Flight of the Earls Read Online Free PDF

appearing as innocent and vulnerable as she did now. The idea of passing on this heavy burden to the little girl before her was cruelty.
    She embraced Caitlin, who reached back with arms of desperation, somehow aware of the unspoken significance. Clare drew back her sister’s hair and whispered into her ear.
    â€œRemember how this feels. You will always be in my embrace, Cait. Though gone for a season, I will never leave you. Never.”
    She felt arms wrapping around her waist and saw her brothers had joined them, each with dread in his eyes. Clare tried not to let them hear her crying, and after a while she stepped back and knelt before them, summoning all reserves of confidence.
    â€œSeamus and I are going to a faraway place where there is money enough to buy food for everyone. A place where people are never hungry. We’re going to send all of our spare earnings back here. And while I’m away, I will think of you every day and I’ll say a prayer for each of you.”
    â€œBut we don’t want you to go,” Davin said. “We’d rather be hungry.”
    Clare caressed his cheek. “Nor do I want to leave you. But leave I must. And soon, you’ll look up from your chores and off in the horizon, with the sun rising behind it, you’ll see Clare and Seamus walking toward you, with smiles on their faces and gifts in their arms. And we’ll be home forever. This I promise.”
    They clutched as one family and cried together without restraint. After a long while, Clare’s gaze drifted toward the road leading away from their farm. She repeated the words again, this time for her own benefit.
    â€œWe’ll be home forever.”

Chapter 3
    American Wake

    Cormac Brodie, a tall, slender man dressed in a worn tweed vest, white shirt, brown frieze pants, and a faded, black stovepipe hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead. He turned his reddened face, framed by bushy, gray sideburns and nodded to the other two men in his band, who met his gaze with military seriousness. He lifted his fiddle to his shoulders and, with a sharp pull, began to dance his bow across the strings, and a song of unbridled merriment arose.
    Soon his son, Aedan, a young, brown-haired lad, joined on the wooden flute and added beautifully high and clear syncopated notes. Then on cue, Cormac’s cousin Bartley, who was renowned through many villages for his musical talents, pressed his elbow against a bag of air, and the pipes protruding chimed in with low, echoing tones.
    As if unable to do anything else, puppets on the strings of their masters, dozens began to join in the hearty dance—boys, girls, young and old, without reservation and bearing a cheery disposition far removed from their underlying poverty.
    Clare watched from a distance and marveled at the ability of her townspeople to dance in the face of gloom. With the green grass, unseasonably warm weather, and festive atmosphere abounding, she imagined a stray visitor would never know that here on her family’s field, death’s shadow was seeping through the soil.
    The potato plague had not yet reached all, but plenty of farms were crippled with more succumbing weekly. As they would say amongst themselves, if the feet of darkness had not yet tread on their soil, the steps could be heard approaching.
    Clare shared a large makeshift table with several women. In between town gossip and commentary about the dancers, they were cutting potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, and parsnips. These vegetables, along with barley and an assortment of lamb neck bones and shanks, were being put into two large black cooking pots, hoisted above pits of fiery peat.
    The warm smells of the lamb stew, lively music, children’s laughter, and the vibrant chatter of the ladies near her were muted by Clare’s disguised angst. She chopped away at a stack of vegetables and wrestled tomorrow’s fears.
    In the morning, she would be leaving Branlow, perhaps