The Last Horseman (10 page)

Duly chastised, Pierce nodded in acknowledgement. ‘I apologize.’

‘Right you are. And it would be a help if the master of the house could let me know when he might be home. We can’t be wasting food ’cause he’s off gallivanting.’

Despite her hands being dry she wiped them on her apron as she turned back to her kitchen, a slow, worried hand-wringing that let the household know she was a woman who carried the burden of the house on her shoulders – and that they should never forget it.

Since Edward had left several weeks earlier the house had been almost desolate in its silence. Reminders of the young man were everywhere and Pierce was tempted to write a letter of his own to the boy. The boarding school was miles to the south in Cork and by now he would have been unpacked and settling back in. He toyed with the pen, dipped it in the inkwell, steadied the sheet of paper beneath his hand and waited for the words to come. But they never did. He had tried each day since the boy had left and each of those times he failed.

Instead he spread open the
Manchester Guardian
, an English newspaper that was despatched weekly to Radcliffe on the Liverpool mail boat. It was a newspaper firmly against the Boer War and stood its ground against fierce opposition from the more jingoistic press. He let the broadsheet cover the desk and turned the pages in a slow, deliberate manner. His eyes scanned them for a column headline that might entice him to put on his bifocals. It was always a struggle to read the small typeface in the soft light from the gas lamp. War reports and casualty lists, columns of news, advertisements, obituaries and a faded photograph of a woman with a caption:
Evelyn Charteris
– the thorn in the British government’s side.

Pierce held his spectacles inches from the newspaper like a magnifying glass. The smudged print was of poor quality, but it was the same Evelyn Charteris he knew was trying to help the women and children caught in the conflict of the war.

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ Pierce muttered to himself, then glanced across the newspaper in case Mrs Lachlan was in earshot. Which she wasn’t. Pierce harrumphed in quiet disbelief as he scanned the text. This had been the letter he had sent out to the various newspapers and the
Manchester Guardian
had given it some column inches and written an article about her. Charteris, the well-to-do woman who had set up a charity for those women and children, might now get some support from the paper’s readers. The British and their colonial troops fought not only the Boers but a Foreign Brigade of volunteers from America, Europe and Ireland. And this woman was right in the middle of it. The newspaper had got hold of a photograph from somewhere. Pierce had always imagined she would be a robust woman who looked like a beef farmer’s wife, not this delicately featured woman with her hair tied up, a small wisp falling from its confining hairpin. He was already impatient to show Radcliffe. Such a woman could match Radcliffe’s sense of justice. It’s what his friend needed – the kind of woman who would – He stopped the thought in its tracks and gave a mental shrug. It was time for Radcliffe to abandon his wife’s memory.

He closed the paper, cursing himself for even thinking the thoughts. Matchmaking should not be something considered by a man who’d had enough grief with women over the years to know he was unsuited to waking every day to the same face on the pillow next to him.

*

It took a couple of weeks before the first alarm was raised.

It was not another dispatch from the war with its ongoing news of defeats and casualties that caused trepidation but the letter sent by Edward’s headmaster querying why the boy had not returned for the start of the new term. The Dublin Metropolitan Police were not in the business of trying to find runaway boys, and the County Cork police made only rudimentary inquiries. Radcliffe seemed trapped in a cage of bureaucratic apathy. He reached out to those he had helped over the years in court and it seemed for a week or so that there was a chance the boy had been seen back in the city. The fleeting moment of hope proved as false as those sightings. Edward Radcliffe could be anywhere in the country or, worse, have become a victim of his father’s reputation for defending Fenians. Fear clawed at Radcliffe and Pierce every day. It was the threat of political repercussions should this fear bear any truth that finally made the Dublin police begin an investigation.

Pierce entered Radcliffe’s study and saw him gazing through the window. It took a moment for him to turn, realizing that Pierce had entered the room. Pierce laid the day’s mail delivery on the desk as Radcliffe fingered through the envelopes.

‘I should never have taken Fenian cases. What if those who see me as being a sympathizer have hurt Edward because of it?’

‘Damned right, Joseph. We’ll burn every damned begging letter and decline every case desperate for a defence,’ agreed Pierce.

Radcliffe raised his head and stared at his friend. Did Pierce actually believe that?

Pierce gave his friend a questioning look.

Radcliffe knew his moment of self-pity was being mocked. ‘OK, but you know, Ben, if they have hurt the boy because of me then we’re heading back to America. The British and the Irish can scratch the scabs off their own self-inflicted wounds without me trying to heal them.’

‘Edward is a resourceful kid. He’s tougher than you think. Wherever he is he’s blowin’ off steam. I’ll put money on it. He’s giving us a fright is all. Just letting us know that he can manage this big wide world on his own.’ Pierce tapped the sheaf of envelopes. ‘Put your mind where it’s of use.’

Radcliffe slipped the letter opener into an envelope. ‘You and Mrs Lachlan, you make a fine show of ganging up on me. If I didn’t know better I’d say you two are closer than you admit.’

‘I’ll make allowances for the trouble that’s going on in your head, but if
I
didn’t know better I’d say you need to see a doctor. Damned if that woman couldn’t turn a Comanche war party back to their camp with their tails between their legs.’ He shook his head at the thought of the formidable housekeeper. Mrs Lachlan had the measure of them both.

*

Out in the blackness of the countryside coach lanterns at Kingsley’s stables flickered behind their soot-stained glass. The man’s bulk filled the archway to his yard. He was drenched from the cold night’s rain, and the cigar he smoked smouldered like peat, but he was impervious to the weather. Steam rose from his wool coat as from a beast of the field. A coatless urchin stood shivering before him: he had run from the city until he was almost on his knees with exhaustion. Kingsley had listened to the boy’s stumbling speech. Questioned him once and then again, making certain of the message being delivered.

‘Fergal!’ he called and a moment later the stable lad who had gratefully accepted Radcliffe’s coin that day came out of the stables, pulling on his coat and turning up the collar against the cold night air that bit hard after the rain. There would be a frost by morning when he exercised the horses and it seemed there would be little chance of returning to the comfort of his bed, as crude as the sacking and straw was. He stood next to Kingsley awaiting his orders. For some reason there was a slum kid standing there, shivering like a fish out of water. His master puffed hard on the cigar until it glowed and only then, as if he had made a decision, did he turn to the stable lad.

‘You see this boy here? You take him into the kitchens and give him a bowl of Cook’s fine stew, and a loaf of bread for him to take away with him. And then you find a coat from one of the lads and let him sleep in an empty stall.’

‘Yes, Mr Kingsley,’ the stable lad said, and tugged the urchin towards him.

Kingsley reached out to the bedraggled child, a silver coin held between finger and thumb. ‘I reward those who help me,’ he said as the wide-eyed boy reached out hesitantly to take the money. ‘You see to it this child gets back to town tomorrow morning,’ Kingsley told the stable lad, ‘and then you fetch Mr Radcliffe here.’

Kingsley watched the older boy run with the child across the courtyard to the kitchen door.

The stubborn lawyer’s pride was always something that couldn’t be bought, but when it came to the fate of one’s own child, what price wouldn’t a man pay?

The cigar tasted sour on his tongue and he tossed it into the puddles. The scattering clouds fled past the moon and as the rain eased the crystal stars shone with a clarity he had not witnessed for as long as he could remember.

*

The following day a mantle of frost cloaked the grassland hills. Trees, stiff as angels with frostbitten wings, hovered over the graveyard as Radcliffe stood before the memorial stone. His weekly ritual of visiting the cemetery had been delayed by Kingsley’s summons and the slow cold journey on horseback. Splashes of blood and a fox’s tracks told him a rabbit had been trapped and killed in the confines of the cemetery. The blue sky and white birches roused memories that haunted him: memories of another country when he and the Buffalo Soldiers had trekked across snow-capped hills and laid waste their enemy’s village. Blood on snow was a common theme in Radcliffe’s bad dreams.

He stooped over the gravestone and brushed the frost clear from the name etched into the granite; as he did so his breath plumed, caressing the cold surface in a ghostly kiss. He took a pace back and wiped away the morning’s tears. Grief had long drained such emotion from him – these were from the cold air – but the blurred name was as fresh in his mind as it always had been.

J
OHN
M
ICHAEL
R
ADCLIFFE
1874–1891

B
ELOVED
SON
OF
J
OSEPH
AND
E
ILEEN

B
ROTHER
TO
E
DWARD

I
N
G
OD
’
S
C
ARING
H
ANDS

One son had been taken; another was missing. Now nothing mattered more than finding him.

Kingsley leaned on the wooden wall surrounding the show ring. The horse, free of its box, kicked and scuffed the sawdust. It snorted and pranced and then raised its head, nostrils flaring, gazing at the man who loved and cherished him. Kingsley allowed a smile and sipped from a hip flask. The horse whinnied and trotted around the ring, the shallow light painting a silver line from withers to tail across its black sheen.

‘Is that you, Radcliffe?’ Kingsley asked without turning.

Radcliffe had stood for a moment inside the huge doors behind the hunched shoulders of the Irishman as the horse moved in and out of shadow. The barn’s stone walls held the chill, and the horse’s snorting breath made him seem as Kingsley had said: a horse for unearthly warriors.

Neither man moved for a moment, and then Kingsley half turned. It seemed to Radcliffe that the Irishman had barely slept. Cold whiskers of frost clung to his wool coat. ‘You and your boy... there’s misery between you, is there not?’ He waited, but there was no answer from Radcliffe. Kingsley shrugged: ‘Your son. He ran off to war.’

He watched Radcliffe’s reaction. There was barely a flicker of the fear that information must have driven into the man. He knew the lawyer was waiting to find out what Kingsley was after. Valuable news had a price.

‘Aye, I’m certain,’ Kingsley said in answer to Radcliffe’s silent doubt. ‘People like to be in my debt – they tell me things. Seems he caught a steamer the night of the race.’

Radcliffe walked to where the man stood. ‘No. I checked. And so did the police.’

Kingsley snorted and spat into the sawdust. ‘The police. Jesus, Radcliffe. You know as well as I do those clowns couldn’t find a whore in a brothel. Your boy used a false name. Give the lad credit. Probably going off to find that chum of his, Lieutenant Baxter. He went to South Africa all right. Guaranteed. You should’ve let me fix that race like I said. Saved yourself this grief.’

Radcliffe nodded, resisting the fact he was in the man’s debt. ‘Thank you.’

Kingsley clicked his tongue at the horse, and it responded with a sudden flurry that caught Radcliffe by surprise. It surged forward and then braced its legs into the sawdust, stretching its head towards Kingsley’s open hand.

‘You’ll be going after him, so you’ll need a horse that’ll take you to the ends of the earth, through shot and shell and bring you back again... He’s yours. And I want nothing in return.’

The impact of the man’s offer was not lost on Radcliffe. ‘Why give me that which you prize the most?’

Kingsley looked at him. He had no need to give Radcliffe any reasons but he had already made his decision. ‘Seventeen years ago I had a bit of fun with a girl... down in Wexford. I was going off to war m’self. She had a baby... I couldn’t own up to it. Over the years the lad went adrift. His mother, she was trash anyway and the boy didn’t turn out well. I tried to keep my eye on him best I could – he never knew me – but he got himself caught up in the wrong business... Do I have to spell it out to you?’

Radcliffe still couldn’t grasp what the man was trying to tell him in his stumbling fashion.

‘For a lawyer you’re not very illuminated in the upper regions,’ Kingsley said. And waited, because he saw the realization dawn in Radcliffe’s eyes.

‘The boy they hanged? O’Hagan? Your son?’

Kingsley nodded, took a swig from the flask, wiped it off and offered it to Radcliffe, who accepted and took a swallow.

‘You tried to save him, you fought for him, and you made no judgements against him. I feel I owe you a debt,’ Kingsley said.

‘You’re a Fenian?’

‘When I have to be. Those stupid bastards think it’ll be solved with a gun. It’s the politicians that’ll make the deals and sell us all downriver.’

Radcliffe saw the pattern of events more clearly. ‘It was you who warned Colonel Baxter about the attack on the garrison.’

‘I knew an attack would make the English spit blood. That they might hang my boy without another thought. And I couldn’t let on; I couldn’t show what I felt. Y’get it, d’you?’