O’Bannion saw the sickness come into her eyes, but the moment soon passed. Not only could she get a grip on herself if needed but she’d figured things out for herself and had seen glimpses of truth in what he’d just said.
The Germans would have to know if U-121 had been taken and not scuttled off the Orkneys as had been reported in the press of last January. They’d have to know if the British were not now reading the German navy’s coded transmissions.
‘He wants to escape. I know he does,’ she said emptily, ‘but he hasn’t said this to me.’
Her eyes were downcast, she trying to fight back the tears. ‘You’ll do as we tell you,’ said Nolan—Mary knew it was him, and that he wasn’t the leader after all. Grimly she nodded and tried to face them, begged herself to do so.
Fay touched the woman’s lovely soft hair, making her jump and look up.
Kevin was the one to say, ‘We’ve a meeting place, Mrs. Fraser. When the right time comes, we’ll tell you of it.’
‘You’ll be blindfolded,’ said Fay. ‘I’ll be the one what comes to take you there.’
They left her then—left her in the middle of nowhere again but with a British Army service revolver, she standing alone amid the clutter, weeping buckets and not knowing what to do.
‘Bastards!’ she softly blurted. ‘You’re all bastards, Erich especially!’
Kevin O’Bannion watched her from the seclusion of the woods. Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser pushed the bicycle out into the fleeting sunlight to stand there a moment. Then she did a curious thing for a woman who must surely wonder what must happen to her in the end. She lowered the bicycle to the ground and ran trailing fingers through the thickness of the waist-high Michaelmas daisies that crowded about her. Slowly, as if coming out of a dream and not a nightmare, she began to gather a bouquet and to smell them frequently, as though to banish the stench of what she’d just been through.
When enough of them had been gathered, she found a wisp of straw and wrapped it tightly around the stems several times before tying it. First the gun went into the carrier basket, then the folded jacket and lastly the bouquet. He was impressed, for she would use the bouquet as a talking point if stopped on the road and questioned.
Leaning the bicycle against the wall of the smithy, she picked her way through to the house. Hesitantly she nudged the door open a crack to peer in and then, finally, to step inside, causing him to be dumbfounded at such a summoning of courage and resilience. He knew she’d find among the refuse on the window sill the cast-off boots whose laces were gone, knew she’d find the faded amber of forgotten photographs, the dark brown empties of Guinness, the broken teacups, littered straw and cobwebbed gas mask Padrick Darcy had once used in the trenches of France. The enamelled plaque of the Christ, too, with the words, Wherever I am hung, I am present.
Mary knew she was being watched even as she looked out through the window and tried to appear preoccupied, and when, having set down a still half-filled, stoppered bottle of tincture of iodine, she brushed the dust from her fingers and decided that it was time to leave, she came outside.
Kevin—she still did not know his last name—met up with her on the path, she saying only, ‘It was cruel of you people to have left me like that, but I got over it soon enough.’
‘Are you really carrying his child?’
‘You’ll have to wonder about that just as I’m wondering myself.’
The water was hot and when she had lowered herself into the tub, her skin grew pink. Steam floated about the place. Stretching out, Mary tilted back her head and shut her eyes, let herself go limp, went right under. She had to unwind, was still far too tense. It had taken guts to have ridden into Ballylurgen with that revolver in the carrier basket but she’d forced herself to do it, hadn’t wanted them to think her weak, had known they’d somehow still be watching. The Irish made good sausages and even though rationed, she had managed a pound and some kippers. One couldn’t trample kitchen toes at home, though, so she hadn’t bought someone else’s soda bread and barmbrach that was light with beaten eggs2 and yeast yet so well speckled with dried fruit she had momentarily forgotten the war. Both Catholic shops of course, both Republicans, it being that sort of day.
A fruit tart and then a custard one had been for herself, secretly and hastily eaten on the road home but enjoyed … yes, enjoyed, crumbs and things dribbling down her chin in spite of feelings of guilt, of starving, war-torn children, and then a few shortbreads—had she been eating for two, or simply because she’d been so darned scared?
In a rush, she surfaced, gasping for air as the water coursed off her. She had wanted to see Parker O’Shane at his farm. Wizened, bent, thin and with a sharply pinched face, Parker’s skin had the look of oak tannin. Bound leather was always at the knees of his trousers and down over the laces of his boots, not canvas there for him, the pipe clenched and the scythe going with the rhythm of the centuries. ‘A cutting of the hay it is, missus,’ he’d always say. ‘And you like the blush of an April morn. Them cows of mine be powerful eaters.’
Parker was Mrs. Haney’s half-brother, so he had the inside track on herself both ways and yet they had a common bond they could explore and enjoy. A trade-off she had welcomed, thereby having gained his respect, a rare thing for an Irishman and not given lightly to an outsider, especially not in these troubled times.
But she couldn’t have gone to see him today. Parker would have noticed the burs and weed seeds that still clung to her clothes, the mud on her shoes. He would have known she hadn’t just been ‘out and about’ but precisely where she’d been, and if not by those, then by the look in her eyes.
Again she tried to let the warmth sooth her, but Mrs. Haney would hear the silence, for the bath was directly above the kitchen range, the woman wondering at it, for a body ought to be scrubbing a body’s skin to ‘murder and Creation’ with the bristles of a murderous brush.
Carefully budgeting the prewar glycerine soap, she did a thorough job of it, and always there was the blessed relief of gurgling water as it ran away and took its time, giving some few moments of privacy.
They had her right where they wanted. She couldn’t go to the police or to Jimmy Allanby—Hamish’s life had not only been threatened, he’d be ruined, devastated.
Everything came back in a rush, the Darcy woman, Liam Nolan and Kevin … Would Parker let slip that one’s last name if she was careful—had she stooped so low as to use the only friend she had apart from Hamish? Was Hamish really what she should call a friend? It had been ages since they’d been away together. They’d once been very much in love. It had been good, hadn’t it?
But then Erich had come between them and the war, the castle and Hamish never refusing to help others when needed.
There were stacks and stacks of books in with all the rest of his things. Dickens, Dumas and Kant—she had to find something big enough. Balzac … Mark Twain … Moliere, Tolstoy, Burns, Darwin, Kant again and such a jumble. It couldn’t be a favourite. He had such a mind for his books, such a memory …
The Thackeray, then. The Virginians, an illustrated copy.
Even as she touched its red leather binding, intuition told her to leave it, but having come this far and needing it, there was no turning back.
Upstairs, in her room, she cut out almost the whole of the inside of the book before jamming the revolver into the gap. The gun just fit, even its cylinder, but the muzzle did cause a slight bulge in the top of the pages when the book was closed.
Burning the scraps in the grate, she took some string and bound four others with it: a Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in the original German; then the Thackeray; and lastly the Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
She would leave the bundle on the floor beside her desk with all the others she had prepared. Each was of five, six or seven books, so as to always have something.
They let her into the castle on Friday at just after 2.00 p.m. From the gatehouse and the barbican with its armoury, offices and living quarters for the guards, it was a walk of several hundred yards across the bailey, the huge courtyard that was enclosed by the walls, the house and the towers.
Clutching her bundle of books by its string, Mary started out alone, for the corporal who had accompanied her had been told to go no farther. That, in itself, was unsettling—always someone would escort her right to the library and not up to the top of the keep. But what made her even more uneasy was the sheer and utter absence of another living soul.
Only the flapping of the flags came to her, and the solitary sound of her own steps on the metalled surface of the road. One hundred and eighty-two prisoners of war, their guards and guard dogs were here someplace, yet there wasn’t a sign of any of them.
It made her think that the truth was out and that they were all watching her—Hamish especially, because he would have been let in early this morning. Colonel Bannerman and Major Trant would both be with him, spiffy in their uniforms but of so vastly different characters and abilities: Trant harshly military and always thinking the worst; Bannermann, the good fellow who was prepared to sit out the war here because the British High Command knew he was of no other use.
Then, too, there was Jimmy—Captain James Allanby. Mary knew he had ordered this, that he must be watching her from the top of that bloody keep. He’d see the books and wonder about them, would hate her for having never paid the slightest attention to him at any of the staff do’s. Arrogant—did he think that of her? Did he not sense that she had instantly come to feel there wasn’t something quite right about him?
A lone woman, dressed almost as she’d been the other day. The brown velvet jacket was a favourite. It went with so many things and it had lots of useful pockets, had been brushed thoroughly, brushed of its seeds and burs, brushed to that sheen only a good quality of velvet can possess. Didn’t it compliment the beige skirt and sand-coloured knee socks, her brown Oxfords, her eyes most of all?
Still there wasn’t a sign of anyone—not up on the battlements of the enclosing walls, not anywhere within the bailey below them. Nothing, either, from the many tall windows of the castle house proper, but would the sun and the drifting clouds not block those out with glare or reflections?
Access to the keep was either from within the castle via the second storey, or by the stone staircase to a forebuilding that went up to that same floor. Mary took the latter because she’d been told to, but paused only once to look back across that wasteland.
Cannon were positioned at the four corners of the parade square. A flagpole stood in its centre. Five flags then—at least five. She picked out three of them. The wind … the wind atop the keep must be gusting hard.
Reaching the iron-studded, oaken door at last, knowing how heavy it would be, she set the books down to use both hands and brace a foot against the sill. A rush of cold air hit her, she being momentarily blinded by flying dust. Straining now, she pulled the thing open and struggled to retrieve the books, finding this all but impossible unless she threw a shoulder against the door.
It slammed so hard behind her, the sound of it reverberated in the emptiness, making her cringe and hurry on beneath a high stone arch whose portcullis hung above her like a grill of iron teeth set to come crashing down, a lesson in castles for which she might once have been grateful. Boiling oil and hot boulders or iron-tipped arrows would have rained through the murder holes, though this was only a pseudo-Norman castle, not a real one, but was Jimmy watching her through one of them? Would he cut the string and search through the books, he and Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman, the three of them in front of Hamish?
The corridor was nearly seventy-five feet in length, and at the end of it, more stairs began again and it was still so very silent, it made her shudder.
Jimmy was waiting on the battlements some eighty feet above. The wind was freezing. It drove the flag above him to desperation, and at first he didn’t say a thing, and she thought then that it really was all up for her, but she wouldn’t beg, not even for Hamish’s sake.
A Vickers machine gun covered the bailey. One of the merlons had been taken down so as to widen the embrassure and give the thing a greater field of fire. Sandbags helped to buttress the gun and its crew of three.
Two sentries, armed with Lee Enfields, stood to attention in the wings. Was she to be arrested?
‘Well, Mrs. Fraser, good of you to have come. Major Trant thought you might like the view. I hope you’re not dizzy.’
‘Jimmy, why this? Why up here? What’s happened?’
She was looking positively ill. Allanby hesitated, asked harshly of himself as he had many times before, Why the bloody hell did Hamish Fraser have to have a wife like this?
Her eyes were moistening rapidly—was it simply because of the wind, he wondered, or because she was afraid of what she’d been up to? ‘The prisoners are confined to their barrack rooms until further notice.’
‘Then why the machine gun?’ demanded Mary, seeing nothing in his gaze but the brutal emptiness of an accuser.
‘They’re allowed an hour of exercise under Sergeant Stuart’s command—push-ups, calisthenics, a forced run of three miles around the compound.’
The bailey and its ring road. ‘I see,’ she said, turning away to look out over the place and catch glimpses of other machine guns and other sentries on the high points, on subordinate towers and along the battlements of the intervening walls. Had they always been up here? Had there always been so many, and why would Jimmy let her see them if he knew she was meeting Erich Kramer in secret and would be bound to tell him?
‘They’ve threatened to break out, have they?’ she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her. Like Fay Darcy, Jimmy had chosen to stand directly behind her, the gun crew and sentries hearing everything, of course, because normal conversation was impossible and one had to all but yell.
‘They’ve hanged an innocent man, Mrs. Fraser. A man who had no use for their Nazi doctrines and was strong enough to have said so.’
‘An informer?’ she asked too swiftly, biting back the tears, knowing that it really was all up for her.
She was still clutching her latest bundle of books by its string. A gust of wind flung her hair about, she still not turning to face him. Crying now, was she? he wondered. Allanby knew he wanted to break her, wanted to smash that infernal pride. ‘That husband of yours has threatened to take his bitching to London, to a higher authority than the British High Command in Belfast. To put it bluntly, he wants to mollycoddle murderers—Nazi swine, Mrs. Fraser. There’s a war on.’
‘And some of them have been pretty badly wounded.’
Must she always rankle him? ‘Our authority can’t be challenged. There is the law of the land to be obeyed. British law.’
‘Then why let me in?’
Allanby wanted to shriek, ‘Look at me, damn you!’ but would hold himself in check and every bit as erect. ‘Because, as a measure of our good faith, and in hopes one of them will come forward, the colonel’s decided to allow the library to be reopened three afternoons a week.’
‘From two until four?’ she asked, knowing Hamish must have raised hell.
‘On market days.’
Stung by this, Mary turned to angrily face him. He couldn’t have known she had agreed to meet Nolan and the others on those days. He couldn’t! Yet still there was that emptiness. Jimmy was watching her far too closely. A raw, tough, and unfeeling man when it came to war, and this was war, but had they been using her all along to find things out? Had they? ‘The conditions, Captain? What is it you people want of me?’
Allanby noted the distress and the bitterness—she had realized well enough that she’d naively repeated things overheard, but he’d not smile in triumph, not yet. He’d take her by an elbow and guide her over to one of the merlons,
would force her to look straight down. ‘That you say nothing of this meeting either to those bastards in here or to that husband of yours, and that you will report everything to me that you see and overhear.’
‘My German’s useless.’
‘You studied it at college. I’ve seen you suddenly turn when things were said by them.’
‘My first in third-year university classics and modern languages is far too rusty. Besides, I simply won’t do it.’
‘I didn’t think you would.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? A deal … some sort of deal?’
‘Make of it what you will.’
‘Wait and see what happens—is that it, Jimmy?’
Her lower lip was quivering; her cheeks were tightening. By God it was good to have her like this. He’d break her, he really would but would only say, ‘Yes, wait and see.’
Mary went first, she hurrying to keep ahead of him, the two of them pitching down the stairs and along each length of corridor, faster now, their steps resounding until she was practically running. At any moment she knew she’d burst into tears, would throw the books down and …
Allanby snatched at an arm. Missing it, he tried again and managed to yank her to a stop, her chest rising and falling in panic, she struggling to find the will to face him.
Only as her chest eased, the tears plain enough, did he let her have it. ‘Colonel wants to see you in the staff common, madam. You’re to come along now.’
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