"Yes."

"But they're gonna . . ." Daley swallowed hard, "take and boil our bodies. That's the thing I have a hard time getting used to."

He looked imploringly at Cheverus, almost as if the priest had the power to change that fact. He put his hands to his face and began to cry, softly at first, then in big quaking sobs that made his shoulders lurch.

"Dominic," Cheverus said, reaching out and putting his hand on his shoulder. "Listen to me, Dominic. That is just your mortal shell. Not you. Not your soul."

"I know, Father," he said, continuing to sob. The tears ran down into his hand. "But. . ."

"Put yourself in God's hands, my son."

He nodded. "I'm sorry for crying like this."

"It's all right." Cheverus rubbed his back.

After a while Daley's sobs slowed and soon they stopped altogether. He took a deep breath and exhaled. "Mother o' God," he moaned. "Would you look at me now. Blubberin' away like some schoolboy." He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt. "I don't want 'em all to see me cryin' tomorrow. Them that's come to see us hang. I don't want to give them the satisfaction."

"I understand," said Cheverus. "God will give you courage."

"Do you really think so, Father?"

"Yes. And I'll be right there with you."

Because of the manacles, he reached with difficulty into his shirt and took out a packet of letters tied with a string. The letters were worn thin and dirty from handling. He gave the packet to Cheverus.

"Those are from Finola. I'd like her to have 'em back. They won't do me no good where I'm going. And they might be of some comfort to her in the future."

"I'll see that she gets them."

"And there's one in there for me boy. I wrote it."

"You wrote it, Dominic?"

"Aye," he said, smiling with pride. "Jamy learned me how to make me letters. And I copied what he put down, as best I could anyway. Would you pass it along to him?"

"I will be sure to."

"When will I get to see them, Father?"

"I shall go and bring them here later. Anything else you need?"

"Could you ask 'em if we mightn't be allowed a razor? I'd like to shave in the morning. I would like to look presentable."

"I will ask."

"Oh. One more thing, Father? Whatever happens, would you tell me mam I died quick like. That I didn't suffer none. I wouldn't want her to get upset."

"I understand. I'll tell her that... it went smooth like."

"I know I've been a terrible burden on her. Tell her I'm sorry, too."

Cheverus looked at Daley expectantly, waiting. "I will." Then, "Dominic?"

"Yes, Father."

"Do you feel true remorse?"

"Remorse, Father?"

"For what you've done."

"I feel I've let me folks down, if that's what you mean. And I feel bad for that man's mother."

"Whose mother?"

"That fellow's. Lyon's mother?"

"You feel bad for her?"

"Yes."

"Because of her loss, you mean?"

"That, too, I suppose. But mostly on account of the money."

"The money?" Cheverus asked. So he would tell him finally. The truth. The truth that would save his soul.

"Aye, Father." He paused for a moment, looking down at the stone floor. He swallowed hard again, his big Adam's apple bobbing in his neck. "It was rightly hers and we shoulda come clean."

"So it was his money?"

Daley nodded, his gray eyes appearing contrite. "We lied about it because . . . well, on account of how it would look and all. We were afraid."

"I understand. And yet, you feel remorse for that now?"

"Sure and I do, Father."

Cheverus felt his heart lift up, like a white bird taking flight. He felt the joy of bringing God's gift of mercy to this man.

"That's good, Dominic," he told him. "It is through remorse and sincere repentance that we are able to receive the Lord's blessing. Would you care to make confession now?"

"Please, Father."

Cheverus opened his trunk. He took out his surplice and his violet stole, the one he used for hearing confession, and put them on. Of all the many confessions he had heard in his time as a priest, this one, he sensed, was by far the most important he would ever hear. A soul teetered on the brink, the abyss of hell waiting below him, and he, Cheverus, was going to snatch it back. He was going to save it. He thought of his mother, her prediction when he was a child that he would do something great in God's service. That he would make her proud. Till now he had only brought shame upon himself and upon his mother's memory. Secret shame. Shame which only he and God knew. But shame nonetheless. Perhaps this was what he had waited so long for. What he had crossed an ocean hoping to find. When he was ready, he blessed Daley with the sign of the cross and said, "Dominus sit in corde tuo . .

Daley began. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

He wandered over the sins of his life, offering up every curse and oath and blasphemy he'd ever uttered, every lie and falsehood he'd told since he was a boy. He confessed to stealing some eggs from a neighbor back home when he was eight. To not paying a debt of a half-crown for some seed he'd purchased on credit. To selling a heifer for twice what he knew it to be worth. Yet when Daley had finished his confession, he hadn't said a word--not one word--about the murder. He told him about the money, how it wasn't theirs, how they'd lied to the authorities about it, but to Cheverus's utter amazement, the prisoner didn't say anything about the rest: how they had held up Marcus Lyon, pulled him from his horse and bashed in his skull, then pushed his lifeless body under the water. Nothing at all about that. Instead, what he told him was a preposterous story about their having found the purse lying in the weeds by the side of the road. Found it! And that his deepest regret was for not having turned it in. He knew that it was not his money and that it was wrong-- a form of stealing--and he didn't want that on his conscience when he died.

"You found the money?" Cheverus asked him, his eyes widened in astonishment.

"Yes, Father. It was just a-laying there off the road. Down by the river."

"How had it got there?"

"I dunno. That's the odd thing. There was no explainin' it."

Cheverus paused, wondering how to continue. Was he going to persist in this hardened obstinacy, one that would condemn his soul to hell? He needed to get him to understand the spiritual peril he was in.

"Is there anything else you would wish to confess before God, Dominic?"

"I don't think so, Father."

"Are you quite sure?"

Daley scratched his beard.

"I think that about does it, yes."

"You know that you must make a complete and full confession in order for me to absolve you and for you to be forgiven in the eyes of God."

"Why, yes, Father, I do."

"Dominic, I must warn you one last time. You would be placing your immortal soul in grave jeopardy if you were to knowingly leave out a sin, especially a mortal sin. You would not have benefit of absolution because you hadn't, in your heart, repented of the sin. Do you understand what I'm telling you, Dominic?"

He stared at Daley, waiting. The big Irishman looked down at his hands, his fingers slowly contracting into fists and then relaxing, doing it again and again, seeming to knead something invisible. Cheverus wanted to take him by the shoulders, as you would a child, and say, If you want absolution, Dominic, you will have to confess to your crime. If God is to forgive you, you will have to admit to killing that man and show remorse for your action, before it is too late. Daley finally looked up at him. His gaze was the simple, uncomplicated gaze of a dog.

"I know, Father," he replied.

"Very well," Cheverus said, discouraged. He decided he would leave it there for now. There was still some time. Not much, but a little. Time to save his soul.

"What's my penance, Father?" Daley asked.

"Say five Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys."

And then Cheverus went ahead and said the words of absolution.

Chapter Thirteen.

One day, he thought. One stinking day is all you got, boyo.

While Daley was with the priest, Halligan lay on his bunk staring up at a tattered cobweb dangling from the ceiling. In it lay trapped the dry husk of a single fly, dead for ages yet he had not noticed it before. He thought that odd. Soon you'll be as dead as that blasted fly, he told himself. He didn't hold out hope about the appeal saving them at the last moment. No, that was pure fantasy, as of course were his thoughts about escape. There'd be no escape. That was just grasping at straws. He needed to abandon hope, as it was a tantalizing and treacherous wench that would only make it harder to do what he would have to do on the morrow. He needed to set his sights on death, to look it right in the eye, to get used to the bitter tang of it in his mouth. And yet he knew it was only with the arrival of the little priest that the last shred of hope had vanished completely. It was as if the man had carried the certainty of their end with him like a buzzard floating over a sick calf in a field.

He looked back on his life with sadness and regret, with yearning and confusion, and with an odd detachment, too, as if it weren't really his life but that of someone else, or as if it were merely a story someone had told him once around a campfire: There was once this lad named Halligan . . . What had seemed an infinite array of days stretching out, glittering and luminous, all those he'd squandered or frittered aimlessly away, tossed aside like so much chaff, spent in drunken abandon, in card-playing or gaming or whoring, thinking they would remain as plentiful as the grains of sand on the shore below Slea Head, that there would always be more, always a tomorrow. But the joke turned out to be on him--they could be used up. They had been used up--or almost. It wasn't as if he would have done anything particularly differently with his life, though maybe here and there he might have. Yet he would have done what he did knowing full well this day would come. The last one. The very last. He could almost feel the approach of death as a tingling sensation along the back of his scalp, so that the hairs stood on end.

He had not been afraid of much, perhaps because he'd never considered he had much worth losing. But he supposed he was afraid of this. At least a little. Not of the pain of the thing so much, not like with Daley, though he didn't look forward to that either. He just hoped it would be quick. Sometimes the memory of poor Father Roche dying miserably up there on Wexford Bridge slipped into his mind. Jaysus, he'd cry out. He didn't want to go like that. No sir. He'd rather be shot down like a dog running away. Perhaps it was more simply the unknown of it, the strange, dark mystery of the thing he'd be facing tomorrow. He felt there was nothing waiting beyond, neither joyful nor filled with terrors, only silence and darkness. Still a fellow couldn't help but wonder, could he now? And that was the thing that rubbed him the wrong way. The wondering and thinking on it.

Yet mostly what he felt today hadn't so much to do with fear, nor even with the rage that had burned so hotly in him just a short time before. Of course, he was angry still, but the anger had dissipated, become a thing muted and distant, a notion more grasped by the mind than felt by the heart. So what did he feel? A peculiar kind of resignation had stolen over him in the last day or so, a grudging acquiescence regarding his fate. He accepted both the injustice and the inevitability of his end, not willingly, not gladly, but with the pragmatic fortitude similar to that one had with the approach of a storm: there was nothing to do except get ready for it, close the shutters, get the animals into the barn. To do otherwise was foolish. Yes, he would rise tomorrow for the last time, eat his last meal, take his last breath, and that was all there was to it. It was as simple, as straightforward, as uncomplicated as that. There was even a kind of cold comfort in that certainty. No man lived forever. This was his time and to fight it was not only futile but foolish.

Since yesterday though, he'd felt a strange feeling rising in his chest. A raw burning in his lungs, as though he'd inhaled smoke. He had to concentrate hard to breathe or he'd start coughing. For some reason, he thought of the feeling as regret, a vague longing after something he couldn't even put his finger on. Yet what did he have to regret? Though still a young man, he'd been all over, seen things, done things, had had a bellyful of living. More than most men twice his age. Perhaps, he reasoned, anyone facing death felt that way. Even if he lived to be a hundred. Maybe it was the innate greediness of the human heart, always wanting more than it could ever possibly hold. Or perhaps it was the fact that he felt he'd come to a certain understanding about the world and about himself as well, but too late for it to be of any real use to him. Maybe if he had lived. Maybe . . . But to hell with it, he told himself. That was all in the past. Just let it go. Give the whole damn thing up. There was nothing to be done. You could think until hell froze over, and it wouldn't change a damn thing.

Daley returned to the cell then, accompanied by the guards. His eyes were strangely luminous, his pockmarked skin mottled. There was a high, burnished color to his cheeks and forehead, as on a man who had been sitting too close to a fire. It was obvious that he'd been crying and was embarrassed by it. He looked chastened and subdued, his shoulders hunched forward like a reprimanded schoolboy. And yet at the same time he appeared serene, his face emptied of fear. There was about him a calmness Halligan had not seen before.

"How'd it go?" Halligan asked his friend.

"Your turn, Jamy boy," was all he said, a foolish grin on his face. His expression reminded Halligan of that of the boys back in the orphanage, after they'd left the confessional. Relieved that they'd made it through somehow and feeling smug enough to taunt the others still in line.

"You told him I wasn't going to make confession?"

"Just go talk to him. You'll like him."

"You told him though, right?"

Daley only winked.

As Halligan entered the cell, he found the priest kneeling on the floor. He held a large silver cross with both hands, and he was praying silently, his back to the door. Despite the noisy racket of his chains on the stone floor, the priest continued, undisturbed by the noise. Halligan took a seat on the bunk and waited. Even in his vestments now, the man looked unpriest-like somehow, too small and frail, more like a student studying for the priesthood. An old-looking altar boy. His face was puffy and bruised, his right eye swollen, the skin taut and shiny beneath it. It looked as if he'd come out on the short end of a fight. There was about him, Halligan thought, something very sad. Why, you'd have thought he was the one bound for the gallows. Halligan decided there was no harm in just talking to the priest. He would be polite, make conversation, pass the time. But that was it. If he started in on all that other business, he would tell him not for him, thank you very much.

"Hello, James," the priest said to him finally.

"Good morning, Father."

The priest rose and sat beside him on the bunk. His surplice was dirty at the knees and threadbare. The large cross hung on a heavy silver chain around his slender neck, almost seeming to weigh his head down. As he spoke, he nervously fingered the cross with his thumb.

"How are you, James?"

"Not bad considering," he said, trying to make a joke. Cheverus didn't smile. "How's the eye, Father?"

"It hurts a little," he said, touching it.

"I'm sorry you got hurt on our account."

"It wasn't your fault. It was my own . . ." But he didn't finish the thought.

"I want to thank you for coming, Father," Halligan offered graciously.

"Your letter made quite a compelling case. You've obviously had some education."

"Aye. A bit. Your being here means a lot to Dom."

"He is a man of great faith."

"Indeed, he is. He's always praying. I've never seen anyone pray so much."