Lark's Eggs by Desmond Hogan

and on the way they heard that O’Rourke, king of the Tinkers, was dead. ‘You’ll be the next king of the Tinkers ,’ Eileen said.
    She arranged he fight Crowley his opponent in Mountshannon. Women stood by with Guinness and cider and children paddled among the fresh roses and geraniums. She saw her lover strip to the waist and combat a man his senior and she recalled her father’s words, ‘Lucky is the man who wins ye.’
    Â This man over the others had won her.
    She wrapped a shawl about her as they fought and fell to the ground. In the middle of combat her gaze veered from fight to lake where birds dropped like shadows. ‘I have travelled at last,’ she said. ‘There’s a hunger and a lightness returned to my body. A grandmother and mother I’m not no more but a woman.’
    After Joseph fought and won they drove off to a pub pushing out from a clump of rhododendrons and celebrated.
    â€˜Jesus, Mother,’ said Mary. ‘Have you no sense?’
    â€˜Sense I haven’t but I have a true man and a true friend,’ she said.
    She was held in high esteem now and where she went she was welcomed. Age was creeping up on her but there were ways of sidling away from it.
    She’d jump on a horse and race with Joseph. He was a proud man and faithful to her.
    Also he was a learned man and conversed with school teachers.
    In Cairo he’d had tuition from French Jesuits. He spoke in French and English and Romany and could recite French poets or Latin poets.
    When it came to his turn at a feast he’d not play the whistle but sing a song in the French language.
    Finally he grew younger before her eyes as she grew older. In France she’d fled because it was a bad match. Here there was nowhere to go.
    It was lovely, yes, but her eyes were becoming criss-crossed like potato patches.
    â€˜I have reached an age that leads towards the grave,’ she wept to herself one evening, ‘I am an old banshee.’ Joseph comforted her, not hearing, but maybe knowing.
    She watched him bathe in the Shannon and knew he should be with a woman younger than her but that yet she loved him and would cut her throat for him. She saw in his eyes as he looked from the water the stranger that he was and the stranger that he was going to be.
    In 1957 he fell from a horse in the fair green in Ballinasloe and was killed.
    She remembered the curse on him in the South of France and knew it to have come true.
    Â She watched the flames burning and coaxing at the wake and recalled his words in France. ‘Our secrets are the secrets of the universe , a child, a woman with child, a casual donkey. We are the sort that Joseph was when he fled with Mary.’He was educated by French Jesuits and held comers in his tongue and twists in his utterances. He was a poet and a Tinker and a child of the earth.
    She recalled the lady in the manor long ago who’d befriended her, to whom she’d go with bushels of heather on summer evenings.
    Why was it that woman had been haunting and troubling her mind recently?
    It had been so long since she’d known her yet she bothered her. Had it been warning of Joseph’s death? All her life despite the fact she was just a Tinker she’d met strange people.
    From the woman in the manor who’d asked her to tea one day, to the French Gypsy who’d become her lover as old age dawned upon her. He’d been the strangest of all, brown face, eyes that twinkled like chestnuts in open pods. Yes, he’d been a poet as well as a lover. He’d been of the earth, he’d gone back to it now. He’d possessed the qualities of the unique like the cockney music-hall girl who’d attracted the attention of an Irish peer and came to live in a manor, finding a friend in a Tinker from a hovel of tents and caravans.
    She watched the flames dance and saw again the white horses of Camargue, flurrying in uncertain unison, and would have