Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  ‘But what about Martin?’ Sean said.

  ‘He’s dead, son. There’s nothing to be done. But you save yourself and live - live for Ireland!’’

  Then Sean was running, dodging and swerving from side to side, around the side of the pub to where he had left his bicycle. And so away, pedalling like a lunatic down the long road towards Windy Harbour and normal life in Dublin. Halfway down the road there was a herd of cows, shambling into the dairy on the edge of the city to be milked. Sean and his companions rode straight down upon them screaming like eagles, their coat-tails flapping in the wind behind them, and the cows panicked and began to climb up on each other’s backs and push each other into the ditch.

  Only when they had the cows between them and any pursuit by the army lorry did Sean begin to laugh, and then for a while he could not stop. He laughed as he pedalled, great long laughs of triumph and exhilaration, with the tears not far behind.

  2. A New Dance

  THE BULLET-scarred limousine pulled up in a spray of gravel outside the Viceregal Lodge. The passengers piled out. Lord French, his revolver smoking in his hand, strode up the steps and barked orders at the astonished sentry. By the time Sir Jonathan, the other ADCs, and Detective Sergeant Halley followed him under the Ionic pillars of the elegant portico, the old general had servants and soldiers scurrying across the vast hall in every direction, their heels clicking urgently on the marble floor.

  In all the flurry, Catherine was temporarily forgotten. She sat down, white-faced, stunned, on a little gilt chair in the corner. She was certain it had been Sean. That smooth, boyish face, the wide grin, the silly stick-out ears; there could be no doubt. That one second had burned a picture of him into her mind, as though her eye had been a camera. She could see him still, like a photograph - if only photographs could be in colour. He had been half-smiling, his young face flushed with excitement and determination, his arm bent back to throw the bomb. Like a hero, she thought. It was truly heroic - a young soldier of Ireland in action, taking up arms for the republic against the armed might of the British Empire! A young man in civilian clothes, a cloth cap and long tweed coat, daring to stand out in the middle of the street to attack a convoy of enemy soldiers!

  Because of Sean, the Viceroy, that old fool French, was running around like a scalded weasel, his face bright red with indignation above his white moustache. So much for discipline and firmness!

  Catherine began to laugh. And when she had begun, she found it hard to stop. Her voice echoed in the hall.

  A butler spotted her and came over. ‘Can I be of assistance, madam? You were in the car, weren’t you? I can see you were hurt.’

  Catherine controlled herself with an effort. ‘What? No, I’m all right.’

  ‘Forgive me, madam, but your face is bleeding.’ He turned and clicked his fingers. ‘Mrs Boyd! Here, please!’

  Catherine touched her cheek hesitantly. It was wet, slippery; her fingertips came away red. A short, middle-aged woman in a housekeeper’s cap and apron came up.

  ‘Oh, my dear, that looks nasty! Have they shot you too?’

  ‘No, it’s just a cut, I’m sure.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be all right, if I can just wash it. Don’t make a fuss, please.’

  ‘All right, miss. I’ll show you.’

  Catherine followed the woman down a corridor, past a number of sculptures and paintings, and up a flight of stairs. She opened the door into a large bathroom. In one corner was a bath with a massive oak shower cabinet at its head; there was a window with stained glass in it, a window seat, some cane chairs and stools, and a large basin with a mirror.

  ‘You sit down there, dear,’ said the woman, pulling up a stool. ‘I’ll clean it up for you.’

  The sight of her face in the mirror was a shock. Her small bob hat was awry; and under it, ragged fingers of blood trickled down a paper-white skin. She took off the hat, astonished. She didn’t feel bad - how could her face be such a mess?

  She had a small, delicate face with large deep-set eyes and dark pageboy hair, which her hands tried to pat into place. The overall effect was normally of a sort of elfin beauty. Now she looked as though she had been torn by a cat.

  The housekeeper ran some warm water into the basin and began to dab at her forehead gently with a flannel. ‘There’s a few cuts just under your hair,’ she said soothingly, ‘but not too bad. Heads always bleed a lot. I remember my son once …’

  Catherine did not listen. Sean did this, she thought. Did he see me in the car? Would he still have thrown the bomb if he had? A fortnight ago he kissed this face. She remembered how it had felt …

  They had met in her first term at University College, in October. As one of only thirty-two women among some hundred and sixty men studying medicine, she had been plagued by youths inviting her to ceilidhs, picnics, tennis parties - quite enough to satisfy her father, if these had been the sort of young men he had had in mind. But Catherine, like the other women, had been more serious about her studies than most of the men - predictably, for it had been a hard struggle to get in - and she had rejected most of the invitations as distractions.

  Sean had seemed to her one of the more serious students. She remembered the first time they had met. He had sat next to her in a lecture, and afterwards asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee. Then he had started to talk, not about anything trivial or flirtatious, but about the subject of the lecture, the structure of the colon and small intestine.

  It was one of many subjects which she found very difficult to discuss with male students. Either they avoided it altogether, because it was indelicate, or they became defensively childish, elaborating on all the most repulsive details to see if she would be embarrassed.

  But Sean had been simply interested - and, it turned out, a little confused. After a few minutes’ conversation she found herself having to repeat most of the lecture over to him again, illustrating the main points from her notes. There were quite a few things Sean had not taken in, or had misunderstood. And he had not been insulted by this, merely grateful.

  ‘I do take notes,’ he said. ‘But he goes so fast, don’t you think? That’s hardly fair, when it’s all new stuff.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose they expect us to read it all ourselves, as well. That’s what I do. I look up the titles of the lectures to see what’s coming, and then try to read about it beforehand. Then the lecture’s clearer; it comes as a sort of revision.’

  ‘Mary and Joseph! Whenever do you find the time?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. In the evenings.’ She realized how priggish her explanation had sounded, and tried to make amends. ‘I’m alone a lot. I probably don’t have so much to do as you do.’

  ‘No.’ He regarded her with a rather quizzical, fetching grin. Soft hazel eyes, smooth, brown, carefully back-combed hair, a little dimple appearing on his cheek. Two months later, in the Viceregal Lodge, she could remember that grin clearly; at the time, it had had a definite unsettling effect on her pulse. ‘I’ve got the books, of course, but I’m afraid I don’t have that much time for them. I’m out most evenings.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Well now.’ The grin got wider, and more quizzical. ‘For one thing, I go to the Gaelic League. I’m learning the language.’ Then he said, in hesitant Irish: ‘Do you have the Gaelic?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she answered fluently. ‘My nurse spoke it.’

  ‘But that’s tremendous! You must come. You can teach us!’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since I had a nurse, you know. I’m sure there are a lot of things I’d say wrong, or I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter!’ His face lit up, in a way quite different from when they had been discussing medicine. ‘You had the Gaelic as a child - I wish I had. We should all learn it, you know! We’ll never be a nation if we lose our language.’

  And so she had gone along to the Keating branch of the Gaelic League, in 46 Parnell Square, opposite the R
otunda Lying-in Hospital. It had been a strange experience. There was an odd mixture of people: students like themselves, working men, actors, one who claimed to be a playwright, some intellectuals with wispy beards, and several middle-aged women - including, once, a tall woman in a wide hat and sandals, who was said to be the Viceroy’s elder sister. The use of the Irish language was equally varied. One or two spoke it fluently, others contented themselves with writing words down, or speaking about Gaelic enthusiastically in English. Catherine seemed to be the only one who had learnt the language as a child; and that was not such an advantage here, either, because nearly everyone in Parnell Square wanted to discuss politics, and she had not learnt the vocabulary for that, picking up seashells with her nurse on the beach in Galway.

  It was a busy, fascinating place. There were several classes going on every night, and some of these seemed to attract quite a different clientele. There was a group of men who met in a room upstairs, and came and went briskly on bicycles. Some she recognized - elected members of the Dail, prominent Sinn Feiners. They came down in ones and twos, smoking and talking busily, and rode away again into the night. One or two might look in on the way, and give Sean a friendly wave. She had been impressed, and teased him in Gaelic: ‘Is it yourself that’s the armed revolutionary, then, a chara? A Fenian with a gun?’

  He winked at her, his open eye sparkling above that wide engaging mischievous smile, and said: ‘I am that.’ She had only half believed him, then; but today, in the Viceregal Lodge, she saw it was true. It was a thrilling, sobering thought. No wonder his eyes lit up more when he spoke about Ireland than about medicine. He was really at the heart of the movement she admired so much.

  Two weeks ago she had been with Sean to a ceilidh. It had been hot, noisy, charged with emotion. Catherine had danced all evening, relishing the sense of being part of a crowd of Irish people, touching, singing, swinging each other round in the dances. Her own life was so intense, so lonely, she had been intoxicated by the sense of togetherness - the sense of touch.

  So when at last they came out into the cold night air she had leant against Sean, naturally, easily, wanting to make the warmth last a little longer.

  He had walked her home, one arm round her, wheeling his bicycle with the other. She wondered, now, if she had been a sort of passport for him, for the soldiers and the police were less likely to stop a young couple together. But it had been the natural thing to do, after all.

  She could not invite him in and she did not want the servants to see, so she had stopped on the corner of Merrion Square and pointed across the little park to her house.

  ‘That?’ he said. ‘Sure it’s a mansion!’

  ‘A town house. I told you I was an aristocrat.’ She tried to make out his expression in the dim gaslight. ‘Are you shocked?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, maybe a little.’ He glanced at the house again and shook his head. ‘To think you live in a place like that and still spend time with me. Do - do you have all of it?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes. Well, Father has half, and then there’s the servants. We’re great employers, you know. There’s half a dozen people in there.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He took his arm away from her waist, and put both hands on the handlebars.

  ‘Sean.’ She had not wanted the contact to end. She had been alone for so much of her life; that was the way of her father’s world, the world she had been born into. Sean was at once himself to her, and the spirit of the people, the warmth of the ceilidh. She reached out and held him. ‘I know it’s unjust, but don’t blame me now. It was a grand evening, wasn’t it? I don’t want it to end.’

  When he put the bicycle against the wall and embraced her it had been oddly aggressive, fierce, as though he had to overcome something within himself to do it. But that she only remembered later, when she thought about it carefully, languorously, alone in her bed. For in all her nineteen years, it was the first time she had embraced any boy alone, like this.

  She had thought perhaps he would kiss her lips and so he had, but only briefly. Then he had kissed her eyes and her cheeks and her hair, and held her close to him, very hard. They were nearly the same height, and his bristly cheek rubbed against hers. She nuzzled against him like an animal, and he leaned back, his hands clasped behind her, and lifted her off her feet.

  ‘You’re a lovely girl for all that,’ he said. ‘I can carry you - look!’ He turned in a circle, whirling her round with her feet in the air, and put her down panting.

  ‘That’s a new dance,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ And then they had looked into each other’s eyes in the shadows of the gaslight, and their smiles had faded and they had indeed kissed each other’s lips, very slowly and long until neither had any breath left; and then they tried again and got the breathing better, and in fact the whole thing was so very much better that they might have gone on, with short pauses, for the rest of the night, had not a policeman scrunched into the square behind them, and coughed discreetly to let them know he was there.

  It had been a cold night. But half an hour later, as she climbed shivering into her bed, she wondered how it was that she had never felt warmer in her life than in those few minutes, crushed against his overcoat outside in the square.

  A fortnight later, staring at her face in the mirror in the Viceregal Lodge, she wondered what he had been carrying in the pockets of that coat.

  Sir Jonathan O’Connell-Gort was in a fine, cold rage. He thought he could not have looked a greater fool if he had tried. Newly appointed Divisional Army Intelligence Officer, he had met Sir John French on the train that morning to brief him on the current reports, and to plan an improvement to the service. He had served briefly under French in France, before Haig took over, and he respected him for a fine officer who did not suffer fools gladly. Sir Jonathan had had a good war, and he had hoped to make a good impression on the little Field Marshal. He felt confident in his local knowledge, and had a report in his pocket suggesting that Michael Collins and his murder gang were short of arms, exhausted, nearly finished. Sir Jonathan agreed. The people of Ireland, he felt, had had enough. The crisis was nearly over.

  So he had thought this morning, as he had motored through the cold, crisp air of Galway. And then, in quick succession, he had been humiliated by his daughter, and nearly murdered by Collins and his thugs.

  His discussions with French on the train had been polite but frosty. The conference in the Viceregal Lodge, which had just ended, had been tempestuous. The Lord Lieutenant was a brave, choleric soldier, with a great deal of physical courage, as Sir Jonathan had seen in the car. But he also had a strong sense of the dignity of his position. He had not, he told Sir Jonathan, been appointed His Majesty’s Viceroy in Ireland in order to indulge in pistol fights with street hooligans. Nor did he expect his Intelligence Officer to feed him pure unadulterated stupidity. Clearly the Irish Republican Army was neither unarmed, nor exhausted, nor finished. If it had been quiet for a couple of weeks, they now knew why - because it had been planning an operation on a rather grander scale than the murder of a few policemen. And it had nearly succeeded. Perhaps the British Army Intelligence Service was staffed exclusively by blind deaf morons, but clearly the same could not be said of the IRA. They appeared to have known the exact time and place that his train would arrive, and which car he normally travelled in. If the IRA’s Director of Intelligence, Michael Collins, was able to get hold of such facts, then the sooner the man was arrested or shot, the better. Perhaps, Lord French suggested, if Sir Jonathan and his colleagues ever did get hold of Collins, they could ask him to put on a training course, to show them how an intelligence service should be run.

  It had been a very painful interview indeed, and Sir Jonathan’s temper had not been improved when he came out of the room. Lord French’s butler had glided up to inform him, smoothly, that his daughter had been served with tea in a drawing room and would no doubt expect to see him shortly.

  ‘What?’ Only his lifelong training had prevent
ed Sir Jonathan from cursing his daughter out loud. ‘Yes, thank you, Chitham. I’ll see her when I have time.’ And more self-control, he thought bitterly, as he strode down the corridor. If I meet that girl now this house will be treated to a family row the like of which hasn’t been seen since the Normans!

  He had thought she had stopped all that nonsense over the past year. Studying medicine was hardly his idea of a ladylike thing to do, but at least it had seemed to keep her quiet. It was respectable, too, in a bizarre sort of way - better than all that agitation she had made a few years ago about evictions, tenants’ rights, and the damned Irish Republic! He had thought she had calmed down, and forgotten all that Sinn Fein nonsense. She hadn’t spoken of it to him when he was at home. She had been quiet, polite, friendly, as she had used to be - that was why he had risked inviting her on to the train. It just showed how out of touch one could get, when one was away from home so often.

  ‘Sir Jonathan?’

  A voice broke into his thoughts - a strange, rather quiet voice, almost apologetic. He turned, and saw a small, round, inoffensive man, a civilian, looking at him from a doorway. The man wore spectacles, and had a pale, mouselike, bookish air. He recognized him as a sort of civil servant; Harrison, that was the name. An important fellow, he recalled, more imposing than he looked. Had the ear of people in high places in London as well as here.

  ‘Yes. What is it? You know the place is in uproar - there’s been an assassination attempt.’

  ‘Yes. It’s that I want to talk to you about. If you could spare me two minutes.’

  Despite his anger, Sir Jonathan had nowhere precise, at this moment, to use the surplus energy the shock had given him. He had to mobilize an attempt to find the assassins, of course, but that was being done already; and if they had not been caught at Ashtown, nothing he could do would catch them in the next five minutes.