The Tenants of Time [antikvár]

[Patrick Prentiss]Long after the Fenian rising in Kilpeder in 1867, after both Robert Delaney and Ned Nolan were dead, after Ardmor had settled in Italy, at a time when only Hugh MacMahon was alive who knew one part of the story, and old Lionel Forrester who knew another part, a stranger to Kilpeder found himself given over, at first without realising it, to fitting the pieces together. By the time that he knew he might never finish, and so put the pieces back into the box of the past, he had come to believe that what happened in Kilpeder between the rising of 1867 and the fall of Pamell in 1891 had a shape, a design, a theme which worked itself out in the variations of a dozen lives. But there was nothing that he could do with his knowledge. He had fallen in love with the past, a profitless love.On a June night in 1904 Patrick Prentiss came for the first time to Kilpeder and booked a room at the Arms. He was a quietly dressed man in his middle twenties, grey herringbone tweeds, soft grey hat, a topcoat across his arm. And an accent which impressed Gilmar-tin, the proprietor of the Arms, an expert in such matters. When he signed the register, he took from a morocco case eyeglasses framed in thin, bright gold which caught light from the green-globed bulb. His handwriting was unlike the scrawls of strong-farmers or the brusque assertiveness of commercial travellers, the usual trade at the Arms. Patrick Prentiss. Dublin and London.