The Blood Upon the Rose (58 page)

There was a pause, a few crackles, and then a little girl’s voice came on the line. ‘Daddy? When are you coming home?’

‘Oh, in a few days, my dear. Just a week or two, perhaps.’ It would be longer than that, Kee knew. First there was this man Daly to find, so that he could keep his promise to Bill. Then there was the prosecution of Davis, and all the details from today, before he could even think of asking for a transfer home. He sighed, and looked out of the window, where the winter rain was sweeping in. He would have a foul, lonely walk back to the Standard Hotel. But there was no hurry about that.

He smiled, and said: Tell me about your birthday now, Ruthie. What did you do?’

When he had taken his daughter home, Sir Jonathan went to Brunswick Street and the hospital. He stayed there some time, and then returned to the Viceregal Lodge. As he walked down the ornate corridor with his riding boots clicking on the marble floor, Sir Jonathan remembered how often he had come to knock on this door before. Half a dozen times, perhaps, since the attempt on Lord French's life. And each time he had felt a curious excitement and companionship, as though only Harrison in all the world understood. He straightened his back, and walked faster.

He met Harrison in his grand room on the second floor. The curtains were drawn against the evening rain, and a fire crackled busily in the grate. Harrison was working quietly at his desk, his big eyes scanning the paperwork before him. He looked up calmly as Sir Jonathan entered.

‘I’ve heard the news already,’ he said. ‘Butler got very close, I understand. A pity. He was a brave man.’

‘Yes.’ Sir Jonathan chose his words carefully. ‘But I haven’t got all the information. The police don’t seem to know who was there.’

Harrison folded a letter in front of him carefully, and put it in an envelope as if the operation were some kind of scientific experiment. ‘The police are useless,’ he said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, like an old man’s. ‘The only way we can ever defeat these people is by using their own methods.’

‘You said that before,’ Sir Jonathan said. ‘I’m not so sure now. There are some things no one should do.’

The big eyes looked up at him over the envelope, considering him curiously. There was a patronizing smile on the man’s lips, Sir Jonathan noted; not the slightest sign of nerves.

‘Come, come, Colonel,’ Harrison said. ‘The man Butler was a hero. He only killed a few bog Irishmen – that’s nothing to be ashamed of. We should recruit more men like him.’

‘Perhaps,’ Sir Jonathan said. He felt he was holding himself unnaturally stiff, like a man on parade ground. But it was the only way he could contain his feelings. He said, slowly: ‘If we do, I shall ask Major Butler to help us train them.’

There was a silence. Harrison did not move for some time. Then, very gently, he put the paper knife down on the envelope in front of him. As the soft fingers moved away from it, Sir Jonathan saw them tremble slightly.

Harrison’s voice was even more of a whisper than before. He said: ‘I don't understand you, Colonel. Major Butler is dead.’

‘I imagine that is what the Shinners think, certainly,’ Sir Jonathan answered. ‘But if you had got your information from the hospital, you would know that the bullet entered his cheek, just below his left eye, and came out lower down through the back of the neck. It seems to have been fired from above. He may lose the sight of the eye, but it missed the brain. I have just spent some time with him in hospital.’

‘And?’

‘And for a few moments he was conscious and able to talk. He mentioned you, Mr Harrison.’

Harrison pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He stood there, a short, ineffectual figure in the grand room, framed in the window with the fine view of Phoenix Park behind. Now he had got up, he seemed uncertain where to go.

Sir Jonathan strode briskly to the door behind him, and opened it. There were two uniformed military policemen in the corridor outside. Sir Jonathan pointed to Harrison.

‘That’s your man, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s a hanging matter, so guard him well.’

For Andrew the nurses were like angels. Their faces were soft and kind and they had beautiful crisp white caps with high wings on either side. He could see only dimly through one eye, but he always searched their faces anxiously to see if one might look like Catherine. But in fact it didn't matter, because they brought her to him anyway, in a bottle.

They tilted up his head very gently on the pillow and fed him with a spoon from the bottle, and then Catherine would come.

She came to him in his house at Ardmore. The house had been rebuilt and gleamed with new yellow stone, and she walked with him in the early morning across the lawn by the pond, while the southwest breeze blew the mist curling up from the sea, and the tops of the hills came clear. She held his hand and walked with him into the stables, where they talked to the grooms and stroked the noses of the young racehorses he had bred.

Then, without any change of time, they were in his mother's bedroom with the Chinese carpet and silken dragons writhing over the bedspread as they had done when he was a child. But he was not a child now and Catherine was his wife, as he had wanted her to be. She lay on the bedspread with her head propped on her elbow, her short bobbed hair hanging loose as she smiled at him, her body quite smooth and naked with the small brown nipples erect as he remembered them. There was a bulge in her stomach that had not been there before, but as he came closer to touch it his eyes became bad again, and he lost sight of her altogether because of the pain in his face.

It was worse than the pain he had had in the war. It was as though the side of his face were being crushed with giant pincers, and a spike thrust in his eye. The medicine the nurses gave him took it away for a while, but when it came back he could only turn his head feebly from side to side to try to escape, and stare grimly at the cracks in the ceiling. But it brought him back to reality.

The reality was that he had failed and Collins had won. There would be no money now and no rebuilt Ardmore. If he lived, his face would be uglier than ever before. A target for every Sinn Feiner in the land. An object of revulsion for every woman.

Sir Jonathan had spoken of taking Catherine home, so she must have escaped from the cellar. Andrew was glad of that, he had never meant to starve her. He wondered if she had got to see her young Sinn Feiner, and when the boy would be hanged. When the boy was dead at last, she might come to her senses, and forget him.

And then? Would she would want to marry a one-eyed cripple with no home or money or job and a broken face? A man who believed in an Ireland she had rejected and which didn't exist any more? A man who was prepared to murder again and again for it until he was shot in his turn?

It hardly seemed likely. But everything about the girl was unpredictable. It was that which gave him hope. Andrew turned his head from side to side, gripped by the pincers of pain, and stared at the cracked hospital ceiling with his one remaining eye. If he stared at it hard enough, he thought, he might see the vision of her face, smiling at him again as she had done in the bed at Killrath.

He had to believe in her. There was no other reason to live.

When her father told her Andrew was alive, Catherine left the house. She couldn't bear it. She didn’t want to know. The words of a poem kept running through her mind and they were the only thing she had left to hold on to now.

The poem was about Christ, but Catherine did not think of it like that. It had been written by Joseph Plunkett in 1916, on the day before he had been shot as a traitor in Kilmainham Gaol. He had given it to his wife Grace, whom he had married the morning before his death, in his cell. As Catherine walked alone through the rainy streets, the lines echoed in her mind:

I see His blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of His eyes.

His body gleams amid eternal snows

His tears fall from the skies.

Catherine had stopped going to church during the war, and she was not sure if she could believe in any God after what the world had been through since her childhood. Her prayer this afternoon had sprung more from desperation than belief. Certainly she did not believe in a God who was all-powerful or all-loving. But there must still be some spirit in the universe, responsible for what happened and how people lived and felt. Catherine believed that spirit must be made up of the best and worst actions that people did; the things they gave their lives for and were remembered by.

Surely that was what Grace Plunkett must have thought when she read the poem that her husband of less than a day had written. Not just that Christ was in the stars and the rain and the snow, but that the spirit of her dead husband was in them also. And that he was part of the spirit of the nation because of the nobility of the way he had lived and what he had done.

Catherine wanted to believe all that of Sean. She walked in the icy winter rain along Bachelor's Walk towards the Customs House, and watched the black water of the river glitter in gaslight. It was very late, but she could not stay at home. Only the cold and the rain and the wind were bearable. She thought of all the things she and Sean had done together, and wondered whether he had really loved her as he had said this morning.

And she wondered whether Sean’s deeds could be thought of as noble in the way that Plunkett’s were, and if he would be remembered as a hero one day in Ireland, and whether that memory would make the world a better place or a worse one.

His body gleams amid eternal snows

His tears fall from the skies
.

She had nothing else but the rain to remember him by, not even a lock of hair or a photograph. She stood alone upon O'Connell Bridge until midnight, letting the sleet drive into her face until the bones of her cheeks were quite numb.