Catherine looked at her sister, as she often did, with trepidation, because she felt Sara had crossed some invisible line that made them both wholly independent of each other, which in itself, though scaring, was ennobling. Sara led the way, Catherine followed.

“Good morning, ladies,” O’Muichin said. From this out they were to be known as ladies it seemed. When, after breakfast, they sat down at the table with their notebooks and pens as they were accustomed, O’Muichin suggested a walk round the countryside instead. He took with him a bird book and a flower book, but he did not need them, for the girls – long encouraged by their father – recognized everything, recalled spring flowers, autumn flowers, told him in English, and he translated.

The meadowsweet was airgead luadra, the silver rushes. The primrose was bainne bo bleachta, the milk of the milch cow. The daffodil, the flower that hangs its head, lus an chron chinn. The ditches were filled with herb Robert and he became lus coille, flower of the wood, though there was not a tree in sight. And then came the daisy, noinin, little noon or midday.

The girls could not believe the soft nature of this man, with his upturned shoes, consoling eyes and frayed shirt collar, that could give the flowers they knew a different stance in another language. They walked from field to field accounting for the lesser celandine, the purple loosestrife, the purple head of the thistle, the grip of the leaf round the phallic head of the blossoming hemlock, and back again to the cluster of mauve lights from brave herb Robert in a ditch. Some plants he could translate by colour alone, for the Irish had no name for them. Then they passed on to birds: Robin, spideog, a snot or the little perky one; the scald crow, preachan na gearcha, crow of the hens or the chicken crow; londubh, blackbird, the black spout of music. The lady thrush, and the lady blackbird had the same name, he said.

“And what’s that?” asked Sara.

Here O’Muichin hesitated.

“Some words for birds,” he said, “are lost in meaning. If you take the male it’s smollach, and that could be translated as a lighted coal. But if you take the cléirseach that could mean something else.”

“And what’s that?” asked Catherine.

“Oh, that’s a hard one.”

O’Muichin considered his book of birds where the female thrush was drawn in flight, and at rest, in quick dabs of faded watercolour; he looked at her coat of spots and wondered how the ancient Irish had found there what the word described.