The Fox's Walk (21 page)

I put on my dressing gown and, steeling myself to look under my bed, the most likely and terrifying place for a monster to lurk, I found my bedroom slippers. If I met anyone on my way to the kitchen, I did not want to add the misdemeanor of not being warmly enough wrapped up to that of being found out of bed in the middle of the night. As I put on my slippers, I remembered one of the rare moments when my father had concerned himself with a detail of my upbringing. “Why isn't that child wearing bedroom slippers?” he had asked, interrupting my mother who was scolding me for some more serious offence.

Shielding the flame of my candle as best I could from the draft, I put the box of matches in the pocket of my dressing gown and went downstairs. The back stairs would have provided a quicker and more discreet route to the kitchen, but they creaked and the stairwell was darker and there were corners and doorways from where some faceless horror could lean out and whisk me in, never to be seen again. Fortunately for my family, I thought, bitterly and not completely logically—I was halfway down the
front
stairs at the time of the self-pitying thought—my mother had a new baby to distract her, so my loss would not be a serious one.

I now could see a waning moon through the fanlight above the front door as it emerged for a moment from behind night clouds. As I reached the foot of the stairs and started to cross the hall, I heard a sound and stopped in my tracks. Soon afterward I heard the tiny explosion of a spark from the remains of a charred log in the drawing-room fireplace. That seemed to explain the former, less identifiable, sound. The embers of the evening's fire, safely behind a spark guard, were gradually settling into themselves, adding a small warmth to the chimney that rose behind the drawing-room wall to Grandmothers bedroom above.

The candle flame protected by my hand, a necessity that reduced the available light, I pushed through the baize-covered door and went along the service passage into the kitchen. Oonagh was asleep in front of the range; she opened one eye and, seeing it was no one likely to feed her or put her out the back door into the night, closed it again. I paused, surprised by her presence, having thought that she slept on Grandmother's bed, making her exits and entrances onto the dark gray slates of the veranda through a window kept open even in the coldest, wettest weather.

My boots were no longer beside the kitchen door. I had come downstairs for nothing. Bridie had put them away with the other boots in the gun room, and, even if I had brought them upstairs, as I had intended, she would have taken them down to join those belonging to my mother, who no longer hunted, and to my grandmother, who had not worn hers during the past twenty-five years, perhaps for longer. It occurred to me that after I had grown out of my beautiful new boots, I would grow into my mother's and, in time, Grandmother's. There would, of course, be a couple of sizes between my boots and those of my mother's, and another between hers and Grandmother's: My grandmother was a tall woman.

So I should go back to bed. I retraced my steps. All went well until I had almost regained the landing. Then I trod on the hem of my night dress, stumbled, and dropped the candle, which immediately went out.

I sat in the dark on the top step, collecting myself and groping about for the candle. One of my bedroom slippers had come off as I lost my balance and was now out of range of my searching foot. Below I heard a door open and saw a very faint glimmer of light.

“Don't wait for me,” I heard Grandmother say.

I thought she was going to the kitchen to look for Oonagh. I also thought my great-aunt would wait for her; the question was where she would do so. If she came to the foot of the stairs, her candle would, in all likelihood, provide enough light for her to see at least some movement as I crept away. I had three or four seconds to gather myself up, scurry around the corner, along the corridor, and back into my bedroom.

But first I had to find the candle and the candlestick. They had separated when I dropped them. I felt along each carpeted step and the polished wood at either side—very carefully along the edge next to the banisters, since I didn't want to knock either candle or candlestick through the railings and have it fall noisily on the stone flags below. I found the candlestick first; it had a square base and so had not rolled any distance. As my fingers searched further afield, they touched a patch of something smooth and soft. Candle grease. I wasted a moment scraping at it with my fingernails before I heard footsteps in the hall—Grandmother and Aunt Katie both walking in my direction. Desperately, I crawled down a step or two, found my slipper, groped around a little wider, and felt the candle. My hands full, I scrambled to the top of the stairs, got to my feet, and tiptoed around the corner. Once inside the door of my room, I waited for the old ladies to reach the top of the stairs; I wanted to hear if they had noticed me. As I waited, my heart thumping, I pushed the candle back into its stick; I still held one slipper in my hand. It took a little time for Grandmother and Aunt Katie to gain the landing. To my surprise, instead of turning right toward their rooms, I could hear their footsteps coming closer. I scampered back to my bed, kicked off my slippers, put the candle on my bedside table, flung my dressing gown at the foot of the bed—using a few seconds to take the box of matches out of my pocket and return it to its place—and scrambled into bed. I was lying still, eyes closed and trying to make my body appear relaxed when the old ladies paused in my doorway.

I could hardly breathe; if they had seen me they must have known I wasn't asleep, if they had not, what were they doing in the doorway? I was considering speaking and was trying to think of something more substantial than “Hello, Grandmother,” when Aunt Katie said, “You see. She's fast asleep.”

It seemed to me at that moment that Grandmother must have caught sight of me and that Aunt Katie had said that it was only her imagination. I lay quite still and waited for them to go.

“Why do you think she does it?” Aunt Katie's voice again, somewhat closer. She straightened my bedroom slippers and put my dressing gown neatly over the rail at the foot of my bed.

“It's probably seeing that woman today. She hasn't done it for months.”

“She'll grow out of it, won't she? Doctor Jacobs———”

Dr. Jacobs? Dr. Jacobs was the family physician, frequently coming to the house to tend Grandmother and Aunt Katie. I had never had cause to meet him.

“Yes, but suppose it's part of the other thing———” Grandmother's voice trailed off. She sounded unsure of herself for the first time since I had come to live at Ballydavid. I sensed that her unsureness did not pertain to my physical health, whether or not Dr. Jacobs had been called to diagnose me in absentia; it seemed as though some moral dilemma had presented itself and that I was somehow the cause.

After they left, I lay awake for some time. I understood that I had avoided reproof for my misdemeanor because the old ladies had thought I was sleepwalking. And I had learned that I did sleepwalk; the discovery causing both pride that I was so interesting and an unsettling awareness that I was not quite in control of my own body.

It took me much longer to consider the possible significance of several mysterious moments during the day. I understood only that my grandmother and great-aunt had looked at me differently, with almost a touch of deference, and that this change had nothing to do with anything I had done. I had an uneasy feeling, similar to that I had felt when I discovered that my place in Grandmother's affections owed a good deal to some similarity in my features and coloring to those of her dead son. I suspected that she and Aunt Katie now mistakenly attributed some action—I could think of no origin for it other than the hunting field—or quality to me and that I was getting, and would get, special treatment as a result of their misapprehension.

It seemed important that this misunderstanding, whatever it was, should not miscarry. I was determined to be strictly accurate if asked how I had done in any future riding lessons. I also determined that allowing my aunts to be deceived or to deceive themselves—as in the sleepwalking incident—would never happen again. I already had the feeling of being swept, probably to my advantage, into something I didn't understand; when it became clear—as it would—that there had been a mistake, I did not want to seem to have knowingly taken advantage of it. At last I fell asleep.

When I woke up the sounds from downstairs suggested it was a little later than I was usually encouraged to sleep. I dressed quickly and hurried along the corridor toward the stairs. The wax I had spilled the night before had already been removed.

I
RISH HISTORY IS FULL
of heroic gestures and blind incompetence. Bad luck also plays its role. Communication, or lack thereof, is frequently part of these disasters. Leading up to the Easter Rising and the tragedy and debacle of Casement's last mission, the poor—in some cases, nonexistent—communication between the various arms of the revolutionary movement was in contrast to the efficient manner in which the British Admiralty, who had broken the German code, were intercepting wireless transmissions and deciphering their contents.

It was already the afternoon of Friday, 14 April, when a message from the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhoods headquarters in Dublin was received in New York at the offices of the
Gaelic American.
In code, it read: “Arms must not be landed before midnight of Sunday 23rd. This is vital.” The twenty-third was Easter Sunday, nine days away.

By the time the message was decoded, it was too late to deliver it that day to the Germany Embassy. On the fifteenth, the Embassy sent a message by wireless to Berlin and, unknowingly, to London. Although the wretched Casement in Berlin had been kept in ignorance, the same was not true of British Intelligence. The U.S. Secret Service had come across plans for the rising in the course of a raid on a German agent in New York and the information had been passed to London.

By the fifteenth, the
Aud,
the trawler carrying the arms—obsolete, in poor condition, and far too few—was already well on her way to Ireland. Since she didn't have a wireless, there was no way to communicate the change of plan to the captain.

That it was too late to intercept the
Aud
was not, in turn, communicated back to New York (and thence to Ireland), and the committee in Dublin, believing the altered plan in place, prepared to meet the trawler and unload the arms on Easter Sunday.

Earlier in April, Casement and two companions—Robert Monteith and one of the Irish Brigade recruits—had boarded the submarine that was to take them to Tralee Bay off the west coast of Ireland where they were to meet the
Aud.
Casement now hoped only to reach Ireland in time to warn the revolutionary leaders that there was no meaningful aid to be expected from Germany and to urge them to cancel the revolution planned for the Easter weekend.

It had been for some time clear to the German military and diplomatic authorities that the increasingly neurotic and obsessive Casement was more trouble than he was worth; he was increasingly fragile psychologically and his lack of judgment had become apparent. The Irish Brigade had been, from its inception, an unmitigated disaster. Not even the most optimistic senior German official any longer considered sending the Brigade to Ireland; there had been doubts about sending Casement himself. Robert Monteith was the man the Germans preferred to deal with by then. Monteith worshipped Casement and had known him for a short enough time to be worried and sympathetic rather than disillusioned.

The three men boarded the U-20, the submarine that had almost a year before sunk the
Lusitania.
After a day and a half at sea, there was a mechanical failure, and they were forced to turn back. Casement, high-strung, suspicious, and obsessive, suspected the German authorities of faking the failure in order to prevent him from landing in Ireland in time. His suspicions were unfounded; when they arrived in Heligoland he saw for himself the broken shaft. It was decided that they would travel by another submarine and one was summoned from Emden.

On 15 April, they put to sea once more. The new submarine was under the command of Captain Raimund Weisbach, who had been the torpedo officer on the U-20 a year before. It was he who had fired the fatal torpedo that had sunk the
Lusitania.

A little after midnight, during the early hours of Good Friday, the submarine, traveling largely on the surface and carrying the exhausted, seasick Casement; Monteith, who had injured his wrist; and the never-very-promising Irish Brigade recruit, arrived at the point where they were to meet the
Aud.
The conditions were perfect for the rendezvous: a calm sea and moonlight. But the captain of the submarine found no trawler, no signal light—nothing to suggest that they were expected and no indication of what they were to do next.

Captain Spindler, in the
Aud,
reached the part of Tralee Bay where he expected to find the submarine at midnight. He, too, found no one waiting for him, but he didn't realize he had made a navigational error and was several miles away from the meeting place. He waited for a few hours, and then, following orders, cruised up and down the Irish coast until, in the morning, he was intercepted by an English naval vessel. The
Aud
was scuttled, and the load of arms intended for the rising sank to the bottom of the sea.

The U-20 also waited for about three hours; then Casement, Monteith, and the recruit loaded themselves and some equipment and a few personal possessions into the dinghy and made for Banna Strand.

***

IT WAS TOWARD
the end of Lent (I had, not entirely of my own volition, given up chocolates), the hunting season was over, and Grandmother was composing an invitation. Although Aunt Katie's presence was required and it was she who would write the letter, her suggestions were neither solicited nor welcomed.