The Blood Upon the Rose by Tim Vicary Page A

hit the rocks with a shock like thunder, and Catherine and her pony trembled as the pulse went through them. She felt awed and humble, as though the great god of the sea, Manaanan mac Lir , might appear at any moment before her.
    Then the storm had reached the clifftop, and she had ridden away inland, hunched beneath the drenching sheets of rain. Instead of heading for home, she had let the storm blow her further east than her usual haunts, to an area of bog and pasture behind a mountain. Here, when the rain eased, she had come across a gathering outside a small cottage.
    She had seen the place before - a small, thatched, untidy hovel, always with a skirl of dirty, barefoot children running around outside it, and a harassed woman in a headshawl. There was a small potato garden, a couple of poorly tended fields, a sick-looking cow. She had never liked the family much. Once she had tried to talk to them, but the man, a mean, scrawny individual, had cuffed the children and sent them inside, and then glared at her sullenly without speaking.
    Since then, she had heard, the man had gone away to the war, one of the thousands who had answered John Redmond's call to fight for the Empire against the Hun.
    But that day the woman and her children were all out on the road, in the rain. Around them was a heap of possessions - something that might have been a mattress, a table, three broken chairs, a spade, a rusty bucket. Half a dozen men were striding back and forth in the garden, carrying things, trampling heedlessly over the vegetables. As Catherine rode up, one of them dropped a pile of crockery on the road in front of the woman, with a crash. A plate had broken, and a chipped cup fallen in the mud.
    ‘Whatever is happening?’ she had asked. Ferguson, her father's agent, was directing the men. He had caught hold of her bridle. After all these years she still remembered the harshness of his rainswept face, the rough jerk of his hand on the reins.
    ‘No business of yours, Miss Catherine. Be off with you now!’
    ‘But what are you doing?’
    ‘Never you mind! Clear off out of it, will you!’ He had hit the pony a sharp clout on the rump with his stick, and to her shame she had gone away, letting the pony carry her down the muddy lane out of reach of the gang of rough, cruel men. She should have shouted back, she knew - no man on her father's estate had the right to speak to her like that. But she was only thirteen, and Ferguson ran the estate in her father's absence. Only when she was half a mile away had she stopped the pony to look back.
    The men had been still there. They had erected a great tripod outside the house, made of three treetrunks about fifteen feet tall, chained together at the top. From a chain in the middle hung another treetrunk, shorter, thicker, parallel with the ground. This they were swinging against the walls of the little stone house, again and again. As she watched, a section of the stone wall fell in. The men heaved the battering ram a few yards to the left, where the wall was still standing, and began again.
    Catherine had watched until the house was just a heap of stones. All the time two men kept guard over the woman and her children as they sat on their mattress, weeping and hopeless in the muddy lane. The drizzle fell gloomily on everyone. And Catherine trembled at each thud of the battering ram as she had trembled at the power of the sea. But while the power of the sea had filled her with awe, the power of her father's men filled her with shame and hatred.
    She had complained to her mother, who was, by that time, beginning the illness that would lead to her death. Together they had asked Ferguson the reason. The man had been arrogant, condescending. Sir Jonathan O'Connell-Gort had left the business of the estate in his, Ferguson's, hands, he said, and he must do what he thought was best. The rent on the cottage had not been paid for months, and the husband had deserted his family. Besides, they had