Stardust [antikvár]

CHAPTER one The scream stirred the cloying air in the straw-thatched cottage. A brown-robed priest smoothed the damp, straggly hair back from the young woman's forehead. The mounded stomach beneath the woman's course, homespun skirt heaved with its effort to eject the fetus. The aged priest sighed. Another child to cramp the already crowded hut. What was this, Mary's fourth child? Nay; her fifth. There were some things about his faith he would never be able to reconcile. It wasn't just the burden of unplanned-for children that he questioned. Somehow it seemed to the priest—and he knew it was blasphemous—that God too often overlooked the plight of Ireland. For hundreds of years the Irish had suffered beneath their own burden: the burden of being tenants under the English landlords, the burden of being Catholic under Protestant rule, the burden of plowing a land already too overworked. Another scream burst from her pain-contorted mouth, and the priest worried how much longer she could endure the agony of her labor. "The child," she moaned. "It won't come." 1