Bold Sons of Erin (36 page)

“You’re a coward to blame God.”

He smirked. “I damn God.”

“You’ve damned yourself. By the accords of your own faith.”

“Then let me be damned. If she’s in Hell, I want to go to Hell. To be with her. I want no part of His Heaven . . .”

“You are an evil man.”

He smiled, almost like the cool fellow he once had been. “I’m a man. I’ve learned that much. Perhaps that alone makes me evil.”

“We must struggle against evil. Against temptation.”

“Against love?”

“If you did not kill Kathleen Boland, who did?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Because you’re lying.”

“Because I gave my word.”

I wanted to slap him again. Harder. “Your
word?
Your
word,
man? The word of a priest who turns girls into whores? The word of a priest who keeps his lover’s corpse in his bed? Your
word?”

“I gave my word. Hang me. It doesn’t matter.” He smiled bitterly. “Perhaps we’ll be happy in Hell. Perhaps that’s the only chance any of us has for happiness.”

He was mad.

I could stand the stench no longer. Nor could I stand the wicked man before me. I should not have soiled my own soul by arguing with him. Perhaps I should have shot the fellow dead.

I longed for fresh, clean air as I never had before and have not since.

“I will come back tomorrow,” I told him. “For you. And for her. Do not do anything foolish before I return. And do not try to run away from the law.”

He mocked me with his laughter. “Run? From your pathetic law? I’m running from God, you ass. I’m not running from you.”

I LEFT HIM THERE and took me outside. I had to pause at the foot of his steps, to gulp the night deep into me, to find some purity in a rotted world. I wanted air and bearable explanations. I had not even asked him of Mary Boland. For I was flummoxed. All my theories had collapsed. I no longer believed the priest had killed his beloved. I did not think his character strong enough for that.

Perhaps you see the pattern of things already. But I could not. I needed one great piece to make sense of the puzzle, and I could not know how soon that piece would come to me. I reeled, despite the support of my cane, almost drunk with the stink that had entered my lungs. The icy air was not enough to cleanse me, inside or out. I had the scent of her rottenness in my nostrils, on my tongue. It had seeped into my clothes. Into the heart of me.

I took my first steps down that hill in a welter of anger and disappointment, of shame and wounded pride, confused by the priest’s sulfurous arguments. I grumbled threats toward him, only to keep myself from too much thinking. A sorry creature he was, blaming God and love for loathesome sins.

I stepped into the trees and vomited. I could not get her corpse out of my mind, see. When I had gone into that house, to force the priest into an admission, I entered his bedchamber to confirm the corpse’s identity. It was Kathleen Boland, and no question. Kathleen of the cinnamon hair. Twas even longer now, for the hair continues to grow on a corpse for ages. He had covered her in a white gown, but the rot come seeping through. The bed appeared as though he slept beside her.

I retched until my belly burned and my throat was raw to a misery.

As I wiped my mouth, I saw Mary Boland before me.

She looked as beautiful as Guinevere must have done. Or perhaps she was a fairy princess, indeed, with her hair too black for description and the moonburned white of her skin framing tyrant’s eyes.

“Mrs. Boland,” I said. Twas all the words I could manage in my surprise.

And then I saw the witch. Or the old woman, I should say. The leprous creature, her flesh corrupting the moonlight. She stood behind Mary Boland and off to the side. As if relying on the younger woman for protection. Or using her as an instrument.

“Nun kommt die Stunde des Todes,”
the old beast cackled.

Mary Boland drew a knife from her shawl. “You’re keeping him from me!” she screamed. “You’re keeping my Danny from me!”

As she shrieked out those words, she hurled herself at me. The violence of her assault was almost stunning. The fiercest Afghanee was nothing to her. I lacked the time to lift my cane to parry her. I barely managed to thrust my left hand between the blade and my chest.

The knife plunged into my palm, a shining, quicksilver thing. The tip erupted from the back of my hand with a splash of blood. My own gore struck my face. That knife might have been heated in Hellfire, for the pain was instant and scalding.

I stabbed my cane into her bosom so fiercely she let go of her weapon. The blade remained in my hand, pinning it to the air. Mary Boland clutched herself, recoiling. The old woman rushed toward me with her claws.

Quick as could be, I unlocked the sword inside my cane, flinging the sheathe to the side.

The old woman stopped an inch short of impaling herself. Mary Boland, who meant to attack again, crouched down as an animal will. Longing to spring.

I teased my blade at one, then at the other, warning them off. All the while, pain raged in my hand. I have been wounded a plenty of times, but remembered no such a sensation. Twas a
great, scalding burn, like a muscle tormented by spasms. My fingers would not move. The big blade wobbled and dangled from my flesh. I wanted to tear at it and howl, as a dog will.

I pressed my skewered hand against my coat. Feeling the hot blood smear. My paw might as well have been held against a skillet.

“I will kill you. Both of you,” I told them.

They began to circle me. Like beasts. Snarling. Cackling. The old woman’s skin was diseased to a luminosity. The moonlight seemed to melt it from her bones. Mary Boland looked as beautiful as anything on this earth. And feral.

Perhaps there were such things in the night as witches.

Mary Boland had an animal’s wiles. She sensed me. Something dreadful about me. About all of us. About Adam. She dropped her shawl from her shoulders and I heard cloth tear. In a moment, the woman had freed her breasts. The glow of the heavens showed her to me.

“Do ye want this?” she hissed. “Is that what you’re after wanting? That’s what ye all want, an’t it?” She eased toward me, pressing up against the tip of my blade, and began to hike her skirt. “Come hither to me then. Come and take what ye want . . .” She lifted her skirt until she had exposed her long, white nakedness. And her darkness.

The old crone edged toward me all the while. While the younger woman sought to bewitch my eyes.

I did not press my blade into Mary Boland. Instead, I slowly drew it back. Unable to harm her. The two of them closed their distance, ever so slowly. I smelled their stink the way I smelled that corpse. Two distinct scents they had. As different as life and death.

I stepped rearward. Crushing frozen leaves. Terrified that I would trip and fall. With the blood running off my fingers, soaking my greatcoat and dripping down onto the earth.

“Keep you back,” I said. “Or I will kill you.”

“Ye don’t want to kill me,” Mary Boland said. Advancing an inch at a time. “That’s not what ye want of me. Come now. Let me kiss the blood from where I’ve hurt you.”

She held her skirt at her waist with one hand and stretched out the other toward me. Reaching for me. Beckoning.

“Keep away . . .”

So queer it was. I have killed many a man, God forgive me. Yet, at that moment, I could not put my blade through a creature who had just stabbed me. Or even through the old woman.

The crone began a nonsense incantation. It thickened the night. And seemed to shade the moon.

“Come on, my sweet,” Mary Boland said. “Come take what ye want now . . .”

The hilt of the sword-cane was pressed into my own stomach. The long blade shivered. I felt that, in a moment, the woman would take it from me.

“Come to me,” she whispered.

The women must have seen him in the moment before he struck. Or they heard a sound I did not. They both cringed back, as if I had thrust my blade at them after all. An instant later, he fell upon them, swinging a stick.

“Get off with you,” he barked. “Get off, you filthy devils.”

He slashed at them with his stick and I heard it crack over their shoulders, across their backs.

“Get away, now,” he commanded.

The two women screeched and cursed at him. But they did not put up the least bodily resistance. They scuttled off, Mary Boland struggling to free the skirt she had dropped and caught on a nest of nettles. She got a fierce clubbing for her efforts and finally ran off to the sound of ripping cloth and leaves crisp underfoot.

And so they left me.

“For the love o’ sweet Jesus,” the man said. “Put up your bloody, damned knife. They’re only a pair of crazy women.”

“Witches,” I gasped.

He laughed. Twas an iron sound. “They’d love ye for thinking it, wouldn’t they? The hag . . . and that other one?”

It was John Kehoe. The fellow they called “Black Jack.” But his beard shone blue in the moonlight, as anthracite will go blue in the flicker of a lamp.

Twas then he saw my hand.

As he watched me, I propped my blade against a tree and pulled the knife out of my palm. Now, I am not a weak man. And I have dug a bullet from my own leg, when the surgeon died of the bloody trots himself and the column was fighting for its life in the Pushtoon hills. But I nearly dropped as I felt the blade slide out of me. My bowels quaked.

As soon as I had the knife free, the pain collapsed to an ache. But blood there was in plenty. And I still could not move my fingers enough to speak of it.

“You’ll have to take yourself off and have that seen to,” Kehoe told me. “Or you’ll bleed to death and we’ll have the blame for another one.”

THERE WAS NO DOCTOR IN THE VALLEY, of course. For miners and laborers did not merit such attention. Kehoe wanted to be shut of me, but I remembered Mick Tyrone’s insistence that wounds must be washed clean at the earliest chance. We never fussed with that sort of thing in India, but Mick was no fool and I made Kehoe lead me down to a pump.

He worked the handle, a long, creaking affair, and the icy water poured over my wound. I tried to let it into the crack where the blade went through, but there is a limit to what a man can do to himself. A woman popped her head out of a window to ask what the doings were, but Kehoe told her to take herself back to her slumbers. I cut a great, long strip from my shirt—which troubled me, for the garment was recently purchased—and Kehoe helped me bind it about my paw.

“You’ll need it seen to,” he repeated.

We stared at each other. The moon was falling and the silver light made the side of his face look hard and bright as plate.

“How did you know?” I asked him. “Were you following me?”

“If I was, I’d say ye were the luckier for it.”

“Were you watching me? Or watching the priest? Or the women?”

“I was sleeping,” Kehoe said. As if that would suffice for an explanation.

“And you heard something?”

He sighed. As men will when they see that they must answer. “No, boyo. I was sleeping and I had a dream, if ye have to know. A quare enough dream it was, and lucky ye are that I had it.”

“This isn’t a dream,” I said.

“Oh, I can tell the difference, laddybuck. No, I dreamed a gypsy woman was shaking me by the arm. A brown-skinned bit she was, in some sort of heathen get up. Shaking me and telling me I must get up that instant. And get up I did. To nothing at all. Nothing but the cold beyond the blankets. But I stepped out of bed to have a visit with the night pot, and then I heard something that wasn’t a dream at all. I heard footsteps where no footsteps should have been. And when I had me a look out Donnelly’s window, there ye were. Walking up the street like a one-man parade. So I thought ye might want following. For I was half a pint sure ye were going up to the priest’s house. And I didn’t see that any good would come of it. Now . . . does that satisfy your great, Welsh curiosity?”

“No,” I said. “Tell me. You must have waited while I was in with Father Wilde. You must have . . . God, man, don’t you people know what’s going on up there? You
must
know. It’s unpardonable.”

“We’ll settle our own affairs.”

“Will you? Before Mary Boland kills someone else? The way she killed Kathleen Boland? Oh, I see it now. That I do. And I do not doubt that she killed the general, too, though I cannot yet see the why of it. But I will get to that in time.” I wrinkled up my mouth. “You and your Mr. Donnelly, with his ‘No man among us killed your general.’ Playing me for a fool. Because it wasn’t a man who did the killing, but a woman.”

“Ye want to have that hand looked after,” Kehoe said. He turned his back and began to walk away.

“I know Danny Boland didn’t kill anyone,” I called after him. “I understand, see. I can help him. If you help me.”

Kehoe did not turn to me again.

“I know about his father,” I tried. “I know why you all protected Danny Boland.”

But Black Jack Kehoe was never a man to be swayed by another’s words. He got to things in his own time, not before. A hard man, he was, and a capable hater, never shy of doing what he thought necessary. But he did not deserve the fate that Franklin Benjamin Gowen would prepare for him in a dozen years time.

“I’ll be back,” I nearly shouted. “With a warrant for Mary Boland’s arrest.”

By that time, he was little more than a shadow.