Summary
Against the bruised emerald of 18th-century Ulster, where the hedgerows drip with ancestral grievance and the moonlight is rationed by landlords, Willy Reilly—ginger-haired scion of a dispossessed Catholic clan—gambols straight into the cross-hairs of history. He is a rakehell with a price on his head and a lute in his satchel, dodging Redcoat patrols by day and serenading the flaxen-haired Úna O’Halloran—his Colleen Bawn—by night. Their courtship is a clandestine choreography of smuggled glances inside the ivy-choked ruins of a Franciscan friary, their vows sealed with a braid of grass that later frays like the country itself. Enter Sir Robert Corry, squire of the neighbouring manor, a predator wrapped in snuff-scented satin who covets Úna’s dowry of fertile acres and, more viciously, her porcelain neck. Corry’s scheme is baroque: forge a mortgage on the O’Halloran farm, force the girl into a marriage of forfeiture, and dispatch Willy to a penal colony where salt winds flay the skin off songs. But Willy, ever the fox, enlists the Friar Luke, a tonsured trickster who can smell a Protestant warrant at forty paces, and together they hatch a plan that ricochets from moonlit sickle-duels to candle-lit confessionals, from peat-bog hideouts to the scaffold of Enniskillen jail. The final reel unspools in a deluge: muskets misfire, wills are rewritten in blood, and Úna, once a trembling lily, wields her father’s shillelagh like a Valkyrie, shattering Corry’s signet ring—emblem of colonial title—into the lough where it sinks beside the bones of forgotten kings. The curtain falls not on nuptial bells but on a single, defiant chord struck from Willy’s lute, echoing across the water, unanswered yet unextinguished.
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