Anna was used to defining herself by her ability to tolerate pain, which she knew was the best possible quality for a new lawyer in a large law firm that was ready to expand. She’d overheard one of the partners talking about her during the first year. “Every company has its workhorse, and that’s just what Anna is.” Despite having felt ruffled by being associated with a farm animal, Anna had secretly been proud, and she’d worked even harder. Her seventy-hour week had slid into eighty. Somewhere between the first and third year her husband had fallen in love with a woman who’d been perfectly happy being a receptionist manager in a dental clinic, the clinic where Anna and Steve had gone twice a year to have their teeth cleaned and where Anna had had her wisdom teeth extracted. The office manager’s name was Rita. And Anna had to admit that Rita had been vivacious, positive, and attractive, with the potential for moments of vulnerability and helplessness. Just enough to get Steve’s attention. And coincidentally, Rita had needed an attorney for her divorce.
The horse cart met a sharp dip in the lane and jolted Anna back to the here and now.
“Is there a man waiting for you in America? Do I have a rival who I must pummel?” asked Donal.
Anna wondered if her thoughts had been bleeding out on her forehead.
“I was married once. He left me.”
“He’s gone for good then?”
“Yes.”
“All the better for me. And what a horse’s ass he was. Clearly your taste in men has taken a turn for the better.”
“Clearly,” said Anna.
They continued on their way to Kinsale. And with each step of the horse, she left behind the disappointing life of almost-babies and wandering husbands, and expanded into the space next to Donal. Now she was fresh from the passions of love, and although she had not called it love and neither had Donal, she did not want to leave this man.
Growing up, her ability to read a room instantly, to spot signs of danger, had been as essential as breathing. If she was to be successful at smuggling, to help Donal and Glenis, she still needed to be this acutely aware of her environment.
But she was slowed by culture and time, and she had to concentrate on more carefully understanding the social cues of 1844 if she was to protect them, as well as the rest of the fine smugglers. She was sure that she missed the majority of non-verbal language, and she wondered if this feeling of being unable to catch critical interpersonal nuances was what it felt like to have Asperger’s.
What did it mean when she and Donal stopped at a blacksmith to water the horse and three men in the barn stopped talking when she walked in? Was there something odd about her behavior? Or was she like a true outsider—was there something so inescapably different about her that everyone sensed it?
When the horse was rested and watered, they continued on.
“Why did the men stop speaking when I went in?” she asked him.
“I suppose they were surprised that a woman went into the blacksmith shop, and more so, that they didn’t know you, or your family. That’s all,” said Donal. He was clearly not as impressed with their behavior as Anna had been. He shifted his weight on the plank seat.
Being in the past felt as if she’d been dropped off in Madagascar without a tourist guidebook. Time held its own customs and language, inside jokes, and longings. Her only advantage was historical hindsight, and she wasn’t always sure that her hindsight was accurate. There was the gender stuff, things that women were not expected to do, and she would need to be more observant, but surely her ability to scope out a situation—the way she could walk into a roomful of lawyers, defendants, and prosecutors and tell who was going to make the first move—surely that would defy time.
The future began to lose its hold on her, drop by drop. Anna swore she would find Joseph, but she was no longer sure what would happen when she found him. As if she had ever been sure.
They spent four days in all, traveling from the Beara Peninsula back to Kinsale, sleeping snugly beneath the cart each night. They avoided the coastal road for fear of roving militia, especially after the capture and killing of smugglers in Glengariff. By the time they rode into Kinsale, night had taken hold. Donal had not fully stopped the wagon when Anna leaped off, sprinting to the door of Tom and Glennie’s cottage.
“Glenis? I’m back! Where are you?”
As soon as Anna opened the door, she smelled the brittle vibration of fear. The children were too quiet, their spines too upright in their soft bodies, their jaws clenched shut. She looked for their father.
“Where’s your father, Michael?”
Michael clenched one hand around a hoe, while the other hand dragged a sharpening stone across the metal edge. The boy didn’t look up.
“He’s in with our mother. She’s taken sick in the stomach.”
Anna stepped as quickly as she could through the thick atmosphere of illness to the one room off the hearth room where Glenis and Tom slept. She heard the murmur of voices; she recognized Tom’s voice but not the other. She tapped on the door. Not waiting for an answer, she pushed it open even as she knocked with the knuckle of her forefinger.
The only color remaining in Glenis’s face was gray, the color of blood gone wrong, lack of oxygen, of dread. Her eyes had sunk deep into her skull. Tom stood on one side of the bed, while a woman pulled the quilt tighter around Glenis’s shoulder.
Glenis rolled her head to one side to look toward the door.
“Anna,” she said, letting the name expel from her lungs as if the effort lacerated her throat.
Anna looked quickly at Tom, who bravely met her eyes with a heavy, unblinking language reserved for disaster. “Tell me what’s happened. She was strong and fit when I last saw her. It’s only been ten days.”
“This is Mrs. Eveleen O’Donohue, who births babies for all the women. We’ve sent out a word for the parish doctor, too, but we’ve been told he’s too far off, tending to people a full day’s ride from here.”
Anna nodded to the woman by the bed.
“There’s a poison of some sort in her belly. She’s with child, but something’s terribly wrong. I’ve seen this before; the baby has taken hold outside the womb. From the color of her, she’s bleeding inside. The body can’t shake it, and fever has taken over.”
Ectopic pregnancy; Anna knew they’d have no way of dealing with the catastrophic medical emergency. It would mean surgery to remove a burst fallopian tube. In the course of Anna’s three miscarriages, she had studied up on all possible calamities that could rob her of a full-term pregnancy. The worst was an ectopic pregnancy because of the fatal threat to the mother.
But not to Glenis, this couldn’t have been happening to Glenis, who had defended Anna against dangerous rumors of spy, traitor, outsider. Not Glenis, who had braided Anna’s hair, helped her wash it despite Glenis’s admonitions against frequent bathing, who’d laughed uproariously at Anna’s size nine feet. Not the Glenis who knew where Anna was from, when she was from. Not this Glenis.
Tom stood next to the bed and picked up a cloth. He dipped it into a jug of water, wrung it out, and placed it on his wife’s forehead. Then he dipped a finger in the water and let a drop of water land on her lips. Her tongue sought out the water, emerging like a fattened sow’s tongue, but dry and hard. Anna could see a crack in her tongue from eight feet away. Eveleen put her hand on Anna’s arm and guided her out of the room, closing the door behind her. They edged into a corner as far away from the children as possible.
“She won’t be with us much longer. It will be a miracle if the morning finds her alive,” she said.
“She’s dying? There was nothing wrong with her when I left her. She did say that this pregnancy felt different. But then each of the babies had come differently, had felt different.” Even though Anna knew what the outcome of this was going to be, she could not bear to speak it.
Eveleen was six inches shorter than Anna, and she spoke softly, which forced Anna to bend her knees and pull her head closer to her. Both women looked ov
er at the children. They lowered their voices even more.
“Even if a doctor were to come this moment and cut her belly open, there would be no saving her or the baby. The womb is the only place for a baby to grow. Misguided ones try to set up on the outside of the womb or in the most confounded places. This is the worst thing that could happen to her, nearly as terrible as bleeding to death after a birth. I can smell the infection; there’s a smell that I’m attuned to, a sweet and putrid scent, and once it gets started on the inside of the body, there is nothing that I can do.” The midwife hung her head and pressed her palms to her eyes. A shudder ran through Eveleen’s body, then she continued. “Glenis told me that she had to speak to you. So you need to go back in there now, very close to her. Tell her you’re here. She’s in a horrid amount of pain, but I’ve known the lass since she was a baby; she was born into me own hands. She’ll not die until she speaks to you.”
Tiny dots of black flicked across Anna’s vision. She nodded and willed her feet to move, in the boots that Glenis had bartered for her, the dress she had altered for her, and the shawl she had knit for her.
Eveleen stepped in the room and said, “Give the two women a moment, Tom. Your children are frightened half to death out here.”
When Tom left, Anna moved to the bedside and dropped to her knees. She heard Donal’s voice as Tom greeted him in the outer room. She placed her head close to Glenis and said, “I’m here, Glennie. It’s me, Anna. I know what’s happening, the midwife told me.” She found Glenis’s hand, cold and already waxen, and covered it with her hot fist. Glenis rolled her head toward Anna.
Glenis focused with the greatest effort and parted her dry lips. Anna dipped the cloth in more water and let a few drops fall into her mouth. Glenis spoke with excruciating slowness. “You’ve. Got. To. Go. Back,” she said.
This is not what Anna had expected. “No, I don’t know how to go back, I told you that. And if I could, I don’t want to. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I want to stay. I’ll keep looking for my nephew. If he’s survived the travel from my time to here, we can make a life here…”
With shocking strength, Glenis emphasized every word. “It’s wrong that you are here. Go back, Anna. For all of us, you’ve got to find a way. Find the coin…”
Glenis gasped, and her head fell back on the bed.
“Glennie! Tell me why. Is this what Biddy Early told you? And how, you’ve got to tell me how. What about the coin?”
But Glenis could not catch her breath, and her eyes rolled white. Anna rushed to the door and said, “Eveleen, please, she can’t breathe.”
And from there, the midwife guided them all through the reckoning stages. The three children were led in to say goodbye. Their brave properness nearly killed Anna. Michael held the hands of his younger sisters and walked them to the side of the bed. When the youngest, little Nuala, began to crumble, he picked her up, and she wrapped her arms and legs around him. From that point on, Glenis’s breath took on a rasping nature, as if dragged over stones, and her eyes remained closed.
“It won’t be long now,” Eveleen whispered in Glenis’s ear. Tom knelt by the bed, folding his frame at the knees and hips, and laid his head on his wife’s breasts.
“Oh sweet breath, sweet breath, stay with me,” he said as the breaths grew further apart. Everything about Tom grew softer—his lips, his hands, his voice.
Is this it? thought Anna. Is it this simple and this horrible, that breath leaves in a sudden screech and that’s it?
The pause between breaths grew longer, punctuated by Tom’s murmur of “sweet breath, sweet breath.” Then, as if caught in midsentence, Glenis exhaled and did not inhale; there was no more breath, and Glenis was still.
Anna had never seen anyone die before. I’m only thirty-four years old, she thought to herself, as if being thirty-four had been a safety net that precluded death. She suddenly wished to be younger still, to feel an elusively protective family around her that had never quite been there in the first place.
Women prepared the body; Anna was asked to help and she did. When the older women began to weep, she truly knew how alone she was. She knew the sound that they made was keening—she’d heard the word before—but why did they wail so hideously and tug at their hair? One woman rubbed dirt on her face, and her tears ran muddy down her cheeks. If Glenis had been there, Anna would have whispered to her, “What are they doing? Why are they screeching so?” She would have asked her friend, her chosen sister, the one person who’d known that Anna was not from there or then.
After washing and dressing the body, binding the jaw with cloth, and weighing down the eyelids with coins, the women set Glenis on a plank in the center of the cottage for one day and night. The crush of mourners was constant. Anna pressed her back to the wall and stayed there, vowing not to leave Glenis for an instant. Donal rarely left Tom’s side; if he did, it was to take the children outside to walk.
When the sun set, a group of young men came in, stinking of whiskey and singing a song best suited for a pub. Tom rose up and fell on them like a lion.
“Not here, not at Glennie’s funeral, you drunken bastards!”
The flush-faced boys were shocked into sobriety. Tom threw the closest one against the wall, and the entire house shook. Two men laid hands on Tom, wrapping their arms around him, saying, “You know it’s the way, Tom. It’s not their fault.”
Chapter 28
Anna and Donal stayed in the barn behind the cottage for a week after the funeral. In the days immediately following Glennie’s burial, Anna wanted to reach out to Donal, but her own sadness kept her paralyzed. She had known Glenis for only a few months, but Donal had known her since she was born. Glenis had been his cousin, his lifelong mate, and she could smell the anguish of grief coming off him.
Losing Glenis was too much. Each circuit board of her brain was steaming with the sharp smell of burned wires, anesthetizing the part that went to her vocal cords. Anna tried to speak, but the memory of speech had gone missing. She could still ponder, and she wondered how odd, how strange it was that here in 1844 she could smell electrical wires burning while no one else could because they didn’t exist yet. Donal could not and Glenis would never, ever sniff electrical wires.
So this was what it would have been like to have had a sister. She’d had no idea, before sluicing through time and waking up under the care of Tom and Glenis, that having a sister was like being in a walnut shell. Glennie had been one half, and she was the other half, connected by small but essential tendrils. She’d had girlfriends before, but never someone who had stood up for her the way Glennie had when she’d ridden off on O’Connell, leaving her husband, children, and thriving smuggling enterprise behind. There had never been anyone like Glenis, not in law school, and certainly not in the gut-clenching work at the firm.
Anna was not sure what Donal did when he left the barn during the day; at night, he returned and slept with her. They held each other in the barn without making love and breathed in the warm scent of the cow and the horse. O’Connell, Glennie’s heroic steed, had such a restless night after the funeral that Anna slipped Donal’s coat over her shoulders and went to the horse, cooing to him as she had seen Glenis do, touching and talking. She finally pressed her head into his neck and wrapped her arms around him. Tom found her sobbing and hugging the horse.
“When O’Connell brought her back, she was gripped with pain. Glennie said she felt the pain hours after leaving Biddy Early. She rode two days in stinking misery,” Tom revealed.
“O’Connell is truly Glennie’s horse?”
“Aye. The two of them could barely stand to be apart. She only trusted one neighbor with her horse. You do remember that we can’t acquire too many horses, don’t you?”
Anna remembered. There was much she didn’t know about Glenis.
On one of these days, Anna emerged blinking into the sunlight and found Donal and Tom coming back with a load of dried peat. The two men loaded the dark bricks off the cart and in
to the house. When they were done and Tom was surrounded by his three sad children, Anna walked shyly up to Donal, as if speaking to him for the first time.
“Would you tell me about Glennie? Would you tell me what she was like as a child?”
Donal wiped his hand on his pant legs. He paused for a moment, and it looked as if he was watching a flash of images and he was trying to pick one.
“Oh, she was a thorny babe, all spiked hair and shrieks.”
Anna pictured a baby Glennie. For the first time since returning to Kinsale, something like a laugh gurgled out of her. Donal took her hand, and they walked back to the barn, where they nestled into the loft that they had made their own.
“What did she tell you?” asked Donal. “Tom thinks she stayed alive until you got here. After she spoke to you, she never spoke again.”
The days since the funeral were a soggy blur. Anna had not eaten since she’d returned, or at least she couldn’t remember eating, couldn’t remember how she had ever eaten, how anything had slid past the clotted sorrow in her throat.
“She said that I had to go back to my home, that’s what she said.”
Anna knew she had to be careful about how she phrased all of this to Donal.
“That’s all. She told me I should go home,” Anna repeated. She left out the part about the coin.
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