Chapter 4
Mam exhaled with triumph when they spotted England’s shore a week later. Anne stood at her side on the bow of the ship in the brisk dawn. Mam, bundled in a shawl, rested her hands on Anne’s shoulders.
“Good riddance to our mighty troubles,” Mam said, head thrown back and eyes closed as sea mist clung to the gray air. The brine burned Anne’s cheeks. “I hope the Devil cannot swim.”
Anne laughed in response, though she knew her heart to be broken forever.
Served her damn right. This was her own doing, her own fault.
That dog had not charged her, had not snapped its teeth into her flesh.
She’d run away, fled, within sight of the door, chased by her own pathetic fear.
“All will be well,” Anne muttered. She stared into the waves, the way they crashed relentlessly against the hull. “Da promised to take care of us.”
Mam glanced over her shoulder to where Da stood, engaged in conversation with two men, then she whispered into Anne’s ear. “Remember to never call him dadaí in public. We must strive to leave all traces of Ireland behind, especially Irish.”
Anne nodded dutifully, remembering her new vow to be good. She peered up to study Mam’s face. Her expression glowed with health and light. Mam heaved a great breath, causing a small cough. Then she ran her fingers through Anne’s hair. “Come, turn around. I’ll be fixing your wild mane again.”
“Sorry,” Anne offered, allowing her mother to plait her thick tresses. She was sorry for everything. She’d never tell her parents what she’d done, where she’d gone. And she’d never forgive herself for freezing. Failing.
A gull called overhead, circling before making its way back toward land. Had this gull ever been to Kinsale? Seen the sails of ships unfurling in the harbor at dusk or the emerald of a new spring? Sat atop Fort Charles, in whose shadow Seán and her friends might be playing even now?
A poignant silence settled as the wide ocean brimmed all around them.
“Heed this moment always,” Mam said thoughtfully, dividing Anne’s tangled hair into separate strands. “You’ll be a woman before you know it, my Anne. There are certain things every woman must know.”
Anne’s stomach knotted. Mam tugged as she formed the start of a tight plait, but Anne did not wince.
“Your father is a fine man,” she whispered. “As fine as the Good Lord makes them. But his being with me wasn’t always so clear. When your father made his intentions known, under the nose of that cold-hearted Mrs. Cormac, there was another. A blacksmith from the market who used to fancy me.”
Anne stiffened as Mam told her, for the first time and with a strange, secretive quality to her voice, about this blacksmith.
His fine eyes. How she’d fancied him. His flowers and nice compliments.
It was a difficult story to follow, something about how the blacksmith—learning of Da’s growing attachment to Mam—had come to the Cormac estate and stolen some silverware that somehow, later, ended up in Mam’s bed while she served as the Cormacs’ maid.
“The bitter fool,” Mam lamented. The case of the missing silverware, in addition to Mam’s suspiciously untouched bed in the servants’ quarters while living with the gentleman of the house, was what sent Mam, with Anne in her belly, to prison.
The spurned blacksmith, in a rage, had set her up.
Da’s legal wife, Mrs. Cormac, discovered the silverware and pressed charges.
Mam’s health had never been the same since her six months in jail.
“They locked you in the gaol because of me?” Anne asked, confirming what she already knew.
“Because of Mrs. Cormac,” Mam corrected.
Anne feigned a glower meant for the wench she’d never met, though from this tale, she wondered why Mam did not condemn the blacksmith.
These strange details only made her insides coil.
She knew Mam spared her the worst truth: that Anne, growing in her mother’s belly, had made life so difficult.
Unbearable. Had almost killed her then and so recently again.
Maybe starting anew, losing everything Anne loved, was the only way forward.
Her mother deserved that horizon.
Mam’s voice grew wistful. “It’s hard to know sometimes, which way my life might have gone, had I not been a young maid in the Cormac house,” Mam said, tying off Anne’s plait.
“Don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m grateful.
Not all men in your father’s position would have stuck around.
And I love him better than any other—and only more so with each passing day.
He worships me like a queen, never minding my lowly beginnings.
” She turned Anne around and faced her, tucking stray hairs behind her ears.
“I’m only saying you need to watch yourself. The world is not kind to women.”