O'Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle

"The Five-senses-world is a small island in a vast ocean of all we do not know and cannot see; in that ocean, there may be faeries."

This second story about the intrepid leprechaun, O'Shaughnessey, takes up where the first left off, that is, with Bobby Mahoney grown and with children of his own.

Having lost the ability to see leprechauns, as it happens to the best of us as we grow up, he takes a trip to Ireland with his daughter, to study folklore and get back something that he knows he's lost if only he could put his finger on what that was.

Twelve year old Margaret McNeil Mahoney will have none of it. She is, after all "the brightest pupil" at the La Madeliene Academy for (Exceptional) young Ladies and has no room in her life for such silliness as leprechauns and faeries.

O'Shaughnessey has persuaded a reclusive Shenache (storyteller) named Moira McCarthy to take the visitors in, hoping that Bobby may eventually be able to see him again.

Moira McCarthy is "Cold-school," as the jarvy who drives the pair to the hilltop farm describes her. "You won't find a drop of petrol on her farm says it stinks of death and nothing that comes from that far in the bowels of the earth can be good for the Gentry. The Gentry, that's what we used to call the faeries, and Moira McCarthy has kept with it."

Moira McCarthy is, in addition to being a Shenache, a guardian of the Invisible World. Many there are who want to have commerce with the faeries and it is she who either allows it or sends them on their way depending on what their motives are. She is suspicious of the visitors until, that is, she is introduced to Margaret. She recognizes in the young girl a kindred spirit with a latent Sight that is greater even than her father's, for once having given up the Second Sight, it never comes back entirely. But Margaret, the "little skeptic" Margaret, she has possibilities.