The metallic clattering of a horse’s hooves behind her. Only as the rider caught up to Lib did she recognize the broad shoulders and rusty curls. She nodded, expecting William Byrne to touch his hat and canter on.
“Mrs. Wright. What a pleasure to run into you.” Byrne slid out of the saddle.
“I need my daily stroll” was all she could think to say.
“And Polly and I our ride.”
“Is she mended, then?”
“Quite, and enjoying country life.” He slapped the glossy flank. “What about you, have you happened on any sights yet?”
“Not one, not even a stone circle. I’ve just been in the graveyard,” Lib mentioned, “but there was nothing of historic interest there.”
“Well, it used to be against the law for us to bury our own, so the older Catholic graves would all be in the Protestant cemetery in the next town over,” he told her.
“Ah. Forgive my ignorance.”
“Gladly,” said Byrne. “It’s harder to excuse your resistance to the charms of this lovely landscape,” he said with a flourish of the hand.
Lib pursed her lips. “One endless, waterlogged mire. I fell headlong into it yesterday, and I thought I might never get out of it again.”
He grinned. “All you need to fear is quaking bog. It looks like solid land but it’s really a floating sponge. If you step onto that, you’ll rip right through to the murky water below.”
She made a face. She was rather enjoying talking about anything other than the watch.
“Then there’s a moving bog,” he went on, “which is something like an avalanche—”
“This is pure invention, now.”
“I swear,” said Byrne, “after heavy rain the whole top of the land can peel off, hundreds of acres of peat sliding faster than a man can run.”
Lib shook her head.
Hand on heart. “On my journalistic honour! Ask anyone around here.”
She cast a sidelong glance, imagining a brown wave rolling towards them.
“Extraordinary stuff, bog,” said Byrne. “The soft skin of Ireland.”
“Good for burning, I suppose.”
“What is, Ireland?”
Lib burst out laughing at that.
“You’d set a match to the whole place, I suspect, if it could be dried out first,” he said.
“You’re putting words in my mouth.”
William Byrne smirked. “Did you know that peat possesses the eerie power of keeping things as they were at the moment of immersion? Troves of treasure have been pulled out of these bogs—swords, cauldrons, illuminated books—not to mention the occasional body in a remarkable state of preservation.”
Lib winced. “You must be missing the more urbane pleasures of Dublin,” she said, to change the subject. “Have you family there?”
“My parents, and three brothers,” said Byrne.
That wasn’t what Lib had meant, but she supposed she had her answer: the man was a bachelor. Of course, he was still young.
“The fact is, Mrs. Wright, I work like a dog. I’m the Irish correspondent for a number of English papers, and in addition I churn out stern unionism for the Dublin Daily Express, Fenian fervour for the Nation, Catholic pieties for the Freeman’s Journal—”
“A ventriloquist dog, then,” said Lib. That made him chuckle. She thought of Dr. McBrearty’s letter about Anna, which had begun the whole controversy. “And for the Irish Times, satirical comment?”
“No, no. Moderate views on national questions and matters of general interest,” said Byrne in the quavering tone of a dowager. “Then, in spare moments, of course, I study for the bar.”
His wit made his boasting bearable. Lib was thinking of the article she’d wanted to toss in the fire yesterday evening. She supposed the man was only doing his job with the means at hand, as she did hers. If he wasn’t allowed even to set eyes on Anna, what could he write but erudite flippancies?
She was too warm now; she undid her cloak and carried it over one arm, letting the air go through her tweed dress.
“Tell me, do you ever bring your young charge out for a walk?” asked Byrne.
Lib gave him a repressive look. “Oddly rippled, these fields.”
“They’d have been lazy beds,” he told her. “The seed potatoes were set in a line, and the peat was folded on top of them.”
“But they’re grassed over.”
He shrugged. “Well, fewer mouths to feed around here since the famine.”
She thought of that mass grave in the churchyard. “Wasn’t some kind of potato fungus to blame?”
“There was more to it than a fungus,” said Byrne, so vehemently that Lib took a step away. “Half the country wouldn’t have died if the landlords hadn’t kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins… Or if the government at Westminster hadn’t thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.” He wiped a sheen off his forehead.
“You didn’t starve, though, personally?” she asked, punishing him for his coarseness.
He took it well, with a wry grin. “A shopkeeper’s son rarely does.”
“You were in Dublin during those years?”
“Until I turned sixteen and got my first job as a special correspondent,” he said, pronouncing the term with light irony. “Meaning an editor consented to send me off into the eye of the storm, at my father’s expense, to describe the effects of the failure of the potato. I tried to keep my tone neutral and make no accusations. But by my fourth report it seemed to me that to do nothing was the deadliest sin.”
Lib watched Byrne’s taut face.
He was staring far down the narrow road. “So I wrote that God may have sent the blight, but the English made the famine.”
She was thrown. “Did the editor print that?”
Byrne put on a funny voice, eyes bulging. “Sedition! he cried. That’s when I decamped to London.”
“To work for those same English villains?”
He mimed a stab to the heart. “What a knack you have for finding the sore spot, Mrs. Wright. Yes, within a month I was devoting my God-given talents to debutantes and horse races.”
She dropped the mockery. “You’d done your best.”
“Briefly, yes, at sixteen. Then I shut my mouth and took the pieces of silver.”
A quiet between the two of them as they walked. Polly paused to nibble a leaf.
“Are you a man of belief still?” asked Lib. A shockingly personal question, but she felt as if they were past trivialities.
Byrne nodded. “Somehow all the miseries I’ve seen haven’t quite shaken that out of me. And you, Elizabeth Wright—quite godless?”
Lib drew herself up. He made it sound as if she were some crazed witch invoking Lucifer on the moors. “What entitles you to assume—”
He interrupted. “You asked the question, ma’am. True believers never ask.”
The man had a point. “I believe in what I can see.”
“Nothing but the evidence of your senses, then?” One ruddy eyebrow tilted.
“Trial and error. Science,” she said. “It’s all we can rely on.”
“Was it being widowed that did that?”
Blood boiled up from her throat to her hairline. “Who’s been giving you information about me? And why must it always be presumed that a woman’s views are based on personal considerations?”
“The war, then?”
His intelligence cut to the quick. “At Scutari,” said Lib, “I found myself thinking, If the Creator can’t prevent such abominations, what good is he?”
“And if he can but won’t, he must be a devil.”
“I never said that.”
“Hume did,” said Byrne.
She didn’t know the name.
“A long-dead philosopher,” he told her. “Finer minds than yours have reached the same impasse. It’s a great puzzle.”
The only sounds the tread of their boots on
the dried mud and the soft clopping of Polly’s hooves.
“So what possessed you to go to the Crimea in the first place?”
Lib half smiled. “A newspaper article, as it happens.”
“Russell, in the Times?”
“I don’t know the individual—”
“Billy Russell’s a Dubliner like myself,” said Byrne. “Those dispatches of his from the front changed everything. Made it impossible to turn a blind eye.”
“All those men rotting away,” said Lib, nodding, “and no one to help.”
“What was the worst of it?”
Byrne’s bluntness made her flinch. But she answered, “The paperwork.”
“How so?”
“To get a soldier a bed, say, one took a coloured slip to the ward officer and then to the purveyor to have it countersigned, whereupon—and only then—the commissariat would issue the bed,” Lib told him. “For a liquid or meat diet, or medicine, or even for an urgently required opiate, one had to bring a different-coloured form to a doctor and persuade him to find the time to make requisition of the relevant steward and have it countersigned by two other officers. By which point, the patient would very likely be dead.”
“Christ.” He didn’t apologize for swearing.
Lib couldn’t remember the last time anyone had listened to her with such attention. “Unwarranted items was the commissariat term for those things that, by definition, couldn’t be supplied because the men were supposed to have brought their own in their knapsacks: shirts, forks, and so forth. But in some cases the knapsacks had never been unloaded from the ships.”
“Bureaucrats,” murmured Byrne. “A phalanx of cold-blooded little Pilates, washing their hands of it all.”
“We had three spoons to feed a hundred men.” Only on the word spoons did her voice wobble. “There were rumours of a hoard in some supply cupboard, but we never did find it. Finally Miss Nightingale thrust her own purse into my hand and sent me to the market to buy a hundred spoons.”
The Irishman half laughed.
That day, Lib had been in too much of a hurry to ask herself why, out of all of them, Miss N. had sent her. She realized now that it hadn’t been a matter of nursing skills but of reliability. It occurred to Lib what an honour it was to have been chosen for that errand—better than any medal pinned on her cloak.
They walked in silence, very far from the village now. “Perhaps I’m a child, or a fool, that I still believe,” said William Byrne. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, et cetera.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“No, I admit it: I can’t face horror without the shield of consolation.”
“Oh, I’d take consolation if I could get it,” said Lib under her breath.
Their footfalls, and Polly’s, and a bird making a clinking sound in the hedge.
“Haven’t people in all times and places cried out to their Maker?” asked Byrne. Sounding, for a moment, pompous and young.
“Which only proves we wish for one,” muttered Lib. “Doesn’t the very intensity of that longing make it all the more likely that it’s only a dream?”
“Oh, that’s cold.”
She sucked her lip.
“What about our dead?” asked Byrne. “The sense that they’re not quite gone, is that mere wishful thinking?”
Memory seized Lib like a cramp. The weight in her arms; sweet pale flesh, still warm, not moving. Blinded by tears, she stumbled forward, trying to escape him.
Byrne caught up to her and took her elbow.
She couldn’t explain herself. She bit down on her lip and tasted blood.
“I’m so very sorry,” he said, as if he understood.
Lib shook him off, folded her arms around herself. Tears raced down the oilproof cloth of the cloak over her arm.
“Forgive me. Talk’s my trade,” he said. “But I should learn to shut my mouth.”
Lib tried to smile. She feared the effect was grotesque.
For a few minutes, while they walked, Byrne kept his mouth shut, as if to prove he knew how.
“I’m not myself,” Lib said hoarsely at last. “This case has… unsettled me.”
He only nodded.
Of all people to whom she shouldn’t blab—a reporter. Yet who else in the world would understand? “I’ve watched the girl until my eyes hurt. She doesn’t eat, yet she’s alive. More alive than anyone I know.”
“She’s half swayed you, then?” he asked. “Almost won you over, hardheaded as you are?”
Lib couldn’t tell how much of this was sardonic. All she could say was “I just don’t know what to make of her.”
“Let me try, then.”
“Mr. Byrne—”
“Consider me a fresh pair of eyes. If I say so myself, I know how to talk to people. Perhaps I can tease some truth out of the girl.”
Eyes down, she shook her head. Oh, the man knew how to talk to people, that was undeniable; he had a knack for teasing information out of those who should have known better.
“Five days I’ve been hanging around here,” he said, steelier, “and what have I to show for it?”
The blood swept up from Lib’s throat. Of course the journalist would consider all this time making conversation with the English nurse a waste and a bore. Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young; how could Lib have forgotten that she was only a means to an end?
She was under no obligation to exchange another word with this provocateur. She spun around and strode back in the direction of the village.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vigil
vigil
a devotional observance
an occasion of keeping awake for a purpose
a watch kept on the eve of a festival
The laundry was gone from the bushes, and the cabin smelled of steam and hot metal; the women must have been ironing all afternoon. No Rosary this evening, it seemed. Malachy O’Donnell was smoking a pipe, and Kitty was encouraging the hens into their cupboard. “Is your mistress out?” Lib asked her.
“’Tis her Female Sodality on Saturdays,” said Kitty.
“What’s that?”
But the slavey was running after one recalcitrant bird.
Lib had more urgent questions that had occurred to her as she’d lain awake this afternoon. Somehow, out of the whole crew, Kitty was the one she was most inclined to trust, for all that the young woman’s head was crammed with fairies and angels. In fact, Lib rather wished she’d taken more trouble to cultivate the maid’s friendship from the first day. She went a few steps closer now. “Kitty, do you by any chance remember the last food your cousin ate before her birthday?”
“I do, of course; sure how could I forget?” Kitty’s tone was ruffled. Bent in two, shutting the dresser, she added something that sounded like Toast.
“Toast?”
“The Host, she said,” Malachy O’Donnell threw over his shoulder. “The body of Our Lord, ah, under the species of bread.”
Lib pictured Anna opening her mouth to receive that tiny baked disc that Roman Catholics believed to be the actual flesh of their God.
Arms crossed, the maid nodded at her master. “Her very first Holy Communion, bless the girl.”
“’Twas no earthly food she wanted for her last meal, was it, Kitty?” he murmured, eyes on the fire again.
“’Twas not.”
Her last meal; like a condemned prisoner. So Anna had taken the Host for the first and only time, then shut her mouth. What strange distortion of doctrine could have impelled her? Lib wondered. Had Anna somehow picked up the notion that now she’d been granted divine nourishment, she’d no further need for the earthly kind?
The father’s face hung, uneven in the flicker of the flames. Some adult had been keeping Anna alive all these months, Lib reminded herself: Could it have been Malachy? She could hardly credit that.
Of course, there was a grey zone between innocent and guilty. What if the man had discovered the trick—his wife’s
or their priest’s or both—but by then, his little pet’s fame had already spread so far, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to interfere?
In the bedroom, beside the sleeping girl, Sister Michael was already doing up her cloak. “Dr. McBrearty put his head in this afternoon,” she whispered.
Had everything Lib had told him sunk in at last? “What instructions did he give?”
“None.”
“But what did he say?”
“Nothing in particular.” The nun’s expression was unreadable.
Of all the doctors under whom Lib had served, this affable old man was the most difficult.
The nun left, and Anna slept on.
The night shift was so quiet, Lib had to keep pacing to ward off sleep herself. At one point she picked up the toy from Boston. The songbird was on one side, the cage on the other, yet when Lib twirled its strings as fast as she could, her senses were tricked and two incompatible things became one: a vibrating, humming caged bird.
Past three, Anna blinked awake.
“Can I do anything for you?” asked Lib, leaning over her. “Make you more comfortable?”
“My feet.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t feel them,” whispered Anna.
The tiny toes under the blanket were icy to the touch. Such poor circulation in someone so young. “Here, climb out for a minute to get the blood moving again.” The girl did, slowly and stiffly. Lib helped her to cross the room. “Left, right, like a soldier.”
Anna managed a clumsy march on the spot. Her eyes were on the open window. “Lots of stars tonight.”
“There are always just as many, if only we could see them,” Lib told her. She pointed out the Plough, the North Star, Cassiopeia.
“Do you know them all?” asked Anna, marvelling.
“Well, just our constellations.”
“Which ones are ours?”
“Those easily seen from the Northern Hemisphere, I mean,” said Lib. “They’re different in the South.”
“Really?” The girl’s teeth were chattering, so Lib helped her back into bed.
Wrapped in flannels, the brick was still hoarding heat from the fire in which it had sat all evening. She tucked it under the child’s feet.