Swords and Crowns and Rings Read Free Page A

she walked distraughtly about the unlighted cave of a place that smelled of mouldy oats and pollard, half-scrubbed floors, and damp, greening potatoes. The street lights shone subaqueously through the ginger-beer bottles in the window. Shadow-shows went on outside the window, people meeting, kissing, quarrelling; and she watched them enviously.
    The neighbour, Mrs Early, had fed Jackie and put him to bed. ‘He’s been a devil again,’ she said, admiringly. ‘Out in the tree like a possum. Wouldn’t come in for half an hour, and not a stitch on his little rumtum but a singlet.’
    The bereaved woman pulled down the blankets from the tittering, heaving heap that was her son. His sparkling eyes, the most beautiful she had ever seen in a human face, looked back at her. They were grey as the dawn, with black velvet bands around the iris, and the lashes were like a foal’s.
    â€˜The Nun’s going to build me a treehouse tomorrow,’ he said.
    The mother, looking into those eyes, saw nothing of her sad husband or herself. Perhaps he was like her father, who had died young.
    â€˜He says I’m a luck child,’ said Jackie.
    â€˜So you are,’ cried Mrs Hanna, gathering him to her breast. The child’s face struggled up to her shoulder and he said excitedly to the neighbour: ‘And I’m going to put my wee iron stove in it, and cook grapes and snails and me and Cushie Moy’ll eat them.’
    Mrs Hanna was aware that the Nun had every intention of courting her when the year was up. A man she had scarcely known in her husband’s lifetime except over the counter, she had nevertheless heard and absorbed his history. He was gardener and handyman at the convent, and in Kingsland it was thought uniquely amusing that his name should be Jerry MacNunn.
    The Nun was a large man of sixteen stone. Because of a wound inflicted during the Boer War, he limped and was often in pain. He was down and out when he came to Kingsland in the depressed years after the war. He first went to the parson who gave him a shilling and his hopes for a clean and temperate life. He saw the Seventh Day Adventists, but they were vegetarians and gave him a bag of carrots.
    The Nun sat on the railway station trying to eat raw carrots and cursing his leg and his luck. He was not a Catholic, but in desperation thought he’d go to the priest. It wasn’t Father Link then, but the old tough from Clare, McTigue, face speckled like a bantam hen, knuckles broken and splathered from scrapping in his youth. He was saying his Office in the windy presbytery garden when the Nun put on the bite for a doss-down in his tool-shed.
    â€˜Never,’ said he between two psalms. ‘The last time I was fool enough to let a couple of whining miseries from up-country sleep there, they got off with me hedge clippers and a grand chisel. What’s the matter with you, a great lump of a man like you, that you’ve no job or a place of your own?’
    â€˜I’ve got this crook leg,’ began the Nun, already incensed at the other’s brutal manner. ‘I was at Mafeking ...’
    â€˜And so was every other bloody loafer,’ snorted Father McTigue. ‘Go and sleep under the bridge where all the vagrants go.’
    And he walked off into the dusk intoning. The Nun pondered a moment or two on whether to go after him and pull his biretta down over his lugs, then went vengefully away to sneak through a window into the nearby convent kitchen to help himself to some Christian charity. Fearlessly he bogged into half a leg of mutton and a loaf of bread, and was away on what was left of the steamed pudding when the lay sister returned from the refectory and discovered him. She went flying off like some wingless black bird, squawking.
    In came the Mother Superior, tall, commanding, kindly.
    â€˜What are you doing here, young man?’ she inquired. The Nun stared challengingly, meanwhile shovelling in the