The girls’ lesson took place in the kitchen between ten and twelve in the July mornings. Sometimes, to torment him, the girls would speak to each other in lewd French so that he was left as hopeless as they were when he’d break into a tirade of Irish.

“What did your father do above?” he asked casually.

“He was a traveller for chocolates,” said Sara.

“Was he now?” replied MacDonagh.

The afternoon and much of the early evening the teacher spent above in the Master’s room, from which, crestfallen and appalled, he’d make his way around nine to O’Malley’s pub. Both the Sergeant and the girls found MacDonagh a very stern customer. A Hail Mary in Irish began each lesson. A strange, untranslatable plea to the Lord ended it. It often appeared that nothing had happened in the Irish language except worship of God. Should the girls turn noisy he was out the door complaining. He held a special spite against Catherine because she would have her lessons prepared, answer him with sarcasm and throughout the class preserve a hostile female air. He tried everything to win her over, and failing that, to humiliate her by humiliating himself. His voice would break at the end of a love poem. He’d look up to find her looking away. His treatment of Sara was at first matter of fact, and then he tried by praise to turn her into a collaborator. But his attempts to separate the girls brought them closer together. He remained outside, a figment of their father’s imagination.

His inadequacy with the girls made him a stranger. But worse was to come. He made no bones of expressing his horror to Maisie Adams that a picture of Queen Victoria and other royal memorabilia took pride of place on the parlour mantelpiece. It was only mock horror, yet the woman of the house took it seriously. Now he began to realize why they had invited no local in. The Adamses had old-fashioned Royalist leanings. They were hiding a secret. Maisie remonstrated with her husband, who remonstrated with MacDonagh that the Queen was his wife’s hobby.

“Hobby!” said MacDonagh astounded and looked with amusement at the Queen.

He would not let the argument be. He treated them at tea time to an account of how the Prince Regent had sped through Ireland two generations before. “In my village, the people laid out flowers for him. The tenants were made to line the platform like idiots. There was a brass band assembled to break into a colonial air. All were trained to wave in unison. They waved and the Prince, the bastard, shot by without losing speed.”

“You are lucky,” said Maisie. “He never made it to Rathkeale, where I came from.”

“Most likely,” he said jokingly, “living in a huge house where you lorded it over the natives.”