by Charles Todd
We continued to argue. I understood Eileen’s fear. A deep infection could kill. And she had only just begun to feel that Michael was safe.
He’d been listening all the while as we discussed his care.
Now he said, the weakness in his voice a reflection of the weakness in his body, “She’s right, Eileen. We need to leave here. As soon as possible.”
“I don’t see how. Not until you’re stronger. And now this—I wish I’d never insisted on being wed in Ireland. I wish I’d agreed to marry in London as soon as you left the Army.”
“I know,” he said, comforting her. “But that’s past history now, my love. It’s the future, not the past, we need to consider. Let’s make our plans and go. The shoulder is fine, it’s only a minor setback.”
Eileen bit her lip. “What about my mother? And there’s Major Dawson—you said you couldn’t leave without him.”
“Yes, I did say that. But they’ll find him any day now. I got away. He’s a clever man, the Major. He’ll make it as well.” But there wasn’t the ring of certainty in his voice.
“Did you tell him anything about your own capture?” I asked.
Michael shook his head. “I should have tried. God knows. But I didn’t think anyone would dare touch him. I just didn’t think.”
He was sitting up, and it was wearing down his strength.
I touched Eileen’s arm. “Let’s not worry him about the future just now. Has he had his breakfast?”
“Yes, an hour ago. I prepared it. Molly hadn’t come.” She plumped the pillows at his back. “Is there any more aspirin? That might help?”
During the war, many doctors had been very liberal with their use of aspirin, but some patients had had problems with it, and other doctors had cut back on doses.
But I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to give him a bit this morning, and see if it would break his fever. Still, in the back of my mind was the memory from the war, where shrapnel and bullets often carried a bit of filthy uniform cloth or metal fragments deep into a wound. And it would seem to heal on the surface, only to fester from infection we couldn’t see. Nothing short of surgery could reach it. Michael might well have the same deep infection, only from the boat, sleeping rough, even from the horse, and it too could spread if it wasn’t treated. I wasn’t about to attempt surgery here on the front room carpet.
“He needs a regular bed,” Eileen was saying. “Where he can sleep properly, and people aren’t coming in and out, waking him.”
I’d been wondering when she would remember that I was staying in her room. The married couple would have been off on their honeymoon—the trip across to England—as soon as the wedding breakfast was over and they’d changed into their traveling clothes. I wouldn’t have been in the way, as I was now . . .
“I’m not up to climbing the stairs,” Michael put in, glancing at me before turning to his wife. “That leg is still hurting. I don’t think it’s a good idea yet.”
She was all concern.
And then her mother knocked at the door, and came in to see how the patient was faring.
I used that as an excuse to go and fetch the aspirin.
Terrence stopped me on the stairs. “The search this morning hasn’t found anything. I don’t know where else to look.”
I replied, “You’ve looked everywhere?”
“We have.” He said it tersely, as if I’d doubted his honesty.
“Then perhaps the Major’s not out here, on this bit of land that Killeighbeg sits on. Perhaps they’ve taken him somewhere else.”
“Where else?”
“I don’t know. How many fingers jut out into the sea, just like this one? There must be a dozen? More? Aren’t there islands offshore? Couldn’t they have taken him farther away, knowing how thoroughly you’d be searching? After all, they must have known you’d turn this part of the county upside down to find Michael.”
Slightly mollified, he said, “There are people on the larger islands. You can’t simply arrive with a prisoner in your midst and ask for houseroom to hold him in.”
“What about the smaller ones, that aren’t inhabited?”
“There’s no shelter on most of them. Birds nest there. That’s about it.”
“How do you reach them?”
“There’s a small boat that makes the journey on an irregular basis. Taking mail—such as there is—and goods out, bringing back the ill, if need be.”
“It was a thought,” I told him. “He can’t just have vanished. He has to be somewhere. And how long has it been? What are they doing to him? If they were holding him for ransom, to pay for their wild schemes, surely we’d have heard by now?” And the Captain would have dropped another note, if the Guards had been contacted with demands. My father would have heard about it. “Why else did they take him?” I waited to see how he would answer me.
“I don’t know.” But I believed he had a fairly decent idea. Terrence Flynn was nobody’s fool.
“What does Michael say about where he was taken? I’ve asked any number of times, and he tells me he has no recollection. Is he lying to me?”
“Why should he?” I countered.
He swore in Gaelic.
“I can’t fight an unseen enemy,” he said. “I did my damnedest to bring Michael back, and I failed. I’m still not convinced that anyone in the village had a hand in it. I know most of them. I know where they stand on— matters.”
I took a chance then. “The man who was singing when you took me to the pub that first day. I didn’t care for him then, and neither did you. Does he live here in the village?”
“No, he claims he’s from County Mayo. He says there’s a price on his head. That he escaped from Dublin as the Rising collapsed. But I knew most of those who were with us. And I don’t remember him at all.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m told he’s not well. Will you have a look at him? It can’t hurt.”
He’d looked well enough when Simon and I saw him at the edge of the spinney. But since then he’d tangled with Simon.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“He was in a fight with that Traveler. And got the worst of it,” Terrence said pensively. “I might just offer the services of Michael’s nursing Sister. Do you have the courage to go with me if he agrees?”
Simon wouldn’t care for it. Nor my father. But I said, “I will, yes.”
“I was going up to sleep for an hour. Instead, I’ll go back to the village. Be ready, in case.”
And then he was gone, down the stairs with what appeared to be renewed energy.
Sometimes something to do was the best medicine for hopelessness.
I waited in my room for Terrence to come back. I heard the kitchen door open and Molly’s voice as she spoke to someone inside. Niall went out to the stables. And I saw Eileen walking in the kitchen garden, her mind clearly on anything but the vegetables growing in their tidy beds. Who took care of these beds? At home, in Somerset, we had a gardener who saw to the gardens, under my mother’s watchful eye.
Molly seemed to be the only servant in the house. I’d ask Terrence about that again, when—if—he came for me.
And then he was tapping on my door, just when I was tired of waiting and was about to go back down the stairs.
“He’s agreeable.”
I collected Eileen’s kit—it was often in my room, and I suddenly remembered that I was to give Michael an aspirin.
“I must stop in the kitchen for a moment,” I told Terrence. “It’s best if you wait for me outside.”
He turned and left. I followed, filled a glass with water from the pitcher, and took the aspirin and water in to the patient.
Eileen was asleep on the sofa against the wall, her breathing deep and regular. But Michael hadn’t been asleep, and when he looked up at me there was something in his expression that had nothing to do with his wounds. He turned his head away quickly, hoping that I hadn’t seen it.
Making certain that Eileen was really asleep, I knelt beside the pa
llet.
“What is it?” I whispered, bending toward him.
“What is what?” He offered me a smile, but it looked more like a grimace.
“If there is something on your mind—you won’t heal, Michael, until you can rest. Body and spirit.”
He closed his eyes. “I-I can’t be certain—it was probably only a dream.”
“Tell me. Let me decide.”
I expected him to say that he hadn’t held out against his captors’ questions as strongly as he’d let us believe, and he was ashamed. But I was wrong.
“As they were—they pushed me into the boat, my head struck the thwart. But I remember—there was someone on the slight rise a little distance away. The moon was just setting out at sea. We must have been silhouetted against it. They—they were worried about the man, that he’d seen us. My head was swimming, but I tried to shout to him, and they hit me again. When I came to my senses, they were arguing—one said something about waiting, the other said they couldn’t chance it, that he would have to die. I thought at first they meant me, but then the other man added, ‘I know who he is. When I’ve left you, I’ll take care of it myself. He will trust me.’” He lifted an arm to cover his eyes. “They were talking about the man on the rise. And when I tried to shout for help, I put his life at risk. He must have seen us, Bess. And if they killed him, it was my fault. Mine—but I was desperate, I didn’t think—”
In that dark room, curtains tightly drawn against the bright sunlight, hearing his account in broken whispers, I could almost picture the scene as two men manhandled a third into a boat. And another man stood on the rise, uncertain what it meant. “Did you hear a name? Anything to identify him?”
“No—yes.” He took his arm away from his face and clutched at my hand. “The first man laughed and said something like I never liked his work, anyway.”
And the next evening, Fergus Kennedy was found floating in the sea. He’d seen Michael being shoved into the boat—at that distance he couldn’t have possibly recognized anyone. Still, tomorrow the world would be searching for Michael, and the man on the rise would start to think about what he’d witnessed, and wonder. Would he have come into Killeighbeg and told someone, if he’d lived? There was no answer to that. But the men who had abducted Michael couldn’t be sure . . .
It fit. All too well. Fergus Kennedy standing there—watching the moon set, possibly even doing sketches for a painting later—just in the wrong place. A danger to the men in the boat, all the same. Had ransacking the croft only been to cover up the real reason?
I couldn’t tell Michael what I believed. But it made sense, it was what we’d suspected—and it was proof that Fergus Kennedy had been murdered.
Instead I shook my head, and whispered, “Even if it really happened, even if you didn’t dream it, you couldn’t possibly have been responsible. If they believed he’d seen them—even if you’d never cried out, don’t you see?—his fate was already sealed. Besides, you can’t even be sure he heard you. But he saw them. And if he’d tried the next day to go to the Constabulary or to tell someone what he’d seen, they’d have cut their losses and killed you too.”
“I can’t be sure!” The strain in his voice was still there. “But what you’re saying—it makes sense. Now I don’t know what to believe.”
“There’s nothing you can do until you’re stronger. Let it go. I’ll see what I can discover. Meanwhile, you must rest.”
“Yes. All right,” he agreed, reluctantly. “I’m grateful, Bess.”
“Here’s the aspirin. It will help a little. I have to be careful how much laudanum I give you, until I’m sure what is hurt. I’ll leave it beside you, shall I?” He nodded, and I whispered as I got to my feet, “Don’t say anything to Eileen. It will only worry her.”
“No.” He caught my hand again. “In the war we always knew we could talk to the Sisters. No matter what. You must know that.”
I smiled, for his sake, and slipped out.
There was no time even to think about what he’d just told me.
Terrence was waiting impatiently.
We walked on toward the village, and as we were passing the church, I asked Terrence what had become of the staff at the house.
“You and Niall work in the stables, we take turns making meals or you bring something from the pub. Molly does the washing up, and the kitchen garden is tidy, apparently without the touch of human hands.”
“They tolerated Eileen, even though she was a nursing Sister for the English. But when Michael came, the staff left. Except for Molly, whose mother needs the money she earns.”
“Will they come back, once Michael is gone?”
“God knows.”
We were walking down the lane toward the village and its tiny harbor. I’d expected to be taken to the pub, where I thought Paddy Murphy was staying. Instead we stopped at a cottage on the edge of the village. Detached from it, as was the custom, given the risk of fire, stood the small blacksmith shop. One of Paddy Murphy’s friends was working the bellows, the orange flames shooting up as the smith was frowning over something. The clang of hammer on metal was loud.
Terrence said, “A distant cousin of the Murphys. And not the happiest of men to take in the likes of Padriac.”
We came up to the door and it opened.
An older woman dressed all in black glared at me, but allowed the two of us to enter. I was surprised to find us in a large kitchen, a table to one side, and a dresser against the back wall. I glimpsed doorways at either end of the room, possibly bedrooms. I expected her to point to one of them. Instead she gestured toward a set of steps leading up from the left-hand wall.
“In the loft,” she said, and turned her back on us.
We climbed rickety stairs up to the loft, and there was Paddy Murphy, lying on a bed of none-too-clean blankets.
He looked terrible, his face so pale it looked gray under the growth of beard. And it wasn’t the marks of his fight with Simon that were affecting him, although I could clearly see bruising and cuts on his face, while his knuckles were beginning to heal a bit.
Simon would never hurt a man deliberately, not even to stay in Killeighbeg a few days longer, for my sake. He was tall, strong, had a long reach, and had fought hand to hand in India and the trenches. He would know when enough was enough. Broken ribs, damaged spleen, head injury, bruised kidneys—I could ignore the possibility of any of those.
Paddy Murphy still had the strength to glare at me as I came across the loft to kneel by him.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“That damned Romany has poisoned me.”
“What?” It was the last thing I’d expected.
“They’re good at it.” His mouth twisted.
“How did he do it? And where is this Romany?”
“It had to be the drink. He bought me a brandy when it was over.” He grimaced, whether in pain or in anger, I couldn’t tell. “I’ll kill him, see if I don’t, when I’m on my feet again. Bury him with that damned parrot in his mouth.”
“What are your symptoms?” I persisted. Because whatever was wrong, it was imperative that I find out—if he died, whatever the reason, Simon would be blamed.
“I vomited as if my very gut was coming up into my throat. I’ve never felt anything like it. Now I can’t keep anything down.”
“Any other symptoms?”
“Damn it, woman, isn’t that enough?” He stirred restlessly.
In my kit was an emetic, to be used only in emergencies. But I didn’t have my kit. And I’d used what little I carried while I was in Paris during the Peace Talks.
I opened Eileen’s kit, and there was a small bottle in one of the pockets. I held it up, trying to judge what was left in it.
It was nearly empty. But when I opened the cap, I could see that it was wet inside, not dried up from long disuse.
Of course I couldn’t be sure. But there were labels on every vial and bottle in my kit. And in Eileen’s. No one could mistake a bottle
for anything but what was written on the label.
Who else would have such a thing as an emetic? I didn’t know if a Traveler’s caravan contained herbs and other remedies. Including a few that weren’t in a doctor’s kit. But if this man died . . .
I said bracingly, “You’ve eaten something you shouldn’t. Fish—shellfish—chicken—they can make you very ill if they’re off. And being sick is the way you know.”
I wasn’t at all sure what was troubling him. I had no way to test anything. Sisters worked in hospitals or aid stations. We had access to whatever we needed. Not out here, on the very edge of the continent. But for Simon’s sake, I had to take away the very idea of poison.
“I ate a fish in sauce . . .” He gagged at the very thought of it. “It tasted fine.”
“Yes, it often does, but the meat is starting to spoil. Perhaps,” I suggested, “it had already begun to go, and that’s why the cook added a sauce.”
“It was the drink, I tell you.”
“One can’t get food poisoning from brandy. Too much and you’re ill for quite another reason entirely. How much did you drink?”
“The one glass.”
“Well, if you wish to blame the brandy rather than the fish, I have no objection. But it’s medically impossible, and anyone who knows that will laugh at you.”
He looked up at Terrence, standing just behind me. “This was a waste of time. Take her away.”
“You will feel as if you are dying,” I said. “It comes with the bad fish. But you aren’t, you know,” I told him frankly. “You’ll be able to hold food by tonight. Meanwhile, you must drink a little tea from time to time. Your body needs fluids. No milk, a little sugar if they have it here. And dry toast to dip in it. Every hour. You won’t take much at first, but your stomach will begin to accept it after a while. Nothing else until tomorrow morning. Even then, you mustn’t eat too much for several days.”
He turned his face away. I thought, he wants to cause trouble for the Traveler.