Lucinda Sly by Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé Page A

from the table, put them in a dish of water and cleaned and wiped the table, she sat on a chair by the fire. Sly sat beside her and reddened his pipe with a coal from the fire. He was totally at ease.
    ‘When I have finished my smoke, we will walk around the farm,’ he suggested.
    They walked out the back door and through the broken bog to the top of a low hill where they had a fine view of the countryside all around. The way Sly was casting his eyes around, one would be forgiven for thinking that this was his first trip to the top of the hill.
    ‘Look down there in the direction of Carlow town,’ he boasted as he stretched himself, ‘and east towards the thatched house … then west to the big glen … I own every acre of it. Between commonage and land there are more than three hundred acres and perhaps in a few years a few holdings will be added to it.’
    Lucinda saw the glint of the landlord in his eyes but she let itgo without saying a word. She supposed it wasn’t a bad thing in a man to have a desire for land.
    Lucinda Singleton couldn’t but be satisfied in her mind as she guided her horse home from Oldleighlin that evening. Therewould be an end to her poverty not to mention her fear of putting a ha’penny astray. She would be able to buy a new pair of shoes and a shawl at least every other year instead of resoling old shoes whose uppers and seams were rotten from cowdung and milk that spilled from the pails. She imagined she would have a good life as soon as she was married and settled in Walter’s farm. Yes, and the
snooties
who sold their butter on the side of the street and were looking down on the widow wouldn’t be able to do so any longer.
    She visited her son and his wife briefly before she left Bilboa to strengthen the friendship Walter Sly had re-established between them. But she didn’t spend too long in their company as night was falling. In those days a woman travelling on her own wouldn’t be safe on the King’s road. At that time stories were going around that a woman who was walking home on her own from a neighbour’s house was viciously attacked. The poor woman ended up in the lunatic asylum as a result. Yes, and it wasn’t the fairies who attacked her.
    When Lucinda reached home she unyoked the horse and let him out in the field. There was so much running through her mind that she almost forgot to milk her two cows.
    ‘Anyone would think that I’m only an eighteen-year-old the way my head is spinning,’ she thought to herself as she loosened the spancel from the second cow’s legs. The day’s events were still going around in her mind.
    Because there was a nature of frost in the north wind, she lit the fire. She would get no sleep until she went over in her mind her arrangement with Walter Sly. Suddenly she began to have doubts.Was she doing the right thing? She had spent most of her life working her few acres on her own without anybody to tell her ‘do this’ or ‘do that’. In a short time she would be married and she would be answerable for two.
    Little by little the fire lit up until it threw light on the whole kitchen. Lucinda sat looking into the heart of the fire, her mind still on Walter Sly’s farm and question after question worrying her. Oh! She had a long dark road ahead of her. It wasn’t too late to pull back from the brink but, then again, would she end up a cantankerous , tormented old woman sitting on her own in the corner with nobody to look after her? Contact had been re-established between herself and her son thanks to Walter Sly. The blaze of the fire was a help to her, she felt. If it did nothing else, it put her mind at ease and, at the end of the night before she put her head on the pillow, she had decided that she would take a chance on marrying Walter Sly.
 

Chapter Six
    Lucinda Singleton spent the first three days of the following week doing the usual household chores and working on the farm. She baked twenty cakes of bread for the market on