Free Silent Time by Paul Rowe

suddenly left the People’s Party in ruins and retired to England with a seat in the House of Lords. It was a nasty and cowardly retreat that only sharpened William’s growing fear that the slaughter he’d encouraged had been for nothing, that all those young lives lost had served no greater cause than to elevate people like Morris into the peerage. This terrible thought had mercilessly eroded his peace during the five long years since the war. Today, it had finally reduced him to hiding away in this remote community under an old bridge that, like his life, he suddenly realized, was falling apart as he stood by powerless to stop it.
    Still, he’d have to leave in a few minutes. He’d have to return to Thomas’s house and find a way to reassure the good old man who, thankfully, hadn’t lost a son in the war: another reason the Tobin’s was a good house for William to stay.
    William had been done with praying for a long time, but he couldn’t deny the inarticulate yearning he felt as he gazed out from beneath the bridge and up at the pearl grey sky.
    That’s when he noticed the girl fishing beside the river.

2
    Maisie was busying herself around the stove when he got back to the house. She placed a piping hot cup of tea and two tea buns in front of him.
    William obligingly buttered one half of a tea bun saying, “Funny, I don’t often see a girl trouting, but there’s a little one over there by the brook now and, my son, she sure can handle a rod.” The girl by the river had been strangely adept with the fishing rod, had even hoisted a large trout ashore while he’d observed curiously from beneath the bridge. She displayed only a calm sense of routine as she captured the slippery thing in her hands, whacked its head on a rock and threaded it through the gills onto a gad made from a peeled alder stick.
    â€œThat must be Dulcie,” Maisie said. “Leona Merrigan’s little one. The poor little thing spends whole days there sometimes, when she’s not busy dragging buckets of water from the river to the house. I dare say she puts more food and water on the table than that mother of hers.”
    â€œNow, Maisie,” said Thomas, provoking her to throw him an angry glance.
    â€œOh, don’t mind him, Mr. Cantwell,” she said, daring Thomas to interrupt. “He’s always the one to stand up for Leona Merrigan, ever since she showed her sorry face here, what, over twenty years ago now.” She lifted a damper from the stove and, with a knock of the poker, collapsed a small birch log into a bed of bright red cinders. An orange glow touched her face as she watched the small busy flames reappear. Thankfully, she refrained from adding another junk before she sat down opposite William at the table.
    â€œPoor old Paddy Merrigan! God rest his soul, he come to a sad end,” she said, making the sign of the cross. “He got more than he bargained for when he brought that one down the shore from Three Brooks, I can tell you. He thought he had it made marryin’ a young one half his age, but he soon learned the rights of that.”
    â€œI’ve heard the story, of course, about the terrible thing that happened,” William said. “She lost all her children in one night to some sort of fever and, then, her husband took his own life. Isn’t that how it goes?”
    â€œThey lost their three boys,” Thomas said.
    â€œIt was no one’s fault but her own,” Maisie said. She caught the surprise in William’s look and, likely only out of respect for his standing, quickly softened the remark. “God forgive me for sayin’ it,” she said, “but it was an act of pure covetousness that brought that misery on their heads.”
    Despite himself, William smiled at the way she pronounced the word.
    Cubby-chus-ness
.
    â€œI always assumed she’d remained childless,” he said. He’d seen Leona