The young woman said to me, “Who is he?” and I told her Mr. de Valera's name, and his role in the Mill. Our conversation went on, and thanks to her good offices I was able to recover myself and find a place to sleep. Through her, I was also able to arrange a change of clothing, and eventually I gained some composure after such an extraordinary week. However, I was quite unable to eat for two days, and for a month afterward I found myself trembling many times.
Next morning at ten o'clock, I made my way to Dublin Castle. Some soldiers halted me at barricades, but I was able to persuade them of my neutrality, and on I went. The city lay ruined, with bodies still lying in the streets. I have often heard it said that it is the civilian population that tells the world when a battle has ended. Now I saw the pathetic sight of families peering at corpses, hoping that they would not find a loved one who had died. No corpse that I saw wore a uniform; these dead included old men, young men—who seemed not to have been armed—women, girls, and I saw two small children. I was glad that I had eaten no breakfast.
At Dublin Castle, I asked to see the highest authority in the land. Obviously I did not expect such a wish to be granted; but I did meet a gentleman whose office, when I was shown into it, manifested a significant position. I used my mother's name and connections to introduce my inquiry: I wanted to find Mr. Joseph Harney, from whom I had been separated in the events of the week; he was supposed to travel with me to Tipperary Castle that very night.
The respect that I received was very considerable—until I returned, as bidden, at four o'clock that afternoon. The same gentleman met me in the hallway of Dublin Castle and told me that my friend—“Harney,” as he called him—was in jail in a rebel uniform, and would be courtmartialed sometime in the coming week. By exerting considerable pressure, I was able to establish that Harney had been sent to Kilmainham Jail, and I went there forthwith.
Nobody would allow me to see Harney. Nor would they confirm his presence there. I waited a distance away from the prison, trying to make myself as discreet as possible. At six o'clock, in the dusk, some warders appeared, their day's work over. I followed two of them to a public house, where, presently, I joined them. After some drinks I learned that all the prisoners would be tried within the week. When I asked what sentences might be expected, one man drew his hand like a knife across his throat.
Next morning, some banks opened and some city shops. I presented a letter of credit and bought myself some clothes; then I paid a call on Mr. Yeats. He accepted my profuse apologies for arriving unannounced and seemed pleased to see me. During some excellent tea—which he himself made—he plied me with questions regarding Tipperary Castle, and clapped his hands in delight at my progress reports.
Then we discussed the events of the past week, and I described to him some of what I had seen on Northumberland Road. We commiserated regarding the awfulness of it all—and I told him that my treasured friend and colleague had been caught up in all this. Mr. Yeats knew the gentleman at Dublin Castle, and had been a dinner guest at his house; he now gave me a letter, which he read before he sealed. After an introductory remark, the letter said, “Mr. O'Brien, with whom I understand you are already acquainted, has excellent—and truly non-political— reasons for requiring the safe conduct of his colleague Mr. Joseph Harney. I would deem it a personal favor if you would do all in your power to assist.”
At Dublin Castle, they would not allow me to see the gentleman— but the name of Mr. Yeats got the letter accepted. I waited outside. At one o'clock, the gentleman in question appeared, to take his lunchtime walk. I allowed him to see me walking along Dame Street toward the castle, and when he did not turn away as he saw me, I knew that Mr. Yeats had gained some purchase.
We greeted politely and he said, “An inquiry has gone through at a high level. That is all I can say.”
I replied, “Thank you. And may I deliver in person Mr. Yeats's warmest compliments.” I added, as well, an invitation to see the work in progress at the castle, and we parted as gentlemen. I never saw him again; and I did not find Harney.
All week I haunted Dublin Castle and Kilmainham Jail. Dreadful word began to seep through of unjust trials and frightful executions. Ten men had been shot, we heard, then twenty, thirty, fifty—they were killing them hour upon hour. The rumors grew frantic. In the earliest morning light I went and stood at the prison walls. Others had gathered, small, sad bunches of people, women in black, praying aloud. We winced, each one of us, and we shuddered as we heard the volleys of shots from behind the walls.
At last I had nothing left to do but go back to Tipperary. I made a plan to go home by train on Friday, stay with my parents, and on Saturday return to the castle. On Sunday I would travel to Urlingford and meet Joseph's family.
That plan never fell into place. I went home as planned, and Mother waited at the station. When I showed surprise to see her, she told me that she had met every train from Dublin since Tuesday, the day on which they first heard news of the rebellion. I took the reins and we talked and I told her of Harney and what had happened; I did not include details of my time in the house on Northumberland Road.
When we neared home, Mother said, “We must go to the castle first.”
I know every line on my mother's face; I hear every nuance of her voice.
“What has happened?”
“It's best to let you see.”
From the avenue all seemed normal. And from the Long Terrace all seemed normal—except that no workman could be seen, and many liked to work on after the day's end. We walked to the main door, which stood open.
“Go inside,” she said.
The castle interior had been attacked with fire. Where the recovered paneling had so recently been shining, there spread wide holes whose edges still smoldered a little. Not all of the timbers had burned through. One of the two new doors had been all but destroyed; the other had not caught fire.
“April?” I said—and betrayed my concern, which neared panic.
“Safe,” said Mother. “She received some burns on the hands and arms trying to put out the fire.”
“Serious burns?”
“No. And nobody else was injured. But—everybody has fled.”
Mother told me the story. On Wednesday morning, as I witnessed the extraordinary gun-battle in Northumberland Road, three armed and masked men came to the castle. They ordered everybody out of the building—including April and such workers and craftsmen as were there—and said that they were restoring this castle and all in it to the land whence it sprang. And they announced that anyone working on this castle henceforth would be shot on sight. One of the raiders could then be seen spreading some flammable liquid all over the ballroom floor, and then the main hall. He lit it and the armed men departed. Amid much fear, the workers drifted away. Only two people would go into the flames with April—the Master Stonemason and the Master Carpenter.
7
Charles, though exhausted, describes how he “reached for vigor and energy.” The burning, now two days past, had done all the damage it was going to do. He needed to establish the human damage. Helen, the bad-tempered housekeeper, emerged from the kitchen, and Charles's text says that he “allowed her to speak the rage that everybody felt.”
When she had calmed down, she told him that April had gone to Mrs. Moore's. The Italians might not yet have left the country, even though they'd threatened to do so. Mr. Higgins and Mr. Mulberry had stayed in their lodgings in the village. The two of them had come up to the castle together each morning. They had secured the damaged areas against collapse and told Helen that they awaited “further orders.”
My oppression at the loss of my beloved Harney now had this new weight added—but my thoughts fell quickly into a straight order, which I proceeded to follow.
The main depredation had been directed at the fresh repairs, as though the arsonists sought to destroy the very principle under which we had been laboring—the restoration of a former glory. They had splashed with oil the beautiful ancien
t panels in the hall and then held matches or flaming rags to them. This achieved no more than wide scorch marks across the painted details, the destruction of one full panel, and half of another door; evidently they had hoped that when the rest caught fire, the flames from the wood in the panels would add ferocity to the fire.
As I walked through the house, their method became evident to me. Leisurely in their vileness, they had taken enough time to set several fires here and there. As well as the hall they had attacked the ballroom, the library, the dining-rooms, and the three drawing-rooms. In each place, they had heaped piles of books and chairs together on the floor, then doused and lit them, hoping that the planks would then come alight too, and thus attack the fabric of the house. As in the hall, many of the fires had been set along the walls, also in the hope that the flames would lick up along the panels and spread.
But they seem to have known little about setting such fires—they had even tried to start one on the marble of the Grand Staircase, where it had simply died. I did not yet know enough about marble to tell whether it had been damaged permanently, but the snow-white Carrara balusters along one flight of steps had blackened entirely; and two wooden props that the Marchettis, with Mr. Higgins's help, had placed under a marble parapet for temporary support had all but burned through, and the long slab leaned perilously.
The raiders had not continued upstairs; all their efforts had been aimed at the main floor. The worst damage occurred in the Library, where three stacks of books had burned completely through. Again, we had good fortune here; most of the books had heirloom status and the leather bindings had prevented them from blazing—that is to say, the leather halted the flames and thus obstructed a larger conflagration. That would indeed have threatened the entire house, but it was contained within a series of dozens of little fires.
We had been fortunate (if I may use such a word about an attack) in that the castle's original sturdiness resisted the lick of the flames. Indeed, in one section, where an old carved column rose from floor to ceiling as an ornamental support for the library shelves, the flames had succeeded only in making a little blackening.
I went down to the cellars; no fire had penetrated there. In fact, anybody entering the cellars from the western doors—that is from the butler's pantry—would never have known that there had been a fire in the house. Only the smell of burning told the story—it hung all over. I have been told that much of the fear related to a house on fire comes from the sense of smell; this odor permeated every place and, I thought, every object. The old window hangings now reeked of it, as did the remaining books on the library shelves—what should we do with those? They reeked too; perhaps the airing of the coming summer days would help, or the frosts of winter.
I stood in the Great Hall, looking through the north and south windows. On this spring day, with its gently sailing white clouds, I allowed myself to breathe for a moment. In the past, I should have shrunk with the inward moan of a querulous child asking self-piteously, “Why me?” Now I gave a grim smile, and commented to myself on the force and pace of my life. Mount Street, Boland's Mill, Dublin Castle, Kilmainham Jail—no more momentous week could I ever have spent, and nothing in my life had prepared me for it. Then I began to assemble my priorities—though my heart still ached for Harney.
First, I would take Mother home; then I would tackle a horse from the farm, ride over to Knocklong, and find April at Mrs. Moore's house. I would hear her plans, and then I would ride back to the castle and find my workers. How I needed Harney now; he would have taken such efficient charge over so much—above all, his local intelligence would have set the measure of how seriously we must consider the threats that the arsonists made. In this, I was as a blind and deaf man; other than Harney, I knew nobody in the republican movement, or where to find them.
April, when I saw her, proved admirable; as with Helen, anger had taken her through the difficulty. The Moore house, a fine, gray stone building with tall windows, sits in trees at the end of a curving avenue. One may observe the house from the road and, as I approached, I could see two ladies standing in the doorway, their faces turned to the last of the sun. Even from a distance of several hundred yards, April was easily identified; beside her stood little raven-haired, plump Mrs. Moore.
The bandages shocked me, and I did not trouble to hide it. April's hands, including all the fingers, wore white swathes to the elbow; her face had suffered no burns. Her hair, uncovered at the time, had singe marks, and the very lowest reaches had been burned; she had managed to beat out the flames before they reached her neck. In doing so, her palms had been burned—and before that, her arms and the backs of her hands had suffered when she'd tried to save books in the Library.
When I questioned her as to the time she'd spent among the flames, she diverted me and talked about the mason and the carpenter and their heroics. Neither man, fortunately, had received any burning, nor damage of any kind, other than distress at the vandalism to their work. I released the anger in her by asking about the arsonists—and in doing so heard the details that I fully expected.
“Three of them came,” she said, “and they felt no necessity to wear masks or disguises. One of them is easily recognized—he has a finger missing.”
I asked, “What exactly did they say? Helen says they threatened everybody.”
“Helen rushed at them; she hit one, and kicked another until I pulled her back.”
My view of our housekeeper took another positive leap.
“Do you believe their threats?”
“They're scum! Cowards! I'm certain they knew that you had gone away. How did they know that? And I'm certain that they would never have come near the place had you been there. How is Harney?”
“I have much to tell,” I said. “But I want to see those burns.”
Somewhat to my surprise, she readily agreed to let Mrs. Moore and me unbandage her hands and arms. Again, I did not hide my response; she had been burned badly. One burn had a wide black edge—a charring, which is the worst sign of all; I feared permanent scarring. Mrs. Moore told me that they had put an ointment of chamomile leaves on the burns, but it seemed to have had no effect. We repaired to a landing upstairs, and I asked Mrs. Moore to have her housekeeper fetch me a pan, some spoons, buttermilk, three eggs, and some honey.
It did not take long to bring the mixture together. I painted it gently on April's arms and hands; she never flinched, though I observed tears in her eyes when I had finished.
“Now comes the harder part,” I told her. “You must sit motionless— or certainly as still as you can—for the next three hours, until I take this off.”
As someone who spends her life in perpetual motion, she frowned, but agreed. Mrs. Moore invited me to stay the night, as darkness would soon fall. I accepted, out of weariness as much as anything else—I had scarcely slept all week, and the train in the morning had been most uncomfortably packed with people fleeing Dublin. It seems that every person in Dublin has a country cousin.
Three hours later, in advance of dinner, I removed the loose cheesecloth with which I had covered April's hands and arms. Touching her filled me with a rare kind of joy, notwithstanding the circumstances, and for the first time I began to feel freedom from the burden of Euclid's death, and the loss of him. To my surprise, I could already report progress, in that the black charring had reduced. April saw this too, but said nothing—she did cast a significant glance at Mrs. Moore, who smiled. In those days I watched for any and every sign of April's approval.
At dinner I sat on one side of her; Mrs. Moore sat on the other, and we helped to manipulate food to her fork. Finally, she gave up and began to use a spoon. My chief advice had to do with preventing the blisters from bursting. From across the table, Dan Moore, whom I had never before met, commiserated in a gentle and altogether decent way. We talked not at all of my week's adventures; when asked about Harney, I sidestepped. Nor did I offer any details about Dublin; I indicated that the city had been closed to all but the militar
y.
When it came to bedtime, I surprised them.
“There will be no more dressings,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, I will again paint the burns with egg white, honey, and buttermilk. When I have gone, peel it off after three hours and make sure that the skin gets air. Keep a towel nearby. If any blister should break, cover the mark with a thin layer of honey”—and I demonstrated. “But tonight you must, I fear, sleep with your arms thus.” I raised my arms above my head, and everybody laughed.
Next morning, after attending to my new patient, I set out for home. We made an arrangement that April should return to Tipperary when she felt ready—and that I would come to Knocklong again in the meantime. Our parting had friendliness and humor in it, although the gratitude for my care was expressed solely by Mrs. Moore—whose husband then walked with me to the gate.
“Will you be calling on the constabulary?”
I said, “I don't know. Last night, when I awoke for a time, I tried to gauge the best measure.”
“Awkward,” he said. “You're supposed to tell them—but that's probably more dangerous.”
“What would you do?” I asked him.
“I'd find 'em and shoot 'em. One at a time. That'd stop the rest of 'em.”
Charles O'Brien saw more of the Easter Rising than most people in Ireland. It never turned into a countrywide rebellion. That first weekend, some units of republicans—the “Volunteers”—reported for duty here and there throughout the country. But they met, hung around, and disbanded. They had all been waiting months for something to happen. It was on. It was off. It was on again, it was off again. Finally, the main action took place only in Dublin, because the commanders there defied general orders and set out on their own.
Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland Page 34