The Ballymara Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

is in my arms, he pulls me to the kitchen window and I know he is looking down the backyard for his mammy. Maura, what can I do? I cannot even say her name, so I can’t, or I will risk setting him off. Thanks be to God for our Nellie. She can really distract him now, much better than me, can’t you, Nellie?’
    Nellie looked across at them from the range and nodded. Maura noted that she looked sad-eyed, as though carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.
    ‘And what about poor Brigid?’ said Maura.
    Maura was referring to Sean’s wife: the wronged woman, deserted without the slightest inkling that anything had been amiss and left with a house full of little red-haired daughters to keep and care for. A woman who was both extremely house-proud and very much in love with her husband and her perfect family. Perfect, that is, until the moment on the night before Christmas Eve when she had opened a note she found propped on the mantelshelf, informing her that Sean, the husband she had devoted her life to, had run away to America with Alice, the wife of her friend Jerry.
    That was the moment when everything had altered. When her love had turned to hate. In one tick of the clock, her life had gone from light to dark. All she believed was true in their world had washed away before her, in a river of tears.
    ‘We should call in and see her this morning,’ said Kathleen. ‘The poor woman is distraught.’
    Nellie was pouring boiling water into the tin teapot when she saw Bill from the pub burst through the gate, run down the yard and in through the back door.
    ‘Maura,’ he panted. ‘Maura, ye have to get to the pub now, yer relative from home, Rosie, she will be calling back in thirty minutes. She says to tell ye she is phoning from Mrs Doyle’s in Bangornevin. She needs to speak to ye as well, Kathleen. She said I have to take ye both together ’cause she won’t have the chance to call back again, she needs to speak to ye both and that I had to make sure of that.’
    With that, Bill ran back down the yard to the pub where the draymen were in the middle of a delivery. But that mattered not a jot. News from home was the most important kind and not to be kept waiting.
    Kathleen, Maura and Nellie looked at each other, but no one spoke until Nellie whispered into the silence, ‘Can Kitty have had the baby?’
    She put down the kettle and moved closer to the others. They were in their own home and no one could possibly overhear them, but they were the only females in Liverpool who knew why Kitty was in Ireland. She had slipped across the water, in the dead of night, with Kathleen and Nellie for company.
    The baby growing in her belly had been put there by Father James, and Tommy had ensured he paid for it. A priest’s murder, dismembered of his langer, coinciding with a child’s pregnancy would surely have guaranteed that Tommy would have been hanged once the police realized he had been defending his daughter’s honour. The connection was too obvious.
    Kitty had awaited the birth in Galway, hiding in a convent and working in a laundry. Waiting out her pregnancy and delivery.
    Sister Evangelista and Kitty’s school friends believed that Kitty was visiting Maura’s sister who was poorly and needed help, but on the four streets only three women – Maura, who was Kitty’s mother, and her closest friends, Kathleen and her granddaughter, Nellie – knew the truth. Or so they had thought.
    ‘She’s not due for three more weeks, but it is possible,’ said Maura.
    ‘If it’s Rosie wants to speak to ye, then that baby has been born and if Rosie is at Mrs Doyle’s, it’s her way of letting us know Kitty is at Maeve’s farmhouse and safe,’ said Kathleen.
    Maura was already standing at the back door, holding it open and waiting impatiently whilst Kathleen tied her headscarf and fastened her coat, ready to run to the pub and reach the phone to hear news of her daughter. She had counted the days, one by one, since