Before The Fall: Centenary Edition E-Book

Ross Orna

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Irish Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

"A highly ambitious, engaging, and evocative novel and a hauntingly captivating read." -The Sunday Independent

What happens when a woman is haunted by the sins of her foremothers–and the men who betrayed them?

Facing the birth of her child, and single motherhood, Jo Devereux has spent the last six months in Mucknamore, the Irish village she fled twenty years ago.

A trunk of letters and diaries left by her grandmother and great-aunt has revealed a heartbreaking legacy of bitter secrets that have haunted the women of her family for four generations.

Now she must find out the ultimate truth: What other secrets and lies lie under her mother’s and grandmother’s unshakeable silence? How does it connect with her failed life as a gender-bending agony aunt in San Franciso? And what of Rory… her lost love, son of her family’s sworn enemies?

Will Jo’s mission to uncover the past unlock a possible future together? Or are they about to lose everything all over again?

As she pieces together the poisonous fragments of the past, Jo must now face into the guilt and shame that were her legacy and see how she might best redeem them in her own life.

Leseprobe

BEFORE THE FALL

CENTENARY EDITION

ORNA ROSS

REVIEWS

BIBLIOFEMME.COM: “An incredible debut that will have the reader absolutely enthralled.”

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT: “The sort of book you could happily curl up with…A hauntingly captivating read.”

IRISH INDEPENDENT: “An impressive canvas…

a captivating read…an achievement.”

EVENING HERALD: “A haunting tale…a gripping story.”

SUNDAY TRIBUNE: “Epic sweep…ambitious scope…

an intelligent book.”

EMIGRANT ONLINE: “A riveting story…vividly brought to life.”

AMAZON.CO.UK: “It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think. It’s beautifully written. I highly recommend it.”

THEBOOKBAG.CO.UK: “I couldn’t put it down.”

AMAZON.COM: “Ross has written a masterpiece and,

in this age of exaggeration and hyperbole, I hope I can convey

just how exceptional her book is.”

PARTI

PLASH: NORA

1923

Thirty-six hours she was in the coming. The pain of pushing my insides out, pain cutting me to blood. Two nights and a live-long day with no one to talk to. All I had was a cross old nun saying every few hours I'd be another while yet. And getting annoyed with me because she wanted to be in her bed.

Curses to the Lord. Curses on curses and pain on pain, for a night and a day and another long night. And when she finally came, she didn't come easy. Push. Push again. Push, for God's sake, push would you, push I said, push can't you? Push.

At the very last, when I could do no more, Child took over herself.

"It's coming, it's coming," said the nun. Out my daughter slithered in a rush of blood.

She was given to me and — oh! — all curled over, she was, from being inside me, her back curved like a bowl and her hands and feet like little cups. A black downy head on her. Arms and legs purple and fleshy. Bits of my body and blood stuck to her.

And her eyes. Open so wide they seemed half the size of her face. I couldn't take my own off them. They drew me in.

"Look how she's looking at me," I said to the nun.

"Don't fool yourself," she said. "Newborns see nothing for weeks."

She was wrong. I was being seen and it was opening my own eyes wide too.

Too wide.

They cut the cord. All for the best, they said. Hush now, stop now, all for the best now.

 They took her away as my bosoms were filling. Your milk's come in, the auld nurse said, when I told of the pain in them. Full hard fit to burst, longing for little lips to ease them. And beneath, my belly shrinking, closing in round the space where she used to be.

I got to name her. Máirín, Maureen, but the Irish way. The new way. At least there’s that. The nun said they’d keep it while she was with them but once adopted, they could call her anything.

Child, Child, I can’t be naming you, so. Let’s leave it at Child. Leave me here, so, leaking every kind of liquid, blood and milk and tears, from every soft spot left in me.

PARTII

SPILL

1995

Midsummer is past. The days are getting shorter again. Sometimes, it feels like I've never lived anywhere but this tiny shed, in this tiny village, on the edge of the ocean. My busy days in San Francisco — so full of to-dos and appointments — used to seep past without me, but here, my life is stripped down to six basic activities: sleeping and eating, writing and reading, running and relaxing. Time is mine again.

Life likes to take it easy, it seems, and the only way to be properly alive is to slow your pace to match.

So I find myself less bored than when I was busy, and less lonely than I've been for years, though I've never spent so much time  alone. Solitude soothes me, along with the fresh air, the sound of the sea, and the past that I'm excavating with my pen. All are helping me to heal. I didn't know that was what I was doing when I came here, but I know it now, and I tell myself that's why I've stayed on, why I haven't yet left as planned.

I'm reading an election leaflet of Gran's from 1923 when a voice from the door interrupts. "Jo Devereux, sometimes I think you're mad."

I jump. Then I see who it is. Irritation, instant and involuntary, coils in me.

I don't want to stop writing, certainly not to listen to my sister's views on my lack of reason. Yes, it is Maeve, come all the way down to Mucknamore from Dublin to visit me. She stands at the door of my shed, neat and slim in linen shorts and Ralph Lauren polo shirt, her car keyring looped over one finger.

Living here as I have been since May, centred on the secrets I've been finding in my mother's family papers, I've long ceased to notice the dilapidation. Now, following my sister's eyes, I see what she sees. Flaking walls. A concrete floor. An unmade bed on one side of the room. Debris piled into the opposite corner.

"What brings you here?" I ask.

"Lovely welcome, I must say. Can I come in?"

I hesitate, conscious of my shape and that I never did get round to telling her.

It wasn't intentional. What I had planned was to go to Dublin, to see her there, and explain. I never thought I'd still be here in this shed so many weeks on.

There's nothing for it now except to get up from my chair and step out from behind the table.

Her eyes fall on my body, swoop in on my abdomen, then swing back upwards to my face. "What —?"

She is stunned, her face so very shocked that I find myself laughing, that nervous laughter she always brings up in me when I've done the wrong thing.

"Oh my God!" she gasps. "I don't believe it. Oh my God!"

"Let's go round the back," I say, voice airy, as if I am a society hostess suggesting tea on the lawn. "That's the nicest place to sit."

I take my rug from the end of the rumpled bed and, while she's swallowing her surprise, I lead her to the grassy patch where Rory and I have been sitting most long evenings of this long, strange summer. It's private out here, between the shed and the edge of the little cliff, and the sea is singing a soothing song today, as if it's on a go-slow, not really wanting to turn the waves over.

"You should have rung Hilde to tell me you were coming," I say, flicking the rug out over the grass. "I'd have arranged to meet you somewhere a bit more comfortable."

"I've been expecting to hear from you every day, Jo. You've been down here for weeks and not so much as a phone call. But," she breathes, "never mind all that...What about this?" She leans across as if to touch me, then changes her mind. "Look at you. My God."

I gesture her to sit on the rug. "Would you like something?" I remember to ask when I'm down. "A drink? I only have orange juice."

"Orange juice would be nice." She puts a hand on my arm to stop me trying to push back up. "I'll get it."

"It's just inside the door, in the corner. The coolest spot."

She comes back with two plastic glasses and hands me one. "That's quite a mountain of manuscript you've got in there."

"I know. It keeps growing on me."

"Am I allowed read it?"

I shake my head. 'Not yet."

"When?"

"Soon. I have to type it up, and it needs a lot of tidying."

She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again.

"Sorry the juice is warm," I say, when the silence stretches too long. "No fridge, obviously."

"I really thought I was beyond being shocked by you, Jo, but you've done it again. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't tell anybody." Well, nobody except Rory.

"Not even the father?"

"No. Especially not the father."

She dips her head down to her plastic cup, trying to stop the disparagement that's rearing up inside her. She is thin, I notice, too thin; her hipbones jut against her shorts.

"What about you?" I ask her. "How have you been?"

"Fine. Fine. Nothing compared to this."

"Are you sure?"

Her face creases. "Oh, up and down, I suppose." Then she tilts her head towards the house. "Two shocks in a row. What they've done to Mammy's house, to the shop...It's so different, isn't it?"

"Unrecognisable."

Our mother had died just as she closed the sale of her house to Hilde and Stefan Zimmerman, an efficient German couple who'd pre-organised planning permissions. They'd arrived to live here within a week of her funeral. Work had begun immediately and was well advanced already.

"I wish it could have been kept as it was for a while," Maeve says. "It would have been nice to get used to Mammy being gone first, before we had to deal with this too."

"It's been easier for me, I suppose, being here. Seeing it change day by day."

"I still can't believe I'll never see her again. Can you? I think of things I want to tell her before I remember she's not here. And it hits me all over again."

"Time helps," I say.

"Is it helping you?"

"It's not the same for me, you know that. I hadn't seen her for almost twenty years."

"Still, she was your mother."

I try again. "I do know the feeling you're talking about and how awful it is. Time really does help."

"Your friend Richard?"

I nod, gratified that she remembers.

"Well, then, I wish time would just hurry up and do its thing."

We both fall into a silence, looking out over the sea.

How have I let this shed become my home-away-from-all-homes? That's the question my sister's arrival has thrown into relief.

I was supposed to depart for Dublin a week ago. Yet still I sit, day after day, at my makeshift desk, sifting through sentence after sentence bequeathed to me by my mother and grandmother, telling myself I need to be here to do it when I know I'm really here for Rory.

Though I told him I was leaving. Though I wrote it down to show him, to show myself, that I really meant it and though every word I wrote was right and true. If Rory's marriage was indeed so wrong for him, if our love — the first love — was what he wanted, then that had to be formally acknowledged. Properly done. Slip-sliding into an affair was not an option. 

So, I wrote him. I was leaving. I was going to Dublin where my sister would help me organise an obstetrician. I would have my baby there and, as soon as possible afterwards, I was going to fly back to San Francisco to make a new home as a single mom.

My letter set him free. "We missed our time, my love," it said and I can still feel how good it felt to write that, to break the will-we-won't-we game we'd been playing since I came back here at the beginning of summer.

If his wife and family were not what he wanted — if what he wanted was me — then he was going to have to find a way to tell them and do what he should have done the first time, twenty years ago, when it was all less complicated. Come after me.

I didn't quite say all that in my letter, but it was implied. "When we were young, I so wanted you to follow me," I said. "I wanted that long, long, long after there ceased to be any possibility that you might."

Hint hint, Rory. Over to you.

When Maeve arrived fifteen minutes ago, I'd been typing out documents. A letter to Peg from her friend Molly, a letter to Norah from Peg that was never sent, and an election leaflet that seems poignant to me, that seems to carry in it all the yearning that my grandmother passed down the years.

Dear Voter,

We were told the Treaty with the British Empire would bring peace. If so, what is WAR?

We were told it would bring freedom. What, then, is SLAVERY?

We were told it would bring order. Then what is CHAOS?

They said this Treaty would fill Irish pockets. It has filled only Irish PRISONS and GRAVES. If the British Government is going to keep fighting and destroying us, we prefer that she should use her own English troops — as she does in the North of Ireland — and not our own misguided pretend-politicians.

People of Ireland, come back to us. Our country's future is now in your hands.

 A REPUBLIC is the only basis on which we can build a proud and prosperous national life. Use this coming election to vote NO to this terrible Treaty. Then we can ALL share TOGETHER in the final victory over the British Empire.

Come back to us.

Vote for those who will yet SAVE THE NATION.

Vote Anti-Treaty.

It gets me every time, this leaflet put together by my grandmother and great-grandmother. It's those words: "Come back to us." Come Back.

People don't, do they?

We can't.

That's what I was trying to say to Rory, in my letter. Trying to reclaim what we had, to start over, to get it right this time, wasn't possible. No matter how much we wished it was.

So why am I still here?

"So tell me," Maeve asks, echoing my thoughts. "Why are you still down here? What have you been doing with yourself?"

"You saw that heap of papers in there. Reading and writing, mostly. Lying low."

"Is there anything of interest in those papers of Mammy's? Are they all rubbish?"

"Oh, no, they're not rubbish."

"Really? Tell me."

"I think you better wait until I've put it together."

She sits up, intrigued by something in my voice. "What on earth have you found?"

"All sorts of things."

"Deep dark secrets?" she grins.

"Yes, as a matter of fact."

"Things Mammy didn't tell us?"

"You're forgetting, Maeve, Mrs D. never told me anything."

That stops her smile. "Oh no, Jo, you're not going to write something Mammy wouldn't want known? Please tell me you're not."

I spread my hands and examine my fingernails.

"Jo!"

Above us a gull screams, slides across the air towards the sea. How much did Mrs D. know? That is the question. In her letter, she said she didn't read Norah's "scribblings" or all of Gran's diaries. I have read everything now, some of them many times, and still I'm not certain. Sometimes I find one thing in their words, especially Norah's. Sometimes another.

But what I hear in almost every sentence is the sound of their words shrinking from what they're saying, even as they say it. That's what speaks loudest to me across the years.

Maeve is annoyed with me again. "It's not your story, Jo, to do what you like with."

"Hey, calm down. I'll tell you in a while."

She looks sceptical.

"I will, Maeve, I promise. I just want to get it straight myself first."

"So you're not going against Mammy's wishes?"

I shrug. "Nothing I write can hurt her now. And if she really didn't want me to know — or write — about something, all she had to do was take it out of the suitcase."

"Maybe she wanted you — us — to know, but not the whole goddamn world."

I shake my head, though she's right, of course. That's possible.

Maeve takes off her sunglasses, blinks at me in the sunshine. "Jo, if you publish something she wouldn't like just to settle some score of your own, you'll be sorry later."

I don't think that's what I'm doing. I think I want to tell my family's story because if a story is to be told, it must be told as whole as we can tell it, not picking and choosing the bits that make us look good, as Mrs D. liked to do.

If I am to make anything meaningful of my life — and what else has this whole strange summer been about, if not that? — then I cannot let myself add one more drop to my family's unfathomable well of silence.

I know Maeve will never allow me all that, so I shrug and say instead, "There is no score."

She blinks even harder at this. I see her trying to calm herself, trying to find tactful, persuasive words to convince me. Just at that moment, you ripple inside me, then settle, like you are snuggling down.

I put my hand to where I feel you. Maeve notes the movement and, despite herself, smiles an indulgent smile. "Where are you going to have it?"

"I don't know."

"What does your doctor say?"

"I haven't seen a doctor."

"What? You're...how many months pregnant?"

"About six."

"Six months pregnant and you haven't seen a doctor?"

Here we go. I close my eyes, take a breath, wait for the next onslaught.

"That's just downright irresponsible."

This is why I haven't told her. Do all big sisters think they have this right to reprimand like this? It seems we don't have a single safe place to rest, Maeve and I, no matter how hard we both try.

"I'm sorry, Jo, but that's what it is."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Maeve, but I thought this was my pregnancy?"

"When you're pregnant, Jo, you have more than yourself to consider."

"Yeah, well, I don't happen to think pregnancy is an illness. And I don't see why I need some doctor I've never met before to tell me I'm fine. I know I'm fine."

"But at your age especially..."

"Is this why you came, Maeve? To deliver a series of sermons?"

That works. "Oh God." She sighs and sags, like a pricked balloon. "How do you do this to me, Jo? Coming down in the car, I swore I wasn't going to criticise no matter what I found. But I never ever expected to find...this."

She's right, she can't help it any more than I can. Here we are, thirty-eight and forty years old, and as testy with each other as ever. We'll always be the same. The best time we ever had together was when she visited me in San Francisco, when we were on my territory, but here in Ireland, I'm her inadequate little sister again. Here, she'll always take liberties.

I try to appease her. "As a matter of fact, I am going to see a doctor soon."

"I'm glad," she says, trying to match my conciliatory tone. "Do."

"I will, I will."

I lie back, close my eyes to the sun. Should I tell her about Rory? What would I say?

That two days ago, I came out here, the day's work not so much done as abandoned for the evening, and found him sitting, his back to the shed, looking out to sea, waiting. He'd heard that I hadn't left after all and had come straight to me.

I knew that moment of seeing him there was one of the most important in our whole relationship. As important as the day when we were two children first spying each other across the village divide that separated our relatives. As important as the first time we spoke to each other properly, at a wedding, under the noses of our people. As important as the first night we slept together, twenty years ago, in his flat in Dublin. And yes, as important as the night soon after when I told him we were pregnant, and he responded so inadequately.

I hovered in the doorway of my shed, afraid to go forward. What would I say? Tell him to leave, to go back to his wife? Ask him to...Well, it doesn't matter now what I thought or considered saying, because all I did was go across and slip into sitting beside him.

We sat together for a long, long time, quietly watching the waves, afraid to speak. And ever since, it's been just as it was before, with him coming round each evening at sundown and us sitting, late into the night, talking, talking, talking.

It can't go on, I know. It has to stop, and soon.

While I'm trying to find words that might be able to explain some of this to my sister, she says, "You said 'her'? The baby's a girl?"

"That's how I find myself thinking. Of 'she', of 'her'."

"So you don't know for sure?"

"No, how could I? But right from the start, I've had the feeling it's going to be a girl."

And it's true. "She," "her": these are the words I used when talking about you to my sister — or to Hilde or Rory — but most of the time we're not with others. Most of the time we're alone together and the word I use is "you".

You are changing me, making more of me: swelling my breasts and my girth, expanding my heart and my lungs, ripening and plumping my genitals, filling and darkening my nipples, increasing the volume of my blood.

You have splashed my skin with colour, drawn a bold line of brown down my belly. Greased and furry, somersaulting and thumb-sucking inside me, getting firmer in the world: you rely on me. Soon you will be what they call viable, able to breathe on your own.

Still I can see how you will draw on me, body, heart and soul, for the rest of my days. For the first time, I see how a mother birthed every bird and animal and person on the planet. Everything, everywhere, has been mothered into being: how had I never noticed that before? I think of all the churches holding up their God the Fathers, the men who have insisted that children carry their names through the generations and, instead of my usual anger, I feel pity.

You've unpicked the me I used to be. I am going to join the band of mothers, those people who let themselves fade in the light of their offspring, those people — like my sister — that I used to slightly disdain. Now, as I sit here with her, as I look back up the tunnel of time at our mother's life, and our grandmother's, and our great-grandmother's, what I disdain is that earlier, unknowing me.

"Did you know this place used to be called Bastardstown?" I ask Maeve.

This was a secret of Coolanagh sands that I came across while doing library research.  Coolanagh, Mucknamore, Inisheen: these names for our village, and the topography around it, came from the Irish language, but outsiders gave the area this different, ugly, English name, because it was famous as the place to go if you had a baby you didn't want, or were unable, to keep.

Infanticide. Thanks to its unique play of sands and tides, Coolanagh was where reluctant mothers came, according to legend — truth's abiding sister — to do their agonizing deed.

The book I read about it was schlock. It told its grisly stories, some of them going back centuries, without pausing once to consider the lives of those women, of why they were unable to rise to the demands of motherhood. To the man who wrote it — M.K. Trevalyan — they were ciphers, travesties of pure-and-holy womanhood: mad, bad and murderous.

Maeve shivers. "Bastardstown. God, I haven't heard it called that in years."

But she doesn't want to talk about that. While she embarks upon another long stream of sisterly advice, I look out to Coolanagh. It looks so innocent out there, on yet another beautiful summer day. The tide is so far out that the sands stretch almost as far as the island.

What age was I when Gran first brought me out that causeway to tell me her story about these sands having swallowed an entire town? The height of her hip, anyway. Auntie Norah was with us and the three of us stood on the tallest dune and I felt like we were on the high deck of a ship, sailing through an ocean of sand.

Gran's palm was rough, I remember, like the skin on a rock, but hers was the hand I most loved to hold. I can feel the damp of her swimming costume against my cheek as I leaned my face against it. Beneath the fabric was her soft old flesh and underneath that again, her tough hip bone.

She pointed in a diagonal from where we stood, towards the island.

"Look across now at that stretch of sand," she said to me. "There behind the barbed wire. Tell me what you see."

Hearing this, Auntie Norah took a few steps away from us. Gran looked back but, unusually, didn't follow. Instead, she pulled me in closer, gripped me tighter. "Do you notice anything strange about what you're seeing?" she asked again. "Come on, pet. Look a little harder."

I stretched my eyes for her.

"Can't you make out that double row of sand-hills near the edge and that long, straight dip running in between?"

All I could see was an undulating blanket of sand that looked flatter and flatter the further away you looked. The tide was way out that day, just as it is now.

"I wish we could walk across to it," Gran said. "If we could walk the length of it, you'd feel what I'm saying to you."

But we couldn't walk across Coolanagh sands. Young as I was, I already knew that.

"What would you say if I told you that what you're looking at is the rooftops of a sunken town?"

I turned my face up to hers, tried to read it.

"Yes, a sunken town. Under those bumps there, the ones that are so regular, all in a row. See? That's from the houses down below. And across there...that dip between them — " she pulled my hand up, pointed my finger — "that's the long main street."

She began to talk in her story voice. "Fadó, fadó – a long time ago – a big town stood on that spot I'm showing to you now. A city it was called, though smaller in them days than any of our cities now, but with its own charter to prove it. It was one of the largest sea ports in all of Ireland, and so rich that it used to send not one, but two, Members of Parliament to the government in London. I'm talking hundreds of years ago now, not long after the English first came to Ireland.

"What the poor people who lived in this city didn't know was that their town was built on sinking sand. From the first day those buildings went up, the sands were sucking at them — slowly, slowly drawing them down. So slowly that at first they didn't notice, but day by day it went on, until they came to know what was happening and to realise that they'd all have to leave.

"So they did. Still the city kept on sinking, until nothing was left of it above the ground only those bumps and hollows that you see before you."

At that, Auntie Norah, who must have been listening behind us, made an explosive sound, something like the harrumph of a horse. She started to walk away, back along the causeway towards home.

Let her go, the inside of my head pleaded to Gran, but already we were turning after her. "It's all right, Norah," Gran called. "Wait now, don't be going on." We broke into a run, my arm pulled along, Gran calling after her back: "Ah, Norah, where's the harm in a bit of an old yarn?"

In the library, researching facts about quicksand, I was astounded to learn that Gran was right. There was once a bustling seaport town on this spot, five centuries ago. And it was sand that caused its demise. The inlet silted up and couldn't be navigated and that was the end of the trade on which the town depended. It declined and died and, eventually, disappeared. All of it, every building, into complete oblivion, until there was almost no trace of evidence that it ever existed.

Everything else she told me about Coolanagh, though, was wrong. Quicksand does not suck, it is not bottomless, it does not have a life of its own. It is a phenomenon, not a substance; any sand can become "quick" given the right conditions.

On Coolanagh, those conditions are a stream flowing off the island onto the sands, the stream in which I once pretended to see fairies to please a bunch of mean Mucknamore schoolgirls. That, and a layer of rock underlying the sand that slows drainage, keeps the sand grains in permanent liquid suspension.

As to the danger, the books I read were divided. One said it was impossible for an upright human to sink below the surface of such sand. The density of human body mass is less than that of any sand–water suspension and so they'd never get down far enough. 

Yet people have died on Coolanagh. On the island, there's a cross which commemorates three people — a man and two women, who died out there in 1879 — as well as "all who fell victim to these sands". And there was Dan, of course, in 1923, the real source of my enquiry. They would have died, this book claimed, through trying to escape. It was their wriggling and writhing that would have pulled them face down into suffocation.

Another book disagreed. It held that a human body falling into deep quicksand behaves as it would on falling into deep water, plunging down below the surface then rising back up again. Except in quicksand, the higher density elongates the down-and-backup motion, so that the lungs run out of breath before the body re-emerges from the depths.

On the tidal sands of Coolanagh, there was a third possibility: the sea. A victim who survived an initial immersion in sand, who succeeded in re sisting the urge to struggle, would remain stuck in the sand until the arrival of help, or the return of the next tide. Whichever came soonest.

Since reading that book on Bastardstown, my head is full of lonely women and their lost babies, and thinking again of them now, it comes to me. That's why I'm still here.

As Maeve and I run out of conversation, as we get up and she prepares to leave, I'm only half with her. Talking to her about you has brought it all together.

I see it now. I'm being held here by the loss that Rory and I never discussed.

He and I were doomed before we got started: we knew it back then and the family papers have shown me why. But none of that excuses how we behaved. Or accounts for what we ourselves destroyed, what we added to the loss. And the shame. And the silence.

We've talked about everything else, he and I. Everything I've discovered about his family and mine. All the events of our lives since we met and before. Everything, except how we came to fail each other so very badly that I ended up taking that boat to London, without him.

1923

Knock, knock, knock! Knock, knock, knock!

The sound had been going on for a while, Peg realised, as her sleeping ears woke to it. As it sank in that what she was hearing was somebody banging on the front door, like they were trying to rouse the entire county, she heard a voice calling. Her mother's, calling from across the hallway, from what used to be Barney's room, querulous in her weakness. “Peg? JJ? Peg?"

This was how they'd slept since Barney died: herself, her father and mother in three separate bedrooms, all doors open, in case Máire took a turn or needed anything in the night.

"It's all right, Mammy," she answered, already out of bed and shoving her feet into her slippers. "I'm coming."

Knock, knock, knock! again. Free Staters, no doubt, on another raid. Holy God, they'd been round twice already this month. They'd find nothing; they must surely know that by now. Nothing only the pleasure of persecuting true Republicans, a sport that never seemed to grow weary for them.

"I'm coming," she called to the front door as she hurried down the stairs, fast as she could without falling. Only when she opened the door, it wasn't soldiers on the step, but her neighbour, Mrs White, Lama's mother, and in a state.

All dishevelled, tears drying on her cheeks, with Tipsy Delaney beside her.

"I'm sorry, Peg,"  she said. "I'm sorry now to rouse you in the night like this, with you having the childer to teach in the morning."

"What is it? What's wrong? Come in."

"I didn't know where else to go. Tipsy suggested here."

No doubt he did. “That’s all right, Mrs White. Come in, come in both of you." She ushered them into the hall. "What's happened?"

Her coat was on over her night clothes, and her hair was thrown up, falling out of its clips. In her hand, she was holding what looked like a letter.

"Is it...?" Peg stopped, not wanting to say her friend's nickname – Lama, so-called for his habit of saying "Lamb of God" every few minutes – to his mother. For a panicked moment, she found herself having a blank about the proper name of this boy she'd known her whole life long, who'd become a close friend in the experiences they'd shared over the past years, first in the War of Independence, and even more through being on the same side in this follow-up war. 

This "War of the Brothers", as it was coming to be called. Only it wasn't only brothers divided. It was sisters, and friends, and parents from their children, and husbands from their wives.

John! she remembered, the name jumping to her mind. And with it her friend's face, long and angular and teeth forever stretched into a smile, like the wooden face on a rocking horse. A flood of feeling for him rushed in with the image, hot and soft.

When you shared a killing with somebody, as she had with Lama last October, it drew you close like nothing else. Even if the killing was something you knew you'd spend the rest of your days regretting, you were bonded to all involved.

And all the more so to Lama, with Barney, the third of the trio who'd done the deed, gone from them.

Killed in reprisal.

And now...?  Was she in danger?

"It's bad," said Tipsy, his tongue, as always, a little too large in his mouth. Anyone looking at him would think he was smiling, but Peg knew better.

"Yes," wailed Mrs White, bursting into a fresh round of tears as she pushed the letter into her hands. "Yes Peg, it's John. It's the worst."

Dear Mother and Father,

I am very sorry to have to be writing what I know will be sad and shocking news for you. The Free State army has, without judge or jury, decided our fate. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, I am to be shot for my part in Ireland's fight for freedom.

This is a hard letter to have to write.  But, if it were not for knowing how it will grieve you and Mattie and Janey and the little ones to receive it, I would not regret this way of leaving the world. I am proud to have served Ireland and I hope you, knowing I died to save the Republic, will be proud too.

I have seen a good priest, Father Carty from Kyle, and have made my peace with God. He who knows all has forgiven all and I, too, forgive the men who do this to us. Irish soldiers doing English work: they know not what they do.

I, and the three boys who will die with me, go to God in peace, knowing our blood — like that of Pearse and Connolly in 1916 — will bring new soldiers to Ireland's cause. For our cause is the cause of right and God is on our side.

So if you can, do not grieve me, Mother dear, or Father. We will meet again in Heaven.

May the Lord have mercy on us all.

Your loving son,

John.

JJ came downstairs, sent by Máire to see what the fuss was about and Peg, heart thumping as she read the letter a second time, sent him out to the byre to rouse George, the pony, and hitch up the trap. She sat Mrs White down in the parlour with Tipsy while she ran back upstairs to explain all to her mother. As always, Máire was roused out of awareness of her illness by Free State perfidy.

"You're right to go in," she said, when she heard what Peg intended. "Where there's life, there's hope."

"I pray we're not too late. And that they’ll listen to reason. Surely even Free State soldiers won't sink so low."

"They've done it in other counties."

"But here in Wexford, Mammy. These are the selfsame boys who fought with us against the English. They surely won't do down one of their own."

"Take Tipsy in with you," said Máire. "They'll take more notice of a man, even poor Tipsy, than of a girl."

Would they? Peg wasn't so sure but the company would do no harm.

"Oh, I wish I could go myself, I'd give them what's what."

"We'll do our best, Mammy."

"I know you will, lovey. I didn't mean that. I just wish I was more use."

"You did enough, Mammy. You did more than anyone. We'd have no-one on the side of the Republic around here at all were it not for you. You rest yourself and we'll be back before you know it. With good news, I hope."

Peg kissed her cheek, as she always did now, whenever she took leave of her, and looked back for a moment at the door. Her poor mother, so reduced in size, and face so changed, it was hard to believe it was her and not an old aunt or relative in her bed.

No time for any of that now. Peg took the stairs down two steps at a time, and led Mrs White and Tipsy out of the parlour, into a night of high, tight stars, and a sliver of moon. Calm and clear and dry. That, at least, was a blessing. The night air was cooling on the heat of her thoughts.

As they climbed aboard the trap, she handed Tipsy the reins, so she could keep Mrs White company.

Peg had never gone into town by night. This was a new road to her. The trees and ditches were shadows of black on black, turned inside out in their night clothes. She didn't recognise any of them. For a while, she tried to keep Mrs White distracted by small talk, but then let them both settle into their thoughts. Oh, but that letter of Lama's. It had sounded so final. Would they even be in time? It was thirteen miles into Wexford: the journey would take them the bones of an hour, more maybe in the dark.

And of course the never-ending questions about Dan O'Donovan came slithering to the surface. Would he be there, in the jail? If he was, what was she going to say to him? Would he be moved to help? It was a measure of how things had changed between them that she hadn’t a clue of the answer to that.

Surely he couldn’t possibly be involved in this, the execution of his old comrade? If he was, then he was capable of anything now. And that, of course, was the real question, the one that rose in her still, hour after hour, driving her into a torment that let go of her only while she slept — and sometimes not even then. Had Dan fired the shot that killed their Barney, his onetime best friend? Was he capable of such a thing? And was that the real reason he was keeping her and Norah apart?

He had assured her not, told her the kindest thing she could do for Norah was to leave her alone, insisted that Norah had expressly asked not to be contacted by the Parle family. And while he was before her, handsome and bulky and seemingly sincere, she'd believed him. His flashing eyes, the fervour of his words, his sorrow about Barney all but convinced her.

All but. But. But.

Words come easy to some but it's actions that tell the real story. If his reported doings were to be believed, only a fool could trust him. Organising round-ups; stalking about the county making raids and arrests galore; putting Lama, Molly, Des Fortune and other good friends behind bars: all that she knew to be true, but could maybe be explained by politics and conviction. She mightn't like that he thought different from the rest of them, and was willing to go against them, but it was a long leap from there to the other thing she suspected.

 And now, this. Lama, his friend and hers, to be shot at dawn. Executed — a word that was never made to fit any of them. If it was true, and Dan had any part in it, then she had her answer.

Trusty George clip-clopped on. Somewhere along the way, Peg fell into a place between waking and sleep. She was half-dreaming — Barney was chasing Norah down the strand with Dan running after them and Peg was looking on from the top of the cliff, helpless — when the sound of hooves and wheels hitting a harder surface jolted her awake.

A good road. They were coming into the town.

How did anybody live in a town at all, she wondered, as the houses started to cluster together and road turned to street. It was so unnatural. She wouldn’t be able to breathe if her house didn't have field around it and the sea in its sights. She put her face up to gulp some air and saw that light was cracking a thin, faint line across the horizon.

Dawn.

At dawn, I am to be shot for my part in Ireland's fight for freedom.

Oh pray God, not. Not.

The buildings huddled, stern in the darkness, saying nothing.

At the bottom of Hill Street she said, "Pull over the side here, Tipsy," and he did as bid. "Mrs White, you stay here and look after George. Tipsy and I will go see what we can find out."

The older woman's frightened eyes were so like her son's. How had Peg never noticed that before? She handed her the reins.

The sound of their boots rang loud in the empty streets as they ran towards the jail.

"What should we say when we get there?" she asked, knowing as soon as the words were out that Tipsy wouldn't have any ideas to offer. "Should we ask for Dan, do you think?"

All she got back was a shrug.

At the jail, there was nobody about: just the big oak door, closed, and the thick stone around it.

"There's nobody here," Tipsy said, specialising as always in stating the obvious, but she, too, had expected somebody outside. A sentry. Someone.

Tipsy knocked on the door. Nothing.

They knocked together, hard as they could, but the slab of wood swallowed the thin sound of their knuckles.

What now? She sat on a stone ledge, trying to straighten out the snarl of her feelings, to decide. How had she ended up here, outside a jail in the middle of the night, with Tipsy Delaney? Her brother dead, her best friend gone from her? Had she brought it on herself?

Was it that she liked being a freedom fighter more than was good for her? That she wanted her own way too much, as Dan said? Was he right? She saw that in her mother sometimes. Did she suffer from the same trait herself without knowing? Would she ever find in her thoughts a key that would open the door to peace? 

Everything around them was slowly revealing its lineaments as the sun rose, but no such emerging light for her. As she sat, watching shadows become shapes, a barrage of rifle fire suddenly sounded from inside the jail. She and Tipsy jumped up together. This fusillade was followed by four single shots at short intervals. The echo of it pounded in their ears and reverberated over the town, on the quiet of early morning.