PRAISE FOR ROBERT B. PARKER AND
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
“UNFORGETTABLE … Robert B. Parker weaves the vivid, gracefully structured story of three generations … [he] expertly brings a large cast of characters to life.”
—The Arizona Daily Star
“A SPRAWLING NOVEL about three generations … a saga of obsessive love, blackmail and how the sins of fathers are passed on to their sons.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Spenser fans as well as newcomers will enjoy Parker’s brick-by-brick familiarity with Boston.”
—Library Journal
“THE OLD MAGICIAN DRAWS YOU IN, ABSOLUTELY! Parker has something important and touching to say about fathers and sons, about marriage and love, about courage and anomie. A compelling look at a corner of one of our century’s hundred-years wars.”
—New York Newsday
“Parker’s dialogue and action scenes are crisp, terse and punchy.”
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“THREE GENERATIONS’ WORTH OF LOVE AND OBSESSION are the foundation of this tightly worked novel by the author of the popular Spenser series?.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Books by Robert B. Parker Available from Dell
THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT
GOD SAVE THE CHILD
MORTAL STAKES
PROMISED LAND
THE JUDAS GOAT
WILDERNESS
LOOKING FOR RACHEL WALLACE
EARLY AUTUMN
A SAVAGE PLACE
CEREMONY
THE WIDENING GYRE
LOVE AND GLORY
VALEDICTION
A CATSKILL EAGLE
TAMING A SEA-HORSE
PALE KINGS AND PRINCES
CRIMSON JOY
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
ROBERT B. PARKER
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.”
Macbeth
Since this book is about fathers and
sons, and since I am a father particularly
fortunate in his sons, this book is for them,
and for their mother.
Acknowledgments
I have been strongly influenced in this work of fiction by three works of nonfiction. R. F. Foster’s gracefully told Modern Ireland: 1600-1912 gave me a broad perspective on a heritage which belongs not only to the Sheridans but to me through my mother. Ernie O’Malley’s impressionistic recollection of the troubles, On Another Man’s Wound, provided me not only incident, but, when it seemed better than any I could invent, actual language. And from Alan Lupo, in Liberty’s Chosen Home, I learned more about Boston than I wish to admit. Until I read it, I thought I knew enough.
Robert B. Parker
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993
1994
Voice-Over
It was sullen and gusty and snowing like hell when I went to see Grace. There was lightning, and thunder, and heavy wet snow collecting on the roadways. The radio weathermen were hysterical about the possibilities. It wasn’t supposed to be snowing, it was almost April, and it was supposed to be a thunderstorm.
It was about five in the evening when I parked in the lot behind Grace’s condo and got out and turned up my collar and walked to her door and rang her bell. I could feel the tension radiate from my solar plexus and jangle along the nerve circuitry. It had nothing to do with the weather.
She opened the door.
“Long time” she said.
“Six months,” I said.
She stepped away from the door and I went in. The room was opulent, like Grace. Two storied, with a huge lamp hanging down over the oval glass dinner table. Red tile in the kitchen, a spiral staircase in the far left corner leading to a sleeping loft.
“You want a drink or something?”
“Yeah, I’ll take a beer.”
She got me one.
“Trouble driving here?”
“No.”
She nodded at the couch and we went and sat on it. The snow slanted by the wind splatted against the window and melted on contact, making lucid ropes of water as it washed down the dark surface of the glass.
“Where’d you go?” Grace said.
She sat with her legs tucked under her. She was wearing blue jeans and a white sweater. Her hair was neat. She had on makeup, but not too much. Don’t want to excite Chris.
“Dublin.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. After what happened last fall I knew we couldn’t just go on as if it hadn’t happened. It was too much, too large, too awful. It was going to take more than goodwill to save us. I had to get some distance.”
“From me?”
“From me, I think, more than anything else.”
Outside, in the dark, the storm energy increased. I could hear the wind. And the snow, pelting at the window, came thicker. I was where she lived, alone with her. She slept here, made supper here, entertained here, made love, maybe, but not with me, here. There was her bathroom, where she stood naked every day under the shower. Where she put on clean lingerie and slipped into her dress. The counter where she had her coffee and left a lipstick crescent on the cup before she went to work. While I’d been gone she’d laughed here with people, told her stories, smiled her brilliant smile, held court, said smart and funny things, in the dramatic, yet somehow offhand without being less dramatic, way she had. I could smell her perfume, her shampoo, her self. My senses, so long deprived of her, were seismographic. I could almost hear her heart beat.
“So what did you do in Dublin?” Grace said.
“Studied in the old library at Trinity College, had tea at the Shelbourne, looked at the GPO, walked up O’Connell Street, drank some Guinness, had dinner at Patrick Gilbaud’s, took a tour of Kilmainham Jail, wandered around Dublin Castle, read Joyce, walked along the Liffey.”
“And what did you learn, Chris?”
“Everything,” I said.
“That’s quite a lot.”
“It’s everything, three quarters of a century bearing down on us. Too much. Too much for us.”
“And you’re going to tell me about it?”
“If you’ll listen.”
“And you think it will save us?”
“It might get us free enough to save ourselves.”
Grace got up and went to the window and looked out at the dense snow swirled by wind, and shimmered by lightning. Behind the lightning, like ancestral voices, the sound of thunder came. Grace turned back from the window toward me.
“My friends were worried you might try to kill me.”
Grace’s gaze was very steady on me. She seemed in gyroscopic balance.
“I would never hurt you,” I said.
“I know.”
She came back again to the couch and sat at the other end of it. No hint of huggy-snuggy. In proximity, we were still separate and Grace was making sure I knew it.
“But you’ve got a lot of rage.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“Do you have a plan for hurting someone?”
“A weak attempt at lightness,” I said. “I yearn for the death of anyone you date, but I would never hurt someone you cared about.”
“You already have.”
“I’m not sure I’m the one that did it, but whoever did it, it had to be done. We’d have had no chance if it hadn’t happened.”
“And you think we have one now?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You tell me there’s no chance and it’s over. I’ll get up, and go, and get on with my life.”
She looked at me for a long time in the dead-quiet room, made to seem more still by the storm roiling outside just beyond
the lamplight.
“No, I won’t tell you that. We’ve been together a long time.”
I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t talking to me, really, she was thinking out loud.
“But I can’t live like we did. It’s odd, isn’t it? My connection with the man you were, makes me hope that there’s a chance for me with the man you may become. But I cannot live with the man you were.”
“God save me, I understand that,” I said.
She smiled carefully, and only a little.
“So maybe I love you, and maybe you love me, and maybe you can help me understand the awful thing that happened last fall. I’m prepared to listen. Do you want another beer?”
“No,” I said.
She nodded faintly, as if she were keeping score somewhere, and settled back a little in her corner of the couch with her legs beneath her and the gulf between us as unbridgeable as the void. I looked past her out the window at the darkness made brilliant by the momentary lightning, at the winter storm penetrating the spring night, and took in a deep breath.
“My grandfather’s name was Conn Sheridan,” I said. “He was born with the century, in Dublin, and in 1916 he got hold of a Lee-Enfield rifle, and he and another kid sniped, apparently to no significant effect, at British troops during the Easter Monday uprising. By twenty he was a captain in the IRA, maybe for the hell of it, maybe for patriotism, though it’s hard to imagine a full-feathered patriot perched up there in the Sheridan family tree. In the four years his aim improved.”
1920
Conn
In mid Tipperary, in a pass through the hills, at the village of Hollyford, there was a long, two-storied, whitewashed police barracks with a slate roof. The windows of the barracks were protected by steel shutters, and there were narrow firing slits cut into the walls.
Conn Sheridan stood at the top of the pass, looking down. He was writing in his notebook. Below him a stream had cut its way through the hill, and a road ran along beside it. The village straggled along the road on the downslope. Thatched roofs and zinc outhouses.
Beside Conn was a tall, narrow, high-shouldered Australian Irishman named Seamus O’Gorman. He’d been a sharpshooter in the World War and was the commander of the Hollyford battalion.
“There’s a stone wall across the road,” Conn said.
“May give you cover, won’t help you much getting in there.”
“We could fire from behind it, to keep their heads down,” Conn said.
“And what?”
“And blow in the gable end.”
“The floor of them barracks is six feet higher than the outside ground, bucko. You might as well try to shift the fucking Rock of Cashel.”
“You never know,” Conn said. “How many rifles in the battalion?”
“Six, plus yours if you’ll be using it.”
“That’s what I brought it for,” Conn said.
“Fine.”
“Another thing,” Conn said. “I am, at least for this operation, your battalion commander. There’ll be no need for being too formal, but it’ll go better if you don’t call me bucko!”
O’Gorman met Conn’s eyes. He was a leathery man, nearly Conn’s height, older than Conn, and full of a veteran’s arrogance for new officers. He held Conn’s eyes for a moment. And felt the near physical force of them, and looked away.
“That’ll be fine with me, Conn.”
Conn smiled. He was wind reddened and sun darkened and his smile was a bright contrast.
“Good,” he said.
They walked back down the hill toward the village, rifles slung over their shoulders, khaki ammunition slings slanting across their chests. In the countryside the rebellion was no longer covert. Beyond the village the hills were bright green, rolling toward Glenough under a high, hard sky where white clouds ran raggedly before strong winds.
That night Conn sat with O’Gorman, and the battalion lieutenant, in a slate-roofed little house about a mile from the village. In a kitchen dense with the peat fire, under fat bacon hanging from the smoke-blackened rafters, they studied a map, and ate potato cakes and drank strong tea. The police and military barracks Shevry, Kilcommon, Annacarty, Cappagh White, Doon, Dundrum, and Rearcross.”
“There’s a big one at Pallas,” the lieutenant said. “Twenty miles. And Goolds Cross, and Tipperary, twenty, and Newport twenty-seven. Soldiers as well as peelers in Tipperary and Newport.”
“We’ll block the soldiers,” Conn said. “Here, at the crossroads,” he marked on the map. “And here. How much gelignite is there?”
“Close to half a hundred,” O’Gorman said. “A little blasting powder, three pounds and a little of gunpowder, plenty of fuse, and two boxes of detonators.”
Conn went to the shed with him to examine the gelignite. It was frozen. They put pots of water on to thaw it. The steam from the bubbling water added to the atmosphere as the three men huddled over the map. O’Gorman’s gray wife moved silently about the kitchen, stoking the fire, pouring more tea. No one paid her heed. The tea had been taking heat from the fire all day. It had long since ceased to draw, and begun to stew. Conn swallowed some and shook his head.
“A bleeding mouse could trot across that tea,” he said. The other men laughed. They were much older than Conn, especially the lieutenant, a short, plump man who’d been a cook with the British army in India.
“’Tis a darling thing, Cap’n, sir,” he said, “to see a fancy fucking Dublin boy drink proper country tea.”
Outside it had begun to rain. A cold rain, barely above freezing’.
“How much ammunition?” Conn said.
“Twenty rounds a rifle,” O’Gorman said. “Some shotguns, and four hand grenades. There are ten or twelve policemen in the Hollyford Barracks.”
“With all the ammunition they’ll ever need,” Conn said.
They were silent. The rain sounded on the roof, the squares of slate, carefully lapped from peak to eaves, resting on close-spaced rafter poles.
“It makes no sense to rush it.”
“None at all, at all.”
“We’ll burn them out,” Conn said.
“How?”
“From the roof,” Conn said. “The gable end has only one window. We can keep people away from it by rifle fire, and go up to the roof there.”
“Man, dear, it’s forty feet. We don’t have a forty-foot ladder in the county.”
“We’ll splice two twenty-footers,” Conn said. “We’ll make some bursting charges to blow off the slate, and we’ll burn them out from above.”
“Might work,” O’Gorman said. “Who goes to the roof?”
“I will,” Conn said. “If I can swallow this tea, I can climb that roof.” He smiled his brilliant smile in the smoky room. “With one heroic volunteer.”
“I’ll go with you, I guess,” O’Gorman said.
Conn
They spent the rest of the evening waiting and getting ready. Conn disassembled and oiled the big Webley .45 he carried under his coat. He cleaned and oiled it nearly every day. But he had nothing else to do while he waited. He took the German automatic, 9-mm parabellum, from its holster under his other arm. He oiled the pistol and the magazine spring, tucked bullets into the magazine, put a round in the chamber, and put it back with the hammer cocked and the safety set. The men in the kitchen improvised hand grenades by packing scrap iron in tin cans around a stick of gelignite. Other men arrived, gathering quietly, in the front room, some in the shed; cleaning and oiling rifles, and shotguns, practicing with the spliced ladder against the side of the barn. They didn’t talk very much. The rain pattered on the roof. Mrs. O’Gorman and her daughters stayed quiet in the corner of the kitchen, murmuring the rosary.
It was an hour till midnight when a thin little man in a tweed cap and a black raincoat arrived on his bicycle to say that the Volunteers had begun to fell trees and pile stone barricades across the roads. His name was Feeney.
“In the pass,” he said, “there are no trees handy, a
nd not enough rocks.”
“Can you find a way to block it?” Conn asked.
Feeney grinned.
“I’ll have them throw the road over the ditch, Cap’n.”
Conn nodded. The fire made a dim reflection on Feeney’s wet rubberized coat. Feeney’s cap was sodden and shapeless.
“And the wires?” Conn said.
“We’ll cut them at midnight, telephone and telegraph both, sir.”
At five after midnight they set out. Conn, O’Gorman, five shotguns, and seven rifles. Because he would be climbing the roof, Conn donated his rifle to Dennis Tracy, who would be in charge of the ground party.
“Musha,” Conn said with a wide smile, as they moved out. “I feel like a tinker.”
He and O’Gorman each carried two handguns, grenades, hammers and bursting charges, and on their backs each a tin of petrol. Oil soaked squares of sod hung from ropes around their necks. Oil soaked into their clothes. Four men carried the ladder. Others carried paraffin oil in zinc buckets.
The rain wasn’t heavy but it came without surcease as they walked silently toward the police barracks. In the slippery darkness one of the men carrying the ladder stumbled.
Someone said, “Jesus Christ, man.”
Conn’s voice was soft and sharp as he spoke to them.
“Quiet now, lads. The less the peelers hear us, the less they’ll know what’s happening. A silent assault is a frightening thing.”
In the back one of the men murmured, “Cap’n’s a stone killer, where’d he come from?”
“They sent him down from Dublin.”
Again Conn’s voice cut the darkness.
“Quiet.”
They went forward in silence. Close to the barracks the laddermen took off their boots. The rifles and shotguns took the places they’d been assigned, three to lay down fire on the gable-end window, the rest to cover doors and windows. The men with the paraffin oil put the buckets down at the base of the gable end and retreated to cover. The laddermen raised the ladder.
Conn and O’Gorman went up, heavy with firearms, burdened with ammunition, laden with explosives, and dripping oil.
All Our Yesterdays Page 1