In Dublin's Fair City (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #6)

The man's name made me react with a start. Paddy O’Riley had been my employer and mentor in New York. From him I had been learning how to be a detective. If he hadn’t been killed just when I was getting started, I might be more use at my profession by now instead of stumbling along blindly most of the time, solving cases more by luck than skill. And now it seemed I was to be in the hands of another Paddy O’Reilly. We Irish are a grand bunch for believing in portents and dreams and that kind of thing, so a shiver went up my spine as I heard the name mentioned. It never occurred to me that Paddy Reilly must be one of the most common of Irish names, with one in every town. Instead I felt the excitement of believing I was finally on the right track.

I set off again. The countryside now was more like the Ireland I had known—wild, rocky with the occasional cottage and a glimpse of the sea in the distance. Along the way I passed the ruin of one cottage after another, with four crumbling walls, some with roofs caved in and some with no roofs at all, but no sign of live inhabitants. At last I came to a cottage with a line of nappies flapping outside and the sounds of children's voices squealing as they played. A woman came to the door, a baby on her hip, another one on the way, by the look of it. She had never heard of the Burkes and confirmed that Paddy O’Reilly would be the only one in the neighborhood who might be able to help me.

I followed the road down toward Clonakilty Bay. A couple of cottages perched on the small quayside, a rowing boat bobbed in the waves, but there was no sign of life. Then I noticed smoke rising from a cottage chimney and savored the familiar sweetness of burning peat. I went to the front door and knocked. A dog barked and an old man appeared from a vegetable plot beside the house. His face was rough and weather beaten, the wrinkles set into a permanent scowl-and indeed the face did seem to mirror his temperament.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “If you’re one of those do-gooding church ladies you can turn right around and go home. I’m not coming to your services nor reading your confounded Bible.”

“Are you Paddy O’Reilly?” I asked.

“What if I am?” he demanded. He was certainly nothing like the Paddy Riley I had known.

“I’m here because I’m trying to find information on a family called Burke who used to live around here.”

“There's no Burkes around here anymore,” he said grudgingly. “They’re all gone. Those that didn’t die in the famine went west across the ocean.”

“But you remember them?”

“I do,” he said. He glared at me suspiciously. “Are you a relative?”

“A friend of the family. Which was their cottage?” I asked.

He pointed. “Up on the hillside over there. You can scarcely tell it was once a home now. The land agent's men didn’t bother to wait for the people to die. Wanted them out in a hurry. They came in and set fire to the thatch and started knocking down the walls. Didn’t even wait for folks to get their possessions out first. And those that couldn’t get out quick enough burned with the thatch. I still remember the stench of it in my nostrils.”

“That's terrible,” I agreed. “I gather we had the same sort of thing where I come from in county Mayo.”

“That's how they behaved in those days. There were once three hundred or more people living in these parts. A thriving little port it was here. Now there's just a handful of us left, waiting to die.”

“So what happened to your family? You didn’t go away?”

He grunted. “I didn’t say that. I went away all right. My dad was lost at sea when I was a boy. I couldn’t wait to get out. I took a job on a merchant ship, sailing to South America, bringing back beef from Argentina. It wasn’t a bad life at all. I came back here when I was too old to do the work, and everyone had gone. Not a soul that I remembered from the old days.”

“But you do remember the Burkes? Tommy Burke?”

“Tommy Burke—was that one of their children? They had a brood of children like most people around here.”

I nodded. “Four children, I believe. An older boy and girl. Tommy would have been about three or four at the time they left. And there was a baby sister too—Mary Ann.”

He shook his head. “Can’t say I remember clearly now. I heard that the Burkes went to America. The old folks died and the younger generation went. That's how it usually was in those days.”

“But the baby didn’t go with them,” I said. “She was sick. They had to leave her behind. Tommy has sent me to find her.”

He looked scornfully at me. “They’d only have left her behind if she wasn’t expected to recover, wouldn’t they?”

“How would I find out if she died? Where's the nearest churchyard?”

He jerked his head to the right. “There's a churchyard at the old abbey, behind those pine trees on the hill. That's where we bury folks around here, but it won’t do you any good looking. During the famine there were too many to bury properly. They just dug big pits and filled them up with bodies. The priest said a prayer over them and that was it. No headstones, no memorials.”

“So where would her death have been recorded, do you think?”

He looked at me scornfully. “They didn’t bother with recording births, deaths, or marriages in those days. Not for us Catholics. We were like cattle. Not worth much alive,- worth even less dead.”

I tried another tack. “Tommy Burke believes the baby was left with a priest along the way to Queenstown. Where's the nearest church?”