Second Chance at the Belfast Guesthouse

by Anne Doughty

  There followed many evenings at Daniel’s house before the children were born. When he had someone with a violin, or a penny whistle, he’d insist the young ones take the floor. Once, indeed, to please him, she had taken the floor herself with Patrick to learn ‘The Waves of Tory’.

  She would never forget that evening: being passed from hand to hand by young men in shirtsleeves, dipping her head below raised arms, making an arch herself with a new partner, and all the time the lilt and dip of the music mimicking the flowing waves.

  Hannah’s regular visits to Daniel were interrupted when she had her first miscarriage and then again when Patrick went back to Scotland. It was only a week after his departure when Daniel himself came to call on her. He told her that he still expected to see her, Patrick or no Patrick, whenever she could spare the time.

  So she had walked up there on her own, or joined with another neighbour from Ardtur, for the long months when Patrick was away in Scotland. And so the year turned and Patrick returned. But it was only after two more miscarriages that she finally managed to carry Rose to full term. Then, there could be no more evening visits for her until Patrick was at home over the winter.

  But Daniel made it clear that he was not prepared to be deprived of her company for all those long months. If she could not come to him in the evening because of little Rose, then he would come down and visit her in the afternoons. That is what he then did, almost every week.

  Sometimes he brought a book and asked her to read to him, sometimes they just talked, but always he asked her about ‘home’, her father, her brothers and sisters, their lives, their travels and their families. Slowly and very intermittently, he told her something about his own unusual background and how he came to have a formal education that included Latin and Greek.

  It was while Rose was still a baby that he came one afternoon to tell her of a decision he’d made. He said that since a young man who took pupils had left the adjoining townland quite unexpectedly, there was now no school anywhere nearby. He had decided that unless he did something himself, a generation of children would grow up on the mountainside who could neither read nor write. He was going to start a school and he needed her advice as well as her encouragement.

  If you enjoyed Second Chance Girl at the Belfast Guesthouse, then why not try another heart-warming read from HQ Digital?

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