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have a son Ethan’s age, and Mr. Quigley looks almost as old as Mr. Hanratty, but then she explains that their son was the sort of miracle that John the Baptist bein’ born to Elizabeth in the Bible was, and Ethan can’t help but feel sorry for them. He decides not to argue with hisMam for his own independence, figuring he can as much look after the Quigleys as they will after him. And it’s sealed when Mam tells them about havin’ lost Aislinn to the fever too, and there’s all three of them,
Mister
Quigley even, with the water in their eyes.
    When it comes to the farewells not even an hour later, Aunt Em hugs him and gives him a long kiss on the cheek, then hugs him some more, and smiles as much as she can force herself to do. But there’s no such smile on Mam’s face. Hers is a look he can’t quite understand at first, worse than the one he remembers from when Seanny and Da left, and different from the one at Aislinn’s funeral. Her face has the look of defeat, as if sayin’ goodbye to her last child is all she can bear, and he wonders if she’ll become like Mr. Hanratty now, with all the life and joy poured out through her cupped hands. She tells Ethan to
keep readin’ an’ be a good boy
, and tells him how much she’ll miss him. It’s unusual talk and he begins to suspect that maybe she thinks she’s sayin’ goodbye for the last time. But it’s a thought he’ll not allow himself to consider as she puts her hands on the back of his head and whispers in his ear.
    Be happy, she says three times softly, before kissing his cheek and releasing him.
    They separate for a moment, but then she quickly pulls him closer and kisses him one last time. And then it’s up the gangway alongside the Quigleys, with just a final wave to Mam and Aunt Em, each of them with one arm wrapped so tightly around the other that it’s impossible to tell which one is holdin’ the other upright. As their free hands brush the water off their cheeks, Ethan tells himself that this isn’t so much a
fare thee well
like in one of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays, but rather a simple
s’lahng
that’d be uttered along the Lane back home … the kind that carried with it the understanding of seein’ each other again. And soon.

E THAN
    SUMMER 1847
    Numbers are cold and impersonal things, efficient, absolute. So it was no wonder then that they’d become Ethan’s near-perfect refuge after Aislinn’s death, what with the way he’d count everything he could to keep from thinkin’ about her, about The Hunger, about everything else that was beyond his control. By the time he and Mam and Aunt Em’d left for Newry, Ethan already knew that the distance from the Brodericks’ stables to Mr. Hanratty’s cottage was about fifteen hundred of his normal steps, though he’d once made it in one thousand three hundred eleven, taking the longest strides he could. It took about two hundred strokes to properly groom each horse, three hundred seventy-seven horseshoe nails to fill the wooden bucket at the stables, and two hundred forty-seven dry oats were as many as he could hold in one hand.
    So as he followed the Quigleys down into the cargo bay accommodations of the
Lord Sussex
, with people pushing and shoving and even fightin’ each other as if staking out a claim to their own small bit of land, it made perfect sense for Ethan to turn to numbers once again. He counted the support rails set up every six feet or so, the ones that held up the long rows of planking that ran practically the whole length of the bay, two of them on each side with about four feet of space between them. There were fourteen support rails per side, and as the passengers scrambled for spaces by the bow where there was a trickle of light comin’ down the stairway, Ethan walked slowly to the stern alongsidethe Quigleys, defeated just like they were, and counting, so as not to think of how he’d have to live here without enough light to read.
    By the time they reached the