It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them, gathering in black batches on the outskirts of town then coming in, walking the streets, cocking their heads and perching, impudently, on whatever lookout post that took their fancy, scavenging for what was dead, or diving in mischief for anything that looked edible along the roads before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent.

The convent was a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, facing the town. Year round, the front garden was kept in order with shaved lawns, ornamental shrubs growing neatly in rows, the tall hedges cut square. Sometimes, small outdoor fires were made up there whose strange, greenish smoke carried down over the river and across town or away in the direction of Waterford, depending on how the wind was blowing. The weather had turned dry and colder, and people remarked on what a picture the convent made, how like a Christmas card it almost was with the yews and evergreens dusted in frost and how the birds, for some reason, had not touched a single berry on the holly bushes there; the old gardener himself had said so.

   The Good Shepherd nuns, in charge of the convent, ran a training school there for girls, providing them with a basic education. They also ran a laundry business. Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation: restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there. Reports were that everything that was sent in, whether it be a raft of bedlinen or just a dozen handkerchiefs, came back same as new.

There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren't students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she'd been called out to treat a fifteen-year old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash-tubs. Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting Aran jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes, and weren't allowed to speak, only to pray, that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings, once their work was done. Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.

But people said lots of things — and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.

Furlong didn't like to believe any of it but he'd gone, one evening, to the convent with a load well before it was due and, finding no sign of anyone at the front, had walked down past the coal house on the gable end and slid the bolt on a heavy door and pushed through to find a pretty orchard whose trees were heavy with fruit: red and yellow apples, pears. He went on with the intention of robbing a freckled pear but as soon as his boot touched the grass, a flock of wicked geese ran out after him. When he retreated, they stood up on their toes and flapped their wings, stretching their necks out in triumph, and had hissed at him.

He'd carried on to a small, lighted chapel where he found more than a dozen young women and girls, down on their hands and knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor. As soon as they saw him, they looked like they'd been scalded — just over him coming in asking after Sister Carmel, and was she about? And not one of them with shoes but going around in black socks and some horrid type of grey-coloured shifts. One girl had an ugly stye in her eye, and another's hair had been roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with shears.

It was she who came up to him.

'Mister, won't you help us?'

Furlong felt himself stepping back.

'Just take me as far as the river. That's all you need do.'

She was dead in earnest and the accent was Dublin.

'To the river?'

'Or you could just let me out at the gate.'

'It's not up to me, girl. I can't take you anywhere,' Furlong said, showing her his open, empty hands.

'Take me home with you, then. I'll work til I drop for ya, sir.'

'Haven't I five girls and a wife at home.'

'Well, I've nobody — and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?'

Suddenly, she dropped to her knees and started polishing — and Furlong turned to see a nun standing down at the confession box.

'Sister,' Furlong said.

'Can I help you?'

'I was just looking for Sister Carmel.'

'She's gone across to St Margaret's' she said. 'Maybe I can help you.'

'I've a load of logs and coal for ye, Sister'

;As soon as she realised who he was, she changed. 'Was it you that was out on the lawn, upsetting the geese?'

Furlong, feeling strangely chastised, took his mind off the girl and followed the nun out to the front, where she read over the docket and inspected the load to make sure it matched the order. She left him then, going back in the side while he put the coal and logs in the shed, before coming out through the front door, to pay. He took stock of her while she was counting out the notes; she put him in mind of a strong, spoiled pony who'd for too long been given her own way. The urge to say something about the girl grew but fell away, and in the end he simply wrote out the receipt she asked for, and handed it over.

As soon as he got into the lorry, he pulled the door closed and drove on. Farther on, out the road, he realised he'd missed his turn and was heading in the wrong direction with his boot to the floor, and had to tell himself to settle, and go easy. He kept picturing the girls down on their hands and knees, polishing the floor, and the state they were in. What struck him, too, was the fact that when he was following the nun back from the chapel he'd noticed a padlock on the inside of the door that led from the orchard through to the front, and that the top of the high wall separating the convent from St Margaret's next door was topped with broken glass. And how the nun had locked the front door after her, with the key, just coming out to pay.

A fog was coming down, hovering in long sheets and patches, and there was no space on the winding road to turn, so Furlong took a right onto a by-road, and then, farther along, took another right onto another road, which grew narrower. After he'd taken another turn and passed a hayshed he wasn't sure he hadn't already passed, he met a loose puckaun trailing a short rope, and came across an old man in a waistcoat with a bill-hook, out slashing a crowd of dead thistles on the roadside.

Furlong pulled up and bade the man good evening.

'Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?'

'This road?' The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him.'This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.'

*

That night, in bed, Furlong considered going over no part of what he'd witnessed at the convent with Eileen, but when he told her, she sat up rigid and said such things had nothing to do with them, and that there was nothing they could do, and didn't those girls up there need a fire to warm themselves, like everyone? And didn't the nuns always pay what was owing and on time unlike so many who would put everything on the slate until you had to put the squeeze on, and there the trouble would come.

It was a long speech.

'What is it you know?' Furlong asked.

'There's nothing, only what I'm telling you,' she answered. 'And in any case, what do such things have to do with us? Aren't all our girls well, and minded?'

'Our girls?' Furlong said. 'What has any of this to do with ours?'

'Not one thing,' she said. 'What have we to answer for?'

'Well, I didn't think there was anything but listening to you now, I'm not so sure.'

'Where does thinking get us?' she said. 'All thinking does is bring you down.' She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. 'If you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.'

'I'm not disagreeing with you, Eileen.'

'Agree or disagree. You're just soft-hearted, is all. Giving away what change is in your pocket and—

'What ails you tonight?'

'Nothing, only what you don't realise. Wasn't it far from any hardship that you were reared.'

;'Far from what hardship, exactly?'

'Well, there's girls out there that get in trouble, that much you do know.'

The blow was cheap but it was the first he'd heard from her, in all their years together. Something small and hard gathered in his throat then which he tried but felt unable to voice or swallow. In the finish, he could neither swallow it down nor find any words to ease what had come between them.

'I'd no call to say that to you, Bill,' Eileen cooled. 'But if we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through.

Those were put in there because they hadn't a soul in this world to care for them. All their people did was leave them wild and then, when they got into trouble, they turned their backs. It's only people with no children that can afford to be careless.'

'But what if it was one of ours?' Furlong said.

'This is the very thing I'm saying,' she said, rising again. 'Tis not one of ours.'

;'Isn't it a good job Mrs Wilson didn't share your ideas?' Furlong looked at her. 'Where would my mother have gone? Where would I be now?'

'Weren't Mrs Wilson's cares far from any of ours?' Eileen said. 'Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?'