by Nina Dreyer
John reached down and pulled her up with his unbroken arm, gently drawing her to him and exhaling with relief. Marion was not hurt.
‘They’ve murdered her,’ she croaked, ‘they’ve murdered her, why didn’t you stop them?’
‘Hush,’ he whispered, stroking her sodden sleeve. He closed his eyes and thought of Eilis’ letter, delivered to him by that priest, death threats on lavender-scented notepaper. He thought of Eilis, those many years ago, in the golden summers before the war, smiling thinly at him over the Ouija board in this very room, her eyebrows arched. Try harder, she’d told him, try to summon the ancient Celtic spirit inside you. If you have one. You probably don’t, though, do you, my beautiful Sassenach. She hadn’t been Eilis Hurlihy yet, then, just plain Eilis Browne, but the madness had been in her already as she whirled through the Salon parlours, brandishing a broadsheet of Liam Hurlihy’s speeches. And now it had gotten her killed. John sighed. It would not have been the death she’d dreamed of, spear in hand on a wind-swept hillside with a green banner fluttering overhead. He hugged Marion tighter. At least now, Eilis wouldn’t be able to drag Marion into danger. ‘Hush,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a war. People get killed.’
‘Why didn’t you stop them,’ Marion sobbed into his chest, her voice muffled, ‘I loved her, you knew I loved her, she was my friend.’ She broke free from him, her shoulders shaking.
‘Marion… I tried to warn you. This was always going to happen. Eilis would never be content until she’d martyred herself. You knew that.’ He brushed her tear-streaked cheek with a knuckle.
‘That is a brutal thing to say,’ she gasped.
‘Yes. But it’s true.’
Marion groaned through clenched teeth and drew her sharp little nails over her forehead. Then she glanced at the old grandfather clock in the corner and grasped his unbroken wrist, tugging at him. ‘We have to leave, let’s leave right now-’
‘What? We’ve got work to do, we can’t just leave. And this is my city, nobody’s going to hound me out of my city.’
‘That is just what Eilis said,’ Marion shouted hoarsely, ‘listen to me, there’s no time. Please,’ she pulled at his arm, ‘please, let’s go away from here. We can make everything alright.’ Her eyes spilled over. ‘We can make things right again.’
‘If you don’t want to live here anymore,’ John cleared his throat and dropped his voice, ‘I can arrange somewhere else for you. I’d understand. I would.’ He turned away, fumbling for his cigarette case, forgetting for a moment that it had been crushed. The ringing in his ears tilted to a higher pitch, and he shook his head.
Marion stepped in front of him, curling her fingers into his shirt collar. ‘I am not,’ she said slowly, ‘leaving you here alone. Come away with me. I can’t lose any more people I love.’
The word hung in the stillness between them.
John drew her closer, hugging her to him so hard that her spine crackled and her breath was pressed out of her. He leaned his cheek to her damp, tangled hair and closed his eyes. She didn’t want to leave him. She loved him. He closed his eyes and savoured the feeling. He thought of Sid’s febrile letter. Return home forthwith. That was actually not such a bad idea. Not such a bad idea at all. Going back to Gorse Hall. And when all this was over, he’d bring her somewhere better, somewhere with high, clear skies and warm summer winds. ‘Hush, my love,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll take you away from here. We’ll leave at dawn.’
Chapter Twenty Six
The cortege of trucks and cars rumbled over winding mountain roads. In the backseat of a black car, Marion shrank into her thick coat, gazing at the raindrops streaking over the car window and gathering in broken little streams on the glass. They’d been driving for hours and hours, the roads narrowing, the towns and villages becoming more and more sparse.
She dug under her coat and curled her fingers around her medallion. Eilis’ death hit her again, like a sudden slap of cold water. She closed her aching eyes. Eilis’ voice came back to her in snippets from an afternoon long ago by the roaring fire in her parlour. ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,’ she’d read, trailing a finger over the page, ‘and I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; there midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, and evening full of linnet’s wings.’
Marion rubbed her eyes and gazed out the window. The landscape smeared past, grey and desolate. This was not Eilis’ countryside dreamland. The roads cut deep into the brown hills. Frozen blackthorn hedges dripped on the roadside, and in the high moors above, in icy fog hung low in withered heather and lonely cottages under heavy thatched roofs.
She glanced at John, who sat in the front seat with a gun in his lap, talking to the driver over the hum and roar of the engine. The back of his neck was bruised a deep purple. But this was his homeland, she thought. He’d be safe here. Smiling sadly, she reached out and brushed his hair with her fingertips. He turned and smiled at her, crinkling the corner of his eye. ‘That’s Carncormac coming up,’ he said as the car rumbled round a corner. ‘I used to play with the local lads there when I was young.’
‘So it is,’ said the driver, ‘all abandoned now.’
‘What do you mean,’ asked John.
‘Sure they all take themselves off to sleep in the hills at night now, for fear of the Tans. All the villages round here. Carncormac, Carnderrig, Ruane’s Hill.’
Marion could not hear John’s reply over the growl of the engine. They drove through the small village, past huddling white houses with small windows. A scattering of women in black shawls ducked hurriedly into darkened doorways when they drove by.
‘Ah feck,’ said the driver, ‘there’s a roadblock coming up now.’
John flung his cigarette out the window and turned to look at Marion, wincing slightly as he moved his broken arm. ‘Don’t worry yourself,’ he said, gazing steadily at her, ‘they’re here to protect you, Marion.’
At the edge of the village stood a military truck. Three men stalked around it, dressed in that strange combination of military uniforms and police uniforms. Black and Tans. Marion cowered in her seat. The first time she’d heard those words, she’d thought they were saying blackened hands. Blackened from burning and beating. Black bruises and tanned hides.
The Tans saluted and waved the cars on. Marion craned her neck to look out the back window. They’d caught two men. A Tan struck one in the gut with the butt of his rifle as the other two looked on, laughing like hyenas. The other captive, stood on the edge of the russet ditch with his hands over his head, dressed only in a ragged shirt, rain dripping from his hair.
Soon they were gone from view, and the car trundled on.
Marion clutched her medallion. This was not Eilis’ dream. This was a nightmare, a desolate, lonely nightmare.
They drove on, up a steep hill.
‘Coming up to the demesne now, Miss,’ the driver called over his shoulder, ‘you’ll want to look out at the views here.’
Drystone walls surrounded the estate, lichen-covered and shrouded in mist. The tyres crunched over the long, winding driveway, past a few spindly willows.
The car stopped, and the driver opened the door for Marion. She stepped into the icy fog and looked up at the house, inhaling sharply at the sight. It wasn’t just a house. It was a manor. It rose from the high hill, forbidding and bare, dark against the milk-white winter sky. A mesh of dead tendrils covered the pockmarked old facade. Clinging ivy, hacked at the roots. A few dead leaves rustled on the front steps.
The countryside was open on all sides, with curdling fields of brown and grey, frozen tufts of high grass receding into a low bank of dense pines, under the misty humps of higher hills. The surrounding hamlets and farms were shielded in the shadows of the brownish hills. It seemed the loneliest spot in the world.
Marion gazed at the tall, black front door. For a fleeting moment, she imagined crossing that threshold on John’s arm, w
ith a white veil billowing around her, fine cobweb lace, thin and glimmering as moonlight.
John got out of the car and glanced up at the house with a wry smile. ‘Dreary old pile, isn’t it?’
Marion opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment, remainder of the cortege ground to a halt in the driveway, and Brock emerged from a grumbling truck, coughing pipe smoke. ‘Ah, John,’ he called, flapping his arms in the cold, ‘here we are at last, then.’
John ambled over to greet Brock.
Silent servants emerged from the house to unload the luggage.
Marion’s heart shrank in her chest. He’d brought Brock along. Of course he had. She knew that. She’d seen him get into the truck that dawn on the curb on Merrion Square, growling about how Hettie wouldn’t be joining them because of her nerves. Can’t deal with the strain, he’d said, feeble woman, I should’ve bloody well left her behind in England. Marion had hated him for saying that, and she hated him now for chattering at John and prodding his arm and taking all his attention.
They went inside, Marion trailing behind with the servants and a few men from Brock’s staff. The marble hall was lofty but narrow, like an old-fashioned museum. From deeper inside the house came the smell of old wood polish and chimney soot. But there were other smells as well, fainter. Marion crinkled her nose. Wet leather. Metal. Sweaty bodies.
She started when someone gently tugged at her arm. A chambermaid with hair the colour of peat nodded at her. ‘I’m to show you to your room. If you’d like to come through, Miss.’
Marion followed, glancing over her shoulder. John was walking up the wide staircase, with Brock still babbling at him incessantly, nudging his arm.
The maid brought her through narrow hallways and parlours, all cluttered and lightless, stuffy with velvet and tassels and porcelain figurines. Over everything hung a faint feeling of disinterest, as if nobody had really loved those rooms for years and years.
Paintings lined the walls. Old paintings from a more frivolous age. Sweeping green fields, great oaks and beeches billowing against a bright summer sky whirling with white clouds. These landscapes did not resemble the barren, windswept hills here. And there were no people in the paintings. They were all empty.
The maid opened the door to a bedroom with wallpaper the colour of a slaughterhouse floor. A great four-poster bed stood in the middle of the room, draped in heavy green velvet. The maid put down Marion’s suitcase on a silken settee at the foot of the bed. ‘Miss,’ she whispered, wiping her hands on her crisp white apron, her eyes wide and raw with fear, ‘tis not my place to be saying, but you should not have come here.’
She left, sliding the door shut behind her over the thick carpet.
Marion took out her pocket watch and tapped it with a finger.
Her throat tightened. The forty-eight hours were up.
Marion crept through labyrinthine corridors, searching for John with her hands outstretched in the dark, her velvet slippers silent as shadows over the threadbare carpets. No servants had come to light the lamps or kindle the fires. A smell of mothballs and soot hung in the musty air.
She passed a row of wide, lead-spindly windows and glanced out into the darkness. The hills were a black outline under a dim moon sailing through drifting clouds. Eilis’ words rang in her mind, the ancient hills and rivers of Éire still glow with the magic of old, you know. We really must go out West sometime, pet. And to Meath, to visit Baile Átha Triom, the ford of the elderflowers, and the Hill of Tara, the seat of the old High Kings of Ireland. When the war’s over and my country is free.
Marion pressed a hand to the frozen windowpane. The spirits of these hills were not singing of love spells and river gods. She closed her eyes and felt it seep into her bones. They made you hard and cold, these hills. They made you reach for twisted iron in the night, for rocks to crack skulls with when the moon was dark. For hunger.
Under a window stood a frail table, shaped like a crescent moon. Photographs covered its dusty surface. Marion picked one up and raised it in the glimmer of moonlight. A woman with her face obscured by a black mourning veil. Every inch of her was covered in black. None of her skin showed, not even her fingertips. A small dark-haired boy sat on her lap, gazing up at the photographer’s magnesium flash.
Marion put it down and picked up a leather-framed photograph tucked away behind the others. Her heart warped into a knot. John in his uniform, his English uniform. A captain with medals glinting on his chest. He stood staring into the distance, his ink-black hair swept back in that scar-like parting. His eyes looked dead as pebbles.
An image bloomed like mould in her mind’s eye. John lying dead somewhere in a ditch in those storm-swept, lonely hills. Shot in the back. She shouldn’t have let him walk away with Brock. She should have followed him, clung to his side, watched every movement around him. She’d find John now, she’d draw him away into a quiet corner and whisper to him about…
She froze.
A gust of cold air billowed through the house.
A door slammed.
Boots tramping, men’s voices barking, crass and loud.
Gunmen. It would be the gunmen. They’d found him already.
Marion dropped the photograph with a clatter and rushed from the room, cursing under her breath as she bumped her hip on a sharp table in the darkness.
She ran to the landing at the top of the great winding staircase, her heart pounding in her throat. Cowering in shadows, she peered over the banister.
They were not gunmen.
They were Black and Tans. Tall men with long leather coats, wet at the shoulders from the blustering mountain rain, stalking in through the flapping front door on gales of sleet-wind and the smell of pine and gasoline. Not filing in like soldiers or policemen, but prowling, jostling one another, slapping one another’s shoulders, chins held high but eyes darting sideways. One was tapping his revolver against his thigh as he marched in, swinging his arms as if beating out a tune.
In their midst, two men. Prisoners. One bent his head low, the other had to be shoved forward like a mule. Both were blindfolded and handcuffed.
Marion leaned over the edge, hands pressed over her mouth. This could not be real. John would never allow this.
‘What are you staring at them for,’ a voice rasped behind her.
Mr. Sidney appeared from the gloom of the hall, leaning on a crooked cane. A thin sliver of saliva gleamed on his drooping chin, but his eyes shone.
Marion drew back. Sid looked considerably older than when she’d last seen him, and sunken, as if his broad form was hollowing out. A faint smell of illness hung around him.
‘Come to leer, is it?’ He leaned closer. ‘Think you’re better than us, do you? I know what you are. A dirty Hun. Your lot do the same thing.’ He stabbed a crooked finger in the air. ‘Got to keep the rabble down, now that your old Kaiser’s not there to save your hides anymore.’
‘Mr Sidney,’ Marion gasped, ‘don’t let those men bring prisoners into your house, tell John about this, he’ll make them go away, don’t let-’
‘Some fucking neck on you, trying to lecture me. Your lot invented poison gas.’ Sidney scraped the corner of his mouth with a yellowed fingernail. ‘Your lot cleared trenches with flame throwers. Your lot crucified soldiers with bayonets.’ He made a stabbing motion with his withered left hand. ‘Bayonets through the thighs, the wrists, the bollocks, men left hanging on barn doors to bleed out and die.’
‘That’s a lie. That never happened.’ Marion’s hands trembled. ‘Where is John? I have to find John, tell him-’
‘A lie, is it?’ Mr. Sidney leaned closer, rasping for breath. ‘Half those men down there served in that war, if not all of them. On the Western Front. They saw. Oh, they saw it all. Why don’t you go down there and tell them it’s all lies?’
Marion recoiled and looked around desperately. ‘John, where is-’
‘Oh, but you don’t care about that, do you now? I know why you’re here,’ Sidney wheezed.
‘And I’m telling you now, I’m not going to let you ruin my boy. You think you’ll ever be a bride in this house? Over my dead fucking body.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know what you are,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘I know what you did in the war.’
Marion stared at his slack mouth, swallowing thickly, her heartbeat cramping in a dull thud of panic.
‘I know everything about you. All your filthy, rotten secrets.’ Mr. Sidney leaned back, nodding to himself, his watery eyes glowing with satisfaction. ‘See, it all makes sense now. Why you were so desperate when you first arrived on these shores. I could smell it a mile off you. Lost your nerve, eh? Desperate to get away from all your dirty dealings in Germany. And you better believe I’m going to tell-’
‘Leave her alone, Sid.’
Marion started and spun around.
John came stalking out of the shadows, glaring at Sid. ‘Go back to your place by the fire. Go stay warm. Go on, now.’
‘No, John,’ wheezed Sid, ‘you will listen to me now, this is all your fault, you’re after bringing those Tan madmen into my house-’
‘Yes, well,’ said John through clenched teeth, ‘they’re here to protect you, Sid. Wouldn’t want to get shot now, would you? I’d say you haven’t seen a gun up close since your last hunting party back in 1908.’
Marion stared from one to the other, gulping back a painful knot in her throat. John had brought the Tans here.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ Sidney rasped, ‘this is not your estate yet, you should’ve asked-’
‘Have you gone deaf? Go back to your room, Sid. Now.’
‘You will listen to me! Now you’re after bringing that,’ Sid flailed an arm at Marion, ‘that bloody whore into my-’
‘Talk about her like that again, and I swear to God…’ John narrowed his eyes and stepped closer. Marion had never seen a look of such malevolence on his face. For a moment, she thought he was going to shove the old man down the stairs.