A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

Father Maguire sat at the improvised table in Herbert’s billet. He’d brought directions to the home of Madame Lisette Papinau. There was another matter, he mumbled. During the night, Flanagan had asked the priest to translate into English something he’d written in his one letter. It had spilled out in Gaelic.

  ‘A strange citation, in a way,’ said the priest, looking around, Herbert suspected, for the forbidden bottle. ‘It’s just two lines from a lament by Feiritéar, a man at home as much in England as in Ireland. He made his choice when his back was to the wall.’

  Herbert understood him to mean that the same might be said of Flanagan, that soldier and poet shared the same spirit of Irish identity.

  ‘It’s odd, but the first line applies to her, and the second applies to him,’ said the priest. ‘They’re joined in the one lambent phrase. Maybe I’m just a romantic old fool, but that’s what I thought.’

  Herbert couldn’t bear to read them. He took the folded paper and put it with the letter in his jacket pocket. As he struggled with the button, he felt the Chaplain’s compassion upon him, as heavy as the hand he’d once placed on his neck – long ago it seemed, a world away – when he’d collapsed into the reserve trench, his arm torn and bleeding from the wire.

  ‘Mr Moore,’ said the Chaplain, ‘I will go to Flanagan’s people. I’ll tell them everything: what their son did. Let that be an end for you.’ He became gruff. ‘The execution was not your fault. For Joseph’s sake, there’s no room for guilt. Yours or anyone else’s.’

  Herbert thought he might hit the next person who said that. It was a refrain haunting him, like the face of Quarters in the mud. Instead he held out his hand, as Duggie had done to him.

  ‘Thank you, Father. For your example and comradeship.’

  The priest shrugged his broad shoulders, showing his helplessness before his responsibilities, but his determination to plod on. Perhaps it was his remaining innocence that blinded him to Herbert’s intentions. Perhaps the priest could only see the billet of a soldier who’d be coming back – slightly disarranged with shaving implements laid neatly on a serviette. He didn’t know that three small shells were heavy in Herbert’s pocket.

  Beneath low cloud and a sense of rain, Herbert began his desertion, taking the same route as Flanagan. At Abeele he caught a train to Étaples and then followed the rights and lefts to an estaminet off a main street.

  For a long time Herbert stood on the opposite side of the road, just looking at the frontage. The woodwork was painted a deep marine blue. Large frosted windows were etched with geometric designs that revealed nothing of the interior. Two small vent windows revealed a cellar. Across the top, painted in gold lettering, schoolbook style, was a brief statement of tenure: ‘Chez Madame Papinau’. And above this panel were three windows, two of which had their curtains drawn. It took a while before Herbert noticed that the third framed a face that was intent upon him. She had the most beautiful countenance he’d ever seen, though one hand covered her mouth.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  1

  Anselm received the insight almost simultaneously to the sting of a bee.

  He’d just finished harvesting the honey crop. Not thinking about what he was doing, he’d been letting his attention shift and start. One moment it was on Edward Chamberlayne and his abrupt disappearance from the country he’d served; the next it was on Joseph Flanagan and the elegiac quality of his life, the movement from spring, to summer to autumn. Then it shifted to the names on the war memorial, those nine lives without season. All the while Herbert seemed to be standing at Anselm’s shoulder, seeking forgiveness. Anselm had just moved on, heavily, to the recollection of Mr Shaw – his joyfulness, his acceptance of suffering, his two walking sticks, each scratched with the initials of his grandchildren – when he felt a sharp stab upon the wrist. It had come with the shock of an unforeseen reprimand, the unjust kind that endures into maturity.

  Anselm winced … and then his mind saw something very clearly indeed.

  Harold Shaw never mentioned seeing ‘Owen Doyle’ again. And yet they’d been in the same Section, the same Platoon, and the same Company. The same Regiment.

  Leaving his bees and jars, Anselm walked briskly to his cell, an intellectual aggression settling upon him while the poison inflamed his skin. He threw back the door and opened his bundle of documents, moving instantly to the War Diary entries for the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry. Satisfied, he then checked a memo copied from the Doyle file. His intuitions confirmed, he almost ran to the calefactory and rang the Public Record Office.

  ‘I’ll explain later, Martin,’ he said after some rushed courtesies, ‘but could you please look up the War Diary of The Lambeth Rifles, and fax me every entry for September nineteen seventeen?’

  Back in his cell, Anselm flicked through one of his books on the battle for Passchendaele, finally stopping when he found a diagram of the Army troop dispositions for the attack on Menin Road. He’d wanted to check which unit was near Glencorse Wood but he hadn’t anticipated what he now saw. He stared at the diagram … this meant something … and he couldn’t quite grasp it … but his mind was leaping onward …

  Half an hour later Anselm guided the glossy paper out of the fax machine, almost pulling it ahead of the print mechanism. He read the entries slowly, his finger checking off each day. When he’d finished, he lowered himself on to a stool, barely conscious of his surroundings. He arranged the material in his mind, laying the facts into position. Shortly Anselm saw a picture whose wild shape and vibrant colour he could never have imagined. When he was quite calm and altogether sure of his judgement he dialled the Prior’s extension.

  ‘I think there’s something you ought to know about John Lindsay,’ he said, casually.

  They met in the parlour where Anselm and the Prior had received Martin Reid and the Osborne family.

  On the table was the map of the Ypres Salient. Beside it, laid out like torn pages from a book, were the faxed entries from The Lambeth Rifles’ War Diary. Anselm read out a selection of each day’s events, beginning on the 1st September – ‘Divine Service held in the village, lecture to senior officers, route march, Company training …’ – and stopping on the 18th, when he disclosed the fact implicit to every activity. ‘The Lambeth Rifles were out of the line. They were preparing for the attack on the Menin Road. They didn’t go into action until the twentieth.’

  The Prior nodded ponderously. He drew back a chair, showing neither comprehension nor growing intuition. But he asked the key question.

  ‘When was Doyle reported dead?’

  Anselm had the place marked in his bundle of documents. ‘On the sixteenth … the day following Joseph Flanagan’s execution, and three days before The Lambeth Rifles set off for their designated areas. And from whom do you think the report originated? Unfortunately there’s no name, but the unit is cited: the eighth Service Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry. But they, too, were out of the line.’

  ‘Which means an official in the NLI sent a memo about a casualty he couldn’t know about … and which couldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Precisely,’ replied Anselm. ‘And that memo is just the opening shot in a savage but … stylish protest.’

  Anselm pointed to the map. He’d marked in red ink the dispositions of the Army that was ready to attack the Menin Road, broken down into Corps, Divisions, and Brigades. Anselm’s finger hovered to the northwest of a copse of trees near the entrenchments of 1 Anzac Corps.

  ‘Whoever sent that message from the Northumberland Light Infantry wanted to make a point. And I’m now fairly certain that it was the same person who weeded the Flanagan file. He said Doyle died northwest of Glencorse Wood. That part of the line was held by the Australians. They’re the only part of the BEF who didn’t have the death penalty. This is an attack on military capital punishment … in one, sweeping sentence. If anyone within the administration had bothered to check the detail they’d have seen that Doyle could not have been a fa
tal casualty … and that would have led them back to the Étaples material and the link with Flanagan, whose file carried its own message: the leading recommendation in the queue was for clemency, which is precisely what should have happened and didn’t. The actual decision of the Commander-in-Chief had been removed … thrown away. Along with the death certificate. It’s as though this critic was saying to the Army, in the name of the regiment, “We refuse to accept this man’s death.”’

  A mixture of sobriety and approval had gradually transformed the Prior’s features. He was, of course, glancing impatiently ahead, to the identity of the man who’d come to Larkwood, and who remained out of reach, but Anselm hadn’t quite finished his appraisal.

  ‘First and foremost, however,’ he said, admiring the economy and ingenuity of the unknown critic, his poise and insolence, ‘this shredding of paper and memo-sending is not just a protest, it is an act of calculated subversion: by reporting Doyle killed in action he set him free … right under the noses of the administration, because they should have known that Doyle couldn’t have died among the Australians … and wouldn’t have done, if he’d been, say, a Queensland boy. But of course, they never looked. That’s why the boy finally got away. He was as good as dead to the army.’

  The Prior sighed and put on his glasses again. ‘You’re right, Anselm. But if we didn’t understand the papers, neither have we understood the people. It makes sense now. Kate Seymour allowed Martin Reid and the Osborne family to believe she was related to Flanagan because she was protecting the dignity of John Lindsay. He lives, as Herbert anticipated, with enduring guilt and shame. Who wouldn’t? Like Mr Shaw, he carries a unique kind of burden.’

  He drew a hand across the bristles on his head, closing his eyes tight as though he were very tired. ‘We now know the meaning of the trial; we know what Herbert wanted to say, and we know who is waiting to hear it. His tags are in our keeping.’

  But the contact address had been mislaid by a dear old man who represented all that was good in Larkwood, along with its folly. A matchless Gatekeeper. This fond thought was shared by Anselm and the Prior. Their eye contact, however, betrayed a recognition that the resulting state of affairs was almost hopeless.

  But only almost. With the Prior hopelessness was often rapidly converted into buoyancy and clear-thinking. Folding his arms, eyes smouldering like a forest fire, he began talking as if he were addressing the community at Chapter. Tracing Mr Lindsay through conventional means was a massive task, he conceded. It required professional skills that Larkwood did not possess. The simplest solution – in fact the only option left open – was to follow John Lindsay’s movements after September 1917. He almost certainly returned to England, either during the war or afterwards and had, of course, a ready means of permanent concealment: he would be coming back as John Lindsay, not Owen Doyle.

  ‘And Mr Lindsay had never joined the army,’ said Anselm, understanding the Prior’s line of thought.

  ‘And he’d never been tried by Field General Court Martial.’

  So the military suspended sentences lay buried with Doyle near Glencorse Wood … while the three-year borstal sentence from 1915 remained very much alive. Wasn’t this their best chance? argued the Prior, knitting his hands. Could it be that the court system had eventually caught up with Lindsay? Martin Reid may have examined the borstal files but he didn’t go beyond 1915 because that was the year Lindsay had joined the army.

  ‘I think you should go back to the national archives and trawl any penal records held after nineteen eighteen,’ concluded the Prior. ‘I’m confident you’re going to pick up his trail fairly easily.’

  ‘Why?’ Anselm didn’t share his optimism in the least.

  ‘Because John Lindsay first left his mark in life upon a school punishment book. He was a prolific offender before and during the war. He can’t have a turned a new leaf that easily.’

  2

  Martin listened to Anselm’s exposition with unconcealed admiration. That John Lindsay had survived was, he agreed, ‘the meaning of the trial’, to use Kate Seymour’s phrase. Finding him, however, was another matter, and it was plain from his tone that he shared Anselm’s lack of confidence. His own reluctant view was that—

  Anselm for a brief moment lost his bearings. He leaned on the calefactory wall, reliving that first accidental meeting by Herbert’s grave. This was no ordinary trial, Father, she’d whispered with sudden feeling … as though hiding her thoughts from the old man who wouldn’t draw near. She’d looked down on Herbert’s cross from a wounded place inside herself, and said, I’d hoped he would explain it to me … and bring an old man some peace before he died. Anselm tried to penetrate that plea, knowing what he’d subsequently learned. Floundering, he gripped a terrible probability: the old man could not begin to comprehend what Joseph Flanagan had done for him; and it needed Herbert, who became a monk, to place revealing words upon it, healing words …

  ‘… so, you see,’ said Martin, ‘I didn’t research the borstal records after nineteen fifteen because any subsequent action regarding Lindsay’s sentence for shopbreaking would have reactivated the file.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Anselm, disorientated, as if he’d just surfaced out of nowhere in someone’s swimming pool.

  ‘Of course, Lindsay may have attracted later custodial sentences for other offences—’

  ‘I was just going to say that.’

  ‘—but most records are kept at the prisons themselves …’ Martin stalled portentously – ‘and, frankly, I doubt if any of the registers kept from the twenties have been placed on a data base.’

  ‘Which means that I’d have to check the vaults of every prison in the United Kingdom?’ asked Anselm, moored to the conversation now. ‘Turning pages in ledgers?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  When someone wants to hold out hope, they often say all sorts of nonsense – anything to cushion the impact of disappointment which will, ultimately, have its day. And with such a tone of confidence and helpfulness, Martin said he’d check the available records at the PRO. ‘We’ve got some … not many … but you never know.’

  Anselm went back to his hives, rather like a witness might revisit the locus in quo of a complex accident. He sat on his bench between Augustine and Thérèse. Slowly, he walked out of the clearing and into the shade of the aspens, approaching Herbert’s grave by stealth. With the freshness of the enactment, he listened again to Kate Seymour’s words, and he looked at the man with the wide cap and the wild, white beard. Something at the back of his mind told him a greater truth had presented itself that day, but that even now he lacked the vision to see it.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  A Matter of Example

  1

  The estaminet sparkled with all kinds of glass: flat, round and tinted. Green and yellow bottles stood in rows on a back wall counter beneath shelves covered in upturned glasses. A vast mirror multiplied their number and the depth of the room. Pictures covered the remaining walls: of boats and bays, a packed harbour, buildings of timber and stone leaning into one another, a walled town with a great gate, men and women in large flat hats working with rakes by the sea.

  Herbert sat at a polished wooden table opposite Madame Lisette Papinau. Unable to face her directly, he let his eyes rest on a vague spot over her shoulder. But all he could see was the woman whose face had been framed by the window, the beautiful woman who’d opened the door in silence and drawn back his chair in welcome, surmising why he had come.

  ‘Joseph is dead?’ she asked.

  Her self-possession was so complete, her tone of voice so measured, that his compassion was out of place. She wanted a clinical reply.

  ‘He was executed by a firing squad yesterday morning at five forty-six a.m.’

  ‘Where?’

  Herbert still couldn’t look at Madame Papinau. But neither could he escape what he’d already seen: rich black hair wound into a bun at the back of the head; a spotless white blouse with loose cuffs, like a buccaneer
’s, the laces tied into neat bows; a black silk band held the collar high, covering her throat.

  ‘Oostbeke.’ He sensed a brutal requirement for greater detail. ‘A road leads out of the village past an abbey and a school. After a mile there is a wood. A track on the right leads to a clearing … I was there. The singing of birds is all I want to bring you from that place.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A hint of flowers captured the room, though Herbert couldn’t see any blooms.

  ‘He was buried with dignity among the roots of great, living trees. There is no other marker.’

  Now that he’d managed to say what had happened, Herbert brought his eyes into focus and saw a door that led, presumably, to Madame Papinau’s living quarters. It was slightly ajar. And in this place of cold precision, even a door left open was incongruous. Owen Doyle was on the other side, listening. Herbert was sure. The certainty gave him the confidence to finally look upon Madame Papinau. In complete silence he reached over and placed three small shells in her cupped hand.

  ‘Joseph asked me to give you this letter.’

  He passed the envelope across the table. Madame Papinau took out the single sheet of paper and opened it. Her eyes swam but no tears fell. Herbert could see the writing through the paper; it crossed the lines in a wild diagonal. Very little had been written but Madame Papinau read it over and again, her face gathering into a frown – not because of the sharpness of moment: the handling of a dead man’s final words – but because she was completely taken aback by what she read. The hand holding the letter dropped and she closed her eyes in thought, like someone trying to hear a very distant sound. Thus occupied, she slowly folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. After a long moment, she looked at Herbert as if she’d emerged from the dark, and said, weakly, ‘He wrote something I don’t understand.’

  Herbert gave her Father Maguire’s translation.

  ‘“Softer than rain your innocence,”’ she read, quietly, ‘“Unyielding as rock your firmness.”’