Ashes In the Wind Read online

  In the evening they bring William back. He is almost unrecognizable, covered in bog mud, his right eye closed and bleeding, one arm dangling limply. There is little Eileen can do to console or nurse him.

  ‘I got as far the Kenmare road. But I looked like a banshee, all covered in mud. The first two cars wouldn’t dare stop – and the third one along was them in their truck. I was past running; I couldn’t thole it,’ says William.

  ‘They may shoot us, you know. I’m sorry,’ says Eileen.

  ‘I know that,’ says William.

  That night William, in pain from his broken arm, cannot sleep. Eileen, ashamed of how little she knows of him, asks about his family in the North.

  ‘Three children, me and two sisters,’ says William. ‘I started at Harland and Wolff’s alongside of my da. He was a foreman welder, and I qualified after five years. Worked on all the big ships, so we did, the Olympic, the Titanic, the Britannic. Welders were the big men in the shipyard. Hard work, good money.’

  ‘So why did you leave?’

  ‘My da was a heavy drinker, a hard man altogether. Always spoiling for a fight. Used to knock my mother about. Did it once too often, and I near killed him. Next time I would have done, so I had to go.’

  ‘Do you ever hear from them?’

  ‘I send my ma a little money now and then. She’s not much for the writing, but I got a postcard last year saying both the girls were married. And my father had a stroke – best thing for both of them, maybe. I doubt I’ll see them again.’

  Eileen doesn’t reply. She has kept the pen she used for the letter to General Strickland, but there is no paper. Later that night she takes down the calendar above the fireplace and on its back writes to John in the dim light of the oil lamp, a long outpouring of regret and hope, then replaces the calendar on the wall.

  A week later the five condemned Volunteers are shot at dawn in Kenmare Barracks. The oldest is twenty-six.

  Outside the barracks a small group stand close together. They have just heard the rifle shots, two volleys separated by ten minutes, that tell them their sons are dead. Three of the women are crying quietly, arms crossed and clasping their shoulders, rocking to and fro. Two girls are saying aloud, ‘Mother of Perpetual Succour, help us; Mother of Perpetual Succour, help us’. Their men are still and stony-faced, save one who stamps up and down and curses. He stops when Father Michael, who has heard the condemned men’s confessions, comes out of the barracks.

  ‘They won’t release the bodies; they’re all to be buried in the barracks,’ says Father Michael. He doesn’t add that the officer in charge of the firing squad has told him that they will be thrown into a pit full of quicklime, ‘like Roger Casement in Pentonville’.

  Father Michael blesses the group, some of whom kneel; they stand together for a moment and then travel back on the long road to Drimnamore.

  One of the Drimnamore boys, Patrick O’Mahony, has given a letter for his mother to Father Michael.

  Dear Mother,

  I write you this letter to keep you in good heart. My sentence is confirmed, and I am to be put to death by being shot. All the other boys the same. If the government thinks by shooting a few young fellows like us they will break down the spirit of the Irish nation I think Strickland’s imagination imbecile.

  You have no need to be crying or downhearted when I am gone, but take courage and be proud when you know you have given one to God and Ireland.

  From your son,

  Pat

  When John hears the news of the executions he goes into St Peter’s church, open and empty, and kneels down. ‘God, please get my mother back safe,’ he says out loud, then guiltily adds, ‘and William,’ wondering whether he should be offering anything in return. Instead he says the Lord’s Prayer. He gets up and walks back towards Derriquin, pauses outside the Catholic church on the outskirts of the village and goes in for the first time in his life. It is a large, dark building, three times the size of the Protestant church. John finds it difficult to believe that the same God is worshipped here. The darkness, the strong smell of incense, the crude paintings of the Stations of the Cross along the side walls, all seem to belong to a different, older, darker religion, one that has more in common with the little shrines to Celtic gods against which Father Michael has long preached than with the lukewarm faith of the Church of Ireland.

  Three women, all in black shawls, are praying at the front of the nave. He kneels and repeats his prayer, silently this time; as he walks out he sees a row of votive candles flickering in iron brackets at the back of the pews. Boxes of different-sized candles lie on a table, a penny, threepence and sixpence depending on their size. He buys two sixpenny candles, lights them from one already burning and sticks them in vacant holders. He is about to leave when he sees the confessional box and a pair of black shoes showing under the curtain on the priest’s side. Father Michael is the only priest in Drimnamore. John goes in, kneels down and says into the grille, ‘Father Michael, I need you to tell me where my mother is held prisoner.’

  John waits, hears Father Michael clear his throat.

  ‘This is a confessional. And if I had been told anything useful I would be unable to pass it on. But I don’t know where Eileen Burke is; my only contact with the Volunteers was with the dead and the prisoners below Staigue Fort.’

  John does not reply. As he opens the door to leave the church he looks back up the aisle and sees the candles guttering in the draught.

  Word from Kenmare comes to the cabin, brought by three men, one of them Tomas Sullivan.

  ‘Tomas mo chara...’ begins Eileen, and then stops.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want the priest,’ says Frank O’Gowan.

  ‘It’s you that has need of him,’ says Eileen.

  Eileen takes William’s hand as they are led out into the farmyard. William begins to shake and a dark stain runs down the inside of his trouser leg.

  ‘He’s the first – stand him over by the wall, so,’ says Frank O’Gowan to the three new arrivals, each carrying a rifle. William’s legs give way and he curls up on the ground as though the foetal position might somehow save him. Tomas Sullivan crosses himself; then the three men fire. William lies there, uncurled and groaning in a pool of blood, until Frank O’Gowan shoots him once more with his revolver. Eileen has turned her head away.

  ‘You’re next, madam. Stand closer and aim for her heart, boys.’

  They reload; Tomas drops two bullets in the mud and has to wipe them clean.

  ‘Shoot, damn you,’ says Frank O’Gowan, and the three men fire for the second time. Afterwards Tomas Sullivan, sickened by the smell of human excrement and blood, vomits again and again as the others wait. They take the bodies in a hand-cart to a deserted quarry, the quarry from which the grey stone of Derriquin had come, and leave them under a pile of stones and rubble.

  John spends several more days on the mountain and in the village. No one in Drimnamore knows anything. No one speaks to Josephine. Ten days after the executions of the five Volunteers in Kenmare he stops looking.

  He relives, morning and night, the moment the car was stopped on the way back from church. Different versions elbow reality to one side. He tells William to accelerate, they drive around the roadblock, the car teeters on two wheels over the ditch, crashes back onto the road, they escape to the barracks at Kenmare. Or he grabs the pistol out of Frank O’Gowan’s hand and shoots two Volunteers. Is one of them Tomas? He isn’t sure. Or he says, ‘Leave my mother alone. Take me instead,’ and they do. And in the end, he and Josephine are still standing on the road, watching the Humber and the Crossley Tender disappear up the road towards Kenmare.

  5

  DERRIQUIN CASTLE IS raided six weeks after the abduction. Josephine has moved in to give John some company in the evenings; they watch together as the Volunteers fill the drawing room with petrol-soaked straw, setting a trail to the front porch and lighting it as they leave. The Volunteers help themselves to food but nothing else; they have
drained the sea-water pool and taken the fish. John’s spaniel lies in the hall, shot on the way in. John picks up the warm, bloody body and cradles it as he and Josephine are escorted outside past the bull Cúchulain lying dead in the farmyard. The horses, terrified by the smoke and flames, have broken out of their stalls and galloped off into the dark.

  John and Josephine stand on the oak-studded knoll in the demesne a hundred yards away from Derriquin, feeling the heat of the fire. Tears stream down Josephine’s cheeks; John is dry-eyed. They watch for a while, then walk slowly back to Drimnamore. On the path through the rhododendrons John sees a pair of eyes gleaming and realizes it is a woodcock sitting unafraid in their way.

  ‘It’s Henry Burke,’ says Josephine, fearful, holding John’s arm.

  John takes two paces forward and reaches down to pick up the bird. It rises, and John feels the beat of its wings as it zigzags away towards the burning house. They walk on past the Great Southern Hotel, where they can see half a dozen faces of the winter staff pressed against the dining-room window, watching the flames and the smoke. They spend the night in Josephine’s cottage in Drimnamore.

  Derriquin takes a long time to burn. Floor after floor crashes down, glass splinters and breaks, sofas and chairs flare up, oil paintings catch suddenly and disintegrate in minutes, two hundred years of estate records char slowly, the ashes caught by the wind and whirled out to sea. The stone walls are strong and the skeleton of the building, gaunt and windowless, still stands two days later, so that from a distance Derriquin seems intact.

  The bodies of Eileen and William are found in August after a tip-off, and what is left of them is buried in the Protestant graveyard. There are few mourners at the funeral, as the local Ascendancy families and the Derriquin tenants are reluctant to leave home. John’s grandfather and his Aunt Agnes come over from Cork by car. Ambrose O’Halloran and the two Doyle brothers, uneasy about going into a Protestant church, listen to the service from the porch and then join John and Josephine by the graves.

  After the funeral John goes to Cork with his grandfather and aunt. He has never been to Middleton Park; the war and Middleton’s attitude to Henry and Eileen’s marriage put paid to any social visits between the Burkes and the Brodricks.

  ‘We’ll eat in the small dining room now Agnes has gone back to England,’ says Middleton. ‘No need to dress for dinner in these times. Would you mind exercising the horses? They aren’t getting enough work now the IRA has banned hunting. Nobody has the guts to ignore the ban, though it’s not even popular with their own people.’

  Middleton manages to talk to John about Eileen as they walk to the stables.

  ‘Brave woman, your mother, no doubt about that. Never agreed with me about the Union, supported Home Rule early on. Didn’t do her much good in the end. You need a long spoon to sup with these people.’

  ‘Do you think she should have done nothing?’

  ‘I do, I do. You’d still have a mother, I’d still have my eldest daughter. She was always the headstrong one in the family.’

  ‘I think she was right to try. We should have learned the lesson of the Easter Rising.’

  ‘In 1916 we were in the middle of a world war, we were shooting men for desertion on the western front. Anything else would have looked like weakness.’

  By now John has saddled up one of the hunters; his grand­father walks slowly back to the house as John canters off down one of the long rides in the park.

  That evening Middleton is silent at dinner, drinking most of a bottle of claret himself, then talks about Ireland’s future over coffee and whiskey in the smoking room.

  ‘Look at our country now. The RIC are frightened to come out of their barracks and do their job, the courts aren’t working, taxes aren’t collected, men and women on both sides are being murdered every day. It’s hard to see a future for the Burkes or the Brodricks if they get their Republic. And we’ve every right to be here.’

  ‘By right of conquest.’

  ‘True enough – conquest and re-conquest. Ireland has always been like that. There’s been war or rebellion two or three times every century since 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne. We’ve had the ’98, Whiteboys, Caravats, Ribbonmen, the Peep o’Day Boys, Captain Rock and Pastorini, the Terry Alts, the Rising in 1848, Land Leaguers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They’ve all come and gone. Until now we’ve had the will to fight – that’s what we’ve lost.’

  ‘How do you think it will end?’

  John’s grandfather takes a drink from his glass of whiskey and looks into the fire.

  ‘Unhappily, unhappily. It’s already been disastrous for Eileen, and for you, and for Derriquin. We’ve been outflanked by the Ulstermen, and Lloyd George will hang the Southern Unionists out to dry. John, I don’t want to talk about it any more, it’s too depressing. I’m off to bed. Good night to you.’

  On his way out he pats John’s shoulder in a rare display of affection. The next day John travels back to Drimnamore.

  The sale of the Derriquin estate takes place in the ballroom of the Drimnamore Hotel: 24,929 acres, three roods, twenty-two perches, the Derriquin Oyster Fishery, three islands in the estuary, the Drimnamore River (‘a spate river, seventy-one salmon in a good year’), forty-two cottages, the demesne and the home farm, all go under the hammer. As the auctioneer reads out the townlands to be sold – Derriquin, Drimnamore, Inchinaleega, Ardeen, Gortfadda, Slievenasaska, Lomanagh, Derreenavurig and Fermoyle – John, dry-eyed since the funeral, weeps again. The hotel buys the demesne and the fishing. The proceeds of the sale bring John £2,850 after the mortgages have been paid off and the creditors settled. He gives half of this to Josephine.

  Below Staigue Fort on the road to Waterville an obelisk was later placed:

  IN LASTING MEMORY TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SECOND KERRY AND FIRST CORK BRIGADES KILLED OR CAPTURED AND SUBSEQUENTLY EXECUTED AFTER ENGAGING BRITISH FORCES AT STAIGUE FORT ON 14 APRIL 1920

  And below, in Ogham script, which Eileen Burke could have translated but not Frank O’Gowan:

  LAISAIR ROMHUIN A BUADH

  Eileen and William each have a simple gravestone in Drimnamore churchyard. There is no mention of how they died.

  6

  AFTER THE SALE John goes to the graveyard by the church in Drimnamore, where the raw earth on Eileen’s and William’s graves has not yet settled. The brown curve above the grass presses heavily down on the bodies six feet below. There are no flowers. He stands there for a moment, then walks to the square to catch the horse-drawn outside car to Kenmare. He is given a heavy leather blanket to keep out the worst of the rain; although he is the only passenger, the elderly cob makes heavy weather of the long pull to the top of the pass at Moll’s Gap. There he asks the driver to stop for a moment, gets out and looks back across the bog down towards Drimnamore.

  A turf line has been cut in the bog to a depth of five feet and the black walls glisten with the rain, showing the neat cut-marks of the slane. The drain at the bottom of the wall is half full of water moving slowly down the hill. The dozen beehive mounds of cut turf are drenched. They’ll hardly save that, thinks John. Only the red berries of a small rowan break the grey landscape. The steady drizzle does not stop; a sea mist rolling up the Kenmare estuary blots out the country that John used to feel was his.

  From Kenmare John takes the train to Dublin and stays for the inside of a week with a friend in Trinity. It is less than a year since he left Dublin, which had then seemed alive, at the centre of a struggle just beginning, and Kerry a backwater. Staigue Fort, Eileen and William’s capture and murder, his days of fruitless searching, the fire and the sale had changed, changed utterly, his perception of the war. He had been transformed from a spectator into one of the walking wounded.

  Dublin is more sombre now. There is a nightly curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. Since the arrival of the Auxiliaries there are even more troops on the streets; in parts of the city groups of Volunteers openly carry weapons, no longer on the run. The balance of power
is shifting. It is clear to John that the struggle will have only one ending, an ending that a year ago he would have welcomed, as would Eileen. Now he isn’t sure.

  He goes to see his solicitor in Leeson Street to sign some papers to complete the Derriquin sale. On the way, two troops of cavalry trot by, and he recognizes the saddlecloths of his father’s old regiment, the Royal Irish Dragoons. He had last seen them at a review on The Curragh just before they embarked for France in November 1914, his father at the head of his squadron, the regiment a heady mixture of green, red and gold, bright bits jingling, horses’ coats gleaming. The horses hadn’t lasted long, and Henry not much longer, thinks John. He wonders whether his father could have stopped the Staigue Fort battle, whether Henry could have found Eileen or persuaded General Strickland to reprieve the five Volunteers.

  These troopers are in khaki, their tin hats incongruous on horseback. The horses’ coats are dull and the line is ragged. John sees the last horse has cast a shoe. As they pass, a woman on the far side of the street yells abuse and spits. A trooper in the rear rank shouts back at her.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to that fucking Fenian bitch,’ says the troop sergeant.

  The man next to him on the pavement says, ‘They’re on their way to Kilmainham where there’ll likely be a riot. They’re hanging a young Volunteer at three o’clock this afternoon. He’s a boy, a medical student, barely nineteen. No sense, no sense at all.’

  The next morning John travels down to Queen’s County and is met at the station by his father’s cousin Charles. The two Burke brothers, who had arrived in Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century, had gone their separate ways, one to twenty-six thousand acres of County Kerry, the other to eight hundred acres in Queen’s County an hour out of Dublin.

  ‘Our branch of the family had the best of it,’ says Charles Burke. ‘It’s hard to scratch a living out of bog and rock. It’s a wonder you Kerry Burkes lasted as long as you did. Some would say you’re well rid of the place.’