads. Mike sighed. It looked like the entire day was going
to be a wash.
The wheat for sure didn’t
need any more damn water. If it kept up like this much longer,
they’d start to lose crop.

“Da?”

“No, Gavin, I haven’t talked with Mr.
Gilhooley about his idea.” Mike watched the three men approach.
They looked like they were all of one mind about something.

Gilhooley raised a hand in greeting even
though they’d all spent the morning together. “Donovan!” he called.
“Declan got something to tell you.”

Mike watched Declan
approach, his gait unhurried but purposeful.

Something tells me I’m about to hear
Gilhooley’s words come tumbling out of me good mate, Declan’s,
gob.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Declan put his hand on
Mike’s horse and patted its neck. Like many gypsies, Declan was
good with animals. Mike couldn’t help but feel that Dec was
physically soothing Mike’s horse as a substitute for trying to
placate its rider.

“Well, I got the idea,” Dec said, “when you
were talking about how much wire we’d need to finish the job of
stringing the camp, you know?”

Mike didn’t speak or nod.
He tried not to look at Gilhooley, who seemed to be standing back
as proud as a new parent waiting for his bairn to break into a buck
and wing.

“And it occurred to me that instead of
trying to enclose the camp, we should focus on repelling unwanted
guests, you see? Oh, sure, have a basic barrier up…”

“Like we’ve got now,” Gavin said.

Declan nodded. “That’s
right. Holes and all, it’s still a kind of demarcation. But trying
to make it do the work of a castle wall is just never going to
work. We don’t have the materials or the manpower to make it
work.”

“Is that what you think?”
Mike said mildly. He could feel his temper rising and he fought not
to let it show. “Is that your big newsflash?”

“No, that’s the
reason
I felt it
necessary to come up with something different than what we’re
planning on,” Declan said with more firmness in his voice than Mike
had ever heard before. “I think we need to form an
army.”

“
An army
?” Mike’s mouth fell
open.

Gilhooley stepped up. “Well, really more of
a protective force or squad, right, Dec? A group of men whose sole
job it is to patrol and protect the camp.”

“Aye,” Iain said. “Like they did in the
Middle Ages, right?”

“Exactly,” Gilhooley said. “It worked then
because it’s a sound idea. Set aside those men in the community not
needed for planting and hunting and have them concentrate on our
full time protection.”

“I volunteer!” Gavin said. “Can I, Da? It’s
what me and Jamie have been doing sort of all along anyway.” He
turned to Declan. “How would it be organized, like?”

Declan shrugged. “We’re just early days,
lad,” he said, watching Mike’s reaction. “There’s lots to talk
about before we do anything.”

“Mind you,” Gilhooley said. “We don’t want
to wait too long.”

Mike shifted in his
saddle. He tried to give every appearance of considering this daft
idea of making an army from the layabouts and fishermen that
constituted the bulk of the community of Donovan’s Lot. “Well, it’s
something to think about,” he said finally, before turning to Iain.
“Iain, you were tearing up the pasture pretty good and it’s not
usual for you to actually run if whisky isn’t somehow at the end of
it. Has something happened?”

Iain looked at him with
confusion for a moment and then his face cleared as he remembered.
Mike was astonished to see the man actually glance at Gilhooley
first, almost as if for approval.

“Yer sister stopped me to tell ya you got a
visitor.”

“A visitor? What the feck does that
mean?”

Iain shrugged. “She said a woman showed up
an hour ago, walked all the way from the coast—with a little girl,
mind—looking for you.”

Mike stared at him for a moment and then
turned his gaze toward the camp.

Was it Aideen? Could it
be? What the hell was she doing here?

But he knew the answer to that.

6

“How in the world did you
get here?” Mike leaned across the small dinner table and handed a
cloth napkin to little Taffy, but his words were for her, Aideen
knew.

“Just put one foot in
front of the other and Bob’s your uncle.”

“You walked all the way from Wales?”

“Mum said we’d get a ride
part of the way.” Taffy, a mulatto child with large expressive
eyes, pulled her bowl of stewed rabbit with pole beans closer to
her. “But we only did the one time. We walked the
whole
way.”

Aideen smiled at her
daughter. It had been difficult trying to make the journey an
adventure, especially when Aideen had been nearly frightened out of
her wits a good deal of the time. She’d heard the stories of the
terrible things that happened to women in the backcountry of
Ireland after The Crisis, especially women traveling
alone.

“Did living with your aunt
in Wales not work out then?” Mike asked.

It had been a little less
than a year since the last time she’d seen Mike and, if anything,
Aideen had to admit he looked even more handsome. She knew that was
likely because he was happy. He certainly looked happy. And
that
was likely because
he’d found that woman he’d been looking for last year.

“You could say that,” she
said, her eyes trying to express her unspoken words over Taffy’s
head, silently asking him to reserve any questions until they were
alone.

He seemed to understand,
because he nodded and looked back to his meal.

“You always made Donovan’s
Lot sound like Eden.” She turned to Declan, Brian and Fiona, who
were sitting at the table with them. “He said it was a community of
like-minded people, some family, but mostly people brought together
by circumstance and that you all lived and worked together. So I
thought, why not? Why not start a new life in this new world where
I have at least one friend?”

“I’m new here, meself,” Brian said.

Aideen thought Brian had
interesting looks. He was good looking in a rough sort of way, with
a slightly pocked complexion but because his eyes were so kind, the
flawed exterior came off rugged and honest.

“It’s really as grand as
it seems,” he said. “Everyone supports each other. Just as you’d
think they should.”

“Are you planning on
joining the community, Mr. Gilhooley?” Aideen asked. She noticed
Mike lifted his head from the study of his plate to hear the man’s
answer.

“I am. That is, if they’ll have me. I have a
wife and some family back in Dublin. I wouldn’t want to bring them
out until I had a place for them.”

Mike grunted,
noncommittally, it seemed to Aideen and she wondered if the two of
them were at odds in some way. She knew that Mike was the leader of
the community.

“So you’ll build a cottage for them?”

“Well, me father-in-law
and brothers can build their own homes. They’re all healthy and
quite capable. They can live in tents until then. The gypsies don’t
seem to mind living rough, do they?”

Aideen turned back to
Mike. “Does everyone have jobs here? I’m a good seamstress and a
fair cook.”

“Aye,” Mike said, turning
back to his own meal. “Everyone takes care of their own families
and then contributes to the community whatever skill they have to
give. Families take turns feeding the bachelors and widows in camp,
and newcomers like yourself and Mr. Gilhooley. Then everyone
pitches in on the planting and the harvesting since we all benefit
from that.”

“And security measures,”
Declan said. “My job is to patrol the perimeter and keep an eye on
things.”

Fiona turned to Aideen.
“We had a terrible incident last year when Sarah…when a few things
happened…and we were attacked by a gang from the UK.” She put a
hand on her husband’s arm as it lay on the table. “My Declan and
his family came in the nick of time to help us beat the blackguards
back.”

“Well, true enough, it was mostly me,”
Declan said, scooping a squealing Fiona into his lap. “But me
family helped a bit.” The two of them began snuggling, shutting out
the rest of the world.

Brian attacked his plate
with new fervor but Taffy stared at the newlyweds, her eyes wide,
her little mouth open.

“Finish your tea, Taffy,”
Aideen said.

“Sure, I’m glad you came,
Aideen,” Mike said suddenly.
Possibly
prodded by the infectious display of affection from his sister and
her new husband?
“It’s good that you’re
here.”

“Is it, Mike?” She made
sure that he caught her meaning with no mistake. She’d walked many
miles—been hungry more times than ever before in her life—and went
to bed each night with terror as her sleep mate—and the one thing
that kept her going was the memory of Mike Donovan.

Before she could
underscore her meaning to him with anything more, Fiona hopped up
and grabbed the pot on the stove behind the table.

“So how old are ya,
darlin’?” Fiona asked Taffy as she ladled another serving of food
into the child’s bowl.

“Seven. Almost.”

“Such a big girl.” Fiona
turned to Aideen. “My brother tells me the two of you met last year
on his hunt for Sarah?”

“That’s right. In Boreen.
He…” She stole a glance at him to see if he was listening. He was.
“He stayed with my father a few weeks to earn passage on the ferry
to Wales.”

“But you said you never made it to Wales,”
Fiona said to Mike, frowning.

“He didn’t,” Aideen said. “He gave his
passage money to me so Taffy and I could leave.”

“Ahhhh,” Fiona said and returned to her
chair at the table.

“And what’s
that
supposed to mean?”
Mike growled. “Oh, never mind. I don’t want to know.”

Aideen took a breath and,
affecting insouciance, leaned across the table for the water
pitcher and said, “You mentioned Sarah in the altercation you had
last year. Does that mean you found her after all?”

“I did.”

“But she’s leaving now,”
Fiona said. Implied, it seemed to Aideen by the way Fiona spoke
were the words,
after all that effort and
worry.

“Leaving
here
? Why ever for? She
found something better than this?”