Book Week Orphan And Strangers by Gemma Hill

Orphan And Strangers

Bio

William’s choices in love and war drag him to the brink of a madness that thrusts him and his family into the heart of the Trouble and threatens to destroy them all.

Short excerpt from Chapter one

William watched dead eyed as the hilly ground held against the best efforts of the pallbearers to force the cheap flimsy coffin into the narrow slit in the ground.

He held intently to his image of Margaret’s face below the lid framed in a halo of hair the colour of ripened corn. The person they were preparing to pile filthy clay on couldn’t be his Margaret. His eyes fell on his daughter Trisha, It should be her I’m burying, he thought savagely.

Eight year old Trisha shrank back from the hatred in her father’s eyes

“Stop moving about,” her fourteen year old brother George whispered. “You know what happens when Da gets angry.”

“I’m afraid of the men with the shovels,” she said too loudly.

Her father turned. “You keep her quiet or I will,” he snarled at George.

Reverend Snodgrass snapped his prayer book shut and turned to the Furlongs, Margaret’s parents, Fergal and Maureen. The clash of the Furling’s Kerry brogue amongst the chatter of northern voices irked him. His mind went back to the promise he made to Sarah, William’s mother, on her death bed. He had broken it today by letting Margaret to be buried here in this graveyard. “William is not a well man.,” he said brusquely. “The War, you understand, I was hoping William’s sister Lisa would be here.. Lisa could always manage William.” He held up his hand as Fergal Furling started to speak. “Your daughter is at her rest,” he said, a note of tetchiness in his voice. “But there’s been talk in the village about …the children, especially the daughter,” he said almost under his breath.