Irish End Games, Books 4-5-6

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “Where is everyone?” he asked.

  “Oh, they’re here,” Gilly said, looking up at one of the houses as they passed. It looked vacant but then John caught a glimpse of a moving curtain in the window. “When the sickness came, people started staying inside. Like that would save them.”

  “Is the sickness bad here?”

  “Not as bad as Fishguard,” Gilly said. “I don’t know how it’s been in the last couple of weeks, obviously, but it’s not the Oxford I grew up in, let’s just say that.”

  They walked silently until they came to a cobblestone alley that led to a stone archway into Trinity College. The sounds of their shoes on the cobblestones echoed loudly in the walkway. John saw bicycles everywhere, parked in bike holders, propped up against walls and trees, fallen over in a tangle of rubber and chain.

  “Don’t they have cars in this part of the UK?” he asked.

  “They do. Mind you, not like they used to.”

  “It’s like the whole place is depressed,” John said.

  “You’re not wrong there.”

  The college setting reminded him of what Disney World would feel like if they closed it for a day but you got to roam around. Here was this world famous university that felt like a ghost town. It began to snow in big fluffy flakes drifting lazily to the ground. John couldn’t help but feel it gave a decidedly magical air to the scene.

  “Here we are,” Gilly said as she walked up to a large wooden door and yanked on the handle. They went up two flights of stairs worn slick with generations of use, and then down a narrow hall. Dr. Heaton’s lab was visible behind a long wall of glass enabling anyone to watch the work in progress. Standing in the hall were two men and a woman in white lab coats seeming to do just that. Gilly nodded at the group and hurried past them but John was startled by the animosity that seemed to roll off the glowering threesome.

  Gilly tapped on the glass and John saw movement inside as her father turned his head to see them and wave to them.

  The contrast between Heaton’s lab and the rest of the college was dramatic. Outside was cobblestones and ornate archways. Inside, the lab was all bright lights and streamlined countertops packed with chemistry paraphernalia and microscopes. Dr. Heaton wore a white lab coat and latex gloves.

  “Is it safe to come in?” John asked Gilly.

  “Must be,” she said, opening the door. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hello, you, two,” Dr. Heaton said, turning to face them. “Well, you’re looking better, laddie.”

  “Thank you, sir,” John said, gazing around the lab. He felt his heart start to race.

  “Like science, do you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ve an idea,” Dr. Heaton said. “Before we head to lunch, I’ll give you a tour. Gilly darling, you’ll be bored to tears. Why don’t you go down to the salon and fetch your old Dad a hot cuppa?”

  Gilly hesitated for a moment and glanced at John. Something was going on. That was clear. There was no point in having a cup of tea now if they were going to lunch. But Gilly just shrugged.

  “Sure,” she said. “Back in a tick.”

  As soon as the door closed behind her, John turned to Dr. Heaton expecting him to lead him around the long tables. He was surprised to see the man staring at him.

  “Sir?” John said, unsure of what was going on.

  “She’s gotten attached to you, my Gilly.”

  “She’s a great girl,” John said, feeling uncomfortable. Had he said something inappropriate?

  “Aye, she is that. I have a problem, young John, and I need your help with it.”

  “Sure. If I can.” John felt his shoulders tense up under his jacket. Now that he was inside, he was feeling too warm with it on.

  “Gilly has had a terrible time with the loss of her mother last year. She’ll have talked to you about that?”

  “Yes sir. She said her mom died of the sickness.”

  “Aye. She’s had…problems adjusting to the loss.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “I’m going to ask you to stay with us a little longer, son.” He held up his hand as John started to speak. “I know. You’re in a hurry. You have a mission. I know. But I think I might be able to help you with your problem if you think you can help me with my problem.”

  Did he know a way back to Ireland?

  “I am in a position to arrange medical transport to Ireland because of my position. If you were to agree to stay with us—just until the lass can handle it, mind—I’d be happy to see you back to Ireland where you won’t be dodging bullets as you go.”

  John turned to see the figure of Gilly as she walked toward them down the hall balancing a mug of tea in her hands.

  “How long would you need me to stay?”

  “Not long. Three months, maybe?”

  Three months. Mom will have a nervous breakdown in three months.

  “Will you think on it, lad? For Gilly’s sake?”

  “Yes sir. I will.”

  *****

  The routine of life in Oxford took on a comforting monotony for John, punctuated with predictable episodes of pure joy. Once he accepted that he would be staying—at least for a while—he found he could turn his attention to the world around him and table his plans. Wherever Gavin was, John would find him one day. He knew exactly where his mom and Mike were and would return to them when he could.

  Meanwhile, he’d discovered a brand new world peopled by scientists who understood him better than he’d ever imagined possible. As soon as Dr. Heaton saw that John had a keen interest in the lab, he began bringing him to work most days. Their conversations were complex, educational and engaging.

  Sometimes Gilly came too. But often she didn’t, seeming as if the comfort and security of knowing that both her father and John would return each afternoon for tea, board games, dinner and long walks was enough.

  John never really saw the depression in Gilly that Dr. Heaton had hinted at. But even he saw the difference in her affect after only a week of the three of them living together as a family. She was more independent, happier to be left to her own projects—usually knitting or crocheting—and willing to spend whole afternoons with her girlfriends who lived on the same street. Dr. Heaton had arranged for John and Gilly—along with other classmates—to attend tutoring sessions in the college classrooms with various professors. While John attended these classes with pleasure, his greatest passion was visiting Dr. Heaton’s lab, which he anticipated every morning with enthusiasm.

  As the weeks went by, John realized that Finlay Heaton was the first person since John’s dad who spoke John’s same language. It wasn’t just their mutual love of science but a love of learning. There was a symbiotic connection between the two of them that was palpable.

  It was clear that Heaton’s objective—to find a cure for the water-borne disease that was ravaging the UK and the continent—was also a considerable feather in his cap. Even in the few weeks that John had been in Oxford he had picked up on the thinly veiled disrespect in which Dr. Heaton was viewed by the other scientists in the lab. That he would be formally tasked by the government to find a cure for the plague was generally greeted in the department with unabashed and open astonishment.

  As Dr. Heaton had explained it to John, the disease involved both a bacterial and a viral infection. The bacteria acted as transports for the virus. What worked to kill the bacteria still left the virus intact. And the usual methods of killing the virus—high temperatures and chlorine washes—left the water toxic for consumption.

  One Oxford scientist in particular, Dr. Sandra Lynch, seemed to make it her goal to come by the lab daily to goad Dr. Heaton. In John’s opinion she was too tall for a woman, easily over six feet. Her hair was pulled back in an unattractive ponytail that made her ears stick out while her thick-lensed eyeglasses made her eyes look froglike.

  Dr. Heaton gave John basic lab chores, like cleaning test tubes and dusting the microscopes. But often he just talked to John about l
ife, about the disease, about the way things were and the way they’d become.

  “Did you know that smallpox killed fifteen million people a year until 1967?” Dr. Heaton said as he squinted through his microscope.

  “I thought smallpox was eliminated.”

  “It was. Ten years later it didn’t exist because of the vaccine.”

  “So is our plague like smallpox?”

  Dr. Heaton looked at John and frowned. “It is and it isn’t. More like a super cholera, which is also transmitted through water.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to figure a way to prevent it than cure it?” John asked.

  Heaton walked over to his desk and picked up a thick sheaf of documents that had arrived from London that morning by courier. “Very possibly. But that’s not the job, lad.”

  “I mean, isn’t coming up with new antibiotic therapies or vaccines going to take forever?”

  “Welcome to the world of science.”

  “It seems you’re spending a whole lot of time trying to figure out what it is that’s making people sick instead of how to stop the disease from spreading.”

  “Ah, the impatience of youth. Finding the cause of the disease will help us fight it.”

  “Maybe the cause doesn’t matter.”

  “How can it not matter? It’s knowledge, John. And knowledge always matters.”

  “But when you’re trying to fix a problem, isn’t some knowledge more important than others? Why not just do the easy thing first and move on from there? That’s what I’d do.”

  “You call creating a prophylaxis the easy thing, do ye, lad?”

  “Well, comparatively, yeah.”

  They sat in silence for a bit.

  “Ye should be in school, John,” Dr. Heaton said. “And then college. Not planting turnips in Ireland.”

  “My family’s there.”

  “I know, lad.

  One night, after he’d been in Oxford for three weeks John was surprised to see that Gilly had invited Dr. Lynch to join them for dinner. If he read Dr. Heaton’s face correctly, it was a surprise to him, too.

  Gilly’s English professor, a brittle and timid older woman named Bertie Mangham, was also waiting for Dr. Heaton and John when they arrived home. The fragrance of chicken stew reached out to John from the moment he entered the foyer. Just being in a house again felt so…normal. Not that the cottages of the compound didn’t have a homey feel to them, but there were times living with the Heatons in Oxford that John actually forgot that the bomb had ever dropped.

  Tonight was one of those nights. John could see Gilly had gone to no little effort to create a special dinner for all of them. They ate off her mother’s china and drank wine from crystal goblets. Dr. Lynch and Bertie knew each other and because they weren’t in the same field, were friendly with each other. Dr. Heaton was a gracious host, giving each woman equal attention. The conversation was often academic but also very lively. Bertie, when she had a glass of wine in her, relaxed and was surprisingly witty. Even Dr. Lynch, usually so proper and stiff, seemed to loosen up as the evening went on.

  Later, when they all retired to the salon and the fireplace to play Scrabble, Dr. Lynch shared the small settee with Dr. Heaton. John was sure he saw her smile at one point during the game. The laughter, the conversation and the warmth washed over him like a caressing wave. He envied Gilly’s easy and constant access to these sharp minds—from birth, really. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to live in a town like Oxford, totally committed to the life of the mind and intellectual pursuits.

  At one point in the evening, he glanced at Gilly and she was giving him an eyebrow-arching, smug look like: See? These are your people.

  The hell of it was she was totally right.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mike guessed it would take them three days of steady walking to get back to the Jeep. It was the middle of December, cold and wet. Sarah wasn’t complaining, but he knew she was physically miserable. Hell, they both were.

  Mentally was a whole other animal entirely.

  No matter how many times he told her this wasn’t the end, he could see she wasn’t buying it. In her mind, John was a mere hundred kilometers to the east and a little thing like a country’s militia and ice-cold north Atlantic waters weren’t gong to keep her from her lad.

  Except they were.

  Thank God, those pikers O’Reilly and Sullivan hadn’t taken Mike’s few gold coins. They had enough to stock up on food—a cooked guinea fowl and two loaves of bread—to get them as far as Arklow. Mike had sprung for a bottle of brandy too. It was dear but it’d help keep them warm and maybe buy them a moment or two of forgetfulness. That was well worth the price.

  At first, they kept near the coastline. It was colder to be sure but Mike knew Sarah took comfort seeing it, knowing her boy was just across the way. They walked beside the coastal road the first day, confident they wouldn’t run into anyone. And they didn’t. Toward the end of the first day, they grew tired, and the dregs of their mutual despair began to bubble up to the surface.

  They found an abandoned house overlooking the water whose front steps opened onto a walkway leading up to the road. It was a dreary structure, with only one small window among three sides of bleak grey stone. Mike found it difficult to believe anyone had chosen to live here. But the Crisis had changed things for everyone and it might easily be inhabited—as forlorn and unwelcoming as it appeared to them.

  He positioned Sarah on the road overlooking the house.

  “Stay here until I get back, aye?” he said. He noticed she’d spent much of the day with her own thoughts and he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  She nodded but didn’t answer. Nor did she look at the house with any curiosity. She just stood, waiting. He hated leaving her up here, exposed and without a weapon, but he hated worse the idea of ushering her into a house without checking it out first. He slid the fifty feet down the steep walkway to a gap in the broken stonewall encircling the house. The trees and bushes within the wall were overgrown and hedged the house in tightly.

  When he got closer he could see it wasn’t falling down. In fact the house looked as if its exterior had been recently repaired in spots. But there was a chimney and no trail of smoke coming from it. On a cold day like today—with the rain spitting every few minutes—there should have been a fire. He peeked over the wall to see if there was anything alive within—a goat or a dog—but there was no sign of life. When he got to the front steps, he glanced up at the road to see that Sarah was watching him. She might well be on the verge of total despondency but she wasn’t totally oblivious—at least not where Mike was concerned. He waved to her and then turned to the house and rapped on the front door.

  The sound of movement inside made him jump to the side of the door in case it swung open followed by a shotgun blast.

  “Who is it?” a woman’s voice called out. “Phelan? Is that you?”

  “Sorry, Missus,” Mike said. “It’s just a traveler with his exhausted and pregnant wife hoping to find shelter for the night.”

  He wasn’t out of the woods yet. A woman—especially a panicked, frightened one—was just as able to shoot a hole in him as a man was. Mike felt very vulnerable with only his boot knife sheath—and that empty.

  The door creaked open and the long barrel of a rifle emerged.

  “Show yourself,” the woman said, her voice hard but shaky.

  Mike put his hands up but before he revealed himself to the woman and her gun, he heard Sarah coming around the house.

  “Mike? Did you find someone?”

  Mike’s feelings were at war with one another. On the one hand, Sarah’s presence was likely to put the gun woman at her ease. On the other hand, he’d have felt better if she’d stayed on the road and out of range. The woman stepped out of the house and pointed the rifle at Mike’s chest but her head turned to watch Sarah as she appeared in front of the house.

  “Oh!” Sarah said, affecting to be out of breath from the jaunt
down from the road, her eyes on the woman’s gun. “We come in peace, I swear.”

  The woman immediately dropped the nose of the gun.

  “You’re American?” she asked, frowning.

  “Canadian,” Sarah said.

  “I’m Kate Donovan.”

  “Sarah Donovan. And this is my husband, Mike.”

  “Donovan, you say? Are ye from Roscommon by any chance?”

  Mike shook his head. “Closer to Tipperary.”

  “Well, then. There’s a few of us then, aren’t there? Come in. Me husband will be back soon. There’s a fireplace in this dump but no firewood. D’ye have food by chance?”

  “A roast chicken and some bread,” Sarah said. She stepped into the dark house, whose small window provided little light through its dirty panes. “We’re happy to share for a place to stay.”

  An hour later, Phelan Donovan showed up with an armful of wood and he and Mike soon had a fire going in the hearth. Sarah feared they would all be spending the night in the forecourt of the place when the chimney started smoking but it was just age and a few old birds nests and it soon righted itself. Mike and Sarah shared their food and the brandy. There was no furniture in the place but Sarah didn’t care. She snuggled up next to Mike, feeling stronger after eating. The fire warmed her face as she fought to stay awake against the exertions of the long day.

  “I was an IT specialist with Accenture,” Phelan said, hugging his knees as he stared into the fire. He was middle-aged but in good shape, lean and hard. “Sometimes I can’t believe the life we used to have.” He looked at his wife, Katie who nodded in agreement.

  “We lived in Dublin,” she said. “I was taking some classes but basically we were just enjoying being childless in Dublin. We went clubbing every weekend. Life was so good. No offense, Sarah. Kids are great. Just not for me and Phelan. Especially now.” She looked at her husband. “Can you imagine?”

  Sarah felt her heart tighten. Yeah, trust me, do not have kids so you can be worried sick about them twenty-four seven.