Imelda lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening to his steady rhythmic breathing. Sometimes she wondered if Larry wasn’t interested in her anymore. He hadn’t come near her for a few months after Peter was born, eighteen months ago, telling her to ‘let things settle’. She heard the baby whimpering in his cot and got out of bed and went over to tuck him in where he’d kicked off his blankets. She looked at his downy head of dark hair, illuminated in the moonlight. He was a sturdy wee chap, who got on with things. Keelin, her ten-year-old, was a stubborn little madam, like she’d been, Imelda acknowledged, smiling in the dark. Cormac, the eldest of her two sons, was placid and loving, like his father. She knew she shouldn’t have favourites, but he was hers. By this time next year there’d be another baby in the cot, and that would be the end of it, Imelda vowed. She wasn’t going to wait for the Women’s Movement to liberate her from the rulings of the Church. She was going to bloody well liberate herself.

*

Imelda had crested the top of the big hill between Ardcloch and Glencarraig when nausea overtook her. She pulled in to the side of the road and got out of the car, afraid she might be sick. Twilight had fallen softly on the countryside; only the sound of a dog barking and the crackling of the hoarfrost underfoot broke the still silence.

Imelda took some deep breaths, the inhaled air burning her lungs with the cold, the exhaled forming a white mist in the dark night. Only the starlight, and the twinkling of window lights in the houses scattered across the fields, broke the velvet darkness in the valley to her left. To her right, the dim orange hue from the street lamps of Glencarraig, two miles away, called her home.

She’d no sooner climbed back into the car, when the first excruciating cramp struck, followed swiftly by another. She felt the blood flow through her, unstoppable, like another miscarriage she’d suffered.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she whispered. ‘Help me get home.’ She started the car, taking deep shallow breaths. This was her punishment for wanting to use contraception. For not welcoming the child she was bearing. She knew of two women in Glencarraig that were in the depths of despair because they could not conceive. Women who would have danced with joy to be expecting, unlike herself, who had seen her pregnancy as an act of oppression. Now she was paying for her sinful ingratitude.

She was being smote by the hand of God.