The Promise of Light (17 page)

Crow stayed at the window. “Ben didn’t know about the guns. Willoughby didn’t tell him.” Sun through the lace curtains spiderwebbed his scalp and face. “He told me Arthur died of blood poisoning. Some doctor messed up a transfusion and told him that Arthur wasn’t his real father. Something about different blood types.” He laughed and his breath clouded on the glass. He kept it up until he saw that Guthrie’s face had remained stony. Then his laughter collapsed into coughing and clearing his throat.

I sat cradling my tea, feeling as if I wasn’t in the room at all, and had dropped in like a ghost at the mention of my name.

Crow changed the subject. “Willoughby sent us some money. Three hundred American dollars.”

“And you’re looking after it, are you, Harry? Now that Fuller’s underground. You may have taken Fuller’s job, Harry, but you haven’t taken his place.” Guthrie studied the smoldering peat in the fireplace.

“We’re going to get Clayton out, sir. I have a contact at the Lahinch barracks. He’ll take a bribe.”

Guthrie blinked fast a couple of times. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You say that, sir, but you don’t mean it.”

“I’m not involved.” He glared at the fire, as if Crow had hidden himself somewhere in the flames. “I haven’t spoken to my son in months.”

“I came to ask if you would look after Ben. I know you have that nephew who’s coming over from the States one of these days.”

Guthrie poured more tea into their cups. “He wrote that he was coming last year and he didn’t. He said the same thing the year before that. But what am I supposed to do if this is the year when he finally arrives?”

“You could tell him not to. Write him a letter, sir.”

“If I was to lay a guess on it, I’d say you’ve already started telling people that Ben here is my nephew.”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“The Tans will come.” Guthrie looked hollow-eyed and sad. “Burn down my house. I’m not involved in this! I’ll sit here and drink tea with you, Harry Crow and if the Tans come by afterward and ask me what I did, I’ll tell them. And if they ask for tea, I’ll pour them some as well. Do you see the way it works, Harry? I’m out of this now. If I take a Sheridan under my wing and hide him away, I’ll be as mixed up in things as you are.”

“We’ll get him home as soon as we can.”

“No you won’t. You need him here. You need him because of his name.”

“That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s true!” Guthrie picked up a poker and beat at the flames. “You heard the rumors that are already going around. Already! This boy hasn’t been in the country two days and already you’ve got people here believing that Sheridan and his avenging battalion of Wop gangsters is here in the hills and ready to thrash the Tans out of existence. It’s idiots like Petrie that do it. They spend half their time bellowing at people to be calm and the other half spreading rumors that can only bring panic. And it’s people like you”—he jabbed his finger at Crow—“who keep the rumors alive! This country needs heroes and nobody knows it more than a man like you, Crow. You can’t just keep spitting out the old stories about Cuchulain, and Finn MacCool asleep in the hills and ready to come down and save Ireland when the time is right. Even Mrs. Gisby won’t believe those stories. But Arthur Sheridan! There you’ve got yourself a live one, don’t you, Harry? Better than a live one! The son!”

“Are you going to shelter him or not, sir?”

I stayed silent, feeling them bat my life back and forth like a tennis ball. I thought to myself, You have never taken charity from anyone. And here you are now, not only begging, but having someone else do it for you. It would be better just to get up and leave. You are asking more than just charity. It’s more than you should ask from anyone.

But I didn’t get up. I knew what was outside and how long I would last on my own, with only waterlogged American money and a voice to give me away. I found myself surprised at how much sense it made to take Crow’s gun and blow my head off before the soldiers got to me and made me tell them names.

Guthrie slammed his hands down onto his knees and Crow fell suddenly quiet.

They had been talking, but I hadn’t heard them. I was far away inside my head, pacing the grey corridors and wondering whether to die.

Guthrie was talking to me. “Bring your things around, Ben. I’ll keep you as safe as I can.”

“Thank you, sir.” Crow settled his cup in its saucer. “He only has the one suitcase, and that’s up at Mab Fuller’s for the moment.”

“I thought I recognized Fuller’s clothes.”

The tea was cold. It tasted sour in my spit. “I didn’t mean to bring trouble, Mr. Guthrie.” I couldn’t even raise my head to meet his gaze.

“You can’t help what you bring.” Guthrie’s yellow-nailed fingers drummed on the edge of his chair.

*   *   *

I walked to the end of the street with Crow, still numb from realizing how much it cost these people to hide me. I wondered where the hell my plan had gone, and that strong resolve that had flared up inside me as I lay in my cabin on the
Madrigal.

It wasn’t fair. I didn’t come to hurt anybody, or to do anything wrong. I told myself all this, but even to me it sounded like the bleating of sheep. I wouldn’t have expected the soldiers to believe me, and it seemed too late for that now. It was not fair, but fairness had nothing to do with it.

“It’s been such a long time since Guthrie saw his son.” Crow buttoned his coat against the chill. “Clayton went away to university in Dublin last year. Trinity, he went to. While he was there, he joined the Sinn Fein. But he decided they weren’t doing enough, so he joined the IRA. They trained him and sent him back here. He’d been in charge of a local brigade for the past six months, ever since Fuller went to prison. But then the Tans arrested Clayton and I had to take over. And damn near everything I’ve done, I’ve buggered up. If it had been Clayton here to deal with the
Madrigal
’s guns, they’d all be ashore by now and hidden away. Instead of that, there’s only a couple of dozen. That’s why we need him back, and that’s why Guthrie won’t have anything to do with him. He says he’s had enough for one life.”

“Why do you say that?” The sky was very pale, with clouds that streamed like wagon tracks from one horizon to the other. I thought it meant rain. Bosley could have told me. He knew things like that.

Crow kicked a rifle cartridge. It jangled away down the road. “I told you he was with me in the war. He was our company officer. He was a bit old, but he’d been in the Territorial Army for a long time and when he volunteered, they didn’t turn him down. Well, he was relieved of his command in 1917. He was disgraced.”

“What did he do?” It made me dizzy to stare up at the clouds.

Crow stopped in front of a chest of drawers that had been dragged into the street. He opened a drawer and pulled out a neatly folded handkerchief. Then he blew his nose in it and stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket.

“In the spring of 1915, we were in the area of Mons in France. One night we were moving up to the line, up to the trenches. We marched and the officers rode on horseback. It was a damp night and we had half a moon looking down on us. It appeared now and then from the clouds. Stretching out on either side of the road were fields, just muddy fields as far as I could see into the dark. It was just a piss-awful night, all cold and wet, and it was about the time when people were realizing that the war would go on for years and not months like they said in the beginning. The trench war had started. We were setting up the patterns that would go on for another three years. We’d move up to the line, live in the parapets for two weeks, then be relieved and go back for two weeks’ rest. Every time we went up to the line, we’d lose ten or twenty or once as many as forty percent of the company. We lost sixty-five percent when the Germans came at us out of the fog with bayonets one night and our sentries didn’t see them in time.

“This time I’m talking about, it was maybe two in the morning and we were all marching along in silence, when suddenly Captain Guthrie reins his horse in and stops. I heard the bit clunk in the horse’s mouth and looked up. He’d been startled by something. But then he rode on. For a while it was quiet again, nobody speaking or singing, no smoking allowed, everybody just thinking about being at the line and how soon it would be before they fall into the ten or twenty or forty percent that go back from the line all rotten in a donkey cart. Or who don’t go back at all. Then Guthrie calls me up to the front. I break rank and go stamping up through the mud to see what he wants. I was a corporal, then. I see his face and he’s pale. He’s frightened. He leans down from his horse, and his horse is frightened, too, and his damn face is so pale, I can’t stand to be that close and I step back. He says to me, ‘Look out into the fields and tell me what you see.’ And I saw riders. I looked and in the moonlight and shadows, I saw a line of horsemen moving in pace with us. They were heading toward the front, same as we were. ‘Cavalry,’ says Guthrie. ‘Do you see the horsemen, Crow? Tell me I’m not mad and that there’s horsemen in the fields. No, sir, I told him. You’re not mad. I see them, too. I didn’t know we was moving up with a cavalry group. Then suddenly he leans down at me again, his face so damn pale, you’d think he had a wound that was draining all his blood. ‘Look at them again, Crow.’ So I looked.”

Crow’s voice had turned gravelly. “They was horsemen, but”—he sighed—“but they were wearing armor. Do you see what I’m saying, Ben? Armor. From the time of the Crusades damn near seven hundred years ago. With my own damn eyes I could see them. They had white tunics over their armor and on the tunics were red crosses. They carried swords and lances. And there they were riding slowly beside us. Hundreds of them. I swear to Christ Almighty, I saw them with my own blasted eyes! I looked back at the others, all the rest of the company, and they could see them, too. We all looked out into the fields, none of us daring to step away from the road. All of us was pale as corpses. These horsemen had ridden up out of the grave and were coming to help us. Do you see? We was all expecting to die. We knew the percentages would catch us in the end, and most of us they did catch. But when I saw those knights come riding from the dark to help us in our war, I figured then that the line between the living and the dead was no more than a fog. And sometimes the fog blows away for a while and you can see straight through. Since then, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that the dead can come to help us. The way your father has in a way.”

I thought about the fog between the living and the dead, Arthur Sheridan strong again and not raging in pain, waiting for the fog to blow away.

“The horsemen were gone by the morning. They disappeared. Guthrie reported what he’d seen and at first they threatened to pull his rank and dismiss him right there. They thought, here’s some bloody Irishman had too much to drink. But too many others had seen it, too. One company not a mile from ours said they saw longbowmen from the time of Agincourt. Guthrie never got back everything he’d lost on the night we saw the horsemen. They had their eye out for him, you see, the high command. It made a fine little story for the papers but they didn’t want anyone really believing it. Fine for the people at home, you know, but not for us. A year later, we were further north, still in the trenches and it was wintertime. It was night again. One of the sentries was looking through a trench periscope at the German line. You know what a trench periscope is, don’t you? You look in one piece and through a series of mirrors you can see through a tube a couple of feet up. So you can see over the top of the trench without getting your head shot off. Guthrie asked to have a look. He was watching the German line through the periscope. Their lines lay only two hundred yards away at that time. Suddenly the sentry tripped backward and let out a yell and Guthrie told me that right then something flipped in front of his periscope lens. He looked up and saw a horseman. One of the Crusaders in battle armor, riding one of those great Clydesdale horses and not ten feet from where Guthrie and the sentry stood. Guthrie said he could see the rings on the rider’s chainmail vest. Before he passed out of sight, he turned once and looked down at them.

“Ten minutes later, the Germans came at us with bayonets and shovels and trenchknives. The sentries weren’t ready, hadn’t heard the Germans assembling in their dugouts. They just came running out of the fog with no preliminary barrage or flares or anything else. They just came at us and they were screaming when they ran. That was the night we lost sixty-five percent of the company. When the end of it came and our line held and the Germans had to fall back, Guthrie reported what he’d seen to the brigade commander. I don’t know what he was thinking. He should have known what they’d do. He called for the sentry who’d been with him at the time, but it turned out the man was dead. They told him to forget about it, told him he hadn’t seen it really and he was just upset was all and to go back to his company. But he wouldn’t let up. He kept talking about the rider and the warning in the man’s face. It was too much, you see. They relieved him of command and sent him home.”

“Do you think he really saw it?” Black birds with orange beaks marched on the rooftops.

Crow shrugged. “I saw those horsemen that one night. I saw them. So if Guthrie is mad, then I’m mad, too. And everyone in that company who’s still alive is mad. But as far as I know, it’s just me and Guthrie and Stan. Percentages caught up with all the rest.”

CHAPTER 9

“Tuppence!” Mrs. Gisby barked in my face. Then she squinted, stretching her neck across the copper-plated bar top. “Oh, sorry, dear. I didn’t recognize you. I can’t see without my glasses and they always steam up when I’m working.”

She talked for a while longer about her glasses, how they slipped off and broke at least once a month. Then she demonstrated, putting on the glasses and waggling her head until they slid down to the end of her push-button nose.

I watched the khaki foam settle on my beer.

*   *   *

I had been here a week, working alongside Crow at the Dunraven Hotel, which was run by Mrs. Gisby and called Gisby’s Hotel by everyone except the soldiers. Most nights, the British officers ate dinner there, in the main dining room, which had salmon-pink walls and white curtains and silver candlesticks. There was a pub at the back entrance to the hotel. The locals all piled in there after sundown.