a good place to be an unmarried mother. So many of them ended up in those terrible homes for fallen women, the Magdalene Sisters, you know. Enormous pressure to give up the baby, not to wreck its life with the taint of your own sin. Very often the Sisters didn’t even bother with that, they simply abducted the child: told the mother it had died, sold it to a well-off American couple. Quite possibly kept the mother imprisoned for life, working in their laundry to expiate her sin.”
“I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,” I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. “Just playing the odds.”
Hugo didn’t grin back; instead he gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Perhaps,” he said, turning his attention back to his food. “I’d like to think so, too. So much less uncomfortable to think about. But until I know, you see, I have to pursue all the avenues.”
He ate with the thorough, methodical enjoyment of a laborer, leaning forwards over his plate. “I’m not a DNA specialist,” he said, between mouthfuls, “but I can make a decent fist of analyzing results—or at any rate better than someone like Mrs. Wozniak, who’s never done it before. She was born in 1945, and the percentage of matching DNA puts the McNamara connection two or three generations back. So we’re talking about somewhere between, say, 1850 and 1910. It would be easier if I had the census records, but . . .” An exasperated, familiar shrug. A combination of government logic, World War I paper shortage and fire destroyed basically all the nineteenth-century Irish census records; I had heard Hugo complain about it plenty of times before. “So I can’t just go and check if one of the ancestors was on the census with a wife and three children before he emigrated, or if someone vanishes from the home address and pops up in a Magdalene laundry, or if the next-door neighbor happened to be a McNamara. Instead I’m going at it sideways. Parish records, mostly, but I’ve also been checking the passenger lists of emigrant ships—”
I was losing hold of the conversation—too many possibilities and tributaries, the words had stopped meaning much—but the run of Hugo’s voice was peaceful as a river. The standing lamp, on against the dim underwater light, gave the room a sanctified golden glow. Rain pattering at the windowpane, bindings worn at the edges. Bird-dropped twigs in the grate of the little iron fireplace. I ate and nodded.
“Would you like to give me a hand?” Hugo asked suddenly.
He had straightened up and was blinking hopefully at me. “Well,” I said, taken aback, “um, I don’t know how much use I’d be. It’s not really my—”
“It’s nothing fancy. Just the same stuff you and your cousins used to help me with: going through records looking for the right names. I know it’s not very exciting, but it does have its moments—do you remember that nice Canadian whose great-grandmother turned out to have run off with the music teacher and the family silver?”
I was trying to come up with a good excuse—I couldn’t read a news article without forgetting what was going on halfway through, what were the chances I could keep track of half a dozen names while I deciphered page after page of Victorian handwriting?—when I realized, duhhh, with a sharp prickle of shame: Hugo wasn’t charitably trying to keep the poor unfortunate gimp busy. He wanted to know the answer to Mrs. Wozniak’s mystery, and he didn’t have a lot of time to find it. “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure. Absolutely. That’d be great.”
“Oh, marvelous,” he said happily, pushing his empty plate aside. “It’s been too long since I had company at this. Do you want anything else to eat, or shall we get stuck in?”
We cleared the plates (“Oh, just put them in that corner for now, we’ll take them downstairs later”—I had a sharp flash of wondering whether Hugo had noticed my dragging leg and wanted to spare me the stairs, but his face was turned away from me as he stacked the tray, I couldn’t find anything there) and he set the printer to churn out a stack of ships’ manifests while he fixed me up with the armchair and the side table and a year-old phone bill to run down the pages so I wouldn’t miss a line.