“I do.” Smiling still, Alice began to rock. “And would if I did or not. But my meaning wasn’t clear. I thought for a time, a short time, it would be Maggie for him. As much as I love that girl, it worried me fierce. They’d have driven each other to murder within a year.”

Despite all common sense, Shannon felt a niggling tug of jealousy. “Murphy and Maggie?”

“Oh, nothing more than a passing thought and a little wondering between them. Then I thought it would be Brianna. Ah, now that, I told myself, was the wife for him. She’d make him a strong home.”

“Murphy and Brie,” Shannon said between her teeth. “I guess he was making the rounds.”

“Oh, I imagine he made a few, but not with Brie. He loved her, as he loved Maggie. As he loves his sisters. It was me, planning in my head and wishing for him to be happy. I worried, you see, because he was twenty-five, and still showing no partiality for another of the girls hereabouts. He was working the farm, reading his books, playing his music. It was a family he needed, I’d tell myself. A woman beside him and children at his feet.”

Shannon moved her shoulders, still irked by the images Alice had conjured in her head. “Twenty-five is young for a man to marry these days.”

“It is,” Alice agreed. “In Ireland men often wait years and years longer. As they know once the vows are said there’s no unsaying them. Divorce isn’t a choice for us, not by God, and not by law. But a mother wants her son fulfilled. I took him aside this one day in his twenty-fifth year, and I sat him down and talked to him from my heart. I told him how a man shouldn’t live alone, shouldn’t work himself so hard and have no one to come home to of an evening. I told him how the O’Malley girl had her eye on him, and didn’t he think she was a pretty thing.”

Alice’s smile had faded when she looked back at Shannon again. “He agreed as she was. But when I began to press him about thinking more deeply, planning for the future, taking a wife to complete his present, he shook his head, and took my hands in his and looked at me that way he has.

“ ‘Ma,’ ” he said, “ ‘Nell O’Malley isn’t for me. I know who is. I’ve seen who is.’ ” Alice’s eyes grew dark with an emotion Shannon couldn’t understand. “I was pleased, and I asked him who she was. He told me he hadn’t yet to meet her, not in the flesh. But he knew her just the same as he’d seen her in his dreams since he was a boy. He was only waiting for her to come.”

Shannon swallowed on a dry throat and managed to keep her voice level. “Murphy has a tendency toward the romantic.”