They put up in wayside inns, where travelling salesmen seemed to be the only other guests, going from farm to farm with smudged brochures offering new steam-driven machinery that none but rich landowners could afford. Against these men, adrift on their tides of frustration and disappointment, they locked their door at night. Clorinda was not surprised that Aisling wanted to reach out before she slept to hold her aunt’s hand. She clutched it tight. She told the girl about her tea room, which had been born out of an old funeral parlour, and how death and sorrow could be conquered by visions of new things. She described the galas she had attended in Bath, with their carousels and their fireworks, and told her about the handsome Belgian acrobat who had fallen off his stilts and lain in the dust, looking ridiculous. She heard Aisling laugh. And when the laughter faded, the girl said, ‘that was a strange feeling. I don’t think I have laughed very much in my life before, except once, at a mouse which ran up the side of the bread bin and turned a somersault.’

When they came to the house, near Ennistymon, where the grandfather had lived his solitary life, they found it occupied by a pair of sisters, the Misses McKinnon, creeping unobserved into middle age. One of them, Miss Elizabeth, spent her days in the old barn, painting pictures of birds and sailing ships, while the other, Miss Maeve, milked their goats, fed their chickens and kept the house. And when these woman saw Aisling, wearing her poor city clothes and with her bonnet all askew, they looked at her with longing. They had never had a child to love and now here was an eleven-year-old girl at their door, who was thin and lost-seeming, and they wanted to take her in and set before her the elder Miss McKinnon’s oyster pie and make a bed for her with their best linen sheets and teach her the pet names of their goats.

Though Clorinda said that they would find an inn nearby in Ennistymon, the McKinnon sisters, learning that their house had once belonged to Clorinda’s grandfather, would not hear of them leaving. They were shown to an attic room, now furnished with a wooden bed and a painted chest of drawers and hung with Miss Elizabeth’s bright pictures, and when Clorinda went in there, she remembered what it had housed in her grandfather’s time: a sewing machine with an old black handle and piles of cured animal skins, from which he fashioned the tawdry coats and mufflers which he sold to the people of Ennistymon and which kept him in silver sixpences and tobacco all through the winter.

Clorinda told Aisling that she had longed for one of Grandpappy’s rabbit-skin coats and he kept promising that he would make her one ‘to keep you warm in that sinful city of Dublin’, but it had never come her way. But now, as she lay in the wooden bed, holding Aisling’s hand, she fancied that the smell of rabbit and fox had lingered in the attic after all these years – the perfume of the past, caught in the wainscot and in the dusty space beneath the floor.