“That is true, Clodagh.” His tone was a little odd, and when I looked at him I saw an expression on his face that seemed part compassion, part sorrow. “Johnny’s adept at maintaining a good face; like his father, he seldom lets others see deep. Clodagh, he loves the island. He loves his work as a leader of men. As for the other, he doesn’t want a wife and children. You must know how things stand between him and Gareth.”

For a moment I failed to understand what he meant. Then I wondered if he was teasing me in the way that had become all too familiar at Sevenwaters. But he’d looked and sounded entirely serious. Rather than utter the denial that sprang to my lips—for what he suggested was a complete surprise to me—I held my tongue and considered the possibility that it might be true. I recalled my visit to the island and Johnny’s trips to Sevenwaters, on most of which Gareth had accompanied him. They were certainly very close, the two of them. But if there was something more than friendship between them, they were expert at concealing it.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I am, though perhaps I should not have told you. I thought you would know. On the island it is not a secret.”

“I didn’t know, Cathal.” I thought again about Mother’s ambivalent attitude to Johnny as heir to Sevenwaters, which I had always put down to the fact that she had never quite approved of his father. Nobody could dislike Johnny himself. He was the kind of man everyone wanted as a friend. “Maybe my parents do, but it’s not the sort of thing they would discuss with me—we aren’t quite as open in our conversation as that. Poor Johnny; such expectations of him, and all likely to leave him deeply unhappy for the rest of his life.”

“A man can marry and father sons even if he is not that way inclined,” Cathal said dryly. “But there would be little love in such a partnership.”

“Love?” I echoed. “In our circles, marriages are made for reasons of strategic alliance. I count Deirdre lucky that she actually likes Illann. None of us expects love.”

“How fortunate that you met Aidan, then. With him you will have both a strategic alliance and love. I most certainly should not set any obstacles in your way.”