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 Everything I am or ever was, all I have pilfered from this begrudging world, my whole life, my fame and what you call my downfall has come from one thing only. Love. I owe everything to love. Not the sweat between man and woman; not the helpless dependence that parents and their children confuse with love; not the passion for country or idea that men will kill and die for. I am talking of that sensation rushing through your body; seething in the marrow of your bones; seeping like light from your fingertips; that bewitchment, the one and only love, that makes you want to touch your fellow creatures and, through the simple alchemy of hands, give healing to their lives. © John Dunne |  It was a morning on which a war might have started. The storm the previous night had all but stripped the lime trees, and the ground around the rectory was water-logged. There wasn't a sound of chick or child out on Sackville Square as the Reverend John Drew dragged open the flaking shuttered windows. He suddenly found himself wishing the three women were back again: Judith lolling about on the armchair, her nose buried in a book; Theodora tricking with some embroidery she had been set in Miss Markham's; and Eliza, in the background, calling out commands to Bridget Doheny in the scullery. But now he was alone with himself, with no warm words to soften the uneasy moments between dawn and dusk. And Westmacott's sojourn in Aghadoe had been deferred... © John Maher |
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