The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘Ach! You haven’t to look over your shoulder for a word. And you know how to use it; and to direct it. And your profession has trained you for disguise. You are not likely to get caught straight off the boat like the other chaps we sent over.’

  ‘Speaking of disguise, perhaps you could procure something to disguise my feet. They look so obvious without boots. Mine were removed for my leg to be dressed. They have vanished.’

  The millionaire soldier who refused to become an officer while pouring his wealth into the Federal funds—and now into the Fenian funds—could procure most things. Once Thomas’s foot had healed, John Holohan procured all the essentials to assure Thomas’s safe transit to New York, where he played in a Command Performance for Colonel Michael Corcoran of the 69th Regiment, back from his long imprisonment in Richmond.

  New York staged the greatest public display that the city had ever seen for Corcoran, the Irishman whose regiment had fought so gloriously. Under the shower of bouquets, in the midst of the handshaking and speeches Corcoran turned to speak to Thomas about his mission to Ireland. Briefly he outlined a plan of campaign. He talked rapidly in between frequent interruptions by dignitaries with testimonials. At last the din of bands and fire bells and church bells proved too much. Corcoran gave an exasperated shrug and turned towards the crowd. Thomas edged closer. He had absorbed his instructions. He wanted to say goodbye. The boat left for Ireland this very evening.

  There came a lull in the clangour. Corcoran called over his shoulder.

  ‘This,’ he said, as he waved his hand at the cheering crowd, ‘this is not for me. This is America on her knees to Ireland!’

  There was something different about the Fenians and their plans for rebellion. They were a brave, grim-faced band. Their firmness of will and organisation were even more impressive than their oath of secrecy and the guns they smuggled in from America. They were not like the men who had followed O’Connell or Davis. Even Cousin Maurice O’Carroll noticed it in the men who waited in his cave for the long oilcloth-covered weapons that were carried from off-shore vessels.

  ‘Do you know, Sterrin,’ he had said on his last visit to Kilsheelin, ‘I don’t think this next affair will fail. There is a frightening efficiency about these Fenians. They are not young hell-rakes of rebels. They are old-young fired by a relentless purpose. The famine did that; cheated them out of boyhood and fun. Even the military are leaning towards Fenianism. I drank a few noggins of claret at the club the other day with a Hussar officer and, by God, he made no secret of his sympathy.’

  Sterrin felt it, too. When she visited Denis, the blacksmith who had taken Dominic and her to the meeting, she heard similar accounts of the military sympathy. Denis had administered the oath to nearly every soldier in Clonmel Barracks.

  ‘They are ready to admit the Fenian insurgents when the time comes and fight side by side with them.’

  ‘And when will that time come?’ A man moved out of the shadows. Sterrin recognised Bergin. He always seemed to materialise from shadows. Later, Denis explained that Bergin was afraid. But it was a different fear from most. Something inside him had broken in the terrible settlement in New Zealand. He was chafing for the first shot of revolt; prepared to die therein; but to be caught beforehand for a lesser treason and Sent Over again was a prospect that he could not face.

  ‘Clonmel is not the only barracks to be taken over,’ said Bergin. ‘I’ve travelled all over the country, organising, and everywhere I have found disaffected regiments and pregnable forts. We are at the peak hour to strike, yet James Stevens counsels us to wait, and meanwhile he writes columns of highfalutin’ patriotism in the Irish People. He is not a soldier. He is a dilettante. The time that he, and others, is hoarding will not mount up like ammunition stored. It will melt in this fever of waiting like gold in a crucible.’

  ‘We must wait for the Americans,’ the blacksmith said. ‘It won’t be much longer. As soon as we’ve helped them to dispose of their own war, they will come and help us to win ours. They’ve promised.’ Bergin gave something like a snort. ‘I can’t see it happening. The Americans are not idealists. The moment their war is over they will rush back to their factories and their shops and their offices. Their first concern will be to restore their own prosperity.’

  Sterrin’s exasperation with the man broke its bounds. ‘Why must you be so bitter always?’

  Bergin looked down at her where she sat on a rough seat near the furnace and he spoke, a stumble of words and then a cascade. Here was another depleted life, thought Sterrin as she listened, like those Cousin Maurice had spoken of, who had been rushed through the forcing house of the famine from childhood to a grim manhood. He had been in the glory of youth, an athlete, hurler, footballer, the best dancer on any crossroads platform. He described how he had got the gash on that rollicking journey to the Carlow Races. Sterrin was stunned as she realised that she had witnessed that scene from the carriage window; that here was another of her husband’s victims. No wonder he hated her. Was it to punish her he was telling her this?

  The wound had festered. Erysipelas had developed. Women shrank openly from the sight of his face. This was far worse, Bergin said, than the horror of the convict settlement, worse than the slavery, the starvation, the floggings, the spectacle of hangings.

  Sterrin felt abused. Why must he lash this into me? Lash, lash, lash of toneless words!

  ‘Dammit!’ she rose angrily to her feet. ‘The day you got that lash I was four years old—Why should you—’

  He stepped closer. ‘You thought fit to ask about me being bitter. I’m sorry that I am slow at words. My own bitterness with life was cured by—by someone who loved you.’ He could hear her quick intake of breath. ‘A girl had promised to wait for me. I didn’t think to hold her to young promises, to bring her my battered face and spirit. But he told me that she would be waiting for me—that...’

  ‘Did he know her?’

  ‘He knew you.’

  She was startled. The quiet statement lingered in the quiet darkness.

  ‘He based his faith in all womankind on you.’

  And now it was her turn to pour forth a cascade of words. A young girl’s gush of eager questions about her sweetheart. What did he say about me? Did he say I was—How did he—Tell me more. He didn’t hear the words. They were unuttered; silent jets spraying through her hurt spirit.

  ‘I shall never forget his anguish that day when he came and told me that the plans for the elopement were off. You were married to someone else.’ The toneless words fell like stones. Where the spraying jets had bedewed was now aridity.

  ‘He consoled himself very quickly.’

  Bergin felt his own bitterness could scarcely equal hers. ‘Did he get married?’ He was startled out of his tonelessness.

  ‘I assume,’ she answered, ‘that the woman who was with him in Paris became his wife. They were together in Switzerland, too.’ He shook his head, too surprised to speak. He knew now that he would not tell her, as he had thought, that his bitterness towards her sprang from the memory of her walking hand in hand with Donal Keating along the river; gallivanting, as he had thought, behind her husband’s back.

  He scraped his throat and started to frame some embarrassed apology for his misjudgment, but she had jumped to her feet. She hadn’t come here to listen to his condemnation of her conduct—nor his self-pitying whining. Did he expect her to stand at the coach stop every night like—like the girl who had waited for himself?

  ‘You didn’t do too bad, did you? How many men have known similar misfortunes without being crowned with such success. You were able to buy a big estate. My husband wanted to buy it.’

  ‘That’s why I bought it.’

  ‘So that you could be within shooting distance of him?’ It was one of those utterances that seemed to escape from her unaware to startle her own ears. She waited for his outburst. But as though she had never uttered the terrible charge; as though he hadn’t heard, he said,

  ‘I owe my we
alth also to the man who loved you—and because of his love for you.’ He told her the story of the mine shaft abandoned by the London clerk who had hoped to marry his employer’s daughter. ‘It was sympathy with the young man’s hopes, because of his own aspirations, that made him go back and work it. We tried to argue him out of it.’

  She sat down again. Her knees felt weak. Nothing else. And out of that shaft that Thomas had tried—for her sake, was it?—Bergin had found wealth enough to enable him to come home and shoot her husband with the maximum of security. It must have been he—The hundreds of her husband’s victims had diffused suspicion; it was eerie, some thread of fate linking this man with her and her husband and with Young Thomas. So Young Thomas had made a fortune! The fallen shares had soared. It wasn’t just his salary as an actor! The old ache of yearning came upon her like a vapour. He had kept his promise. He had made a fortune for her. And then to go and throw it at the feet of another woman! God, how could he have comforted himself so quickly? And suddenly she thought she saw the explanation. He had probably been engaged to this girl that time when he had come to play in Kilkenny. Hadn’t he said something about having been told that she herself had entered a convent!

  She little knew how decorative she seemed to the two men as she stood there, tall and graceful. Denis spoke his thoughts.

  ‘My Lady. You do us too much honour to come here. You belong in high places. To see you there in your lovely cloak, one would think ’twas for a palace or a ball you were dressed instead of for my dirty old forge.’

  He would not take the hand she offered. ‘I’d dirty it with my black paws.’ He displayed the big, grimy palm, all calloused and blistered. She didn’t offer her hand to Bergin. Suddenly she felt that she couldn’t touch the hand of her husband’s murderer.

  55

  In the month that followed, Sterrin’s activities crowded out the thoughts of Thomas. There were too many victims of evictions to be succoured. Seldom a week passed that Sterrin did not journey to the scene of an eviction, her saddlebags bulging with food. The police and military were finding her an embarrassment. It was an offence to render assistance at these operations, but Lady Devine was a haughty piece, without fear. The rank and file level regarded the heavily-veiled face with something of superstitious dread. The officers with thoughts of intrigue. Was it true that the face had been hideously disfigured? Their eyes took liberties probing the veil, admiring the lissom grace of the proud head poised on the neck like some dark blossom on its stem.

  By accident, Sterrin chanced upon the eviction of Ryan Ha-Lad. The familiar thud of the crowbar reached her as she mounted the summit of a low hill.

  ‘My God!’ She spurred the horse and the next moment flung herself to the ground in time to drag an infant from beneath a lurching wall. The wall fell in on its back. It had a gay wallpaper; a tasty house, roofed with braided thatch. The falling rain bedewed the flowers on the wallpaper. Children screamed at the sight of the four walls that had held them in the happy safety of a home now lying prone and battered like murdered things. Their mother, too, lay prone. She was in the last stage of her labour; and then the heavens sided with the demolition squad. Their clouds opened and let down sheets of icy rain.

  A word of command sounded above the din. Police and military assembled to march away in proud formation. Sterrin barred the way of the first line. ‘You cannot leave these people like this. The woman needs immediate attention.’

  ‘Madam,’ the police officer replied, ‘we are representatives of the law. We had a duty to perform and we have performed it. We are not midwives.’

  She stopped herself from wasting her breath on outraged reproach. He was doltish and smug. He thought he had said something cleverly quelling. Instead, she reached to the kitchen table that lay upended.

  ‘Help me get this to that hedge,’ she said. ‘It will shelter her till the doctor arrives.’

  His neck swelled inside his tunic. He put a shiny gloved hand to his sword hilt. He, said the gesture, was a sub-inspector of police, with sword and epaulettes and the power of life and death over men.

  ‘Madam,’ he barked, ‘I warn you that you are violating the law that forbids intervention or interference at evictions. Stand aside!’

  He called out a word of command to his men. For answer, Sterrin jerked the massive table upwards and pulled it across the front line of men. The men, with right legs raised in precision for the first step, were thrown backwards on the line behind. Sterrin, assisted by some of the children, continued to pull the table until it was past the men and in the shelter of the hedge. When she tried to drag the woman beneath its shelter, she shrieked with agony. Cruelly, inexorably the bony gates of life were being forced open. With the imperishable optimism of the human race, another member was thrusting and forcing, demanding, pain by pain, its right to know hunger and cold and homelessness.

  ‘Take the baby! Miss, take the baby!’ The woman must be delirious. There was no sign of a baby except the one that was trying to play with the wallpaper. ‘Take it. Miss! Oh take it. It’s there.’

  Sterrin’s heart turned over. Deliver the baby, that’s what the woman meant. Nausea rose in her gorge. She had never been near a birth. Never heard the details. There was before; there was after; but there was a gross part and this was it. She dragged off her gloves. She groped down there but she couldn’t look. Her eyes fixed themselves on the flowers on the wallpaper but they denied her a focus. Rain was smudging them to a running blob of colour. Her fingers touched natal slime. They cringed with repulsion. Nausea rose again. And then, miraculously her fingers found their sensitivity. They thrilled to the contact of Life, frail, quivering but substantial. A wave of exultation surged through her. Fingertips that were separate entities grew over-bold as they drew the life away from its background of mystery. The woman cried out in panic.

  ‘The cord! Miss! Your Ladyship! The cord, you’ll choke the child.’

  Disgust returned. How could a woman with such a tasteful home use twine so sluttishly? Dear Lord, what was keeping Ryan Ha-Lad, her husband, with the doctor? A pleasant voice said, ‘How are you managing?’

  She straightened up. ‘I was beginning to—to manage, but she—she seems to have got herself—got the child entangled with cord or twine or something.’ It was one thing for a woman to secrete a packet of tea down the neck of her gown, but to have twine—in such a context—endangering a child’s birth! ‘It’s most careless,’ she said aloud.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ The doctor spared her a whimsical glance over his shoulders. A moment later he handed her the newborn child.

  ‘Have you never heard of the umbilical cord, Lady Devine?’ She hadn’t; but with instant knowledge grasped his meaning. She felt a thousand prissy fools. Why had it to be like this always, she thought, while she rummaged amongst the scattered furniture for baby clothes? This inane reticence about the most vital of all matters, life itself. The wonder of this mystery had never been described to her. But then who could have done it. Not her mother, surely. Nor the nuns at the convent.

  Someone was saying something to her. She couldn’t quite catch because the new baby was proclaiming its presence as loudly as if it had suddenly realised its folly in letting itself in for such an existence. Sterrin’s brain felt as sodden as her clothing. The only positive act she could recall having ever performed for a tiny baby was when she bit off Dominic’s nails when no one was looking, because Mrs. Stacey had said that that would keep the fairies from getting him. She stooped in a sudden and then it occurred to her to put the baby in its mother’s arms.

  In the poor little happy silence of their meeting Sterrin at last managed to catch what the man was saying. Fear flooded through all the crevices of her being. Another man’s voice said, ‘Are you mad? Do you realise what you are saying?’ Donal Keating sprang from the dogcart in which he had driven his brother-in-law to the patient. ‘Do you?’

  The sub-inspector did realise. He repeated his words. He said to Sterrin. ‘I arrest you
, in the name of the law—’ He went on to talk about her obstruction of himself and of his men in the performance of their duty. He omitted to say that she had made him a fool before his men; that there had been a suppressed snigger when she had turned their parade into a burlesque. All the time that he talked she observed how the macassar on his hair resisted the raindrops; and all the time the fear hardened within her until her mind was made up. That was what she was afraid of. Not of what he might do to her, but of what she knew that she was going to do to him. ‘I’ll kill him,’ she thought. ‘I’ll kill this bloodless popinjay, just as soon as it takes me to get home and get a gun. I’ll shoot him through clean as a whistle.’

  But there was no returning home.

  Sterrin could never recall the exact moment when the handcuffs were placed on her wrists. One minute there was a void in the girdle of her arms where the little soft body had nestled. The next, they were closed together, manacled at the wrists with an iron chain. There was a vacuum silence; like the aftermath of a great blast that has swept away the air. Sterrin found her voice. ‘Remove these!’ She said it as though it had but to be said to be obeyed.

  The officer gave a signal. Two policemen closed in on either side. Fear of a different kind swept through Sterrin. Panic! This was real. They were actually daring to lay hands on her—Sterrin O’Carroll. She didn’t think of herself as Lady Devine. They were going to shut her up some place. She brought the manacled hands down over the horse’s neck and tried to swing herself up. For the first time since she had learned to ride the pony with the fairy blood she bungled and staggered. For a moment she ran alongside the animal; her hands achieved the mane. With superhuman strength she held on until she was in the saddle with a ‘Yup, Clooreen’ and the mare breaking into its beautiful canter. Police and military jumped from her path. Sterrin was away.

  But not for long. Scarlet uniforms and uniforms of bottle-green ran alongside. The bridle was seized. The great, black horse reared up fearsomely; uselessly.