Read Online Songs of Love and War by Santa Montefiore - Free Book Online Page B

Bridie soon drifted off to sleep.
    She awoke abruptly at dawn to the sound of loud knocking on the front door. It was still dark, but for a streak of red bleeding into the eastern sky. The knocking was
insistent. She sat up and wondered who would come calling at this time of the morning. At length she heard her father’s heavy tread on the stairs and felt a cold sliver of wind, like one of
the snakes St Patrick banished from Ireland, winding its way round her door and slipping into the room. She shivered and pulled the blanket tightly around her. A moment later the door slammed and
the footsteps went back up the stairs. The house was silent again but for the chewing of a mouse beneath the floorboards under her bed, and the moaning of the wind outside.
    ‘Da, who was at the door this morning?’ she asked her father when she came down for breakfast.
    ‘No one,’ he replied, taking a loud slurp of tea.
    Old Mrs Nagle crossed herself. ‘’Tis the auld Banshee with the first of three knocks, God save us,’ she said darkly. Mrs Doyle blanched and crossed herself as well, sprinkling
drops of holy water around the room from the little Norah Lemonade bottle by the door.
    ‘’T’was a tinker, more like,’ said Sean with a chuckle.
    ‘Whoever it was, he was off before I got to the door,’ Tomas Doyle continued. Bridie cut herself a hunk of soda bread upon which she spread a thick layer of butter. She didn’t
like the frightened expression on her mother’s face and tried not to look at it.
    ‘’T’was the Banshee,’ said Old Mrs Nagle, crossing herself again.
    ‘Lord preserve us from the Banshee!’ muttered Mrs Doyle.
    ‘I tell you, woman, there was no one at the door. Sean’s right. It must have been a tinker in search of a warm hearth. Come, let’s not be late for Mass.’ Her father stood
up.
    Bridie dismissed dark thoughts of the Banshee, who, as legend had it, was a fairy woman heard wailing when someone was about to die. Well, there had been no wailing, as far as she had heard, so
her mother and grandmother were overreacting. As she walked down the street on the way to the school house she saw, to her relief, an old shabby horse pulling a cart full of grubby-faced children.
There were skinny goats tethered to the back and one or two young ones inside the cart. The ragged children watched her with wary black eyes as she passed, but the mother was too busy shouting at
her husband to even notice her. Tinkers, Bridie thought happily. Her father had been right. They’d probably spent half the night knocking on doors in search of a warm place to sleep. Bridie
quickened her step. Her father had told her never to trust a tinker and never to look one in the eye.
    The school of Our Lady in Ballinakelly was run by the church but fortunately Father Quinn had little to do with the day-to-day teaching. Bridie’s teacher was a nun from Cork City called
Sister Hannah who was softly spoken and kind. ‘It is through education that we better ourselves,’ she had once told Bridie’s class. ‘The only way out of poverty is through
learning, so listen hard to what I’m teaching you. They can take everything you own but no one can take your heart or your mind or your love of God. They’re the only things that really
matter.’ Bridie concentrated hard, but Jack O’Leary, who was in the boys’ class next door, just gazed out of the window and watched the birds.
    At the end of the day Bridie and Jack found Kitty in her usual place on the wall. However, this time she was standing on one leg, very still, like a heron. ‘What are you doing?’ Jack
asked.
    ‘Balancing,’ she replied.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘No reason. For fun, I suppose. It’s a challenge. What are you doing?’
    ‘Jack has to give a lesson about birds tomorrow in school,’ said Bridie. ‘A punishment for gazing out of the window during class.’
    ‘There’s no challenge in that,’ said Kitty. ‘There’s nothing Jack doesn’t know about