A Shocking Assassination

by Cora Harrison

  ‘No, not that, not that at all, Reverend Mother, you’re getting things mixed up and no wonder, with all that you have to do. No, I was telling you that the fellow in charge of those Black and Tans was an officer in the Dorsetshire Regiment. That’s what I was telling you. His name was Charles something, a German name, Schulze, that’s what it was, Charles Schulze, he was the captain in charge of those hooligans that burned down the city. And he used to be in the British army during the war against Germany and they turned him out of that. I’m not surprised. A more wicked man never walked the earth. They say that he was the one that fired the shots at those two poor lads in Luke’s Cross, sitting up in their beds without a stitch on them.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Reverend Mother storing the name into her memory. An unusual name; Sister Bernadette was right. It did sound German. There would be little chance that a fellow officer would have forgotten it. Cork, she thought, was a very small city. Did these two men from the Dorsetshire Regiment meet and recognize each other? She thought that it was almost certain that they would have done so. Sister Bernadette, she noticed with amusement, was looking slightly embarrassed. She opened her mouth a few times, gave a perfunctory dust of the shining wood around the statue and then turned back to the Reverend Mother.

  ‘The Dorsetshires,’ she said hesitantly. ‘The Dorsetshires. Perhaps, I’ve got the name wrong, Reverend Mother, I was thinking that it was the regiment of the captain of those Black and Tans that burned down Patrick Street. At least that was what the postman told me. Perhaps he got it wrong. I only know what he told me. Captain Charles Schulze; that was his name, bad luck to him; he was the man in charge that night. He was the one telling the men where to throw the cans of petrol and which buildings were to be burned and which ones were to be left untouched.’ Sister Bernadette gave a guilty look at the Reverend Mother and added hastily, ‘Still, I suppose that there are all sorts of men in a regiment, like everywhere else in life. I’m sure your cousin is a very nice man and would have nothing at all to do with that Captain Schulze. And it was probably a different regiment entirely.’ She gave an uncertain smile and then sidled off, back to the kitchen, but her kind face looked troubled and the Reverend Mother understood. That night when Cork city burned on the 11th of December 1920 was engraved into the memories of all Cork people. The anger would be there for many generations to come. And anyone who had any connection with the outrage would be anathema to the citizens. Sister Bernadette could not bear to think that the cousin of the Reverend Mother might have been connected with that terrible time.

  THREE

  W.B. Yeats:

  Hearts with one purpose alone,

  Through summer and winter seem

  Enchanted to a stone.

  To trouble the living stream.

  The grass on Gogginshill, near Ballinhassig, was very green; Eileen always noticed that. It was five miles south of Cork city and the air was very pure. Mists did occur, but smoke-laden fogs were infrequent on the high ground there. On that Friday afternoon when the city was shrouded in murk and moisture, the air was fresh and the April sun was warm, illuminating the cowslips and the primroses on the steep fields. She and Aoife picked a few. They, like all members of the Republican Army, were always careful to give their actions an air of innocence and what could be more casual than two seventeen-year-old girls picking a bunch of spring flowers.

  In fact, of course, they were checking their line of escape in case the hideout was raided by the army or by the civic guards.

  Beneath the patchwork of fields that covered the steep hill ran the Cork to Bandon railway tunnel. One of its ventilation shafts came up in the centre of this very field, marked by the presence of a lone blackthorn bush, saved by superstition from the attention of the railway staff. It was one of Aoife’s duties to check the entrance daily, to make sure that the metal ladder that led down into the tunnel was in good order, that the blackthorn screened, but would not impede, desperate men from the Number One Brigade of the Republican Army if the Free State Army discovered their hideout in a deserted farmhouse. Casually they rubbed some new buds from the black twigs so that the entrance was kept free.

  ‘Have you thought about something to write for your column in the Cork Examiner this week, Eileen?’ The words were only just out of Aoife’s mouth when there was a noise of a motorcycle driving slowly and cautiously along the lane nearby.

  ‘Tom Hurley,’ said Aoife. ‘We’d better go back. Everything seems to be fine here.’ She shone her torch for the last time down into the tunnel and then they turned and went back. ‘Should we throw the flowers away? He’ll be saying something sarcastic about women, if I know Tom Hurley,’ she said.

  ‘Let him,’ said Eileen indifferently. ‘The trouble with him is that he is stupid and narrow-minded. Hang onto the flowers; we’ll put them in a jam jar when we get back. Don’t hurry yourself, Aoife, why should we run to him? He’s never got a civil word to say. You’re doing the duty assigned to you.’

  Nevertheless when Aoife started to run, Eileen followed her. No sense in putting him in a bad mood when he found that the farmhouse was empty and if he was rude to Aoife she wanted to be around to pay him back with his own coin.

  As they expected, his face was dark with anger. He had a habit of flicking his middle finger against his thumb when he was impatient and the sound of the loud crack always made Aoife feel jittery.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Tom?’ Aoife was asking nervously as soon as she climbed the wall and Eileen could hear the note of anxiety in her voice. ‘Have you any news for us?’

  ‘News? Well, I suppose I have some news. James Doyle, the city engineer, copped it in the English Market this morning. That’s what the news is. Shot, girl, shot. Dead as a doornail. This morning he was James Doyle, City Engineer and now he is James Doyle R.I.P.’ Tom Hurley’s temper was never good, but he was increasingly on edge these days. Ever since the death of their leader, Liam Lynch, defeat was staring them in the face. Some Republicans had slipped off on the boat to England but this unit, safe for the moment in their headquarters in Ballinhassig, had remained fairly intact and Tom Hurley was determined to be effective. Their orders from the chief were to continue the fight and their immediate aim was to expose the corruption of officials who were supposed to be rebuilding the city centre and to prove to the people of Cork that the Republicans would form a better government. Warnings would be sent out and if they did not heed the warning, then they would be shot. James Doyle, the City Engineer who was busy lining his pockets, was due to be warned. She had written out the notice herself and intended to pop it into the office of the Cork Examiner newspaper later in the day.

  ‘Do you mean that he’s dead?’ asked Aoife. ‘Did you shoot him?’ She sounded a little uncertain, thought Eileen, Aoife was squeamish about assassinations.

  ‘He was a legitimate target,’ she said quickly, trying to sound as tough as Tom Hurley himself. The French Revolution, she told herself sternly, would never have been achieved without the spilling of blood. Her thoughts went to her schooling at St Mary’s of the Isle and to the discussion that she had held with the Reverend Mother after the sixth form class had read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Eileen had attacked the great man, saying that he had changed his mind about the revolution halfway through the book and that had weakened the book. The Reverend Mother had defended her favourite author, saying that was what made him great. The more he wrote, she said, the more real his characters and their experiences became and in the book he had centred on the experiences of Dr Manette and his daughter Lucie, so as the book went on his sympathies turned away from the ideals and more and more towards the victims of the French Revolution. It had been a good discussion and when the bell went for the end of school, Eileen was still finding arguments and only Sister Bernadette, summoning the Reverend Mother to a phone call from the bishop, had put an end to it.

  Someday, thought Eileen, I’ll write a book about Cork called The Tale of a Rebel City and everything will be
in it: the fear, the blood, the suffering, the betrayals, the mistrust between allies and at the same time the fun and the excitement, the camaraderie and, above all, the shining hopes for a great future where there would be equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens. In the meantime, she had to learn to take the unpleasant aspects of the present as well as looking forward to a glorious future.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, doing her best to sound harsh and experienced.

  Tom Hurley gave a half-smile. ‘The man fell dead in front of a crowd of Cork’s foremost citizens, town planners, the bishop’s secretary, builders, Reverend Mother Aquinas from St Mary’s of the Isle, old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,’ he said and turned his back, beginning to walk towards the house which a sympathetic farmer had given them – an ideal bolthole, lost in a network of small lanes and with that wonderful escape hole, the west Cork railway tunnel which ran underneath one of the fields, only 150 yards from the farmhouse. Tom had not answered any of their questions, noticed Eileen. He was an old-fashioned type who regarded the woman’s organisation, the Cumann na mBan, as fit only to make sandwiches and endless cups of tea for the men.

  ‘How did you get away?’ she called after him and he turned on her, his face dark with temper.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he said harshly. ‘Who knows who might be listening? You’re not calling the cows home, you know.’

  ‘We were practising firing in the barn this morning, that made a lot more noise,’ said Eileen. He’s not going to intimidate me, she told herself as she stared defiantly at him. I’m as good as he is any day. I’ve got more brains, more idealism. There was a brief staring match and then Tom Hurley shrugged.

  ‘It’s Friday,’ he said. ‘Easy enough to get away; the world and his wife were buying fish and I just walked straight for the nearest fish stall and pushed my way through the crowd, all making sure that they obey the bishop and don’t eat meat on Friday. I was out on the Grand Parade before you could say Jack Robinson. In any case, no one was looking in my direction. They were looking at the man with the gun in his hand, and why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘The man with the gun!’ Aoife sounded puzzled.

  ‘The old trick,’ said Tom Hurley with a sarcastic grin. ‘Fire the gun, drop it on another fellow’s foot, he picks it up – they all do. Everyone stares, starts shouting, you walk away quickly, get on your motorbike, put a few miles between yourself and the scene.’

  Eileen giggled. She was not too keen on Tom Hurley. He seemed to despise her because she was a seventeen-year-old girl, not a tough thirty-year-old man, but there was no doubt but that he could be quite funny.

  ‘Who picked it up? The bishop, I hope,’ she said.

  ‘No, actually it was that young fellow. You know the chap who used to work for the Cork Examiner – what’s his name? Yes, I know, Sam O’Mahony.’

  ‘Sam O’Mahony!’ Eileen felt her lips grow cold. She sensed that Aoife had turned to look at her, but she kept her own eyes fixed on Tom Hurley.

  ‘You walked off and left Sam O’Mahony holding the gun.’ Her voice did not sound like her own.

  Tom shrugged – it was his most frequent gesture. ‘Why not? Who is Sam O’Mahony, anyway? Not one of us, is he? He’ll keep them busy for a while. James Doyle was the cause of Sam being sacked from the Cork Examiner so the gun couldn’t have been picked up by a better person. Yes, he’s ideal. They’ll take him seriously. The bishop would have been no good. No one would have believed that he did it, even if they saw him with their own eyes.’ And then Tom deliberately turned his back on her and walked off with the long-loped stride and the furtive glances from side to side that were now second nature for most of the Republicans.

  Eileen went after him. Fury was almost choking her. She grabbed his arm. He jerked it away with a force that almost overbalanced her. She grasped it again and hung on. On the perimeter of her vision she saw Aoife move slowly towards them and then stop. Aoife was a little scared of Tom. He wasn’t like the rest of the carefree bunch who laughed and joked, played music, talked seriously about the future of Ireland and then ended the session with a an improvised ceilidh. Tom Hurley came and went on secret missions, snapped out orders, eyed all with suspicion and then disappeared again. No one quite knew where he went or what he did. He never quoted the idealistic writings of Connolly or of Pearse. He dealt in the harsh currency of guns, of explosives, of the necessity for tit-for-tat killings.

  ‘You’re letting Sam suffer for something that you did, is that right?’ Eileen heard her voice tremble with anger.

  ‘Why not? What’s he to you?’

  ‘He’s her …’ Aoife stopped. Tom Hurley’s views on emotional attachments were well-known and frequently expressed. No one on active service was to form an attachment to anyone, especially not to anyone outside their own brigade. Engagements or marriage were to be put on hold until after the war was won and Ireland in its entirety – its thirty-two counties, not just twenty-six – were free from Britain. It was well known that the relationship between Florrie O’Donoghue, Head of Intelligence for the Republican Army, and Josephine Marchment, his future wife, was only tolerated because her job as a clerk in the army barracks during the War of Independence meant that she could bring valuable information to her future husband. Josephine had excellent shorthand skills and could, sitting on a lavatory seat, manage to take down the essence of any document in the time that another woman would take for a bathroom break. Eileen knew what Tom was implying and it roused her temper.

  ‘That’s nothing to do with it,’ she raged. ‘I’m talking about ordinary common decency. If you killed the man, then we must put a notice in the Cork Examiner to say that it was an execution carried out by the Republican Army who had judged James Doyle to be guilty of corruption and of misuse of money meant to house the people of Cork city. We must say that Sam O’Mahony had nothing to do with it, that he just happened to pick up the gun.’

  Tom Hurley had been walking towards the house that sheltered them, but now he turned back and swung his leg over his motorbike. His face was still averted from her.

  ‘Well, if you won’t do it, then I will,’ said Eileen resolutely and at that he turned and looked at her. His face was white with anger.

  ‘Who told you that I killed him?’ he snapped. ‘I never said such a thing. You keep your tongue to yourself, girl, and obey orders or you might find yourself shot for disobedience.’ He looked at her steadily and her tongue faltered and she knew that her face betrayed her fear. There had been too many shootings, too many bodies buried in bogs for a threat like that to go unheeded. Rumours could often be untrue, but it would be naïve to imagine that they always lied.

  ‘Sam should not be left to bear the burden of a killing that was not of his doing.’ She managed, eventually, to force the words out.

  His only answer to that was a contemptuous glance. He revved up his engine and sped off in a mist of smoke and petrol fumes. Eileen stood, resolutely not looking back at Aoife, but following with her eyes the motorcycle as it went hurtling along between the hedges. The sound seemed to fill the hills and one part of her commentated on the security shield which they all tried to maintain. Tom, in normal times, would be first to condemn anyone who would draw attention to himself by driving like that. She knew why he did it, of course. Her questions had angered him, but they had also made him feel uneasy. She did not, however, deceive herself with the thought that he would wish to extricate Sam O’Mahony from the danger into which he had been pitched. She stood irresolute for a few minutes and then her ear picked up another sound, a heavier deeper sound. It was the Crossley tender, a vehicle which they had stolen a few years ago and which had proved its worth time after time. She stood and waited, feeling that she needed some friendly support and when the big vehicle appeared at the gates she went forward and threw open the second gate so that it could come into the farmyard.

  ‘Was that Tom Hurley, driving as though the demons of hell were after him?’ Eamonn parked the Cross
ley tender outside the front door and jumped down out of the driving seat. For once he was alone. The others must have stayed in the city. She nodded dumbly and he looked enquiringly at her.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked in puzzled tones. ‘He’s driving like a lunatic. And he’s the one who is always lecturing the rest of us about keeping our speed down and not drawing attention to ourselves.’

  ‘There’s been a shooting,’ said Eileen. She could hear how flat her voice sounded. ‘There’s been a shooting. James Doyle, the city engineer, was assassinated in the English Market. Tom Hurley shot him and then dropped the gun on Sam O’Mahony’s foot and now Sam has been arrested by the guards.’

  ‘Sam O’Mahony?’

  ‘The fellow that she’s been doing a line with,’ hissed Aoife and Eileen stared across the hedge into the spring-like fields where the snowy whiteness of the blossom softened the harsh blackthorn. It was a funny expression, ‘doing a line’. She didn’t know whether the rest of the world said that, but certainly Cork people did. Probably originated, her mother thought, when a newly engaged couple would be allowed to walk out along a lane from the city together and after them came the matchmaker, then the parents of both and probably most of the children of the neighbourhood, all forming one long line behind the happy pair.

  Things were different nowadays. Nowadays things were less permanent, more private. She and Sam met at the steps of the Pavilion cinema, cuddled together in the warm, cigarette-smoke-filled darkness while they watched a Charlie Chaplin film, or walked hand-in-hand up through the dark lanes of the marsh and alongside the bank of the river. They never really talked of marriage or the future. Life was too uncertain. And, of course, once Sam lost his job on the Cork Examiner, the only sensible future for him was to get the boat to England.