by Rose Doyle
Sarah had watched, in silence, as I dressed and fixed my hair.
'You're going to meet your captain, aren't you?' she said.
'He's not my captain.'
'Did you tell Daniel Casey about him?'
'It won't be necessary to tell Daniel anything after this meeting.'
'Why are you taking such care then, if it's to be a goodbye?'
'Because it is a goodbye,' I said.
It started to rain when I was more than halfway to the camp. It fell lightly at first, no more than a shower really. But then the drops became bigger and a sudden wind blew up and the drops began to beat down in fast and faster torrents. There was nothing to do but go on; the camp was nearer than the village and there was no shelter in either direction.
I was wet through and through by the time I arrived. The rain kept most people indoors but the few soldiers who were out and
about in the deluge ignored me as they rushed past in their oiled capes. No one offered me cape or cover of any kind. To be so wet I'd need to have walked a good distance; they probably knew where I'd come from.
But the rain was a blessing too. Its suddenness, and ferocity, had sent most soldiers to their quarters; Alexander was in his hut and opened the door in seconds to my knocking.
'Allie! What in God's name . . .' He reached for me and pulled me inside and kicked the door shut with his foot without letting go of my arm. 'What's wrong? What's happened?'
'Do you have a towel? Something I could use to dry my hair?'
I stood in the middle of the familiar room until he brought a towel, and with it a heavy, dark blue wool overcoat.
'You'd better put on something dry,' he nodded to the screen, 'and tell me what's happened while you do so.' He was frowning. I began to dry my face and hair.
'I won't be staying long,' I said, 'there'll be no need for me to change my clothes.'
'As you please.' He watched me closely. He was still frowning.
I gave him back the towel and stood in front of the small, log-burning fire. I knew I must look like a half-drowned cat and hated to present such a sorry spectacle for our last meeting. I was cold too and clenched my teeth to stop convulsive shivers as I held my hands open to the fire.
'A friend has arrived from Dublin,' I said, 'he came to see to Sarah's baby, James. He's a doctor . . .' I gave him a quick look but he'd turned away and was standing with his back to me, studying a map of the Curragh pinned to the wall. I willed him to turn, even a little, so I could see his scar. The scar, which was prone to involuntary tics and shudders, would tell me how he was taking my news. He went on studying the map. 'He's a very good doctor. He works in the dispensary I spoke to you about.' I paused. Alexander's silence was louder than ever.
'He was of enormous help to me.' I hardened my voice when I went on. I'd nothing to apologise for. I'd in no way deceived
Alexander Ainslie, had never pretended an affection I didn't feel. 'He's proposed marriage to me. I came to tell you that our walks and meetings will have to end.'
'Have you accepted him?' 'No.'
'Then why do we have to stop meeting?' He turned as he said this. The scar was giving a very small flutter.
'Because he would not understand that we can be friends and not lovers.' It was the simplest way I could put things. 'He would be hurt.'
'His hurt matters more than our friendship?'
'It does.'
'Do you love him?'
'I care for him. He's a good man.'
'Ah . . .' he raised his eyebrows. 'The good man! Such a creature will always win the lady's affections.' The scar was quite lively now, its mood angry. 'What's this good man's name?'
'He's called Daniel Casey.' I paused, then added for want of something to say, 'He's from Galway.'
'I don't care, Allie, if he was born on the islands of the Pacific Ocean. He's taken you from me and it's my own fault. I should have had more courage.' He shrugged and smiled, his anger evaporating as quickly as it had blown up. Then he sighed. 'I'll always regret you, Allie. But I wish you happiness.'
'I wish the same for you, Alexander.'
I was so cold I'd stopped shivering by the time he helped me into a horsecar. The rain had stopped but he insisted anyway that I wrap myself in his greatcoat. I did so to please him but it didn't help much. The cold and wet had gone through to my bones.
When I was seated Alexander gave a curt, sharp order to the driver to go safely. Then he tipped me a brief salute and walked quickly away. This time I didn't turn once as we drove out of the camp.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Allie
The wren village, in my absence, had become a different place.
The rain, and more especially the wind, had torn it apart. Nests had collapsed in on themselves, others had been blown sideways or had furze lifted to make huge gaping holes in roofs.
There were no bright dresses on bushes, no children playing, no chatting groups of women. Robbed of colour and sun the place looked wretched and so desolate I wanted to turn and run.
I walked into the village slowly. The ground around and between the nests was thick with mud. Wrens, slipping and cursing and mud-splattered, struggled everywhere with the job of rebuilding them.
'We weren't prepared. It came too sudden.' Ellen Neary didn't stop gathering furze as I came up to her. 'Usually we'll see a storm like that coming and tie down the nests, do what we can.' She stood still long enough to look me up and down. 'You're a sorry sight,' she said.
She didn't look so good herself. 'I wasn't prepared for a storm either,' I told her.
Our nest hadn't been so badly hit as some of the others. Beezy claimed credit for this, saying it was because she'd had the foresight to tie the first layer of furze when we were building. She may well have been right. Between us we made it dry and secure as we could again. But nest number eleven was not as it had been before. Nothing was.
More than the structures of the village had changed; the mood had too. With this sudden, vicious ending of the long drawn-out summer the harshness of winter had arrived before anyone was ready for it. The wrens, salvaging what they could of dignity and their homes, were poor, pathetic creatures, shrunken and older and grim-faced.
And this was only the beginning; it would be impossible from now on to keep clean, to be dry and warm. There would be no way of avoiding disease if it struck — because to stay healthy in conditions so dank and foul and poverty-stricken would be impossible.
Daniel Casey arrived in the very late afternoon with food, enough for a banquet compared to the meagre rations we'd been allowing ourselves for weeks past. He brought Limerick ham, currants and raisins, fresh soda bread, cheese, milk, lemonade and a flask of old French brandy. He'd gone to every shop in the town and asked his landlady to bake him the bread.
'Doctoring is a powerful profession,' Beezy said drily, 'it'll get you anything and anywhere.'
'Almost true,' Daniel agreed, 'providing you don't run foul of the enemy within and of politics.'
'The enemy within?' I pricked up my ears.
'The watchful and controlling in the ranks of physicians,' Daniel half smiled, a habit when he had something serious to say, 'they're what put the brakes on the activities of such as myself.' He paused, looking about the nest for something on which to place the ham. 'And will on you too, once you make your move to enter their ranks.'
'I'll deal with them,' I said and thought I could, then. Considering all that had happened, and the way we were now living, anything else seemed to me child's play.
'I won't stay here any longer with James,' Sarah announced.
There was no need to ask why. The nest smelled bad. The not unpleasant headiness of freshly cut furze had disappeared and the walls, in drying out, were giving out all sorts of odours.
Though it was only five o'clock it was so dark we needed three candles to have enough light to eat by.
'It's a death trap,’ Sarah went on, ‘I’d be putting James in the way of every disease kn
own to man if I stayed on here. Jimmy agrees. I'll be moving out in a matter of days.' She looked me in the face, then looked at Beezy. 'There'll be no reason for either of you to stay on after that,' she leaned forward, her face all shadowy hollows in the candlelight. 'It's my fault we're still here. My fault entirely.'
We'd all come for our own reasons so I ignored this last. On the other hand, I wasn't at all sure Jimmy Vance was prepared for Sarah to move so suddenly. I said as much.
'Will you marry within the week so?' I asked.
'It'll be arranged, don't you worry,' she was short, taking a breath before adding, even more shortly, 'whether or which.'
Jimmy hadn't visited in a week. He'd been confined to barracks and given extra sentry duty after being caught slipping into the camp after curfew time. This hadn't so much to do with his crime as with an army fear that Fenians were infiltrating the ranks and a great deal of resulting high security. There were fewer soldiers in the camp too, since many had been sent off to reinforce numbers in barracks around the country against what an army notice called 'the ferocious and irregular warfare practised by the Fenians'. The camp, as a result, had become fortress-like.
In the circumstances, I couldn't for the life of me see how Jimmy Vance could have set about arranging his and Sarah's wedding.
'What do you mean, whether or which?' I watched her carefully. So did Daniel. Beezy, pouring for herself from the old French brandy, kept her eyes fixed on the liquid.
'You know what I mean or you wouldn't be asking.' Sarah looked stubborn. James, behind her in his corner, made a small sound and she turned to him, gentling him with her hand.
'I want you to tell me what you're planning,' I said.
'She's going to marry without leave,' Beezy took a long slug
from the cup, 'without getting the army's permission. That's the case, isn't it, Sarah?'
Sarah kept her hand on James and her head averted. 'That's what I'm going to do,' she agreed, 'there's many have done it before me. James should have his father's name.'
'But the army won't house you if you do that.' I said this in as neutral a voice as I could manage. Sarah, even in these extremes, wouldn't take being told what to do. 'You'll have no choice but to take lodgings in Kildare or Newbridge.' With a will of its own my voice went up an octave. 'I wouldn't give you much chance of happiness in either place.'
I could have added that I didn't hold out much hope either for James's well-being and reminded her too that she wouldn't see a lot of his father. But she knew these things already.
'The army will find a place for us soon enough once we're married.'
'The army will leave you to rot and you know it.' Beezy poured brandy for Daniel. She offered none to either myself or Sarah. 'You've waited this long so you might as well wait the extra few weeks for your soldier to sort things.'
'I've the name of a priest that I'm going to talk to tomorrow,' Sarah said. 'We'll be married on the Saturday after Jimmy's finished his punishment.'
'I've to go to Kildare myself tomorrow,' Beezy was brisk, 'I've a bit of business to attend to. I'll come with you to see the priest.'
'I don't want you to come to the priest with me, Beezy.'
'Afraid he won't marry you if he sees the sort of company you keep?'
'Yes,' Sarah said.
'Well, I'm of a mind to test the Christianity and charity of this man of God you've been told about,' Beezy snorted. 'So I'll come with you.'
'You can put your trip off till the next day, Beezy,' Sarah said, 'and leave me to get on with my business tomorrow.'
'I've done a lot for you, Sarah, but I won't put off my trip,' said Beezy.
‘I’ll go the next day so,’ Sarah said.
It rained again in the night. After Daniel had gone I listened to it falling steadily on the furze and marvelled at how none of it got inside. I thought of Daniel too, caught in the open carriage he'd hired to collect him, and hoped the carman provided oils for cover. I didn't want to think of him catching a chill on account of me. I didn't want to think of anything bad happening to Daniel Casey.
I thought about him a lot before I fell asleep. I thought about the way he'd held my hand as we walked out on to the plains after supper, how easy it had been talking to him. We spoke of things which mattered to us: the dispensary, his mother and sisters in Galway, my concern for my father, a little of Sarah.
We said nothing at all about ourselves, not a word about the growing feelings between us. They mattered too much to even whisper about.
I promised him I would to go to Kildare with Beezy next day and that I would call at his lodgings before midday.
The rhythm of the falling rain lulled me into a state of reverie, to thinking lazily about how it never rained but it poured and how the dead it rained upon were blessed. As if this wasn't enough a piece from the Bible, about rains descending and floods coming, popped into my head. It was from Luke, if I remembered rightly, and finished with how 'the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.'
I cursed my memory for woeful things and curled myself smaller. I was almost asleep when Beezy began to snore and James to cry. But the rain, at least, had stopped.
I was already awake when a grey dawn inched its way slowly through the covering we'd hung at the door.
Beezy's tale of business in the town had been just that, a tale.
'It was all I could think of to stop Sarah seeing the priest,' she said as we crossed the Curragh next day. 'It's hard but she'll have to wait for her soldier to arrange for things to be official.' She hitched her skirts higher and walked faster, finishing the bottle of brandy that morning had given her a great burst of energy.
Crossing the plains was, in any event, a lot easier than walking in the streets of Kildare. 'There'll be nothing but ruinous poverty ahead of Sarah if she marries without leave,' she went on, 'that's if her soldier marries her at all.'
I had to make a fast trot to keep up with her. 'Why do you say that?'
I only asked because I'd my own, and growing, doubts about Jimmy Vance and wanted to hear Beezy's. Maybe she knew something I didn't; in any event she knew men better than I did.
'He's torn in two, that's why,' Beezy said. 'He wants Sarah and he wants to be off adventuring across the world with the army. He can't do the two and knows it. It's my feeling the army will win him in the end.'
'He loves Sarah. And he loves James . . .'
'He loves the army and its promises more.'
'What promises?'
'Promises of India. Of freedom. The smells of the Orient are in the air of the camp and filling his nostrils. The talk there is of men fighting for their Queen. If he goes he'll have the companionship of boys like himself, all of them growing into men together.' Beezy stopped as, panting, I fell behind. 'You'd no business putting on so many petticoats. Anyone would think you'd a fancy for Daniel Casey.'
'How do you know the army's promised him India?'
'How do you think I know?'
Beezy didn't expect an answer and I didn't give her one. I didn't pursue my own question either; I didn't want to be told when and how her soldier clients spoke with her.
'Sarah and James will take his freedom from him,' Beezy went on, 'and freedom's what our soldier boy's heart is set on. It's what every boy's heart is set on.'
'Sarah will make a man of him,' I said.
'You're right about that at least.' Beezy gave me a surprised look that was most insulting.
'I'm right about a lot of things . . .'
'Oh, be quiet,' Beezy gave a snort, 'my head's not up to your
whining this morning. Just take it from me that Jimmy Vance has been promised India and is a torn man. He's honourable enough to want to do well by Sarah but he craves India. He thinks if he waits a solution will present itself. It won't.'
'What good will putting her off seeing the priest today do?'
'It'll give me a chance to talk to Daniel Casey, ask him to visit the camp and tal
k with Sarah's soldier.' She paused. 'It's better to know than not, in my experience, and maybe the doctor can help him decide his mind.'
'Daniel will agree to see him,' I said, 'but I'm not sure how much good it will do.'
'It'll flush his intentions into the open,' Beezy said.
We crossed the Curragh in silence after that.
The wind and rain had not improved Kildare town. Beezy and I were ankle-deep in mud within minutes of entering the place and had to cling to one another to stop ourselves from slipping and falling into the worst of it.
It was a good half-hour after midday, which was the time I'd told Daniel I would call, when Beezy stopped outside Cummins & Co. in Kildare's Main Street.
'I'll wait here while you go on to the doctor's lodgings.' Beezy squinted through the grimy glass of the window as she called after me, 'There's something I want to get inside.' She was going to buy whiskey. I knew it. 'It would be best if our good Daniel's landlady remained unaware of his connections locally.'
She waved me on, grinning, her eyes flashing green through the kohl painted around them. There was a lot of the old, outrageous Beezy Ryan in that grin and I will always remember it.
It was the last time I saw joy of any kind in her face.
'Get out of this town! Go, and go now or I'll help you on your way . . .'
The man bearing down upon her was a priest. He wore the cloth and he wore the collar but there was nothing priestly about his face, red and roaring and filled with an apoplectic rage. He was a big man, and broad. The horse he'd dismounted from stood several yards away and he was carrying a whip.
'My money's as good as another's,' Beezy, standing her ground, was cool. 'And if the shopkeeper feels I'm a threat to his soul he can refuse to serve me.'
'There's not a merchant in this town will take money earned in fornication and filth.' As he came closer to Beezy I moved closer to her myself. Passing townspeople stopped. 'But neither should temptation be put in their path. I'm here because of a report made to me about your parading through the town. I've a duty to rid the town of you and your kind. Out,' he held the whip between his hands, 'take yourself away from here back to the degenerates you came from.' The whip, of black, shining, leather, quivered.
