Read Chapter 4: The Missing Brother

The afternoon light had gone thin and grey by the time Maeve walked her mother back to the small stone cottage at the edge of the estate. She had meant to stay only a quarter of an hour—there was mending to do, and accounts to tally, and a hundred small tasks that pressed on her like stones in her apron pockets—but her mother had set out tea, and Maire Brennan had a way of making silence feel like an accusation. So Maeve stayed. She sat in the low chair by the turf fire, letting the heat seep into her bones, and listened to her mother talk about the neighbour’s cow and the price of salt and how the new priest had a cough that did not sound right at all.

“I had a letter from Cormac,” her mother said, as casually as if she had mentioned the weather.

Maeve’s hand stopped halfway to her cup. “You had what?”

“A postcard.” Maire fumbled in the pocket of her apron and pulled out a creased piece of card, bent at the corners, the ink smudged in places. “It came Tuesday last. I meant to tell you sooner, but with all the fuss about the Englishman…”

Maeve took the card. Her fingers were cold. The image on the front was a drawing of a wide, busy street, buildings crowded together, a caption in faded letters: BROADWAY, NEW YORK. She turned it over. The handwriting was tight and slanted, the hand of a man who wrote quickly and did not want to be questioned.

*Maire Brennan, care of the Post House, Ballymore, County Galway, Ireland.*

And above the address, in the same cramped script:

*Ma, I am alive. I know you had word I was gone, but I am not. I have been in the west, working the railroads. I have a place now and money coming. Do not tell anyone yet. I will write again when I can. — C.*

Maeve read it twice. Three times. The words did not change. Her brother, dead these eight years—dead in a fever in a Massachusetts boarding house, according to the letter that had come with his belongings—her brother was alive, and in New York, and had sent a postcard to their mother as if the years between had been no more than a long journey.

She looked up at her mother, who was watching her with the bright, anxious hope of a woman who had spent eight years not quite believing what she had been told.

“He is alive, Maeve.” Maire’s voice trembled. “I knew it. I told your father—God rest him—I told him no son of mine would go so quiet. But he said the letter was from the priest in Boston, and who were we to doubt a priest?”

Maeve handed the card back slowly. Her mind was moving too fast, catching on edges. Cormac had left Ireland at nineteen, wild-eyed and restless, swearing he would send money home or die trying. He had not sent money. He had not sent letters. And then the news had come, and Maeve had mourned him, and her mother had put black on her door for a month before the neighbours said it was enough.

“He says he has money now,” Maire went on, tucking the card carefully into her apron pocket. “He says he will come home, or send for us, or—you know Cormac, he never told the whole of a thing. But he is alive, Maeve. That is what matters.”

“Does he know about the estate?” Maeve asked. She tried to keep her voice level. “About Seamus, and the debts?”

“I wrote him after Seamus died. I do not know if he got it.” Maire frowned. “Why? Do you think he could help? He says he has money, Maeve. If he has money, and he is your brother, and he has daughters he has never met…”

Maeve felt the weight of what her mother was not saying. *You are not alone in this. You have a brother. You have kin who could carry some of the burden.*

But she had read the postcard. She had seen the words *Do not tell anyone yet.*

“I think,” Maeve said carefully, standing and setting her cup on the table, “that we should not count on letters from America until we have seen his face. It has been eight years, Mother. People change. Lives change.”

Maire’s face tightened. “You never liked him running off.”

“I liked him fine. I did not like him leaving us to manage the land alone, and then being told he was dead, and then—this.” Maeve gestured at the apron pocket where the card now rested. “A postcard. After eight years. No return address, no way to reach him. Just *I am alive.* What am I meant to do with that?”

“You are meant to be glad!”

Maeve closed her eyes. The turf smoke stung them. She thought of Doyle’s thin smile, of Ashworth’s pale, precise hands, of the £900 that sat on the estate like a winter fog. She thought of Mary and Patrick asleep in the nursery, and of Ruby in her stall, and of the seed loan due at Michaelmas with no seed in the ground to show for it.

“I am glad,” she said, and meant it, though her voice came out flat. “I am glad he is alive. But I cannot spend that gladness, Mother. I cannot plant it. And if he means to help, he will have to help in a way I can count.”

She leaned down and kissed her mother’s cheek, hard enough to feel the bone beneath the papery skin. “I will come again soon. Do not show that card to anyone else, mind. Not until we know more.”

Maire made a small sound of protest, but Maeve was already moving toward the door. She paused on the threshold. “Where did you say the postmark was?”

“New York. The card has it on the back.”

“I know. But look again, Mother. Tell me what it says.”

Maire pulled the card out and squinted at it. “New… York,” she read slowly. “The writing is too small for me. Why does it matter where it was posted?”

Maeve did not answer. She stepped out into the grey afternoon and pulled the door shut behind her, standing for a moment with her back against the stone. In her mind she was turning the postcard over again, reading the cramped script, noting the way the letters leaned forward, eager and impatient. It was Cormac’s hand. She would have known it anywhere.

But there was something wrong. She had seen the postmark when her mother’s hands had covered it—not New York at all, but a name she had not had time to read. And there was no return address. A man with money, a man who meant to send for his mother and sister, would leave a way to be found.

She walked home slowly, past the empty fields that should have been green with early potatoes for the autumn harvest, past the hedgerows gone brown at the tips, past the low stone tower that had stood at the edge of the estate for three hundred years and was, according to the last surveyor’s report, leaning a full degree further toward the bog. The children were in the kitchen with Nora, the cook, when Maeve came in. Mary was chopping carrots with the careful intensity of a child given a knife; Patrick was stacking wooden spoons in a tower that he would, in a moment, knock down with abject glee.

“Mama,” Mary said without looking up, “Nora says we are having rabbit stew and that is all right because it is better to eat a rabbit than to be eaten by a rabbit.”

“Nora is right,” Maeve said. She hung her shawl on the peg by the door and went to the window, looking out at the drive that led to the road. No dust rose from it. No horseman appeared. Ashworth had gone back to the village this morning, to take his dinner at the inn and, she suspected, to ask questions about her to anyone who would answer him.

She had one day, perhaps two, before he came back with his ledgers and his questions and his quiet, terrible authority. One day to find something to hold against him. And now, from nowhere, her brother had sent a postcard from a city he had never intended to reach, with no address and no promises, written in a hand that had not changed in eight years.

Or had it? She had only her mother’s word, and her own memory, and memory was a liar wearing her father’s face.

Maeve turned from the window. She looked at her children—Mary’s dark head bent over the carrots, Patrick’s small fist raised to knock down his tower. Then she went to her room, lifted the mattress of her bed, and took out the letter from the Galway and Atlantic Land Company that she had kept hidden there, the one signed by a solicitor named Ashworth in Tuam.

She read it again, slowly, the way she had read it a dozen times since it arrived. The signature was a careless scrawl—*J. Ashworth*—no middle initial, no title, no hint of whether he was related to the Geoffrey Ashworth who had sat in her parlour and called her land “an asset of questionable yield.”

They had the same name. They must have the same blood. And if that were true, then this was not an inspection at all. It was a settlement—a family collecting on a debt that had been arranged years before, perhaps before Seamus had signed, perhaps before her husband had even met her.

She folded the letter and put it back. Then she went to the window again and looked out at the tower, grey and leaning, older than any of them. Her father’s father had built it. Her father had told her stories in its shadow. And somewhere in America—or wherever he truly was—her brother was alive, holding secrets of his own.

She had two days, maybe three. She had a brother who might or might not be coming home. She had an inspector who shared a bloodline with the man who had arranged her ruin.

And she had no one she could trust but herself.