The doctor didn’t comment. She turned to me and said, You’re doing all you can, Nurse Power. Keep up the whiskey. Now I’m afraid I’m needed in Women’s Surgical.

But—

I promise I’ll be back, she told me on her way out.

For something to do, I took Bridie’s temperature’s again; it was 106. Could that be right? Pearls of sweat standing out on her face, appearing faster than I could wipe them away.

Stay nice and quiet like the doctor said, I murmured. Don’t try to talk, and you’ll get better all the faster.

I dabbed iced cloths on her magenta cheeks, her forehead, the nape of her neck. It occurred to me that Bridie wasn’t coughing because she couldn’t; she was being choked by her own rising fluids. Drowning from the inside.

Hours rolled by like one long, impossible moment. Every now and then, moving like an automaton, I made myself perform one of my other duties. I gave Mary O’Rahilly a bedpan when she ventured to ask; I checked her binder, changed her pad. Barnabas woke and cried a little. I changed his nappy and made up another bottle for him. But all the while, all I knew was Bridie.

Her cheeks were nut brown all the way to her ears; you couldn’t call it any shade of red, and her breath was a rapid, wet grinding. She couldn’t hold her whiskey cup anymore, so I knelt on the bed beside her and held it to her cracked lips. She took sips between her raking breaths. She sneezed five times in a row, and suddenly the handkerchief was smeared with red.

I stared at the linen. One broken capillary, one of thousands, millions in her resilient young body. Blood meant nothing. Birthing women often thrashed about in puddles of the stuff and were perfectly well the next day.

I think I need the—

What, Bridie?

No words came out.

I guessed. A bedpan, is it?

A tear slid out of her left eye.

I checked, and she’d wet the bed. Don’t worry your head, it happens all the time. I’ll have you dry in two ticks.

I tilted Bridie’s light, limp frame at just the right moment to roll the dry sheet on at the left side and the wet one off at the right. I undid the tapes of her nightdress—glimpsing her pale flanks and what looked like an old scar—and got a clean one on her.

I asked her, Can you see me all right? Am I blurry?

She didn’t answer.

Her temperature was down to 105. My voice soared with relief: Your fever’s breaking.

Bridie gaped like a fish. I wasn’t sure she’d grasped what I’d said.

I checked her pulse; it was still fast and the force felt low to me. I had to stop her going into shock, so I ran to make up a pint of saline. I filled our largest metal syringe, willing my hands steady.

Even in her confusion, Bridie quailed at the sight of the needle.

I told her, It’s only salt water, like the sea.

(Had doctors made visits to her so-called home? Had Bridie ever had an injection in her life?)

She whispered, You’re putting the sea into me?

I ordered myself not to hurt her, got the needle into the vein on the first try.

I watched; I waited.

Still one hundred per cent alive, I repeated in my head, even if her lips were turning a beautiful shade of lavender, almost violet, and her swollen eyelids so smoky, shadowy, like Mary Pickford’s on the silver screen.

The saline didn’t seem to be working; her blood pressure was still dropping.

When ought purple be considered blue? Red to brown to blue to black. What exactly had Dr. Lynn said about the blue cases, their chances of pulling through?

Bridie gasped something.

I thought it might have been Sing. You want me to sing?

Maybe she was delirious. Maybe it wasn’t even me she was addressing. Anyway, she couldn’t answer, because all her effort was bent on that next breath.

I would run to Women’s Surgical and drag Dr. Lynn back with me.

Bridie, I’ll only be gone a minute.

Did she even hear?

I fled the room. Turned left, went down the passage very fast.

Back the other way, there was some commotion. It didn’t matter.

But then it got louder and I looked around and saw Dr. Lynn coming down the stairs in an apron with a trace of red on the bib, each arm in the custody of a helmeted constable. How clumsily the trio descended; the men were holding her too firmly and she was briefly lifted off her feet.

Dr. Lynn!

The doctor stared through the knot of gawkers that stood between us. She had the most baffling expression—mingled frustration, regret, sorrow, even (I thought) laughter at the absurdity of the situation. I realised she couldn’t help me, and she couldn’t help Bridie, because her time was up.

The men in blue steered the doctor around a corner, out of sight.

When I stumbled back into the ward, Bridie was the colour of a dirty penny. Her eyes were wide with what looked like terror.

I gripped her damp hand. You’ll be grand, I swore to her.

One of the babies started crying and I thought Mary O’Rahilly might be too, but I didn’t turn my head from Bridie. Her wheezes were laboured and shallow, almost too fast to count. Her face was dusty blue.

I waited.

I watched.

The bone man was in the room. I could hear him rattling, snickering.

But Bridie’s powers of endurance were extraordinary, weren’t they? She was younger and tougher than me, she’d gloated. Deprivation and humiliation had been this girl’s meat and drink; she’d swallowed them down and turned them to strength, mirth, beauty. Surely she could survive this day as she had all the other ones?

It was only a path through the woods, I told myself. Tangled and faint and looping but a path just the same, and didn’t every path have an end? Like the forested hills around Dublin where we’d walk one day, Bridie and I, joking about how scared I’d been when she got the flu. She’d come home and meet Tim and his magpie. She’d lie beside me in my bed. There’d be all the time in the world. We’d take a ship to Australia someday and walk in the perfume-clouded Blue Mountains. I pictured us strolling through eucalyptus groves, entertained by the exuberant flutter of strange birds.

A little red froth leaked out the side of her mouth.

I wiped it away.

In my mind’s eye, the track through the woods was getting dimmer as the branches closed overhead. More of a tunnel now.

I thought of running in search of another doctor to inject Bridie with something, anything. But all stimulants would do was buy her a few more minutes of pain—wasn’t that what Dr. Lynn had told me?

The tunnel straightened. The two of us knew right well where it was going.

Bridie whooped and coughed up dark blood all down her neck.

I held her in my arms as crimson bubbled from her nose. I couldn’t find a pulse in her skinny wrist. Her skin was clammy now, losing all the heat it had hoarded.

I did nothing, only crouched there counting her fluttering sips of air—fifty-three in a minute. How fast could a person breathe? As light as the wings of a moth; as loud as a tree being sawn down. I kept count, totting up Bridie’s breaths until the small, noiseless one that I realised, a few seconds later, must have been her last.

My eyes were dry, burning. I turned them towards the floor. It was Bridie who’d mopped it earlier; I tried to find her silvery track.

Nurse Power, please. Get hold of yourself.

Groyne; when had the orderly come in?