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  'You were always full of big ideas Allie and whatever education you got beyond in France doesn't seem to have improved you much,' Bess said.

  'Miss Buckley's education is not yet complete, any more than is your own, Mrs Rooney.'

  Mary Connor was by the range. I marvelled again at her stealth and wondered how long she'd been there.

  Bess said nothing but I saw her agitation in the clenching and unclenching of her great knuckles.

  'The family will breakfast as soon as Miss Buckley is refreshed.' The housekeeper looked around the kitchen. 'Where's your daughter?'

  'I saw her follow the milk cart down the road,' I said.

  This wasn't exactly a lie and it wasn't exactly the truth. Mary Connor gave me a sharp look.

  'From my bedroom window,' I added.

  'We're not in need of milk,' she said, 'I order exactly what the household requires.'

  'I drink a great deal of it,' I lied wholeheartedly this time.

  From where I was standing I could see the door in the back garden wall open and Sarah come through. She was carrying a pint measure as she came up the garden.

  I grinned at Mary Connor. 'You weren't to know how much extra would be needed.'

  Sarah came through the kitchen door. She was smiling as she put the milk into the cold safe on the wall. 'I caught up with the milkman,' she announced as she put a cap like the one Bess was wearing on her head, 'so now we can get on with the breakfast.'

  We'd always had a finely tuned telepathy, Sarah and I.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sarah

  August, 1867

  It's hard to keep a secret in Henrietta Street. With everyone outside it's near impossible. And the heat, this summer, has kept everyone outside.

  In the evenings, and for a good part of the night, the women sit on the steps. They talk about the world and their neighbours. They take note of comings and goings. They miss nothing. The children play alongside them. Men with no money for the pubs sometimes sleep, for hours, in the doorways in the sun.

  And why shouldn't they? It's a great deal more pleasant outside than it is for many of them in the rooms they live in.

  Any other summer I'd have been glad to sit with them. But this summer I have wished, heartily and often, for wind and rain to drive them indoors. This summer I have a secret, a life of my own outside Henrietta Street. I will not share it with any of them. Not yet.

  There are suspicions in the street that I have a man. But no one knows for sure and no one would dare to question me. They know the sharp edge of my tongue too well. My mother may even suspect I have a soldier.

  My mother is right, as she usually is. But Private James Vance of Her Majesty's Royal Welsh Fusiliers will stay my secret for a while longer. I'm nowhere near ready to risk my happiness by exposing Jimmy Vance to my father's wrath, my grandmother's disapproval, my mother's anxiety, the gossip of neighbours. I'll keep him to myself for as long as I can, precious and hidden 'til I'm more sure of him. Then, if I should lose him, and I pray to God I won't, I'll at least have my memories of our time together intact and unsullied. Or, if all goes well and we grow old together, then I'll be able to talk to him about the things we said and did.

  But if I have a secret then Allie's mother, Harriet Buckley, has one too. Has had one as long as I have, maybe even longer. And if it is what I think then her secret could have an effect on us all. Especially Allie. My innocent and good best friend only half knows what her mother is like. Now that she's back from France she'll unfortunately have the rest of her life to find out. Allie is going to need a friend and I was not the friend I should have been to her on her first night home. A meeting already arranged with Jimmy Vance was all I could think about.

  I was on my way to meet him when Beezy Ryan stopped me on the steps. 'You never have the time to talk to anyone these days.' She was fanning herself and leaning against the railings, her red hair loose down her back. She watched me closely.

  'You don't often have a lot of time yourself.' I smiled to hide my impatience. 'Things must be quiet in North King Street or you wouldn't be here.'

  'Too quiet,' Beezy agreed, 'not even the divils of men want to be inside these evenings.'

  Beezy ran a kip house in North King Street. Some of the women in Henrietta Street hated her because their men went there. Others because they said she was a whore of Babylon and should be cast out.

  Some feared her. Beezy was nearly six feet tall, had a tongue like a razor and used it to say what she thought. Most liked her. She'd been reared by the nuns in a Magdalen and though she was hard and her life was hard she was fair.

  I knew Beezy better than most. This was on account of my mother befriending her when she first arrived in the neighbourhood and got herself into a spot of trouble. That was nine years before. But I'd a clear memory of Beezy sitting in our room while I made her a cup of hot, sweet tea and my mother bathed a wound to her forehead. Beezy was seventeen at the time and had run away from the nuns. With her wild red hair and great eyes I thought her the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She'd been selling herself in Henrietta Street when three of the neighbour women attacked her.

  'If you won't go back to the nuns child,' my mother dabbed and Beezy winced, 'then you'd best find yourself some cleaning work it's safer.'

  'My mother was a whore,' Beezy was harsh, 'and I'm a whore too. It's an honourable calling.'

  'There's plenty would disagree with you,' my mother sighed. 'But you'd best take your business elsewhere. Henrietta Street won't tolerate you.'

  Beezy took herself elsewhere, but not too far. Within four years she'd opened in North King Street, a madam in her own kip house. But she never forgot my mother and at Christmas, and certain other times of the year, would arrive in Henrietta Street with cheese and whiskey. One was to nourish, she said, the other to fortify. Beezy was a great believer in the benefits of whiskey. Ill-matched though they were, she and my mother would on these occasions open the bottle and sit talking for up to an hour. Beezy liked to gossip and my mother knew everything that went on. My mother, who prayed a lot, liked to question Beezy about the nuns.

  I always liked Beezy myself. Both of us being tall gave us that much, at least, in common. I also knew her well enough to know I wouldn't get away from her on the steps that evening without making some excuse for my busyness.

  'Allie Buckley is home from France,' I said. I let the implication that Allie had been occupying my time hang in the air and put my guilt about not being with my friend on her first night home to the back of my mind.

  'Is she indeed.' Beezy raised her eyebrows and eyed the low neck of my sprigged cotton dress, the way I'd caught and curled my hair. 'So you're off to see your old friend . . .' She laughed. 'You've gone to a lot of trouble for her.'

  The other women on the steps pretended to ignore us. They did a bad job of it. 'And how is Leonard Buckley these days?' Beezy gave a different kind of laugh when she said this. It left no one in doubt about how, and how well, she knew Allie's father. 'Now there's a man's come up in the world.' Beezy looked round her audience then back at me. 'I'm told he wears two-piece suits and has taken on a housekeeper to smarten up yourself and your mother.'

  'Leonard Buckley's not the one took on Mary Connor.' For old times' sake and the man he'd once been I felt I should defend Allie's father. 'She was Harriet Buckley's idea.'

  'Oh?' Beezy, scenting trouble, and gossip, straightened. 'What sort is this Mary Connor?'

  'She's an old woman, small and wizened.'

  There wasn't much else I wanted to say about the Buckleys' housekeeper. It would have been normal to feel kindness, or even pity, for a woman her size and age. I felt nothing but dislike.

  'And the daughter, Allie, is still your friend, even though her father's your landlord? She hasn't got too big for her Paris boots while she was away?'

  Beezy lifted the hair from the back of her neck and coiled it languorously on top of her head. She wore rings on every finger. It was said she never too
k them off, no matter what she was doing.

  'Allie's not the type to change,' I said, 'and she's not responsible for her father either. Leonard Buckley, in any event, is not the worst of them.'

  'She can't help her father, that's true,' Beezy shrugged, 'nor the fact that he's one of a type the city's full of these days. Fat- bellied buffoons, the lot of them, buying up empty houses before they fall down and filling them with the poor . . .'

  'He's better than most to his tenants.'

  God alone knows why I went on defending Leonard Buckley. The signs were that he was becoming everything Beezy claimed he was. Maybe it was because he'd been decent enough in the past and my mother believed he would continue to be so for the future. I hoped she was right.

  'Could be you know what you're talking about,' Beezy shrugged again, 'or maybe it's just that he's got good cause to behave himself where you Rooneys are concerned.'

  Beezy knew everything, or thought she did. She knew that my father's withered leg, and the reason he couldn't get work, was the result of barrels falling on him in the Buckleys' public house. She also knew that it was because my father had no work, and in spite of his wife not wanting me near the place, that Leonard Buckley had taken me into service in their new house,

  If she thought too that the barrel accident was the reason he'd kept my mother on as cook she was wrong. The Buckleys kept my mother because there wasn't a cook in Dublin could match her.

  Beezy began fanning herself again. 'So, what does Miss Allie Buckley have to say about France?' she asked.

  The women on the steps had grown quiet, openly listening now. Beezy had a way of attracting, and keeping, an audience.

  'She only arrived home this morning,' I said, 'I haven't had much of a chance to talk to her yet.'

  'You might make hay while the sun shines then,' Beezy looked over my shoulder and waved a hand, 'and be off before Bess gets here and finds something for you to do.'

  My mother was coming slowly up the hill. Her day in Haddington Road was longer than mine so her arrival home meant it was later than I'd thought. I'd allowed Beezy to delay me too long.

  'Is your father at home?' my mother asked as I came up to her.

  'No. But I've given Mary Ann and Nana their tea. Nana's gone to bed. She says she'll go to the markets in the morning.'

  I hoped my mother wouldn't ask where I was going. I didn't want to lie to her.

  'Your sister's too young to be spending her time indoors. She'd be better off outside.' My mother sagged a little as she looked up to our second-floor windows. 'Take her with you, Sarah, for the walk and the airing. She'll behave . . .'

  'She won't. She'll drag out of me and torment me. I want to look at the shop windows on my own.'

  My mother sighed. 'Go on then,' she said.

  I knew she didn't believe me about the windows but was too filled with panic to care. I was late. Jimmy Vance might not wait for me. I ran all the way, fast as my skirts and decency would allow.

  Even so, and taking what I thought the shortest route, by Rutland Square and the Rotunda Maternity Hospital, it took me twenty minutes to get to our meeting place in front of the New Mart in Sackville Street. There was the usual commotion and bustle of people about the store. There was sign of Jimmy.

  I was breathless and too hot as I leaned against the side of a window to gather myself together. My hair had come down and there were three inches of dust circling the hem of my dress. In the glass of the window I looked like a wild-eyed tinker woman. I did what I could with my hair. There was nothing to be done about the hem.

  There was still no sign of Jimmy Vance.

  There were soldiers about but he wasn't one of them. He wasn't the sort to be easily missed in a crowd. He was tall and carried his head high and had a naturally good-humoured expression that drew people to him. Either he hadn't arrived yet or something had happened to him and he wasn't coming at all.

  Anxiety devoured me. We'd only made the arrangement that morning. I'd lied about going across to the barracks, saying I was going for milk.

  Maybe I was being punished for the lie. Maybe I'd seen the last of him. Maybe my father had found out and gone storming the Beggar's Bush Barracks with his crutch and bottle of whiskey. It was the sort of thing he'd do. He was a supporter of the Fenian struggle and thought the British Army 'made up of nothing but the pickings of the gutter'. He was right too, as far as some of the soldiers were concerned. But they came from Irish gutters as well as English ones and this my father would never acknowledge.

  Another thought came as I waited. Maybe Jimmy Vance not turning up was a punishment for putting him before my old friend Allie. For refusing her when she'd asked me to stay on to

  help her sort the clothes she'd brought from Paris. I paced the windows, seeing nothing of the fashions on display. Nowhere the reflection of a tall soldier either.

  The panic died in me and an angry acceptance had begun to take its place when I saw him. He was watching me from the corner of Sackville Place, a grin on his face. I knew instantly that he'd seen my panic and had kept his distance to tease me. I stood where I was. I don't like to be made a fool of. No Rooney does.

  He crossed the road and came quickly to me. 'You're angry,' he said as he took my arm, 'it was only play-acting, to tease you . . .'

  'You made me look a fool.' I pulled my arm free. 'You can take yourself back to Beggar's Bush and play-act with your own kind there. Maybe they'll think you amusing.'

  I turned on my heel, back the way I'd come. Jimmy Vance was a step ahead of me, blocking the way.

  'I'm sorry, Sarah.' He looked it. He had taken off his cap and his hair stood on end. 'Please don't go. It was a feeble-minded thing to do.'

  I said nothing, just stood staring at him as my anger faded. The way it always did with Jimmy. It had been a childish thing to do, typical of the simplicity I liked about him. He was a soldier who took his Queen's shilling and didn't interest himself in politics, or even religion. He was my own age but still a boy, as all men were, even when they were a lot older. He hadn't intended to be cruel.

  'It was cruel, but not meant to be,' he said.

  He often read my thoughts. I allowed him take my arm again.

  'I wouldn't hurt you for the world, you know that.' He grinned. He couldn't help himself. 'Am I not worth the wait?'

  'You're worth a couple of minutes,' I said, 'no more.'

  We walked in silence until we came to the Carlisle Bridge. Halfway across we stopped and stood looking at the boats and the distant opening of the river.

  'You're still upset,' Jimmy said. He was gentle for a soldier.

  'I thought you weren't coming. I thought all sorts of things . . .'

  'I'd never let you down,’ Jimmy said and we walked on, desultory as the evening itself.

  It was half past eight and there were streaks of flame in the dusky sky when we got to the end of Grafton Street. Though it was still hot the days were shortening with the first warnings of the winter to come.

  ‘I’ve to be back in the barracks by ten o'clock,' Jimmy said.

  'We haven't long then,' I said.

  It was always like this, getting ready to part almost as soon as we met. I took his hand, not caring if the whole of Dublin saw us. Our fingers held tight. I was shameless when I was with Jimmy Vance.

  Tonight I was going to be reckless too.

  We walked on up Grafton Street, past the fine homes and quality stores. The street musicians were everywhere playing but making sure to keep two steps ahead of the police. Outside Pigott's music shop we came upon the blind Zosimus playing 'Eanach Dhuin' on the whistle. Jimmy drifted towards him but I was not in the mood to listen to a tune which tells the story of a tragic drowning.

  'It's too sad,' I said, 'let's keep going.'

  'He plays well,’ Jimmy was coaxing, 'and it's a fine air . . .' He held me beside him while we listened.

  Zosimus played beautifully. But the sad loneliness of the music filled me with an irrational fear f
or myself and Jimmy Vance.

  I was wishing he would stop playing when the police arrived. Zosimus protested, full of dignity, shouting at them that even Homer was allowed to 'sing the praises of his country on the public highways'. The police took him away anyway.

  I felt another kind of guilt then, as if my wish for him to stop playing had brought the police. But I felt glad too. I'd had enough of 'Eanach Dhuin' and all that it signified. Our walk up Grafton Street was not as aimless as it appeared. We'd a destination in mind.

  We planned to be alone, Jimmy and me, to find ourselves a private corner in St Stephen's Green, be together among the bushes and sheltering trees. In the months since we'd met we'd done nothing more than snatch kisses along the canal bank near Beggar's Bush. I wanted the real feel of Jimmy’s mouth on mine, his arms tighter than tight about me. I felt nervous and talked a lot as we walked.

  I told him about Allie, how unhappy she was to be home.

  'Not that I blame her. There's not much joy in that Haddington Road house. She has no friends there, except for me . . .' I paused, 'and I refused her tonight. I'll have to find a way to share myself between you and her.'

  'But not yet.' Jimmy squeezed my hand. 'I'm not ready to share you yet.' He looked thoughtful. 'Do you think she would suit John Marsh? Or is she too grand for a common soldier?'

  'She's too good for John Marsh,' I said, 'but it has nothing to do with him being a soldier.'

  I was sorry as soon as I said this. John Marsh was Jimmy's best friend. I didn't like him but shouldn't have been so hasty. Jimmy's silence was full of offence.

  I tried to make amends. 'It's just that Allie is fond of learning and books . . .'

  'John has read a great deal,' he was stiff, 'and the fact that you're learned and I'm not doesn't come between us. Does it?'

  'No,' I said, 'only I'm not so educated as all that.'

  I'd gone to national school until I was twelve and had learned a good deal about reading and writing. But I was by no means the great scholar Jimmy thought I was.