Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  ‘It damn near was you,’ Daly said softly. ‘That’s my job, Mick, remember? To keep you alive.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Paddy. I’ll tell you next time.’

  ‘If you don’t, I’ll go back to Connaught and spend my time fishing. What was the the second point?’

  ‘The second point? To prove beyond any doubt that the government is employing murderers against us. We had the evidence which the RIC had collected about the killings near Ardmore, we had Frank Davitt as a witness, and we had that document offering a reward for me dead or alive. So we would have had a brief trial, executed him, and passed on the lot to the newspapers. Can you imagine what they would have made of all that?’

  ‘What do you mean, would have? Can’t you still do it?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Paddy. The whole key to it was that contract he threw in the fire. We would have said we’d found it on him, you see. Without that, they can deny the whole thing, and we’d just blow Harrison’s cover to no purpose. And before you say anything, Paddy Daly, no, you were not supposed to know about Harrison.’

  ‘So who is he then?’

  Collins flopped down on a sofa, exhausted, his arms sprawled along the back, his boots up on the cushions. ‘Harrison, Mr Daly, is a top-level British civil servant who, since 1916, has been convinced of the justice of our cause and is devoted to furthering it in any way he can. Post-imperial guilt, they call it.’

  ‘So what does he do? Pass you minutes of Cabinet meetings, that sort of thing?’

  Collins grinned faintly. ‘Sometimes. More often, as in this case, he helps by persuading French and his top brass to take the worst possible course of action. Such as employing assassins to murder me, for instance.’

  Daly scowled. ‘Sounds like a very good course of action from their point of view.’

  ‘Only if it works, Paddy. Not if we can expose it.’

  Daly’s frown deepened. ‘But what about the first time, Mick - in Brendan Road? Did you know about Butler then?’

  ‘Well, now. I did that, but G Division got to him first. You remember I was late for the meeting? I’d been with Harrison that morning. He’d only just found out that Butler was impersonating a German - we hadn’t expected that. I rang to ask you to keep Hessel waiting upstairs, remember, so that you and I could have a word first. I was going to tell you then.’

  ‘I wish you had, Mick.’

  ‘So do I, now. But when he was arrested I wanted you to keep up the contact with him in case he came back. You did well the other day at the Joy, Paddy, but they’d never take you on as an actor at the Abbey Theatre, would they now? If you’d known who he was you’d have shot the man before he opened his mouth.’

  The front door slammed, and there were loud, excited voices in the hall. Seamus Kelly came in, his face red with the cold and the rain, his eyes wide, staring, distraught.

  ‘What is it now?’ Collins asked.

  ‘Sean!’ Seamus’s voice was high, wild, unsteady with emotion. ‘They shot Sean Brennan! Half an hour ago outside Clancy’s!’

  ‘But … what in the world was he doing there? I ordered him to stay inside with you, blast you!’

  ‘Yes, I know, but …’ Seamus told the story of the morning, the way Sean had suddenly disappeared. When Seamus had realized Sean had gone, he had begun his own fruitless search of the city. He had been coming to Clancy’s to tell Collins he couldn’t find him when the police and soldiers arrived. ‘It was that other Ulsterman who did it. I saw him. I forget the name.’

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ Collins’s face was white, strained, intense as that of a ghost. ‘Sean Brennan as well!’

  Daly walked past him and put on his coat. This at least was something he could deal with. ‘Kee, they call the man,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Detective Inspector Kee.’

  In his office in Brunswick Street, Kee slumped in his chair and picked up the telephone.

  He was exhausted. The events of the last twenty-four hours - the arrest of Davis, the shambles he had found inside Clancy’s, the confusion, the unanswered questions - would have been enough to shatter any man. But in addition he had had to cope with the combined guilt and elation he had felt at shooting down Sean Brennan on the pavement in Mary Street.

  Elation, because he had fulfilled half of his promise to Bill Radford. Brennan was dead - he had lived by the gun and died by it, shot down on the street in exactly the same way as he had shot down Bill. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. He would never escape or laugh about it again with his perky, choirboy smile.

  But Kee felt guilt too, because although Brennan had drawn his gun Kee would have shot him anyway, even if he had been unarmed. Before the raid he had cocked his revolver, and as soon as he had seen the boy come out of the door he had taken it out of his pocket and aimed it. He had fired the first shot. The soldiers’ rifles had fired the rest, sending the boy jerking and twitching back into the doorway, because Kee had started it. A year ago, a few months ago, Kee would have waited and tried to arrest the boy, but today he had not cared. A red rage had seized him and when he had seen the boy fall he had felt a savage, vengeful delight. Part of him still felt that. Another part felt that he had no right, any longer, to be a policeman.

  The voice on the telephone answered and he gave the number of his small terraced house in Belfast. The phone began to ring - a tinny, unreal sound, infinitely far away. He thought how it would be if he walked down those streets near his home. The yellow gaslight, the sound of his boots on the cobbles, the hard clear tones of the Belfast accent all around him. And when he opened the door, the smell of warm stew or fresh bread, the smiling face of his wife, his daughter and the three boys helping to set the table, bowing their heads around it to listen to him say grace.

  The ringing stopped, a voice said: ‘Hello. Belfast 358.’

  ‘Hello, Mary.’ Although he rang every few days, when it came down to it Kee could never think of very much to say. He never had that problem when he was with her.

  ‘Tom? Oh Tom, I hoped you’d ring today. It’s Ruth’s ninth birthday.’

  ‘Is it? Yes, of course.’ And I’d forgotten, Kee thought. What’s happening to me? ‘Let me talk to her, will you?’

  There was a pause, a few crackles, and then a little girl’s voice came on the line. ‘Daddy? When are you coming home?’

  ‘Oh, in a few days, my dear. Just a week or two, perhaps.’ It would be longer than that, Kee knew. First there was this man Daly to find, so that he could keep the rest of his promise to Bill. Then there was the prosecution of Davis, and all the details from today, before he could even think of asking for a transfer home. He sighed, and looked out of the window, where the winter rain was sweeping in. He would have a foul, lonely walk back to the Standard Hotel. But there was no hurry about that.

  He smiled, and said: ‘Tell me about your birthday now, Ruthie. What did you do?’

  When he had taken his daughter home, Sir Jonathan went to Brunswick Street and the hospital. He stayed there some time, and then returned to the Viceregal Lodge. As he walked down the ornate corridor with his riding boots clicking on the marble floor, Sir Jonathan remembered how often he had come to knock on this door before. Half a dozen times, perhaps, since the attempt on Lord French’s life. And each time he had felt a curious excitement and companionship, as though only Harrison in all the world understood. He straightened his back, and walked faster.

  He met Harrison in his grand room on the second floor. The curtains were drawn against the evening rain, and a fire crackled busily in the grate. Harrison was working quietly at his desk, his big eyes scanning the paperwork before him. He looked up calmly as Sir Jonathan entered.

  ‘I’ve heard the news already,’ he said. ‘Butler got very close, I understand. A pity. He was a brave man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sir Jonathan chose his words carefully. ‘But I haven’t got all the information. The police don’t seem to know who was there.’

  Harrison folded a letter in front of him care
fully, and put it in an envelope as if the operation were some kind of scientific experiment. ‘The police are useless,’ he said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, like an old man’s. ‘The only way we can ever defeat these people is by using their own methods.’

  ‘You said that before,’ Sir Jonathan said. ‘I’m not so sure now. There are some things no one should do.’

  The big eyes looked up at him over the envelope, considering him curiously. There was a patronizing smile on the man’s lips, Sir Jonathan noted; not the slightest sign of nerves.

  ‘Come, come, Colonel,’ Harrison said. ‘The man Butler was a hero. He only killed a few bog Irishmen – that’s nothing to be ashamed of. We should recruit more men like him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sir Jonathan said. He felt he was holding himself unnaturally stiff, like a man on parade ground. But it was the only way he could contain his feelings. He said, slowly: ‘If we do, I shall ask Major Butler to help us train them.’

  There was a silence. Harrison did not move for some time. Then, very gently, he put the paper knife down on the envelope in front of him. As the soft fingers moved away from it, Sir Jonathan saw them tremble slightly.

  Harrison’s voice was even more of a whisper than before. He said: ‘I don’t understand you, Colonel. Major Butler is dead.’

  ‘I imagine that is what the Shinners think, certainly,’ Sir Jonathan answered. ‘But if you had got your information from the hospital, you would know that the bullet entered his cheek, just below his left eye, and came out lower down through the back of the neck. It seems to have been fired from above. He may lose the sight of the eye, but it missed the brain. I have just spent some time with him in hospital.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And for a few moments he was conscious and able to talk. He mentioned you, Mr Harrison.’

  Harrison pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He stood there, a short, ineffectual figure in the grand room, framed in the window with the fine view of Phoenix Park behind. Now he had got up, he seemed uncertain where to go.

  Sir Jonathan strode briskly to the door behind him, and opened it. There were two uniformed military policemen in the corridor outside. Sir Jonathan pointed to Harrison.

  ‘That’s your man, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s a hanging matter, so guard him well.’

  For Andrew the nurses were like angels. Their faces were soft and kind and they had beautiful crisp white caps with high wings on either side. He could see only dimly through one eye, but he always searched their faces anxiously to see if one might look like Catherine. But in fact it didn’t matter, because they brought her to him anyway, in a bottle.

  They tilted up his head very gently on the pillow and fed him with a spoon from the bottle, and then Catherine would come.

  She came to him in his house at Ardmore. The house had been rebuilt and gleamed with new yellow stone, and she walked with him in the early morning across the lawn by the pond, while the southwest breeze blew the mist curling up from the sea, and the tops of the hills came clear. She held his hand and walked with him into the stables, where they talked to the grooms and stroked the noses of the young racehorses he had bred.

  Then, without any change of time, they were in his mother’s bedroom with the Chinese carpet and silken dragons writhing over the bedspread as they had done when he was a child. But he was not a child now and Catherine was his wife, as he had wanted her to be. She lay on the bedspread with her head propped on her elbow, her short bobbed hair hanging loose as she smiled at him, her body quite smooth and naked with the small brown nipples erect as he remembered them. There was a bulge in her stomach that had not been there before, but as he came closer to touch it his eyes became bad again, and he lost sight of her altogether because of the pain in his face.

  It was worse than the pain he had had in the war. It was as though the side of his face were being crushed with giant pincers, and a spike thrust in his eye. The medicine the nurses gave him took it away for a while, but when it came back he could only turn his head feebly from side to side to try to escape, and stare grimly at the cracks in the ceiling. But it brought him back to reality.

  The reality was that he had failed and Collins had won. There would be no money now and no rebuilt Ardmore. If he lived, his face would be uglier than ever before. A target for every Sinn Feiner in the land. An object of revulsion for every woman.

  Sir Jonathan had spoken of taking Catherine home, so she must have escaped from the cellar. Andrew was glad of that, he had never meant to starve her. He wondered if she had got to see her young Sinn Feiner, and when the boy would be hanged. When the boy was dead at last, she might come to her senses, and forget him.

  And then? Would she would want to marry a one-eyed cripple with no home or money or job and a broken face? A man who believed in an Ireland she had rejected and which didn’t exist any more? A man who was prepared to murder again and again for it until he was shot in his turn?

  It hardly seemed likely. But everything about the girl was unpredictable. It was that which gave him hope. Andrew turned his head from side to side, gripped by the pincers of pain, and stared at the cracked hospital ceiling with his one remaining eye. If he stared at it hard enough, he thought, he might see the vision of her face, smiling at him again as she had done in the bed at Killrath.

  He had to believe in her. There was no other reason to live.

  When her father told her Andrew was alive, Catherine left the house. She couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want to know. The words of a poem kept running through her mind and they were the only thing she had left to hold on to now.

  The poem was about Christ, but Catherine did not think of it like that. It had been written by Joseph Plunkett in 1916, on the day before he had been shot as a traitor in Kilmainham Gaol. He had given it to his wife Grace, whom he had married the morning before his death, in his cell. As Catherine walked alone through the rainy streets, the lines echoed in her mind:

  I see His blood upon the rose

  And in the stars the glory of His eyes.

  His body gleams amid eternal snows

  His tears fall from the skies.

  Catherine had stopped going to church during the war, and she was not sure if she could believe in any God after what the world had been through since her childhood. Her prayer this afternoon had sprung more from desperation than belief. Certainly she did not believe in a God who was all-powerful or all-loving. But there must still be some spirit in the universe, responsible for what happened and how people lived and felt. Catherine believed that spirit must be made up of the best and worst actions that people did; the things they gave their lives for and were remembered by.

  Surely that was what Grace Plunkett must have thought when she read the poem that her husband of less than a day had written. Not just that Christ was in the stars and the rain and the snow, but that the spirit of her dead husband was in them also. And that he was part of the spirit of the nation because of the nobility of the way he had lived and what he had done.

  Catherine wanted to believe all that of Sean. She walked in the icy winter rain along Bachelor’s Walk towards the Customs House, and watched the black water of the river glitter in gaslight. It was very late, but she could not stay at home. Only the cold and the rain and the wind were bearable. She thought of all the things she and Sean had done together, and wondered whether he had really loved her as he had said this morning.

  And she wondered whether Sean’s deeds could be thought of as noble in the way that Plunkett’s were, and if he would be remembered as a hero one day in Ireland, and whether that memory would make the world a better place or a worse one.

  His body gleams amid eternal snows

  His tears fall from the skies.

  She had nothing else but the rain to remember him by, not even a lock of hair or a photograph. She stood alone upon O’Connell Bridge until midnight, letting the sleet drive into her face until the bones of her cheeks were quite numb.

  First publi
shed as an ebook by White Owl Publications Ltd 2012

  Copyright Tim Vicary 2012

  ISBN 978-0-9571698-3-8

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

  No reproduction without permission

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Tim Vicary to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

  The Monmouth Summer Contents

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six