The Convictions of John Delahunt

by Andrew Hughes

  Seeing Helen again became a preoccupation. I skipped afternoon lectures to walk home by Merrion Square, aware that she took a stroll in the enclosed park each day with her elderly governess, Mrs Bruce. The red-brick terraces of the square hem in a large and rambling pleasure garden, with tall trees, manicured lawns and serpentine paths. I had no key, so could only skirt the iron rail, but occasionally I caught Helen’s eye as she walked within.

  One afternoon, a woman with an infant in a baby carriage approached the gate from the inside. She withdrew a key from her apron and attempted to back out, but the sprung hinges of the gate closed against her. I took hold of the railing and said, ‘Allow me, madam.’ She thanked me, called me a gentleman, and didn’t mind that I walked past her into the garden.

  I crunched along the gravel path, past green benches and flowering shrubs. That day Helen was wearing a pale yellow dress that complemented her sloping shoulders. Her light brown hair hung beneath a white bonnet in corkscrew curls. Mrs Bruce wore a shawl despite the warm weather, and carried a clasped parasol. She had been employed by the Stokes family since before Helen was born, and she knew me well enough because I was a friend of Arthur’s. After greeting me, she asked how I had come to be in the garden.

  ‘I was invited in by my tutor, Professor Lloyd,’ I said, knowing he lived on the square. ‘But he had to return to college. It was so pleasant I decided to walk on alone.’

  I fell into step beside them, holding my wrist behind my back as my father used to, and enquired after the Stokes household.

  Helen moved a low-hanging branch aside with the back of her hand, as if parting a curtain. ‘What subject does Professor Lloyd teach?’

  I looked to see if she made sport of my white lie, but she seemed genuinely interested. ‘Well, he’s the chair of experimental philosophy,’ I said. ‘But he only teaches me one class, which is optics.’

  The governess asked if I meant the grinding of spectacles.

  ‘Why no. It’s the study of light and all its properties.’

  ‘Imagine.’ Mrs Bruce noticed another woman walking a little further ahead and said it was Mrs Saunders. She quickened her step. ‘I wanted to have a word with her.’

  Helen and I were able to drop back and we walked for a while in silence. With each stride, a slim shoe emerged from the bottom of her skirt, then disappeared once more.

  I thought of a question. ‘Was your absence noted when we went to Thomas Street last week?’

  She said she managed to sneak back into the house unseen. ‘They thought I was in my room the entire time. What about you?’

  ‘I tend to come and go from the house as I please. I’m rarely missed.’

  We were strolling through a circular arbour, sheltered by newly green branches of ash that wove together overhead. In front of us, Mrs Bruce and Mrs Saunders emerged on to the sunlit path. Helen moved closer and took my hand. Her neck craned as she put her lips against my cheek, and she exhaled through her nose, which I felt down my jaw and beneath my collar. The arm she clasped was pressed firmly between us, against the smooth fabric of her dress, along her side and the top of her leg. I could smell sweat beneath her perfume. After a moment she disengaged, and stepped quickly on to the main path behind her governess.

  That April, an election took place among ratepayers to select a poor law guardian for the St Stephen’s Ward. The new Repeal Association put forward a candidate, and on election day they left little to chance. To ensure a full turn-out at the hustings, they employed the canvassing abilities of a large number of coal-porters from the north quays, who were provided with cudgels and hackney cars to escort reluctant electors to the meeting. A menacing body of such men also stood at the back of the hall, to remind hesitant voters of the consequences should they display a want of patriotism. Several prosecutions were brought after the election, for threats and actual assault on voters.

  There was one case in particular. Captain Craddock, a retired military gentleman of Leeson Street, declined to vote because of poor health. On the evening of the election, three canvassers gained entry to his house, dragged him from his sickbed, and beat him in his own chamber.

  A few days later I left Trinity by the front gate, intending to go straight home, but stopped at the window of a curiosity shop on College Green. An item in the corner had caught my eye, and I checked to see if I had enough money to buy it as a gift for Helen, but I was a few pennies short. It was a Chinese finger-trap. A little further up the street, some men had gathered around a printed proclamation. The notice described the assault on Captain Craddock and offered twenty pounds for information that led to the discovery and conviction of his assailants. I examined each detail on the poster. My eyes lingered on the amount.

  When I got home I went down to the kitchen. Miss Joyce was at work near the stove, attending to a pot of bubbling stock. She had already arranged a tray to bring up to my father, containing a glass of claret, an empty soup bowl and a folded newspaper.

  The front-page article dealt with the Craddock case. I paused at the table and began to read.

  Miss Joyce noticed me and said, ‘I believe that poor man is at death’s door.’

  It didn’t say so in the report. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘His housekeeper is a friend of mine. Mrs Skerritt.’

  ‘Did she see what happened?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Does Captain Craddock have any family?’

  She looked at me over her shoulder. This was the most I had spoken to her in several weeks. ‘I believe he lives alone.’ She used the sides of her apron to carry the pot over to the table, and ladled some soup into the bowl. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I just feel sorry for the man.’

  She picked up the tray. ‘I must bring this to your father.’

  If I discovered some small piece of information about the attack, I could bring it directly to Sibthorpe and perhaps claim the reward. I went up to the study and retrieved a Dublin almanac, only a few years old. Its binding was of red leather with a paper inlay of marbled ink. I flicked through the pages, then scanned the list of addresses under ‘Nobility, gentry, merchants and traders’. The tip of my finger traced down the Cs to: ‘Craddock, Captain Nathaniel, 41 Leeson Street, lower’. There could be no harm in having a look. I found a hat, buttoned my coat and went to investigate.

  It rained as I walked over, and water dripped from a pediment beneath the stained-glass fanlight of Craddock’s home. Passing hansom cabs sprayed mud on the uneven pavement where I stood, impeding pedestrians. A moment after I knocked, the polished brass letter box opened and shut with a metallic click before the door was pulled slightly ajar.

  ‘Mrs Skerritt?’ The woman inside nodded, and opened the door further. Without pretence I told her I wished to enquire about the attack on her employer. The woman rubbed her hands nervously, as if she had been in distress before my arrival, and surprised me by asking directly if I had come from the Castle. I thought that an odd assumption to make, but I had arrived at an opportune moment.

  Without hesitation I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘For once your timing is good. I was about to send word.’ She said the Captain had regained consciousness for the first time since the assault, though he was driven to distraction by the agony of his injuries. ‘He groans and struggles to breathe. I fear he cannot survive long.’

  ‘In that case I should ask him about his attackers at once.’ I walked past her into the hallway. ‘Is he alone?’

  Her eyes darted to me, perhaps with suspicion.

  ‘I mean is he attended by his physician?’ She shook her head. ‘Then the best thing you can do, Mrs Skerritt, is fetch the doctor and inform him of the change in condition. I will glean what information I can and make sure Captain Craddock is comfortable in your absence.’

  She considered this for a moment. The concern for her employer was overriding, so she fetched a shawl and departed. I was left in the gloom of the hallway with the echo of its closed door.<
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  I climbed the stairs in search of Craddock. The first-floor drawing room had been converted into a bedroom, and there was a thick crack in the wood beside the keyhole. I gave the door a nudge and it swung inward loosely.

  Familiar odours assailed me, reminding me of my father’s chamber. Craddock’s iron bed was positioned between a shuttered window and the hearth. Two duelling pistols were mounted above the fireplace, crossed at the barrel. A small bedside table contained bloody rags and a stoppered bottle of red laudanum with brown sediment gathered at the bottom.

  Craddock himself looked small beneath the covers. His head was cocked back and away from me; his breath short and ragged. One eye was closed over by a swelling so neat and round it was like a tumour. Gashes and welts distorted his features, gouged in silver mutton-chop whiskers. Most striking of all were the colours. Like some demented jester, his face was painted in the deepest crimson and violet, flushed in the firelight. His shoulders and chest were dressed in stained bandages, girding his broken frame.

  When he failed to sense my presence I spoke his name. After a few seconds his head rolled towards me.

  ‘Sir, can you speak? You must tell me anything you can of the people who did this to you.’

  His dry tongue extruded and scraped along his lower lip. I looked around to see if there was a jug of water.

  My doubts as to whether he could speak at all were dispelled when he said, at the edge of hearing, ‘Is that you, Richard?’

  His son, I presumed. I leaned over the bed and tried to meet his eye. I told him that men had come to his house. I described how they had broken through his door and beaten him for failing to cast a vote. ‘They shall go unpunished unless you can tell me what they looked like, what they wore, how they spoke.’

  But it was no use. His good eye swivelled unfocused, and the few things he uttered were muted and nonsensical.

  Then an unsettling change came over him. Even in his mangled features I could recognize panic, but I couldn’t fathom its source. I soon gleaned that he simply felt the approach of a coughing spasm, which was terrible to witness. He gasped to fill his lungs before great racking coughs were dragged from his chest and throat. Every heave caused him to lean forward, compressing his broken ribs. After each cough he attempted to suck in air that wouldn’t come, resulting in terrifying inward groans.

  I stood above him, unsettled by my inability to help. I took his hand to offer some kind of comfort, but then realized his arm was broken, and that I was adding to his torment. I was sure he was about to expire, and began to wonder how I could explain his death to Mrs Skerritt.

  But the Captain’s fit subsided and the room quietened. I took up the bottle of laudanum. The label had no indication of dosage, but I couldn’t leave the man to this ordeal. Thinking back, I’m sure I believed an overdose was a lesser evil. I removed the tapered glass wand attached to the stopper, and watched the russet liquid form droplets at its tip.

  ‘One of them had a cleft lip.’ The Captain’s eye fixed on me for the first time.

  I put the bottle aside. ‘How many were there?’

  His eye began to waver, but he brought it back. ‘There were three. I first heard them on the stairs shouting my name. I left my bed to lock the door and fetch my sabre.’ I saw the sword propped in a corner. ‘They put a hole in the door and one stuck through an arm to turn the key. I sliced him across the knuckles.’

  I looked again at the door and spotted a smear of blood beneath the broken panel. That’s what earned him his beating. The men had only come to drag him to the polls.

  Craddock grew weaker as he described how they kicked in the door, wrested his sword away and began their assault.

  ‘You said one had a harelip. Are you sure?’

  He said he was. Also he thought the man he cut came from Belfast.

  He was spent. A tear ran from his good eye. ‘Let me drink the bottle,’ he said. I told him his physician was on the way. His eye began to wander again. ‘Let me drink the bottle.’ And he lost consciousness.

  Craddock’s chin slumped forward on red-flecked sheets. I took a deep breath and detected a tang from his soiled bedclothes. I went to the window and opened enough of one shutter to look outside. Mrs Skerritt was bustling from the corner with Pembroke Street; the doctor in tow was pulling at his lapels and hurrying to match her step. Skerritt’s gaze swept up and across the front of her house and I stood back from the window. I considered maintaining the charade – that I had been sent from the Castle to enquire about the attack. But the Captain was again unconscious, so what could result except time for them to ask searching questions and memorize my face?

  The front would be closed off by their approach. I slipped down the staircase and went back through the hall, then descended the stairwell leading to the basement. I heard the main door open. The gloomy passageway below went past sculleries and larders to the rear exit. I tried the handle and found it locked. Muffled voices reached me from the landing above. The keyhole was bare. I felt along the top of the lintel, scratched my thumb on an exposed nail, then brushed a key that fell with a clatter on the flagstones. I listened for a reaction. There was silence, so I scooped it up and turned the lock with a clunk.

  Craddock’s yard was long and unkempt, with heaps of rubbish and empty coal scuttles. A path ran down its centre, overgrown with weeds. I hastened through without looking behind, hoping that those inside were tending to the Captain in his front room. The perimeter wall was about ten feet high, but some intact masonry from a demolished outbuilding offered the means of scaling it. Standing atop the rubble, I leaped and grabbed the wall-cap with both hands.

  Still suspended, I scraped my right leg up towards the ledge and managed to catch my heel on top. In that ridiculous pose I had to pause and rest before attempting the final heave. A cat seated further along the wall in the neighbouring garden regarded my unseemly scrabble with mild interest, in the same way that I would observe him attempt a doorknob. I vaulted my legs over, maintained a grip as I lowered myself down the other side, and then dropped the remaining five or six feet, which sent a shock through my heels up to the knees. I found a stone, pitched it at the cat – who turned his head sharply as it sailed by, but was otherwise unmoved – and lurched down the lane towards St Stephen’s Green.

  The coal-heavers worked on Arran Quay, where the fuel was taken from barges, brought into Smithfield Market and distributed throughout the city by horse and cart. A few dozen men unloaded the cargo. One stepped nimbly along a gangplank, seized a coal sack by both corners and lifted it on to his back as if he was throwing on a cloak. Those broad shoulders carried the load as if it had no weight, but when he tossed it into a waiting cart, the bed shook and the horse flinched. He lifted his cap to wipe his brow, adding another dark streak to his face, then turned to retrieve the next bag.

  I’ve always been wary of coalmen, ever since I was very small. Our first maid used to threaten that if I misbehaved I would be carried away by the coalman in his empty sack. This was a real terror, and I dreaded the sound of that great grimy fellow clomping up the stairs to the wooden coal bin located just outside our nursery door. The thunder that came when he pitched in his heavy load, I can hear it now, and then the sound of his wheezing. He was just catching his breath, but I always thought he was weighing up my indiscretions, deciding if they warranted my abduction.

  I looked more closely at the coal-porters on the quay. Some wore gloves, but none carried his hand as if it was injured. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell if any had a misshapen lip.

  On the far side of Whitworth Bridge, an old stevedore stood alone near the quayside wall. He lifted both sides of his coat to rummage in a number of pockets that had been sewn into the lining; the stitches were visible on the outside as several haphazard scars. He seemed to satisfy himself that whatever he searched for wasn’t there, for he withdrew his hands, leaned against the wall on his forearms, and gazed over the Liffey.

  I went to stand beside him. When h
e looked towards me with a raised eyebrow I said, ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m trying to locate a particular man.’

  The old docker turned his face and spat into the river. ‘And does he wish to be found?’

  I smiled and said undoubtedly so. I told him I was a scrivener in a solicitor’s office, sent to find a man named in the will of a wealthy client recently deceased. ‘We were told he worked on the docks of Arran Quay, and so here I am. His name is Arthur Stokes.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I’ve made numerous enquiries now and all of them fruitless. You’d have thought it easy enough to find a man with a cleft lip.’

  He glanced at me, and I made a point of peering at the clock on the pepper-canister cupola of St Paul’s Church.

  ‘I do know of a man,’ he said, still wary. ‘Though not personally. I’ve seen him drinking several times in Nowlan’s up in Stoneybatter.’

  ‘Thank you. I might look there.’

  He cocked his head twice as if to say I could do as I wished, then walked away. He sensed he had spoken loosely.

  Smithfield Market was a maze of stallholders through which local children dashed barefoot. Vendors put lanterns over their booths as evening fell. On the pavement outside Nowlan’s, an old street hawker cried at me. She held dozens of rosary beads looped over her outstretched palms and up the length of her arms. Our family had had a Catholic nanny once, who prayed nightly with beads made from jet and amber. She showed them to me one evening, and tried to explain what they meant. I was only interested in the larger beads that symbolized the mysteries. It fascinated me, that the events of a man’s life could be remembered on a string of stones.

  Nowlan’s pub consisted of two large rooms connected by a single bar that ran the length of the wall. Labourers and dock workers sat on benches, where decades of grime had given every surface a polished black varnish. A group of well-dressed students occupied a table in one corner, most likely apprentice barristers from King’s Inns.