Esther turned away into a corner, to snuff a guttering candle, and to think out what to say to them.

Behind her back there was a flash, and a monstrous explosion which delivered an intolerable blow at the nape of her neck. Above her head the whole cottage floor lifted, and daylight poured in upon them; but for Esther there was suddenly nothing but pain, and stifling darkness, and then oblivion.

Chapter Two

The grown-ups bore the wreckage home: the small corpses of the dead, and the bodies of the barely living. Young Michael Fairlie had gone limping straight to Heaven, and Johnny Costello with him: little Denis Finane lingered long enough to open surprised eyes to the ceiling before joining them. Only Esther Costello clung to life, and slowly made good her hold on it.

By some freak of the explosion – because she was a few feet farther off or because her body was turned at some merciful angle – she was apparently unharmed: the pretty, young face was without blemish, the immature body unmarked and untwisted. The blood with which her clothes were drenched was, amazingly, none of hers. But the shock had been tremendous, driving deep into some hard secret core every trace of feeling, every normal faculty. She lay unconscious for many days and nights, while the doctor from nearby Wexford did what he could, which was little enough; she showed no sign of life, nor of death either. Thus she lay, while her small friends were buried, and the inquest was begun and then adjourned; and Cloncraig gossiped or speculated or kept its mouth prudently shut.

Her parents, mourning Johnny the only son, prayed long and fervently that Esther the only daughter might live. But when she did live, it might be that they wished within their hearts that they could recall those long prayers. For Esther Costello, on awakening, could neither see, hear, nor speak.

Cloncraig kept its mouth shut by old habit. It was a small village, of fifty thatched houses, two shops, and one ‘hotel’ – a rough public house which did indeed boast a couple of rooms to shelter passing travellers. Hardly two hundred souls there were in Cloncraig, and all of them scratching a bare living from tenant farming (with the landlord away in England), odd-jobbing, horse-dealing, and scrounging from each other. But like any other village of Ireland, north or south, during the present hard century, it had had its fill of ‘incidents’ and violence. It remembered the ‘Trouble’ of 1916, when many men on the run from Dublin had passed through, or had gone to earth there; and the worse ‘Trouble’ of 1921 and 1922, when the Black-and-Tans, of evil memory, had been quartered in Cloncraig for one terrible winter and one yet more terrible spring. Cloncraig, in fact, had had its full share of contemporary Irish politics, which had always consisted, in essence, of ringing the changes on Up-the-rebels and To-hell-with-the-British. Some of its inhabitants had played an active part, others had watched or held aloof; but all knew that below the surface of this drab, down-at-heel village, brave men and cowards, traitors and patriots, had moved and lived and written their own page of history.