The Year of the French [antikvár]

Prologue: Early Summer, 1798 MacCarthy was light-headed that night when he set out from Judy Conlon's cabin in the Acres of Killala. Not drunk at all, but light-headed. He carried with him an inch or two of whiskey, tight-corked in a flask of green glass, and the image which had badgered him for a week. Moonlight falling on a hard, flat surface, scythe or sword or stone or spade. It was not an image from which a poem would unwind itself, but it could be hung as a glittering, appropriate ornament upon a poem already shaped. Problems of the craft. Halfway to Kilcummin strand, the sullen bay hammered flat to his right, and to his left a low stone fence, he took the flask from a back pocket of his long-tailed coat. Within the colored glass, in the clear light of summer's evening, the whiskey was a drowned moon. When the flask was empty, he sent it on a high arc toward the shore. Like moonlight's glint upon water. Or its glow upon her rounded breast. No, the image demanded a flat surface. Until he had the image, he would be its slave. At Matthew Quigley's tavern, a long, low cabin across the narrow road from the rock-strewn strand, he put his fist to the door, knocked, and waited. Quigley opened it for him, a short, bandy-legged man, bald, with a large head round as the full moon. "You are late," he said. "I am," MacCarthy said. "I had better thmgs to do." "You did to be sure," Quigley said. "In the Killala Acres." "It is where I live," MacCarthy said. Quigley stood back, and he entered the tavern, bending his neck to the low door. He was a clumsily built man, tall and raw- 1