Her father folded a slice of eye in half, let it melt in his mouth, and then spoke. ‘Their sense of their selves is very big I will say, but still they are a very small, undernourished people,’ he reflected. ‘I did see a very big Dubliner, but he told me he was from Antwerp, a vicinity of Dublin I do not know, and he spoke strangely, like a touched child. They are a very rank people, as well, though one would think they would be better preserved than us on account of the salt air. On the whole, they are littler and scruffier than we are, but more violent, though they have fewer Gaels on their lands so they have fewer justifications for it.

‘But I know by your hinting manner, daughter, that you are curious to taste this strange morsel, but it would not be proper to bequeath such an eye as this on a young mother like you. Your melancholic disposition is too great to allow it. The eye might spill out in the milk of your breasts in strange concoctions once it has sifted its way through your imbalanced humours. You would poison your son with such a sup. You have always been sad, Raghnailt; you were a sad girl and you are a sadder mother, and this whale, whose eye I plucked out, was the saddest creature I ever did come across.

‘Around me, that day, hundreds of sea monsters were in terror, but I alone stood before a very accepting creature. I felt it did know me when I saw it, and it flapped its enormous tail in a very despondent fashion. I wish I could show you how it felt but I have no tail with which to express the particularity of its emotion, but believe me, I never saw such a desolate beast, and it would be wrong to pass this melancholia on to you for it might purify those tendencies that have already been too strong within you from birth.’

Balffe’s prohibition saved her, for he and his two sons were dead of dysentery within two days, and though they all had terribly flatulent deaths, the knowledge of their own approaching demise was so apparent and drawn-out that it allowed for many poignant moments of reconciliation to be passed amongst visiting relatives. Some cousins even came from Kells to make their farewells, and Father Unction had ample time to deliver unusually luxuriant death rites.

This poignancy was tempered, though, by eight other deaths in Nobber, and her father was blamed. The meat he had generously dispersed had been two weeks old. The family’s good name was gone.