Long after he had left her near the foot of the stairs, Trant continued to watch her, then went back to open the doors to that other corridor and find his way from there through to the library.
Thackeray, he mused. The Virginians. Dulsey had memorized the titles of the lot she’d brought in today. It had been sharp of the colonel to have done that, but then Bannerman was an old hand at such things.
Kramer … had she given him the book? All the others had been accounted for, so that must have been it.
A note … had she passed him a note?
‘Now, Doctor, you’re not to worry yourself. Sure and that wee slip of a girl is feeling terribly out of sorts and hiding herself away upstairs, but Bridget and I will keep a close eye on her.’
Hamish was sitting in the kitchen at the big deal table Mrs. Haney used to roll out her pastry and do everything else. One of those huge cups the Irish sometimes use was in front of him, but was it carrot, rose hip, dandelion or blackberry tea? Hamish always went along with the ‘expeerimints,’ even though slices of ham, freshly baked brown bread, butter—not margarine yet—and a plate of scones were there too.
‘You’re a wonderful woman, Mrs. Haney. As God is my witness, I don’t know what I’d do without you. Mary still not back?’
‘Likely walking in the fields and woods, and it’s yourself be worryin’ about her too. She be doin’ a powerful lot of walking about these days, she does, Doctor. Now she does.’
Oh how they avoided things, the two of them, sparring with each other like that. Wisely, though, Hamish never questioned the alchemy of the kitchen. He laid a slice of ham on one of liberally buttered bread, could just as well have been out fishing were it not for the stoop to his shoulders.
Mary waited out in the corridor, seeing the two of them through a gap in the door. It was well after dark and yet he hadn’t questioned this nor had Mrs. Haney thought to raise the issue of her not having even come in for supper.
‘Is she meeting someone?’ asked Hamish at last, not wanting to let things show. ‘A bunch of tinkers perhaps? Mary’s always been fascinated by them.’
‘Tinkers is it?’ snorted the woman. ‘God would wish it so, Doctor. Indeed He would.’
Fastidiously he took time with the open-faced sandwich he’d made and carefully cut it into quarters. ‘Then you’ve heard something?’ he hazarded.
Mrs. Haney sprinkled on a last dusting of flour before muscling the rolling pin over the pastry dough so quickly and robustly, Mary found jealousy intruding her thoughts. The woman was so capable, so solid. Like one of those round tower houses that had been built a thousand years ago and stood out all over the landscape, some having been more lately refurbished in payment of a ten-pound note to London.
‘I have, Doctor. That I have. Parker O’Shane, that disreputable half-brother of mine, God save him, saw her on the old tote road to Newtonhamilton the day we had them sausages from Mr. Brian Kelly’s butcher shop. She’d been picking the Michaelmas daisies.’
‘There’s nothing wrong in that, is there?’
‘Not with bunches of them growing along every roadside from here to Killarney and Ballyshannon. It’s the broken bridge on that old bit of road what worries me, Doctor. You’ll be recalling the one we had to cross the other night.’
‘How could I ever forget it,’ said Hamish sadly, but remembering, too, to take a generous bite and reach for his tea.
Mrs. Haney set the rolling pin down, after first having given it the wringing scrape of an encircling thumb and forefinger. She went over to the stove to get the big teapot she’d brought from her own hearth, the doctor’s not being good enough. Refilling his cup with its ink, she slung one over for herself, took but a grain of the sugar, and sat down across the table from him. Rationing or no rationing, the Lord always helped those who helped themselves, and of course there was the black market too, and connections, always those, but worry had entered the woman’s gaze, fear and an honest concern that puzzled, Mrs. Haney not liking her.
‘Doctor, did she meet someone at that broken-down ould bridge, I’m asking? Parker, he said she had burs and weed seeds all over her like enough to fit an English setter with fleas.’
‘Liam Nolan?’ asked Hamish, the name barely whispered.
‘The same, Doctor. Is it not what you yourself have been thinking?’
‘Mary would have told me. She’d not have kept a thing like that from …’
‘Doctor, what is it?’
‘Caithleen … I was thinking of Caithleen.’
‘I’ve sent Bridget up to keep her company. Now you’re not to worry yourself. Caithleen?’ asked the woman, she prodding, probing, wanting answers herself.
Hamish stared at the bread and ham on the plate before him, then glanced at the wall clock beneath which Mrs. Haney had hung one of those hideous aquatints of the Christ in hand-painted luminescent tones.
Mary started into the room. ‘I’ve been out walking and thinking, Hamish. I’m sorry if I worried you, darling. I know it’s well after dark. Belfast bad? They turned you back, didn’t they? The colonel said that they would.’
‘Lass, where have you really been?’
‘Out walking. If Mrs. Haney had thought to ask William, she’d have been told my bicycle was in the shed, so I couldn’t have been far, could I?’
‘But it’s not safe for a woman to walk about at night alone. Not after what’s happened. Not with …’
‘With the hills being combed by British tommies? No, I guess it isn’t. Mrs. Haney, I’d like a cup of that tea, please. It’s freezing out there. Shouldn’t you be home yourself by now?’
Ria gave her a look that would have whipped a dead donkey to life. Bolting up from the table, she stormed over to the door to yell at the top of her lungs, ‘Bridget! Bridget Leahy, girl, her ladyship is home and we can be away now. Away it is, and me with a husband who’s not yet had his supper these past three hours. Three it is, Mrs. Fraser. Three!’
‘Mary … Mary, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. I just had to have a think. I wasn’t far, Hamish. I was in the garden.’
Waiting for Bridget and Mrs. Haney to leave the house, she poured herself a cup of tea—dandelion it was and horrible. Roasted to death and pulverized. Grimacing, she said, ‘The colonel will arrange for Caithleen to be taken to his sister’s in the Midlands.’
‘In return for what?’
Did Hamish now know everything? ‘For my cooperation.’
On Thursday morning she was at the bridge again but they didn’t come. Perhaps they were hiding out in the hills and too afraid, perhaps they were back in the South and hadn’t been able to get a message to her.
Dismayed at not finding them, for they had to meet—there’d been no word from Mrs. Tulford in Dublin either—she rode into Ballylurgen. Irish villages weren’t like those in England. They were more like some she’d seen from the train west on the prairies of Canada, if one took away the grain elevators and the endless horizons. A straggle, then, of houses along an empty road with gaps between and the damned loneliness of it all stretching away for miles around.
She knew she was being unkind, that it was just because things had been going badly for her. Ballylurgen was no better, no worse than any other village of two hundred souls. It had a Catholic day school, the boys out playing hurley in the yard and Father O’Donnell in his cassock with the wind flapping at it to make him look like a tall, gaunt old rook in a sea of shouting to which the shrill blasts of his whistle did not the slightest bit of good.
She stopped on the road, for the school and the adjacent church were not the usual, but a little ways from what might be termed the heart of the village. One of the boys was particularly good. Very fast with the stick and the eye. Goal after goal to the dismay of the opposing team and the cheers of his mates.
They’d choose up sides again tomorrow and Father O�
��Donnell would see that the boy was on the other team.
The wind blew at her skirt. Mary grabbed a fistful to bind it to her legs. After a rain, the light over the fields and hills with their hedgerows seemed always greener, sharper, clearer as if washed.
Another gust came, a stronger one. She grabbed her tam, letting go of the skirt which billowed well up above her knees before she could beat it down.
Seen from the bell tower of the church, the Fraser woman was wearing knee socks today but not the Stewart Hunting of a green tartan skirt. Instead, it was the soft, greyish white of the Stewart Dress with its lines of red, green, yellow and that lovely shade of blue.
O’Bannion kept the field glasses trained on her, now that he’d seen the coast was clear. As so many times since they’d first met, he thought her not just proud and pretty, but beneath it all, tough and determined, and he wondered then, as he stood out of sight and the shouts of the boys came up to him, what she’d do.
That business of the O’Neill girl couldn’t have gone down well with Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser. ‘Necessary,’ Fay had said and he’d known enough not to have challenged her, the larger issue being far more important, but would the threat of a tarring be enough? Would that woman out there not find herself forced into such a situation, she’d throw herself away and betray them all in one last proud act of defiance?
The wind tugged at her hair. She continued to watch the boys, and the shrill blasts of the whistle seemed only to make her forget her cares. He knew it was but a moment for her, a brief escape. He found a gladness in himself and wondered at it harshly before setting it coldly from him.
Dublin had got through to Berlin again. They’d had the rendezvous already chosen for the Nazis, a place right under the noses of the British, right where they’d suspect it least, but the Fraser woman mustn’t get wind of the location until the end. There must be no chance of her giving that away. Everything had to go like clockwork. The exchange had to be made. The Kapitänleutnant Erich Kramer and the information he would be carrying in return for much, much more. For everything.
He would have to watch what Fay and Liam said to the woman. He had the thought that she would try her damnedest to find out the location of the rendezvous. She would want to know that desperately because by now she must have had inklings that for her, life would take her no farther. They’d have to kill her.
O’Bannion let the glasses settle on her one last time. She was laughing. Not knowing that she was being watched, she was taking delight in the play of small boys and the antics of an old priest.
When the ball came out on to the road, as it often did, she madly set the bicycle down and ran like the blazes after it, wound up and pitched it back. ‘Haroo!’ he heard her yell, and he wondered then again if he hadn’t softened towards her, and he knew that this would only get in the way and that she’d use it if she could, that she’d use every little thing she could to betray them all.
4
Kevin O’Bannion was watching her from beneath a hawthorn whose berries were scarlet, the thorns some three inches long and of a deep purplish brown. The leaves, having turned to russet, were falling about the ruins over which the ancient branches had spread, Mary hearing them and nothing else.
He’d been leaning against the inner part of one of the stone walls, smoking a cigarette and waiting. ‘So you’ve come at last,’ he said, as if there could have been any doubt in the matter, as if the note someone had left in her carrier basket in Ballylurgen—she in one of the shops—hadn’t been found by her and read.
‘Yes, of course I’ve come,’ she answered tightly, not stepping closer but having tucked the bike out of sight.
No danger then of them being seen from the road. ‘Did you take him the gun?’ he asked. She was even prettier now that he had a chance to see her up close without Fay and Liam around.
Mary found suddenly that, unlike the walk out from Padrick Darcy’s smithy, the nearness and aloneness of herself and O’Bannion unsettled her in more ways than one. Perhaps it was that closed-in feeling the walls exuded, perhaps the absence of the others. In any case, she didn’t like the feeling and found she couldn’t understand it in herself.
He was no longer squinting at her and when he asked about the gun again, she said, ‘Yes, I took it to him. It … it wasn’t easy, though. Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman suspect I’m up to something, as does Jimmy Allanby.’
‘I thought they might. Did you tell Kramer he’ll get the cartridges when we’re satisfied with the negotiations?’
‘No … No, I didn’t.’ What was there in that look of his?
‘Was he glad to get the gun?’ he asked, smiling knowingly.
Mary tensed. ‘Yes, he … he was glad to get it.’
Then she’d been upset by Kramer’s elation and had been worrying ever since. ‘Why didn’t you tell him the gun was empty?’
His sudden harshness was frightening; the dark grey eyes held nothing now, no sympathy, no attempt to understand how difficult it had been and still was.
Well? his look demanded. ‘I didn’t, that’s all.’
‘Is it that you’re continually needing lessons?’
‘It was despicable what you people did to Caithleen. An act of cowards not rebels.’
‘Cowards, was it? From what I hear, your Captain Allanby was no better.’
‘He’s not my “captain.” I despise him as much as I … Look, I didn’t mean that. I …’ They were all alone. The road wasn’t far but she’d never make it and he knew it too, had seen her thinking this.
‘Oh but you did mean it, Mrs. Fraser. You despise us more than you do Jimmy Allanby, but he would have torched that girl and then what would you have believed?’
Mary glanced away. Suddenly she had to avoid his scrutiny, couldn’t seem to bring herself to face him. ‘It’s not important what I think. What is important is that I’m to take the girl to Dublin this weekend. I’m to put her into the hands of the authorities there who’ll see she gets safely over to England.’
‘Good.’ O’Bannion gave her a moment to consider the terseness of his response, knew then that she’d have to be broken gently, knew, too, that she hadn’t even wondered why the Brits had chosen Dublin instead of Belfast which was one hell of a lot closer and far more logical. ‘You’ve made a deal with the colonel?’
She would have to face him. ‘Yes, but it has nothing to do with you and the others.’
‘You’re full of surprises. Enlighten me.’
She mustn’t tell him everything. ‘They want me to spy on the prisoners for them.’
He’d let it come as a sigh. ‘Correction. They want you to tell them who hanged that man in there.’
‘Yes.’ The wind, gusting in the enclosure, tugged at the wiry black hair that was receding from his forehead but was still thick and crinkly. ‘Am I to stay at the White Horse Inn again, or is it now too dangerous?’
‘Is it that they suspect you’re up to something else?’
‘I wouldn’t know. How could I? Trant and the colonel are together in this, as is Allanby. I may never know how much they’re aware of until it’s too late. In the past they must have heard me repeating things the prisoners had said, but … but stupidly I hadn’t been aware of their having used me like that. It’s probably why Trant and the colonel agreed to let me into Tralane in the first place. They knew I’d be bound to pick things up and pass them on.’
She’d been thinking things over, all right. Muscling that pretty little head of hers around it all. ‘There’s a slab of stone next to that wall. Let’s sit out of the wind. We’ll be safe enough for a while.’
Mary knew she’d no longer have to face him when they leaned back against that wall, but why had he suggested it? To put her off her guard, to pry everything out of her while there was still time, or simply to be alone with her so as to get to know her better? With Fay Darcy and Liam
Nolan she could almost gauge the trend of their thoughts; with him it was more difficult. He still hadn’t told her if she was to stay at the White Horse again, still hadn’t told her anything much.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.
She had smoothed that tartan skirt of hers over those shapely thighs, had leaned back and was feeling grateful for the chance not to have to face him. Best then to let it come easy, best not to rattle her too much. ‘Because we have to. There’s no other way of looking at it for us. Too much has happened in the past.’
As if to emphasize this, he took out his revolver but said suddenly, ‘Don’t be frightened,’ and breaking the cylinder open, let one of the cartridges fall into his hand, knew absolutely that she must be bone-terrified.
The slug was fat and ugly and she’d know it soon enough, but had he been too conscious of her feelings? wondered O’Bannion. Was the woman getting to him with those downcast eyes of hers? ‘You’re to take this to Kramer, Mrs. Fraser. Tell him we’ve been in contact with C-and-C U-boats via Berlin. They want him badly, and we’ll know soon enough if they’ll pay the price.’
‘Which is?’ she heard herself asking, but he wouldn’t tell her, of course, for he’d gone from trying to be considerate, to being brutal and that could only mean he had been angry with himself for letting his thoughts show.
O’Bannion pressed the bullet into that palm of hers and closed the fingers over it, just as he’d done with the revolver at the Darcy place. He took out another cigarette and, lighting it, sat back with the gun still in his lap.
Inhaling deeply, giving her a moment, and why not? he said, ‘You’ll be told when it’s all arranged and not before then. Your German must know something vital, Mrs. Fraser. Have you any idea what it is?’
She’d have to give him something. ‘Only what you said before, that the British may have captured Erich’s boat with all its codes and things.’
‘He could send that over on Mrs. Tulford’s wireless and probably already has in that first message you took to her.’
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