We Meet Apart Part 1

A novel by Martha Conway

 

 

“My basic view of the world is that right next to the world we live in, the one we’re all familiar with, is a world we know nothing about, an unfamiliar world that exists concurrently with our own. The structure of that world, and its meaning, can’t be explained in words. But the fact is that it’s there, and sometimes we get a glimpse of it, just by chance.”

Haruki Murakami, interview in The New Yorker, 2018

 

“Throughout the descriptions of this early [Celtic] religion there is always the feeling that the deities are never far away and that the Otherworld, or next life, is only just barely hidden from view, ready to become visible at a moment’s notice.”

In Search of Ancient Ireland

 

“These siths or fairies they call sleagh maith or the good people … and best seen at twilight.”

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, 1692

 

 

________________

 

 

So We must meet apart – 
You there – I – here – 
With just the Door ajar

Emily Dickinson

 

________________

 

 

June 24, 1940
Ireland
Dieter Ott

Prologue

He’s not nervous until he sees the expression on the pilot’s face looking back toward the rear of the aeroplane. Dieter looks, too. Smoke is rising from the Dornier’s starboard engine.

He had just been gazing out his small, square window thinking how Ireland reminds him of Germany: the sloping hills and brown rivers, the green fields and gray stone houses. His grandmother’s house outside Hamburg was made of just this kind of stone. It had cherry-red shutters and a veranda where they ate breakfast in good weather. He was sent to Oma—“that old witch,” his father called her—for the first time when he was four, the day after his baby sister was accidentally scalded to death in a boiling bath. After that he spent every summer with her, away from his mother’s bruised face and his father’s temper. It was the only place where, as a child, Dieter was happy.

The pilot, Walther Anschuler, nudges the radio operator sitting next to him. He cocks his head at the problem: a rising gray plume wagging in the wind like a tail.

Dieter is sitting alone in the rear double seat. Today marks midsummer, traditionally the time halfway between planting and harvest. He’s got a roll of film in the heel of his boot, which has been cleverly hollowed out for this purpose, but if they crash he’s got to ditch the camera. It’s twilight, the time of day when, according to his Oma, ghosts can be seen walking our world. Technically, civil twilight; Dieter calculates the sun to be only 5 or 6 degrees below the horizon. They’d counted on cloud cover to hide them or, failing that, indecision on the part of the Irish. They’ve no anti-aircraft machinery, the Irish, and their army is mostly volunteers on bicycles. Plus they’re neutral; a neutral country. A German Dornier—the famous “Flying Pencil”—should not be in their airspace.

The radio operator starts sending out a distress signal.

“You must try to land her,” Dieter tells Anschuler loudly, over the noise.

“Yes, yes,” Anschuler says as he cranes his neck left and right looking for a suitable place. He’s the same age as Dieter, twenty-two, but seems younger. His face is stiff, all bone and nose. His forehead is bright with sweat. He doesn’t like to be told what to do but Dieter is in charge of this recon.

The engine coughs and hisses as though someone is applying wire cutters to it, raising sparks. As the plane’s metal frame starts to wobble, Dieter spots a block of shops ending in a long, flat field.

“There.”

He’s leaning forward trying to read the altimeter over Anschuler’s shoulder when something through the windscreen makes him blink. One of the shops is displaying a German banner. A trick of the light? But no, there’s the white circle with the Nazi insignia. Even more surprising: a German Panzer truck is parked on the road. But that’s impossible. The German high command has not committed itself to an invasion of the Irish Free State, as they like to call Ireland. At least not yet. What would it be like, Dieter has wondered, to rule the Irish like the Norse did, and the English after them? To teach their children German, lead competitive games, reward healthy habits and physical bravery? Dieter’s supervisor back in Hamburg declared the Irish unteachable; “subhuman,” he called them. A word cast in many directions these days.

The plane circles the shops as it descends. The Nazi banner flaps in the wind. “Do you see that?” Dieter asks.

But Anschuler has begun pulling the nose up to bleed off excessive speed. The plane’s wobble has grown into a violent shaking, and the smell of smoke and burning fuel fills the cabin. Although the field looks to be long enough, there’s a ditch and a stand of trees to clear first.

Dieter leans forward again. “Keep above 300 hundred feet until the last turn.”

But as he’s speaking the starboard engine coughs and cuts out.

No more turns. They have to land.

Anschuler pulls at the controls furiously, trying to hold the plane steady as it approaches the field. The radio operator—an old man at forty—is clutching his iron cross while barns and stone houses zoom in ever closer. In the day’s leftover sunlight Dieter can see grain glittering as though their tips have been dipped in ice.

Is this how it ends? Will there be another world after this one? His stomach tightens but, strangely, he isn’t afraid. His skin sings with feeling and he’s awash in a kind of brilliant heat. He can remember every movement his body has ever made: skating on Herr Graesler’s pond in winter, swimming in the Elbe, dancing on an outdoor platform at a midsummer party in France. Two American girls, one missing her right hand, watch him foxtrot. He can feel the weight of their gaze. Then the wind wraps itself around the plane and tilts it hard.

“Left rudder!” Dieter shouts. He holds onto his safety belt and grips the knapsack between his knees as the earth rushes up to swallow them.

“The dead watch us,” his Oma used to say, “waiting for their cue to enter.”

 

 

Chapter 1

 

April 9, 1940
Ireland
Gaby

 

She isn’t lost, at least. The address on the paper—Gaby looks down to check again—matches the brass number on the door, 41 Glanmire Road, a blue-gray house with white shutters. It’s a narrow, city house; only a whisper stands between it and its neighbors. A mouse couldn’t squeeze its way through, Gaby thinks. She rings the bell again.

It’s colder and smoggier in Cork than she expected, and the street is loud with buses and taxis and horse carts. Today is Market Day today, apparently. Near the ferry she watched cows in canvas halters being air-lifted onto boats while barefoot boys led goats up the streets. The goats got in the way of cyclists who were getting in the way of the cars and buses. Gaby can hear low, flat honks behind her, interspersed with bicycle bells and animals bleating or braying their distress.

When she steps back to look at the upper windows for signs of life the wind brushes her face, carrying with it a faint smell of gasoline. Petrol, she reminds herself. Like the bird. Different spelling. She’s wearing the narrow, shiny shoes that she bought back in France; leaving Customs she stepped on a piece of discarded chewing gum, which is still stuck on her heel. She tries, once again, to scrape it off but can’t get enough friction off the cobblestones.

Cobblestones! On top of everything else she’s gone back a century in time. When Monsieur Perrin first suggested going to Ireland, Gaby imagined old-fashioned Georgian houses and funny-looking telephones. But the houses here are cramped and run-down, not at all like picture postcards, and there’s soot everywhere. All she wants to do is stretch out on a bed or sofa or anywhere and close her eyes. The sea became choppy as soon as they left the French port and her cabin mate, a dancer from Paris with peroxide blonde hair, was sick for the entire two-day crossing, spurting a line of yellow vomit up the wall the time she couldn’t make it to the sink and hadn’t yet succumbed to the bucket. Up on deck it was almost as bad with its stench of machine oil and salty, sea-rotted wood. The chairs were claimed at once and, as far as Gaby could see, never relinquished. She could hardly walk for all the tagged suitcases and crates and people sitting where they could wrapped in horse blankets, a few holding umbrellas against the sea spray, all of them just thankful to have found a way out of France ahead of the German army. One family sat around a wire cage of chickens while a nearby woman held, like a prize, two pigs on a split leash.

The fog is turning into an icy drizzle and a drop like a wet finger slides down the back of her neck. Gaby is eighteen, tall and healthy looking; with lipstick on she can pass for twenty. But at the moment she feels like a child wandering around an unfamiliar neighborhood, spent and confused.

Maybe you should leave, find something to eat, come back in an hour? She’s begun talking to herself this way in the last few weeks, as though it’s someone else giving her directions. But as she picks up her suitcase she hears a scraping noise from the house next door as a window opens. A woman with a wide red face appears.

“Is it Mrs. Sheehan you’re looking for?” she calls down.

Gaby raises her voice. “Yes, I’m her niece. Her great-niece, I mean. She’s expecting me. Gabrielle Donnelly.”

The woman pulls back her chin. “American, are you?”

She’s wearing a brown head covering that looks like a cloth duster. A moment later something furry bobs at her side: a small child with a fluff of curly hair.

“I am,” Gaby calls up.

The child disappears and then reappears a moment later; she must have climbed on a stool because now Gaby can see her face and chin and the top of her shoulders. She has a wide face like her mother.

“Your father’s a Donnelly?”

“That’s right, Kevin Donnelly. Mrs. Sheehan is his aunt. Though he isn’t … he grew up here, but then he moved to New York. That’s where I’m from. Although just now I came from France.” Gaby flaps her hand in a meaningless gesture, aware that she’s jabbering. She unsticks her right heel, feeling a slight pull from the gum, and sets it down carefully on another spot.

“Do you know where my aunt is? Should I wait for her?”

“Well. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but Mrs. Sheehan passed last Saturday.” The woman makes the sign of the cross. Her daughter does, too, bypassing her forehead in order to catch her movements up with her mother’s.

Passed? For a moment Gaby’s vision narrows to the window with the woman and child framed within it and the peeling green paint on the trim. She doesn’t understand. “She …?”

“A stroke or a heart attack, they’re not sure which, maybe both at the same time.” The woman leans out to tell the story. “The postman was just there and he ran to the pub to call the hospital, while Mrs. O’Keefe, she lives on the other side, she sat on the step with her. But the poor soul was gone before the ambulance could get here, so.”

“But I spoke to her only last week!” Gaby says. “I was supposed to live with her until I could get back to New York!”

“Were you, now?” The woman shakes her head, and her little daughter shakes her head, too. “That’s a shame.”

 

* * *

 

Mrs. Daly—she introduces herself when she leaves her window perch and comes down to the front door—is shorter and plumper close up. She hands Gaby a business card from Aunt Maeve’s solicitor. “He gave it to me Monday when I saw him on the property and asked him his business. Here you are then, I’ve no need for it.”

Gaby looks at the card. Gerald Faley, Esquire, with an address on St. Patrick’s Street. She fights the urge to plead her case: This can’t be right, she was expecting me!

There’s a taxi threading its way between horse carts. Gaby waves it down and then takes a wrapped peppermint drop from her purse and offers it to the little girl, who accepts it solemnly with her pink, clean, babyish hand and, when prompted by her mother, says thank you.

The taxi is worn but clean inside, smelling of disinfectant. As she struggles to close the window the driver says, “Sorry, that needs to be mended.”

So she leans back, keeping her face away from the thread of wind whistling in, and stares out at the young boys with their goats and pigs, and men bent over from the weight of the bundles tied to their backs, and clutches of old women in long black cloaks with huge hoods; one is holding a straw basket as big as a washtub. There are also glimpses of modern life: shiny double-decker buses advertising whiskey, and a couple of gorgeous young women crossing the street arm-in-arm, both of them wearing belted raincoats and bright pink lipstick. She stares at them trying to control—or divert her attention from—her growing anxiety.

The curb is littered with wet straw and animal dung. On the corner, a newsboy calls out the headlines:

“Germany invades Norway and Denmark this morning in stealth attack! Denmark surrenders after only three hours!”

The taxi driver shakes his head. “Three hours, can you credit it? They know how to plan a raid, those Germans. Everything worked out to the minute.”

Gaby heard the news already on the ferry this morning. She can’t return to France, where the war is only getting worse. The French government has begun rationing meat and flour, and she needed special papers just to travel from her grandmother’s house to the port.

“We’re all of us wondering if we might be next,” the driver says. “No doubt the Dev will make a broadcast tonight.”

“The Dev?”

“Eamon De Valera. Our Taoiseach.”

“Tay-shuh?” She’s never heard of that.

“The prime minister, you might say.”

She’s embarrassed by how little she knows about Ireland, for all that her father was born here. The potato famine, of course, and how Ireland is really two countries, Northern Ireland and Ireland—or Eire, as her father sometimes called it. Rhymes with Clara.

“But I thought… Ireland’s neutral, isn’t it? In the war?”

“That didn’t help Norway or Denmark now did it?”

He meets her eyes in the mirror. Gaby has one overstuffed suitcase, eighty francs, and the roll of ten-dollar bills that her father always traveled with, his “emergency funds,” which she found at the back of his sock drawer. She looks down at her hands, which are white and cold, her fingernails bitten to the quick. A hunk of cold steel forms in the middle of her chest like an undetonated bomb.

Don’t panic, she tells herself.

The driver stops in front of a row of brownstone office buildings and gets out to help Gaby with her suitcase. On the sidewalk she pours the coins from her coin purse into the palm of her hand.

“Can you …?” she asks, holding out her hand to him.

He shakes his head as he picks out two coins. “You Americans. I’m only wondering, have you got so much money to spare that you don’t care if a stranger cheats you?” His fingernails, brushing against the creases in her palm, are trimmed to a straight, square shape. “Here’s two shillings, see? And the fare is two shillings. So I’ll just pocket that.”

“I only got here this morning.”

“And already setting yourself up to be robbed.”

But he smiles as he says it and her heart warms unexpectedly. Human contact, she thinks.

Get a grip on yourself, Gaby. One step, and then the next. As Monsieur Perrin advised.

 

* * *

 

Mr. Faley’s office is above a chemist’s shop; it’s a square, chilly room with high ceilings and long bookcases crammed with thick leather volumes. A small electric fire is glowing (uselessly, it feels like) in the corner, and three tall file cabinets stand like soldiers against the wall, one of them partially blocking a window.

Mr. Faley gives her tea and condolences—”So unexpected, a lovely woman”—while pulling out one file and then another until he’s located the one he wants. Gaby wraps her fingers around the mug and leans back in the worn leather armchair facing his desk. Her eyelids feel heavy; her whole body feels heavy. She inhales sharply, willing herself into alertness. You can take a nap later.

“I admired your aunt,” Mr. Faley is saying as he sits down. “Very organized, she was. She listed your father as next of kin. Naturally I did try to contact him in—” he opens the file on his desk and looks down at his notes—“in Poughkeepsie.” He pronounces it Pow-keepsie instead of Poh-keepsie. “But I couldn’t get through to him, so.”

“No. You wouldn’t. We were in France.”

“In France? I’m surprised to hear that, considering the state of things.”

He means the war, of course. He has a kind face with crinkly blue eyes and ears that jut out from his head. About forty, Gaby guesses. Does he have a wife, children? He manages to be both instructive and kind, like her father. She shifts in her chair.

“I know. But we always spend every summer there. At my grandmother’s house in Puy-de-Dôme. That’s where my mother grew up, she’s French. But my grandmother had a stroke in August and so naturally we had to stay on, even after they declared war. We were in the country, I guess it felt safe enough. And we thought there’d be a treaty soon.”

Her grandmother was ill for months and they kept hoping, though not really expecting, that she would recover. Gaby’s grandfather had died before Gaby was born, and Gaby’s mother, Adèle, was an only child. “We’re all she has,” Adèle kept saying.

Anyway the war will be over by January, everyone said. In January they said it would be over by April. Years later people would call that period The Phony War and Gaby will think: Yes, that’s exactly how it felt.

“And then, just a few weeks after my grandmother died, the rest of us—my whole family—we came down with typhus.”

She stops and bites her bottom lip. When Mr. Faley asks her, gently, whether her parents recovered, she shakes her head.

“No. They—no. Also my younger sister, Sabine.”

“Oh dear. Oh my dear,” he says, his face crumpling.

She looks down. Don’t, she tells herself, but an image surfaces of Sabine’s silvery blonde hair, her long pretty lips—Gaby tries to push it away. It’s no use thinking how others have it just as bad or worse; like everyone else in the world she’s seen the grainy newspaper photographs of displaced Polish children, victims of Hitler’s invasion, but her sympathy for them can’t replace her own misery. There seems to be an infinite amount of room on that shelf.

She works to keep her voice steady. “It’s why I came to Cork. To live with my Aunt Maeve. My grandmother’s neighbor—Monsieur Perrin—he arranged it for me. He said Ireland would be safer since it’s a neutral country. Also he thought maybe I could get to America from here. I’m supposed to be in college. Vassar. That’s where my parents taught.”

“They were professors? Your mother as well?”

“She taught French. My father was history. European history.” She bites her lip again. If she lets herself cry she might never stop.

Mr. Faley shakes his head. “Well, there are no ocean liners going across the Atlantic now, I’m afraid. The Germans have been laying mines underwater. No one will risk it. But don’t worry, my dear, we won’t leave you to wander.” He begins to thumb through the papers on his desk, finds one, pulls it out. A bus rumbles by outside, making the windowpanes rattle.

“Your aunt was related to the Grogan family, am I right? Thomas Grogan and his wife? I’ve done some work for them in the past.”

“Connected, more like. Not related.”

“But surely they would help you? They own The Majestic, that’s the largest hotel in Cork, also the biggest import business outside of Dublin. Do you know them?”

“We met them once. My father didn’t like them.” Snobs, he called them. “We’re not related,” she says again.

After his parents died, Gaby’s father lived with his Aunt Maeve, who sent him to university in Dublin and then helped him get to America for graduate school. He and Gaby’s mother met a few years later in New York. By then Kevin was teaching at Vassar, and Adèle, who had a degree from the Sorbonne, was hired to teach French. Aunt Maeve married Mrs. Grogan’s uncle soon after Kevin moved away, and she became a widow when Gaby was a toddler.

“So you see I don’t really know the Grogans. I don’t think my father has spoken to them in years.”

“Well let me ring them up for you.”

“Please! Don’t do that. Can’t I stay in my aunt’s house? Until I can get back home?” She’s not sure how long her money will last but maybe she can find a job.

“Problem is, your aunt didn’t own that house. The Grogans own it. And they’ll want to get a new leaseholder straight away.”

“A new leaseholder?”

Mr. Faley looks down at a sheet of paper. “I can see that they gave your aunt a good rate, but yes, she paid them rent.”

This fits with what Gaby knows of the Grogans; they have more money than God’s favorite prince, as her father would say, but they still look for every opportunity to make more.

“Thomas Grogan passed some years back, but let me ring Mrs. Grogan at least,” Mr. Faley says.

Gaby can tell he’s trying to be helpful. And what choice does she have? She came here with no back-up plan, she didn’t think she needed one. Take a ferry to Ireland and then find a steamer to New York: that was the whole plan.

“In the meantime,” Mr. Faley continues, “we’ll find you a hotel for the night. I know one or two you might try. Not The Majestic, of course.” He spreads his hands, as if summoning all the wealth Gaby doesn’t have. “Something comfortable, but on a smaller scale.”

 

* * *

 

Comfort on a smaller scale turns out to be a hotel near the river, which means noisy. The lobby features a long desk and thin blue carpeting and two armchairs covered in worn pink-and-cream fabric. There’s no elevator—lift, Gaby reminds herself—and the floorboards creak whenever she shifts her weight.

“If you wait a tick,” the clerk says, “I’ll get the boy to help you with your case.” He looks like a boy himself with red hair brushed back from his forehead and a small birthmark shaped like a strawberry on his cheek.

But she’s too tired to wait. “I can manage, thanks,” she tells him.

The stairs have a wobbly wooden railing and lead up to a narrow, twisty, dimly lit hallway that feels downright Dickensian. But she likes the room they’ve given her. There’s a sink in the corner—the bathroom is at the end of the hall—and a painted wardrobe instead of a closet, and pretty rosebud wallpaper with matching rose-colored curtains.

The window overlooks the alley behind the hotel. For a moment Gaby gazes down at the stream of people below: a woman pushing a pram, another woman on a bicycle, two men in suits discussing something together with their heads bent forward as they walk. She feels a pang of dislocation. Everyone is out there living their lives while she’s standing apart, only watching. She can no longer imagine what it feels like to do the most ordinary things: go to school, wash the dishes, prepare for bed. One foot and then the next might be fine for Monsieur Perrin but with every step she feels further away from her true self, her true life, whatever that might be.

As she turns to unbuckle her suitcase she realizes she doesn’t have it in her to hang up even one dress. Her sister’s old stuffed koala bear is staring up at her from where she jammed it, at the last minute, on top of her clothes, and on impulse she carries it with her to the bed.

She stretches out and looks up at the plastered ceiling, fingering the soft tuft of the koala’s ear. Then she slides her hand into its pouch, the way Sabine did so many times as a little girl. Sabine, only a year younger than Gaby (“Irish twins” they were called), had been born with a little stub on the end of her right arm instead of a hand: a smooth oval peg. “Is that where your fingers were?” little boys sometimes asked about the pebble of flesh at the end of it—the botched beginning of a fetal thumb. If she sensed someone stealing a glance at her short arm, Sabine would lift her chin defiantly.

The pouch is plush and warm with a few hard lumps behind it. The night before she left France, Gaby cut a thin slit here where it couldn’t be seen and pulled out a handful of the koala’s cotton stuffing. In its place she pushed in her parents’ gold wedding rings, her mother’s engagement ring, and her grandmother’s silver peacock pin with six small emeralds on its fanning tail. Then she sewed up the slit, a difficult task since she couldn’t see inside the pouch very well and there was barely enough room for the needle.

“There are laws about taking jewelry out of the country,” Monsieur Perrin had warned her earlier that day; he might have been telling her the truth but she didn’t like the way he kept looking at her grandmother’s silver.

She figures she can sell the jewelry if she needs money. You’ll be all right, she tells herself. You’ll find a way back to Poughkeepsie and sign up for classes. Sign up for the tennis team. Will the girls look at you funny; will they know? There’s Gaby Donnelly, she’s completely alone.

She thinks of Luc Perrin, Monsieur Perrin’s nephew, now off fighting God knows where. She remembers the feel of his warm lips on hers when he kissed her under the chestnut tree near her grandmother’s barn. At the time it seemed that kiss was just the beginning, but the next day war was declared and after that there were no more kisses, only talk of rifles and tanks and whether the Maginot Line would hold.

There’s a shout at the end of the alley, another newsboy:

“Coming of the Armageddon! The German war machine is on the move!”

Her feet are cold and she slides them under the folded blanket at the foot of the bed. All this death—it doesn’t make sense. Men are drawn to destruction, she thinks. If not to do it themselves, then to be there when it happens and watch. It’s easy to imagine a bomb falling on this little hotel, the walls shaking and crumbling inward, the roof collapsing on top of her. It’s not that she wants to die, exactly, it’s just that she can see herself dead. She can’t begin to imagine the future when what all she wants is the impossible: to be back home with her parents and Sabine.

She closes her eyes. As noise from the street crescendos and then, abruptly, falls off again, she feels herself moving into sleep, as though sleep itself is her true destination—the place where, for weeks and weeks now, she’s been trying desperately to reach.

 

* * *

 

The next morning Gaby wakes up early, still in her clothes. She lifts her wrist to her face to read her watch but she didn’t wind it yesterday—she thought she was just napping—and it’s stopped. The corners of her eyes are wet and there’s a scratching noise in the wall by her head. Rats? But it wasn’t the scratching that woke her. Someone has slid an envelope under her door.

 

Message from Mr. Gerald Faley, Esq.: “Mrs. Grogan has extended an invitation to you to visit her at her estate near the village of Ballyleam this Friday. If acceptable to you, I’ll drop by your hotel at breakfast time to give you full details. Yours very truly, GF.”

 

There’s no mention of how long the visit might last. A weekend? A month? Until Gaby can get back to America? Still, the note lifts her spirits.

She clips on her mother’s earrings that are shaped like small gold shells and applies coral lipstick without a mirror. Her chest feels like a thin sheet of metal: endurance or resolve. You can do this. Maybe the Grogans can help her find a boat—they’re in the export business, right? And they’re rich, they’re connected. Her parents raised her to think problems through logically, preferably with pro and con columns. Pro: She’s out of France, now a war zone. Con: She knows absolutely no one in Ireland. And the Germans could very well invade here next. That’s two cons. She tries to think of another pro to balance the sheet.

Downstairs two women are setting tables in the dining room, one instructing the other on how to fold the napkins. They laugh at something together.

“Did anything happen yesterday?” Gaby asks the young man behind the front desk. It’s the same clerk she saw yesterday with the strawberry birthmark on his cheek.

“What do you mean, miss?”

“With the war?”

“Ah.” He scratches his throat with his fingertips, something her father used to do when he was collecting his thoughts. “Right. First off, here we call the war The Emergency, since we’re not in it. But you’ve heard about Norway and Denmark?”

“Yes, I just thought … they’re not coming here now, are they? To Ireland?”

“What, the Germans?” He gives a short laugh. “I wouldn’t say so, no. We’re a neutral country.”

“But weren’t Norway and Denmark neutral?”

“Well but they were close at hand, weren’t they?” He motions to a stack of newspapers on the table by the dining room door. “Complimentary.”

The front page is all about the attacks on Denmark and Norway, but on the second page Gaby reads about a German weapon that’s washed up on a beach in southern England: a torpedo that can detonate twice. On its side is a crude drawing of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, carrying his ubiquitous umbrella.

A threat, obviously. This is for you. But when Gaby shows the photograph to the clerk, he surprises her by laughing.

“Let’s hope they get Mr. Chamberlain direct with the next one,” he says.

 

* * *

 

“You have to understand,” Mr. Faley says when Gaby tells him about the clerk’s reaction, “the history of British rule in Ireland. Suppression and domination. Land grabs. Starvation. The famous law whereby a Catholic—and that means most Irishmen—weren’t allowed to own a horse valued over five pounds. Quite a lot of bitterness still.”

This morning he’s wearing a green sweater under his blazer with flecks of orange cat hair. They’re sitting in the dining room at a table far from the electric fire. Spring in Ireland is like December everywhere else, her father used to say. Gaby is wearing her gray flannel skirt and a matching cardigan. Should she run upstairs for another sweater? She wishes she could take a long hot shower, something she hasn’t had since she left New York.

“My people are from Mayo, they took part in the Battle of Castlebar fighting for the umpteenth time for independence. Doomed, of course, like every attempt before it. My great-uncle was exiled to Tenafly, New Jersey. I hear it looks much like Killarney.”

Their waitress is matter-of-fact but not unfriendly, and she punctuates her clipped speech with now. “Now. What will you be having with your breakfast, tea or coffee?”

“Coffee please,” Gaby tells her. “And eggs.”

“Fried or boiled?”

“Fried.”

“I’ll have the same,” Mr. Faley says.

“Now. How about a kipper with that?”

Yes from him, no from her.

The eggs come with boiled tomatoes and bacon but Gaby has learned to distrust meat in other countries—it never tastes right. As she squishes the side of her fork into her tomato the young man at the table next to them raises his voice.

“I’ll not go back with you. I’m eighteen. It’s my decision, so it is.”

“Is it now?” the older man sitting across from him says. “Tell me, why should we lift a finger to help them? What did they ever do for us except bring us starvation and humiliation for eight hundred years?”

“You can get training, da, and they pay for it. It’s more practical than school.”

“No son of mine is going to go help the British army conquer the globe.”

“It’s the Germans who are doing that.”

“They’re all filthy rats to my way of thinking.”

Mr. Faley raises his eyebrows. “There you have it,” he says to Gaby. “Both sides of the argument.”

He pours himself another cup of tea. “Now to the business at hand.”

He tells Gaby about the Grogans, some of which she already knew: they started out in Cork where they built up an export business, after which they expanded to a string of hotels and golf courses along the coast. They have a large house in town but are currently living in their country home, Kilcurra House, which is in the country near a village called Ballyleam. He asks if she’s ever been there.

“Once. A long time ago. I don’t remember it very well.”

“Oh it’s a grand house altogether,” he says. “Huge rooms with India carpets and all the comforts you could wish for. I was there once with my wife, we were going up to my uncle’s sheep farm for a holiday and I said I’d drop off some papers on the way. We had tea in the drawing room. Lovely and warm it was, with a fireplace as big as a race horse. I think you’ll enjoy yourself there. There’s a bus leaving for Ballyleam every Friday afternoon, and Mrs. Grogan said she’d have someone come meet you down in the village.”

“How did Mrs. Grogan sound when you talked to her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was she pleased? Annoyed?”

“Hm. Neither, I’d say. She’s not one to be what you might call overly emotional.”

A cold fish. Didn’t her father once say that? She tries to think back to their visit to Kilcurra House all those years ago. Mostly she remembers the tiny sandwiches rolled up like sausages.

Mr. Faley looks down at his sweater. “Made the mistake of saying good-bye to my cat this morning.” He plucks off a few of the orange hairs.

Gaby likes him, especially when he says he’ll see what he can do for her about money. She gives him Monsieur Perrin’s address in France.

“He’s also handling the sale my grandmother’s house.”

“Matters in France move very slowly,” he warns. “Especially now with the war. But in the meantime I’ll get him to wire whatever money he can so I can set up a bank account for you here.”

 

* * *

 

After breakfast Gaby decides to go look at Elizabeth Fort, which Mr. Faley told her was once a famous prison. She has a couple of days to kill before Friday and only one book with her.

When she crosses the river she can see clouds reflected in the water, more wings than weather. A light fog is rolling down the street like another herded animal. She passes men who are missing arms or legs or who have angry red scars down their faces. A lot of them have weird gaits, too, as though their legs are loosely, crookedly, attached to their torsos. The effect of malnutrition and poverty, Gaby wonders? War and civil unrest? In comparison she feels monstrously tall and well fed.

Elizabeth Fort turns out to be just a jumble of ivied stone walls and broken steps and heavy chains barring her passage. For a while she walks aimlessly up and down the streets looking at the shops until she spots a large Woolworth’s on the corner. Her heart lifts: something familiar at last. She’ll order a Coca Cola in a glass with chipped ice, like she used to at home. She’ll sit at the counter and pretend she’s in America, which is possible, maybe, if she doesn’t look around.

When she pulls open the heavy door she’s hit with a familiar scent of soap, sugary candy, brown paper wrapping, and polished wood. Tables have been set in regular rows with neat arrays of merchandise: handkerchiefs and socks, bike spanners and repair kits, candy hearts in small boxes, rolls of socks and stockings, and pyramid towers of canned meat.

But no lunch counter.

“Not at this location,” a girl in uniform says when Gaby asks.

“Oh. Okay.” She tries to hide her disappointment.

“You’re American? My cousin just moved to Chicago. Her name is Annie Neary.”

Is Gaby supposed to know her? The girl is wearing thick pancake makeup and fuchsia lipstick. When she smiles at Gaby, Gaby smiles back reflexively.

“She says that Americans say, ‘Durn right.’ Do they?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like something you’d hear on the radio, a radio story.”

Sabine used to love the Woolworth’s in Poughkeepsie; she would have spent hours there if their mother let them. But Adèle was always in a hurry to leave; an efficient shopper she was, in and out and then onto the next errand. In looks Sabine took after Adèle with her slim frame and light blonde hair, almost white. Gaby was more like their father, tall and thick-limbed.

“Is there a museum or anything nearby?” Gaby asks the girl who has a cousin in America. She can’t keep walking around outside with no purpose.

The girl suggests the Savoy Theatre. “It shows all the latest films.”

 

* * *

 

The Savoy is a tall structure nestled in the curve of St. Patrick’s Street with its name spelled out in enormous block letters. The stylized art deco lobby makes Gaby think of old Hollywood, and the huge screen in the auditorium is flanked by two curly columns, like Shirley Temple locks.

She chooses a brown velvet seat in the middle of a row, spreading her coat on the chair next to her as if waiting for someone. She can smell marshmallows and hair tonic and damp wool, and she buys a Cadbury Flake bar from the girl walking up and down the aisles carrying a tray strapped to her neck. The chocolate is sweeter than American chocolate and crumbles in an odd way.

A newsreel flicks on, “Defending Our Nation.” And there in black-and-white is the Irish Prime Minister—or whatever he’s called—Eamon De Valera. He’s got a pinched, narrow nose and round glasses, and he’s addressing a crowd of men in a park. “Mr. De Valera sounds a warning about German aggression,” the announcer says with rolling gravitas. “Britain and Ireland may not have always seen eye to eye in the past, but today all that is forgotten in view of our common danger.”

A man in the theatre shouts, “Not on your life!” and a titter of laughter follows. The shot changes to a line of military trucks driving into a camp. “If Herr Hitler tries to strike our way, we trust he’ll find Ireland ready.”

No one laughs at that.

She watches a film with Laurel and Hardy followed by another string of newsreels and then a second film, The Light That Failed. Ronald Coleman plays the part of a painter who is going blind. It’s a silly story with melodramatic music, but Gaby finds herself tearing up when Coleman wakes from a nap and discovers he can’t tell the difference between night and day. She cries harder when he leaves his dog because he can no longer take care of him (“Good-bye, Binks,”), and when he asks to be put in the calvary charge since he has nothing left to live for, and when he’s shot dead in the middle of the battle.

The woman in front of Gaby turns around to look at her. At the closing shot, when Coleman’s riderless horse stands alone against a gray sky—incredibly hoaky—Gaby is sobbing so hard that she’s hiccoughing. Two more people turn to look at her.

“Everything all right, miss?”

Gaby nods but can’t manage to speak, her head feels like two wooden doors are banging against each other. There’s something wrong with her neck, too, as if it’s being squeezed and wrung out. She grabs her coat and makes her way down the stairs, trying not to stumble. She wants to stop crying but for some reason she’s thinking about the time she and Sabine were fighting and Sabine crawled under her bed and Gaby tried to pull her out by the hair. Another time Sabine scratched Gaby on her face because Gaby wouldn’t stop reading to walk into town with her. They were close; sometimes too close, her father said. That’s why they fought. When they were little they loved to play a game they’d made up themselves called The Encounter, about when and how they would meet their true love. It always began with a mistake: “I fell asleep on the train and missed my stop and the man across the aisle said …” “I was crossing the street in New York when I tripped and the heel of my shoe came off and a man helped me up saying …” Sometimes in drugstores or while waiting in lines they spoke French, which they thought of as their own private language. “Don’t hide it!” Gaby used to say when Sabine tried to cover up her missing hand with her coat sleeve.

Gaby wipes her cheek with the back of her hand and turns to follow the river, which should lead her back to her hotel. She inhales slowly, breathing in the minerally air. After a few minutes her head begins to feel marginally better and she looks down at the water pleated with tiny brown waves. When she was in the hospital delirious with fever she thought her bed was a rowboat; she was trying to find the oars while Sabine watched from the other end of the boat, frowning a little. They were both wearing life jackets but Gaby knew they had to get off the water and back to land to be safe. Where were the oars?

She woke to find a nurse feeling her forehead. Another nurse gave her something warm and sweet to drink. After a while the doctor came and, in very good English, gently told her the news: mother, father, sister.

At first she didn’t believe him. When she did, she turned her face away while he was still talking and stared at the white stucco wall so hard she thought she might push herself right through it. She heard the creaking groan of a window being opened and a woman’s voice asking for water. Everything was normal and nothing was. The doctor went on and on in his nasally English but she didn’t want to hear one more word. It was a boat after all, her hospital bed, taking her away from everyone she loved.

Her parents were young but at least they’d had full lives. Sabine was only seventeen. Not quite seventeen.

You couldn’t protect her. It’s not your fault.

Still, she feels guilty. She survived and Sabine didn’t. If only I could see her again, she thinks. As children she and Sabine loved books about magic and thought it very unfair that nothing magical ever happened to them, though they tried to bring it on by rubbing coins and sniffing the contents of any unusual bottle they found. In the stories the magic always went awry—no one, not even the most blameless hero, could control it. Better to stay with the natural order of things, that was always the lesson.

But I hate the natural order of things, Gaby thinks. Her grandmother, her parents, Aunt Maeve, Sabine. And surely it can’t be natural to wish, as she does, at least in part, that she hadn’t been left behind.

Nothing feels right. Nothing feels less than awkward and miserable. One foot and then the next won’t change your circumstances, not really, since you’re still dragging along the same thoughts and regrets.

In the water she catches a sudden movement, a darkening on the surface. Are there fish in this river? She would like a cup of tea or hot chocolate, and for her mother to rub her temples with rose oil, Adèle’s standard cure for headaches. One more thing I’ll never have again. Up ahead she spots her hotel; the Irish tricolor flag beside the door is jittering in the wind. From this distance the hotel looks small but somehow brave, a little brave haven in the fog.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

April 9, 1940
Ireland, The Otherworld
Sabine

 

The first wave of soldiers dropped from the sky at sunrise—white balloons, Sabine thinks when she sees them. Then she notices the men attached.

Parachutists. Scores of them. Like a swarm of flies above a carcass, slowly drifting down to feed.

By this time Sabine has been in Cork for nearly a week, sleeping in alleys near the harbor with rats running over her legs. She’s drunk rainwater that collected in barrel tops and has eaten wet cabbage, discarded sausage casings, potato peelings, scraped bones, moldy bread, and the soggy ends of unidentifiable brown-spotted vegetables. Last night she discovered an export warehouse that had a loose board in the back, which she pried off. At nearly seventeen, she’s only recently left girlhood behind and is still thin as a board herself. Sucking in her breath and twisting uncomfortably, she managed to squeeze through the gap.

Inside she found crates and crates of butter packed in ice. She had to break a crate to get to one of the tubs, and then break the tub. She ate the butter with a broken slat like an oversized spoon, holding it with her good left hand and balancing it with the stump of her right hand.

Butter and honey shall be eaten that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. Isaiah 7:15. This, printed on a lemony square of poster paper under a picture of a fat black and white cow, was pasted on the side of every crate.

Was it an advertisement, Sabine wondered, or a warning? The rumpy cow made light of the quotation, and the somber quotation made the cow seem ridiculous. She made a nest for herself using straw and papery packing materials that smelled like glue.

The boom of guns wakes her. Her first muddled thought is that it’s thunder, a rainstorm. But when she goes outside there’s not a cloud in sight. A brilliant flare, dropped from a plane, lights up the sky; that’s when she sees the parachutes.

A man jumps out from a doorway, startling her.

“It’s begun,” he says. He’s wearing a thin, oat-colored sweater with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows.

“What’s begun?”

“The Germans, they’re invading. Take my advice and get out of the city quick as you can.” He wags his thumb like a hitchhiker a couple of times before he runs down the street. She watches him turn into an alley and disappear.

The butter warehouse is in a line of buildings facing the water. Boat lights blink on; an armada. Planes buzz over the rooftops. The sky lights up again as more flares float down. The parachutists are far away—they’ll land in fields, organize themselves, and march into the city—but there are legions of them, and they’re coming.

The blood rushes to Sabine’s ears. Every cell in her body seems to twitch in a different direction.

“By air and by sea,” she thinks.

 

* * *

 

Maybe because the first thing she heard after the invasion began was, “Get out of the city,” Sabine tries to follow this directive. But she’s hemmed in by the troops and can’t escape Cork for over a week.

The first few days are chaotic. Submarines surface off the Irish coast and great ships unload Panzer tanks that roll through the narrow Cork streets, turning awkwardly through the maze of the city and chipping stone buildings they meet at corners. Glass shards litter the sidewalk from so many windows being shot out as soldiers with rifles lean out of tank hatches to fire into any crowds that form. People quickly learn to duck into doorways if they hear the rumble of metal links eating up the street. Armored vehicles follow the tanks, with helmeted soldiers pointing rifles in every direction.

Sabine sees one tank nick the side of a wooden structure as it turns. The wall splinters and falls, and a moment later the roof slides down over it into the street, and then the adjacent wall crumbles into its neighbor. A couple of more buildings collapse, a domino effect, and a woman screams from a third-floor window as the building she’s standing in starts to fold. But there is nothing anyone can do.

She came to Ireland to be safe, to get away from the war in France. Ironic. She’s lost her passport and a boy on a bicycle stole her suitcase, ringing his bell merrily after he wrenched it from her hand and cycled away. Her sister Gaby and her parents are dead—but that’s too painful to think about, so she tries not to think at all. She has to work to keep her panic at bay, no easy task. Keep moving, find food, hide. She can’t let herself dwell on anything else.

If she does stop to think she might quit moving. She might stand stock still in the middle of the street, giving herself up to whatever this is out of exhaustion and fear.

No.

Leaflets rain down from the sky, German propaganda dropped from airplanes: “Irish men and women: we have come to you as friends, to save you from the English.” All the government offices have closed, and the Lord Mayor has fled. Bands of young people arm themselves and fight back while others carry flour and sugar in burlap bags as they try to get out of the city.

Soldiers on the street corral young men, pushing them into the back of trucks with the butt end of a gun across their back or head or face. No one knows where they’re going. Other soldiers line up a group of men and shoot them against the wall of a pub (“Watch, you must watch,” the soldiers shout to the crowd), and three boys are hung with some ceremony in Elizabeth Fort for disrespecting the German flag. Their bodies are left hanging to rot while crows flap around them, swooping in and away. An old woman wearing a long black cloak with an enormous hood throws loose cobblestones at the birds, trying to shoo them off. “But I can’t stand here all night, now, can I,” she complains.

Sabine helps her, hoping the old woman will offer her a place to sleep that night, but when she spots a soldier coming toward them lifting his rifle she runs.

 

* * *

 

By the end of the week, like everyone else, she’s searching for shops that haven’t already been completely looted while also trying to stay as far away as possible from the soldiers. One woman pushes a wheelbarrow full of puppies down the street and Sabine follows her for a while, curious, but the woman is walking aimlessly, crying and talking to herself. One sandwich short of a picnic, as her father would say. Sabine can hear his voice so clearly; a lump rises in her throat and she veers away, swallowing hard. On a side street she comes upon a passel of children, maybe one family, all wearing nothing but white shifts. They glimmer in the sunlight like angels but are stick thin and they crouch in the dirt crying with hunger or fear.

She hears a tank coming and presses herself into the nearest doorway. The street, not much more than an alley, is empty except for the children and herself. The children don’t move from their spot near the street. One of them, the smallest, starts hiccoughing while she watches the tank pass. Following the tank are two jeeps, coming so close to the children that the driver could have touched the little girl’s head as he passed. When the second jeep brakes, Sabine holds her breath. A German soldier jumps out of the back with something in his hand.

A loaf of bread.

He gives it to the little girl. Then, moving heavily with all the guns and ammunition strapped to him, he jogs back to his jeep.

The four ragged angels in their stained white robes stagger away with their prize. For a moment Sabine has the urge to follow them, to snatch the bread for herself. She’s taller than the tallest one and probably older. She makes herself walk in the opposite direction.

 

* * *

 

“And where are the Brits in our time of need, I’d like to know?” asks a young man with greasy red hair and a red birthmark shaped like a strawberry on his cheek. He’s crouching behind a blown-out window with Sabine and five or six others, all strangers who rushed into an abandoned basement flat—scrambling through a huge hole in the wall like a round Chinese door—when they heard tanks barreling up the street.

“What about Ireland’s army?” Sabine asks. She keeps hoping that soldiers will come marching into the city and save them. Save her.

“What army is that? The LDF’s a joke,” he says, scratching his throat with four fingers. Something her father used to do.

“What’s the LDF?”

Another man snorts. “Bicycle units and that.”

“You’d think the lads up in Belfast would lend us a hand,” says a bony woman wearing a man’s ripped overcoat.

“They’re fighting for their own lives up there.”

“So we’re doomed altogether.”

“And not just us. Norway and Denmark were invaded, too,” the man with the strawberry birthmark says. “I heard the news at the hotel where I work—used to work.” He scratches his throat again. “It’s all past tense now, so.”

The bony woman is looking at Sabine’s short right arm, at the rounded end where her hand should have been.

“What happened there?” she asks.

Sabine raises her chin. “I was born this way.”

“Oh. Thought you might have forgotten it somewhere in all the commotion,” the woman says and Sabine feels herself flush. The men laugh, meanly, but they stop laughing when another furious spray of bullets razes the street. Sabine crouches lower and holds her breath, listening to the metal clang of spent shells on cobblestones and then the wail of an animal—a dog?—in pain. She can’t risk going out to drag it to safety. I’m a coward, she thinks. But no one else moves, either. We’re all cowards. At last the tanks turn the corner and are gone.

 

* * *

 

Horses appear in the city, brought by the Germans on boats to haul all the heavy guns from their landing craft—jeeps are no good on the beaches. One unit is ordered to clear the Woolworth’s on St. Patrick Street so it can be used as a stable.

Sabine is inside when they come, combing through the shelves for anything useful among the piles of ribbons and skeins of colored wool, packets of needles, packets of pins, bicycle tire pumps and repair kits, garden tools, shoelaces. She finds a knapsack, that’s good, but there is not a scrap of food—even the licorice whips are gone—so she looks for supplies: a ball of twine and a pen knife, a bakelite cup and plate, and all the cutlery from a wicker picnic hamper. Her plan now is to leave the city at night, in the darkness, avoiding the sentries. She’s tried twice so far—last night and the night before—but turned back when she spotted German patrols. She heard them asking for identity papers and she doesn’t have any.

Woolworth’s familiar smell is comforting. It reminds her of America, as far away as Mars.

“All in a flash, it’s everything gone,” the woman next to Sabine complains. She picks up a pair of boys’ woolen knee socks. “Here now, these might fit you.”

But before Sabine can take them a German unit comes bursting through the heavy doors. She barely has time to look up before they begin spraying the room with bullets.

“Aus! Aus!”

But no one can get out; the soldiers are blocking the exit. The people who raise their arms in surrender are immediately shot. The woman next to Sabine drops to the floor and begins crawling but as she crosses an open aisle she’s gunned down, too.

“Diebe! Aus!”

Thieves, get out.

More gunfire. Some of the soldiers are laughing as they pick off people trying to leave.

It’s a large store and Sabine is near the back. She crawls under the ransacked display tables and until she finds a door marked Employees Only and struggles to pull it open with her good hand, thinking maybe there might be a rear exit. Instead she comes upon iron steps winding down into total darkness. Another spurt of gunfire sounds. She runs down the steps.

She finds herself in a dimly lit storage area piled with boxes and crates. An old dresser stands against the wall; it looks, at first glance, like a squat, many-eyed monster. The room smells of rusty iron and wet wood and packing materials. She can’t see an exit.

“Friend or foe?” comes a man’s voice, low and quiet.

She spies two figures sitting in the corner with their knees up and their arms around their legs.

Sabine says, “Friend, I think.”

“American, are you? What are you doing over here?”

“I don’t know,” she says truthfully.

He tells her they’d only just come down to the cellar when the soldiers charged in. “Out on the street I’d seen the horses, a man at every bridle. Only they were stopped at the corner and waiting for what I didn’t know. But now I’m putting two and two together. They need a stable I’m guessing and this’ll be it.”

He introduces himself as Joe Kearney. “I used to work upstairs. I was thinking there might be something left in the storeroom, that’s why we headed straight down. This is Moira,” he adds.

“Why don’t you come sit with us,” Moira says.

Sabine crouches down beside them. Her eyes begin to adjust to the darkness—not totally dark as there are a couple of small vented windows high up on one wall. When Moira shifts her position, Sabine sees that she’s pregnant.

Moira and Joe want to get back to their flat in another part of the city but they are all trapped there for the better part of the day, listening to furniture (and bodies?) being hauled outside, and curt commands, and then hammering and sawing. Joe has a tin of ham in his bag which he slices open with a butcher knife when the hammering begins. After he left his job at Woolworth’s—Woolies, he calls it—he found work as a carpenter, and Moira works at the Thompson’s Bakery on MacCurtain Street.

Joe claims he wasn’t surprised when the Germans landed.

“England’s back door,” he tells Sabine, handing her a slice of ham. “They’ll go there next, I’m thinking, and truth be told at first I was just that little bit pleased. The English deserve to know what it feels like to be conquered and pushed around. Only it seems they’ve decided to burn us down first, so. The Germans, I mean.”

The ham is good, the first unspoiled meat she’s eaten in weeks. She’s aware that she’s eating too fast but can’t help herself. She visibly startles at every loud noise above them, something else she can’t help. She both is and isn’t getting over the shock of how her world has changed so suddenly—all in a flash, as the woman upstairs (now dead) put it.

“Had an accident, did you?” Joe asks, noticing her hand.

She lifts her chin. “It’s always been this way.”

“Well don’t let the Germans see. They don’t like anything defective. I’ve a mate who escaped from Warsaw a couple of months ago, he saw his uncle taken away because he’s retarded.”

“Away where?”

Joe shrugs.

“I’m not retarded,” she says.

“No. But you’re pretty,” Moira tells her. She glances at Joe. “That might be a problem, too.”

Joe finds a pot with a lid and they take turns peeing into it. He examines the crates and from one pulls out a pile of heavy sweaters, which he hands around. He pries open a second crate to find small round tins of beef tongues, and a third with tins of baked beans.

“Let’s find you an opener,” he says to Sabine.

He has to time his movements to the noise upstairs, stopping whenever there is silence. When the horses clomp in, dust shakes down from the ceiling. Joe lights a match to check his watch and in the spark of light Sabine can make out a poster behind him:

Cover that Worn Patch

And Beautify Your Home

With a British Made Floor Mat

 

Above the block lettering, the colored illustration of a woman wearing a flared apron over a gingham dress makes her think of her mother, although her mother didn’t own a gingham dress and hated to be seen in an apron. She was a French professor and wore tailored suits even on Saturdays. Sabine’s throat feels like there’s a hard round marble stuck at the top. She tries not to think of her mother or father or her sister, Gaby. She digs her fingernails into her thigh to keep herself from crying but she’s angry, too. You left me alone.

“It’s getting cold down here.” Moira hands Sabine another sweater. “Here. Put this on. You want help?”

“That’s okay,” Sabine says.

She arranges the sweater the way her father taught her long ago, placing it on her lap and folding up the hem until she can push her good arm through the body of the sweater to make a channel, in the opposite sleeve, for her short arm. After she pushes her short arm through the channel she pushes her good hand through the other sleeve. Then she grabs the hem material from the outside, bunches it up to get as much as she can, and leans over to pull the sweater on over her head.

You must do things for yourself, her father told her, as much as you can. Don’t rely on others. Sabine grips jars with her right elbow so she can use her left hand to open them, though that can be hard if the jar is cold or wet. Cutting her fingernails is fairly impossible so she bites them instead.

“Sun has gone down,” Joe says. “Nearly time.”

“Time for what?” Sabine asks.

“To make our escape.”

Most of the men will leave when it gets dark, he guesses; they’ll go back to their quarters with only a sentry posted outside. Maybe also a man guarding the horse stalls, so they’ll have to be quiet.

“There’s an employee entrance we can use to get out, but it’s upstairs.”

“What if it’s locked?” Moira asks.

“We’ll break the window next to it, crawl through and make a run for it. But we should wait until it’s absolute dark.” He looks at Sabine. “You’re not afraid of the dark?”

Sabine shakes her head.

“At least we’ll miss the pookies and ghosts,” Moira says.

“What do you mean?” She has to go to the bathroom again but feels shy about asking for a match to see her way to the pot.

“That’s when you can see them, after sunset but before true darkness settles in.”

Joe says, “If you believe that nonsense.”

“Oh I do,” Moira says. She and Sabine are sitting side by side against the wall, and she’s holding Sabine’s good hand. She gives it a squeeze. “We’ve a ghost living above the bakery, so.”

“Moira. She’s only young, and scared enough.”

“And who wouldn’t be with soldiers stomping around waving guns above our heads? But ghosts, they’ll not harm you. They’re just sad and confused. Wandering about. Searching for something.”

“Isn’t it midsummer when the veil is thin?” Joe asks, jokingly. “And here it is only April.”

“What’s the veil?” Sabine asks.

“Between our world and the next. And it’s always thin,” Moira says to Joe.

Sabine isn’t afraid of ghosts but she is afraid of water. She doesn’t tell Moira and Joe this. She’ll have to swim across the river to get out of the city, they’ve decided, since the bridges are all well guarded. Joe agrees that without a passport it would be best to head north, get out to the countryside. “More food in the country, too. But you’ll have to keep your distance from the soldiers all the same.”

“Maybe I could just stay here?” She isn’t altogether joking. When she was little she had a secret wish to live in the Woolworth’s in Poughkeepsie. She would sleep in the display hammock set up in the window and make hamburgers for herself behind the counter. She’d be able to inspect every item on every aisle without her mother hurrying her out.

“They’ll come down here eventually,” Joe says. “Best for you to head north, toward the middle of the country. They’re less likely to bother you there.”

He can’t find a tin opener so he gives Sabine his butcher knife. “We’ve an opener at home.” Moira packs Sabine’s knapsack carefully so the tins won’t rattle. Then she finds a rubbery raincoat to wrap around the outside.

“It’ll not be perfect,” Moira says, “but hopefully some of it will keep dry.”

 

* * *

 

When Joe figures it’s time they creep up the iron steps, himself leading the way followed by Moira and then Sabine. At the top he pushes open the heavy employee door slowly, inch by slow inch, trying to keep it from creaking. A sliver of light slants down from somewhere. The comforting smell of Woolworth’s has disappeared, replaced by the scent of recently cut lumber and straw and sweating horses and manure.

Sabine and Moira step carefully behind Joe, who even in the new maze of woodwork seems to know where to go. They walk as softly as they can, carrying their shoes. Every so often Joe stops, and once he even sniffs the air—for what, for soldier scent? The back door, the employees’ entrance, isn’t guarded thank goodness. Moira squeezes Sabine’s elbow to reassure her. Or maybe for luck.

Joe tries the handle. It turns. But as he’s pushing open the door a German voice calls out from behind them.

“Stop. Who are you. Hands up.”

His English is oddly inflected. There’s straw on his uniform and he’s not much older than Sabine, with chubby lips and a round face. His eyes look scared. He has no gun in his holster and his fly is unzipped. Perhaps he’s come from the bathroom? Or was engaged in some private, salacious activity? She pushes the image out of her mind.

“Oh now, mate, sorry to surprise you. We were just coming in for a delivery—didn’t know the store had changed hands!” She knows Joe has to be scared but he’s trying for jocular.

“A delivery? What delivery?”

“We pick up boxes for the store in Dublin. Things they can’t sell. Every Tuesday like clockwork I load up here, and then I drive the stuff up to Dublin. My van’s out back.”

“You drove here?”

“No easy task, I can tell you!”

The boy scowls, thinking. His fat brow creases making him look even more like a toddler. “When we came, only thiefs. No, what do you call them, the workers?”

“Is that so? Management’s gone?” Joe’s hands are still raised. “Wish I’d been told.”

The boy looks at Moira. “This is your wife?”

“And her sister.”

“They come with you?”

Joe nodded. “Every Tuesday.”

“Every Tuesday you come,” he repeats, obviously thinking it over.

“Like clockwork.”

Sabine has put her raised hands behind her head hoping to hide her little stump. They don’t like defects. The boy is still looking them up and down. “Why you not wear shoes?”

She sees Joe flick his eyes toward the empty holster. With a sudden movement, he kicks wide the door and pushes her toward it. Run, he hisses.

She runs. She’s only a few steps into the street when she hears a crash and then a shout, but she doesn’t look back. She can still feel the pressure of Moira’s warm fingers on her elbow and she decides this is a sign that they are okay. They are resourceful and quick. Even pregnant, Moira will be quick. They will make it back to their flat and Joe will find the tin opener in the kitchen drawer and he’ll open the tinned meat and maybe a bottle of wine, red wine. They’ll be laughing with relief. When her parents came home at night they always opened a bottle of wine, and sometimes they gave Sabine and Gaby their own small glasses with a sip or two in each.

The marble rises in her throat again. She clutches her shoes with her good hand and keeps running with her lopsided knapsack jogging up and down uncomfortably on her back. Her feet are bleeding but she puts the pain somewhere else, outside her body. The Opera House is on the River Lee, and Joe told her that under its cover she could probably swim across the water undetected.

The river is cold and somehow greasy-feeling but she makes herself start swimming. Above her, German soldiers are assembling large, drum-like searchlights on the Opera House balcony. One flashes on while Sabine is still in the water. A pale white light sweeps downstream, and she veers right—against the tide—to stay out of the search eye. But more lights snap on, and soon it will be difficult, if not impossible, to stay in the darkened swaths of the river. The breaststroke is the only stroke she’s ever mastered, and that’s difficult enough with only one hand.

By the time she climbs up the rocky bank she’s shaking all over, and not just from the cold. The night is windless; still and dark. The earth seems to be holding its breath. But she still has her knapsack, thank God, with the extra sweater and tins of food and Joe’s butcher knife. She’s only lost her shoes.

Crouching in the underbrush among blackened tree stumps, she can hear the lapping river and shouts in German as one of the searchlights fails. How would she have managed without Joe and Moira? She sends a prayer of thanks into the dark, timeless void that now seems to be her existence.

She cups her short arm, making a nest for it in the palm of her hand. All she wants is to be safe. Or invisible. Maybe both.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

April 1940
Ireland
Gaby

 

The bus to Ballyleam is slow and cold; the trip seems to take half the day and they didn’t start until noon. The driver looks to be about thirteen years old. Gaby doesn’t remember closing her eyes but she wakes suddenly to a coppery orange light. She has a moment of panic: Have I missed my stop?

“Good you could close your eyes for a bit,” Moira says.

Moira is the young woman sitting across the aisle. She has dark hair and a wide face with strong cheekbones, and she works at Thompson’s Bakery back in Cork. She offered Gaby a day-old scone when she first sat down, which was surprisingly tasty. “Buttermilk,” Moira explained. “That’s the trick.”

She’s heavily pregnant, “still sick in the mornings to my great annoyance,” and is going to visit her parents who live in a tiny village north of Limerick. “You’ve not heard of it,” she told Gaby. “No one has.” Her husband Joe has a new job with a carpenter and couldn’t get the day off. Before that he worked at Woolies.

“Woolies?”

“Woolworth’s, on St Patrick Street.”

“I’ve been there!” For some reason the coincidence delights her.

“It’s lovely, yeah? But the managers are very particular. You can get sacked if you tie your shoes wrong, Joe says.”

For the first few miles out of Cork the bus had followed an onion cart, and pale gold onionskins flitted out whenever the cart met a bump in the road. The road grew increasingly narrow as they went north, wending its way around farms and fields dotted with sheep and stocky plow horses staring at nothing. Every so often the bus driver stopped to drop off a pile of newspapers tied with string, or to let on a passenger standing at the crossroads. They passed churchyards with tilting headstones and piles of quarried rocks that had once been houses.

Now the landscape has changed. The farmhouses are further from the road and the trees are darker, their trunks thicker. The dense ivy growing up their bark is more black than green, and the gray stone wall hugging one side of the road has a line of jagged rocks on top, like pointed teeth. A stream follows the road for a while, a thin trickle that disappears into the muddy earth then re-emerges a stone’s throw later.

Moira is knitting a sweater using four needles; a worm of gray wool rings her thumb. She lifts the half-finished sweater toward the window. “I’ll have to stop soon. It’s gotten to be the ghostlight.”

“What’s the ghostlight?” Gaby asks.

“That’s what my mam calls it. The time of day when our world connects with the otherworld, the ghosts and fairies and that. You can see them at dusk before true darkness sets in.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“Oh, aye. We’ve a ghost at the bakery. She looks sad, like she’s lost her way, poor thing.”

“Ballyleam, next stop,” the driver calls out.

The bus begins to climb a rise. “Ooh. There it is,” Moira says, pointing, and Gaby sees a large stone house appearing through the mist. It has three stories, six chimneys, and at one end a crumbling castle tower, a remnant probably of the original structure. Kilcurra House. A dark feeling opens up in her, like a flower that blooms in the night. It’s not a premonition exactly, more like recognition. But that’s crazy, Gaby thinks; she couldn’t have been more than eight when she came here with her family.

The road turns and the bus heads down among the ivied trees. Gaby twists around on the rubber seat but the house drops out of sight.

“Aren’t you the lucky one visiting that grand place,” Moira says, winding the loose yarn around her knitting needles. “It’s like a palace, so it is.”

 

* * *

 

Gaby knows gasoline has been rationed but still she’s surprised when she steps down off the bus to an empty road. The bus stop, if you can call it a bus stop, is in front of a pub. There’s a butcher shop next to it, a few more shops beyond that, and that’s about it. Across the street she spots a police station and a post office; both appear closed. But Mr. Faley assured her that someone would be here.

“Would you be Miss Gabrielle Donnelly, then?” a small voice calls out.

It’s a child, a young girl, who is sitting on the bench in front of the pub. She looks to be about ten.

“I’m to take you up to Kilcurra House.”

A donkey cart is tethered near the pub. Gaby glances at it; aren’t donkeys notoriously bad-tempered and hard to control? The girl sees her look and laughs. “He’s not mine. We’ll just be walking.”

She jumps off the bench. She’s small with large blue eyes and straight brown hair cut into a bob that touches the top of her shoulders.

“Mr. Terence would drive normally but with the petrol shortage they’ve mostly stopped driving and anyhow he left us yesterday to retire because of his arthritis and to be with his daughter. Mrs. Grogan sometimes takes out the pony cart but Mrs. Connell, that’s the housekeeper, she would be the one to come for you and she hates the cart and horses and anything like that and also she had an appointment with the dentist. So Mrs. Walsh says what about Norrie, she can walk, and I say delighted. Mrs. Walsh is the cook. I’m Nora Cullens.”

Gaby takes her hand. “Gaby Donnelly.”

“You’d never find the path yourself though it’s not far, just over the bridge and then a shortcut through the woods. Do you want me to carry your case? It’s a bit uphill for part of the way.”

“I’m fine, but thanks.” The suitcase is probably as heavy as Nora herself.

“I’ve got a hurricane lamp.” Nora lifts the lantern she’s carrying up slightly, as if Gaby might not have noticed it. “Couldn’t find a torch. It can get quite dark in the woods but we’re in and out in a minute. Do you need to use the lav first? There’s one in the pub.”

“Are you allowed in?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? The sign says The Two Hounds but everyone calls it The Wailing Baby on account of Mrs. Murphy’s oldest son who cried night and day for the whole first year of his life. He’s studying to be a priest now.”

Gaby is relieved by Nora’s chatter and by Nora herself: a child, and so not someone she needs to impress. When she opens the heavy door to the pub a strong smell of hops seeped in wood hits her first, and then smoke from the peat fire burning in the fireplace. There’s a semi-circular bar in front, a large room to the left, and a smaller room to the right. Both rooms have wide archways instead of doors. A cigarette is burning in a square plastic ashtray on the bar top but no bartender is in sight. Signed photographs of celebrities—Gaby assumes they’re celebrities, though she doesn’t recognize any of them—hang on the wall, along with a trio of stuffed, mounted fish.

“Mrs. Murphy?” Nora calls out. “We’re just here to use the lav.”

“Go on then,” a husky voice replies from the back.

Nora shows her a door marked Mna. Gaby uses the lavatory then works out how to pull the chain to flush it. She combs her hair and puts on lipstick and voila, she’s an adult again.

“The question is,” a man with a wet, rich voice is saying when she walks back into the main room, “will the Germans use us as a launching pad to get to England, or will they land in England first and then come for us?”

She glances at a group of men sitting near the fireplace, all of them holding pint glasses between their knees.

“I’d lay good money that the Brits’ll come first, pretending to defend us,” says a man with a bright red handkerchief triangled up in his breast pocket. He takes it out and wipes his mouth, and then carefully folds it again. “After which they’ll stick it to us for another five hundred years.”

A chorus of affirmatives. “Aye, Aye.” “That’ll be it.”

“So we have to be ready to block them,” the man with the red handkerchief goes on.

“You’d rather have the Germans here?” one man asks.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend, am I right?” he retorts.

“That was Jammy Jim,” Nora says when they get outside. “The one with the red handkerchief. Has an opinion about everything. The postmaster’s daughter Aisling Mulligan is in love with him. At school they call her Bun Mulligan because she sells buns in the yard at lunchtime.”

“Why do you call Jammy Jim Jammy Jim?”

“Oh, he collects old jam jars and things and then sells them to somebody else. He’s got a bike and he cycles around the countryside. With panniers and that.”

They come to the bridge. The moon is casting dappled light over the water.

“Do you live in Kilcurra House?” Gaby asks. “With the Grogans?”

“I do, yeah. Well not in the big house, in the gardener’s cottage with my father, he works in the yard, he’s a gardener. I’m still in school. Mrs. Walsh is training me to cook for when I get my leaving certificate but I’m not sure I want to be a cook, you’re stuck inside all day, aren’t you? My da says I don’t have to decide right now but I might as well learn what I can. It’s just the two of us in the cottage. My mother died right after I was born but I still see her sometimes.”

“You see your mother?”

“She came and sat on my bed last Christmas. She asked me did I like baking.”

“Maybe you were dreaming.”

“Maybe. I’ve seen her before, though. Twice when I was playing outside. She didn’t talk then, just looked at me she did.”

On the other side of the bridge, Nora steps off the road toward the woods. She’s swinging the lantern slightly as she holds it before them.

“My mother died, too,” Gaby says. “Also my father and sister.”

“I know. Mrs. Walsh said not to ask about it.”

Gaby says, not quite immediately, “That’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“Was it a motorcar accident? I hear that happens a lot in America.”

“Typhus. And we were in France.”

“Were you ill, too?”

“I was. But I got better.” To her surprise, she doesn’t feel the sharp pain she expected—pain, yes, but not quite as piercing. Is this what happens, Gaby wonders? You get used to telling the story? But that’s awful too.

Nora says, “Here’s the path.”

She hands her lantern to Gaby—“Hold this for me?”—and then lifts the glass bowl. When she strikes a match a pinpoint of light catches on the glossy wick and grows. The little bit of light makes the rest of the world seem darker.  Nora closes the glass bowl and takes back the lantern, and they start down the narrow passage through the woods.

As the trees close over them the air abruptly cools. There’s a dense smell of bark and dry leaves and something else, something animal. Although it’s April the trees feel like autumn trees, already dressed in mourning.

“How old was your sister?” Nora asks.

“Almost seventeen.”

“I’m eleven. How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Sabine and I were fourteen months apart. They called us Irish twins at home. Do they say that here?”

“They do, yeah.”

By now Gaby and Nora are both puffing and Gaby switches her suitcase to her other hand. Her footsteps crackle as she walks over twigs and decomposing leaves, a sound like crunching bones. A branch catches her arm and when she turns her head she thinks she sees the metallic glint of a gun. For a moment her breath is stuck to her ribcage as she tries to see into the crypt of darkness, but it’s just a glitter of moisture from the fog.

“Mrs. Walsh says your mother was French.”

“That’s right. She met my father in New York. At the Frick Museum.”

Gaby and Sabine always loved hearing the story: how their father was supposed to go to the Met but the exhibit he wanted to see wasn’t yet up—he’d gotten the dates wrong. So he decided to go to the Frick instead, and that’s where he saw Adèle. He knew right away she was French—from her posture, he always claimed, not her clothes. He talked her into walking around the museum with him, and after that suggested lunch.

“They always said that by the time they left The Frick they were in love,” Gaby says. “Sabine and I had a name for the story, we called it The Encounter, and we played a game we called The Encounter where we’d make up a story about meeting the man who would change our lives. It had to begin with a mistake. Like going to the Frick at the last minute when all along you’d been planning to go to the Met.”

“The Encounter. I like that. My parents always knew each other. They grew up right next door.”

They come to a long wire fence and Nora works the twisted latch that opens the gate. The Grogans’ property begins here, she says.

“Pigs are over that way. That other path leads to some old farm buildings we don’t use anymore. No one goes there except Mrs. Walsh or myself sometimes to get some of the rosemary or the mint that grows near the old barn.”

Nora unlatches a wire gate and they leave the cover of trees. She says, unnecessarily, “And there’s the house.”

Up close it’s even more commanding with its soft blonde stones, almost white, and long impressive windows. Despite her lipstick Gaby doesn’t feel like an adult anymore. Will she have the chance to wash up before she sees Mrs. Grogan? Her face is sticky with sweat and she shifts her suitcase to her other hand. They trudge around a dark tennis court with dry leaves littering its surface and a lone tree with sparse, waving limbs. Nora heads for the back door.

“Here we are, Mrs. Walsh!” she calls out as she opens it.

 

* * *

 

Mrs. Walsh is a plump woman with a round face, salt and pepper hair twisted into a bun, and a heavy bottom lip that curls up over her top lip. The thick frown line between her eyes deepens when she sees them, and she scolds Nora for bringing Gaby in through the kitchen.

“But it’s so much faster this way and then I don’t have to scrape the mud from my shoes—see?” She’s pushing the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other, trying to lift her foot out. “I can just take them off. And you told me I’m always to use the kitchen door myself.”

“Never mind.” Mrs. Walsh turns to Gaby. She takes her hand but doesn’t smile. “Mrs. Grogan unfortunately has a headache and is having soup in her room. She left a message that she’s looking forward to meeting you tomorrow. Miss Julianne was supposed to return this afternoon but at the last minute decided to spend another week in Dublin.”

“And the—the son?” Gaby can’t remember his name. She’s never met him. He was away at school when their family visited all those years ago.

“Mr. Theobald is in Galway at the minute.”

No one to greet me here, either. She’s not sure if she’s insulted or relieved.

“Bridie,” Mrs. Walsh calls out. A moment later a twiggy girl wearing a dark blue uniform and a white cap walks into the kitchen. When she sees Gaby she narrows her eyes.

“Is Mrs. Connell back yet?” Mrs. Walsh asks.

“Not yet.”

“I don’t suppose she left any instructions?”

Bridie says not to her.

“All right. Well let’s see. Why don’t we put Miss Donnelly in The Emerald Room for tonight. Take her case up, won’t you?”

The kitchen is huge and warm and smells like roasting meat. There’s a long wooden table in the middle and at least three different ovens plus a roasting spit all made from the same dark iron. Off the main room is a smaller room with two tables piled with bowls and sifters and tin canisters marked Flour and Sugar and Tea.

“Do you want to see something?” Nora asks. “Over here. Now look down. No, to the right. Look at the floor. Those are fish bones.”

A tiny fish skeleton is embedded in one of the flagstone tiles.

“It came like this from the quarry, the stone.”

“Two hundred years before you were born!” Mrs. Walsh says, scolding again.

“I didn’t say I was here at the time.”

“Is that how old this house is?” Gaby asks. “Two hundred years?”

“More even,” Mrs. Walsh says. “Still has part of the old castle turret. Fifteenth century, that.”

“It’s full of bats,” Nora tells her.

Mrs. Walsh turns to fetch a bowl from the shelf. “Idleness is a fool’s desire as they say, and here we are talking while you’re wanting something to eat.” She begins ladling stew into the bowl. Pork, from the smell of it, with carrots and onions. Gaby’s stomach growls.

Mrs. Walsh and Nora have already had their meal, “but we’ll keep you company,” Mrs. Walsh tells her, dishing out two more bowls. There’s also a loaf of brown bread and the most delicious butter Gaby has ever tasted.

“Better than French butter,” she says.

Mrs. Walsh is pleased by that.

“We’re a small staff. Not like the old days. But I have my standards.”

Gaby has never been in a kitchen anywhere near as large as this. Even her richest friend—Marielle Regan, whose grandfather founded a car company—has a kitchen only half this size. Mrs. Walsh is cutting another slice of bread for her when a startlingly handsome man walks in from outside.

“Hello Desmond,” Mrs. Walsh sings out. “We’re just having a wee second supper. Care to join us?”

Gaby’s introduced to him: Desmond Cullens, Nora’s father. He’s in his thirties, though it’s hard to tell how far he is into them. His face, a bit ruddy from working outdoors, is beautifully sculpted with sharp cheekbones and a distinct chin. He has dark hair and dark blue eyes, and the perfectly straight nose she saw so often in Cork. He smiles at her, not very energetically, and with obvious effort.

“So you’re the American.”

She’s getting so tired of that. It’s as though her personality has been stripped away and replaced with a cowboy or something.

Nora doesn’t get up when Desmond comes in but only nods at him, still holding her soup spoon. Gaby and Sabine didn’t run to their mother or father either. They weren’t a hugging family. “Why should I tell my daughters I love them?” she overheard her mother once saying at a party. “They know I love them.”

Don’t think ill of the dead, Gaby tells herself.

“What’s the news, then, Norrie?” Desmond asks.

“I brought Gaby here from town. I showed her the shortcut through the woods.”

“Did you, now? That’s very helpful.” He leans back in his chair.

“Well,” Mrs. Walsh turns to Gaby. “You must be longing for bed. Nora’ll show you up. Let me just make a hot water bottle for you.”

 

* * *

 

The Emerald Room lives up to its name with its competing shades of green: creamy wallpaper with a repeating pattern of clover and ivy, a dark green bedspread, and a fitted carpet the color of spring peas. Even the electric lamps have swirly green vines painted on their paper shades. The room is small and square with a narrow bed that faces the window. To the left of the bed is a fireplace that’s laid but not lit, and next to that is a washstand with a china basin.

An antique, or is she supposed to wash there?

“Lavatory’s just next door,” Nora tells her. “Bridie or Clary will bring you hot water in the morning.”

She’s brought along a tin of biscuits, which she leaves on the bedside table, and drops the hot water bottle on the bedspread. The room smells of burnt charcoal and floor polish.

“We’re in the cottage in back. This room looks out to the drive. Mrs. Connell always keeps the shade half closed so people visiting the house can’t see inside as they drive up.”

“Mrs. Connell is—?”

“The housekeeper. She doesn’t like children.” Nora is matter of fact. She sits down on the bed and bounces the mattress. “Only she likes me.”

“Do many people visit here?”

“No, not many. The Grogans are Catholic like me and Da and Mrs. Walsh. Their type are mostly Protestant.”

Their type. “You mean rich?”

“Living in the grand houses, yeah.”

Gaby doesn’t see the problem. “So why can’t they visit each other?”

“They can, they just don’t. Sweet dreams!” Nora jumps off the bed and skips out the door.

Gaby’s suitcase is on the mahogany rack at the foot of the bed. Someone—Bridie, she assumes—has unpacked for her. Sabine’s koala bear is propped against the pillows and Gaby’s nightgown is laid out on the bed like a ghost waiting to be filled with flesh and bone. In the bathroom she finds her toothbrush by the sink with a curl of toothpaste already on it.

Back in her bedroom she gets undressed quickly. No central heating, and she doesn’t want to mess about with the fireplace—she’s not sure she’s allowed to. She feels like a party guest invited by mistake.

She checks the window: locked. She peers under the bed. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for; maybe like a dog or a rat she just wants to secure her den. The house creaks around her, ancient and unfamiliar. More like a museum than a home, Gaby thinks. Living in a manor house with servants! It’s hard to believe, after everything that’s happened. Her life has twisted itself into an unrecognizable shape.

 

* * *

 

In the middle of the night she wakes up drenched in sweat.

She’s perspiring everywhere—her legs, her torso, even the back of her neck. Her nightgown is wet through but she can’t tell if she’s cold or hot. Am I ill? There’s a faint, fluttery headache behind her ears.

She presses the palm of her hand to her forehead. If she’s cold, she should get another blanket. Mostly she feels wet. She gets out of bed and roots in the cupboard for her extra nightgown. The thin carpet is scratchy and cold on her bare feet. As quickly as she can manage it, she strips off her clothes, even her underpants, which are also wet with sweat. She pulls the new nightgown on over her head. Then she finds a pair of socks and puts those on, too.

Back in bed it takes her a few minutes to warm up. What if she falls seriously ill here, like she did in France? Who would take care of her? With effort she closes her eyes and puts herself into her old bedroom in Poughkeepsie, the one she shared with Sabine. She sees the white wallpaper with small yellow daisies, the sloping ceiling, the window that looks out to the street. Gaby’s bed was the one closest to the door. Sabine made friends more easily than Gaby but she also lost her temper more. She didn’t care as much if somebody didn’t like her. In high school she used to draw animal tails in her notebooks, where other girls might draw hearts and a boy’s name.

A great longing, like a thirst, rises in her. She can picture Sabine sleeping with one arm flung out across the bedspread. She’s making her usual night noises: not snores exactly, but quick puffs through her mouth like a fish. Their parents are in their own bedroom down the hall. The front door is locked. Everyone is safe in their beds.

It’s okay, she tells herself. You’ll be all right.

 

* * *

 

In the morning, two birds arguing in the trees wake her. She feels fine.

 

* * *

 

She’s sitting at the dressing table brushing her hair and trying to see her face properly— the mirror is warped with age—when there’s a knock on the door. Before she can answer Bridie walks into the room carrying a tray with toast and tea. She sets the tray down on Gaby’s unmade bed and goes to light a fire in the fireplace.

“Oh, hello. Thanks,” Gaby says, but Bridie doesn’t answer. When the flame catches and spreads she gets up off her knees and replaces the gilded fire screen.

“Mrs. Grogan will see you at nine,” she announces with her back to Gaby. She seems unaccountably surly, whipping open the stiff curtains so hard they seem to crack. “In her solarium.”

“How do I get to her solarium?”

“Through the library.”

“Where’s the library?”

“Downstairs.”

Gaby can’t keep playing this game so she goes over to the window and looks out, waiting for Bridie to leave. There’s a white wrought-iron table and three matching chairs below her on the lawn, and a dozen or more sheep are grazing near the house. That’s a surprise. Shouldn’t they be off in a field somewhere? A line of elm trees lead to two white posts marking the far end of the drive, and beyond that, she imagines, is the road.

When Bridie closes the door behind her, Gaby gets back into bed and eats a slice of toast. I could get used to this, she thinks. There’s fresh marmalade, and orange juice, and a newspaper that looks as though it’s been ironed. Or rather, half ironed; towards the middle the paper is crumpled.

The front page is all about the war, of course. The Swiss, apparently worried that Germany will invade them next, are handing out rifles to boy scouts and old women. Everyone is speculating on Hitler’s grand plan. Does he have a secret weapon, as he claims? Will he honor his peace agreement with Ireland? Will his troops march into Belgium?

Gaby turns to the society column. The Duke of Windsor—the former king of England—and his wife—the former Mrs. Simpson—are planning a trip to their estate on the French Riviera despite the war. “We’re not at all worried,” they declare.

When Bridie doesn’t come back with hot water Gaby goes to the lavatory and twists the tap. The water runs and runs but never gets warm.

 

* * *

 

After she’s dressed Gaby goes out to the hallway, closing the door softly behind her. The hallway is wide enough to be a room itself, with long mahogany tables along the wall and wooden cupboards so shiny with polish they seem liquid. Rabbits and fish are carved on the cupboard doors, and a long red silk runner covers the floor.

The house feels deserted though she knows that it isn’t. Gaby crosses the hall and opens a door to a bedroom that’s much larger than hers and dominated by a huge bed under a heavy, embroidered silk canopy. An antique desk and a chair with spindly legs is opposite the bed, and two chintz armchairs face the fireplace, which is stained black from centuries of smoke and ash. The knickknacks are all horse-related—small mahogany statues of rearing stallions, a miniature gold-filigree pony cart, and horsehead bookends propping up a set of leather-bound books on the desk. A door on the far side leads to a private bathroom with a porcelain hip bath and a sleek cupboard, also carved with fish.

She peeks into two more rooms before going downstairs. Both have long rectangular windows with glittering diamond panes and silk wallpaper—one deep red and the other one pale yellow. She looks into a wardrobe where a few garments are hanging: a mint-green jacket, a navy dress patterned with small white flowers, a creamy blouse ruched in front like an accordion.

But the house isn’t perfect. As she goes down the wide staircase she can feel tiny nicks in the banister, and the white marble floor in the hall is yellowing with age. A dozen or more animal skulls hang from the walls alongside stuffed elk heads with glass eyes. The domed ceiling makes her think of an art gallery or a church, inspiring the belief that perhaps she could be someone better one day, maybe starting today; also, conversely, the fear that she never actually will be anyone better.

There’s no sign of Mrs. Grogan or anyone else. She has a choice: right or left. She opens the door to the left, a kind of sitting room. Or is it the library? There’s a bookshelf under one window. She steps up to examine a delicate oil painting of a young girl and reads the slanted signature: John Blythe. Never heard of him.

“Miss Donnelly?”

She turns. An extremely tall, thin woman with round rimless glasses is standing in the doorway.

“I’m Mrs. Connell, the housekeeper. I was away yesterday so I wasn’t able to welcome you when you arrived.”

“Oh, hello. How do you do.”

Mrs. Connell takes Gaby’s outstretched hand very briefly, exerting no pressure at all with her fingers. She’s wearing a neat brown dress with a pointed lace collar, and the shape of her face with the rimless glasses makes Gaby think of a hungry owl. She leads Gaby across the hall into what must be the library (two bookshelves this time) and knocks at a paneled door at the far end.

“Mrs. Grogan, here’s Miss Donnelly to see you.”

She opens the door and nods Gaby into a bright room. The solarium.

“Oh,” Mrs. Grogan says, glancing at a black and gold painted clock on the wall. “All right.”

“Do you want me to see to Miss Donnelly’s room?”

Mrs. Grogan inhales through her nose, thinking. She’s a tall woman with a square forehead and a wide, handsome face. A little too much space between nose and lip, Gaby thinks, but otherwise beautiful. For her age.

“I suppose not,” Mrs. Grogan says. “Now that it’s done.”

Gaby’s first impression of the solarium is that it’s too much, it’s like something you’d see in a film. There’s a spread of windows along the southern wall and cheerful green-and-yellow striped wallpaper on the other walls. A wide wicker basket chair with a round back, somehow tropical, takes up one corner. The rest of the room is stuffed with long bamboo tables displaying neatly aligned terrariums and potted plants.

Mrs. Grogan is wearing a canvas smock with large pockets and exudes a strong chemical scent, a mixture of perfume and hairspray.

She takes Gaby’s hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Gabrielle.”

Gaby feels overdressed in her violet suit and French shoes and her mother’s silver bracelets. She almost slipped on her mother’s diamond engagement ring, too—later she’ll wish she had—but it’s still sewn into Sabine’s koala bear. She doesn’t want to feel intimidated by this woman or this house, but she does. The room is humid but not particularly warm. They’re standing in front of a table with four or five terrarium boxes, two of which are identical with planed glass sides and triangular lids. Another one resembles a birdcage, while the one next to it has a wooden drawer built into the bottom with a brass handle.

“Mrs. Grogan collects moss from all over the world,” Mrs. Connell is saying. “They ship them in boxes lined with zinc.”

“And other plants, too, but yes I do like an exotic moss. This one is from Australia.” She shows Gaby a mass of spiky green growth in the terrarium that looks like a glassed-in birdcage. “And you see there across from it there is another specimen from Borneo. Darsonia superba, both of them. Slight variation, of course.”

Gaby looks closely. “Is there a little purple on the one from Australia?”

“Very good.” Mrs. Grogan steps over to another terrarium. “And in here is a very exotic sample from Ohio. Just around the corner from you, yes?”

“Not too far,” Gaby lies. It’s impossible to explain the distances between states to people in Europe and she’s given up trying.

“Fissidens bryoides, from a place called Hocking Hills. It sounds very English, does it not?”

“Would you like tea now, ma’am?” Mrs. Connell asks.

“Yes, please, Mrs. Connell. If you could just help me off with my smock.” She turns to Gaby. “I’ve a touch of rheumatism in my shoulder.”

 

* * *

 

A healthy fire is burning in the fireplace in the library. Was this where her family had tea with the Grogans all those years ago? It’s a large room with two gold sofas, matching chintz armchairs, embroidered footstools, tall vases, and half a dozen side tables with old family photographs—one of a boy in a sailor suit holding a teddy bear—in heavy silver frames. Like the solarium, the room feels overdone: Hollywood’s idea of a country manor. Gaby notices little knobs on one side of the fireplace—bells to call the servants? She wonders how many they have.

She sits on the sofa opposite Mrs. Grogan who, now that she’s taken off her gardening smock, has turned into an advertisement for Country Life in her oatmeal tweed suit and knotted silk scarf with a pattern of horseshoes. Gaby spots a small gold cross on a chain beneath the scarf. Catholic, Nora had said. Gaby was raised Catholic, too, but she can’t imagine her mother wearing a necklace with a cross. A tiny, sly smile always appeared on Adèle’s face when conversations turned to religion, as if she wouldn’t dare share her thoughts (too radical?) but wanted you to know that she had them.

A small dog emerges from the corner and jumps up onto Mrs. Grogan’s lap. As she strokes his muzzle, Mrs. Grogan tells Gaby how sorry she was to hear about her parents.

“And my sister. Sabine.”

“Such a tragedy,” Mrs. Grogan says. But she speaks almost absently, as if her thoughts are already elsewhere. “I’m trying to remember, did your family live in the west part of the country?”

The west? “We live—our house is in New York. Upstate New York.”

“I meant in France.”

“Oh. Yes. Near Rouen.” Sort of.

Mrs. Grogan fingers the dog’s silky ears; her fingernails are perfectly shaped and painted with a rosy pink polish. “Were your people in wine?”

“No. They were—they owned land.”

“Ah. And your grandfather, did he have a title?”

Gaby is confused by this line of questioning. She begins to explain her grandparents’ estate, the acres of land they leased out, the stud farm her grandmother ran with a neighbor, Monsieur Perrin. She wonders if she should use the term chateau, or is that too pretentious? It’s certainly not a castle. Americans would just see it as a large country house. She doesn’t know how the Irish would see it.

Bridie comes in with a tea tray. The face she presents to Mrs. Grogan is stiff and closed, and she doesn’t look at Gaby at all.

“Thank you, Bridie. Here, take Rodney, will you?” She hands Bridie the dog.

The teacups have gold rims and budding pink petunias curling toward the handles. Gaby doesn’t want tea; she already drank three cups up in her bedroom and needs to visit the bathroom again. But she takes a sip when Mrs. Grogan hands her a cup.

“My daughter was supposed to come home yesterday but she decided to go look at a horse. Do you ride?”

“I do.” In France, she and Sabine rode their grandmother’s horses almost every day.

“And do you hunt?”

Ugh. Gaby tries to keep her expression neutral. “No.”

“Have a piece of fruitcake,” Mrs. Grogan says. “Mrs. Walsh’s specialty.” She lays a tiny silver fork on the side of the plate and hands it to Gaby. “I suppose your French is very good. How do you say fruitcake in French?”

“Gateau aux fruits.”

Mrs. Grogan frowns. “I believe that’s a different dessert.”

“My mother made it last Christmas. It’s similar to this but without the nutmeg.”

“Well, it can’t be a real fruitcake then, can it?”

Gaby is stumped. She takes another sip of tea and regrets it.

“Did you bake often, you and your mother?”

She’s being tested but she doesn’t know for what. She learned how to make French croissants last summer—very difficult, an accomplishment to be proud of, although she only did it to impress Luc Perrin. She doesn’t mention that part.

“Oh, croissants, yummy.” For a moment Mrs. Grogan looks like a young girl. “We can’t get those here. Well, maybe one or two places in Dublin.”

She takes another sip of tea still looking at Gaby.

“Mrs. Grogan, thank you for inviting me here.” Gaby realizes she should have thanked her first thing but got sidetracked by the moss and the questions about France.

“Of course. To be perfectly honest, Gabrielle, I thought I might be able to help you. But I wanted to meet you first.”

Gaby lets out a breath. She was right. Mrs. Grogan, with her money and connections, can help her get home. Maybe not on an ocean liner, but something. She leans forward in her chair.

“I thought perhaps we could help each other out,” Mrs. Grogan says.

“Of course.” Gaby puts her teacup down on the side table next to a little china cat sitting upright holding its tail. She tries to arrange her expression into something obliging. But what could she possibly do for people like the Grogans?

The thread of explanation is, at first, confusing. A girl who was working in the kitchen has left to get married just when Mrs. Grogan decided to stay in Ballyleam for the whole of The Emergency. (“Fewer restrictions in the country, plus they’re threatening to bomb the north.”) And now their butler has left too, to live with his daughter.

“Claims arthritis is getting to him,” Mrs. Grogan says shrugging, as if repeating a lie. Although this is a small household, it’s one with certain needs and standards. She can offer Gaby room and board in exchange.

“It won’t all be clean work. Do you have a plain dress you can wear? You don’t have to put on a uniform unless you prefer it.”

She’s looking at Gaby with a neutral expression—calm and transactional—and Gaby’s cheeks flush hot. All at once Bridie’s surliness this morning makes sense to her, also the snippet of conversation between Mrs. Grogan and the housekeeper, Mrs. Connell: Do you want me to see to her room? No, now that it’s done.

She was put in the wrong room last night. She was not meant to be a guest. She was meant to be a servant. Mrs. Connell probably said as much to Bridie this morning. But I suppose we’ll have to bring up a tray to her just this once.

The library windows are small and intricately paned as if constructed to let in as little light as possible. Gaby finds herself looking at the china cat on the side table, its front paws holding its tail like an upside-down question mark. She tells herself she has options. She could take the bus back to Cork and look for a job, find a room in a boarding house. But the humiliation feels strangely justified.

Giving yourself airs, so you were. She can hear her father’s Irish inflection so well, that particular timbre that’s half amused and half scolding. She’s the daughter of academics, the granddaughter of a French landowner without a title. She doesn’t deserve to be waited on. Is this what she deserves? Mrs. Grogan is watching her patiently, waiting for an answer.

“I—I have a dress,” Gaby says.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

April 1940
Ireland, The Otherworld
Sabine

 

In the early morning Sabine finds—steals—a pair of rubber boots from outside a farmhouse. They’re at least a size too large but anyway she has footwear again, and she can find old newspaper to stuff into the toes. She heads north, following Joe’s advice, skirting the German guards barricading bridges or appearing in twos and threes at crossroads for impromptu checkpoints.

She has no compass so she follows the sun. North, north. She chants it to herself like a mantra. Her senses stretch themselves, hyper-alert to signals of danger: the charred scent of recent gunfire; a steely flash on the road ahead that means motorcar. Fear has a metallic taste.

German planes fly so low overhead that she can make out the black and white crosses on their wings and the helmeted gunners in the back. Can they see her? Would they gun her down if they could? She sleeps in barns when she can and in fields when she can’t, waking early to an orchestra of feeling: birds crying out their delight and hunger. She has no real plan except to keep walking and to stay out of sight. Whenever she thinks about her old life, Gaby in particular, a dark, unreasonable anger rises in her. You abandoned me! Now look what’s happened! Childish and irrational, but there it is.

It’s strange how sadness can feel distant, Sabine thinks. Or not distant, exactly. It’s like she can see it without hearing it. Or hear it without seeing it. But anger is different. It cuts through her at unexpected moments, uncomfortably close. You left me to fend for myself.

Don’t think about it. Keep moving. Look for food. Look for places to hide.

Sometimes she sees plumes of smoke rising in the distance; houses or farm buildings on fire. If she comes to a village that seems safe (no German cars or tanks) she stops to ask for news and directions. Old women like to talk to her.

“It’s full surrender as of Monday,” one woman tells her. She has a single gray braid slung over her shoulder and is sitting on a bench in front of a pub puffing on a long white pipe. Behind her there’s a printed poster with Eamon De Valera looking pale and pinched like a mechanic or a factory worker, someone who stays inside all day and never sees the sun; beneath his picture is the new Irish slogan, dictated by Germany: “Farm, Family, and Fatherland.”

The Germans have taken over the schools and post offices, the woman reports. They’ve seized most of the motorcars and are buying up white flour to send back home. She takes a drag from her pipe, expels the smoke, and continues with her grievances. They’ve changed the time to German time. They’ve set all able Irishmen to widen the roads for their trucks. They like Irish lace so now everyone is tatting, even young boys, but they’re paid in German deutschmarks.

“For that’ll be the Irish money now. I wouldn’t be surprised if they change our name too. New Deutschland, what do you think? Like locusts they are.”

Don’t complain too loudly, Sabine wants to tell her, thinking of the soldiers hanging boys in Cork for just for mocking their flag. She accepts a drag of the woman’s pipe.

“Good for the hunger,” the woman says. Everyone is hungry.

The smoke feels like a gritty snake winding its way down to her stomach, curling uncomfortably there.

The next evening Sabine finds an empty schoolhouse where German words are chalked on the chalkboard and there’s a pile of books by the door marked, in English, “To Burn.” Sabine reads as many as she can before it’s too dark to see. She hasn’t read a book in weeks, or has it been months? She can’t tell how much time has passed. It’s almost summer, that’s all she knows. Berries are ripening on bushes near streams. She’s trying to eat what she finds, to save all the food that she can. She keeps the tinned meat for barter.

Is this what life is now—constant movement, and fear, and hunger? She misses the smell of hay in her grandmother’s barn. The sight of the leather saddles on wooden pegs, and the off-balance thrill when she put her foot into the stirrup while mounting Tenor, her favorite horse. The feel of a banana bite squashed up against the roof of her mouth. The scent of her mother’s Nivea lotion when she kissed Sabine good night.

All that is gone.

I’m heading toward something. I must be. There must be a new life for her out there, a life where she’ll be safe. Where? What? I’ll know it when I see it.

She finds herself holding the stump of her arm for comfort, an old habit. When she was younger she used to slide her short arm into the pouch of her old stuffed koala bear—where is that now? Gone, like everything else.

 

* * *

 

A few days later a bomb explodes near the barn where she’s sleeping, so close that for a moment Sabine is sure she’ll be killed. The wooden walls shake violently from the explosion and then keep trembling for a long time afterward. Will they collapse? She holds her breath waiting for the next bomb, wondering if she should go outside. Or is it better to stay put?

The two cows are also uneasy, lifting their hooves and putting them down again. The floorboards rumble like the floor of a train car. Once, when her family was going to Paris for the weekend—something they did every year after their annual midsummer party, as a treat—they shared a train compartment with a tall frizzy-haired woman and her two young sons, boys in flannel shorts and silly white shirts with bows. When the woman saw Sabine’s missing hand she said it was a sign of God’s favor. It was a piece He kept for Himself, she said, and she told Sabine that she’d be blessed her whole life.

She doesn’t feel blessed. She feels exhausted and scared. Later she and Gaby laughed about the woman; remembering this her dark anger rises again. She knows Gaby is dead and she shouldn’t be mad at the dead. But she can’t help herself. Her mother and father, that’s more understandable. They were a pair, inseparable. Of course they would leave together. But Sabine and Gaby were a pair, too.

I’ll find a new life without you.

Sleeping in straw makes her sweat. She lies awake listening for more planes and the whistle of a falling bomb. She imagines the barn exploding in fire. Light travels like sound; you can feel it approach. A sort of anticipation. After a while she goes outside to check the sky but sees nothing except stars.

Safe for now. But although she returns to her nest in the barn it takes her a long time to get back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

The next morning Sabine wakes up later than usual and nearly runs into the farmer, coming to see to his cows. She’s out near the road when she spots a line of soldiers marching her way, and she quickly finds a leafy sycamore tree to hide herself in. She’s not as clumsy as she was in the early days, battling a racing heart and her whole body shaking. Of course she’s nowhere near calm now, but at least the shaking doesn’t start until after she’s hidden.

She climbs as high as she dares, pulls her legs up, and hugs the thick branch just above her. Then she looks down at the soldiers marching toward her. As always, she’s amazed at how clean they are—their stiff, spotless uniforms, their helmets like shiny tortoise shells, even their boots. How do they keep their boots so clean on these dusty roads? Boreens; that’s what they call them. It sounds like a little girl’s nickname.

The sycamore is on the other side of a low stone wall that runs along the road. If they look up the soldiers might notice her but they don’t look up. They’re like a pack of wolves with their snouts pointing straight ahead. It’s a show of power, surely, this marching up and down the boreens. A display of German organization and discipline. Although they only landed, what, a couple of months ago?—her sense of time is hazy—already they are firmly in control. It’s as if a much older child has come into a game they’ve all been playing and immediately taken charge of the rules.

The last soldiers pass, eyes straight ahead. On the grass below a couple of farm horses with thick tufts of hair on their fetlocks stand motionless, facing the road. Their ears twitch forward as if trying to gauge whether the troops will return.

When she can no longer see even the dust the men have kicked up, she climbs down from the tree. The movement rouses the horses and they begin to walk slowly toward the middle of the field. She follows them, keeping well away from the road now.

Oats and beans and barley grow, do you or I or anyone know, how oats and beans and barley grow? Her father used to sing that to them at night when they were little. It was her favorite bedtime song, though Gaby always wanted Mitty Matty Had a Hen.

The grain in this field—could it be barley?—is still mostly stem. Looking back Sabine sees a trail of flattened plants behind her. She feels flattened herself, as if all the dimensions have merged and there is only herself in the present moment, a speck in the universe, with nothing behind her and nothing before her.

Her lack of sleep is like a board pushing her skull from the inside. The corners of her eyes are wet—from fatigue, she tells herself. But she’s also twitchy and disheartened. At the bottom of the field there’s a sign posted on the stile: “All farmland owners must plant only those products decreed by German authority.”

The laws change every day. Driving a private car has been illegal for weeks, and meat is rationed. There’s no more sugar and no more tea. Radios are still allowed, but listening to an English broadcast is a crime “because the English only tell you lies.” Breaking the law can result in a fifty-pound fine.

But for her, a foreigner with no papers, the result would be worse. Tall makeshift crosses mark the graves of the Irish who’ve been killed, mostly Local Defense Force soldiers. The crosses are topped with rimmed helmets or hats though a few have bonnets—women in the resistance or caught in the crossfire.

She spots two crosses now on the other side of the field. Hanging on one of them is a bonnet and a pair of soft, knitted baby shoes.

Her throat tightens. A baby and its mother, probably; caught where they shouldn’t have been and killed for it. The white knitted wool is chunky but it will certainly unravel in the first heavy rain. A young life briefly acknowledged before vanishing altogether.

The idea wraps itself around her heart. The baby will never learn how to walk unassisted, never eat ice cream on a hot summer day. Never have a first kiss. Never fall in love.

She hears the creak of wooden wheels: a small caravan is making its way down a small track near the field. Her heart lurches but it’s not soldiers. There are five of them: two men in civilian clothing, two nuns, and a third woman leading a donkey. The donkey is pulling a cart with suitcases and wooden crates roped to its bed.

Sabine lifts her good hand and walks out to meet them.

“Mind if I join you for a bit?”

She’s never done this before. But the bomb last night unnerved her, and the soldiers this morning, and the dead baby’s shoes.

Or maybe she’s just tired of being alone.

 

* * *

 

The older man and his wife are going to Mayo, where his uncle has a sheep farm. “We’re the Faleys,” he says, nodding toward the woman leading the donkey.

“And I’m Ronan,” the other man tells her. “I’ve a brother in Roscommon.”

“We’re going to Galway, ourselves,” says one of the nuns, and the other one adds: “There’s a priory there.”

When it’s her turn, Sabine just says, “I’m going north.”

“American, are you?” Mr. Faley asks. “How’d you get caught over here?”

“My father’s Irish. I’m trying to catch up with him. With my family. We got separated.” Not wholly a lie.

She asks if they’ve heard any recent news. “A bomb dropped close to where I was sleeping last night. But I thought we’d already surrendered?”

The man going to Roscommon, Ronan, shakes his head. He has a bristly, black and white mustache and a pug nose that seems to lift itself away from it. A raspberry red handkerchief is folded up into a triangle in his jacket’s breast pocket.

“They’ve given us no peace terms as yet,” he says. He pulls the red handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his face, and carefully folds it again. “They’re still at it up in Belfast and that. Probably meant to drop your bomb there.”

Mr. Faley is wearing a gray wool cap and his ears jut out beneath it like little flags. He’s carrying a large orange cat in his arms. “Meanwhile they’re taking all our food. Bad enough we’re invaded, now we have to bear the cost of the occupation as well.”

His wife is walking next to him holding the donkey’s lead. Sabine thinks of the horses in Woolworth’s. She asks if she can pet it.

“You can, yeah,” Mrs. Faley says. “We traded our last two pounds of tea for the poor thing.”

“Almost three pounds it was,” Mr. Faley says.

The donkey is a thin, sway-backed creature, more spirit than beast. When Sabine strokes his nose he lifts his head slightly.

“Stayed in Cork as long as we could and longer than we should have,” Mrs. Faley tells her, “hoping against hope that things would settle into some sort of order. Instead it just kept getting worse. When we left we took every last bit of tea we could find. Had the idea it would be handy for bartering, so we did.”

Mrs. Faley has sharp cheekbones and heavy eyebrows that make her look stern but her voice is kind. She’s wearing a tweed skirt with a matching wool cardigan, both slightly ragged, and a brown low-brimmed hat with one square wooden button on the side posing as decoration. The two nuns nod their heads and smile at Sabine as they step back to make room for her. They are no taller than she is and make her think of tiny, wizened raisins.

“I saw some soldiers about a half an hour ago,” Sabine says. “Marching west.”

“Did you now? Probably heading for Kerry.” Ronan looks at Mr. Faley and nods, man to man. “Good thing we stuck with our plan.”

“Well, they’ll get to Ballyleam eventually,” Mrs. Faley says.

“Is that where you’re going?” Sabine asks. Ballyleam. The name sounds familiar.

“There’s a Big House near there,” Mr. Faley says. “We thought we’d stop and see the family. If they’re still there. And get more supplies if there are any to be had.”

“A Big House?” In America, that’s slang for prison.

“A manor, like,” Mrs. Faley explains. “A family called Grogan bought it during the last war but they don’t farm it. My husband has done some business for them. He’s a solicitor.”

The Grogans. This is why she knows the name Ballyleam. The Grogans are—not family, exactly. She can’t remember what they are. But she met them once, on one of their trips to Ireland. They lived in a large house in the country; it took ages to get there and she’d been sick in the car. The Grogan girl had long, strawberry blonde hair and was snotty to Gaby. The mother collected tiny plants.

A sharp sensation, a kind of brightness, zings through her. That’s where I’ve been headed all this time. That’s where I’ll be safe.

“Do you mind me asking, what happened to your hand?” Mrs. Faley asks.

The same tired question. Sabine lifts her chin. “I was born like this.”

“Like what?” Ronan says. He looks down at her good hand and then at her other one. “Oh.”

“How long will it take to get there?” Sabine asks. “To Ballyleam?”

“A week maybe?” Mr. Faley guesses. He glances at the thin donkey and the cart crammed with crates, cardboard suitcases, a birdcage for the cat. “Longer if we lose the donkey.”

 

* * *

 

She feels almost happy walking with them along the wriggly boreens going north, and then west, and then northeast. She needed to be with people, she realizes. To talk, and to listen as they talk. She’s been too afraid; she’s been too much in her head.

The roads are even dustier than usual because the spring was so dry, Mrs. Faley tells her, and summer’s bound to be more of the same. Farmers have started to scoop river water into barrels to water their crops, and children in rubber boots bend over streams, filling up galvanized buckets.

They’ll take those back to their houses, Mrs. Faley tells her, “For won’t the wells will be drying up, too.”

She and her husband take turns leading the donkey while the other one holds the cat.

“We don’t want him wandering off with the woodland creatures.” Mr. Faley smiles when he talks, even if he’s saying something serious.

He swats a horsefly away from his wife. “All right?” Mrs. Faley smiles up at him, her severe expression loosening its grip. She finds herself watching the Faleys as they walk holding hands or brush loose leaves off each other’s backs. They’re always together. They remind her of her parents, actually: one unit.

I am he and he is me. Where did she hear that?

Mr. Faley turns to Sabine. “And you, Sabine? All right?”

Her heart folds over at the sound of her name. It feels like a long time since anyone’s used it.

“Thanks. I’m good.”

Being with people again is exhilarating. Other than getting news, Sabine hasn’t really talked to anyone since she left Moira and Joe. The haze behind her eyes is lifting, and her brain is beginning to move its gears faster. Dry as it is, the countryside is beautiful: haycocks in the meadows and clusters of small white flowers with insect-nibbled petals along the side of the road.

Sabine picks one and brings it to her nose but it has no smell. She lets it fall from her fingers. Just a weed.

“So now where’s your mother and father?” Ronan asks. The same question from the nuns or Mr. Faley would sound harmless. Ever since Ronan noticed her hand a strange expression comes over him when he looks at her. As though he views her as damaged. Or vulnerable. She moves a little closer to Mrs. Faley.

“A little town you’ve never heard of, probably.”

“Try me.”

“Now don’t harry the girl,” Mrs. Faley scolds him.

There are beads of perspiration on Ronan’s coarse black mustache. He puts his hand up, palm forward. “Just thinking I could help her to get to it maybe.”

Sister Jerome asks Mr. Faley if she might take a short rest in the cart—they’re both ancient, the nuns, and one or the other usually needs to ride in the back for a spell among the suitcases and crates—and the subject drops. Sabine wonders what the nuns make of her. She tries to be useful, offering her last tins of food as contribution to the group. Mr. Faley doesn’t know what they’ll find in Ballyleam; Kilcurra House, that’s what the big house is called, might still have stores of food. And maybe there will be someone living there, the daughter or the son. Sabine has never met the son. He’ll be older than she is, but not so old. He might take her in, take care of her. Would he remember her name? Did he ever meet her father?

“You could have a bath if you like. I have soap,” he’ll say.

She laughs aloud. Out of all the things she might fantasize about! But she hasn’t seen a bar of soap in weeks.

“What’s funny, there?” Ronan asks.

 

* * *

 

They’re so deep in the countryside that it’s generally quiet except for the clatter of birds and insects, and their own sporadic talk. So it’s a shock when the road turns and they see a parked armored car up ahead. Mounted on the car’s hood is a red flag with a black and white cross and a swastika bull’s eye in the middle.

Sabine stops in her tracks.

“It’s not a checkpoint, I don’t think,” Mr. Faley says after a moment. “Looks like they’re just waiting for those horses to cross.” Two young men are driving a couple of horses pulling ancient plows into the next field. “It’s all right, we’re fine. We all have our identity papers if they ask.”

“I don’t,” Sabine tells him, soft as a breath.

Ronan looks at her sharply. “What?”

“I don’t have any papers.”

Two soldiers in heavy green uniforms stand in the road. The car has spare tires and heavy canvas bags roped to the back, and one of the soldiers is fiddling with a knot. The other one is leaning against the driver’s door, smoking. He turns his head to look at their group. Blows out smoke. Flicks the ash.

“Well, they’ve seen us. They probably don’t care but best to play nice,” Mr. Faley says. “Let’s stop and have a bite of lunch right here, right in front of them. Lena, you spread the blanket.” He gives his cat to Sabine. “I’ll go talk to them, nice as punch. I’m thinking they won’t bother us if we don’t seem afraid. And Sister Jerome,” he raises his voice just a little, “why don’t you just stay in the cart there, out of sight. Lie as flat as you can.”

“Like me to come along?” Ronan asks. He pulls out his red handkerchief, primly re-folds it, then tucks it neatly back into his breast pocket.

“Mm.” Mr. Faley frowns, thinking. “Better not. Just the one of us will seem less threatening.”

He walks down the road alone while his wife steers the donkey as far to the side as possible. She puts the bucket of water they filled at the last stream down on the ground and he begins to drink noisily, his long pale tongue lashing out. Ronan gets the food box from the cart—a water-stained black leather trunk—while Sister Agnes helps Mrs. Faley spread a blanket on the edge of the field. They weight the corners with palm-sized rocks from the ditch.

Mr. Faley comes back a minute later.

“They want to see our papers. Sister Jerome,” he raises his voice a little, “just stay there in the cart. I’ll come to you. Hopefully they’ve only seen the five of us, and we’ll give them five sets of papers.”

“But I’m not a nun,” Sabine says. “They’ll see that.”

“A novitiate. Get a flour sack from the back to cover your hair.”

Her brain is pricking with fear, as though someone is sticking pins into it.

Mr. Faley gathers everyone’s documents and goes back down the road. Sabine can feel the cat’s punctuated heartbeat through her fur. The flour sack won’t convince anyone close up. She could run across the field, try to get away, but then what? And what about everyone else? They can’t all run. The nuns can’t. But if she runs and they stay they’ll be put in jail. Or worse. Back in Woolworth’s they sprayed bullets into the store when they found looters, even women with their hands raised.

“It’ll be over before it’s begun,” her father had promised in September when war was declared in France. But not only is it not over, it’s worse. Even here in Ireland, where I should have been safe.

She watches Mr. Faley pull out a tan oilcloth pouch and offer tobacco to one of the soldiers, the one who’d been smoking. He shakes his head. When Mr. Faley returns, he isn’t smiling. For a moment she’s afraid he’s given her up.

“He told me Japan has come into the war,” Mr. Faley says. His voice is dry and flat, a piece of brittle wood. “On Germany’s side. They’ve invaded the Philippines and Hawaii and are dropping bombs on America. San Diego, California. Have you been there?” he asks Sabine.

Sabine shakes her head.

“Well anyway America is going off to fight them. Which means they’re not coming here. And the Luftwaffe has begun bombing Paris.”

Mrs. Faley crosses herself. “Is that it, then? No one to help us in our time of need?”

Mr. Faley doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, “For now let’s just stick with the matter at hand.”

He gives Sister Jerome’s papers to Sabine. “Put these in your pocket. All right then. We won’t leave until they do.” He means the soldiers. “And mind, keep your back to the road. Now. What have we got to eat? Oh, it’s the tinned meat, is it? That’s a treat.” He flashes her a thumbs-up smile but his eyes look worried.

Sabine hears the armored car growling to a start and then the sound of tires spitting out gravel as they find traction. She hides the stump of her right hand in her lap and hopes the flour sack, fastened under her chin with one of Mrs. Faley’s long hat pins, stays on her head. When the car gets closer Mrs. Faley stands, partially blocking Sabine from view.

The driver sounds the horn aggressively as he passes. Mr. Faley raises his hand in farewell.

“All right then,” Mrs. Faley says as the car zooms out of sight. “Over and done.”

“Good thing you have us here to protect you,” Ronan says to Sabine. His lips are plump and wet.

 

* * *

 

So far Sabine has managed to avoid soldiers asking for identity papers, but she’s had a couple of near misses. Once, not long after she left Cork, she stepped into a shop to ask for water and a minute later a couple of Germans on motorcycles roared up the road. This was in a tiny village—more of a crossroads with a couple of shops and a blacksmith. The curfew here, the shopkeeper told her, was six p.m. instead of eight because someone threw a clod of dirt at a German truck as it passed.

“What time is it now?” Sabine asked.

“Six o’clock.”

She stayed inside hoping the Germans would carry on to wherever they were going but instead they swerved to a stop and parked. From the window, she and the shopkeeper watched them adjust their belts and uniforms. They tugged their black gloves tighter and, not quite in unison, each man placed a hand briefly on his holster.

“Do you have a back door?”

The two men were walking toward the shop.

“Behind the counter. Through the curtain. Be quick.”

She ran out and kept running through the long field behind the shop as long as she dared — if the men came out to the road they would see her, the land was that flat— and then she fell to her stomach in the tall sprouted grass, her heart pounding.

Seconds later the men left, one of them holding a ham under his arm like it was a football. He took his time roping it to the back of his motorcycle while the other one watched. Even after they zoomed off, both of them leaning into the curve of the road, Sabine stayed where she was. She watched the shopkeeper come out and look for her, his hands on his hips. Did he report her? She held her breath, hoping the grass was high enough to hide her while at the same time feeling like she was nothing at all. Insubstantial.

It’s a strange feeling to want to be visible and invisible at the same time. Depending on who’s looking.

Mr. Faley finds an even smaller boreen—she didn’t think it was possible— that twists west and then north as though unplanned, once even looping south back toward Cork before correcting itself. Dust rises steadily from the cart wheels, and now and then the air fills with fairy spores twinkling as they ride the breeze.

The news about America has made them all somber. How would she feel if the Germans started bombing Poughkeepsie? She thinks of their kitchen, the bedroom she shared with Gaby, the crabapple tree in their back yard where some previous owner had wedged a metal bar five or six inches wide into the vee of the trunk, providing a narrow seat. When they were little, Sabine and Gaby loved to sit up there making up stories.

She waits to feel the spurt of anger she always gets when she thinks about Gaby. But you’re not alone now, Sabine reminds herself. And what happened is not Gaby’s fault.

Mr. Faley takes the donkey by the bridle and steers him into a dirt path dividing two fallow fields. A crow clicks at them from the gate post.

“Tonight we’ll have to sleep outside again,” he says over his shoulder. “But maybe we can find a fairy fort.”

Sabine looks down at the path, clumpy soil mixed with pebbles and dry leaves. Her feet feel hot in her rubber boots. “A fairy fort?”

Ronan maneuvers his way closer. “You’re not afraid of the dead, are ya? The Tuatha De Danann? Fairy forts is where they live.”

“Who are the Two-a-day . . .?”

“The Too-ah-day-dah-nahn.” He enunciates it slowly, as if she’s an idiot. “The fifth race of people that came here.”

Ireland doesn’t have a creation story, he tells her, it has an invasion story. Wave after wave of invasion. The Tuatha De Danann were supernatural, they were the last group to invade before the Celts.

The nuns shake their heads. “Unchristian stories.” But Ronan pays them no attention. When the Celts came, he says, they forced the Tuatha De Danann down into the earth, where they’ve lived ever since.

“The fairy forts are their portals,” Ronan says, “to the otherworld.” His mustache is a furry insect, wagging when he speaks.

“After the Celts it was the British,” Mrs. Faley shakes her head. “And now the Germans. You’d think we’d get used to it, so you would.”

 

* * *

 

But what they find instead of a fairy fort is, to Sabine’s mind, even better: the remnant of a castle. It’s set back in a field, a mass of unevenly crumbling walls surrounding a single, roofless tower. Outside the wall sits a second ruin, the small remains of a house or a chapel.

Mr. Faley carefully maneuvers the donkey and cart through a break in the wall. The ground is so congested with dirt and bracken that the cart nearly tips. In the middle of the enclosure, in front of the tower, is a sprawling ash tree.

“The walls are a bit shaggy, aren’t they?” Mrs. Faley says, helping her husband uncouple the donkey from the cart. The weathered castle stones are covered with lichen and spattered with bird droppings. “But the tree might shelter us if it starts to rain.”

They all look up. The clouds are one long piece of stretched felt.

Ronan makes a campfire. This is his job in the morning and at night, and he also provides flour for the little griddle cakes Mrs. Faley makes over the fire. He has a weathered face that makes Sabine wonder if he’s lived out of doors before.

The nuns find a couple of rocks large enough to serve as chairs, take out their rosaries, and begin to pray—their nightly ritual before dinner. Sabine watches their lips move though she can’t hear their words.

“Shall we take a look at the tower?” Mr. Faley asks. The orange cat is curled up in the bird cage, asleep. He takes his wife by the hand. “What about you, Sabine?”

Inside the tower it’s two shades darker despite its roofless state. Mr. Faley takes out his flashlight—torch, he calls it—and shines the beam up and down the walls. A rocky ledge glitters as if encased in gems.

“That’d be the second floor, once.”

There are stones on the ground separating the tower into rooms. Sabine steps carefully into one. A bedroom? A rook flaps down as if taking a look at her. Satisfied, it flies back up to its perch.

“Remember when we snuck into the Lennox house?” Mr. Faley says to his wife.

Mrs. Faley turns to Sabine. “That was a grand manor house burned down by the Republicans. After that it was just a square stone box with empty windows and weeds for a carpet.”

“Is that where you met?” Sabine asks.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Faley says, “We were engaged by that time. No, we met by accident. I was supposed to go to a dance with a friend of my cousin’s but he never showed up. I didn’t have makeup so I used red Christmas paper to rouge my cheeks. I looked like a film star, I thought.” She laughs. “Then when I found out I was jilted I was so mad I went into the pub down the street, which was not done at that time, not by single women. Though it was all right if you went into the snug so long as you were with a couple of friends.”

“The snug?”

“A little room by itself, not the main room.”

They’ve gotten to the far end of the tower with the remnants of a large fireplace taking up nearly the length of one wall. Mr. Faley shines his torch along it. The stones are cracked and mossy, like a giant’s bad teeth.

“I was drinking at the bar,” Mr. Faley says, “and had just made up my mind to go home when I saw this beautiful woman walk in. I plucked up my courage and asked her did she want company.”

“I said why not and he bought me an orange squash.”

“Now it’s our anniversary drink.”

“Very posh.” Mrs. Faley laughs. “At the time he was still at university studying law. I was a domestic. I didn’t think it would lead anywhere serious.”

“I wanted to kiss you that first night but you had some of that rouge on your nose and I thought you had a cold.”

“So I had to kiss him.”

Sabine likes that. “You did?”

“Well, not that night but soon after. Very forward, he thought me.”

Sabine’s parents met at the Frick Museum in New York, and that was also by mistake. Her father had been planning to go to an exhibit at the Met but he got the dates wrong so he went to the Frick instead—and there was her mother standing in front of St. Francis in the Desert. He was already a professor at Vassar, and Adèle had just graduated from the Sorbonne.

It was their family’s favorite story. The Encounter, Sabine and Gaby called it. Up in the crabapple tree they played a game imagining what The Encounter would be like for them. Meeting the man who would change their lives. It always begins accidentally.

Tonight it’s boiled potatoes for supper and the wild carrots that Mrs. Faley found growing along the road. The carrots are crooked and stubby and Mrs. Faley boils them with the potatoes. They don’t get quite soft enough but they’re sweet. A slight aftertaste of dirt.

“The ash tree is sacred, isn’t it?” Sabine says after they’ve cleaned up from supper but before Ronan puts out the fire. The tree’s fingerlike branches are waving in the wind, pointing here and there, unable to make up their mind. “They say it has healing powers.”

“And I for one believe it,” Mrs. Faley says.

“How d’ya know so much about Ireland,” Ronan asks, “you being a Yank and all?”

“My father. He was Irish.”

“Was? I thought you were going to meet up with him?”

She realizes her slip. “I’m meeting my mother and sister.”

“Your father, you told us.”

Her face burns. “My stepfather, really. Yes, him too.”

Does he believe her? He picks up a stick and pokes at the campfire. Mr. Faley is sitting behind his wife with his arms around her. He bends his head and kisses her neck through her hair.

It looks so easy. Two people in love. Gaby had a crush on Monsieur Perrin’s nephew, Luc, with his hooded eyes and moody smile. But Sabine has never even had a crush. The red-headed boy in church back home, that’s the closest she ever came. She didn’t even know his name.

After Ronan scatters dirt on the campfire they say goodnight to each other and then there’s a brief, common rustling as each person arranges their blankets and themselves just so for sleep. Sabine could leave their little group, and probably she should—without identity papers she’s a liability—but she likes the Faleys and the two nuns, and she likes traveling with other people. She likes seeing the Faleys together, one unit, still in love.

They give her hope. Everyone should have someone of their own. Herself included. That’s where I’m going, she thinks. To find him.

A night bird clacks for a couple of beats and then falls silent. Sabine closes her eyes. She’s been alone for so long.

 

* * *

 

In the morning she wakes up before everyone else. It’s light out, not quite sunrise, and the cold has settled onto her shoulders because her blanket is a little short and she likes to wind up her feet in it. When she sits up she can see a thin green stripe near the horizon. For some reason she feels happy.

She pulls on her oversized boots and finds her sweater. Her heels have become calloused and tough but the papers in the boot toes are ripping, she should replace them. She leaves the Faleys, a curled lump under their shared blanket; and Ronan, a piece of bent wood with his cap over his eyes; and the nuns. One of the nuns is snoring.

She walks over to the second, smaller ruin, which has four walls but no roof. She feels like exploring. There’s a smell of moisture in the air, and dew on the grass. Her footsteps leave a trail behind her. A bush by the stone doorway is covered in cobwebs, like a frayed hairnet stretched over unruly hair.

Inside there’s not much to see: pebbly dirt and weeds made gray by the lack of light. A chipped line of dark, ankle-high stones suggests a front and back room, and a pile of rusting farm equipment sits in the corner with a helter-skelter of rags or blankets beneath it. Sabine is about to go examine the blankets—maybe there’s a length of wool or something else useful—when a noise makes her turn.

“Up early today, are you?” Ronan says.

He’s standing just inside the doorway, blocking it. His mustache looks like a swath of dirt above his lip. She’s not afraid, not until he takes another step toward her. Then her heart starts pumping a little harder.

“I’m just wondering, would it cost you very much to give an old man a kiss?”

She pulls back and shakes her head, staring at the red handkerchief in his jacket’s breast pocket.

“Why doncha!” He’s grinning like an ape although his upturned nose also brings a pig to mind. “Might bring me luck.”

There’s no mistaking his plan. Sabine backs up again but there is nowhere to go.

“Why do you need luck?” she asks, stalling.

He takes another step and, to her surprise—he has a long reach—leans forward to grab her arm. She pulls away but can’t free herself from his grip. He holds her firmly and with his other hand begins stroking the end of her short arm.

“I’ve been wondering how this would feel to the touch.”

He brings his finger to the knob of skin that was supposed to be a thumb and begins to jiggle it around in circles. His breath is foul, raspy.

“Stop it,” she says. She struggles to free herself but he’s stronger.

“Don’t pretend with me. You Americans. I know all about you.” He stops rubbing her nascent thumb and begins to unbutton his trousers with one hand while holding her fast with his other hand. “You’ve probably done this more times than I can count.”

“I haven’t. Don’t!” She tries to scream but as if in a dream it comes out like a breath of air. Her throat is too tight.

He pulls out his penis, stiff and red. He’s not smiling anymore. “There now, you’ll like it.”

“Sister!” she cries.

He takes her by the shoulders and pushes her onto the dirt floor. “Ssh, can’t you. They’re both asleep.” He sprawls on top of her, bringing his knee down hard on her thigh. A sharp slash of pain. The sour scent of sweat and woodsmoke on his clothes fills her nose. Fumbling, he grips her left shoulder with one hand and with his other hand tries to get hold of her stump again.

He wants to hold it while he rapes her. Once she realizes this Sabine swings her arm in the air, trying to keep it out of his reach.

“What are you two on about, then?”

They both startle at the sound of a weedy voice behind them. Ronan loosens his grip on her shoulder and Sabine takes advantage, bringing her free leg up to knee him in the groin. “Ach-ow! Hell!”

She scrambles out from beneath him and tries to stand. Her legs are shaking hard; her muscles have turned to water.

“Waking me up with your sinful ways, so you are,” the voice says.

The blankets and rags under the rusty farm equipment rise and form themselves into an old woman. She’s as thin as a rail and wearing at least two dresses plus a gray tartan shawl crossed over her front like a pretzel and tied in the back. Sitting up, she feels around the dirt and comes up with a man’s hat. She takes a pair of round rimless glasses from inside the crown and puts them on. Then she puts on the hat.

“What the hell?” Ronan says.

Sabine is leaning against the wall; she can’t yet trust her legs to run but she’s got the door in sight and Ronan is not in the way of it.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the old woman goes on, now peering at them through her cloudy lenses. Her thin face and round rimless glasses make her look like a starving owl.

Ronan makes a disdainful noise although his face is as red as a pepper. “Just having a bit of fun, no harm in that.” He glances at Sabine as if challenging her to say different. Can she outrun him? Her legs still feel like jelly but she goes for the door. She walks, then runs, over the wet grass.

Light is spilling over the countryside as though filtered through a paper shade. She spots the two nuns walking arm and arm outside the castle wall.

“Sister!” she calls out. “Sister!” Her voice quivers and sounds strangely high and weak. But they hear her. They turn their heads in unison and smile.

“Just enjoying the new morning,” Sister Jerome says as Sabine reaches them, shaking and out of breath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

May 1940
Ireland
Gaby

 

Mostly, Gaby washes dishes.

She stands at the long stone sink in the kitchen scrubbing mixing bowls and bread pans and the long wooden spoons that get surprisingly gritty with clumpy dough, while Mrs. Walsh moves between the various ovens braising meat and stewing vegetables.

The window above the sink is so high that looking out Gaby can see only sky, and in the early morning before the ovens are lit she wears two wool cardigans over her brown serge dress. To her right there’s a small pantry and a small windowless room where Mrs. Walsh prepares dough; the main room is filled with heavy iron appliances (charcoal grill, bread oven, meat oven, broiler) and copper pots hanging from thick hooks. The large, scrubbed pine table in the middle of the room, where Gaby ate stew on her first night, has thin grooves etched into it from decades of being scoured with a wire brush—which is now one of her jobs, too. If she runs a fingernail along one of the grooves she pulls up a line of ancient soap.

Neither fish nor flesh, her father used to call the Vassar freshmen. Neither adult nor child. Although Gaby doesn’t wear a uniform she’s at work in the kitchen by six a.m. If she thought she was going to learn something useful, like baking a cake, she’s so far been wrong. The warm smell of yeast—comforting at first—has become just another kitchen odor, along with roasting meat and smoke and the smell of Jeyes-Fluid, which Mrs. Walsh occasionally directs Gaby to use for, as she puts it, “a good scrub out.”

Gaby still sleeps in the Emerald Room but her nightgown is no longer laid out for her at night, and she squeezes toothpaste onto her toothbrush herself. Still, it’s her own room, with a lavatory just down the hall. Clary and Bridie, who share a bedroom up in the attic, use a chamber pot at night. They scowl when they pass her in the corridor; they don’t want to share a room with her but they hate that she sleeps in one of the guest rooms.

Neither fish nor flesh—neither servant nor guest. She’s rolled newspaper into her narrow French shoes so they’ll keep their shape and pushed them to the very back of the wardrobe. Julianne Grogan is still visiting friends or looking at horses or both. Theobald, the brother, supposedly comes to stay on the weekends but so far Gaby hasn’t laid eyes on him.

There are bars on all the downstairs windows. A line of bells calling servants to various rooms (“Library,” “Drawing Room,” “Master Bedroom,”) hangs in the corridor. On the wall opposite is a long black sign with gold lettering: RULES to be OBSERVED in THIS HALL.

Gaby has studied it surreptitiously, not sure if it’s meant as humor.

No person is allowed to sit in the hall with his hat on.

The hour of meals to be strictly attended to, or servants get none.

Bad language will not be tolerated.

The coachman will see that these rules are obeyed.

What coachman? The Grogans’ stables have been converted to a garage, although there are still a few stalls at one end. The sign must be there for nostalgic reasons, or else a bit of fun. But maybe not.

In truth there’s not much baking or cooking to do for one person, Mrs. Grogan, who has toast and tea in bed in the morning, a small lunch, and then a slightly larger meal in the evening that she calls tea. Gaby doesn’t know why they need her, except that Mrs. Walsh would rather not wash the dishes herself. She grumbles at Gaby for using too much hot water or too much soap or for not noticing a scrape of dried food along the inside of a pot that needs to be scrubbed again with a little—a little!—hot water and soap. And then clean out the roach trap or it’s doing us no good at all.

Her pay is five shillings a week, plus room and board.

 

* * *

 

Nora takes her down to see to the village of Ballyleam but there isn’t much to see. Its two blocks of shops include a couple of pubs and one of everything else: grocery, police station, post office, butcher. “My school’s across the bridge,” Nora tells her, “past the garage and next to the Church.” The Church of Ireland (Protestant) is on the same road but further down. Nora claims she’s never set foot inside it, “as that’s a reserved sin.”

Kilcurra River snakes around the stores and houses like a long protective arm. The shop doors are painted in a variety of colors—bright red, bright green, French blue—all except for the police station, which is appropriately somber. “We’ve a police sergeant as well as a guard,” Nora says. “And that’s Kip.” She points to a white sheepdog sleeping outside the station door.

“Kip used to belong to Dennis Mulligan but he likes it here at the station better,” Nora says. “The daughter’s called Bun Mulligan because she makes buns and sells them at lunchtime. Dennis Mulligan plays the fiddle and will give you a lesson for a penny but I’ve never taken one. I’d play drums if given a choice, which I’m not. A Dublin band comes down every year to give a concert to help poor babies and unfortunate women, though they never say how the women are unfortunate, even when I ask very politely. Do you think they’ve lost their arms or their legs? They play in the school lunchroom. The band I mean. Not the women without arms.”

She carries a black purse shiny with age, holding it against her belly. She has Desmond’s clear blue eyes but not his beauty. For all that she lives with her father she seems, to Gaby, like an orphan: independent, watchful, with a certain resilience.

The houses in Ballyleam are spread out across the fields, and not all of them face the same direction. Some have slate roofs and some have thatched, and Gaby spies at least one with only a hole in its roof instead of a chimney.

The postman cycles by, lifting his hand in greeting.

“You’ll see the Baggy Man about as well,” Nora says. “He sells rags and wears grain sacks tied around his legs with twine and another sack tied over his shirt like a shawl. Like a soft clane rag?” She imitates a man’s breathy voice.

There’s a garage but only the priest and the Grogans own motorcars, she says. Daniel McGuin owns the garage and he can repair any machine ever invented. “He’s also good with shoes and boots, and once he fixed the buckle on my coat.”

“Does he have a nickname?” Gaby asks.

“What d’ya mean?”

“Like Bun Mulligan or the Baggy Man?” Tools McGuin. Boots McGuin.

Nora narrows her eyes. “We’re not comic strips and that.”

“Sorry.”

What if this is her whole world now, this small village that doesn’t even have a library? Gaby feels so out of place, a puzzle piece from a different puzzle altogether. She stops to read a yellowing newspaper article posted in Twomey’s window about a gold collar found in the Ballyleam churchyard. Celtic. Over a thousand years old. Currently displayed in a museum in Dublin.

Everything interesting is carted out of here, she thinks.

“Do you fish?” Nora asks her later, on the bridge. Below them a couple of men in waders stand motionless in the river holding fishing poles.

“I might have to start,” Gaby says.

 

* * *

 

In the afternoons, when Mrs. Walsh doesn’t need her, she explores the grounds—tennis court, algae pond, castle turret, woods—walking round and round alone for the exercise. Sometimes she sits on the stone bench near the pond and reads the Evening Echo, checking the want ads:

Messenger boy

Nursemaid

Hairdressing assistant

 

It makes her tired just to read them. She has no qualifications, no training, and she needs a certificate to teach—also apparently the teachers must be able to speak Irish. Jobs are hard to find all over the country. According to the Echo, unemployment is nearing 20%.

Not a good time to be looking for work. No wonder so many boys are leaving to fight for England, Gaby thinks, remembering the young man and his father at the hotel restaurant.

She writes letters to the Red Cross and the American Consulate hoping to find a way back to America, but so far no answers have come back. She begins to read the war news more carefully, trying to keep track of German advancement (a herculean task). If they decide to invade Ireland, Gaby thinks, I’ll be well and truly stuck.

 

Meredith Zimmerman

Poughkeepsie, New York

May 16, 1940

 

Dear Merrie,

Half of me is in shadow. It’s an hour before sunrise and the lawn below my bedroom window is a long field of ash. I’m writing this letter by candlelight as a lone bird calls out for morning.

How’s that for poetry? Do you think Miss Hague would approve?

I am actually writing by candlelight. I’m visiting my cousins in a grand house in the Irish countryside with a castle turret and servants. There’s a handsome gardener (!!!), and Julianne, the young mistress (read that with irony), is about my age. We go riding in the mornings, it’s great fun. We might take the train up to Dublin next week to go shopping. They’ve all been very kind, only of course I can’t stay here forever.

The stupid war means I can’t get a regular steamer home—they’ve stopped going across the Atlantic, apparently, for fear of mines. But I know your father works in shipping. Any chance he could find me a corner in a commercial boat somewhere? I can leave from anywhere in Ireland, and I can also get to England and leave from a port there. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. My parents, you may have heard, and Sabine, succumbed sad to say have I’m sorry to report

 

Gaby feels the tears coming and she crumples the paper. Merrie is a dolt anyway, she couldn’t help.

 

* * *

 

A few days later she takes the bus to the train station and then two very slow, very cold trains up to Dublin. Mrs. Grogan has gone to Galway to see a litter of puppies—she’s thinking of trying her hand at raising a show dog, “Something to occupy my time in the country”—and so Mrs. Walsh has given Gaby a couple of days’ “leave” (as if I’m in the army, Gaby thinks).

Dublin is more crowded than Cork but has the same cold smoggy air. She walks past men building an air raid shelter in Fitzwilliam Square and trucks full of sandbags; the war has picked up steam. The German army has begun moving at an astonishing speed as it vacuums up countries, commands puppet governments, sets up local war offices, rations food to hapless citizens so that German soldiers can be packed off to the next country they invade with bread and beans and cured meat in their haversacks. Denmark is finished; Norway is limping to its end. Last week Germany added Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg to its invasion list; Luxembourg surrendered immediately. It’s rumored that the Germans parachuted into Holland wearing British uniforms, to confuse them.

That’s six countries down in less than six weeks. In London they’re distributing gas masks and they have a new prime minister, Winston Churchill, who vows to fight Hitler to the end. The French are erecting barbed-wire barricades at bridges and crossroads, while up in Belfast men are digging trenches for underground telephone lines and there are lookouts stationed all along the Irish coast. Gaby keeps thinking of her cab driver back in Cork: Everyone’s wondering if we might be next.

At the embassy she stands in no less than four lines in rooms that feel more like hallways. She fills out form after form with mostly the same information. All the clerks are useless, she can’t find anyone to speak with who has any authority. “I’ll see that your request is passed on, Miss.” “Can’t I talk to somebody now?” “Do you have an appointment, then? No? Well the line’s just there to book one.”

Afterwards she stops at a fish and chips shop where she is given, by mistake, two blunt forks but no knife—like a prison, she thinks. She doesn’t want to ask the waitress, an older woman with a missing front tooth and a limp, to make an extra trip so she cuts the fish with the edge of one fork while holding it in place with the other.

On the cafe radio, a man with a posh accent drones out propaganda: “When we read about German submarines sinking British vessels, let us remember what the British did to ourselves, the battering-in of little cottages in Donegal by English soldiers, and the turning of poor Irish families out onto the roadside with nothing. They made our children into beggars, don’t forget.”

She takes another bite of the bland fish. She misses hamburgers and American ketchup. Hot showers, hot baths, hot anything. Strong coffee. American toilet paper. Twice now Gaby’s found pig hairs in her bacon at breakfast.

Back at the embassy she overheard a woman talking about the U.S. ambassador, who lives in a place called Phoenix Park. When she asks the limping waitress, Gaby learns that Phoenix Park is only a short bus ride away.

Another half shilling, plus she’ll have to stay overnight because she’ll have missed the last train. But shouldn’t she try everything?

In Phoenix Park the daffodils are blooming and the tulips have opened into translucent, layered cups. She’s had to walk a long way through the park to get to the ambassador’s residence, and despite the cold she feels sweat under her arms. The house is protected by a long white stone wall with iron gates and a sentry who won’t look at her. She can see the residence beyond the iron railing with its American flag fluttering in the crisp, Irish wind.

What did she expect? That she was going to knock on the front door and plead her case? Now that she’s standing here she realizes how stupid she was, thinking she’d say that she knew the president of Vassar College and then throw herself on the ambassador’s mercy. She’s young and pretty, it might have worked. But the sentry is as unhelpful as the embassy clerks. “No access, Miss.” Still not meeting her eye.

She can’t get near anyone who might help her.

Defeated, she heads out of the park to look for a hotel. Two drunken teenage boys don’t so much follow her as stumble along in her wake. One of them is wearing a bright red slicker. She isn’t worried, or maybe she is—she’s beginning to sense that in this new, unprotected life of hers anything might happen. She goes into the first place she sees (“Luggage Storage and Rooms to Let”), which turns out to be a pub that rents out a couple of bedrooms upstairs.

Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas; she’s seen this motto all over Dublin. Obedience brings happiness. But she won’t obey fate, or whatever this is. That won’t make her happy. In bed, listening to the clink of pint glasses and rowdy laughter in the pub below, she composes another letter in her head. Professor Marsh, one of her father’s colleagues, used to boast about his son in the foreign service. Our fathers were friends and I’m in need of assistance.

Isn’t everyone in need of assistance these days? How can she pretend to be more deserving than anyone else? She feels like a gambler who has nothing left in her pockets but won’t walk away from the game. If she can’t get home, what will she do?

Another ripple of laughter wafts up from the pub. Is the boy in the red slicker standing at the bar with his friend? They might have watched her walk in and followed her. Gaby gets up and pushes a wooden chair against the door, barricading herself into a place she’s frantic to leave. As she closes her eyes and pulls the thin, scratchy green blanket up to her chin she tries and fails to appreciate the irony.

 

* * *

 

When she finally gets back to Kilcurra House—the return train, even slower and possibly colder, stopped twice for the slowest cattle on earth to cross the tracks—Gaby learns that Julianne Grogan has come home.

She’s walking through the hall pulling at the fingers of her gloves when she hears an unfamiliar voice in the library. Gaby stops outside the closed door still wearing her hat, blatantly eavesdropping, while the ancient stuffed elk look off into the distance as if ashamed of her actions and want no part of it.

The voice is light and melodious: “Who is she again?”

A murmur from Mrs. Grogan.

“But why is she working in the kitchen?”

Gaby presses her ear against the door.

“We need the help,” Mrs. Grogan is saying. “It’s good for her as well. She’s getting useful training. You must think of her as an au pair.”

Julianne says something Gaby doesn’t catch.

“In times like these we must all make sacrifices.”

Who is sacrificing here, Gaby wonders? Me, or Mrs. Grogan?

Mrs. Grogan says, “She’d not be my first choice, either.”

 

* * *

 

Later Julianne comes down to the kitchen wearing blue silk harem pants and a blue-and-pink striped blouse. She has strawberry-blonde hair and her mother’s sturdy, tall frame.

Mrs. Walsh smiles at her broadly. “There you are, my duck.”

Julianne gives her a long hug.

“Hi, Norrie,” she says to Nora, and then, smiling, she turns to Gaby and holds out her hand.

“Gabrielle! I remember when you came here ages ago. You had tea with us, didn’t you? And I showed you my pony? Though I can’t think which one.” She drops her voice. “I’m terribly sorry about your parents and sister. How awful for you.”

She uses the same tone that Mrs. Grogan used: as if she’s heard of sympathy but doesn’t entirely know what it should sound like.

“You’ve grown quite pretty,” she says, and Gaby feels herself blush.

Julianne is somewhere between handsome and stunning. Striking, Gaby’s father would say. If you take her features apart they don’t seem especially fine; one of her eyes is visibly larger than the other, she has a straight but fleshy nose, and a rather large mouth. But somehow they work together to achieve a definite beauty. Her reddish-blonde hair is tied back with two thin ribbons, one green and one white.

“I see that the carnival’s in town,” she says. “What do you think? Care to look in at it?”

Gaby had noticed the striped tents when she stepped off the bus, they were set up in a field just over the bridge. It looked small and homemade, a country caravan traveling from village to village in painted vans.

“Right now?”

“Sure, why not? What about it, Norrie? Would Des let you come?”

“I’ll just go ask him,” Nora says happily.

“It’s a strange time to have a carnival,” Gaby says after Nora leaves.

Julianne is looking into one of the pots. She wrinkles her nose. “Is it? They always come in May.”

“I meant because of the war.”

“Oh. The Emergency,” Julianne corrects her. “That’s not so bad. Of course, the petrol shortage is tiresome.”

“Are you at all worried about the Germans coming here?”

“They won’t do anything to us, they’ve given their word. Now the English, that’s a different story. They might decide to invade.”

“The English?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Nor I,” Mrs. Walsh says. She’s slicing carrots rhythmically, like a machine.

“But why ever would they?” Gaby asks.

Nora shoots into the kitchen. “He gave me three pennies to spend,” she announces, panting. She opens her fist to show them. “Well. Two pennies and two half-pennies.”

“Grand!” Julianne tells her. “Let’s be off.”

 

* * *

 

Gaby was hoping Desmond would go with them. It’s not that she’s attracted to him really, they’ve barely spoken, only he’s so very good looking. Julianne, despite her flimsy sandals, walks over the field with the ease of someone who has always been athletic and active. Gaby looks down at her ugly brown loafers. She’s taken off her apron, at least.

“Your brother runs your family’s company, is that right?” she asks.

“A man of business,” Julianne says dismissively.

They walk around a large makeshift wall with “Dreamland” painted on it in bright yellow paint.

“Exports? And also hotels?”

“Always diversify, that’s what he says. I don’t pay much attention, myself.”

Julianne buys a string of tickets at the ticket booth from a tall, skinny woman with large dark eyes and a colorful red and gold turban.

“Is he sending any boats to America, your brother?”

“Not at the minute I shouldn’t think. Shall we take an elephant ride first? Or should we save it ’til the end?”

“Elephant!” Nora says, skipping ahead. The dirt field is already rutted from so many people and animals walking about.

Julianne glances at Gaby. “So you’re still hoping to get home?”

“Of course.”

“I know how you feel. I was supposed to start art school in the fall. In Paris. Then the stupid war started.”

Does Julianne think their situations can compare? Gaby rolls through a few responses before she says, “It was kind of your mother to take me in.”

They catch up to Nora, who has stopped to watch a girl climbing to the top of a long wooden pole only about six inches around. “The Stratosphere Girl!” according to a man with a bullhorn. A fiddler starts to scratch out a tune as she pirouettes on the pole end, balances on one foot, and then bends into a handstand. Her torso forms an upside-down U as her legs go up, left one first. She’s slim with dark hair cut as short as a boy’s. When she stands upright again she lifts one arm to the sky and her open hand pivots toward the clouds as if inviting—what? God? Good fortune? Applause?

Everyone claps.

“Why don’t you and Nora take the first ride,” Julianne says.

The elephant has a long, beaded double saddle with raised cloth handrails that are satiny red and a bit worn. Nora and Gaby are slightly too large to sit together for comfort; Nora is squished in front and Gaby can feel the saddle end pushing into her backside. But as the elephant, prodded by the trainer, rises up from his kneeling position she’s suddenly joyously high. The Irish landscape rolls out in soft sloping hills all around her, culminating in a mountain to the west. She can see the river, the shops, the houses, and even the old castle turret from Kilcurra House—just a glimpse of it over the treetops.

“Oh!” Nora says.

Gaby says, “We’re the kings of the world,” and they laugh.

The village seems more vivid from up here. The shops feel alive, as if they’re waiting for someone, and the road curving over the bridge promises a happier future. For a moment Gaby can imagine an abundance of choices: to live in this cottage or that, or to float away entirely and land someplace new. Closer at hand she spies two men behind one of the circus tents. They’re embracing.

Is one of them Desmond? She cranes her neck to stare at the couple as the elephant jostles away. Nora is looking off in the opposite direction.

It is Desmond.

She doesn’t recognize the other man. He’s square-shouldered and tall, and he has reddish blonde hair that’s a shade darker than Julianne’s hair. When Desmond’s cap slips from his head to the ground, the man stoops to pick it up for him in one elegant motion.

Theo Grogan, Gaby guesses.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

June 1940
Ireland, The Otherworld
Sabine

 

Sabine wakes with the feeling of an animal, quivering with sensation. Not knowing what but knowing something.

Her heart starts pounding hard and she looks up to the sky, which is made up of deep gray and purple stripes. A nearby tree is creaking in the wind. Her grandmother’s gardener once told her that in the moment before dawn all the cows lift their heads. But there are no cows here. She’s been sleeping outdoors again, this time next to a bombed-out railway platform.

Sabine Marie Donnelly. Mother Adèle, father Kevin, sister Gaby. France. Typhus. War.

She lets out a breath. It’s all coming back to her.

A stillness settles in. Sadness, and something hidden. She recognizes the four sleeping bodies around her: the two nuns and the Faleys, all wrapped in blankets she has come to associate with their personalities: Sister Agnes with a russet blanket the color of Christ’s dried blood; Sister Jerome with a bluish-white blanket like a statue in church. The Faleys share a tartan plaid, yellow and orange and red. The deep orange matches their cat’s fur. They also have a heavier brown wool blanket but that’s been put away for now. It’s summer. Cool at the moment with morning dew, but the day will grow steadily warmer.

Her thigh still hurts where he pressed Ronan pressed knee into it. As she lifts her head her heartbeat quickens again, hard fast pebbles against her chest. She gets up onto her elbows, looks around. Sits up, looks around.

She doesn’t see him.

The sun is struggling over the horizon as she stands and looks for her cardigan. She walks over to the donkey, quietly skirting Sister Jerome and Sister Agnes. The donkey has a long piece of grass dangling from his gray saggy lips. Sabine strokes him between his bunny ears and watches him give a chomp every so often as though suddenly remembering the grass. She digs out a small, wizened apple from her pocket and holds it out in the flat of her palm. He mouths it a couple of times before committing to it.

The railway station has been burned to the ground—a bomb, or arson—and has clearly been picked over already for usable firewood. Tall weeds sprout up between the rails, changing color as the rising sun reaches them. One room is still partially intact at the end of the platform.

It’s the station bathroom, now only two half-walls made of brick, but the toilet and sink are still there. No roof and no running water, of course, and there’s algae growing over the sink. But she uses the toilet anyway, which is a luxury after so many months of squatting in the grass. Underneath her is a long, dark hole; she listens as her urine hits dirt. Above her, spots of gray clouds pattern the sky like a line of bruises on milky skin.

The bruise on her thigh has gone from pink to purple to gold. She also has a bruise on her shoulder, a bruise on her neck, and a cut beneath her thumbnail from clawing at the floor. That doesn’t make sense, though; it was only a dirt floor. Maybe she scratched him?

Don’t think about it.

She tears off a scrap of the newspaper that she carries in her pocket for toilet paper. In the mirror she confronts herself, tracing out a circle from the grimy surface so she can see her face, which is none too clean. Dirt is caked on her skin as though pasted to her in patches. She feels it on her scalp, the creases in her elbows, and between her toes. She re-braids her hair into one long braid and then spends a long time picking the sleep from her eyes with her pinkie. Her forehead shines back at her.

Is it possible she looks older? On impulse Sabine unravels her braid. Yes, that’s better. Her birthday is coming up soon. She’ll be seventeen.

The sound of footsteps makes her heart suddenly beat fast, but it’s only Mrs. Faley. She has a leaf in her hair and sleep creases along one cheek.

“Whoowh! That’s a smell for you.”

Sabine hadn’t noticed the smell.

 

* * *

 

Ronan has disappeared. He never followed Sabine back to the castle, and when Mr. Faley went to look for him the small ruin was empty.

“There was an old woman there, too,” Sabine told Mr. Faley when he returned.

“Not anymore,” he reported.

The last thing Sabine wanted was for them to go out looking for him, so she told the Faleys, half in whisper, what had happened.

“He what?”

She didn’t know why she was whispering. She didn’t know why she felt ashamed.

“Kneeling on my leg so I couldn’t get up.”

“And did he—did he—”

“The old woman who was sleeping there, she surprised us. Then I ran.”

A shocked silence.

“I thought there was something,” Mrs. Faley finally said. “You coming back pale as a ghost.”

Mr. Faley’s face was crimson. “Are you sure that he—that he wasn’t just flirting?”

“Kneeling on her leg? Honestly. And Sabine a —” Mrs. Faley stopped herself.

Sabine lifted her chin. “I’m not a cripple.”

“I never trusted him, to be honest with you,” Mrs. Faley said.

“But I thought he was your neighbor? Back in Cork?”

“A neighbor? No. He saw us fussing with the cart outside the city and he offered us rope. Had a couple of burlap bags with jars of flour and grain and that. Provisions, he said. So we joined forces.” She shrugged. “He probably thought we’d let him ride in the cart is the truth of it.”

That was two days ago. When the nuns asked, Mrs. Faley told them they had parted ways with Ronan. “He’s a bad egg so he is, and the less said about him the better.”

They threw Ronan’s abandoned burlap bags into the cart before they headed out. Now, when Mrs. Faley and Sabine return to the camp site, they find Mr. Faley going through it.

He’s pulled out two wool sweaters and a frayed black blanket with red edging. There’s also a small wooden toy boat, badly cracked, and a storybook: Little People. On the cover a young boy is pushing a girl in a chair over ice.

Sabine looks carefully at the girl, who appears to be crippled. She has a pale, pretty face, full lips, and red cheeks. A resolute expression.

“Would you look at this, now,” Mr. Faley says.

He holds up a battered, green-covered booklet with a title in block letters: Militargeographische Angaben uber Ireland.

“Military Geography Information of Ireland,” he says.

“You know German?” Sabine asks.

He runs the flat of his palm over the cardboard cover. “A little.”

He turns to the first page and began reading. “It’s plans for the invasion of Ireland. Operation Green, it’s called here. It’s very specific.”

At least 3900 troops and a bridge-building battalion at first landing. Artillery squadrons. A motorized infantry. Horses to haul guns and timber ashore from landing craft. Air cover given by the Luftwaffe’s Air Command.

“And after Ireland surrenders,” Mr. Faley goes on, reading aloud, “they’ve got twenty raiding patrols to do … something… in the countryside, followed by three divisions to oversee the occupation.”

“It says all that?” Sabine asks. All of it rings true. It happened. She lived it.

“My German’s a bit rusty, but yeah.”

“Makes you wonder, it does,” Mrs. Faley says.

“Wonder what?”

“If he was a spy.”

“He could have just found it,” Mr. Faley says. “Plenty of dead soldiers on the road, their belongings scattered about.”

“Fifth columnists, they’re called,” Mrs. Faley tells Sabine. “German sympathizers and spies.”

“We don’t know he was one of them,” Mr. Faley says.

“Why are you defending the man?”

“I’m not. He’s a lout. He might very well might be a spy. Or maybe he just wanted to be a spy—ideas of grandeur and all that.”

“Take a look at this,” Mrs. Faley says.

She holds up a jar which a moment before had been wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. “It’s the flour he brought with him.”

She tilts the jar to show that inside it contains mostly straw. She unwraps another jar, and then a third. Each one has only a thin layer of flour on top of heavily packed straw.

Mr. Faley shakes his head. “I did wonder why he was so cagey about fetching flour when we asked.”

He consolidates the flour into one clean jar. “Do we want to keep his blanket?” The blanket with its black and red weave—Germany’s colors—now seems suspicious.

“Leave it,” Mrs. Faley says firmly. “Leave everything.”

“Well I won’t leave the flour, so.”

“And that being hardly a mouthful.”

Mr. Faley looks down at the jar with a tired expression. He’s not been smiling much these last few days. “We might just need a mouthful before too long.” Their supplies have gotten thin.

Sabine considers taking Ronan’s storybook, Little People—she’s desperate for books—but she doesn’t. Nothing he’s touched, she thinks.

 

* * *

 

They leave the burned-out station but follow the tracks for a while, still heading north. The donkey has a hard time of it as they’re not on a proper road or path, so eventually they give up and go back to the winding boreen. A few days later they have some luck at a farmhouse, where the farmer and his wife give them milk and cheese and bastible cake made with honey instead of sugar, sugar being almost impossible to get. In return Mr. Faley offers them a can of kerosene. The farmer keeps bees behind the outhouse and also has a cow and her calf hidden in his cellar. “You should see them try to climb the stairs.”

They eat the cheese and cake sitting on crates in the kitchen because a couple of Germans had taken a fancy to their chairs. “We didn’t try to bargain with them, just wanted them out before Lila started making noise,” the farmer says. Lila’s the cow.

“The chairs were hand painted by my granny, they were,” his wife tells them. She shakes her head. “Well.”

They have no electricity and no indoor plumbing. They cut turf for the cooking stove in the kitchen, but the house is so small it keeps warm and snug in winter, the farmer says. A cross hangs on the wall on one side of the stove, and a horseshoe and a photograph of a young girl hangs on the other.

“Our Caitlin,” the farmer explains when he sees Sabine looking at it. “One of the Petticoat Pilots.”

“Petticoat Pilot?” Sister Jerome asks. “I’ve not heard of that.”

“Girl pilot. Got her license when she left school, before the war started. A year later and isn’t she shot down by the very first Messerschmitt in sight.”

The nuns cross themselves and kiss their fingers. “Terrible.”

“Our boy’s still fighting up north. For his sister, he says.”

Sabine doesn’t know how she manages it, but Mrs. Faley convinces the farmer to let Sabine have Caitlin’s identity papers, sent to them by the Local Defense Army with a box of ashes. No ration card, of course, but it’s something at least.

Caitlin Gallagher. Is that who she is now?

Mr. Faley gives them the last of their flour—Ronan’s flour—and the farmer’s wife makes up a little package with more cake and a few apples.

“I’m only wondering,” Mr. Faley asks the farmer. “Did you hear any planes last night?”

“Not a peep.”

“Maybe the Prods have surrendered.”

“We had that thought, too.”

Has the resistance up north been defeated? Will the Germans invade England from here? No one knows but there are plenty of guesses.

The farmer and his wife walk outside to watch their slow departure. They’re a generous couple but they never smiled, not once. Maybe no one does anymore. The farmer raises his hand in farewell while his wife scans the empty sky.

“Should I go by Catlin now?” Sabine asks when they’re back on the road.

“You should, we’ll introduce you that way, but we’ll call you Sabine amongst ourselves,” Mrs. Faley says in her comfortingly firm voice. “Times like this, it’s important to remember who you really are.”

 

* * *

 

Part of the problem is that it hasn’t rained in three weeks, which is good and bad for traveling; the dirt roads are easier to traverse, but dry weather is no friend to the cart’s wooden wheels. The wood starts to shrink and then the iron rims around them become loose. When a rim falls off it’s quite a job to hammer it back on. So Mr. Faley keeps a look-out for mud holes or puddles in the fields, and he runs the cart over them to keep the wheels moist. Sabine, whose eyes are sharper, helps him look. Which is why she doesn’t at first see the carnival.

Or the remains of a carnival. They’ve been walking on a rocky, narrow lane with a jumbled stone wall at elbow height. At intervals the stones have fallen or been taken away, replaced with wires strung up between wooden poles. They come to a spot where the wall has crumbled entirely and Sister Agnes says, “Well look at that, now.”

It’s a flat dirt field littered with oversized dart boards, two long wooden slides, and a half-dismantled shooting gallery. Torn sailcloth is scattered about—the remains of tents—as well as a makeshift wall with the word “Dreamland” scripted in yellow paint. Everything is broken and abandoned or cannibalized. One of the slides has been pulled down and hacked at with a saw. There’s an oval track with small cars, all of them turned over and their wheels removed. The cars have metal steering wheels on long rusty rods, like flamingo necks.

“Look at this.” Mrs. Faley picks up a torn, muddy poster from the side of the road.

 

The whole town is talking about

A.A. Show & Carnival!

featuring

Camel

Two Baboons

Elephant rides

The Stratosphere Girl

Also Pongo, Speedway, and The Big Spinner
All Barry’s Amusements

Admissions 4d.

Don’t miss our Surprise Item!

 

“Do you hear music?” Sabine asks.

“Music?” Mrs. Faley cocks her head.

There it is again, a faint whine.

The Faleys and Sabine walk across the field to investigate, leaving the nuns with the donkey cart. Down past the Dreamland wall is a small building with wide barn-like doors and a couple of old gas pumps in front of it. Inside someone is playing the accordion.

“A dance hall,” Mr. Faley says.

Mrs. Faley sniffs. “An old garage, I’d call it.”

Inside there’s a strong smell of gasoline and oil, but Sabine doesn’t notice this at first because she’s entranced by the mirror ball that someone has strung up from the rafters. Kerosene lights nailed to the wall posts make the ball flicker. It can’t be much past six o’clock—early for dancing—but it’s wartime and tradition goes out the window when opportunity presents itself.

Or when there’s a curfew.

A dozen young women are shifting around together on the cleared floor, and a few older women sit on stools around the room watching them. A couple of boys have been corralled, too; they look no older than Sabine. The only grown man is the accordion player. He stares at the Faleys and Sabine when they walk in but he doesn’t stop playing.

He’s playing a quick-step, his fingers dancing hard along the instrument and his thumbs hitchhiking above it. The girls laugh as they step on their partner’s feet but one couple has perfect timing: their shoes stay toe to toe as they sashay one way and then another.

“Having a dance here, is it?” Mr. Faley walks up to the oldest women there, a crone with wide-spaced blue eyes and claws for hands. But she’s smiling as she nods in time to the music, and her foot is tapping, too.

“That we are.”

“What happened outside?”

“Outside?”

“The carnival.”

“Oh, the carnival.” Her smile straightens itself into a long thin pencil. For a moment Sabine doesn’t think she’ll answer. Then she says, “The carnival people, what happened was the soldiers took ’em.”

“They took them?”

“Right in the middle of a show. Girl doing ballerina poses on top of a post no wider than my fist. One of them kicked the post down while she was posing and she fell and broke her neck. Left her body to rot, so they did. All the rest were rounded up in lorries and driven away.”

Sabine says, “But that’s horrible!”

“They’ll not be returning, that’s certain.”

“And the animals?” Sabine asks.

The woman shrugs.

A boy approaches, wiping his hand with a handkerchief.

“And here’s my grandson. How are you faring, my boy? Learning to keep up with the girls? That’s a skill come in handy all your life.”

The Faleys laugh. The boy flushes. He says to Sabine, “Care to dance?”

She’s never danced much, except with Gaby. She thinks about her missing hand and lifts her chin. “I would, if you don’t mind—” she holds up her short arm to show him.

A challenge.

He takes in her missing hand and flushes darker. Will he weasel out? But he says, “You can manage it? Right then.”

Sabine, surprised but pleased (and a little worried—does she remember how to dance?), puts her left hand on his shoulder. His shirt is rough, handmade, with gray threads unevenly shot with black. He takes hold of her wrist lightly, just above the bump of her dwarfed fetal thumb. She can’t see his face, which makes his touch all the more thrilling. His hands are cool but not cold. She wonders how her skin feels to him.

She hasn’t danced much, but when she has the boys wouldn’t really hold her stump, only circle it with the least amount of flesh on flesh possible. But this boy holds her skin firmly. She stumbles a little as they check their initial movements and try to coordinate them. Then, gamely, they cross the dance floor; never quite relaxing but following the beat, avoiding each others’ shoes. Up, down; up, down. His hand starts to feel warmer.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

She starts to say Sabine and at the last minute remembers to say Caitlin.

“I’m Michael,” he says. “My friends call me Mick.”

They start back toward the other end of the room.

“So what’ll I call you?”

He looks at her, surprised. Then he smiles a small, sweet, lopsided smile. “I guess you can call me Mick.”

She catches a whiff of motor oil from a long, dark stain shaped like a vase on the floor. Mick steers right to avoid it as the music wheedles its way into another refrain. Mr. and Mrs. Faley have come out on the floor to dance, too.

“You live here?” Sabine asks him. “In Ballyleam?”

“Up the road, yeah. With my gran there.” He pauses. “From America, are you? We don’t see many Americans.”

“And here I was thinking my accent was fading.”

“You’ll want to be mistaken for one of us, then?”

“Any chance of that?”

“Keep working on it. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

They smile at each other.

The accordion player begins another song without a pause. They move a little faster to keep up with the new beat.

Mick says, “Not a bad dancer, yourself.”

Is it her imagination, or has he pulled her closer?

“The trick is to dance in oversized boots,” she says. He laughs.

They go around the floor again.

“And what do you do? Farm?” Sabine asks.

“Used to work at a pub. But I’m eighteen in a couple of weeks, so they’ll probably start me on the roads or something. I had plans for university, but.”

There’s compulsory labor for all Irish men aged 18 to 60; she’s seen the posted signs with colored illustrations of smiling men in work caps, a few holding pickaxes. Would the Germans really give out pickaxes? Sabine trips slightly in her boots—she admires the other girls with their low-heeled shoes—and Mick tightens his hand on her waist to steady her. “All right?” She nods. He has cornflower blue eyes that crinkle up in the corners.

“How did you find yourself here anyway?” he asks.

“I was in France, I left to avoid the war. But I didn’t run far enough it turns out.”

“Must have been a shock when they came.” He means the Germans.

“I was in Cork when it happened.”

He looks at her face. “I heard Cork had the worst of it.”

“It was pretty bad. I hid in a Woolworth’s for a while. Very American of me, I guess.”

She leans into him a little. Is this what people do?

“You’ve a nice accent, really,” Mick says. “You should keep it.”

She’s trying to think what to say next when the music breaks off in the middle of a refrain. Surprised, Sabine looks at the accordion player and then follows the line of his gaze.

Two German soldiers in glossy boots and long gray uniform capes are standing in the doorway.

Her heart lurches and she pulls away from Mick, looking quickly around for the Faleys. Mrs. Faley motions and Sabine steps sideways toward her, hiding her short arm behind her back. Mick follows suit, making a beeline for his grandmother.

The soldiers take off their caps as they duck inside. One of them, the older one, is dark, and the other is blond. The blond one crosses the room, taking in everything. He’s short with a barrel chest and rigid shoulders. When he lifts his eyes to the mirror ball, he frowns.

“What is this, a celebration? Did someone marry? I don’t see a bride.”

His tone makes it clear that he views the gathering as an infraction of some kind. He mock salutes the accordion player, though his manner shows he might have just as well have spit. The light from the mirror ball makes his heavy belt buckle sparkle, and his smooth yellow hair glints like bright metal.

So clean, Sabine thinks again. How do they stay so clean? She edges back further, toward the wall.

“Well?” the blond soldier says again.

The accordion player clears his throat. “No wedding, sir. Only a dance.”

“Only. A. Dance.”

Menacing. But why? Because he can. The older soldier is still standing by the door. He has black hair and widely spaced brown eyes and a long, razor-thin nose. He reminds Sabine of Luc Perrin; they’re about the same age, with the same thin frame. The blond turns and stares down Mr. Faley next.

“Shouldn’t you be at your job? It’s not yet six o’clock.”

“I’ve a travel pass, sir.”

“Well, let’s see it.”

Sabine notices that one of his eyes is slightly smaller than the other, with a heavier lid. He makes her think of a teenage boy shooting at pigeons. Or Irishmen. Or anything.  When he hands back the travel pass he catches her watching him and he leers at her. He says something in German, his eyes moving across the girls in the room.

The other officer says, “Nein. Wir haben keine Zeit.”

“What’s he saying?” Mrs. Faley whispers to her husband.

“That they don’t have time for — for this.”

The dark-haired one seems to be senior. He is everything Sabine has always, all her life, detested: stiff, polished, clipped, and severe. Nothing like the easy relaxed manner of her Irish father, whose words nevertheless carried weight. This one is all business. He’s not obnoxious, like the blond, but rules and regulations seem to emanate from his rigid spine, his perfect uniform.

He steps out to the middle of the dance floor as if it’s a stage and takes off his cap.

“We’re looking for a house large enough for a commander,” he says loudly, in English, “and his men. They’re coming next week. We need a grand house, a manor, you understand? We were told there was one nearby.”

The flap of dark hair over his forehead is stiff with oil, as if carved from polished mahogany. There’s a slight pause as if everyone is wondering who should speak.

The accordion player has his instrument between his legs. He puts one hand on top of it protectively. “That’ll be Kilcurra House, sir. If you follow the road straight up the hill and take a left at the crossroads, past the shops, you’ll come to it.”

“Is the family in residence?” His English is surprisingly good.

“I don’t know, sir.”

The blond says, “You don’t know?” and stares at the accordion player with drummed-up anger. He’s a weak personality who finds himself with power; the worst kind of authority, her father used to say. Sabine’s mouth has gone dry. You’ve got papers now, she reminds herself. You’re Caitlin Gallagher.

“I believe—I believe some of the family might be there still.”

Los gehts, the dark-haired one says. He replaces his cap and straightens his cape, one hand on each lapel. Like a witch, Sabine thinks. She can imagine him taking to the air, the heavy cloth cape billowing around him like a sail. To everyone’s relief, that’s it; the two men stride out heavily, the equipment on their belts clanging against their canteens.

After they leave the dance breaks up. Mick takes his gran’s arm but then turns to look at Sabine. “Maybe I’ll see you here next week? Unless they shut it down.” He means the dance.

“Sure. Yes.” She wishes she could think of something interesting to say. Her heart is beating hard—probably because of the soldiers. She watches him navigate his grandmother around the oil spill on the floor and out the door.

Mr. Faley spends a few minutes talking to the accordion player, probably getting news or directions. When they finally go outside, Mick and his gran are nowhere in sight. Sabine spies a coin in the muddy imprint of a horse’s hoof.

There’s a harp on one side, a rabbit on the other. Irish money. Useless now, but she drops it into her pocket anyway, for luck.

Mrs. Faley waits for her to catch up.

“Next time a boy asks you to dance,” she says, “don’t show him anything. Just go dance.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7

 

June 1940
Ireland
Gaby

 

Gaby is sitting on a white, wrought-iron chair on the front lawn, the croquet lawn, although all the croquet hoops have been removed. The air is warm and thick with humidity: summer weather. A bird is clacking out a morse code and, after a pause, another bird answers. Julianne is standing nearby in front of a portable easel, painting en plein air.

“I’ll just put on my evil pose, shall I?” Theo says, stretching out his legs and crossing his ankles in front of him. He’s sitting on a chair facing the easel.

Julianne swirls paint onto her brush tip. “No need to pose.”

It’s only just past noon but Gaby is glad to be off her feet. She’s already washed a sinkful of pans and topped two baskets of strawberries and rolled the newly made butter into little balls, which is how Mrs. Grogan likes her butter apparently.

The morning paper is open on her lap. The news is bleak: Norway has surrendered. There are photographs of Nazi flags flying in Oslo and German soldiers high-stepping in the streets. The Norwegian king is rumored to be hiding in the Nybergsund forest after refusing to abdicate. But the worst reports are about Dunkirk, where until recently British and French troops have been trapped.

The sheep are nibbling grass near the drive, so close that Gaby can see bits of dung hanging from their backsides, caught in the wool. Julianne is wearing her artist costume: an ancient, paint-stained smock and a greeny-black beret. Gaby can’t tell if Julianne means the beret to be taken ironically; she’s an odd mixture of confidence and naiveté. On the canvas, a young man—Theo—is lounging on a white chair while long, stemmy flowers grow over his feet and up toward his calves.

“A sort of sinister pre-Raphaelite,” Gaby said when she first saw it.

“Sinister pre-Raphaelite—I like that, Gabrielle!”

She’s decided to call Gaby by her full name (“So pretty, why put it to waste?”), which makes Gaby feel as though she’s actually talking to somebody else, someone more sophisticated. Julianne is amused that Gaby wants to study art rather than make it. “Dream bigger, Gabrielle!” But she’s also, Gaby suspects, happy to have a consultant without the competition.

At first Gaby thought that Julianne’s arrival might change her life here—Julianne is so friendly, and Theo is too. Every morning they greet her like a cousin. But Gaby still works in the kitchen, and she eats her meals with Mrs. Walsh and the rest of the staff downstairs. Bridie and Clary call her “Madam” when they ask her to pass a dish, forever annoyed that doesn’t have to live in the attic with them (but do they really want her to?). Gaby is company when Julianne wants company, and is a servant the rest of the time. Theo drops in every weekend and is charming and kind but unhelpful about anything that really matters—like finding Gaby a berth on a boat.

“What do you think about flames behind his head?” Julianne asks Gaby now. “Orange spears, maybe with a touch of blue?”

“Mm.” Gaby considers it. “Maybe.” It seems a bit much.

Julianne takes in a long breath through her nose. “I’m going to try it.”

Theo is wearing a crisp white shirt with a loosened blue silk tie and no jacket.  When he moves his hand—which is often, as he’s smoking—his heavy gold watch glints in the sunlight. Earlier, after Gaby set the dough to rise, Theo corralled her in the kitchen: “Julianne wants me to sit again. You’ve got to save me from an hour of utter boredom.”

“It’s a miracle that Churchill got as many men out as he did,” Theo says about Dunkirk. He takes another drag off his cigarette as Julianne mixes a bright orange color on her palette. “Word has it if the three German units up the coast hadn’t halted for a day, the war would be over now. Total German victory.”

Maybe because of his job, he seems to know more about the war than the newspapers here report. Gaby hasn’t read anything about three halted units.

“Why did they stop?” she asks.

“Exhaustion? Lack of supplies? Or a mistaken strategy.”

Gaby hasn’t seen Desmond and Theo together since the carnival, though Theo has been back every weekend since. She was surprised about the two of them, but not shocked. At Vassar her parents were close friends with two professors who went everywhere together, Mr. Parker and Mr. Crowley. They ate lunch on campus together, attended evening events together, shopped together, and went to the cinema in town together, although they lived in two separate houses.

Everyone liked them. Mr. Crowley always gave Sabine and Gaby butterscotch drops when he came to the house for dinner while Mr. Parker, behind him, carried in a bottle of wine for her parents. No one said anything, as far as Gaby knew. But of course it’s probably different if one of you is rich and the other one isn’t. And Ireland is Catholic. Maybe that’s part of it, too?

“Would you fight if the Germans come here?” Gaby asks Theo.

He stretches his arms above his head. “Have to, I suppose.”

“Everyone’s so afraid of invasion,” Julianne scoffs. “Myself, I’d throw a big party.”

“You wouldn’t,” Theo says.

“I would!” She steps back to look at her canvas. “It’s the English I’d fight off tooth and nail.”

Theo lifts his eyebrows, making an attractive, upside-down V above his eyes. “You wouldn’t say that if you were facing thousands of angry krauts with rifles pushing you into the sea.”

“He’d rather fight for our English oppressors,” Julianne says to Gaby.

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

Theo shrugs again. “Have to defend your country from the bandits, I suppose.”

“Some Germans are quite nice,” Gaby says.

“You have German friends?”

“Second cousins. On my mother’s side. Hans and Karl. They used to visit us in France. Every year we threw a big party on midsummer night and they always came.”

“You see!” Julianne says to Theo, as if a point in some ongoing argument has just been made. “Anyway they can’t be any worse than the English.”

Theo looks down at his cigarette tip. “Can’t they?”

Julianne swirls an orange-red flame on the canvas. There is a strong element of performance in all her actions. She loves being watched. “I thought for a while I’d be an actress,” she told Gaby last week, “but theatres are so dusty and cold and the dressing rooms smell like burnt mascara. Better than the house seats, though; they smell like an old granny’s coat.”

“When our grandfather bought Kilcurra House,” she says now, moving her arm with a flourish up the canvas, “he found portraits up in the attic of Lord and Lady Eagan with their eyes shot out.”

“Why their eyes?”

“We think their portraits were used for target practice,” Theo says. “By the revolutionaries in the ’twenties. Yeah, there’s no love lost between us and the English. On that score she’s right.”

“I wish I’d been alive then,” Julianne says.

“You were alive. You were a baby.”

“You know what I mean. And stop moving your hands. I wish I’d been in it.”

“You’d be all withered and wrinkly now instead of young and dashing.”

“But at least I’d have lived. I’d have done something. Instead I’m stuck here, doing nothing.”

“Oh kangaroo,” Theo says, his pet name for her. He throws his cigarette butt on the ground by his foot and steps on it without leaving his sitting position. “You wouldn’t have done a thing.”

 

* * *

 

Gaby has asked Theo about a boat to America and he promised her he would look into it. But so far: nothing. It’s been almost two months and she’s no closer to going home than she was when she first landed in Cork. She should be at Vassar right now, walking on the paths between the quads to Rockefeller Hall or eating Vassar Devils—fudgy cake with ice cream and marshmallow sauce—at the Alumni House, or studying in her dorm parlor while someone tootles on the parlor piano. She should be requesting heavy art tomes from the library stacks and practicing dance steps and sharing a cigarette with some new friend as they walked laps around Sunset Lake, trying to keep their weight down. Instead here she is in the middle of nowhere, washing dishes and watching a rich girl play at being an artist.

She can’t say she’s depressed though she feels a sick deadness in the afternoons when she has nothing to do. Last week she went into the library to look for something to read, though from previous inspections she knew that the books there were mostly about fishing or dogs. To her surprise, she found Mrs. Grogan on her knees on the carpet.

“Oh, Gabrielle,” Mrs. Grogan said. “Look at this. I found it on the floor.” She was holding the small china cat sitting upright with its white paws clutching its tail, which Gaby had noticed at their first meeting—her interview, as she thinks of it now.

“Someone knocked it down and didn’t bother to pick it up.”

The cat, about the size of one of Adèle’s perfume bottles, was the same color as the carpet. The nearest window had its curtains pulled back but the rest of the room was dark, and the air smelled stale.

“Maybe they didn’t notice it?” Gaby suggested.

“And look. It hasn’t been properly dusted. So easy for dust to get trapped between these tiny ears. Do you have a handkerchief on you?”

She did. She pulled it out of her skirt pocket and offered it to Mrs. Grogan. But instead of taking it, Mrs. Grogan handed Gaby the china cat. She said, “It’s these small jobs that show a person’s worth.”

Gaby stood still, unsure what to do. Mrs. Grogan was watching her. She began to rub her handkerchief over the cat.

“Use the corner,” Mrs. Grogan instructed her, “for the tight spots.”

When Gaby passed the cat back, Mrs. Grogan turned it over in her hands.

“Mm. Not quite there, I think.”

Gaby felt her face flush.

“Spit and polish,” Mrs. Grogan said, giving her the cat again.

After a strange moment—am I really going to do this?—Gaby spit on her handkerchief. She rubbed the spot between the cat’s ears again.

Mrs. Grogan nodded. “That’s the way.”

Would Gaby’s mother treat a relative, even a relative by marriage, this way? No. She never would. She was always generous to Hans and Karl. Julianne has complained to Gaby about Mrs. Grogan—“Don’t bother asking for sympathy, she has a great contempt for personal feeling”—but Gaby can tell she’s afraid of her, too.

After Mrs. Grogan left the library, Gaby studied the bookshelves for something, anything, to read. Her heart was beating hard with shame and anger. As she walked back past the table with the little china cat, she had a sudden impulse to take it. She scooped it up without breaking her stride and pushed it into her pocket.

Since then she’s stolen two more things: Julianne’s thin silver necklace with a freshwater pearl pendant, which she spied on the drive one afternoon; and a ten-shilling note. The ten-shilling note was bad, since she actually rifled Mrs. Grogan’s purse for it, though it only amounts to about fifty cents. The purse had been left on the hall table, no one else was around. The stuffed elk heads with their cloudy glass eyes had an air of detachment; why should they care?

Clearly she’s angry at the Grogans—at Mrs. Grogan for making her work in the kitchen (cheap labor); and at Julianne for not insisting that her mother treat Gaby better; and at Theo for not finding her a place on a boat. But she doesn’t openly protest.

Pathetic.

“Are you nearly done?” Theo asks Julianne. He’s tired of posing, though it only amounts to sitting in a comfortable chair in the summer sun.

Gaby stands up to look more closely at Julianne’s canvas, where freshly painted tangerine flames rise behind Theo’s head and burn blue in the middle.

“It is very dramatic,” Gaby says. She has to admit the flames add a new, interesting layer.

“You see? You must always believe me,” Julianne tells her.

“Now don’t go doing that thing with my nose you did last time,” Theo says.

“What did I do? You have a bump and you know it.”

“Not as large as all that.”

They flash amused looks at each other, and for a moment they seem like twins out of Shakespeare, both of them tall and healthy and nearly identical; the boy is the one with the short hair. Gaby envies their ease with each other, their deep familial knowledge and their shared history, good and bad, which they can always call up and discuss. She misses that. She used to scream at Sabine, so mad she could burst, but she also knew her through and through. “No more for me, s’il vous plait,” Sabine liked to say primly, as a joke, when something unpleasant was offered.

“How does it look Gabrielle?” Theo asks about the painting. “Tell me the truth.”

He’s addressing her but the joke is still between himself and his sister. Gaby feels a heavy weight, an ache that might just be permanent. They aren’t my family, she thinks, and they won’t ever be. They’re just the closest ones to it.

“There’s no bump on this nose,” she tells him.

“No bump yet,” Julianne says wickedly, and the two of them, twins again, laugh the same laugh.

 

* * *

 

The next morning Gaby wakes early and dresses without switching on a lamp, feeling for the clothes she laid out the night before on the sad little armchair near the window, upholstered in faded stripes of clover. She’s down to two pairs of stockings; one pair is soaking in a bucket of Lux next to the wardrobe, and the other pair is yellowing and stretched out but dry. She pulls those on, buttons her brown serge dress over her slip (also yellowing), and grabs her wool cardigan for all that it’s June.

When she goes downstairs she can hear Mrs. Walsh in her bedroom, the floorboards creaking as she moves about getting ready for the day. Gaby pockets the heavy scissors that are kept with the knives in the kitchen, and then she slips on her shoes and opens the back door.

The sun is glittering its way over the treetops and the breeze feels fresh and cool. Dew sparkles on the ground, painting the grass in different shades of green. Gaby crosses the back lawn to the woods. She ignores the path that leads to town and instead heads toward the abandoned farm buildings that Nora told her about. The air is thick with humming insects, and bluebells and fairy flax dot the ground.

When she emerges from the trees she blinks and stands for a few moments just looking across the cleared space. This was where the farm work was done, back when Kilcurra House was still a working farm. All the old outbuildings—the barn, the milk house, the lime kiln, the potting shed—are made from the same quarried gray stone. A few windows still retain broken shards of glass (one shard looks like a tooth, standing upright in defiance of gravity), but most are empty. The barn roof has great gaps where its tiles have blown off. Some of them, cracked and broken, litter the ground nearby.

But the milk house, where they used to store the huge canisters of milk back when Lord Eagan kept a dozen cows, is still in fairly good condition. It has a painted teal-blue door with a long horizontal pole acting both as a door handle and a latch. Next to it, a rosemary bush with Medusa-like branches has grown nearly into a tree.

Gaby walks over to the rosemary bush, taking the kitchen scissors from her pocket. Today is Sabine’s birthday. She would have been seventeen.

Her grandmother used to put a jar of fresh rosemary in her bedroom every year on their grandfather’s birthday, “Rosemary to remember,” she’d say. It’s a strong smell, not at all sweet, but long lasting. Eventually, in water, the stalk ends soften and grow white but they never take on the musty smell of decaying flowers, a smell Gaby particularly dislikes.

At their annual midsummer party, Gaby’s mother made sure to put rosemary in the flower arrangements to honor her father, who began the traditional party years ago. Adèle invited all their neighbors as well as her German cousins, Hans and Karl, although she liked to tease them that they really were French—they were born in Alsace Lorraine. Where are Hans and Karl now, Gaby wonders? As far as she knows they haven’t been heard from them since the war began. She hopes they’re safe. They’re not much older than Gaby herself, and great fun. Every year they brought a friend or two along with them to the party. “Let us introduce you to our beautiful American cousins!”

The rosemary branches are as thick as Gaby’s pinkie and peppered with small, violet buds. As she half-cuts, half-saws one of the stalks, its scent fills her nostrils. She cuts another stalk, struggling with the alive greenness of it, twisting and bending to sever it from the mother bush.

Back at the house she fills a jam jar with water, arranges the stalks in it, and takes the jar upstairs to put on her bedside table. Rosemary to remember. She stares at the slender, sharp needles waiting to feel sad, or dutiful, or virtuous. She wants to do the right thing, to honor her sister, but the gesture feels surprisingly hollow. Remembering isn’t enough. In some ways, Gaby thinks, it’s a trap. Is this what’s keeping me from moving forward? Nostalgia?

“You can start on the dough,” Mrs. Walsh tells her down in the kitchen, “and then slice up what’s left of the roast and push it through the meat grinder. Oh, and fetch me a soup ladle, would you?”

Gaby wraps an apron around her waist and expertly ties it behind her back. In the pantry she tugs open a couple of sticky drawers until she finds a ladle and, next to it, a small silver salt bowl, which was probably put in the drawer by mistake. The bowl is the size of a half dollar, tarnished but heavy, with a small indent for salt in the middle. Its colors make her think of the night sky: dark with flashes of silver like the whorl of a constellation. She stands for a moment in the cramped space tipping the bowl back and forth in the palm of her hand, hardly breathing, watching the flecks of light spark and fade.

“Today, if you please!” Mrs. Walsh calls out.

Gaby slips the salt bowl into her dress pocket and picks up the soup ladle. As she moves around the kitchen—mixing dough, washing wooden spoons, mincing meat with the antiquated hand grinder—she can feel its weight against her thigh like a stone.

It’s probably worth a few pounds. No one will miss it.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

June 1940
Ireland, The Otherworld
Sabine

 

“They came around, yeah. A couple of soldiers. But they’ve gone now,” the man says. He’s wearing a rough, outdoor coat and he pushes his cap back from his forehead to look at them.

He’s got a sunburnt face but he’s handsome, Sabine thinks, with his startling blue eyes and heavy eyebrows. She’s standing next to the nuns at the end of the Grogans’ drive, her loose rubber boots rolling forward on the gravel. The donkey cart, without the donkey, is propped up on the grass behind them. The donkey is dead.

After they heard that the German officers wanted to requisition the Grogans’ house, Mr. Faley decided to just press on north to Galway. But the loss of the donkey made him reconsider yet again. The poor animal knelt in the road soon after leaving the carnival field, buckling one front leg and then the other like a penitent. His pink tongue hung loosely from his lips and his visible ribs were like a giant, curved comb.

Sabine cried for him: his long lashes, his patience. His sporadic thirst and constant hunger. She’d given him a personality: self-effacing and loyal. She didn’t think she was wrong.

“I’ve been expecting this, the poor sad fellow,” Mr. Faley had said looking down at the corpse in the road. He sighed. “All right then, now what?”

“At least we might spend the night at the house?” Mrs. Faley suggested. “If the soldiers have left? Or in the barn if they haven’t.”

The wind had changed direction and was blowing in quick, heavy gusts. There was rain on the way, maybe even a storm. They pulled the donkey cart to Kilcurra House themselves, Mr. Faley and Sabine on one shaft and Mrs. Faley and Sister Agnes on the other. Sister Jerome carried the cat. They had to leave the donkey to the dogs.

“Or that nice accordion player, if he’s in need of meat,” Mrs. Faley remarked.

“Please! Don’t!” Sabine couldn’t bear to think about it.

“It’s a pity, so. But the hunger here will only get worse.”

When they got to Kilcurra House they found the white iron gate off its hinges and the drive overgrown with weeds. Sabine could smell cut grass; not newly cut, but cut and left out in the dew and rotting. There was a long battered motorcar by the front door and a man in a thick work coat and cap, a civilian, was loading suitcases into the back seat. A young girl sat on the flagstone step of the house. She looked at the group with dead eyes.

“They were only here a short while,” the man says about the soldiers, “a quick ten-minute tour. Decided the house will do and that’s that. Said they’d be back in a couple of days with the others, so. But in the meantime we’re cutting out. And how do you know Mr. Grogan?”

“I’m a solicitor, I did some business for his mother in Cork. Leases, that sort of thing.” Mr. Faley puts out his hand. “Gerald Faley.”

“Desmond Cullens,” the man says, taking his hand. He turns to the girl. “Run and fetch Mr. Grogan, Norrie.”

The house is large and square, made of light gray stone with an old castle turret at the back. One of the front windows is broken; an unevenly cut board has been nailed behind the jagged bits of glass.

“Mrs. Grogan isn’t here, then?”

“She left with her daughter, oh, about three months ago now. Headed for South America—Columbia. We haven’t heard if they made it.”

“Got out while they could, did they?”

“A good thing they did, now it’s come to this.”

Sabine is trying to remember her last—her only—visit here. There was a daughter and a mother, and a large room with a warm fire, and two little dogs, and a pony around back. The daughter was a year or two older than Gaby. She showed them her pony when her mother insisted: “Take the girls to see Peabody, why don’t you.” She wasn’t very nice, the Grogan girl. She looked bored. “You mustn’t touch his muzzle, he bites,” she said in a way that made Sabine think she rather wished one of them would touch his muzzle.

What was her name? Julia?

The young girl comes back with another man behind her; Theobald Grogan, he says, introducing himself to the nuns. And to Mr. Faley he says, “Faley! Look at you now! I’d hardly recognize you and that’s the truth.”

“Lost a bit o’ weight lately, Mr. Grogan.”

“Haven’t we all. And it’s Theo, please. No need to stand on ceremony these days.”

The girl begins shifting the cases and boxes more neatly into the cramped back seat of the car. She has short, straight brown hair and the same blue eyes as her father.

“Can I help?” Sabine asks.

“I think that’s everything. Is that everything, da?”

“They’ve cleaned up in the north and now are massing near Wexford,” Theo Grogan is saying. “I heard another battalion landed in Cork last week.”

They keep on talking about the war and Sabine gets bored. She looks at the girl and sticks out her hand. “I’m Caitlin,” she says.

“Nora Cullens.”

Theo is standing next to Nora’s father, Desmond. Although they aren’t touching Sabine senses an intimacy. When they turn to go into the house they glance at each other, an unspoken communication. Don’t worry, from Theo. I’m not, from Desmond. Something about that feels familiar.

Theo takes them into the drawing room so the nuns can sit down. “Let me pull off some of these sheets,” he says. “I was covering everything when you came, not that it matters. I’m not entirely sure—well. It doesn’t seem likely we’ll be back.”

“We don’t want to keep you,” Mrs. Faley says.

“We were planning to wait until dark in any case. Roads not as crowded and all that. I’ve a pass but it can still be dicey.”

“Do you live here, too?” Sabine asks Nora.

“In the gardener’s cottage. Behind the house. My father’s the gardener.”

“And so where is it you’re off to?” Sister Jerome asks.

Halifax, Canada, Desmond says. “There’s a boat for us in the west, up near Galway.”

“We hope,” Theo adds.

“All the troop movement’s to the east at the moment,” Mr. Faley says. “Now’s the time to go.”

“I wish I could offer you passage.” Theo fiddles with the gold watch on his wrist and for a moment Sabine thinks he’s going to offer it to Mr. Faley. For what, recompense for not taking them, too? “I’m not even sure they’ll take us,” he says, “though my family does own the boat. On paper.”

He stops fiddling with his watch and turns to switch on a standing lamp.

“Oh!” the nuns say together. They gaze up at the shaded light.

How long has it been since she’s been in a place with electricity? Sabine blinks, feeling its magic.

They hear the rain begin, hard drops against the windowpane. All the sofas and chairs except the ones they’re sitting on are covered in white sheets, and the walls are empty save for nails. Sabine spots a pile of paintings stacked in the corner with their backs to the room. The carpets have been rolled up and tied with heavy twine.

It’s like a chicken coop after all the chickens have been slaughtered. A present that’s really just a sad reflection of the past. All these weeks she’s felt drawn to this place and now here she is. Should she tell Theo Grogan she’s been here before? That she’s met his sister’s pony? But what would be the point? He’s leaving, and she is not.

“Was it very bad down in Cork?” Theo asks Mr. Faley.

“Terrible. Hanging lads from the lampposts for breathing wrong, so they were.”

Desmond glances at Nora. Her eyes have gone dead again. “We’ve seen some of that here, too.”

 

* * *

 

Theo takes them upstairs to show them the bedrooms. “You’re welcome to camp here for a day or two but I’d be off before the Boche return,” he says, using the French slang for Germans. “Their commander’s off somewhere at the moment, I think they’re waiting on him.”

“We’ll just be glad to sleep indoors for a night.”

Mr. and Mrs. Faley take Mrs. Grogan’s old room, the nuns take Theo’s, and Sabine chooses a small, square room with green carpeting and clover wallpaper. “The Emerald room,” Nora calls it.

The window looks out over the front lawn and the drive. She thinks of Mick’s smile flicking on like the electric lamp. How far away does he live?

Nora comes in with blankets and a hot water bottle. “The lav’s down the hall.”

Indoor plumbing! Even better than electricity.

“Did the soldiers say when they were coming back?” Sabine asks.

“End of the week.”

“So the house’ll be empty until then.”

Nora looks at her sideways. “You’ll want to be gone when they get here.”

“Do you know a boy named Mick?” Sabine asks as they smooth a blanket up toward the pillow. “Lives with his gran? I met him today.”

“Today? You saw Mick today? I’m glad to hear it.”

Sabine waits; she can tell there’s more. Nora glances up and then stares down again at the blanket.

“A bunch of lads were walking down the road with their legs tied together, a couple of soldiers with rifles prodding them along. Last week it was, and I wasn’t sure who the lads were exactly, I was watching from the window.” Nora lowers her voice. “They shot one in the head. For what I don’t know. He was still tied to the others and they had to drag his body along behind them.”

“But that’s awful!”

“I’m glad Mick’s all right at least. He’s always been nice to me.”

Sabine follows Nora downstairs past a huge elk rack and smaller polished skulls all hanging on the walls. A green baize door leads to the servants’ area. There, in the hallway by the kitchen, there’s an open crate of knickknacks packed in straw: jade ashtrays, Chinese vases, and a little gray and white china cat holding its tail.

“Mrs. Grogan took most of the silver with her, but there are still dishes and cutlery and that,” Nora says.

Sabine picks up the china cat and strokes the curve of its tail and its little back. Strangely, she likes seeing the house like this: remnants of a former life. What comes next? She thinks about Mick again.

“Seems like a nice place to live,” Sabine says.

“It is, yeah. I’d rather not be leaving, to be honest with ya.” Nora looks at the china cat in Sabine’s hands. “You can probably keep that if you like. They’ll not be back for it I’d wager.”

Sabine nestles the cat back in its nest of straw. “No. It’s not mine.”

In the kitchen, Mrs. Faley is helping Desmond and Theo pack up as much food as they can for their trip. “You’ll not be finding much on the way, so.”

Still, generously, Theo sets aside a box for the Faleys with a jar of flour, five eggs, a few cans of condensed milk, and three squat jars of milled barley.

“There’s wood stacked in the cook’s sitting room,” Desmond says, “here’s the key. People kept breaking into the kitchen so now we keep everything locked up there. The window has bars on it.”

“Do you like barmbrack?” Nora asks Sabine. “I made it myself.”

It looks like a loaf of bread. “I’ve never had it, I don’t think.”

“I’ll cut you a slice.”

It’s delicious. Nora cuts her another slice, then one for herself, and then sets the rest of the loaf aside. “You keep it. We’ve another. But it’s better with butter.”

“I’ve nothing to give you. Wait.” Sabine pulls out the coin she found at the carnival. “It isn’t anything. Just to remember me by.”

The rain trickles to a stop. “Should be the worst of it over,” Desmond says.

As they say good-bye Sabine feels an urge to hug Nora, although they’ve just met, and she’s not from a hugging family—neither is Nora, she suspects. Nora and Desmond and even Theo are all careful with their personal space. But after Theo puts the car into gear he grasps Desmond’s hand on the seat beside him and gives it a squeeze. Sabine can’t see this but somehow she knows it.

“We’ll they’re off,” Mr. Faley says as the car pulls away.

Mrs. Faley crosses her arms in front of her. “And good luck to them.”

They look up at the sky again before going into the house. The nuns are already asleep in their bedroom. Sabine waits, savoring the feeling of being outside and the happy knowledge that she can go inside whenever she wants. Theo’s car is halfway down the drive when it brakes and Nora hops out. “Caitlin!”

Sabine runs over, her feet sliding in her oversized boots.

“If you go into the woods behind the house and take the left path you’ll get to the old farm buildings,” Nora tells her. “No one goes there now. You could stay there when the soldiers come. In the barn or the old milk house. For a little while at least.”

Have I given myself away? Nora seems to know what she’s planning.

“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” Nora says.

 

* * *

 

The next morning is humid and overcast. The dirt road leading to town is littered with straw and there are bulky burlap bags piled up near the bridge. Women in head scarfs stand in a line outside the grocer’s; Twomey’s, it’s called. Sabine and Mrs. Faley join them. Tacked up behind the glass window is a square poster: Citizens Exploited by the English, the Third Reich Will Protect You! There are no soldiers in sight, although a long red Nazi banner hangs outside the post office.

Mrs. Faley buys a block of cheese, three boxes of biscuits, a paper sack of salt, and as much animal feed as she can manage. They’ve got the Grogan’s speckled gray pony now, shorter and fatter than the donkey, with a white mane and white socks.

Outside Twomey’s a man stumbles by pushing a rusty bicycle and bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Another man, in the middle of unloading jingling glass bottles from a cart, stops and stares at them.

Mrs. Faley nods hello. “Warm day, isn’t it?” He doesn’t answer. They’re strangers here.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Faley says as they walk back. Sabine helps push the wheelbarrow with her good hand, the feed and groceries in its bucket. When they get to the house the nuns are standing on the flagstone step like salt and pepper shakers looking at the sky.

“Cart’s all loaded,” Sister Jerome says, and Sister Agnes: “Let’s hope the weather holds.”

Mr. Faley is fitting blankets around the whiskey crates holding their supplies. “Have you got your papers?” he asks Sabine. She nods.

“I’ve left our address in Clew Bay on the hall table. Are you sure your family will find you?”

This is the story she told them this morning; she’s meeting her family nearby and she’ll just stay in the house for a few days until then. It’s obvious they don’t believe her but what can they do?

“You’d be doing a service coming with us,” Mr. Faley had said. “Help with the farm and that.”

But Sabine was firm. “Can’t. I’m sorry. It’s my family!” Lie, truth, lie.

Now she strokes the pony’s shaggy mane. “Do you bite?” she asks gently. He lifts his head and looks her in the eye for a fraction of a second. His pupils are as dark as coffee. “No, you don’t,” she says, and touches his muzzle.

After they’re all packed up, Mrs. Faley pulls her into a hug. “Don’t let anyone walk down on you.” Sabine doesn’t know what that means but she says she won’t.

The nuns both bless her, and Sister Agnes touches the top of her head.

“I don’t like it,” Mr. Faley says.

“You can see her mind is made up,” Mrs. Faley tells him. “And at her age my mother already had a babe in arms and was expecting another.”

“Times have changed, though, haven’t they?”

“You’re right, they have. Girls need to grow up even faster now.”

But as they start down the drive Sabine sees Mrs. Faley wiping her eyes.

 

* * *

 

After she makes and eats an omelet with the egg the Faleys left for her—bliss!—Sabine searches the house for shoes. First order of business: get rid of these rubber boots.

In what must have been the daughter’s bedroom—Julia? Juliette?—she discovers masses of clothes hanging in a huge wooden wardrobe carved with rabbits and fish. There’s a short-sleeved knitted white dress, a wrinkled blue dress with white flowers, and a stained lilac dress with a matching short cape. There are also silk evening gowns with muddy hems and several crepe-de-chine blouses, most of them stained as well. One blouse smells strongly of horse.

Did Julia leave in a hurry? Or maybe, being rich, she just took whatever was clean, planning to buy more later. Sabine tries on dark blue harem pants and a matching blue-and-pink striped blouse. She studies herself in the long mirror affixed to the wardrobe door. Do I look older? She holds her hair up to the top of her head, like a bun. On the wardrobe floor she finds a pair of cork-wedged sandals but they prove to be uncomfortable, so she switches to the daughter’s riding boots. A perfect fit. She pulls out two wool cardigans in slightly different shades of gray, most of the blouses, three dresses, two skirts, and a black velvet evening gown. Then she packs the clothes into two large hat boxes after dumping out the hats.

She’s happy. She’s just gone shopping.

 

* * *

 

Next stop: the library, though it turns out the Grogans’ books are inexpressibly dull. Fly fishing and more fly fishing. Biographies of elder statesmen. She’d been looking forward to drowning herself in a story, a real story with adventure and romance. Still, she reads a page or two, sometimes a whole chapter, before picking up a new book, starved for the act of reading itself. She’s aware of the passing time only when the room grows cold.

She’d like to light a fire but what if people in town see the chimney smoke? Do they know the whole family has now left, will they come to investigate? For the first time Sabine wonders if Theo Grogan made his plans known. If he did, others might come by hoping to loot the place, or to live here like she is.

People kept breaking into the kitchen, Desmond said.

Will someone come while she’s inside? A man? Several men? There’s plenty left to steal. What if Ronan comes? He knew they were headed for Ballyleam.

You’re making up stories, she tells herself. You wanted to be here, and now you’re here.

She goes out to the hall and pulls the iron bar across the front door then attaches the heavy chain as though securing a dungeon. The sound, a dull clanking, is dungeony too, and afterward she can’t tell if she feels safer or trapped. She makes herself dinner—a bowl of strawberries and the rest of Nora’s barmbrack—and then carries a book about dog breeding up to her bedroom to read. Sitting up in the bed she can see out the window to the front drive.

But she can’t concentrate, she keeps checking to see if there’s anyone coming. And the house creaks sporadically for no apparent reason. Is it haunted? It’s dusk, the time for pookies and ghosts as Moira told her at Woolworth’s. A hundred years ago, that feels like. She thinks of Ronan kneeling on her leg, unbuckling his belt. She felt drawn to this place for so long, day after day, certain that this was where she was supposed to be. But the house is so big and empty. Why is she only now taking that in now?

A smell drifts into the room which at first she can’t identify. Then it comes to her: rosemary. Her grandmother used to keep a few sprigs in a cracked Chinese vase by her bed, and they were there all through her illness and even after she died. The smell of death, Sabine thought. She’d asked her mother to get rid of it.

“Non, cherie. Rosemary to remember.”

Hoping to lose the smell she struggles to open the bedroom window, a herculean task. The wood groans and sticks; she can budge only it a couple of inches. Beneath the window she can see four or five rusty croquet hoops and a broken mallet in the shrubbery.

A thought occurs to her.

She leaves the bedroom and goes downstairs. In the kitchen, a calendar is hanging near the stove, the days marked off one by one in pencil crosses. June. She looks at the date.

She was right. Today is her birthday. She’s seventeen.

They always celebrated her birthday in France. If the weather was good they’d have a small family lunch outside and play croquet and a game from her mother’s childhood, pétanque. Gaby always won at croquet; she was vicious about hitting other people’s balls out of her way, especially their mother’s. After the games: presents tied up in silk ribbon, which Sabine kept for her hair. Last year she received a sketch book with thick ecru paper, a Japanese calligraphy set, and, from her grandmother, a silver pin shaped like a horseshoe.

Four days later the housemaid Genevieve found her grandmother slumped in the garden. A stroke, the doctor said when he came to the house. She had a second, worse stroke that night, and never left her bed again.

Sabine takes the pencil that’s balanced on the calendar nail and crosses out the date. Seventeen. Do I feel any different? She thinks of a babysitter they once had, Margy Russell, who was seventeen. She seemed so old to them, an adult. Sabine and Gaby went through Margy’s coat pockets when Margy was in the bathroom but they found nothing except an unused tube of cherry red lipstick.

It was a mistake to stay here alone. I should have remembered what alone was like. If she knew where Mick lived she would go there and knock on his door. Tomorrow she’ll go into town to look for him.

She’s just replacing the pencil when she hears glass breaking and then the high clanging sound of metal on wood. Sabine freezes, listening hard. Her fear has come true: someone is breaking in. Her heart starts pinging like mad. “Here!” a man’s voice calls out. Another voice answers. There’s more than one of them.

The wooden floorboards start creaking above her, heavy stomps followed by the scraping sound of furniture being moved. More voices, they sound angry. They’ll be coming down here soon, searching for food.

She looks around wildly, opens the kitchen door, and spots Nora’s woods.

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

June 1940
Ireland
Gaby

 

Nora and Desmond’s cottage is tucked within the Grogans’ walled garden at the side of Kilcurra House. Gaby’s grandmother, in France, had a gardener’s cottage on her property, too, though not attached to the garden wall. Gaby’s cousins Hans and Karl used to stay there when they came for the annual midsummer party. André, her grandmother’s gardener, had moved into a room off the kitchen when they put in central heating, and the little cottage was cold and damp. But Hans and Karl loved it; they preferred it to a guest room in the main house. They used to make a great fire in the fireplace to cook their famous rabbit stew. “We have all that we need right here!”

Nora’s cottage is larger and prettier than her grandmother’s old cottage. It’s made of the same black-and-ash quarried stone as the garden wall around it, with a slate roof and red geraniums in the two front windows flanking the front door. The main room has a wide fireplace, a kitchen table, and prim stuffed chairs covered in worn chintz—cast offs, Gaby suspects, from the big house. Nora shows Gaby the settle bed in the corner where she sleeps; Desmond sleeps in the room off to the right. The kitchen takes up the rear of the cottage, blocked off by two blue-and-white gingham curtains in lieu of a door.

Nora has invited Gaby to tea. She’s made barmbrack—a kind of dense, cinnamony raisin bread—which she slices carefully, her tongue hanging over her bottom lip. She slathers the piece with Mrs. Walsh’s creamy butter and puts it on a little white plate with ivy trim for Gaby.

“The secret is soaking the raisins overnight in cold tea. Plumps them up.”

Gaby takes a bite. “Delicious!”

They’re sitting in the chintz armchairs by the fireplace. There’s no central heating in this cottage either, but it’s small enough to be kept warm by a peat fire. Every summer Hans and Karl had to clean out a year’s worth of stray leaves and debris before they could build a fire in the tiny stone fireplace in France. They were both tall and blond and athletic, and they used to lead camping trips for the Boy Scouts in Hamburg before it was banned to make way for Hitler Youth. They always came for at least three days, driving up the night before the party with a friend—a different one each year—and their two dogs, little spaniels, whom they walked every afternoon in the woods near the cottage. When Karl gave a signal, one of the spaniels would dive into the hedge; a moment later a rabbit leaped out and the other spaniel jumped on it and broke its neck. Hans picked up the dead rabbit and pressed its stomach with his thumbs to make it pee, and after that he put the loose body into a cloth shoulder bag he carried on their walks for this purpose. Hans and Karl always caught three or four rabbits this way. For their famous rabbit stew.

Their friend, whoever they happened to bring with them that year, always laughed in delight at the peeing. Gaby did, too. But Sabine refused to go into the woods with them; she hated the sound of the rabbit’s neck cracking, she said.

Gaby finds herself telling Nora about the cottage and her cousins and the party. “It was mostly outside,” she says. “That’s where everyone danced, though there were a couple of tables of food in the house, and a champagne fountain.”

“Did you grandmother dance?”

“She watched from a window. My father carried over her favorite chair, it had an embroidered crimson seat, like a throne.”

Every year men from town would construct a wooden platform for dancing on the long back lawn (once a potato field), and Adèle put a wooden table at one end for the gramophone. The gramophone had a wide black and gold horn and used triangular wooden needles; a man hired for the night changed records and clipped the needles to keep them sharp. André, the gardener, strung electric lights up the four poles around the platform and in the guard trees just beyond the field.

“Fairies are watching us from the woods!” Gaby’s father used to say.

Last summer Gaby danced four dances in a row with Luc Perrin: a swing dance, a foxtrot, a jitterbug, another swing. In her new high heels they were almost the same height. He wore a tight-fitting suit and his shiny dark brown hair had a cowlick in the back—not quite a duck’s tail but threatening it. Gaby had the urge to lick her fingertips and wet it down. Or run a finger along his newly shaved jaw, or touch the side of his neck, which pulsed with exertion. She pulled herself toward his chest whenever the dance called for it, daring herself to get as close as she could. Luc had plump lips that curved downward, a tiny scar above his eyebrow, and a smell of outdoors that she couldn’t identify but thought of as France.

She thought he might kiss her that night but he didn’t. That happened later, after her grandmother’s stroke. At the time she thought her life had finally begun, that the world was opening up its doors to her at last, but the following morning German tanks rolled across Poland, and the next time Gaby saw Luc he told her he was going to enlist as soon as he possibly could. The lover, if he’d ever really been one, was gone.

“We sometimes have a bonfire,” Nora says about midsummer night, “but never a party. But they have dances at the garage on Fridays, and my da says when I’m fifteen I can go.”

She cuts another slice of the barmbrack. “I’m not eager,” she says.

“What, to go to a dance? Dances are fun!”

“No, to be fifteen.”

“Why not?”

Nora stops to think. “When you’re my age you know who you are,” she says. “But when you get older you forget. Then you do things like reading newspapers and listening to the radio trying to figure out what you think. Once you start doing that it’s too late to get back to yourself.”

“But reading the papers,” Gaby says, “that’s important. You don’t want to be ignorant of the world.”

“Oh, I probably will read them, so.”

“But you just said reading newspapers makes you forget who you are?”

“I didn’t. I only said that by then it was too late.”

“Well, it sounds like it’ll happen no matter what.”

“That’s why I’m not eager. Do you want to see my walrus? My mam got it for me before I was born.”

The walrus is displayed in pride of place in a hollowed-out grotto near the fireplace, a spot probably meant for small statues of Mary or Jesus. Like Sabine’s stuffed koala bear, the walrus has glassy black button eyes. It still smells faintly of factory.

“She found it in a shop in Dublin. I don’t have any other stuffed animals, only this one.”

Gaby turns it over in her hands. The two white plastic tusks have yellowed slightly—the only sign of age.

“You never play with it?”

“I want to keep it just as it is.” Nora returns the walrus to its shelf. “Do you miss your parents?”

“Of course. And Sabine.”

“People—my teachers and that—they’ll tell me I can’t miss my mother because I never knew her. But it’s not true. I have an idea of her, don’t I, and I miss that idea. And I think that’s all we really have of other people anyway, an idea. I mean, we can’t know their thoughts, only what they show us, or what we happen to see. Bits and pieces. Then we make a sort of picture in our head of who they are.”

“Mm,” Gaby says. She’s never thought about it like that.

“Do you think that you knew your sister? Really knew her?”

“I thought I did at the time. But now—” she hesitates, then decides to plunge ahead— “now I sometimes wonder if I’m making her up just a little bit. And maybe I’ll do it more and more the longer she’s… she’s gone.” She doesn’t want to say dead.

Nora nods. “It’s not a bad thing, though. It’s better than not thinking of her at all. I like to think of my mother, and when I’m dead I hope someone will think of me. Her name was Deirdre. I like your sister’s name, Sabine. Maybe I’ll name my daughter Sabine, if ever I have one.”

The thought is both piercing and sweet, like painfully cold ice cream. “It is a nice name,” Gaby agrees.

She takes the tray to the kitchen and helps Nora wash up. Everything in the cottage is snug and pretty. Desmond has good taste in colors: French blue and cherry red are splashed throughout the clean white rooms. As she wipes the last dish (expertly turning it with one hand as she dries it with the other) she wonders if Sabine, if she were here, would despise her, what she’s become. An untrained servant. A thief. Would she recognize me now?

Outside a dog starts barking, a high yip in three quick beats that pauses for a second and then repeats itself. Gaby still has her parents’ wedding rings, her mother’s engagement ring, and her grandmother’s peacock pin. She could go back to Cork and pawn them and use the money to live on until she finds a job, any job. But the truth is she hasn’t left because she’s afraid to leave; she’s afraid to do anything. Because what if it’s the wrong thing?

What does she want? How should she live? There seem to be, simultaneously, too many choices and too few. And each choice is a coin toss. Applying for one job and not another, choosing a room in a boarding house based on the color of the wallpaper. I took the bus to work but as I looked for an empty seat I dropped my book in the aisle and a man picked it up, saying … The Encounter game, once you’re grown up and you have to decide what to do with your life, is actually terrifying. There are better and worse encounters, as everyone knows. You can’t rely on luck.

You’re sleepwalking through your life, Gaby tells herself, hoping for a miracle. You’re stuck. But she doesn’t know how to get unstuck.

The dog outside is still barking and barking, and now more dogs have joined in. They love their dogs, the Irish, and they are amazingly well trained. Kip, the police station dog, is said to have saved not one but three children from drowning in the river.

“What’s happening?” Nora asks.

They go out of the cottage to look, Nora still in her stockinged feet. The sun has only just set and the sky is a clear, watery blue. Over the barking Gaby can hear the faint guttural whine of an aeroplane; that must be what set the dogs off. She’s never seen a plane around here before.

When the plane comes into view it’s noticeably wobbling and black smoke is wafting up from its tail. There’s a dark cross painted on a white background near the wing.

German.

“Just over the pig field, it is,” Nora says.

Gaby’s skin seems to shrink into her bones. Has it begun? She looks around for more planes. Are they coming here now? What everyone has feared?

The plane drops lower, shaking hard. The metal looks tarnished and the glass windows glint in the leftover sunlight. When plane dips behind the tree line they wait, tensely; expecting what they don’t quite know. But there it is: a fantastic roar that ends in a boom and a screech of metal, followed by more animal noises, cows and pigs and something else—horses? Also rooks or crows sounding the alarm too late.

“It’s crashed!” Gaby says, unnecessarily.

“It’s German, isn’t it?” Nora makes a 360-degree turn scanning all corners of the sky. “Are more coming?”

Smoke begins to rise over the trees, not pretty tendrils but an expanding beast racing upward.

Gaby looks at Nora. “Go and get your shoes on.”

She wonders if anyone was in the field. She should do something but she doesn’t know what. The smoke thickens and expands, and she hears another explosion. Her one thought is to take Nora to the big house to keep her safe.

Desmond comes running into view. “Nora!” He looks at Gaby full in the face, stricken. But before she can say anything Nora comes out of the cottage with her canvas shoes half on, her heels hanging over the backs. Desmond races over and enfolds her in his arms.

“I’m all right, da, we’re fine. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says, releasing her. “I was only thinking you might be there in the field.”

Gaby can smell smoke and burning oil.

“I thought I’d take her to Mrs. Walsh.” She’s trying not to look up into the sky too often for more planes. She doesn’t want to worry Nora.

“Good idea. Norrie, go on with Gaby. I’ll see if there’s anyone—if I can help anyone there.”

Nora nods. Then she says, “I’ll just go get my walrus first.”

“Your walrus? Oh. Oh now, don’t worry. It’s nothing like that. We’ll be fine,” Desmond says.

But after they’ve gone a few steps he calls out, “Ask Mrs. Walsh to switch on the wireless, why don’t you. And Mrs. Grogan should telephone the garda.”

 

* * *

 

“An aeroplane went down in the pig field,” Mrs. Grogan says as they come around to the front of the house. Her voice is as mild as always. “I saw it from the window.”

She’s standing in the doorway, framed by it. What would it take to really startle her, Gaby wonders? Her eyes are trained on the sky above Gaby’s head and she’s cupping her elbow like a model being photographed.

“Julianne is just back from golfing. She ran down to see what happened.”

Nora says, “We didn’t see Julianne.”

“Through the woods she went. I do hope Mr. Dennehy wasn’t there.”

Mr. Dennehy is the farmer they lease the field to.

“Desmond asked, will you telephone the—the garda?” For a moment Gaby can’t remember the word for police.

“No doubt they’re on their way already. What a noise.”

In the kitchen Gaby and Nora find Mrs. Walsh standing at the open back door looking out toward the woods. Bridie and Clary are together at the window, which is clearly as near to being outside as they want to be.

“Was it a German plane?”

Gaby nods.

Clary and Bridie both slide back from the window in one motion like two snakes suddenly alert to a hawk above them.

“It had engine trouble or something,” Gaby tells them.

“We think the pilot and everyone must be dead,” Nora adds.

“But what if they’re not?”

Mrs. Walsh shakes her head. “Aren’t we in a great big house here made of stone? No one can get in if we don’t want them in.”

It’s true, Gaby thinks; it’s a castle, cold and protective.

“Oh!” Bridie says. “Look! It’s Miss Julianne coming from the woods! And hasn’t she got someone with her!”

Julianne is walking up the back lawn. She’s still wearing her golfing clothes but her long hair is loose and blowing forward in the wind. Next to her, leaning heavily on her arm, is a tall, bare-headed man.

Gaby leans forward to look closer. “No uniform,” she says.

 

* * *

 

His name is Dieter Ott. “A civilian meteorological observer,” he tells them, “not a soldier.” They were on a routine weather check but got blown off course.

“I’ll say you did,” Desmond says.

There were two other men in the plane, a pilot and a radio operator, but they’re both dead. The local garda are down in the field; one of them allowed Julianne to take Dieter Ott up to the house, seeing he was injured. And although he does not, to Gaby, seem threatening—he’s sitting with his broken foot up on a stool and a clean tea towel, dotted with blood, is wrapped around his head—she’s glad Desmond’s there. For once the huge kitchen feels crowded: Bridie and Clary, Nora and Desmond, Mrs. Walsh, Julianne, and even Mrs. Grogan, who never comes into the kitchen if she can possibly help it, is here.

Dieter Ott smiles showing a dimple in his left cheek, but it’s clear he’s in pain. His bare foot, resting on ice pushed into a pillowcase, is monstrous: swollen and purple.

“I’m sorry to put you to such trouble. I feel fine. Well, just my leg. Broken, I think. But the rest of me—fine. Even my heart.”

“Your heart?” Julianne asks.

“Arrhythmia. Not terrible, but it’s why I was able to stay out of the army.”

Why I was able to stay out of the army. He speaks as though of course he would want to stay out; anyone would want to stay out. Julianne pours him a cup of tea. Clary and Bridie have offered him scones and Mrs. Walsh’s special redcurrant jam. Only Desmond and Nora stand off a ways, both slightly frowning.

“Dr. Stephens shouldn’t be a minute,” Mrs. Grogan tells him.

“Should I make a poultice in the meantime?” Mrs. Walsh asks. Her face is very red.

“Oh yes,” Julianne says. She turns back to Dieter Ott. “Mrs. Walsh is good at that.”

“I’ll get the witch-hazel. I’ll need some fresh mint, and rosemary, too.”

Julianne glances at Gaby. “You can find those by the old barn. You know where that is? Through the woods?”

“Yes, but—” Gaby looks over at Bridie and Clary and they stare back at her boldly, unwilling to leave this interesting scene.

“Okay,” Gaby says. “I guess I can go.”

Now it’s Dieter Ott’s turn to look at her. He has a razor-thin nose, slanted cheekbones, and a mouth that’s large and full. He’s very handsome in a sharp, sort of sculpted way, she thinks.

“You’re American?” he asks her.

“Gabrielle is helping out in the kitchen,” Julianne explains. “For the summer.” Her offhand manner says: she’s nothing.

In the space of ten minutes Gaby is no longer her shiny new plaything.

Was I ever, she wonders?

 

* * *

 

Her shoes make a puffing sound as she walks over the spongy grass. Although the sun has gone down, its lingering light makes it feel like late afternoon: the famously long Irish summer evening. When she unlatches the wire gate a finch calls out as though it’s limping up steps—one two, one two, one two—and a couple of silvery spores float by her as she enters the woods. She can still smell exhaust and petrol and burning metal from the crash.

The trees look different in a way she can’t quite pinpoint, and the wind rippling through their branches has a displaced quality, as though she’s listening through a window. Her skin constricts, like an animal sensing its world is not right. She inhales deeply trying to feel normal again. The day has dramatically slipped off its tracks.

In the clearing Gaby pulls a handful of the mint growing against the barn door; how much does Mrs. Walsh need? Straightening up, she notices that the door to the old milk house is unbarred and juddering in the breeze. The warped wooden pole that acts as a latch is lying on the umber dirt beside it, amid the white fairy flax and weeds.

Later she’ll wonder why she didn’t go back to fetch Desmond or one of the others, but everything was so quiet and she felt absolutely alone. She’s never looked inside the milk house before and she’s curious. It’s only as she’s pulling open the door that it occurs to her to be cautious. There could be another plane crash survivor, one who ran away and hid. She feels a flash of fear—have I done something stupid?—but the creaky door is already open and she’s peaking inside.

The milk house is small, hardly bigger than a potting shed, with clumpy bits of straw scattered on the floor and a couple of dented metal canisters along the wall. At first she sees nothing more than that. A cloying smell fills her nose. Then her mouth goes dry.

A figure—a person—is kneeling on a blanket in the corner.

“Aaaah!” Gaby hears a noise come out of her mouth, half dread, half longing; it starts at the base of her throat like an animal. Her brain stalls but not her senses, sight and hearing and smell, all straining to understand what’s before her. Her nostrils widen and goosebumps rise on her arms.

“Gaby?” the figure says.

It’s her sister. It’s Sabine.

 

* * *

 

Sabine stumbles toward her like a toddler and for a terrible moment Gaby doesn’t want to touch her, certain she’ll evaporate in her arms or turn into someone else.

But she doesn’t. They hug hard, clinging to each other, and then rock to keep their balance.

They both start talking at once:

“I thought you were dead! They told me you were.”

“They told me you were dead!”

“But how did you—?”

“I know!”

“I can’t believe it!”

Gaby’s head feels light, as though a heavy brick that’s been there for ages has finally been lifted. It’s not possible. It can’t be true, but it is. Sabine feels solid. She feels the same. She takes hold of Sabine’s short arm, her lovely rounded oval. She finds the nub of thumb.

All the same. All real.

“How did you get here?” she asks. “I mean, to Ireland?”

Sabine says, “Monsieur Perrin.”

“Don’t tell me. He knew a man who worked at the ferry office.”

“You too?”

Gaby nods.

“It was horrible.” Sabine shudders. “They crowded me into a room that already had two girls in it, I had to share a bed! I decided to sleep out on the deck instead, on a deck chair.”

“Weren’t you cold?”

“Freezing.”

They have their arms around each other like they did when they were little and everyone thought they were twins. Sabine was prettier but when people saw her little stump of a hand their admiration turned to sad pity, as though the defect was made worse by landing on so lovely a girl. Gaby never saw Sabine’s loss of a hand as a defect. It was just part of her. It made her unique.

They go outside where insects are zooming in and out of the greenery and bats have begun diving down from the broken barn roof. Gaby’s brain still isn’t fully working. Shock; like she felt in the hospital in France and again later, in Cork, when she learned Aunt Maeve had died. But this time it’s not a bomb that’s inside of her, it’s a beam of light.

“How long have you been living out here?” she asks.

“A few days. But I’ve run out of food.”

“Let’s go up to the house. We can stay there together until we work out a plan.”

“No. No. The soldiers will take me away.”

“What soldiers?” Gaby pulls back so she can see Sabine’s face. Does she know something? The German plane—have more landed? “Are they here?”

“Not yet. But they’re coming.”

“What did you hear?”

“Just that. When the Germans come they’ll take over the house.”

So: only speculation. Sabine’s scared, of course she is. Like everyone else she’s waiting for the war to come here.

“Beanie, you’re safe. I just came from the house. There are no Germans here. I promise. They haven’t come and no one knows if they will.”

“They will.”

“All right.” She’s not going to argue. “But they’re not here now.”

“What if they come while we’re there? While we’re sleeping? And the men, the looters?”

Gaby realizes that something has happened to Sabine, something bad. She’s in shock or worse. Her face is thinner; her eyes dart about anxiously. She looks like she’s been living outdoors for the past two months. “Then we’ll leave,” Gaby promises, to placate her. “C’mon, it’s getting dark out.”

She helps Sabine to her feet. “All right? Are you cold?”

“A little,” Sabine says.

Gaby presses herself against her sister. Sabine is here, in Ireland. She’s alive. She can’t work out what’s happened—the how and the why—but does it matter? Her heart feels like a boat carrying water.

When they go into the little woods she wishes she thought to bring a flashlight or the cumbersome lantern that Mrs. Walsh keeps by the kitchen door, the one that Nora brought on Gaby’s first night. It’s much darker under the trees and they walk awkwardly down the narrow path, still arm-in-arm, as if they have to feel each other’s skin to keep believing it’s true. When they come to the wire gate, Sabine waits while Gaby unlatches the mechanism.

“Will you just check first?” she asks after Gaby pushes the gate open.

“What, the house?” Gaby hesitates. “All right, if it makes you feel better.”

She walks up the lawn until she’s in sight of Kilcurra House. The light is on in the kitchen. The house, the castle turret, the walled garden; it’s too dark now to see them clearly but she recognizes their solid presence. Everything is as it should be. Bombs are falling on Paris, the world is at war, but here it’s just a long country evening.

She goes back to where Sabine is waiting on the other side of the gate, peering around like a nervous sentry—Gaby can see the movement of her head. An owl calls out and Sabine looks off in its direction. For a moment Gaby pauses at the wonder of it all. She stares at her sister’s beautiful profile. The short straight nose like their father’s, the gentle curve of her brow.

And then, while Gaby is watching, Sabine disappears.

She doesn’t stumble. She doesn’t walk away. She just: vanishes.

 

 

 

Chapter 10

 

June 1940
Ireland, The Otherworld
Sabine

 

At first Sabine doesn’t panic, although after a few minutes her hand begins to shake—something that hasn’t happened in weeks. Or maybe the shaking is panic. Why isn’t she back yet?

The bats are more numerous now and she can hear owls communicating to each other in the trees. The trees themselves are straight as soldiers—scrub trees, for the most part, no good for anything but shade and hardly that. Still, she likes the cover. She doesn’t want to move away from them. She doesn’t want to expose herself. She crooks two fingers around the wire fence and stares in the direction of the house, willing Gaby to appear.

I’ll wait another minute.

I’ll wait another two minutes.

What could she be doing?

Fear turns on like a switch. It’s all right, she tells herself. After what feels like a century in time, she forces herself to leave the trees and cautiously makes her way around the rutted, netless tennis court. The house, from the back, is completely dark. She holds her breath as she steps out of her boots and opens the kitchen door.

Silence. There’s no sound, nothing to lead her from room to room except the desire to make sure. Kitchen, hall, library, solarium. No Gaby, no looter, no soldier. Even though it’s been less than a week since Theo Grogan left, Kilcurra House feels utterly abandoned, a Miss Havisham with tarnished, old-timey jewels—the stuffed elk heads, the Victorian end tables—that no one else wants.

She checks the dining room with its massive fireplace and heavy, dust-filled curtains. Did I dream her, Sabine wonders? She’s only had a few crackers to eat today, the last of her stash. Hunger, she’s heard, can bring on hallucinations.

Or maybe she left me again.

None of this makes sense.

She goes back to the kitchen and opens all the cupboards looking for food, but the looters have taken everything. She’s feeling light-headed and scared but she doesn’t want to cry.

Either I dreamed her, or she left me, or something terrible has happened.

She doesn’t want to believe something terrible has happened. Put that thought out of your mind.

Yesterday she went down to the village in the late afternoon, hoping to see Mick. She found a hiding spot, a boarded-up doorway, where she could watch people go in and out of the pub but Mick wasn’t one of them. If she’d had money or something to trade she would have gone to Twomey’s, the grocer’s, but hadn’t brought anything with her.

She’s so hungry. She needs to find something to eat. At this time of night everything is closed but maybe a window will be open; or maybe she’ll find someone—Mick, ideally—who’s willing to help her. And when she returns, Sabine tells herself, Gaby will be here.

In the hall near the kitchen she spies the same packing crate she looked at with Nora. On impulse she scoops up the little china cat—maybe she can leave this as payment for food? She doesn’t want to steal. Though of course technically, Sabine thinks, pulling on her boots, she’s stealing the cat.

 

* * *

 

When she gets to the village she slinks along the shop walls like a ghost. Not that anyone is watching. The pub is closed. Everything is closed, just as she thought. She holds her breath, listening. Boots are usually loud but not always. Not on a dirt road.

There’s not a soul in sight.

It’s too dark to see over the bridge to the field with its remains of a carnival. Sabine crosses the road heading for the row of shops that back up to an alley. In the alley, she begins sorting through trash barrels. Potato peelings, an apple core, unfamiliar seeds, and something that looks medicinal. There’s a blackberry bush growing along one stone wall but it’s been picked clean. How it nourishes itself in this patch of pebbles and dry dirt is a mystery.

She makes a fairy plate using a broad brown leaf she finds on the ground and arranges the food on it. It’s important to eat slowly, ready to spit out anything gone bad but also to make the meal feel bigger. The seeds are sour with hardly a crunch but the apple core, though soft, is sweetly autumnal and has more flesh than she first thought. The potato peelings taste like nothing.

“Now didn’t I know we’d meet up again,” a soft voice says.

Sabine jumps up, her scalp prickling as though a hundred thousand spores are suddenly pushing at her hairline.

Ronan.

“Saw the others leave. Noticed you weren’t with them. Thought you’d come round here eventually. But at night! That takes courage. Or desperation.”

He doesn’t move, not yet. He doesn’t need to. He can take his time.

“Where were you—how did you—?” She’s stammering with fear.

“Well now, didn’t I just find myself a job at the pub? The old widow liked the look of me and gave me a room. When I’m not in her room, of course. From my window I can see a fair ways up the road, so.”

Sabine feels sick to her stomach. In the moonlight his pug nose and mustache are only smudges of dirt, and his eyes are two tiny, dark coins.

“Happened to look out at the right moment.”

She can smell oil on him and something smoky. If she pounds on a back door, will anyone hear? Will they let her in? Most of the shopkeepers live in rooms on top of their shops. But the windows are dark and there is no one else in the alley. No old woman disguised as a pile of blankets and rags this time.

There’s no point in talking.

She takes a step back, fills her lungs, and lets out a high, sharp scream. It’s loud, not like a nightmare scream where you can’t gather your breath, and it startles him. He jumps toward her with his hand out ready to clamp it over her mouth, but she ducks and screams again.

“Stop that.”

He gets her by the shoulders.

“Stop that!”

She wrenches away. But as she’s drawing her breath he grabs her by the arm and gets his other hand over her mouth. Sabine bites down and hears him inhale sharply in pain. He hits her face with his elbow and she staggers, falling. Her good hand shoots out to break her fall. He bends over and pulls her up like she was nothing, a sack of feathers, but also roughly as though he hated sacks of feathers.

She hears something. Boots, running.

“Halt!”

A German voice.

“Halt!”

Ronan swears under his breath. He pulls away from her and, without looking back, turns to run. But before he’s gone two steps there’s a crack of gunshot, and then another, and he crumples heavily to the dirt. His right palm is on the ground next to his head, fingers splayed as if he’s about to push himself up. Blood is oozing out and coating his hair like slow dark tar leaking out of him.

Her mind goes white for a moment.

Two German soldiers catch up and kneel, clunky with all their gear, to check his body, confirming he’s dead. Sabine scrunches against the wall of a shop but they knew she’s there. She recognizes the taller soldier; he’s one of the officers from the dance, the dark-haired one with a razor-sharp nose. His clipped precision is, this time, a relief not a repulsion; she hears two satisfying clicks as both men secure their pistols and replace them into their holsters.

“Now we’ve a corpse to deal with,” the dark-haired one says. “Next time, the kneecap.”

She doesn’t recognize the second soldier. They both stand up and look at her. Now what?

“He was trying—I didn’t mean to—” Didn’t mean to what, to scream? She did mean to scream. She’d felt like a wild, angry animal. But now everything in her has shrunk to insect size and she’d like to disappear. If only her heart would settle down.

“Are you hurt?” the dark-haired soldier asks.

“No.” Her voice comes as a whisper.

The other soldier has long arms and narrow shoulders and he wears his helmet strap like a chin guard. He has a spreading, bulbous nose and seems, to Sabine, too old to be a soldier.

“Papers?” he asks. She draws them out of her pocket with her good hand.

While he looks them over, the first one interrogates her. “What were you doing out after curfew?”

“I—I’m sorry. I was looking for food.”

“You can’t look for food after curfew. You know this. Where do you live?”

She motions vaguely. She keeps her short arm behind her back. He doesn’t remember her from the dance, this is clear.

The chin guard soldier hands over her papers to the dark-haired one. He moves his flashlight over the print.

“You’re far from home.”

She thinks quickly. “There’s nothing to eat there. I was hoping to get work in the village, maybe in the pub, but no one is hiring.”

“Mm,” he says. He looks at her face, assessing her.  Then he turns to the other soldier. “What do you say we bring her along. We’re going to need housemaids.”

“But Lieutenant Ott, she’s a prostitute!”

“I don’t think she is. And she owes us a favor, wouldn’t you say?”

All three look down at the body. It’s their problem now, Sabine thinks. Though not a big one. Ronan was out after curfew and ran when they called for him to stop.

“What do you think,” Lieutenant Ott says to her. “Can you do housework? Cook? In exchange for room and board? If your work proves acceptable, of course.”

A maid. That’s not something she ever imagined. But she’s been someone else for a long time now—ever since she left France.

“Well?”

She’ll do whatever he says; of course she will. What choice does she have?

She lifts her chin. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. We were just on our way to the manor. We’ll drive you there now,” he looks down again at her papers, “Fraulein Gallagher.”

 

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