I looked to the people who sat across from us. Jane sat a little apart, nursing a bleeding hand. The second woman was tying a tourniquet round one of the men’s legs; and the last two men were sitting with their heads close together, speaking in soft voices.
Finally, they looked up. One of the men said, “I know that it’s not a very friendly time, but why don’t we exchange names? It’s something to pass a few moments, at least.”
I only shook my head at him, and said, “I don’t know how to thank you. How can I . . .?”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “You were there, we were there – what else were we to do? But anyway, my name is Edward Plummer. I own this shop with my wife, Jane. And this –” (he gestured to the man beside him) “is my brother, Scott.”
Scott Plummer gave me a nod.
Jane Plummer said, “I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but – well, you know what I mean.”
“I’m Roberta Eckle,” said the second woman. “I’m Jane’s sister. This is my husband, Quincy.”
Quincy groaned, and clutched at his leg.
“Kate O’Brien,” I said simply. I looked down at Tyler, to see if he was of a mind to answer. But his eyes were crossed, and he was whispering something to himself about a hare and a jackal; so I took the liberty of giving his name, as well.
I’m not sure if I said anything to any of them, after that. I kept my thoughts to myself, and busied myself with watching Tyler. The others were quiet on the other side of the room, sometimes sitting with their backs against the wall, and whispering to one another; and sometimes stretching out upon the floor, to rest their eyes for a while.
Eventually, I felt my own eyelids beginning to droop. I shook myself awake again and again, trying to listen to the sounds of running and shouting, and of occasional gunshots, in the street outside the shop. But at last, I could do nothing but let my eyes slip shut. I sank down against the wall, and fell into a light sleep, which I drifted in and out of for hours.
***
I awoke to the feel of Tyler, tugging on my hand.
“Kate,” he whispered. “Kate, wake up.”
“What?” I murmured, looking all around. But I could see nothing, at first, for the candle had burned down. I blinked quickly for a few seconds, and then squinted across the room. I could just make out the sleeping forms of all the others.
“Where are we?” asked Tyler, pulling himself up from the floor to sit beside me.
“In a bookshop,” I said. Then I pointed to Edward Plummer, and said: “His.”
Tyler only nodded; but then winced, and put his hand to his head. His face was crusted over with patches of blood, which he began to pick away with his fingernails.
“Where’s Abbaline?” he asked.
I looked into his face. With the small amount of light that was seeping through the crack under the door, I could only just see him. It seemed that the poor thing could not remember; and I certainly did not have the heart to tell him.
“She’s fine,” I lied. “She’s going to meet us.”
He only nodded again, as thought he had perfect faith in any promise which Abbaline had given.
“How long have we been here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A few hours – maybe more.”
He took a look around the room, as if calculating something about it in his head. He frowned; then looked at me and asked:
“Will they think to look here?”
I did not answer; for of course, I had no idea. So we each issued a separate sigh; then laid our heads together, and fell asleep.
***
The next time I came round, it was to a much louder sound than the whisper of Tyler’s voice. I looked about, and could make out the movement of the others across the room. There had been a loud crash out in the shop.
A moment later, I heard voices. Irish voices. A small hope began to grow; but as I continued to listen, was quickly dashed.
“Nothin’ ‘ere,” someone said. “Nothin’ but piles o’ books.”
“Burn ‘em,” said someone else. “Just burn ‘em all to bits.”
I got down on my stomach with Jane, to look out through the space under the door. There were two soldiers out in the shop. Night had fallen, but there were bright torches waving about in the street. The soldiers took their own torches, and began setting the contents of the shelves aflame.
“They’re setting the place on fire,” Jane whispered to the others. “We’ll die of the smoke.”
“Maybe they’ll leave,” said Roberta. “Maybe they’ll leave before the fire gets too high.”
So we waited, and watched. But the men lingered, picking out books to throw into a blaze in the centre of the room. “Imagine all this!” said one of them. “What’s the point o’ all this rubbish? This is why people go wrong, you know.”
“Don’ I know it,” said the other, shaking his head. “Just burn ‘em. Burn ‘em all to bits.”
There was a great fire burning, just before the door to the back room. Jane and I had to move back a little, for the heat was intense, and the smoke was already beginning to creep under the door. Soon, the back of the shop would be consumed by flame; and we would be trapped.
“We have to get out,” I whispered. “If we don’t do it now, we’ll die in here.”
“But they’re still out there!” said Roberta.
“We have to try,” said Edward. “I won’t die like this.”
So we all stood up, and whispered hurriedly to one another.
“It’s out the door, and as quick as we can for the street.”
“They’ll be surprised. What with the fire, they might not be able to get us.”
“They can’t get us all at once.”
“We have to go. We have to go now!”
Scott removed his jacket, and wrapped it round his hand to take hold of the heated doorknob. He turned the lock, and threw the door open; and then we were out, running to either side of the fire and rushing towards the door to the street.
I held tightly to Tyler’s hand, as we rounded the fire on the left-hand side. The others went to the right, and were the first to catch the attention of the soldiers.
“Eh!” cried one of them, raising his gun. “Who the ‘ell are you?”
The men jumped in front of the women, and took the first round of fire. The women screamed; but then they were felled, too.
The soldiers were moving off to inspect the bodies. Tyler and I shrank against the wall for a moment, waiting for them to clear away from the door. We looked into each other’s faces; gave a brave nod; and then made a dash for it.
Just as the soldiers caught notice of us, and were turning towards us, a man burst into the shop. His clothes were all torn and hanging, and his face was smeared with mud. He held a rifle under his arm.
The soldiers made to shoot at him; but he opened fire first, and took one of them down. The second, who was a man of considerable size, rushed at him, and flung him back into the flames. Then Tyler and I ran on again – but the soldier turned his eyes upon us, and fired.
So many things happened in that moment, that I had trouble keeping account of them. I felt a terrible bite in my right thigh, and fell to my knees on the floor. The bedraggled man with the rifle fell back out of the fire, and rolled madly over the floor to extinguish the flames that lay all upon him. The soldier shot at him, but missed. Tyler was still standing, and tried to drag me with him towards the door; but the soldier let loose another shot.
And that was when the world went quiet.
I saw everything, but heard nothing. The man with the rifle fired at the soldier, and caught him right in the chest. He fell down upon his comrade, and was engulfed by flames.
The man hurried over to me, and helped me to my feet. But Tyler was still attached to my arm; and I looked helplessly at him; and I saw that he had dropped down to the floor. He pressed my hand once; and then fell away from me. I saw the red stain, growing larger and larger, on his perfectly white shirt. I know
that I screamed, that I screamed to high heaven, and struggled to reach Tyler’s body; but the man with the rifle was pulling me away, with all of his might, towards the window.
The flames had leapt up across the doorway. There was no escape there. But the man let go of me, and I fell once again; hardly watching but out of the corner of my eye, where I saw him leap straight through the glass of the window. I started to crawl towards Tyler. A moment later, though, an arm came to grab me by the waist, and I was hoisted out of the shop.
I fell down on my back, with the lights and the chaos raging all around me, and looked up into the face that hovered just above me. I could see the lips moving, see them forming words that were meant for me; but I heard nothing. I coughed with the smoke that filled my lungs, and went still as the coloured stars came to twinkle before my eyes.
Chapter 27
Heavy things pushed in at me from all sides; I tried to move away from them, but I managed only to back myself into a small, stifling corner. I stood stock-still, preparing myself to fight. But then, quite suddenly, I collapsed down into myself, knowing that I would not fight anymore. Not that day. Maybe not ever again.
The dark, nebulous shapes continued to draw nearer. They grew large, then small – they ran forward, then pulled back, playing a sick sort of game with my tired mind. Finally I put my hands in front of my face, and tucked my knees up under my chin. I felt the first cloud descend upon me. I felt its wispy fingers; its ice-cold moisture. It shoved my hands aside and pried open my mouth, reaching its never-ending arm down into my throat, into my stomach – it drew on my erstwhile strength, the strength that had disappeared halfway through the tumult. I felt the warmth beginning to leave my body; I shivered in my lonely corner, not quite able to do anything that might decrease my level of helplessness.
But then, I was not sure that I wanted to. It was so easy, allowing that spectral arm to take away all of my life-light. The darkness began to creep up on me, moving fluidly through my eyelids, staining all of the colour that lay beneath. I knew that my eyes were nothing, then, but two small portals of blackness. So I turned instead to the sights that lay already within me, all of the wreckage and the carnage that I could not possibly worry about – or hope on – forgetting.
I saw the bodies that had seemed to pile up like firewood in the street, as a mass of armed soldiers and rebels surged in. I saw their terrified faces, locked forever in death. I felt their blood soaking into my clothes, smearing my skin. I tried to wipe it away, but it was a hopeless thing to do. I reached out to close their lifeless eyes – something that I had not done in reality. As I closed theirs, I closed my own, shimmering out of that moment to another, equally disturbing one.
I saw the parlour floor, littered with bodies; so many bodies that they could only be dolls; dolls that some child had grown tired of, and cast aside. I fell to my knees and began to pull them all towards myself, confident that I could somehow bring them back to life. I saw Joseph’s face, and I choked. I stroked his cheek, hoping that he would feel me, hoping that he would wake. But all I succeeded in doing was smudging his face worse than ever, with the crimson stuff that matted his hair and dripped down from the side of his neck. I let his head fall into my lap.
I gazed around at all the rest. My eyes watered and my throat tightened; my vision blurred as the scene shifted.
I sat huddled in the path by the stream, eyes fixed in grim fascination upon the lifeless body before me. There was an indentation in the forehead, large as a bowl; and blood streamed down from it, as the eyes below kept a hateful watch over me. I covered my face.
When I dropped my hands, I saw that the body was gone. I turned my head ever so slightly to the right and watched my father, anything but dead, disappear into the house. Before he slammed the door behind him, he looked back at me. I watched his face, so handsome – yet so worthy of fear. I held it up inside my mind, tossing it back and forth beside my own, almost as if I were juggling. I studied the features, and registered the similarities – the undeniable, unmistakable similarities.
The shadows around me opened as would a split in the surface of the earth, spreading wide apart to admit me. I fell through them at a speed undetermined, arriving back at the chaos of the city streets, in what seemed only a moment. I peered warily around, my eyes immediately coming to rest on the body of Tyler Ashley, from which I was forced to witness the life depart, as I was dragged away from the flames; and as a single shot felled him to the ground, where he lay with glassy eyes. Oh, my strong, funny friend! I saw him as I had seen him, just before the flames appeared. He held my hand inside his own, and pressed it with the knowledge of goodbye – just as he had done before we parted forever.
No words were spoken in that moment. I swore I felt his grip on my own hand slacken, but I tried not to think on it; I imagined that I saw his eyes opening again, his mouth smiling at me just as always. I sat there beside him, knowing that he would wake at any moment, knowing that I had to be there when it happened. Wouldn’t he be frightened, if he woke and I wasn’t there?
I felt something, then, something quite different from the pain in my heart that came from thinking of Tyler, lying dead amidst the raging flames. Oh, if I could, I would take him away from there! The flames leapt higher, and consumed him completely. There would be nothing left; nothing left to save! Nothing but a shining spirit, to rise up above the bedlam beneath, and drift away to its place of rest.
But no. The ache of grief had subsided, and was replaced by a sharper, hotter pain. It was the pain of reality – the ache of wounds.
My eyes sprang open. I lashed out with both arms, unwilling to let myself be taken. Maybe I would die, that was all right – but I would not be taken.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I cried, repeating the word over and over again. It seemed that it was the only word I could recall, the only word that suited my present circumstances.
“NO!”
My defensive motions were countered. My arms were pushed down to my sides, pinned by an ogre of a man with black hair and even blacker eyes; they were like small pools of melted rock, burning hot, fixed directly upon me. I wrested an arm loose and swung up at his face, cold-cocking him on the side of the head.
He fell away from me.
“Robby! Robby, are you all right?”
The man stood up, turning his back to me. I kicked at him, but he moved quickly to the side.
“I’ll be fine,” said the man. “But this one’s lucky that I’m a gentleman.”
“Oh, really, Robby. She’s frightened. She didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“She didn’t hurt me,” he argued. “She only grazed my face with her nails.”
“And that’s why you’re holding your head, as though you’ve been hit with a spade!”
“Oh, shut up, Niamh.”
“Fine. Just step away from the patient, will you? Perhaps it’s your admirable bedside manner that’s making her so unreceptive to treatment.”
Someone else came up beside me, then. I squinted at the strange form, so much smaller than that of the man – but just as hazardous, I knew.
I brought my knee up into the stranger. I could not entirely make out the face, and because I could not see it, I stayed away from it. Who knew? It might be possessive of wide, gaping jaws and rows of razor-sharp teeth. The English were known for such things.
I heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Remember now, Niamh – she doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh, shut up, Robby.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“For God’s sake, miss! We’re going to have to strap you down to the bed, if you don’t stop trying to injure us!”
“Speak kindly to the patient.”
“Go away, Robby!”
“Fine. I’ve got to sew up this chap over here, anyhow.”
I went still at the threat of being strapped down. I did not want to be bound to anything; for that would make my escape much more tricky.
“There, n
ow. That’s better, isn’t it?”
I spit up into the air, hoping to hit a face.
“Good Lord, what is it with you?”
No talking. Don’t let them hear your voice.
“Can you at least tell me your name?”
No, don’t do it!
“It would make my job much easier, you know, if I knew your name.”
Oh, the trickery!
“Well, if that’s how you want it. Just – stop – moving!”
I felt a stabbing pain in my thigh. I tried to reach for it, but my hands were pulled away. I grew still again.
“Can you hear me? I need you to answer me.”
I felt a wave of nausea rolling over me. I turned away from the voice, reaching for the edge of the surface on which I lay. I held my head over it and vomited. I refused, at the very least, to be covered in my own vomit.
I felt hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right?”
Don’t trust . . .
It did not take long for me to lose consciousness.
***
When I woke from my brief spell of sick-induced sleep, I was surprised to find that the dark shroud around me had been removed. It had been almost like a curtain, semi-transparent, distorting what I tried to see. But now it was gone, and my vision was clear.
I looked all about me, not the least bit sure as to where I was. I lay on a narrow bed in a large room; all around me were other beds, filled with people who were either sleeping or moaning. On closer inspection of these people, it seemed that some were missing limbs; some were all wrapped up in bandages halfway down their bodies; some had faces so bruised and contorted that I could scarcely make out their features.
I was the only woman in the room.
About half an hour after I woke, a large man came striding in. He wore a white uniform that stretched tight over his muscles – especially those of his upper arms. He was middle-aged, but his strength seemed formidable. I recognised him, but had trouble placing him.
An Irish Heart Page 27