The Lost Garden Read Free

about Jimmy’s ‘lucky’ status. ‘We have no idea what the pull is like on the water around here. This coastline is full of shoals and sandspits – you wouldn’t know what’s happening under the water.’
    ‘I’ll be fine,’ Jimmy said, so impatient with the buttons he was already pulling the shirt off over his head.
    ‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Larger and a good deal stronger than his wiry young cousin, Tom grabbed him and held the struggling teenager down on the bench. ‘I’m not going back to your father to explain how I lost you to a mirage of a woman,’ and as the shirtless youth struggled wildly against him, he added, ‘happy and all as I’d be to see you drown . . . Jesus!’
    Jimmy had bit his arm and in one swift movement set himself free and dived overboard.
    It took longer than usual for Jimmy’s face to surface, especially as he had barely remembered to draw breath properly before diving in. He spat out a mouthful of saltwater and, grimacing, checked the shoreline ahead of him. There was still no sign of her. No matter. He’d find her – and he began to swim. He had not taken six strokes when he felt what seemed like hands pulling him down under the water, except that he knewit wasn’t hands; it was a whirlpool gathering around his legs. The waters around Aghabeg were predictable. When they were still on the surface, they were still beneath. This was different. He’d move free, though – it was only wat—
    As he was pulled beneath the surface with an almighty tug, he heard his cousin cry, ‘Grab this, Jimmy. Grab it . . .’
    Flailing around – down, down, down – drowning, Jimmy – don’t breathe in – don’t drown, Jimmy – something hard and sharp hit the side of his head and he reached up and grabbed it as his cousin pulled him up, up, up, bringing Invincible Jim to the surface of the water and over to the boat. Every bone in Jimmy’s body wanted to let go of the anvil and try to swim ashore again, but he was woozy from the hit to the side of the head, and he wasn’t sure if it was worth risking his life again – for a girl? And a red-haired one at that?
    As Tom dragged him up the side of the hooker, roaring at his stupid cousin for his foolhardiness, Jimmy smiled as broad and bold a smile as his face had seen in nineteen years.
    Ah, but yes. She would have been worth it surely.

Chapter Three
    Aileen patted the last of the seaweed down on top of the compost where she had planted the seeds from the pods that she had found on the beach. Then she carefully placed the shallow tray between the vegetable bed and the low stone wall where it would get maximum shelter. What would happen to these strange seeds in the next three months? What would they grow into, and how would she have altered when she came back to claim them?
    Aileen felt that she had been waiting for this moment all her life; at sixteen, she was finally leaving Illaunmor.
    Although they would all be coming back in three months’ time, the young girl knew her first trip away from the island would change everything. Her oldest brother, Paddy Junior, had left for his first summer in Scotland as a boy of fourteen and come back a man with hair on his arms and a voice as deep as a holy well. As the youngest, and the only girl, everyone in the house had always treated Aileen like a child. By working in the world and earning money, she would be making the transition from girl to young woman.
    That night, Aileen went into the bedroom and crawled in between her two brothers’ warm bodies. Familiar with the rigours of the journey they were facing the next day, Paddy Junior andMartin were already asleep, but Aileen was too excited to close her eyes.
    She looked up at the soot-blackened ceiling as clouds of her brothers’ warm breath wafted past her in the chilly spring night and thought how tomorrow she would be leaving for somewhere else, somewhere beyond Illaunmor – to enter a world so thrilling it was beyond her