Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (36 page)

“As a friend of mine used to say it looks as though the cat has absconded with your tongue,” she said amusedly while topping up the tea he’d barely touched and handing him the cup along with a stack of phone messages.

“Where’s Liz?” he asked weakly.

“Family emergency, she flew out to Edinburgh this morning, she’s left you a letter,” she handed a sheet of his own stationary to him, filled with Liz’s neat squared off hand. “She’ll call you tonight. When she’s back, which won’t likely be for a few weeks, she’s mentioned that she’d like to cut down on her workload. She is sixty-three you know and her daughter’s been asking her to come for an extended visit for quite some time. She’ll talk to you when she returns, in the mean time you’ll have to make do with me.”

He endeavored to make eye contact with her, only to receive a quizzical and slightly annoyed, “Yes?”

“It’s just, I thought,” he took a deep breath, feeling stupidly adolescent, “that you might not want to be here after what happened in Scotland. You disappeared as soon as we got back and I haven’t heard from you since.”

“You hired me to work, Jamie and, I must say it’s been a bit of a farce on both our parts thus far. If I’m going to stay as your employee, then it’s time I actually did a job. I’m entirely dreadful at Gaelic, though I can manage the rougher translations for you if you don’t mind polishing up the entrails so to speak. This though, organizing your day from home, keeping track of calls and appointments I can manage quite well. As to what happened, well you were only being honest, weren’t you? I can, if it makes you more comfortable, endeavor to blush and dimple as you enter the room and sigh audibly when you leave it. I can even,” she smiled wickedly, “throw in a thwarted seduction every month or so just to keep the peace.”

“Have you found a place to live then, so soon?”

For the first time that morning, her composure seemed to slip slightly. “I have.”

“May I ask where? I will after all need an address to send the checks to won’t I?” He strove to keep the sarcasm from his voice and failed completely.

“I’m staying with Casey and Pat for now, they’ve a spare room.”

“Do they?” he retorted sharply, “Perhaps Pamela you should have actually read those books I gave you this summer.”

She smoothed a sheet of paper and took a careful breath before replying.

“I’d like to stay on working here Jamie, I think I can actually be of help to you, but once I walk down that hill at night and through those pretty gates, my business is my own. If that seems unreasonable to you, I’ll find another job elsewhere and you can wash your hands of me entirely. You aren’t responsible for me Jamie, I don’t need taking care of.”

“Don’t you? I’d say that your choice in roommates says the opposite.”

“Jamie,” she said simply, professionalism stripped from her voice, some echo of the vulnerable girl he’d rejected showing herself for the first time that morning, “I can’t do this with you.”

“It’s only,” he shook his head and sighed, “I’ve gotten into the habit of taking care of you, of having you about in the evenings. I’ve, as the saying goes, grown accustomed to your face.”

“I’ll miss you too, Jamie,” she said softly and then smiling brightly resumed her mask of professionalism. “You really had best get back to Ronan, he sounded just a bit desperate and if you don’t face up to Dannyboy he’ll be on your doorstep by this evening, once again his words. I,” she stood up, smoothing her skirt with hands that betrayed only the slightest trembling, “have to order some stationery from the printers and go over the plans for your dinner party with Maggie.”

“Dinner party?” he echoed, feeling somewhat bruised by her brisk tone.

“Yes, you’re having a dinner party on the fifteenth of October for the Duke of Dungarvon, at which, after lulling him into complacency with good food and even better whiskey you’ll broach the subject of the deplorable working conditions of his factories in Belfast and Derry.”

“I will? And just where might his Belfast factory be?”

“In your father’s old riding, as you well know. Lucien Broughton will be invited as well.”

“What?” Jamie shot forward in his chair, causing his tea to slop over the rim of the cup.

“There’s an old Chinese proverb that goes something to the effect that you must fight the enemy on ground of your own making, or as my father once said ‘before sticking the bastard over the fire you should lightly butter him on all sides.’”

“You want me to have that viper in my own home?”

“We’ve dug in as far as we can on an exposed hill; it’s time to start fighting. It’s time as well don’t you think, to get off that fence Jamie before someone gets permanently damaged.”

“Perhaps,” he said, taking in the tone of her voice and the paleness of her aspect, “it is.”

Part Two
The Skein Unwound

In the spring of 1968, it seemed as if the whole world was on the march, on fire, ablaze with ideals and bright, burning hope. There were student riots in Paris protesting Vietnam, the incandescent, leaping promise of the Prague Spring, the pouring flame-ridden speeches on American campuses, in American streets against a war that was cutting open the great mother heart of America and spilling her blood across the people, seeping irrevocably into her soil. But Paris ended, the students went home and the pale light of the Prague spring was squelched by Soviet tanks and guns, and America witnessed the end of the decade two years before the calendar would admit to it. The swift and merciless deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy saw to that, as did Tet and the escalation of troops into Vietnam and the realization that some wars were never meant to be won.

The Irish were late to catch the fever, out of time and mind as they were. But being Irish burned all the harder to catch up. It was the opening act in an unconventional war. War was never the aim of the students who began the revolt, who marched through the streets regardless of bans and opposition and outright hostility, stones had been thrown before and would be again, it was only the unfortunate that died. The ideals and demands were as old as the human longing for justice and seemingly as out of reach; freedom of speech and assembly, an end to the gerrymandering of political districts, an end to discrimination and one vote for every one man. Simple enough, seemingly. Feet may be quick to march but as a wise man once noted the march of the human mind can be damnably slow. The Irish, stubborn regardless of caste, class or religion took hard to their own sides of the fence and were not, regardless of the passion and fervor of youth, to be pulled willingly down the road to democracy. The older generation scratched their heads, long comfortable in misery or ignorance now, they’d lost their need to rock the boat. Rocking the boat got you drowned, plain and simple. Unionists out and out accused the emergent civil rights movement of merely being Republican foot soldiers in camouflage. The government dismissed them as rabble-rousers, agitators seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. The students with the wisdom of youth ignored all imprecations and sallied forth under ban, under the blow of rock and baton, coming up repeatedly against the hard, ugly face of hatred. They were the flame that would be put to the tinder of sectarianism and old hatreds, caught in the headiness of that year, of that dying, burning decade, they did not see that regardless of who sets the fire all who touch it will be burned and bear the scars for it.

Pat Riordan, as sweetened by the wind of optimism as any other nineteen year old with a pure heart is bound to be, found himself smack-dab in the middle of the new movement. He’d come back early from his country summer, intending to settle into his studies, continue his job at the pub and do what he could on a grass-roots level for the advancement of democracy in his own community. And found himself swept into the tides of history by the events of one autumn afternoon.

It was a march in Derry to protest the discrimination that had long divided the city by the river. Derry had always been recognized as second only to Belfast in political importance. It was a town in which a Nationalist majority was denied control of local government by a flagrant re-alignment of electoral boundaries. Not a single new house had been built since 1966 within the city boundaries. Over a thousand houses in Derry were occupied by more than one family and in some cases seven or eight families were huddled in homes that had originally been single dwellings. The Unionist body that controlled the city’s council refused to extend its borders in fear that they would no longer be able to control the vote if political lines were expanded. Over 1,500 families were on the local wait list for housing and almost all of them were Catholic. Derry was a city filled with grievances and old hatreds and as such an obvious sight for a march.

The organizers of the march had chosen a particularly inflammatory route, over sacred Orange marching ground, feeling that change never came without provocation. The numbers attending were smaller than hoped, as the lure of an at home football match proved too much for many well-intentioned hearts. Some four hundred eventually formed up in Duke Street, the starting point, were treated to five minutes worth of speeches from the march organizers and turning about to begin the march ran into simultaneous police baton charges from either end of the street. Pandemonium and panic ensued, men, women and children cudgeled to the ground with equal impunity. Pat, stopping to help a small girl who was wandering about alone, found himself firmly thwacked across the back of the head with a baton. Scrambling to his feet and grabbing up the little girl before he could think twice about it, he tucked her face into the protection of his neck and shoulder and ran in the direction that seemed the least dangerous. Chaos blossomed redly behind, the marchers were knocking each other down in their panic to flee, the police, mad with bloodlust were wreaking vengeance for uncommitted crimes and all of it, Pat saw as he dodged yet another upraised stick, was being captured on film by a man on the edge of the crowd.

Scenes flashed before his eyes that he would only have time to realize later. A young girl being dragged by two policemen, half-dazed, shirt rucked up around her shoulders; a middle-aged man in a suit being struck repeatedly in the groin with a baton; and a boy near his own age, reeling and dizzy, blood coagulating and trickling down his face, struggling to get to his feet only to be struck savagely at the base of his neck by a police shield. Pat, holding the little girl, who’d gone very silent, as tightly as he dared, headed for the bridge at the top of the street, beyond the bottleneck of the frantic crowd.

He made it through the gauntlet of sticks and stones, still clutching the little girl, bruised and winded and about to make a dash for it across the bridge when a huge cascade of water caught him full in the face and threw him back several feet. He stumbled backward, caught his heel on a loose stone and fell down hard with the little girl still clinging for dear life to him.

“You okay?” he heard as he fought to catch his breath and shaking his head to clear the dizziness, he peered up at the speaker.

“So ye do have a tongue,” he said. The little girl sat on his stomach, dripping with water, smiling a toothless smile. She looked about six.

“We got to run,” she said, with what seemed great sense for a six-year-old. She hopped nimbly off to the side and waited for him to regain his feet. When he did so, she grabbed his hand and said, “this way.” For lack of a better plan Pat did as he was told. They ran away from the crowd and away from the city, ran far enough, she with such sprightly speed, that Pat thought he might not be able to keep pace after awhile. She stopped just as abruptly by a tree in a vacant lot. “My Sylvie said to come here if there was trouble, my Sylvie will find us here.”

“Sylvie?” he gasped out, leaning against the tree and smelling the bitter-soap smell of an old hawthorn.

“Aye, my Sylvie,” the child said and sat, tidying the folds of her blue cotton dress as if she were about to take tea with the Queen. “I’m hungry, d’ye have anything to eat?” she asked with the equanimity of a child whose stomach takes precedence over horrors of every variety.

He patted his pockets down and found a soggy, half-melted chocolate bar that he handed over to her.

She ate it quickly and neatly, licking the last vestiges of it off the silver wrapper and smiling her gapped and gummy smile at him when she was well and truly finished. “D’ye have anything else to eat?”

“No, no I don’t. I’m sorry about that, if I’d known I was goin’ to be on the run with ye today I’d have filled my pockets.”

“Hmmphm,” she said and cast a famished eye over her surroundings as if she expected something to fall from the sky.

“What’s yer name?” Pat asked.

“Sarah,” she said, searching the pockets of her dress for a crumb and sighing when they produced nothing.

“Were ye with yer mammy an’ daddy?”

“No,” she chewed briskly on her index finger, a digit that looked as if it was thus abused on a regular basis.