A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  When Mr Lindsay and the woman turned to leave, Anselm remained where he was, waiting at the mouth of the track. The morning light had given colour and depth to the woods. He could see the two guests clearly now. And they saw him. But Anselm was the more astonished … because he’d never seen either of them before.

  When they came level, Mr Lindsay said, in French, ‘Now you know my secret, Father.’ He held out his hand warmly, his eyes assured, his manner calm. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’

  Anselm drew out the tags from his pocket, gripping them tight as if he might squeeze some guidance from Herbert. ‘I’m a monk from England,’ he said. ‘I live in the monastery where Herbert Moore spent sixty years after he condemned Joseph Flanagan to death.’

  His words stunned Mr Lindsay. He placed a hand on Anselm’s shoulder, not for need of support but out of … what was it? Anselm knew it was pity. The old man’s head fell low. He remained like that, quite still, as if he were back before the mulberry tree.

  For a man of advanced years, Mr Lindsay – like Sylvester – possessed remarkable good health. And like Sylvester, he seemed ageless and had a certain childlike quality. His ears were pink, his face lightly tanned. One eyebrow rose higher than the other, suggesting more mischief than surprise. Looking up he said, ‘I do hope he lived a happy life?’

  ‘He did,’ replied Anselm.

  ‘And without any guilt.’

  Anselm’s failure to reply immediately unsettled Mr Lindsay, so he hastily explained that Father Moore had founded Larkwood, had been an inspiration to many, but had secretly longed to meet the boy saved by Joseph Flanagan. ‘And he wished upon you what you have wished for him.’

  Mr Lindsay’s mouth fell open, and he looked to the young woman by his side to share the wonder of this strange happening. She was in her early twenties. A hood covered her head and, within it, thick black hair framed an oval face. Fine black eyebrows arched to a low fringe. She was shy but her silence was heavy and protecting.

  ‘Father Moore wanted you to have these –’ Anselm held out the tags – ‘and it’s why I came to Les Ramiers to find you.’

  ‘These are mine,’ he whispered. ‘This is who I was.’ He fumbled behind his tie, opening two shirt buttons. He reached inside and tugged out another cord and other discs. Holding them up for Anselm, he said, ‘four-eight-eight-eight Pte Joseph Flanagan. We swapped tags … because he knew no one would be looking for him … ever.’

  3

  After Lauds, Anselm joined Mr Lindsay and Sabine, his granddaughter, for breakfast. Given the circumstances, Anselm secured a room in the monastery by the kitchens, where they would be guaranteed privacy and bounty.

  Anselm and the Prior at Larkwood had pretty much misunderstood every detail of importance. John Lindsay had not led a tormented life at all: he’d married, had four children, seen numerous grandchildren arrive and attended more weddings and christenings than he could accurately calculate. He was a happy man. That said, it had taken him fifty years before he could step into that clearing where Flanagan had died. ‘My only remaining desire is to visit Inisdúr, where he was born. He spoke of it all the time to Lisette. But that can never happen. It’s part of the price.’

  The brother in charge of the kitchens nudged open the door with his foot and laid a platter of meats and cheese on the table. A novice followed with fresh bread and a bowl of fruit. Another monk brought hot steaming coffee.

  The plan had always been that Mr Lindsay would catch a boat from Boulogne when Madame Papinau’s cousin had secured a passage to England. But the day following Herbert Moore’s visit to the estaminet, she asked him to stay. Not for a few weeks, but for good. Étaples could become his home, she said. He could work here, in the kitchens. The war would end one day. He wouldn’t have to hide for ever. Mr Lindsay didn’t have to think for long. He had no life in England, just a borstal sentence, if he was caught. ‘But I don’t speak French,’ he stammered. ‘I’ll teach you,’ she promised. And she did – without a single formal lesson. She just stopped speaking English.

  ‘She never married again,’ said Mr Lindsay, his face soft with affection, ‘though she changed. When I first came she was a cold and brittle woman, for all her kindness. But she grew warm, over the years. One day she asked me to call her Maminette. It was only after her death that I found this letter. Joseph wrote it to her in his cell, hours before he was shot. She kept it in a drawer by her bed.’ Mr Lindsay drew an envelope from his inner jacket pocket. ‘I bring it with me every year. It’s as though she comes with me to see him.’

  Written on the front was one word: Lisette. Anselm opened the single sheet of paper inside. There was a Gaelic phrase he didn’t understand – making it sacred and secret. Written underneath it, rising across the lines, was a sort of desperate afterthought, a plea that went to the heart of Flanagan’s purpose, as if he hadn’t quite realised it himself until afterwards:

  Keep hold of the boy for a while. Teach him what you would have taught your son.

  ‘I first heard about Louis, her son, on the day Mr Moore delivered the letter,’ said Mr Lindsay, taking it back. ‘I was listening at the door as they talked. She’d sent Louis off to the war, as Mr Moore had sent Joseph off to the cellar. Both of them were killed. I think my life changed when I heard that confession, because she then sent Mr Moore back to his regiment – and he would have stayed in Étaples, believe you me.’

  Sabine poured the coffee. She evidently knew everything. It was part of her identity. Her own life blood flowed from an execution. There was a blush to her skin as though she felt what Lisette had felt – along with Joseph and the old man around whom these events had turned. Anselm thought she might cry but the door swung open and the novice brought in a rattling tray of jams arranged around a single pot of English marmalade.

  For over a year Mr Lindsay lived like a prisoner, hiding in the house and never going out, except at night and only into a small walled garden at the rear of the premises. After ten minutes he was back in the cellar. During the day he remained in the kitchen peeling potatoes and in the evening he sat in the parlour listening to Lisette. She made him repeat words and phrases until her ear was pleased, though he didn’t know what he’d been saying. And ever so slowly a new world opened out before him – one that he could never have imagined. He began to speak in a language that was, for him, pure. He’d never sworn in it. He’d never robbed anyone with it. None of these sounds had ever been heard in a court or a borstal. By the time the war ended, he was dreaming in French. He walked on to the streets of Étaples a different man.

  ‘When I was twenty-two, Maminette had a shock for me.’ Mr Lindsay checked the jams. ‘She said I was a grown man, now, and I should go back to England and serve my sentence. I knew she was right. What I’d done – who I’d been – hung round my neck. So I did my time. And I’ve never looked back.’

  ‘But what of “Doyle’s” two prisons sentences?’ asked Anselm. ‘Weren’t they around your neck, too?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mr Lindsay, both eyebrows raised high. ‘They were around Joseph’s. If I’d claimed those back, he would have died for nothing.’ He opened a jar marked Reine-Claude. ‘But it’s one of the reasons I could never return to England. I was a deserter – I still am; it remains with me – and I didn’t deserve what the others had fought and died for. There were plenty of boys my age who stuck it out, and I ran away.’

  He screwed the lid back on to the pot, not having taken any jam. And without Anselm having to ask, he talked of his parents, that rascal Owen Doyle, and a butcher called Albert Powick. Sabine took up the story, as if she’d been there, and Anselm listened as from a distance, as he’d done in the woods, his eyes on a mulberry tree.

  The next morning Père Sébastien, the Prior of Les Ramiers, drove Anselm to Poperinghe, where he took the coach to Boulogne and the ferry to Folkestone. On the train home he mused on sundry peculiarities: he’d come to the battlefields of Flanders without visiting a single war cemetery; his sole pil
grimage had been to the site of an execution; a copse of trees was known locally as Flanagan’s Woods, but no one knew why; and John Lindsay, a man whose only unfulfilled desire was to visit Inisdúr, had never heard of Kate Seymour.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Time to go Home

  Herbert went back to Flanagan’s Woods frequently with a watering can, for he feared for the life of the tree. Lisette Papinau never came to Oostbeke again – at least not to Herbert’s knowledge. He’d waited on the anniversary of the shooting, wondering if she might again walk solemnly along the road between the school house and the trees, but it never happened. From this he deduced that her life had moved on; that she had left her memorial, just as surely as Owen Doyle had left her, and moved on also – back to England and an open future.

  Over the years Herbert grew in understanding. Of himself; and why he had come to Les Ramiers and why he would stay. His first painful lesson was the discovery that for much of his life he’d lived outside himself, reacting to the multiplicity of events, be they mundane or harrowing. In the silence of the monastery or out working in the fields, he gradually noticed – with a new kind of terror – that within himself he was quite hollow, and probably always had been. Without a jab from the outside, he was nothing. He had no depth … none at least that he was aware of. Reluctantly, fearfully, Herbert began the journey inward, the voyage that cannot be put into words or explained but only lived. And he made another discovery: a richness of existence, intrinsic to his identity and true for all humanity, whose depth was beyond the reach of any calamity.

  Herbert never tried to articulate the confidence that grew within him, but he noticed that the closer he came to his final vows, the less he felt he had a ‘vocation’, in the sense of an Office, or something he had to do. He had simply set about becoming himself. Monk and man were one. The steady rhythm of life at Les Ramiers had disclosed something basic to his humanity: he hungered for something within reach and out of his reach; he looked to a Beyond that was near and yet far; he sensed another place over the burning leaves, a green Kingdom behind so many broken windows. Without wanting to study the anatomy of association too closely, Herbert obscurely linked this inner landscape with the memory of Joseph Flanagan’s sacrifice, and the island of his birth, where the land and the sea were one.

  In the spring of 1924 Père Lucien asked to see Herbert in the vegetable garden. The Prior was attaching wire and posts to make a raspberry patch, despite the designation of the location.

  ‘You are due to take your final vows next year?’ said Père Lucien, his round face uncharacteristically sad.

  ‘Yes, if you think it fit,’ replied Herbert.

  The Prior wrapped wire around a post. ‘A few months ago I received a letter from Les Moineaux in Burgundy. They’re setting up a new foundation in England. Suffolk. The Order is being asked for volunteers.’

  ‘No, Father, please,’ said Herbert, his heart suddenly void. ‘I want to stay here, this is my home.’

  The Prior stretched the wire to the next post and wrapped it tight. ‘It’s also been a refuge, hasn’t it?’

  Herbert didn’t want to admit that Père Lucien was right. In a flash of painful foreshortening, Herbert was back as a soldier by a pile of raked leaves.

  ‘I think it’s time for you to go home, Herbert.’ The Prior waddled back to the first post and unravelled some more wire off a spool. ‘Take your final vows in a new monastery. You’ll lay its roots with your example. Maybe something great will grow.’

  That was the end of the conversation, for Gilbertines don’t say that much, unless they work in the guesthouse; and Herbert recalled his first night at Les Ramiers – suddenly precious now – when he’d read the maximum stay was for a week, when he’d been warned that you can never escape into a cloister.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  The community at Larkwood gathered in the Chapter Room before Compline. A candle burned on a central stand. Each of the monks drifted to their seat built into the circular wall of stone. Everyone was present, save Sylvester. After a brief prayer the Prior gave a summary of all that was known about Joseph Flanagan and his trial. He then invited Anselm to take the floor. ‘This is the story Herbert never heard of the man he’d always wanted to meet.’

  Anselm stood up, his arms hidden in opposing sleeves.

  John Lindsay did not have an auspicious start in life. His father was probably a merchant seaman from Liverpool. Relationships were fluid and always bruising for Peggy, his mother. She was found dead on Hornby docks. John ran off, leaving his four siblings to a workhouse or an orphanage, he never did find out. Aged six, he would easily have been swallowed by the primitive care system of the time, only he met Owen Doyle playing by a railway shunting in Bolton. Owen, five years his elder, brought John home to his dumbfounded mother and father. Though born in Lancashire, both parents were from Irish families who’d migrated during the Great Hunger of the previous century. Nine other children shared the four rooms where they lived. They found a corner for John and, in that tight but warm space, he became Owen’s shadow. At school they gave Mr Lever, the headmaster, a run for his money, though he grudgingly liked them both. Occasionally, on a Sunday after mass, he’d buy them sweets if their shoes were shiny and their nails were clean.

  Perhaps all might have gone well for John. Maybe he’d have landed a warehouse job and married one of Owen’s lively sisters. But Owen’s eyes turned red and swollen, his skin became pale, and he coughed up blood into a rusted bucket. He died of TB. And so did an infant sister. That was when John first began to rebel against life: not after the death of his mother at the hands of some brutal man, but after the slow, tortured decline of the boy who’d saved him; when he learned that what you value most is only as strong as India paper. He started petty thieving; and fighting. Mr Lever, the headmaster, tried to talk him round, as did a priest, but there was a thrill in the disobedience, in the anxiety of adults, in being a disappointment to good people. When he got older Big Mr Doyle gave him a hiding with the belt from his trousers. But that didn’t work. In truth, the family couldn’t look after him. They were grieving themselves, for other children had died; and poverty can hamper loving. John stopped irritating the police and began, instead, to seriously upset them. They gave him a hiding, too.

  ‘This is the boy who ran from court and joined the army in nineteen fifteen,’ said Anselm. ‘Within a year he’d twice been sentenced to death. But on his third approach he met Joseph Flanagan in no-man’s-land. It was a moment, I suspect, more powerful for Flanagan than Lindsay. There and then, while a battle raged, he took the boy to a widow in Étaples whose own teenage son had been taken by the war. And for that unwarranted leave of absence, Joseph Flanagan was eventually tied to a chair and shot. Part of Herbert’s story, and one he could never tell, was that he helped put that chair in place. He was obedient to the law and the circumstances of war but he nonetheless carried a burden of responsibility for the rest of his life. That is what Herbert felt, I am sure. And I’m also sure that he only discovered afterwards what Joseph Flanagan had actually done and why. He desperately tried to change the direction of the tide, but he couldn’t. The tragedy among other tragedies is that the knowing beforehand would have made no difference: Joseph Flanagan had committed a capital crime at a capital moment.’

  Anselm’s eye fell on Sylvester’s empty seat and a rush of sympathy made him want to quit the room and find the old fellow. To tell him that Herbert’s silence on these, the most important experiences of his life, was not a species of rejection, not a lack of trust, just the inevitable outcome of a moral and emotional battering no man could recount without breaking down, perhaps permanently.

  ‘There are two journeys of great importance that now took place,’ resumed Anselm, after clearing his throat and his mind for the task in hand. ‘Herbert’s, to Larkwood as a man restored to himself, and that of John Lindsay – who owed his life, yet again, to someone he’d met by chance. As for Herbert, he set out with Doyle’
s tags around his neck. He never removed them. No one can know what happened during his passage save that, at its end, he came to define Larkwood’s ambience. Now, while we know that John Lindsay followed a similar path towards fulfilment, Herbert remained in the dark. He had no way of knowing, because after leaving Étaples he had no contact with either the boy or his adoptive mother, Lisette Papinau. And he worried that Joseph Flanagan’s sacrifice had been wasted by a life of remorse. Thankfully, he was wrong. There was no healing message to deliver, because John Lindsay had been nurtured to the harmony of light and dark by a woman who’d known both in equal measure, Lisette Papinau. If you like, everything Herbert had hoped for had come to pass.’

  Anselm paused, recognising a question in many of the faces fixed upon him. Involuntarily, he glanced again at Sylvester’s empty chair. ‘The problem, as you are well aware, is that someone did come to Larkwood. Kate Seymour: a relative or friend to someone who is tormented; a man to whom Herbert never gave a glancing thought. And I have no idea who it might be.’

  Anselm had finished. He sat down feeling weary, blood beating gently against his ears. He was exhausted by what he’d had to say; by his own long journey through scraps of paper to the wavering voice of Mr Shaw, through so much submission to suffering, only to reach this moment of confusion. He let his gaze rest on the guttering candle, unable to restrain the flood of names and imagined faces.

  ‘It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?’ came Bede’s voice.

  Anselm snapped into the present.

  Bede’s stern eyes were upon him. Swiftly, Larkwood’s archivist scanned the Chapter Room as if looking for support. No one made a sound. ‘The family thrown aside by military justice was Joseph Flanagan’s. What about them? They’ve probably hidden their loss for half a century.’