The Wonder(52)

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.”

“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?”