The White Plague (69 page)

The convoy passed and Father Michael crossed the roadway, to be almost run down there by a speeding jeep that came careening around a corner and dashed off after the lorries, the driver shaking a fist and screaming at the black-clad priest in his path.

Some things never change,
Father Michael thought.

But it was better that The Boy lived here now and was getting a fine education at the special school set up within the Huddersfield perimeter for selected students. They had accepted The Boy because he was Father Michael’s ward and Father Michael had official status as an envoy of the Irish state. Yes, a fine scientific education, which could be reinforced later by the Jesuits in some safe place like America.

Sian was going to be important someday. Father Michael had begun to sense this that day on the road above the besieged castle when The Boy had taken John O’Neill’s hand and told the white lie to protect the poor man. Given the obvious things there must be in The Boy’s background urging him toward revenge, it had been a grand gesture, a true turning of the other cheek. Doheny had thought it merely clever and guileful but Father Michael had known better. It had been right.

There were a great many people on the Huddersfield campus this morning, Father Michael noted. Rushing about, brushing past him. The place got more cluttered with people every day. Some of the passersby recognized Father Michael and nodded. Others smiled vaguely, knowing they had seen him somewhere.

Y’ saw me right here, y’ Sassenach fools!

Immediately, Father Michael put this thought down as unworthy of him. He must learn magnanimity from The Boy.

Strange, the rumors and stories coming out of Ireland about O’Neill. He was seen here; he was seen there; but never a confirmation. ‘Twas said that people were putting out food and drink for him the way they had once done for the Little People. Ahhh, there was no accounting for Irish behavior. Look at the hero they were making of Brann McCrae and him with twenty-six of those young girls pregnant!

“But he saved almost fifty Irish women!” they were saying. Saved! What good was it saving their flesh if their souls were lost? It was not as though McCrae were the only one who had saved women from the plague. They were saying it would be generations before all the stories were told of how women had been secreted and protected by their clever men. Not enough saved, though. But efforts would be made to bring them all back to God… even the poor girls at McCrae’s château. It had not been their doing. They had been caught by the troubled times.

As he neared the Administration Building, where Kate and her husband were quartered, Father Michael saw the usual long line of men waiting to be threaded past the viewing window where Kate could be seen. Just to see a woman was a magnetic thing, so powerful that the authorities could not deny the demands. Too dangerous, they said. And what harm did it do?

It harms Kate
, Father Michael thought. Just showing herself was bringing about changes in the woman that Father Michael feared. Was this the thing Doheny had warned against?

Father Michael made his way past the waiting men, hearing the bits of conversations:

“She’s a pretty thing, I hear.”

“And with a baby at her breast.”

Father Michael saw resentment in the faces of the men he passed. They knew he had a right to push ahead, but there was a jealous awareness here that he could go in and talk to Kate, even touch her.

The line of men wound in a long serpentine up the stairs inside the building. Father Michael ignored the stairs and went to the lift at the center of the long corridor. The guard at the lift opened the door for Father Michael and punched the button for the top floor.

Father Birney Cavanagh was waiting outside the lift as Father Michael emerged on the top floor. There was no getting around the man and Father Michael was forced to stop.

“Ahh, there you are, Father Michael. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Where had the Brits found this priest?
Father Michael wondered. Oh, Cavanagh was a Catholic priest, right enough. That had been confirmed. But he had been too long with the Gall. He even spoke with the accents of an Old Etonian.

“What is it you want?” Father Michael demanded. “Just a word or two, Father.” Cavanagh took Father Michael’s arm and almost forced him into a corner beyond the lift.

Father Michael stared down at the other priest. Cavanagh was a cherubic little man with pale cheeks. There was an insecurity in his blue eyes, which seemed always to be looking for an avenue of escape.
Did he ever comb that gray hair?
Father Michael wondered. It always seemed to have just come through a whirlwind.

“A good Irishman,” he claimed to be. And wasn’t he out of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the same as Father Michael?

Had he gone through the troubles there? Father Michael had inquired, seeking to trap the man in a lie.

“No. I was sent out ten years before.” And that had proved to be true enough.

But Cavanagh was seeing Kate and talking to her. And Father Michael did not like the mood of the woman when Cavanagh had gone. The man was thick with the papal envoy who had come over from Philadelphia, too, and Father Michael did not like what he heard about
that
. There was talk of an accommodation with “the demands of these changing times.” Father Michael knew what that meant: backsliding! Nothing good would come of it. There might even be a new schism. How could anyone respect a Catholic Church with its administrative seat in America? Things would not get back to normal until Rome was restored.

“You cannot go in to Kate just now,” Father Cavanagh was saying, his eyes avoiding Father Michael’s. “She has an important visitor.”

“Who is it now?”

“The admiral over all the Barrier Command, the one who saved her by permitting the channel passage.”

“God saved her!” Father Michael protested.

“Of that there is no doubt,” Cavanagh agreed. “But it was the admiral’s command that gave her passage.”

“The channel would have parted if God had wanted it,” Father Michael said.

“I agree,” Cavanagh said, “but the admiral has his powers and we cannot disturb him just now. It’s for her own good, I assure you.”

“Why is he seeing her?” Father Michael demanded.

“As to that, I’m not at liberty to say.”

Father Michael put down a surge of anger. He knew Cavanagh sensed it, because the man released Father Michael’s arm and stepped back defensively.

“What is happening in there?” Father Michael asked, keeping his voice under careful control.

“There’s guards on the door and you’ll not be permitted to enter,” Cavanagh said. “I promise you, there’s no harm coming to her.”

Father Michael sensed truth in Cavanagh’s words and wondered if it would be right to force the issue.
I am an envoy of the Irish state!
But that had its strictures, too. An envoy must behave with proper decorum. He sensed Doheny’s fears coming true. That silly woman was famous all over the world. “The Woman in the Tank!” Something about her had caught the public fancy. It was the press doing it, of course! All of those sensational stories. And the baby being born during the storm of the channel crossing.

“When will I be permitted to see her?” Father Michael asked.

“Perhaps this afternoon sometime. Would you care to wait in my quarters, Father. They’ve given me digs just down the corridor here.”

Father Michael felt a hollow hardness in his stomach. Something bad was happening and he was to be kept out of it. Well, he would fight! Before he could speak, though, three armed naval officers came down the corridor, their attention on him. Father Michael knew then that he was to be a prisoner and these were his guards.

Our world undermines at its peril the individual’s own sense of worth, that force at the root of human strength. This is our survival we undermine, our ability to deal with challenge. It is an inborn capacity without which there can be no humanity.

– Fintan Craig Doheny

K
ATE LIKED
to sit by the window of her new room on the top floor of Huddersfield’s Administration Building when she nursed her baby. She knew the big mirror across from her was actually a window permitting the lines of men passing in the outside corridor to peer in at her. She had only to look up into the mirror to see what the passing viewers saw. She found it odd that she felt no embarrassment to know men watched her suckling Gilla at her breast.

What a beautiful infant Gilla was becoming – the way her feet kicked, the wrinkles smoothing out, the look of alertness beginning to appear in her eyes. She was going to have red hair, fine and silky the way Kate’s own mother’s hair had been. How precious this infant was!

There had been a bad few days when they brought the serum and told her their decision. So cold-blooded they had sounded, and she had screamed at the hulking Doctor Beckett, that ugly, lantern-jawed man with his gigantic mouth and the awful words coming out of it.

“You and your husband can have many daughters, Mrs. Browder. You’ve already demonstrated that, and, with our new techniques of genetic control, we can insure that you have only daughters.”

Men in white coats had been holding her all through this, keeping her away from Gilla, not even letting Stephen be with her.

Beckett, an angry light in his eyes, had shouted at her: “We’ve only enough serum for you, Mrs. Browder!”

“Give it to Gilla!”

“No! If your blood picks up fast enough, we can give your blood serum to the baby. We may be able to save her.”

“May be!” she had screamed.

But there had been no resisting the strong men and that was the way it had been – her arm strapped down, a needle in it. She had lived through dreadful days, rocking Gilla and sobbing, fearing every moment that she would see the terrible plague symptoms in the infant.

After the injection, Stephen had been permitted to come to her. Sounding almost like a priest, he had pleaded with her to “be calm and accept whatever God gives us.” Stephen and the drugs had tried to be soothing but she could still think back to that time and feel the awful tremors in her stomach. Gilla at her breast restored the calm. The blood serum had been produced in time. And now, everyone was giving blood serum. It was spreading out across the world like a wave.

The door behind Kate opened and she heard Stephen enter, the cautious movements. She saw him in the mirror, the way he looked at the mirror, not liking it but accepting the necessity. He had seen the long lines out there, the avid eyes peering in at mother and child. Stephen was resisting extensions of the viewing time but Kate was not sure this was right.

In the whole world, the ratio of men to women was said to be ten thousand to one or worse. Here in England, of course, it was worse, although women saved by resourceful men were still being found and inoculated. A great new barracks establishment had been set up at Aldershot where the women were being protected. Kate wondered how those women felt about her own special status – the first one saved. The Woman in the Tank. She knew there was pressure to get her back to Ireland, but she and Stephen were agreed that it was not yet safe. There were still Beach Boys with weapons roaming loose. And there were even women survivors being found in Ireland, although the stories of their tribulations filled Kate with horror. Troubles! That was all Ireland ever seemed to experience.

I was lucky.

She sensed the power in her position. She was a symbol in a world agog with the announcements being made from Kangsha and Huddersfield. Despite her nurse’s training, she found some of the things being said almost too much to accept. Was it possible that she and Gilla might live five thousand years or more? They were saying that they could assure from conception whether a baby would be male or female and that the female birth ratio was going to be held at “very high levels” until the balance had been restored.

Kate found the thought of a five-thousand-year lifetime difficult to imagine. Five thousand years. What would she do with all of that time? There would have to be more than producing babies, although she knew this would be her duty for years to come. Duty! Hard from the mouth of a priest, it was a male word… a legal judgment. There would be no escaping it. She and Stephen must produce more daughters.

There were compensations, though. Kate found she rather liked her present female eminence, sensing that she must take advantage of it while she could. It would not endure in the face of this new genetic science. While it lasted, it was exciting. The men paying court to her! That was the only way to describe it: courting. Not flirtation or simple attempts at seduction; the men were serious and it enraged Stephen.

Kate saw in the mirror that Stephen had taken a chair by the smaller window behind her, the one looking out over the Huddersfield campus. The way he pretended to sit there reading his book! He was making a statement to the passing viewers: “This one is mine!”

She liked that. Kate could feel the love of Stephen, a warm current all through her body. A bond of terrible strength had been welded between them in the confinement of the isolation tank. She knew tiny detailed things about him now, weaknesses and strengths.

He saved my life.

Each suckling movement of the baby drawing life’s own milk from her breast amplified the waves of loving heat she felt for Stephen. She sensed it deep in her abdomen.

The courting men were interesting, though, especially the Russian, Lepikov. What a charming man. Old World charm. How amusing he was, lifting those thick black eyebrows at her, rolling his dark eyes. Poor man. His entire family dead somewhere in the Soviet Union. She felt so sad when she thought of it. How she wanted to cradle his head on her breast and comfort him. Stephen would never permit that, though.

Its stomach full, the baby turned away from her breast and drifted into sleep, a tiny bubble of milk on her lips. Kate smiled down at her daughter, taking her time about covering herself. Gilla was such a fascinating person to watch: the miniature face in innocent repose, that little dimple on her left cheek. What a blessing. What a miracle.