Read Chapter 9: The Blight

The first black speck appeared on a leaf in the middle of the east field, no larger than a tear of tar. Maeve knelt and touched it. The speck smeared, oily and foul, and beneath it the leaf had already begun to curl and die. She stood slowly, scanning the rows. There were others. A dozen. Then a hundred. The blight had come.

Within days it was a plague. The plants blackened as though burned from within, stalks collapsing into stinking ruin. The air turned thick with the smell of rotting green, and Maeve tasted it at the back of her throat even indoors. She walked the fields each morning with her shawl pulled tight, counting the dead rows, and each morning there were more. By the end of the second week, nearly half the east field crop was gone. The rest was a race against rot.

“We harvest what’s clean,” she told Padraig at dawn, her voice hoarse from lack of sleep. “Everything that doesn’t show a mark. We dig it up and we store it in the barn, and we pray it keeps.”

Padraig stared at the blackened expanse. “The tenants, missus—they’ll see the carts. They’ll know.”

“They already know. There’s no hiding a smell like this.” She picked up a spade and handed it to him. “We save what we can. That’s all there is.”

It took them three days. Maeve worked alongside the men—Brigid refused to join them, muttering about the sins of the land—digging potatoes from the earth with her bare hands when the tools ran short. Her nails split and her palms blistered, but she did not stop. The children were sent to collect the blighted plants into piles for burning, and the smoke rose in black columns across the estate. By the third evening, they had filled the barn with a pitiful harvest: less than a quarter of what she had hoped for, and more than half of that already soft with early rot.

Maeve stood in the barn door, watching the last of the smoke curl into a grey sky. The debt to the bank would come due at harvest. And now there was no harvest.

“Missus.” Padraig appeared beside her, wiping his hands on his trousers. “There’s something you should see.”

He led her past the barn to the far edge of the yard, where a low stone wall separated the estate from the road. On the other side, a small cluster of tenants had gathered—the Dalys, the O’Shea boy, old Niamh with her stick. They were not speaking, just standing, watching the smoke. Niamh saw Maeve and raised her hand, not in greeting but in something closer to a plea. Maeve’s chest tightened.

She had promised them reduced rents. She had promised them mercy. And now she had nothing left to give them but a barn full of dying potatoes.

“We can stretch it,” Padraig said quietly. “The seed for next year, if we’re careful. But we’ll need to buy more by spring. And there’s the debt besides.”

“I know,” Maeve said.

She returned to the house and sat in the kitchen, staring at the locket hidden beneath the floorboard in her room. The gold sovereigns she had found were nearly half-gone already—she had used them to secure feed and seed and salt, small purchases that kept the estate breathing but not thriving. The note said the treasure continued *across the water*, but she had no way to follow it now, no time, no strength for riddles.

That evening, as she was drafting a letter to the bank—her third attempt, each one more desperate than the last—she heard a knock at the door. Brigid answered and came back looking sour.

“The Englishman.”

Ashworth stood on the threshold in his riding coat, mud flecked to the knee. He did not wait for an invitation. He stepped inside and removed his hat, revealing hair dark with damp. “I’ve seen the fields. The whole valley is burning the blight.” He paused. “But your barn is full. You harvested early.”

“We did what we could.”

“Most landowners are doing what they can. Organizing the funeral, as it were.” His eyes moved to her hands—the raw blisters, the cracked knuckles, the dirt still buried deep in her nails. “You did more than that. You dug with your own men. Saved a crop that would otherwise have rotted in the ground.”

Maeve folded her arms. “I didn’t do it for your approval, Mr. Ashworth.”

“No. You did it because you are stubborn and proud and unwilling to lose. Which is precisely why I’m here.” He reached into his coat and withdrew a folded paper, creased but clean. “I spoke to the bank in Galway. There is a program, newly introduced for estates willing to adopt modern methods. Drainage, crop rotation, stone walls to prevent the spread of disease. If you agree to implement them—and if you allow an overseer to inspect the work—they will extend a development loan against the estate, delaying your current debt.”

Maeve stared at the paper. “And what do you get from this?”

“A commission. And the satisfaction of seeing this land yield more than rot and resignation.” He held the paper out. “I know you believe I work against you. I know you suspect my name on your husband’s loan was no accident. Perhaps you are right to. But I am not your enemy in this.” His jaw tightened. “The blight does not care about English or Irish, creditor or debtor. It will take everything if you let it.”

Maeve did not move. The letter trembled in his hand, and she could see the fine print of clauses and conditions, the language of a system that had ground her people for centuries. But she also saw her barn, her tenants, her dead husband’s debts. She thought of the locket beneath her floorboard, the hollow promise of treasure across the water.

She took the paper and said, “Show me what I’m signing.”