I upended the envelope across the small desk, the way I’d done a month ago at Eoin’s bedside. The book, heavier than the other items, slid out first, the pictures fluttering around it like afterthoughts. I tossed the envelope aside, and it fell heavily, making a small thunk as it hit the edge of the desk. I picked it up again, curious, and reached inside. A ring had found its way under the padded lining and was wedged into the corner. I worked it free, finding a delicate band of gold filigree that widened around a pale cameo on an agate background. It was lovely and old—an intoxicating combination for a historian—and I slipped it on my finger, delighted that it fit, wishing Eoin could tell me to whom it had belonged.
It was probably his mother’s, and I picked up the old photos to see if she wore it on her hand in any of the shots. Anne’s hands were tucked in the pockets of her gray coat in one photo, wrapped around Declan’s arm in another, and out of frame or out of sight in the rest.
I thumbed through them all again, touching the faces that had preceded my own. I stopped on Eoin’s picture, his unhappy little face and stiffly parted hair making my eyes tear and my heart swell. I could see the old man in the child’s expression in the set of his chin and the frown on his lips. Age was the only color in the photo, and I could only guess at the vibrancy of his hair or the blue of his eyes. My grandfather had been snowy-haired as long as I’d known him but claimed he’d had hair as red as his father’s before him and my father after him.
I set Eoin’s picture aside and studied the others, pausing once more at the picture of Thomas Smith and my grandmother. It hadn’t been taken at the same time as the picture with the three of them—Anne, Thomas, and Declan—together. Anne’s hair and clothes were different, and Thomas Smith wore a darker suit. He seemed older in the one, though I couldn’t think why. The patina was forgiving, his hair dark and uncovered. Maybe it was the set of his shoulders or the solemnity in his stance. The picture was slightly overexposed, leaching the details from Anne’s dress and giving their skin the pearly quality so often found in very old photos.
There were pictures in the stack I hadn’t seen. Eoin’s pain had interrupted my perusal on the night of his death, and I paused over a photo of a grand house with trees clustered around the edges and a glimmer of lake in the distance. I studied the landscape and the stretch of water. It looked like Lough Gill. I should have taken the photos with me to Dromahair. I could have asked Maeve about the house.
In another photo, a group of men I didn’t know stood around Thomas and Anne in an ornate ballroom. Declan wasn’t in the picture. A big, smirking man with dark hair stood in the center of the shot, one arm slung loosely around Anne’s shoulders and his other arm around Thomas. Anne stared at the camera, wonder stamped all over her face.
I recognized that look—it was one often captured on my own face at book signings. It was a look that telegraphed discomfort and disbelief that anyone would want a picture with me in the first place. I’d gotten better at controlling my expressions and pasting on a professional smile, but I made a rule not to look at any of the shots my publicist regularly sent me from such events. What I didn’t see wouldn’t fill me with insecurity.
I continued to study the picture, suddenly riveted by the man who stood next to Anne.
“No,” I gasped. “It can’t be.” I gazed at it in wonder. “But it is.” The man with his arm around Anne’s shoulders was Michael Collins, leader of the movement that led to the Treaty with England. Before 1922, there were very few pictures of him. Everyone had heard of Michael Collins and his guerilla tactics, but only his inner circle, men and women who worked alongside him, knew what he looked like, making it harder for the Crown to detain him. But after the Treaty was signed and he began rallying the Irish people for its acceptance, his picture had been taken and saved in