The Heather Blazing Read Online Free Page A

hands and which was still held by the Allies.
    â€œHe’s too young to be telling him about the war,” Mrs. McCurtin said. His father and Mr. McCurtin drank bottles of stout and waited for the next bulletin, the sounds from the radio came in waves as though they were being carried in by the sea.
    There was a big reading room in the Athenaeum with a fire blazing and a big table full of newspapers and magazines. There was a rule about silence and even if you wanted to whisper you had to go outside. One day he heard his father telling a man that they were going to buy the Castle from Dodo Roche.
    â€œDoes she live there?” he asked his father.
    â€œWhen she was younger,” his father said.
    â€œI thought that Spenser lived there?”
    â€œThat was in the fifteen hundreds. You’re getting everything wrong,” his father said.
    â€œIs Dodo Roche going to give you old things for the museum?”
    His father had the big key to the door in the garden wall of the Castle, and other keys to doors and presses on a ring.
    â€œCan I carry the big one?” Eamon asked.
    â€œBe careful with it or we’ll all be locked out,” his father said.
    They walked down to the Castle; it was a cold day and the men waiting at the gates were shivering and stamping their feet with the cold. Mick Byrne, who was in Eamon’s class in school, was there too with his uncle. Eamon went up to him and showed him the key before handing it to his father.
    â€œIs Father Rossiter not coming?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” his father said. “He’s out on a call.”
    It was quiet suddenly when they closed the old heavy gate and stood inside the garden of the Castle. None of them had been here before, except to deliver a message to the side door. Mick Byrne and Eamon exchanged glances as though they were trespassing and could be caught at any moment. When his father turned the key and pushed the front door they could see that it was dark inside. Eamon had expected old furniture and cobwebs; instead he could see nothing. One of the men with his father lit a paraffin lamp, illuminating a huge hallway with a low ceiling. There was a sharp, sour smell.
    â€œThere’s an awful stink,” Mick Byrne said. No one else spoke. One of the men went across the room and pulled back the shutters on a side window and a pale, dim light came into a corner of the hall. His footsteps echoed as he walked back to join the others who were standing there looking around them, as though afraid to move.
    Eamon stood close to his father. One of the men hadopened the shutters of another window and it was now bright enough to see the flagstones.
    â€œThis is the old part,” his father said as he moved across and pushed a door which led into a room the same size as the hall, but brighter and with a higher ceiling. It was completely empty.
    â€œThis is the part the Roches built,” his father said.
    Another door led into a kitchen where there were still tables and chairs as though someone had been living there. The men who had come with his father still looked suspicious and nervous, and they restrained Mick Byrne when he began trying to open drawers and presses.
    â€œWe can’t go upstairs,” his father said, “because some of the floor is rotten.”
    â€œThere’s a lot of work needed all right,” one of the men said.
    *  *  *
    As the spring came his father and the priest sat in the car more and more and talked to each other, smoking all the time. Mrs. Doyle would go out to look through the front window, and come back shaking her head. “They’re still talking. They’re going to talk all night. You’d better go to bed before your father comes in and catches you up.”
    Most of the time they talked about the museum but they also talked about the war. They talked about how difficult it would be to get the work done with most of the men in England. Some of them