Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  Sarah Becket sat in the front seat of the Lancia, between the chauffeur and Sergeant Cullen. Very soon, she knew, she would collapse with exhaustion; but for the moment she was simply terrified. If the Germans were still here, there was likely to be a gunfight with Deborah and Tom in the middle of it; if they had already left, they would probably have taken Tom with them, and he would be in worse danger than before.

  Nonetheless, she had done her best. She glanced gratefully at Robinson, the chauffeur, beside her. When the Lancia had stopped for her in the lane, an hour or so ago, she had felt certain the two men in it were Germans. But they were not. The man with the shotgun had been Charles’s butler, Smythe, who had realised that something was terribly wrong in the house when he had looked out of a window and seen two men he had never seen before carry a wounded Charles into the library. Then there had been shouts, and another shot. He had distrusted Werner from the first, and had not believed these men were soldiers in the UVF. So he had gone on his own initiative to rouse Robinson, and the two of them had pushed the Lancia quietly down the back lane, past the stables, until it was too far away from the house for the sound of its engine to be heard. Then they had driven towards the village with the idea, like Sarah, of seeking help from Sergeant Cullen.

  Sergeant Cullen had been roused many hundreds of times before dawn in the African veldt and the North West Frontier. He had learnt, long ago, that speed of thought and action meant the difference between life and the broad blade of a tribesman’s spear through your neck. Within ten minutes he had sent a despatch rider speeding towards Craigavon; within twenty he had a convoy driving back towards Glenfee. But he was not accustomed to dealing with hostages.

  As the Lancia scrunched to a halt in front of the wide front steps and the verandah, Sarah thought the house had a dreadful, deserted feel. Birds were singing energetically from the trees, but there were no fires lit, no smoke from the chimneys, no faces at the windows. We’re too late, she thought. They’ve gone.

  Four men leapt from the running boards and dropped to one knee in the firing position, their rifles aimed at the house. Four others jumped out quickly to join them. Sergeant Cullen barked orders to the motorcycles to drive on round the back.

  The front door of the house opened. A woman came out, with a small boy clutched to her long skirts.

  Deborah and Tom.

  With a little cry of relief Sarah leapt from the car and ran towards the steps to join them, but Sergeant Cullen caught her arm and held her back.

  ‘Wait! Just a minute, Mrs Becket,’ he said. ‘It may be a trap.’

  Deborah walked very quietly forward to the top of the steps and gazed down at them. There was no emotion on her face, none at all. Just a pale haunted weariness, as though she found what was in front of her eyes too hard to comprehend. She saw the lines of armed men and ignored them.

  ‘Sarah?’ she said. ‘Sarah — come up.’

  ‘Wait.’ Sergeant Cullen said again. He called out: ‘Mrs Cavendish? Where is your husband, ma’am?’

  Deborah looked down. ‘Oh, it’s you, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘You’ve come too late. My husband’s inside, but he’s dead.’ She waved her hand briefly towards the door, and moved it back quickly to clutch Tom as though she feared he might escape unless she held him. ‘They’re all dead, except one, and . . . there’s so much blood.’

  Sarah saw her sway again, and this time the Sergeant let her go, so she ran up the steps and put her arms round Deborah gently. Soldiers ran past them in their heavy boots, pushing the door open warily and stepping inside. Sarah guided Deborah to a garden seat on the verandah, between an urn of geraniums and a sculpture of a small lion. The seat was wet with rain but it didn’t matter.

  Sarah said: ‘What happened?’

  Deborah sighed, staring out across the park to where the great trees waved by the road in front of the grey squally waters of the lough.

  ‘Charles shot two of them, and then . . .’ Slowly, piece by piece, the story came out.

  ‘He would have got them all if . . .’ Tom’s thin, shocked, high-pitched voice piped up for the first time, and the two women stopped, waiting for him to finish. But he didn’t finish, his voice tailed away.

  There are no ifs, Deborah thought. Only what happened. Those endless seconds when he raised the rifle too slowly. And all the waste of our lives before that.

  Ifs don’t matter.

  The sunlight hurt her. It was bright clean sunlight, gleaming out of a clear blue sky on to fields and woods that were still sodden with yesterday’s rain. There was still mist along the streams and rivers and in all the dips and valleys of the fields, and the newly-washed leaves on the hedges and trees beside the road glittered and sparkled as they drove past. Despite the sunlight the road was still damp, and sometimes spray whooshed up from the tyres as they drove through puddles where branches overhung the road, and occasional rivulets of water splashed down on their heads and trickled icily under their collars and down the backs of their necks. Yet all the time the sunlight warmed their faces.

  If only the sun had shone like this yesterday, Deborah thought bitterly. But on the day of Charles’s funeral the rain had come down in torrents. She had stood beside the sodden grave, throwing mud on the coffin instead of dust, and had squelched, shivering, past the honour guard of drenched UVF soldiers with her soaking son’s hand clenched tight in her own. There had been so much rain she had not known if there were tears on her face or not, but she must have been crying because of the pain in her chest and throat.

  Sir Edward Carson had been there. He had spoken to her kindly and given Tom a little Union flag with the Red Hand of Ulster in the middle. He still held it proudly in his hand now as he sat between Deborah and Sarah in the back of the Lancia on his way to school.

  He was proud of his father, Deborah knew. That was the greatest gift Charles had been able to give the boy. He had died like a hero; Tom had seen that. Yesterday Sir Edward Carson had come to Glenfee and said to Deborah, in front of Tom: ‘If it had not been for the heroic actions of yourself and your husband, Mrs Cavendish, not only would I probably be dead, but, far more important than that, this province would have been plunged into the unnecessary chaos of civil war, which I still pray God we can avoid. Not only Ulster but the entire nation is in your debt.’

  It appeared that the government in London agreed with him on that if nothing else, because the police had confirmed to Deborah that, because of her sister’s part in the events at Glenfee, no attempt was to be made to secure her rearrest. Quite apart from certain embarassing disclosures in London, newspaper interest in the deaths at Glenfee had been intense, and the government would have been extremely foolish to imprison anyone who had played a part in foiling the German plot.

  Of the two surviving Germans, one, Adolf, had escaped, and the other, the injured Franz, confirmed what Charles had told Deborah, that Simon Fletcher had been promised a fortune in German marks to betray UVF secrets and kidnap his commanding officer’s son. Sometimes, in her prayers, Deborah had asked God why this thing had had to happen to Charles, instead of any one of dozens of other senior officers of similar background in the UVF. But the only one who knew the answer to that was Werner, and he was dead.

  As they approached St Andrew’s Preparatory School Deborah clutched her son’s hand more tightly. I can’t do it, she thought, I can’t let him go again. But the headmaster, Dr Duncan, was there with his wife on the main steps to meet her, and Tom was clearly so embarrassed by his mother’s concern that she had to let go. Dr Duncan himself was crippled with guilt and determined to make amends in any way he could.

  ‘Under no circumstances, madam,’ he repeated endlessly as they toured the building and settled Tom down again in his dormitory, round the door of which peered the wide, curious eyes of half a dozen of his friends. ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever will young Cavendish or any other boy from now on be allowed to leave the grounds of this school without being accompanied by a member of staff — and
Tom will not be allowed home unless you personally come to fetch him. It was a most dreadful thing, dreadful, and I am determined it will never happen again.’

  Of course it won’t, you silly man, she thought wearily. My husband’s dead, no one would want to kidnap Tom now. And, in a strange way his pompous, pointless assurances helped her to deal with her own anxiety. Life had to go on, Tom had to grow up, he couldn’t stay tied to her skirts forever.

  Nevertheless Tom allowed her to kiss him, and she saw tears well in his eyes, briefly, as she left. In the car, Deborah waved and waved until the car turned a bend in the rutted track and the old ivy-clad school was out of sight. Sarah touched her arm.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Debbie,’ she said. ‘Truly.’

  Deborah dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know he will. Oh, that stupid man!’

  ‘Who? Dr Duncan?’ Sarah smiled. ‘I expect if any German comes he’ll bite their legs like a bulldog.’

  ‘And make them write a thousand lines.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The sisters smiled at each other. The chauffeur, Robinson, drove stolidly along the country track and out on to the road beside Lough Neagh. After a while they came to a small village where a stream joined the lake and Deborah leaned forward and touched Robinson on the shoulder.

  ‘Pull in at the grocer’s shop, will you please? If I remember rightly, we can get a cup of tea there and stretch our legs in the garden.’

  The grass was almost dry now, and the woman agreed to serve them tea outside at a small wooden table. While they were waiting, Deborah and Sarah wandered down to the shore. The sunlight sparkled on the waters of the lough, and little puffy white clouds floated high in the warm blue sky. A few hundred yards away, a heron stood motionless in a bank of reeds.

  ‘You are lucky, living here,’ Sarah said. ‘In London, one forgets.’

  ‘Yes.’ Deborah took a deep breath. ‘Sarah, there is something I have to tell you.’

  ‘So serious?’ Sarah turned to her, surprised. ‘Debbie? What is it?’

  ‘I . . . ‘ She hesitated. It is a secret that does not have to be told at all, Deborah realised. Not now. Charles is dead, and I am an honoured widow. Everyone will assume that the baby is his.

  Unless . . .

  Maybe I’ll come over and see you some time. And we can meet . . .

  Rankin’s words had sounded so callous when he said them. Standing with his hands in his pockets under the street lamp, watching her walk away. She had hated him then. But now Deborah knew that some day, some time, she would have to see him again. Not for passion. That was all gone, a fever that had passed. But to let him know . . .

  What?

  That she was glad they had been lovers. That she did not hate him anymore. That he was right; his child would be brought up in a good home, with all the advantages which wealth and education could give. And that she would love it, with a love as fierce and protective as she had for Tom.

  I would like to tell him that, Deborah thought. And that if I had not taken his advice, I would have lost Tom also. But if he does come, and Sarah is here? I shall have to pretend, and deceive her.

  Still Deborah hesitated. She thought of Sarah, who had wanted children so much and would probably never have any now. She would probably stay married to Jonathan for form’s sake, but they wouldn’t live together, not any more. She was likely to be hurt, jealous even, when she learnt that Deborah was pregnant; if she learnt about Rankin too she might never speak to her sister again.

  But Deborah was tired of lies. She realised how much she needed someone in her life to whom she could speak honestly. Who would love her for what she really was. Charles was dead, and anyway, she had never been able to talk to him. Even if Rankin came, he would go away again after an hour or a day or a week — she would never be able to rely on him.

  So if not Sarah, who?

  I could go and whisper my secret to a shell on the seashore, she thought. And what good would that do?

  I don’t want her to go back to London, and leave me alone with my guilt and my memories. I want her to stay here with me at Glenfee, at least for a while. When my baby is born I want someone to share the moment with me. I want there to be at least one person, apart from myself, who knows everything about where it came from and how it was conceived, and who still loves it, for all that.

  I want that person to be Sarah, my sister.

  I want her to know the truth.

  So she began.

  ‘A while ago I met a man . . .’

  The two rich ladies, Mrs Devlin thought, did not seem to know their own minds. They had ordered tea at eleven o’clock in the morning, but when she had laid a cloth over the wooden table in the garden and set out two willow pattern cups with the sugar bowl and the milk jug and the tea pot which was only a little chipped at the spout, and a selection of cakes with some hot soda bread fresh from the oven, they had not come to sit down.

  They just continued pacing up and down by the shore of the lough, the fair-haired one in the blue coat doing all the talking, while the slim dark one in the grey skirt and jacket and straw hat listened quietly, until all the heat had gone out of the soda bread and the tea in the pot would be tepid and stewed for sure. At times they frowned and looked very solemn, and once the fair one cried, so that Mrs Devlin felt certain all the good food would go to waste, but the dark one put her arm around the fair one and started talking earnestly, and they walked right the way up to the reeds so that the heron flew away in disgust.

  Mrs Devlin was just wondering whether to clear the table and brew fresh tea, or give it all to the chauffeur, when the two ladies suddenly came and sat down laughing and ate and drank as though it was the most delightful meal they had had in their lives.

  Mrs Devlin didn’t like to interfere. She just stood at the stone sink in her kitchen and watched from the window until they had finished, and marvelled. All that money, so that they could have a chauffeur in a big shiny six-seater car just sitting outside the shop by the roadside reading the newspaper until their ladyships were ready, and yet they understood nothing about good food and drink. Perhaps it came from living in a big house, Mrs Devlin thought, where everything would be stone cold anyway by the time it reached the table from the kitchens. Maybe rich folk grew to like their food and drink like that.

  Anyway, the two ladies had certainly found plenty to talk about, Mrs Devlin couldn’t deny that. They spent nearly two hours in her garden, and never let up for a moment. And when at last they came to pay and left her a two shilling tip, they were both smiling and laughing all the time, as though the good Lord had just granted an extra birthday to the pair of them.

  Mrs Devlin came out into the garden to clear the table, and stood watching wistfully as they drove away out of sight, in the back of the shiny black car.

  A Novel of Love and Irish Freedom

  First published as an ebook by White Owl Publications Ltd 2012

  Copyright Tim Vicary 2012

  ISBN 978-0-9571698-5-2

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

  No reproduction without permission

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Shuster Ltd in 1992

  Copyright Tim Vicary 1992

  First Published in Great Britain by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Shuster 1993

  The right of Tim Vicary to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

  To Sue,

  with love and gratitude

  The Blood Upon the Rose Contents

  Author’s Note

  1. Assassin

  2. A New Dance

  3. Kee

  4. Merrion Square

  5. Radford

  6. A Walk by the Sea

  7. Love in the Firelight

  8. Defence of the Realm

  9. War Hero

  10. Lust an
d Flames

  11. A Solitary Fisherman

  12. The Perils of Confession

  13. The New Policy and Plan

  14. Minister of Finance

  15. The Lambert Hotel

  16. The Song of Songs

  17. Arms Dealer

  18. A Careful Typist

  19. Society Hostess

  20. A Face to Remember

  21. A Man in the Street

  22. A Shooting Match

  23. Arrest

  24. Father and Daughter

  25. A Soldier of the Irish Republic

  26. Unwelcome Guest

  27. Two of a Kind

  28. Military Intelligence

  29. Prison Visit

  30. An Unsuitable Proposal

  31. A Nasty Surprise

  32. Stone Walls Do Not A Prison Make

  33. Two Confessions

  34. Rats, Fire, and Rain

  35. On O’Connell Bridge

  Author’s Note

  On Easter Monday 1916, on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin, Padraig Pearse read out a declaration of Irish independence. Ireland, he said, was not part of the United Kingdom; it was a sovereign independent state. Behind him, several hundred armed Republicans raised the flag of an Irish Republic.

  They had no chance of success. The British government was at war with Germany and had no sympathy for Irish rebels who had tried to get guns from the enemy. A week later, after a battle in which 450 people were killed, the rebels surrendered. Pearse and 13 other leaders were convicted of treason and executed. Their followers were imprisoned in North Wales for 6 months, and then released.

  Pearse’s death made him a martyr. As the poet W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘a terrible beauty is born.’ In the general election of 1918, the party of Pearse’s supporters, Sinn Fein, won 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland. One of these was won by the first ever woman MP, Constance Markiewicz. But instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein MPs declared themselves the new Parliament of Ireland, Dail Eireann. A state of war existed, they said, between England and Ireland.