Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (30 page)

He braced his hands on either side of him on the bed and raised himself up a little way. The woman was leaning on the open half door again, with her head and shoulders outside, just as she had been leaning when he arrived. He must have made a sound for now she turned and looked at him. He sat up, still pressing his hands against the bed for support, but there was no need, he was no longer dizzy. In fact, his head was wonderfully clear. He had been sleeping. The woman must have drugged him; there must have been something in the drink she had given him. He did not care. He had not felt so rested in a very long time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I seem to have…” He did not know what to say. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

The woman shut the window and advanced slowly between the beds and stood looking down at him. Her expression was one of mild interest, tinged with amusement. “I was keeping an eye out for himself,” she said. “Had he of found you here he’d say we were
spurking
and that’d be the end of you.”

“Spurking?”
Quirke said.

“Doing it, you know.” She bit her lip, laughing a little. “
Spurking,
we call it.”

“You said this was your place,” he said, “that no one would come here.”

“Himself knows no bar,” the woman replied darkly.

Quirke looked again at the sleeping child. She was breathing through her mouth, making eerie animal sounds, little yelps and whinnies. “Dreaming,” the woman said, looking too at the girl. “What about, God knows.”

She sat down beside Quirke on the bed. He looked at her toes braced on the bare planks of the floor. Feeling his look, she waggled them. “What did you give me to drink?” he asked.

“’Twas tea”—she pronounced it
tay
—“and nothing but. You had a great sleep, all the same. You’re the weary man, surely.”

He smiled sidelong at her. “Yes, Molly,” he said, “I’m the weary man.” He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, with a flick of disdain. He found his lighter. He wondered if his wallet was still in his pocket—she could have stolen it, while he was enjoying his great sleep—but he did not bother to check. It was pleasant and restful, sitting here beside her in companionable warmth; he was at peace, after so many tempests. “Tell me about the priest,” he said. “Tell me about the two of them, the two
sharogs
.”

“Tell you what?” she asked. She was smiling sideways back at him now, a teasing light in her eye.

“Tell me who killed the young one. Tell me who killed Jimmy Minor.”

She went to the stove and opened the fire door with the metal hook and lifted a log from a wicker basket under the bed in which the child was sleeping. She dropped it into the glowing embers and shut the door again. Quirke looked to the half door that was open at the top and saw the moon shining low in the sky, a strangely small but intensely bright silver disk. When had the rain stopped? He drew back his cuff and looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. It seemed to him he must have been asleep for hours, but it could hardly have been for more than a few minutes. How had he come to be lying down, in the first place? He had no memory of stretching out on the bed—had Molly helped him? Strangely, it did not trouble him not to know these things. His muddy shoes had begun to dry out; he could feel the tightness of the leather.

The stove tended to, Molly sat down again, but this time she sat opposite him, on the bed in which the girl was sleeping. Quirke looked into the opening of her blouse, at the slope of her breasts and the soft shadow between them.
Spurking:
he smiled to himself.

Molly had set a hand lightly on the girl’s narrow forehead. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her from her sleep. “’Twas the
cuinne
that done it,” Molly said.

The dog had returned, and was outside, whimpering to be let in.

“The priest?” Quirke said. “What did he do?”

A long interval passed before Molly spoke again. The moon shone in the window; the dog still whined. Quirke saw again the priest leaning against the bar in Flynne’s Hotel, smoothing his tie with his hand and lifting the whiskey glass in the other and smiling at him over the rim.

“They’re a queer crowd, them priests,” Molly said. “I’ll have naught to do with them. Himself it was that brought him here.”

“Packie, you mean?” Quirke said. “It was Packie who brought Father Mick here?”

“Aye.” The child in the bed gave a little mewling cry, as if she were in pain, and Molly laid her hand once more on her forehead. “Took a great interest in this one, he did,” she said. “Told Packie he could help her, could teach her book learning and the like. What book learning, I said to himself—what book learning could he teach her, and her with no more than a scrap of understanding?
Oh, no,
he says,
Father Mick will learn her, Father Mick is the man
.” She was looking down at the girl, and her mouth tightened. “So he started coming out here, every week, of a Sunday night. I knew by the look of him what he was.”

“And what was that?” Quirke asked.

She seemed not to have heard him. “Taught her, all right, he did—oh, aye, he taught her.”

“What kind of things did he teach her?”

She looked at him, her face tightening. “The like that you wouldn’t find in any decent reading book. Had them all at it, at the learning, so called, all the lads and the girleens in the camp. Himself was delighted.
Oh, they’ll all be great scholars,
he’d say,
they’ll get grand jobs and keep me when I’m old
. The
mugathawn
.”

She stopped. Quirke eyed the moon in the window, and the moon eyed him back. His throat had gone dry. He saw again the priest standing at the bar in Flynne’s Hotel that rainy night and turning with a smile of broad disdain to watch the red-faced young man walking stiffly in the wake of his angry girlfriend. What was it he had said? Something about love, and love’s difficulties.

“And what did you do?” he asked.

It was some moments before Molly replied. “I didn’t know,” she said, very softly. She stroked the forehead of the sleeping child. “She never told me.”

“Why not?”

“Why? You might as well ask the wind why it blows.” She slowly shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell me, but then there was no more hiding it.”

“Hiding what?”

“That she was
granen
—in the way of a babbie coming. And she hardly more than a babbie herself.” She stopped, and Quirke saw to his surprise that she was smiling, coldly, with narrowed eyes. “She told
him,
though.”

Quirke waited a beat. “She told Packie?”

The woman nodded. “Aye. She told him it was the
sharog,
and all about the things he done to her—and not only her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sure, wasn’t he doing it with half the childer in the camp!”

“There were other girls, like Lily—?”

“Girls, aye, and the lads, too, the ones he was supposed to be teaching the book learning to. He didn’t care what they were, so long as they were childer.”

“Why had none of them spoken? Why hadn’t they told what was happening?”

She looked at him pityingly. She did not have to speak; he knew what the answer was. To whom would he have spoken, when he was a child at Carricklea? Who would have believed him? Who would have so much as listened?

“What did Packie do,” he asked, “when she told him?”

“He wouldn’t have it that it was the priest, of course, so he sent Mikey and Paudeen after that poor young fellow instead. Somebody had to pay the price.”

“But you knew it wasn’t Jimmy Minor that she meant when she said it was the
sharog
. You knew which of the two it really was.”

“Ach!” She made a grimace, screwing up her mouth as if to spit. “What matter was it what I knew? Himself knew it too, anyway.”

“But he knew it wasn’t Jimmy.”

“What matter? It was the
sharog
done it, that was enough for him. Sure, you couldn’t touch the priest—you’d have no luck after that.”

“And the baby?” he said. “What happened?”

The woman was gazing at the child, her hand still resting on her forehead. She shrugged. “She hadn’t a strong enough hold of it. How could she, after the sinful way it came to her?”

“I see.”

“Do you, now.” The woman glanced at him from under her eyelashes, smiling in malice. “So you’re satisfied, then. You had the great sleep, and learned what you came to learn, and now you’ll be off.”

He gazed back at her, and slowly her smile faded, and she looked away from him.

“Why did you tell me?” he asked.

“Why would I not?” she answered quickly, with a flash of almost anger.

“And what if
I
tell?”

She brought out her tobacco and papers and set them in the lap of her red skirt and began to roll a cigarette. “Who would you tell?” she asked.

“The Guards?”

That seemed to amuse her, and she nodded to herself, bleakly smiling. “Mikey and Paudeen will be gone by morning, across the water, on the boat.”

“To where?”

“Over to Palantus—England, as you’d say. That’s the place to get lost in.”

Quirke expelled a low, slow breath. “So,” he said, “Packie is sending them off, yes?”

She shrugged. “They’ll not be found, the same two, and there’s no use that peeler looking for them—you can tell him that from me. Them are the boys that knows how to hide.”

The moon was edging its way out of the square of velvety sky above the half door. How strange a thing, Quirke thought, a silver ball of light floating there in the midst of that dark emptiness.

Molly stood up, the cigarette unlit in her fingers. Quirke looked up at her. “Go on,” she said, “go on off now. I’ve said enough and you’ve heard more than is good for you.” He rose to his feet. He was a head taller than she was. “You’ll not come round here again, I know,” she said, lifting her eyes to his.

“Will I not?”

She put up a hand and grasped the back of his neck and drew his head down to her and kissed him. He smelled the harsh scent of her body and breathed her gamy breath. He made to put his arm around her waist but she drew back from him quickly. “Go on now,” she murmured, pressing both her palms against his chest. “Go on with you.”

He stepped back. Outside, the dog gave a soft, beseeching yelp. The faint music had started up again. Or was it, Quirke wondered, only the wind, keening?

20

He walked back into the village and found a hackney cab to drive him home. Slumped in the back seat he had slept again, briefly, and had only woken up when the car was pulling into Mount Street. When he saw the figure slumped in the doorway he thought it must be one of the working girls who patrolled here at night looking for business. They all drank, and this would not be the first time he had stumbled on one of them passed out in a stupor. He climbed the steps and crouched down beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, and looked at him, and then in a flash of pallid moonlight he saw who it was.

“Christ,” he said, “Phoebe!” His heart pounded and his mouth had suddenly gone dry. She clung to him, and said she was sorry, that she had not meant to give him such a shock. He got her to her feet and opened the door with his key. “I’m sorry,” she said again, but he told her to shush, and led her into the hall. She seemed not to be hurt, yet she was so shaken he had to help her up the stairs.

In the flat he put her in one of the two armchairs that stood at either side of the gas fire. She was still trembling. Her skin had a greenish pallor, and her eyes as she stared fixedly before her seemed enormous. He fetched a blanket from his bed and wrapped it about her shoulders. Then he went into the kitchen and poured a brandy and carried it back into the living room. She drank a little of it and began to cough. “Tell me what happened,” he said, keeping his voice steady.

She told him how she had gone out for a walk and how the man in the sheepskin jacket had overtaken her and caught her by the wrist and pushed her back against the railings. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she said.

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I had seen him before, though, when I was with Sally. I think she thought he was following her, when all the time it was me he was after. It’s almost funny, isn’t it.”

He crouched down beside the arm of the chair, sitting on his heels, and took her hand. It was cold, cold and moist, and seemed so thin and frail that he felt his heart contracting. “What do you mean, he was after you?”

She shook her head slowly, gazing at the fire as if mesmerized. Her voice when she spoke sounded wispy and faraway. “When I was little,” she said, “there was a gas fire like that in the nursery, behind a screen. I never understood about the gas—I thought it was the filaments themselves that were burning, and I was always puzzled why they didn’t get burnt up.”

Her hand lay in his, chill and lifeless, like the corpse of a bird. “Tell me what happened,” he said again.

She turned her face to him and blinked slowly. She had stopped shaking, and all her movements now were ponderously slow, as if she were moving underwater. “He cursed at me,” she said, “and crushed my wrist in his hand—I thought he was going to break the bones.” She took her hand from his and drew back the cuff of her blouse from her other hand and showed him the bruises. “You see? I couldn’t believe the strength of his grip.”

Quirke stared at the livid marks on her wrist, his mouth twitching. “What did he say?”

She turned to look at the fire again. “He said to tell you,” she said, “that he was from Mr. Costigan, and that Mr. Costigan wanted you to know that he was keeping an eye on you.”

*   *   *

He let the telephone ring for a long time, and was about to hang up when Isabel answered. She sounded sleepy and irritated. “Who is this?” she demanded. He said he was sorry, he knew it was late but he needed her to come round. “Phoebe is here,” he said. “She’s had a fright.” Isabel was silent for a moment. He supposed she was disappointed; no doubt she had thought he was calling because he was lonely and wanted her company.