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.”“She’ll be with her grandfather.She won’t be throwing herself at any young men with old Josh there to frighten them off.”“I meant, someone I could trust.I don’t want her to—I don’t want her to become one of them.”“Them?”“My father, all that.Their world.” She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile.“The Crawford clan.”“Then don’t let her go.”Her grip on his arm tightened.“I’m not strong enough.I can’t fight them, Quirke.They’re too much for me.”He nodded.“What about Mal?” he said.“What about him?” Suddenly there was the coldness of steel in her voice.“Does he want Phoebe to go?”“Who knows what Mal wants? We don’t discuss these things.We don’t discuss anything, anymore.”He stopped, and made her stop with him.“What’s wrong, Sarah?” he said.“Something has happened.You’re different.Is it Mal?”Her answer this time came like the snap of a tautened wire.“Is what Mal?”They walked on.Quirke felt the ice under his feet, the treacherous smoothness of it.What if he were to slip and fall here? He would not be able to get himself to his feet again.Sarah would have to go for help.He might die.He entertained the thought with equanimity.They came to the crest of the hill.Before them was another long valley, the floor of which was hidden under a haze of frost.They stood and gazed into that glowing gray immensity as if it were the very heart of desolation.“Will you go to America?” Sarah asked, but before he could answer a shiver ran through her, he felt the force of it in her arm that was still linked in his, and with a sort of swooning sigh she let all her weight collapse against him, so that he thought his knee might give way.“Oh, God,” she whispered in distress and terror.Her eyes were closed, the lids fluttering like moth wings.“Sarah,” he said, “what is it?” She took a deep, trembling breath.“Sorry,” she said, “I thought I…” He wedged the walking stick under his elbow for support and held both of her hands in his.Her fingers were icy.She tried to smile, shaking her head.“It’s all right, Quirke.I’m fine, really.”He led her away from the track, the frozen snow snapping like glass under their shoes, to a large, round rock standing in self-conscious isolation on the barren hillside.He brushed the snow from the top of the rock and made her sit.A little color was coming back into her face.She said again she was all right, that it was just her dizzy feeling.She laughed weakly.“One of my turns, as Maggie calls them.” A nerve in her cheek twitched, giving her a bitter aspect.“One of my turns,” she said again.Nervously he lit a cigarette.At this high altitude the smoke cut into his lungs like a flung handful of blades.A large gray crow with a sharpened chisel of a beak alighted near them on a fence post and uttered a derisive croak.Sarah was looking at her hands clasped in her lap.“Quirke,” she said, “I have something to tell you.It’s about Phoebe.I don’t know how to say it.” In her distress she lifted her hands, still clasped, and shook them before her in a curious gesture, like a dice player preparing to throw but knowing the throw will fail.“She’s not mine, Quirke.She’s not Mal’s, either.” Quirke stood so still he might have been made of the same stuff as the stone on which she sat.Sarah shook her head slowly from side to side in a kind of disbelieving amazement.“She’s yours,” she said.“Yours and Delia’s.You didn’t know she lived, but she did.Delia died and Phoebe lived.The Judge, Garret, he phoned us in Boston that night, to tell us Delia was dead.I couldn’t believe it.He asked if Mal and I would look after the baby—for a while, he said, until you were over your shock.There was a nun coming out from Dublin.She brought Phoebe with her.” She sighed, and cast about her as if vaguely in search of some way by which she might escape, some passageway or hollow in the snow down which she might drop.“I shouldn’t have kept her,” she said, “but I told myself it was for the best.You were already drinking so much, because of Delia, because she wasn’t what you had hoped she’d be.And then she was dead, and there was Phoebe.” He turned, a stone man, and took some steps over the snow, leaning his weight on his stick, and stopped, looking away from her, down again into the frozen valley far below.The bird on the post ducked its head and flexed one wing and this time gave a low, rattling squawk that might have been of entreaty, or mildly regretful deprecation.Sarah sighed again.“I wanted something of you, you see,” she said to Quirke’s enormous, hunched back.“Something that was yours.Terrible of me, I know.” She laughed briefly, as if amazed again, at herself, at what she was saying.“All these years…” She rose to her feet, clenching her fists and holding them at her sides.“I’m sorry, Quirke,” she called to him, making her voice loud, for it seemed to her that when she had stood up the air had somehow grown too thin to carry mere words, and that anyway he was, over on that bare mountain rim, almost beyond hearing her.He would not turn, only stood there in his crow-black coat with his back to her and his head bowed.“I’m sorry,” she said again, and this time it was as if she were saying it to herself.THREE25ANDY STAFFORD FELT LIKE HE WAS ON TRIAL.THEY WERE IN SISTER Stephanus’s office, he and Claire, sitting side by side on two straight chairs in front of the big oak desk behind which Sister Stephanus was seated.At her back, standing, was the red-haired priest, Harkins, the one who had called at the house that day to spy on them.Another nun, he could not remember her name—she was a doctor, she had a stethoscope around her neck—was standing by the window looking out at the brilliant day, her face lit by the light reflected from the snow.He had explained to them, again, what had happened, how he had found the baby having a fit or something and had given her—he just managed in time to stop himself saying it—a shake to try to get her to snap out of it, and how she had died instead.It was all a misunderstanding, an accident [ 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