The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10)

by Scott Mariani

  … Having learned from that villain Burrows that a number of the starving tenants on the estate were attempting to feed themselves by shooting one or two rabbit and grouse, my dear husband has forbidden the use or ownership of private arms. I did what I could to impress upon him that by such action he effectively condemns yet more Irish people to the same lingering death that now afflicts every morbid corner of this land. To no avail; his word is final. ‘I will not allow these peasants to roam at will over the countryside with loaded weapons,’ said he. ‘Today it is a rabbit they will shoot. Tomorrow a gentleman, for the pennies in his purse or the meat on his table. We shall not permit anarchy, and there’s an end to it. Nor shall I allow you to meddle in the affairs of the estate.’

  Yet meddle I shall, for I cannot simply stand by and do nothing.

  … This morning I rode across the blighted fields to the cottages of our three nearest peasant neighbours, the Callaghans, McCormicks and Driscolls. To the Callaghans I gave a share of what little money I have been able to collect and keep hidden, ever fearing that Edgar might find it and discover that I have been secretly selling pieces of the jewellery he gave me. I then crossed the hill to the cottage of the McCormick family, to give them their share of the same in the hope that they might make use of it to provide for themselves. When I entered the cottage, stretched in one corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and the rags that covered them, were the three children huddled together, pale and shrivelled. They turned their sunken eyes upon me as I entered, but were too weak from hunger to rise. In another corner, prostrated on a bed of sodden straw, sat a poor creature, barely human in her squalor and evidently close to death. In a piteous croak, the old woman implored me to give her something to eat, but all I could give was the small sum of money I could spare.

  Unable to bear the sight any longer, I hurried onwards towards the Driscolls’ thatched hut beyond the wood, to find there a spectacle even more ghastly: the hut in ruins, reduced to burnt wreckage on the blackened ground. This I knew was the work of the house tumblers, unspeakable rogues employed by my own husband to force eviction upon their very countrymen. The family were gone, dead perhaps, buried in the pits now that the carpenters have no more wood for coffins, or else sent to the workhouse. I reined my horse around and wept for bitter shame as I returned to Glenfell House. I am weeping still.

  … Yesterday I was attending to my stable when I came upon little Moira O’Brien, one of the servant girls, sobbing forlornly in the hay barn. ‘What sorrows you, my dear?’ I asked her, giving her a handkerchief. ‘Pray dry your tears and confide in me.’ Barely able to speak at first for her grief, she then related a tale so extremely distressing that I have not been able to shake it from my mind. I did not sleep for a single minute last night and my hand trembles as I force myself to write these words:

  It is dreadful. Two of Moira’s cousins, Sean and Liam McGrath, and seven other young men of the county are sentenced to death for the crime of armed robbery after gathering up arms and attempting to raid a convoy of food and livestock bound for Wicklow Port. What manner of desperation could have prompted such a foolhardy course? Everyone has seen the long columns of redcoats marching side by side with the wagons, muskets aloft and gleaming in the sun. Yet in their unthinking folly, Sean and Liam and their friends attacked from the wooded high ground as the convoy passed along a narrow road outside Loughrea. It is said the clamour of gunfire and the great clouds of powder smoke could be discerned for miles. How could nine inexperienced farmers have expected to succeed against English soldiers, to say nothing of escaping alive with enough food to feed their hungry families?

  Three of their band were killed outright in the battle, if a battle it can be called. Michael Murphy received a musket ball in his right arm, shattering the bone so horribly that it was caused to be removed at the shoulder. The rest were quickly rounded up and are now in the gaol awaiting execution. Their poor heartbroken families have petitioned for clemency, begging for the sentence to be commuted. Even deportation to the penal colonies of New South Wales must be better than hanging.

  ‘I shall do no such thing,’ Edgar remonstrated with me when I pleaded, pleaded with him this morning to use his influence in the matter. ‘These men deserve no less than the full punishment of the law; they shall have it next Thursday at dawn. I will be there in person to watch them drop, and to the Devil with them.’

  Nice guy, Ben thought. He broke away from his reading for a moment to gaze across at the entrance of Tulsa City Hall. There had been no movement in or out of the place for the last several minutes. Mayor Finn McCrory was definitely working late today. This might be a long wait. That was okay with him.

  Ben turned his attention back to the journal and scanned through the pages of angry indignation Elizabeth had poured out over the hanging of the Irish raiding party’s six surviving members, including Michael, the amputee, who’d been dying of his infected wound anyway when they’d dragged him from the prison hospital to the gallows. Ben understood Elizabeth’s sense of outrage, and he understood Sean and Liam, too. If he’d been around at the time, he’d probably have joined the raiders himself. They might not have fared any better, but at least they’d have taken a few redcoats with them.

  The hanging had come and gone. There had been no surprises, no reprieves. It was sad. It was one of those tragic and unjust things nobody could have prevented.

  Ben flipped more pages and went on reading. Then he stopped. Blinked. Looked again. ‘What the …?’ he muttered aloud.

  Explosive revelations, Brennan had said. The deepest, darkest of secrets, ones that have lain dormant for over a hundred and fifty years.

  And suddenly Ben was thinking he’d found one of them.

  He read the journal entry through to the end, staring at Elizabeth Stamford’s faded handwriting so hard he could feel the blood rushing in his ears. Then, just to make sure he hadn’t dreamed it, he went back and read the same passage again:

  August 19th, 1847

  I have made a discovery that shakes me to the core. I am at a complete loss as to what to think, or what to do with such knowledge. Oh, Stephen, where are you when I am in such need of a friend to confide in? I am alone and can do nothing but record upon these pages the turmoil of my mind.

  I have often wondered what goes on behind the locked door of my husband’s laboratory in the east wing. He will let no servant enter, nor have I ever been permitted to see inside. He habitually spends many hours shut in that room, refusing to speak afterwards of his work, on the grounds that his botanical and chemical researches lie so far beyond the limits of his wife’s mental powers that to discuss them would be futile.

  Inquisitiveness has not seldom driven me to venture to the laboratory door when he is inside, keeping silent as a mouse lest he detect my footstep and wondering at the peculiar odours that emanate from behind it. I have sometimes tried to peek through the keyhole, but could see only the opposite bare wall.

  The only human being Edgar will allow into the laboratory is his Royal Society colleague Heneage Fitzwilliam, whose visits to Glenfell have long been a frequent … I shall not say ‘pleasure’, for although the respectable gentleman’s scientific eminence is without question, I have always found his manner somewhat odd. For days on end, many times repeated, have they closeted themselves inside the room, speaking in low tones as if conferring on matters of a highly secretive nature.

  Now I come to my discovery. I shall not dwell on how the key fell into my hands today, or how I discovered where my husband keeps it hidden inside the cigar box on his desk. Seizing the opportunity while he is away on some business (whose nature he did not choose to reveal to me), I retrieved the key and ran to the laboratory, all sense of guilt quite overcome by curiosity.

  The laboratory is a smaller room than I had expected it to be, yet containing such an amazing variety of instruments and other scientific objects whose names and purposes I cannot guess at, except to say they are connected with Edgar’s botanical inve
stigations. On a long table, covered with papers and books, I came across a heavy ledger filled with entries and notes in my husband’s careful hand. I could make little sense of them, but they appeared to comprise an extensive record of experimental results, dating from the year forty-five to the present. In another book I came upon many drawings of plants similarly dated. Upon a wooden rack sit rows of jars filled with preserved plant specimens, which have been labelled in order and range from those apparently plucked in a state of perfect health, to others bearing signs of disease. The more recent the date, the more withered and ill-looking the plant, as though marking a progression.

  Little do I know of botany – but to have lived here in Ireland for any length of time is to know and recognise these specimens as coming from the common potato plant that we see – used to see – growing everywhere around. What can Edgar and his colleague have been doing with them? I asked myself over and over, and could come to no answer until I discovered the box.

  It is a plain wooden item, the size of a lady’s sewing box, with a lid that hinges open to reveal the red velvet of its lining. Protected inside, I found a row of small glass tubes – I imagine one could call them phials – each stoppered with a tiny bung and containing some manner of thick brown fluid that resembles … well, I will not say what it resembles. I tentatively uncorked one of them and held its opening to my nose, only to recoil in disgust at its odour before quickly replacing the bung. The phial, like the rest, bears a label in Edgar’s hand with the name ‘Phytophthora infestans’.

  Following my discovery, my mind awhirl as to what it could all signify, I replaced the items as I had found them and fled the laboratory, locking the door. Hastening directly to Edgar’s study I returned the key to its hiding place, then perused his bookcase and brought down a Dictionary of Ancient Greek. My knowledge of such things being severely limited by the meagre education reserved for my sex, I spent some time looking up the words I had seen on the labelled phials of noxious fluid. From this investigation I quickly learned that the stem ‘phyto’ refers generally to the plant kingdom, and that ‘phthora’ is the old Greek term meaning destruction, corruption and ruin. ‘Infestans’ I did not need to be told must describe an infestation, an infection or blight.

  A blight, intended to destroy plants? Is this what my husband and his scientific colleague have been working on all this time? The foul substance; the potato plant samples in their varying states of corruption; the profuse notes of all their experiments; the conclusions are too unthinkable to contemplate.

  Unthinkable, and yet inescapable. I am not a person of any great scientific understanding but it is clear to me that the goal of Edgar’s researches has been the deliberate creation of as severe a withering and devastation of the potato crop as modern science could contrive. God help us. It is more than I can bear. Can my husband truly be responsible for the starvation that afflicts Ireland?

  Completely stunned, Ben closed the journal. The enormity of what he’d just read was so overwhelming that he struggled to take it in.

  After the initial shock, things that Gray Brennan had said back in Madeira began to fly into his mind. He remembered the historian telling him about the French scientist Edgar Stamford had studied with after leaving Cambridge, and then gone back to visit twice during the mid-1840s. What had been his name? Ben racked his memory for a few moments before he recalled it. Montagne. French for mountain.

  He took out his phone and went online to look the guy up. Montagne had served as a surgeon in the French army before turning to botany. He’d later become one of the first scientists to study and describe the highly infectious plant disease known as Phytophthora infestans.

  And Stamford had left the comforts of his estate to travel all the way to Paris, not once but twice, just to study with this guy. Working on what? The causes of a lethal blight that could wipe out a whole crop and plunge an entire country into starvation? If these nineteenth-century scientists could figure out how the disease worked, then was it possible they could invert the formula and figure out how to cause it, too?

  Gray Brennan’s voice echoed again in Ben’s mind. It wasn’t a famine. It was a starvation.

  But it was one thing to talk about simply taking advantage of a chance natural disaster. One thing to bemoan the cruel neglect the English rulers had inflicted on the starving Irish, taking the food from under their noses as they died in the ditches.

  This was different. It went further than Ben could have imagined.

  One of the worst acts of genocide you never heard of.

  Now Ben understood.

  This was it.

  This was the journal’s secret.

  He put the phone away and stared into space, still reeling from what he’d just read. Forget explosive. It was a hundred-megaton warhead.

  That was when a movement across the street caught his eye, jerking him from his thoughts. He sat up straight behind the wheel of the Jeep and watched out of the window as a scuffed white GMC van pulled into City Hall’s parking lot. The van’s driver looked to be in a hurry. It squealed sharply to a halt in front of the building, and two men piled out and began walking fast towards the main doors.

  Ben snatched up his binoculars to get a look at them before they disappeared inside. He felt his guts tighten with anger when he saw them magnified up close. Because these two guys were becoming familiar faces. Just like old friends he kept meeting up with. The combat kit from Madeira had been exchanged for a more casual look. The slightly taller one was in black, with a few more days’ stubble on his shaved head than he’d had back in Ireland. The skinny one with the ponytail had ‘PUT THE WHITE BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE’ emblazoned across his chest. Subtle. He reached into his jeans pocket as he walked, took out a wrapper and popped something in his mouth. Gum. Ben didn’t have to smell it to know it.

  ‘Hello, fellas,’ he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Portraits of the current Pope, JFK and Robert Kennedy smiled down upon Finn McCrory as he sat at his desk in the air-conditioned cool of the mayor’s office. Some of Finn’s Republican peers had been known to frown at the presence of such iconic Democrats hanging on his wall, but despite his party affiliation Finn remained staunchly loyal to the Kennedy name for what it meant to Irish-Americans.

  Finn was reclining in his huge green chair with his boots up on the desk and the door locked. It was only at this time of the afternoon, when Janet and the rest of the staff had gone for the day, that he could make certain phone calls to certain people without having to hide in the bathroom or go out to sit in his car. Right now he was speaking with Xavier, one of his business contacts in Nuevo Laredo. Xavier sounded like he was standing out in the desert or somewhere, because the wind was crackling his phone’s mike. Xavier had a thing about being listened in on, too – which, given the nature of their business, wasn’t surprising.

  No names were ever mentioned in their conversations. Specifics were referred to in the most oblique and vague way possible, so that even if anyone had been listening in, they wouldn’t have understood what the hell the men were talking about. The call had been going on for over twenty minutes, because they had a lot to discuss about the shipment due to head south next week. It was a big one and both ends wanted it to go perfectly. Which Finn was confident it would, now that Blaylock had been taken out of the picture.

  ‘Just a slight glitch in the system,’ he told Xavier.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s cleaned up now, huh?’ Xavier said.

  ‘Cleaner than clean. I don’t think we’ll have any more problems this end,’ Finn said, smiling. ‘Everything’s looking good.’

  Three rapid knocks at his office door interrupted what he was about to say next. He looked up from his call to see the door handle turning. Who the hell was that? One of the cleaners trying to get in, probably.

  ‘So I’ll be at the station as planned,’ Xavier was saying. ‘I expect the train will be on schedule.’

  ‘It’s always been a reliable ser
vice,’ Finn replied.

  ‘Tickets are getting kind of expensive lately.’

  ‘But the passengers arrive right on time and everybody’s happy, huh?’

  Thump, thump.

  Finn looked irritably over at the door. The handle was turning again. Hadn’t that damned fool of a cleaner figured out it was locked for a reason?

  ‘Later,’ he said to Xavier, and ended the call. The knocking was getting louder and more insistent. Finn strode to the door, unlocked it and wrenched it open, ready to yell at the stupid cleaner.

  But it wasn’t the cleaner.

  ‘What in the name of—?’ he demanded, staring at Ritter and Moon, who were standing in the doorway. In a panic, he peered past them in case anyone might have seen them. Luckily, the place was deserted. ‘Get in here,’ he grated, lowering his voice. ‘I thought I told you never, ever to show your damn faces here.’ He ushered them quickly into the office, shut the door after them and locked it again.

  ‘You’ve been on the line the last half hour solid, boss,’ Ritter said. ‘We needed to talk to you. Something’s up.’

  ‘What in hell could be so important that you had to come to my office? Have you lost your minds?’

  ‘Spicer’s been shot.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘The Hayes bitch shot him,’ Moon filled in, smacking gum and breathing mint.

  Finn was stupefied. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘He won’t be trippin’ the light fantastic any more, that’s for sure,’ Moon said.

  Finn shook his head. ‘Damn it, Ritter, you told me he was reliable.’

  ‘Yeah, well, a nine-mil Springfield auto’s pretty reliable too,’ Ritter said. ‘He took one in the leg. Blew a hole the size of Kansas above the knee, near enough took it off. She must’ve been using hollowpoints. Black Talons or something, I guess.’