Merciless Reason

by Oisin McGann

  “Come on, you,” the man said. “Your turn to be bled.”

  Pip nodded and started putting his tools back in the wooden box on one end of the bench. The man didn’t wait, confident that the young boy would obey without question. Cathal had been wondering about this too—the samples of blood that Gerald was routinely taking from the children. Cathal had yet to hear an explanation, and the children simply accepted it as just another part of their ordeal. As he was walking past Cathal, Pip paused and acted as if he was picking something out of the sole of his bare foot. He tipped his head in Red’s direction.

  “Watch out for dat fella, Mister Dempsey, he’s got it in fer you. He’ll make you pay for dat scar.”

  “What do you mean?” Cathal asked, frowning, but careful not to look up at the boy.

  “Deh scar on his mug,” Pip muttered, meaning the weal that cut diagonally across Red’s face. “He’s fierce upset abou’ you ruining his ‘good looks.’”

  “You’ve got it wrong, Pip. I didn’t give him that scar.”

  “Aw no, of course not.” Pip stopped and looked back at him with a sly expression. “Sorry, I mean everybody knows … sure, wasn’t it the Highwayboy who gave him dat mark?”

  And with that, he turned away and hurried off towards Gerald’s laboratory.

  XIX

  “DO NOT WASTE YOUR TEARS”

  THE BULLET WOUND IN NATE’S SHOULDER ached horribly, and it itched so badly he wanted to dig his fingers into it, but even scratching it would risk re-opening the wound. The itching was a familiar sensation, one that told him the wound would be nothing more than a scar in a few days. Clancy had not been so lucky. One shot had taken him in the side and another through his arm. His left leg had been broken in the fall from the horse. Gerald had once treated the manservant with an injection of Wildenstern blood for a near-fatal injury, and his ability to heal was much improved, but it was not on a level with Nate’s. He could have little active part to play from now on.

  Nate listened to the click-clack of the train’s wheels beneath him, soothed by the sound and the speed with which they were traveling towards Dublin on the Great Southern and Western line from Limerick. Clancy was lying on the seat across from him, shifting painfully in an exhausted sleep, his arm in a sling and his leg bandaged with splints. Lying on his back, the old man snored like water draining out of an enormous sink. Nate smiled and looked out the window at the darkness beginning to fall over the flat, open landscape of fields and hedges flowing past. Traveling by train was a risk, as it made them easier to find, but now they were not alone.

  Dempsey had returned to Ireland after jumping ship in Boston. He had joined up with the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the south of the country, having arranged with Clancy to meet up in Limerick. The Fenian rebels had welcomed Dempsey with open arms—a British-trained military man was a valuable ally in their struggle. And though his hatred was more for the Wildensterns than for the British, the rebels were willing to overlook this character defect in return for the training he could provide.

  Nate had mixed feelings about trusting these men—they were a wayward, motley bunch, but Dempsey had chosen a competent gang and seemed to have imposed a military discipline. And Nate had faith in the man’s vendetta against the family, if not in the man himself.

  Having just finished looking through the box of his mother’s effects, Nate was dismayed to find they provided few answers, although there was one connection he had not expected. Some of the letters were addressed to a man named Eamon Duffy. Nate knew a man of that name; he was one of the leading figures in the Irish nationalist movement. A Fenian rebel like the men Dempsey had joined, Duffy was a highly resourceful and formidable character.

  But these letters were all dated between February and March, 1846, the period Nate was reading about in his fathers journals, nearly twenty years ago—when Duffy would have been a young man in his twenties or early thirties. Could it really have been the same man? At first, Nate wondered if he would discover evidence of an affair—Duffy was not the kind of man his mother would normally have come into contact with. But these were not love-letters; they were civil but businesslike and discussed the plight of the poor, the shortage of food in different areas, the price of seed and grain. Hardly the kind of thing one might expect in a secret romantic correspondence.

  The section of the newspaper was from a publication entitled The Nation, which Clancy had told him was a nationalist paper from the forties. There was an article in it about the Wildensterns’ humanitarian campaign to combat the famine, providing American grain to feed the starving, and the seeds of turnips, carrots and other winter vegetables to replace the seed crops lost to the blight. Other landowners were urged to follow the Duke of Leinster’s example. Nate had a quizzical expression on his face as he read this, for there had been nothing in his father’s journals about any humanitarian campaign, and he would have been surprised to find it.

  He was still puzzled by the silver flask of poitín. It was not his mother’s type of drink.

  At the bottom of the box was a letter addressed to his father, and Nate read this with a dull pain in his chest. It was dated April of the same year—the month Tatiana was born. There was a hint of a smile as he thought of his sister, but then a pang of regret that he had missed the birth of his own son. He had missed his son’s whole life so far. Given the terrible potential Nate carried, perhaps it would be best if he stayed out of it altogether.

  The letter was unfinished, and Nate wondered why his mother had not completed it or, if it was not to be sent, why she had kept it. But this was a letter that had been written to a lover and Nate found it uncomfortable to read it now:

  My dearest Edgar,

  I write this with a heavy heart, but with the hope that we might still recapture the love and devotion that, I am certain, we still feel for one another. I don’t know if I will ever find it within myself to forgive you for what you did that night two weeks ago. I have always known that you were raised in an environment that brutalized you and encouraged the most predatory and ruthless instincts within you, and I have spent my entire married life struggling to come to terms with the conflicting sides of your character—the implacable leader of men that is your public face, and the tender, loyal and loving husband that so few people see.

  I long ago chose not to involve myself in the family’s business, and I have suffered terrible trials of conscience as I have watched this family grind the common people under its heel. I have tried to tell myself that I am just a woman, and that my first duty is to my husband and to my family and nothing should dilute that loyalty in any way, especially with the birth of our beautiful new daughter.

  But looking into Tatiana’s sweet, innocent face, I find myself desperately ashamed, and determined that she will not grow up in a home full of brutes and scoundrels. I can no longer condone your callousness, and your lack of action, as the people of our country endure the torturous drawn-out death that is starvation. My beloved Edgar, I once promised my heart to you, and it will ever be yours, but the murderous violence I witnessed that night made me realize that part of you, at least, is the monster people believe you to be. And I wonder if my heart is lost forever to the evil greed that passes down to each man in your family. I write this now, before I leave, in the hope that I might still return, and

  And there it stopped, incomplete. Nate gazed at it for some time, pondering its contents. It was a strange thing to think anyone would describe his father as ‘tender, loyal and loving,’ but he could vaguely remember his mother and father speaking in tones they did not use with anyone else. And everyone in the family had said that Edgar Wildenstern did truly love his wife.

  Nate looked at the date again, took out his father’s journal, and flicked through the pages, trying to find something that might explain what event had finally driven his mother to such desperation that she was willing to leave her husband. She might have turn
ed a blind eye to the family’s business methods for the sake of her marriage, but she must have been aware of some of the tyranny with which the estates were ruled, and certainly knew about the Rules of Ascension and all that they entailed. For all her apparent principles, she must have been either naïve or willfully obtuse to be ignorant of the family’s ways. So what had finally turned her head?

  It did not take him long to find it. The entry was dated the 26th of March 1846, not long before her letter would have been written:

  As I feared, my dear Miriam has been taken in by the worst kind of balderdash being spread about by the rabble-rousers who hope to use the present difficulties to sow seeds of dissent among the peasants. I had for some time noticed that she was engaged in a project that was not producing broken pots, brown bones, or useless engimal parts. Concerned that she might be becoming involved in matters that were beyond her female capacities, I placed her under the surveillance of some of my investigators. They followed her whenever she left the house, recorded any meetings she had and examined the contents of any letters sent to her. It is just as well that I took such precautions, for my men discovered a thoroughly unwholesome association forming with a young Catholic named Eamon Duffy.

  Nate frowned. Here was another reference to this man—the man to whom his mother had written a number of letters. Could he be the same Eamon Duffy who would become a prominent figure among the Fenian rebels? Not someone Nate would have imagined being associated with his mother. Nate read on:

  The report on Duffy’s background raised my suspicions, and an article in today’s edition of a nationalist rag confirmed them. Duffy fancies himself as an entrepreneur, but his business is the illegal distilling from potatoes of that poisonous concoction the peasants refer to as poitín. Somehow, I cannot imagine that business to be thriving in a country where all the potatoes are rotting in the ground. So it comes as no surprise that he has wheedled his way into my wife’s bottomless well of goodwill, in the pretence of wanting to provide food to the starving peasants.

  Today, it was announced in that rag known as The Nation that “the Wildensterns are making efforts to feed the starving masses.” This was news to me. I have sanctioned no such campaign, and the manner in which it has apparently been executed is painfully naïve, worthy of my darling’s most romantic notions. The peasants do not know how to cook the tough American grain—and waste much of it in the process. Their complete reliance on the potato over generations means they have lost the knowledge of how to bake bread. Few peasants in this country would possess a millstone to grind the grain, or an oven to bake it.

  Planting the new seeds my Miriam has thoughtfully provided will not produce vegetables until October, and these other vegetables will require more land than the potato needs to feed the same number. Land that the Popish rabble do not have. Miriam curses them with false hope through her charitable efforts, instead of letting their desperation spur them into solving their own bloody problems.

  All this as the birth of our newest child draws near. It is no way for a woman to behave.

  I pressed my investigators into an examination of my wife’s personal effects, and they discovered that she has recently disposed of a great number of highly valuable items—paintings, antiques, jewelry, etc.—in her possession. How she got them out of the house without being seen confounds my men, though the fact that she is a woman may have given them a foolishly low opinion of her powers of deceit. And being a woman, she could not have sent the valuables to auction herself—I would have to have been consulted. I suspect that Duffy may have taken them to the auctioneers, posing as a reputable businessman, and owner of the items, and sold them on her behalf. Whatever corn or seeds he might have bought with them, I have no doubt that the bulk of the money made from the transactions will have found its way into his pockets.

  My men learned from a telegram sent to Miriam that she was to meet Duffy tonight, and when the time came for the rendezvous, I used the secret passageways to follow her to the basement, and to the workshop where she carries out all of her archaeological work. Looking at the crates which were packed with her finds, I quickly realized how she had smuggled her valuable possessions out of the house. The large room was dark, and I entered unnoticed through the false support column situated against one of the walls.

  Duffy was there. A square-framed man with a hard face and dark brown hair, he was dressed in the work-clothes worn by all the men who do the manual work on her digs. These men come and go through the servants’ ways and she no doubt has him listed on the books as one of her helpers. It seemed that she had no shame, and was quite willing to meet with this blackguard alone. I felt a terrible rage rise within me. My wife—almost nine months pregnant with my child—and her criminal consort, the two of them deep in conversation, standing over that bronze cauldron of which she is so proud—the one with the serpent around the rim. It seemed to me an appropriately devious and treacherous symbol of her activities. I moved out of the shadows, approaching silently as the pair conspired together.

  They were discussing some new way to transfer the worth of my family’s assets into the pockets of the poor when they found me standing over them. Miriam let out a gasp, but Duffy was struck with fear, staggering backwards against the cauldron. I cannot say that I acted with any rational sense, finding myself staring into the face of the man who had deceived and used my wife and stolen from her and now was set to do more and who knew what else. I was like a wounded beast, blinded by fury. Of all the deaths I have caused, his gave me the least pause for thought. I seized his neck with the engimal claw that is my right hand, crushing his throat. Miriam screamed my name, but I paid her no mind. The spring-loaded sheath strapped to my left wrist shot the dagger out of my sleeve and into my left hand. I drove the blade over and over again into his belly as he thrashed and screamed. Miriam tried to stop me and I shoved her away—the only time I have ever shown her violence.

  When I had finished stabbing, Duffy’s abdomen was a torn and bloody mess, his innards starting to slop like giant worms through his clutching hands. But I knew he would still take some time to die, and it would be an agonizing death. Miriam was crouching down against the cauldron, wailing so hard she could not take a breath. I tossed the cur backwards into the old cauldron, where he coughed and groaned as the blood pooled around him. I spat on him and then turned to her, as she pointlessly tried to use her handkerchief to cover his wounds.

  “There he is, my darling, the man who would use you as if you were any silly old trollop with more money than sense. And he has learned what it is to cross the Wildensterns. Do not waste your tears on this jack-gagger, my dear. If it is God’s will that you be taken in by him, then you should pray for his salvation, and your prayers will surely be answered. Or perhaps your Dagda’s cauldron will cure his injuries and bring him back to life. Either way, I will leave you here with him, as you seem to enjoy his company so much. When you decide to start behaving in a manner befitting my wife, you may show your face upstairs again, where I will be waiting. I will send down some men in a while, to empty that chamber-pot of yours.”

  I left her with those words, and did not look back. Her sobs, and the tortured cries of the dying man, followed me up the stairs. Neither sound gave me great satisfaction.

  XX

  “PREPARE TO REPEL BOARDERS”

  “WILDENSTERN.” A VOICE BROKE INTO NATE’S THOUGHTS. “Rouse yourself, man! The dogs are at our heels!”

  Nate blinked and looked up Dempsey.

  “What is it?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  Nate marked his page with a piece of string before closing the journal and rising to his feet in a stiff motion. His body was feeling the strain of the days of travel, as well as the aftermath of the recent gunfight. A bolt of pain shot through his shoulder and he grunted, shrugging it away. He moved down the aisle of their second-class carriage, following Dempsey towards the rear of the tra
in. They went through two doors to the next carriage, striding between the rows of wooden seats in the third-class carriage—one had to travel second-class to get cushioned seats. Nate noticed people were peering out the left-side windows at the scene thrown into silhouette by the setting sun. Nate stopped to see what they were looking at, but Dempsey gripped his arm and kept him moving.

  Dempsey had told him about Harmonica, the American bounty hunter who was dogging them. His real name was Thomas Radigan, a former US marshal of Polish and Irish descent. The man was famous in his homeland for his determination and resourcefulness. He had turned in his badge and become a bounty hunter after the law had failed to catch his brothers murderer. Ever since, he had devoted himself to the manhunting profession with fanatical resolve, tracking down any criminal with a substantial price on their head. Once he took on a job and set himself on the trail of a quarry, he never failed to finish the job. Now it would be a matter of professional pride with him that he make up for the fouled-up ambush in Limerick. He had earned his nickname by playing the harmonica to condemned prisoners he had caught, as they walked to the gallows. Dempsey had assured Nate that they hadn’t seen the last of this human bloodhound.

  The train was composed of a steam locomotive pulling a tender—carrying the coal and water—along with six passenger carriages and a guard’s van at the rear. The door to the guard’s van was unlocked, and three of Dempsey’s men were already inside. The uniformed guard was sitting in high dudgeon on a bench alongside some large sacks of mail, where he had obviously been instructed to sit down and shut up. He scowled at Nate and Dempsey as they stepped out the door at the back of the railway car and onto the wide footplate, buffeted by the wind and swaying slightly with the motion of the train.

  “I expected to cross paths with him again,” Dempsey growled, scratching his jaw through his beard. “But I never saw this coming.”