THIRTY-THREE
We’re outside the next address. Like the toy shop, it’s in one of the better areas of the Old Town. This address is a private residence in a close. Isla buys two fresh loaves of bread at a nearby shop, and we climb the stairs to the right address and rap on the door. It cracks open. After a pause, a woman with a baby on her hip pulls it the rest of the way, still eyeing us with suspicion.
“Aye?” she says.
“We’re looking for a Mrs. Ryan,” Isla says. “We were given this address.”
“There is no Mrs. Ryan here,” the woman says in a thick Irish accent and begins to withdraw.
“Wait!” Isla says. She smiles at the baby. “Since we do not have Mrs. Ryan’s proper address, we cannot deliver these loaves. Perhaps you would take them?”
The woman studies Isla, her gaze narrowing. Then she smooths out her expression and shakes her head and murmurs, “No, thank you, ma’am. You should find your Mrs. Ryan.”
The door closes, and we climb down the stairs to stand in the courtyard.
“Not immigrants then,” I say. “And is it me, or was she acting oddly?”
Isla stares at me a moment. Then she laughs. “They were most certainly immigrants. Did you not hear her accent?”
“They’re Irish. That’s not the same thing, right?”
“It is most certainly the same thing.” She tucks the loaves into my shopping bag. “We may have some immigration from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, but the Great Hunger sent the Irish here in droves, and many Scots were not happy to see them.”
“The Great Hunger? Oh, is that the potato famines?”
She nods. “It has been twenty years, yet there is extreme prejudice still in some areas. That is why she was wary, and it is why she did not trust the bread. It is also why the family’s residence would be on that list. Show it to me again?”
I do, and she says the first two addresses are in an area we shouldn’t visit alone, but the remaining one is on our walk back to the New Town.
When we reach the area, I look around at the towering, teeming slums.
“Um, you said the others were in neighborhoods we shouldn’t visit alone. Worse thanthis?”
“Yes, worse than this.”
I look around us, trying to imagine it.
Isla continues, “There are neighborhoods with buildings ten stories tall, with no running water or sewage. One collapsed on High Street while Duncan was in school. Seventy-seven residents. Thirty-five dead. A lecturer took his medical students to see it. Not to assist with the wounded. Purely as an intellectual exercise. Bodies were still in the rubble and Duncan—” She inhales sharply. “It affected him greatly.”
She glances at me. “I know my brother can seem distant and single-minded, but he still sends money each year to the families of those killed. Anonymously, of course. Even I am not supposed to know.”
“Is nothing being done, then?” I say, waving around. “About this?”
“Yes, something is being done. They are clearing the slums. You will see notices here and there. The buildings being knocked down, the people sent on their way. No reparations. No assistance. Driven out as if they were rats. For their own good. To convince them to better themselves, because all they need, obviously, is motivation.”
Bitter sarcasm drips from her voice. Nothing has changed there either, then. The poor just need a kick in the ass to punt them into the middle class.
“The need is overwhelming,” she says, looking about. “In the truest sense of the word. I see this, and I am like Duncan at the site of thatcollapse. Overwhelmed. I want to run to every door with one of these loaves of bread, ensure everyone has food in their belly tonight. But then what? Perhaps, rather than a single loaf of bread for all, I could sponsor families and see to their needs. Yet most do not want that. Others are beyond that sort of help, lost in a bottle of spirits or laudanum, whichever dulls the pain of this.” She waves at the tenements.
My gaze catches on a girl, no more than five, dressed in a sack of a dress, her arms piled high with clean laundry. Then on a man, half drunk in a doorway, staring listlessly, seeing nothing.
“Is it better in your world?” she says. “Please tell me it is not like this still.”
“Parts are better,” I say. “But not as much as they should be. Where I live—Vancouver—we have a lot of homelessness. People living on the streets. Even after years of patrol, I couldn’t help wanting to help. With some, I could, but it never felt like enough. Most didn’t want the name of a shelter or a clinic. Addicted to drugs and alcohol, as you say. Or suffering from mental illness. A lot of mental illness. And then, for some, it’s a choice, however hard that is to imagine. Eventually, I had to acknowledge that as much as I want to help them all, they’re people, not stray cats.”
“Not stray cats,” she repeats, and her eyes glisten. “Yes, that is exactly the lesson I have had to learn, and it is a hard one.”
She pops a mint from her tin. “Take Alice. When Hugh brought her to me, my impulse was to adopt her. Hire achildto labor in my home? Absolutely not. Hugh counseled against an adoption, and that may be the worst fight we have ever had. Duncan stayed out of it, but he asked me to employ Alice for a month before making any decisions, and I saw my mistake soon enough. To me, being a child like that, adopted into a well-to-do family, would be a dream come true. The stuff of novels. Yet Alice would have run away had I suggested it. She wants to earn her keep, and anything else smacks of charity and obligation. I am educating her, which she enjoys very much, and I have hopes of easing her into a life where her dreams rise above her station, but it is a slow process.”