Free The Devil's Due: An Irish Historical Thriller by L.D. Beyer

the baby?” I asked. “They’re well?”
    “The baby,” Mary said softly, she looked down for a second before finding my eyes again. Then she shook her head. “The baby died, Frank.”
    “Died?” I said, not quite believing my ears. I felt a tightness in my chest. Died? How can this be? Ever since Eileen’s letter, I had pictured my son. I had thought of all the things I would teach him, the things my own father had taught to me. My son is dead?
    “It was two days,” Mary explained, “and poor Kathleen, she tried Frank, but the baby wouldn’t come. When she finally did I could see something was wrong. It was all too much.” Mary shook her head again. “The baby died two days later.”
    The news came like a blow and I stood there staring blankly at Mary. Dead? How can this be?
    I don’t recall climbing onto the cart, but at some point I found myself sitting next to Mary as Tim, his hands on the reins, steered us over the bumps and ruts in the road, away from Limerick. Mary and Tim were both silent, which was just as well for I had nothing to say. The only sound came from the snorts of the horses, the clop of their feet and the creaks and groans of the cart. I stared ahead, hardly noticing the sights and scenes that had occupied my dreams for the last year as a jumble of thoughts and emotions swirled in my head.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “Oh Frank,” Kathleen said as she sobbed on my shoulder. “She hadn’t been baptized. We never had a chance.” I held her tight, her body shaking as she sobbed. I felt a tear run down my own cheek.
    From a young age, both Kathleen and I, like most Catholics, had been told of the horrors that befell babies who died before they’d been baptized. They were forever damned to the eternity of Limbo, Father Lonagan had told us. Although we never knew exactly what Limbo was, I had a vague yet terrifying image of souls in anguish, chased forever by demons. In many ways, Limbo sounded worse than the fire and brimstone of hell that Father Lonagan had repeatedly assured me I was destined to see firsthand. Many babies died before their first year, something I had seen not only here in Ireland but in America too. That was painful enough. What made it worse was that Kathleen and I had never married. To many priests, unwed mothers were sinners, and the babies they bore were the product of that sin. An unbaptized child, and an illegitimate one at that, if I believed what Father Lonagan had preached, our baby would suffer for our sins. Despite my own views of Father Lonagan and the church, I understood Kathleen’s anguish.
    We were standing outside Mary’s house, a small cottage on twenty acres, nine miles south of Limerick City in an area known as Kilcully Cross. There was steam rising from the washtub. Kathleen, when I first saw her, had her sleeves rolled up, her forearms red from the scrubbing. Now as she clung to me, her body wracked by sobs, I didn’t know what to say. The dreams that had kept me awake for hours—what I would find when I returned to Ireland, my reunion with Kathleen, meeting my son—had been nothing more than that. Just dreams.
    “Did the baby have a name?”
    Kathleen lifted her head from my shoulder, wiped her eyes, and nodded. “Margaret,” she said.
    “Margaret?”
    Kathleen nodded. It was my mother’s name.
    I let out a heavy breath. The child that I thought would be a son had turned out to be a girl. She must have known the world that awaited her. That’s why she fought so hard against being born—and almost killed Kathleen in the process, Mary had said. Then when she first saw Ireland for what it was, she decided it wasn’t a world she wanted to live in.
    “And you?” I asked. “You’re alright are you?”
    Kathleen nodded. “The midwife said the baby wasn’t ready, that she had turned the other way. That’s why she wouldn’t come.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “But I’m fine now.” She took my hands. “I wanted to tell you, Frank, I did.