by Rose Doyle
No one disturbed us.
When I was at last able to let him go I stood again by the bed and rearranged his hair. The hospital doctor had told me about seeing a case like Daniel's before, where a man had been unmarked by a terrible fire. He said it meant Daniel had been unconscious going into the flames and had lain on the floor of the nest, breathing in smoke. He would have been suffocated within minutes, the doctor said, and suffered little. I knew he was right and that that was how it had happened. I knew it because Daniel had been pulled from under the nest, his face and hands blackened by smoke, the only burns to his back. Standing now by his bed I was able to give thanks for this, small, mercy.
His body had been so very still under the falling rain when they stretched him out on the grass. I'd shaken and shaken him but nothing I did could revive him. Cornelius Cummins had shaken him too and when he stopped I'd tried again, calling to Daniel to breathe, not to go from me. I only stopped when Clara Hyland lifted me bodily away from him.
'He's gone,' she held me against her while Moll took my hand. 'There's nothing you can do to bring him back. There's nothing anyone, doctor or priest, can do now.' She held me tighter. 'He was the best of men. May they burn in hell, those that murdered him.'
Some of the mob had sobered up when they saw Daniel go into the fire. Cornelius Cummins and two others had run with sticks and beaten at the flames while a fourth man, who'd disappeared into the dark immediately afterwards, pulled him by the feet from the burning nest. When the police and a doctor arrived an hour later it was because the fourth man had alerted them. But none of it had been enough to save Daniel.
I was waiting now by his bed for his mother to arrive from Galway. There could be no wake without her, and no funeral. I'd found her address in his medical bag and telegraphed her. It was a hard, cruel way to let her know of her son's death but there had been no alternative. The wrens, and even some townspeople from Kildare, had been and paid their respects to him but it was more than I could bear to leave him alone.
The hours went by without my noticing. The room was narrow and cold and I know that night passed into day and that night came again before a thin woman in black stood beside me. Hannah Casey put her hand over her dead son's eyes and said, without looking at me, 'I know who you are. My son wrote to me saying he'd come to Kildare because of you.'
I didn't correct her, tell her about him coming to the Curragh
because of James too. She was right in that Daniel had stayed on because of me, and that this was what had made all the difference. It made me responsible for his death.
I stood and gave Daniel's mother my seat and said nothing at all. After a while a nurse attendant brought a second chair and I sat opposite Mrs Casey, on the other side of Daniel. She didn't touch her son again.
When she took the shawl from about her head I saw a woman with a worn face and heavy, dark grey hair caught back in a bun. She looked nothing like Daniel so his looks must have come from his father. Her back was very straight and she stared without seeing at her dead son; she didn't weep either.
'He was ... a good man.' It wasn't what I wanted to say.
'He was too good for you,' Daniel's mother said.
'He was,' I said.
'You were everything to him. I knew by the way he spoke of you. Because of you he's dead and you . . .' she looked at me out of bleak, cold eyes, 'are alive. There is no God.'
We didn't speak again. If her grief was impenetrable then so was mine. I had no way of escaping my pain so as to help her with hers.
Not that she wanted or would have allowed me to. Daniel's mother despised me. She'd come alone and was quick about arranging Daniel's funeral. He would be buried in Galway, beside his father and a dead sister and the generations of Caseys who'd gone before the three of them.
By the end of the day of her arrival in Kildare, Hannah Casey had Daniel coffined. She had also booked for him to go first thing in the morning on the train with her to Dublin and from there to Galway.
While she was away doing all of this I stayed by Daniel's bed. He was much less like himself now, growing waxen and hollow- looking, his soul as well as his life departed. I wanted to lie alongside him again. I would close my eyes and, as long as I didn't touch his cold, stiff limbs or face, could pretend we were together at last in the way he'd wanted.
But I wasn't completely deranged with grief and knew I would have been thrown into the street if I attempted such a thing. Instead I sat and remembered every minute of every hour I'd spent with him since the first time I'd met him by Mary Ann's sick bed. I remembered our talks and our walks, in Dublin and on the Curragh. I remembered his quick hands and the way they healed patients in the dispensary and his quick tongue when he had something worth saying. I recalled his decency and kindness: to Mary Ann and Sarah, to James and to Beezy.
To me. There had never been a man so patient and understanding of me. He was the only man I'd ever kissed.
Jimmy Vance came to pay his respects in the late afternoon.
'He came when my son was ill.' He stood with his hat in his hands. He looked tall and awkward in the narrow room, and very ill at ease. 'What I knew of him I liked.' He looked at Daniel for a long time. 'I knew about the threats. I should have looked out for him. I should have looked after Sarah and James better too.' He lifted his gaze to the iron barred window and stared at it. 'I don't want her staying with those women. It's dangerous and indecent. I want her to go back to Dublin. I'll follow her there as soon as I can.' He was very stiff. 'Will you persuade her that's the best thing?' He didn't look at me.
'Why is it the best thing?' I wasn't thinking straight. But I knew enough to know that what he was suggesting was odd, and wrong. 'I thought you were to be married?'
'We'll be married,' he looked at me at last and he was firm. 'Don't for a minute doubt that Sarah and I will be married. It's that I don't want her staying out on the Curragh, or even in one of the towns round about, until it's arranged.'
'You'd better tell her yourself,' I'd no energy left to deal with his and Sarah's predicament. I hadn't even the energy to care.
'I'll do that,' he said, 'but I'll need you to back me up.' He stopped. 'She'll listen to you.' The thought didn't seem to give him much pleasure.
'Go to her and talk to her now,' I said.
I was alone again with Daniel when his mother came back. It
was past eight o'clock and I'd somehow fallen asleep in the chair. A nurse attendant had earlier brought me some bread and sweet tea. I'd taken the tea.
'You can go now,’ Daniel's mother said loudly enough to wake me up. 'They'll be here with the coffin in an hour. I'll sit the night with my son alone.'
My head reeled when I stood up. 'Please believe that I cared for him.'
I'm not sure why I wanted her to know this. Maybe some part of me wanted her to be assured that his fondness for me had been valued, and returned.
'It's of no interest to me whether you did or not,' in the light from the oil lamps her eyes were grey as a rain cloud; there were still no tears in them. 'From what he told me you led him a dance and now he's dead. Because of you.'
'He told you that? That I led him a dance?' I felt icily cold. To support myself I held on to the iron of the bedstead.
'He told me he'd met the woman he wanted to marry. The rest wasn't hard to make out. He wasn't wise to the ways of women like you. All he knew how to be was faithful and honest.' She sat with her eyes on her son's dead face. They were very bright now. 'He was too good for you,' she said for the second time. She sat so rigidly I thought she would keel over. She was exhausted.
'I'll get you some tea,' I said.
'I'll take nothing from you,' she said, 'and I don't want you or any of the women you live with to be at the railway station in the morning.'
There was no danger of the wrens seeing him off because they wouldn't know he was being taken on a train so early. The village was too far away, and it was in any event too late for me to get there now to let them
know.
I sat on a bench in the hospital corridor. An hour had barely passed when two men went by with a pine coffin. I followed them and stood at the door of the narrow room while Daniel was coffined. His mother had dressed him in a clean suit of clothes and shirt and the coffin, inside, was plain. It was what he'd have wanted. The men left the coffin open and Hannah Casey put a candle at its head and knelt at its foot in prayer. The men left.
I went back to the bench in the corridor. Someone, in the night, threw a blanket over me and I slept for a while. The cold woke me at around five o'clock and with waking came the memory, like a blow to my stomach, that Daniel was dead.
The men came and nailed him into his coffin at six o'clock. When a horsecar began for the station with him and his mother I followed behind on foot. I didn't care about the indignity. I couldn't let him go. Halfway through the town Hannah Casey had the carman stop and allowed me to climb into the back of the car.
At the station, after Daniel had been put on the train, she turned to me. 'Take this,' she handed me his doctor's bag, 'there'll be no more doctors in my family.'
The train took a long time to disappear from view. When I couldn't see it any longer I could still hear it, hooting and whistling in the quiet morning as it went down the tracks.
When I told a carman at the station that an officer would pay him well at the other end he agreed to take me to the army camp.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Allie
Alexander’s manners were, as always, impeccable. He gave no indication that the hour, the state I was in or the carman demanding money were in any way an inconvenience. He poured me a small glass of brandy and when he laid me in his bed to sleep it was still warm from his own body having been there.
I slept for three hours. When I woke Alexander was in the room, sitting in a chair by the bed, reading. I studied him for a few minutes. He was leaning forward with the book, which was about birds, holding it in both hands in front of him. He was dressed in trousers and shirt and hadn't shaved. I wondered if this was because he'd been afraid of waking me. His face looked kind, but unreadable.
'Thank you for taking me in,' I said.
'The pleasure's mine,' he put the book down, smiling. 'You'd no doubt like some tea?'
'Thank you,' I sat and swung my legs from the bed. 'The doctor friend I told you about is dead.'
'I heard.'
He went into the main room and was poking at the fire under the kettle when I came up behind him.
'You know then what happened in the village?'
'I do.' He nodded but didn't turn round.
'His mother has taken him back to Galway to be buried.'
'The best thing, in the circumstances.'
'Yes.'
The kettle began to hum and he rinsed the teapot and put in two spoons of tea. For a man he was very adept at domestic tasks.
'Another for the pot,' I said and he looked at me. 'An extra spoon of tea for the pot is supposed to be lucky,' I explained.
'As you wish.' He added another spoon.
We drank the tea in silence, sitting at the small table. He seemed disinclined to talk and I didn't know where to begin telling him the reason I'd come.
'Your friend was taking a priest of the Kildare parish to court,' Alexander said at last.
'You knew about that?'
'It was the talk of the camp. He'd a great many on his side but not many willing to stand and be counted. Not even Private Vance, who was worried about what the consequences might be for Sarah and their child.' He shrugged and went to the window and looked out. 'Your friend had courage.'
'He had conviction.'
'The courage of conviction then.' He continued to look out of the window. 'He should have taken you back to Dublin and left Kildare and everything in it to rot. In his place that's what I would have done.'
'Will you make love to me?' I said.
'Why?'
He turned. With the light from the window behind him it was impossible to see his expression. His voice was curious, nothing more.
'To make me better. To warm me. I'm so very cold.'
He came to me and held me against him. 'Cry if you want to, Allie,' he said.
But I couldn't have wept, even if I'd wanted to. All I wanted was to feel alive, to stop thinking about Daniel's surprised face as he fell into the burning nest, to empty my head of visions of his still, cold body and his lips that would never speak to me again.
'Love me,’ I lifted my face to his and he kissed me.
It wasn't like Daniel's kiss and that was a good thing. It was bleak and hard but I didn't care. Bleak was how Alexander felt and the hardness was his safeguard. I understood how he was because now I knew how much I'd hurt him. I knew too that he wouldn't hurt me, ever. That was why I was there.
He lifted his head and looked at me. 'Will you be sorry, after?'
'Will you?'
'Never,' he ran a finger down the side of my face, 'I'll be glad, whatever your reasons . . .' He moved away from me, towards the bedroom. He didn't take my hand or try to touch me. I followed him and he shut the door behind me. We stood together just inside the door. Even then he didn't touch me.
'Do you still want me?' I took his hand and kissed the palm and held it to my face.
'I want you,' he was smiling, rueful, 'come . . .' He led me to the bed and I sat on its edge. He sat too and turned me by the shoulders to face him.
'You are confused and grief-stricken,' he shook me gently, as you would a child, 'these are not reasons to make love.'
'Why not? To be close to someone, a friend, is what I need. We're friends . . .'
'And now you want us to be lovers,' he was not so cool as he was pretending to be. I could feel a tremble in his hands and see the intensity in his eyes. It made me feel powerful. 'Making love will not take away the grief,' he said, 'you'll have to wait for time to do that.'
'Let time do it then. This is what I want for now, for this moment. I will at least have crossed a barrier. I will be a woman. I will be different.'
'Maybe you'll be a woman,' he put his hands into my hair, 'but you will be no different. You may even be lonelier.'
I put my hands on either side of his head and covered his ears. 'No more talk,' I said as I closed my eyes and let out a slow breath, 'kiss me.'
This time, as he kissed me, he loosened my hair with one
hand and held me tight against him with the other. I felt his teeth against mine and stiffened. He took his mouth from mine.
'Don't be afraid,' he whispered, then began to open the buttons of my dress. As he went he laid his lips against my bared neck, moving his mouth lower with each opening until he was kissing my breasts. 'Such beauty.' He lifted his eyes and uncovered my breasts and shoulders and arms as he eased my dress to my waist. He held me close and now I was the one trembling; so hard I could feel my heart beating against his chest. Quite quickly he removed all of the rest of my clothes. Quite expertly too. I was glad of it. I liked his sureness. It compensated for my own lack of experience.
I lay with my eyes closed while he took off his own clothes. I didn't open them when he stretched himself beside me and when I felt his hands on my back and waist, pulling me into him.
'You knew I wouldn't resist you,' he half whispered, half groaned, into my ear, 'I've wanted you every time we met. You're so lovely, and so fragile.'
Dimly, I was aware that there was something I should say to him. All I could think to say was, 'I'm not fragile.'
I pressed my bared body against his, feeling his skin, surprised at its softness, at how warm his body felt. Softness and warmth weren't things I'd expected from a man's body. I felt his male part, hard against my stomach, and lower in my own stomach, at the very pit, felt a lurch, and then a long quivering.
His hands went about my waist and he turned me and laid me on my back. He was whispering, I couldn't hear what, into my ear again. He parted my legs and began to kiss me, putting his tongue into my mouth this
time. His fingers between my legs were doing what his tongue was doing in my mouth, so gently insistent my initial trepidation turned quickly to a wild torment.
'Take me,' I said, 'take me now.' I wanted the act of love to happen. I wanted everything else in the world blotted out.
He came into me slowly and gently and I felt myself slipping away, losing myself in the feel of him. His breathing became faster and so did my own. I heard myself moan too, and whimper, and put my hands into his hair as he moved in and out of me, slowly at first and then faster, faster.
'Allie . . .' He said my name once before, in a frenzy of deep, final thrusts, he spent himself in me.
He didn't leave me at once and when he did at last roll away he put his arms about me and stroked my back and hair.
'Are you all right?' he said.
‘I am.’
But I wasn't and he knew it. Making love hadn't made me feel better. Just lonelier for Daniel and desolate that it wasn't him lying beside me.
'It's not your fault that he's dead,' Alexander said, 'he died because he was the sort of man he was.'
'He wouldn't have been there, in the street to see Beezy Ryan beaten, if it wasn't for me.'
'Another man would have walked on. He responded as he did because of the sort of man he was.' Alexander was insistent. 'He had courage, of a foolish kind, but courage nevertheless.'
I said nothing. I would never think Daniel foolish. He'd been brave and passionate and committed to justice and rights for all. That he'd fallen foul of man's savage inhumanity didn't make him foolish. His courage was what separated him from Alexander Ainslie.
'How did this happen?' I touched with a finger the scar above his eye. 'Is it a battle wound?'
'Nothing so interesting,' he smoothed the hair back from my forehead. 'I fell out of an apple tree as a boy.' He paused. 'My life's been a protected one, Allie, and privileged. I've known women, some respectable, some not. The woman I was to marry when I go home? I haven't the heart for it any longer.' He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling, holding me against his side. 'I could take you away from all of this, Allie. I could marry you.'