Women of Courage (83 page)

Before he left, his head cocooned in bandages, Andrew had looked at the corpses of the German machine-gun crew. They were very young, hardly out of school. One had tried to grow a moustache but the hair was as soft as a baby’s. His face was frozen in a grimace of utter terror.

He remembered that face now, as he stroked the quivering dog and watched the coot pop up on the black lake, and paddle in little zigzags across the surface. The machine gunner had not spared him out of mercy, then, but only out of fear: a paralysing fear which had frozen his finger on the trigger. It was not a weakness which Andrew would ever allow himself.

He who strikes first, he thought, lives to strike again.

If he had struck a little faster, he would still have a decent face.

A second flight of ducks flew towards him out of the east. Four of them, high up. As they came in sight of the lake their wings stopped beating and they began to plane round in a wide circle, as though still not quite certain whether or not to land. They divided - two continued to plane down lower, the other two flew round again in another circle. Andrew tracked the higher two, the harder shot. As they reached the trees to his right, he fired. One barrel - two; and both birds fluttered down, in a scattering of feathers, one bouncing off the high branches of a pine tree.

At the sound of the shots the other two ducks ended their dive and began to fly away from the lake, their necks stretched upwards, their wings whirring in panic. Andrew put down his shotgun and picked up a second, which was lying loaded on a bank beside him. One duck was flying to his left, the other straight towards him. He hit the duck going left first, and then raised the gun sharply overhead to try the second barrel. But he was too late. The duck was past him and skimming the treetops. Though he pivoted swiftly he could not get a line on it before it was gone. He lowered the shotgun ruefully.

‘Three out of four,’ he murmured. ‘Getting slow.’

He had perfected the trick of hitting four in a row in the year before the war, when they had still had shooting parties at Ardmore, and his parents had been alive. It had brought him loud applause, and several guineas in bets, as others tried to emulate it and failed. Now his parents were dead, and he would have to organize any shooting party himself. But he had little desire for company, and anyway, all the friends he valued were dead.

The dog, which had leapt up at the first two shots, had turned in confusion at the third. It was a young dog, it didn’t mind about his face. As far as the dog knew, he had always looked like that. It stared at him expectantly, quivering with excitement. He pointed to the nearest duck, which had fallen in the lake. ‘Go on, boy! Fetch!’

As the swimming dog’s head cut an arrowhead across the dark waters of the lake, Andrew saw how the sun had now fully risen into the morning sky.

The day had begun well enough, but now the rest of it stretched in front of him, empty. Like the house itself, Ardmore, which he had come home to, after the war.

He wondered how he was going to fill it.

When he came in sight of the house he paused, as he always did. Ardmore, the house was called - the Big Hill - but in fact the hill itself was behind it. Andrew stood on the hill now, looking down at the back of the house in which he had been born. From up here it did not look so beautiful - a square, solid block of a building, three storeys high, with dozens of chimneys grouped in four great stacks, and a jumble of yards and stables behind it. The real beauty of the house could only be appreciated from the front, where the twin columns of the entrance looked across lawns towards the sea. All visitors approached the mansion that way.

To his surprise, Andrew saw that some visitors were approaching now. A small black model T Ford was inching its way through the tall wrought-iron gates, three-quarters of a mile away. He watched them through his field glasses. One of the passengers, a young man in a long coat and cap, was holding the gates open. When the car was through, he climbed on to the running board and got in, without bothering to close the gates behind him.

Andrew was surprised. Hardly anyone came to see him, these days; and no one came unannounced, so early in the morning.

When he reached the house, the three were already in the hall, talking to Henessy, his father’s old butler. Henessy looked unusually flustered, Andrew thought; the red veins on his bibulous old nose stood out more than ever, and he was taking anxious little steps backwards and forwards in front of the visitors, as though he did not know which one to speak to first.

They, for their part, were taking scarcely any notice of him. One, a large, heavily built young man in a thick tweed jacket and flat cap, had picked up a delicate statuette of Venus from a side table. He was holding it in hands as big as a butcher’s and examining it with distaste. Another, slimmer but still tall and heavily built, was walking up and down with his hands in the pocket of his trenchcoat, gazing at the family portraits in the hall, and trying to peer into the rooms that led off it. The third, a short fellow with horn-rimmed glasses perched on an unusually short snub nose, was pacing up and down in front of Henessy, looking at his watch.

It was immediately clear to Andrew that these were not the class of person who ought to be in the main hall at all. But for some reason, his servants were unable to deal with them.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said in a clear, hard voice, that cut through the querulous protests Henessy was trying to make. ‘Have you come to see me or my housekeeper?’

A second glance had shown him that Mrs Macardle, his usually forceful cook and housekeeper, was watching from the passageway at the end of the hall, which led into the kitchen.

The three young men turned to stare at him. There was a studied, deliberate insolence in their manner, something he had met once or twice in Flanders, amongst men from regiments who were near mutiny. It had been a shock then, he remembered; the sudden sick realization of how few the officers were, and how the men could turn the whole structure of the organized world on its head, if they chose.

The fellow with glasses spoke first. ‘‘Tis yourself we’re after coming to see, Mr Butler.’

Andrew waited, deliberately staring them out. With his two shotguns broken open over his left arm, the string of ducks stuffed into the game bag, and the setter gazing up at him, he was faintly aware of his resemblance to the twelve-foot portrait of his grandfather on the wall behind the man in the trenchcoat. Except that his grandfather had not had a jagged, seven-inch bayonet scar down the left side of his face. He stared at each man coldly, letting the fact sink in that this was his house, and they had no obvious reason to be in it.

But they did not seem as cowed as they ought to.

‘It’s about money,’ said the biggest man suddenly, the statuette still in his hands.

‘I see.’ Having established a sort of dominance by silence, Andrew moved on swiftly. He strode into the hall, unslinging his game bag and handing it to Henessy. ‘Well, we cannot discuss that here. Show these men into the library, will you, Henessy. I’ll join them in a moment. And …’ He put his guns on the floor and took the statuette gently from the big man’s grip. ‘I think we’ll put that back, if you don’t mind. It’s rather valuable and very fragile. The library is over there.’

He watched them go, picked up his guns, and strode out of the back of the hall towards the gun room. Mrs Macardle followed him.

‘Who are they, Mary?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen them before?’

‘Sure I know two of the beggars,’ she said. ‘That’s Michael Rafferty from the butcher’s shop in Youghal, and Frank Davitt, a saddler’s apprentice in the next street. But the little fellow with the snub nose is a mystery to me. It’s likely they’ve sent him down from Cork or Dublin to take charge of the others.’

‘Take charge? But what would they be wanting with me?’ He unlocked the door of the gun room, and put the two guns in their racks. Mrs Macardle stood in the doorway.

‘They’re our local Volunteers, Mr Andrew. The Sinn Feiners.’

‘Ah.’ It fell into place. ‘So that’s why Henessy was so flustered.’ He smiled, picked up his service revolver, and slipped it into the pocket of his hunting jacket. ‘Well, Mary, I’d better not keep them waiting then, had I?’

The library at Ardmore had been Andrew’s father’s great pride. A scholar as well as soldier, he had collected well over five thousand books himself, to add to those already there. It was a long room, with a view out over the park towards the gatehouse and the sea. It was a place for work and relaxation, with a fine carved desk at either end, and a set of comfortable leather armchairs clustered around the fireplace in the middle.

Although he himself had never cared much for the room, it annoyed Andrew intensely to see his three visitors seated, still with their coats on, in his father’s favourite armchairs.

He strode across the room and stood in front of them, his back to the fireplace. A housemaid had hurriedly laid a fire which was beginning to smoke, but gave no warmth. He felt the room had a cold, uncared-for, unwelcoming air to it this winter morning.

‘So. You’ve come about a question of money, have you?’

He looked at them each in turn. It seemed that the smaller young man, the outsider with the glasses and snub nose, was their leader in this. Presumably the butcher’s boy and the saddler’s apprentice were bodyguards to his lordship.

‘Well, this is how it is, Mr Butler.’ The young man ventured a smile, but he had not the charm of it. Perhaps it was shock at the way the weak morning sunlight picked out the horror of the white jagged line down Andrew’s face. ‘As you will surely know, the people of Ireland have voted for a republic.’

Andrew raised his good eyebrow, but said nothing.

The young man ploughed on. ‘And as representatives of that republican government, it is our duty to raise money to finance the actions of the said government during the period of enemy occupation. We do this by selling government bonds, which can be redeemed in five years. And since you are without doubt a wealthy man, I have come to invite you to purchase an appropriate number of these bonds. Think of it as an investment if you like, to safeguard your future as a citizen of the republic.’

Andrew regarded them coldly. Then he said: ‘An appropriate amount. Do you have any idea, Mr, er …?’

‘Slaney, Mr Butler. Brian Slaney.’

‘Do you have any idea what an
appropriate amount
might be?’

‘For a man in your position, Mr Butler, I would suggest somewhere in the region of a thousand pounds.’

‘I see.’ A little devil began to laugh in Andrew’s mind, betraying itself in a thin, mocking smile on his lips. ‘And would you have any of these bonds with you, by any chance?’

The young man pulled a folder from inside his jacket. ‘The government hasn’t actually printed the bonds themselves yet, Mr Butler, but I am authorized to sign a receipt.’

He gave Andrew a sheet of paper. It was thick, beautifully embossed in gold, green and black lettering, with the name of
Dail Eireann
at the top. ‘It’s issued by the Finance Minister, Michael Collins.’

Andrew fingered the paper thoughtfully. ‘And if I make this investment of a thousand pounds, what benefits do I get?’

The young man was becoming enthusiastic. ‘Well, it’s like any other bond, Mr Butler. The government would expect to redeem it at a fair rate of interest. I can’t say how much at present, but …’

‘What about protection?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Protection.’ Andrew glanced at the two bigger men, watching stolidly from the two leather armchairs. There was, he noticed, a heavy bulge in the saddler’s trenchcoat pocket. ‘Any genuine government grants its citizens protection, with a police force and so on. Does your government do that?’

‘It’s your government too, Mr Butler. Yes, of course it provides protection. There are the Volunteers, the Republican courts, the …’

‘Does it provide protection against blackmail?’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Butler?’

Andrew took a deep breath. These men were dangerous, he knew; but the little vengeful devil in his mind was laughing now, stoking a fire of rage that would overcome all caution. ‘I mean, does the government of this republic of yours provide protection for the citizens of Ireland against armed criminals who go around the country demanding money in return for worthless pieces of paper like this?’

He crumpled the embossed receipt up, threw it into the smoky fireplace behind him, and took his service revolver out of his pocket. ‘Because if it doesn’t, Mr Slaney, I’ll just have to rely on this, won’t I? Unless of course I trust His Majesty’s Royal Irish Constabulary. Which I do.’

The sight of the revolver had brought the other two to their feet. Andrew smiled, watching them carefully. ‘Which regiment did you gentlemen fight in during the war, may I ask ?’

The butcher’s assistant, Rafferty, blurted out: ‘We’re Sinn Feiners, Irish Volunteers, we didn’t join up to die for no damned British Empire!’

‘I see,’ said Andrew pleasantly. ‘Cowards, too, then. Your decoration is the white feather, is it not? I think you gentlemen had better leave, quickly.
Now!’

The shock of the shouted last word made them jump, and they moved towards the door. As they reached it, Slaney turned round, pointing to the fireplace, where the receipt was blazing merrily.

‘We came decently to make you a fair offer, Mr Butler, and your answer was the flame. You remember that, when you sleep at night - you in your great house that you robbed from us all!’

Now there’s a fine threat, Andrew thought, as he watched them go down the steps and scramble into their tiny Ford.

You should have shot them while you had the chance, said the vindictive little devil in his mind.

But this is peacetime, he told it.

10. Lust and Flames

A
T THE beginning of the war Andrew had had some sympathy for the Germans because he had a German mother. He had been to Germany several times as a schoolboy, and spoke the language fluently. In 1914 he had been twenty-two, still studying at Trinity. But then his elder brother, Peter, had been killed at the first battle of the Marne.