Women of Courage (88 page)

So all morning, white-faced, reverent and solemn, she and the other girls completed the first stage of their dissection, identifying the organs they had studied only in books, finding the fatty buildup in the heart that had led to the old woman’s end, noting the impurities in her liver. There was some hilarity and attempts at horseplay from one or two of the other tables, a reaction to nerves, but Professor O’Connor stamped on it quickly. He too, Catherine thought, saw this place as a temple of learning, not a meat shop.

And then it was done and the old lady, whom they would come to know well over the coming weeks, was packed away in ice, her face still blind and ecstatic.

Catherine washed her hands, changed her coat, and walked out on to the front steps of UCD. Trams, bicycles, and pedestrians bustled everywhere in front of her, busy, ignorant of death. After the hushed clinical horror of the dissecting room, the winter sunshine was intoxicating. Impulsively, she ran down the steps, sending up a burst of pigeons from around her skirts, and set off towards the river.

If only Sean had been there in the morning. He had said he might have to drop out of the course for a while, but this was the first time it had come home to her. No one could qualify without completing their dissection. She had looked carefully round the room but he had not been there, not answered the roll.

She would have liked to talk about it with him. She had not been in the presence of death since her mother died, and that had been quite different. Shattering. That once proud beautiful woman frozen in her bed like a waxwork. Although she had expected it for so long, it had seemed to Catherine unbelievable, impossible. And there had been such a welter of feelings: anger, relief, and, above all, a growing resolution that it would not happen to her. Whatever hardships come my way, Catherine had told herself, I will never turn in on myself like that, never be beaten by either men or disease. I will find out what went wrong, and take control of it.

This morning had been a small step in that direction. Death had become a little more banal, a little more approachable. She had taken the knife, she had opened the body, she had looked inside and seen how it worked and what went wrong. She knew more than before.

More than Sean, too, she thought, about that. I am a step nearer being a doctor than he is. She stood on O’Connell Bridge, feeling the winter wind cold on her face in the sunlight, and looked at the people around her. There was a mother pushing a pram, with two toddlers clinging to her skirts; some young men in flat caps leaning on the parapet; an old woman making her way slowly, carefully, across the road.

Catherine watched them all with a strange fascination. They were at once closer to her and more distant than before. The old woman had arthritis, she thought, and the bandy legs showed she had suffered from rickets in her youth. She was probably short of breath because the spinal curvature did not give her lungs enough room in the chest to breathe. Probably her liver would have those white spots on it that I saw today. I understand all that better now than I did, because I have been inside and touched it. Nothing these people think or believe matters at all, because a clogged artery or rotting liver can bring it all to an end in a moment.

But that’s just why it does matter, she realized suddenly. Any one of these people could die here on the street at any moment and not come back, not now, not ever. They would be just wax and bones and meat, like my mother and two brothers and all those millions who died in the war in France and Belgium and the old lady on the table. Each one of them had hope and love and ideas, until their bodies failed and it was all gone. That’s what I want to learn, to hold death back and give them time. That’s why I want to be a doctor.

She wished Sean was there to talk about it with her. Then she thought of him on the road at Ashtown and the way he had spoken of his friend Martin dying there. Death could come to Sean at any moment and he is learning to bring it to others. She had a sudden vision of the city as a living creature like a human body, afflicted with the disease of war. The streets were infected with British troops and police, and Sean and the other Volunteers were like white blood cells, eating up the alien bacteria so that the city’s blood could be pure.

But each white blood cell only lives a short time, she thought. Oh, God, I don’t want Sean to die. I support the revolution but I wish he were not part of it. I don’t want him killed and I don’t want him to do the killing either. It’s too final, it’s too much of a sacrilege. I couldn’t bear to see Sean on the slab like that old woman this morning.

Or to see someone he’d put there.

She walked slowly along the quays by the river, thinking. Ahead of her, a young couple sat comfortably on a low wall, their arms around each other, throwing crumbs to a couple of swans. As Catherine passed, the girl threw back her head and laughed, and the boy hugged her and kissed her under the ear.

Catherine smiled, caught the girl’s eye, and looked away, shivering suddenly with loneliness.

Tomorrow night, she thought eagerly. At the Gaelic League in Parnell Square. He promised to be there.

If he’s still alive.

13. The New Policy and Plan

T
HE SERGEANT knocked at a heavy, oak-panelled door, and ushered Andrew in. ‘Mr Butler, gentlemen,’ he said respectfully.

‘Thank you, Sergeant. That will be all.’

It was a comfortable, medium-sized office, with a large desk facing the door. Light streamed into the room from a window behind the desk. But there was no one sitting at the desk. Three men were rising to their feet from a group of armchairs which were clustered around a cheerful fire blazing in a grate to the right. One of them came forward and held out his hand.

‘Welcome, Andrew. Good of you to come.’

Two days ago Andrew had received a letter from his old commanding officer, Sir Jonathan O’Connell-Gort, asking him to come here to Dublin Castle. And since the letter had hinted at the possibility of employment, and Andrew desperately needed money to rebuild Ardmore, he had come.

Sir Jonathan indicated the other two men. ‘Commissioner Radford of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. And Mr David Harrison.’

Andrew shook hands with them both. Radford was a fit, broad-shouldered man in civilian clothes, his hair parted in the middle and plastered neatly back over his head. A former athlete, Andrew thought, a rugby full-back, perhaps. Beside him, Harrison seemed small, drab, self-effacing - subfusc was the word that came into Andrew’s head. He bobbed his head, proffered a limp, soft hand, and shrank back immediately into his armchair, where he crouched like a small mouse, furiously polishing his spectacles, as though the effort of getting up had caused them to mist over. Without them, his face seemed naked and defenceless; when he put them back on, Andrew was alarmed to see how his eyes appeared to grow suddenly bigger, like eggs dropped into a glass jar.

‘Sit down, my boy, sit down,’ said Sir Jonathan. He turned to a table where there were a number of bottles and decanters, and poured a drink. ‘Cigarette?’ The room was already hazy with smoke, as most men’s clubs and offices were.

‘Thank you, no.’ Andrew took the drink in the elegant cut-glass tumbler, and sat quietly on the edge of his chair, waiting. He made no attempt to speak.

Sir Jonathan sat down. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Ardmore,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible thing, a wicked crime. It must have come as a great shock to you.’

Andrew’s face set grim and hard, as though he were facing the cold wind outside. ‘It was a surprise, certainly. I try not to let anything shock me, any more.’

‘Will you be able to build it up again?’

‘I don’t have the money.’

‘But you will not sell up and leave, I hope? That would be a foolish thing to do now; you will get nothing for the land, in these times.’

‘Oh no. I shall never leave Ardmore. That is my land, my country. I shall rebuild it one day, when I can.’

The Ulsterman, Radford, watching Andrew closely, saw something in the rock-hard utter certainty of the young man’s scarred face that he could recognize. ‘And the arsonists?’ he asked. ‘Have they been caught?’

Andrew’s eyes, when he looked at the policeman, were quite cold and hard. There was no hint of amusement or irony in them. But Radford, who had been shown a newspaper report about the three young men who had been found in the Blackwater River, felt a tinge of fear at the precision of the response.

‘The police have not caught them, no. But there are many mysteries in our country which the police cannot solve.’

There was a silence. Andrew was aware that all three men were watching him intently. He looked back at each of them in turn, quite coolly, unmoved, unembarrassed. He did not venture to speak.

The silence lengthened. No one broke it. A door banged somewhere, far away down a corridor. The fire crackled, and a log fell on to the grate near Harrison’s foot. The little man muttered something, turned his pebble eyes away from Andrew, and fumbled with the tongs to put the log back.

‘Well, we in Dublin have had our troubles, too,’ said Sir Jonathan at last. ‘You read of the attempt on the Viceroy’s life?’

‘Yes, of course. And you have caught none of them?’

‘None; except Savage, the man who was shot. The devils melt back into the slums. No one knows anything. Or if they do, they regard us as the enemy. Even Commissioner Radford’s police can only venture out in armed groups.’

‘I see,’ Andrew said. He thought with amusement of his solitary walk through the city this morning, and remembered how dreary and peaceful it had all seemed. ‘You speak of it as though it were a war.’

‘It
is
a war, Mr Butler,’ said the small man, Harrison, speaking suddenly for the first time. ‘I would have thought you would appreciate that, after the loss of your home.’ His precise English voice and intense pebble eyes made him seem more than ever like a mouse; or a brain perhaps, equipped only with a rudimentary body. Andrew imagined him haunting books and codes in a library somewhere, scurrying in and out among the shelves, sleeping in a lair behind the wainscot. As if to prove it, the man pulled a crumpled paper out of his pocket, and began to read:

‘“
We solemnly declare a foreign government in Ireland to be an invasion of our national right which we will never tolerate, and we demand the evacuation of our country by the English Garrison.”
That is a declaration of the rebel MPs meeting in the Mansion House, and they claim that this gang of street assassins is their national army carrying out a war against the British invader. They have murdered eighteen policemen since they wrote that, and now they have come within a breath of Viscount French.’

‘Eighteen policemen,’ Andrew murmured. He thought of Passchendaele - 40,000 dead in a morning, for nothing. The best part of his three companies dead in twenty minutes, when they had gone over the top after the barrage. And now, all this fuss about eighteen policemen in a year. Ardmore was worth more than that.

The little man misinterpreted him. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘And many more to follow, no doubt. It is a real war, a shooting war, whatever is pretended in public. But our side are bound by the rule of law. We cannot fight back as we would wish. As you know.’

There was a pause. Andrew waited, but none of the three men seemed willing to break the silence, and come to the point of the interview. ‘Do you not know the names of the killers?’ he ventured, helpfully.

‘Some of them, yes,’ said Radford. ‘Dan Breen, Sean Treacy, Sean Brennan. There will be rewards out for them soon, and my men are looking for them every day. But they are not … not really at the centre of it, for all their bravado. They are not the brains behind this business. I want to get at the man who sends them out to strike.’

‘And that is?’

‘Michael Collins.’ Oddly, all three men spoke at once, but Andrew only heard the sibilant whisper of Harrison. The mousy little man hissed the name as though it were that of a snake, and the cold pebbly eyes seemed to swell with hatred. ‘Collins,’ he went on. ‘He has eyes even in this castle, Major Butler. He knows what we are doing; he sends his men everywhere. He picks off our best detectives, chooses their most unguarded moment to send his assassins in to kill them. He may be waiting for a moment to kill all of us here. And he is their commissar, too, their paymaster. He is collecting a loan, by force and trickery, no doubt, to finance this gang of his; and he is very efficient indeed. I would not be surprised to learn that he has collected as much in the past few months as the Inland Revenue itself. And with it he can buy more guns, more bombs. We know these things are coming into the country, even if we cannot stop them. It is my job to watch this business, Major Butler, and I can assure you that in a few months it will not be just assassination we are dealing with. This man is collecting enough money to finance a major war throughout Ireland.’

‘And unfortunately, he has the brains to know how to organize such a war, too,’ said Sir Jonathan slowly. ‘So that, Andrew, is why we want him dead.’

Another pause. The grey finality of the last word sounded out of place, shocking, in the respectable book-lined room. Andrew sat very still, feeling the pulse of adrenalin flood through his veins.

‘And that is why you sent for me?’

‘That is why we sent for you.’

Andrew looked at each of the three curiously. Despite Sir Jonathan’s bluff, decisive manner, there was a definite air of anxiety in the room. Naturally; Andrew realized that he held the reputations of a senior army officer, a police commissioner and a senior - whatever Harrison was - between his fingers. They were proposing murder. If he refused, and told this story to the press, their reputations would shatter as easily and irreparably as if he dropped his cut-glass tumbler on to the stone grate.

He smiled, and sipped his watered whiskey. ‘Why me?’

Sir Jonathan chose his words carefully. The night before had been a sleepless one for him, and he had thought about what he would say then. ‘First, because you are one of the best marksmen and bravest fighting soldiers I know. I have read every one of your medal citations, and I know they speak no more than the truth. You are the equal of ten other men in battle. And secondly, because you are an Irishman who believes in the Union and the Empire, and who would lose everything if these men came to power. As you have already lost your house.’