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– of no more consequence than the single loose cannonball she watched rolling uselessly about the deck. She wished she were Finn McCool, the giant hero of one of Maura’s tales, who could cross the Irish Sea in just a few leviathan strides, with little ships riding in his hair like thorny crowns.
    But at nightfall she saw the wrong Mr Walsh again. ‘It’s worse,’ he said. ‘Get below, or you’ll drown. Two seas meet here, and they’re both angry.’ He untied her raw wrists, grabbed the back of her soaking coat and all but threw her into the men’s quarters. Standing braced in the door frame, lashed by rain, he shouted to all the green, gathered men. ‘Make your vows and your prayers,’ he bawled above the maelstrom. ‘Confess your sins, make all right with your God, call upon your personal saints, for we may not see morning. Lamps out, for we don’t need a fire as well.’
    Kit curled in a corner, in the dark, crowded but alone, making herself as small as possible. Some of the men were praying aloud, barely to be heard above the screaming timbers, some hardy souls even tried to sing hymns, but most were mouthing silently into their clasped fists. Kit shut her eyes as the sea shunted her painfully between two timbers, bruising her shoulders even through the heavy felt of her coat. She tried to think of an appropriate saint who would get her through this storm. Her frightened brain scuttled through the candlelit side-chapels of her childhood and recalled those burly bearded men in golden halos and wind-whipped robes who held back mosaicked waves with one lift of a saintly hand. But would St Brendan the navigator or St Finian who’d sailed to England know what to do in these foreign waters? ‘The Madonna della Fortuna,’ shouted a Genovese sailor, as if in answer to her unasked question. ‘She is the only lady with the power to help us. We must all pray to the Madonna – her shrine is at Genova where we’re bound, and she’ll bring us safe home.’
    Slowly, stupidly, she realised what the landlord back in the Liberties had told her in that raucous bar. Not ‘Get over’. Genova . They were sailing to Genova, wherever that was; and she’d found out where they were bound just as it seemed sure they would never reach it.
    It seemed fitting, though, at her last hour, to pray to a woman; to Mary mother of all, to feel that sisterhood at her last. Genova’s Madonna would do as well as any other incarnation at this pass. Kit closed her eyes tightly; she knew what she had to promise. ‘Madonna della Fortuna,’ she prayed, ‘please let me live and find Richard, and I will never ask for adventure again. I will be a good wife and be happy, and contented, and make a home with him, and children, and I will never leave Kavanagh’s again.’ It was not likely that she would be overheard, but she was past caring – she just wanted to save her skin, whether it be male or female. Kit prayed for the rest of the night, making the same promise over and over again. The Madonna della Fortuna did not answer at once; perhaps she too could not hear her above the howling winds and screaming timbers. But slowly, slowly, over the next dark hours, the roll of the ship lessened; Kit’s poor shoulders were buffeted less, and by the time the grey dawn seeped into the hold, the ship seemed to be holding level. Slowly, slowly, the grey-faced soldiers emerged into a grey world; the sea was a dun silver looking glass, the sky sullen and flat, but the storm had passed.
    Kit found the boredom of a sea voyage almost as trying as the excitements of the storm. She had expected vaguely, from stories she’d heard of seagoing in Kavanagh’s bar, to be swabbing decks and hoisting sails. But of course, the ship had a regular crew and the soldiers were merely cargo, three score and ten of them crammed into the keels like so many cattle. Now the wind had dropped there was nothing for them to do except collect their meals of salt pork, sour