The White Plague (63 page)

“I know.” He extinguished the torch. “But it’s all we have.”

Kate began to cry softly. “What a terrible way to enter the world. What a terrible world.”

“It’s the only world she has, darling.”

The baby made a tiny hiccoughing noise.

Stephen flashed the torch on her face. The baby’s lips were moving in and out. He sensed a hunger for life in the motion.

“Let me see her,” Kate said. She raised herself on one elbow and stared down into her daughter’s face. “She hasn’t been named,” Kate said. “We’ve not even thought about a name.”

“There’s no hurry.”

“Stephen, if the cables break, this iron tank will sink like a stone.”

“The cables aren’t going to break. They’ve even put a net over us.”

“I’ll not have my daughter dying without a name!”

He stared at Kate in the dim torchlight, feeling the wild motion of the sea, aware of the wind sounds, the waves shocking against the barge. Morbid thoughts were easy to have here, but they helped nothing.

“They’ve taken every precaution,” he said.

“It’s a girl, Stephen. Don’t you understand? It’s a girl. The plague… something awful is going to happen. I know it!”

He could hear hysteria in her voice.

“Kate! You’re going to be a nurse. You’re my wife and I’ve just delivered our first baby.”

“It’s dirty in here,” she said. “Sepsis.”

“We’ll not let you die of a fever, I say! Now, stop this.” He extinguished the torch.

“Dervogilla,” Kate said.

“What?”

“We’ll call her Dervogilla,” Kate said. “Gilla for short. Gilla Browder. It has a nice sound.”

“Kate! Have you a mind to the name you’d saddle this poor babe with?”

“You’re thinking of the curse on the original Dervogilla.”

“And on Diarmud, the man she ran off with.”

“We’re running off.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Dervogilla and Diarmud,” Kate said, “the two of them to wander Ireland and never find peace, never to be together until one Irishman forgives them.”

“I’m not one to believe too much in luck,” he said, “but that’s a name to tempt fate.”

Kate’s voice was firm. “It’s the curse of poor Ireland, as well. Don’t speak against it, Stephen. I know why this plague was laid upon us. Because we refused to forgive Diarmud and Dervogilla.”

“You heard that somewhere. The old men nattering back at the castle.”

“Everyone says it.”

“You’re daft.”

“You must forgive them, Stephen, and say you approve this name for our daughter.”

“Kate!”

“Say it!”

Stephen cleared his throat. He felt on the defensive against this new Kate, this virago. He realized abruptly that she was a mother defending her child in the only way she knew. He felt a wash of tenderness for her and for their daughter.

“I forgive them, Kate. It’s a pretty name.”

“Thank you, Stephen. Now, our daughter will live.”

He felt her moving the baby and turned the torch on her. She was trying to bring the baby to her breast.

“I don’t think she’ll suckle yet, Kate.”

“She’s moving her mouth.”

“It’s when she breathes.”

“Gilla,” she said. “A pretty name.”

Stephen once more extinguished the torch. It was getting dim. They might need it.

Kate closed her eyes. If this terrible motion would only stop. Darkness made it worse. And the wild noises outside. The sourness arose once more in her throat. Abruptly, with barely time for her to put her head out of the blanket shelter and turn away from the baby and Stephen, she vomited. The smell permeated the chamber.

“It’s all right,” she gasped, reaching for his hand to stop him from turning on the torch. She did not want anyone seeing her like this. “Take the baby.” She rested her cheek against the hard edge of wood beside the mattress, heaving and heaving. It was going into the books under the bed, she realized. The smell was awful. She heard Stephen taking deep breaths to keep himself from being sick. She tried to do the same but her stomach was knotted too tightly.

The nightmare went on and on, absorbing all of her energies. It was only gradually that she grew aware of a change in their motion. The barge was rocking only slightly now. Kate wiped her mouth on a corner of the blanket and thought she might live. There was a roaring of the tug’s engines beside them and they felt their motion reversing, then a crunch against pilings. The accents of British dock workers could be heard out there.

“Have a care, y’ bloody sod! Precious packet, this one. Get the lorry in closer.”

Once more, the compressor went silent. They felt the chamber being lifted, steadier here. There came the expected thump as they were settled onto a lorry.

Stephen found the microphone and keyed the switch. “Hello, out there.”

There was no answer.

“Do you smell that?” someone outside asked.

“Bloody puke!” someone else said. “Look under the thing!”

The compressor started up then. Someone pounded on the side of the tank. “Hullo, in there! I think you’ve been breached! It’s low down to the end here.” The hammering continued to locate it.

Stephen grabbed up the torch and crawled out of the restricting rope toward the sound. The light was very dim, but he saw what he thought was a dark crack beneath the head of the bed. He looked around frantically for something to cover the place. Pressure was building in the chamber and he heard a faint hissing – vomit being forced out of the crack. His books! He had packed some of them in a box wedged behind the toilet. Grabbing the first book off the top, he began tearing out pages and stuffing them over the crack.

“Get a welder over here!” someone outside shouted.

Another voice called something that Stephen could not make out. Paper and vomit were making a crude patch but, as pressure built up in the chamber, he knew the patch would not hold.

“I don’t care if you have to break his bloody door down!” someone out there shouted. “Get that welder!”

We’ve been breached, Stephen thought. The plague. It happened while the compressor was off. He looked up and met Kate’s staring eyes, shadowed holes in the reflected glare of a spotlight coming through the ports. She held Gilla in her arms.

“You’ve fixed it, haven’t you, Stephen?” she whispered.

“Yes, love.”

“I knew you would.”

Faith
, he thought.
It resists all reason
.

A molecular biologist who dreamed of becoming famous because of a dramatic contribution to the fine chemistry of DNA – that was a thing not considered by this world’s power brokers.

– Jost Hupp

J
UST AFTER
noon on the fifth day after Kevin O’Donnell took over the Killaloe Facility, John was removed from the basement storeroom where he had been imprisoned. The prison chamber was one of three dark, stone-walled rooms beneath the old castle tower, a noisome place with slime on the walls and a damp floor. The barred windows on the three identical doors suggested this had been the castle’s original dungeon keep. Doheny had been kept for a time in one of the other rooms, but he had been removed earlier. The priest and the boy occupied the third cell. The overhead joists of the outer chamber dripped with cobwebs. The wall opposite the three prison chambers was piled high with a jumble of old discards: broken sofas, warped tables, rusty electric lamps, a gas stove with three legs, odd lengths of iron pipe, an automobile wheel with flaps of rubber clinging to its rim. A rotted stack of planking lay piled against a corner.

Two uniformed guards came for John. He did not know their names, but they were the ones who had brought meals to the prisoners. John thought of them as Slim and Baldy. They told him to strip and, when he obeyed, they kicked his clothes into a corner and handed him a clean-room smock from the Facility. It was more gray than white. He was allowed to keep only his shoes.

It was a cold gray day and a wind blowing when they escorted him into the castle courtyard. He shivered under the thin smock. A thick cloud cover made the courtyard a gloomy place. Through the arched gateway to the lakefront he saw the wind whipping a froth on the water. The wind wrapped the inadequate smock around his shanks.

“Where are you taking me?” John asked.

Slim said: “Shut up, prisoner.”

The castle proper lifted a stark monolithic shape in the gray light, with a few spots of yellow in the narrow windows to indicate where lamps had been turned on against the darkness. There were streaks of white blossoms on the window ledges, though, and the air smelled clean after the rotted odors of the dungeon.

Slim and Baldy kept firm grips on his upper arms as they hurried him across the courtyard into the administration wing, then down a yellow corridor and up the stairs to the castle library.

Every light in the library had been turned on. The crystal chandeliers danced with brilliants. Spotlight sconces focused on a raised platform that had been built near the fireplace out of plywood nailed to heavy timbers. A trestle table had been placed on the plywood and leather armchairs set up behind it. Kevin O’Donnell and Joseph Herity occupied two of the chairs. Father Michael sat at the end of the table, the boy standing beside him. Fintan Craig Doheny stood in front of the table, his back to John. Six chairs had been arranged at one side in what looked like a jury box. A dock fashioned of water pipes had been bolted to the floor near Doheny. John’s guards manacled him to this stanchion before retiring two paces.

John stared around the room. There were people standing packed in the library stacks peering out at him. He recognized Adrian Peard in his lovat green tweeds in the forefront. Peard would not meet John’s gaze.

Doheny and Kevin O’Donnell were conversing in low voices when John entered. They paid no attention to the prisoner’s arrival but went on with their conversation. Herity was sipping from an open bottle of whiskey. Several folders of papers lay loosely on the table between Kevin and Herity. A large pasteboard box sat on the chair to Kevin’s right.

John found himself enduring chiaroscuro shifts of mood as he awaited whatever ritual they had prepared for him here. The scene was at once ludicrous and moving in the trappings it borrowed from deadly courtroom games.

Father Michael stared fixedly at the table in front of him, not moving when the boy nudged him at John’s entrance. The boy stared at John with an unreadable expression.

John directed a thought at O’Neill-Within:
They mean to kill me because they think I’m you.

O’Neill-Within did not respond. 

Kevin suddenly raised his voice: “The boy is a witness and he’ll speak his piece when I say!”

The boy turned his head and looked at Kevin. In a high voice on the edge of hysteria, he screamed: “You’re a shit! Your mother thought she was having a baby! She had shit instead!”

Nervous laughter sounded from the stacks. Kevin merely smiled. “Let him be,” he said. “We know he has a full line of talk and most of it taken from the gutter.”

Herity tipped up his whiskey bottle and took a long swallow from it. He placed the bottle carefully on the table in front of him and stared at it. The bottle was almost half empty.

Father Michael looked up at Kevin and Herity. “You’re evil men. An oath means nothing to you – your own or another’s. I ask you, Joseph, when you knew they had the fingerprints and dental charts in America, why did you threaten this boy and force me to break the seal of the confessional? Why?”

“I did it to make the boy talk, not you,” Herity said. “No one should go through life like a silent ghost!”

“I pronounce you anathema,” Father Michael said, his voice low. “You are cursed through all eternity, Joseph Herity, and you, Kevin O’Donnell. I give you the burden of your terrible sin and may it grow heavier with every breath you take.”

“Your curse means nothing to us,” Herity said. He took another pull from his bottle.

A hint of nervousness in his voice, Kevin said: “Life and death are in our hands, not yours!”

Father Michael looked at John: “Forgive me, John, I beg it of you. They would torture this poor boy. I cannot permit that. I have broken the seal of the confessional. Forgive me.”

Turmoil gripped John’s breast. Seal of the confessional? How could that be important? Perspiration poured down his brows, burned his eyes.

Kevin O’Donnell grinned and opened the box on the chair beside him. He lifted a large sealed jar from it and placed it on the table beside him. John stared at the bottle. It was rilled with amber liquid and there was something floating in the liquid. O’Donnell turned the bottle slightly and John saw a face there.

It was a head!

The eyes were closed but the lips were slightly parted. John thought he recognized the third horseman who had arrived with Herity and Kevin.

“Meet Alex Coleman,” Kevin said. “Pickled in whiskey at last and that his dream of paradise, I’m sure.” Kevin focused a wide-eyed stare on John, motioning for Doheny to stand aside. “This was the traitor whose warning let Fin here spirit away from us the pride of Ireland.”

Doheny said: “Kevin, you –”

“Don’t interrupt! You’re here under sufferance and only so long as you live up to our agreement!”

Six men came out from the stacks then at Kevin’s signal and took seats in the row of chairs, seating themselves with a noisy scraping of the wooden legs on the floor, coughs and low-voiced comments.

Kevin rapped once on the table with a small block of wood. He lifted the wood.

“I have in my hand a bit of the roof timber from Cashell. It is a token that Irish Law prevails here.” He lowered the wood gently to the table. “We have ridden here on horseback as did the kings of old, it being the mark of a conqueror. The Brehon Law will be restored.” He glanced once around the room. “Is there another O’Neill present?”

No one moved.

“The prisoner’s family has deserted him,” Kevin said. “The prisoner stands alone.” He tapped the bottle beside him. “But the triumvirate is present and the trial will proceed.” Kevin let his gaze wander over the others in the room, settling at last on Herity. “It’s time, Joseph.”