Eccles was thriving. He proudly showed Nicole his Vandercook press, warhorse for the ages, telling her it was still used for printing wedding announcements, funeral programs, and everything between. Afterward, down the street in the raucous pub where we had dinner, both girls clapped and sang along as best they could with the live trad music accompanied by guitar, fiddle, tin whistle, and stomping feet. In bed that night, the River Sheen whispering words I could no more understand than the Gaelic I’d once tried and pretty much failed to learn, I slept untroubled by dreams.
Next morning, though it was overcast and promised rain, we were to take the ferry out to the Skellig Islands, where monks—and Jedi—once lived in utter austerity, cut off from the outside world, like the pillar saints of bygone centuries, atop their barren rocks hundreds of feet above the gnawing ocean. When I came downstairs to join the others, I noticed Will was sitting with two men at the far end of the spacious breakfast room. They huddled in serious, private conversation at a table by large windows overlooking the greens where some jackdaws pranced and marched in circles. One of the men wore a uniform of the Garda Síochána, as the Irish police service was called. I waved nervously at Will, who saw me and waved back, offering me a calm smile. Maisie was poring over a brochure about the Skellig monastery while distractedly eating her porridge, but Nicole, I noticed, was as focused on Will as I. A fierce look, much like that of her kingfisher, was set on her face, and though the men were quite a way from where we were seated, she seemed to be trying to read their lips.
Once they finished their discussion, the three stood and, without shaking hands, bade one another farewell. When Will joined us, he said we needed to get on the road, but he was famished and ordered a full breakfast, complete with a black pudding of groats and blood. I asked him what the officers wanted and he replied that a felon we knew from here and home, one whose name needn’t be repeated, had gone missing. Aware of Will’s horrific encounter with the man in Kenmare before the new millennium, the Garda requested that he alert them should he happen to see his sometime assailant in County Kerry during our stay. He most certainly would do so, Will had assured them.
As my husband unfolded his starched white napkin, the loving, if unsettled, look he gave our elder daughter was one I wouldn’t soon, indeed ever, forget, even though I had no idea how to interpret its meaning. “So there it is,” he said, as that ragged flock of jawdaws, startled by who knew what down along the river, vaulted crazily from the emerald grass and wheeled together toward the lower reaches of the leaden sky above.