I knew what my husband’s departure would mean for Patricio and me. We would have to reside again with Mrs. Brenane, Charles’s maternal aunt. While I did prefer the outskirts of Dublin to the city itself, I did not prefer Mrs. Brenane’s household in Rathmines to my own. Widows, especially those without children, had only their grief for company, so they nourished and indulged it, like a lapdog or a parrot. Mrs. Brenane’s grief inhabited all the rooms of her manor house and made it seem much smaller than it was. Her live-in servants took up room as well, the entire top floor, though I doubted any of them ever slept soundly up there, given what she expected of them during their waking hours.

I had never seen dust treated like a disease before. Each book in her library had to be taken off the shelf every day and caressed with a cloth, like the forehead of a dying man. I had never seen people treated like they were diseased either. Her servants all wore a white cotton cloth tied over their mouths. Every day, their clothing, right down to their undergarments, had to be hung up outside and beaten as if they were odd-shaped rugs. That sound—multiple sails whipping against a strong headwind—and the chirping of the birds signaled the break of dawn in Rathmines.

Patricio, when you and I first came to your grandaunt’s manor house, I thought that we also would be made to wear a cloth. We came to Mrs. Brenane’s because she came to us first. We had been in Dublin for about a month—a city so shrouded in fog upon our arrival that I knew it at first only by its sounds—and were staying on Lower Gardiner Street at the town house belonging to your grandmother Hearn, Mrs. Brenane’s sister. I never learned which one was the elder of the two. Both wore the same facial expressions—the disgust that comes with the taste of a spoiled oyster—and had sallow, papery skin that would have cracked, if they smiled. I did not need their language to understand that there was no love lost between the sisters and that they had chosen you and me as a site for their duel, but without their language I had no way of understanding the nature of their feud until we were already living within Mrs. Brenane’s home.