He turned without finishing the sentence, and began to walk out of the room. He found that his eyes were pricking. Perhaps grief was near at hand, after all … Ryan allowed his glance to follow the other man for a long moment, compassionately, before he reached out his own two hands, towards the story and the spike.

Epilogue

The great Boston hall, the largest in the state, was crammed to the rafters; all tickets, indeed, had been sold out weeks before, and the rush when the doors opened had mirrored the traffic tie-up in all the nearby streets – a purposeful, close-packed, mainly silent crowd of people, converging on a single target. Many of them had been waiting outside for three and four hours: when the hall was opened, and they had surged into their places, they settled down again with subdued, reverent patience for the meeting to start. It was not an ordinary crowd: there was over the whole vast concourse an air of dedication which gave it a special quality.

On the platform were seated, not only all the Guild trustees, but representatives of every religious and charitable body in the state. They waited, grave-faced, unsmiling, for Mrs Bannister to appear; and down below in the packed hall the audience waited too – row upon row of them, and tier upon tier in the upper galleries of the hall. They talked in low tones; and just above the hum of voices, a string orchestra played gentle airs – not gay, not sepulchral, but poised between the two, on a sustained note of comfort and charity.

All round the hall, and down each aisle, was ranged a guard of honour of children – the City of Boston Tapalongs, in their green-and-white uniforms, and their white wands with the shamrock-shaped collecting bags on the ends. But there was one essential difference: tonight, every child wore a broad black sash, draped across the breast in the manner of an English diplomat; and the white wands had small black bows tied round their handles. Many of the smaller children were already crying. They, and the collecting bags, had been very busy, nonetheless.

It was the first memorial meeting in Boston for Esther Costello.

In the body of the hall, towards the back, near Harry Grant, two people were talking. They were a man and a woman, middle-aged, soberly dressed, wholehearted in their devout attention.

“Wonderful crowd here tonight.”

“She deserved it, poor kid.”

“Mrs Bannister will be pleased.”

“She deserves it, too. She gave up her whole life to Esther. And then to have it finish like that.”

“She’ll carry on, I guess.”

“There’s still plenty of work to do. For the blind.”

“You could say it was blindness killed Esther, in the end.”

“Easy to make a mistake, when you can’t see and there’s no one by.”

“Terrible thing for Mrs Bannister.”

“Perhaps she’ll tell us about it – share it with us.”

“It might be a help to her.”