“The GPO?” I was so tired, and the question slipped out.
He stared at me, his brow furrowed. “The post office, Anne. Weren’t you and Declan with the Volunteers at the post office? Martin said he thought you evacuated with the women, but Min said you turned back. She said you insisted on being with Declan to the end. But you weren’t with Declan. Where did you go, Anne?”
I didn’t remember, but I suddenly knew. The Easter Rising. He was describing events I’d read about in considerable detail.
“It was a battle we weren’t going to win,” Thomas murmured. “We all knew it. You and Declan knew it. We talked about what revolution would mean, what it meant to even fight back. There was something glorious about it. Glorious and terrible.”
“Glorious and terrible,” I whispered, picturing it, wondering again if I’d conjured this scene the way I’d imagined stories as a child, putting myself in the very center of the action and losing myself in my own productions.
“The day after we withdrew from the GPO, the leadership surrendered. I found Declan lying in the street.” Thomas gazed at me, watching my face as he spoke of Declan, and I could only stare back helplessly. “He wouldn’t have left you in the GPO, and the Anne I knew wouldn’t have left him at all.”
The Anne I knew.
Fear, sour and hot, churned in my stomach. I didn’t like this development in the story. They had never found Eoin’s mother. They’d never found her body. They had assumed she was dead, alongside her husband, lost in an insurrection that had ended very badly. And now I was here, raising questions that were long since buried. This was bad. This was very bad.
“We would have known. If you’d been sent to England with the other prisoners, we would have known. They released the other women. Everyone has been released. Years ago. And . . . and you’re well!” Thomas insisted. He turned away, shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Your hair . . . your skin. You look . . . well.”
My good health was an accusation, and he threw the words at me, although he never raised his voice. He turned back toward me but didn’t approach the bed.
“You look well, Anne. You definitely haven’t been wasting away in an English prison.”
There was nothing I could say. No explanations I could give. I didn’t know what had happened to the Anne Gallagher of 1921. I didn’t know. The image of the graves in Ballinagar rose in my mind, a tall stone with the name Gallagher at the base. Anne and Declan shared that stone, and the dates had been clear: 1892 to 1916. I’d seen it yesterday. I was dreaming. Only dreaming.
“Anne?” Thomas pressed.
I was a wonderful liar. Not because I was deceitful, but because my mind could immediately conjure variations and plot twists, and any lie became an alternate version of a tale. I didn’t especially like that I was so skilled but considered it an occupational hazard. I couldn’t lie now. I didn’t know enough to create a convincing story. Not yet. I would go to sleep, and when I woke, this would be over. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, blocking it all out.
“I don’t know, Thomas.” I used his name, a plea to let me be, and turned my head toward the wall, needing the safety of my own thoughts and the space to examine them.
8 September 1917
Garvagh Glebe means “rough place.” I’ve always thought that an interesting name for such a beautiful spot, as the land sits next to the lough, and the trees are tall, the soil rich, and the grass green. The land isn’t a rough place. Yet for me, that is exactly what Garvagh Glebe has always represented. A rough place. A hard spot. And I’ve always struggled between loving her and resenting her. She belongs to me now, but she was not always mine.
She belonged to John Townsend, my stepfather, an English landowner whose family had been granted the land on the lough three hundred years before his birth. John was a kind man. He was good to my mother, good to me, and when he died, I inherited it. An Irishman. For the first time in three hundred years, the land had returned to Irish hands. I’d always believed that Irish land should be owned by Irish men and women, by the people who had lived and died