For years he kept the same quiet profile. A reserved man, a church-goer who seldom went to church, a reader of odd doctrines, a man who lived by himself in the barracks, a man whose prejudices were hidden from the world. And perhaps he would have remained like that, if, in the same year that both his parents died, he had not met Maisie Ruttle, a gangly, fair-haired woman who was a Methodist, born and bred in the Free State. She had come North to work as a cook for Lord Brookborough. Jonathan met her on the tarmacadam path that was being laid through the estate. A roadworker had a finger severed by a winch that was hauling stone, and the police had been called. She was holding the man’s hand in a bloodied towel by the edge of the path under a spreading elm. Very gently she got the labourer seated next to her in the back of the police car. All the way to Enniskillen hospital she talked to the man as she held his wounded hand – you’ll be all right, don’t fret, easy now – and only let him go when the doctor came.

“The poor fellow,” she said.

The Sergeant nodded.

Then she stopped talking. They sat facing a blank wall in the hospital for more than two hours without speaking. Then, again without speaking, they sat another hour each side of the labourer’s bed. Then there was the silent drive home. Hay was being tossed in the fields.

“I spent my childhood playing in haylofts,” she said.

“Mine,” he replied, “was spent in police barracks around the North.”

A few nights later she climbed out of the pantry window and met him on the edge of the private lake. He stood skimming stones across the surface of the moon in the water. She sat with her back to the trunk of a tree.

“Would you like,” he asked her, “to be buried with my people?”

She was eighteen when she married Jonathan Adams. He was forty-three. The day before the marriage he drove down to her home place in the townland of Ballindan, just outside Rathkeale, Co. Limerick. Accompanying him was Matti Bonner, the Catholic labourer Maisie had taken to the hospital that day.

Some time after he proposed Jonathan bought a small house a few miles outside the village. Their nearest neighbour they discovered was Matti Bonner. Since he’d lost his finger in the winch certain types of work were denied him. Maisie hired him to decorate the old house. Having been born in the Republic, she had no religious qualms about knowing Catholics. But the first thing Jonathan Adams did was lift his Fenian ledger to check to see if his new neighbour’s name was in it. It wasn’t.