At fourteen, the boy was gone, and Father Conroy heard that he was at home on the farm, keeping house for his father. That setup did not last long. Maurice still lived up to his early reputation for leaving a rag on every bush. He racketed around in the company of jockeys, bookies’ men, and other itinerants whose passing seemed to stir up likely women from the most unpromising countrysides. His lavish spending (his companions being half his age) soon wasted the farm for which he had waited so long. When he sold out and went to take a job in the stables near Castlemore, Father Conroy tried to get employment for Tomás from the local farmers, but they were wary of him; his troublesome reputation had preceded him from school. After some persuasion, Father Conroy managed to get Canon Fitzmaurice (plain Father Fitzmaurice then, and Father Conroy’s parish priest in Slievenalua) to take the boy on, temporarily, as general help in the parochial house.

That parochial house! Father Conroy remembered with delight his formal weekly visits there from the curate’s house in which he had set up his own untidy camp. The book-lined sitting room was waxed and shining as a convent parlor. On the hall stand was the cane – the massive, silver-knobbed cane – without which the Canon could not go walking. (It had belonged to the Canon’s father, once mayor of Donore, the old cathedral town to which Fitzmaurice was later appointed canon, an appointment for which, even then, he was rumored to be keeping a canon’s purple stock folded in mothballs.) Father Conroy’s visits always made the Canon uneasy; he came as an interloper, with secret threats of anarchy. Perhaps that was why he had brought Tomás.

The boy was a good worker; even the Canon granted him that. He mowed the lawns, clipped hedges, and did all the chores which the sour-faced old housekeeper (ancilla mea, the Canon called her, my handmaid) gladly passed on to him. After breakfast, the Canon would patter down in his carpet slippers to the kitchen, where ancilla and boy were working away in silence. While he watched his own little boots being polished, he would question the boy about the place-names of the district.

“Kilnahorna! Now, what an interesting name that is!”

“Yes, Father.”

“But it doesn’t make sense, now, does it? The chapel of the barley!”

“No, Father.”

“Isn’t your father from that side of the parish? Surely you must have heard him explaining it? There’s never been a chapel there (and I’ve looked up all the old maps), nor is there any tradition of growing barley. I understand the land thereabouts is not suitable for such a crop.”

“No, Father.”

“One would imagine he’d have told you these things. After all, that’s how they’re handed down.”