HER NAUSEA CAME AND WENT. HER SKIN WAS AGLOW. Her belly protruded under the loose dress. She’d covered herself as best she could, but soon it would show. Cork City gaol under a grey sky, a grey stone castle, the wardens’ boots against the hard floors, the jingle of keys, the slamming of doors. Jamie looked at her across the table. He was thinner, had a couple of missing teeth. He tried to shrug.
‘Everyone knows he’s a hanging judge,’ he said. ‘It was always going to be…’
He fell quiet.
She wanted to reach across to him, but she couldn’t.
‘Why did you do it, Jamie?’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Why?’
‘It was for you! For us… For the baby.’
‘How?’ she said.
‘Home Rule will never come to pass,’ Jamie said. ‘We will rise to fight for it. We will free Ireland. Or we will always be dogs for the English to whip at their will.’
‘Where did you learn to talk like that, you damn fool!’ she said.
‘There are people, planning. Organising. That’s all I am going to say. We will be ready. There will be a war, Annie.’
She stared at him. He wasn’t smiling. She had him down as an easy-going lad. A good lay. Always up for some fun, always up for some mischief. But this? This was new. Did she not see it before, or was it that she did and didn’t want to?
She could respect a man like that, she thought.
But she couldn’t love him.
‘What was in the satchel, Jamie?’
‘Important papers. Information. Listen, Annie…’
All I do is listen to men talking, she thought.
‘What?’ she said.
‘If you need help. Go see Eleanor Wallace. She’s with… with the movement.’ He coughed. He didn’t look too well, she thought. But then, it wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it.
‘All right, Jamie,’ she said.
‘If it’s a boy,’ he said. ‘Will you call him James Patrick?’
He tried to smile. It didn’t take.
‘Of course, Jamie,’ she said. ‘Of course I will.’
*
‘Are you pregnant?’ Lady Julia demanded.
‘Excuse me?’
‘How irresponsible can you be, child?’
‘I am not a child!’ Annie said. She glared at Lady Julia. The older woman moved like a chiaroscuro, widow-black against the white studio lights.
‘And yet you got yourself knocked up,’ Lady Julia said. ‘Don’t lie to me, Annie. I knew you were hiding it. Hard to hide, though, as it grows.’
‘It?’ Annie said. ‘He will be a beautiful boy—’
Lady Julia sighed.
‘Children are a prison,’ she said, ‘designed to keep women in chains. Sit down.’
Annie sat down.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘You could take it to the convent,’ Lady Julia said. ‘That, or find yourself another husband to replace that Flynn of yours, but you’d have to be quick. Prospective husbands vanish like dew upon the morning when there’s a baby in the picture.’
‘I will make my own arrangements,’ Annie said.
‘Is that so? And what will you do for money, Annie? I do not need a pregnant assistant.’
‘I am hardly your assistant!’
‘It will not do,’ Lady Julia said. ‘You must cover it up better. You must wear looser clothes. You must powder your face, give it some pallor. You are too…’ She waved a hand. ‘Glowing,’ she said in distaste.
‘I am as women have been since the dawn of time, Lady Julia.’
‘But this is not the dawn of time, child! This is a new century under Christ, where many things are possible that were never possible before. The camera, Annie! The automobile! Perhaps, in time, even our right to vote! We are the way God made us, yes, but He made us with a brain to think, with hands to learn new skills, with hearts to yearn for more than what we have. You would throw it all away?’
‘I would not,’ Annie said.
‘Good,’ Lady Julia said. ‘Then do as I instruct. Perhaps, with luck, it will be into the sixth month before it becomes too obvious. In the meantime, I have another job for you.’
‘My lady?’
‘Don’t “my lady” me, child.’ Lady Julia almost smiled. ‘I dare say I see more in you than you see in yourself. Did I not give you this position? Did I not instruct you in the use of light and shade, of composition? There is a dead man down in Kinsale. Joe Doyle will drive you. You may spend the night there and claim it from expenses. Come back early. I do wish to help you, Annie. But children are expensive. You will not work once it is born. And I have spent too much, training you as a photographer, to let you go this easily. Put up the baby for adoption. It needs a father. It needs a family. Oh, take the Kodak again.’
‘I would like to take a tintype machine, too,’ Annie said.
‘What for? You are not an itinerant, Annie. We do not take beach snaps for pennies. We are artists.’
‘Just in case,’ Annie said.
Lady Julia shrugged.
‘As long as you record it in the book,’ she said, ‘and bring it back. Any damages will be deducted from your wage.’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you saving, Annie?’
‘Saving, Lady Julia?’
‘Saving money, for the hardships to come,’ Lady Julia said.
‘I try,’ Annie said.
‘I worry for you, Annie,’ Lady Julia said.
Annie thought, I worry for myself, too, Lady Julia.
‘Yes, my lady,’ she said.
She went to the stockroom. She signed out the Kodak and a tintype machine she liked, a flash lamp and powder, chemicals and stock. She carried it all outside.
Joe Doyle leaned against the cart.
‘Hey, Annie,’ he said.
‘Hey, Joe.’
‘Let me give you a hand,’ he said. He smiled shyly. ‘On account of your condition.’
‘Does everyone know!’ Annie said.
Joe shrugged. ‘Word gets around,’ he said. ‘You know how it is. Besides, your…’ He blushed. ‘You know. They’re bigger.’
‘My what?’
‘Bosoms, Annie. Sorry.’
He carried the equipment into the cart. Annie started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. All the tension, and the fear, about Jamie, the baby, the future – it all burst out of her, making her shake with laughter until she had to hold her ribs to stop them from aching.
‘What?’ Joe Doyle said. Then he, too, started to laugh.
‘My… bosoms? My bosoms!’ She roared with laughter until tears streamed down her face. Then she was crying, and Joe held her, saying, ‘What’s wrong, Annie? What’s wrong?’
She buried her face in his chest.
‘Everything, Joe,’ she said. ‘Everything’s wrong.’
‘Well, it will be all right,’ he said. ‘Everything will be all right.’
He helped her onto the cart.
‘Keep your eyes on the road, Joe,’ Annie said. A giggle escaped out of her, like a bubble rising to the surface of the water from a depth. She took a deep breath of air. Lady Julia was right. Annie didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t felt like this before. This… life, forming inside her. It was changing everything, changing her body. But she was still her, she thought. She was still Annie. She had the same dream, the same desire to stand on her own.
She thought of America. She needed money, because in everything in life you needed money, so she would have to take steps to acquire it. Lady Julia was right. It was the twentieth century, and everything was possible. One day she might even get to vote. She sat back, strangely comforted by that notion, and watched the road as Joe drove the horse on the road, out of town.
*
The rain rained and the fog fogged the green hills. A frog on the side of the road hopped into a puddle. It stared at the approaching cart with big, bulging eyes, as though the cart was a particularly large and juicy fly coming the frog’s way. The cart swayed from side to side, Joe humming as he held the reins, Annie holding on, half-drunk on all that quiet. She would miss it, she thought.
She had been thinking more and more of the ties that held her and the roots that went deep into that dark, wet soil. She was a green shoot out of that earth, she thought, and now she flowered, pollinated by a bee named Jamie. Plants couldn’t travel but they could die. And to live she would have to die herself: uproot herself from something that resembled peace to go elsewhere, across the sea. She would become someone new, she thought. Perhaps in her dotage she would sing old maudlin songs about the old country, and how much better everything was there. Perhaps everything is better when you’re young, she thought. And maybe that was just a crock of shit for people who liked banal quotes.
The rain rained, but gently. The fog fogged the green hills. A goat wandered across the road, indifferent to the approaching cart, to Joe Doyle’s singing, to Annie’s vacant stare. It was as if the goat was the only one real, and Annie, Joe and cart were merely ghosts, things from the past drifting like smoke across an empty road. The goat chewed grass and stared.
Thatched stone-walled cottages, a church. The bell rang as they passed. As Annie watched, a silent procession emerged from the church, a priest in front, holding a chalice, and black-clad monks behind him, carrying a coffin. They chanted Latin. The cart rolled on. They passed a graveyard with the headstones broken and jutting out of the ground at angles, the grass grown over the graves. A barefoot child stepped out from under an ash and stared at them as they passed, chewing a blade of grass thoughtfully.
Did he even see them? Annie thought. She felt uneasy. The rain made sound disappear, Cork was long vanished behind them, and she felt as though she were drowning, going on some quest into the netherworld. The road crossed ponds swelling with water next, a fisherman with rod and wire stood on one bank and watched them pass. He waved. It seemed incongruous. Joe Doyle waved back.
‘I liked your man,’ he said.
‘John Savage?’
‘Him,’ Joe said.
‘He liked you, too, I think,’ Annie said.
‘Oh, that he did, he does,’ Joe said.
‘You’ll see him again?’ Annie said.
‘Could be. Could be.’ Joe brooded. ‘It doesn’t do, you know,’ he said. ‘A bit of fun and games and all is well and good, but a man needs a wife and babies to call himself a man.’
‘You’re still a man, Joe,’ Annie said.
‘Perhaps.’ He brooded. ‘Not everyone sees it that way.’
‘I do,’ Annie said.
‘And you are leaving,’ he said, giving her a sudden, unexpected smile.
‘You know?’ she said.
‘Annie,’ Joe said. ‘Your face is a book even the village idiot could read. Him best of all, perhaps. It takes one to know one.’
She laughed suddenly. ‘You’re calling me an idiot?’ she said.
‘It takes one to know one,’ he said, and laughed too.
‘I’ll miss you, Joe,’ she said.
‘I’ll miss you too. Perhaps I’ll follow you,’ he said. ‘There are so many Irish in America now it may as well be Ireland.’
Horses ran in a field on their left. Smoke rose from a stable. Annie heard the sound of hammer on metal, a man shoeing a horse. She wouldn’t miss it, she thought. She was never a country girl. She wanted to hear the sea again, the cry of gulls, the ocean swell, the sound of the waves against the docks. A dog barked in the distance. All was well.
By early evening they had crested one last hill and in the dying sunlight they beheld the harbour of Kinsale.