Ashes In the Wind (6 page)

A
FTER
THE
SALE
John goes to the graveyard by the church in Drimnamore, where the raw earth on Eileen’s and William’s graves has not yet settled. The brown curve above the grass presses heavily down on the bodies six feet below. There are no flowers. He stands there for a moment, then walks to the square to catch the horse-drawn outside car to Kenmare. He is given a heavy leather blanket to keep out the worst of the rain; although he is the only passenger, the elderly cob makes heavy weather of the long pull to the top of the pass at Moll’s Gap. There he asks the driver to stop for a moment, gets out and looks back across the bog down towards Drimnamore.

A turf line has been cut in the bog to a depth of five feet and the black walls glisten with the rain, showing the neat cut-marks of the slane. The drain at the bottom of the wall is half full of water moving slowly down the hill. The dozen beehive mounds of cut turf are drenched. They’ll hardly save that, thinks John. Only the red berries of a small rowan break the grey landscape. The steady drizzle does not stop; a sea mist rolling up the Kenmare estuary blots out the country that John used to feel was his.

From Kenmare John takes the train to Dublin and stays for the inside of a week with a friend in Trinity. It is less than a year since he left Dublin, which had then seemed alive, at the centre of a struggle just beginning, and Kerry a backwater. Staigue Fort, Eileen and William’s capture and murder, his days of fruitless searching, the fire and the sale had changed, changed utterly, his perception of the war. He had been transformed from a spectator into one of the walking wounded.

Dublin is more sombre now. There is a nightly curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. Since the arrival of the Auxiliaries there are even more troops on the streets; in parts of the city groups of Volunteers openly carry weapons, no longer on the run. The balance of power is shifting. It is clear to John that the struggle will have only one ending, an ending that a year ago he would have welcomed, as would Eileen. Now he isn’t sure.

He goes to see his solicitor in Leeson Street to sign some papers to complete the Derriquin sale. On the way, two troops of cavalry trot by, and he recognizes the saddlecloths of his father’s old regiment, the Royal Irish Dragoons. He had last seen them at a review on The Curragh just before they embarked for France in November 1914, his father at the head of his squadron, the regiment a heady mixture of green, red and gold, bright bits jingling, horses’ coats gleaming. The horses hadn’t lasted long, and Henry not much longer, thinks John. He wonders whether his father could have stopped the Staigue Fort battle, whether Henry could have found Eileen or persuaded General Strickland to reprieve the five Volunteers.

These troopers are in khaki, their tin hats incongruous on horseback. The horses’ coats are dull and the line is ragged. John sees the last horse has cast a shoe. As they pass, a woman on the far side of the street yells abuse and spits. A trooper in the rear rank shouts back at her.

‘Don’t pay any attention to that fucking Fenian bitch,’ says the troop sergeant.

The man next to him on the pavement says, ‘They’re on their way to Kilmainham where there’ll likely be a riot. They’re hanging a young Volunteer at three o’clock this afternoon. He’s a boy, a medical student, barely nineteen. No sense, no sense at all.’

The next morning John travels down to Queen’s County and is met at the station by his father’s cousin Charles. The two Burke brothers, who had arrived in Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century, had gone their separate ways, one to twenty-six thousand acres of County Kerry, the other to eight hundred acres in Queen’s County an hour out of Dublin.

‘Our branch of the family had the best of it,’ says Charles Burke. ‘It’s hard to scratch a living out of bog and rock. It’s a wonder you Kerry Burkes lasted as long as you did. Some would say you’re well rid of the place.’

Seeing the look on John’s face, he quickly adds, ‘Although I wouldn’t agree with them. The most beautiful county in Ireland.’

‘It is,’ says John quietly.

‘I don’t think I’m going back to Trinity,’ he tells Charles later. ‘I don’t like the idea of Dublin any more.’

‘Don’t blame you. Never thought a lot of a university degree. Although, mind you, I did matriculate – got under starter’s orders, fell at the first fence.’

They pull into a long drive flanked with great beech trees.

‘You’re always welcome here.’

At the end of the drive is Burke’s Fort, a solid, handsome Georgian house in grey stone standing among rolling pastures grazed by horses and a few cattle. John walks through a hall full of an untidy clutter of boots, whips, hunting caps, odd items of saddlery, almost tripping over an elderly foxhound fast asleep in a crumbling basket.

‘Cleo from the Bicester, best bitch we ever had,’ says Charles.

The drawing room is dominated by an enormous oil painting of a stallion. ‘Now there was a horse,’ says Charles. ‘Beaten once in fifteen starts, and then only because he was giving a stone and a half to the winner.’

John admires the picture, slightly distorted as it is by the artist’s eighteenth-century approach to horse anatomy. He loves the stallion’s bright, nervous, white-revealing eye, the star on the broad forehead, the gleaming chestnut coat. The horse is half rearing, the better to show off the powerful muscles of his hindquarters; the groom, in a bottle-green long coat and soft jockey’s cap, has eyes as nervous as the horse, the halter rope at full stretch. In the background is Burke’s Fort; the artist has added an extra bay to each side of the house, bays that Charles’s great-great-grandfather had perhaps planned, certainly never built, but was happy to leave uncorrected. A small cartouche says,

THE ARCHDUKE, 1787–1817

Winner of fourteen races, including the Ormonde Stakes and the St Leger.

‘He’s the foundation stallion for this place,’ says Charles. ‘All our mares trace back to him, one way or another, although after a hundred years it’s a little diluted.’ Charles plainly feels that a sixtieth of The Archduke’s blood is enough to transform the foal of even the most modest mare.

Around the rest of the room are racing scenes from Punchestown, the names of the horses and jockeys in narrow bands below each print.

‘Seventeen started, nine finished. My great-grandfather was on the winner, horse called Lisrenny out of a mare of the Filgates from County Louth. Horse never did a damn thing afterwards, but the Conyngham Cup’s on the sideboard in the dining room.

‘Would you like to hunt?’ says Charles as he shows John upstairs to his bedroom. ‘While young Charlie’s away you can ride his two. One’s a patent safety, the other’s a little wild, but they both jump anything in the county.’

For the next two months John hunts two or three days a week, always two days with the Queen’s County pack, plus a day with one of the neighbouring hunts. Occasionally they go out with the Ward Union, although Charles disapproves of hunting carted stags.

‘You never have a blank day,’ he says. ‘But it’s not natural.’

Hunting for John is the perfect distraction; up at six to get the horses ready, the long slow hack to the meet, convivial fields of ten to twenty on a Tuesday, forty or fifty on a Saturday, mostly farmers and gentry, several officers from The Curragh, a few horse-copers always on the lookout to buy or sell. Queen’s County is good hunting country, its grass, hedges and banks, well-spaced and well-guarded fox coverts, coupled with no barbed wire and little shooting, all guaranteeing a run almost every day. The huntsman, a hard-bitten, hard-riding man from County Galway, knows his business. He had been lured away by Charles from the Galway Blazers with the promise of a good cottage and better horses.

‘I’m not welcome in Galway any more,’ says Charles. ‘Worth it to have got Timmy Murphy.’

John shows so little sense of fear out hunting that Charles has to persuade him to slow down at his fences.

‘It’s the horses I’m worried about, not you.’

He and Charles like each other’s company, happy with long periods of silence as they hack out and home, what conversation there is concentrating on horses, hounds, coverts and the run. After a deep bath and a glass of Irish whiskey, the two of them relive the run over dinner with salt cellars, pepper pots and napkin rings.

Charles’s wife Cis is happy to sit quietly through dinner, occasionally answering a question about the place-names of the county, otherwise speaking only to encourage the single maid to clear the plates and bring in the next course.

‘She knows our hunting country better than I do, stopped riding after a nasty fall. Now she’s in love with the Lord,’ Charles says in a rare moment of candour. ‘I married a Papist, you know. She spends all her time with the Poor Clare Sisters, it makes her happy, and they’re harmless enough. My father would have cut me off, even though she was a Dease and her brother a VC, but there wasn’t anyone else to leave it to. Good thing being an only son. And in these times having an RC wife is better than an insurance policy. That and Timmy Murphy, who knows the local boys. We’ve never even had a visit.’

‘Eileen believed in Home Rule, and much good it did her,’ says John. Charles changes the subject.

‘W
HATEVER
YOU
DO
, don’t run,’ says Frank O’Gowan as they walk down Patrick Street. ‘You’ll not outrun a bullet. The Tans will shoot a running man first and ask questions after. Not many questions.’

Cork bewilders Tomas; Drimnamore could fit in its back pocket. Tomas has never been out of Kerry, never seen trams and buses. The steamers unloading along the Quays are enormous. The city is full of soldiers, policemen, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries.

‘The Auxies are the worst. They’re the ones with bandoliers and pistols on each hip, like Mexican bandits. Ex-officers who got a taste for killing out in France and signed up to do some more. Bastards, all of them, bastards.’

They spend the first two nights sharing a room in a two-up, two-down house with a privy at the end of a neglected little garden. The row of houses is next to the railway station. Maureen O’Hanrahan is Frank’s cousin and an IRA widow. Her house is well placed to see who and what passes through Cork Station.

On the second day a messenger comes for Frank, and he and Maureen go out together for half an hour. Frank comes back alone.

‘That one thinks because he has a felt hat and a trench coat with a turned-up collar he’s Conn the Hundred Fighter. Didn’t he jump a yard in the air when a car backfired alongside of us in Waterside Lane? Any road, Michael Collins, the Big Fellow himself, wants to see me, so I’d better go. And you, Tomas, clear out for the day. That one’s stupid enough to have been followed.’

‘Where’ll I go? I don’t know my way around Cork,’ says Tomas.

‘Kitty will take you,’ says her mother. ‘Best pretend you’re sweethearts if the RIC stop you.’

Kitty, who is eighteen, dark-haired and serious, blushes and looks away. She is a head shorter than Tomas and Frank, who are both over six feet; she is wearing a brown dress and black stocking, black shoes. She is a girl on the edge of becoming a woman.

Kitty shows Tomas the sights of Cork – the Municipal Gallery, University College, the Quays, the statue of Father Matthew.

‘He began the Temperance Movement in Ireland,’ Kitty tells him.

‘I don’t think it got as far as Drimnamore,’ says Tomas, laughing. Kitty frowns.

They climb Patrick’s Hill, looking down over the city, the wishbone of the River Lee coming together and broadening out to sea. They can smell the hops and malt carried up on the wind from Beamish’s brewery.

‘You must be proud of your city,’ says Tomas.

‘I’ll be prouder when it’s ours.’

They go back down along Patrick Street and the Quays. Whenever a patrol goes by, Tomas takes Kitty’s hand and doesn’t let it drop until the patrol is well out of sight. She asks him why he’s in Cork.

‘I’m not sure I can tell you.’

Kitty looks offended for a moment, then laughs. ‘I’m greener than a shamrock, green longer than you, I’d say. I’ve been a member of Cumann na mBan since I was fifteen. I was one of the two girls on bicycles, lookouts we were, at the Fermoy ambush. And the British shot my father after the Easter Rising.’

Kitty takes out a black-and-white postcard from her worn leather handbag. It is a head-and-shoulders picture of a young man with a thick moustache in an overcoat with a bunch of shamrock in his lapel. Below the photograph the caption reads:

MICHAEL O
’
HANRAHAN

Author of
The Swordsman of the Brigade

Executed in Kilmainham Prison, 4 May 1916.

There is a catch in her voice as she says, ‘He was a teacher, a decent man. Not yet forty. And I hardly got to know him.’

They say nothing for a while, then Tomas tells Kitty about the Staigue Fort battle, the souterrain, how Patrick had been left behind.

‘His knee was destroyed – they tied him to a chair to shoot him. Like James Connolly in 1916.’

‘You had no choice but to leave him. But how did you get here?’

‘We hid out in the mountains, then made our way to Cork, walking across the hills and through the bogs, mostly at night. Frank O’Gowan’s a Cork man.’

‘Sure, he’s my cousin,’ says Kitty. ‘A tough one, that.’

Tomas finds he cannot tell Kitty about the hostages, about the shooting of Eileen and William.

The next morning he goes out alone to find St Mary’s Cathedral, cavernous and incense-heavy. Tomas finds a confession box with a priest and no queue, goes in and kneels down, resting his elbows on the flaking varnish of the sill.

‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned...’

And the whole of the Staigue Fort story and the capture and killing of the hostages pours out of him; he still cannot give the hostages their names, nor say that Eileen Burke was a woman he knew well. The voice that comes from the other side of the grille is matter-of-fact with a strong Cork accent. This is the first confession Tomas has made to a priest other than Father Michael.