Gilly was really worried about his wife and waited patiently each day for news that she might have been interred somewhere else in the city. Aoibhinn was one of the country’s leading landscape artists and so he could only imagine that she had had to endure the same fate as him, only with paintings instead of books.

‘Her poor heart must be badly broken,’ Gilly said to himself.

Gilly kept busy by trying to focus on the fact that he was actively resisting the end of the world by nursing books and pamphlets back to health.

But what else he supposed to do?

The alternative was to forever imagine the torture and deprivation that Aoibhinn had most likely endured.