Friends Indeed

by Rose Doyle

  I turned, slowly. He'd made a steeple of his fingers. They were surprisingly fine and delicate fingers, their tips pressed so hard together they were blue-white.

  'Major General?' I said.

  'You were wrong to bring that woman here,' he spoke in clipped, militaristic fashion. 'You seem a respectable person. No doubt you thought you were doing good. You were duped. You heard her yourself. She is a wanton harlot. She is insolent to boot.' He collapsed the steeple and dismissed me with a flick of his fingers. 'You may go, but first some advice . . .' He leaned forward, his eyebrows low over his eyes again as he slipped into the paternalistic role of the day before. 'Nine trains leave the town of Kildare each day for the capital. Seven leave from Newbridge. Take the first one you can this evening and go home to your father. Have nothing further to do with that woman.'

  'That woman is my best and oldest friend.' I nodded good day and left, moving quickly to catch up with Sarah. The soldiers followed close behind.

  'Don't tell me I should have listened to you,' she didn't break her step as I came alongside. 'Don't tell me I brought this on myself. Just be pleased with yourself that you were right.'

  I trotted beside her in silence, two of my steps matching every one of hers. There would be no talking to her until she'd flogged herself a good deal more.

  People looked at us as we went along. We were a lively procession, two women and an unhappy infant being escorted at a quick march through the camp. The roads were rutted and sudden holes threatened to swallow us every few yards. I stumbled a few times and had to clutch at Sarah, whose shoes were sturdier than mine. She steadied me but didn't stop. James cried all the way.

  'What's the name you would have called the major general?' I said when we were well clear of the headquarters building.

  'I'd have called him a tin God from hell. It's too good a name for him.'

  'Much too good,' I agreed.

  We were passing the Catholic chapel when Captain Alexander Ainslie stepped into our path. He was buckled into his uniform and wearing his hat and looked a lot less amiable than the day before. Our escorts saluted and he saluted in return. He gave Sarah a swift bow before turning to me,

  'How was your meeting with the major general?' he asked.

  'Educational and disagreeable.' I made to move on.

  'May I walk with you?'

  'We're leaving the camp,' I pointed out.

  'So it seems.' He glanced at our soldier chaperones and for a minute I thought he would dismiss them. He didn't. What he said, with a smile and before falling into step by my side, was, 'I was going that way myself.'

  I wished, suddenly and childishly, that he would take off the hat. There was far too much of the soldier about him with it on.

  Sarah hadn't so much as acknowledged him and resumed walking at an even faster pace. Captain Ainslie gave me his arm; with the rutting and holes becoming worse as we neared the boundaries of the camp I was glad to take it.

  'You didn't go alone to see the commander?' he said.

  'You ask a great many questions,' I said.

  'Only when a situation isn't clear to me. I understood you wished to make a social call on behalf of your father?'

  'That was a lie.'

  'Do you tell many lies?'

  'I lie when the truth is not enough to get me what I want.'

  'Expedient lying. I do it myself.'

  'There's nothing admirable about it. I'm not proud that I've become a liar. Just sorry our society is such that devious means are often the only way a woman may get justice.'

  'Is our society so different to that which went before it?'

  'It's no better and it's worse in many ways. We hold truth as a virtue but it's not rewarded. We're more concerned with the appearance of things than we are with the reality. Greed and acquisition are values, friendship and learning are not.'

  'Do you see yourself redressing some of these wrongs?'

  'Some wrongs, yes.'

  'What a passionate young woman you are, Miss Buckley.'

  'What a patronising man you are, Captain Ainslie.'

  He laughed and for a minute I thought he was going to remove the hat, but he merely touched the brim in mock salute. 'You're right that I've patronised you,' he agreed, and slowed down. 'Forgive me.'

  He was holding my arm still, which forced me to slow down with him. Sarah went relentlessly ahead, the soldiers with her. Captain Ainslie nodded at her retreating back. 'It seems you failed to redress the wrong done your companion and her child?' he asked.

  I thought for a moment before I said anything. Both Captain Alexander Ainslie and his commander seemed to think me a respectable woman given to good deeds. Not a bad thing. The captain might well be a gift horse. It would be foolish to look him in the mouth.

  'The commander was unwilling to help her find the father of her baby, yes,' I said, 'but she is unwilling to give up the search. I'm not going to give up either.'

  'And the child you had with you yesterday, is she another of your causes?'

  'People are not causes, Captain Ainslie.'

  'They can be,' he shrugged, 'what will you do now that the commander has refused to help?'

  'Seek help elsewhere.' I looked at him questioningly. For a moment he looked startled, then he laughed outright. One of the soldiers with Sarah, a good bit ahead by now, looked back uneasily.

  'I was right about you,' he said, 'you're a woman who will have her way.' He glanced down at me, half laughing still but more thoughtful. 'You expect me to help you find that young woman's soldier lover — even though my commander has refused and has more than likely told her to leave and not come back. Am I right?'

  'That much is obvious,' I said. 'I'm asking because you struck me yesterday as a man who was aware how harsh army life and rules could be on soldiers as well as wives and children.'

  'This is not about a wife . . .'

  'It is about a father and his son,' I said quickly, 'and about two people who planned to marry but were parted by the army.'

  'Tell me what happened.'

  I told him Sarah's story then. I gave him Jimmy Vance's name and told him he was a private with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. I told how he and Sarah had met and grown to love one another. I told him of Sarah's need to be with him after Mary Ann's death, how their friendship had deepened and how, weeks after the regiment had been sent to the Curragh, she discovered she was carrying his child.

  I told him all of this because there was no point expecting him to help unless he could be made to understand how things had happened, and sympathise. It was easy to tell him. He'd the air of a man more diverted by life's calamities than shocked by them.

  'Sarah wrote to Private Vance three times,' I said.

  'That doesn't mean he got the letters. Mail is often intercepted for reasons of censorship and discipline.' Captain Ainslie shrugged. 'The case of the young woman you've taken up is not unique. The army doesn't encourage…’

  'I know about the army's position,' I cut him short, but politely. I needed to know if he was going to help, or not. 'Sarah is certain her soldier will move heaven and earth to have them together once he knows about his son.'

  'She may be right,' he said mildly. He didn't once suggest that Jimmy Vance might not be the father of Sarah's child. His manners would always be impeccable.

  As we stood talking Sarah and her retinue came to the boundaries of the camp. The soldiers said something which she ignored and, head high, walked quickly on in the direction of the wren village. After several hundred yards she turned and, seeing me still in conversation with Captain Ainslie, began to pace back and forth, an expression of hopeless fury on her face. I waved to reassure her; her expression didn't change.

  'How did you come to hear of Miss Rooney's case?' the captain asked.

  I'd been waiting for this question. 'She was in service in my family home, which is close to Beggar's Bush Barracks, when she met Private Vance . . .' I allowed my voice to trail away, as if this fact explained every
thing.

  'Do you often take on the burdens of others?'

  'Now and again,' I said. After a while, when he didn't say anything, I said, 'Will you help find Private Vance?'

  'I might be persuaded to,' he said. 'There will be a price, however.'

  So he knew I was a wren. He'd been playing with me all along. 'I've very little money,' I said stiffly. 'But you're welcome to what jewellery I have with me.'

  'I think, Miss Buckley, that you're being deliberately disingenuous.' His tone was still light but now it was impatient too. 'What I want in exchange is some of your time. I would like to meet with you again. Your conversation is entertaining.' He smiled. 'I haven't been so entertained since arriving here.'

  'I haven't been called entertaining before,' I said, 'and you might find on a second meeting that my conversation is not so interesting as all that.' I didn't for a minute believe his desire was for conversation. He'd admitted to being a liar, after all.

  'We can meet then?' he said.

  'It seems the least I can do in return for the favour of finding Private Vance.'

  'Good.' He became brisk. 'Come back tomorrow, alone. No airy little girls, no unhappy young women. Come by the entrance closest to the marketplace. The sentries there will expect you. Be at the clock tower by one o'clock in the day. Tell the sentries you've a meeting with me. I'll see that you speak then with Private Vance, if he's in the camp. You can make whatever arrangement suits for him to meet with the mother of his child. After that,' he gave a mocking salute, 'I will expect you to begin fulfilling your part of our bargain.'

  I shaded my eyes and looked down the road at the pacing Sarah. 'Miss Rooney will be pleased,' I said.

  Once Sarah and her Jimmy were together I would worry about my deal with Captain Ainslie. Once he knew I was a wren there would be no deal anyway.

  Unless,as I suspected, he knew already.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Allie

  Life has a way of making its own decisions, of upsetting the plots we draw up ourselves.

  Sarah, when I told her of my conversation with Alexander Ainslie, was caught between wild hope and a creeping despair. She had me go over and over everything he'd said, examining and reexamining words and phrases: Had he said absolutely that I would meet Jimmy Vance in the morning? Did I believe him? Why was he doing it? Was it all a trick, a cruel joke?

  'Is he a good man? Does he really mean to help?' She searched my face, as if the answer was written there. 'Or is he a trickster of some sort?'

  'I don't know what he is,' I said.

  Sarah would have gone on all night if it hadn't been for Lizzie Early. Beezy, tired of a conversation in which she had no part, had gone early in the evening to Lizzie's nest. There was always drink to be had there.

  It was close to midnight when I heard Beezy's voice in the distance, then quickly and loudly coming closer, calling my name. Her head appeared in the doorway. Lizzie was bad, she said, and needed my help.

  'I don't know as there's much you can do for her,' she said, her hair like an orange veil in the candlelight, 'but get your bag and come anyway.'

  Lizzie had crawled from the nest and was lying a few feet from it, on grass already moistening with dew. The state she was in the damp wasn't going to affect her very much.

  The place stank. Lizzie had lost control of her bodily functions and was lying in her own vomit. She lay gasping and jerking, her hands clawing at the ground and her bony feet dancing to a demented rhythm of their own.

  But it was her face told me everything. Her sunken eyes and sharp nose. The tormented grinning of her exposed teeth, the yellowy-green colour of her skin, apparent even in the fitful moonlight. I knew what I was looking at: I'd come across descriptions of the Hippocratic facies often enough, the facial appearance of impending death as described by Hippocrates.

  All in the space of two days. I hadn't thought she would go so quickly.

  I knelt beside her. The stench unsettled my stomach and I had to close my eyes and swallow and hold myself rigid against an attack of nausea.

  'Lizzie, can you hear me?'

  But Lizzie, consumed with her pain, couldn't give me a sign. I went on talking to her, feeling her poor, swollen stomach with my hand. It was rock hard. Her breathing was very shallow, and it was rapid. Her skin, when I felt it, was hot and dry.

  'I'm going to give you laudanum, Lizzie.' I spoke close to her ear. 'It'll calm you, give you some peace until we get you to the hospital.'

  'They won't take her into the hospital.' Clara Hyland, standing with the circle of wrens about, was adamant. 'They'll only take her into the workhouse and she won't go there. She said that if she's to die it might as well be here.'

  The moon disappeared behind cloud and the first rain for weeks began to fall in heavy drops. Three of the wrens, with the speed and efficiency of practice, brought sticks and sacking and erected a canopy over the dying woman.

  'Where's the God poor Lizzie prayed to now?' said one of them as she hammered. 'You'd think, after all the praying she did to Him, that He'd at least give her a dry night to die in.'

  'He wasn't much good to her in life,' Nance Reilly spread the sacking, 'so why would He look out for her in death?'

  I gave Lizzie the laudanum from a spoon, not easy with her vomiting still. But I got it into her at last and she managed to keep it down. She became still, but no better, just dying more quietly. Some of the wrens began to pray.

  'I can't do any more,' I said.

  'You did what you could,' Ellen Neary said.

  Lizzie needed to be in hospital, or at least in the shelter of the workhouse. I'd no idea how to convince the wrens of this. I tried to pray, but couldn't. God had never seemed so far away.

  'We should get her a priest,' said Beezy, 'she'd want a priest.'

  'There's none of the local druids will come out here,' Nance Reilly said.

  'She'd be seen by a priest in the hospital,' I said, 'and by a doctor who might be able to do something to make her more comfortable.'

  'You'll have to accept, Allie, that the hospital won't take in a wren that's gasping her last.' Ellen Neary was impatient.

  She was also the answer to the prayers I couldn't say. She faced Clara Hyland.

  'We can't let her die here,' she said. 'There'll be another inquiry and it'll be worse than the last one. We'll be turned out of our nests and have no peace for weeks.' She knelt with me at Lizzie's side and took one of her threadbare hands. 'She won't thank us but we'll have to get her into the workhouse. We've no right to deny her a priest for the end. She's sinned. She'd want to be forgiven.'

  'She's suffered enough for whatever sins she has,' Beezy said stubbornly, 'she came here to keep out of the workhouse. She knew she hadn't long to go.'

  The rain got heavier and the trampled ground around Lizzie began turning to mud. A pallet came from somewhere, made from pieces of timber and more sacking, and was slipped under the dying woman. Furze bushes were put leaning against the canopy of sacking. In minutes she was housed in a makeshift nest.

  I went inside and bent over her. 'A proper doctor might do something,' I said, 'maybe save her. We've no right to deny her a chance of life.' A hospital of doctors wouldn't save Lizzie, but I would never be party to the barbarity of allowing her to die in the rain and mud.

  ‘I’ll go to Kildare for the relieving officer.' Lucretia Curran, who'd been whispering with Ellen Neary, broke ranks with the other wrens. 'He'll bring a cart to carry her to the workhouse.' She blessed herself. 'Let ye pray she lives until I get back.' She left running. She was already wearing her boots and dress, all prepared to go hunting.

  'Lucretia's an innocent and a fool,' Clara Hyland said as she added more furze to the makeshift nest.

  'What's innocent and foolish about her?' I was angry. Lucretia had gone, alone in the dark and rain, for help. Courageous and good were words I'd have used.

  'She's innocent to believe the relieving officer will come any sooner than daybreak,' Clara
said, 'and she's a fool for the same reason. He's paid thirty pounds the year, and so were those that went before him, for relieving sick and destitute women. But I've never known one of them willing to put himself out. Not for the sake of wrens, at any rate.'

  'When she tells him how it is with Lizzie he'll come at once, surely?' I didn't try to keep my voice down. There was no way Lizzie could have heard us. I doubted she was even aware of our existence.

  'You're as simple-minded as Lucretia.' Clara Hyland kicked the furze into place. 'The facts speak for themselves. It's not long since a wren died in a ditch because of neglect by the relieving officer. She wasn't the first and she won't be the last.' She swore at the rain, added yet another clump of furze and said, 'God and the relieving officers are together in wanting to see the lot of us dead. And that's another fact.'

  She left then, to see to Moll, she said.

  'To see what's left in the whiskey bottle, more like,' Ellen Neary observed with a shrug.

  'Tell me what happened to the wren who died,' I said.

  Ellen frowned at Lizzie and smoothed the hair from her forehead. She blocked a hole where the rain was coming through, then reached a hand from under the canopy. 'The rain's stopping,' she reported.

  I waited. When she was ready she told me about the dead wren. 'Her name was Rosanna Doyle. She was in a nest with three others on the far side of the camp from here. She was taken ill and a Curragh caretaker by the name of Greany was asked for help. He waited a full day before going to the police and when he did the police didn't kill themselves with speed either. One of them left a note for Patrick Cosgrove, the relieving officer. But Cosgrove, and Bergin the carrier, waited yet another full day before going for Rosanna. By then, if you've been keeping track, she'd been two days dying in a ditch.

  'They finally put her in a donkey cart on top of straw, covered her with a sack and drove the three hours to Naas and the workhouse. She died as soon as she got there. There was an outcry and an inquiry.' Ellen peered from under the sacking again. 'The rain's stopped altogether. Lucretia's innocent but she's no fool. She'll knock on doors until she shames them into coming out.'