The White Plague (8 page)

“I’ve told you what I know,” Flynn said. “That’s all I can do.”

“What’s this about officials coming?” Mulvaney demanded.

“From the Health Office in Dublin.”

“Why do they have soldiers barring our way?” someone else demanded. “They’ve even guns up on Corraun!”

“There’s no need to create a panic,” Flynn said. “But it’s a serious matter.”

“Then why do we not hear it on the wireless?” Mulvaney asked.

“Haven’t I said we don’t want a panic?”

“It’s the plague, isn’t it?” Mulvaney asked.

An abrupt silence settled over the room. A small dark man with pinched features, standing at Flynn’s right, cleared his throat.

“There’s our own boats,” the man said.

“There’ll be none of that, Martin!” Flynn snapped, glaring down at the speaker. “The navy’ll be here in a few minutes to collect your boats. My orders are to prevent your leaving Achill… using what force necessary.”

His voice hoarse, Mulvaney asked: “Are all of our womenfolk to die then? Nineteen dead since yesterday and only the women and girls. Why is that, Denis?”

“The doctors will find the answer,” Flynn said. He jumped down off the chair, steadying himself against Mulvaney, but not looking the man in the eye. Flynn’s own superintendent had voiced that same fear less than an hour earlier, speaking with gentle firmness over the telephone.

“If all the women die there it could be very bad, Denis. And there’s talk it was done deliberately. You’re not to speak of that now!”

“Deliberate? By the Ulstermen or the British?”

“I’ll not discuss it, Denis. I speak only to impress you with the gravity of our situation. You there inside the quarantine will be alone for a bit to represent authority. We depend on you.”

“Will I get no help then?”

“Some soldiers are being asked to volunteer, but they’ll not be along until the afternoon.”

“I didn’t volunteer, sir.”

“But you swore an oath to do your duty and that’s what I’m asking of you now!”

As he pressed his way out of Mulvaney’s, ignoring the questions still being shouted at him, Flynn recalled that telephone conversation. There had been more orders and things he must do now.

The rain had turned to a light mist as he emerged from the bar. He got into his car, not looking at the angry faces peering at him from Mulvaney’s. Starting the motor, he turned around and drove slowly down to the concrete apron overlooking Achill Sound and the fishboats anchored there. He could see a fast patrol boat spreading a wide bow wave as it sped down from the Bulls Mouth. It appeared to be no more than five minutes away, for which he was thankful. He parked on the concrete and took his shotgun from its rack, feeling strange with the weapon in his hands. The superintendent had been firm with his instructions.

“I want you on armed watch, Denis, until they pick up those small boats. I want it understood that you’ll use your weapon if necessary.”

Flynn stared bleakly across the water at the approaching patrol boat. Seabirds were wheeling and calling over the strand. He inhaled the familiar salt odors, the smell of the seaweeds and the pungency of fish. How many times had he looked on this scene and never thought it strange? Flynn wondered. Now, though… the differences sent a shuddering through his thin body. The thing he had wanted to say back at Mulvaney’s, the thing that had filled his throat with sourness, stood uppermost in his mind.

But his superintendent had been adamant on the need for secrecy. “A great many women are sure to die, perhaps all on the island. We count on you to keep the peace until help arrives. There must be no panic, no mobs. You must be firm in keeping order.”

“I should’ve told them,” Flynn muttered to himself. “They should be bringing in the priests. It’s sure nothing else will help them now.”

He stared out at the moored fishboats, feeling a deep loneliness and a sense of inadequacy.

“Lord help us now in the hour of our need,” he whispered.

Not since the Black Death struck Ireland in the winter of 1348 has there been such a terrible time with disease.

– Fintan Craig Doheny

O
N THE
day before the Achill Island quarantine, Stephen Browder and Kate O’Gara drove off together to Lough Derg, planning to lunch near Killaloe and then drive on to a cottage on the lake near Cloonoon. It was to be a stolen three days together before examinations and a hectic summer schedule for Stephen, who now planned to specialize in high-pressure medicine.

The cottage, a remodeled farmhouse, belonged to Adrian Peard, who had graduated six years ahead of Stephen and already was recognized as an important researcher in pressure medicine and the ailments of divers. Peard, scion of a wealthy old County Cork family, had established a vacation and weekend base at the cottage on the lake, installing a large steel pressure-decompression tank in the barn behind the cottage. Stephen had been several times to the cottage, earning money as a guinea pig in Peard’s experiments.

Since their first
sexual experience
beside the Mallow Road, Kate had rationed them to one or two repeats a month and then only at her least fertile times. She had resisted this outing at first because it coincided with her highest fertility period, but Stephen had promised to “be careful.” Kate, not certain what that meant, had warned:

“We’ll not be having any bastards in our family, Stephen Browder!”

They had arranged the outing with care. Kate ostensibly was with her friend, Maggie, on a holiday in Dublin. Stephen supposedly was boating with friends near Kinsale.

Peard, who had guessed the nature of Stephen’s involvement with Kate, had volunteered the use of his Lough Derg cottage “when it doesn’t interfere with my schedule.” He had handed over the keys with a laugh and the admonition: “Leave the place neat and do try to get in a little time for study. I’d tike you with me someday, Stephen. You have a talent for solving unusual problems… such as this one.”

As Peard had expected, Stephen blushed – as much from the praise as from the conspiracy.

The car they took was a tiny green Fiat whose use Stephen had earned tutoring its owner in the niceties of kidney function, a subject that baffled the Fiat’s owner until Stephen hit on the stratagem of a large drawing with signposts on pins through which the student was required to maneuver a tiny cardboard automobile labeled “foreign matter.” It amused Stephen and Kate to call the Fiat “foreign matter” as they drove north.

A few minutes before noon they crossed the narrow old stone bridge into Killaloe. The castellated tower of St. Flannery’s Cathedral stood out like a Norman sentinel against a gathering of clouds on the horizon. The sky overhead was blue, however, and the lake was a blue-and-emerald mirror to the surrounding hills, its surface rippled by a light wind and the passage of a quartet of swans.

Just north of Killaloe, Stephen stopped at a roadside “gypsy stand” for sandwiches, chips and beer, which they ate in the meadow beside the mound where Brian Bora had raised his castle. Their picnic site looked down on Ballyvalle Ford where Patrick Sarsfield and his six hundred troopers had crossed the Shannon on the night of August 10, 1690, during the Siege of Limerick.

Kate, fascinated by her nation’s history and a little awed to be “in this very place,” began regaling Stephen with the story of Sarsfield’s ride when she found him unfamiliar with the details. Watching her color rise as she talked about that “wonderful, futile ride” against the Williamite siege train, Stephen looked longingly at the concealing shade of the trees that hid the circular foundation of Brian Boru’s castle, wondering if Kate might agree to walk into that sheltering bower with him for a time. But he could hear children shouting at the lake below the meadow, and the picnic site soon was buzzing with flies attracted by the food. They wolfed their food and ran back to the car, pursued by the flies.

In the shelter of the car, Kate looked back at the meadow and surprised Stephen with a mystical side of her nature that he had not suspected.

“Terrible things were done in that place, Stephen. I can feel it. Could the flies be the souls of the evil men who did those terrible things?”

“Ahhh, now, Kate! What a thing to say.”

She did not really cheer up until they turned down the graveled track to the cottage and she saw the old double chimney pot above the trees. When they entered the cottage, she was almost childlike in her admiration.

Stephen, who had come to understand and enjoy most of her moods, took a positive delight in showing her around. The kitchen had been remodeled from its old farmhouse days, a large window added on the lakeside, every piece of equipment not only modern but the best available.

Kate put her hands to her cheeks as she looked at it. “Oh, Stephen, if only we can have a house like this.”

“We will, someday, Kate.”

She turned and hugged him.

Outside, there was a small orchard and an area set off by stones for a kitchen garden. The barn stood on the far side of the orchard. It was a stone building with a new corrugated metal roof, and was easily half again as big as the house. A tall growth of weeds lapped against the stone sides of the barn but the path from the house through the orchard to a small side door was clear and neatly trimmed at the borders.

Stephen unlocked the padlock and swung the door open for Kate. He flipped the light switch beside the door as she stepped through. Brilliant illumination flooded the one large room, pouring down from banks of reflectors suspended from the rafters by pipes. The big tank dominated the center of the area. It was a full six meters long, two and a quarter meters in diameter. There were two quartz windows on each side, small and set at eye level, plus another even smaller quartz window in the pressure-sealed airlock hatch at the near end.

Kate, who had heard Stephen’s descriptions of his stays in the tank, said: “It’s so small. Did you really stay in there four days once?”

“It’s comfortable enough,” he said. “There’s a double-seal sanitary exhaust system. It has a telephone. The only uncomfortable part was wearing all the connections for Peard to monitor my vital signs.”

Stephen led Kate around to the far side, showing her the long bench of instruments there, the leads into the tank and, at the end, the racks and shelves of scuba gear that they used in the lough, and then at the far end, the two French-made compressors with their elaborate air filters.

Kate peered through one of the quartz windows into the tank. “I’d be bored silly in there all that time,” she said.

“I took some of my books. Really, Kate, it was quite peaceful. I studied and slept most of the time.”

Kate pushed herself away from the cold metal and brushed her hands against her skirt. “I want to make us a fine dinner in that kitchen,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a grand kitchen. Did you get all the things on my list?”

“They’re in the boot.”

While Kate busied herself in the kitchen, Stephen brought in their suitcases, the separate packs of their books from school and Peard’s blood-saturation tables. He left the suitcases on the bed, made sure Kate did not need anything more from the store at the village, then set himself up to study in the tiny parlor. He could hear Kate humming as she worked, the clatter of pans. It was possible to imagine the two of them safely married, a calm domesticity about their lives. The mood stayed with him all through dinner and right up to the instant in bed when he showed Kate how he intended to be careful. He held up a condom that one of his fellow students had bought in England.

Kate, her face flushed, grabbed it out of his hand and hurled it across the room.

“Stephen! It’s sin enough what we do, but I’ll not have that on my soul!”

It took him almost an hour to calm her, but then she was especially tender, crying against his shoulder and laughing. They went to sleep with her head cradled against his chest.

Stephen awoke late to the sound of Kate again busy in the kitchen. He had not expected this domestic side of her nature and it filled him with a warm satisfaction. She had the wireless on and was humming along with the music. Stephen looked at his watch on the bedstand, shocked to find it almost 11:00
A.M
., vaguely aware that the music from the wireless had stopped and a man’s voice was speaking with controlled excitement.

When he had bathed, dressed and entered the kitchen, he asked: “What was that news broadcast? I couldn’t make it out.”

“Oh, just some trouble up at Achill,” she said. “Will you be having one egg or two?”

“Three,” he said, kissing the back of her neck.

“Can we go swimming in the lake?” she asked.

“It’ll be cold but we can come back and be warm.”

She blushed. Stephen started to turn her around, but the ringing of the telephone interrupted.

He was a time finding the telephone behind a stack of magazines on a stand in the parlor. It was Peard.

“Ah, thank God you’re there, Stephen. Is your friend with you?”

Stephen hesitated, then: “Yes, but I don’t…”

“There’s no time for niceties! I’ve been called to a big medical meeting by Fintan Doheny. The subject matter should concern you.”

“Doheny?
The
Doheny? What could –”

“I’ve not much time, Stephen. A madman with knowledge of recombinant DNA has released a new plague up at Achill. They’ve quarantined the place but no one expects it to be contained there. Now, listen carefully. It seems this plague kills only women. It’s one hundred percent fatal so far. Now, it occurred to me that you and your friend are at the cottage and we’ve that lovely tank in the barn. A woman in that tank with positive pressure in there would be in a pretty effective isolation. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Certainly I understand, but I don’t see how…”

“I’ve no time to argue. I’m just asking that you do this thing on my request.”

Stephen glanced over at Kate, who was standing looking at him.

“I don’t know if she’d… I mean, you’re asking me to…”