The moment was awkward. I tried to make a joke: Rather funny that motherhouse is the word for an order’s main premises when there’s not a mother in the place.

She chuckled.

So you’re a—a novice, Bridie? Or is postulant the term?

A dark laugh now. I wouldn’t be a nun for a hundred pounds.

Oh, my mistake, I thought—

I just board there.

Her voice went very low.

I come from one of their homes, she added, down the country.

I registered that. It suddenly struck me as perverse that someone was said to have grown up in a home only if she had no real home.

Awfully sorry, Bridie, I didn’t mean to pry.

That’s all right.

A stiff kind of silence.

She muttered, I’d rather you knew why I’m so stupid.

Stupid?

They only sent me up to Dublin at nineteen, see, and it’s all still new to me.

Bridie, you’re the opposite of stupid!

Ah, you wouldn’t believe the mistakes I still make, she said bitterly. Handling change, reading signs, getting around on the trams, losing my way or losing my hat—

You’re a traveller in a strange land, I told her. Clever and brave.

That made Bridie beam.

Nurse Power?

Dr. Lynn, coming up from the basement, almost barged into us. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you possibly help me with Mrs. Noonan?

I blinked, wondering what could be done for Ita Noonan now.

With the p.m.

A discreet abbreviation for postmortem.

Oh, of course, Doctor.

Frankly I’d have preferred to go home, but how could I say no to her?

The flare of Bridie’s head had already disappeared in the throng. I felt nettled that the doctor had broken up our chat.

I followed her down the stairs.

She told me, It has to be tonight, since the body will be released to the husband first thing in the morning.

Families were rarely told in so many words about autopsies; it was hard for them to understand the benefit to medicine of our hacking their loved ones about.

Then it occurred to me that I might be in real trouble. I asked, You’re not thinking Mrs. Noonan’s cause of death is in doubt?

Not at all, the doctor assured me. Since the outbreak began, I’ve been seizing any chance to do a p.m. on a flu case, especially a pregnant one.

Just my luck to run into a true scientist; I could have been on my way to bed by now. Still, Dr. Lynn’s zeal impressed me, especially considering she was living under the shadow of arrest, if the gossip was true; how did she manage to rise above her own sea of troubles and concentrate on the common good?

The mortuary was deserted. I’d been down to its white chill before, but I’d never seen it so eerily full of coffins. Six high against all four walls, like firewood stacked ready for the furnace. I wondered how the attendants remembered who was who—did they pencil the names on the sides?

So many!

Dr. Lynn murmured, This is nothing. Out at the cemetery there are hundreds of caskets piled up, waiting their turn. Hazardous to the living, I call it. The Germans—an eminently practical race— cremate their dead.

Really?

A shocking notion, but fas est ab hoste doceri, you know.

My face was blank, so she glossed that: Learn even from enemies. It wouldn’t surprise me if this flu turned out to be caused by a miasma of rot blowing over from the battlefields…

I followed her into the autopsy room, where the table was a gleaming altar: white porcelain with a central drain and deep grooves like the veins in a leaf. I put down my things as Dr. Lynn slid out one of the laden shelves and lifted off the sheet.

Ita Noonan, paled to grey already, in a few hours. Those fingers, incongruously bright from the TNT she’d packed into shells. The mound of her belly under the nightdress. There’s a baby, she’d whispered in my ear. With pride, dread, bewilderment?

In the ordinary way of things, she’d have shed her burden sometime in January, then some weeks later gone to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water. Only now did churching strike me as a peculiar tradition, as if giving birth left a faint taint on a woman that needed wiping away. Did Ita Noonan’s death do away with the need to be churched? I wondered—was it enough to purify her in the priests’ eyes?

Dr. Lynn set a rubber block on the ceramic table. This improves access to the abdominal cavity. Can we manage her between us or will I go fetch an attendant?

She had the far ends of the sheet gripped in her hands.

Childishly, I couldn’t bear to stand there alone in the underlit vault while she stepped out. So I said, No bother.

I seized the near corners and braced myself. The small woman was heavier than I’d expected. My back tightened; I arched it a little to relieve it. The two of us got Ita Noonan onto the ceramic and rolled her to one side, then the other, to remove the browned sheet and set the rubber block along her spine.

A little pink leaked out of her nose. I dabbed it away.

The doctor was already rolling the surgical lamp across the floor. She trained its light on the body and clicked it up to its very brightest.

I began to undo the tapes of the nightdress; I lifted and tugged. Rather ashamed to bare Ita Noonan so to the air.

I stationed myself across from Dr. Lynn with my fountain pen and paper.

She murmured, Livor mortis, the blue of death.

She put her fingertip to Ita Noonan’s livid arm, which went white at the spot. After twelve hours, she remarked, it’ll stay blue even when pressed.

I pointed out, The body doesn’t seem stiff yet.

That’s due to the cold down here, Nurse.

Really?

It may sound rather back-to-front, but it’s the metabolic processes of decomposition that cause rigor mortis, whereas a low temperature slows down decay and keeps the cadaver soft.

Purple was pooling in patches on Ita Noonan’s shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, the backs of her legs. Bruising above her elbows from where I’d tried to revive her. (So often we had to mete out indignity on a body in a vain attempt to keep it breathing.)

Dr. Lynn let out a breath. What a wreck. Practically toothless at thirty-three, and that huge leg must have given her constant pain.

I considered the devastated terrain of Ita Noonan’s belly, which had been pushed up from plain to mountain a dozen times.

Did you know, said the doctor, we lose half again as many lying-in cases here as they do in England?

I didn’t.

Mostly because Irish mothers have too many babies, she added as she unrolled her blades. I rather wish your Holy Father would let them off after their sixth.

I almost laughed at the image of Dr. Lynn—Protestant socialist, suffragette, republican firebrand, in her mannish collar and bluestocking glasses—demanding an audience with Pope Benedict to press her point.

She glanced up as if to check I wasn’t offended.

I said, Ready, Doctor.

Now, I don’t think we’ll chance a cranial cut, as they’re hard to cover up.

I was relieved; I’d helped peel back a face before, and it was one of those sights I wished I could unsee.

Dr. Lynn’s finger rested on Ita Noonan’s hairline. This weird flu. I’ve seen it start with thirst, restlessness, sleeplessness, clumsiness, a touch of mania—then, afterwards, a blurring or dulling of one or more senses…but alas, none of this shows up under the microscope.