Read Chapter 10: The Aftermath of Blight

Maeve stood at the barn door with her hand on the mare’s neck, feeling the warm shudder of the animal’s breath against her palm. The roan had been Kilmartin’s gift on their wedding morning, a sleek creature he’d paid too much for and never once regretted. Now her ribs showed through her coat like the slats of a fence, and still she nickered softly when Maeve came near.

“You’ll fetch a fair price in Ennis,” Padraig said from behind her. He did not look at the mare when he said it.

“She’s worth more than fair.” Maeve stroked the white blaze between the mare’s eyes. “She’s worth everything.”

“Aye. And so are the children in the cottages who’ve not had a hot meal in a week.”

Maeve closed her eyes. The harvest had yielded less than a quarter of what she needed. The tenants had come to her again yesterday—not as a delegation this time, but as individuals, mothers and old men, each with the same hollow look. The blight had crept from Connacht like a fog, and though her east field had taken the worst of it, the patches the tenants worked had not been spared either. The potato trenches they’d dug together had yielded mostly black rot. What little good crop remained had been set aside for seed, locked in the barn with Padraig’s warning ringing in her ears: *We’ll need to buy more by spring, or there’ll be nothing to plant.*

“Take her,” Maeve said. She pressed her forehead to the mare’s neck. “Take her and get what you can.”

Padraig lingered a moment, then nodded and moved forward with the halter. Maeve did not watch him lead the animal away. She stood in the barn doorway until the sound of hooves on stone faded, then she walked back to the house with her jaw set and her eyes dry.

Brigid was in the kitchen, kneading bread with less flour than the dough required. She glanced up as Maeve entered. “Sold her?”

“Padraig’s taking her to Ennis now.”

Brigid’s hands stilled. She looked at Maeve with something that was not quite sympathy, not quite accusation. “You’d have sold your own hair before that mare, once.”

“Once I had nothing else to sell.” Maeve poured herself water from the ewer, though her throat was tight. “The children need food. The seed needs buying. I’ve no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.” Brigid’s voice was low. “You’ve made yours. I hope it’s the right one.”

Maeve set the cup down harder than she meant. “If you know something, Brigid, tell me. About Kilmartin. About what my mother won’t say. About any of it.”

Brigid turned back to the bread. “I know that you’re a widow with a dead husband’s debts and a hungry estate. And I know that the man who holds the note on this land is sleeping under your roof tonight.” She pressed her palm flat against the dough, hard. “That’s all I need to know.”

Maeve left the kitchen before she could say something she’d regret. She climbed the stairs to the bedroom she’d once shared with Kilmartin, closed the door, and stood very still in the middle of the room. The house was quiet around her. The wind had died, and even the birds seemed to have abandoned the fields.

She moved to the wardrobe and pulled out the small leather satchel she’d hidden there, behind the winter coats. Inside was the gold locket she’d found in the tower wall, its chain still tangled around her father’s initials. She’d looked at it a hundred times since that day, tracing the engraving with her thumb, but she had not dared open it again. Now she did.

The map unfolded across her palm like a dried leaf. It was cruder than she remembered—a child’s rendering, nearly, with a few strokes for rivers and hills and a single word at the edge in her father’s hand: *Clare*. And beneath that, in smaller letters, *the west wind remembers*.

She’d thought it was nonsense. A scrap of a man who’d spent his last years in drink and delusion. But now, with her mare gone and her seed locked in the barn and her gold nearly halved, she traced the ink with her fingertip and thought of the phrase again.

*Across the water.*

She had thought it meant England. The gold, the note, the map—all of it pointed to something beyond the Irish Sea, something her father had hidden or borrowed or stolen. But the map said Clare. The map said west.

Maeve crossed to the window and looked out past the ruined fields toward the line of hills that marked the boundary of her land. Beyond them lay the road to Galway. Beyond that, the coast. And beyond that, nothing but water.

She had never asked her father about the west. He’d died when she was fourteen, a sudden fever that took him in three days. Her mother had burned most of his papers without reading them, or so she claimed. But Maeve remembered now, dimly, the way her father used to stand at the window on clear evenings and look west. Not at the fields. At the horizon.

She folded the map and put it back in the locket, then set the locket in the satchel and returned everything to the wardrobe. The gold sovereigns she kept separate now, in a pouch beneath a loose floorboard in the corner. She counted them every night. She knew to the penny what remained.

A knock at the door made her start. She straightened her skirts and called out, and Ashworth’s voice came through the wood.

“Mrs. Kelly. I’d like a word about the loan application.”

Maeve opened the door. Ashworth stood in the hallway in his riding coat, his boots still dusty from his morning survey. He had pale eyes that seemed to take in everything at once, and he used them now to study her face before he spoke again.

“Padraig tells me you’ve sold your mare.”

“News travels.”

“It does. Especially when a woman sells her best animal to feed her tenants.” He paused. “That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation.”

Maeve stepped past him into the hall and started down the stairs. “You came to talk about the loan.”

“I did.” He followed. “The bank in Galway will want proof of income and a sense of the estate’s viability. They’ll also want collateral. Your land is already mortgaged to the bank in Ennis, which complicates matters.”

“Then why apply at all?”

“Because there’s more than one way to structure a loan.” They reached the study, and Ashworth closed the door behind them. The room was dim, the fire low in the grate. He moved to the desk and spread out a sheet of paper with columns marked in his neat hand. “If we apply jointly, with the estate as the borrower and a personal guarantee from your side, the Galway bank may see enough value in the land’s potential to advance the capital against next year’s crop.”

“A personal guarantee.” Maeve read the paper without sitting. “Whose?”

Ashworth met her eyes. “Yours.”

“And yours.”

“I’d be willing to co-sign.” He said it evenly, without emphasis. “I’ve capital of my own. The bank would see that as security.”

Maeve studied him. The firelight caught the edge of his jaw, the careful set of his mouth. He was not an unkind man—she’d come to understand that much over the weeks since he’d arrived. But he was an Englishman, and she had learned never to trust Englishmen with her name on a paper.

“If you co-sign, the loan is in both our names,” she said. “That gives you a claim on this estate.”

“It gives me a claim on the loan’s repayment. That’s different.”

“Is it? In the bank’s eyes, my land becomes your guarantee. If I fail, you have the right to call in the debt. And if you call in the debt, the estate falls to you.” She stepped closer to the desk. “I’ve seen that done before, Mr. Ashworth. I won’t be party to it.”

Ashworth’s jaw tightened. “I’m not trying to take your land, Mrs. Kelly.”

“Then why are you here? Why offer to co-sign a loan for a widow you’ve known barely a month? Why not simply return to London and leave us to fail?”

For a long moment, he said nothing. The fire crackled. Outside, the wind picked up again, rattling the window frame.

“Because I watched you dig potatoes out of blighted earth with your bare hands,” he said at last. “Because I watched you sell your horse to feed people who may turn on you before the winter’s out. Because you’re the first person in this country who’s treated me as a man rather than an occupation.” He looked away. “I’m not offering to save you, Mrs. Kelly. I’m offering to work alongside you. If you’d rather I didn’t, I’ll ride out in the morning and you’ll never see me again.”

The words hung in the room between them. Maeve thought of her father’s locket in the wardrobe. She thought of the map pointing west, the gold nearly gone, the seed locked in the barn. She thought of Padraig walking the mare toward Ennis with his shoulders bowed.

“I won’t put the estate in your name,” she said quietly. “But I’ll take your help to Galway. We’ll see what the bank says before we decide anything more.”

Ashworth nodded. He began to gather his papers, and for a moment the tension in his shoulders eased. “We’ll leave at first light,” he said. “It’s a long ride.”

“I know the road.”

He paused at the door. “I’m sorry about your mare.”

Maeve did not answer. She stood at the desk long after he’d gone, staring at the columns of figures he’d left behind. Then she climbed the stairs to her room, took the locket from the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed with it in her palm.

Clare. West wind. Across the water.

She did not know what her father had hidden there, or why he’d hidden it from her mother. But she knew now, with a certainty that settled in her chest, that she would not go to Galway only for a loan. She would go because Galway was the gateway to the west. And whatever her father had left there, it was the only inheritance that might save them all.

She slipped the locket into her pocket and went downstairs to help Brigid with the bread.