Ashton came in and said good-day to Dr Wood, then stood and looked down at Jane’s head protruding from its mound of furs and bound like an Egyptian mummy with her white bandages. Nancy brought in a chair for him and he, too, reached out for Jane’s cold hand and held it, so that he and Julietta seemed to play the role of her keepers, and they hoped that they were leading her, not towards death’s prison, but towards a resumption of her life.

All night, they stayed like this, barely moving. In the early hours, Dr Wood departed, leaving the laudanum jar by the bedside and promising to return at midday. Nancy showed the doctor out and then came back to the hall, where she had had to sluice away Jane’s blood with her mop and scoop up the broken foetus in her bare hands. Now, she wept for the tiny embryo she had tipped into the night-soil bucket. Then she washed herself and changed her clothes, and made coffee on the range and took this up to Ashton and Julietta, who were talking about the terrible events of the afternoon, in soft voices, while outside the chimes of old St. Peter’s Church tolled the hours.

Towards morning, Julietta went down into the hall and stared up at the damaged portrait, torn at the very centre of the picture. Pieces of the canvas hung down, revealing the wall behind, and Julietta was disturbed to see that it was in fact the area of Jane’s womb which had been destroyed. And it shocked her to realise that Valentine Ross, wherever he had fled, might live the rest of his life never knowing that he had murdered his own child.

A STATE OF MARVELLOUS DREAMING

Knowing nothing of all this, Clorinda Morrissey was in Dublin.

Word had reached her that her niece Maire had ‘succumbed’, despite the expensive interventions of the Dublin surgeons and had been laid to rest in the little cemetery at the end of Bishop Street, where, in autumn, the rowan trees shed a carpet of orange berries onto the graves.

Michael Morrissey wrote to Clorinda that ‘the thyroid gland, once removed from poor Maire’s body, may have caused her other organs to act wrongfully, being turned against their proper functions, so that she and we endured distress beyond your imagining.’

Clorinda wished to reply that nothing was ‘beyond her imagining’. She had lived through the famine. She had seen the Liffey freighted with dead bodies. She had seen the stomachs of babies burst from the gas of starvation. But she knew, also, that now her quarrel with Michael had to end. He had lost one of his beloved girls. She would have to show mercy towards him, no matter what it cost her.

She found him and his wife, Kathleen in a state of dumb sorrow. Michael was unable to go to work at the Anchor Brewery, he told her, ‘because my legs just won’t carry me there’. He sat all day by the smoky fire in the parlour, ladling on coal, watching the blue and yellow of the flames, choking on the smoke, spitting phlegm onto the dusty floor.