The Road to Listowel

With her head so bowed as she travelled the morning, she may have mourned, but she didn’t. The sun fell green through the leaves and lit her auburn braid, warm on her head. She was dressed and styled for wiles in her mother’s pastel red dress and her father’s own brogues.

She came to the wood’s edge and down a small slope to the road. She sought out a bend in it, not long in being found, and there she waited. All her roguish instinct bade her lounge on the road’s grassy shoulder, but to her roguish intent she stood and preserved the red linen.

She felt at the back of her head to be sure of the braid. She inspected her dress, bending to see the skirt better. She felt in her pocket at the two necklaces. One bore a crucifix. One bore a cross. She produced the latter and hung it around her neck. She then clasped the former in her hands and prayed.

She ground gravel under her heel. There was poetry between the brogues, the road, and the rogue. It was on this road that her barefoot father had proved to his father his merit enough for shoes. For fate, it was in these same shoes that she would prove her merit enough for sight.

The awaited sound of wheels over stone came from across the bend.

Now, putting the sound to her back, she began to glide over the road. Her dress, as a soft beam of shadow, swallowed and passed stones and gravel. Between swallow and pass, they were crunched by the hidden brogues. And her knees bent, so the skirt would brush the ground and hush her ankles. Her hands hung thin at her sides and confined the swaying skirt to an elegant way.

The horse-driver-carriage ensemble drew parallel to her, first adjacent the horse, then the driver. Only when he passed her and was backgrounded by light rather than painted wood could she figure his figure, which looked rotund. Finally, the carriage drew next to her. Coming to her, it kept to her pace, as if always a companion. She turned to its dark mass. The only ornamentation that she could perceive was a tunnel of light between the windows on either side. Within this was set the pale half-moon of the passenger’s face, features unfeatured.

‘Assistance, dear lady?’ a man’s voice, kind but dripping dryness.

‘I would be grateful,’ she said. ‘Provided you are a wise and moral man.’

‘I am.’ As all who say are and all who are say.

‘I am going to Listowel.’

‘Then you are on the right road.’

‘And a woman on the road to Listowel would be grateful for the assistance of a wise and moral man on the same road.’

‘Then Providence has provided.’ And he conferenced with his driver from within the carriage. The carriage halted and she with it. The driver alighted from his perch. He was rotund, moreover fat, with a ruff of skin sprouting over his collar. He opened the carriage’s door and offered his hand as assistance. In its black leather glove, her hand felt dainty, frail.

The stepping was the manoeuvre that she had to consider, that the brogues be secreted still. And from her hesitation, the passenger’s hand was flourished as a second aide. She took this for his own comfort, but was herself reassured by his fingers, equally bony as hers. The flourish in them must have been designed with an economical use of muscle in mind. Stepping into the carriage, she pointed her toes down, that they remained in her dress’s shadow.

She settled beside her host on a wooden seat and set about determining to herself the carriage, beginning with the rectangular driver’s window in front of her. She drew that light in and gradually evaluated the carriage. Then the carriage rocked, and the driver’s seat creaked as his bulk blocked the window she was working from. The carriage’s interior was tight and plain. Her host was black-suited. A second bench ran opposite them. The carriage eased its rocking, then lurched forward to bumping along. Mottled green sheets were pulled past her window.

There was a fricative hiss as her new travelling companion struck a match up for the tobacco in his pipe. She took this brief light to study him as she could. She saw by the smudged shadows a long nose and small mouth. To move to see more would be taken as forward.

‘What waits for you in Listowel?’ he asked as the tobacco lit.

‘Eyeglasses,’ she answered. ‘Costing £2.’

‘You would spend £2 for eyeglasses?’

‘And travel.’

‘You would travel for eyeglasses?’

‘I know there is a jeweller in Listowel with a pair which would work for me.’

‘Then, you are a woman of means,’ he decided, turning his face and pipe to look out the window.

She was a woman of ways. And, to this point, having already told her host more than was his due, she bent forward and reached a hand under her skirt while his head was turned. She heard her heart beating a steady rhythm against her legs.

‘Do not think me forward,’ he said. ‘But I am a wise and moral man and would offer you this advice: take care with your expenses. One, especially one so young, mustn’t store up treasures in a perishable world.’

‘Oh?’ She turned her head to speak out of her lap. Her voice was strained with her stomach’s compression and her neck’s strain as she navigated her petticoat. She breathed against her heartbeat.

‘In a time such as this, consider looking widely and generously to those less fortunate than yourself. I have found the Church a particular aide in this endeavour,’ his voice faltered. ‘Dear woman!’

Her heartbeat bolted as she found what she required. She produced from her petticoat a loaded pistol, sitting up and resting its barrel on his hip in a rehearsed movement. That done, proximity would not risk forwardness, so she sat forward and nearer to him. She felt his heat and her heat meeting, the metal cool between. He had pale brown eyes and his quivering lips were indeed small.

‘I mean for those spectacles now,’ She made a measured tone out of her quivering neck. ‘And I mean to pay the full £2.’

He cleared fear from his throat. ‘By which I’ll be paying the £2?’

‘You are a wise man.’

‘And you an immoral woman,’ he said with indignation. She felt tears roll down his face and land on her sleeve. She sat back, so she didn’t have to see it. She steeled her emotions.

‘By no means,’ she said. ‘Rather, of no means.’

‘Are my country’s poor driven to such depravities so readily?’

‘I am afraid the church does not have much business with jewellers.’

On this, he seemingly found a hill to stand. ‘Then, dear woman, observe that the concerns pressing you do not press so hard on the wiser and more moral sex.’

‘And still, the tired old preachers can always see the youngsters making rabble in the back pews. £2 and be careful where you store your treasures, sir. Your wallet, now.’

Her hostage took a moment to smother his tobacco, then put the pipe back in his coat’s pocket. He paused in that position.

‘I may have a gun myself, in my jacket,’ he said. ‘A revolver, perhaps.’

‘If you had a revolver, you wouldn’t be telling me that you had a revolver, and you wouldn’t be tearful. Your wallet.’

‘I may have told you to avoid bloodshed.’

‘My pistol is currently using your ribs as a mount,’ she spoke slowly. ‘The only blood shed would be your own.’

‘But.’ He put up a finger and it was close enough to be clear to her. ‘But if I were a man to avoid bloodshed and still carried a revolver, then I must be efficient and confident in its use.’

She put the elbow carrying the gun in her other elbow’s crook for rest. She blinked and blinked thrice. She weighed his claim against his bluffing incentive. She bunched her toes in the brogues.

‘Alright, where’s your wallet?’

He gestured to his inner hip pocket on the opposite side. She leaned closer so strands from her unkempt braid caught in his stubble, and kept the pistol pressed into his gaunt side. She found the leather fold and produced it. She emptied its total of 30d. into her lap. She gave her victim a look of incredulity.

He shrugged and rested his head in his hand by the window. ‘I myself am not a man of means, momentarily.’

‘A man with means of transportation,’ she retorted.

‘Which means little else.’

Then, for a while, she was stilled by bitter thoughts to the man. ‘Means but not merit.’

‘Merit is not money only,’ he said quietly, still involuntarily nursing the pistol at his hip.

She supposed this must be true, or her father hadn’t earned his shoes. But her current enmity with her hostage was disinclining her to his notion. She inclined her eyes to look out the window at the dissolved battle between her green trees and the distant seafoam sky. She thought the sky might be yielding to a silver.

‘Morals can merit,’ he suggested. ‘And if not morals, then compensation.’

The well-dried voice seemed to turn on this last word, but it was not to such baseness as his being a man and her being a woman. She guessed compensation, like his means, was of a more momentary, monetary nature.

When she had taken that prodding, he offered another.

‘You aren’t concerned I’ve seen your face?’

‘Aren’t you?’

Now began to them a voice from a concurrent drama.

‘Stand and deliver!’

It wormed its way through the morning air and protruded in. It sounded muffled and strained, but commanded the carriage to an unauthorised halt. When she had clocked the threat, her eyes fixed into a stare out of furrowed brows. She felt her nostrils racking air across her lip.

The green curtains shook to still and the crunching of stones under spokes ceased. She and her hostage waited out a beat of silence. She heard his breathing, too, and lost hers in it for a moment. Then stones were crunched to the beat of boots, and the highwayman approached. She smothered shock, closed her eyes, pressed the gun closer to the gut, and strained to discern which side of the carriage the rogue was approaching. She determined it was hers. She slid to the edge of it and tracked the only moving blur from within its window.

She eased her pistol out of her hostage and whispered between her gritted teeth. ‘Move and he’s as like to shoot you as I am.’

He sucked in a high breath, and she freed the barrel from its position. She redirected it to the side of the door. With her free hand, she pinched the window frame’s thickness. Splinters from a shot door concerned her, but she decided they would localise about her waist given her current position. She confirmed her hair’s resilience. It had cooled.

The approaching man was placing his feet slowly, rolling the rocky road under his feet. Heel to toe. Other heel to other toe. There was no use watching his blur, from which she discerned nothing, but she watched where he should step into place and become somewhat known. He had seen her, might have already taken aim at her. She felt like she was smothering cold sweat under her forehead. No beads came to her eyebrows, so she focused on her finger, for the first time firm on the trigger.

He slid into the picture frame, receding black hair with his face’s lower hemisphere cloaked in dirty blue. He placed his pistol in the window, and she traced along the snake of his coat’s arm to its tip, trajectory coming to her neck. His wrist hovered like a dragonfly over the window frame’s base. She swallowed down the threat and smoothed out her forehead.

He drew breath to threaten, but she preceded with a voice steeled by tensed ribs. ‘I see that your pistol is not cocked, so my honour, my mother’s honour, tells me to tell you that mine is and is aimed too.’

At this, Dirty Blue paused. His turning chin told surprise, reproach, and resolved to disbelief. But these formers gave foothold.

Dirty Blue formed his words in his mouth’s hollow. ‘What?’

‘I’ve a pistol, concealed behind this door.’

‘I should probably shoot you, then.’ He put his other hand to the pistol as well.

‘That would be the wise thing, yes, if you had already cocked your pistol. If you do so much now, you won’t be doing very much more.’

‘I don’t believe you. Why should I believe you?’

‘Cock your pistol and I’ll give you reason. Now, to business?’

But the rogue was looking through the carriage to the other side. Framed there, like a bubble, was a second, this with a dull white covering his nose and mouth. A glimmer of silver threatened her there, too. Calculating, she flicked her pistol away from the door and planted it back at her hostage’s side. He grunted but maintained composure and she looked back at Dirty Blue.

‘Then it’s two against two.’ And she prodded her hostage with the barrel to recruit a co-conspirator.

‘Yes.’ Her hostage cleared his throat. ‘My door seems just as thin as hers.’

He planted his hand, empty, on the side of the door. Then the horse cantered forward nervously, and the rogues slipped from the scene. They stepped back up in a moment later.

‘Nothing like that, now,’ Dull White said. ‘Why should this road have four pistols this morning? Two I understand, but a quartet seems excessive.’

‘I believe we may call each other peers,’ she stretched the words. ‘Though it may be stretching the term.’

She was twisted about herself, with the barrel in her hostage and nothing but flimsy wood between herself and Dirty Blue’s.

‘Hear that? A peer,’ Dull White said while his partner rearranged his grip on the pistol.

‘That looks heavy,’ she told him.

‘If you really carry pistols,’ Dull White said and she turned half an ear to him. ‘Show us a shot.’

‘A spare?’

‘Between index and thumb,’ he said.

‘I would have to be using my non-dominant hand,’ she said.

‘Surely, so would your man.’

With her sinister hand tucking under the arching of the dexter arm, she produced from the pouch at her belt two spare shots. She palmed one to her hostage. It slipped up his sleeve. He looked to move his feigning hand to retrieve it. She struck her pistol upwards to pluck his rib. He stifled a corrective cough. She imagined him sweating. He held aloft his shot, and she hers, both presenting it between index and thumb against the light.

Dirty Blue nodded to Dull White and received the reciprocal.

‘Alright,’ Dull White said. ‘A standoff. A duet of standoffs. I say we let you pass.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘But that would give us the advantage on you in your backing away. So, the advantage is ours, and we want your company in this carriage.’

Her hostage glanced at her, then remembered, with fear, to look back at the threat.

‘You said your pistol was loaded,’ Dirty Blue supposed. ‘So, if you wanted to shoot us, you always could have.’

‘Then I’d be getting into the carriage if I were you,’ she said.

A conference founded on familiarity seemed to pass between the rogues, across her and her hostage. It was limited to eyes, the rest of expression being concealed. It broke into voices at last.

‘Don’t,’ said Dull White, the wiser.

Dirty Blue tossed his pistol through the window. It cascaded off her flinching leg and the shadows at her hostage’s feet consumed it. Said hostage, her primary hostage, looked at her, as if for instruction. She motioned with her head for him to pick it up and raised her pistol past him to Dull White. She put a hand on her hostage’s wrist to deter any ploys and guided it to its goal. Her body thus twisted into his motion for a moment, like a waltz, and he stifled himself. She was occupied in keeping the remaining rogue at bay.

‘Aren’t you concerned we’ve seen your faces?’ Dirty Blue asked.

She returned her pistol to her hostage’s side. He was now comfortable enough with the sensation, and he raised Dirty Blue’s to Dull White’s face, replying and cocking.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Hand the man your pistol,’ she said. ‘I’ve put mine back against your friend.’

Dull white had now seen two opposing pistols. The most danger he posed was in his fiery glares at his foolish companion. The only one who didn’t know he’d been so thoroughly confrontationally castrated was said fool. Dirty Blue looked with expectation at his comrade. That expectation dissipated, disappointed, when Dull White handed the pistol through the window, handle first.

‘Now join us.’ She opened her door, and her hostage did the same, the third and final pistol sitting on his lap.

The captured rogues climbed in and up and counted the trio of pistols. And, seeing where hers was directed, they came to an understanding, to different degrees and at different speeds. Her hostage took up both pistols and aimed at the rogues, that she alone would be unthreatened.

‘Tell the driver to carry on,’ she said gently, smuggling out a sigh of relief.

‘Open the window,’ her hostage said to the rogues. Dirty Blue opened the driver’s window. A lump of the driver’s rear sagged through, fleshy white where the shirt failed. ‘Poke him three times.’

Thrice poked, the driver hesitated, then set them to trotting again. Dirty Blue tried to reclose the window.

The woman held out her available hand to the two rogues. ‘Your earnings.’

Dirty Blue looked to Dull White, who was fixed to glaring at his captor. Without reciprocating, Dull White drew a small pouch from his pocket. It fell lightly into her hand. She felt few coins inside.

‘Who’ve you been robbing?’ She put the pouch on her belt. ‘Catholics?’

‘No,’ Dirty Blue said adamantly. He turned again to his companion. ‘We’ve not been robbing Catholics, have we?’

‘We’ve not been robbing anyone.’ He was now assessing her hostage’s two pointed pistols. ‘We’ve encouraged charity.’

‘Oh.’ He was placated until – ‘But the priest said St. Peter won’t care for our charity if it’s come from someone else’s. He’ll just let the someone else in twice.’

‘Hence in encouraging them, we do them a favour and ourselves a good work.’

‘Right,’ Dirty Blue settled. ‘But then shouldn’t you be the main robber next time as you’re the one needing the good works?’

She checked her hostage. He watched with resigned amusement, though flinched at her checking.

‘No,’ Dull White answered. Even now, he did not stop glaring at her. ‘Your good work counteracts their good work, so the money’s not their charity when you gift it to me and I offer it to the Church.’

She interceded with a smile. ‘You can’t bribe your way past the Pearly Gates.’

Her first hostage interposed. ‘Perhaps I can be of assistance. I am, in fact, a man of the cloth myself.’

It seemed even the wheels were quiet for the moment of breath, but they were first to resume. They churned along, laughing at the misfortunes unfolding within the carriage. She stared with a racing mind at the dark wall opposite. The wind passed through, benignly reminding the three rogues to breathe.

‘Hell,’ Dirty Blue said. ‘We’ve just robbed a priest.’

‘Encouraged his charity,’ Dull White said remotely.

She watched only the priest’s blurry shape. She could tell his eyes were flicking towards her during this vie for freedom. She warned him by her own expression. She felt her breath pushing the dress’s shoulders.

‘I am,’ the priest said.

A few more moments peered through the window at the scene. Dull White shifted.

‘If you are a priest,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be like to shoot anyone, would you?’

The rogue sat forward and began a slow lean across the carriage. The priest looked to be almost offering the pistol to him. She flicked her pistol out of him and towards Dull White.

‘If that’s true, I only need worry about you.’ Already she planned a tussle, managing White in a gunshot and scrambling for the other pistol for managing his friend. She despised the chance in it. ‘Tell them you’re not a priest.’

‘A priest mustn’t lie.’

‘Then good job you aren’t a priest, alright?’

‘Pity that I am.’

Dull White had stopped his reaching, but his conspirator had begun another. He wrapped his fingers around the barrel and the priest dropped his own investment in the pistol. He let the other one drop to his lap, useless unless he forfeited the innocence of a priest. Dirty Blue offered it to his fellow.

‘I suppose saving a priest would be a good work.’

Her frantic consideration incomplete, she replanted the gun in the priest’s side, received the customary grunt, and spoke before Dull White was armed.

‘Consider me a force of nature,’ she said. ‘Give that pistol, and the priest will die. I am not a person, but a pistol in your hands.’

They looked at each other, the priest for his wisdom. He reluctantly nodded, and Dirty Blue kept the pistol. She aimed again at the damned man, Dull White.

‘If any pistol should find me,’ she warned his friend. ‘This man dies as he is. May God have mercy.’

Dull White went white. Dirty Blue shied. To him, she gave this last instruction.

‘Hold the priest hostage.’

‘Ah.’ The priest tensed forwards. ‘But if you shoot a priest, that would not help your righteousness.’

‘But you would have plenty of chance at redemption, unlike your friend,’ she said.

Dirty Blue came to complying slowly, the pistol coming to face the priest. Keeping trained on Dull White, she reached across the priest and pried out his last pistol. Her hair caught again in his stubble, a few more strands coming loose. Taking the pistol was resisted as like tearing bread. When she was sitting back, before she was back across him, she saw his eyes clearly for the first time: blue and fiery.

She now had two pistols. Feeling a swell of peace, like she had made the carriage a well-built ballast on which she now surely stood, she laid the latter in her lap. She knew that hers was the only peace had been carved from the scene. She curled her toes in the brogues and dwelt on the road that slipped beneath.

Her father had walked. She rode a carriage and found herself smiling.

‘Miss?’ Dirty Blue said, soft and muffled. ‘May I make a confession?’

She frowned. ‘What would you like to confess?’

His finger he pointed parallel with his pistol at the priest, who shifted.

‘Would you need to be sitting next to him?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ the priest said weakly, then strongly. ‘Yes, he does.’

‘No, then.’

‘Let him,’ the priest said. ‘Have mercy.’

‘I’ve a pistol instead.’

‘I’d be happy to exchange seats with the priest,’ Dull White interjected.

‘No,’ she said. ‘If we were to be doing it, your friend and I would exchange seats, so I wouldn’t have to keep you both in sight with your crossing. But we aren’t going to be doing it.’

Dirty Blue scratched the wrist holding the pistol, and looked apprehensively at Dull White.

‘Keep your eyes on your priest,’ she said, and he snapped them back to place.

‘Could he pray for me then?’

‘I’d rather a go at trading seats than bringing God into this carriage. Wouldn’t you?’

The priest sounded sly. ‘But you can only stop my doing that by letting him confess.’

She considered what he said and mapped out within the carriage’s confines how such a manoeuvre could be safely achieved. It would be tight.

‘Alright,’ she said to Dirty Blue. ‘You’ll move in front of me, and I’ll go over you, and let’s not let our hostages slip us in our doing it.’

She and Dirty Blue slid off their seats. He went to his knees, and she bent over him. In doing this, she reduced her sight to shadows, murky as in water. By memory and steadiness, she maintained her aim and, moving slowly, they crossed over. Dirty Blue brushed her belly and two money pouches. Her back passed the window, cooled by the passing air for a moment. Her braid traced along the roof of the carriage.

She came adjacent with Dull White, looking over her shoulder to show she was still watching Dirty Blue. She sat next to Dull White and placed the pistol in his side. Dirty Blue did the same to the priest, who cleared his throat.

With one hand, Dirty Blue removed the handkerchief from his stubbled chin. He handed it to the priest.

‘Do you mind?’

The priest took it and held it up between their faces. It was threadbare and filtered the light from one window into the shade of the other. With his free hand, for his other was occupied in gunning up the priest, Dirty Blue made the sign of the cross.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been five days since my last confession.’

‘What are your sins, then?’ The priest adjusted his arms to rest more easily on his lap. Dull White looked out the window. She watched on.

‘I got drunk three nights ago,’ Dirty Blue said.

‘I see.’

‘I think I cursed this morning. I can’t quite remember.’

‘Yes?’

‘I pointed a pistol at a priest.’

‘That is a grave sin, boy.’

‘I know, Father.’

‘Is that all, then?’

‘I think I’ve got one more in me, if that’s alright.’

The priest frowned and, irritated, let one hand drop the handkerchief to droop while he scratched his face.

‘Go on.’ He picked it back up again.

‘I’ve a friend who’s not right with God, Father, and his fate rests in my hands a bit. And to help him, I must continue in one of those sins.’

‘Which one?’

Dirty Blue hesitated. ‘Cursing.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘No, it was the pointing the pistol at the priest.’

‘Sin is sin, boy.’

‘I know, and I was thinking of doing a betrayal to my friend, stopping sinning, but then I thought about betrayal, and I thought maybe that was a sin, too.’

Dull White drew his attention back to the private confession before him, apparently concerned with its concerning him. The priest contorted himself into some kind of sympathy toward Dirty Blue. She glared at her hostage, and he, with wariness of her, took his next steps.

‘Betrayal is not always a sin, my son.’

‘But what about Judas, and all that nasty business?’

‘Well, that was betraying Jesus. That’s different.’

‘No it’s not,’ Dull White interjected.

The priest ignored him. ‘Betraying your friend could serve as penance.’

‘But it’s just ceasing the sin, not making it right.’

‘You’d be helping the priest, which could make it right.’

If Dirty Blue betrayed Dull White and pointed the pistol away, potentially to her, she’d have to defend herself against him and leave herself vulnerable to Dull White and the priest.

‘Isn’t pointing a pistol at a priest a terrible sin, Father?’ Dirty Blue asked.

‘It’s not so terrible as all that. You could redeem yourself.’

‘And from the betrayal?’

‘The betrayal’s not a sin.’

She looked at Dull White, who was looking at the potential traitor as he might a yapping dog. She coughed slightly his attention towards her. Slowly, she shifted the spare pistol from her lap to his hand. He took it and aimed at his friend. He coughed slightly Dirty Blue’s attention towards his newly defended self.

‘Well,’ Dirty Blue cleared his throat. ‘I was only thinking about doing a betrayal. This is all I can remember, Father. I am sorry for these and all my sins.’

The priest did not provide penance, nor prayer, but tossed the handkerchief back onto Dirty Blue’s lap. He let muttered cursing out the window. Dirty Blue attempted to reaffix his handkerchief.

Dull White set a cupped hand on the pistol’s hammer, for to mutedly cock it. She watched his attempt at secrecy with a smirk. She began to devise words to stop him. But so determined was he to conceal his action from her, that, attempting to still his shaking hand, Dull White’s arm became rigid and at once fell, cocking the pistol, aiming it upwards, and firing the shot.

The horse, to the shot, let out a frightened bray and bolted. The carriage, rocked by the road and horse’s spree, sent its passengers whirling and unfurling about, bumping each other in cries of murder and wordlessness. If a passenger were blessed by a speeding look out a quaking window, nothing would greet them but light and blurs.

Her head was rocketed into stomachs, knees, heads, as all manner of flesh, hair, and cloth struck her back and front. Now those familiar blurs turned sinister on her and danced and laughed and plunged her into their shadowy pits. Her cheek hit a cushion as her foot lost a brogue to the window and road.

The sentinel trees along the road barely noticed the commotion.

One, and then both, of the remaining shots were loosed. One, and then all empty pistols were released into the tumbling, but little was noticed in either instance, except by the flying priest. He had been tossed to the ceiling and came down on them all, pushing her off her cushioned haven. She fell to the door, where her braid was caught and undone when she was tossed across to the other window.

Through this she was hanging when the horse broke free. The carriage teetered and then came to rolling. Hanging there, she looked up to see, between the green, before the blue, and on the grey road, a brown shape, still tossing its head and braying, though distance and indistinction made it look to her majestic. She wondered why this scene was rolling by, then recalled: she rode a carriage.

There was groaning and the priest cursing loudly behind her, and the smell of some blood ironed the wrinkles in the trembling air. She put her hands to the window frame, reassured by its solidness. The door itself wavered beneath her weight, for it was poorly made as she had once threatened. She pressed herself up and back inside. She tried to make sense of the scene.

One shape, with an exposed face, was wrapping a dirty blue handkerchief to the priest’s leg, from which he had painted the floor. This was clear, immediately at her feet. Dull White was on a seat, trying to reach past the priest at something opposite. They were all in the one blanket of gunpowder’s smoke and smell.

But her attention was caught by the splintered side of the scene. The wall had collapsed in and a bulbous black mass fallen partway through, highlighted by a top rim of cascading cream, into which a trickle of red was falling. This, the driver’s rump, she went to, for some papers protruded from the black pants, and she knelt on the seat opposite Dull White’s to see them. Taking the papers from the pressured hold of the driver’s waistband, and holding them close, she made out that they were banknotes and offertory packets.

The sum contained far exceeded the £2 for eyeglasses in Listowel.

Turning in wonderment, she turned to Dull White’s holding a reloaded pistol in her way. It was close enough to be accessorising her dress. Well, he had got to holding someone up in the end.

‘The money, ma’am.’

Her heart stabbed her chest.

She set to stuffing the paper up her sleeves, in her belt, between her knees, and under her chin. He stood there, watching and, she imagined, showing a fair bewilderment. Behind him, the priest carried on his damning tirade.

‘Now,’ she said, voice tucked into her neck. ‘I may as well have taken the shot out of that pistol, alright? If you use it now, you’ll bloody all this church money that you just recovered for penance.’

Dull White shook out his free hand. ‘What?’

‘At this range, anywhere you’re shooting me with that pistol is making a mess and I have something like a £5 in each sleeve. Ask your priest, but I think he’d much rather the money come to him clean. And he can.’

‘Then what were you holding him up for?’

‘Eyeglasses,’ she said.

‘Damn your eyes!’ the priest roared at her.

‘Now here’s my proposition,’ she said. ‘As I’m the one with your salvation stuffed about me. And you listen, too, man of the cloth. It’ll be worth your while and end your moment of no means.’

In thirty diminishing seconds, the priest had quieted, and Dull White had still not bloodied the money with her.

‘Now here’s my proposition,’ she said. ‘I take the £2 I need, and you recover the rest. You donate it to the priest to buy your heaven. The priest uses it to refurnish this carriage, or buy new pantaloons, or some such. If there’s any debt to righteousness remaining for you then, then let’s say that your shot killed the thief, and mine wounded the priest. What do you say to that?’

The priest on the floor grunted and pushed Dirty Blue away, for the woman had placed between him and his money a pardon for her. They both knew that he would take up such burdens to see to his gain. She guessed her perceiving this caused the greater part of his frustration.

The woman still knelt on the padded seat, and Dirty Blue now sat at her knees. She imagined that he might want to move. If not, he too risked being covered in her, should his partner deem it.

Dull White was the only one standing, and it hunched him.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Give me a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an arse in my face.’

‘Alright? We’ve all an arse in our faces,’ she said. ‘We’re managing.’

The man was a vagabond, and base. In the face of condemnation, he had set about setting on innocents. Her move had not been a trigger, but a rolling die. She should have climbed out the window when the road had given it to her.

Dull White spat into his mask. A red stain seeped through into it, dripping down to his chin.

‘How are we doing this?’ he said.

So it was that Dirty Blue opened the door and, keeping her face to the irate priest and armed, masked man, she backed out of the carriage. She was met by the driver’s blurred face and her familiar road. She ground gravel under her brogue. With those uneven feet and a braid the Sun did not recognise, she made to the edge of the road, and the trees.

Coming here, she dismantled her paper armour, hunching over so any bloodshed would mar it. She looked up and saw the four figures about the carriage. The one high up slumped still. The one low writhed and bit the air. One of the other two was holding a pistol. Whichever he was, she was staring him down. The money sat with the leaves under her.

She took £2 and, launching, fled into the forest, followed by one gunshot. Therein she hid, until two hours had passed, when she returned to fetch her father’s lost brogue. With her feet rebalanced, she carried on through the morning to Listowel.