Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Tee Morris

  *****

  “‘Tis a word for slaughter,” Miss Snow said as they hurried through the streets. The tension she’d noted upon her arrival had not lessened at all. In fact, upon leaving the Bell, it seemed all the thicker.

  “Not entirely true, ma’—” A sigh. “Miss Snow.”

  “Enlighten me.” She was glad that Miss Kennedy could speak and move quickly all at once. It seemed that Miss Snow had arrived in Galway just in the nick of time. Any later, and she wasn’t positive there’d be a Galway to arrive to.

  Somebody was mucking around with dangerous things.

  “It’s true that the word can mean slaughter, but as a thing, it means a stack of corn, or a heap of it. It also describes something bloody.”

  She had exceptional lungs, did Mr Kennedy’s daughter. Not a pant out of place.

  Taking mental note, Miss Snow had no intentions of slowing until they were far enough from the Bell that the gents with cripplingly tingling limbs would not pick up on their trail. “What do you know of Cromm Crúaich?” she prompted.

  Miss Kennedy did not disappoint. “Me da said that when St. Patrick drove the snakes away, it wasn’t snakes he tossed out but the gods.” She tucked her long black braid behind her shoulder as she kept easy pace, her cheeks and nose red with cold and whatever breeding gave the Irish that blushing hue. “He said that Cromm Crúaich lived on Magh Slécht, and even the Ard Rí worshipped him.”

  Miss Snow noted that the girl’s Gaelic was near impeccable, or as much as such a strange amalgam of consonants and syllables could be. Good, suggested excellent lingual talent. She looked up at the sky.

  It had darkened between entering the Bell and stepping out. Clouds scudded across it in various hues of black and grey, eager for whatever stormy collision could be managed in the winter wind.

  An ill omen.

  “How many have fallen to the illness?” Miss Snow asked.

  The girl did not look up, though the wind tugged at the tendrils of her hair released from the braid she wore it in. Curls, Miss Snow noted. How quaint and bucolic.

  “Sixteen,” she replied. “It doesn’t look like famine does, anyway. We’re poor and hungry, but we aren’t starving.”

  Yet. The Great Famine of some decades back had struck when Miss Snow was just a child. The stories, reports of fleeing Irishmen and deaths tolling in the thousands, was enough to turn one’s stomach. That none yet had died from this smaller crop of blight was a blessing.

  That left sixteen corpses unaccounted for. More than enough to satisfy the legend’s mathematical demands. Indeed, four more than strictly necessary–and such things mattered.

  As the wind blew across the oddly silent city, the faint echo of church bells rang through the coming dusk. They shimmered in sonorous harmony, casting a caution for peace upon a city teetering on the brink of conflict.

  Of course. She put an arm out, halting them both. “Of the sixteen,” she asked the girl, “how many died within earshot of church bells?”

  That question confused her, but to her credit, Miss Kennedy appeared intent on working that out. “Peter and Tom, I think, and Nattie Doyle. Me da, too.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?”

  “No, Miss Snow. I don’t know all who passed, just them.”

  Miss Snow’s mouth pursed. “Would it be fair to assume that twelve of the number lived outside the reach of the bells?”

  “A fair guess, aye.”

  “And how many are firstborn?”

  She blinked. “Me da, Nattie, Peter, and Tom. I think the papers said the others, too.”

  There was precious little that could be called truly coincidence. Miss Snow fished a map of Galway from her valise, gesturing with the folded parchment to a corner of the street where a wagon had been left, its bales of hay tied for whatever purpose it would serve later.

  Heedless of the hem of her fine coat, she crouched behind the wagon and spread the map. “Can you read this?”

  “Aye,” Miss Kennedy affirmed, with more than a little rankle of pride.

  Miss Snow bit back her smile. “Would you mark for me all the homes of those who passed?”

  It took her a moment, but Miss Kennedy fetched a few of the pretty white stones decorating the patch of dirt beside the nearest building’s front stoop and placed six upon the paper. Another five dotted the borders outside. “An estimate,” she explained. “They were crofters whose potatoes weren’t all blighted. Just some.”

  “That’s only eleven.”

  “Aye, Miss Snow. That’s all I know, and some of them being guesses.”

  Not nearly enough, true, but perhaps something to go on. “And the churches in the area?”

  Miss Kennedy was much quicker this time, fetching different coloured rocks to mark the churches in the city.

  There were enough that as expected, three of the white stones placed within Galway were out of clear range, while the five outside the city like as not had to travel to whatever church they favoured.

  That was only eight confirmed, but it would do.

  She studied the map, then touched the city centre. “Are there no churches here?” A trick question, for Miss Snow remembered passing by a lovely cathedral.

  “There is,” Miss Kennedy confirmed, “but the bells’re down for repair. Me da said it was strange that it was taking so long. He wanted to find out why.”

  “Oh, you are a clever girl, Miss Kennedy.” The praise earned another of those delightful blushes the girl gave so well, and Miss Snow did not withhold an approving smile. “Tell me, have you put it together for me?”

  The wind tugged at the map upon the ground, rifling through the girl’s warm woollen skirts. Miss Kennedy frowned at the map so hard, Miss Snow half expected it to catch fire.

  “It seems,” she said haltingly, “that there’s a strange bit of ague affecting them what live outside the range of bells.” Miss Snow waited. “I think it’s not been commented upon because of the worry. From the famine, I mean. We’re all too busy looking for an excuse to call on shillelagh’s law.”

  “Likely, Miss Kennedy, all the more pity for it.” She reached for the map, twitching it out from under the markers weighing it down. “Which leads one to ask an important question, does it not?”

  Miss Kennedy’s brow was so furrowed as to nearly hide those lovely eyes. “What question?”

  She looked up at the blackening sky. “Is the conflict stemming from the hearts of mortals, or the hands of those what play at gods?”