Give Us This Day (79 page)

There were accounts here of evictions, abortive risings, rent strikes, Fenian forays, and the savage penalties all forms of protest had provoked. There was the horrifying story of the successive potato famines of the ‘forties, and the steady drain of Irish emigrants overseas, mostly via coffin ships sailing out of Cork for the New World where, she imagined, whole areas must now be populated by fugitives from Mayo and Kerry. For those who survived, that is, for it seemed to her, reading grisly accounts of epidemics and ill-found voyages, that only half the emigrants lived to begin life again elsewhere.

It was desperately gloomy reading but it strengthened the bond between man and wife, for he came to see her now as a convert in her own right, brought to the light by her own convictions rather than by wifely obligations. The time would come, he told her, when he would persuade his colleagues to see her in this way, and not as a potential informer in their midst, as they tended to regard every Englishwoman domiciled in Ireland. But it would need time, for the long story of revolt in Ireland was blotched with betrayals from within.

This was how matters stood when Rory returned from his survey of Ulster in the early summer of 1914, shortly after the mutiny at the Curragh, where Ulster-born officers succeeded in obtaining from the British Government a guarantee that they would not be called upon to fight fellow Protestants in the north.

He had gone there half-doubting the stories of extreme militancy among the Orange Lodges, and the martial preparations said to be on foot by the Carsonites, aided and abetted by the British Unionists and aimed at recruiting an army capable of resisting Home Rule by force of arms. He returned a despondent man, his worst fears confirmed, he told her on the night he came home to find her waiting for him. Ulster was virtually mobilised, and it was high time—almost too late, maybe—to take this undeniable fact into the strategical considerations of Sinn Fein.

“I went there supposing they had a few hundred sporting guns and surplus Continental discards,” he said, “but our sources in Belfast soon changed that view. In April, over at Larne, they ran in thirty thousand rifles and bayonets and three million rounds of ammunition. Right under the noses of the police and coastguards, and Carson, they say, now has a hundred thousand volunteers pledged to fight. How will the National Volunteers stand up to that?”

“By running in an equivalent armament you’ve always said,” she reminded him. But he replied, with an impatient gesture, “Aye, that’s what I said, Princess, but I spoke out of turn. Our Continental agents tell us they can lay hands on enough rifles to equip the Dublin brigades now drilling with broomsticks but in our case, without big money interests behind us, it’ll always be cash in advance. Where would we lay our hands on that kind of money? For my part I’m bled white, and so are the few of us who started out with capital. It costs a great deal to raise and equip an army of starvelings.”

“I have money, Rory.”

He looked at her with a half-smile. “Your private nest-egg, hatching in an English bank? No, Princess, we’re not that straitened…” But then, his grey eyes regarding her with a curious intentness, “I’ve never asked about your means. It wasn’t my business, for I had more than enough before all these demands were made on me. I know of your father’s marriage settlement, but as to capital—how much have you got under your own name?”

“Fourteen thousand,” and judging by his expression it was a far larger sum than he had anticipated. “Mostly it’s my share of Grandfather Sam’s legacy and I’ve never touched it. It’s grown over the years.”

She rose and rummaged in the top drawer of her bureau, returning with her bankbook and a typewritten list of investments that George’s lawyers sent her each quarter. The bank statement showed a credit balance of over eight thousand. The last quarter’s estimate of investment yielded another six thousand, four hundred and eighty pounds. He returned the documents. “I couldn’t accept this. It represents all you’ve got, doesn’t it?”

“No, Rory, not nearly all. I’ve got you.”

“But, God in heaven, woman, this isn’t your quarrel.”

“If it’s yours, it’s mine. What would that money have done for me if you hadn’t rescued me from myself a dozen years ago? Arrange for that shipment in cash. By the time it arrives I’ll guarantee you fourteen thousand. I don’t know what a shipload of German arms would cost, and I don’t suppose you do at this stage. But it’s a sizeable contribution by any standards, isn’t it?”

He said, taking her hand and studying it, much as a fortune-teller might, “You’re a strange creature, Princess. I’ve always thought so, ever since you told me about that part you played in the Peking shindig. But I love you and need you, as few men ever loved or needed a woman,” and he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I’ll make no promises one way or the other until I’ve put your offer before them, but I’ll tell you this. Spurn it or accept it as manna from heaven, I’ll never forget you offered it.” And then, with the ardour and despatch of a groom carrying his bride over the threshold, he scooped her into his arms and marched out of the room and up the broad staircase. It was ample reward for the money, she reflected. Particularly for a woman who had recently overlooked her forty-fourth birthday.

* * *

The Appel Quay ran above the river Miljacka, dividing the ancient city of Sarajevo, and on the morning of June 28, St. Vitus’s Day, both sides of the thoroughfare were lined with spectators, assembled there to see the Archduke’s motorcade pass on its way to the City Hall.

Spectators were more numerous on the northside, for there was shade here. On the river side the crowd stood in blazing sunshine, heads turned west towards the station as the first of the six cars came in view. It was here, close together, that three conspirators were positioned, Mehmedbasic, the one Mohammedan in the plot, young Cabrinovic, and Cubrinovic, the latter both nineteen-year-old Serbs. Across the road stood Popovic, the fourth assassin. Further along, again on the river side, Gavrilo Princip was posted. Ilic, the mentor, moved among the five, keeping up their courage, urging them to be firm and sure-handed.

The procession passed Mehmedbasic unscathed. The Mohammedan boy fumbled, or lost his nerve, thinking himself watched by a policeman. But when the second car, containing the Archduke and his wife Sophie, drew level with Cabrinovic, next of the group, a small black object sailed in an arc to pitch on the folded hood of the car, roll off, and explode with shattering force. The procession halted abruptly and the Archduke stepped out unharmed, hurrying back to inspect the damage done to the following car, where one of his entourage was bleeding profusely from bomb splinters.

Further along, beside the Lateiner Bridge, Princip continued to wait but he, too, had no luck. The procession restarted and passed him at speed. The other assassins, with the exception of Cabrinovic, who was hauled, vomiting, from the river into which he had jumped, dispersed. Bombs and revolvers were discarded as Sarajevo’s one hundred and eleven policemen moved in, broadcasting news of the heir-apparent’s miraculous escape. But Princip retained his weapons. He had the nerve of a dedicated revolutionary, but what was more important, at this juncture, was that he had more patience than his fellow-conspirators.

* * *

Far away to the northwest, where the Kentish Weald was dreaming under sunshine as hot as that flooding the Appel Quay, Adam Swann, a few days beyond his eighty-seventh birthday, took it into his head to take his daily constitutional on horseback.

Only when the temperatures were high, and he found walking excessively tiring, did he venture afield mounted nowadays. In the spring and autumn he could walk, indeed, he preferred walking, and in the winter he stayed indoors. But sometimes in the summer the fancy would take him to feel a horse between his knees again, and Henrietta, watching him from the terrace, shook her head at this exhibition of an old man’s obstinacy as she saw him ride his mare down the drive as far as the old mill house, then over the low bank, into the coppice that marked the northern boundary of the estate.

He rode well and confidently, she thought, for so old a man, but then he had never liked to be driven, not in carriage or dogcart, and certainly not in one of George’s motors.

“When a man has to depend on others to get him around, he’s done for,” he told her, the last time she suggested it was time he put his mare out to grass. She did not argue with him. She was well aware, as indeed were all who knew him well, that he had always accepted the loss of a leg, at the age of thirty-eight, as a personal challenge to his mobility.

He rode northeast along bridle paths and through a stretch of woodland in the general direction of Dewponds, looking about him with satisfaction and noting not merely the quality of his son-in-law’s crops but also the profusion of what farmers would call weeds but what he thought of, these days, as the summer finery of the Weald. Charlock glowed among the barley, and here and there a cornflower added its splash of blue to a patchwork of green and gold. And on higher ground, where a straggle of oaks and beeches crowned the hogsback that separated farm and estate, the woods were en fete with a hundred thousand wild flowers, from foxgloves taller than himself, to tiny outcroppings of bugloss and toadflax under the hooves of the mare.

He thought, with satisfaction,
I notice these things now. Years ago, when I used to ride this way to East Groydon Station, I took little heed of them. The scent, maybe, but not the sparkle and glory of it all.
But that, he recalled, had been a time when he despised the city gent who made his pile, kissed his farewell to the counting-house, and set about turning himself into a country squire. He was far more tolerant now, far more appreciative of the fact that Kent, the oldest settled shire in the islands, was still largely rural, with its panoramas of field, coppice, and wood; its redtiled oast-houses and hopfields; and its old, crouching farmhouses that had been supporting life hereabouts since the days of the Plantagenets. Men who worked the land, men like his son-in-law Denzil and his grandson Robert, were not qualified to judge their heritage, save in terms of what it would yield. But to a townee like himself it was a rare privilege to be here, with strength enough to sit a horse and savour the richness of the countryside.

He had a mind, as he descended the slope beyond the woods and glimpsed the roof of Dewponds among its screen of elms, to pay a friendly call on Denzil and drink some of his cider, but he thought better of it on meeting Robert, driving a wain up to higher pastures east of Tryst.

He called, “Hello there! You’ve got a fine crop, Robert. The weather’s been good to you this year.”

Robert, reining in, replied, “Arr, it’s fair to middling. If we don’t pay for it in July, as we generally do.”

Adam smiled, reflecting that he had yet to meet an optimistic farmer. He said, changing the subject, “How’s your father, my boy?” Robert said he was well enough but not as active as he had been in happier days at Dewponds, and as he said this he looked speculatively at his grandfather, probably reflecting that his eighty-seven years sat upon him more gracefully than his father’s fifty-four. He said, however, noticing Adam’s jaded mare, “Isn’t it time you put that old nag out to grass, Granfer?”

“We’ll be put out together,” Adam told him, genially, as he swung about and rode alongside the creaking wain. “In a year or so maybe, depending upon how much we get of this kind of weather.”

Robert glanced at the clear blue sky. “It’ll hold for a time yet,” he said, phlegmatically, and lifted his hand as their ways parted and Adam moved back into the shade of the woods, letting his mare crop wherever she felt inclined and easing his legs from the stirrups.
That’s the trouble with being Robert’s age
, he reflected.
You think it’s there for good and you don’t appreciate it, any more than I did at his time of
life. But now, with no more than a summer or two ahead, you hoard it, ticking off each week as a score against time.

Away in the direction of the village, the sound of church bells reached him, intruding, though not discordantly, on the murmur of the woods. He thought, I’ve been lucky
, I suppose. Luckier than most, despite this damned leg and that frightful packload of work I carried all those years. I’ve survived and that’s about all a man can expect at my time of life. And then, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was coming up to eleven and hi
s newspapers would be coming up from the village. It was time, perhaps, to see what was afoot elsewhere, for keeping pace with events was always important to him. He gathered up his reins and set off up the winding bridle path to the summit where, a mile below, he could see Tryst dreaming its way through another June.

* * *

The Sarajevo dignitaries, putting as bold a face as possible upon the outrage on the Appel Quay, had their fulsome say, trying to look as if they did not comprehend their distinguished guest’s comment, beginning, “I come here to pay you a visit and I’m greeted by bombs…!”

There would be no more bombs, Governor Potiorek assured him. The Bosnian capital was not swarming with assassins, and the young madman who had thrown the bomb was now under lock and key. The route for the visit to the museum had been changed. There would be no tour of the narrow streets and, after lunch and a brief visit to the hospital to see how the wounded officer was faring, the Archducal couple would entrain for home. To interpose between any potential assassin and the heir-apparent, however, Count Harrach surrendered his seat and took his stand on the running-board. He would have done better to inform the Archduke’s chauffeur of the change of route.

For a second time that morning the fate of the world rested at point of balance. Then the chauffeur made a right turn into Franz Josef Street and Governor Potiorek, realising the driver was in error, shouted that this was the wrong way and the driver stepped on the brake, preparatory to reversing.

It was, to the hovering Princip, a heaven-sent opportunity. He was standing within yards of the stationary car and he acted with the promptitude of a trained soldier, stepping forward and firing two shots before he was seized and overwhelmed. The car reversed, straightened up, and sped away down the Appel Quay. The Archducal couple remained sitting bolt upright so that it seemed yet another assassination attempt had been foiled. But then Sophie, shot through the stomach, collapsed, and a thin stream of blood spurted from the mouth of the Archduke. Seeing it, Count Harrach enquired anxiously if His Imperial Highness was suffering badly. Franz Ferdinand sagged murmuring “
Es ist nichts… es ist nichts…
” repeating the three words over and over again. They were the last he uttered. The door had slammed on an era. At eleven a.m., fifteen minutes after his wife had died, His Imperial Highness, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was dead.