Thinking of von Schön reminded him of Caitlin. He presumed she was still a working journalist, but he couldn’t be certain—he hadn’t seen an American newspaper since arriving in India. She was probably back in America—after Colm’s execution what would there have been to keep her in England?
Toward the end of October, Caitlin took an early train from Euston and the afternoon ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. It was dark when she arrived, and rain was steadily falling as the taxi took her from the docks to the Imperial Hotel, where she’d stayed on her previous visit. Offered the same room overlooking Sackville Street, she instinctively refused and only later decided that this was her heart’s way of saying good-bye to Michael Killen.
Next morning she walked up to Parnell Square, where Cumann na mBan’s annual convention was being held, and sought out Maeve McCarron. Maeve was both surprised and pleased to see her—“I thought we’d seen the last of you!”—and quickly arranged her accreditation before racing off on some urgent errand. Caitlin sat through what sometimes seemed an interminable morning of procedural wrangles but found some compensation in the obvious commitment of the delegates. The afternoon brought more substantive debates on the role of the organization—was an auxiliary role a necessarily subservient one?—and the unveiling of the new Cumann na mBan uniform, which featured a military-style tweed jacket with four pockets worn over a long skirt. It was further decreed that the hem, “to be of really practical use,” must be seven inches off the ground.
Practical use for what? Caitlin wondered. Running, presumably, which raised the question of why a member might need to run.
At the end of the day’s proceedings, Maeve caught her at the door and insisted on putting Caitlin up for the duration of her stay. When working in a strange city, Caitlin usually liked the convenience of a hotel room, but Maeve’s enthusiasm, and the help she might provide when it came to writing something about Cumann na mBan, persuaded her to accept the offer. After collecting her luggage from the Imperial Hotel, the two of them walked to Maeve’s house on nearby Mary Street and talked until way past midnight. Maeve had heard of Alexandra Kollontai but knew nothing much about her, and she was fascinated by Caitlin’s account of their conversations and the common ground they revealed between women on opposite sides of Europe. Caitlin was both amused and somewhat alarmed by Maeve’s tale of a mock attack on Dublin Castle that the Citizen Army had conducted a few weeks earlier, no mention of which had appeared in the English papers. “You’re not planning a real attack, are you?” she asked, only half in jest.
“Who knows?” was Maeve’s response. “We’ve all heard Connolly say that this generation will shame itself if it doesn’t take advantage of England’s bother. I’m not saying it will happen, mind, although I wouldn’t be shocked to find that someone is drawing up plans.”
“But you couldn’t take on the British army and hope to win, not alone.” She told Maeve about her meeting with Casement in Berlin and the failure of his efforts to raise a significant Irish Brigade from the POWs. “And the last time I was here, I got the impression that most people were happy to wait for Home Rule.”
“And they still are,” Maeve admitted. “But the longer the war goes on, the more come over to us.”
During the next few days, Caitlin saw the truth of this. Attaching herself to Maeve, she observed Cumann na mBan in action. At meetings of two new Dublin branches, she saw women flocking to join and heard how militant most of them were. At Liberty Hall, whose elegant frontage still bore the banner we serve neither king nor kaiser, she saw the office where the women produced their leaflets and papers and the printing press in the basement room they shared with the transport union and its Citizen Army militia. She attended first-aid classes that ended in drilling, Morse-code lessons, and rifle practice.
Maeve’s own Cumann na mBan branch was organized into six squads, each attached to a unit of the Irish Volunteers. Their primary job was to tend the wounded and get them to the nearest field hospital, but unlike traditional nurses they also carried revolvers. No wonder these women needed their hems so far off the ground, Caitlin thought. They were training for war.
The realization unleashed a flurry of contradictory emotions. Excitement and admiration. Disquiet. Trepidation.
In prewar days those returnees from India who wished to avoid the Bay of Biscay’s notorious waters had left the ship at Marseilles, caught the Blue Train to Calais and a suitable boat to Dover. The war, McColl found, had put an end to such speed and luxury. Reaching the French capital took two depressing days, and a rain-swept Paris seemed full of women in black. The war news was predictably bad: Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers, and the French offensives in Champagne and Artois had followed the familiar pattern—high hopes, ground gained, ground lost. The casualties were still being counted.
Since boarding the Marmora in Bombay, McColl had feared arriving home to news of his brother’s death, and with each report he read, his sense of dread rose up another notch. When he reached Dover, the first thing he did was wire his mother, telling her he’d returned and asking for news of Jed. It was dark by the time he reached Fitzrovia, and her reply was on top of the pile inside the door. letter yesterday, the telegram read. everyone all right. welcome home.
McColl exhaled like a man who’d been holding his breath for days, then opened some windows to freshen the air before gathering up the rest of his mail. According to an older letter from his mother, his father had been ill and, though recovered, had now fully retired. His pension was “good enough, provided we spend it on things we need”—his dad, McColl suspected, would spend his retirement down at the pub. She named two neighbors who had lost sons, but try as he did, McColl couldn’t dredge up their faces. The rent strikes were still going on; Glasgow’s women, his mother said, had “better generals than the boys in France.”
It was the last paragraph of a later missive from his mother that stunned McColl. “You won’t believe it,” she said, “but Jed ran into your old American girlfriend in France. She’d been visiting a hospital behind the front, and the two of them had a nice cup of tea together.”
McColl was dumbfounded. He just stood there for a moment, staring into space. And the more he mulled it over, the more amazed he was. The idea of them “running into each other” seemed ludicrous, but how else could Caitlin have found Jed? And why would she have wanted to?
A faint hope stirred his heart, only to fade. If she wanted to contact him, she would have surely have done so directly—there was nothing devious about Caitlin.
She had found Jed amiable enough back in 1914, but as far as McColl knew, they’d never shared more than a few moments together, let alone become friends. Caitlin was a journalist first and foremost, but a “nice of cup of tea together” didn’t sound like work. Jed might have omitted that bit on account of the censors—McColl doubted whether ordinary soldiers were allowed to talk to the press—but what journalistic reasons could she have had for seeking Jed out? McColl felt bewildered, felt like rushing over to France and asking his brother what the hell was going on.
It did mean that Caitlin was still in Europe, or had been in early October. If she hadn’t returned home since, then where would she be? Paris or London, most likely. Once he had found out, he could make up his mind whether or not to contrive a meeting.
After sleeping badly, he went out in search of breakfast. A café on Tottenham Court Road provided eggs on toast, and over succeeding mugs of tea he read through an abandoned paper—England, he found, was still England. As he walked south toward the river, he realized that he’d finally left his sea legs behind and was taking the earth for granted again.
He had assumed that the Service was still run from the top floor of 2 Whitehall Court, and indeed it was. Cumming had always been early to work, and today proved no exception. Last time they’d met, the Service chief had been on crutches, having lost a leg in the motor accident that had killed his son, but the
re was no sign of them now—the artificial leg he’d been awaiting had clearly arrived. The office looked even fuller than McColl remembered, with papers, maps, and models spread in wild profusion. The painting of Prussian soldiers executing French villagers was still on the wall, in case he forgot who the enemy was.
Cumming was brusquer than usual—there was none of the usual chat about automobiles, sailing boats, and airplanes—but pronounced himself pleased by McColl’s work in India. There’d been several more killings in Bengal since McColl’s departure, and the situation was far from stable, but it did seem as if the Germans had shot that particular bolt. The new sources of trouble were elsewhere: in Persia a German named Wassmuss had won himself local disciples, and in Afghanistan a Berlin-funded group of Indian extremists was trying to interest the King in an invasion of the Punjab. “Without much success,” Cumming noted. “And we’re sending a few airplanes over the Khyber to show them how effective bombing can be. Not the real thing,” he added, seeing McColl’s face. “A demonstration. They should get the message.”
The Service was putting its main effort into Belgium, where various train-watching networks had been set up behind the German lines. These were run from Rotterdam in Holland and were supplying copious and highly valuable intelligence of troop and supply movements. The one serious problem had been the failure to agree upon a simplified command structure, but it looked as if that were about to be solved—a meeting had been arranged to demarcate the territories for which the different organizations involved would be responsible. “In the meantime we’ve just lost one of our better agents. I presume you’ve heard about Miss Cavell.”
McColl was surprised but supposed he shouldn’t be. “I didn’t know she was working for the Service.”
“Oh, yes. A brave woman,” Cumming added, as if slightly surprised by the possibility that such a creature might exist.
“No doubt,” McColl agreed. If not quite the innocent the papers were weeping over. “Is that where you’re sending me?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine anywhere better.
“No,” Cumming said, crushing that hope. “I’m afraid I’m loaning you out again.” The Service chief looked uncharacteristically hesitant. “There are rumors—more than rumors—of a possible rising in Ireland,” he said eventually.
McColl stifled a groan. For a second or two, he was back in the chilly Dublin waters, shivering with pain and fear as Brady and Tiernan peered hopefully down from the dockside above. Ireland held no happy memories, and once again he would be pitted against people whose cause was hard to deny, left defending the indefensible because the needs of the war trumped everything else. He would rather be in the trenches, he suddenly thought. And the way the war was going, they might even take him.
The sudden urge to resign lasted only an instant, unwittingly deflated by the man across the desk. “Forgive me for asking a personal question,” Cumming was saying. “Am I right in assuming that Caitlin Hanley broke off your love affair when she discovered you were after her brother?”
It wasn’t how McColl would have put it, but he couldn’t dispute the gist. “More or less, but what—”
“Did you know that she met up with your brother in Arras a few weeks ago?”
“Yes, though I only found out last night. There was a letter from my mother waiting for me, and she mentioned it. She said that according to Jed, they just ran into each other.”
Cumming smiled and passed a newspaper over the desk. It was a fortnight-old edition of the New York Chronicle, folded open at page four. hell is a six-foot trench was the headline above Caitlin’s name.
McColl skipped through the piece, thinking that she’d lost none of her way with words. He also thought he recognized Jed’s voice in the quotes attributed to “one disillusioned British soldier,” quotes that seemed calculated to cure the American public of any lingering thought that war might be romantic.
“We don’t know that Jed is the disillusioned soldier,” Cumming said. “She talked to others at a nearby hospital. And she could have made it all up, come to that. The point is, with half a million men to choose from, why did she seek out your brother?”
“Because she already knew him,” McColl thought out loud. Why hadn’t that occurred to him before?
“Perhaps. Or because she still feels a connection to you?”
This was the hope that McColl had dismissed the previous evening, but he didn’t say so. “Perhaps,” he said instead, allowing the possibility.
Cumming took back the newspaper. “So you haven’t been following her journalistic career?”
“I’ve been in India, sir.”
“Yes, of course. Well, she’s made quite a splash according to our people across the pond. The pieces I’ve read seem pretty radical, even for Americans. She’s become friendly with the Pankhurst daughter—the red one—and she even turned up in Glasgow and wrote a piece on the rent strikes there.”
“She was always a progressive,” McColl said, feeling absurdly loyal.
“Call it that if you like. And anyway, what she writes for Americans is neither here nor there. It’s her European activities that worry me. She spent most of August in Germany, and one of the people she met was Sir Roger Casement. He’s there to get help for the Irish rebels, guns for the rising we think they’re planning.”
“He does seem like the sort of person an American journalist would want to interview,” McColl remarked.
“Ah, but she didn’t. She’s written about meetings with Russian exiles and German socialists, but there hasn’t been a word about her meeting with him. Which leads me to think that their meeting had nothing to do with her job as a journalist and everything to do with her late brother’s friends.”
“I find that hard to believe,” McColl said. But did he really? He had always thought Caitlin’s hatred of violence would keep her on the sidelines, but maybe Colm’s death had changed all that.
“And there’s something else you should know,” Cumming went on relentlessly. “Last autumn, while her brother was in Brixton, she took up with the man the Irish sent over to support him and the other prisoners. A man named Michael Killen, who we know is close to James Connolly, the union boss who’s also the leader of the Irish Citizen Army. She spent more time with him in Dublin this spring, but as far as we know, they haven’t met since—she spent most of the summer on the Continent.”
Michael Killen, McColl thought, hiding his feelings as best he could. He hadn’t expected her to take a vow of celibacy, but abstract knowledge was one thing, a name quite another. For a few shameful moments, he hoped Cumming would ask him to kill the man. Hoped in vain. “What do you want me to do?” he asked Cumming.
“Regain her confidence, if that’s at all possible, and find out all you can.”
McColl shook his head. “But she knows I work for the government that executed her brother. Why would she tell me anything?”
“Two reasons,” Cumming replied. “Everything she’s written in the last few months suggests that she’s joined the antiwar camp. Whether that means she’s now opposed to any form of violence is impossible to say—these people seem to juggle their beliefs to fit whatever they’re feeling at any given moment. But if she really has become a raging pacifist, then she would be opposed to a violent rising in Dublin and might even help us nip one in the bud. Not likely, I know, but maybe worth a shot.”
“And the other reason?”
“Oh, that she’s still in love with you but won’t admit it to herself. Hence the visit to your brother. Next time she’s in Glasgow, she’ll probably visit your parents.”
McColl swallowed the sudden upsurge of hope and tried to see things clearly. He didn’t like what he saw. Cumming’s Caitlin didn’t sound much like the woman he’d known, and the notion of her still being in love with him seemed depressingly far-fetched. He ought to say so, ought to tell Cumming that he would be wasting his time and talents
in the vain pursuit of a woman who wanted nothing more to do with him. He ought to, but he didn’t. “I’ll give it a try,” was what he said. When it came down to it, all that mattered was seeing her again.
Cumming nodded. “All the rebels who came to London are dead. Except for Aidan Brady, and the last we heard, he was back in America. Who else could recognize you from your time there last summer?”
McColl had spent his month in Dublin masquerading as a returned Irish-Australian; the only people who had seen him unmasked were the other patrons of Killoran’s Tavern, on the night that Brady had recognized and almost killed him. Those men had been sympathizers, not activists. He couldn’t remember their faces, had never known their names. “Just Kell’s people,” he said, referring to the Dublin representatives of the Service’s sister outfit, who handled home and empire intelligence. “Have any of them been turned in the last year?”
“Not that I know of,” Cumming said, reaching for a pencil. “But I’ll make inquiries.”
“Do you know where Caitlin Hanley is now?” McColl asked.
“Oh, yes. She’s in Dublin. Staying at the Imperial Hotel.”
“She’s being watched, then.”
“Only a light touch. We had her followed back from France, but she soon realized what was happening, so there wasn’t much point. Since then we’ve just kept track of where she’s staying.”
“Is she with Killen?”
“He hasn’t been seen.” Cumming rummaged in a file, brought out a photograph, and passed it across.
He was a good-looking man, McColl thought. Ignoring the surge of jealousy as best he could, he turned back to Cumming and chose his words carefully. “I loved that woman once. If it turns out she’s part of a plot, I want you to promise me that she’ll be sent back to America, not thrown in the Tower.”
Cumming looked slightly taken aback, though whether by the outward display of emotion or the sheer cheek of the request was hard to say. He stared at McColl for several seconds before gruffly nodding his acquiescence.
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