Ashes In the Wind Read online

  Seeing the look on John’s face, he quickly adds, ‘Although I wouldn’t agree with them. The most beautiful county in Ireland.’

  ‘It is,’ says John quietly.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going back to Trinity,’ he tells Charles later. ‘I don’t like the idea of Dublin any more.’

  ‘Don’t blame you. Never thought a lot of a university degree. Although, mind you, I did matriculate – got under starter’s orders, fell at the first fence.’

  They pull into a long drive flanked with great beech trees.

  ‘You’re always welcome here.’

  At the end of the drive is Burke’s Fort, a solid, handsome Georgian house in grey stone standing among rolling pastures grazed by horses and a few cattle. John walks through a hall full of an untidy clutter of boots, whips, hunting caps, odd items of saddlery, almost tripping over an elderly foxhound fast asleep in a crumbling basket.

  ‘Cleo from the Bicester, best bitch we ever had,’ says Charles.

  The drawing room is dominated by an enormous oil painting of a stallion. ‘Now there was a horse,’ says Charles. ‘Beaten once in fifteen starts, and then only because he was giving a stone and a half to the winner.’

  John admires the picture, slightly distorted as it is by the artist’s eighteenth-century approach to horse anatomy. He loves the stallion’s bright, nervous, white-revealing eye, the star on the broad forehead, the gleaming chestnut coat. The horse is half rearing, the better to show off the powerful muscles of his hindquarters; the groom, in a bottle-green long coat and soft jockey’s cap, has eyes as nervous as the horse, the halter rope at full stretch. In the background is Burke’s Fort; the artist has added an extra bay to each side of the house, bays that Charles’s great-great-grandfather had perhaps planned, certainly never built, but was happy to leave uncorrected. A small cartouche says,

  THE ARCHDUKE, 1787–1817

  Winner of fourteen races, including the Ormonde Stakes and the St Leger.

  ‘He’s the foundation stallion for this place,’ says Charles. ‘All our mares trace back to him, one way or another, although after a hundred years it’s a little diluted.’ Charles plainly feels that a sixtieth of The Archduke’s blood is enough to transform the foal of even the most modest mare.

  Around the rest of the room are racing scenes from Punchestown, the names of the horses and jockeys in narrow bands below each print.

  ‘Seventeen started, nine finished. My great-grandfather was on the winner, horse called Lisrenny out of a mare of the Filgates from County Louth. Horse never did a damn thing afterwards, but the Conyngham Cup’s on the sideboard in the dining room.

  ‘Would you like to hunt?’ says Charles as he shows John upstairs to his bedroom. ‘While young Charlie’s away you can ride his two. One’s a patent safety, the other’s a little wild, but they both jump anything in the county.’

  For the next two months John hunts two or three days a week, always two days with the Queen’s County pack, plus a day with one of the neighbouring hunts. Occasionally they go out with the Ward Union, although Charles disapproves of hunting carted stags.

  ‘You never have a blank day,’ he says. ‘But it’s not natural.’

  Hunting for John is the perfect distraction; up at six to get the horses ready, the long slow hack to the meet, convivial fields of ten to twenty on a Tuesday, forty or fifty on a Saturday, mostly farmers and gentry, several officers from The Curragh, a few horse-copers always on the lookout to buy or sell. Queen’s County is good hunting country, its grass, hedges and banks, well-spaced and well-guarded fox coverts, coupled with no barbed wire and little shooting, all guaranteeing a run almost every day. The huntsman, a hard-bitten, hard-riding man from County Galway, knows his business. He had been lured away by Charles from the Galway Blazers with the promise of a good cottage and better horses.

  ‘I’m not welcome in Galway any more,’ says Charles. ‘Worth it to have got Timmy Murphy.’

  John shows so little sense of fear out hunting that Charles has to persuade him to slow down at his fences.

  ‘It’s the horses I’m worried about, not you.’

  He and Charles like each other’s company, happy with long periods of silence as they hack out and home, what conversation there is concentrating on horses, hounds, coverts and the run. After a deep bath and a glass of Irish whiskey, the two of them relive the run over dinner with salt cellars, pepper pots and napkin rings.

  Charles’s wife Cis is happy to sit quietly through dinner, occasionally answering a question about the place-names of the county, otherwise speaking only to encourage the single maid to clear the plates and bring in the next course.

  ‘She knows our hunting country better than I do, stopped riding after a nasty fall. Now she’s in love with the Lord,’ Charles says in a rare moment of candour. ‘I married a Papist, you know. She spends all her time with the Poor Clare Sisters, it makes her happy, and they’re harmless enough. My father would have cut me off, even though she was a Dease and her brother a VC, but there wasn’t anyone else to leave it to. Good thing being an only son. And in these times having an RC wife is better than an insurance policy. That and Timmy Murphy, who knows the local boys. We’ve never even had a visit.’

  ‘Eileen believed in Home Rule, and much good it did her,’ says John. Charles changes the subject.

  7

  ‘WHATEVER YOU DO, don’t run,’ says Frank O’Gowan as they walk down Patrick Street. ‘You’ll not outrun a bullet. The Tans will shoot a running man first and ask questions after. Not many questions.’

  Cork bewilders Tomas; Drimnamore could fit in its back pocket. Tomas has never been out of Kerry, never seen trams and buses. The steamers unloading along the Quays are enormous. The city is full of soldiers, policemen, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries.

  ‘The Auxies are the worst. They’re the ones with bandoliers and pistols on each hip, like Mexican bandits. Ex-officers who got a taste for killing out in France and signed up to do some more. Bastards, all of them, bastards.’

  They spend the first two nights sharing a room in a two-up, two-down house with a privy at the end of a neglected little garden. The row of houses is next to the railway station. Maureen O’Hanrahan is Frank’s cousin and an IRA widow. Her house is well placed to see who and what passes through Cork Station.

  On the second day a messenger comes for Frank, and he and Maureen go out together for half an hour. Frank comes back alone.

  ‘That one thinks because he has a felt hat and a trench coat with a turned-up collar he’s Conn the Hundred Fighter. Didn’t he jump a yard in the air when a car backfired alongside of us in Waterside Lane? Any road, Michael Collins, the Big Fellow himself, wants to see me, so I’d better go. And you, Tomas, clear out for the day. That one’s stupid enough to have been followed.’

  ‘Where’ll I go? I don’t know my way around Cork,’ says Tomas.

  ‘Kitty will take you,’ says her mother. ‘Best pretend you’re sweethearts if the RIC stop you.’

  Kitty, who is eighteen, dark-haired and serious, blushes and looks away. She is a head shorter than Tomas and Frank, who are both over six feet; she is wearing a brown dress and black stocking, black shoes. She is a girl on the edge of becoming a woman.

  Kitty shows Tomas the sights of Cork – the Municipal Gallery, University College, the Quays, the statue of Father Matthew.

  ‘He began the Temperance Movement in Ireland,’ Kitty tells him.

  ‘I don’t think it got as far as Drimnamore,’ says Tomas, laughing. Kitty frowns.

  They climb Patrick’s Hill, looking down over the city, the wishbone of the River Lee coming together and broadening out to sea. They can smell the hops and malt carried up on the wind from Beamish’s brewery.

  ‘You must be proud of your city,’ says Tomas.

  ‘I’ll be prouder when it’s ours.’

  They go back down along Patrick Street and the Quays. Whenever a patrol goes by, Tomas takes Kitty’s hand and doesn’t let it drop un
til the patrol is well out of sight. She asks him why he’s in Cork.

  ‘I’m not sure I can tell you.’

  Kitty looks offended for a moment, then laughs. ‘I’m greener than a shamrock, green longer than you, I’d say. I’ve been a member of Cumann na mBan since I was fifteen. I was one of the two girls on bicycles, lookouts we were, at the Fermoy ambush. And the British shot my father after the Easter Rising.’

  Kitty takes out a black-and-white postcard from her worn leather handbag. It is a head-and-shoulders picture of a young man with a thick moustache in an overcoat with a bunch of shamrock in his lapel. Below the photograph the caption reads:

  MICHAEL O’HANRAHAN

  Author of The Swordsman of the Brigade

  Executed in Kilmainham Prison, 4 May 1916.

  There is a catch in her voice as she says, ‘He was a teacher, a decent man. Not yet forty. And I hardly got to know him.’

  They say nothing for a while, then Tomas tells Kitty about the Staigue Fort battle, the souterrain, how Patrick had been left behind.

  ‘His knee was destroyed – they tied him to a chair to shoot him. Like James Connolly in 1916.’

  ‘You had no choice but to leave him. But how did you get here?’

  ‘We hid out in the mountains, then made our way to Cork, walking across the hills and through the bogs, mostly at night. Frank O’Gowan’s a Cork man.’

  ‘Sure, he’s my cousin,’ says Kitty. ‘A tough one, that.’

  Tomas finds he cannot tell Kitty about the hostages, about the shooting of Eileen and William.

  The next morning he goes out alone to find St Mary’s Cathedral, cavernous and incense-heavy. Tomas finds a confession box with a priest and no queue, goes in and kneels down, resting his elbows on the flaking varnish of the sill.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned...’

  And the whole of the Staigue Fort story and the capture and killing of the hostages pours out of him; he still cannot give the hostages their names, nor say that Eileen Burke was a woman he knew well. The voice that comes from the other side of the grille is matter-of-fact with a strong Cork accent. This is the first confession Tomas has made to a priest other than Father Michael.

  ‘My son, murder is a mortal sin, a terrible sin. The archbishop has proscribed the Volunteers. I can give you absolution only if you can perform a genuine Act of Contrition and leave the IRA.’

  ‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pain of hell...’

  There Tomas stops, gets up off his knees and walks out of the cathedral. Unshriven.

  He goes back to the house uneasy, aware that he has crossed into a world where his old certainties are gone. There is no return. He and Patrick O’Mahony had walked across to Staigue Fort the night before the ambush for a change from the drudgery of the farm. The bloody halo round Seamus O’Connell’s head and the bullet that destroyed Pat’s knee had given a bitter meaning to adventure. Tomas has to wrench his mind away from the recurring images of the remote farmyard and the shooting of Eileen Burke and William McKelvey.

  He turns into Station Road and goes into the front room. Frank is there with Mrs O’Hanrahan and Kitty.

  ‘We’d best be on the move. Get your stuff and we’re away.’

  Getting his stuff takes no more than a moment; all his possessions are in a small carpet bag of his mother’s. He shakes Mrs O’Hanrahan’s hand, holds Kitty’s for a long moment, who looks down, then brushes Tomas’s cheek with her lips.

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ says Frank, frowning, and they walk out the door. As they reach the far end of the road a lorry pulls up outside number 17 and half a dozen Auxiliaries jump out. ‘Don’t run,’ says Frank as they turn the corner. Half an hour later they are in a small room above a bar down by the docks.

  ‘The Queen Victoria’s a great name for a Republican snug,’ says Frank, pointing to the sign. ‘Eamonn was for changing it. I said, better leave it alone. Call it the Wolfe Tone or the Ninety-Eight, it’ll fill up with singing heroes and get raided every other night.’

  In the upstairs room they are joined by a third man a little older than Tomas. He is called Denis; no last names are exchanged.

  ‘The three of us are away to the country for a while,’ says Frank. ‘Michael Collins has a job for us back here when we’re ready. You two need some practice.’

  ‘Practice at what?’

  ‘The revolver.’

  Frank leaves later that evening; the next morning Michael Kelly, a fifty-year-old farmer arrives in a pony and trap and gives detailed directions to Tomas.

  ‘It’ll take the best part of the day. And go easy on Cora, on the pony. She’s not one of your Kerry mares. Frank says you know horses – I hope he’s right.’

  ‘He’s right enough,’ says Tomas with a smile, patting Cora on the neck as she nuzzles his sleeve. He has a sudden longing for the farmyard smells of horses and cattle and hay.

  He and Denis swing up onto the trap and trot off down Victoria Quay. The city is soon left behind; the Cork countryside down towards the coast is flatter and more prosperous that the boggy, rocky little fields of County Kerry. Bracken, rowan and larch mark their journey and in the distance lies the grey-blue sea. The journey passes without much conversation. Tomas extracts a couple of monosyllabic replies from Denis and then gives up, concentrating on the road and, now and again, Kitty’s soft parting kiss.

  Outside Ballygarvan they are stopped by an army roadblock.

  ‘Where are you two going?’ asks the sergeant, looking down at a sheet of a dozen photographs.

  ‘Back to our farm at Lissagroom,’ says Tomas. Denis looks straight ahead and says nothing. There is a perfunctory search of their bags.

  ‘What’s in the sacks?’

  ‘Potatoes.’

  The sergeant laughs, rips open the topmost sack, tumbles out a few of the potatoes, rummages about and finds nothing.

  ‘I’d have thought you had enough of these already. And they’re a bit small, no?’

  ‘They’re seed potatoes for next year.’

  The sergeant holds up the sheet of photographs alongside Tomas, then Denis. Tomas sees Frank’s picture in the gallery and looks away.

  ‘You’re neither of you there yet,’ says the sergeant. ‘Be off with you.’

  They arrive at the farmhouse in the evening after a couple of wrong turnings, directions hard to come by from the cautious travellers they pass along the road. Frank is already there.

  ‘Were you stopped along the road?’ he says.

  ‘Only the once. They’d never seen seed potatoes before.’

  ‘Lucky they didn’t look in every sack,’ says Frank as he shifts the load and takes the bottom sack into the house. He opens it and unpacks three bulky packages, each revealing a shiny new Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and several boxes of ammunition.

  ‘These’ll do the business once you learn to point them. More reliable than any automatic.’

  Tomas and Denis say nothing, offended that they hadn’t been told.

  ‘I’ll see to the pony,’ says Tomas; he goes out, unharnesses Cora and leads her into the small stable opposite the farmhouse front door. She drinks thirstily from the bucket, then sets about the hay-net while Tomas runs his hands down each leg in turn. Sound as a bell and all four shoes still on, he says to himself. Good girl, Cora.

  The next morning they take the pistols up the hill to a small quarry where Frank puts up a couple of makeshift cardboard targets. Tomas is surprised at how close they stand.

  ‘We’re none of us Wild Bill Hickok,’ says Frank. ‘These are accurate at close range. They’re revolvers, pull the trigger each time, watch the kick as you fire. Stand square on, brace your right wrist with the left hand and pull steady, don’t jerk.’

  Tomas gets the hang of it quickly. After a week he is putting three shots into a soup-plate-sized ring every time.

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Frank.
‘We’re not snipers. If you have to fire from forty yards it’s to frighten them off. You’ll hit anything only through pure luck. Remember, close as you can, two or three to the body, one to the head to finish him off.’

  Denis takes longer. Frank is patient, showing him the grip and the stance and the pull again and again.

  Practice with the revolvers takes an hour a day; the rest of the time they spend in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and reading back numbers of Ireland’s Own, all they have to stave off boredom. On the third day the farmer returns from Cork City.

  ‘You’ve looked after Cora all right,’ he says. ‘Better than I’d expect from a Kerry man.’ This is high praise.

  The farmer has brought a message from Michael Collins.

  ‘Here’s our man,’ says Frank, spreading out a two-week-old copy of the Cork Constitution.

  The picture on the front page is of a moustached figure in British Army uniform. Underneath he is quoted as saying to a group of Auxiliaries, ‘If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are in any way suspicious, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped and you are bound to get the right persons sometimes.’

  ‘Colonel Gerald Smyth, DSO and Bar. All the way from Banbridge in County Down to make our lives a misery in Cork. He’s attached to the Auxiliaries – they’re the ones who roughed up Maureen O’Hanrahan and Kitty the day we left.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ says Tomas angrily.

  ‘Because I didn’t want you heading off back to Cork to no purpose. It could have been worse if the Auxies hadn’t been called away.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘Maybe. Any road, the colonel goes to the County Club every day for lunch, and reads the paper in the smoking room after. One of our boys is a waiter there. You, Tomas, are to go in and shoot him. Denis here will watch your back.’

  ‘Go in and shoot him, do I? Just like that,’ says Tomas. What a world am I in, he thinks, where I can be told to kill a total stranger.