by Nina Dreyer
Behind her, Fr. McSorley sniffed in the cold. ‘Yes, a very pretty little poem. But would you not rather say a prayer with me, Miss Hahn? For the repose of her soul.’
Marion shook her head. ‘She knows what I’d say to her. She knows what I’ve done. I think she does.’ She reached out and touched Eilis’ headstone one last time, sliding her fingers over the chiselled inscription. ‘What does it say?’
McSorley read out the words in a quiet voice, touching his lips lightly with a crooked finger. ‘My body to Ireland, my heart to Ireland, my soul to Our Lord.’
Marion nodded and closed her eyes. She thought of the poem of Aedh, the love-sighing god of the Irish dead, Eilis smiling over his words, dreaming of the stars entwined in his dark hair in halls of shimmering midnight. She hoped Eilis had found her starlit god of the dead, somewhere on the far side of the outer darkness.
McSorley glanced down at her. ‘Don’t you want to know who killed her?’
Marion wiped her eyes. ‘No. It ends here.’
A little brown sparrow fluttered its wings on a branch of the yew tree and took off into the hazy mist.
‘No, it doesn’t end here. Not for you.’ McSorley grimaced and inched away from her, gravel crunching under his heels. ‘Now listen, your mystical friends have all run away. Your two accomplices, Charles Kavanagh and George Simard, they’ve already taken themselves off. Saved their own skins. Very sensible of them.’
Marion thought of the two of them, floundering around in the Salon parlours, trailing whiskey fumes and slurred songs. They’d loved John too, in their own way. ‘They never harmed anybody,’ she said quietly, ‘not really.’
McSorley pressed his lips together. ‘Word’s reached us that your man is vanished,’ he said. ‘John Kilcoyne.’
Marion looked up at the bare, dripping branches splintering the smudged sky. ‘John is… not here anymore.’ She thought of him, broken, huddled and alone in a lightless cell, and her heart sank.
‘You know he’ll be found. Sooner rather than later. You’re still on the death list. Both of you,’ McSorley whispered as he glanced over his shoulder, ‘the IRA are on your trail, Marion, they already know you’re back in Dublin. They will find you in a matter of hours. Now, you’ve never heeded a single thing I’ve ever told you, but if you value your life, you’ll leave. Leave now. You’ve said your fond goodbyes, now pack up your things and flee while you still can. There’s a boat out to Holyhead at noon, you-’
‘No.’ Marion rose, brushing the soil from her skirt. ‘I have unfinished business here.’
‘I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, and I don’t much care. Are you trying to commit suicide,’ McSorley said, raising his voice, ‘is that what this is? You’ve somehow managed to survive the Cork flying columns, they meant to burn you alive, for Christ’s sake, and yet here you are again!’
Marion closed her eyes and tried to suppress the images of the howling fire, the men approaching from the dark hills with rifles aimed, the blazing orange heat and sparks bursting into the sky, the stench of burning hair, the weight of John as she’d struggled to carry him down the smouldering staircase.
‘If you won’t listen to me, then at least do it for Eilis,’ McSorley hissed, ‘do you think she’d want you to throw your life away like this? Do you?’
Marion sniffled and pulled her coat more tightly around her. ‘Eilis would want me to set things right.’
‘You can’t set things right. You’ve had your chance, the IRA will kill you when they find you. You have not been forgiven. And you will not be forgiven.’
‘I know.’
McSorley curled his fists over his mouth and groaned. ‘For God’s sake! There is no reason for this, there is no reason for you to die like this, why can’t you see that, the dogs have been set on you, they can’t be called off, why can’t you just see sense and leave?’
‘Because I have blood on my hands. I have debts to pay.’
‘And that’s worth more to you than your own life?’
‘Yes. It is.’ Marion breathed deeply, inhaling the chill. She looked up at the priest. His eyelids were tinged with blue, and he was staring at Eilis’ gravestone and faintly shaking his head, as if willing all of this to be some nightmare. ‘None of this was your fault,’ Marion said quietly. ‘There was nothing more you could have done. Remember that, in the years to come.’ She reached out and hugged him, hard and brief. McSorley stiffened, wincing as if he’d bitten his tongue.
‘Goodbye,’ Marion whispered, smiling sadly. ‘Pray for us all.’
McSorley just darted his eyes over her, dry lips parted, with a look of loss and bewilderment in his face.
Marion turned and walked down the gravelly path, past the endless rows of neat graves, under the shadow of a great marble angel with his hand raised to the grey heavens.
McSorley did not follow her. And he did not wish her luck.
Chapter Thirty Three
That evening, Marion walked up the broad granite steps to the asylum, mist swirling in her wake. Distant church bells tolled six times. The Angelus. The visiting hour. She clenched her purse tightly under her arm and pushed open the heavy front door.
Sparse light bulbs cast hard angles of light over the cold corridor. Marion let the door groan shut behind her. Wooden signs nailed into the stone walls pointed to the reception. Marion made her way over the stone-paved floor.
The reception room was small and smelled of paint, disinfectant and damp overcoats. Wooden benches lined the walls. An elderly woman in a felt hat sat quietly sobbing in a corner, rocking a small boy on her lap. A little yellow toy truck lay on its side by her scuffed shoes.
A brown iron radiator pinged and crackled under a wide window in a wooden booth. Behind the glass sat a nurse in a stiff white cap, flicking through a ledger and nibbling the end of a pencil.
Marion tapped the glass. ‘I’m here to visit John Kilcoyne, please.’
The nurse looked up briefly, then glanced back at her ledger, tugging at her lip. ‘Oh. I’m afraid… One moment.’ She scraped back her chair and hurried into a back room.
Marion clasped her hands. Her fingers felt clammy and cold.
After a while, Dr. Grey emerged from a side door, inching towards her with a wary look in his eyes.
Marion straightened herself and tried to calm her pulse. ‘I’m here to visit John Kilcoyne.’
Dr. Grey cleared his throat, glancing at the ceiling, his feet, the sobbing woman in the corner. ‘Afraid that’s entirely out of the question.’
‘No, it’s the visiting hour, how can-’
‘The patient you request is being kept in strict isolation, it is, I’m afraid, a medical necessity, nothing must disturb-’
Marion took a step towards him. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said through clenched teeth, ‘I have to see him. I have to. Now.’
Grey shied back, as if he thought she was going to latch onto him and claw at his face. ‘As I’ve just made abundantly clear, the patient must not-’
Marion clutched her purse more firmly to her chest. ‘Please listen to me. This is my last chance to see him.’ A hot pressure gathered in her eyes. ‘My last chance to,’ she swallowed, ‘to say goodbye to him.’
‘Well it’s out of the question if you’re going to become hysterical.’
Marion drew in a ragged breath. ‘I am composed. I am.’
Grey sighed. ‘Grand, I suppose we can make this one exception, then. But only for five minutes, and you’re not to upset him, do you hear?’
Marion nodded.
Grey led her through a glass door. Panes of sea-green glass cast a strange, underwater glow over the vaulted stone corridor. Metal doors lined the wall on one side. Like in a prison. Faint moans echoed under the low ceiling. Somewhere deeper inside the building, wails sounded.
‘Now, don’t be expecting much conversation from him,’ said Dr. Grey, jangling a set of iron keys, ‘or any conversation, as a matter of fact. He’s in a very poor state.
Catatonic. That means unresponsive. You understand what unresponsive means, don’t you?’
Marion nodded. Her eyes felt gritty, as if full of ashes. ‘What are his hopes of recovery?’ She struggled to keep her voice still. ‘Tell me honestly.’ She didn’t ask if he was in pain. She already knew the answer.
‘Recovery?’ Grey pursed his lips and tutted. ‘None at all, I’d say. None whatsoever. His central nervous system has been shattered. He really ought to be transferred to the Richmond War Hospital just around the corner, but his symptoms are too severe for them to handle.’ He glanced at his wrist watch. ‘Now, come along quickly, there’s a dear.’
Grey led her up a flight of concrete steps and down a long, dim corridor. The stale air smelled of lye soap and unwashed linen. John would hate that. He always wanted his shirts laundered to perfection.
‘Now.’ Grey stopped at the very end of the corridor and lifted a black key. The light of a single bulb glinted in his metal-framed glasses. ‘This is the isolation wing of this institution. You will keep your voice down. You will not make any noise.’
‘I will be very quiet,’ said Marion.
The doctor nodded briefly. ‘I don’t have time to sit in on your visit. So when you’re done, just go back through this hallway, back down the stairs, and down along to your right, down the front hallway and to your left, and call for a nurse to show you out. Wouldn’t want you to get lost in here.’
Marion gazed at the moss-green metal door. ‘How often do you tend to him,’ she asked quietly.
‘Oh, not often. As I already explained, he’s in isolation. A nurse will check on him again sometime tomorrow night. He won’t take any food at all. And he seems to be chewing through his own tongue, so we may have to employ a metal mouth clamp soon, and force-feeding through tubes. But don’t fret over that, it’s a purely routine medical procedure.’
Marion felt the back of her neck grow cold.
‘Now, as I said, you can have five minutes with the patient.’ Grey unlocked the door and opened it, scraping it slowly over the concrete floor. ‘Shouldn’t take much longer to say your farewells. He won’t recognise you, after all.’
Grey’s brisk footsteps receded down the echoing corridor.
Marion pushed the heavy door fully open.
The cell was dark, windowless, the size of a coffin. Cold, watery light from the corridor slanted over bare stone walls and a bare stone floor.
Her hands fell to her sides.
On a stripped metal bed lay John, one leg curled up, the other shaking. His feet were bare, painfully curled up in hard spasms.
They’d put him in a straight-jacket. Even though his arm was broken.
Marion ducked inside the cell and knelt by the bed. Her shadow fell over his face. ‘How cold you are, my love,’ she whispered, ‘how cold.’ She shrugged off her coat and gently laid it over him, wrapping his shaking legs and feet in the thick folds of velvet and fur. A tremor jolted through him, and he arched his back, straining the leather straps on the straight-jacket, grinding his teeth.
‘Oh, John. What have I done to you.’ Marion wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sat down on the hard mattress beside him. ‘What have we all done to you…’ She stroked back his hair from his bone-white forehead.
His eyes were clamped shut, a pained frown chiselled in his face. Blood stained the corners of his mouth.
Marion leaned over him, breathing the scent of his skin over the leather collar of the straight-jacket. Nobody had come to shave him, and his chin felt rough and stubbly against her cheek. ‘You always knew I wouldn’t leave you here,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘didn’t you?’
Slowly, carefully, she began to undo the leather collar around his neck.
‘Breathe easy now, my love,’ she whispered, ‘breathe easy, and listen to my voice.’
Her purse clinked as she set it on the stone floor. Hettie had picked it out for her, that morning long ago in Clery’s. Burgundy damask with poppies embroidered in red and black crystals. She opened the silver clasp with a click.
A tin box with metal syringes.
Needles so sharp you wouldn’t even feel them pierce your skin.
The heavy brown phial of morphine.
She set them on the floor, where John wouldn’t see them.
John let out a groan, slurred, thickened. Perhaps a name. Perhaps a plea. Perhaps a curse. Marion gently loosened the leather straps around his wrists. ‘Do you remember the night of the ceremony,’ she asked, ‘how fine you looked. You were so proud, so tall. And nobody’s ever going to forget that speech you gave.’ She sniffled and slipped out a cold syringe from the tin.
‘We walked arm in arm, and everyone was looking at us. I was so nervous. Remember how you told me to smile? You were always telling me to smile, not cry, weren’t you?’
She took the phial, unscrewed the cap and pierced the rubbery film with the needle.
‘But you know what I remember the best?’ She smiled, blinking back tears. ‘You and me, alone by the fireside. All the others had gone home. That was the first time we were ever alone together. We drank brandy. You always did love your brandy.’ Marion cleared her throat and tried to keep her voice cheerful and easy. ‘Just you and me, there by the fire. I’d slipped off my shoes. You’d slipped off your tie. You smiled at me, there in the firelight, that crooked grin of yours, and I was so happy then.’
She drew on the metal clamp and filled the syringe with the sluggish, dark brown liquid, emptying the phial entirely.
Then she leaned closer to him, stroking his cheek. ‘Do you remember the night after Hettie’s dinner party? When we were alone in my house, by the fireside?’ She smiled, stroking his hair, and a warm tear trickled down her cheek, down her throat. ‘We played cards afterwards, in bed. You won every game. You always won over me. But I didn’t mind, John. I was so happy. I felt like a woman again. A real, living woman, with a future. Even though you ripped off most of the buttons on my best gown.’ She laughed softly through her tears. ‘I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all.’
John’s eyes slid half-open, faint light glinting in the burst blood vessels.
Marion snatched a breath and tried to catch his gaze, searching hungrily for a glimmer of recognition. Just one glimmer. Just one.
‘You had such great dreams,’ she whispered, resting a hand on his chest, ‘such impressive dreams.’ She leaned closer and breathed softly in his ears. ‘But so do I. And my dreams are kinder.’
A great tremor wracked through him again, and he trashed, jerking his head back, as if he was being stretched and crushed from the inside, as if his bones were cracking under some unseen pressure.
Marion’s throat thickened. She searched his bared throat with trembling fingers. ‘Hush now,’ she whispered, ‘hush.’
She found a vein. And she sank the needle into his neck. ‘There might not be any light beyond the outer darkness, but there is light in my memories and there is light in my dreams.’ She plunged the syringe, slowly emptying it into his neck.
The light bulb in the corridor began to fizz and crackle.
She held his arms down. After a while, he stopped struggling.
John’s eyes grew wide, his pupils slowly narrowing to black pinpricks.
‘Be still now,’ she whispered, her voice cracking, ‘it’s all over now.’
Marion closed her eyes and rolled them back, sinking into the outer darkness, cold reality blurring into velvet darkness. She could feel his heart slowing, his breath weakening. ‘Hush,’ she whispered, opening her hand to him in the darkness. Palm up. An invitation.
She opened her eyes and saw him through the veil of darkness.
He lay very still now. His lips had a bluish tinge.
Marion felt the currents of rage and agony rising in him, clawed deep in him like barbed wire roots, the howls and storms of the war dead convulsing through his dying mind.
The light bulb in the corridor exploded.
Darkness.
Mario
n plunged her hands into the outer darkness, drawing her memories tightly around John’s fading consciousness, sheltering him in her dreams, pulling him to her with all her might, wrapping him in all her love and tenderness, away from the stench of mustard gas and the sucking mud, far down beneath the ragged imprints of the pole at dawn and the blood gurgling in trenches and gutters.
Leaning over him, she kissed his cold lips, swallowing his final breath. ‘I bind you to me,’ she whispered, reaching into the outer darkness and grasping his dead heart, glowing blood-red, ‘I bind you to me for eternity, I bind you and shield you in my memories, in my dreams.’
She felt his aching soul sinking into her own memories of soft linen and warm skin, her own dreams of hazy spring sunlight slanting through new beech leaves and blooming cherry trees, the two of them locked in each other’s arms under soft summer starlight…
His death came slowly, gently, morphine-warm, sweet as syrup and wilting violets.
After a long moment, Marion opened her eyes.
A sliver of moonlight illuminated John’s corpse. He looked peaceful now. She gently swept her thumb over the faint, puckered scar on his upper lip. Wiping her eyes, she placed his arms over his chest, just so. Peaceful. As if he was just asleep.
She looked up at the bare stone wall and sat for a long moment, blindly breathing the gaping emptiness around her.
Reaching into her pocket, she took out his sweetheart pin.
She pinned it to her chest, just over her heart, and raised his cold hand to it, pressing it to her.
Then she wrapped her arms around his dead body, crumpled down to bury her face in his chest and let out a low, raw wail.
Morning light glinted brightly in the wind-swept waves of Dublin Bay. The pier at Kingstown was crowded with passengers, nervous, shoulders hunched. Marion moved through them slowly, keeping her distance from the policemen and soldiers with their rifles. A low winter sun gleamed through streaky clouds. She dug the telegram from her pocket, glancing at the words again. Come see me off. Kingstown Docks at nine-thirty. Hettie.