Free August by Bernard Beckett

darting eyes of the children and hardly noticed the sores they suffered. They closed their ears to the pleading whispers that reached up to them, creepers intent on strangling their host.
    Good Friday came and Grace handed over her small coins in a spirit of generosity and holiness. This was the one day a year the girls were allowed to feel special and they weren’t about to ruin it with a show of misplaced sympathy. She bought a small wire butterfly from a woman with a furrowed face and small, suspicious eyes. It was perfectly formed and Grace imagined the long careful hours spent bending it into shape. Like all the girls, Grace had a special box where she kept her trinkets, but this year she wasn’t adding to the pile. Instead she took the tiny sculpture and left it outside Sister Angela’s door. The nun had kept special watch over her since the whipping, and it felt good to be able to repay her kindness. Grace decided not to leave a note with the gift. It was enough to imagine the old woman’s smile.
    The following night Grace was on duty at the front gate. It was a promotion from the laundry, engineered, she suspected, by the same old nun. The work was easier. She simply had to sit beside the locked gate in case someone came knocking. Most nights nobody did and she was left with her dreaming. If anybody did knock the procedure was clear. She was to ask them their name and if the voice that came back was female Grace was permitted to look down on her from the small slit above the viewing platform. She would ask her business, take her name and then tell her to return in daylight hours. Male voices were to be ignored, although after three months of working the gate Grace was still to hear one.
    The knock came and Grace stirred from her almost-slumber.
    â€˜Who is it?’
    â€˜I need your help.’
    It was a young woman. Grace climbed the ladder to the platform which ran at height a little above her own head and from there peered down through the slot. Grace could see she was holding something up for inspection. It appeared to be a bundle of rags.
    â€˜Please,’ the young woman said. Thick strands of hair framed her sunken face and her eyes were deep with pleading. ‘My child is very sick. There is no hope for him out on the plains. You must help me.’
    â€˜I am sorry,’ Grace replied, repeating carefully the words she had been taught, ‘you must come back tomorrow, during the hours of daylight.’
    â€˜We are not allowed in the City in daylight,’ the mother replied.
    She was one of them, the people of the night. They had no right to knock here. They knew that. Everybody knew that. Grace didn’t know where to look, or how to dismiss the woman. Worse than that, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Normally following instructions made Grace feel holy, but there was something about that face—its desperate darkness—and the dreadful shape of her package.
    â€˜Please,’ Grace asked, although she didn’t know what it was she was asking. For the mother and her baby to vanish perhaps, for neither of them to have ever existed.
    â€˜Please,’ the mother echoed, but with an intensity Grace couldn’t match. ‘His name is Ronan. If you do not take him, he will die.’
    Give me strength, God , Grace recited silently as she had been taught to do in times of trial. God, give me strength .
    â€˜I cannot take him,’ Grace told the woman. ‘I am just a girl.’
    â€˜Then get someone who can,’ the young mother implored.
    â€˜It is not permitted.’ Grace felt the words’ coldness freeze her throat.
    The woman moved back a step, and the light fell on her face. Grace recognised the look in her eyes. She had felt it herself. She understood loss.
    â€˜He is a baby, just a baby. He has done nothing wrong. He deserves to live.’
    Grace made the mistake of looking at the child. He was only a few weeks in the world and she