The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  As the clock strikes eight, the people around him stop talking and look upward. A door at the rear of the scaffold opens and a tall priest in full canonicals steps onto the platform followed by one of the condemned men—William Allen. The priest is reciting the liturgy, and Allen, who appears frail and weak-kneed, is responding. Christ have mercy on us. Lord have mercy on us. Their entwined voices are faint but clear. Allen glances out at the crowd, then looks away again. Calcraft the hangman appears next on the platform, followed by the other two prisoners, O’Brien and Larkin, each with a warden and an intoning priest in tow. Allen’s eyes are closed and his pinioned hands are raised up in clumsy prayer. The priest is whispering into his ear. Calcraft fits and tightens the nooses, binds their ankles, and puts a white cotton bag over each man’s head. O’Brien edges sideways and kisses Allen clumsily on the cheek. Larkin’s legs buckle and there is a small commotion as one of the priests and a warden struggle to keep him upright. Calcraft, unperturbed, moves back and forth along the platform, checking and readjusting the fastenings with the quick, fidgety expertness of a tailor sizing suits. He gazes briefly at his work, nods in satisfaction, then steps away. O’Connor hears the caw of a crow like a dry cork being pulled from a bottle and, from over near the river, a clatter of cartwheels and the whinny of a horse. For a long moment, the three men stand side by side beneath the heavy oak crossbeam, separate but conjoined, like rough-hewn caryatids, and then with a startling suddenness they are gone. Instead of their breathing, living bodies, there are only the three taut lines of rope like long vertical scratches on the prison wall. The crowd inhales, then gives up a long guttural sigh like a wave slowly pulling back from a beach. O’Connor shudders, swallows, feels a pulse of nausea sweep up from his stomach into his mouth.

  There is a pause, a silent gap, the crucial moment seems to have passed, then one of the ropes starts to twitch and swing and there are grunts of exertion from the fenced-off compartment below the platform. Boos ring out, then catcalls. The priests break off their prayers and peer downward. The rope continues its twitching, and Larkin’s bagged head bobs up and down like a half-hooked fish as Armstrong the apprentice executioner lifts the body up and tugs it down again to finish the job. Sweet Jesus, is it really so complicated to kill a man? O’Connor wonders. The rope, he thinks, the fucking drop. How difficult can it be?

  He turns and starts shouldering his way back through the dense and shifting crowd. Out of habit, he looks around as he moves, checking for familiar faces. Off to the left, thirty feet away, he notices Tommy Flanagan standing alone, wearing a greasy beaver hat and smoking a meerschaum. Of course, O’Connor thinks, if any man is going to ignore all dictates of wisdom and good sense, it will likely be Thomas Flanagan. He stands awhile and looks at him. Flanagan sucks his pipe, blows out the gray smoke, blinks, and glances upward. He is a short, scrappy-looking fellow, with thick black eyebrows, sucked-in cheeks, and a nose too large for his narrow face. He looks, as he always does, much too pleased with himself. You might think he had just won at the horses, not witnessed three of his countrymen being hanged by their necks until dead. O’Connor moves closer in and tries to catch his eye. When Flanagan finally notices him, he frowns, then smiles quickly and nods his head in the direction of Worsley Street.

  Ten minutes later, the two men are sitting together at a small table in the rearmost private room of the White Lion. Flanagan is dribbling hot water into his brandy and O’Connor is watching. He has his notebook out on the table and a pencil in his hand.

  “You’re wondering what I’m doing here, I’ll bet,” Flanagan says. “Wondering why I didn’t stay in my nice warm bed, or go along to mass with all the others.”

  “Someone sent you, I expect. Told you to report back.”

  Flanagan sniffs and shakes his head.

  “Not so,” he says. “I’m here under my own recognizance. I’m not a man to be bound by the rules, you know that, Mr. O’Connor. I like to blaze my own particular path, don’t I?”

  O’Connor nods. That is how Flanagan likes to justify his various betrayals, so it is best not to quibble. He is a vain and trivial fellow, but he is well trusted by the Manchester Fenians and in among the general nonsense he talks, there is sometimes a gobbet or two of useable truth.

  “So a sightseeing trip, then, is it?”

  Flanagan frowns and looks suddenly solemn, as if the quip is in poor taste.

  “I wanted to be near them at the very end,” he says, “or as near as I could be. I’ve known Michael Larkin for a good long time. I know his wife too—Sarah she’s called. The others, Allen and O’Brien, were a little hotheaded, a little bit wild, I’ll grant you that, but Michael was a good family man. His four poor children orphaned and all for what?”

  “They’re not the only orphans hereabouts,” O’Connor says.

  “What happened with that prison van was just an accident. Everyone knows it. They tried to shoot the lock off the door and the poor bugger Brett got himself in the way, that’s all. It was never murder. It never was.”

  “It hardly matters now. What’s done is done.”

  Flanagan shakes his head.

  “It matters to the fellows I know,” he says. “Oh, it matters very much indeed to them fellows.”

  He pauses, blows the steam off his brandy, and takes a delicate sip.

  “It’s a nice wee drop, that one,” he says, “and I thank you for it, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “So they’re angered,” O’Connor says. “But is the anger likely to lead to anything else?”

  “It’ll lead to plenty, to plenty. I hear there are grand plans afoot.”

  “What plans are they?”

  “That I don’t know, but I know they’re fucken big.”

  O’Connor doesn’t answer. The plans he hears about from men like Flanagan are always big, yet it’s rare that anything much comes of them.

  “There’s a man being brought over specially from America, I hear,” Flanagan says. “A soldier from the war.”

  “What’s this man’s name?”

  “I don’t know his name. I just know he’s being brought over specially from America.”

  “Where’s he coming from in America, New York?”

  Flanagan shrugs.

  “Could be New York. Could be Chicago. He’s here to wreak some havoc, that’s what they say.”

  “I’ve not heard of anyone coming over from America. No one else has mentioned it to me.”

  “That’s because they don’t know about it. He’s a secret.”

  “Without a name, that’s not worth anything,” O’Connor says.

  “I’m telling you what I know. He’s sent here to take revenge for the hangings, show the world that we’re not weakened or afraid.”

  “If you don’t know his name, it’s most likely he doesn’t exist. He’s just an idea in someone’s head.”

  “He exists all right. They’re being extra careful with it, that’s all. They’re wary of spies.”

  O’Connor nods, then licks his pencil and writes a sentence in his notebook.

  “So you better watch yourself,” he says.

  Flanagan shrugs again. O’Connor stands up and puts a coin on the table.

  “Get yourself another brandy,” he says. “If you learn that name or anything else of value, you know whereabouts to find me.”

  Flanagan pockets the coin and nods his thanks.

  “Did you see poor Michael wriggling there at the end, Mr. O’Connor?” he asks. “Did you see it? Wasn’t that a terrible fucken sight? Just terrible. Can you imagine what the man was going through dangling half dead and half alive on the end of that rope with his wrists and ankles all bound? It’s a shame and disgrace, if you ask me. No one deserves to die like that. To have the very life dragged out of them in public, for all to see.”

  “Calcraft doesn’t know his trade. He’s
an oaf. They’d replace him tomorrow if they could, but no one wants to be a hangman these days. Who would?”

  Flanagan thinks on this a moment.

  “I’d consider the job myself if they ever asked,” he says. “Why not? If the money was right.”

  O’Connor looks down at him quickly, then shakes his head.

  “It’s the bottom end of the rope I’d worry about most if I were you, Tommy Flanagan,” he says, “not the top.”

  CHAPTER 2

  At the Liverpool docks, Stephen Doyle asks a porter for directions, then walks up the long hill to Lime Street Station with his knapsack slung across his shoulder and his legs still quaking from the eight-day voyage. Empty-eyed beggars call and hold out their broken billycocks to him as he passes, but he pays them no mind. He buys a ticket at the window, checks the times to Manchester, then takes a seat in the second-class waiting room. Through the wide windows, beyond the iron barricades, he watches the massive engines come and go. He counts them, then looks at his watch. Thirty trains an hour, he calculates, five hundred a day, or possibly more. The old man sitting beside him is eating plums out of a paper bag. The juices dribble pinkly into his white beard. On the platform, a guard in a neat blue uniform blows a tin whistle twice and raises a red flag.

  When the train halts at St. Helens Station, a young man dressed like a farmhand comes into the compartment and looks at Doyle carefully.

  “Are you the Yank?” he asks.

  “Who are you?”

  “I have a message.”

  He gives him a note and Doyle unfolds and reads it. It is signed by Peter Rice, the Manchester Center, and it warns him that there are detectives waiting at London Road Station with orders to stop and question any Americans arriving on the train from Liverpool.

  “Do I get off here?” Doyle says.

  “Next one. There’ll be someone waiting. I’ll show you.”

  Doyle nods and puts the note in his pocket. The young man sits down in a corner seat and stares out of the carriage window at the empty platform. He has fawn-colored down on his lip and cheeks, and his skin is greasy and pustulated. The train hisses twice, then starts to clatter forward. At Collins Green, they get off together and the young man leads him outside and points to a waiting hansom.

  “This is Skelly. He’ll take you where you’re going,” he says.

  “Do you know who I am?” Doyle asks him. “What did they tell you about me?”

  “They told me I’d know you by the scars on your face,” he says.

  “And what else?”

  He shrugs.

  “They say you’ve come to cause trouble.”

  Farms give way to quarries and brickfields, then to mills and lime works and rows of soot-stained terraces. Doyle can smell smoke and see the factory chimneys ahead, clustered against the rain-dark sky like scorched remnants of a ruined forest. They pass by the Exchange and follow an omnibus onto Corporation Street, then they turn again onto a narrower side street and come to a stop. Skelly leans down and tells him they’ve arrived. Another man appears, and Doyle is led through an unpaved passageway and into a shadowy courtyard crisscrossed with lines of dripping laundry. There is a pig rooting in the ash heap and a low, hot smell of rot and urine. The man knocks on a door, and Doyle hears the brief squeal of a bolt being pulled back.

  The room within is small and bare, two worm-eaten chairs and a table in the center, but nothing else. The light through the dusty windows is halfhearted and gauzy. Peter Rice gestures to one of the chairs, then sits down himself. He is a heavyset man, thick-shouldered. His grizzled hair is cut tight to his square skull and his features are fleshy and broad.

  “This is where you’ll stay,” he tells Doyle. “There’s a bed upstairs. I’ll have a woman come in to build you a fire.”

  Doyle looks about the room.

  “What about the neighbors? Do they know who I am?”

  “They know to keep quiet. You don’t need to worry about them.”

  “The boy gave me your note on the train. It’s not what I expected.”

  Rice shifts a little and rubs his nose.

  “It pays to be cautious,” he says. “It might have been nothing.”

  “There were police waiting at the station?”

  “That’s what we heard from the porters. That they were asking about any Americans coming in from Liverpool. That’s what we heard, but it might have been nothing.”

  “How many people here knew I was coming?”

  “Three or four.”

  “Can you give me the names?”

  Rice shakes his head, shifts his elbows, leans forward a little. His skin is pitted and grimy; the stubble on his jaw is thick and black as iron filings.

  “That’s not the way we do it,” he says. “You don’t come here and start asking us questions, suspicioning.”

  “How else would the police know I’m coming?”

  “They don’t know you’re coming. It’s guesswork, rumor, that’s all. They don’t even have a name.”

  “Who starts the rumor?”

  “Mebbe someone in New York. Ever think of that? From what I hear, New York is full of traitors.”

  Doyle breathes twice, then shrugs. Kelly has already warned him about Peter Rice: He is loyal to the cause but jealous of his authority and mistrustful of strangers.

  “I need to be sure before I start off,” Doyle says. “I can’t take any risk.”

  “Before we attacked the van no one talked. Twenty-five men and not a whisper. You should remember that, before you start thinking about finding any spies in Manchester.”

  “Men change—get scared or greedy. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Rice shakes his head.

  “In America they might but not around here.”

  Doyle nods.

  “Colonel Kelly told me you were your own man,” he says. “That you might not like taking orders.”

  “His letter don’t mention taking any orders. It says I should offer you my help when required and that’s what I’ll do.”

  Doyle takes a pouch from his pocket and fills his pipe. He offers the pouch to Rice, but Rice shakes his head.

  “If a Manchester man were to get an urge to talk to the police, how would he do it?”

  “There’s a detective office in the Town Hall on King Street.”

  “Do you keep a watch outside?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “But not always?”

  Rice gives him back a sharp, skeptical look. Doyle reminds himself to be careful. If he treads too hard he will lose him completely and it’s much too soon for that.

  “We have a boy watching in the daytime,” Rice says, “but there’s no one there at night.”

  Doyle nods.

  “And if someone goes to the Town Hall intending to talk, which detective do they ask for?”

  Rice shakes his head and sniffs.

  “No one goes to the Town Hall,” he says. “No one talks.”

  “But if they ever did?”

  Rice pauses before answering. The pig snorts in the courtyard. A baby begins to wail.

  “There’s a head constable named James O’Connor,” he says. “They brought him over from Dublin six or seven months ago. He likes to put himself about, ask questions.”

  “Do you know where he lodges? His address?”

  Rice shakes his head.

  “But I could find it out easy enough.”

  “I want to be sure, that’s all,” Doyle says. “You understand. I can’t start this until I’m sure.”

  “Take your time,” Rice says. “Wait if you want to. No need to rush in.”

  Doyle nods and looks around the empty room.

  “When that woman comes, I need an oil lamp and a bottle of whiskey,” he says.

  “I’ll
pass the message on.”

  Rice has a ragged crêpe band tied around his right arm. Doyle looks at it and nods.

  “How were they captured in the end? Kelly didn’t tell me.”

  “The peelers got them on the Gorton brickfield. Larkin was too sick to run quick, and the other two stayed back to help him.”

  “The British did us a service with the hanging,” Doyle says. “If they were locked in jail the names’d be forgotten next year.”

  “They died for their country,” Rice says. “I don’t call it a service. I call it murder. Them boys are martyrs.”

  “At Gettysburg, I saw a thousand killed in a single afternoon. They stacked the bodies up like cords of firewood. You could say those men were martyrs too, except no one’s making songs about them.”

  Rice narrows his eyes and tilts his head back.

  “Why would a white man risk his life fighting for the Negro? I always wondered that.”

  “I didn’t join the Union army to free any Negroes. I joined because a man with waxed mustaches and shiny brass buttons on his coat offered me twenty-five dollars and a glass of beer. I wasn’t a soldier when the fighting started, but I turned into one quick enough. I had to. Then afterward I found I had a taste for it.”

  “And now you fight for Ireland.”

  It is not a question, but it nearly is. As though there are degrees of loyalty and conviction, Doyle thinks, and Rice is wanting to show him where he stands.

  “I was born in Sligo; I left there when I was thirteen. Do you doubt me, Peter?”

  Rice shakes his head and frowns as if he doesn’t understand the implication.

  “Why would I ever doubt you?” he says.

  * * *