Maeve Binchy - Whitethorn Woods

Praise for Maeve Binchy

This is light entertainment at its frothy best. The charm is in the telling, often with the authors tongue held firmly in cheek

The Times

A Maeve classic, itll leave a warm, fuzzy feeling in your tummy

Company Magazine

Vintage Binchy. A touching, funny, optimistic book full of wonderful, well-observed characters

Daily Mail

The former journalist is back and at the top of her game. We love her warm, witty novels with characters that spring straight from the page

Bella

The ultimate feelgood fiction

Daily Irish Mail

Maeve Binchy at her best

Choice

This is Binchy at her mischievous best: tongue-in-cheek, oozing warmth and humour and evoking a culture and people she knows and loves. Comfort food indeed

First

What readers are buying into with a Binchy book is a unique environment: a world of warmth and compassion in which a kind heart is prized above a pretty face, family life is celebrated and qualities such as decency and initiative are rewarded

Irish Times

Reading her books is like gossiping with old friends

Daily Express

Maeve Binchy was born in County Dublin and educated at the Holy Child Convent in Killiney and at University College Dublin. After a spell as a teacher in various girls schools, she joined the Irish Times . Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle , was published in 1982, and since then she has written more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, each one of them bestsellers. Several have been adapted for cinema and television, most notably Circle of Friends and Tara Road . Maeve Binchy was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award at the British Book Awards in 1999 and the Irish PEN/A. T. Cross award in 2007. In 2010 she was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement award by the Romantic Novelists Association. She is married to the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell. Visit her website at www.maevebinchy.com .

BY MAEVE BINCHY

Fiction

Light a Penny Candle
Echoes
The Lilac Bus
Firefly Summer
Silver Wedding
Circle of Friends
The Copper Beech - Paperback - eBook
The Glass Lake - Paperback - eBook
Evening Class - Paperback - eBook
Tara Road - Paperback - eBook
Scarlet Feather - Paperback - eBook
Quentins - Paperback - eBook
Nights of Rain and Stars - Paperback - eBook
Whitethorn Woods - Paperback - eBook
Heart and Soul - Paperback - eBook
Minding Frankie - Paperback - eBook

Non-fiction

Aches & Pains - Paperback - eBook
The Maeve Binchy Writers Club - Paperback - eBook

Short Stories

Victoria Line, Central Line
Dublin 4
This Year It will Be Different - Paperback - eBook
The Return Journey - Paperback - eBook

Whitethorn
Woods

For dear good Gordon.
Thank you for the great happy life
we have together.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

The Road, the Woods and the Well 1

Father Brian Flynn, the curate in St Augustines, Rossmore, hated the Feast Day of St Ann with a passion that was unusual for a Catholic priest. But then as far as he knew he was the only priest in the world who had a thriving St Anns Well in his parish, a holy shrine of dubious origin. A place where parishioners gathered to ask the mother of the Virgin Mary to intercede for them in a variety of issues, mainly matters intimate and personal. Areas where a clod-hopping priest wouldnt be able to tread. Like finding them a fianc, or a husband, and then blessing that union with a child.

Rome was as usual unhelpfully silent about the well.

Rome was probably hedging its bets, Father Flynn thought grimly, over there they must be pleased that there was any pious practice left in an increasingly secular Ireland and not wishing to discourage it. Yet had not Rome been swift to say that pagan rituals and superstitions had no place in the Body of Faith? It was a puzzlement as Jimmy, that nice young doctor from Doon village, a few miles out, used to say. He said it was exactly the same in medicine: you never got a ruling when you wanted one, only when you didnt need one at all.

There used to be a ceremony on 26 July every year where people came from far and near to pray and to dress the well with garlands and flowers. Father Flynn was invariably asked to say a few words, and every year he agonised over it. He could not say to these people that it was very near to idolatry to have hundreds of people battling their way towards a chipped statue in the back of a cave beside an old well in the middle of the Whitethorn Woods.

From what he had read and studied, St Ann and her husband St Joachim were shadowy figures, quite possibly confused in stories with Hannah in the Old Testament who was thought to be for ever childless but eventually bore Samuel. Whatever else St Ann may have done in her lifetime, two thousand years ago, she certainly had not visited Rossmore in Ireland, found a place in the woods and established a holy well that had never run dry.

That much was fairly definite.

But try telling it to some of the people in Rossmore and you were in trouble. So he stood there every year mumbling a decade of the rosary, which couldnt offend anyone, and preaching a little homily about goodwill and tolerance and kindness to neighbours, which fell on mainly deaf ears.

Father Flynn often felt he had quite enough worries of his own without having to add St Ann and her credibility to the list. His mothers health had been an increasing worry to them all, and the day was rapidly approaching when she could no longer live alone. His sister Judy had written to say that although Brian might have chosen the single, celibate life, she certainly had not. Everyone at work was either married or gay. Dating agencies had proved to be full of psychopaths, evening classes were where you met depressive losers; she was going to come to the well near Rossmore and ask St Ann to get on her case.

His brother Eddie had left his wife Kitty and their four children to find himself. Brian had gone to look for Eddie who had now found himself nicely installed with Naomi, a girl twenty years younger than the abandoned wife and had got little thanks for his concern.

Just because youre not any kind of a normal man at all, it doesnt mean that the rest of us have to take a vow of celibacy, Eddie had said, laughing into his face.

Brian Flynn had felt a great weariness. He thought that he was in fact a normal man. Of course he had desired women, but he had made a bargain. The rules, at the moment, said if he were to be a priest then there must be no marriage, no children, no good normal family life.

Father Flynn always told himself that this was a rule that would one day change. Not even the Vatican could stand by and watch so many people leave the ministry over a rule that was made by Man and not by God. When Jesus was alive all the Apostles were married men, the goalposts were moved much later.

And then all the scandals in the Church were surely making the slow-moving conservative cardinals realise that in the twenty-first century some adaptations must be made.

People did not automatically respect the Church and Churchmen any more.

Far from it.

There were hardly any vocations to the priesthood nowadays. Brian Flynn and James OConnor had been the only two ordinations in the diocese eight years back. And James OConnor had left the Church because he had been outraged by the way an older, abusive priest had been protected and allowed to escape either treatment or punishment by a cover-up.