FORTY-TWO
Mary, asleep in her rocking chair, did not hear her go.
Eleanor Garforth did not want a new dress. Or anything else except to be left alone in her misery. Mary’s comforting words were just an irritant, as were those of her sisters, Mary Margaret and Margaret Mary. ‘Just leave me alone to die,’ was her unspoken thought.
‘Why? Why? Why had that man, she could not give name to him, done that to her?’
She wanted her innocence back, her belief in goodness, in innate kindness and pity. All that had been torn away, the very bastions of her sheltered soul had been ripped asunder, torn from her being as casually as a butcher plucking out the innards from a chicken’s carcass.
To compound her misery, her brothers, Joe, Daniel, Edgar and many men from the village had been caught up in t
