The cross-Channel voyage was pleasantly uneventful, and those passengers of nervous disposition who took up station close to the lifeboats and trained their eyes on the fog-shrouded sea saw nothing to further alarm them—no German ships, no questing periscopes, no monsters of the deep. But the boat had been late in leaving the Hook and was even later arriving in Harwich, so by the time McColl reached Liverpool Street, it was almost ten in the evening. He took the Underground to Great Portland Street and was climbing the stairs to his flat before he remembered he hadn’t a key. A vague memory of leaving one with the married couple downstairs slowly percolated up through his tired brain, and a ring on their bell eventually brought the sleepy-eyed husband to the door in dressing gown and pajamas. Yes, he did have a key, though he was damned if he knew where it was. Five grumpy minutes and several drawers later, McColl was turning it in his lock and wading through the mail on the mat.
There was nothing from Caitlin. Though they’d agreed that her writing to him there was foolish, he still felt slightly disappointed. He dearly hoped there’d be letters waiting at the King William Street post office, which they’d chosen as their poste restante. If not, he would visit her lodgings in Clapham.
The flat felt stuffy, so he opened all the windows before running himself a bath. Soaking in the tub, he thought about his months in Belgium. The last few days had been somewhat fraught, and he couldn’t say he’d enjoyed the first three months—the absurd manner of his arrival had precluded that—but working with the resistance had been a pleasure and an honor. In Belgium he’d been on the side of the angels—he had no doubt about that.
Next morning he walked south toward Whitehall, saving the poste restante for after his meeting with Cumming. On Charing Cross Road, he saw the word dublin emblazoned on a news vendor’s stand and stopped to buy a paper. Tinsley’s fracas had grown into a full-scale rebellion.
Something like a cold compress seemed to settle on his stomach. Was Caitlin over there?
He hurried on down Whitehall, wondering what, if anything, he should say to Cumming. Taking the familiar lift up, he emerged in the top-floor warren that housed the Service HQ. After handing Tinsley’s package to the duty secretary, he took a seat in Cumming’s anteroom and skimmed through several boating magazines. Eventually a man in an infantry captain’s uniform emerged from the inner sanctum and offered a polite smile in passing. A few seconds later, Cumming’s raised voice called him in.
It was almost six months since McColl had seen the chief or his office, but neither seemed changed. “So parachuting didn’t agree with you?” was the first question fired across the overcrowded desk.
“I might like to try it in daylight,” was McColl’s wry response.
Cumming grinned. “You don’t seem to have done any permanent damage.”
McColl couldn’t help glancing at the chief’s artificial leg, the legacy of driving into a French tree eighteen months earlier.
“Some days I almost forget it’s not real,” Cumming said equably, having noticed the look. “So how’s Tinsley?”
“Very worried. I brought a bunch of reports back, but he didn’t tell me very much. I got the impression that things are going pretty badly in Belgium.”
“They are. The Germans have rolled up half our networks in a matter of weeks.”
McColl shook his head. “That’s a shame. The Belgians I met were an impressive bunch.”
“Oh, they’re a plucky lot, all right. We’ve let them down, I’m afraid, with some really basic errors. Putting too many eggs in one basket, that sort of thing. But we’re going to reorganize the whole business. I’m sending Tinsley some help—you probably saw him leave. Impressive chap. I think he’ll sort things out.”
“That’s good,” McColl said automatically.
“I haven’t made up my mind where to send you next,” Cumming was saying, “but I expect you could do with a few days off. Visit your family, perhaps.”
“Yes,” McColl agreed. “I see there’s trouble in Dublin,” he said impulsively. “Is it serious?”
Cumming grunted. “Treason is always serious. But it won’t take the army long to sort these rebels out.”
“What have they done, exactly?”
“Oh, seized a few buildings in Dublin. The post office, the Four Courts, a bakery—about eight in all. Now they’re sitting inside them waiting for the army to roust them out. It’ll be over in a few days, and then there’ll be a reckoning.”
“A reckoning?”
“We’ll need to make examples. This sort of treachery would be bad enough in peacetime, but when the country’s at war . . .”
“How many of them are there?”
“Around fifteen hundred, we think. Maybe fewer.” Cumming must have read something in McColl’s expression. “Your old girlfriend Miss Hanley lied to you last autumn,” he added. “And maybe worse than that. We still don’t know how those republicans tracked you to the Royal Hotel.”
“Perhaps they fooled her, too,” McColl said, ignoring the last suggestion. “Maybe they had no plans back then.”
“She took the boat across on Saturday night,” Cumming said. “Which might have been a coincidence if she hadn’t received a highly suspicious message that morning.”
“What sort of message?”
“One that read like a prearranged signal.”
“Journalists get tip-offs.”
Cumming gave him a stern look. “You’re not still carrying a torch for this girl, are you?”
“No, of course not,” McColl said, trying to sound offended.
“Good. Not that I’d dream of sending you back to Dublin. The bastards almost killed you on the last two visits, and being Irish they probably believe in third time lucky.” Cumming smiled at the thought. “Take a break and report back here on Monday week. By then I’ll have found you something to do.”
McColl nodded and took his leave, hoping the Service chief hadn’t noticed his emotional turmoil. After buying two papers from the newsstand outside Charing Cross Underground, he dodged across the busy embankment and read through the news from Dublin on the first empty bench. Cumming had sounded disgusted by the rebels’ treachery, and McColl could understand why. Most British people—and especially those with men in the services—would consider this a stab in the back. But McColl had spent enough time in Dublin—and enough with Caitlin—to know that things were not that simple.
The tone of the newspaper reports veered between paranoia and complacency, as if the reporters were uncertain of their role—did patriotism require that they exaggerate or play down this threat to the empire? There was no shortage of paragraphs, but details were surprisingly thin on the ground. How much danger was she in?
However much she wanted to be, was the obvious answer. He couldn’t believe she was actively involved in the rebellion—whatever her sympathies, she saw herself as a journalist first and foremost.
A journalist who would seek to put herself wherever the action was.
And that was her choice. It was not for to him to decide what risks she took with her life.
Provided, of course, that she knew what they were. Cumming’s “need to make examples” sounded ominous. And she probably had no idea that Kell and his people were still watching her and reading her messages. If he didn’t tell her, no one else would.
Out on the Thames, a tug was pulling a chain of barges downstream. Had she lied to him about the prospect of a rising? Probably. He didn’t blame her if she had. If anything, he found the thought of her deceiving him almost gratifying, as if that might make his earlier deceiving of her a tad less inexcusable.
But he would never believe what Cumming had implied, that she had led his republican enemies to the Royal Hotel. No one could act that well. And he knew she loved him. Despite Colm, despite Ireland, despite his job as a hired gun for the British Empire.
He had to go
, but how was he going to get there?
In a travel agency on the Strand, a serious young woman informed him that the ferries to Dublin and Rosslare had been suspended until further notice, but that as far as she knew, those from Scotland to Ulster were still running. When he expressed interest in the latter, she consulted her Bradshaw and found him an afternoon train to Stranraer. If he spent the night there, he could catch the early-morning boat.
Emerging onto the busy pavement, he looked at his watch. The train left in two hours. He had time to visit his bank and the post office and pack himself a change of clothes.
As he hurried up Charing Cross Road, McColl found himself wondering what Cumming would do if he ever found out. Dismissal might be the best he could hope for.
Caitlin was approaching the Henry Street entrance of the GPO when she heard the sound of explosions a few streets away to the west. Once inside, she learned that shells had been fired at Liberty Hall. As a watcher on the GPO roof reported, the culprit was a Royal Navy gunboat that had advanced up the Liffey under cover of darkness and was now moored just beyond the railway bridge. The shells had missed, he added with some satisfaction.
But the hall’s reprieve proved short-lived. Artillery south of the river took up the challenge with greater precision, and by midmorning its demolition was said to be complete. Caitlin had no way of verifying the sad news—the whole of Sackville Street was now within range of English machine guns, and only the foolish or desperate were still attempting to cross it.
After a long and fruitless wait to interview the fully engaged Connolly, she left by the back door and cautiously walked south. On Liffey Street she ran into a colleague of Maeve’s who was carrying a message from de Valera. A battle was raging around the Mount Street Bridge, the woman told Caitlin excitedly, and the British were falling like ninepins.
Caitlin found this hard to believe, but it did seem worth investigating. Intent on avoiding British troops, she took a long loop round St. Stephen’s Green and found herself walking through a city at peace, its denizens seemingly deaf to the steadily rising barrage only a few streets away.
How close could she get? When the canal she was following took a slight right turn, moving figures appeared in the distance, under a cloud of smoke. Simply walking into a battle didn’t seem that sensible, and she was wondering what to do next when a neatly dressed young boy popped up right in front of her. Did the lady want to see the fighting?
“Yes,” was the simple answer.
“It’ll cost you sixpence,” the boy told Caitlin, extending an upraised palm.
She crossed it with the appropriate silver.
“This way,” he told her, leading her back a few yards, into a narrow alley, through an open side door, and up a gloomy staircase. Even inside the building, which looked like an abandoned works of some kind, the gunfire was almost deafening. When they stepped out onto the roof, it sounded loud enough to wake the dead.
And there were certainly dead to awaken. The first bridge across the canal, some hundred yards away, was littered with bodies. So was that part of the road that approached the bridge from the south. Even as she looked, another soldier flopped to the ground. His body convulsed for several seconds, then suddenly went still.
“Got him!” the boy by her side said quietly.
It was terrible, but she couldn’t take her eyes away. Why did the soldiers keep coming? Why not find a way round? There was only one explanation—the man in command had decided otherwise and was driving them into the withering fire with that same indifference to life that his peers were showing in France. It was human sacrifice in all but name—throw enough men onto a fire and their bodies would put it out.
They might be the enemy, but her heart went out to them. Treating men like this was a crime.
And what was worse—on this occasion it seemed certain to work. There actually were enough bodies to extinguish this particular fire, and as the hours went by, the high tide of corpses crept ever closer to de Valera’s outposts. Once brought within range, English grenades and machine guns were more than a match for rebel rifles.
Every now and then, as if by unspoken agreement, a lull would occur in the firing and people would run out and tend to the fallen, covering some and carrying others to safety on blood-spattered stretchers. And a few would always be left, their moans and wails soon swallowed by the din of battle resumed.
On and on it went. The boy had long since disappeared, but Caitlin was not alone—on the roofs all around and at many a window, people were following the battle that fate had provided for their entertainment.
It wouldn’t be long now. The rebel-held buildings were shrouded in dust after taking so many hits, and the first flickers of flame could be seen through the shattered windows. As the guns inside fell silent, the English soldiers broke into a horrible victory dirge, and Caitlin caught a whiff of something she knew could only be burning flesh.
What now? The show was over, the spectators leaving their viewing stations. She wanted to run, find somewhere to weep. For the people who cared and those who didn’t, for Ireland and England and all the horrors yet to come.
She left the building and began retracing her earlier route through those districts untouched by it all, where people still smiled at one another and at her. She wanted to hit each one. Some men were dying for their independence, others to keep them in the Union, and all not much more than a stone’s throw away. But what did they care? They just wanted business as usual.
Walking north, she heard gunfire from several directions. As she scurried over the Ha’penny Bridge, she almost expected a shot in her direction, but this small area was still apparently part of the rapidly shrinking no-man’s-land, and much to her relief she reached the Henry Street entrance of the GPO without being fired on. Inside, everyone was talking about the Mount Street battle and the wonderful showing their fellow rebels had put up.
Connolly was resting and couldn’t be disturbed, but Caitlin found Maeve and another Cumann na mBan woman in the canteen, both hollow eyed from lack of sleep. According to the latter, all the men in Sackville Street outposts had been withdrawn that afternoon, after the guns on Trinity’s simply blew their walls away.
There was something in their eyes worse than tiredness, Caitlin realized. They knew that those guns that had battered Liberty Hall and the outposts would soon be trained in their direction. Tomorrow, perhaps, the next day at the latest. And as if to confirm that fact, an explosion outside seemed to shake the foundations beneath her, and someone yelled that the bastards were shelling the Imperial Hotel, directly across the road.
It was getting dark when McColl’s train finally reached Stranraer. With the other routes closed down, he half expected the station hotel to be full, but in fact it was almost empty—for the moment at least, the Emerald Isle in springtime had lost its usual appeal. After enjoying the view of Loch Ryan from his window, he lay down on the bed and reread the letters from Caitlin.
There had been four of them at the poste restante, and he’d initially read through them as his train made its way out of London. The first concerned her meeting with his mother, which seemed to have gone well; the second and third described two nights out, one with a woman’s patrol, the other in Liverpool, where she’d witnessed a zeppelin raid. The fourth was mostly about Jack Slaney, the American journalist she’d met in Berlin, who had unexpectedly turned up in London. McColl knew that the man had a sweetheart but felt a slight pang of jealousy nevertheless. That letter ended with her saying that she was far too busy to miss him but did so anyway, especially in bed, and that she loved him with all her heart. And that wherever he was, fighting for his “ridiculous King,” she prayed he would come back safe and sound.
“I did,” he told the room. And now it was her in danger.
She had not mentioned Ireland in any of the letters, he realized. Was that because it hadn’t concerned her lately or because sh
e knew it lay between them?
Next morning the ship left slightly early and docked in Larne less than two hours later. There was no apparent check on arrivals, and the little train was waiting to carry him on to Belfast, where he purchased a morning paper. There had been a major battle in Dublin the previous afternoon, in which as many as two hundred British soldiers had been killed.
McColl found that hard to believe until he remembered whom he was dealing with. Why would British generals prove more adept in Ireland than they had on the Western Front? Or anywhere else, come to that.
But their incompetence wouldn’t save the rebels, not in the long run. It would just make their men angrier. And more inclined to lash out.
He went to check on the trains to Dublin and found they were running as normal. He was about to buy a ticket when the thought crossed his mind that the stations would be under army control, if only to greet any rebel arrivals. He would have to get off at the penultimate stop. Or, he suddenly realized, hire an automobile here in Belfast and drive himself down. If he left the car in the suburbs, it would offer them both a means of escape.
Outside on the forecourt, McColl asked a cabbie if he knew where one might be hired.
The man did. His brother, who owned the cab company, also rented out automobiles by the day.
“Take me to him,” McColl said.
Half an hour later and several pounds lighter, he was on his way out of the city, following signs for Newry. It was a pleasant enough day, dry for Ireland, with occasional glimpses of sun. The four-cylinder Alldays was not a machine he would have chosen, but it seemed in good enough condition, and there was virtually no other traffic to impede his southerly progress. Purring along at a steady twenty-three miles an hour, he hoped to reach Dublin early that afternoon.
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