Looking into the clear gray eyes, McColl knew that Cumming would keep the promise if he possibly could and be duly apologetic if the national interest demanded otherwise. It wasn’t enough, but it was the best he could hope for.
Lovers Tell Each Other Secrets
This was the second time in sixteen months that McColl had been ordered to Dublin after a long spell abroad, and, as on the previous occasion, Cumming gave him permission to travel via Glasgow and the family home. He reached the house on Oakley Street early on the Friday evening and was astonished to find his mother out—“at one of her meetings,” his father informed McColl, as if his housekeeper wife had been attending such things all her life.
Her eyes were shining when she arrived home just before ten and lit up still further on seeing her elder son. There had been an emergency meeting of the local rent-strike committee, she told him—the landlords had gone to law, and a mass rally was being organized for the day the business came to court. The women were in charge, she told him as she made them both tea, but the men from the workshops and yards had promised their support.
Over the next hour, as she recounted the events of the last year and explained how she herself had become involved, McColl was forced to the realization that his mother had been almost reborn. His father, by contrast, seemed diminished, by both age and the strangely altered balance of power between him and the wife he had bullied for so long. Which should be cause for celebration, McColl told himself, no matter how disturbing he might find it to see their roles reversed. When he gave his mother the silver brooch he had found in a Bombay bazaar, his father remarked how nice it was and how well it would go with a particular blouse.
She showed him Jed’s recent letters, which were much more cheerful than the ones he wrote to his brother. Jed was protecting his mother from the sordid realities of his life in the trenches and the frightening thought that it might all be for nothing. She knew it, too. “I expect he tells you more,” she said, both proud and sad.
In the old familiar bed that night, McColl thought about the change in his mother. Caitlin would see it as a sign that the world was changing for the better, and in this at least he knew she was right.
The following evening McColl took the overnight boat to Belfast; it arrived soon after dawn. Sixteen months earlier, waiting in the ticket queue at the city’s Central Station, he had read about the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo; reading the newspaper now, it felt as if those two bullets had spawned a million more. There were battles everywhere—several in France, in Poland and the Carpathians, in Serbia and Macedonia, the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia. There was even fighting in the Cameroons. Across the world, men who had never met were busily trying to kill one another, with no apparent end in sight.
The train journey south seemed longer than last time, but he was still in Dublin by lunchtime. He called Five’s HQ at Dublin Castle from a booth on the station concourse and asked for Jimmy Dunwood, Kell’s top man in Ireland. When they’d met in 1914, McColl had found Dunwood rather too “army” but had come to respect his competence and, during the hospital visits that followed his own near-fatal encounter with Brady and Tiernan, had grown to like the man.
They arranged to meet at the bar of a nearby hotel, and McColl walked slowly there, wondering what he’d do if he suddenly ran into Caitlin. He realized he hadn’t a clue.
Dunwood was there ahead of him, already sipping a pint. He looked heavier than he had the year before, the face a little redder, the eyes just as blue. “So you’re here for the colleen,” he said with some amusement after they’d taken seats in a quiet corner.
“Something like that. Do you know where she is?”
“Oh, yes. She spent her first night at the Imperial, but ever since then she’s been staying with Maeve McCarron, who’s quite a big wheel in Cumann na mBan. Her brother, Donal, was one of the bridge bombers.”
McColl remembered the name. Donal McCarron had been Aidan Brady’s partner.
“Am I understanding this right,” Dunwood asked him, “that you and the Hanley woman were a romantic item at one time?”
“You are,” McColl conceded.
Dunwood gave him a look.
“I met her in China,” McColl explained. He could picture her emerging from the house on Bubbling Well Road, eyes alight with anticipation. “And she wasn’t advertising her family’s republican connections,” he added in excuse before moving on to safer ground. “Tell me what sort of contacts she has here now. For a start, who or what are Cumann na mBan?”
“They’re female Volunteers, in essence. Their relationship to their male colleagues isn’t clear—one minute they’re styling themselves as auxiliaries who do all the first aid and cooking, the next they’re claiming equality and out taking rifle practice. Last year, after John Redmond announced his support for the war, the original Volunteers split—the majority went with him and became the National Volunteers.” Dunwood paused to take a sip, then carefully lowered his glass to the table. “They’re mostly in France now. The minority, who would rather fight the English than the Germans, still call themselves the Volunteers. They’ve committed themselves to a rising ‘at the first possible moment,’ which of course means bugger-all—because they’ll never agree on when that moment has arrived.”
“And Cumann support which faction?” McColl asked. A group of men had just come in, and one had given Dunwood a friendly nod.
“Cumann split as well, but with a majority opposing the war.”
“And the Irish Citizen Army? Didn’t that start as a union militia during the lockout?”
“It did. They were Jim Larkin’s shock force, but Larkin went to America last year, and Connolly took over. Officially at least, the ICA is still subordinate to the Transport and General Workers’ Union—you have be a union member to join it—but these days it’s more than a workers’ militia. Connolly calls himself a socialist and a nationalist, and he’s made it very clear that he sees both the bosses and the English as his enemies. Your Miss Hanley’s old boyfriend Michael Killen is one of his lieutenants.”
McColl didn’t want to think about Michael Killen. “How do the ICA people get on with the Volunteers?” he asked. “If they both favor action, you’d think they’d get together.”
Dunwood shrugged. “If they have, they’re keeping it quiet. And they spend a lot of energy taunting each other for being too timid.”
“Okay,” McColl said. “But I’m still confused. You said this McCarron woman is Cumann and Citizen Army, but Cumann are with the Volunteers.”
“Not only. To be honest, it’s hard to keep track. There are so many groups, and all with a different angle. Some are pure politics, others more cultural—promoting the Gaelic language, that sort of thing—and a lot of these people belong to several of them. Quite a few of the Cumann women are attracted to the Citizen Army because, on paper at least, it’s much more committed to their women’s-equality nonsense. Some are members of other women’s groups who have offices at Liberty Hall. And they all know one another. Dublin is a small town, and we’re really only talking about a couple of hundred people.”
“So this McCarron woman will probably belong to several different groups?”
“More than likely. What exactly does Cumming hope the Hanley woman will tell us?”
“Whether a rising is actually planned. Is someone like McCarron—or Michael Killen—likely to know if one is?”
Dunwood shrugged. “Who knows? If the Volunteers or the Citizen Army—or both of them—are doing more than just mouthing off, then not many people will know. There were rumors a few weeks back that the Volunteers had set up a military committee, so we asked our informers to ferret around, but none of them found any evidence to confirm it.”
“What’s your instinct?” McColl asked, surveying his empty glass and telling himself it wouldn’t be wise to have another.
“I can’t believe they’d be so stupid as to launch an insurrection. They wouldn’t get much public support—in fact, now that so many people have relatives in France, they’d probably lose what support they have. And there’d be no chance of success. They could mount some sort of demonstration—occupy Dublin Castle for a few hours, something like that—but how would that help them? A few days of headlines for a few years in jail doesn’t seem much of a bargain.”
“I hope you’re right,” McColl said. He didn’t want Caitlin caught up in some bloody insurrection and ending up either dead or in prison.
Dunwood drained the last of his pint. “I still don’t know why Cumming thinks Hanley will tell you anything.”
“He expects me to worm myself back into her affections,” McColl said dryly. Not for the first time, he wondered if the idea was as ridiculous as it sounded.
“I’d say you had your work cut out,” Dunwood said. “Do you want us to call off the watchers?”
“No, not yet. Just let them know I’m here and that I may be watching her, too. I haven’t decided how to approach her yet. If I simply ask her to meet me, she’ll probably say no.”
“We can always arrest her and let the two of you chat in a cell.”
McColl smiled. “I don’t think she’d find that beguiling.”
“So where are you staying?” Dunwood asked.
“The Royal, if they’ve got any rooms.”
“In November with a war on? You’ll be able to take your pick. Look, why don’t you settle in today, and I’ll have whoever’s on surveillance pick you up in the morning. He can show you where she’s living.”
It sounded like a plan. After they parted company, McColl took a cab across the river. The Royal was as he remembered it, and empty as Dunwood had said it would be; McColl took a room high up at the back, after checking that the fire escape offered an alternative exit. A small restaurant on Dawson Street provided dinner, but none of the noisy pubs he passed on his way back to the hotel tempted him to make a night of it. Dublin seemed, superficially at least, undimmed by the war, but he was tired from all the traveling and eager to reach his bed.
Sleep proved elusive nevertheless. The rain started up again, and an overflowing gutter was soon beating a noisy tattoo on the iron steps outside. He lay there wondering how seeing her again was going to feel. Would it be the same or like a bubble bursting? He didn’t know which would be harder to deal with. He told himself he was here to work, to do a job, to serve his country, and knew it was a lie. If he could, he would, but that was not why he was here.
It was still raining when he woke up. Dunwood’s man—a thin Irishman of around forty with dark hair and anxious green eyes—found McColl finishing his breakfast in the hotel’s dining room soon after eight. His name was Ardal Waldron, and his car, an anonymous black Ford, was parked out front.
They drove up past Trinity College, across the Liffey, and along Sackville Street, turning left onto Henry Street at the colonnaded post office. After a couple of blocks, this became Mary Street. “That’s the house,” Waldron said, nodding his head toward a small detached two-story dwelling with a dark green door and a large brass knocker. There were lace curtains behind the windows.
Waldron turned the automobile at the next intersection and brought it to a halt behind another Ford, some hundred yards short of the house. A wave of an arm and the other car drove off. “The changing of the guard,” Waldron murmured, and switched off the engine. “They usually go out between nine and half past,” he said, taking out a cigarette case and offering it to McColl.
They had each smoked three by the time the door opened. Caitlin was first out. At this distance she looked unchanged, the slim figure encased in a long dark coat, unruly hair tied back in a bun. The way she moved and held herself was achingly familiar, and all the old thoughts and feelings welled up inside him—that he’d been so stupid to lose her, that he would never in his life find another like her, that if by some miracle she ever gave him a second chance, he wouldn’t hesitate to seize it, even if that meant leaving the empire to look after its own salvation.
“That’s the American,” Waldron was saying. “And this is McCarron.”
The other woman was shorter, with what looked from a distance like a lovely face and black hair pinned in a similar fashion. She was wearing a military-style jacket over a long black skirt.
The two of them walked off in the direction of Sackville Street, deep in conversation, but Waldron made no move to pull the car out. “Let’s give them a good start,” he said.
The women were not much more than specks when he deigned to turn the key and had long since rounded the distant corner when the men reached it in the Ford. But there they were, crossing Sackville Street a couple of hundred yards down. “Liberty Hall, I expect,” Waldron said. “Most days they start off there.”
And Liberty Hall it was. The two women were walking through the entrance doors as Waldron and McColl slowly drove past the imposing building. After parking out of sight around the next corner, Waldron led McColl down two alleys and in through the back door of what looked like a disused warehouse. Up some stairs, down a corridor, and they reached a room with a perfect view of the hall. A man was sitting with a telescope across his thighs. “McCarron and Hanley?” Waldron asked him.
The man shook his head.
“They’re probably in the basement,” Waldron guessed.
McColl stared out at the banner rejecting both King and Kaiser. A year ago it would have angered him, but not any longer. He felt an obligation to serve his country, but not because he thought it was best or always behaved correctly. It was the country and the people he knew, the one his brother and friend were risking their lives for. He supposed many Germans supported their country’s war for much the same reasons.
And then there those whose countries were occupied, whose national feelings were denied, repressed, forbidden. McColl had not agreed with Jatin Mukherjee’s terrorist tactics, but the man had been a patriot. He had died for his country. Many Bengalis would see him as a martyr, as someone to emulate. And no doubt many Irish people felt the same way about Colm Hanley and his friends, regardless of how reckless or murderous their operation had been.
For McColl the choice of tactics was what really mattered—he drew the line at certain methods. And this, he knew from their conversations, was where he and Caitlin were—or had been—in total agreement. It was okay to protest, march, or strike, to pursue any form of peaceful noncooperation, but they had both believed that the deliberate use of violence, for anything other than self-defense, was immoral and counterproductive. His only hope of bringing Cumming the intelligence he craved—always assuming he could persuade Caitlin to share the same space for long enough to listen—was to trade on her sense of the practical and her hatred of men’s willingness to wreck the lives around them for no real lasting gain. An insurrection in Dublin was doomed from the start and would bring nothing but grief to the city and its people. It was in everyone’s interest—Irish and English alike—to nip one in the bud.
If he got the chance, he would have to be very persuasive. He was under no illusions—she was probably cleverer than he was and had no reason to trust him. While his instincts told him to wait, another inner voice accused him of simply putting off the inevitable moment when she slammed another door in his face. He wasn’t ready for that.
It was the evening of Friday the fifth of November, and the small explosions outside were fireworks lit by the local English in honor of their ancestor Guy Fawkes, the only man, as the old joke went, to enter Parliament with honest intentions. Maeve had a committee meeting in north Dublin, and Caitlin had walked to Sackville Street and the Imperial Hotel bar for a couple of drinks and the chance of professional company. But the English journalists who usually haunted the place were conspicuous by their absence, most likely out watching the fireworks.
She hadn’t noticed t
he usual car that evening, which seemed to settle her and Maeve’s dispute over which of them was being followed. “I’m not dangerous enough,” Maeve had argued, to which Caitlin had retorted, “Neither am I.” Perhaps it was nothing to do with politics, Maeve had mused, just some rich young man who’d taken a fancy to one of them. “Or both,” Caitlin had suggested with a giggle.
If they did have an admirer, he was clearly too shy to approach them, and it did seem more likely that the G-men, for God only knew what reason, had decided to put the two of them under surveillance. It was almost flattering and not really inhibiting—all their work was done indoors, and no one ever followed them into Liberty Hall or any other building where Maeve had a meeting, although Caitlin had glimpsed a face in the window when one first-aid class dissolved into Irish dancing.
The English must be worried, she thought, taking a sip from her pint of Guinness in the sparsely populated bar. And there seemed a good chance they had reason to be. Maeve had no inside knowledge of anything definite in prospect, but both she and Caitlin had picked up on hints that something was brewing.
Which would be a hell of a story, and one she was well placed to scoop. This, and enjoying Maeve’s company, had kept her in Dublin for longer than she’d intended, but over the last few days she’d come to the realization that a rising was still some way off. It was time she got back to London. There were only so many Americans interested in Irish matters, and the others deserved her attention.
She was draining her glass when a man appeared at her shoulder and settled himself onto the adjoining stool. “Miss Hanley,” he said. It was Finian Mulryan, the republican who had come to see her in May, when she was visiting all the families for her piece on Colm’s operation.
Another man took the seat on her other side, and for a moment she felt threatened. But both were smiling, and the place could hardly be more public.
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