Whitethorn Woods

a l s o by m a eve b i n c h y Light a Penny Candle Echoes London Transports Dublin 4 The Lilac Bus Firefly Summer Silver Wedding Circle of Friends The Copper Beech The Glass Lake Evening Class Tara Road Scarlet Feather Quentins Nights of Rain and Stars Aches & Pains (nonfiction) WH ITETHORN WOODS This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels. WH ITETHORN WOODS G Maeve Binchy Alfred A. Knopf New York 2007 t h i s i s a b o r zo i b o o k published by alfred a. knopf Copyright © 2006 by Maeve Binchy All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.aaknopf.com Originally published in Great Britain by Orion Books, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2006. Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Earlier versions of some chapters of this novel have appeared in Agein Matter, Books Quarterly, Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly. June’s Birthday was read on BBC Radio 4. Copyright © 2004 by Maeve Binchy. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Binchy, Maeve. Whitethorn Woods / Maeve Binchy.—1st American ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-26744-3 1. Highway bypasses—Ireland—Fiction. 2. City and town life— Ireland—Fiction. 3. Ireland—Fiction. I. Title. pr6052 i7728w48 2007 823'.914—dc22 2006048803 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. v1.0 For dear good Gordon. Thank you for the great happy life we have together. The Road, the Woods and the Well G at h e r Br i a n Fly n n , the curate at St. Augustine’s, Rossmore, hated the Feast Day of St. Ann with a passion that was unusual for a Catholic priest. But then, as far as he knew he was the only priest in the world who had a thriving St. Ann’s well in his parish, a holy shrine of dubious origin. A place where parishioners gathered to ask the mother of the Virgin Mary to intercede for them in a variety of issues, mainly matters intimate and personal. Areas where a clodhopping priest wouldn’t be able to tread. Like finding them a fiancé, or a husband, and then blessing that union with a child. Rome was, as usual, unhelpfully silent about the well. Rome was probably hedging its bets, Father Flynn thought grimly, over there they must be pleased that there was any pious practice left in an increasingly secular Ireland and not wishing to discourage it. Yet had not Rome been swift to say that pagan rituals and superstitions had no place in the Body of Faith? It was a puzzlement, as Jimmy, that nice young doctor from Doon village, a few miles out, used to say. He said it was exactly the same in medicine: you never got a ruling when you wanted one, only when you didn’t need one at all. There used to be a ceremony on July 26 every year, where people came from far and near to pray and to dress the well with garlands and flowers. Father Flynn was invariably asked to say a few F whitethorn woods words, and every year he agonized over it. He could not say to these people that it was very near to idolatry to have hundreds of people battling their way toward a chipped statue in the back of a cave beside an old well in the middle of the Whitethorn Woods. From what he had read and studied, St. Ann and her husband, St. Joachim, were shadowy figures, quite possibly confused in stories with Hannah in the Old Testament, who was thought to be forever childless but eventually bore Samuel. Whatever else St. Ann may have done in her lifetime two thousand years ago, she certainly had not visited Rossmore in Ireland, found a place in the woods and established