The Wonder(51)

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.”