TransAtlantic

1919, cloudshadow

IT WAS A MODIFIED BOMBER. A VICKERS VIMY. ALL WOOD AND LINEN and wire. She was wide and lumbering, but Alcock still thought her a nippy little thing. He patted her each time he climbed onboard and slid into the cockpit beside Brown. One smooth motion of his body. Hand on the throttle, feet on the rudder bar, he could already feel himself aloft.

What he liked most of all was rising up over the clouds and then flying in clean sunlight. He could lean out over the edge and see the shadowshift on the whiteness below, expanding and contracting on the surface of the clouds.

Brown, the navigator, was more reserved — it embarrassed him to make such a fuss. He sat forward in the cockpit, keen on what clues the machine might give. He knew how to intuit the shape of the wind, yet he put his faith in what he could actually touch: the compasses, the charts, the spirit level tucked down at his feet.

IT WAS THAT time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

Alcock had piloted air-service fighters. Small bombs fell away from the undercarriage of his plane. A sudden lightness to the machine. A kick upwards into the night. He leaned out from his open cockpit and watched the mushroom of smoke rise below. His plane leveled out and turned towards home. At times like that, Alcock craved anonymity. He flew in the dark, his plane open to the stars. Then an airfield would appear below, the razor wire illuminated like the altar of a strange church.

Brown had flown reconnaissance. He had a knack for the mathematics of flight. He could turn any sky into a series of numbers. Even on the ground he went on calculating, figuring out new ways to guide his planes home.

BOTH MEN KNEW exactly what it meant to be shot down.

The Turks caught Jack Alcock on a long-range bombing raid over Suvla Bay and pierced the plane with machine-gun fire, knocked off his port propeller. He and his two crewmen ditched at sea, swam to shore. They were marched naked to where the Turks had set up rows of little wooden cages for prisoners of war. Open to the weather. There was a Welshman beside him who had a map of the constellations, so Alcock practiced his navigation skills, stuck out under the nailheaded Turkish night: just one glance at the sky and he could tell exactly what time it was. Yet what Alcock wanted more than anything was to tinker with an engine. When he was moved to a detention camp in Kedos, he swapped his Red Cross chocolate for a dynamo, traded his shampoo for tractor parts, built a row of makeshift fans out of scrap wire, bamboo, bolts, batteries.

Teddy Brown, too, had become a prisoner of war, forced to land in France while out on photographic reconnaissance. A bullet shattered his leg. Another ruptured the fuel tank. On the way down he threw out his camera, tore up his charts, scattered the pieces. He and his pilot slid their B.E.2c into a muddy wheatfield, cut the engine, held their hands up. The enemy came running out of the forest to drag them from the wreck. Brown could smell petrol leaking from the tanks. One of the Krauts had a lit cigarette in his lips. Brown was known for his reserve. Excuse me, he called out, but the German kept coming forward, the cigarette flaring. Nein, nein. A little cloud of smoke came from the German’s mouth. Brown’s pilot finally lifted his arms and roared: For fucksake, stop!

The German paused in midstride, tilted his head back, paused, swallowed the burning cigarette, ran towards the airmen again.

It was something that made Brown’s son, Buster, laugh when he heard the story just before he, too, went to war, twenty years later. Excuse me. Nein, nein. As if the German had only the flap-end of his shirt sticking out, or had somehow neglected to tie his shoelace properly.

BROWN WAS SHIPPED home before the armistice, then lost his hat high in the air over Piccadilly Circus. The girls wore red lipstick. The hems of their dresses rose almost to their knees. He wandered along the Thames, followed the river until it crawled upwards to the sky.

Alcock didn’t make it back to London until December. He watched men in black suits and bowler hats pick their way amid the rubble. He joined in a game of football in an alley off the Pimlico Road, knocking a round pigskin back and forth. But he could already sense himself aloft again. He lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl high and away.

WHEN THEY MET for the first time in the Vickers factory in Brooklands, in early 1919, Alcock and Brown took one look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate. The obliteration of memory. The creation of a new moment, raw, dynamic, warless. It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside. They didn’t want to remember the bombs that had dudded out, or the crash or burn, or the cellblocks they had been locked into, or what species of abyss they had seen in the dark.

Instead they talked about the Vickers Vimy. A nippy little thing.

THE PREVAILING WINDS blew east from Newfoundland, pushing hard and fast across the Atlantic. Eighteen hundred miles of ocean.

The men came by ship from England, rented rooms in the Cochrane Hotel, waited for the Vimy to arrive at the docks. It came boxed in forty-seven large wooden crates. Late spring. A whip of frost still in the air. Alcock and Brown hired a crew to drag the crates up from the harbor. They strapped the boxes to horses and carts, assembled the plane in the field.

The meadow sat on the outskirts of St. John’s, on a half-hill, with a level surface of three hundred yards, a swamp at one end, and a pine forest at the other. Days of welding, soldering, sanding, stitching. The bomb bays were replaced by extra petrol tanks. That’s what pleased Brown the most. They were using the bomber in a brand-new way: taking the war out of the plane, stripping the whole thing of its penchant for carnage.

To level out the meadow, they crimped blasting caps to fuses, shattered boulders with dynamite, leveled walls and fences, removed hillocks. It was summertime but still there was a chill in the air. Flocks of birds moved fluidly across the sky.

After fourteen days the field was ready. To most people it was simply another patch of land, but to the two pilots it was a fabulous aerodrome. They paced the grass runway, watched the breeze in the trees, looked for clues in the weather.

CROWDS OF RUBBERNECKERS flocked to see the Vimy. Some had never ridden in a motorcar, let alone seen a plane before. From a distance it looked as if it had borrowed its design from a form of dragonfly. It was 42.7 feet long, 15.25 feet high, with a wingspan of 68 feet. It weighed 13,000 pounds when the 870 gallons of petrol and the 40 gallons of oil were loaded. Eleven pounds per square foot. The cloth framework had thousands of individual stitches. The bomb spaces were replaced by enough fuel for 30 hours of flying. It had a maximum speed of 103 miles per hour, not counting the wind, a cruising speed of 90 mph and a landing speed of 45 mph. There were two water-cooled Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines of 360 horsepower and a turnover rate of 1,080 revs per minute, with twelve cylinders in two banks of six, each engine driving a four-bladed wooden propeller.

The onlookers ran their hands along the struts, tapped the steel, pinged the taut linen of the wings with their umbrellas. Kids crayoned their names on the underside of the fuselage.

Photographers pulled black hoods over their lenses. Alcock mugged for the camera, shaded his hand to his eyes like an ancient explorer. Tally-ho! he shouted, before jumping the nine feet to the wet grass below.

THE NEWSPAPERS SAID anything was possible now. The world was made tiny. The League of Nations was being formed in Paris. W. E. B. Du Bois convened the Pan-African Congress with delegates from fifteen countries. Jazz records could be heard in Rome. Radio enthusiasts used vacuum tubes to transmit signals hundreds of miles. Some day soon it might be possible to read the daily edition of the San Francisco Examiner in Edinburgh or Salzburg or Sydney or Stockholm.

In London, Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail had offered £10,000 to the first men to land on one side of the Atlantic or the other. At least four other teams wanted to try. Hawker and Grieve had already crashed into the water. Others, like Brackley and Kerr, were positioned in airfields along the coast, waiting for the weather to turn. The flight had to be done in seventy-two hours. Nonstop.

There were rumors of a rich Texan who wanted to try, and a Hungarian prince and, worst of all, a German from the Luftstreitkräfte who had specialized in long-range bombing during the war.

The features editor of the Daily Mail, a junior of Lord Northcliffe’s, was said to have developed an ulcer thinking about a possible German victory.

— A Kraut! A bloody Kraut! God save us!

He dispatched reporters to find out if it was possible that the enemy, even after defeat, could possibly be ahead in the race.

On Fleet Street, down at the stone, where the hot type was laid, he paced back and forth, working the prospective headlines over and over. On the inside of his jacket his wife had stitched a Union Jack, which he rubbed like a prayer cloth.

— Come on boys, he muttered to himself. Hup two. On home now, back to Blighty.

EVERY MORNING THE two airmen woke in the Cochrane Hotel, had their breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon, toast. Then they drove through the steep streets, out the Forest Road, towards a field of grass sleeved with ice. The wind blew bitter blasts off the sea. They rigged wires into their flight suits so they could run warmth from a battery, and they stitched extra fur on the inside flaps of their helmets, their gloves, their boots.

A week went by. Two weeks. The weather held them back. Cloud. Storm. Forecast. Every morning the men made sure they were carefully shaved. A ritual they performed at the far end of the field. They set up a steel washbasin under a canvas tent with a little gas burner to heat the water. A metal hubcap was used as a mirror. They put razor blades in their flight kits for when they landed: they wanted to make sure that if they were to arrive in Ireland, they would be fresh, decently shaved, presentable members of Empire.

In the lengthening June evenings, they fixed their ties, sat under the wingtips of the Vimy, and spoke eloquently to the Canadian, American, British reporters who gathered for the flight.

Alcock was twenty-six years old. From Manchester. He was lean, handsome, daring, the sort of man who looked straight ahead but stayed open to laughter. He had a head of ginger hair. A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines. Nothing pleased him more than to pull apart the guts of a Rolls-Royce, then put her back together again. He shared his sandwiches with the reporters: often there was a thumbprint of oil on the bread.

Brown sat on the wooden crates alongside Alcock. He already seemed old at thirty-two. His bum leg forced him to carry a walking stick. He had been born in Scotland, but raised near Manchester. His parents were American and he had a slight Yankee accent that he cultivated as best he could. He thought of himself as a man of the mid-Atlantic. He read the antiwar poetry of Aristophanes and admitted to the idea that he would happily live in constant flight. He was solitary but did not enjoy loneliness. Some said he looked like a vicar, but his eyes flared a far blue, and he had recently gotten engaged to a young beauty from London. He wrote Kathleen love letters, telling her that he wouldn’t mind throwing his walking stick at the stars.

— Good God, said Alcock, you really told her that?

— I did, yes.

— And what did she say?

— Said I could lose the walking stick.

— Ah! Smitten.

At the press briefings, Alcock took the helm. Brown navigated the silence by fiddling with his tie clip. He kept a brandy bottle in his inside pocket. Occasionally he turned away, opened the flap of his tunic, took a nip.

Alcock drank, too, but loudly, publicly, happily. He rested against the bar in the Cochrane Hotel and sang Rule, Britannia in a voice so out of tune that it was loaded with whimsy.

The locals — fishermen mostly, a few lumberjacks — banged on the wooden tables and sang songs about loved ones lost at sea.

The singing went on late into the night, long after Alcock and Brown had gone to bed. Even from the fourth floor they could hear sad rhythms breaking into waves of laughter and then, later still, the Maple Leaf Rag hammered out on a piano.

Oh go ’way man

I can hypnotize dis nation

I can shake de earth’s foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag

ALCOCK AND BROWN rose at sunup, then waited for a clear sky. Turned their faces to the weather. Walked the field. Played gin rummy. Waited some more. They needed a warm day, a strong moon, a benevolent wind. They figured they could make the flight in under twenty hours. Failure didn’t interest them, but in secret Brown wrote out a will, gave everything he owned to Kathleen, kept the envelope in the inside pocket of his tunic.

Alcock didn’t bother with a will. He recalled the terrors of the war, still surprised at times that he could wake at all.

— There’s puff all else they can throw at me now.

He slapped the side of the Vimy with his palm, took a look at the clouds massing far off in the west.

— Except of course some more ruddy rain.

ONE GLANCE DOWN takes in a line of chimneys and fences and spires, the wind combing tufts of grass into silvery waves, rivers vaulting the ditches, two white horses running wild in a field, the long scarves of tarmacadam fading off into dirt roads — forest, scrubland, cowsheds, tanneries, shipyards, fishing shacks, cod factories, commonwealth, we’re floating on a sea of adrenaline and — Look! Teddy, down there, a scull on a stream, and a blanket on the sand, and a girl with pail and shovel, and the woman rolling the hem of her skirt, and over there, see, that young chap, in the red jersey, running the donkey along the shore, go ahead, give it one more turn, thrill the lad with a bit of shadow …

ON THE EVENING of June 12 they take another practice run, this one at night so Brown can test out his Sumner charts. Eleven thousand feet. The cockpit is open to the sky. The cold is fierce. The men hunker behind the windscreen. Even the tip ends of their hair begin to freeze.

Alcock tries to feel the plane, her weight, her dip, her center of gravity, while Brown works on his mathematics. Below, the reporters wait for the plane to return. The field has been outlined with candles in brown paper bags to make a runway. When the Vimy lands, the candles blow over and burn briefly in the grass. Local boys run out with buckets to douse the flames.

The airmen climb down off the plane to scattered applause. They are surprised to learn that a local reporter, Emily Ehrlich, is the most serious of all. She never asks a single question, but stands around in a knit hat and gloves, scribbling in her notebook. Short and unfashionably large. In her forties or fifties perhaps. She moves with a hefty gait across the muddy airfield. Carrying a wooden cane. Her ankles are terribly swollen. She looks like the type of woman who might be working in a cake shop, or behind a country-store counter, but she has, they know, an incisive pen. They have seen her in the Cochrane Hotel, where she has lived for many years with her daughter, Lottie. The seventeen-year-old wields a camera with surprising ease and style, a flirtation. Unlike her mother, she is tall, thin, sprightly, curious. She is quick to laugh and whisper in her mother’s ear. An odd team. The mother stays silent; the daughter takes the photos and asks the questions. It infuriates the other reporters, a young girl in their territory, but her questions are sharp, quick. What sort of wind pressure can the wing fabric withstand? What is it like to have the sea disappear beneath you? Do you have a sweetheart in London, Mr. Alcock? Mother and daughter like to stride across the fields together at the end of the day, Emily to the hotel room where she sits and writes her reports, Lottie towards the tennis courts where she plays for hours on end.

Emily’s name banners the Thursday edition of the Evening Telegram, nearly always accompanied by one of her daughter’s photos. Once a week she has a mandate to cover whatever she wants: fishing disasters, local disputes, political commentary, the lumber industry, the suffragettes, the horrors of the war. She is famous for her odd tangents. Once, in the middle of an article on a local trade union, she darted off on a two-hundred-word recipe for pound cake. Another time, in an analysis of a speech by the governor of Newfoundland, she strayed into the subtle art of preserving ice.

Alcock and Brown have been warned to be on their guard, since the mother and daughter have, by all accounts, a tendency towards nostalgia and fiery Irish tempers. But they like them both, Emily and Lottie, the odd edge they give to the crowd, the mother’s strange hats, her long dresses, her curious bouts of silence, her daughter’s tall quick stride through the town, the tennis racquet banging against her calf.

Besides, Brown has seen Emily’s reports in the Evening Telegram and they are amongst the best he has read: Today the sky was truant over Signal Hill. Hammer blows ring across the airfield like so many bells. Each night the sun goes down looking more and more like the moon.

THEY ARE DUE to leave on Friday the 13th. It’s an airman’s way of cheating death: pick a day of doom, then defy it.

The compasses are swung, the transverse tables calculated, the wireless primed, the shock absorbers wrapped around the axles, the ribs shellacked, the fabric dope dried, the radiator water purified. All the rivets, the split pins, the stitches are checked and rechecked. The pump control handles. The magnetos. The batteries to warm their flight suits. Their shoes are polished. The Ferrostat flasks of hot tea and Oxo are prepared. The carefully cut sandwiches are packed away. Lists are carefully ticked off. Horlicks Malted Milk. Bars of Fry’s Chocolate. Four sticks of licorice each. One pint-sized bottle of brandy for emergencies. They run sprigs of white heather on the inside of their fur-lined helmets for luck, and place two stuffed animals — black cats, both — one in the well beneath the windscreen, the other tied to a strut behind the cockpit.

Then the clouds curtsy in, the rain kneels upon the land, and the weather knocks them back a whole day and a half.

AT THE POST office in St. John’s, Lottie Ehrlich skips across a cage of shadow on the floor, steps to the three-barred window where the clerk tips up his black visor to look at her. She slips the sealed envelope across the counter.

She buys the fifteen-cent Cabot stamp and tells the clerk that she wants to get a one-dollar overprint for the transatlantic post.

— Oh, he says, there aren’t no more of them, young lady, no. They sold out a long time ago.

AT NIGHT BROWN spends a lot of his time downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, sending messages to Kathleen. He is timid with the telegraph, aware that others may read his words. There’s a formality to him. A tightness.

He is slow on the stairs for a man in his thirties, the walking stick striking hard against the wood floor. Three brandies rolling through him.

An odd disturbance of light falls across the banister and he catches sight of Lottie Ehrlich in the ornate wooden mirror at the top of the stairs. The young girl is, for a moment, ghostly, her figure emerging into the mirror, then growing clearer, taller, redheaded. She wears a dressing gown and nightdress and slippers. They are both a little startled by the other.

— Good evening, says Brown, slurring a little.

— Hot milk, says the young girl.

— Excuse me?

— I’m bringing my mother hot milk. She can’t sleep.

He nods and tips at an imaginary brim, moves to step past her.

— She never sleeps.

Her cheeks are flushed red, a little embarrassed to be caught out in the corridor in her dressing gown, he thinks. He tips the nonexistent hat again and pushes the pain through his bad leg, climbs three more steps, the brandies jagging his mind. She pauses two steps below him and says with more formality than it requires: Mr. Brown?

— Yes, young lady?

— Are you ready for the unification of the continents?

— Quite honestly, says Brown, I could do with a good telephone line first.

She takes one step farther down the stairs, puts her hand to her mouth as if about to cough. One eye higher than the other, as if a very stubborn question got lodged in her mind a long time ago.

— Mr. Brown.

— Miss Ehrlich?

— Do you think it would be a terrible imposition?

A quick eye-flick to the floor. She pauses as if she has just propped a number of stray words on the tip of her tongue, odd little things with no flow to them at all, no way to get them out. She stands, balancing them, wondering if they will topple. Brown imagines that she, like everyone in St. John’s, would like a chance to sit in the cockpit if there is another practice run. An impossibility of course, they cannot bring anybody up in the air, least of all a young woman. They have not even allowed the reporters to sit in the plane while it waits in the field. It is a ritual, a superstition, it is not something that he will be able to do, he wonders how he will tell her, he feels trapped now, a victim of his own late-night strolls.

— Would it impose greatly, she says, if I gave you something?

— Of course not.

She negotiates the stairs and runs down the corridor towards her room. The youth of her body moving in the white of the dressing gown.

He tightens his eyes, rubs his forehead, waits. Some good-luck charm perhaps? A memento? A keepsake? Silly that, to have allowed her a chance to speak at all. Should have just said no. Let it be. Gone to his room. Disappeared.

She appears at the end of the corridor, moving sharply and quickly. Her dressing gown exposes a triangle of white skin at her neck. He feels an acute and sudden pang of desire to see Kathleen and he is glad for the desire, the errancy of the moment, this odd curving staircase, this far-flung hotel, the too-much brandy. He misses his fiancée, pure and simple. He would like to be home. To nudge up against her slim body, watch the fall of hair along her clavicle.

He holds the banisters a little too tight as Lottie approaches. A piece of paper in her left hand. He reaches out. A letter. That is all. A letter. He scans it. Addressed to a family in Cork. To Brown Street of all places.

— My mother wrote it.

— Is that so?

— Can you put it in the mail bag?

— No imposition at all, he says, turning on the stairs once more, slipping the envelope inside his tunic pocket.

IN THE MORNING they watch as Lottie emerges from the hotel kitchen, her red hair askew, her dressing gown fixed to the neck, tightened high. She carries a tray of sandwiches wrapped in waxed butcher paper.

— Ham sandwiches, she says triumphantly, placing them down in front of Brown. I made them especially for you.

— Thank you, young lady.

She crosses the restaurant floor, waving over her shoulder as she goes.

— That’s the reporter’s daughter?

— Indeed.

— They’re a little cuckoo, eh? says Alcock, pulling on his flight jacket, looking out the window at the fog.

A STRONG WIND arrives from the west in uneven gusts. They are twelve hours late already, but now is the time — the fog has lifted and the long-range weather reports are good. No clouds. The sky above seems painted in. The initial wind velocity is strong, but will probably calm to about twenty knots. There will, later, be a good moon. They climb aboard to scattered cheers, secure their safety belts, check the instruments yet again. A quick salute from the starter. Contact! Alcock opens the throttle and brings both engines to full power. He signals for the wooden chocks to be pulled clear from the wheels. The mechanic leans down, ducks under the wings, armpits the chocks, steps back, throws them away. He raises both arms in the air. A cough of smoke from the engines. The propellers whirl. The Vimy is pointed into the gale. A slight angle to the wind. Uphill. Go now, go. The waft of warming oil. Speed and lift. The incredible roar. The trees loom in the distance. A drainage ditch challenges on the far side. They say nothing. No Great Scott. No Chin up, old sport. They inch forward, lumbering into the wind. Go, go. The weight of the plane rolls underneath them. Worrisome, that. Slower now than ever. Up the incline. She’s heavy today. So much petrol to carry. One hundred yards, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and seventy. They are moving too slowly. As if through aspic. The tightness of the cockpit. Sweat accumulating behind their knees. The motors strike hard. The wingtips flex. The grass beneath them bends and tears. Bumping along on the ground. Two hundred and fifty. The plane rises a little and then sighs again, jarring the soil. Good God, Jackie, lift her. The line of dark pine trees stands at the end of the airfield, looming closer, closer, closer still. How many men have died this way? Pull her back, Jackie boy. Skid her sideways. Abort. Now. Three hundred yards. Good Jesus above. A gust of wind lifts the left wing and they tilt slightly right. And then they feel it. A cold swell of air in their stomachs. We are rising, Teddy, we are rising, look! A slow grade of upwards, an ever so faint lift of the soul, and the plane is a few feet in the air, nosing up, the wind whistling through the struts. How tall are those trees? How many men died? How many of us fell? Brown converts the pines to possible noise in his mind. The slap of bark. The tangle of stems. The ack-ack of twigs. The smashup. Hang on, hang on. The throat still tight with terror. They rise a little in their seats. As if that might unloosen the weight of the plane beneath them. Higher now, go. The sky beyond the trees is an oceanic thing. Lift it, Jackie, lift it for godsake, lift her. Here, the trees. Here they come. Their scarves take first flight and then they hear the applause of branches below.

— THAT WAS A little ticklish! roars Alcock across the noise.

THEY HEAD STRAIGHT into the wind. The nose goes up. The plane slows. An agonizing climb over treetops and low roofs. Careful now not to stall. Keep her rising. Higher up, they begin a slight bank. Take her easy, old chum. Bring her around. A stately turn, all beauty, all balance, its own sort of confidence. They hold the altitude. Banking tighter now. Until the wind is behind them and the nose dips and they are truly leaving.

They wave down to the starter, the mechanics, the meteorological officers, the other few stragglers below. No Emily Ehrlich from the Evening Telegram, no Lottie: mother and daughter have already gone home, early, for the day. They have missed takeoff. Pity that, thinks Brown. He taps the inside of his jacket where the letter still sits.

Alcock wipes the sweat off his brow, then waves to the shadow of themselves on the last of the ground and steers the plane at half-throttle out to sea. A line of golden strand. Boats bobbing in St. John’s Harbour. Toys in a boy’s bath.

Alcock picks up the rudimentary telephone, half-shouts into it: Hey, old man.

— Yes?

— Sorry about this.

— Sorry, what?

— Never told you.

— Never told me what?

Alcock grins and glances down at the water. They are eight minutes out, at one thousand feet, with a wind strength behind of thirty-five knots. They lurch over Conception Bay. The water, a moving mat of gray. Patches of sunlight and glare.

— Never learned to swim, me.

Brown is momentarily taken aback — the thought of ditching at sea, of flailing at the water, floating for a moment on a wooden strut, or clinging to the rolling tanks. But surely Alcock swam to safety after he was shot down over Suvla Bay? All those years ago. No, not years. Just months. It is odd to Brown, very odd, that not so long ago a bullet pierced his thigh and now, today, he is carrying that fragment over the Atlantic towards a marriage, a second chance. Odd that he should be here at all, this height, this endless gray, the Rolls-Royce engines roaring in his ears, holding him aloft. Alcock can’t swim? Surely that’s not true. Perhaps, thinks Brown, I should tell him the truth. Never too late.

He leans into the mouthpiece of the phone, decides against it.

THEY RISE EVENLY. Side by side in the open cockpit. The air rushing frigid around their ears. Brown taps out a message on the transmitter key to the shore: All well and started.

The telephone is a series of wires wrapped around their necks to pick up speech vibration. To listen, they have earpieces tucked beneath their soft helmets.

Twenty minutes into the flight, Alcock reaches under his hat and rips the cumbersome earpieces out, throws them down into the blueness. Too bloody sore, he mimics.

Brown gives a simple thumbs-up. A shame that. They will have no other means of communication now — just scribbled notes and gestures, but they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.

Their helmets, gloves, jackets, and knee boots are lined with fur. Underneath, they wear Burberry overalls. At any height, even behind the sloping windscreen, it is going to be freezing.

In preparation, Alcock has spent three evenings in a walk-in fridge in St. John’s. One night he lay down on a pile of wrapped meat and failed to sleep. A few days later Emily Ehrlich wrote in the Evening Telegram that he still smelled like a freshly cut side of beef.

SHE STANDS WITH her daughter at the third-floor window, hands on the wooden frame. They are sure at first that it is an illusion, a bird in the foreground. But then she hears the faint report of the engines, and they both know they have missed the moment — no photograph either — yet there is also a strange exaltation about seeing it from a distance, the plane disappearing into the east, silver, not gray, framed by the lens of a hotel window. This is a human victory over war, the triumph of endurance over memory.

Out there, the blue sky lies cloudless and uninterrupted. Emily likes the sound of the ink rising into her fountain pen, the noise of its body being screwed shut. Two men are flying nonstop across the Atlantic to arrive with a sack of mail, a small white linen bag with 197 letters, specially stamped, and if they make it, it will be the first aerial mail to cross from the New World to the Old. A brand-new thought: Transatlantic airmail. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic. The distance finally broken.

FLOATING ICEBERGS BELOW. The roughly furrowed sea. They know there will be no turning back. It is all mathematics now. To convert the fuel into time and distance. To set the throttle for the optimum burn. To know the angles and the edges, and the spaces in between.

Brown wipes the moisture from his goggles, reaches into the wooden compartment behind his head, grabs the sandwiches, unwraps the waxed paper. He passes one to Alcock who keeps one gloved hand on the yoke. It is one of the many things that brings a smile to Alcock’s lips: how extraordinary it is to be munching on a ham-and-butter sandwich put together by a young woman in a St. John’s hotel more than a thousand feet below. The sandwich is made more delicious by how far they have already come. Wheat bread, fresh ham, a light mustard mixed in with the butter.

He reaches back for the hot flask of tea, unscrews the cap, allows a wisp of steam to emerge.

The noise rolls through their bodies. At times they make a music of it — a rhythm that conducts itself from head to chest to toes — but then they are lifted from the rhythm, and it becomes pure noise again. They are well aware that they could go deaf on the flight and that the roar could lodge itself inside them forever, their bodies carrying it like human gramophones, so that if they ever make it to the other side they will still, always, somehow hear it.

KEEPING TO THE prescribed course is a matter of genius and magic. Brown must navigate by any means possible. The Baker navigation machine sits on the floor of the cockpit. The course and distance calculator is clasped to the side of the fuselage. The drift indicator is fitted in under the seat, along with a spirit level to measure bank. The sextant is clipped to the dashboard. There are three compasses, each of which will illuminate in the dark. Sun, moon, cloud, stars. If all else fails, he will have dead reckoning.

Brown kneels on his seat and looks over the edge. He twists and turns, makes calculations using the horizon, the seascape, and the position of the sun. On a notepad he scribbles: Keep her nearer 120 than 140, and as soon as he shoves the note across the tiny cockpit, Alcock adjusts the controls ever so slightly, trims the plane, keeps it at three-quarter throttle, keen not to push the engines too hard.

It is so much like handling a horse, the way the plane changes over a long journey, the shift in her weight from the burn-off of petrol, the gallop of her engines, her rein-touch at the controls.

Every half hour or so Brown notices that the Vimy is a little heavier in the nose, and he watches Alcock exert backwards pressure on the yoke to level the plane out.

At all times Alcock’s body is in contact with the Vimy: he cannot lift his hands from the controls, not even for a second. He can already feel the pain in his shoulders and the tips of his fingers: not even a third of the way there and it has lodged itself hard in every fiber.

AS A CHILD, Brown went to the racecourse in Manchester to watch the horses. On weekdays, when the jockeys were training, Brown ran on the inside of the Salford track, around and around, widening his circle the older he got, pushing the circumference outwards.

The summer he was seven the Pony Express riders came from America and set up their Wild West show along the Irwell River. His people. From his mother and father’s country. Americans. Brown wanted to know who exactly he was.

Cowboys stood in the fields, swirling their lassoes. There were broncos, buffaloes, mules, donkeys, trick ponies, a number of wild elk. He wandered around the huge painted backdrops of prairie fires, dust storms, tumbleweeds, tornadoes. But most amazing of all were the Indians who paraded around the tea shops of Salford in ornate headdresses. Brown trailed behind, looking for their autographs. Charging Thunder was a member of the Blackfoot tribe. His wife, Josephine, was a sharp-shooting cowgirl who wore elaborate leather coats and six-shooter holsters. Towards the end of summer their daughter, Bessie, came down with diphtheria, and when she got out of hospital they moved to Thomas Street in Gorton, right beside Brown’s aunt and uncle.

On Sunday afternoons, Brown cycled out to Gorton and tried to stare into the window of the house, hoping to see the shine of the headdress coins. But Charging Thunder had cut his hair short and his wife stood in an apron making Yorkshire pudding on the stove.

A COUPLE OF hours into the flight Brown hears a light snap. He puts on his goggles, leans over the fuselage, watches the small propeller on the wireless generator spin uselessly for a second, shear, then break away. No radio now. No contact with anyone. Soon there will be no heating in their electric suits. But not just this. One snap might lead to another. One piece of metal fatigue and the whole plane might come apart.

Brown can close his eyes and see the chessboard of the plane. He knows the gambits inside out. A thousand little moves that can be made. He likes the idea of himself as a center pawn, slow, methodical, moving forward. There is a form of attack in the calm he maintains.

An hour later there is the chatter of what sounds to Alcock like a Hotchkiss machine gun. He glances at Brown, but he has figured it out already. Brown points out towards the starboard engine where a chunk of exhaust pipe has begun to split and tear. It glows red, then white, then almost translucent. A flock of sparks flare from the engine as a piece of protective metal breaks away. It flies upwards a moment, almost faster than the plane itself, and shoots away into their slipstream.

It is not fatal, but they glance at the severed pipe together and, as if in response, the noise of the engine doubles. They will have to live with it for the rest of the trip now, but Alcock knows how the engine roar can make a pilot fall asleep, that the rhythm can lull a man into nodding off before he hits the waves. It is fierce work — he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there.

WHEN THEY ENTER the layers between the clouds, there is no panic. They tug on their fur helmets, reposition their goggles, wrap their scarves around their mouths. Here we go. The terror of a possible whiteout. The prospect of flying blind. Cloud above. Cloud below. They must negotiate the middle space.

They climb to escape, but the cloud remains. They drop. Still there. A dense wetness. Can’t just blow it away. I’ll huff and I’ll puff. Their helmets, faces, shoulders are soaked with the moisture.

Brown sits back and waits for the weather to clear so he can guide the plane properly. He looks for a glint of sun on the wingtip, or a breakout into blue, so he can find a horizon line, make a quick calculation, shoot the sun for longitude.

The aircraft swings from side to side, fishtailing in the turbulence. The sudden loss of height. It feels as if their seats are falling away from them. They rise once more. The ceaseless noise. The bump. The heart skip.

Light fading, they come upon another gap in the upper layer of clouds. The sun falling red. Down below, Brown gets a brief glimpse of sea. A split-second curve of beauty. He grabs the spirit level from the floor. Tilts it, straightens. A quick calculation. We’re at 140 knots approx, on general course, a bit too far south and east.

Twenty minutes later they come upon another huge bank of cloud. They rise to a gap between layers. We will not get above the clouds for sunset. We should wait for dark and stars. Can you get above at, say, 60 deg? Alcock nods, banks the plane, curls it slowly through space. Red fire spits through the fog.

They both know the games the mind can play if caught in cloud. A man can think a plane is level in the air, even if laid on its side. The machine can be tilted towards doom and they might fly blithely along, or they could crash into the water, no warning. They must keep a lookout for any sight of moon or star or horizon line.

So much for the bloody forecast, scribbles Brown, and he can tell from Alcock’s response, in the gentle pull-back of the engine, the slight caution in the movement, that he is worried, too. They pull their collars up into the wet slap of weather. Beads of moisture slide upwards along the open windscreen. The battery in the seat between them still sends faint pulses of warmth through the wires in their suits, but the cold is shrill around them.

Brown kneels on his seat, leans over the edge to see if he can find any gap, but there is none.

No range of vision. 6500 feet. Flying entirely by dead reckoning. We must get through the upper range of cloud. Heating fading fast, too!

THE BONES IN their ears ring. The racket is stuck inside their skulls. The small white room of their minds. The blast of noise from one wall to the other. There are times Brown feels that the engines are trying to burst out from behind his eyes, some metal thing grown feral, impossible now to lose.

THE RAIN COMES first. Then the snow. A prospect of sleet. The cockpit has been designed to keep most of the weather at bay, but hail could rip the cloth wings asunder.

They lift into softer snow. No light. No relief. They hunker down as the storm thuds around them. More snow. Harder now. They drop once more. The flakes sting their cheeks and melt along their throats. Soon the white begins to drift around their feet. If they could rise above and look down, they would see a small open room of two helmeted figures pelting through the air. Stranger than that, even. A moving room, in the darkness, in a screech of wind, two men, the top of their torsos growing whiter and whiter.

When Brown shines his flashlight at the control behind his head he sees that a layer of snow has started to obscure the face of the petrol-overflow gauge. Not good. They need the gauge to guard against trouble with the carburetor. He has done this before, turned in the cockpit, reached dangerously high above his head, but never in weather like this. Still, it has to be done. Nine thousand feet above the ocean. What form of madness is this?

He glances at Alcock as they ride a small bump of turbulence. Just keep her level. No use telling him now. Can’t swim, old boy. Would hardly bring a smile to his lips.

Brown adjusts his gloves, pulls his earflaps tight, hikes his scarf high around his mouth. He swivels in his seat. A throb in his bad leg when he moves. Right knee against the edge of the fuselage. Then the left knee, the bad one. He grabs hold of the wooden strut and pulls himself up into the blast of air. The chloroform of cold. The air pushing him back. The sting of snow on his cheeks. His soaking clothes stuck to his neck, his back, his shoulders. A chandelier of snot from his nose. The blood backing off his body, his fingers, his brain. Abandoning the five senses. Careful now. He extends himself into the thrashing wind, but can’t quite reach. His flight jacket is too bulky. He loosens the zip, feels the whoosh of wind at his chest, stretches backwards, knocks the snow off the glass gauge with the tip of his knife.

Good God. This cold. Almost stops the heart.

He hunkers quickly back in the seat. A thumbs-up from Alcock. Brown reaches immediately for the battery wires to warm himself up. He doesn’t even need to write the note to Alcock: Heating is entirely dead. On the floor, at his feet, lie the maps. He stamps his feet, careful not to sully the charts. The tips of his fingers sting. His teeth chatter so much he thinks they might break.

Over his left shoulder, in the small wooden cupboard, is the flask of tea and the emergency brandy.

IT TAKES AN age to get the lid off the flask, but then the liquor stuns the wall of his chest.

THEY REMAIN IN the hotel room, the table still positioned at the window in case the plane returns. Mother and daughter together, watching, waiting. There has been no news. No radio contact. No stirrings at the makeshift aerodrome. The field has been silent for twelve hours.

Lottie finds herself gripping the window frame. What might have happened? It was, she thinks, a bad idea for her mother to have written to the family in Cork. To have distracted them, maybe. She feels complicit now. Brown didn’t need another thing to worry about, no matter how small, why stop him on the stairs, why give him the letter? What was the point of it anyway? Perhaps they fell. They must have fallen. They have fallen. I gave him a letter. He was distracted. They fell. She can hear them falling. The whistle through the struts of the plane.

She puts her fingers against the cold of the windowpane. She doesn’t like herself at moments like this, her strange bearing, her shrill self-consciousness, her youth. She wishes she could walk outside of herself, out the window, into the air, and down. Ah, then, but that’s it, maybe? That, then, is the point of it all, surely? Yes. A salute to you Mr. Brown, Mr. Alcock, wherever you might be. She wishes she could take a photograph of the moment. Eureka. The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

DOWN BELOW, IN the lobby, the other reporters crowd around the telegraph machine. One by one they link back to their editors. Nothing to report. Fifteen hours gone. Either Alcock and Brown are approaching Ireland now, or they are dead and gone, casualties of desire. The reporters begin the first paragraphs, writing in both styles, the elegiac, the celebratory—Today, a great joining of worlds — Today, a great mourning of heroes—keen to be the first to finger the pulse, keener still to be the first to get a hold of the telegraph when any real news comes through.

IT IS CLOSE to sunrise — not far from Ireland — when they hit a cloud they can’t escape. No line of sight. No horizon. A fierce gray. Almost four thousand feet above the Atlantic. Darkness still, no moon, no sight of sea. They descend. The snow has relented but they enter a huge bank of white. Look at this one, Jackie. Look at her coming. Immense. Unavoidable. Above and below.

They are swallowed.

Alcock taps the glass of the airspeed meter. It doesn’t budge. He adjusts the throttle and the front end of the plane lifts. Still the airspeed meter remains the same. He throttles again. Too sudden, that. Darn it.

Good God, Jackie, put her in a spin. We’ll take our chances now.

The cloud grows tighter around them. They both know full well that if they don’t break it now they will spiral-dive. The plane will gain speed and shatter in an immensity of pieces. The only way out is to maintain speed in a spin. To have control and lose it, too.

Do it, Jackie.

The engines throw out a taunt of red flame and then the Vimy hangs motionless a second, grows heavy, keels over as if it has taken a punch. The slowest form of falling at first. A certain amount of sigh in it. Take this weary effort at flight, let me drop.

One wing stalled, the other still lifting.

Three thousand feet above the sea. In the cloud their balance is shot to hell. No sense of up. No down. Two thousand five hundred. Two thousand. The slap of rain and wind in their faces. The machine shudders. The compass needle jumps. The Vimy swings. Their bodies are thrown back against the seats. What they need is a line of sky or sea. A visual. But there is nothing but thick gray cloud. Brown jerks his head in every direction. No horizon, no center, no edge. Good God. Somewhere. Anywhere. Keep her steady, Jackie boy.

One thousand feet still falling nine hundred eight hundred seven fifty. The pressure of their shoulder blades against the seats. The whirl of blood to the head. The heaviness of the neck. Are we up? Are we down? Still spinning. They might not see the water before they smash. Undo the belts. This is it. This is it, Teddy. Their bodies are still pinned to their seats. Brown reaches downwards. He tucks the log journal inside his flight jacket. Alcock catches him out of the corner of his eye. Such glorious idiocy. A pilot’s last gesture. Save all the details. The sweet release of knowing how it happened.

The dial turns steadily still. Six hundred, five hundred, four. No whimpering. No moaning. The scream of cloud. The loss of body. Alcock maintains the spin in the endless white and gray.

A glimpse of new light. A different wall of color. It takes a split second for it to register. A slap of blue. A hundred feet. Strange blue, spinning blue, are we out? Blue here. Black there. We’re out, Jack, we’re out! Catch her. Catch her for godsake. Christ, we’re out. Are we out? Another line of black looms. The sea stands soldier-straight and dark. Light where the water should be. Sea where the light should crest. Ninety feet. Eighty-five. That’s the sun. Christ, it’s the sun, Teddy, the sun! There. Eighty now. The sun! Alcock gives the machine a mouthful of throttle. Over there. Open her. Open her. The engines catch. He fights the jolt. The sea turns. The plane levels. Fifty feet to spare, forty feet, thirty, no more. Alcock glances down at the Atlantic, the waves galloping white-edged beneath them. The sea sprays upwards onto the windscreen. Not a sound from either of the men until the plane is leveled again and they begin to rise once more.

They sit, silent, rigid with terror.

Oh go ’way man

you just hold your breath a minit

for there’s not a stunt that’s in it

with the Maple Leaf Rag

LATER THEY WILL joke about the spin, the fall, the rollout over the water—if your life doesn’t flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you’ve had no life at all? — but climbing upwards they say nothing. Brown leans out and slaps the flank of the fuselage. Old horse. Old Blackfoot.

THEY LEVEL OUT along the water, at five hundred feet, in clear air. A horizon line now. Brown reaches for his drift-bearing plate, corrects his compass. Almost eight o’clock Greenwich Mean Time. Brown scrambles around for his pencil. Ticklish? he scrawls, with a series of exclamation marks. He catches the sideways grin of Alcock. It is the first time in hours they have had a run without fog or layers of cloud. A dull, chewy gray out over the water. Brown scribbles down the last of the calculations. They are north, but not so far as to miss Ireland altogether. Brown reckons the course is 125 degrees true, but allowing for variation and wind he sets a compass course at 170. Ruddering south.

He can feel it rising up in him, the prospect of grass, a lonesome cottage on the horizon, perhaps a row of huddled cattle. They must be careful. There are high cliffs along the coast. He has studied the geography of Ireland: the hills, the round towers, the expanses of limestone, the disappearing lakes. Galway Bay. There had been songs about that during the war. The roads to Tipperary. The Irish were a sentimental lot. They died and drank in great numbers. A few of them for Empire. Drank and died. Died. Drank.

He is screwing back the lid on the flask of hot tea when he feels Alcock’s hand on his shoulder. He knows before turning around that it is there. As simple as that.

Rising up out of the sea, nonchalant as you like: wet rock, dark grass, stone tree light.

Two islands.

The plane crosses the land at a low clip.

Down below, a sheep with a magpie sitting on its back. The sheep raises its head and begins to run when the plane swoops, and for just a moment the magpie stays in place on the sheep’s back: it is something so odd Brown knows he will remember it forever.

The miracle of the actual.

In the distance, the mountains. The quiltwork of stone walls. Corkscrew roads. Stunted trees. An abandoned castle. A pig farm. A church. And there, the radio towers to the south. Two-hundred-foot masts in a rectangle of lockstep, some warehouses, a stone house sitting on the edge of the Atlantic. It is Clifden, then. Clifden. The Marconi Towers. A great net of radio masts. They glance at each other. No words. Bring her down. Bring her down.

They follow their line out over the village. The houses are gray. The roofs, slate. The streets unusually quiet.

Alcock whoops. Shuts the engines. Angles in, flattens the Vimy out.

Their helmets applaud. Their hair roars. Their fingernails whistle.

FROM OUT OF the grass a flock of long-billed snipe rises and soars.

IT LOOKS TO them like the perfect landing field, hard and level and green, yet what they don’t notice coming down are the nearby slabs of peat that lie like cake, the sharp cuts in the brown earth, the lines of wet string that run along the banks, the triangular ricks of earth off in the distance. They miss, too, the wooden turf carts that lie weathered and rainpocked at the side of the road. They miss the angles of the slanes, leaning up against the carts. They miss the rushes grown long on the abandoned roads.

They bring the Vimy towards the ground. A flawless trajectory. Almost as if they could lean out and scoop the soil in their hands. Here we are. The plane suspends itself a foot from the ground. Their hearts thump in their shirts. They wait for the moment of touch. Skim the top of the grass.

They hit and bounce. We are down, we are down, Jackie boy.

But they know straightaway they are slowing too suddenly. A wheel maybe? A burst tire? A snap of tail fin? No cursing, no shouting. No panic. A sinking feeling. A dip. And then they realize. It is bog, not grass. The living roots of sedge. They are skidding across a green bog. The soil holds the weight of the plane a moment and they skid along fifty feet, sixty feet, seventy, but then the wheels dig.

The earth holds, the Vimy sinks, the nose dips, the tail lifts.

It is as if they have been yanked backwards by surprise. The front of the Vimy slams into the soil. The back end flips. Brown smashes his face on the front of the cockpit. Alcock pushes back against the rudder control bar, bends it with pure force. A shot of pain through his chest and shoulders. Good Jesus, Jackie, what happened there? Have we crashed?

The silence, a noise in their heads. Louder now than ever. Suddenly doubled somehow. And then a relief floods up through them. The noise filters down into the rest of their bodies. Is that silence? Is that really silence? The racket of it. Slipping through their skullboxes. Good God, Teddy, that’s silence. That’s what it sounds like.

Brown touches his nose, his chin, his teeth, to see if he is intact. A few cuts, a few bruises. Nothing else. We’re alive. We’re perpendicular, but we’re alive.

The Vimy sticks out of the earth like some new-world dolmen. The nose is buried at least two feet in the bog. The tail in the air.

— Crikey, says Alcock.

He can smell petrol somewhere. He switches off the magnetos.

— Quick. Out. Down.

Brown reaches for the logbook, the flares, the linen bag of letters. Pulls himself up over the edge of the cockpit. Throws down his walking stick and it hits like an arrow in the bog below, stuck sideways in the soil. A burn in the leg as he lands. Hallelujah for the ground: it almost surprises him that it isn’t made of air. A living dolmen, yes.

In the pocket of his flight suit, Brown has a small pair of binoculars. The right lens has fogged, but through the good lens he sees figures high-stepping across the bog. Soldiers. Yes, soldiers. They seem for all the world like toy things coming, dark against the complicated Irish sky. As they get closer he can make out the shape of their hats and the slide of rifles across their chests and the bounce of bandolier belts. There’s a war going on, he knows. But there’s always some sort of war going on in Ireland, isn’t there? One never knows quite whom or what to trust. Don’t shoot, he thinks. After all this, don’t shoot us. Excuse me. Nein, nein. But these are his own. British, he is sure of it. One of them with a camera bobbing at his chest. Another still in his striped pajamas.

Behind them, in the distance, horses and carts. A single motorcar. A line of people coming from the town, snaking out along the road, small gray figures. And look at that. Look at that. A priest in white vestments. Coming closer now. Men, women, children. Running. In their Sunday best.

Ah, mass. So, they must have been at mass. That is why there was nobody on the streets.

The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.

Ireland.

A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.

Ireland.

1845–46, freeman

DAWN UNLOCKED THE MORNING IN INCREMENTS OF GRAY. The rope tightened hard against the bollard. The water slapped against Kingstown Pier. He stepped off the gangplank. Twenty-seven years old. In a black greatcoat and a wide gray scarf. His hair worn high and parted.

The cobbles were wet. Horses breathed steam into the September mist. Douglass carried his own leather trunk to the waiting carriage: he was not yet used to being waited upon.

HE WAS BROUGHT to the home of his Irish publisher, Webb. A three-story house on Great Brunswick Street, one of the better streets in Dublin. He relinquished his trunk. He watched a footman struggle with the weight of it. The servants stood in a line and greeted him at the door.

He slept through the morning and afternoon. A maid ran a warm bath in a deep iron tub. It was filled with a powder that gave off a fragrance of citrus. He fell asleep again, woke panicked, could not tell where he was. He climbed quickly from the water. The print of his wet feet on the cold floor. The towel touched, coarse, at the back of his neck. He dried the sculpt of his body. He was broad-shouldered, muscled, over six feet tall.

He could hear church bells ringing in the distance. A turf smell in the air. Dublin. How odd it was to be here: damp, earthy, cold.

A gong sounded from downstairs. Dinnertime. He stood at the hand basin, before the looking glass, and shaved closely, shook the creases from his jacket, mounted his cravat tight.

At the bottom of the stairs, at the end of a corridor, he stood for a moment disoriented, unsure which door to go through. He pushed one open. The kitchen was steam-filled. A maid was loading plates onto a tray. So very pale. The proximity of her sent a shiver along his arms.

— This way, sir, she muttered, squeezing past him in the doorway.

She led him along the corridor, bowed as she opened the door. A fire leaped orange in the ornate mantelpiece. A whirr of voices. A dozen people had gathered to meet him: Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians. Men in black frock coats. Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks. They applauded quietly when he walked into the room. His youth. His poise. They leaned in close as if to secure his immediate confidence. He told them of his long travel from Boston to Dublin, how he was forced into steerage on the steamer Cambria even though he had tried to book first class. Six white men had protested his presence on the saloon deck. Threats of blood were urged against him. Down with the nigger. They had come within a whisker of blows. The captain stepped in, threatened to throw the white men overboard. Douglass had been allowed to walk the deck, even delivered a speech to the passengers. Still, at night, he had to sleep in the underbelly of the boat.

The listeners nodded gravely, shook his hand a second time, said he was a fine example, a good Christian. He was guided into the dining room. The table was laid with fine cutlery and glassware. A vicar stood to give grace. The meal was exquisite — lamb with mint sauce — but he could hardly eat. He sipped from the water glass, found himself faint.

He was called upon to give a speech: his days as a slave, how he slept on a dirt floor in a hovel, crawled into a meal bag to stave off the cold, put his feet in the ashes for warmth. How he had lived with his grandmother for a while and had gone, then, to a plantation. Was taught, against the law, to read, write, and spell. How he read the New Testament to his fellow slaves. Worked in a shipyard with Irishmen as companions. Ran away three times. Failed twice. Escaped Maryland at twenty years of age. Became a man of letters. He was here now to convince the people of Britain and Ireland to help crush slavery through peaceful moral persuasion.

He was well-practiced — he had spent more than three years giving speeches in America — but these were respectable men of God and empire, in a new land altogether. The obligation of distance. The necessity to say precisely what he meant. To clarify without condescending.

The nerves unbuttoned the length of his spine. His hands grew clammy. His heart hammered. He did not want to pander. Nor did he want to obscure. He was, he knew, not the first black man to land in Ireland to lecture. Remond had been here before him. Equiano, too. The Irish abolitionists were known for their fervor. They came from the land of O’Connell, after all. The Great Liberator. There was, he’d been told, a hunger for justice. They would open themselves to him.

The guests watched as if a carriage was galloping along, but might suddenly overturn in front of their eyes. A bead of sweat rolled down between his shoulder blades. He found himself faltering. He rounded his fist, coughed into it, dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. He had made himself free, he said, but remained property. Merchandise. Chattel. A commodity in law. At any moment he could be returned to his master. The word itself was vicious. He wanted to smash it, ruin it. Massah. He could be whipped, his wife defiled, his children bartered. There were still churches in America that supported the system of ownership: an indelible stain on the Christian mind. Even in Massachusetts he was still chased down the street, beaten, spat upon.

He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more.

— Bravo, called an elderly man.

A tentative round of applause rang out. A young cleric rushed forward to shake Douglass’s hand.

— Hear, hear.

The approval sallied around the room. The maid in the black dress lowered her eyes to the ground. After tea and biscuits in the living room, Douglass shook hands with the men, politely excused himself. The women were gathered in the library. He knocked at the door, entered cautiously, bent slightly at the waist, bid them good night. He heard them murmuring as he moved away.

Webb guided him up the curving staircase by the light of a glass-fluted candle. Their shadows spread haphazard against the wainscoting. A washbasin. A writing table. A chamber pot. A bed with a brass frame. He opened his trunk and took out an engraving of his wife and children, set it alongside the bed.

— It’s an honor to have you in my house, said Webb from the door.

Douglass leaned across to blow out the candle. He could hardly sleep. The sea was still moving in him.

IN THE MORNING Webb drove him around in a horse and carriage. He wanted to show him the city. Douglass sat alongside him, up front, on the wooden boards, exposed to the weather.

Webb was short, thin, narrow, proud. He used the whip judiciously.

At first, the streets were clean and leisurely. They passed a tall gray church. A row of small neat shops. The canals ran straight and true. The doorways were brightly painted. They doubled back and went into the city, past the university, the Houses of Parliament, along the quays, towards the Customs House. Farther along, the city began to change. The streets narrowed. The potholes deepened. Soon the filth was staggering. Douglass had never seen anything quite like it, even in Boston. Piles of human waste slushed down the gutter. It sloshed its way into fetid puddles. Men lay collapsed by the railings of rooming houses. Women walked in rags, less than rags: as rags. Children ran barefoot. Specimens of ancient ruin glared out of windowsills. Windows were dusty and broken. Rats darted in the alleyways. The carcass of a donkey was left bloated in the courtyard of a tenement. Dogs went forth, leanshouldered. There was a reek of porter about the streets. A young beggar sang a melody in a tired voice: a police boot sank savagely into her rib cage and moved her along. She fell at the next railing, lay against it, laughing.

The Irish had little or no order about themselves, he thought. The carriage went corner unto corner, turning, always turning, gray unto gray. It began to drizzle. The streets were muddy and even more deeply potholed. The sound of a fiddle was rent through with a scream.

Douglass was unnerved by what was unfolding around him, but he stared out eagerly, absorbed it all. Webb cracked the whip down on the horse’s back. They clopped back up Sackville Street, past Nelson’s Pillar, towards the bridge, across the river once more.

The Liffey was dimpled with rain. A low barge made its way down from the brewery. The wind ran raw and unstoppable along the quays. Vendors of fish moved over the cobbles, pushing barrows of stinking shells.

A tribe of boys in rags jumped onto the side of the carriage. Seven or eight of them. They used the moving wheels to propel themselves on, then hung perilously by the tips of their fingers. Some of them tried to open the carriage door. Laughter and puddle-fall. One monkeyed across and landed softly on the wooden board, nestled his head against Douglass’s shoulder. A series of raw red welts ran along the boy’s neck and face. Webb had implored him not to give away coins, but Douglass slid the boy a ha’penny. The child’s eyes grew slick with tears. He kept his head on Douglass’s shoulder as if welded there. The other boys leaned in from the side of the carriage, shouting, pushing, cajoling.

— Mind your pockets! said Webb. No more coins. Don’t give them any more.

— What are they saying? said Douglass.

The din was extraordinary: it sounded as if they were chanting in rhyme.

— No idea, said Webb.

Webb pulled the carriage up near a laneway, one wheel on the footpath, shouted at a policeman to scatter the boys. The whistle was lost in the air. It took three of the constabulary to dislodge them from the carriage. The gang ran through the laneway. Their shouts ricocheted.

— Thanks, mister! Thanks!

Douglass took a handkerchief to his shoulder. The child had left a long stream of snot along the arm of his coat.

HE HAD NOT imagined Dublin this way at all. He had envisioned rotundas, colonnades, quiet chapels on the street corners. Porticoes, pilasters, domes.

They passed through a narrow arch into a chaos of men and women. They were gathered for a meeting in the shadows of a theater house. A redheaded man stood on top of a silver keg, barking about Repeal. The crowd swelled. Laughter and applause. Someone responded with a shout about Rome. The words volleyed back and forth. Douglass couldn’t understand the accents, or was it the language? Were they speaking in Irish? He wanted to descend the carriage and walk amongst them, but Webb whispered that there was trouble brewing.

They continued down a havoc of backstreets. A woman carried a tray of kale on a string over her neck, trying in vain to hawk the exhausted green leaves.

— Mr. Webb, sir, Mr. Webb, y’r honor!

Webb broke his own rule, handed her a small copper coin. She ducked away into her headscarf. She looked as if she were praying over the coin. A few coils of hair escaped, damp and coarse.

Within seconds they were surrounded. Webb had to force the carriage through the crowd of stretched hands. The poor were so thin and white, they were almost lunar.

A LADY ALONG George’s Street gripped her umbrella as the carriage passed by. A newspaperman who happened to glimpse him wrote afterwards that the visiting Negro looked rather dandy. An audacious whore on the corner of Thomas Street shouted that she would laugh at his best and whistle for more. He caught sight of himself in a shop window and froze the picture in his mind, stunned at the opportunity for public vanity.

THE STORM MADE the carriage list sideways. Douglass looked for a crack of light in the clouds. None came. Rain fell more steadily now. Gray and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.

Webb entreated him to sit below where he could dry off. Douglass descended. The seats inside were made of soft leather. The handles were brushed bronze. He felt foolish, cowardly, warm. He really should sit outside, bear the brunt of the weather, like Webb. He stamped his feet, opened the neck of his coat. His body steamed. A puddle grew at his feet.

Up near the cathedral, there was a break in the rain. The city opened with afternoon sunlight. He climbed out and stood on the pavement. Children were jumping rope, calling rhymes to one another. One-Eyed Patrick Walker, met a girl, begat a daughter, the girl she turned to dirty water, one eye ’tain’t your fault, sir. They crowded around him, touched his clothes, removed his hat, pushed their fingers through his hair. Magpie, magpie, sitting on the sty, who oh who has the dirty greedy eye? They laughed at the feel of his hair: tall, bushy, wiry, uneven. A young boy shoved a twig in the mass of curls, ran off, whooping. A girl tugged on the end of his coat.

— Mister! Hey, mister! Are you from Africa?

He hesitated a moment. He had never been asked the question before. His smile tightened.

— America, he said.

— Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he won’t pick me and he won’t pick you!

The youngest amongst them was no more than three years old. His chest was bony. Leaves were tangled in his filthy hair. A fresh wound underneath his eye.

— Come on and jump with us, mister!

The rope twisted and twirled in the air, slapped in a puddle, rose again, kicked up water drops as it twirled.

— Give us sixpence, will ya?

He was wary of the mud that already dotted his overcoat. He glanced down at his shoes: they would have to be cleaned.

— Please, mister!

— Ah, come on.

A boy spat on the ground and ran off. The girl coiled the rope, gathered the other children together, stood them at attention, instructed them to wave good-bye. A few stray youngsters followed the carriage until they fell away, hungry, tired, sopping wet.

The streets grew quieter the closer they got to Webb’s house. A man in a peaked blue hat walked along, firing up the streetlamps until they glowed, a small row of halos. The homes looked warm and soft.

The cold had insinuated itself into him. The damp, too. He knocked his boot against the seat to warm his toes. Douglass longed to be inside.

Webb sounded the horn on the front of the carriage. Within seconds the butler had opened the door and was running down the steps with an umbrella. The butler splashed through a puddle and went towards Webb, but Webb said: No, no, our guest first, our guest, please. There was an odd smell in the air. Douglass still couldn’t figure out what it was. Sweet, earthy.

He walked quickly up the steps with the butler in attendance. He was brought to the fireplace in the living room. He had seen the fire the night before, but had not noticed what it was: clods of burning soil.

HE CRAWLED OUT of bed to write Anna a note. He needed to be judicious. She could not read nor write, so it would be spoken aloud to her by their friend Harriet. He did not want Anna embarrassed in any way. My dearest. I am in polite and capable hands. My hosts are witty, convivial, open. The air is damp, yet there is something about it that seems to clarify my mind.

A loosening was taking place in his thoughts. Just the fact that he was not pursued, did not have to look over his shoulder, could not be whisked away.

On occasion I have to pause, astounded that I am not fugitive anymore. My mind unshackled. They cannot place me, or even imagine me, upon the auction block. I do not fear the clink of a chain, or crack of whip, or turn of door handle.

Douglass laid aside his pen for a moment, opened the curtains to the still dark. No sounds at all. On the street, a lone man in rags hurried along, hunched into the wind. He thought then that he had found the word for Dublin: a huddled city. He, too, had spent so many years, huddled into himself.

He pondered the possibility of his own living room: Harriet reading the letter aloud, Anna in cotton dress and red head wrap, her hands folded in her lap, his children at the edge of her chair, poised, eager, confused. I send you my unceasing love, Frederick.

He tightened the curtains, got back into bed, stretched his feet out over the end of the mattress. His toes extended beyond the bed. It was something humorous, he thought, to include in his next letter.

ON A TABLE, in neat piles, was the Irish edition of his book. Brand-new. Webb stood behind him, shadowed, hands folded behind his back. He watched Douglass intently as he flicked through and inhaled the scent of the book. Douglass paused at the engraving at the front, ran his finger over his likeness. Webb, he thought, had endeavored to make him look straight-nosed, aquiline, clear-jawed. They wanted to remove the Negro from him. But perhaps it was not Webb’s fault. An artist’s error maybe. Some fault of the imagination.

He closed the book. Nodded. Turned to Webb, smiled. He ran his fingers once more along the spine. He did not say a word. So much was expected of him. Every turn. Every gesture.

He paused, took a fountain pen from his pocket, let it hover a moment and signed the first book. For Richard Webb, In friendship and respect, Frederick Douglass.

A measure of humility lay in one’s signature: it was important not to flourish the pen.

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the large part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.

AT THE BOTTOM of his traveling trunk he kept two iron barbells. Made for him by a blacksmith in New Hampshire: an abolitionist, a friend, a white man. Each of the barbells weighed twelve and a half pounds. The blacksmith told him that he had melted them from slave chains that had once been used in the auction houses where men, women, and children were sold. The blacksmith had gone around and bought all the chains, melted them, made artifacts from them. In order, he said, not to forget.

Douglass kept the barbells a secret. Only Anna knew. She had lowered her eyes to the floor when she had first seen them, but she soon grew used to them: first thing every morning, last thing at night. There was a part of him that still missed the days of carpentry and caulking: fatigue, desire, hunger.

He turned the key in the bedroom door, pulled the curtains across, locked out the light of the Dublin gas lamps. He lit a candle, stood in his shirtsleeves.

He lifted the barbells one after another — first from the floor and then high in the air — until sweat dripped down onto the wood. He positioned himself to watch himself in the oval looking glass. He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted — it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers, dragging his muscle to work, carving his mind open with idea.

He was in the fever of work. He wanted them to know what it might mean to be branded: for another man’s initials to be burned into your skin; to be yoked about the neck; to wear an iron bit at the mouth; to cross the water in a fever ship; to wake in another man’s field; to hear the jangle of the marketplace; to feel the lash of the cowhide; to have your ears cropped; to accept, to bend, to disappear.

It was his work to capture that through the nib of his pen. His billowy white shirt was covered in ink stains. At times, searching for words, he would hold the blotting paper to his forehead. Later, dressing himself for dinner — cravat, smoking jacket, cufflinks, polished shoes — he would glance in the mirror and find blue spots of ink smudged on his face. He was told by Webb that the Irish words for a black man were fear gorm, a blue man. He scrubbed his face, his hands, his fingernails. He looked at himself again in the mirror, lashed out, stopped short, his knuckles trembling at the glass.

He descended the curved staircase, stopped, bent down, shone the front of his shoes once more, using the wetted edge of a handkerchief.

The butler greeted him in the hallway. He could not for the life of him remember the man’s name, Charles or Clyde or James. A terrible thing, to forget a man’s name. He nodded to the butler, moved through the hallway, into the shadows.

Webb had hired a pianist to accompany the evenings. Douglass could hear the notes colliding in the air as he approached. He was fond of the standard fare — Beethoven, Mozart, Bach — but he had heard there was someone new, a Frenchman called Édouard Batiste who was said to be coming to Dublin to play. He would have to inquire: his life these days was much about having to inquire without exhibiting a lack of knowledge. He could not seem ignorant, yet he did not want to be strident either. A fine line. He was not sure where he could show weakness.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart’s deep need for instruction.

If he showed a chink, they might shine a light through, stun him, maybe even blind him. He could not allow for a single mistake. It was not an excuse for arrogance. It was a matter of defense. Webb, of course, could not be expected to understand. How could he? He was an Irish Quaker. Good-hearted, yes. But he saw all his efforts as pure benevolence. It was not Webb’s freedom that was at stake. It was Webb’s ability to be free. Webb himself had his own ideas about who was slave, who was not, and what it was that lay between them.

Small matter, thought Douglass. He would not let it poison him. The Irish had been so friendly. He was a guest. He had to remember that.

The butler pushed the door open for him. Douglass entered the drawing room with his arms behind his back, his hands clasped. He felt it best to enter a room this way. Equal amounts of deference and aloofness in it. Not haughty. Never haughty. Just tall, full, solid.

It struck him: the sheer surprise of being here. A carpenter, a caulker of ships, a man of the fields. To have come such a distance. To have left behind his wife, his beloved children. To hear the sound of his shoes striking the floor. The only moving shoes in a roomful of men. His voice had now become his hands: he understood what it meant to be made flesh. An energy moved through him. He cleared his throat, but held back a moment. These were, he remembered, the members of the Royal Dublin Society. Creatures of high collars and groomed moustaches. They had an air of antiquity about them. He gazed out at them. The sort of men who had hung their swords above the fireplaces of their minds. He would wait to unleash his fury.

He stepped forward to shake their hands. Marked their names. Reverend Archibald. Brother Harrington. He would write them in his diary later tonight. These were the small matters of etiquette that he had to remember. The pronunciation. The spelling.

— It’s a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen.

— An honor, Mr. Douglass. We have read your book. A remarkable achievement.

— Thank you.

— There is much to learn from it. Much to admire in its style, even more in its content.

— You’re very kind.

— And is Dublin to your liking?

— It is livelier than Boston, yes.

There was laughter all around and he was grateful for it, the manner in which it allowed him to ease his body out of his stiffness. Webb guided him towards a deep chair in the center of the room. He glanced across to see Lily, the maid, pouring him a cup of tea. He liked his tea with an extraordinary amount of sugar. His weakness: a sweet tooth. Lily’s face, half carved in light as she poured, sharp, pretty, alabaster. She glided across to him. Her cool white wrists. The china cup was very thin. It was said that this made the tea taste better. He could feel the cup trembling in his hands. The thinner the china, the louder the rattle.

He hoped his manner of holding the teacup did not appear crude. He shifted slightly in his seat. He could feel his hands grow clammy again.

Webb introduced him. Even in America, Douglass had seldom listened to the introductions that others made. They embarrassed him. Sometimes they made of him a caricature: the colored conquistador, the gentleman slave, the American Orpheus. In the course of the introductions they would remark, invariably, that his father was a white man. As if it could not be otherwise. How he was taken from his mother, his siblings, whisked away, brought for a spell under the guidance of white benevolence. Douglass found the descriptions monotonous. The words dissolved in his head. He did not listen. He scanned the faces of the men. He could sense their uncertainty, a little hint of confusion around their eyes as he watched them, watching him. A slave. In a Dublin drawing room. So remarkably well-kept.

He looked up to see that Webb had finished. A silence. The teacup shook in his hands. He allowed the quiet to edge up against the uncomfortable. He had found that being nervous made him tighter with his words, stronger, more careful.

Douglass brought the saucer up to the bottom of the cup.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace. Now, in the long curve of this journey, I find myself spinning a new strand and I appeal to you, gentlemen, to strive against the despotism, bigotry and tyranny of those who might refuse me entry to this very room.

AT THE END of his second week he wrote to Anna that he hadn’t been called a nigger on Irish soil, not once, not yet anyway. He was hailed most everywhere he went. He wasn’t yet sure what to make of it, it baffled him. There was something crystallizing inside him. He felt, for the first time ever maybe, that he could properly inhabit his skin. There was a chance that he was just a curio to them, but something in him felt aligned to those he met, and in all his twenty-seven years he hadn’t seen anything like it. He wished she could be there to witness it.

It was a cold gray country under a hat of rain, but he could take the middle of the footpath, or board a stagecoach, or hail a hansom without apology. There was poverty everywhere, yes, but still he would take the poverty of a free man. No whips. No chains. No branding marks.

He was of course traveling in high company, but even on the roughest streets he had not heard any vitriol. He attracted a ferocious stare or two, but perhaps it was also because of the rather high cut at the back of his coat: Webb had already told him that he could perhaps afford a tad more modesty.

THE BELL ON the door sounded out long and lazy. The tailor looked up but the shop continued its business. That’s what surprised Douglass the most: the absence of alarm. No shock. No scurry. He walked along the rack of coats. The tailor finally came from behind the counter and shook his hand: You’re welcome to my establishment, sir.

— Thank you.

— You’re the talk of the town, sir.

— I’m interested in a new jacket.

— Certainly.

— And a longer cut of coat, said Webb.

— I’m quite capable of dressing myself, said Douglass.

They glared at each other across the gulf of the room.

— Gentlemen, said the tailor. Come this way.

Webb stepped across but Douglass put his hand on his chest. The air froze. Webb lowered his eyes and gave the faint hint of a smile. He took out a wallet of morocco leather and rubbed the length of it, inserted it back in his jacket pocket.

— As you wish.

Douglass stepped, large and loud-footed, with the tailor towards a rear room. Scissors, needles, cutouts. Dusty ells and bolts of cloth spooled out across the tables. What fields did the cloth come from? What fingers had spun it out?

The tailor whisked a looking glass across the room. The mirror was on a stand, mounted with wheels.

He had never been measured by a white man before. The tailor stood behind him. Douglass flinched a moment when the tape was put around his neck.

— Sorry, sir, is the tape cold?

He closed his eyes. Allowed the measurements. His rib cage, his chest, his waist. Raised his arms in the air to see how deep the armpit of the waistcoat could go. Breathed in, breathed out. Allowed the tattered yellow tape along his inseam. The tailor scribbled the measurements down. His handwriting was fine and exact.

When he was finished, the tailor wrapped his fingers around Douglass’s shoulders, gripped him hard.

— You’re a fine broad man, sir, I’ll venture that.

— To tell the truth …

He glanced at Webb in the front of the shop. The Quaker was standing at the window, looking out, an overseer. The Liffey seemed to want to carry him away on its continuous sleeve of gray.

— I’d be rather grateful, said Douglass.

— Yes, sir?

He looked out at Webb again.

— If you’d also fit me for a camel’s-hair vest.

— A vest, sir?

— Yes, a waistcoat I believe you call it.

— Indeed, sir.

The tailor turned him around once more, busied himself with a measurement of Douglass’s rib cage, brought the ends of the tape together at his navel.

— You can put it on Mr. Webb’s bill.

— Yes, sir.

— He’s always been fond of a surprise.

THE CROWDS CAME, eager, hatted, earnest. A balloon of perfume about them. They lined the front of the Methodist churches, the Quaker meeting halls, the front drawing rooms of mansions. He stretched up on his toes, put his thumbs in the pockets of his new waistcoat.

In the afternoons he took tea with the Dublin Anti-Slavery Society, the Hibernian Association, the Whigs, the Friends of Abolition. They were well-informed, clever, audacious in speech, generous with their donations. They thought him so very young, handsome, debonair. He could hear the ruffle of dresses in the queue waiting to meet him. Webb said that he had never seen so many young ladies attend the events. Even one or two Catholics from good families. In the gardens of well-appointed houses the women spread their dresses on wooden benches and posed for portraits with him.

Douglass was careful to make sure that he mentioned his wife, his children at home in Lynn. It was odd, but at times the talk of Anna drew the women closer. They hovered. There were giggles and parasols and handkerchiefs. They wanted to know what fashions the free Negro women in America wore. He said that he had no clue, that one dress looked much like the other to him. They clapped their hands together in a delight he could not understand.

He was invited to dinner with the Lord Mayor. The chandeliers in the Mansion House sparkled. The ceilings were tall. The paintings majestic. The rooms led into one another like fabulous sentences.

He met with Father Mathew, joined forces with the temperance movement. The streets of Dublin were full of the demons of alcohol. He took the Pledge. It might, he thought, enamor him of a whole new audience. Besides, he never drank. He did not want to lose control. Too much of the master in it: its desire to sedate. He walked with the Pledge badge worn prominently on the lapel of his new coat. He felt himself to be taller somehow. He drew the gray Dublin air into his lungs. He was seldom left alone. There were always one or two who volunteered to accompany him. He found rhythm in the dips and swerves and repetitions of the Irish accent. He had a penchant for mimicry. Grand day, y’r honor. For the love of God, wouldya ever gi’us sixpence, sir? It delighted his hosts to hear his impersonations. There was a deeper intent there, too: he knew that something so simple could hook a crowd. I am pleased to be in aul’ Ireland.

He was five weeks in Dublin. His face appeared on printed bills around the city. Newspaper reporters met him for high tea in the Gresham Hotel. He was leonine, they wrote, feral, an elegant panther. One paper dubbed him the Dark Dandy. He laughed and tore the paper up — did they expect him to dress in rags of American cotton? He was taken to the Four Courts, brought to the finest dining rooms, asked to sit under chandeliers where he could be properly seen. When he was guided into a room to speak, the applause often extended a full minute. He removed his hat and bowed.

Afterwards they lined up to buy his book. It amazed him to raise his gaze from his fountain pen and see the row of dresses awaiting him.

On certain days he grew tired, thought of himself as an elaborate poodle on a leash. He removed himself to his room, took out the barbells, worked himself into a frenzy.

One evening he found the bill for the waistcoat neatly folded on his bedside table. He had to laugh. They would eventually bill him for every thought he ever had. He wore the camel’s-hair to dinner that evening, casually slipping his thumbs into the pockets as he waited for dessert.

EVERY DAY HE found another word: he wrote them in a small notebook he carried in his inside pocket. Rapacity. Enmity. Phoenician. Words he recognized from The Columbian Orator. Assiduous. Declarative. Tendentious.

When he had first found language, in his boyhood days, it had felt to him like carving open a tree. Now he had to be more careful. He did not want to slip up. He was, after all, being watched by Webb and the others: root, blossom, stem. It was essential to hold his nerve. To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

IN RATHFARNHAM HE thundered forth. He talked of woman-whippers, man-stealers, cradle-plunderers. Of fleshmongers and swine-drovers. Of sober drunkards, thievers of men. Of limitless indifference, fanatic hatred, thirsty evil. He was in Ireland, he said, to advance universal emancipation, to exact the standard of public morality, to hasten the day of freedom for his three million enslaved brethren. Three million, he said. He held his hands up, as if he cupped every single one of them there, in his palms. We have been despised and maligned long enough. Treated worse than the lowest of low animals. Shackled, burned, branded. Enough of this murderous traffic in blood and bone. Hear the doleful wail of the slave markets. Listen to the clanking chains. Hear them, he said. Come close. Listen. Three million voices!

After his speech, the Gentleman Usher from Dublin Castle took a hold of his arm and breathed whiskey and amazement into his ear. He had never heard such a speech, such fine words put together. For any man to speak in such a way! It was profound, he said, insightful, weighty beyond anything he had experienced before.

— You’re a credit to your race, sir. An absolute credit.

— Is that so?

— And you did not go to school, sir?

— No. I did not.

— And you took no formal lessons?

— No.

— And if you’ll forgive me …

— Yes?

— How do you possibly explain such eloquence?

A hard knot cramped Douglass’s chest.

— Such eloquence?

— Yes? How is it …

— You’ll excuse me?

— Sir?

— I have to run away.

Douglass crossed the room, his shoes clicking loudly on the wooden floor, a smile breaking out as he went.

IN THE AFTERNOONS he caught sight of Lily when she cleaned the upstairs of the house. Just seventeen years old. Her sandy-colored hair. Her eyes ledged with freckles.

He closed his door, sat to write. He could still see her shape. On the stairs he allowed her to pass. A whiff of tobacco came from her. The world was made ordinary again. He walked quickly down to the drawing room where he sat to read the literary journals to which Webb subscribed, the reams of books, the journals. He could lose himself in them.

Lily’s footsteps sounded above him. He was glad when they ceased. He went back upstairs to write. His room had been made spotless and the barbells remained undisturbed.

IN THE BANK on College Green they sent instructions back to Boston to lodge 225 pounds sterling in the accounts of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It amounted to 1,850 dollars. Douglass and Webb emerged in their crisp woolen coats and white linen shirts. There were gulls out over Dublin: as numerous as beggars. In the back of the chanting crowd he saw the young boy with the raw red welts along his neck and face. Hey, Mr. Douglass! the boy screamed, Mr. Douglass, sir!

He was sure, as the carriage turned the corner by the university, that the boy volleyed out his first name.

HE HEARD IN the newspapers that O’Connell was due to speak to a giant crowd along the Dublin docks. The tribune of the people. Ireland’s truest son. He had spent his life agitating for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary rule, and had written on abolition, too. Brilliant essays, fervent, impassioned. O’Connell had adventured his life for proper freedom, was known for his speeches, his letters, his rule of law.

Douglass canceled a tea in Sandymount to get there on time. He arrived along the teeming docks. He could not believe the size of the crowd: as if the whole sponge of Dublin had been squeezed down into a sink. Such a riot of human cutlery. The police herded the crowds along. He lost Webb and pushed his way through, made his way to the stage as O’Connell emerged. The Great Liberator looked portly, tired, out of sorts: he had apparently been so since his release from jail. Still, a giant roar went up. Men and women of Ireland! The din was extraordinary. O’Connell held a speaking trumpet, and when he spoke into it the words shot up out of him, huge, fearsome, brimming. It astounded Douglass, the logic, the rhetoric, the humor.

O’Connell held the crowd in the well of his outstretched arms. He swayed forth. Slowed down. Pivoted on his heels. Paced the stage. Adjusted his wig. Allowed silences. The speech was relayed by others who stood on tall ladders and passed the word along the dockside.

— Repeal is Erin’s right and God’s decree!

— Withersoever we turn, England has reduced our nation to bondage!

— The employment of force is not our object!

— Associate, agitate, stand by me!

The hats went up in the reeking air. The cheers stepping in rhythm along the crowd. Douglass stood, transfixed.

Afterwards, a huge mob surrounded the Irishman. Douglass forced his way through, excused himself past dozens of pairs of shoulders. O’Connell looked up, knew immediately who he was. They shook hands.

— An honor, said O’Connell.

Douglass was taken aback.

— Mine alone, he said.

O’Connell’s hand was pulled away. There was so much Douglass wanted to speak of: repeal, pacifism, the position of the Irish clergy in America, the philosophy of agitation. He reached forward to grasp the Irishman’s hand again, but there were already too many bodies between them. He felt himself pushed back, jostled. A man shouted in his ear about temperance. Another wanted his signature for a petition. A woman curtsied in front of him: a smell of filth rolled off her. He turned away. His name rang out at all angles. He felt as if he were spinning in eddies. O’Connell was being guided down off the stage.

When Douglass turned again, Webb had his arm, said they had an appointment in Abbey Street.

— Just a moment.

— I’m afraid we must go, Frederick.

— But I must talk with him—

— There’ll be more chances, I assure you.

— But—

Douglass caught eyes with O’Connell. They nodded to each other. He watched the Irishman move away. Slumping within his bright green coat. Wiping his handkerchief on his brow. His wig shifting slightly on his head. A slight sadness there. But to have that command, thought Douglass. That charm. That energy. To be able to possess the stage in such an extraordinary way. To stir justice without violence. The way the words seem to enter the very marrow of the people who still hung around the dockside, bits of refuse floating on the water.

TWO DAYS LATER, in Conciliation Hall, O’Connell brought him on stage and he thrust Douglass’s hand in the air: Here, he said, the black O’Connell! Douglass watched the hats go up into the rafters.

— Irishmen and Irishwomen …

He looked out over the tip heap. All muck and adulation. Thank you, he said, for the honor of allowing me to speak with you. He held out his hands and calmed the crowd and spoke to them of slavery and commerce and hypocrisy and the necessity of abolition.

An energy to him. A fire. He heard the ripple of his words move through the crowd.

— If you cast one glance upon a single man, he said, you shall cast a glance upon all humanity. A wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all. No power can imprison what is good and right. Abolition shall become the natural thought of the world!

He paced the stage. Tightened his jacket. It was a different crowd than any he had seen before. A low rumbling amongst them. He allowed a silence. Then punched up his sentences. Stretched his body towards them. Sought their eyes. Still, he could feel a distance. It troubled him. A bead of moisture lay at the base of his throat.

A shout came up from the rear of the hall. What about England? Would he not denounce England? Wasn’t England the slave master anyway? Was there not wage slavery? Were there not the chains of financial oppression? Was there not an underground railroad that every Irishman would gladly board to get away from the tyranny of England?

A policeman moved into the back of the crowd, the pointed helmet disappearing. The heckler was soon quieted.

Douglass allowed a long silence: I believe in Erin’s cause, he said. A wave of nodding heads crested below him. He had to be judicious, he knew. There were newspaper reporters scribbling down every word. It would lead back to Britain and America. He paused. He lifted his hand. Turned it slightly in the air.

— What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, he said, yet having its people in shackles? It is etched into the book of fate that freedom shall be universally delivered. The cause of humanity is one the world over.

A relief poured through him when the crowd applauded. O’Connell walked on stage and raised his hand in the air once more. The black O’Connell! he said again. Douglass took a bow and glanced down to see Webb near the front row, chewing the stem of his eyeglasses.

AT DINNER ON Dawson Street he sat alongside the Lord Mayor, but leaned his chair back so he could talk with O’Connell.

Later that evening they strolled together in the garden of the Mansion House, moving solemnly among the pruned winter rosebushes. O’Connell hunched over slightly, with his hands clasped behind his back. He wished, he said, that he could be of more direct help to Douglass and his people. It burdened him terribly to hear that there were many Irishmen among the slave owners in the South. Cowards. Traitors. A discredit to their very heritage. He would not let their shadow fall upon him. They brought a poison with them, a shame on their nation. Their churches should be shunned. They had taken an oath of false supremacy.

He took Douglass by the shoulders. He had killed a man once, O’Connell said. In a duel in Kildare. Over a point of Catholic pride. Shot him in the stomach. Left a widow behind, a child. It haunted him still. He would not kill again, but he would still die for his true belief: a man could only be free if he lived in the cause of liberty.

They talked gravely about the situation in America, about Garrison, Chapman, the presidency of Polk, the prospect of secession.

There was something encyclopedic about O’Connell, yet Douglass could sense in the great man a hidden exhaustion. As if the very questions he carried were too heavy to hold and they had eased their way into his flesh, lodged themselves in his body, bound him down.

He felt O’Connell’s arm upon his and he could hear the labored breathing in the silence between steps. A thin man stalked the far side of the garden, tapping at a timepiece that hung down from his waistcoat.

O’Connell sent the man away, but Douglass thought he recognized, for the first time ever, the small defeat of fame.

It is said that history is on the side of reason, but this outcome is by no means guaranteed. Obviously, the suffering of the past will never fully be redeemed by a future of universal happiness, if indeed such a thing is obtainable. The evil of slavery is a constant ineradicable reality, but slavery itself shall be banished! The truth cannot be deferred. The moment of truth is now!

THE CARRIAGE WAS ready: it was October, time to bring his lecture tour south. His clothes were brushed. His writing papers were wrapped in oilskin. Webb had the servants feed and water the horses. Douglass bent down to pick up the traveling trunk himself. New books, new clothes, his barbells.

— What in the world have you got in here? asked Webb.

— Books.

— Let me, said Webb.

Douglass grabbed for the trunk himself.

— Looks rather heavy, Old Boy.

He tried to fake ease. He could feel a hard pull of muscle along his back. He saw Webb smirk ever so slightly. Webb called for the driver, John Creely. He was a small man, sparely built, with the emaciated face of a serious drinker. Together the three men lifted the trunk high onto the ledge at the back of the carriage, tied it with rope.

Douglass wished he had not brought his barbells. A rash decision. He feared that Webb would deem him vain.

In their familiarity, they had developed a dislike for each other. There was a bombast to Webb, thought Douglass. He was intolerant, easy to offend, devout to righteousness. He had been annoyed when he got the bill from the tailor. He had taken the cost of the waistcoat out of Douglass’s earnings for his books. A stinginess to him. He felt Webb watching him much of the time, waiting for him to stumble. He was afraid that he might become a specimen. Pinned. Observed. Dissected. Douglass hated to be called Old Boy. It brought him back to fields, to whips, to spiked anklets, to barnfights. And there was the money — Webb was collecting it to donate it to the cause back in America. Each night he asked Douglass if he had received any private donations. It rankled him. He emptied his pockets with exaggerated formality, yanked the cloth tongues out, shook them.

— See, he said, just a poor slave.

Still, Douglass was not unaware of his own shortcomings. He found himself curt at times, quick to judge, imprudent. He needed to learn tolerance. He was aware that Webb didn’t want financial gain, and it was true that Webb seemed apologetic for the slightly rancorous tone he sometimes took with the black man.

They tightened the rope on the trunk. The servants came out to bid him good-bye. Lily blushed a little when he came to shake her hand. She whispered that it had been an extraordinary honor to meet him. She hoped one day that she would meet him again.

He heard a cough behind him.

— Only so much light left in the day, Old Boy, said Webb.

He shook their hands one more time. The servants had never seen anything like it from a guest before. They remained watching until the carriage disappeared beyond the college, down the length of Great Brunswick Street.

THERE WERE RUMORS of a potato blight, but the land outside the city seemed healthy, green, robust. Near Greystones they stopped on a hill to watch the magnificent play of light on the last of Dublin Bay. There were rainbows in the distance, iridescent over the dulse-strewn strand.

WEBB AND HE took turns sitting up on the boards, up front with Creely. The land was stunning. The hedges in bloom. The gallop of streams. When it rained they sat in the carriage, opposite each other, reading. Occasionally they leaned across to tap one another on the knee, read a passage aloud. Douglass was rereading the speeches of O’Connell. He was amazed by the agility of the mind. The nod towards the universal. He wondered if he would get another chance to meet the man, to spend proper time with him, to apprentice his own ideas with the Great Liberator.

The carriage bounced along rutted roads. It was only slightly faster than a stagecoach or jaunting car. Douglass was surprised to learn that there were as yet no railroads south of Wicklow.

The afternoons spread in a great rush of yellow across the hills. Shutters in the sky, opening and closing suddenly. A swinging brightness and then a darkness again. There was some raw innocence about the land.

When he sat up front, on the boards, crowds came out of their houses just to look at him. They clapped his shoulder, shook his hand, blessed him with the sign of the cross. They tried to tell him stories of landlords, of absentees, of English atrocities, of loved ones far away, but Webb was impatient to get along, they had a schedule to keep, lectures to give.

Small children ran after the carriage, often for a mile down the road, until they seemed to seep down, brittle, into the landscape.

WICKLOW, ARKLOW, ENNISCORTHY: he charted the names in his diary. It struck him that there truly was a suggestion of hunger over the land. In the boardinghouses at night the owners apologized for the lack of potato.

IN WEXFORD HE stood on the top stairway of the Assembly Hall. He was hidden from view, but he could see down the staircase to the next floor where a table was set up; his poster on the wall, rippling in a small breeze.

It was the local gentry who came to see him. They were finely dressed, curious, patient. They sat quietly in their chairs, removed their scarves, and waited for him. His words stirred them—Hear hear! they shouted, Bravo! — and after his speech they made out promissory notes, said they would organize bazaars, fetes, cake sales, send the money across the Atlantic.

But when Douglass stepped out into the street he felt a sharpness move along his skin. The streets were thronged with the poor Irish, the Catholics. An energy of doom to them. There was talk of Repeal Rooms, clandestine debates. Houses being burned. Whenever he moved amongst them he was disturbed and thrilled both. The papists were given to laughter, revelry, high sadness, their own clichés. A street performer danced in the bell-tipped lappets of a clown’s outfit. Children went along the street hawking ballad sheets. Women sparked clay pipes. He wanted to stop in the streets and deliver an impromptu word, but his hosts moved him along. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he felt he was looking into a ditch that was only half-dug.

He was driven down a long laneway of majestic oak trees towards a huge mansion. Candles in the windows. Servants in white gloves. He had begun to notice that he was surrounded mostly by English accents. Magistrates. Landlords. They were melodic and well informed, but when he asked of the hunger that he had seen in the streets they said there was always a hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent, as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured the empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.

The conversation swerved. They engaged him on matters of democracy, ownership, natural order, Christian imperative. Wine was served on a large silver tray. He politely declined. He wanted to know more about the rumors of underground forces. Some of the faces around him smarted. Perhaps he could be told more of Catholic emancipation? Had they read O’Connell’s fervent denunciations? Was it true that Irish harpists once had their fingernails plucked so they could not play the catgut? Why had the Irish been deprived of their language? Where were the votaries of the poor?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always have to be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

— They’re waiting for you, said Webb.

He reached out for Webb’s hand and shook it, then went back inside. A chill went around the room from the open door. They took their coffee in small china cups. The women were gathered around the piano. He had learned how to play Schubert on the violin. He could lose himself in the adagio: even in the slowness, they were thrilled by the deftness of his hands.

THEY CONTINUED SOUTH. Just over the River Barrow they took a wrong turn. They entered wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned by hunger.

A hut burned at the side of the road. The smoke looked like it was issuing from the ground. In the fields, near stunted trees, men stared balefully into the distance. One man’s mouth was smeared with a brown paste: perhaps he had been eating bark. The man watched impassively as the carriage went by, then raised his stick as if bidding good-bye to himself. He staggered across the field, a dog padding at his heels. They saw him fall to his knees and then rise again, continuing on into the distance. A dark young woman picked berries from the bushes: there was red juice all down the front of her dress as if she were vomiting them up one after the other. She smiled jaggedly. Her teeth were all gone. She repeated a phrase in Irish: it sounded like a form of prayer.

Douglass gripped Webb’s arm. Webb looked ill. A paleness at his throat. He did not want to talk. There was a smell out over the land. The soil had been turned. The blight had flung its rotten odor into the air. The potato crop was ruined.

— It is all they eat, said Webb.

— But why?

— It’s all they have, he said.

— Surely not.

— For everything else they rely on us.

British soldiers galloped past, hoofing mud up onto the hedgerows. Green hats with red badges. Like small splashes of blood against the land. The soldiers were young and frightened. There was an air of insurrection about the countryside: even the birds seemed to howl up out of the trees. They thought they heard the cry of a wolf, but Webb said that the last wolf had been shot in the country a half century before. Creely, the driver, began to whimper that perhaps it was a banshee.

— Oh, quit your foolishness, said Webb. Drive on!

— But, sir.

— Drive on, Creely.

At an estate house they stopped to see if they could feed the horses. Three guards stood on the gate. Stone-carved falcons at their shoulders. The guards had shovels in their hands, but the handles of the shovels had been sharpened to a point. The landlords were absent. There had been a fire. The house smoldered. Nobody was allowed past. They were under strict instructions. The guards looked at Douglass, tried to contain their surprise at the sight of a Negro.

— Get out of here, the guards said. Now.

Creely pushed the carriage on. The roads twisted. Hedges rose high around them. Night threatened. The horses slowed. They looked ruined. A gout of spittle and foam hung from their long jaws.

— Oh, move it, please, called Webb from the inner cab where he sat knee to knee with Douglass.

Under a canopy of trees the carriage came to a creaking stop. A silence pulled in around them. They heard a woman’s voice under the muted hoofshuffle. It sounded as if she was invoking a blessing.

— What is it? called Webb.

Creely did not answer.

— Move it, man, it’s getting dark.

Still the carriage did not budge. Webb snapped the bottom of the door open with his foot, stepped down from the inner cab. Douglass followed. They stood in the black bath of trees. In the road they saw the cold and grainy shape of a woman: she wore a gray woolen shawl and the remnants of a green dress. She had been dragging behind her a very small bundle of twigs attached to a strap around her shoulders, pulling the contraption in her wake.

On the twigs lay a small parcel of white. The woman gazed up at them. Her eyes shone. A high ache tightened her voice.

— You’ll help my child, sir? she said to Webb.

— Pardon me?

— God bless you, sir. You’ll help my child.

She lifted the baby from the raft of twigs.

— Good God, said Webb.

An arm flopped out from the bundle. The woman tucked the arm back into the rags.

— For the love of God, the child’s hungry, she said.

A wind had risen up. They could hear the branches of the trees slapping each other around.

— Here, said Webb, offering the woman a coin.

She did not take it. Bent her head instead. She seemed to recognize her own shame on the ground.

— She’s not had a thing to eat, Douglass said.

Webb fumbled in his small leather purse again and held out a sixpenny piece. Still, the woman did not take it. The baby was clutched to her chest. The men stood rooted to the spot. A paralysis had swept over them. Creely looked away. Douglass felt himself become the dark of the road.

The woman thrust the baby forward. The smell of death was overpowering.

— Take her, she said.

— We cannot take her, ma’am.

— Please, y’r honors. Take her.

— But we cannot.

— I beg you, a thousand times, God bless you.

The woman’s own arms looked nothing more than two thin pieces of rope gathering upwards towards her neck. She flopped the child’s arm out again and massaged the dead baby’s fingers. The inside of its wrists were already darkening.

— Take her, please, sir, she’s hungry.

She thrust the dead baby forward.

Webb let the silver coin drop at her feet, turned, his hands shaking. He climbed up onto the wooden board beside Creely.

— Come on, he called down to Douglass.

Douglass reached for the muddy coin and placed it in the woman’s hand. She did not look at it. It slipped through her fingers. Her lips moved but she did not say a thing.

Webb hit the reins hard on the shiny dark back of the horse, then drew back just as sudden, as if he was moving the carriage and yet not moving it at the same time.

— Come on, Frederick, he called. Get in, get in. Hurry.

THEY GATHERED PACE. Through bogland, shoreside, long stretches of unbelievable green. The cold spread its arms. They stopped to buy more blankets. They drove, then, silently, through the dark, along the coast. They hired a man to run a lantern in front of them until they reached an inn. The small globe of light cast the trees in relief. The man fell after eight miles: there were no open inns on the road. They huddled in the carriage together. They did not mention the dead child.

It rained. The sky did not seem at all surprised. They passed a barracks where soldiers in red uniforms were guarding a shipment of corn. They were allowed to feed and water the two horses. An old man stood on the road near Youghal throwing stones at a dark-winged rook in a tree.

There was nothing they could do about the hunger, said Webb. There was only so much a man could achieve: they could not give health to the fields. Such a thing happened often in Ireland. It was a law of the land, unwritten, inevitable, awful.

THEY ARRIVED ALONG the quays of Cork in the autumn chill. The evening was clear. There was no breeze. A great damp stillness. The cobbles shone black.

They pulled the carriage in to 9 Brown Street where the Jennings family lived. A beautiful stone house with rose gardens along the tight walkway.

Douglass swung open the door of the carriage. He was exhausted. He moved as if some axle inside him were broken. All he wanted to do was go to bed. He could not sleep.

Negro girl. Ran away. Goes by name Artela. Has small scar over her eye. A good many teeth missing. The letter A is branded on her cheek and forehead. Some scars on back, two missing toes.

For sale. Able colored man, Joseph. Can turn himself to carpentry. Also for sale: kitchen appliances, theological library.

Available immediately: Seven Negro children. Orphans. Good manners. Well presented. Excellent teeth.

HE CAME DOWN the staircase, carrying a lit candle on a patterned saucer. The stub of candle threw his shadow askew. He saw himself in several forms: tall, short, long, looming. He slid lightly on the stairs. In the arc of stained glass above the front doorway he could see the stars.

He contemplated walking outside a moment, but he was still in his nightclothes. He continued barefoot instead along the wood-paneled corridor and entered the library. The room was all books. Long stretches of argumentative intent. He ran his hands along them. Beautiful leather covers. Rows of green, red, brown. Gold and silver imprinted along their hard spines. He held the candle aloft, turned slowly, watched the way the light flickered from shelf to shelf. Moore, Swift, Spenser. He set the candle on a circular table, moved to the ladder. Sheridan, Byron, Fielding. The wood was cold against the sole of his foot. The ladder was set on wheels and attached to a brass rail. He climbed to the second rung. He found that if he reached for the shelf with his hand he could propel himself along. He pushed himself slowly at first, back and forth. A little quicker, more recklessly, and then he let go.

He would have to be quiet. Soon the house would begin to stir.

Douglass pushed again, off the shelf, along the row of books. Climbed another rung. Higher now. There was a whiff of tallow in the room. The candle had extinguished itself. His mind swung to his young children. They would allow this, he thought. They would not judge it, their very serious father guiding himself on the ladder past the window, the sun coming up over the quays of Cork, the stars almost gone now, dawn a gap in the curtains. He tried to imagine them here, in this house of high bookshelves.

He dropped from the ladder, retrieved the stub of candle, made himself ready to tread the stairs when the door creaked open.

— Mr. Douglass.

It was Isabel, one of the daughters of the house, in her early twenties. She wore a plain white dress, her hair pinned high.

— Good morning.

— A fine morning, yes, she said.

— I was just looking at the books.

She flicked a quick look at the library ladder as if she already knew.

— Can I get you breakfast, Mr. Douglass?

— Thank you, he said, but I think I’ll return to sleep now. The journey from Dublin got the best of me, I’m afraid.

— As you will, Mr. Douglass. You do know there are no servants in this house?

— Excuse me?

— We fend for ourselves, she said.

— I’m happy to hear that.

He could already tell these friends of Webb were unusual. Owners of a vinegar factory. Church of Ireland. They did not display their wealth. The house had a humility to it. Open to all visitors. The ceilings were low everywhere but the library, as if to force a man to bend down everywhere except near books.

Isabel glanced towards the window. The sun was making itself apparent above the small line of trees at the end of the garden.

— So how do you find our country, Mr. Douglass?

Douglass was surprised at the forthrightness of her question. He wondered if she was interested in the courage of honesty — that the countryside had shocked him, that he had seldom seen such poverty, even in the American South, that he found it hard, even now, to understand.

— It’s an honor to be here, he said.

— An honor for us to receive you. And your journey was pleasant?

— We traveled the back roads. There was much to see. Some beautiful places.

In the silence she drifted towards the window. She looked out to the garden where the light continued to climb, agile against the trees. He could tell there was something more she wanted to say. She fingered the edge of the curtain, wrapped one of the threads around her finger.

— There is a hunger afoot, she said finally.

— Certain parts of the journey were bleak, I must admit.

— There is talk of a famine.

He looked at Isabel again. She was thin and ordinary, certainly not pretty. Her eyes were a sharp green, her profile plain, her bearing natural. No jewelry. No fuss. Her accent was genteel. She was not the sort of woman likely to open the windows of a man’s heart, yet there was something about her that daubed the air between them bright.

He told her of the dead child he had seen on the road. He noticed the words move into her face, inhabit her: the road, the raft of twigs, the dropped coin, the roof of trees, the way the light had fallen around them as they drove away. The story weighed her down. She wrapped the fringed thread so tight that the top of her finger was swollen.

— I will send someone out to see if they can find her. On the road.

— That would be kind of you, Miss Jennings.

— Perhaps they will help her bury the child.

— Yes.

— In the meantime, you should rest, Mr. Douglass, she said.

— Thank you.

— And later you must permit my sisters and me to show you around. There is much in Cork to be proud of. You’ll see.

He could hear the rest of the house stirring, the floorboards above them creaking. He bowed slightly, excused himself, went into the hallway. He was tired, but there was work to do: letters, articles, another attempt at a preface. His book was going into a second printing. It was an exercise in balance. He would need to find the correct tension. A funambulist. He would not pander any longer. He trod the stairs, entered his room, unfolded his pages to edit them. Took out the barbells. Rested his head against the side of the writing desk. Lifted the barbells. Began, all at once, to lift and read, lift and read.

Within moments he heard a clicking of hooves outside the window. Isabel was riding out the gravel road. From his high window he watched her go until her coat of royal blue became a speck.

THE CARPETS WERE lush. His pillows freshly laundered. His hosts had cut new flowers and put them in the window where they nodded in the breeze. A Bible had been placed on the bedside table. The Crace and Beunfeld Bird and Wildlife Guide. Charlotte, A Tale of Truth. The Vicar of Wakefield. The Whole Booke of Psalmes, with the Hymnes Evangellical, and Songs Spirituall. At the roll-top writing desk, he found an inkwell, blotting paper, blank journals.

It was a relief to be back to privilege again: the journey through the countryside had agitated him.

Famine. The word had not occurred to him before. He had seen hunger in America, but never a countryside threatened with blight. The smell still clung to him. He poured himself a deep bath. Soaped his body. Put his head in under the water, held his breath, sunk deeper. Even the noises of the house itself were a balm: he could hear laughter echoing up through the rooms. He climbed from the water, wiped the steam from the window. It was still a surprise to see the rooftops of Ireland. What else lay out there? What other ruin?

The sound of leaves falling.

Quieter than rain.

He finished his writing, put the barbells away, lay on the bed with his arms behind his head, tried to doze, couldn’t.

The call to dinner came from downstairs. He wiped his hands in the washbasin, dressed himself in his cleanest linen shirt.

THE FAMILY’S FOOD was served in a country style: rows of plates, bowls, soups, vegetables, and breads were placed on a giant wooden table and the diners walked along to choose what they wanted. There were, it seemed, many among the Jennings family who did not eat meat. He spread a thick sardine paste upon his bread, ladled the salad. At the table the guests jostled and laughed with one another. The Waring family. The Wrights. Other guests came: a vicar, a taxidermist, a falconer, a young Catholic priest. They were delighted to meet Douglass. They had read his book and were eager to talk. It seemed the house was open to all denominations and ideas. An extraordinary volubility of speech. The situation in America, the position of the abolitionists, the possibility of war, the pandering to southern trade laws, the terrible deeds that had been perpetrated upon the Cherokee Indians.

Douglass found himself happily besieged. None of the formality of the Webb household. The talk spun into incredible tangents. Seldom before had all the vectors of the conversation gone through him alone. Webb watched from the far end of the table.

Part of Douglass wondered if they were laying a trap for him, but, as the hours went on, his ease deepened.

He was surprised to see that the women remained at the table alongside the men. Isabel stayed quiet most of the time. She ate sparingly. She wet her finger and picked the crumbs from her plate. There was a shyness about her, but whenever she entered the conversation she seemed to do so on the tip of a knife blade. She was quick to draw blood and then retreat. Douglass had never seen anyone quite like her before. He found himself discombobulated when, in a conversation about Charles Grandison Finney, she turned towards him and asked how exactly Mrs. Douglass felt about the issue of public prayer.

He felt a rush of warmth to his collar.

— Mrs. Douglass?

— Yes, she said.

— Her position is quite clear on all such matters.

He saw Webb move slightly in his chair. The Irishman was chewing at the edge of his dinner napkin.

— She would no doubt be aligned, said Douglass.

He was sure Isabel had not meant to embarrass him, but the heat seared him. A seep of sweat at the brow. He balanced a cup of tea on the saucer without it rattling, then pronounced the meal delicious, excused himself, moved towards the stairs, touching Webb’s shoulder as he went.

He had not written to Anna or his children in a few days. He would do so straightaway.

Upstairs, he caught sight of himself in the looking glass. His hair had grown higher, thicker, more Negro. He would let it be.

There was no lock on the door. He wedged a chair against the door handle. He unwrapped the barbells from the shirts in which he hid them. There were times he was still walking into a church in Tuckahoe. The wooden crossbeams. The singular plane of light sloping east to west during morning services. The glimpse of a red-tailed hawk arcing out through the window. The high sound of the organ. The smell of grass carried in through the wide white doorway.

Anna might cherish hearing the letters read to her for an evening or two, but soon enough they would be burned. It gladdened him, really, that the letters would become smoke: it was so much of what happened to one’s own history.

THE CITY WAS dark, yet it didn’t press down on him quite like Dublin had. He began to feel that, even in the gloaming, things had opened up. The church bells rang high and brassy. The markets on Saint Patrick’s Street hummed. Swans glided under the footbridges that crisscrossed the city. Shandon Steeple stood out against the sky. Even the slums seemed more forgiving. It was a city that gave alms. The poor were still legion, but he could walk with the Jennings sisters along the quays and the beggars would leave them alone. Men carried pieces of lit clay in their hands. They offered Douglass a pull of their pipes, clapped him on the shoulder.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

He was happy when Webb announced, after six long days, that he would leave Cork on urgent business. Both men were glad to be rid of one another. Douglass watched the carriage move away and felt a bolt of freedom. It was the first time in ages that he felt truly alone. At ease in the ornate looking glass.

It must be said that in my time here in Ireland my heart feels stirred. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe and lo! the chattel becomes a man! Though I have seen much that would make my own people tremble, I am encouraged to exercise my true and proper voice. I breathe the sea air freely. And while there is much I observe to make the heart heavy, I am at least temporarily without chains.

HE WALKED ALONG the River Lee, his hands clasped behind his back. A new walk for him. Large and public. The attitude of a thinking man. He enjoyed the pose, found it conducive to the idea of himself. He heard the clopping of a horse behind him on the cobbles, the soft sound of a harness creaking. Isabel descended the horse, walked alongside him, her hand careful at the horse’s neck. The sheen of sweat on the animal’s body.

Barges plied along the river. Corn barges. Barley barges. Cattle barges. Salt barges. Pig barges. Sheep for the slaughterhouses farther downriver. Firkins of butter. Oatmeal. Flour bags. Egg boxes. Baskets of turkeys. Canned fruit. Bottled soda and minerals.

They watched the river of food in silence. Gulls busied themselves behind the boats, swooping every now and then to claim what they could.

They walked along by a merchant-marine shop, a bookseller’s, a tailor shop. Farther down the quays she pulled the horse close to her. As if it might offer protection.

— I could not find her.

— Excuse me?

— That woman you met upon the road.

For a brief moment he was not sure what Isabel was talking about, an incidental skim of words across the surface of the day, but then he caught himself, said it was a great shame, but he was sure the child was buried by now.

— You did what you could, said Isabel.

He knew it was not so: he had done nothing at all. He had borne witness and stayed silent.

— There’s nothing worse, she said, than a small coffin.

He juggled the words in his mind for a moment. He nodded. He liked her. He thought of her, increasingly these past few days, as a younger sister. It was odd to think so — her green eyes, her awkward walk, the rustle of her humble dresses — but, that’s what she was: sisterly. Hovering. Curious. Intrusive. She explored new ideas with him. There were few limits. What did he think of the notion of Liberia? What was the gulf between revenge and justice? Did he have a plan with Garrison to send the money back from churches that embraced slaveholders?

She was quieter when the talk returned to what was happening around them. She stopped midsentence. She worried the bracelet on her left arm. She gazed into the distance. Her voice caught.

There was enough food in the land to feed Ireland three or four times over, she said. It was being shipped across to India, China, the West Indies. The exhaustion of empire. She wished there was something she could do about it. The truth could not be preserved by silence. Her own family had warehouses full of food farther down the river. Bottles of vinegar. Stocks of yeast. Malting barley. Even crates of fruit jam. But it could not just be given away. There were laws and customs and issues of ownership. Other complexities, too. Business alliances. Extended contracts. Taxation. The demands of the poor. The creation of moral illusions.

It struck him that Isabel carried the wounds of privilege. Perhaps, then, he did also? He leafed through the New Testament. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And yet if he himself spoke out on behalf of the poor Irish, what would happen? What language could he create for this? To whom would he speak?

The politics still confounded him: who was Irish, who was British, who was Catholic, who was Protestant, who owned the land, whose child stood rheumy-eyed with hunger, whose house was burned to the ground, whose soil belonged to whom, and why? The simple way to see it was that the British were Protestant, the Irish were Catholic. One ruled, the other lay underfoot. But where did Webb fit in? And where did Isabel fit in? He would gladly have allowed himself to align with the desires of freedom and justice, but it was to his own known cause that he had to remain entirely loyal. Three million voices. He could not speak out against those who had brought him here as a visitor. There was only so much he could take upon himself. He had to look to what mattered. What was beyond toleration was the ownership of man and woman. The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.

He thought he knew now what had brought him here — the chance to explore what it felt like to be free and captive at the same time. It was not something even the most aggrieved Irishman could understand. To be in bondage to everything, even the idea of one’s own peace.

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom. What weight would he carry if he tried to support the Irish, too? Their agonies, their ambiguities. He had enough of his own.

The barges passed.

A river of food afloat.

The sun went down over the slate rooftops of Cork.

THERE WAS A story he sometimes told his audiences. The slave masters in America used barrels. Bourbon mostly. Olive oil. Wine. Any sort of barrel that could be found. They drove large six-inch nails into the wood. Sometimes they placed crushed glass inside the barrel, too. Or thorny bushes. Then, he said, they would bring their slave—he always invoked this word on a deeper pitch — up to the top of a hill. For the most minor of offenses. Maybe she had forgotten to lock the stable door. Or perhaps she had dropped a piece of crockery. Or maybe she had looked askance at the mistress of the house. Or maybe she had left a dishcloth dirty. It did not matter. She was to be punished. It was the natural order of things.

Halfway through his story he would give the slave a name: Mary. He would hear a silence come over his Irish listeners. Mary, he said again.

And then the owners—this word volleyed savagely from him — forced Mary to take the barrel from the barn. It was rolled out into the dust, along the dirt road, to the top of a small nearby hill. They gathered the other slaves together and brought them, too, to the hilltop. To witness. The owners would often shout verses from the Holy Book. They forced Mary to step inside the wooden barrel. They pushed her head down, crushed her shoulders into it. The protruding nails ripped her body. The glass penetrated her feet. The thorns encircled her shoulders. Then the masters put the lid on and hammered it shut. They rocked it back and forth a few minutes. They read again from the Holy Book.

Then the barrel went down the hill, tumbling.

THE CROWDS WERE enormous. He had spoken alongside Father Mathew. He found a language in the temperance movement. The papers still called him the black O’Connell. Posters were pasted up all around the city. His fame spread, day by day. He picnicked with twenty-four women from the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society: they delighted in the large lounge of him underneath a spreading oak tree, a dainty blue napkin at his throat, the gurgle of a brook behind him. The women unloosened the bonnets at their necks and raised their faces towards the sun. They hung on his every word. Later, the group walked together, carrying picnic baskets and parasols, out over the long grass and back towards a wooden bridge. Douglass dared to take off his shoes and socks and waded briefly in the cold water. The women turned away and giggled. The water darkened the cuffs of his trousers.

Newspaper reporters clamored to see him. Whole pages were devoted to his lectures. He had collected hundreds of pounds to be shipped back to Boston. He had sold over two thousand books. He would go on to Limerick next, then to Belfast. From there he would go to England where he would negotiate his freedom, buy himself back, return to America, a freeman.

There was a great welling inside him. His voice had always come from others, but when he stood to speak now, it felt more distinctly his own. There were times he wished he had a thousand voices and could throw them in so many directions, but he had just one, and it served a single purpose: to annihilate slavery. He was almost glad one afternoon when, walking past an ale house on Paul Street, he heard someone say that a nigger had just walked past, a filthy niggerboy, did he not have a home to go to, he wouldn’t find bananas in that direction, did he not know there were no trees to swing from in Cork, Cromwell had taken them all already, go on now, nigger.

He stopped, swelled his chest, held his ground, almost a fake fury, then walked on in his camel-hair vest. Nigger. Filthy nigger. For the first time, the word felt strangely welcome. An old shirt that he would have to wear in the future. Something to unbutton and tear off and rebutton again and again and again.

A FEW DAYS before he left Cork — a day that would stay with him quietly, a flag, a kite, a remnant — he heard a knocking at the door on Brown Street. He was in the midst of writing. His forearms were splattered with ink. His back ached from the bend over the desk. He pushed back in the chair and listened to the voices drifting up from below, then leaned into the work of writing once more.

Later that evening he bathed and dressed and descended the stairs for dinner. A young woman sat at the end of the table, next to Isabel. She seemed at odds with the manner with which she had been seated. Hunched, awkward, but pretty. With fair hair. Her skin so very pale. He thought he knew her, but he did not know from where. She stood up and said his name.

— Good evening, he replied, still confounded.

A hush came over the table. It was obvious to him that some other response was needed. He coughed into his fist.

— Such a pleasure to see you, Madame, he said.

He could feel the embarrassment swell the room.

— Lily is leaving for America, said Isabel.

It was then that he recognized her. She seemed so very different out of her uniform. Younger even. He remembered her shape on the stairs. She had, it seemed, left the employ of Mr. Webb and journeyed from Dublin.

— She will leave from Cove in a few days, said Isabel.

— That’s wonderful, said Douglass.

— She walked here.

— Good Lord.

— Lily was inspired by you. Isn’t that right, Lily?

— By me?

A small panic seized him. He could see a blush come over the young woman’s face. She seemed to want to vanish. He wondered if she had left Webb’s house without rancor. He certainly had not meant to cause consternation. He nodded politely, tried to avoid her gaze. He recalled with a sharp pang the way she had whispered good-bye. He was glad nothing more had come from his presence in Dublin.

— Your speeches, said Isabel. They were a great inspiration. Isn’t that right, Lily?

The maid didn’t look up.

— Boston? said Douglass. Is that your intention?

She nodded and by degrees lifted her head: a surprising shine to her eyes.

— Perhaps I’ll try New York, she said.

A murmur of approval went around the room. Douglass ate quickly, quietly. He kept his gaze on his plate, but glanced upwards every now and then to see Isabel and her sisters lavish attention on the young maid. They served her and poured her a ginger mineral from a pitcher.

The maid seemed to balance a weighing scale about her eyes: she seemed at any moment as if she could easily launch into a volley of words, or just as easily burst into tears.

When Douglass stood to excuse himself — he had more writing to do, he said — he raised a glass to Lily and said that he wished her well, that she would have Godspeed on her adventure, that he, too, hoped to return to his native land and to his wife and family soon.

The toast was taken up around the table. A clinking of water glasses. The maid flicked a brief glance at him: he was not sure if it was one of fear or anger. He made his way up the stairs. Her appearance had unnerved him. What exactly was he expected to do? How should he have reacted? He did indeed wish her well, but what more could he have said? Perhaps tomorrow he could recommend a prominent family for her to work with? Maybe Garrison or Chapman might know someone? Or he could suggest an area of the city where she would be at ease? Why, he wondered, had she come all the way to Cork by foot? And in such weather, too?

He sat at his writing desk, buried the nib of the pen in the inkwell. He had much to do, but he could not write. He tossed and turned beneath the covers.

The birds woke furious with dawn. A blanket of dark had been lifted from Brown Street. He heard his name called from below. He parted his curtains. Isabel stood in the puddled yard at the rear of the house.

— Lily left in the middle of the night, she said.

He could feel the cold against the pane of the window. A rooster crowed in the yard and a young hen rose in the air and scrambled away.

— Can you come with us, Mr. Douglass? she said.

An alarm in her voice.

— One moment, please.

There were letters to write. Correspondence to sign. Meetings to arrange. A debate to prepare with the clergymen of the North Cathedral.

He closed the curtains and placed his washbasin upon the windowsill. He removed his nightshirt and dampened a towel. The water was cold to the touch. It tightened his skin. He heard his name called from below once more. Then the high whinny of a horse from the stables. The clop and splash of hooves. Two of the Jennings sisters, Charlotte and Helen, came from beneath the archway. They wore wide hats and green rain clothing. Isabel appeared again seconds later, holding a sturdy nag by the reins.

Douglass leaned out the window. He had forgotten for a moment that he was shirtless. He saw the two younger sisters turn away and giggle.

Isabel rigged a series of leather harnesses around the horses: she left the tallest horse for him.

He cursed himself. A maid. A simple maid. So, she had left early. And so what? It was hardly his fault. Yet he was eager to please. The inability to say no. He stepped back from the window, bumped his head on the frame. Perhaps it was a foolish desire on behalf of the young woman. It was not as if — not as if — surely not, no. He had not shown any impropriety. None at all. Certainly not.

He went to his writing desk, shuffled the papers. Weighed them up. Stacked them, then turned to pull on his shirt and boots. He had been given an oilskin slicker by Mr. Jennings. A fishermen’s coat. That, and a black hat, wide-brimmed and shapeless. He hadn’t yet worn it during his visit. He caught sight of himself in the swivel mirror. Preposterous. But he was not beyond laughing at himself. He clomped down the stairs, poked his head into the kitchen. Mr. Jennings slapped his teacup down and spurted tea across the thick wooden table. Douglass gave an exaggerated bow and said he was off for a few hours, he had been taken hostage, it seemed they were hoping to overtake the young maid from Dublin, if he didn’t return by nightfall could they please send a search party and perhaps a Saint Bernard? The elderly Jennings sat back in his soft chair and laughed.

Douglass opened the latch on the back door, stepped outside and under the archway to the front of the house where the women sat on their horses, waiting. They smiled at the sight of him: the coat, the wide hat.

He had not been on a horse in a long time. He felt foolish as he swung up onto it. The stirrup bit hard into his foot. The animal was dark and muscled. He could feel its rib cage through his own body. He was surprised when Isabel got off her own mount and deftly readjusted the underbelly strap of his horse. A strength in the young woman that he had not seen before. She moved forward, patted the horse’s neck.

— We’ll take the Cove road, she said.

They went south along the quays, beyond the gaol, past the poor-house. Her sisters rode dainty and high-backed. Isabel was cruder in her style. She galloped up behind stagecoaches, glanced in, reared up, rode on. Looked around as she rode, calling out Lily’s name.

The streets were draped in an October gray. The wind pulsed wintry along the river. Rain spat down in flurries. Outside the fever hospital a man moaned with hunger. He stretched out his arms to them. He had a long, loping, simian stride. They rode past. He started hitting himself, like a man beset with bees and madness. They rode faster. A woman came out from an alleyway and begged for a penny. Her face was bearded, splotched with fever. They hurried again. If they stopped to give alms they would never get beyond the city.

Douglass was glad now of the green slicker and the hat. He realized after a few miles that the hat shaded his face almost completely, that nobody on the roadside could discern who was underneath.

The city seemed to stop at a brick warehouse and then suddenly there were trees. The road curled and whipped out into parcels of green. They passed a stagecoach, waving at the passengers arrayed along the side. The coach was piled high with boxes and suitcases. It looked as if it might totter over. They inquired after the maid but nobody had seen her.

Douglass remained shaded beneath the brim on his hat.

— Fine weather, he said through the light rain.

He could not shake the American out of his accent.

— Indeed, sir, for a Yankee.

The Jennings sisters smiled as they pulled away from the stagecoach. He tried to gallop ahead of them, but the sisters were more than capable: they braided around him, spurred him on.

In the countryside small ribbons of smoke curled up in the air. He was amazed the way the poor Irish lived underground. He could see their hovels from the road, built from turf and sticks and mounds of grass. Their fields were tiny. So many hedges. An occasional run of stone wall. The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist. Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.

He cast his mind back to Dublin and the little boy who had welded himself to his shoulder. It seemed so long ago now. The people didn’t frighten him anymore. It was not so much that he had become immune, it was more that he knew he would not be harmed. He wondered what might happen if this road ran into a road in Baltimore, or Philadelphia, or Boston, how the people might meld into each other.

He wanted now to find Lily, to wish her a truly safe journey. He spurred his horse on. They found shapes on the road, shadows, but none of them were the maid.

In the small villages the rain kept curiosity at bay. They rode out into the beauty of the dripping fields. The sound of the hooves like pistolfire. A rainbow hung on the sky. They halted their horses under a hazel tree where someone had built a low bench. Isabel unwrapped the sandwiches and took a flask of tea from her saddlebags. She had even brought cups. Her sisters sat on the bench. They melded well with Isabel: they were prettier and quieter, as if required by some strange law to balance her out. It was, the sisters agreed, a daring adventure, but they should not go too much farther. It was already near lunchtime. They would never find Lily now.

— We have plenty of time, said Isabel. It’s early yet.

— My sister has a mind of her own. Unfortunately she lost it a few years ago.

— It’s ten miles to Cove. And ten back, said Helen.

— We’ll lose the light.

— Oh, please do come. Please.

The road had become busier with stagecoaches and jaunting cars loaded with cases. The families had their eyes set on the distance. Their children were bundled into grim strips of blanket. The wooden tongues of the cars groaned. The carriages swayed in the ruts. The horses looked bound for the yard. They were bent over with the work of keeping to the road.

The Jennings sisters galloped west, then south. It was, said Charlotte, a prettier journey, and quieter, too. The road rambled and turned. Still, there were families upon them, all heading south, gathering, small rivers.

They asked in vain for any sighting of the young maid. The closer they got to the sea, the more the roads thickened with leaving. Vendors had set up stalls against the hedges. Families were hawking the last of their possessions. Douglass and the sisters had to slow their horses down to get through the crowds. All manner of things for sale. Fiddles, inkwells, pots, hats, shirts. Paintings strung on the hedges. Curtains hung from the branches of trees. Pieces of cloth with half-moons, the once-gaudy colors faded with time. A beautiful silk dress, embroidered with thin strips of gold, draped sadly over the seat of a jaunting car.

They pushed their horses on through, towards the cliffs that overlooked the harbor.

A man came towards them. He wore two boards draped across his shoulders, tied with a string. On it were the prices to Boston, New York, Newfoundland. He called out the prices in a singsong. Some children tugged at his pockets. He slapped them away.

The crowd grew so thick that they had to dismount to guide their horses.

A young priest walked among the crowd, looking for the sick. To administer the Last Rites. He was fingering rosary beads as he went. He glanced at Douglass. They had never seen each other before, but for a brief moment they both thought they recognized one another and they stopped to say something, but nothing came, no words between them.

The priest stepped away, under the overarching green branches of a tree where a child’s clothes hung limp.

— Father, said Isabel. Excuse me, Father.

The priest turned and stepped towards them. His eyes were huge and tired. He pulled the rosary beads tight around his fingers. His face sharpened. His voice was bitter. No, the priest said, he had not seen anyone answering to Lily’s description. He toed his foot into the mud, as if he might find her there. He turned then and spat into his hands. No, he said again, sharply.

The priest went on, calling to the people around him in the Irish language.

Isabel shivered and touched the neck of her horse. Douglass pulled his hat down further and guided his horse away by the reins. The sisters, too, had fallen into a reverent silence. The wind came off the sea and rose up to meet them. The harbor curved like a question mark. A dozen or more wooden ships were dotted on the water below. A small, sad flotilla of masts and tightened sails. Their names scrubbed off by the waves.

They walked their horses to within ten yards of the edge of the cliff. The town itself lay below them like a twitching thing. The thatch of the roofs. The bend of the trees. Carriages moving like small insects along the waterfront towards the square. Douglass knew what chaos lay down there, what desires, what fevers. Yet it was immense with beauty. The town of Cove genuflected to the water. Birds flew ravenously around the cliffs, weightless on the updrafts.

He wrapped the reins around a tree and walked to the edge of the cliff. He took off his hat. The wind and rain rang fierce around him. It took him a moment to realize that Isabel was at his side. The two sisters remained behind, perched now on their horses. The pale of the waves came upon the shore below.

Isabel twined her arm around his. Her face against his shoulder. He was aware of the sisters watching. He wished he could gently prise her from him, but she stayed there, looking down over the town.

Soon the sun would fall and the sea darken and all the land about them would go cold.

IT WAS LATE afternoon by the time they found Lily. Rainsoaked and shivering on the pier. Her head shawled, her body mummied into a coat. She had bought her ticket and was waiting for the morning boat. She would not look at them, her face drawn in some private anguish.

Douglass and the two sisters stood apart. They watched as Isabel bent down in front of Lily. A supplicant. They looked as if they were praying together.

Isabel had brought a few days’ worth of food. Wrapped in a blue teacloth. Bundled and tied. She pressed it gently into the young girl’s arms. She reached inside her coat, brought out a number of folded bills that she quickly stuffed into Lily’s palm. Douglass felt a chill. He watched as Lily moved her mouth but did not seem to say anything. What words went between them? What silence? There was a howl from a nearby shop. The screech of a woman. The thump of a fist. A din of laughter from a public house. From somewhere distant came the sound of a mandolin.

Isabel peeled her gloves off, and pressed them, too, into Lily’s arms. Then she reached inside her own coat and fumbled at her neck. A brooch of some sort. She handed it to Lily. The girl smiled. Isabel leaned forward and embraced the maid, whispered something in her ear. Lily nodded and pulled the shawl tight down over her head. What thoughts trembled there? What fierceness had brought her here?

Douglass felt rooted to the ground. It was as if he could not even pick up his feet. He longed for the warmth of a fire. He pulled his collar up and coughed into it. He felt his breath bounce back towards him. Negro girl. Ran away. Goes by name Artela.

Isabel glanced over her shoulder and called out to her sisters. They brought her horse forward. Her long dress was muddied at the hem. She wiped her feet against the cobbles and climbed demurely to the saddle, spurred the horse through the thronged streets. They moved through the town, past an auctioneer’s shop, and away.

THE PRIEST WATCHED them crest the hill. There was a long scar of dark mud along the side of his soutane where he had slipped and fallen. He still held the rosary beads in his fist, though they were looser now, they jangled at his hip. Isabel raised her hand in parting, but the priest did not respond. He followed them metronomically, his head turning, the rest of his body clamped in place. Then he strode away through the wet grass towards the fires.

THE HORSES DRIPPED with exhaustion. Skittishly they moved through the dark. It was already well beyond midnight when they got home. Mr. Jennings was waiting in the yard. He had prepared food and hot drinks and blankets. The yard was a commotion.

When Douglass put his foot to the cobbles his knee half-buckled underneath him. He was given a candle and a blanket. He trudged indoors. His shadow multiplied upon the stairs.

That night he could not sleep. Towards daylight he went downstairs to the quiet of the library. His knees ached. His shoulders felt welded to his neck. He entered the room quietly. Isabel was sitting in the corner, in the gloom. She looked up to see him come in: it was his ritual to use the ladder to move himself along the bookshelves. He waited a moment in the doorway, stepped across, took her in an embrace. Only that. He held his hand at the back of her hair. He hesitated a moment. She sobbed. When he pulled away, the shoulder of his shirt was wet.

ON HIS LAST morning in Cork, Frederick Douglass took a jaunting car, alone. The horse seemed to yield to him. The reins felt soft in his hands. He went southwest of the city and strolled the strand. Quiet here. No emigrant ships. The tide was out and the beach was penciled by a series of soft sand ripples. Perfect echoes, one after the other, stretching out to the shadowfold of the horizon. No sea anymore. Just cloud. He felt a pang of homesickness: it reminded him so much of Baltimore.

When he placed his foot down, the water squelched beneath the sole of his boot. A brief imprint. The ground felt mobile beneath him. He lifted his foot and watched the water leak away, the sand rebound. It was a thing to do over and over again, footprint after footprint.

The sand apparently stretched for miles, but Isabel had told him to be careful, the area was renowned for its swift, quiet tide. The water could insinuate itself secretly, rush in, turn, surround him, and he would be trapped. He found it hard to imagine. It looked, to Douglass, so very peaceful.

He bent down and in the rippled layers noticed a number of tiny crabs pedaling their legs in the sand. He lifted one onto the palm of his hand. The creature was almost translucent, its eyes high and unwieldy. A fiddler crab, perhaps. It ran to the edge of his fingers, hesitated, returned. He moved his arm in the air and the crab scuttled to the high part of his wrist. Douglass dropped it down into the sand again where it burrowed and hid. How quickly it disappeared.

He noticed a number of women farther out on the strand, stooping to collect shells. They wore long headscarves and carried straw baskets on their backs. Searching for food. He had read in the newspapers that the blight was worsening, that the price of flour had doubled within a few days, that stocks of corn were lower than ever. It was only hoped that the next year’s crop would not fail.

Douglass walked along the shore. A tall-masted ship clung to the horizon. He watched it go. When he looked back towards the strand again, the women seemed to have disappeared into the earth. Only their dark overcoats could be seen. Every now and then they bent downwards, stooping in rhythm for whatever it was they might find.

1998, para bellum

HE EMERGES FROM THE BRIGHT ELEVATOR. MOVES THROUGH the marbled lobby towards the revolving door. Sixty-four years old. Slender. Graying. A slight strain of yesterday’s tennis in his body.

A dark blue suit jacket, slightly rumpled. A pale blue sweater underneath. Slacks creased. Nothing brash, nothing showy. Even the way he walks has a quiet to it. His shoes sound clean and sharp against the floor. He carries a small leather suitcase. He tilts his head towards the doorman who leans down to take the case: just a suit, a shirt, a shaving kit, an extra set of shoes. Under his other arm he keeps his briefcase tight.

Through the lobby quickly. He hears his name from several angles. The concierge, an elderly neighbor on the lobby couch, the handyman cleaning the large glass panes. It is as if the revolving door has caught the words and begun to let them spin. Mr. Mitchell. Senator. George. Sir.

The black town car sits idling outside the apartment building. A little shiver from its exhaust. A relief floods through him. No press. No photographers. A hard New York rain, so different from the Irish kind: hurrying itself along, impatient, dodging the umbrellas.

He steps out into the afternoon. Beyond the awning, an umbrella is held aloft for him and the car door is opened.

— Thank you, Ramon.

There is always a moment of dread that there might be someone waiting inside the car. Some news. Some report. Some bombing. No surrender.

He slips into the rear seat, lays his head against the cool leather. Forever an instant when he feels he can turn around, reinvent. That other life. Upstairs. Waiting. He has been the subject of many newspaper columns recently: his beautiful young wife, his new child, the peace process. It stuns him to think that he can still be copy after so many years. Captured on camera. Pulled through the electronic mill. His caricature on the op-ed pages, serious and spectacled. He’d like a long sweep of silence. Just to sit here in this seat and close his eyes. Allow himself a brief snooze.

The front door opens and Ramon slides into the seat, leans out, shakes the umbrella, glances over his shoulder.

— The usual, Senator?

Almost two hundred flights over the past three years. One every three days. New York to London, London to Belfast, Belfast to Dublin, Dublin to D.C., D.C. to New York. Jetliners, private planes, government charters. Trains, town cars, taxis. He lives out his life in two bodies, two wardrobes, two rooms, two clocks.

— JFK, yes. Thank you, Ramon.

The car shifts minutely underneath him, out onto Broadway. A familiar sudden loss, a sadness, the sorrow of a closed vehicle, moving away.

— Just a moment, Ramon, he says.

— Sir?

— I’ll be right back.

The car eases to a stop. He reaches for the door handle, climbs out, perplexing the doormen as he hurries quickly through the marbled lobby, into the elevator, his polished shoes clicking, carrying the rain.

THE NINETEENTH FLOOR. Glass and high ceilings. The windows slightly open. Rows of long white bookshelves. Elegant Persian rugs. An early lamp lit in the corner. He moves quietly over the Brazilian hardwood. A collision of light, even with the rain coming down outside. South to Columbus Circle. East to Central Park. West to the Hudson. From below he can hear the Sunday buskers, the music drifting up. Jazz.

Heather stands in their son’s bedroom, hunched over the changing table, hair pulled high to her neck. She does not hear him enter. He remains at the door, watching as she pulls together the velcro of the diaper. She leans down and kisses their son’s stomach. She undoes her dark hair and leans again over the child. Tickling him. A giggle from the baby.

The Senator remains at the bedroom door until she senses him standing behind her. She says his name, unlatches the child from the changing table, swaddles the boy in a blanket. She laughs and steps across the fine carpet, still carrying the soiled diaper.

— You forget something?

— No.

He kisses her. Then his son. He pinches the boy playfully on the toes. The roll of soft skin at his fingers.

He takes the diaper — still warm to the touch — and drops it in the diaper pail. Life, he thinks, is still capable of the most extraordinary quips. A warm diaper. At sixty-four.

Heather walks him back to the elevator, takes the flap end of his suit jacket, draws him close. The scent of their son on both their hands. The elevator cables pitch their mourn.

WHAT SHE WORRIES most of all is that he will become the flesh at the end of an assassin’s bullet.

SO MANY MURDERS arrive out of the blue. The young Catholic woman with the British soldier slumped over her child, a hiss of air from the bullet wound in his back. The man in the taxicab with the cold steel at his neck. The bomb left outside the barracks in Newtownards. The girl in Manchester thrown twenty feet in the air, her legs separating from her as she flew. The forty-seven-year-old woman tarred and feathered and left tied to a lamppost on the Ormeau Road. The postman blinded by the letter bomb. The teenager with a six-pack of bullet holes in his knees, his ankles, his elbows.

When she was with him in Northern Ireland, last July, it chilled Heather to see wheeled mirrors being slid in under the car before they drove off. George said it was just a formality. Nothing for her to worry about. He had an air about him, a midcentury dignity that dismissed most danger.

She liked to watch him in a crowd. The way he could forget himself, dissolve and allow everyone else a sense of their own importance. He believed in people, he listened well. Nothing false or politic about it. It was simply the way he went about things. He disappeared amongst them. His tall hunch, his glasses. Even the fine cut of his suit would vanish. Sometimes she could find herself looking for him, and he would be tucked in the corner, talking with the most unlikely of people. He was given to sudden, close leanings. A touching of arms. An unexpected laugh. It unnerved his bodyguards no end. It didn’t matter whom. It was his failure, too, of course: the inability to say no. So hard for him to turn away. An old-fashioned politeness. His New England air. She would watch the party drift: a small pool of water, unknown to itself, shifting sideways. More and more people gathering around him. At the end of an evening she would watch him try to row himself out: that hopelessly surrounded swimmer, bashful now, ready to leave, tired, trying to pull himself up from the deep end, eager not to disappoint.

She holds her foot in the elevator door for a moment longer than she should. But then it closes and he is gone, and all she can hear is the electronic pulleys as he descends through the heart of the building. He will be home in two weeks. By Easter Sunday. He has made a promise.

She hears the faint ting of the elevator bell below.

THE LINCOLN CENTER traffic. The merge of the avenues. The bustle. Dancers hurrying across the plaza. The buskers beneath the awning, tromboning the raindrops down.

He likes it here on the West Side, though sometimes he wishes they could live farther east, just to make it easier to get to the airport. A simple, sharp practicality: to save half a travel hour, to be with her and Andrew just a moment or two longer.

Out onto Broadway. Left onto Sixty-Seventh Street. They turn onto Amsterdam and head uptown. If Ramon catches the lights properly they can go all the way, transform it into an avenue of yellow awnings. Past the cathedral. East, through Harlem. The whirl of faces and umbrellas. Onto 124th Street. The Bobby Sands mural on the wall near the police station. He has been meaning to find out who painted it, and why. Odd to have a mural in New York. Saoirse painted in bright letters above the hunger striker’s face. A word he has learned over the past few years. The streets of Belfast, too, are covered in murals: King, Kennedy, Cromwell, Che Guevara, the Queen painted huge on gable-ends and walls.

A quick merge and swerve. Onto the Triborough Bridge. A glimpse of water. In the distance, somewhere up the river, is Yankee Stadium. He is all of a sudden back at Fenway Park, thirteen years old: the great swell and hush of green as he steps into the top tier of seats, his first flash of ballpark, Birdie Tebbetts, Rudy York, Johnny Pesky at shortstop. A country boy. First time in the city. Watching Ted Williams step up to the plate. The Kid, the Thumper, the Splendid Splinter. He can hear the crack of the first ball cut across the floodlights. Good days, those. Long ago, not far away.

He leans against the cool of the seat. He has traveled in all manner of cavalcades, processions, parades down through the years, but what he likes most of all is this silence. To travel under the radar. If even just for an hour or two.

He opens the briefcase. They cross the bridge at a clip. Ramon has a badge that he flashes at the tollbooth. Sometimes the police try to peer inside, past the dark glass, as if they are looking beneath the surface of a river. To gauge the importance of the catch. Only me, I’m afraid. His staff is already in Belfast and Dublin. And he has refused security while at home in New York, Washington, Maine. No need. They will hardly strap a bomb beneath his lawn mower anyway.

There is much to catch up on. A report from Stormont. An internal memo on decommissioning. A file that came through from MI-5 on the prisoner release. All the secret histories. The ancient longings. The violence of feeble men. He is weary of it all, tired of the permutations. What he wants is a clear, fine skyline. He puts the files aside a moment, looks out the rain-hammered window at the riffle of New York. All the grays and yellows. The concrete cubes of Queens. The broken neon signs. The leaning water towers with their rotting wood. The spindlework of the elevated trains. It’s a primitive city, aware of its own shortcomings, its shirt stained, its teeth plaqued, its fly open. But it is Heather’s city. She loves it. She wants to be here. And he has to admit that there is something grudgingly attractive about it. It is not quite Maine, but nothing is ever Maine.

He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried. He knows his spot already, on the cliff, looking out to sea, Mount Desert Island, the deep green, the curve of horizon, the angled rock, the waves spindrifting upwards. Give him a small square of grass over the cove, a low white fence around it. A few sharp rocks to dig into his back. Sow my soul in the rugged red soil. Let me rest there, happy, watching the lift of the lobster pots, the slow saunter of seacaps, the curl of the gulls. But have some patience, please, Lord. Another twenty years at least. Thirty, even. Thirty-five, why not? Many mornings yet left. He might as well crawl up towards the full century.

The hiss of rainwater sounds underneath the tires. Ramon has a heavy foot when it comes to highways. Onto the Grand Central Parkway. From lane to lane. The brief thwap of dryness beneath the underpasses. Out towards the Van Wyck. No going back. The light fading through the slender shoulders of afternoon rain.

Easter two weeks away.

Last chance.

Si vispacem, para bellum.

YESTERDAY, IN CENTRAL Park, in the yellow sunlight, she reached for a backhand, caught it perfectly, sliced the racquet so that the ball floated a moment and dropped just over the net, and he lurched forward, laughing at the audacity of the shot, the perfect backwards spin, as he went crashing into the net. All around, the applause of the city, in the leaves and trees and buildings, and a red-tail hawk shooting over the courts, and some clouds skillful overhead in the blue, and the babysitter in the background, rocking the carriage, and he had the fleeting desire to make the phone calls to Stormont, leave it all at deuce.

AT THE CURBSIDE he quietly slips Ramon a gift. Three tickets for Opening Day. The Mets. Second deck. Not far from home plate. Bring your boys, Ramon. Teach them well. Tell Bobby Valentine to let loose the cowhide.

THEY KNOW HIM so well at JFK that it almost feels as if he should stand at the counter and negotiate from there. Your air rights. Your refunds. Your delays.

The stewardesses have a fondness for him, his quietness, his humility. From a distance he looks like a man who might shuffle through a constant gray, but up close he is fluid and sharp. His shyness carries a form of flirt.

At the British Airways desk he is taken by the arm and brought beyond check-in to what they call the Vippery. No metal detectors. No search at all. He wishes he could go through the channels, like a normal traveler, but the airline insists and they always whisk him through. This way, Senator, this way. The corridor to the Vippery is rutted and stained. Odd how badly painted the walls are. A sickly mauve color. The baseboards broken and scuffed.

He is brought through the back entrance into the gold-plated shine. Two lovely beaming smiles from the front desk. Girls in silk scarves of red, white, and blue. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.

— Wonderful to see you again, Senator Mitchell.

— Good afternoon, ladies.

He wishes they weren’t quite so loud with his name, but he nods to them, glances at their name badges. Always a good idea to have a first name. Clara. Alexandra. He thanks them both and he can almost hear the noise of their blushes. He glances over his shoulder, the slight rascal in him, and is guided towards the back of the lounge. He has met movie stars here, diplomats, ministers, captains of industry, a couple of rugby players up to their broad shoulders in wine. The minor figures of public glory, their Rolexes peeping out from beneath their cuffs. It doesn’t much interest him, the spotlight. What he looks for is a seat where he won’t be disturbed, yet can get up and stretch his legs if needs be. He has taken to yoga in recent times, on Heather’s insistence. Felt rather stupid at first. Downward dog. Dolphin plank. Crane pose. But it has loosened him up enormously, untightened all the bolts. In his younger years he was far less supple. A certain mental agility in it, too. He can sit and close his eyes and find a good meditative point.

He spots a likely place, in the far corner of the lounge, where the rain rolls decoratively down the darkness, shifts his weight towards the window, allows the young lady to shepherd him along. As if she is the one to have chosen the seat. Her hand at the small of his back.

He keeps the briefcase between them. For distance and decorum.

— Can I get you a beverage, Senator?

He has become a man of tea. He never would have believed it. This unasked-for life, it always surprises. It began in the North. He couldn’t get away from it. Tea for breakfast, tea for lunch, tea in the afternoon, tea before bedtime, tea between the tea. He has learned the art of it. Choosing the right kettle. Running the tap water until cold. Boiling it beyond the boil. Heating the teapot with a swish. Doling out the leaves. Timing the brew. Wetting the tea, the Irish call it. He is not a man for alcohol, and it is the tea that has dragged him through many a late evening. With cookies. Or biscuits as they say. Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell. McVitie’s Digestives.

— Milk and three sugars, please.

He is careful not to watch the swish of her as she moves away through the lobby. He leans back against the seat. But Lord, he is tired. He has, in his briefcase, a few sleeping pills prescribed by a doctor friend, but he is not fond of the idea. Perhaps in an emergency. A newspaper wag said: Some calm in the Stormont. He can already feel the weight of the days ahead, the changed minds, the semantical shuffling, the nervous search for equilibrium. He and his team have given them a deadline. They will not go beyond it. They have promised that to themselves. A finishing line. Otherwise the whole process will drag on forever. The rut of another thirty years. Clauses and footnotes. Systems and subsystems. Visions and revisions. How many times has it all been written and rewritten? He and his team have allowed them to exhaust the language. Day after day, week after week, month after month. To roil in their own boredom. To talk through the vitriol towards a sort of bewilderment that such a feeling could have existed at all.

It has been, on occasion, like playing hide-and-seek with oneself. Open the door and there you are. Count to twenty yet again. Ready or not. Run and hide. Pretend you don’t know where you are.

He used to play that game with his brothers when he was young, in the small house in Waterville. He hid in the closet beneath the stairs where his mother kept the jars of figs. A familiar smell. The jars were ranged high on the shelves: his own small Lebanon, cramped and tidy. A tiny glint of light came from the hallway, leaked in, clarified the dark. He tucked himself away in the corner, at the base of the wooden shelves, waiting to be caught. His brothers got so used to him hiding in the same place that once they left him for hours, just to rile him, and to rile them back he just stayed completely still, remained beneath the stairs until after dinner when they finally came to get him out, cramped, sore, vaguely victorious.

The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap. The Waterville house backed onto the wide Kennebec River. The smoke from the mill drifted downstream. Huge logs arrived and were winched, dripping wet, from the gray river. The wood saws whined. Sawdust whipped across the wind. Railway whistles pierced the air. The town had a vigilance about it. He worked the newspaper route. Rode a bicycle with fringed handlebars. Hopped across the railway trestles. Learned the back roads and the byways. The coins in his pockets clanged. He liked the days when the river iced and he wondered about what it carried underneath: water beneath water. He watched the men coming home from the factories after long days of giving up their flesh. Mornings of fresh blue snowfalls. By the end of the day the snow was dark with grit.

He grew up in his brother’s clothes. It used to make his mother smile to see the shirts slide from one shoulder to another, as if youth were just a thing that would always be passed along the line. When he was finished with the clothes, she would load them up and drive them to the Salvation Army store down on Gilman. Ya hadi she would say. Give us grace.

He was aware of the Horatio Alger quality that hung around him. His mother was Lebanese, a textile worker. His father, an orphan, a janitor in a college. An American boyhood. The newspapers sometimes mocked it. He walked out of college into an unquiet life. Torts, contracts, deeds, the gavel. He could quite easily have been a lawyer in a bow tie, or a small-town judge living on the outskirts of town. He thrived on Webster and Darrow. A Plea for Harmony and Peace. Resist Not Evil. Mysteries dissolving into facts. As a lawyer, he hated to lose. No virtue in second place. He took his chances. Attorney, candidate for governor, federal judge. Fifteen years in Washington. Majority leader for six years. The second most powerful man in America.

He knew how to flip a coin in the air and listen to the language of how it was made to land: what amazed him was that there were times when a coin could land sideways. Vietnam. Grenada. El Salvador. Kuwait. Bosnia. Mexico. All those times when logic was perched on a rim. Health care. NAFTA. The Clean Air Act. The occasional dividend of change.

He retired then, ready to pursue his own route, practice law, breathe easy, leave the flashbulbs behind. Even turned down the Supreme Court. But then the President phoned again. Clinton’s casual charm. The ambitious ease. A favor, George, he said. Two weeks in Northern Ireland. It’s just a trade convention. That’s all. An escape across the water. The Senator was drawn in. He would go for a fortnight, that was all. Before he knew it, it was a year, then two, then three. The shadows of Harland and Wolff falling over Belfast. Where the Titanic had once been built. The vague hope of helping to turn the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.

He glances out the window now at the rows of planes, the moving carts, the men on the runway waving their neon sticks. All the world, always going somewhere. Everyone in a rush. The fatal laws of our own importance. How many aloft at this very moment? Looking down on ourselves in the hazy and confused landscape below. How odd to glimpse the reflection of himself in the window, as if he is both inside and outside at the same time. The young boy looking in at the man in his late years, a father again, surprised to be here at all. The manner in which life deals the unexpected. So constantly unfinished.

He has been asked many times by reporters if he can explain Northern Ireland. As if he could whisk a phrase out of the air, a sound bite for the ages. He is fond of Heaney. Two buckets were easier carried than one. Whatever you say, say nothing. Brief breakthroughs. Intermittent calm. Large ruptures in the landscape. He has never even been able to get all the political parties together in the same room, let alone the whole situation in a single phrase. It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. He has sat in a room for hours on end listening to men talk about words and yet never mention the one word they want. The maniacal meanderings. The swerves and sways. And then, all of a sudden, he has heard them say, No, no, no, as if the language only ever had one word that made any sense at all.

Paisley. Adams. Trimble. McGuinness. Throw a word in their midst and watch them light the fuse. Ahern. Blair. Clinton. Mowlam. Hume. Robinson. Ervine. Major. Kennedy. McMichael. A fine cast. Shakespearean almost. And he sits in the wings, with de Chastelain and Holkeri, waiting for the moment for the cast to bring out their spears. Or not.

There has been, he must admit, a thrill to his days in the North. An edge. A recklessness he enjoys. Another boyhood. Under the stairs. Ready to emerge, in suit and tie, with hands raised high in false surrender. Strand One, Strand Two, Strand Three. He dislikes the praise, the glad-handing, the false backslaps, the gestures to his patience, his control. It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and the damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass. To stay until the cold no longer matters. Fatigue conquering tedium. Match him breath for breath. Let the gunman grow so cold that he cannot pull the trigger and then allow the silhouette to trudge dejected over the hill. To filibuster the son of a bitch, and then watch him climb out the ditch and to thank him and shake his hand and escort him down the high-brambled laneway with the senatorial knife in his back.

— Your tea, sir.

He touches his palms together in grateful thanks. She is carrying a silver tray: small neat sandwiches, biscuits, cashews.

— Some nuts, Senator?

— Ah, yes.

He tries hard to hold back the blatant grin, if not outright laughter. He would like to tell her that he’s had too many of them in recent times, but she might misunderstand, or take it rudely, so he simply smiles and takes the tea, allows her to place the cashews on the table. Indeed, they have been many and legion, the nuts. The paramilitaries, the politicians, the diplomats, the civil servants, too. The polygon of Northern Ireland. He can see six, seven, eight sides to it all, even more. A firefly flashing forward at regular intervals. Context crossing context. There is nothing to gain from the North: no oil, no territory, no DeLoreans anymore. He is not even paid for the work: just his expenses, that’s all. No salary. Some political traction, of course, for him, for the President, and for posterity, maybe even history itself, but there are easier ways to get that, simpler vanities, more approachable conceits.

He is well aware that there are some out there who think they have him on an endless looping string. The judicial puppet. Peace and Judy. But it doesn’t bother him one bit, even when they draw him, glum and dangling, in one of their crude newspaper cartoons. Or their backhanded jibes. There is something fierce about him: he has earned the right to part the darkness slightly, to go with them into the corners.

What the Irish themselves worry about is that they will somehow keep on delaying, but he will not allow it, the endless riverrun, riverrun, riverrun. He will be over eighty when Andrew goes to college. The father mistaken for the grandfather. The distant ancestry. All those ancient ghosts. There were sixty-one children born in Northern Ireland the day Andrew was born. Sixty-one ways for a life to unfold. The thought slides a sharp blade of regret down the core of his spine. His son is just five months old now, and he can count on just four hands the amount of days he has spent with him. How many hours has he sat in the stark chambers listening to men argue about a single comma, or the placement of a period, when all he wanted was to return to the surprise of his very young child? Sometimes he would watch them as they talked, saying very little or nothing at all. Kites of language. Clouds of logic. Drifting in and out. Caught on the moving wave of their own voices. He heard certain phrases and allowed them to take him out over the treetops, into what the Northern Irish called the yonder. Immersed in the words. Sitting at the plenaries, waiting. The brittleness in the room. The cramped maleness. A relentless solicitude about them, they would hold up a hand and tell people they did not deserve the reverence, but it was plain to see that they needed it.

Some days he wishes that he could empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son’s bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow — not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone. How many times has he heard it? How often were there two ways to say the one thing? My son died. His name was Seamus. My son died. His name was James. My son died. His name was Peader. My son died. His name was Pete. My son died. His name was Billy. My son died. His name was Liam. My son died. His name was Charles. My son died. His name was Cathal. My son’s name is Andrew.

THE RAIN OUTSIDE still hammers down. Luggage carts hurry to and fro. He lifts a biscuit, blows the tea cool. Sunday nights to Ireland. Wednesday nights to London. Thursdays to Washington D.C., at his law firm. Friday nights to New York. Sundays back out to England and Ireland again.

Sometimes it feels as if there is no motion at all: thousands of miles in the decompression chamber, the same cup of tea in the same cup in the same airport lounge, the same city, the same neat car.

He wonders what might happen if the plane were delayed, how easy it would be to go home, ascend in the elevator, to turn the key, flick on the lamp, become that other man on whom he is equally intent.

HE IS GUIDED last onto the plane. A special privilege. As if he could be unseen. A nice thought: to be truly unseen. To own an influential anonymity.

He was always recognized in Washington. The push, the shove, the backslap. The corridors of power. What he disliked were the galas, the garden parties, the red carpets. Flashbulbs, press briefings, TV cameras. The irksome necessities. He was recognized in New York, too, but nobody seemed to care. The city was so brash that it was obsessed only with itself. In Maine, he felt at home, amongst his own people.

Out here, in this nation of cloud and air, they all know him, too. They are quick to hang his suit jacket, place the small bag in the overhead bin. He glances across and is glad to see that the seat beside him is free. No need for the kind nod, or the apologetic half-grin. He has his routine down firmly now. The window seat. Briefcase tucked down beside him. Shoes gently lifted, though not fully taken off, not yet. Something vaguely rude in the idea that you remove your shoes before liftoff.

The stewardess moves along the aisle. A tray, a tongs. He reaches for the white towel, holds it to his brow, and then cleans in the depths between his fingers. How quickly the towel grows cool. For once he wishes he had one of those confounded portable phones. What is it they call them? Cellulars. Mobiles. Handhelds. Just to call home. But his refusal to get a phone has become a point of honor now. He clings to the idea, an old-fashioned beating of the chest. He has spent sixty-odd years without one: no point in beginning now. Ridiculous, really. All his aides have them. His negotiating team. All the reporters. There have even been times, just before takeoff, when he borrowed one from his fellow passengers, just to make a quick call to Heather. His hand over the mouthpiece so as not to appear rude.

A menu is slipped into his lap, but he knows this month’s choices by heart: lobster bisque, garden salad, chicken cordon bleu, Asian noodles, beef tenderloin, mushroom risotto. The British are working on their culinary reputation, it seems. Their best, their brightest. They are a tough, intransigent lot, though they have softened a good deal in the past year or so. Embarrassed by what they have done for centuries in Ireland. Ready to leave. To hightail it out of there. They would wipe their hands clean in an instant, if only they didn’t have to do it in front of the world. They seem stunned that Northern Ireland somehow exists. How did they possibly ever believe that the country could have been good for them? What it all came down to was pride. Pride in the rise, and pride in the fall. They want to be able to leave with a measure of dignity. Tally-ho. Ta-ra. Voyeurs to their own experience. Living at an angle to the moment. And the Irish, down south, with almost the exact opposite dilemma. Embarrassed by the fact that it was taken away. Centuries of desire. Like the longing for a married woman. And now suddenly she is there, within your grasp, and you’re not quite sure whether you want her at all. Second thoughts. Other dowries. The mildew in the room where the past is stored. The Unionists, the Nationalists, the Loyalists, the Republicans, the Planters, the Gaels. Their endless gallery of themselves. Room after room. Painting after painting. Men on tall horses. Flags into battle. Sieges and riverbanks. The alphabet soup of the terrorists.

At first he couldn’t understand the accents. The spiky consonants. Angular and hard-edged. It seemed to him like an altogether different language. They came to the microphone. He had to lean forward to try to decipher it. The small punctuations of grief. Ach. Aye. Surely. Not our fault, Mr. Chairman. Six into twenty-six won’t go. They kicked the bloody door in, so they did. They pushed wee Peader out the helicopter. All due respect, Senator, we don’t talk to murderers. If Mr. Chairman would like to know what it’s like why don’t you come, for once, to the Shankill?

They were dumping out the contents of endless drawers on the floor. But he soon caught on. He began to tell the difference between a Belfast and a Dublin accent, between Cork and Fermanagh, between Derry and Londonderry even. All the geography that went into words. The history behind every syllable. The Battle of the Boyne. Enniskillen. Bloody Sunday. There was a clue in every tiny detail. Gary was a Prod. Seamus was a Taig. Liz lived on the Shankill Road. Bobby on the Falls. Sean went to St. Columba’s. Jeremy to Campbell. Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics. Nobody drove a green car. Your tie was never orange. You went for holidays in Bundoran or you went to Portrush. Fly your flag. Pick your poison. Choose your hangman.

Lord, it was a tangled web. One he would do well to sleep upon. One that needed an eternity of rest.

Still, he had grown to like them: the politicians, the diplomats, the spin doctors, the civil servants, the security men, even the loudmouths outside the gates. All of them with their own particular music. A certain generosity to them. All the dirty laundry somehow made eloquent. He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult — and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough. The self-deprecation. The effacement. The awareness. There was something about the endless wrangling that has caught him in the glue pot and kept him there. The confounded intricacies. The edges of endeavor. The fascination with the impossible. He wanted to stay alert to what might be learned. And there was always a key in the anonymous moment. The women in the canteen. They nodded at him and caught his eye. The sad smile. The generous delusion. The lean forward. God bless you, Senator, but it’s a fool’s errand. Well, be that as it may, but I’ll still take the part.

HE WAS NOT beyond knowing that they thought him — when he first arrived — a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. They even called him, for some reason, the Serb. He wasn’t interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible.

Still, he was sure some of them wanted a slice of anger from him. To stumble somehow. To say the wrong thing. So they could apportion the blame away from themselves. But he figured out ways to fade into the background, stuck to silence, looked over the rim of his glasses. He disliked his own importance in the process. It was the others who had brought the possibility here: Clinton, Reynolds, Hume, Major. He just wanted to land it. To take it down from where it was, aloft, like one of those great lumbering machines of the early part of the century, the crates of air and wood and wire they somehow flew across the water.

A RED EYELID of sun out the window. The vaguely scattered morning clouds. London below. The hum and flood of plane lights. His feet have swollen during the flight. In the overhead locker he reaches for his sweater.

He is vaguely embarrassed that Heather dresses him these days. She knows a Persian tailor who double-breasts his suits. It took a little while to step into the crease. Even the very word bespoke. The sweaters are from Cenci or some such place. Something comforting in them. A small surrendering to memory. Odd that desire is made true by distance. He can pull on the sweater and almost be back on Sixty-Seventh Street. Odd, too, how a life can so easily reshape itself. Perhaps the failure that irks him the most is the original marriage. It simply didn’t work out. They tried, he and his first wife, they hung on, they failed, what was broken was broken. Ashes do not become wood. What he feared early on was the idea that his grown daughter might see him in his new suit and ties, and that she would say nothing at all, that the silence would go right to the core of failure.

He hitches his jacket up on his shoulders. Onwards. Away. He is sixth off the plane. He allows the others to go ahead. His body still vaguely belonging to the cabin. That air in the back of his calves.

Halfway down the corridor he is surprised by a hand on his elbow. Bombing? Murder? Broken ceasefire? But it’s a young man, blue-eyed with a nose ring. Must have been sitting at the front of the plane. Vaguely familiar. Maybe a pop star of sorts. Or someone from the movies. Good luck, Senator, we’re praying for you. In an English accent. Odd to think of the young man praying at all. Mostly it was the older women of Northern Ireland who said that to him. Adjusting their hairnets. Wrapping their fingers white with beads.

He shakes the young man’s hand and strides along the corridor. But Lord, he hates this walk. Who will be there to meet and greet him? What sort of security detail? It always gets heavier on this side of the pond. Simply to walk him to another terminal. He can make out their shapes at the end of the walkway. A young woman with short blond hair lifts her hand in greeting: he recalls her name though he has only met her twice. Lorraine. And two new security men. Coming towards him briskly. No news on their faces, no sudden collapses. No apparent grief. Thank God for that.

— How was your flight, sir?

— Wonderful, thank you.

A small lie of course, but why whine? She’ll hardly whisk out a pillow for him. They move swiftly down the stairs, out to the waiting car, towards Terminal Two.

— Sorry, sir, but your next plane’s delayed thirty-five minutes, she says.

Lorraine has, on her belt, space for three phones. She juggles them with style and grace, hooks her fingers under the belt: the Wild West of telecommunications.

In the British Midland lounge they have reserved an area for him. Tea, pastries, yogurt. She hands him a memo and he scans it quickly. A report on Ahern and Blair. Concessions on the proposed North-South bodies. A clause in the Framework Document from three years ago. The status of the Council and the source of its authority. They are, it seems, approaching a tentative agreement on Strand Two.

For a moment he allows himself the luxury of a smile. Two o’clock in New York. Heather and Andrew will be sleeping.

THE NORTH, BELOW, is stunned with morning sunlight. Patches of bright yellow on the mud flats. The fields so wide and grassy. Lake and water-meadow. A silver estuary and a huge lake. One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west. The plane banks and the city of Belfast appears, always smaller than he expects it to be. The high cranes of the shipyards. The maze of side streets. The soccer pitches. The flats. The fretful desolation. Then out over the fields again, the incredible depth of green. He has never quite seen the land so bright before: a clear day through the morning clouds. He is used to its gray edges, its laneways, its high walls. They pull in over Lough Neagh. A vague sadness on touchdown, a tensing of the throat.

On the grass below, the shadow of the plane is squeezed down to its own size, then is gone. Welcome to Belfast International. Contents in the overhead bin may have shifted during flight. The stewardesses fuss with his jacket. He is whisked through security once more, out past the small café and the newsagent’s where he takes a quick glance at the newspaper headlines on the small metal racks. Nothing of damage. A good sign.

Outside, the vague smell of farmland manure hangs on the air. Three cars waiting. Gerald, his driver, greets him with a nod and a lift of the case.

In the car Gerald passes back a sheet of numbers. A small jump in his chest that it might be bad news, but it’s the baseball scores, copied from Reuters, handwritten. He scans them quickly. Opening day. Ah, yes. Hail and hallelujah. The Sox have won.

— A good start, he says.

— Aye, Senator. Oakland? Where’s that now?

— Way, way out there. California.

— Out in the sunshine.

— Keep the good news coming, Gerald.

— We’ll see what we can do, Senator.

The convoy pulls out through the airport, towards the M2, a wide motorway. Fields and hedges and scattered farms. Not much traffic until they get closer to the city. He could, quite possibly, be in any large American town, until he looks out to see the flags fluttering over the housing estates, sketching the skyline, claiming it, coloring it. The Unionists go for the Star of David, the Republicans fly the flag of the Palestinians. Small wars, large territories.

Written on a wall on the road out near Ballycloghan, in large white letters against the gray, a new piece of graffiti: We will never ever forget you, Jimmy Sands.

Which brings a wry smile to even Gerald’s face as they drive past, since it was of course Bobby they would never forget.

IN THE EARLY days — when the process was fresh — he would drive to the Stranmillis Tennis Club along the banks of the Lagan.

Nine or ten outdoor courts, all artificial turf. Sprinkled with gritty sand. Tough on his ankles. But he liked to get out and knock the ball back and forth: he played with the younger civil servants. They were careful at first not to try to beat him until they learned that there was a sort of unbeatability about him. He was relentless, he hung on, a backcourt player, he slid along the rear line, returning the ball safely over the net, time after time. The photos belied it, but he was sprightly.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity: he could play for hours on end in the Irish drizzle. He wore white shorts and long tube socks and a blue tracksuit top. Afterwards he would take the opportunity to laugh at himself in the changing-room mirror.

He was surprised early one morning to come off the northernmost court to see a group of women gathered together on the courts at the front of the club. He wandered quietly in amongst them. Signs were hung on the rear of the benches: ALL IRELAND WOMEN’S TOURNAMENT. He liked that notion. At least in tennis they could play together. He was taken by the sight of an elderly woman who piloted her wheelchair along the back of the courts. A thick-boned woman with striking gray hair. She must have been ninety, but she carried herself quite well in the chair. A generosity to her. She stopped at the back of each court and marked the clipboard with a pencil, then called out to the players and the umpires. She had a singsong voice. He thought he heard an American accent, but wasn’t sure.

He came back later that day after a series of plenaries in Stormont. The usual bickerings. The day had sapped the fire from him. The tournament was still in progress. He loosened his tie and took off his jacket and slid in amongst the crowd to watch the final game.

The woman in the wheelchair was positioned at the back of the court. She wore a plaid wool blanket over her lap. She nodded at each point, and clapped at the end of the games: large, loud, animate. He couldn’t tell what side she was supporting, if any. Every now and then she let out a long laugh, and put her head on the shoulder of a younger woman alongside her. Small ripples of applause slipped across the evening.

These were the moments he liked the most. The refuge of the anonymous. The ordinary bits and pieces. Ireland unwarred.

The match ended to a round of polite applause and the elderly lady was wheeled away from the back of the courts. He saw her reach out for a small plastic glass of champagne.

She was left alone a moment and he noticed the edge of her wheelchair catch on the artificial turf.

— Lottie Tuttle, she said, stretching out her hand.

— George Mitchell.

— Oh, we know who you are, Senator, we saw you this morning with that awful backhand.

He reared back and laughed.

— You’re American? he asked.

— Lord, no.

She finished the small glass of champagne.

— Canadian. Sort of.

— Sort of?

— Newfoundland.

— Beautiful place.

— Lottie Ehrlich was the name. Once. Long ago.

— I see.

— I go back to the Druids, really.

She laughed and pushed the right side of the chair and it spun gracefully. He could hear elements of Irish in her accent.

— I live out by the peninsula. Strangford.

— Ah, he said. I’ve heard of it. The lake.

— Indeed. The lough. You should come visit, Senator. You’d be most welcome. We’ve a small cottage on the water.

— Well, I’m rather tied up now, Lottie.

— We’re hoping you’re going to sort out this mess for us, Senator.

— I’m hoping that, too.

— After that you can return to your backhand.

Lottie smiled and made her way around the back of the court to talk with the tournament winner. She pushed the wheelchair along entirely by herself, but then she turned around with a grin.

— Really, Senator, your problem is that you’re not planting your back foot properly.

HE SAW HER a few times after that. She was a regular at the club. She had, by all accounts, been a handy player once. She had lost her grandson to the Troubles years ago. The Senator never inquired how the boy died: he did not want to get himself in the business of having to choose sides, whose fault, whose murder, whose bomb, whose rubber bullet, whose bureaucracy.

What he liked about Lottie Tuttle was the manner in which she insisted that she still push herself along in the wheelchair.

He saw her early one morning guide the chair out to the middle of one of the courts. She wore a wide white skirt and white blouse. Even her racquet was ancient, a great wooden frame with red-and-white catgut. A younger woman set up on the opposite side of the net and lobbed a few shots at her. They played for half an hour. Lottie hit only three or four balls, and afterwards she sat at the back of the court, exhausted, her swollen arm wrapped in ice, until she fell asleep and dozed under a blanket.

HE RUNS THE gauntlet of the offices at Stormont. Rows of low squat buildings. Hardly palatial. The Gulag, they call it. A good name. Appropriate.

His car pulls up slowly. The crowds are gathered outside the gates. Candles on one side, flags on another. He keeps his head down, inhabits the backseat. But in the rear of the crowd he spies a man carrying a sign, and a bolt of joy moves through him: The incredible happens.

Hallelujah to that, he thinks, as the gates open up, and the car nudges through, flashbulbs erupting at the windowpane.

He walks from the car park and takes the steps two at a time: even jet-lagged, he wants to carry an energy into the building.

THEY ARE ALL here now: the North, the South, the East, the West. The Unionists at one end of the corridor, the Republicans at the other. The Irish government downstairs. The British upstairs. Young diplomats plying the middle ground. Moderates scattered about. Pretty young observers from the European Union walking through with clipboards. The hum of the photocopy machine. The pattering of keyboards. The smell of burned coffee.

His walk is careful but energetic: handshakes, eye-flicks, nods, smiles. Tim. David. Maurice. Stewart. Claire. Seamus. Charles. Orla. Rory. Francoise. Good morning. Great to see you. We’ll have that report ready at noon, Senator.

A bounce in his step. Along the drab gray corridor. Into the small bathroom. A quick change of shirt. He shoves his arms briskly through the sleeves. He would hate to be caught shirtless. He leans into the mirror. The hair grayer than it should be. And a little more scattered on top.

He whisks a quick comb through the hair, parts it sideways, splashes a bit of cold water on his face. A river comes back to him, he does not know why: the Kennebec. There is a song he heard once, at a dinner in Dublin. Flow on lovely river, flow gently along, by your waters so clear sounds the lark’s merry song. The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy. He has heard them often, late at night, singing in the hotel bars, notes drifting up to his room.

His staff is waiting in the outer office. Martha. David. Kelly. They, too, are dark-eyed with lack of sleep.

They phone down the hall to bring in de Chastelain and Holkeri. Followed by their own staff, Irish and British both. A long trail of the weary.

— How was your flight, Senator?

— Wonderful, he says.

They grin and nod: of course it wasn’t. Their own war stories. Delayed flights. Forgotten anniversaries. A burst water pipe on Joy Street. A missed wedding in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A flat tire on the road from Drogheda. A sick niece in Finland. Something in their separateness has bound them together. They are all entirely sick of the process, but the deadline has jolted them awake.

— So tell me, he says, where do we stand?

What they have is a sixty-page draft, two governments, ten political parties, little less than two weeks. Strand One. Strand Two. Strand Three. None of the strands yet set in stone. The incredible weave of language. All the little tassels still hanging down. The tiniest atoms. The poorly tied knots. There is the possibility of an annex. The rumor of a rewrite. The suggestion of a delay. Where are they in London? Where are they are in Dublin? Where are they in the Maze? Or is that Long Kesh? There has been a call for transcripts of the plenaries. What exactly does substantive negotiations mean? Did the security team check the political background of the canteen staff? There is talk of a farm on the Tyrone border where whole crates of rocket-propelled grenades have been hidden. Someone has leaked the MI-5 report to the London Times. Could anyone please decommission the Sunday World? Paisley is cooking up a protest outside the gates. Did you hear that Mo Mowlam took off her wig again? Can you believe that they tried to smuggle a tape recorder into the Stormont inside a sofa? There are whispers of assassination attempts from within the prison walls. A 440-pound bomb was defused in Armagh. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the grounds of a Catholic kindergarten. The Women’s Coalition has called for calm and decency. The light in David Trimble’s office was on until four thirty in the morning. Someone should make sure that the Sands graffiti in Ballycloghan is scrubbed off. The one thing that should be working flawlessly are the photocopy machines. Make sure the word draft is stamped clearly across every page. Was there absolute clarification yet on the North-South ministerial council?

Everyone jumping off their own ledges, sailing out into the middle of the air, developing patterns of flight on the way down.

LATER IN THE morning, alone in his back office, he turns the desk lamp on. A small tilted urn of light. His desk has been cleaned. His photos dusted. The pile of papers stacked high. The red light on his private message machine blinks. He skips through the messages: seven in all. The second to last from Heather. She must have called in the middle of the night. Listen, she says. The sound of his son sleeping. Listen. The small intake of Andrew’s breath. He plays it twice and then a third time.

Sixty-one children.

He flicks the buttons open on his sleeves, rolls the cuffs back, phones downstairs to see if they’d bring him another pot of tea.

ONE SUMMER IN Acadia he learned chess. Move after move. Swap. Remain. Stay. The incredible switch of the king and the castle amazed him. You had to touch the king first and then bring the castle across. He was fascinated by the edge of the board. There was a saying: The knight on the rim is grim.

He learned to keep the knight over at the edge, safe until, late in the game, he could come inside and there was a whole board with eight sudden squares.

FOR THREE DAYS he and his staff stay in the Europa. In downtown Belfast. The Hardboard Hotel, they call it. The Piece Palace. Bits of it blown up twenty-seven times over the past few years. The most-bombed hotel in Europe. It is still, for some reason, the hotel of choice for the journalists, most of whom he knows on a first-name basis. They hang out in the piano bar, all times of the day. He has seen them often, the first drink placed down in front of them, practicing their posture, their casual disregard, their unreadability. They sit at the back as if the act of drinking has been forced upon them. Its obligation. And then all of a sudden the first drink is gone, and they are half a dozen towards obliteration. Stories of Sarajevo, no doubt. Srebrenica. Kosovo. As if Northern Ireland is a slight melancholy demotion. The very idea of a peace process is sentimental to many of them. A mysterious part of them needs an epic failure. They are out most nights, looking for the burning barrels and the kneecapped girls. Or else they are looking for a leak, some shred of scandal, some sexual sectarianism. When he enters the lobby, they try to cadge a quote. He understands it, the base desire at the core of a story. To put their own version of events into the world. It is the tabloids that he avoids the most: the Sun, the Mirror, the News of the World. He is careful whom he is seen stepping into the elevator with, just in case they take a candid shot of him.

They see him as a man who had stepped out from another century, polite, reserved, judicial, an ancient American, yet it is also a form of disguise: underneath they intuit that he is cast for the very end of the twentieth century, biding his time, waiting for his moment. No one has ever quite fully figured him out, if he is driven by the fear of evil, or spurred on by the prospect of what is good, or if he lies in the complicated in-between. Mystery. Silence. Sleep.

Upstairs, the suite is small and dark. The bed narrow. The bedcovers shiny with use. But there is at least a bowl of fruit on the table and flowers on the credenza. Easter lilies: a gentle nudge.

Bags on the floor. Jacket. Shirt. Belt. Trousers. No Heather to tidy him up. He lies down, exhausted, the day’s work still trilling in him. He feels bad for the two security men who have to guard his door. He would like to invite them in, have them put their feet up, pour a soda from the minibar. They are good men, one and all, but what a job, to stand outside a door all night with only the silence of a man who has learned to sleep anywhere, anytime.

Hotel rooms sharpen his loneliness. The hum of others who were here before.

One of his aides once dropped a contact lens on the floor near the window in the downstairs dining room. She got to her knees and searched around by the baseboards. Bits of dust, stray edges of the carpet. She found the contact lens clinging to a piece of wallpaper. But when she fingered the lens, she noticed, for the first time, that the slice of wallpaper was newer than the surroundings. A perfect square, but the paper had been badly applied. A bit of the wallpaper had begun to peel. She noticed a scorch mark beneath, the blackness faded to red. Most likely a petrol bomb thrown years ago. The old hieroglyphics of violence.

He has heard that the women of Belfast used to keep wet blankets by the door, just in case.

He pulls back his own blanket, prepares himself for bed. He has a mobile wardrobe that accompanies him from place to place, a set of lurking ghost clothes. He finds the pajamas, gruffs his way into them. It’s easy then to fall asleep, if even just for a few hours.

HUME. TRIMBLE. ADAMS. Mowlam. Mallon. McMichael. Cooney. Hill. Donoghue. McWilliams. Sager. One by one they visit his office. The air of worried men and women. Everyone with something to lose. This — he has discovered — is part of their generosity. The ability to embrace failure. The cost of what they might leave behind.

They are at ease with him now. They know his ways. He does not like to sit behind his desk anymore. He has broken that territory. He comes out, instead, and sits by the small table that he has set up near the window with four wooden chairs.

With each visitor there is a new set of biscuits and a warm teapot. He pours the tea himself. One of his small gestures. He is not sure if it’s a trick or not, but he likes the ritual. The trays are stacked upon his desk. That, too, is part of his routine. He does not want the meetings disturbed. Showmanship or decency: he is not sure which.

He brings the trays downstairs to the canteen where the ladies in the hairnets hurry out to meet him, all fuss and apology.

— What about ye, Senator?

— Leave those trays be, Senator.

— Ach, don’t be doing that. What’re ye like?

— If ye weren’t married, I’d kiss ye.

— Ye wouldn’t come home and clean my kitchen, would y’now, Senator? That’d be some peace process, let me tell ye.

If the canteen is empty he will take a seat in the corner to watch them a moment. He likes their singsong, their bustle. They remind him of the ladies of Maine. The waitresses in the diners. The women in the tollbooths, leaning out their fume-darkened windows.

One of the tea-ladies, Claire Curtain, has a scar on the left side of her forehead in the exact shape of a horseshoe. One afternoon she caught him looking at it, and she blithely told him that it was a result of a bombing — she was on her way to a concert in a bandstand, there was a horse regiment standing nearby, the blast went off, she was walking by along a tree-lined avenue, and she was hit in the head, left with an almost perfect shoe mark on her forehead, and what she remembered most of all was waking, concussed, confused by the sight of horse hooves dangling in the trees.

THE CORRIDORS BUZZ. A faint chanting coming from the crowds outside. The nervous whirl of helicopters overhead. He climbs the rear stairs towards his office, a packet of McVitie’s Digestives tucked under the flap of his suit jacket.

He was driven last summer, by Gerald, out to a farmhouse on the Plantation Road in Derry. He had been at a conference in Coleraine and it was still early: he was not expected back in Belfast until midnight.

He thought at first that he might get Gerald to drive to the sea and take the coast road up around the headlands, but they swung south instead, out into a tangle of backcountry where Gerald had grown up.

Chestnut trees arced the roads. Sheep and cattle paraded in the fields. The light lengthened, stretched the shadows of the hedges and trees. It reminded him of lower Maine: that lush, rained-upon feel.

They drove along a length of carefully planted forest. Gerald pointed out his old school, the fields, the boxing club. It was nine or ten in the evening, but the sky was still bright, birds out over the haystacks.

— You ever been this way, Senator?

He shook his head, no. They crested a small hill and Gerald pulled the car in towards a blue gate. Down below, in the half valley, there were wide brown steppingstones across a river. Enormous oak trees bent to the water. A series of hedgerows slumped towards a distant farmhouse. Rough tractor tracks ran along the riverbank.

Gerald stepped out of the car and leaned against the gate, his chin cupped in his hands. A summertime smoke drifted across the air: a wood fire, an odd thing on such a warm evening.

— I lived over yonder when I was a child, Gerald said.

He pointed to the small farmhouse tucked into the grove of high oak trees.

— My sister’s there now.

He knew what Gerald was asking. No harm, the Senator thought.

It was late in the evening, but he could allow an hour to slip away.

— You should give her a call, Gerald.

— Ach. She’s there with her wee uns. Sure, she’d have a heart attack.

The driver shifted in the silence, as if waiting for another response. Nothing more was said. The light fell slowly across the fields. The Senator reached for the blue gate. When he pushed the bar, the gate groaned and returned. The hasp was rusty. A few blue flakes fell down into the grass.

— Just stretching my legs, he said.

It was odd how uneven the field was: from the gate it had looked perfectly flat and smooth. Clods of earth. Old mounds of manure. Tough, thorny weeds. He stepped towards the enormous stillness of the trees. His good shoes squelched underneath him.

Gerald called from behind him and then he heard the dull closing of a car door, the quiet hum of an engine. He glanced back to see the car crawling along, the roof just visible over the hedgerow.

The car beeped again. He raised his hands in salute, but kept walking through the field. His shadow slanted in the evening light. The northern sky took on colors now, in the distance, the aurora borealis. Reds, greens, purples. He could feel the hem of his trousers against the grass. Small splashes of mud rising up on the back of his heels.

At the river he thought for a moment that he would just turn around and go back the way he came. A loud beeping. No car. He was out of sight. He unloosened his tie. The steppingstones were slick. He peered down into the water. The evening sun fashioned wheels of light on the surface. He thought he saw the dart of minnows. He held on to a tree branch and hunched a little to prepare for the fall, but landed safely on the middle riverstone.

Leaves stirred about him. Odor of moss and reeds and trout. It thrilled him to think there were still moments like this. He looked up through the enormous trees. A ray of sky. He grabbed the long grasses on the far side of the riverbank, pulled himself up. His foot trailed behind him and splashed in the water. A cold swell around his ankle. He ran up the steep bank. The back of his shoe chafed against his heel. In the distance, again, a loud beeping.

Fifty yards from the farmhouse, he saw her in the rear courtyard. At the washing line. Amid gray stonework and a couple of abandoned cars. She was young and aproned. Her hair was stretched into a dark bun at the base of her neck. The washing line ran for thirty yards along the courtyard. White rope between two tall poles. A large straw basket of laundry lodged in against her hip. She was taking giant white bed sheets from the line. Gerald’s sister.

She walked along the length of the clothesline and unclipped the wooden pegs one by one, then put them in her hair.

The sun appeared large on the western horizon now: the bed sheets were magenta.

He heard the house phone ring from a distance: it carried through the air. Gerald’s sister stooped and put the laundry basket on the cobbles. She walked wearily towards the house. She seemed to sigh into the doorway. The ringing stopped.

Moments later he heard a shriek from the house and saw her emerge in a rush of hair and apron and clothes pegs. She ran towards the washing line, and yanked the last of the sheets, looked wildly about.

Gerald’s car was pulling along the laneway, beeping. The Senator stepped out from among the trees. Gerald had rolled down his window and was grinning now.

— Meet the Senator, he said.

— Ach, sure, look at his shoes, she said. What’ve ya done to the poor man?

— My fault entirely, said the Senator.

— I’m Sheila.

— Pleasure to meet you.

— He let you walk through the field?

— Not exactly.

— He’s never had any sense, our Gerry.

She took him by the elbow and guided him towards the house. He cleaned his shoes carefully on the dark mat, then stepped through the scullery and along a tiled corridor in his stockinged feet. A warmth rolled from the large red stove. A smell of recent cooking. Simple crockery on shelves on the wall. In the front room, three quiet children gathered around a television set. A game show. They wore their pajamas. Sheila called out to them. Her voice was high and sharp. The children snapped the television off and stood up to attention, reached out to shake his hand. Freckled. Towheaded. He got down on one knee in front of them and knuckled their shoulders.

He asked their names: Cathal, Anthony, Orla. A sharp absence flooded through him: he showed them a picture of Andrew but they couldn’t comprehend it; they glanced at the picture, said nothing.

He was guided to the kitchen table and he could hear the high whistle of the kettle already going. Gerald sat across the table from him, his hands folded, his face in a generous grin.

Moths crossed the mouth of a lamp on the far side of the room. The wallpaper was patterned with flowers. On the sideboard sat a row of photographs. In several of the photos there was a young man, longhaired, handsome. He seemed to disappear from the photographs: the man reached a certain age and then was gone. A sudden worry flooded the Senator: perhaps Gerald’s brother-in-law was involved with the Troubles somehow? Maybe there had been a murder. Perhaps a conviction somewhere. A shooting. An internment. He felt a rod of fear stiffen his shoulders. Perhaps he had done the wrong thing entirely, walking through this field, entering this farmhouse, taking off his shoes. Perhaps others would claim he had an allegiance. He wasn’t sure now how he could possibly extricate himself. All his time here, a series of careful choices. How simple it was to put a foot wrong.

A set of headlights swept across the ceiling. The darkness had fallen so very quickly. Cars on the outside road. Maybe they had been followed. Someone taking photographs perhaps. There was a gap in the curtains, for sure. He turned his body sideways to the window. He put his hand up to his face. Another sweep of headlights went through the room. He cursed himself, knotted his hands tight.

He saw Gerald’s sister step out from the kitchen towards him. Her figure was small, slim, lithe. Her face clarified when she stepped beyond the doorway. Something hard about her eyes. He was surprised by a body odor that rolled from her. Sheila ran her hands along the sideboard. Then she stopped a moment and touched one of the photo frames.

— We lost him about six years ago now, she said.

— Excuse me?

— My husband.

— I’m sorry.

— The North Sea, she said.

Sheila flicked a quick look at the children who were gathered on the carpet near the bay window.

— He was working in the oil fields.

She lowered her voice again.

— We don’t talk about it much in front of the wee uns, she said.

He felt a surge move through him. A gust of thanks. Sheila had intuited his brief terror. He wanted to grasp her hand. The happiness of being wrong. The affirmation of it. But what could he say? He had assumed the worst. Ireland. Always the worst.

He flicked another look out the window.

— Do you mind if we close the curtains, Gerald?

He wanted to sag back in the chair and relax. Amid the teacups and the crockery. He could be cynical tomorrow: always time for that.

He brought the cup to his lips. Already a small skin of cold had formed on the surface of the tea. He glanced at the mantelpiece clock. It was almost ten thirty. Sheila put the kettle on again. The Senator stretched his legs out in front of him. He heard the children moving about on the carpet, whispering amongst themselves. There was something funny at hand, it seemed. Their famous visitor. His American accent? His bearing? The way he dunked his biscuits in his tea perhaps? They were giggling now and he saw a sternness move across Sheila’s face. She glared at her children. They fell quiet. A small curtain seemed to cross her eyes, too.

She cut another slice of fruitcake. Gerald plugged in the electric fire. He had yet another story to tell. The Senator glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. At eleven in the evening he stood to say good-bye. Again the children giggled.

He reached across to shake hands, but instead she pulled him towards herself in the manner of someone familiar. He thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek.

— You want me to darn that? Sheila asked quietly in his ear.

— Excuse me?

Another whisper.

— Ye’ll not be taking your shoes off in Stormont, now, will ye?

He glanced down to see the hole in the heel of his right sock. She was laughing now, her face tilted up at him.

— It’ll only take me a wee minute, she said.

Later that night on the phone to Heather all he could hear was the laughter down the wire from his wife, and three days later, in an express package that had to be opened and examined by the secret service, five new pairs of plain gray socks, none for Saturdays or Sundays, simply because she wanted him home.

HE SHIFTS HOTELS on the fifth night. There have been rumors and bomb scares. Another strong hint at an assassination attempt. In the morning, he packs his pajamas, his toothbrush, his extra clothes, and in the evening the security team move him across to the Hilton at the waterfront. From there he will go to his favorite, the Culloden.

Little matter. All his time is in the Stormont offices now. Those dark corridors.

On the phone he talks to Blair and Ahern. President Clinton, too. A letter of best wishes arrives from Nelson Mandela. A handwritten note from Václav Havel. Late in the evening, he and Holkeri pace the halls. Light leaks from under doors. Whispers in the back shadows. Waiting for new drafts of sentences, paragraphs, whole documents to come their way. He is reminded of salmon moving the wrong way up against the water. The Kennebec. Its intricacies. The swift curl at the mill. Patches of light in the eddies, standing waves.

WHEN THE DIPLOMATIC pouch arrives from London on Sunday night — two days late — his heart falls through his chest. Strand Two. From Ahern and Blair. He knows the very moment he reads it that it will not work. He gathers with de Chastelain and Holkeri and their staff. A chill coming in on the weather. There is a Frost poem from school days. Whose woods these are I think I know. He hears it again, distantly, brokenly. Miles to go before I sleep. There are times he wishes he could knock an absolute simplicity into the process. Take it or leave it.

He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence of all existents. The excluded middle ground. The surpassing of personality. The vanity of cultural superiority. The tension between individual conscience and collective responsibility. The need to proclaim again and again what has already been said.

Later, at the press conference, he holds up his hands in a gesture of calm. He has practiced this. There is an art to it: keep the hands open enough not to frame the face, spread the fingers wide in a gesture of appeasement. The ability to deflect a question without swatting it away. He allows a long silence before answering. Speaks evenly, calmly. Moves his gaze around the room. Slowly. Judicially. He tries not to adjust his glasses on his nose — too much a gesture of fabrication. He already knows he will absorb the blame. It is his delay, his fault, his carelessness. No matter. They must go on.

He thanks the prime ministers and government officials. They deserve a lot of praise. Tremendous effort. Energy. Concentration. Ardor. Grace. We urge everyone to proceed. Common sense dictates. Discussions are ongoing. Can you rephrase your question? That assertion, sir, is incorrect.

Flashbulbs pop. A mobile phone rings. A frisson of nervous laughter skitters around the room. He keeps his answers vague. Tiptoes around the truth. He is careful not to let the politeness reel off into anger. His job is to tamp the confusion down. Return again to the moment of simplicity. Reiterate what they came for. The people of Northern Ireland have waited long enough.

What they need are the signatures. After that, they will negotiate the peace. Years of wrangling still to come, he knows. No magic wand. All he wants is to get the metal nibs striking against the page. But really what he would like now, more than anything, is to walk out from the press conference into the sunlight, a morning and evening jammed together, so that there is rise and fall at the same time, east and west. It strikes him at moments like this that he is a man of crossword puzzles, pajamas, slippers. All he really wants is to get on a plane to New York, enter the lobby of the apartment on Sixty-Seventh Street, step into his own second chance, that proper silence of fatherhood.

HE WRITES HEATHER an email to say that he will be home soon. Easter Saturday at the latest. He is careful with the note, in case it is intercepted. No flourishes. No professions of love. He clicks Send, and then goes for a walk in Lady Dixon Park in the middle of the night, amongst the roses, rolling a pebble along at his feet, his security detail behind him, matching him step for step.

It is a photo that’s used in the newspapers a few days later. For the Easter editions. The Senator rolling a stone with his foot. In the gloom. Away from a cave of light. On Good Friday itself.

Nothing, in Northern Ireland — not even the obvious — ever escapes attention.

IT IS AS if, in a myth, he has visited an empty grain silo. In the beginning he stood at the bottom in the resounding dark. Several figures gathered at the very top of the silo. They peered down, shaded their eyes, began to drop their pieces of grain upon him: words. A small rain at first. Full of vanity and history and rancor. Clattering in the emptiness. He stood and let it sound metallic around him, until it began to pour, and the grain took on a different sound, and he had to reach up and keep knocking the words aside just to get a little space to breathe. Dust and chaff in the air all around him. From their very own fields. They were pouring down their winnowed bitterness, and in his silence he just kept thrashing, spluttering, pushing the words away. A refusal to drown. What nobody noticed, not even himself, was that the grain kept rising, and the silo filled, but he kept rising with it, and the sounds grew different, word upon word, falling around him, building beneath him. And now — at the top of the silo — he has clawed himself up and dusted himself off and he stands there equal with the pourers who are astounded by the language that lies below them. They glance at each other. Three ways down from the silo. They can fall into the grain and drown, they can jump off the edge and abandon it, or they can learn to sow it very slowly at their feet.

A RUMOR OF morning hangs faint on the sky. He wears his thick gray overcoat, his scarf, a plain wool hat. He does not wear a flat one for fear he will appear partisan. The confounded demands of peace. He drives towards Stormont, taps Gerald on the shoulder just as they pull in.

— You sure, Senator?

He sees security men scurry into position the moment he gets out. The cold stings his cheeks. The dawn holds the prospect of rain. He leaves the car door slightly open, just in case. The men and women are ranged around barrels, warming their hands. They raise their heads at the sight of him. They have gathered so many candles, burning all night. Against the wall, rows and rows of flowers. How is it possible to speak of the dead? He has imagined the troubles of these people. A sort of ghosthood. How many nights have they sat outside these gates, waiting? Shopkeepers. Plumbers. Musicians. Butchers. Tinsmiths. Professors. Their blights and difficulties. He is at home amongst them. A teenage girl with a shine of sadness in her eye. A man pulling down the shabby hood of his coat to speak. Aye, Senator. What about ye? Frosty enough for ye, hai? Reporters jostling their way through the crowd. A Muslim woman in a headscarf: even she with an Irish desire. A longing spreading through the raw cold. Murmurs moving amongst them.

At the edge of the crowd, he stops. He is not quite sure if it is she or not. Her face in the distance. He peeks over a row of shoulders. The movement of the crowd. The sway. At the edge of the barricades. In a wheelchair. Wrapped in a couple of blankets. He gently parts the crowd and moves towards her.

— Morning.

— Hello, Senator.

Her name, briefly, escapes him. From Stranmillis. Lost her grandson.

— No tennis today?

— Thought I’d come for the final set.

— Oh, well, we hope it’s that, he says.

— Game and set, anyway, Senator.

— So far.

— Make it happen for us, she says, and she pauses a moment: Please.

He nods. The plaid blanket pulled up to her neck. Ninety years old at least. How can she possibly be out in such weather? It strikes him how easy it is to say yes, yes, he will make it work, he will do everything in his power to make it work. But it is out of his hands now. It does not belong to him: it is the property of others.

— Thanks for coming out, Lottie.

— Good luck, Senator.

— Thank you.

— Senator. My daughter. Hannah. Have you met her?

— Yes, of course.

A younger version of Lottie, really. Late fifties or sixties. An energy to her, a flair.

— We can’t thank you enough, Senator, says Lottie.

— It’s nothing, he says.

— Oh, it’s something, it surely is.

Lottie turns in her chair, pulls off her glove, and extends her hand towards him and says: You don’t know what this means, Senator.

— I’ll do what I can.

He is guided back towards the car and for some odd reason — he is not sure why — he slides into the front seat beside Gerald and he puts his hand on the dashboard as if this is a border to cross, a place he will not come back from. The car eases through the gates and the barrier is pulled down behind him. You don’t know what this means. Perhaps she is correct — he has spent all this time not truly knowing what it means. Now, it means everything. He will see this through now. To the bitter end. He will not back down. He hears another shouting behind him, a chant, and the bash of a lambeg drum.

He is dropped off in front of the building. He tells Gerald to go home and get some rest, but he knows full well that his driver will remain in the parking lot, the seat of the car extended backwards, the radio clicked on, steam from the heat gathering on the windscreen, turning and squirming in the small space.

Up the steps he goes, into the drab office block. A heaviness in the corridors. He walks along, shaking hands, touching shoulders. He knows every single one of their names. They are polite, deferent — scared, too. If they are to own it, they are also the ones to lose it. A valuable thing. Once in a thousand years. Peace.

He takes the stairs to the third floor. The stairwells reek of cigarette smoke. In his office he cracks open his window.

News comes later in the morning. A murder in Derry. A member of the paramilitaries. The statements are out. The press releases. The men of violence. Pointless retaliation. Trevor Deeney. Sitting in a car beside his wife. Shot point-blank. For what reason? Is there ever a reason? There will be retaliation. Already promised. This murder, too, is retaliation. Murder the murderers. Deeney’s brother opened fire in a bar called The Rising Sun. No end to the ironies. He leans his forehead against the desk. Strapped to a wheel, we shall not break.

Si vis pacem.

He reaches for the phone. We cannot let this happen, he says. We must make a sharp statement. Draw a line. Show no fear.

Para bellum.

He walks from office to office. Works on the press release. They are all in agreement: nothing will derail us now. We have come too far. Enough is enough. No surrender. We own that dictum now. It is ours. No. Surrender.

Later the news reaches him that Bertie Ahern’s mother, in Dublin, has died. Still, the Taoiseach will arrive by helicopter later tomorrow. Blair, too, will arrive with his convoy. The power brokers. The figureheads. The men who have inherited it. All of them will be in one place. In the one building. Primed. There is talk of a thousand journalists now, too. A thousand. It stuns him. From all corners of the globe. He must coordinate it now, this endgame. No matter what. He sits at his desk, uncaps his fountain pen. There can be no discussion of a pause or break. I intend to tell the parties that I won’t even consider such a request. There’s not going to be a break, not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour. We’ll either get an agreement or we’ll fail to get an agreement.

He cracks the window further. A sea-wind. All those ships out there. All those generations that left. Seven hundred years of history. We prefigure our futures by imagining our pasts. To go back and forth. Across the waters. The past, the present, the elusive future. A nation. Everything constantly shifted by the present. The taut elastic of time. Even violence breaks. Even that. Sometimes violently. You don’t know what this means, Senator.

For the next two days he will hardly sleep, hardly eat. No hotels even. He refuses to leave the office. He will sleep at his desk. He will wash at the hand basin in the small bathroom. Run the water. Tap the soap dispenser. Wash his hands thoroughly, methodically. Splash water on the back of his neck. Walk back along the corridor. Meet with Hume and Trimble. Listen carefully to their every word. Good men, both. The linchpins of the process. And he will spend hours on the phone with Clinton. Examining the very minutiae of the process. The dream of it all. The parade of footsteps along the corridor. Draft and redraft. He will beg the civil servants not to leak the documents. He will stand at the photocopy machine himself. Just to guard the memos. He will even number the copies. Walk up and down the stairs. From the canteen to his office, and back. Visitor after visitor. Party leaders. Representatives. Diplomats. Civil servants. He will feel as if he has had the same conversation a dozen times, two dozen. He will catch himself in midtalk, wondering if he has said this same thing just seconds before. A flush of blood to his cheeks. An embarrassment. Searching for new ways to say the exact same thing. He will listen for a riot, another murder, a bomb blast. On the radio. The television. At the gates even. None will come. Just the constant knocking on his door. Trays of sandwiches. Pots of tea. He will hear the sirens roar out the window. The cheers and the booing. The letters slipped in under the door. The whispered moan of prayers. The uneaten trays of food. Claire Curtain. Lottie Tuttle. Sheila Whelan. All the bits and pieces of his days. His desire for sleep nearly as powerful as his desire for peace. He should call her. Has he called her? Her voice. His breath. Andrew. Sleep.

THE CANTEEN WORKERS finish at ten in the evening, but then his own staff trundle downstairs to light the stove, boil the water, stir the leaves. He will lift and pour, lift and pour. This whole memory, it will taste of tea.

THERE IS A swerve to Blair. The neat suit, the tie. A dishevelment to Ahern. A busy grief. Both of them sweeping in, taking over their offices. Second floor. Third floor. Meeting after meeting. Phone call after phone call. Blair says to him that he feels as if he is entering a caisson. The pressure slowly building. Beginning to swell. A common feeling, that, but what is the word for it? There is, surely, a word for it, a phrase. The Senator cannot recall. So tired now. The ache in his shoulders. Searching for the word, but he cannot find it.

FOUR IN THE morning. Blair’s office. The desk neat and meticulous. A pen balanced on the rim of a coffee cup. The Prime Minister’s shirt open to the second button. They are stuck now on a point of language. The British and their words. The Irish and their endless meanings. How did such a small sea ever come between them?

He watches Blair run his hands through his hair. Strange, that. The Prime Minister’s hair is wet. And the cheeks are glistening. Somehow freshly shaved? Did he manage a shower? Where, then, and how? Surely there is no shower in the building? There cannot be. All these months he has been here, the Senator has never seen one, nor heard of one. No need, back then, with hotel rooms. But a shower? He craves one now. Just the idea. The pourdown. The cleansing. He should ask straight out, but, then again, there is the matter of decorum. Etiquette. Impolite, probably, to tread upon the personal with the Prime Minister? Focus now. Focus. The issue is prisoners. And remand. And language. Eight hundred years of history. How is it now that they can manipulate the words? What is the right way to force the Unionist hand? Will Adams play along? Can Ahern have a word in McGuinness’s ear? What last words? Where is Hume? There is a leak of light, still, from under Trimble’s door. The intrusion of the ordinary. Tired. So very tired. He still cannot shake the idea that Blair’s hair is wet.

He leaves Blair’s office at five forty-five, and at six in the morning, he sends his staff searching. They arrive back, triumphant. There is indeed a shower. Unknown to them all this time. On the third floor. The only one in the building. Incredible, really. A closet hardly big enough to step inside. The Senator goes upstairs, undresses, steps in, leans his head against the tile. Slick and grimy. He doesn’t care. The water pounds down upon his shoulders. Warm and hard against his face. A caisson indeed. The bends. That’s it. That’s the phrase he was looking for. The bends.

He dries himself off with his shirt and walks out into the corridor, a little bounce in his step, his socks wet from where he has padded on the floor.

EARLY ON GOOD Friday afternoon Gerald hands him an envelope. He unfolds the sheet of paper. Sits back in his chair. He had forgotten altogether. Well, there you have it. The Sox. Bottom of the ninth.

He hears a cheer from downstairs, an applause along the corridor, as if the whole country has heard the news.

A FEW TAPS on the pane make him turn. It is lightly raining outside. Falling diagonally against the glass, catching a moment, as if surprised to be stopped. Rolling downwards. Accumulating and dropping farther. He crosses the room and leans across to lift the latch, opens the window wide. Damp air enters the office. Sounds from the street. A beeping of car horns. A cheer from the front gates. A distant sound of traffic and then a silence. He would like to hold this moment, suspend it, to surround himself with only this, to be bounded by it. He leans his hands against the frame. The small touch of rain against his wrist.

The Senator hears the ringing of the telephone and a gentle knocking on the door, slowly more insistent.

The cheers along the corridor growing louder.

He leans his palms against the window. Perhaps to contemplate such happiness is to diminish it. Sixty-one children. He knows, now, that there will be an ordinariness to that he will return to, other days of tedium and loss, and the Troubles will most likely crash into him from behind, when he least expects it, but for now, for the very briefest moment, this suspended instance, the impossible has happened.

The Senator touches his head against the cool of the glass.

— Come in, he says.

HE LEAVES FOR the airport at dawn on Easter Sunday morning. A bright day. As if it were designed for this somehow. He emerges from the Culloden Hotel, down the stone steps, towards the car. The tiredness in his eyes, his jaw, his shoulders. His whole body belonging elsewhere.

A helicopter hovers on the skyline. The distant trees sway. Fragments of white cloud slide on a layered blue sky.

A couple of journalists wait for him in the driveway of the hotel. The Irish Times. The Independent. Die Zeit. Le Figaro. They are already calling it the Good Friday Accords. He wanders over. Hands in his pockets. Still wearing his blue suit, but his shirt open, the small vee of sunburn at his neck, the rest a paleness. He has only ten minutes. He knows their trade: they will want to talk to him one on one. Fintan. Dirk. Lara. Dominique. Always their first names. He walks along the gravel, side by side. The gray dust scuffing his shoes. He is astounded by the calm of his answers. Yes, we must maintain a sense of composure. The real work is only just beginning. I am quietly optimistic. Hopeful in fact. We sensed all along that something could be achieved. We turn it over now to the people of the North and South. The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no. There were times when I thought we were teetering on the edge.

He would like for a moment to tell one of the journalists that there was a giddiness in the hallways of Stormont, that he could hear the champagne corks being popped downstairs in the canteen, that he leaned his head against the shower stall and wept with joy. Still, there is decorum to maintain. A need for parsimony. A careful tread. We have all been caught out before.

The true verdict, he says, will belong to history. The ordinary people own it now. We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here. Nothing could have been achieved unless it was, first, wanted. The collaboration was across the board. No, it doesn’t take courage to shoot a policeman in the back of the head. What takes courage is to compete in the arena of democracy. But let’s not pretend it’s finished. Yet let’s not pretend that it has only just begun either. It was not an expectation, no. It was a conviction. Generations of mothers will understand this. I do not find it sentimental at all, no, never, not that. Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

A catch in his voice now. Think about it, he says. It’s simple enough. We’re forced to change because we’re forced to remember. And we’re forced to remember when we’re forced to confront. Sixty-one children.

He watches the hovering helicopter. It dips sideways an instant, disappears behind the angle of the treetops. He feels a dull thump in his chest, but the sound of the rotors dwindles and the helicopter turns and fades off.

The journalists thank him. Shake his hand. He makes his way across to Gerald who leans against the car, grinning ever so slightly. The driver has a sheet in his hand. The Senator takes it, tucks it away. He will leave it for the plane.

The car rattles out onto the road. The blur of green hedges. The distant warehouses. The rooflines. The flags. The skirling flutes, the bright sashes, the echo of the lambeg drums. Enough now. The crossed armalite, the morose songs, the black berets. Gone, all gone. Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.

It will be morning now in New York. He will fly to London, then home. He will get there by noon. First off the plane. He will leave, for a moment, all decorum behind. He will emerge through customs to see her there, leaning forward, over the barrier, waiting. Dark hair with a ray of gray. Sunglasses on her head. The most eloquent of welcomes. He will take Andrew in his arms. Lean down towards him. Fasten both of them in an embrace.

Or he will call ahead and talk to her and have her waiting downstairs. In the marbled lobby. Her hands against the glass. With his son in the papoose against her chest. The quick kick of her heel backwards in the air. Like women from other wars. She will spin out through the revolving doors, four quarters, provinces of desire.

Or he will surprise her entirely. Arrive without a word. Make his way through the airport, walk quickly along the corridor, out the door into the brief light, Ramon waiting by the overhang in his flat cap. The highways. The bridges. The green signs. The crush of yellow traffic. Through the arc of the tollbooth. Over the bridge. Ramon will dip down through Harlem, speed west, swing south along Broadway. The families out walking in the hard yellow sunshine. Young women with dogs. Children in baseball caps. Near Lincoln Center, they will slow down, ease across the lanes. Ramon will pull sharply into the curved driveway. The Senator will leave the briefcase in the back of the car. No reporters please. No cameras. No notebooks. He will push open the revolving door. A series of nods and smiles. Ask the doormen not to call up. No warning. He will want to surprise her. At least for an instant. He will hope that she doesn’t hear the elevator bell. He will softly key open the door and ghost through the room, across the carpet, into the bedroom, catch them sleeping, a noontime nap. He will pause a moment, watching. Her hair askew. Her body long and slim and quiet against the sheets. The baby against her. Slip off his shoes, his suit jacket, his sweater. Lift the bed sheet. Easter Sunday. Crawl into bed beside them. The cool of the pillow. The sheer slice of sunlight through the room. Waken them to laughter. The pinch of his skin. Hers. The slow curve of her hip.

A walk, then, to Sheep Meadow. The grass cool to the touch. The skyscrapers gray and huge against the trees. To be allowed to feel small again. To embrace that insignificance. The sun over the west side of Manhattan. Falling. The dark rolled backwards.

The car drives on. Beyond Belfast now, into the countryside. The light on the slant of the fields. Fenced here, unbounded there.

There is always room for at least two truths.