The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

and what connected them.
    The air seemed warmer, almost like summer despite the wind, with the fragrance of flowers that scattered through the grass and lay on the dead suddenly wild and sweet. She heard the hum of bees and birdsong, the sound of it clear and musical and ripe.
    The grass grew tall and green and just a little wild over uneven ground. A handful of small, rough stones, she noted, that marked ancient graves settled into it. And with them, the single new. Old Maude had chosen to be buried here, nearly alone, on a hill that looked over the gameboard-neat village, the blue skirt of sea, and the roll of green that led to mountain.
    Tucked into a stone shelf in the ruins was a long plastic pot filled with deep red flowers. The sight of them touched Jude’s heart.
    So often people forgot, she thought. But not here. Here, people remembered, and honored those memories with flowers for the dead.
    “Maude Alice Fitzgerald,” the simple marker read. “Wise Woman” had been carved under her name, and below that the dates of her long, long life.
    It was an odd epitaph, Jude mused as she knelt beside the gentle slope. There were flowers there already, a tiny clutch of early violets just beginning to fade. Jude lay her bouquet beside them, then sat back on her heels.
    “I’m Jude,” she began, “your cousin Agnes’s granddaughter. The one from America. I’m staying in your cottage for a while. It’s really lovely. I’m sorry I never met you, but Granny used to talk about the times you spent together, in the cottage. How you were happy for her when she married and went to America. But you stayed here, at home.”
    “She was a fine woman.”
    With her heart leaping into her throat, Jude jerked her head up and looked into deep blue eyes. It was a handsome face, young and smooth. He wore his black hair long, nearly to his shoulders. His mouth tipped up at the corners in a friendly fashion as he stepped closer to face Jude across the grave.
    “I didn’t hear you. I didn’t know you were here.”
    “One walks soft on a holy place. I don’t mean to frighten you.”
    “No.” Only half to death, she thought. “You just startled me.” She pushed at the hair the wind had loosened and sent dancing around her face. “You knew Maude?”
    “Sure and I knew Old Maude, a fine woman as I said who lived a rich and generous life. It’s good that you’re bringing flowers to her, for she favored them.”
    “They’re hers, out of her garden.”
    “Aye.” His smile widened. “That makes them all the better.” He laid his hand on the head of the dog that sat quietly at his side. Jude saw a ring glint on his finger, some deep blue stone that winked in a heavy setting of silver. “You’ve waited a long time to come to your beginnings.”
    She frowned at him, blinking against the sun, which seemed stronger now, strong enough to make her vision waver. “Oh, you mean to come to Ireland. I suppose I have.”
    “It’s a place where you can look into your heart and see what matters most.” His eyes were like cobalt now. Intense, hypnotic. “Then choose,” he told her. “Choose well, Jude Frances, for ’tisn’t only you who’ll be touched by it.”
    The scent of flowers, grass, earth whirled in her head until she felt drunk from it. The sun blinded her, shootingup fiery facets that burned and blurred. The wind rose, a sudden, dazzling burst of energy.
    She would have sworn she heard pipes playing, rising notes flying on that fast wind. “I don’t know what you mean.” Woozy, she lifted a hand to her head, closed her eyes.
    “You will.”
    “I saw you, in the rain.” Dizzy, she was so dizzy. “On the hill with the round tower.”
    “That you did. We’ve been waiting for you.”
    “Waiting? Who?”
    The wind stilled as quickly as it had risen, and the music faded away into silence. She shook her head to clear it. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
    But when she opened her eyes again, she was alone with the quiet dead and the big yellow dog.

FIVE
    A IDAN DIDN ’ T OBJECT to paperwork. He bloody well hated it.
    But three days a week, rain or shine, he spent an hour or more at the desk in his upstairs rooms laboring over orders and overhead, payroll and profits.
    It was a constant relief to him that there was a profit. He’d never concerned himself overmuch with money before Gallagher’s had been passed into his hands. And he often wondered if that was part of the reason his parents had pushed it