And this was a pity, for a cursory study of the admission records would have shown him that a Catherine Foley, a young woman nineteen years of age and with an infant a week or two old, had arrived at the asylum’s doors very late on Friday evening.

Catherine Foley was still here, her name invented—borrowed, perhaps, was a fairer description—but her predicament real enough. Common enough. For the asylum was full this night and every night. Catherine was the name of Alice’s mother, Foley her maiden name, a girl from the west of Ireland and, though she had been dead these five years, Catherine Nimrod could, in this way, help her daughter.

And Alice Nimrod needed help. She lay with her dead sister’s baby on a tiny cot in a long and echoing ward crammed with such cots rammed up against each other, leaving not an inch of space between, and the hundred and more women who filled this place tossed and turned, cursed and wept. Some of the women had their babies with them and some did not. Some of the women had lost their babies, and in another ward not too far away were the babies who had lost their mothers. There was little talking among the inmates; each was wrapped tightly within her own separate world. This was not to say the place was quiet and calm, for misery is rarely quiet and here, where so many souls, their spirits and their bodies broken, gathered in a single space, the misery leached out of the walls and echoed in the very rafters, it rose up out of the floor. It was made manifest in the legion of vermin that crawled and burrowed through the soiled bedding and over the scabbed bodies of the women.

But there was order, of a kind, among the misery. The women—those who could stand, who could walk a few yards unaided—had attended the service at the chapel that morning. A Proddy service, it had turned out, and Alice Nimrod, who had never been to such a thing before, had sat and wondered at it, at the emptiness of it, as if they were addressing a different God entirely and not the God she was used to; one who was very far away and who seemed untroubled by earthly failings. And in her mind this distant Proddy God became confused with the Dunlevys, who were equally grand and distant and untroubled by things that tore other people’s lives apart.

She did not feel the injustice of her situation, for it seemed to her that if you stood too close to these distant gods, the Dunlevys, you might get burned and she had got burned. It was the way of things.