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called Sullah and her husband, Pompey. Pompey was a quiet, hardworking man, but he was no gardener. He couldn’t tell comfrey, with its bell-shaped lavender flowers, from sage, or
sáiste
. Sean hated to think what the garden would look like in a year’s time.
    But it was not his problem.
    The new Peabodys did not want a gardener.
    The young Mr. Peabody had been kind enough to suggest a man he knew in Queen City who might have need of one, a physician who owned a fine house, one Daniel Drake, who also happened to be Irish. Sean hoped Queen City was bigger than Augusta and friendly to people of his kind.
    At least Queen City wasn’t wilderness.
    This big raw country was not to his liking. It was wild like the worst of gales, and he never knew what next would blow into his life. It kept him on edge.
    When the flatboat left in late afternoon for the forty-mile, all-night trip to Queen City, Sean helped the herb woman tie up her mule on deck between the bales of tobacco and hemp. She untied her baskets of potions and tinctures and her gunnysacks of roots and herbs and set them on the deck. She regularly made the trip to Queen City to sell her medicines and see her daughter, Sarah, recently married.
    Together, Sean in his buckskin and the herb woman in her straw bonnet and heavy wool shawl stood on the flat deck, feeling the river run its westerly course beneath their feet.
    Sean marveled at the flocks of brilliant green parroquets that glittered in the buttonwood trees, those tall, pale trees with thepeeling bark that he knew as
craobh sice.
Their pale yellow flowers dropped silently into the muddy green water.
    When they floated by cattails that grew in marshy areas where little creeks fed into the river, he counted scores of blackbirds with red and yellow markings on their wings.
    As night fell, the lanterns in the forecastle shone their dim light on the dark river water. Sean had heard tales of giant fish and turtles that could snap off a man’s leg. The flatboat kept close to the steep banks. If they hit a sandbar, the men would use the long poles to move them away to deeper water. If they hit a snag and capsized, it was a shorter swim to shore.
    Sean sat on the plank deck, his back against his valise, packed with everything he owned in the world.
    Abigail Newcomb, the herb woman, sat next to him, smoking her clay pipe. He was grateful for her calm, steady presence. He stole a glance at her, her face shadowed by the bonnet. There was something that reminded him of his missus, who had been so kind to him in Ireland. Mrs. Shawcross and the herb woman might be around the same age, he thought.
    Someone played a banjo for a while and sang a few mournful songs, but then got tired and put the instrument away.
    Sean and the other passengers were left with the sounds—and the terrors—of the night. The scream of a big cat from somewhere up in the hills made Sean’s skin prickle.
    â€œThat’s a ghost cat, a panther, some call it,” the herb woman murmured. “They hunt at dark. I had one get up on the roof of my cabin when my Sarah was in her cradle, like to scared me to death.”
    There was a rustling in the underbrush: a slither and then a splash into the water.
    Sean stood to look out over the dark water. He wished he had a rifle.
    The herb woman reached up and touched his hand with something smooth and cold. As he turned toward her in the shadowy light, he saw the small stoneware jug she offered.
    â€œCourage in a bottle,” she said.
    He took a swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Whiskey with a little spice and something sour. He felt the fiery liquid go down his gullet and then he tasted something familiar.
    Suddenly, he felt hollowed out and yet weighed down, as he hadn’t let himself feel in a long time. He was back in the kitchen at Ballykinsale, sitting in front of the fire, stunned to learn that both his mam and his pa were dead. Cook had given him hot,