There was just time, before the kettle boiled, to see whether it was standing or lying down or whether the curse-of-God thing was still there in the field. He hurried out, pulling the back door shut behind him.

It was a relief to be in the open air. Just up the road from his gate, a gang of roadworkers was about to start the day’s work. They had been drawing chippings there the last few days with horses and carts, and now the tar-spreader had arrived. While the fire was being stoked up under the machine, the men squatted beside their bicycles and smoked. One of them was feeding sugar to the pony, which had its head through a gap in the hedge.

Ned Foley, council worker, grave digger, and Father Conroy’s right-hand man, had made a small fire by the roadside and was gathering the blackened billy cans together to make the morning tea. As Father Conroy approached, he looked up and drew the priest toward him with a secretive, in-curving gesture. It was the same gesture which accompanied always his phrases in Gaelic, “Cogar i leith chugham”; in English it had no equivalent, not even, “Come in here, close, till I tell you.” Yet all he had to say, when the priest stooped conspiratorially over him, was, “He’s a right pet, Father.”

“He is, Ned. Easy known an old woman had the minding of him.”

“’Tis a damn shame, Father, to have him going where he’s going. And all the breeding he do have.”

Father Conroy nodded, his eyes on the men, who were touching their caps to him. Ned glanced at them too and said aloud, “Sit down, Father, and take your ease. I’m just wetting a sup of tea for the men.”

Father Conroy needed no urging. He hunkered down in the shelter of the hedge as Ned selected the cleanest of the billy cans and wiped its lip with his sleeve.

“He’ll have to go there, Ned, all the same. That’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, that’s all,” Ned hastened to say. “Fair’s fair. Still...” And he began to spoon the tea thoughtfully into the billy can.

“’Tis a damn shame,” agreed Father Conroy, “when the fellow wouldn’t know a good pony from a tinker’s nag that you’d pick up at the tail end of a fair for a fiver.”

Ned’s eyes met his for a moment. “Wouldn’t he, Father?”