He turned to look at its vast silhouette against the mountains and, for some reason, it almost felt as if it was part of him. His grandfather must have talked of it, he thought, or his father. He couldn’t remember, but the familiarity seemed bone-deep.
He turned again to look out over the land. What a challenge.
To take and to hold...
The family creed seemed wrong, he decided, but To hold and to honour... That seemed right. To take this place and hold its history, to honour the land, to make this place once more a proud part of Irish heritage... If he could do that...
What was he thinking? He’d inherited jointly with a woman from Australia. Jo had no reason to love this place and every reason to hate it. And the lawyer was right; even with the wealth he now possessed, on his own he had no hope of keeping it. To try would be fantasy, doomed to disaster from the start.
‘So sell it and get over it,’ he told himself, but the ache to restore this place, to do something, was almost overwhelming.
He turned back to the castle but paused at the ha-ha. The beautifully crafted stone wall formed a divide so stock could be kept from the gardens without anything as crass as a fence interfering with the view from the castle windows. But in places the wall was starting to crumble. He looked at it for a long moment and then he couldn’t resist. Stones had fallen. They were just...there.
He knelt and started fitting stone to stone.
He started to build.
To hold and to honour... He couldn’t hold, he decided, but, for the time he was here, he would do this place honour.
* * *
Jo thought about heading outside but Finn had gone that way and she knew he’d want to be alone. There was silence from the kitchen. Mrs O’Reilly was either fainting from shock or trying to decide whether she could tell them they could shove their offer. Either way, maybe she needed space too.
Jo started up towards her bedroom and then, on impulse, turned left at the foot of the staircase instead of going up.
Two massive doors led to what looked like an ancient baronial hall. She pushed the doors open and stopped dead.
The hall looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. Oversized furniture was draped with dustsheets and the dustsheets themselves were dusty. Massive beams ran the length of the hall, and up in the vaulted ceiling hung generations of spider webs. The place was cold and dank and...amazing.
‘Like something out of Dickens,’ she said out loud and her voice echoed up and up. She thought suddenly of Miss Havisham sitting alone in the ruins of her bridal finery and found herself grinning.
She could rent this place out for Halloween parties. She could...
Sell it and go home.
Home? There was that word again.
And then her attention was caught. On the walls...tapestries.
Lots of tapestries.
When she’d first entered she’d thought they were paintings but now, making her way cautiously around the edges of the hall, she could make out scores of needlework artworks. Some were small. Some were enormous.
They were almost all dulled, matted with what must have been smoke from the massive blackened fireplace at the end of the room. Some were frayed and damaged. All were amazing.
She fingered the closest and she was scarcely breathing.
It looked like...life in the castle? She recognised the rooms, the buildings. It was as if whoever had done the tapestries had set themselves the task of recording everyday life in the castle. Hunting. Formal meals with scores of overdressed guests. Children at play. Dogs...
She walked slowly round the room and thought, These aren’t from one artist and they’re not from one era.
They were the recording of families long gone.
Her family? Her ancestors?
It shouldn’t make a difference but suddenly it did. She hated that they were fading, splitting, dying.
Her history...
And Finn’s, she thought suddenly. In her great-great-grandfather’s era, they shared a heritage.
Maybe she could take them back to Sydney and restore them.
Why? They weren’t hers. They’d be bought by whoever bought this castle.
They wouldn’t be her ancestors, or Finn’s ancestors. They’d belong to the highest bidder.
Maybe she could keep them.
But Jo didn’t keep stuff, and that was all these were, she reminded herself. Stuff. But still... She’d restored a few tapestries in the past and she wasn’t bad at it. She knew how to do at least step one.
As she’d crossed the boundaries of the castle last night she’d crossed a creek. No, a stream, she corrected herself. Surely in Ireland they had streams. Or burns? She’d have to ask someone.
But meanwhile it was spring, and the mountains above Castle Glenconaill must surely have been snow-covered in winter. The stream below the castle seemed to be running full and free. Clear, running water was the best way she knew to get soot and stains from tapestries, plumping up the threads in the process.
She could try with a small one, she decided, as her fingers started to itch. She’d start with one of the hunting scenes, a brace of pheasants without people or place. That way, if she hurt it, it wouldn’t matter. She could start with that one and...
And nothing. She was going home. Well, back to Australia.
Yeah, she was, but first she was getting excited. First, she was about to clean a tapestry.
* * *
Finn had placed a dozen rocks back in their rightful position and was feeling vaguely pleased with himself. He’d decided he should return to the castle to see what Jo was doing—after all, they were here for a purpose and repairing rock walls wasn’t that purpose—and now here she was, out in the middle of the stream that meandered along the edge of the ha-ha.
What was she doing? Those rocks were slippery. Any minute now she’d fall and get a dunking.
‘Hey!’
She looked up and wobbled, but she didn’t fall. She gave him a brief wave and kept on doing what she was doing.
Intrigued, he headed over to see.
She was messing with something under water.
The water would be freezing. She had the sleeves of her sweater pulled up and she’d hauled off her shoes. She was knee-deep in water.
‘What’s wrong?’
She kept concentrating, her back to him, stooped, as if adjusting something under water. He stood and waited, more and more intrigued, until finally she straightened and started her unsteady way back to the shore.
‘Done.’
He could see green slime attached to the rocks underneath the surface. She was stepping gingerly from rock to rock but even the ones above the surface would be treacherous.
He took a couple of steps out to help her—and slipped himself, dunking his left foot up to his ankle.
He swore.
‘Whoops,’ Jo said and he glanced up at her and she was grinning. ‘Uh oh. I’m sorry. I’d carry you if I could but I suspect you’re a bit heavy.’
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Heading back to the castle. All dry.’ She reached the shore, jumping nimbly from the last rock, then turned and proffered a hand to him. ‘Can I help?’
‘No,’ he said, revolted, and her smile widened.
‘How sexist is that? Honestly...’