Brendan Graham - The Element of Fire

One evening while reading, waiting for Lavelle to come in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside. Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt, sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched at the windowpane, her withered finger bent against the glass. The sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old woman was gone.

The woman was so frail of limb, that she reminded Ellen of those poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. ‘No use thinking of all that now, is there?’ she said to herself, before closing the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe got frightened and took off.

‘Too much reading, agitating the mind,’ Lavelle had brushed it off with when he had come in later.

Whatever about frightened beggarwomen or imaginary phantoms from the past, she knew him the minute she opened the door.

He didn’t recognize her as instantly. Then the surprise in her face, her intake of breath, alerted him. He looked at her hair. The long-maned tumble of it, that he would have known, was long gone. Instead, a much shorter tangle of curls was rather severely nested to the back of her head and securely pinned above the high-necked collar of the dress she wore.

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