Kit Read Free Page A

her. ‘He must be drinking from his shoe, then,’ she said, ‘for his tankard is over there.’
    Kit walked across the bar, her feet crunching on crusts and broken glass, to where Richard’s tankard stood. The tankard shared its time between a hook behind the bar and her husband’s right hand. She did not think she had ever seen it set down. She picked it up. It was empty. No; not empty.
    She tipped the thing upside down and something fell into her hand.
    Something round and heavy.
    For the second time in her life Kit Kavanagh turned over a single coin in her palm, a coin which would change her life. But this time the imprimatur was a queen’s head, not a king’s, and the coin was silver, not gold.
    The Queen’s Shilling.
    Suddenly she was sitting on the floor, amid the detritus, without knowing how she got there. Numbly she looked about her, and all she could think about in that moment was what a mess the regiment had left, and that now she would have to clean it up on her own. How could Richard leave her to clear up by herself? Such a mess! Crusts, buckles, scuffed playing cards, the blood-red puddle of wine, nutshells, papers, broken glass, even a horsewhip. Yes, the regiment had left a high old mess.
    But it had taken her husband.

Chapter 2
    As for their old rusty rapiers that hung by their sides …
    ‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
    ‘Kit.’ Her father stooped near, his red hair and hers entangled, the threads close. He put something into her hand, a heavy something, wrapped in canvas. She opened the cloth. ‘A paring knife,’ he said, ‘so you can help your mother in the kitchen when I’m gone.’ Little Kit looked at the knife unenthusiastically. The thing was small, with a wooden handle. The curved blade looked sharp enough but it was not the blade that she craved. Her father’s sword, that he hung high out of reach when he was not campaigning, was the stuff of legend to her; it held, in those three feet of tempered steel, the song of all the tales he told her at night-time. Gathering her interest, her father had taken her to the meadow and taught her swordplay, month by month and year on year. He taught her with a hazel switch, and the hazel switch grew as she did, but she was never allowed to touch his sword. Then the hazel switch became a stave, so that she could know the weight of a blade, but still she never held his sword in her hand. Her mother had sneered at her, jealous of their time in the meadow, asking what use swordplay was to a maid, telling Kit she was second best to a son.
    And now, now her father was called to battle, he would go and the sword would go, and she would be left with her mother and a paring knife. Vegetables and fruits would now be her adversaries. ‘Learn to wield that knife,’ spat her mother, ‘and you’ll actually be of use to me while Sean is gone.’ She never called him ‘your father’ to Kit, as if she could not bear to share ownership.
    It had been the day before her father had gone that he had held her white hand in his freckled brown one. ‘Now be brave,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make you and the knife friends.’ And he drew the blade across her palm; gently, but the flesh parted one iota, the breadth of a red hair. He kissed the cut. ‘No need to fear it now,’ he said. ‘ For a blade that cuts you once can never hurt you again. ’
    Kit sat suddenly upright in her bed at Kavanagh’s . Her hand throbbed from the dream-cut. Her father was gone, Richard was gone and the dark was silent.
    Kit was alone, and awake, as she had been alone and awake at night for the three months since Richard had been taken.
    Maura had sent a fast rider to follow the regiment to Dublin, but of Richard there was no trace. When Kit glanced across the bar expecting to see him, or across the pew in church, or across the coverlet, acres and acres of space seemed to yawn where he had been. Kit, groping through the black bereavement for some sort of sense and logic, felt that it