Excerpt from The Foundling by Ann Leary, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When we were little girls, after lessons and before prayers, Sister Rosemary, the night matron, read aloud to us. She sat in a lumpy old upholstered armchair in front of the stove, often with a colicky infant or two on her wide lap. We never grew tired of hearing the same few books owned by the orphanage. David Copperfield, Five Little Peppers, Pollyanna—there were one or two others, and for the rest of my life, when I reread these stories, all the characters spoke with Sister Roseamary's thick Irish brogue.

One hot summer night, when I was around six or seven, Lillian Faust returned to the ward with a plaster cast on her arm. She'd fallen out of the giant elm in the courtyard that afternoon and had been taken to the hospital. Now, her eyes were still puffy and red from crying, but as we crowded around her, she proudly showed off her cast like it was a trophy.

Sister Rosemary had been reading to us while giving a baby her bottle. She put down the book and said, "I hear you were acting the fool again, Lillian, playing in a tree, have you no brain in that thick head of yours?"

"It was the boys' fault, Sister," Lillian said, perching on the arm of the nun's chair. "Willie from the boy's ward, he dared me to jump. He already did it, so I had to, see? They were calling me chicken."

"Chicken?" Sister scoffed. "It's better to be chicken for a minute than dead for the rest of your life." She shifted the baby so she could examine Lillian's cast. "A broken arm—you're lucky it wasn't yer neck. That's yer foundling luck, there, Lil, sure."

Lillian was one of the few "foundlings" at St. Cat's. She'd been left at the home as a newborn, her parents unknown. Foundlings are blessed with good fortune, all of them, according to Sister Rosemary. She said we could ask anybody in Ireland if we didn't believe her.

"I knew a girl, back home, little Deirdre Murphy," Sister said, poking Lillian's cast here and there. "She decided to climb way up high in a tree, herself. If only she'd just a broken arm to show for it."

I, and the thirty or so other girls in our dorm, scrambled over. There was the usual pushing and shoving as we tried to find the best places to sit on the threadbare rug—the spots closest to Sister's chair. Lillian managed to wedge herself next to the baby on Sister's wide lap, and she smiled down at us from that coveted spot, ignoring Sister's cries of "ACH, Lillian, you're too big now. Off. Get off before I break your other arm now."

"What happened to the girl, Sister?" Lillian asked, once the nun stopped swatting at her. "Did she have to go to the hospital like me?"

"No, she hadn't your dumb luck, I'm sorry to say."

I've often wondered—do all children have a morbid fascination with the pain, suffering, and misery of other children? Or just orphans? It was beyond fascination with us; we had ghoulish, bloodthirsty little imaginations, and that night we peppered the nun with our usual prompts.

"Did she break her neck?"

"Did she smash her head on a rock when she landed?"

"Did the fall make her brain come out of her ears like your cousin, Sister?"

"No, it wasn't the fall that did her in," Sister Rosemary said sadly. We waited, wide-eyed and breathless, as she carefully adjusted the drowsy baby's little blanket.

"That would have been more merciful, sure." She sighed. "My heart still aches for her poor ma. She was never the same after that, Mrs. Murphy. But who would be? She saw it all from the window of the house. Poor little Deirdre dropped out of the tree, and in the blink of an eye, a bull—a monster of a bull—came charging out of nowhere, black and raging, his eyes as red as the embers in this stove here beside me—and he was on her."

The baby was asleep. Sister gently tilted the swaddled bundle up against her shoulder and continued. "The tree, it was in the dairy field, you see girls, and the bull didn't belong in with the cows, but there he was just the same, nobody knows why or how he got in, but he plucked Deirdre Murphy up off the ground, plucked her right up with his horns, and tossed her this way and that like a rag doll."

Excerpted from The Foundling: A Nove by Ann Leary. Copyright © 2022 by Ann Leary. Published by Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights Reserved.