The Next Day May 1886 Dawrosmore, County Galway, Western Ireland

“Ya’re nothing but trouble.” Her mother’s face, ruddy and lined, sneers as she forces shirts through the mangle. In front of them, a large pile of trousers, the last of the drawers.

What have I done now? Mary Agnes thinks.

“Don’t talk back at me.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“I said, don’t talk back.” Spittle flies from Anna Coyne’s mouth. “Fiach told me everything. How ya lured him into yer bed—”

“I did nothing of the sort, Mam!”

“And then ya attacked him with a candlestick!”

“It should have been a knife.”

Anna Coyne drops a wet shirt and rushes her daughter. She slaps her across the mouth.

Mary Agnes stands her ground and wipes blood from her lip with her sleeve. How many times have I been slapped? And for reasons not of my doing?

She doesn’t break contact with her mother’s steely eyes. “You’ve no call to do that. I did nothing of the sort,” she repeats. “I were asleep, Mam. He came at me while I were asleep.”

“A lie,” her mam says. “I won’t have a whore under our roof.” She throws the now-filthy shirt into the dirty clothes basket.

Whore? When he came at me in the night?

“Remember the Coffey girl? Yer friend who got tangled up with the O’Connor boy?” Her mother scowls.

Oh, I remember. Chapter and verse. And not just the O’Connor boy. The whole lot of them in the RIC coming after her.

“Ya’d have to beg the good sisters to take ya in now.” She spits at Mary Agnes’s feet. “Inviting yer own brother into yer bed.”

“Mammy! Are you listening?”

“Fiach told me more than what I needed to hear.” Her face twists into a scowl. “That it were ya that attacked him.”

“It were him that attacked me, Mammy, I swear.”

Anna Coyne swipes at the shirt, her face red and contorted. “All that book learning and suddenly ya’re too good for the likes of us. Let yer gram and granddad take ya in.”

“You’re throwing me out? Of my own home?” Mary Agnes flings the now-clean shirt back onto the ground and storms into the cottage. She climbs the ladder to her loft bedroom, rifles through cobwebs and trunks to find a battered satchel, and packs in it her clothes, hair combs, handkerchiefs.

I tell you what I would have enjoyed, Mammy. Knocking Fiach senseless. Running him through with a knife and leaving him there to bleed.

She looks out the attic window, her eye out to the greater world, and takes a moment to memorize the view. Wrapping her brown stole around her shoulders, she steps rung-by-rung down the ladder, marches past her mother and younger brothers without a word and slams the door. In driving rain, she turns right toward her grandparent’s cottage, a mile off at the end of the peninsula. Tommy calls out after her, but she can’t turn around. She won’t give her mother the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

MARY AGNES RUSHES DOWN THE RUTTED lane across the treeless peninsula from Dawrosmore to Dawrosbeg. As she crosses the narrow neck that separates the two, she pulls her stole closer to avoid the cold cross wind, Ballynakill Harbour to the north and Barnaderg Bay the south. A mile on, winding up and over the hill, she passes several identical cottages before she arrives at her grandparents’ small stone house at the end of Rev. Magee’s thirteen holdings on the claw-shaped point. It’s impossible to own land here. There would never be enough money for that, even if you weren’t Catholic.

She was tempted to go to Jonesy. He would understand, hold her close, shush words into her hair and stroke her neck. Is there a boy so fine-looking, so kind, within miles? No. But midday he could be anywhere, in the field, in the barn, gone into town. She can’t wait to be with him again. Was it just yesterday that they stole kisses behind the barn? When his hands touch the small of her back, it sends shivers up her spine. Still, she will have to confess, every second of it.

Crossing the threshold of her grandparents’ cottage, Mary Agnes runs straight into her grandmother’s large bosom. Grace Laffey winces and then pats Mary Agnes on the head. “Shh, now, whatever can be the matter?” She shifts so that Mary Agnes is snuffling into the other side of her chest. Grace Laffey is a full head shorter than Mary Agnes, but don’t let that fool you. She’s as tough as they come with a tongue to prove it.

Low, exposed wooden beams line the ceiling and a peat fire crackles in the hearth. Mary Agnes’s feet, caked with mud, streak the wooden floor. Well-worn furniture invites long evenings of stories, old tales that ooze from the cottage every night.

Neighbors don’t bother to knock at Festus’s door—it is always open. “God save all here,” they say as they trundle in, dripping with rain. “God save ya kindly,” is always Grace’s reply, and a seat and warm mug of tea or a drop of whiskey offered, thank you.

Festus bustles into the cottage smelling of wet wool and love. “What have we got here? More troubles with yer mam, Aggie?”

Mary Agnes nods, wiping snot from her nose.

“She’s been sour ever since she married that—”

“Shush yer mutterings, Festus. That’s not for the girl to hear.”

“The girl knows it already. Her da’s a drunk. Thinks he can grace the pub all day, he does. Like rules don’t apply to him. And he’s no fisherman. Our people are fishermen.” He raises his voice.

“Festus! Enough now!” Grace throws a stern look at her husband. “Marriage is a long lane that has no turning.”

And don’t I know that? Being a Coyne? Mary Agnes thinks.

Festus Laffey hangs his coat on a peg. “Aye, and sometimes that lane is as pleasant as a rose in June.” He touches Grace’s cheek.

Grace colors like a schoolgirl.

Festus winks at Mary Agnes. “True,’tis.” He sits in his familiar chair by the turf fire to pack his pipe. Tobacco in, tamp, tamp, tamp. And then, after lighting the match, he pulls his legs up, one at a time, so his feet rest on the small footstool. He sits, content, exhaling sweet-smelling tobacco. “I’ve got some good news for ya, girl. We’ve hired a new tutor for ya. He’s coming this very afternoon.”

“A tutor? For me?” How can you afford it, Granda?

Festus leans back and draws on his pipe again. “A girl needs to know her letters and sums as well as a boy. Maybe even moreso.”

“I’m good at sums already, Granda. And letters. Mam says that’s enough learning for a girl.” And I can’t have you spending all your money on me when the rent’s due.

“There’s more, love. Much more.” He exhales smoke with his words. “History and Latin. Geography. Poetry.”

Poetry, Mary Agnes loves, especially those in the old language, but she is curious about new Irish poets, too. She scribbles poems herself, not very good ones, half-written lines on scraps of paper she saves. A few nights ago, in her attic room at home, she composed a short rhyme.

Little window, white and spare,

Give me what you will,

The world itself, rude and bare,

Or birds upon the sill.

If she works at it, perhaps her poetry will improve. It has to improve.

“But what about fishing?” she asks.

“Ya’re welcome anytime.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” Festus slurps his tea.

Not long after, a knock.

“Ah, that must be the young lad. Seamus Bourke’s the name. From Dublin.” Festus lumbers up, crosses the great room, and opens the cottage door. “Come in, young fellow. Get yerself out of this rain. Grace, put on the kettle.” He takes the young man’s wrap. “Let ya sit down,” he says and points to a chair by the fire.

The young man, tall and lanky, wears a disheveled waistcoat and sports a mop of dark, unruly hair under a drenched cap. The hem of his trousers is threadbare and his tie askew. Mary Agnes thinks he looks like he was just run through a mangle and is in dire need of pressing.

Festus stands behind Mary Agnes. “This is yer pupil, Miss Coyne.”

“Pardon, but you didn’t say it was a . . . girl,” the young man says, choking on his words, eyes wide as shillings beneath fogged eyeglasses. He removes his eyeglasses with ink-stained fingers and wipes them with a handkerchief.

“Would ya have come if I did?” Festus asks. He winks at Mary Agnes again.

Mary Agnes sets a teacup on the small table next to the tutor and folds her arms across her chest. “So you know, sir, I’m as good as any boy with letters and sums. I’ve been to the local school for three grades, until my mam needed me with the littles.”

The tutor smiles.

“And that’s the truth of it,” Festus says. “Smart as a whip, this one. Could go to university anywhere.”

“Five times three?” Seamus asks.

“Fifteen,” Mary Agnes answers.

“Eight times six?

Mary Agnes shakes her head. “You’ll have to make it a bit harder, sir. That’s third form.”

The tutor suppresses a smile.

Festus ruffles Mary Agnes’s hair and turns back to the lanky tutor. “I hope ya find yer lodgings satisfactory. I spoke to Murphy, the barkeep. Said ya’d have one of his finest rooms.”

“Hmph. Means the roof don’t leak,” Grace says.

The young man nods. “The rooms are more than satisfactory, sir. Much better than my rooms at—” He dribbles tea on his stained trousers. “Oh, drat.” He smiles at the girl then. “When shall we start?”

“Ya’re staying then?” Grace asks.

“Seems I have a promising pupil.”

Festus pats the young man on the back. “Well, that’s settled then. Come tomorrow at nine. Ya’ll work mornings and stay for dinner. But off on Fridays.” He puts a large arm around Mary Agnes. “The girl and I have other plans on Fridays.”

Through the week, after her morning lessons, Mary Agnes helps her gram with washing up, laundry, stacking wood. Ironing, sweeping, airing out pillows. In peat-smoky evenings, Festus sits court as he spins tales about wild Irish kings and fierce Irish queens. Faeries and warriors. Sea people so beautiful you could be drawn underwater forever and not regret it, the drowning, that is.

Sometimes the Laffey’s cottage is so crowded with kinfolk and neighbors and friends (never Mary Agnes’s people, they don’t come), Mary Agnes wonders if another person could possibly fit, and then the door creaks open and her gram pulls out another hassock or three-legged stool or trunk and everyone crams in, enrapt, as Festus tells stories late into the night.

And then someone is wont to take up a fiddle or flute, a bodhran or penny whistle, and tunes jump up, vibrant and spirited, like something alive, and everyone, young and old, is set to hand clapping and foot stomping as, one by one, old men and young, boys—girls, even—take turns singing old stories to life.

“Come, Aggie,” Festus says, and Mary Agnes gets up from where she sits on the floor near her gram and stands by the fire, her auburn hair fanning out from her face and falling below her shoulders to her waist, and, in a simple dress, thin, bare-legged with no shoes, begins the song of Grace O’Malley, the famous Irish pirate queen, and the noise in the cottage swells and her heart swells with it.

“Let’s have ‘The Walls of Limerick,’” someone yells then, and chairs are pushed back to the edges of the cottage and musicians strike up the lively tune. Men and women, boys and girls, form sets. Up two paces, back two paces, the dance begins, Mary Agnes grasping Jonesy’s hand, her face and heart flushed.

It is here, in this tiny cottage at the end of this small peninsula jutting out into the ever-angry sea, Mary Agnes is enfolded in warmth and laughter and love. No raw words. No knives. No rattling ladders. And always music and the promise of Fridays.

She may have worries, what girl of thirteen does not? But she has no fears—none at all—like she does home with her mam and her da and Fiach, a mere mile away. It might as well be half a world away, John and Anne Coyne’s cottage, the difference is so pronounced.

After she smoors the peat fire, covering live embers with ashes that will be fanned into flame in the morning, Mary Agnes climbs the stout ladder to her attic room and settles under thick quilts, tired out, but without the hammer pounding in her stomach. She ate today. And she sang tonight. These things fill her as she prays:

Slivered moon, encased by night

Shining like earth’s candlelight

Watch me now as I sleep

And til the morning safely keep.