Meg took care of herself as best she could. She even took care of her brother, who was as trapped as she was. They walked clear across Ireland, getting sicker and angrier and dying by inches. There were a few battles, which were loud and confused; sieges, which meant waiting around and endless thieving; a few times they drove parties of prisoners before them. These prisoners were mostly poor, ragged men who spoke only Irish. Nobody could get sense out of them. Sometimes they prayed, or sang. The army resented them: they were not worth feeding. Often, they let them escape for that reason. Some were rescued by locals who raided by night, always leading to losses. Prisoners were a bad business. No regiment wanted them. There were fewer of them as they went west. Meg did see people fleeing, though. Families, women, even a priest or two, carrying as much as they could on their backs. God knows where they were going. Into the sea, perhaps. The Parliamentarians let them go, only taking their bacon or fowls, though occasionally they killed the priests. They knew the priests would not recant, and they were at war with the Roman church, weren’t they?
Meg and her brother and the last few men she knew from Huntingdon, plus some eight hundred men or so, made it as far as some nameless moor in Connacht. There they definitively lost a battle against a group of well-armed and organized Irishmen under the command of a local lord, who had some horses left. Most of the men had cut down their pikes long since to make them easier to carry. They were used to fighting men on foot. A shorter pike is fine for that. But you need the length to turn horses. The Englishmen lost. Horses and men overran them, and those who could still flee ran for it. Meg, in a field behind the front where the men had been lined up, had the battle fall back and run straight over her. She and the other remaining women, the cripples and camp followers and baggage-carriers, were suddenly in the middle of a crowd of men screaming in Irish and English. There was running. There were pounding hooves, foundering and falling bodies. Within minutes, Meg herself fell. She held up her hand to ward her face and a sword sliced off her finger. Then she was gone.
Nobody missed her because they were all dead. But when Meg came to, on the damp grass that she assumed was endemic to Ireland, she was on Inis Caillte.
Wandering around a day later, weak from loss of blood and beginning to be feverish, she met Mary MacIntosh, out watching over the sheep. Mary was kind to Meg, even after she learned she was English, and Meg was astonished to find that she understood her. She had never understood an Irish speaker before. Meg was led back to the MacIntosh farm and looked after while her hand healed. The family didn’t even shun her when they learned she had travelled with the Ironsides.
“There’s no call for those old enmities here,” said Conor MacIntosh, Mary’s uncle. “They’re not very real to us as was born here,” he went on, “seeing as we only seem to connect to the other islands, let alone the mainland, from time to time. Dipping into certain chapters of a long book, like, and skipping the rest? And then, the people who comes to us, we’ve found over the years that they’re all equally lost. It’s hard to be loster’n somebody else. It’s even-steven.”
The family was, however, extremely interested in Oliver Cromwell. Once they understood that she had crossed the country with his army, they were full of questions about him. Was he, in fact, a giant, a sort of blood-soaked ogre? Did he kill priests and women with his bare hands? How many people really had died after his army took Drogheda? Did he believe in God?
“I never met him,” said Meg, “Nor did my brother. But he did come from our borough. Huntingdon. I think he was gone from Ireland before our regiment fell. He went back to be Lord Protector and run the government with the rest of the Parliament, I expect. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“He died,” said Mary, “And then the king came back.”
“What, Charles the Scot? He was dead!” said Meg.
“No, his son, I heard. I think his name was Charles too, though.”
“That’s terrible,” said Meg, “So, are there still kings and dynasties in England now, then?”
“Yes,” said Conor, nodding, “There’s a queen, Victoria. From Hanover. She’s even queen of Ireland, people say.”
“Isn’t that in Germany, Hanover?” asked Meg.
“Yes.”
“And she’s queen of England?” said Meg, “Is she a Protestant—a Lutheran, or what?”
“All I know is she’s not a Catholic,” said Mary. “Philip Murphy was very clear about that.”
“And who’s he?”
“A Catholic priest. He arrived not long before you did. From the Low Countries, he said. There was a war,” replied Mary.
“There’s always a war,” said Meg.
* * *
Jim had been living on Inis Caillte and cosying up to Mary MacIntosh for two months, working for her father as a herdsman and fisherman by turns. MacIntosh was glad of the help, as he had a lame leg. There was nothing else Jim could do, as he was not a landholder there. Not but there was a lot of free land, and quite fertile, too.
So, for the first time, he had gone on an expedition. He decided to look at the northwest of the country. He was always the man looking for land’s end and the open sea. There he was, on a headland, gazing out at what must surely still be the mouth of Galway Bay and wondering if he sailed out there, would he end up in some imaginary America, when somebody pulled on his sleeve.
He turned and saw a small, fine-boned woman with black eyes and a fountain of heavy black hair.
“Jim Conneely?” she said, in the toneless voice of a sleepwalker.
He had not the slightest idea who she was.
“I am Nellie,” she said, “of Cill Rónáin. She who was dumb.”
“Nellie!” he returned in amazement. He had not been one of her patrons but knew several men who had been.
“Dirty Nellie,” she said in her light voice, and looked at him.
“No longer dirty, I see. As clean as a well bucket,” he said gallantly, wincing at his comparison. He pressed on, “And dumb no more. Was it one of the miracles of this place?”
She looked at him steadily.
The gallantry had been a mistake. It was not his custom to treat woman like fools. Formerly, he had tried to avoid them altogether. But between his courtship of Mary and what he would have to describe as the beginning of a friendship with Meg Haylock, the situation was now somewhat different.
“So, that was stupid, wasn’t it? Whatever it is that goes on here doesn’t strike me a miraculous. Unless you count the fact that I’ve met only the one priest on an island this size. I’d describe it more as a freak of nature,” said Jim.
“There are two priests,” said Nellie, smiling.
“No miracles, then,” said Jim. “Can I ask you how you came to be here? Do you remember it?”
“Pain,” replied Nellie. “I just thought I’d died. But I woke up on the shore here.”
“How is it that you speak so well now?”
“I married a man,” said Nellie, “A learned man. A priest.”
“A priest!” yelped Jim. Then he paused, embarrassed at his own shock. Was he a grown man, or a child? “So, he’s a priest no longer, then? He gave it up?”