On the fifth day, he awoke feeling sharp and extraordinarily alert. His recovery had given him a breathless sense of urgency, his heart beating with a violent desire to live. He saw everything in clear fragments, the Dublin of alleyways and backstreet boarding houses, the empty rooms filling with ashes, the meetings and conspiracies moving from one secret location to another, the daily shootings and ambushes, all had been a place to hide from living. For the first time in weeks, he no longer felt pain every time he breathed deeply.
After breakfast, he decided to get up and dress himself. His clothes had been washed and laundered. He lit the fire with birch logs from a neatly piled stack, and watched the flames lick hungrily at the dry bark. He poked through the wardrobe by his bed, ran his hand over the rack of clothing, the business suits belonging to a broad-shouldered man, dressing-gowns, double-cuffed shirts, a silver-tipped cane, expensive looking, and a pair of black leather gloves sitting on a shelf. He wondered who had been the last inhabitant of the room.
He listened to the comings and goings of servants. He stood in the centre of the room, breathing in the life that was stirring in the mansion, the tide of movement, the sense of order and hurry, footsteps going back and forth, but none with the light familiar tread of Lily Merrin.
Before lunch, he made his way down the stairs and through a hall lined with the horned heads of Irish deer and the smoky portraits of the mansion’s former owners. He walked into a wide drawing room. He seemed to have the run of the place. He explored the other floors. The curtains were barely opened and the rooms were filled with a silky light, like the sheen of fresh snow. A spell seemed to have fallen upon everything, sheets of muslin covering the furniture, a great web claiming all the rooms while he had been sleeping.
An elderly servant dressed in black skirts led him down to the dining room for lunch. She seemed starved of company, and it was easy to draw her into conversation. He learned that Moya had left suddenly to spend the rest of winter with her husband in London. Her nerves have given way, again, she explained. ‘She can’t manage on her own,’ she grumbled. ‘The lady is forever closing the place down and opening it again on a whim. More a hobby than a great house.’ Her face turned toward him out of the gloom. In her grey eyes, he caught sight of an interesting blend of wisdom and spite.
‘I heard a boy playing while I lay in bed,’ he said.
She scowled. ‘The little varmint. He’s forbidden to come near the house, especially when there are visitors.’
‘It must be difficult, keeping a child confined in such a way.’
‘You can never keep a child confined. Like troublesome little insects, they are.’
She scooped back the curtains, flooding the room with a blinding light.
‘If I catch sight of him, I’ll drag him by the ear back to his room,’ she said.
She went off and brought him back his lunch. Kant was glad to see that, although the lady of the house had departed, the place did not go short of luxuries. The servant placed a meal of fresh mackerel and baked breads before him. When she returned to collect the plates, he asked her where the boy was staying.
‘I’m not supposed to say,’ she grumbled. ‘There’s a rumour going round that he’s Mick Collins’ illegitimate son.’
However, that was all she would divulge to the reporter. He bunched up his napkin in annoyance and walked through the ground-floor rooms but all he saw was more furniture draped in muslin and dustsheets. He felt the deadweight of secrecy, the vagueness and apathy that descend when living things are hidden away, and even familiar objects become invisible to each other.
He strolled through the grounds of the estate, and tried to work out a plan of action. He roamed across the manicured lawns. A black mood of impatience settled upon him. He was unsure of what Lily expected from him. Was he meant to wait silently for her next move or follow some trail of clues or secret signals? Unfortunately, he did not know where to begin his search. He explored the dark places of the estate, the conical tower of a folly, an abandoned church, a path through a dark plantation of firs, a block of stables and outhouses. Some of the doors opened, and frantic, twittering birds rushed towards him. Others were locked, and he strained to listen but could detect no signs of human life. He walked around the three-storeyed mansion, inspecting the ivy clambering around the casement windows, watching for a shadow at the glass or a movement. He trekked around a water-lilied lake, through banks of rhododendron and over wintering shrubs. An empty mansion and its privileged domain of lawns and specimen trees on a December afternoon. This was all he could see. Nothing less, nothing more.
Her appearance in the bedroom had filled him with conviction. She had come to his side, deliberately this time. She had singled him out and the realisation filled him with caution. She had given him a part to play in her mysterious disappearance, but it was beyond his power to divine its exact nature or alter it in any way. He walked through the mansion, scrutinising the veiled furniture, the silence of the abandoned rooms, waiting uneasily for a sign to reveal itself. He returned to the dining room, with its conservatory views of the pine forest and in the distance, a restless sea.
About an hour later, something woke him. He opened the French doors, telling himself to stay alert. It was late afternoon, and he had the sense that something about the estate had changed, a heavy hidden presence that had not been there before, the sense of something menacing sharpening the air.
He walked towards the block of outhouses. A dog began barking. He could hear voices, footfalls, the sound of wood splintering. He hurried through a wide-arched entryway into the stable courtyard. The noises were emanating from behind one of the locked doors.
He battered the door with his fist. ‘Lily, are you there?’
The noises stopped. He placed his eye against the rusted keyhole and peered into the dusty darkness. The door fell open, knocking him off balance. Before him stood the tall figure of Isham in a riding jacket, jangling a set of keys in his hand.
‘The keys, Kant. Before you conduct a search, always obtain the keys first.’
The reporter stumbled backwards.
‘You don’t look too happy,’ said Isham. ‘You should be relieved to see me. I’ve brought the cavalry to your aid.’
Behind him, a group of soldiers were upending the bric-a-brac, rusty farming implements, old rowing boats, horse’s tack draped in scarves of dusty cobwebs. They drove their bayonets deep into piles of hay and straw, and sacks of old seed potatoes, sending up a pall of dust and decay. A colony of dead mice fell from a split sack like a soft grey intestine. Through a dusty window, Kant caught sight of another lorry load of soldiers arriving.
Isham’s face was cold and placid, his eyes empty.
‘Where is Merrin?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know. I presume somewhere as far away from here as possible.’
Isham stared at Kant in silence. ‘I want more than that. I hope you will see sense and give me more than that.’
‘Sorry, I don’t think I can.’
‘I received a tip-off from one of Collins’ men that you were hot on Merrin’s trail, and he sent you here. I hear that Collins doesn’t quite know what to do with you, and I sympathise with his dilemma. Here you are, a prying reporter pretending to be a spy, a professional shadow, and a confidant to everyone, who won’t give up his pursuit of a double-crossing secretary. I can’t go on protecting you from yourself and your weakness for this woman. It’s time you allowed the professionals to take over.’
‘I was close to solving the riddle of her disappearance, but I fell ill. I’ve been confined to bed for the past four days. She came to my bedside and interrogated me. She wanted to know who sent me. I’ve recuperated enough to mount a search of the grounds this morning, but I can’t find any trace of her at all.’
‘What did she confide in you?’
‘Practically nothing.’
‘I don’t believe you. Women talk. They always talk. They like to find a confidant. What did she tell you?’
‘I’ve already told you. Almost nothing.’
‘Who is Mick hiding her from?’
‘Dublin Castle and her mother-in-law.’
‘Who else is she hiding from?’
‘I didn’t get the feeling there was anyone else.’
‘She must have confided in you. Told you about her enemies.’
The use of the plural intrigued Kant.
‘Who has been posting her letters?’
‘Writing letters has been the last thing on her mind, I presume.’
‘What about postcards. Surely there was someone to deliver her messages?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t fit to keep her under surveillance.’
‘Did she ask you to post anything for her?’
‘No.’
‘Your denials come very easily.’
‘Because they’re true.’
‘She must have told you about her enemies.’
The glint in his eyes opened up a new labyrinth for Kant. What enemies was he talking about? Who else had Lily been hiding from? He wondered had she a lover, someone else she might have betrayed.
Isham studied him carefully. ‘You seem as much in the dark as the rest of us.’ He paused. ‘Very well, you are at liberty to continue your search for Merrin. I’ll assign several of my men to help you.’
‘I work better on my own.’
‘Have it your own way then.’ He looked up at the empty mansion. ‘I fear she has already flown the nest.’
More of Isham’s men invaded the stables, ransacking the place with diligence and vigour. Their soldierly sense of calm, as though this was all a training exercise, helped Kant past the momentary panic. He detached himself from the search and made his way back to the house. A wave of desperation washed over him, the fear that he was never going to find Merrin, that the odds were stacked too heavily against him. Perhaps it was time to stop living within the memory of something that never really existed, a relationship with a mysterious woman based on little more than a coincidence and a single kiss. No matter how much he searched, he feared he would end up a lonely figure, condemned and lost, as he was now, wandering across an expanse of lawn where even the cold winter wind passed through him, looking for something else.
A shadow at the corner of his vision snagged his attention. The fleeing figure of the elderly maid. She was carrying a small suitcase and hurrying with conviction into the dark plantation of fir trees. He was surprised how swiftly she was moving, her great black skirts flaring and flapping against the wind-tossed shimmer of the pine needles. Making sure that no one was following him, he set off in pursuit.
The wind was as noisy as the Atlantic in the plantation. He followed her along a tortuous path that led to the sea. Above them, the tips of the fir trees almost blotted out the sky. The rough ground was hard with frost, and his ears rang with the cold, drowning out the roar of the trees. Eventually, a hole of blue opened ahead, and they came out at a hidden bay and a cottage fitting snugly into a corner of the rugged coastline. The tide was fully in, and the wind was whipping the watery light over the coastline, giving everything a wild stunned look, as though a thunderstorm had unloaded its static from the sky.
Some hens flew off, startled, as the maid entered the front yard of the cottage. She knocked on the door, called out against the wind and the door opened promptly.
The woman at the door seemed unprepared for guests. She curled inwards when she saw Kant appear behind the maid, collapsing back into the darkness. She had not been expecting him to drop in like this, that much was clear. He followed her into the darkness of a tiny front room, barely lit by a smouldering turf-fire. Even though he had recovered from his fever, he felt out of his depth, unsteady on his feet. He watched Lily Merrin recover her poise, straighten up, smooth the long plain dress she was wearing.
TWENTY-ONE
The sea hissed at the window of the hushed cottage. The sill was filled with speckled shells, pebbles glinting like gems, gnarled pieces of rope and driftwood, the little knick-knacks a mother and son would gather from a beach.
‘Where’s Isaac?’ asked Kant.
‘I’ve sent him to stay with a relative I can trust,’ replied Lily.
‘You must leave now. You don’t have any time.’
He stepped towards her so that she was squeezed against the smoking fire.
‘It’s true miss,’ said the maid. ‘The soldiers are searching everywhere.’ She opened the suitcase and began packing Merrin’s clothes from a wardrobe. Kant moved closer to Merrin, as though she was a wild creature in need of protection. Even in the dim light, he could see the fugitive gleam in her eyes.
‘I wasn’t meant to kiss you that afternoon, or give you the file,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. Our paths were never meant to cross.’
‘Part of what plan?’
She stepped to the side and stood against a door leading to a back room. She smiled at him, knowing that she had frustrated his attempt to close down her escape routes.
‘Please,’ she said, pushing a chair towards him. ‘Listen to the story that I have to tell.’
‘I don’t want to hear it. You don’t have any time.’
‘You should hear the truth.’
Reluctantly, he sat down. ‘I’ve already guessed.’
‘You can go, now,’ Lily commanded the maid, then she turned to Kant. ‘You still have the file?’
‘You don’t understand, Lily. I don’t want to hear about the file. I’m here to warn you that you don’t have much time. You’ve got to get away.’
She loomed closer. Her short hair made her eyes seem larger.
‘The moment I kissed you, I cursed us both.’
She was so close he could smell the peppermint smell of her skin. He had to lean back to look at her properly, and what he saw was not the face and eyes of his memory, the stricken features that had fed his imagination for the past fortnight. What he saw was confirmation that she was no longer the mysterious woman suffering an inexplicable family tragedy. She had grown similar to him. Her proximity stilled the panic in his heart, and prompted him to take a risky plunge into the unknown.
‘In the circumstances, being cursed is neither here nor there. It belongs to another world. I don’t care about the trouble you have brought upon yourself, or upon me. I’m just asking you to leave with me now. We can catch the next boat to England. It will be easy to make a fresh start. Your boy can join us in London. At least for a year or two until things have improved in Ireland. There’ll be a political solution soon to all this fighting and treachery. I’ll arrange somewhere for you to stay, help you find a job.’
Her face tightened. ‘Thanks for the offer, but it won’t solve anything. There’s no escape plan you can come up with that I haven’t gone over in my head dozens of times.’
‘Then what do you intend to do? You can’t just wait here to be arrested.’ He told himself that she was stunned by fear and that when she collected her thoughts she would realise and accept that he was rescuing her.
‘There are still things you don’t know about me.’
‘What things don’t I know?’
‘For a start, you don’t know how I met Michael Collins or how he saved me from despair. You think it’s you who’s been searching for me, that you came to Furry Park by your own powers of detection. You’re wrong. I’ve been following you for the past fortnight, trying to work out if I can trust you or not. You were a mystery to me, why you were in the cab that day, whose side were you on? I followed you to the pub the night you met General Stapleton and his ring of spies. I watched Mick and his men drag you to the train station. I left the bar in Vaughn’s Hotel, a moment before you and Mick entered. And it was me that convinced Moya to let you recupera
te in the safety of Furry Park, rather than throw you back to Mick and his henchmen.’
As she recounted her story, Kant remembered the lightness and fear in her first caress. He realised that he had lived too long in the solitary confinement of his illness, shunning company, until that fateful afternoon when a strange woman’s voice and caress became a web, and her kiss a spider bite. She spoke at length, staring not at Kant, but into the fire, at something private and painful.
‘The IRA kidnapped Isaac, but they were acting under my instructions,’ she told him. ‘His disappearance was engineered to look like an abduction, but really they were rescuing him. Last year, my mother-in-law took custody of him, claiming I was an unfit mother. She has no respect for the natural laws of family life, that a son should be with his mother.’
‘What made you trust Collins and his henchmen to do such a thing?’
‘They have a code of honour.’ She raised her chin. ‘It may not be the same as yours, but it is the reason why ordinary Irish men and women entrust them with their future. All I had to do was keep my side of the bargain, and smuggle out certain documents from Dublin Castle. Mick and I arranged it all one winter afternoon in an hotel sunroom overlooking the sea.’
‘But that amounted to betrayal. You handed over secrets that placed men’s lives in jeopardy.’
‘Don’t talk to me about betrayal. You will never understand the betrayal a mother feels when she is deprived of her son. Please don’t mention that word again.’
‘What about the courts? You could have taken legal action. Pressure could have been applied to your mother-in-law in all sorts of ways.’
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