Brigid walks, as she walks twice each day, every save Sunday, past St Rita's Hospital. The place is seventy-six, twice her age precisely, and roughly three times that of Barry Casserly. Children in the lane are convinced that the ruddy dry-skinned bricks literally ate Julie McCarthy, and Mona Casserly, Blake Casserly too, and Fitzsimmons Riley, and every other who grew thin and spat blood and was silently, shamefully spirited away in the night. The same children avoid Barry, him with two parents, an aunt, and a sweetheart lost or nearly so to the consumption, more than anybody else except old doddering Mrs Keogh who lost husband, parents, and all but one child in the killing winter of 1884.
Moony Barry Casserly, she had heard him called; moony and dreamy and infatuated with poor dead Julie McCarthy since he was knee-high to nothing. Pity about the whole business, but she hadn't known the girl past sight, even living in the same lane and with a common water spigot. Infatuated with her ghost now, and seeing Julie in Brigid's place above in the bed of a clandestinely taken night.
Steadfast brick, in the corner of her straight-focused eyes, from King Street to Waterford Lane, built by and of the steel-boned labourers like Barry (poor child! she crosses herself) in 1858 when Victoria was the Queen. Victoria's portrait, unwilling, grim, moralising, embitters the packets of biscuits Brigid feeds to Barry Casserly of an evening. Peculiar, not shiftless, sad life he had, two parents buried in the clay, dead of the damp and immured within it. His only relative an aunt, he said, now ill, expiring, dissolving in the rain and fog and circumstances of her social class.
She yawns, coughs, pulls her heavy moldy woollen coat close against the damp. An hour yet till she must be at her work, the dusty repetitious drudgery of sweeping, emptying, wiping, tidying. Brigid is a charwoman, a housekeeper, and has a charwoman's mind. Her thoughts are as neatly stacked and briskly dusted as the sheafs of paper she arranges on the barristers' desks.
There is a niggling, a wiggling, in one corner of her tidy mind. Julie McCarthy has been away a year, but has she been dead? There are too many loose ends, too many flaps of paper fluttering in the damp air. The whole packet could come suddenly and violently unwrapped, exposing a nasty clandestine fact. Brigid is not a physicist, unused to abstract thinking, but large shards of some shattered completed event clear suddenly before her.
"Mother o' God." She rolls the words around her tongue, enjoys the taste, and repeats it, drawing a few stares from passerby who are unaccustomed to sturdy middle-aged women blocking a sidewalk for sudden revelations. Julie McCarthy had grown thin, and spat blood, and been silently, shamefully spirited away, but Mrs McCarthy had made no mention of the girl's death. There had been no funeral, and for a pious fool like Teresa McCarthy, her who had aimed for the convent, the lack of a sacramental finish was beyond the beyonds. It's hiding something you are, Barry Casserly. "And I know exactly what."
Brigid arrests herself abruptly before the door of St Rita's, mashing the coarse insubordinate hair more firmly into its pins, replacing the worn but respectable hat she has worn since Kitchener died in the Great War. She quits walking, ceases perambulation - then resumes, with a new briskness about her, straightaway through teh mouldy oak doors and Corinthian-pillared portico of St Rita's, the County Hospital for Consumptives.
Inside:
"Excuse me, Madam. I need to see a patient called Julie McCarthy, if you please."
"Just a moment..." Nurse swoops into cold metal cabinet, finds almost instantly the proper papers. The drawer is nearly barren, only a few dingy papers in a sea of black enamel. As the drawer snaps closed, Brigid can read the impersonal grim designation on the front: Grave Cases.
She sucks in a startled breath. The bright eyes of the white-capped, white-aproned, white-cuffed girl in a sea of white, white, white, question. "Are you a relative of Miss McCarthy? I'm afraid only relatives are allowed to that ward."
"Relative?" Brigid, slightly floored, gapes as a fish would in the moments after it is caught. "A relative... yes," she nods firmly. "Her aunt."
Still to be continued.