By dusk, Emerald Harbour had divided itself into three camps: those who claimed they had always admired Nóra Friel’s spirit, those who swore they had warned everyone she was trouble, and those honest enough to admit they were frightened. Nóra heard all three opinions through the holding-room wall, because the courthouse had been built by men who trusted stone more than mercy and had achieved neither privacy nor warmth.
She sat on a bench rubbed smooth by decades of poorer backs and kept the two halves of the bow across her lap. No one had taken it from her. A weapon, apparently, had to look like a weapon to trouble the law. Songs were more difficult. Broken wood was beneath official notice. Nóra was learning quickly that power often failed to see the thing that would later ruin it.
Mrs Devitt arrived first, because bread women had a way of passing through doors that stopped bishops. She brought a parcel wrapped in cloth: soda bread, a heel of cheese, and a boiled egg still warm from some hen who had not yet been informed of politics. The constable protested until Mrs Devitt looked at him over her spectacles and asked whether His Majesty had begun fearing eggs. Nóra laughed despite herself. It came out rusty. Mrs Devitt’s face softened, and for a moment the whole room smelled of kitchens, flour, and women who survived by making small things stretch.
‘Your mother is fit to murder you,’ Mrs Devitt said. ‘Which means she loves you.’ Nóra picked at the bread. Her throat hurt from singing and from not crying. ‘Is she safe?’ ‘Safer than you, girl.’ The older woman glanced at the door. ‘The town is outside. Half singing, half pretending they are only waiting for the rain to stop. Father Lenihan is praying very loudly, which is his method of negotiation. Mayor Quinlan has discovered a headache. Mr Vane’s agent has sent three telegrams and received none that improved his temper.’
Nóra should have felt triumph. Instead she felt the particular exhaustion that follows an action too true to be taken back. Agency was not a flag one waved from a hill. It was a bill placed quietly on the table. She had sung the verse; now came the reckoning, itemised. Her school position would go first. Then the room she rented from the parish. Then the little money saved in a blue jar beneath her mattress. Respectability, that fragile china cup, had already cracked.
Cormac entered after the bread was gone. He did not knock. Men with keys rarely did. He had removed his hat, and the damp had darkened his hair at the temples. In the yellow lamp, he looked less like an official and more like the boy she had known badly enough to miss and not well enough to trust. Mrs Devitt gathered her cloth parcel with theatrical slowness. ‘I will be outside,’ she said, to Nóra, not him. ‘If he annoys you, scream. I have a rolling pin in my basket and a flexible conscience.’
When the door shut, silence took its seat between them. Cormac saw the broken bow. His gaze held there a second too long. ‘Your father’s?’ he asked. Nóra’s fingers closed over the split wood. ‘You remember.’ ‘I remember more than is useful.’ ‘That must be inconvenient in your profession.’ The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. ‘Nearly everything is inconvenient in my profession.’
He placed a paper on the bench beside her, not close enough to touch. Bail terms. A pledge to appear. A warning regarding seditious performance. The words looked absurd in tidy ink. Nóra read them twice, because anger made her quick but poverty had trained her to be careful. ‘Who paid?’ she asked. ‘No one paid. Not yet.’ ‘That sounds like a trap wearing its Sunday coat.’ ‘It is an arrangement.’ ‘That is what traps call themselves when they have had schooling.’
Cormac breathed through his nose. There it was: the old impatience, the one he had used when she beat him at sums and he pretended not to care. ‘Listen to me, Nóra. The agent wants an example. Dublin wants quiet. The magistrate wants luncheon. Those wants are presently fighting one another, which is the only reason you are not being sent to county gaol tonight.’ ‘And what do you want?’ The question landed harder than she meant it to. His eyes flicked to the shuttered window, where the crowd’s hum rose and fell like tide. ‘I want you alive enough to regret me.’
That was not an answer and was nearly too honest to be a lie. Nóra stood, because sitting made her feel like a child being scolded. ‘You walked me through that door as if I belonged to the file in your hand.’ ‘I walked you through that door before Constable Reade broke your wrist in the square.’ ‘How noble. Shall I embroider it on a cushion?’ ‘If it keeps your hands busy and your mouth shut for twenty-four hours, I will supply the thread.’ The old rhythm flashed between them, bright and dangerous. It was the first warm thing in the room, and Nóra hated them both for noticing.
He told her then what the Bible of the town had not: her father’s forbidden verse had been copied before, years earlier, in connection with a vanished ledger from Vane’s estate office. Men had searched cottages for it after Carrigeen Hill. One informant had died in a ditch. Another had sailed to Liverpool under a name no one believed. ‘Your father had more than a song,’ Cormac said. ‘He had proof.’ Nóra felt the room tilt. Grief, which she had learned to carry like a basket, suddenly grew teeth. ‘Proof of what?’ ‘False rents. Illegal evictions. Relief money diverted. Names of Irish men paid to make Irish hunger profitable.’
Nóra left the courthouse after midnight under bail that was not bail, escorted by a man the town did not trust and followed by a song no constable could arrest. Her mother stood beneath the arch with a shawl over her hair and fury white around her mouth. Nóra expected the slap before it came. She accepted it. Then Máire pulled her in so hard the broken bow pressed between them. ‘You foolish, brave, unbearable child,’ her mother whispered. ‘You have your father’s timing and my bad luck.’
Across the square, someone had tied a strip of blue cloth to the courthouse rail. It fluttered once in the harbour wind: the colour of Nóra’s hidden rent jar, of her father’s ink when watered thin, of the old ribbon women wore to wakes when black cloth ran out. By morning, there would be more. By morning, the last ballad would no longer be Nóra’s alone. Cormac saw the cloth too. His face closed. That, more than any threat he had spoken, told Nóra the song had found its work.