Chapter 23

Hannah saw Monsarrat as he crossed the yard. He looked over and nodded, but he was walking with his hands clasped behind his back – a sure sign of some sort of consternation.

The women were trickling back to their work, into the rooms where even the dust smelled burned, under the eyes of men who didn’t care how uncomfortable they were as long as they met their quota and didn’t give any trouble.

Perhaps Monsarrat had been sent to see Rohan. She would be most interested to hear what he had to say this evening, as well as to find out why he was looking towards the Third Class penitentiary in an apparent state of agitation.

Tonight she would have some information of her own, of course. The discussion with Helen had been in equal parts horrifying and useful.

As the yard drained of all but Hannah, she glanced up to the second-storey window she knew to be Lizzie’s. She looked around a few times for Rebecca, felt in the pocket of her skirt, closed her fingers around the metal in it. Rebecca sometimes entrusted her with the keys to various Factory buildings. Not the gaol, of course, or the stores, but some offices and workrooms and so on.

‘I’m so absent-minded, Hannah. And I don’t want to ruin the line of my dress with this big metal lump. Here, you take them. Then I’ll know where they are,’ she had said.

And really Mrs Nelson had not left her with any instructions as to what not to do with the keys. Any instructions at all, really. While she seemed to have changed her mind about Hannah visiting Lizzie, she had never actually forbidden it.

‘The woman isn’t here to instruct me one way or the other,’ she muttered to herself, and made for the stairs.

*  *  *

As she hurried up the stairs to Lizzie’s floor, Hannah felt nervous. ‘You’ve faced worse than an old madwoman,’ she said to herself. Had anyone been there to remind her that the old woman was around the same age as her, they’d have felt the corner of her cleaning cloth.

She knocked, gently. She suspected Lizzie wouldn’t answer, but it seemed somehow worse to enter without knocking than it did to use the keys without permission in the first place.

She heard no sounds of movement from within the room so she turned the key and put her hand to the door, and scolded herself when she noticed it was trembling. She pushed. Those hinges were in a state, by the looks of them.

Lizzie lay on her small cot, facing the wall, not moving. A bowl of food lay untouched on the floor beside her. For a moment Hannah was concerned enough to watch to see whether Lizzie was breathing.

She was. It wasn’t the slow, deep breathing of the sleeper, either. Hannah was sure that Lizzie was awake.

‘Hello, Lizzie,’ she said quietly.

Lizzie didn’t move. But she spoke. ‘Eddie scolded me for hitting you. But you shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have done that to my Richard.’

‘I did nothing to your Richard, nor to any one of yours,’ Hannah said, keeping her voice soft, a soothing, singsong cadence she might have used to comfort Padraig when he was a boy. ‘And you did nothing to my Colm, or to my father. Other people did all that. It was a long time ago, now, you know.’

‘A month may be a long time for you, but not for me,’ Lizzie said.

Hannah was walking very slowly closer to the bed. Half-bracing herself for the kind of attack only the insane seemed capable of.

‘Lizzie, it was not a month ago. It was twenty-seven years. There are men who were not born then who are now officers in His Majesty’s army.’

‘My Richard might have been an officer in the army. He’s dead now. The Irish killed him.’

‘It was a terrible time, wasn’t it?’ said Hannah, reaching the cot. ‘My son is grown now, and he had not yet been conceived when the trouble started, but I can still smell the smoke from the burning thatch, from the houses. I still hear the yells.’

‘Yes, they never stop,’ said Lizzie. ‘Nor the screams, neither. But the burning – the burning of wood and thatch, I wish that was the worst of it. Those of us in our town, we smelled something different.’

‘What did you smell, Lizzie?’

‘When people burn, they smell like lamb,’ Lizzie said, with a suddenly cheerful tone. ‘Imagine that! You’d never have expected it, would you? Lamb roast. It’s my favourite.’

She rolled over to look at Hannah. She was smiling, but tears were falling down her cheeks.

‘Was it you? Did you?’ she asked.

‘No, Lizzie, it wasn’t me. What happened to your dear ones also happened to mine. And I am no more pleased by the death of yours than I was by the death of mine.’

‘Did yours die in Scullabogue too?’

Hannah almost fainted when she heard the name. Scullabogue. A place her father wouldn’t discuss, nor Colm. The place that had made her realise brutality was not confined to the British. For after the rebels had lined up and shot some of the Scullabogue Protestants, they’d set alight a barn containing as many as two hundred other Protestants, including women and children. Twice the desperate occupants had managed to break down the barn door. But they were unable to get past the pikemen stationed there, who drove them back in. During one of the skirmishes a two-year-old child had managed to crawl through the feet of the rebels, moving as fast as he could towards the clear air. His last breath would have tasted of smoke. When he was noticed, he was piked through.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, Lizzie, but they didn’t die far from there. And any such death in any place is inexcusable. I can understand why hearing an Irish voice upset you so.’

‘It’s just thinking of Richard, you see. The last time I saw him, my head was full of Irish voices.’

‘Was he a yeoman?’

‘A yeoman! What a ridiculous idea!’ Lizzie emitted a giggle, a surprisingly girlish one at that.

‘But you said he might have been an officer.’

‘He might have been, had he lived long enough. I left him with my sister, you see, told them to hide in the barn while I ran to try to get help. He was in the barn when they burned it. Yes, he might have been an officer. He certainly enjoyed waving a sword around. But when they burned him in the barn, you see, he was only three years old.’

Lizzie’s face crumpled, almost fell in on itself, and she began to cry. Not dainty tears, nor the gasping of Helen. A keen, a wail, consistent, flat and hopeless.

Hannah sat down next to her and drew her into an embrace, wondering if she would be rebuffed. She wasn’t, and for some minutes they sat there as Lizzie leaked and wailed onto Hannah’s shoulder.

‘Do you think you can stop them?’ Lizzie asked finally. ‘Maybe there’s still time. Before anyone else dies.’

‘Lizzie, my love. It’s over. You can rest, now. It won’t happen to anyone else.’

Hannah knew this was a ridiculous statement. It could happen again. But Lizzie was not in the kind of state to deal with nuances.

‘Perhaps, Lizzie, we should try to be friends. People being friends – that’s the best way to stop this sort of thing, isn’t it?’

‘Friends. Yes. Friends don’t kill each other. Eddie said you just wanted to be nice. That’s why she was so cross at me for hitting you. She couldn’t understand why I would do that to someone who was just trying to be nice. And she told me it was rude to use that name in front of you.’

‘Lizzie, can I ask you a question? Who is Eddie?’

‘You know Eddie! You were here with her the other day!’ Lizzie’s face clouded then. ‘Was it you? Or someone who looked like you? You’re not a croppy in disguise, are you?’

‘No, no. It was me. But the lady who brought me here the other day is called Rebecca.’

‘She does like to pretend,’ said Lizzie fondly, as though she was talking of an imaginative child. ‘She always did. At night she would tell stories, you see. About dragons and castles, mostly, and handsome princes rescuing damsels. Not very popular with some, though. Not enough handsome princes to go around.’

‘She told stories? To you? Does she come to you at night to do that?’

‘No, of course not – she didn’t need to come. She was already there. In the dormitory, with the rest of us. She spoke so beautifully. She sounded like a princess herself; it was hard to remember that she was no different.’

‘No different from the rest of you? But she’s a free lady.’

‘Yes. She’s a clever girl. But she’ll always be Eddie to me.’

‘Are you sure, Lizzie? It is a boy’s name.’

‘Well, I have known boys called Eddie, it is true,’ Lizzie said. ‘But my Eddie, her name is Edwina.’

‘And you’re certain it’s the same woman, Lizzie?’

‘I am not a liar,’ Lizzie said, beginning to turn away. ‘I’ve never seen hair like that on anyone else.’

‘I know you’re not, Lizzie. But the woman you call Eddie is the wife of a prosperous merchant, a Quaker at that. She’s a free woman.’

‘Yes, she’s done well for herself.’ Lizzie began to chuckle now. ‘A kind man, too. Not like Robert Church.’

‘Do you know what happened to him? Has Rebecca told you? Eddie, I mean? What did she say?’

A look of suspicion began to bleed into Lizzie’s eyes. ‘Eddie says I mustn’t tell tales,’ she said, like a child.

Of course, Lizzie could be imagining things, thought Hannah. There may indeed have been an Edwina living here, and she may indeed have looked like Rebecca yet borne no other similarity to her. But it didn’t seem entirely likely.

Now, she left Lizzie’s side and walked over to the window, suddenly anxious to get a sense of the vantage point Lizzie would have had if she’d seen the attack on Robert Church.

The yard was in almost full view. Church’s body had been found in the middle of it. If he’d fallen where he was stabbed – and it was hard to see how he wouldn’t have, for why would an assailant move the body from a secluded spot into plain view – anyone standing where Hannah was now would have had an unimpeded view of the whole business, although whether they could have recognised the murderer from this distance at night was a question Hannah couldn’t answer.

But she could see Rebecca clearly enough now, walking across the empty space, seemingly looking for someone. She turned back from the window.

‘Lizzie, does it get lonely here?’

‘Sometimes, I suppose. I have my thoughts to keep me company, but sometimes they are thoughts I don’t want.’

‘Would you like me to come and sit with you one evening?’

Lizzie looked doubtful.

‘I could bring shortbread.’

‘I’ve always loved shortbread,’ said Lizzie.

‘So perhaps one evening soon I will visit you and help you count off the dark hours with the aid of my best shortbread.’

Lizzie said nothing, but smiled.

‘One thing, though, Lizzie,’ Hannah said. ‘Rebecca – Eddie – said you mustn’t tell tales, and she was right. My visits should be a secret. Not something to tell tales about. Do you understand?’

Lizzie nodded solemnly. ‘When you come, bring some shortbread for Richard, too,’ she said. ‘He does love it. Sometimes the promise of it is the only way I can get him into bed of an evening.’