“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—”