The story opens in 1916. The world is at war, Irish freedom fighters have just staged an armed rebellion in Dublin, and the three characters we first met in Her Secret Rose are deeply unsettled. The world famous poet, WB Yeats, Yeats, “having come to 50 years” has decided he is in need of a wife. The love of his life, Maud Gonne, has just heard about the band of revolutionaries in Ireland who've decided, once again, that England's difficulty (the war) was Ireland's opportunity (to strike for freedom) and is frantic to join them. And her daughter, Iseult, longs for love and artistic achievement.
As three talented mavericks try to redeem their past against a background of escalating war and revolution, can they rise to what they truly need from each other? Or will lack of understanding destroy their intense love triangle and their work together?
To receive exclusive extracts from this story and give feedback on where it should go next, join my reader patrons here.
(from just $2 a month)
Dancing in the Wind: This week's extract: The Teller of the Tale
“You’ll be wanting to know my name, I suppose, if you’re to trust me with this tale. You can call me Rosie but you won’t mind, I hope, if I tell you as little as necessary about myself.
WB said, “words alone are certain good.” Well… sometimes, I’ll give him that, but in my book, the most certain good is the opposite. The space between the words. The nothingness between the things. You can trust in nothing. It’s always there, holding all, and never a bit of blather out of it.
We Irish do love to blather and none more than our friend, WB. But oh, what exquisite blather he gave us.
Yes, I’m Irish, if you haven’t guessed already from how I talk. My name is Rosie Cross, and I was born in Ireland 101 years ago, and I gave the first half of my life over to the cause of Irish freedom, in the days when it was dangerous to do so.
Already now, your mind is setting itself around that information and, the thing is, I don’t want it to. You have a notion of me now you didn’t have a minute ago, but none of that matters one jot to the story I’m telling and anyhow, by the time you get to reading this, I’ll most likely be gone.
They’ve been telling me for years it’s all up for me, and one of these days, they’ll be right. When you get to my stage of life, you realize it never mat- tered what you were called, or where you came from. All that is only the smallest part of who you are. My own grandmother was the first to tell me so. “You can call me anything you like,” she used to say, “so long as you don’t call me too early in the morning.”
For my preference, call me nothing. No one. Only the teller of the tale.
Help me develop my novel in progress: Dancing in the Wind
Like to read this chapter in full and be involved in shaping the development of Dancing in the Wind? Sign up to my reader membership to receive chapters by email. I'll send you exclusive extracts and invite your suggestions and votes on what should happen next, as the story progresses. You'll be named in my novel and the first to receive it when published.