The first book in the Quirke series, 2006

SHE WAS GLAD IT WAS THE EVENING MAILBOAT SHE WAS TAKING, FOR she did not think she could have faced a morning departure. At the party the night before one of the medical students had found a flask of raw alcohol and mixed it with orange crush and she had drunk two glasses of it, and the inside of her mouth was still raw and there was something like a drum beating behind her forehead. She had stayed in bed all morning, still tipsy, unable to sleep and crying half the time, a hankie crushed to her mouth to stifle the sobs. She was frightened at the thought of what she had to do today, of what she had to undertake. Yes, she was frightened.

At Dun Laoghaire she paced back and forth on the pier, too agitated inside herself to stand still. She had put her luggage in the cabin and had come back down to the dock to wait, as they had told her to. She did not know why she had agreed to what had been asked of her. She already had the offer of the job in Boston, and now there had been the prospect of the money as well, but she suspected it was more that she had been afraid of Matron, afraid to refuse when she had asked if she would bring the child with her. Matron had a way of sounding the most intimidating when she spoke the softest. Now, Brenda, she had said, looking at her with those goggle eyes of hers, I want you to consider carefully, because it’s a big responsibility. Everything had felt strange, the sick sensation in her stomach and the burning in her mouth from the alcohol, and the fact that she was not wearing her nurse’s uniform but the pink wool costume she had bought specially to go away in-her going-away suit, as if she was getting married, when instead of a honeymoon she would have a week of taking care of this baby, and not a hint of a husband.