Shona had not the strength to answer, even had she been inclined to tell him. It was where she had to be just one more time for one last curse; it was all she had left in her and she was waiting to be told how to use it. They had remained unseen, invisible, as she knew they would be, as they set up camp, fed the horses, lit the fire and settled down. But all the time Jay complained. ‘What use are you when you can’t even cook any more,’ he said as he threw the rabbit he’d trapped the previous day into the scalding cast-iron pot. Without any further words, they both bedded down for the night.

In the hour before dawn, Shona lifted her head and took one last look through the parted oilskin draped across the rear of the caravan, down the hill towards the Taramore river. The wind raced through the trees as the river thundered down the steep slope then meandered round the base of the hill, hushed and deep over the Taramore table where the salmon came to spawn year after year, before whispering over pebbles in the shallows. She’d been woken by the voices from the dark, forbidding flow and they were calling her name. It was time.

The straw mattress crackled beneath her shifting weight, disturbing Jay, asleep on the pallet beside her. ‘Lie down, you mad old crone,’ he barked.

She wanted to answer him, to order him to speak to her with the respect she deserved. She was Shona of Erris, the head of the oldest gypsy family in the west of Ireland and the true owner of the land on which they were now camped. They’d parked up on almost the very spot on which she’d been born. But her strength, her powers, were ebbing away from her; she felt it and knew it for what it was.

She gulped down hungry, shallow breaths of the damp night air and tried to speak, but failed. She ignored Jay and his impatience as the sweet and pungent earthy smell of night grass rose, stung her nostrils and scorched her lungs, competing with wood-smoke from the fire to the side of the caravan steps. With supreme effort, she pushed herself up with one hand, grabbing at the bent-willow frame of the caravan for support.

Jay, blinking, offered no assistance. ‘Have you finally lost your mind?’ he grunted as he punched his straw pillow.

Desperate for his help but too proud to ask, she made one last attempt. Grasping and clutching, she leant her back against the frame and looked down on the scene below. The white Church of the Sacred Heart was just in view, on the periphery of her vision; the gravestones reflected the luminous full moon, and the stars shone in the cold, clear sky and danced on the surface of the river.

It was a perfect night to leave the place where she’d spent so many nights before. She knew every rabbit burrow that had kept her and her family fed, the fox that fled when she approached, and the owl that, perched and blinking, watched her now. ‘I knew all your mothers before you,’ she murmured to the bird. The smile of reflection slid from her face as a lone tear trickled down her cheek. The whispers of her ancestors were floating up to her from the banks of the river, in and out of the caravan as the wind grew stronger. She could hear the long past sounds of Daedio Malone from when he and the guards drove her and her family off the seven acres the old Lord Carter had given to her grandmother before his death.