The rub is that no one either inside the village or out thought to question why O’Doul persisted in carrying a rotten and inedible potato. They each assumed, wrongly, that it was a simple meal that had spoiled and just another sign of his sad fall from grace since the accusations.

What no one understood or heeded was that O’Doul was a man both brilliant and utterly vengeful. In seeing the response of his town, his home, to the accusations, he had broken. He had vowed that, if the town would not warm him with friendship and brotherhood, it would warm him as it burned to the ground.

Not literally of course. He couldn’t afford, in his destitute state, the fuel required for a good arson, and it would be traceable. Instead, he had acquired a blighted potato from Kilkenny and carefully exposed it to the seed potato stores that the town kept. Up to that point the blight had largely spared them, but the subsequent crop failed utterly, as did the next. O’Doul’s revenge—which could not be traced back to him, at least not in an official capacity—was so complete that within five years the town was barely a village, having been so denuded of people that abandoned buildings and roaming livestock outnumbered the living.

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