The Pig Comes to Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Yes, I see you, the both of you. And a fine pair you are, come to make fun of me and my marriage and my castle.” She didn’t call out the words; she simply spoke them, more to Maude than to the squatters. “But enjoy yourselves. Welcome you are to the feast. And I thank you for reminding me of what I am. Hardly Lord Shaftoe—may he howl in hell—but keeper of the castle am I, as rightful an heir as anyone with Kerry blood coursing in her veins. You’re standing now on Kerry soil and all the Shaftoe days are done. Eat. Dance. Drink. This feast is yours as much as—”
    She stopped, gave a quick move of her head, and began searching among the thronged guests. “Well,” she said, “I’ve lost them now. Funny.” Still smiling, she looked at Maude expecting her to share her amusement. But the Seer took two steps back and, mouth half open, was staring at Kitty.
    â€œOh, Maude, sorry. I was supposed to look you in your left eye and swear some kind of oath and now I’ve forgot. But you needn’t look at me quite like that, as if you’ve dreamed up some even worse prophecy than the last.”
    When Maude said nothing, Kitty decided she’d best keep talking until the Hag had found her tongue and could again begin wagging it for all to hear. “All right then. I’m looking straight into your left eye. Now tell me what I’m supposed to say so I can say it and be done.”
    Maude’s jaw moved up and down a few times, until she was able to speak, but in a voice low and unsteady. “His name is Taddy,” she said. “Her name is Brid.”
    Kitty gave the snort she often substituted for the laugh she couldn’t quite manage. “Taddy and Brid, you say? The names of those hanged for the plot of the gunpowder? Now you’ve gone completely off with your head, you mocking me as much as they.”
    Maude swallowed twice and, without saying anything more, turned and headed straight for where the drinking was and knocked back in quick succession two generous draughts of whiskey, of Tullamore Dew.
    Before Kitty could scan the crowd to see where the presumed Brid and Taddy had gone off to, Kieran came up and held out a pint. “You ready for this?”
    â€œI’m ready for anything. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
    As if on cue, the fiddler Annie Fitzgerald, the whistle player Jamie Kerwin, along with Cathy Clarke on the bodhran (the Irish drum) and Charlie Dillon with his guitar jumped headfirst into “Johnny Will You Marry Me” and before Kitty could take a first sip, she was dancing the hoppy, all the steps coming back from her girlhood as if her memory were in her feet. Changing partners, weaving in and out, back and forth, slapping her feet on the wooden platform she’d provided for the dancing, unable to show the impassive face the dance demanded, Kitty found herself distracted by the thought that the squatters, whatever their real names, might come on the dance floor and that, sooner or later, she would loop her arm in Taddy’s, if only for a few steps, before being returned by the intricacies of the dance to her newly won husband. When it turned out otherwise, she felt no disappointment, too determined was she not to miss a step and thereby reintroduce into the proceedings the unsettling foolishness Maude McCloskey had tried to put into her mind.
    The Seer was helping herself to more Tullamore Dew.

3
    K ieran had to be careful not to take out his annoyance at Kitty on the cows. They had done him no wrong. They had not paced from room to room, seeming to listen for a sound that only they could hear, searching shadows, darting a glance into one corner, then another. They had not, when questioned about this strange activity, said, as Kitty had, “Oh, was I doing that? Sorry, I guess I get distracted. You can understand that.”
    The cows suffered no inexplicable distractions. They had come