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ill with the fever that evening. He couldn’t even take any of the bread that Bridie had brought back from the town. Mam chewed the crusts and took a tiny morsel out, balancing it on the tip of her finger, trying to feed him as if he was a baby bird and not a boy any more, but he lay limp, his eyes unseeing. That night, his fever grew. His body was a tiny brazen furnace, and his pale gold curls were plastered to his forehead. Mam rocked him in her arms. When she looked too weary to hold him any longer, Bridie took him. His body was like a little bird’s, all fine brittle bones folded in her arms. Bridie curled down on the ground and sang to him, a babble of mouth music. She woke to find him cold and stiff. She knew even before she was properly awake that his soul had flown away while they slept.
    Mam just wanted to hold Paddy. She sat huddled by the little turf fire that Brandon had rekindled that morning, the small boy in her lap. Bridie took Brandon and led him away from the dirt hut.
    â€˜Listen, we have to help Mam,’ she said. ‘We have to leave her be with Paddy for a while and go down to the marsh. Have you got your little knife?’

    Bridie sat on the edge of the marsh while Brandon gathered rushes. At first he only brought her handfuls but when he understood her purpose he worked with a fury, staggering across the marshy ground with armfuls of the dry gold rushes and laying them beside his sister. Bridie wove them together swiftly, fashioning the rushes into a golden basket.
    â€˜This can be for Paddy, to hold him for the last. You see, I’ll make the sides high so he’ll feel safe inside there and the cold breeze won’t get to our darling boy,’ she said, not even feeling the tears that streamed down her face as she worked. Brandon stared at her with bright eyes, his mouth twisted with grief, and then sat down on the damp ground beside her and put his face in his hands.
    When Bridie had finished, she carried the basket back to the bog and set it before their mother. Mam looked up at her as if Bridie was the grown-up and she the little child. Bridie reached down and took Paddy’s still body from her mother’s arms and laid him tenderly in the rush basket. Mam bent over the basket and kissed him and then turned away.
    Brandon followed Bridie up to the famine cemetery that had been set up high on the hill behind the town. A cart laden with bodies trundled up the bothereen , the rutted track that led to the graveyard. The wind was at their back as they trudged behind the death cart. The graveyard was just a field with a low drystone wall around it. Dirt was turned over in great heaps everywhere, piled high above the trenches where the bodies were stacked, dozens and dozens of them.
    When Bridie saw the careless way the man took the basket from her, she wanted to strike him. But she turned away, took Brandon’s hand and ran back down to the village, taking breaths of air so sharp she felt her lungs would burst. She didn’t want to see Paddy laid in the ground, to see the small basket flying to its final resting place. When they were out of sight of the famine pit, she fell to her knees by the roadside and prayed. Brandon knelt beside her, his lips moving soundlessly and together they keened, in a voiceless grief.
    After Paddy died, Mam wasn’t herself any more. It was as if a strange woman had moved into her thin body. Every day she crawled to the top of the nearest dune and sat staring out across the sea, her eyes the same deep blue as the waters of Dingle Bay. Then early one morning, she stood up and said, ‘We’re not staying here. The fever is in this place. I’ll not watch my babies die one by one.’
    They followed her back into the town where thousands of other displaced people wandered aimlessly and squalor and chaos met them at every turn. They stood on a corner for a long while that morning, holding out their bowls, begging. Bridie shut