“Yes. In childbirth.”
“How very sad.” She drew her lips together until the blood was pressed out of them. “And what became of the child?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I would like to find out.”
They were standing in the icy stillness of a checkerboard-tiled hallway. From within the body of the building he could feel rather than hear the rumble of hand-operated machinery and the raucous voices of women at work. There was a wet smell of heavy, woven things, wool, cotton, linen.
“And Dolores Moran,” he said, “Dolly Moran, she was never here either, you say?”
She looked down quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she said again, hardly more than a murmur.
A young woman, short, thick-waisted, with a shapeless mop of bright-red hair, came along the corridor pushing an enormous cane basket on wheels. The basket must have been full of laundry, for she had to use all her strength to propel it along, leaning into the effort with her arms stretched out straight before her and her head down and her knuckles white on the worn wooden handles. She was dressed in a loose gray smock, and gray stockings that were concertinaed around her thick red ankles, and what looked like a man’s hobnailed boots, laceless and several sizes too big for her. Not seeing Quirke and the nun she came on steadily, the wheels of the basket squealing in a repeated, circular protest, and they had to step back and press themselves against the wall to allow her to pass by.
“Maisie!” Sister Dominic said sharply. “For goodness’ sake, watch where you’re going!”
Maisie stopped, and straightened, and stared at them. It seemed for a moment that she might laugh. She had a broad, freckled, almost featureless face, with nostrils but hardly any nose to go with them and a little raw mouth that looked as if it had been turned inside out. “Sorry, Sister,” she said, but seemed not sorry at all. She regarded Quirke with a lively interest, scanning his herringbone tweed suit, his expensive black overcoat, the soft felt hat he was holding in his hands. One of her eyelids flicked-was it a tic, he wondered, or had she actually winked at him?
“Get on, now,” Sister Dominic said, not without a certain softening of tone; Sister Dominic, Quirke thought, appeared not entirely suited to the work here, whatever that work was, exactly.
“Right-oh, Sister,” Maisie answered, and giving Quirke another humorously big-eyed look she bent to the basket and trundled off with it.
Sister Dominic, increasingly anxious to be rid of him, was edging along the wall towards the stained-glass vestibule through which he had been admitted. Following after her, he turned the brim of his hat slowly in his fingers, as she had turned the invisible Rosary in hers. He was convinced, despite the nun’s denial, that Christine Falls had been here at least for some time before Dolly Moran took her to the house in Stoney Batter. He pictured the girl trailing along these corridors in a mouse-gray smock like Maisie’s, her dyed yellow hair turning back to its original nondescript brown, her knuckles red and broken, and the child already stirring restlessly inside her. How could Mal have condemned her to such a place?
“As I say,” Sister Dominic was saying, “we had no Christine Falls here. I would remember. I remember all our girls.”
“What would have happened to her baby, if she had it here?”
The nun kept her gaze directed in the vicinity of his knees. She was still sidling towards the exit and he was forced to keep moving in her wake. “She wouldn’t have,” she said.
“What?”
“This is a laundry, Mr. Quirke, not a lying-in hospital.”
Spirited for a moment, she allowed herself to look him defiantly in the face, then lowered her eyes again.
“So where would it have been born?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. The girls who come to us have…they have already…given birth.”
“And what would have become of the babies they would have left behind them when they were sent here?”
“They would have gone to an orphanage, of course. Or often they-” She stopped herself. They had arrived at the glass door of the vestibule and with undisguised relief she pushed it open and stood back to let him go through. He paused in the doorway, however, and stood facing her. He tried by staring hard at her to make her yield, to make her give him something, however little it might be, but she would not. “These girls, Mr. Quirke,” she said coldly, “they find themselves in trouble, with no one to help. Often the families reject them. Then they are sent to us.”
“Yes,” he said drily, “and I’m sure you are a great comfort to them.”
The transparent azure irises of her eyes seemed to whiten for a moment, as if a gas had formed briefly behind them. Was it anger that was flaring there? The stained-glass panels of the door at her back had the look of a lurid, storm-riven sky, and he was startled and not a little appalled to find himself picturing her naked, a stark white impassioned figure by El Greco.
“We do our best,” she said, “in the circumstances. It’s all any of us can do.”
“Yes, Sister,” he said, in a forced contrite voice, embarrassed as that conjured image of her nakedness hovered still, refusing to fade. “I understand.”
ONCE OUTSIDE HE TURNED AND MADE HIS WAY DOWN THE HILL IN THE direction of the river. The sky was heavy with a seamless weight of putty-colored cloud that looked to be hardly higher than the rooftops of the houses on either side of the road, and flurries of heavy wet snow scudded before the wind. He turned up his coat collar and pulled low the brim of his hat. Why was he persisting like this? he asked himself. What were they to him, Christine Falls, or Christine Falls’s bastard, or Dolly Moran, who was murdered? What was Mal to him, for that matter? And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure.
20
MOSS MANOR’S FAMOUS CRYSTAL GALLERY COULD ACCOMMODATE three hundred people and still not seem overcrowded. The Irish millionaire who had built the house, back in the 1860s, had handed his architect a picture of the Crystal Palace in London torn from an illustrated magazine and ordered him to copy it. The result was a huge, ungainly construction of iron and glass, resembling the eye of a giant insect, fixed to the southeastern flank of the house and glaring out across Massachusetts Bay toward Provincetown. Within, the great room was steam-heated by a latticework of underfloor piping, and palms grew in profusion, and dozens of species of orchids, and nameless dark-green creepers that wound their tendrils around the iron pillars that were themselves molded in the shape of slender tree trunks shooting up dizzyingly to spread in sprays of metal fronds under the gleaming canopy of glass a hundred feet above. Today, long trestle tables were set up under the palms, bearing heaping platters of festive food, sliced turkey and ham and goose, and silver tubs of potato salad, and thick slices of fruitcake, and glistening plum puddings shaped like anarchists’ bombs. Bowls of fruit punch were ranged at intervals along the tables, and there were ranks of bottled beer for the men. From a stage at one side a band of musicians in white tuxedos was blaring out show tunes, and couples were dancing restrainedly between the tables. Sprigs of plastic holly were tucked incongruously among the palm leaves, and streamers of colored crepe paper were strung from trunk to trunk and from pillar to metal pillar, and above the stage a white satin banner pinned with red block letters wished all the staff of Crawford Transport a Merry Xmas. Outside, the already darkening afternoon was dense with frost smoke, and the ornamental gardens were hidden under snow and the ocean was a leaden line in front of a bank of lavender-tinted fog. Now and then a pane-sized square of snow would slide from the roof and burst into powder and cascade in eerie silence down the glass wall and disappear into the drifts that had already built up at the edges of the lawn, white into white.