The Hour of the Harp
The flat-cart rattled and bumped along the dirt road, the donkey moving at a sedate walk, in as little hurry as myself, apparently, to come to Innismore. I sat huddled on the boards, hands clasped and eyes roving the marshlands and bogs on either side of me, wondering what had possessed me to leave Dublin and come west into Connemara, this wild and rocky country that seemed as inhospitable as an Englishman's musket.
Seamus McCarty, he of the black scowl and the curious gray eyes, who drove the flat-cart and glanced at me from time to time with a quirking of his bushy eyebrows, was almost as ungracious. We had come from Ballinrobe, where the train had made its stop, between Lough Mask and Lough Corrib, with the Partry Mountains to the north and west, in a silence so thick you could have cut it with a bread knife.
I stirred against that silence, feeling rebellion inside me. “Faith now,” I said at last. “Is it the cat who's got your tongue, or are you afraid of the fairy folk?”
He chuckled thickly, bobbing his head. “Aye, that I am. Or if not of the shee people, then of the Black Druid.”
I turned my head and stared at him. “The Black Druid?”