A Bittersweet Garden Read online

  BOOKS BY CAREN J. WERLINGER

  Novels:

  Looking Through Windows

  Miserere

  In This Small Spot

  Neither Present Time

  Year of the Monsoon

  She Sings of Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things

  Turning for Home

  Cast Me Gently

  The Beast That Never Was

  When the Stars Sang

  A Bittersweet Garden

  Short Stories:

  Twist of the Magi

  Just a Normal Christmas

  (part of Do You Feel What I Feel? Holiday Anthology)

  The Dragonmage Saga:

  Rising From the Ashes: The Chronicles of Caymin

  The Portal: The Chronicles of Caymin

  The Standing Stones: The Chronicles of Caymin

  A Bittersweet Garden

  Published by Corgyn Publishing, LLC.

  Copyright © 2019 by Caren J. Werlinger

  All rights reserved.

  e-Book ISBN: 978-0-9982179-3-2

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9982179-4-9

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: carenwerlinger.com

  Blog: cjwerlinger.wordpress.com

  Cover design by Patty G. Henderson

  blvdphotografica.wixsite.com/boulevard

  Cover photo credit: Pixabay

  Interior decoration: Can Stock Photo/Red Koala

  Book design by Maureen Cutajar

  www.gopublished.com

  This work is copyrighted and is licensed only for use by the original purchaser and can be copied to the original purchaser’s electronic device and its memory card for your personal use. Modifying or making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, without limit, including by email, CD, DVD, memory cards, file transfer, paper printout or any other method, constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely the work of the author’s imagination.

  Piracy is stealing!

  For Beth

  Do chroí, mo chroí

  Acknowledgments

  Like many of my stories, A Bittersweet Garden has been waiting years to be told. Not until my spouse and I had the opportunity to travel to Ireland in 2015 did I have the last real pieces I needed to be able to write this book. I’m not sure I could be as brave as Nora is in this story—to live a dream, if it meant going alone and upending my life—but it was a dream come true for me to be in Ireland. I hope to get back there soon.

  I need to thank many people for their help (whether they knew it or not) in bringing this book to fruition: Ray Walsh, our tour guide in Ireland, who was a bottomless source of information on all topics; the staff at Ashford Castle and its Lodge, who made our stay there most welcoming; the people of Cong, who put up with an endless stream of tourists like us, who love The Quiet Man; my editor, Lisa, who forces me to dig deep to answer her questions and without whom this book would not be what it is; and, always, my beloved, Beth—I couldn’t write at all if I didn’t have her support and encouragement.

  Thank you, also, to my readers. Your loyalty and messages have meant more to me than I can ever tell you.

  Sláinte!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

  There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

  And evening full of linnet’s wings.

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  ~ W.B. Yeats

  Chapter 1

  Nora McNeill pressed her forehead to the glass, peering through the airplane window, trying to see through the clouds below. The sun, brilliant here above the cloudbank, was blinding. The video screen built into the back of the seat in front of her showed their little plane had been flying over Ireland for the past thirty minutes as it descended toward Dublin, but she hadn’t been able to see anything.

  She’d wanted to come here her entire life—maybe even longer than that, she sometimes thought.

  The flight crew had already cleared all the coffee cups and debris from the breakfast they’d served to the sleepy passengers nearing the end of their overnight flight. Most of the older people around her seemed to know one another and were apparently all part of the same tour.

  She’d carried on a stop and start conversation with Iris, the grandmotherly woman beside her, who had knitted nearly the entire night, her green and yellow baby blanket spilling onto Nora’s lap. Nora now knew that Iris was a widow from a little town an hour west of Minneapolis, had five grandchildren—with a sixth on its way, thus the baby blanket—and had never flown outside the States. Neither had Nora, for that matter.

  “And you’re traveling alone? I could never do that. Don’t you think you’ll miss home?” Iris had asked upon learning that Nora’s plans were to spend the next three months in Ireland. Iris had only been gone a dozen hours, but claimed she was already missing her grandkids.

  Deciding it was probably more diplomatic not to scoff, Nora simply shrugged. “Probably, but I’ll be visiting family.”

  Nora snugged her seatbelt as the plane bounced through a bit of turbulence. The window was suddenly obscured by white. When the plane emerged from the clouds, there was Dublin, spread out below them in the distance.

  Her heart pounded at her first glimpse of Ireland. Beside her, Iris harrumphed, clearly unimpressed, but Nora ignored her. It didn’t matter that it was gray and dreary and looked almost like the view of Northern Virginia around Dulles airport. She sat back with a sigh. Nothing mattered except she wasn’t going to be stuck in Fredericksburg for her entire summer.

  The plane quickly descended and, soon, Nora was wheeling her carry-on off the plane with her backpack slung over both shoulders, following Iris and all the other passengers through the airport toward the baggage claim carousels. She grinned at the signs, all written in English and Irish. She’d been studying and could read some of the words. Of course, being able to say “That’s a yellow bicycle” or “I have a black cat” probably weren’t the most practical phrases, but still.

  When she’d collected her one checked bag and had her passport stamped—“my first stamp!” she’d said stupidly to the sleepy-looking agent—she made her way through the airport, bustling even at this early hour. Following the directions the customs a
gent had given her, she went outside to find the bus, her luggage trailing behind her.

  The morning was misty, and the air smelled of diesel fumes, but nothing could dampen her excitement. She found the bus, with a uniformed driver chatting to another man in a different uniform with a reflective vest.

  “This is the bus to Galway?” she asked.

  The driver turned to her, looking her up and down. “American?”

  She nodded and shrugged out of her backpack straps.

  “That’ll be a hundred fifty euro,” he said.

  She froze, her hand searching for her wallet inside her backpack. “A hundred fifty? I thought the website said eighteen?”

  “Not for Yanks.”

  She stood there, her mouth open, until his buddy burst out laughing.

  “Stop teasin’ her.”

  The bus driver grinned and climbed into the bus where he punched a few buttons on his console. It spit out a ticket that he handed to her as she passed him a twenty-euro note.

  “Just leave your bags,” he said, pointing to a few others sitting on the pavement as he handed her change. “I’ll load them.”

  She hoisted her backpack up the steps onto the bus and dropped into a seat, stashing her backpack on the seat beside her. She listened to the low conversations taking place around her and realized all the other passengers seemed to be either American or European—anywhere but Ireland. She supposed she’d been stupid to think anyone from Ireland would be catching a bus from the airport. Of course they’d all be tourists like her. She was also the only person on the bus traveling alone.

  It doesn’t matter. It’s going to be like that all summer. All that matters is that you’re here. She unzipped her backpack and dug out a bottle of water and a granola bar.

  Within a few minutes, the bus was pulling away from the airport. She craned her neck, trying to take it all in. The bus passed through Dublin, pausing at a couple of stops to let more people on. She snapped photos through the bus windows with her phone, half-wishing she’d planned to spend some time here, but money was tight, and she hadn’t felt quite brave enough to tackle Dublin on her own.

  “I’ll be back,” she whispered as the bus drove along the river with its arched bridges.

  She fought to stay awake and take in the views of the flat countryside outside the city, but her eyes fluttered closed and her head bobbed as she fell asleep despite her efforts.

  When she woke, the bus was winding its way through Galway’s streets to the bus station. She stood with the other passengers to collect her bags as the driver unloaded them from the cargo compartment, and then stumbled into the station where the pleasant young woman at the ticket counter checked the bus schedule for the next leg of her journey.

  “You’ve just over an hour before your bus leaves,” she said.

  Nora paid for the ticket. “Is there anyplace close by where I can get a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure there’s a Starbucks just round the corner,” the ticket agent said, pointing. “You can leave your bags here if you like.”

  Nora stashed her luggage and thanked her before going in search of caffeine.

  By the time the next bus was underway, she was jazzed on a double-shot cappuccino and a scone.

  Unlike the express bus, this one stopped in several towns as it made its way north. The terrain had changed quite a bit, becoming hillier and the roads much narrower. She held her breath a couple of times, wondering how on earth the bus and the oncoming vehicles—on the wrong side of the road—were possibly going to pass without scraping each other or the hedges and stone walls bordering either side of the road. She whispered several prayers of thanks that she’d decided not to rent a car and drive herself.

  The bus’s elevated height gave her a great view of small houses with neat front yards—gardens here, she remembered—separated from the road by low walls. She chuckled at the tiny cars tucked into impossible parking spaces, sometimes seeming to have just been pulled up onto the sidewalks.

  The sun came and went as clouds drifted, soft rain misting the windows and then passing to allow slanting beams of sunlight to sparkle on the drops. Passengers boarded and left at each stop along the way. She tried to catch snatches of conversation, delighting at the accent.

  Her caffeine was wearing off, and the jetlag was beginning to weigh on her as the bus neared her destination.

  “Cong,” called the driver.

  She roused herself to wheel her bags along the center aisle.

  “Visiting?” asked the driver as he carried her bags down for her.

  “For the whole summer,” she said.

  He winked. “Have a grand summer, then.”

  The driver waved as the bus drove away. She stood in front of the Crowe’s Nest Pub, debating whether to go in for a real meal, but the day was fading and she had a ways to go yet.

  She hoisted her backpack straps higher on her shoulders and took a suitcase handle in each hand, rolling them along the street. The narrow sidewalk was crowded with people, most of them part of a tour, judging by the badges they wore on lanyards around their necks and the cameras and phones they held up, snapping photos every few steps. She dropped off the sidewalk into the street, her head swiveling as she walked, trying to take in everything. Some things felt as if she’d been here before: the corner with the Celtic cross the bike flew around, Cohan’s pub. She’d watched The Quiet Man so many times, she had the dialogue memorized. She especially loved the scenes with the villagers who’d been the extras in the movie.

  “There we are,” Mamma said every time, pointing.

  “Oh, those were fine days,” Pop said, his pipe firmly clamped in his teeth as he nodded fondly.

  From the time she was sitting on her grandfather’s knee, she’d listened to the stories of how the movie people had come to their tiny village, transforming it for those months, even bringing in electricity where it hadn’t been before.

  Nora couldn’t wipe the grin off her sweaty face as she tromped along, passing the ruins of the abbey, walking past the ivy-covered cottage that had been the vicar’s house in the movie. When she reached the church at the curve of the road, she paused to catch her breath. It was Church of Ireland, but it had served as a Catholic church for the movie. She leaned on the wall, panting. Behind her, a vehicle’s motor drew near. She turned to see a dark green Land Rover approaching. The driver braked as he passed her and backed up. The door was emblazoned with “Ashford Castle”.

  “Where are you bound, Miss?” he asked.

  “The Lodge.”

  The young man jumped out and hurried around to her. “I’ll give you a lift.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, but he was already loading her bags into the cargo area.

  “It’s my pleasure. I’ve just got to drop off these guests for dinner, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. Thank you.”

  He got in behind the wheel as she climbed into the passenger seat. She smiled and nodded at the couple in the rear seat.

  He drove into the village along the way she’d just come, stopping at Cohan’s. He got out to open the rear door for the woman, confirming a pickup time for later that evening.

  “Your first time in Cong?” he asked Nora when he got back in.

  “Does it show?”

  He chuckled. “Just a bit. You’ve got that gleam in your eye.”

  She laughed. “I guess I do. My grandparents were born here. They’ve told me about Cong my whole life.”

  “Is that a fact? Who are they?”

  “Brigid Cleary and Thomas McNeill. I’m Nora McNeill.”

  “And I’m Craig O’Toole,” he said. “Do you still have family here?”

  “I have cousins, second or third, I guess,” Nora said. “My grandparents’ siblings’ grandchildren. It’s so confusing. I mean to look them up while I’m here.”

  Craig had taken a different road out of the village, Nora realized.

  “Why aren’t we going back the way we came?”
>
  “One way into the village,” Craig said.

  He took a right and drove past a vast stretch of manicured grass with a few golfers in the distance. As if he knew what her reaction would be, he stopped the Land Rover at the curve where the castle came into view. He grinned at her gasp. It was better than her dreams, the picture-perfect stone castle with the crenellated towers and the lake just beyond.

  “Do you ever get tired of it?”

  “I don’t, no. I keep seeing it through fresh eyes when I drive guests here.” He chuckled again. “Would you like to visit the castle? I can drive you up to the Lodge after.”

  As tempting as it was, Nora could feel her body rebelling if it didn’t get sleep soon. “That’s really nice of you, but… I’ll visit it tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  Craig drove on, pointing out the Thatched Cottage restaurant before taking a turn that bore them left and then right again, through deep shadows and mossy trees until they emerged into golden sunlight and a different view of the lake, with small boats bobbing in the cove below.

  “Here you are. The Lodge.”

  He opened the tailgate and insisted on carrying her bags inside for her. “Got a guest for you, Sarah. She was walking all the way from the village.”

  “Oh, you poor thing.” Sarah clicked her computer keys, fingers flashing with vivid red polish.

  “See you later, Miss McNeill,” Craig said with a cheeky wink in Sarah’s direction.

  “McNeill?” Sarah stared at her screen. “Here you are. Three nights with us, right?”

  “Yes.” Nora sighed. “I wanted to stay at the castle, but…”

  Sarah laughed. “No more need be said. We’ve a lovely location at a fraction of the cost.”

  Nora nodded sheepishly.

  “How about I make you a reservation for tea at the castle tomorrow evening, if you’ve no other plans?”

  “I don’t have any other plans. That would be wonderful.”

  Sarah scanned Nora’s credit card and handed her a key and a stack of brochures. “Just call if you need anything.”

  Nora found her way to her room. As soon as she got inside, all her plans to wander the grounds were forgotten when she saw the puffy white duvet on the bed. It was only mid-afternoon here, and she knew all the travel advice said to stay up and get used to the new time zone, but…