Chapter 10

Summer turned towards autumn, and then the winter’s snows fell. He didn’t go, this year, to any of the parties or socials. He would remember Fionn too strongly, and somebody else might ask after him. So Johnathan didn’t know that during the deepest weeks of winter somebody had bought the Owlson farm.

The Owlsons had been his neighbors, when he’d been a child. But they had both died, taken sick of a fever in the winter. They’d had heirs, of course, but all their children had left farming and taken to city trades. None wanted to come back and work the farm. It was a very small farm, it had never really produced cash crops, and none of the neighbors had been able to raise the funds to buy it and add to their own lands. Johnathan and his mother had talked about it more than once, but things had never worked out, quite. So it remained fallow as the years passed.