A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Anselm felt like he’d been thumped from behind. He looked over to Bede and nodded, remembering the vehemence of David Osborne. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Did the army write to his parents?’ continued Bede, again addressing Anselm. ‘They might have done, but if so, the details would have been vague – something to hide what had really happened. “We beg to report that your son died from wounds. I remain, Sir, Madam, your obedient servant.” Some nonsense like that. No precise location, maybe no date. If Joseph Flanagan’s name vanished from all military records after nineteen seventeen, no member of the family would—’

  ‘Bede is absolutely right,’ insisted Anselm, turning to the Prior. ‘There’s no memorial save a tree among trees – the family would never know what had happened to their son. They wouldn’t be able to find out. And that is precisely what has happened.’

  The community were of one mind: whatever Kate Seymour’s connection to the old man might be, they shared a secrecy of purpose entirely consistent with embarrassment or a sense of dishonour, however ill-founded. And that fact alone made tracing them a delicate enterprise because their privacy could not be compromised by a rudimentary public appeal.

  ‘Let’s sleep on it,’ said the Prior, finally. ‘I’ve never yet solved a problem the day it surfaced.’

  With another prayer he drew the meeting to a close and extinguished the candle between his thumb and a finger. The community processed out of the Chapter Room, through the dark cloister and into the church for Compline. There, leaning on his stall like an exile, was Sylvester. Though he knew the words by heart, the Gatekeeper leafed through the pages of his Psalter as if he’d never seen it before.

  Anselm slept badly, trying to think of schemes that would lead him to Joseph Flanagan’s family. When he woke for Lauds he was as lost as the night before. Throwing his habit over his pyjamas, he glanced across his cell and froze. On the ground, inches away from the narrow gap beneath the door, was a small square of white card. He picked it up and read the embossed writing several times.

  Dr Kate Seymour, Ph.D, was a forensic anthropologist based at the University of Galway. How she came to have an interest in Joseph Flanagan was the main question but Anselm was distracted by another. Who had knelt outside his cell during the night? He suspected Bede, who’d spoken wisely at the moment Anselm had confessed to defeat.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Where the Lark Runs

  1

  Herbert and ten other monks walked the eight miles from Sudbury Station along a country lane to the Old Abbey Ruin and a seventeenth-century manor that had been donated for the new foundation. The Benedictines had built the place in the thirteen hundreds and it had thrived until forced closure during the Reformation, when the abbey was quarried for local housing, and a manor built for Henry VIII’s trumpeter. The property had passed through several hands until its ramshackle condition prompted abandonment. Such was the information sent to Les Ramiers, along with a citation from the earliest known manuscript reference to the site and its occupants: hic monachi pacati habitant ubi manat alauda: monks dwell in peace where the Lark runs.

  Herbert stood at the large broken gates, his feet sore. On his back was everything he possessed. His brother monks were from Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, oddly enough the Christian countries at the heart of the conflagration that had destroyed empires and changed the face of the modern world. No map could chart the difference. There were too many dead. Our innocence has gone, as Duggie put it. Herbert gazed at the ruin ahead: tall arches covered in creeper, a worn night-stair leading to the open sky, a tumbling manor with red and pink tiles in disarray. Père Lucien at Les Ramiers had not seen this place; and he could not possibly fathom the delicate configuration of things that might move a man’s heart. But he’d been profoundly right about Herbert’s. I, too, can dwell here in peace, he thought.

  Quite how it came to pass no one knew. The monks began restoring the building, sleeping in old army tents from different armies, and praying in the room of least leaks. In place of a bell they hung a plank between two ropes and struck it with a spade. Perhaps that strange sound had drawn the attention of passers-by, who’d then spoken of what they’d seen. Whatever the explanation, the monks gradually found themselves with other companions. People of faith and no faith, of all denominations and no denomination, began to help the silent monks in their work. Some came with a tent of their own and remained for months. Artisans worked for nothing, learning the blunt sign language that joined the community together. In the evenings, when tools were downed, all other sounds seemed curiously loud after the racket of the day. Herbert waited for that time with impatience. He liked to walk beside the stream, listening to the land: the rush of water and the jubilant song of larks hiding in the fields.

  Despite their years, Herbert’s parents joined the motley crowd. For a week at a time they, too, came to help. Ernest scratched his thick whiskers while deploring the shoddy work done since his last inspection. Constance laid out long trestle tables, covering them with fabulous needlepoint lace, family heirlooms from Bruges and Alençon. Her sandwiches and cakes, once the talk of the 22nd Lancers, became the fare of men without a nation-state. This couple from a bygone age were adored by everyone. They even saluted Ernest on his rounds.

  ‘Herbert,’ said Constance, nervously, on a day of parting. ‘There’s something I’ve wanted to say for a very long time.’

  She twisted a cane umbrella between her gloved hands.

  ‘A long time ago your father and I made a very wrong decision. And it affected you deeply.’

  Herbert thought of Colonel Maude and the High-Ups of the regiment. Inside, he felt a burst of remembered humiliation.

  Like someone stepping honourably under a train, Constance said, ‘When you refused to go to Stonyhurst we sent you to the local school.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Please, Herbert. You know very well what I’m referring to. We wouldn’t let you change your mind, even though you were quite miserable. You see –’ she blushed, tapping a shoe with the umbrella’s point – ‘we thought it would be character-building to make you stand by a decision. I’m so very sorry for my harshness. So is your father. We were frightfully silly back then.’

  If only she knew, thought Herbert. If only she knew of the decisions I’ve made and had to live with. Not even Stonyhurst could have prepared me for the pulling of a trigger … for when he’d said ‘Guilty’ and ‘Death’, banking on someone else’s mercy. Herbert never wished to be once again in the consuming presence of Colonel Maude, but he did now: that his commanding officer might hear his mother confess to a great wrong; that the Lancers might learn how innocent she was, even after all these years.

  When the restoration work on the monastery was almost complete, someone came up with the outlandish idea of erecting a statue of Our Lady right in the middle of a secluded lake behind a shoulder of trees. So one evening Herbert and the Prior, an experienced monk from Les Moineaux, went to take a long look at this hidden eye on to heaven. After gazing at the reflections for a long time, the Prior nudged Herbert’s arm and deftly signed, ‘Where are we?’ He meant: ‘What are we going to call this school for sane living, run by the not so sane?’

  Herbert listened intently to the music in the trees. Then he was drawn elsewhere, to another sound, first heard on a dark road out of Oostbeke when the dawn silvered some nameless trees. He tried a few clumsy manoeuvres with his fingers. Eventually he whispered, ‘Larkwood.’

  2

  One of the more talkative helpers – a whisperer and nudger – was called Sylvester. He came to help with the thatching of a barn and never left. He became a novice in 1925, the year of Herbert’s solemn profession. With tousled blond hair and bright blue eyes, he was, at twenty-two, a lively presence: a practical joker (using a plumb line as a trip wire) who was always late for everything. He had to be dragged out of bed in the morning and hauled away from the table after meals. Despite hours of instruction he never ma
stered the sign language – even though it had been devised to accommodate the slower medieval mind and had worked smoothly for centuries without need of alteration. He took to whistling, pointing and winking. During recreation, when the monks talked freely, he occasionally pressed Herbert for stories of the war.

  Sylvester had wanted to join up but he was only eleven in 1914. He’d been frustrated, because plenty of boys only a few years older than himself had enlisted. They got a spread in the paper. Time and again there was an article about a fifteen-year-old in the trenches, bravely fighting for King and Country. His father, a skilled thatcher, would slam the paper shut every time he saw the photo of some young hero – not because he thought it a disgrace, but because he was ashamed. A back injury had rendered him unfit to serve in uniform. Despite the growing casualty lists and the drawn blinds in the streets, he tried several times to get past the army doctors, but they always turned him away. He was eventually banned from the premises. So Sylvester, eager to please his father, had joined the scouts. He’d even met Baden-Powell, the man who’d stood firm during the siege of Mafeking. And Herbert, ten years his senior, and a veteran, listened to Sylvester’s ardour for England with a deep melancholy. He shared it, still.

  However, something in Sylvester’s questioning unsettled Herbert. Despite knowing many war widows, and former soldiers – both injured and apparently ‘normal’ – the young man didn’t seem to appreciate what it had been like in France and Flanders. Which, perhaps, was not so surprising. In order to survive, most soldiers had bottled up their experiences, or changed their way of talking, to make it credible, to bring it properly dressed into decent society. It was the same for Herbert. He said nothing to his brother monks, but he was still haunted by the face of Quarters; he still had to steel himself to watch those eyes vanish in a spurt of mud. And he still saw Elliot at Broodseinde with the cigarette in his hand, just before he stubbed it on his boot. Herbert had been right beside him. And, of course, there was Joseph Flanagan, his breath beating against a canvas gas mask. None of these moments dimmed. They formed such an intense presence of intimate memory that he could not speak of them. To do so would be like talking while someone died in his hands. Certain tragedies require silence as an epitaph – at least for the participants. And consequently, it was with some alarm that Herbert sensed in Sylvester the birth of a new romanticism, an excitement not dissimilar to that which preceded the war.

  And so one evening Herbert went to the lake where Sylvester was working. A railway official had donated some sleepers to the community and the young monk had spent weeks sinking them into the ground in unusual places, creating benches for those who wandered while they prayed. One such was by the lake, and so it was here that Herbert met Sylvester and led him away, to a copse of aspen trees. There, beneath the shivering leaves, he talked simply about sacrifice and shame; about Joseph Flanagan’s execution and Herbert’s breaking of regimental crockery.

  Colonel Maude would have been proud of him.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  1

  Anselm sat by a murmuring fire near a hotel window that looked on to the beach of Brandon Bay. A strong wind swept off the Atlantic, tugging at a line of trees crouched like men with their collars turned up. Beyond the white crests, concealed by the mist, was Inisdúr. Sitting beside him, dressed in jeans, Wellingtons and a thick woollen jumper, her hair tied in a rough, reddish knot, was Kate Seymour, the only niece of Seosamh Ó Flannagáin. Her father was Brendan, Seosamh’s only brother.

  This friendship of immediate significance; this meeting, a preamble for what would happen that evening; this strange anticipation of something good: all these swift developments had been driven by a kind of relentless inevitability. It was a final ordering of events, the doing of what ought to be done. After Anselm had rung Kate to explain the meaning of the trial, she had told Brendan; and he had wanted to meet John Lindsay, who, in his turn, had wanted to come to Inisdúr. ‘Want’ was not the right word. This was a new experience, of yearning, demand and obedience to history. There was no term for it.

  ‘This is not just a gathering,’ Kate had stressed. ‘My father’s going to hold a leanúint … it’s an island custom. It means “following”. On Inisdúr, when someone died, the body was laid on a table. The family kept watch … to follow the dead to their awakening. Throughout the night anyone could visit to speak a word of memory. Then they’d leave. Only the family saw the sun rise upon the body. Then the burial took place. It’s one ceremony from dark to light.’

  And so Anselm had come to follow Seosamh Ó Flannagáin to his awakening. He’d come in Herbert’s name.

  * * *

  Anselm gazed across the ruffled fields that drifted without boundary on to the sand. To the south, heavy clouds were banked like grey mountains sinking into the sea. Cattle mooched by the surf.

  ‘The Ó Flannagáins left Inisdúr during the “great evacuation” of nineteen fifty-four,’ said Kate. She had a natural smile that vanished when she spoke. Tiny lines gathered round her mouth, seeming to show sudden seriousness. ‘We were, in fact, the very last to leave.’

  Her grandmother, Róisín, refused to move. Brendan literally carried her down the slip to the waiting boat and a new life on the mainland, with a house provided by the Land Board. She never recovered from the displacement and would stare out to sea, when the island was in view. ‘Muiris is still there,’ she often whimpered. ‘We left him behind.’ He’d died thirty years previously.

  For Kate’s parents, Brendan and Myriam, this subsidised existence was almost equally disorientating. They’d lived off the land. Now they lived off the State. It was an incomprehensible state of affairs: they got something for nothing. Brendan set up a shop near Brandon harbour, to serve the fishing boats, and Myriam knitted sweaters for the men – like the one Kate was wearing now – and socks. Once they could make ends meet, they found a house of their own and cut themselves free from those heavy grants.

  For Kate, aged twelve, the leaving was the foundation of her future.

  Inisdúr had been a dying world. Hence the ‘great evacuation’. All the young men and women, bar ‘the loyal’ few, had gone – to the factories, the wages and the electric lights. There’d only been four other children in the school, where old Mr Drennan, the teacher, had long ago abandoned any pretence to structured education. He’d romped through poetry that caught his mood, taught them wild songs, or lambasted the air itself on the sins of Collins and De Valera. His thumping obsessions had all been way above their little heads. Kate had thought him an injured man; a man of strange and private rituals … for as long as anyone could remember, he’d kept a glass of wine-vinegar beneath a writing slate. He’d kept a map facing the wall.

  On the mainland, however, all that changed for Kate. With conventional though less interesting teachers, she flourished. Another world of limitless possibilities opened. She duly chased some of them to ground, beginning at the gates of Trinity College, Dublin, and ending at the University of Philadelphia. She returned to Ireland a forensic anthropologist, two words her parents couldn’t begin to pronounce or understand, and a career they found vaguely deviant: the scientific examination of human remains.

  ‘We never spoke of Inisdúr at home,’ said Kate. The sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks were a stronger characteristic than Anselm remembered. They showed emotion through a slight increase in colour. ‘For my parents it was a kind of grief. For me it was part of my escape. Even Gaelic seemed a retrograde language, a way of speaking for a world that no longer existed. For a long while I wouldn’t speak it, except at home where it was the means of intim acy. On leaving the farm, the currachs and a whole craft of living, the island was cut loose from me, and it drifted free into the Atlantic and almost disappeared … except that I knew my father went back … frequently.’ For a fleeting moment the faint smile returned. ‘He’d stay out there, all alone, for a week at a time. Year after year he crossed over. I thought it was because he missed the sounds of his infa
ncy. In one way, I was right. In another, I was wrong. Very wrong.’

  Kate had just come back from Bosnia where she’d been helping UN investigators prepare forensic evidence for prosecutions at The Hague. Exhausted by her work, she’d returned to a very different manner of trial – a third and possibly final separation from her husband of sixteen years. She went home to Brandon Bay to ponder the meaning of divorce. And then, one fine morning, when a mist had cleared off the sea, she decided to go back to that simplest of places, where the Matchmaker would have been brought to book for getting it so badly wrong.

  ‘I walked up the slip towards the farm,’ said Kate. She’d planned to camp out for a few days in the house. ‘But when I got there, I saw a beautiful, tended field.’

  ‘A field?’ repeated Anselm.

  ‘Yes. Only I’d never seen it before. The surrounding wall was typical Inisdúr … huge rocks and small stones laid to an inimitable pattern, created through a deep attachment to the land. It was in perfect condition. Not a single boulder had slipped out of place. When I got back to the mainland, I’d barely walked through the door when my father said, much too quietly, “It’s Seosamh’s Field.”’

  Kate had never heard of Seosamh in her life.

  ‘Now, come meet my father,’ she said, rising. ‘He’ll tell you what else was hidden from me and this mainland life.’

  They walked south along the beach through a tearing wind, their feet crunching upon a vast scattering of blue and pink shells. Ahead, beneath clouds that seemed to suck up the distant hills, was Kate’s childhood home, a white cottage on a promontory. Small flags fluttered on a crowd of mast heads, their main lines tinkling like millions of tiny bells. The Ó Flannagáins had left Inisdúr but they’d never got further than the harbour where they’d landed.