Tom didn’t know if he was stupid or not. He didn’t mind not belonging to a gang. Holy Mullihan didn’t belong to a gang and no one thought the worse of him for that. Neck Daly and Deso Furphy went around together, but just the two of them could hardly be called a gang.

‘I’ll be looking for improvement in you,’ Brother Meagher warned.

In Spillane’s public house further racing tips were deplored; Butt Nolan was abused in his absence. In Myley Flynn’s, Briscoe, the porter at the Provincial Bank, heard how a woman, swimming on her own one midday, had swum into difficulties and been rescued. She’d lain unconscious for twenty minutes on the sand, her face gone blue, but in the end recovered. Afterwards, hurrying about his business on the streets, Briscoe told of this, exaggerating the drama only slightly.

Few of the summer visitors took the ferry to the island in order to wander along the cliffs, or to view the abbey ruins or climb up to the standing stones. But some women of the town, at the end of the first week in August, made their annual pilgrimage to the holy well. The saint whose hermit habitation the place had been, whose life there had inspired the lives of the abbey monks, was venerated on a day associated with his memory. The stone reputed to have been his pillow was touched by the women; rosaries were told above the moist clay.

Villana, wearing a plain yellow dress, passed through the gates of Carriglas on the afternoon following the day of the summer’s pilgrimage. She turned from the road to follow the stream that ran down to the abbey, where sheep nibbled the grass between the stones that had fallen from the walls. Here and there remained the shape of a gothic window. Steps led halfway up a tower, dwindling to nothing, as the tower itself did. There was a cell of discernible proportions. Once upon a time plots had been tilled in a surrounding garden, bees kept, fish brought from the river and the sea. The monks had sheltered quietly, fearful of invasion, while the lords of the mainland boisterously argued at a distance. But the shattering of that tranquillity had come; the monks had disappeared, the walls had fallen down.