Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (81 page)

Father Terry, who’d anointed five heads the previous night and held countless hands, thought that he could very well do with a shot of Father Joe’s medicinal brandy himself. He surveyed the faces around the table and silently thanked God for the small mercies He’d seen fit to extend over the last twenty-four hours.

The kitchen was a scene of cozy domesticity, smelling vaguely of the bleach Maggie had scrubbed it down with that morning, pleasantly overlaid with bacon and freshly baked scones. Maggie stood at the stove, stirring a vast pot of porridge with one hand while cracking eggs into smoking hot bacon fat with the other. The stomach did indeed prevail through emergencies of all sorts.

The talk at the table had been deliberately careful, though inevitably the events of last night had been hashed and re-hashed. No one had been particularly forthcoming about their individual adventures though and therein lay rather a lot of mystery and many questions no one was asking.

Pat, now polishing off a glass of milk like any perfectly ordinary boy, had been vague about the hours he’d been gone. From three o’clock until six o’clock he’d been unaccounted for and had said, upon returning, that he’d gone to the Ardoyne, found the house burned and had combed the streets after that looking for his brother and Pamela. Father Terry had merely bandaged his burned hands, applied salve to the blisters on one side of his face and said nothing.

Pamela said the last thing she remembered was the tanks coming up the street, the smell of smoke and then being hit over the head with something large and heavy. For her Father Terry had avoided looking too long at the long, thin cut on her neck that wasn’t deep enough to warrant special attention and again, said nothing.

Terry’s eyes moved from the disheveled form of Pamela to the man at her right elbow. Even in the strange ashy light of the day, the man seemed lit by full sun. His face, after a sleepless, anxious night was perfectly attuned to his bones, revealing nothing. Occasionally he would cast a shrewd look at Pamela, or eye Pat speculatively, as if he suspected, much as Terry himself did, that each of them held pieces to the puzzle of last night, that for some reason they wouldn’t or perhaps couldn’t reveal.

Terry had recognized him, even in the confusion of Casey being brought in and having to dig a bullet out of the boy’s thigh, even in the shock of the man then calmly going out and bringing in a wrapped body and saying that though he’d no idea of the identity of the corpse, it would seem that Casey was thoroughly convinced that it was Pamela. However, the man had been so cool and businesslike that Terry saw at once he’d no such fears himself. So he’d known the girl was safe. For him Terry had merely poured a glass of whiskey and left him alone with his secrets. He’d an uneasy feeling that all three of his suspects were perfectly aware of the identity of the heap of bone and charred flesh that reposed in its cell.

Late breakfast concluded, Father Joe announced he must get ready for mass, today would require a special one, for the comfort and sustenance of an entire neighborhood, which was at present shattered and bleeding in both body and mind.

Pamela declared her intention of finding a tub and soaking in it. Pat was off out the door to check on the situation in the neighborhoods, see who needed help finding safe houses as a stopgap and generally to avoid the questioning stares at the table. Maggie was humming to herself while setting a batch of bread to rise, which left only Jamie and Father Terry at the table.

“The British Army moved into Derry last night,” Terry said by way of conversational preamble.

“They’ll be in the streets of Belfast by tonight,” Jamie replied.

“How do ye know that?” Terry asked, stirring the tepid depths of his tea with a fork handle.

“Hardly takes foresight to leap to an obvious conclusion. There’s no choice really, someone has to restore order on the streets.”

“And you think the British are the ones to do it?”

“There isn’t anyone else, is there?” The green eyes met his own, clear and unblinking. “The United Nations won’t send anyone, the Taoiseach already opened up that call and no one answered. The Republic has no money to lend, no army to deploy and no friends in London. Stormont’s already declared Lynch a traitor.” He took a last drink of tea and stood up from the table, “Neglected patriotism is a bitter cup and one can hardly blame the South if they don’t wish to drink from it. We are another country here, a world apart from the Republic, we just won’t admit to it.”

“So the Irish question has been re-opened with the British has it?”

“It would seem so,” Jamie flexed his long fingers against the table and politely stifled a yawn, “and God help the man who tries to find the answer to it.”

“I tend to hope that God does help the man who tries to find an answer to peace,” Father Terry said quietly, his eyes holding the other man’s.

Nothing moved in the room, even Maggie was still, her back to them. Green flame sparked lightly in Jamie’s eyes, simmered and died within the second.

“You’ll forgive me Father but I tend to think God has rather convenient hearing. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must leave. Will you tell them I’ll be back later? My home,” he said with a charming smile, “has many empty rooms and they will, I believe, need a place to stay.”

“And many locked doors, I suspect,” Terry muttered to himself as Jamie turned and after a quick word with Maggie, left the room.

A bowl of porridge, thick with cream and sprinkled with brown sugar was placed with a thump beneath his nose.

“I’ve always said that thin men ask too many questions.” Terry looked up and met the ferocious gaze of Maggie, who reminded him of a mother bear whose cub has just been threatened. She cocked her head and pointed at the bowl, “An’ as I’ve never seen one so thin as yerself, I’d advise ye to eat.”

Terry, with the wisdom of a man who’d grown up under the tutelage of five older sisters, ate his porridge and kept his questions to himself.

Someone had lit candles in the room, a bit of flame and warmth to light and ease the way through the darkness of death. Ironic that the man’s last stop before the road to eternity should be in the sanctuary of the Roman Catholic Church.

He still lay wrapped in the sheet, folded carefully now, ends tucked in snugly as if to prevent the soul from escape. Was he beyond the flames now, the burning, the hatred? Or had he, by his actions, condemned himself to an eternity of those very things? She wasn’t certain which she would prefer.

She touched a cool hand to her throat and felt it constrict under her fingers, tensing as it had under the knife. She could still feel the searing heat of the fire, even if he was now beyond it. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, stepping back from the bed, where the miasma of charred flesh cluttered her senses. Behind her eyes, she could still see the fire—long, grasping fingers of it. She could hear the pandemonium in the streets, the sound of tanks and people screaming...

Sleep had been unthinkable that night. She was jumpy, nerve-ridden, the ringing crack of gunshot like an electric shock laid on bare nerves. Near frantic with worry. Casey had promised to come home before nightfall, but dark had come without the reassuring sound of his footstep over the threshold.

She’d known trouble was inevitable, the streets had smelled of it for days. A sharp, rank scent like an animal soaked in its own fear. She’d stayed inside, door locked, wanting to burrow away from the trouble, to put her head down and keep it down until it was over. She ought to have known better, from past experience if nothing else, trouble didn’t care whether you looked it straight in the face or not, it just kept on coming.

Just before midnight, she’d smelled smoke, heavy and invasive, and then heard a hard banging on the wall between their home and that of their only neighbor. Mr. Delaney, a widower on his own, partially crippled and confined to his tiny home, its four tiny rooms the entire expanse of his world. He was a quiet man, bothering no one, passing the time of day with her as he leaned out his window to water the window box geraniums that were a bright spot in the dingy street. He must be in trouble or he wouldn’t bang.

She girded up her courage, unlatched the back door and run across the meager patch of dew-soaked grass they shared with him. His back door was unlocked thankfully and she’d stepped into Mr. Delaney’s tiny kitchen, the smoke choking her instantly. It was everywhere, obscuring vision, disorienting her. She dropped to her knees, crawled to where the sink should be and bumped her head hard into the table and then remembered that everything in his house would be backwards to their own and crawled back in the other direction. She’d found the cupboard, felt her way up and turned the tap on by feel alone. A shriveled rag lay to the side of the sink and she wet it thoroughly under the stream of water and clapped it quickly over her mouth and nose. The smell of sour milk almost made her throw up, but she’d swallowed over the nausea and forced herself to breathe through the filthy rag.

She crawled the length of the narrow hall and found the foot of the staircase by smashing her knee painfully into it. To her immediate left lay the tiny front parlor, and here smoke was flame. The heat of it so intense that she could feel the fine hair on her arms shrivel up against the tightening skin. She’d pressed herself tight to the right wall that ran beside the staircase and crawled up the stairs, one at a time, her knees feeling like bruised rubber by the time she reached the top. Right or left? She didn’t know and couldn’t see anything in the heavy, shifting cloud of smoke. In a flutter of panic, she remembered being told that it was rarely fire that killed people, it was smoke. But then she’d heard a weak thump coming from the right and had crawled as quickly as she could toward it.

Mr. Delaney was lying in the hall outside his bedroom door, having dragged himself that far before succumbing to the smoke. He was barely conscious, eyes opening and shutting over milky cataracts. She forced herself to push down the panic and review her choices. She could stand, try to get him upright and shoulder his weight down the stairs. The problem with this simple plan being that the man weighed about two hundred pounds. Or she could try to drag him down the stairs, while crawling down backwards. Neither plan seemed to have an advantage over the other, so she’d crouched, tied the rancid smelling rag around her head and placing her hands firmly under his armpits, began to drag him towards the stairs. It was a long, hard process and her muscles protested at once, the sweat evaporating as soon as it hit the surface of her skin.

When she reached the head of the stairs, she’d laid him down for a second trying to steady her quivering arms. The fire had reached the bottom of the stairs, was rolling small, avaricious tongues up the peeling wallpaper and igniting in happy little bursts. At most she had a minute, maybe two. In desperation, she yanked on the inert man, nearly toppling them both down the stairs. He was unconscious and she was grateful for it.

By the time she’d made it halfway down, the fire had spread across the bottom of the staircase and begun to rise in a hissing sheet from the floor. It was a good three feet high and she might, alone and unencumbered, have a chance at clearing it with one good jump off the stairs but there was no way she could drag the old man through it.

The smoke had infiltrated her senses; it seemed to be stealing her hope, laying a heavy blanket over reason. She fought an impulse to sit down on the stairs and simply give herself over to the heat. And then salvation had appeared through the inferno, a bright blond head and hazel eyes at the foot of the stairs, terrifyingly familiar. She’d darted instinctively away from him, up the stairs. But he’d merely run up the stairs, grabbed the old man and heaving him over his back gone back down through the fire.

Having little choice in the matter she’d followed. In the street all was chaos, broken glass littering the pavement, shattered petrol bombs, fire roaring up into the night, casting a hellish red glow over everything. The packed rowhouses were like kindling bundled tightly together, one match would take out the whole neighborhood. People were running heedlessly, some still laying dazed in the street where the mobs had pulled them from their homes. And in the wake of the mob traveled the looters and firebugs, stealing anything of worth, destroying what they couldn’t carry and then torching the remains.

She didn’t see that bright yellow head anywhere, though she’d spotted Mr. Delaney, being attended to by a man and a woman. She saw an ambulance up head of the street, beyond the clog of the burning barricade. Mr. Delaney would be alright.

She glanced at the door of her own home, saw it was cracked open and knew she’d left it closed and locked. She picked her way across broken glass and then, looking back to be certain no one was watching, darted in. The fire hadn’t made it through their walls yet and there was an odd silence, as if the house were waiting for something, the sounds outside muffled. She went through the rooms quickly, whoever had been was gone it seemed and she turned for the door, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before the fire would breach the thin walls.