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child had
    developed a keen self-reliance, and each tried to give his brothers and
    sisters something of what they lacked. These sibling bonds, woven in
    youth, stayed with them, and were a source of comfort and support to them
    all their lives, though never constraining.
        But Jamie determined to create a family that would supply to his own
        children what he had never had. His father's house was not his home,
        merely the house in which he lived.
        For home, he had learned from Sean, is where you are loved.
     
        2
     
    Jamie was fourteen when he had his first experience of violence by the
    soldiers. For years he had known that the local priest, Father Moran,
    forbidden to practice his religion in public, still tended the spiritual
    needs of his peasant congregation in a small cave on Crieve Mountain.
    Jamie knew very little about the Catholic religion, but was told by his
    father and other Protestants that it was a pagan cult of cannibalism, ven-
    erating a priest in Rome, and worshiping graven images. Its followers
    believed that in the communion they were eating the actual flesh of
    Christ. Jamie had never seen the priest, but knew of him from the peasant
    whisperings. He became a legendary figure in Jamie's mind, a secret,
    superstitious man of magic, who lived with the leprechauns on the misty
    mountain, and practiced strange and ancient rituals, spoken in Latin, that
    were to do with birth, and marriage, and death, and the life to come.
    14 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
     
        He was with Sean at the cottage when the messenger came by. The
        messengers carried poles, to help them vault over hedges and ditches, and
        brought important news to the villages of Ireland. This messenger, wary
        of the longer-haired Jamie, whispered to Patrick in Gaelic, which Jamie
        hardly understood. Patrick spoke to Maureen and Sean, also in Gaelic, and
        Jamie could feel a sudden excitement among them, and a sense, for the
        first time in his life, that he was an outsider to them. When he and Sean
        went fishing the next day, Jamie badgered his friend about the messenger,
        and eventually Sean swore him to secrecy and told him the news. It was
        Easter, and Father Moran was going to say a public mass in the village
        square the following Sunday.
        Jamie was thrilled and appalled. The saying of mass was proscribed, and
        if the soldiers or any English sympathizer knew of it, the priest would
        be imprisoned. At the same time, Jamie itched to know about the secret
        religion, and what it was that made its persecutors so angry.
        Reluctantly, Sean agreed to take Jamie to the mass, but made him swear,
        by all he held holy, by his mother's grave, that he would tell no one.
        They met at the cottage on Sunday, ate soda bread and cheese, and then
        Sean walked with Jamie to the village. Maureen and Patrick went on
        before.
        Jamie was not sure what he expected to see, but certainly had not
        expected what he saw. In the village square, an old man in black was
        holding a simple cross and chanting in Latin to the fifty or so kneeling
        villagers assembled there. He saw nothing subversive, nothing pagan,
        nothing that might destroy the fabric of the society in which he lived,
        only a deep and simple faith, and an adoration of the cross and what it
        symbolized.
        It was Easter Sunday and Christ was the risen king, he understood from
        the Latin words, and his Protestant soul could not argue with that, for
        it was what he was taught and what he believed. He found the rituals odd
        but oddly beautiful. He marveled at the true belief of those assembled,
        and at their stubbornness and bravery for resolutely following a faith
        that was so viciously circumscribed by the authorities.
    Then the