TWO
'Redmond, Redmond, my boy, let me look at you.' Loughlin O'Hanlon held his son by both hands on his shoulders and looked him up and down, from his long dark-red locks to his green breeches and flat black shoes. 'Katherine, come and see your son. Home from England and dressed like an Englishman.'
Redmond's mother came in from the scullery, drying her hands on a cloth. She paused momentarily, then rushed to embrace her son, several inches taller and broader than when she had last set eyes on him. 'Oh, Redmond, Redmond, Redmond.' Tears filled her eyes. 'I can hardly get my arms around you, so big you have grown.'
'Sit down, son,' his father said. 'Are you hungry? Thirsty?'
'Thirsty.' Redmond sat at the old familiar table.
'You will drink a mug of ale?'
'That I will, father. If you will join me.'
'But of course I will.'
The family spoke Irish together.
Redmond glanced around him. Nothing had changed, except his father. Loughlin O'Hanlon had aged a score of years to his son's five. His hair was turning grey, his face more lined than that of a man of fifty-three years, his shoulders more stooped. Rightful heir to the castle at Tandragee, the ancient O'Hanlon seat of the Barony of Orior, Loughlin had lost all but the land he now farmed as a tenant of the St John family in the townland of Aughantaraghan in County Armagh. Until the time of the Plantation the O'Hanlons were among the most notable Gaelic clans of Ulster. For half a millennium the chief of the O'Hanlons, The O'Hanlon so-called, was Lord of Orior. Since the early reign of Queen Elizabeth, the status of the O'Hanlon dynasty had drastically diminished. Through stages of confiscation during this period, the ancestral lands of the O'Hanlons were lost to the English crown, and English and Scottish settlers replaced the former owners. Almost three decades ago Tandragee Castle, the former O'Hanlon seat of power, was lost to the incoming St. John family of Bedfordshire.
'We were robbed of our land and saw it handed over to Scots and English servitors,' Loughlin O'Hanlon often bemoaned, 'and all because O'Hanlons fought beside the Great O'Neill against that barren heifer Elizabeth.'
'Not all of the O'Hanlon lands were lost,' said Katherine.
'Ten O'Hanlon families were allowed less than three thousand acres,' her husband pointed out. They had obviously held this discussion before. 'Some received more than three hundred acres, some less. Poor compensation for a family that owned a whole barony. Remember that O'Hanlon country spread over a whole barony in Armagh and stretched into the counties of Down and Louth and even into Monaghan.'
Still muttering under his breath, as he was wont to do, Loughlin brought two pewter mugs of ale his wife had brewed and sat beside his son at the scrubbed, bare, wooden table in the kitchen. His wife moved to her chair by the fireside. She was a short, rotund woman with fine, reddish hair; a round, kind face; and eyes as green as emeralds. Her soiled dress, loose and flowing, was of linen dyed saffron. Second daughter of Anthony Fleming, a relative of Christopher Fleming, eighteenth Baron of Slane, Katherine Fleming was educated by Dominican nuns in their convent in the Boyne valley near Droheda. Encouraged to change her name to Caitríona after her marriage to Loughlin O'Hanlon at the age of sixteen, the spirited Katherine refused.
'I was given the Christian name of Katherine in a baptism performed in the sight of God by Father Conor O'Brady,' she steadfastly maintained, 'and Katherine I shall forever remain.'
'How are Hugh and Ardall and the girls?' Redmond asked.
His father, taking a drink from his mug, did not answer right away. And even when he placed his mug on the table he hesitated before he replied. 'Hugh and Ardall are hard-working farmers like myself. You can see them this evening when they come in from the ploughing. Hugh has six years on you, Redmond. Time you took a wife, I would say. Hugh has three children now. Young Dara must be twelve or so; M?abh, a sweet girl, a year or so younger; and Loughlin, my namesake, a spirited young varlet only seven years old.'
