The headstones were not as ancient as she’d expected; she could find no inscriptions earlier than 1850. She supposed it had to be the soft ground that made so many of them list, and the damp air that furred them with moss.
Have mercy on… In fond memory… In affectionate remembrance of… Here lies the body… Sacred to… In memory of his first wife, who departed this life… Erected for the posterity of… Also of his second wife… Pray for the soul of… Who died exulting in her Saviour in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection. (Really, thought Lib, who ever died exultingly? Whatever fool penned that phrase had never sat by a bed with his ears pricked for the last rasp.) Aged fifty-six years… Twenty-three years… Ninety-two years… Thirty-nine years. Thanks be to God, who gave her the victory. Lib noticed a little carving on almost every grave: IHS, in a sort of sunburst. She had a vague memory that this stood for I Have Suffered. There was one incongruous plot with no headstone, wide enough for twenty coffins side by side; who lay in there? Then she realized it must be a mass grave, full of the nameless.
Lib shivered. By trade, she was on intimate terms with death, but this was like walking into her enemy’s house.
Whenever she saw a reference to a young child, she averted her eyes. Also a son and two daughters… Also three children… Also their children who died young… Aged eight years… Aged two years and ten months. (Those broken parents, counting every month.)
The angels saw the opening flower,
And swift with joy and love,
They bore her to a fairer home,
To bloom in fields above.
Lib found her nails digging into the flesh of her palms. If Earth was such unworthy soil for God’s best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there? What could possibly be the point of these short, blighted lives?
Just as she was about to abandon the search, she found the boy.
PATRICK MARY O’DONNELL
3 DECEMBER 1843–21 NOVEMBER 1858
ASLEEP IN JESUS
She stared at the plainly chiselled words, trying to feel what they meant to Anna. Pictured a warm-fleshed, lanky boy in his cracked boots and muddy trousers, all the restless energy of fourteen.
Pat’s was the sole O’Donnell grave, which suggested that he’d been the one hope of passing on Malachy’s surname, in this village at least. And also that if Mrs. O’Donnell had had other pregnancies since Anna, they hadn’t made it to birth. Lib suspended her dislike of the woman for a moment and considered what Rosaleen O’Donnell had been through; what had hardened her. Seven years of dearth and pestilence, as Byrne had put it with a biblical ring. A boy and his little sister, and little or nothing to feed them during the bad time. Then, after Rosaleen had come through those terrible years, to lose her almost-grown son overnight… Such a wrench might have worked a strange alteration. Instead of clinging to her last child all the more, perhaps Rosaleen had found her heart frost-burnt. Lib could understand that, a sensation of having no more left to give. Was that why the woman made an uncanny cult of Anna now, apparently preferring her daughter to be more saint than human?
A breeze cut through the churchyard, and Lib wrapped her cloak around her. Shutting the squealing gate, she turned right, past the chapel. Apart from the small stone cross above the slates, the chapel struck her as little different from any of the neighbouring houses, and yet what power Mr. Thaddeus wielded from its altar.
By the time she reached the village, the sun was out again and everything sparkled. A ruddy-faced woman caught her by the sleeve as she turned onto the street.
Lib recoiled.
“Beg pardon, missus. I just wondered, how’s the little girl?”
“I can’t say.” In case she hadn’t made herself understood, she added, “It’s a matter of confidentiality.”
Did the woman know the word? It wasn’t clear from her stare.
This time Lib went right, in the direction of Mullingar, merely because she hadn’t walked that way before. She had no appetite and couldn’t bear to enclose herself in her room at Ryan’s yet.
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.”