Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  He had tried to make something of Ardmore, he thought. He had bought the horses, cherished the shrine of his mother’s room, tried to settle down and ignore the devil in his mind. And now they had done this to him.

  There was a movement far away, across the bog. A car, crawling towards him through the twists and winds of the road, like a little black beetle casting here and there. But there was only one way a car could go, in the end.

  He focused his field glasses on it.

  It was a model T Ford.

  He dragged the two logs into position across the bridge. Each log was about fourteen inches in diameter. The first one was a couple of yards below the hump on the far side away from the car, the second a yard beyond that. The driver would not be able to see them until he had driven over the hump of the bridge. Each log had a large stone behind it at either end, to stop the car pushing it back. When the car came over the bridge it would hit the logs, and if the first log didn’t stop it, the second would. He hoped it would be going fast. That way the passengers would be stunned and probably injured by the accident. Then he would just have to finish them off. When they were dead, he could make it look as if the car had smashed into the low wall of the bridge, and tipped into the river.

  When he had finished, the car was about three quarters of a mile away. Andrew picked up his fishing rod and stood quietly beside the bridge, watching.

  It was getting darker, and when the car was about five hundred yards away rain began to fall. Great heavy drops at first, then hard lines of sleet, driven by a southwest wind.

  Andrew picked up his field glasses again. He could see two men in the front, but rain blurred the lenses and he could not make out their faces.

  Ten yards from the bridge, the car stopped. A man got out and fiddled with the windscreen wipers. He shouted something to the man inside but the wipers still didn’t seem to work. Then he lifted the bonnet.

  A second man got out and strolled down to the water. It was the butcher’s assistant, Rafferty. Andrew turned his collar up, and pulled his cap down low over his eyes.

  Rafferty called across the stream: ‘Have you caught much?’

  Andrew shook his head, but didn’t answer. The sleet came down even harder. Rafferty hunched his shoulders against it.

  ‘You’re mad to stay out here!’ he yelled. ‘Touched, man! Will we give you a lift?’

  Andrew shook his head again. Rafferty shrugged and plodded back to the car.

  The first man stood up and closed the bonnet. He was much shorter than Rafferty. He took off his glasses to wipe them, and Andrew could see the broad nostrils of his short snub nose, almost like a pig’s snout.

  The windscreen wipers were working. The two men got in, the car headlights came on, and the car drove up onto the bridge.

  Andrew put down the fishing rod. The car drove over the hump of the bridge, hit the first log with a bang, and stopped.

  Andrew picked up one of the three-foot lengths of wood, walked up onto the bridge, and smashed the windscreen with it. Then he swung it back again and thumped it as hard as he could into Rafferty’s face.

  The little man with the snub nose, Slaney, screamed and got out of the car on the far side. Andrew swung at him with the club and hit him on the arm. Then he looked to his right and saw a third man getting out of the back seat. Hardly a man, really – just a boy with a white, shocked face. He had a revolver in his hand.

  There was no room to swing the club in the narrow space between the car and the side of the bridge. Andrew pulled it back and jabbed it into the boy’s stomach. As he doubled forwards, Andrew raised his knee into the boy’s face. The revolver dropped from his fingers. Andrew pushed him backwards into the car door, bent down and picked the revolver up. He thought: Who the hell are you? And where’s Davitt?

  Slaney was screaming at him from the front of the car. Andrew turned and saw that he, too, had dragged a revolver out of his coat pocket. He was having trouble with it because his right arm wouldn’t work and he had to hold it in his left. It was wavering, but pointing directly at Andrew.

  Slaney shouted: ‘Drop that now, or …’

  Andrew shot him in the stomach.

  It’s too late now, he thought. I can’t disguise this as an accident. Then he felt hands on his sleeve. The mountain of Rafferty was lurching out of the car, moaning, his face covered with blood from all the cuts of the broken windscreen. His great butcher’s hands seized Andrew’s right arm at the wrist and elbow, bending it back against the joint so that it would break.

  Andrew screamed, dropped the revolver, and pushed against Rafferty, knocking him off balance, back into the car. As they fell, with Andrew on top, the butcher’s grip loosened slightly. Andrew felt behind his back with his left hand, and pulled out the hunting knife. Pushing down with his imprisoned right hand, he arched his back and stabbed upwards with his left. The knife went up into Rafferty’s throat.

  Andrew jerked himself free as the fountain of arterial blood sprayed up everywhere. It spattered on the car roof, and pumped through the broken windscreen, on to the bonnet. Finish this now, he thought. The boy was struggling on his hands and knees beside the car. He looked up at Andrew and said: ‘No! Please don’t!’ Andrew picked up the club and hit him with it, hard, at the base of the skull. Then he went to the front of the car and did the same to Slaney.

  The sleet was still pouring down. He noticed it for the first time. The car was a shambles. Rafferty was still twitching and writhing in the front seat as the last of his blood sprayed out of him.

  Andrew leaned over the parapet of the bridge, breathing heavily. For a moment he thought he might be sick but he was not. He spat into the water and turned round.

  He had to decide what to do. The bullet and the knife wound complicated things. If they had driven hard into the logs and he’d finished them off with the club alone, it might have looked like an accident, but not now. Nevertheless, he had to gain time, so that he was far away before the bodies were found.

  He lugged Slaney and the boy back into the car. He took off the handbrake and rolled the car back down the slope to the foot of the bridge. Then he turned the steering wheel, and pushed the car hard down the bank towards the river. It was deep this side of the bridge, he knew, and the current was flowing strongly.

  The car tipped one front wheel in, rolled on its side, and slipped slowly under the brown, muddy water. To Andrew’s intense relief, it disappeared completely from view.

  He hurried back across the bridge, and put the logs back on their pile. Then he picked up the fallen revolvers and looked at the road.

  It was covered with blood.

  He had a water bottle in his fishing bag, and he spent the next ten minutes carrying river water up and pouring it over the road. At the end of ten minutes the stains were less obvious. The sleet had stopped, but a steady drizzle continued to wash it away.

  It was nearly dark now.

  As he tried to dismantle his fishing rod, he found his hands were shaking. Carefully, he folded his arms and breathed deeply. After a few minutes, the shaking had lessened. He folded the rod, emptied his keepnet, and slung his bag over his shoulder.

  When he turned round, he saw a man watching him from a car.

  ‘Any luck?’ the man asked. ‘Rotten day for it, I should think.’

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew heard himself saying. ‘It was fine earlier, though. I got a few.’

  ‘Jolly good show. I say, do you want a lift?’

  ‘No. Thanks all the same. I like the walk. It’s not far.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ The man put his head back inside his car and drove away over the bridge. Andrew watched as he disappeared into the darkness across the bog.

  ‘Drive carefully, old chap,’ he whispered to himself. ‘A fellow could easily have an accident in weather like this.’

  He fingered the scar on his face, wondering if the man had seen it. Then he walked quickly down the road into the forest, to the place where he had hidden his car.

&n
bsp; 12. The Perils of Confession

  IT WAS very peaceful in the church. Sean fancied he could still hear the echo of the funeral hymns murmuring to each other in the stone galleries high above his head. There was the scent of incense and candle wax, the resonance of distant footsteps, the quick mutter of prayers from the side chapels, where people knelt in the pews, clicking their rosary beads.

  Martin’s parents had left a few minutes ago, after the last wreath had been laid on the grave. They were ordinary farming folk from the County Mayo: the father big, red-faced, with a wide leather belt and a suit that had seen better days; and his wife, a solid, decent woman, white-faced under her black shawl. Both had looked confused, uncomfortable at a ceremony at which they knew so few of the mourners. Michael Collins himself had helped to carry the coffin; Paddy Daly had been there too. It was risky to gather together so openly, but it would have been a dishonour to have skulked away, and sent him to his grave alone. Volunteers and kilted boys of the Fianna had kept watch outside. There was no danger in staying behind; as far as Sean could see, no known G man could have got within half a mile of the place unseen, and a detective would have needed a company of armed troops to have broken into the church itself.

  They had fired a volley of shots over the grave, but there had been no speeches. As Collins had said two years ago over the grave of Thomas Ashe, the gunfire itself said everything that needed to be said.

  Sean had spoken a word or two to Martin’s parents, but they seemed dazed, unable to distinguish him from the crowds of other unknown friends their son had acquired. They reminded him of his own parents - solid honest country folk, anxious for their son to get on, bewildered by the discovery that he was so deeply involved with a movement of which they knew so little.

  Sean had never told his parents he was a Volunteer. His father, a prosperous dairyman in the County Wexford, had sent his son to the Jesuits of Belvedere College in Dublin, the best school he could afford, and had been delighted beyond measure when Sean had got his place at UCD. No one else in the family had ever shown signs of joining one of the professions. His elder brother, Liam, was to inherit the business, and his three sisters seemed destined to marry farmers or tradesmen as their mother had done, and raise large families of their own. Sean had been the child prodigy - but it was because he had been at Belvedere in 1916, visiting a schoolfriend for the holidays, that he had seen the heroism and black tragedy of Pearse’s Rising at first hand. The boys had slipped out, watching as much as they could, once or twice running errands, on one famous occasion smuggling two old rifles into Boland’s Mill; and from then on Sean had been convinced that the cause of the Volunteers was one for him. But he had never told his family. Although the old Fenian songs could bring tears to his father’s eye, it would have been a mortal shock to the old man had he learnt his brilliant son was one of them.

  A shock not dissimilar to that which Martin’s parents were suffering now.

  Sean felt the need to confess more urgently than ever before. The guilt of Martin’s death weighed him down; only a priest could absolve him of it. But it was important that, if he were to bare his soul, he should receive comfort and understanding, rather than condemnation. When he saw that Father Desmond was due to receive confession after the service, he decided to take advantage of it.

  A middle-aged woman came out of the confessional box. Sean got up and stepped inside. He bowed his head close to the grill, his cap in his hand.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  ‘Dominus sit in corde tuo. The Lord is always ready to forgive.’ The familiar comforting phrases took him back to the church at home, the fine new suit he had worn for his confirmation. ‘Do your sins lie heavy on you, my son?’

  ‘Very heavy, Father.’

  ‘And how long is it since you have been to confession ?’

  ‘A month, Father. Maybe more.’

  ‘That is a long time, my son. What are the sins that oppress you, which you would like to lay on the shoulders of Our Lord?’

  Sean took a deep breath. ‘I … have sought the life of another man, Father.’

  The response from the other side of the grill became less automatic. ‘I see. When was that, my son?’

  ‘I was with Martin Savage, Father. I was his friend.’

  ‘You were one of those who sought the life of Lord French?’

  ‘I was, Father.’

  There was a pause. Sean had the impression that the priest glanced up towards the grill. But it was impossible to see a face clearly through it, even if he had wished to.

  The priest asked: ‘Did you do this out of hatred?’

  Sean thought for a moment. ‘Not out of hatred for the man, no, Father. Hatred for the things he stands for. Hatred for the oppression of our people. It was an act of war. I did it as a soldier of Ireland!’

  There was a silence.

  ‘And there is another sin, Father, greater than the first. I ... you see, it was because of me that Martin died.’ His voice cracked slightly. Although he had confessed it before, to Catherine, there was an importance in telling the priest that brought the tears more easily.

  The voice from the other side of the box was gentle, sympathetic. ‘Take your time, my son. Tell me about it.’

  So he went through it, slowly: the wait outside the station, the trouble they had had with the cart, the bomb that came too early and alerted the policeman, and then his - Sean’s - shout to Martin: ‘We’ve got to be sure of French. Can you not get closer and put a bomb right inside it?’ A few seconds after those words, Martin had died.

  ‘Were you his officer, to order him to do that?’

  ‘No, Father, I was just his friend. We were in it together. But he died and I lived.’

  As he finished Sean heard the clock chime outside, and the murmur of voices, raised, somewhere in the nave.

  ‘My son, it was not you that killed Martin. That was done by a bullet from a British Army rifle. And it was not you that made him risk his life and run out into the road. That was a thing he chose to do. You ran into the road with him, as I understand it?’

  ‘I did that, Father. But only afterwards. I had no bombs left, you see.’

  ‘But it was a risk you took as well. You all shared it together. It has pleased God to take Martin to Himself now, and to spare you for other things. That is His way, and it is not for us to question the wisdom of the Almighty. But I am sure He did not mean you to wear a cross of blame for your friend’s death. That was a matter outside your control entirely. I absolve you of it freely. Let us say a prayer together for your friend’s soul, and let the burden be lifted from you.’

  And it did feel like that, quite literally. As he prayed, following the priest with the ritual, healing phrases, Sean felt as though his shoulders were somehow lighter. He sat up, after the prayer, straighter than before.

  ‘As for the motive for your action, the military ambush upon Field Marshal Lord French …’ Father Desmond paused, as though seeking precisely the right words. The argument outside had not eased. It penetrated Sean’s mid dimly, as something vaguely improper in a church. The priest resumed: ‘Many things are done by soldiers in war, which involve men in a burden of most grievous sin. The deliberate seeking out of a human life is always one of them. But as in all human action, the underlying motive in our hearts is the key which must guide us. If a man kills another in warfare out of hatred or a desire for gain, that would indeed endanger his immortal soul. As his soul would be endangered if he killed with cruelty, or deliberately slaughtered noncombatants, like women or children or ordinary civilians – that would be a foul and cowardly business surely. But you have done nothing as low as that, my son. It is for you to look into your heart and be sure of two things. Firstly, that your motive for this action was pure; and secondly, that the action itself was one which you will be able to lay before the Lord God Almighty on the final Day of Judgement. If you can do that, then the sin was not a mortal one. Let us pray that it was so.’
r />   After they had prayed together again, the priest laid a penance on Sean of twenty Hail Marys to be said every night. Then he said: ‘Are there any other sins I should know about, my son?’

  Sean answered: ‘Oh. Well, there is one.’ He had not, truly, thought of mentioning this before, but the relief the priest had given to him was so unexpectedly great that he thought the man might understand everything. If he could confess it all, he would be able to walk out of here truly cleansed and innocent, and begin his life anew as the church intended.

  He said: ‘I have lain with a woman.’

  The priest sighed. It was a small sigh, quickly covered up, but it pained Sean greatly. The sigh implied that the sin was an ordinary one, the sort the priest had heard many times before. Sean was not sure, but it also sounded as though this sin might not be so easily forgiven as those which had gone before.

  ‘Tell me about it, my son.’

  That was not easy either. Sean felt his face grow hot. ‘Oh, it … that’s not really necessary, is it, Father?’

  ‘If you wish to be absolved of the sin, first you must confess it, and lay it before the Lord. Tell me.’

  ‘Well, I … we went to my room and, we lay together, Father.’

  ‘You say that you lay together. Did you perform the carnal act of lust?’

  ‘I … well, yes, Father, we did.’

  ‘How many times?’

  Sean’s blush had gone, and his face was now quite drained of blood, white. This was awful. He felt like a Judas, whispering secrets to some spy outside the door. But all through his childhood he had been taught that the rite of confession was sacred. He whispered: ‘Four times, Father. Four separate days.’

  ‘And the girl. Was she a street girl that you paid?’

  ‘No!’ His denial was so vehement that he wondered if it had been heard outside. He could not stand this. He thought he would get up and leave now. But somehow he could not. The weight of everything he had learnt in childhood kept him there.

  ‘So. Did she go with you willingly, or did you force yourself upon her?’