The Girl Who Came Home

CHAPTER 1

Ballysheen, County Mayo, Ireland

April 10, 1912





Maggie Murphy stood alone and unnoticed on the doorstep of the thatched stone cottage that three generations of her family had called home. She twirled one of her rich auburn curls around and around her index finger, the way she always did when she was anxious, and watched as the day she had been dreading dawned in the sky above the distant mountains.

Narrowing her usually wide blue eyes against the glare of the early morning sun, she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth as she quietly observed her friend Peggy Madden. Peggy’s laughter was carried on a light breeze as she vigorously scooped up armful after armful of cherry blossoms and, giggling like a schoolgirl, threw them into the air. The pale pink and white petals cascaded down onto the heads of her cousin Jack and his wife, Maura, whom Peggy had caught kissing under one of the trees a few moments earlier.

“Just like your wedding day, Maura,” she cried. “There’s confetti enough here for all of us to be brides, and then maybe there’ll be some kissing for us too.”

As the two women laughed, Maggie shivered in the cool morning air and wondered how they could be so carefree when her own heart was so heavy and troubled.

Unseen, she continued to watch her fellow travelers for a few moments longer, Peggy fussing with the new hat she had bought especially for the journey to America (Peggy Madden will arrive in America as she means to live among the American people: as a lady, with style, she’d said) and Maura placing a hand protectively over her swollen belly, clearly visible beneath her coat even though her baby wasn’t due for another few months yet. Maggie was fascinated by it, by the fact that an actual person was growing in there. She wondered how Maura would fare on their long journey. She’d heard talk of the strain that a crossing of the Atlantic could place upon a person, and for a woman in Maura’s condition she was certain that it couldn’t be such a good idea. She’d expressed her concerns to her aunt Kathleen a few days previously.

“You certainly don’t need to be worrying about Maura Brennan, I can tell ye,” Kathleen had replied, brushing Maggie’s naïve fears easily aside. “She’s crossed that ocean more times than most men ever will, and a baby in her belly won’t make one bit of a difference. Anyway, we’re sailing on the Titanic, the biggest ship in the world. Unsinkable, y’know. No better crib for any of us.”

Her aunt’s words hadn’t really reassured Maggie. Neither had the adverts in the Western People, which Peggy had insisted on showing to Maggie and their good friend, Katie Kenny, during the previous weeks.

“Look, girls,” she’d enthused, hurling herself down onto the grass between them as they sat by the lakeside, shoving the pages of the local newspaper under their noses. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Listen to what it says: ‘The queen of the ocean, Titanic, the finest steamer afloat, over forty-five thousand tons of steel and triple screws.’ Can you believe we’re going to be sailing on that? They say it stands higher than Nephin Mór and that there’s a hand basin in every cabin—even the third-class ones!”

Peggy’s enthusiasm about the journey to America and the fancy new ship they were to sail on was hard to ignore. Maggie knew that most of the fourteen who would be leaving their small parish that morning had never been on a train or a boat. Were it not for the fact that this journey didn’t come with a return fare, they might have been quite excited at the prospect. As it was, most of them—herself included—knew that this would probably be the last time they would see the sun rise over their homes in Ballysheen. It was a thought that cast a dark cloud over many of their hearts.

For Maggie, the prospect of leaving Ballysheen and traveling across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean toward a new life in Chicago filled her with a sense of sorrow and dread. There was nothing she could do, or say, to alter her circumstances. After the death of her mother—her only surviving parent—that winter, her aunt Kathleen had returned to Ireland as Maggie’s guardian, and arrangements were quickly made for Maggie to travel to America that spring with her aunt. Her fate was sealed, despite the ache in her heart and the doubts and worries that raced through her mind.

Not wanting to dampen Peggy’s excitement and well aware that her pragmatic aunt Kathleen had no time for the silly notions and unfounded worries of young girls, Maggie hadn’t mentioned her doubts or anxieties about the trip to any of her fellow travelers. Not even last night, when Joe Kenny had read the leaves in his sister Katie’s teacup and told her she would drown.