by W. C. Ryan
Which isn’t to say that he plans on getting caught doing it. He lifts the chair that sits in front of the davenport and carries it to the door, wedging it under the handle. He can’t hear anyone nearby but, if someone should come to visit him, the chair should give him a moment or two’s grace.
He walks back over to the desk and tries the top drawer. It’s locked, as are all the others, and he leans down to examine them. Each drawer has its own small round keyhole and, he suspects, they will have the same relatively simple mechanism, served by a single key. He has spent a few afternoons waiting around in the insurance company offices with Vincent Bourke, who has shown him how to pick a lock. If Harkin can find a hairpin or something similar, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to open them. He listens to the house. There is some new movement and noise from downstairs but the upper part remains quiet.
His eye is drawn to the dressing table. He walks over to it quickly and begins his search for a hairpin. The table’s drawers are well organised, with make-up in one drawer, handkerchiefs in another, and so on. They smell of powder, patchouli and, he realises in a hot flush of memory, Maud’s cologne. In the fourth drawer he opens, he finds hairbrushes and, as he had hoped, a small glass jar of hairpins. It is not, however, the presence of the hairpins that makes him smile but rather the brass key attached to a thin gold chain, exactly the kind of chain a young woman like Maud might wear around her neck and more or less the size of key that would fit the davenport’s locks. A moment later Harkin is trying it in the top drawer of the desk. There is a slight resistance and then the key turns and the drawer is open.
He pauses to listen once again. Downstairs in the long hall someone is walking across the marble floor, the sound echoing up through the house. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly and pulls the drawer towards him. It contains pens and pencils, two ink bottles and a pad of blotting paper. He takes everything out carefully, checking each item, before replacing them as he found them and closing the drawer gently. He listens. Nothing at all this time, except for the sound of his own shortened breathing. He rebukes himself for his nervousness. If he’s caught there will be embarrassment, but he’s up to his neck in that already after his performance at the funeral. A little more won’t make any difference.
Harkin opens the next drawer. It contains correspondence, although mostly of a commercial nature. There are letters from a dressmaker in Dublin, informing Maud of new arrivals and a dress that has been made for her, and a reminder about an unpaid bill from a Bond Street milliner. There is some legal correspondence about a will in which she was named as a minor beneficiary, and a description of a horse that a farrier in the town wanted to sell to her. He flicks through each of them, page by page, listening as he does so for any sound on the stairs or landing that might announce an imminent arrival. Then, satisfied there is nothing of significance in the contents, he again replaces them exactly as he found them. It’s unlikely anyone other than Maud has ever seen the inside of the drawer, and Maud is past caring, but it feels the right thing to do – to examine, to remember, but not to disturb.
The third drawer is more promising. It is stuffed full of letters from friends and relatives, dating back several years. There are invitations to dances and hunt balls, newsy updates from a godmother in England and a cousin in India. They decline in number sharply after 1916. Harkin wonders if Maud was no longer welcome at the house parties and afternoon teas after her involvement in the Rising. It seems likely. At the bottom of the drawer, wrapped in a dark green ribbon, he finds a small stack of letters with a handwriting that he recognises as his own. Some are dated from before the war, and some from the training camp in the Curragh and then more from France. He turns over the pages, hearing his own voice in his head, speaking of events he barely remembers. He knows they won’t be the whole truth, because you never told people at home the truth of the trenches, but they bring back the smell and the feel of the war. One letter is marked in places, brown blotches that he suspects must be mud, or maybe blood. Another must have become damp at some stage, the paper bleached by water and the ink blurred where it ran. He looks at the dates – 1915, 1916. There are even some letters from after the Rising, which he reads more carefully. Although officers’ letters weren’t censored in the way that those of the other ranks were, his words are carefully chosen. He would have known, even then, that a policeman or intelligence officer would want to know who was writing to a known rebel from the front, particularly from an Irish regiment. Reading between the lines, it is clear that he was not against the Rising – far from it – although it seems he considered it badly executed. His opinion hasn’t changed since then. It was, however, a necessary step and a lesson about the futility of directly engaging the greatest military power in the world that was well learned.
The last letter is in response to her calling off the engagement. There are no harsh words – only a hope that when the war is over and their situations are different, they will find some means of rekindling the love he believed that they had shared. A tear takes him by surprise when it runs the length of his nose and lands just beside his signature.
When he finishes reading, he ties the letters back up into the stack in which he found them and weighs them in his hand. He thinks, for a moment, about keeping them. They’re no use to Maud now, and of no interest to anyone but him. He could put them in his pocket and no one would ever know. But what would he do with them? Take them out and think about what might have been? He puts them back where he found them, as before. He’s wallowed in the past for long enough. From this point on, he’ll look to the future.
The last drawer is a disappointment – a collection of diaries from Maud’s schooldays. He checks each one in case there might be a more recent entry, but there is nothing. Then he hears footsteps climbing the staircase, along with an accompanying scratchy cavalcade of canine paws, so he closes the drawer, locks it, and quickly crosses the room to take the chair from underneath the door handle and return it to its usual place. The footsteps are approaching along the galleried landing, so he returns to sit on the bed, placing the key underneath the pillow as an afterthought. The steps stop outside his door.
There is a pause and then a soft knock.
‘Come in.’ Harkin can hear the croak in his voice. He reaches for the now empty glass, filling it with water.
Charlie Prendeville enters accompanied by her hounds, who immediately explore every corner of the room, before returning to the door and curling up at her command to be still and not bother them. Once again he is struck by her resemblance to Maud.
‘You’re awake, Mr Harkin. Dr Hegarty said you might be, but we’ve become quite accustomed to you slumbering away. I hope you feel better?’
Her smile seems genuine and, given the circumstances, he is grateful.
‘I feel much better,’ he says. ‘Although I can only apologise. Not the kind of thing I would have ever wanted to do – fainting at your sister’s funeral.’
Her smile doesn’t falter; in fact he thinks his statement somehow amuses her.
‘You have nothing to apologise for. Dr Hegarty tells us you’re likely still suffering from concussion. As a result, I believe Father is quite reconciled to you, given that your passing out was a result of you doing your bit for the Empire and the Union. As for Maud, I don’t think she would have minded a former beau collapsing at her funeral. In fact, I think she would have been delighted.’
He smiles, wondering about that other beau, the father of Maud’s unborn child, and whether he was at the graveside, too, and what he felt when Maud was put in the ground.
‘I’m sure I must have outstayed my welcome, no matter what you say. I should make arrangements to depart.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t. Dr Hegarty said you are not fit to travel just yet. He wanted to send you over to his daughter’s establishment, but we felt that would place us in a shabby light. You are to stay until you are able to leave.’
Harkin can’t help his gaze straying to
the davenport.
‘I might stay for a day or two,’ he says, although he can’t disguise his discomfort. ‘There are a few people I still need to talk to.’
She considers this for a moment.
‘Am I one of them?’ She sets her chin at a determined angle. ‘I wouldn’t worry about offending me.’
Harkin finds it momentarily difficult to gather his thoughts. He wants to ask her about Maud’s lover, but he doesn’t know where to begin with that.
‘It might help,’ he says, hesitantly, ‘if you could you tell me what you remember from that night. The sequence of events.’
Charlie walks slowly to the chest of drawers and picks up the photograph of Maud in her Volunteer uniform.
‘I was in my bedroom when I heard the gunfire. I hadn’t undressed. I was reading. I often read late at night. It’s the quietest time. It was two minutes before midnight. I have a bedside clock and it is accurate to the station clock. The shooting was very intense for about ten seconds and I knew it came from the direction of the gate lodge. We knew Harry had hoped to be dropped back that evening, and as there is no traffic to speak of along the road at that time of night, I feared the worst for him.’
‘You had no idea Maud was with him? Or that Teevan was driving.’
She looks down again at the photograph and he can see that her eyes are wet.
‘No. No idea. She was meant to be staying with Uncle John. Harry had wanted to come back because he was leaving in the morning. I suppose it is possible that he knew Abercrombie would be there but Maud didn’t, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘I came out and found my father in his dressing gown on the landing, then we joined Murphy and Bridget downstairs in the hall. She’d been waiting up for Harry.’
‘And Billy?’
She glances towards the bedroom door, as though concerned that Billy might walk through it.
‘Billy was outside. He likes to go out walking at night. It’s been that way since he came back from France. He came in a few minutes after the shooting started. Perhaps five.’
There’s something she’s holding back – he’s sure of it. A slight hesitancy, as though she might be checking over her response before she speaks.
‘He goes out every night?’
She nods, more confident now.
‘In all weathers. I sometimes see him making his way across the home meadow in the moonlight and I know he goes down to the stables on occasion. He’s not the same as he was before the war. No one who came back is.’
She gazes at him calmly and it’s clear she thinks that he has also changed and Harkin can’t but agree. He also knows that there have been more than a few nights when he, too, has walked the streets of Dublin, preferring to take his chances with the curfew than lie in a sleepless bed. He returns to the matter in hand.
‘And when did Sean Driscoll arrive?’
‘A little after Billy.’
Harkin tries to remember the timing. Billy said he had been just walking up to the house when the final shot was fired, with Driscoll not far behind him. Driscoll said that he was also just walking in when the final shot was fired. There’s a question that has to be asked.
‘They weren’t together?’
She sends him an enquiring glance but when she answers her voice is flat.
‘No. Sean was a little after Billy.’
He rubs at his morning stubble. ‘How long after Billy, would you say?’
‘I should think two minutes.’
Another discrepancy. But he knows how hard it is to keep track of time in such a situation. An hour can seem like a few moments, while the briefest wait can seem to stretch forever.
‘There was a separate shot, a while after the main ambush. Did you hear it?’
Charlie gives a fairly good impression of someone searching her memory, but Harkin has the sense that she’s gone over the events of the evening more than once, and that there is something about it that she doesn’t quite like.
‘Yes.’
‘And when was that in relation to Sean and Billy’s arrival?’
She hesitates once again.
‘Neither Sean nor Billy had arrived when we heard it. Father was anxious – he was worried Billy might have been caught up in the shooting. If he’d been down by the strand, for example, the Volunteers might have picked him up. Maud’s brother or not, he’s a former British officer, and if he blundered into their ambush, they would certainly have taken him prisoner – the same as they did with Patrick Walsh the gatekeeper – or worse . . .’ She pauses, and he can see her face tightening with remembered emotion. ‘When we heard the gunshot, we thought they might have shot Billy. They have shot others for less.’
The Prendevilles were right to be worried. Given the brutality of British reprisals against the families of Volunteers, his death would have been more than likely if Billy could have identified anyone in the column.
‘What did you do?’
‘What could we do? Father called the station in the town and told them about the ambush and they promised to send a patrol, but we knew it would take time for them to come. The rebels knew which road they’d come along, so the police had to be careful in case they were ambushed. It took an hour in the end, and we thought that was pretty good.’
It says something about the state of the country, he thinks, that polite young women are well versed in guerrilla tactics.
‘But Billy was all right.’ Harkin feels relief when he says it, as though he hadn’t known this until he spoke the words aloud. ‘How long after the single shot until Billy arrived, would you say?’
Charlie shrugs as if the timing is of no importance to her, but he doesn’t believe that. Her hands are clasped together and her knuckles are white. Her nervousness makes him wonder why she chose to talk to him in the first place.
‘Two or three minutes, I should think, but it’s hard to be certain. And when Billy did come in, we weren’t entirely sure it was him, he was so pale. It was only that his coat and boots were wet and he was so solid that we knew he wasn’t a ghost. And then he told us what he’d seen.’
‘The White Lady?’ Harkin says, with an attempt at a laugh. His attempt sounds so false that he feels his cheeks warm with embarrassment. She looks at him sharply in response, but then her expression softens.
‘I know you won’t mock,’ she begins. ‘Because you’re kind. But my family has been here a very long time and not all of us pass on when they are supposed to. The White Lady, we think, is one of them. She’s always seen before a Prendeville dies. Billy saw her earlier that night.’
She looks at him, as though expecting some kind of reaction, which he does his best not to give. She shrugs.
‘I don’t expect you to believe me.’
She isn’t joking – far from it. He opens his mouth to ask her a question, but he can’t find the words.
Who, after all, is he to be sceptical, after having seen Maud Prendeville sitting in the armchair by the window only the night before?
There must be something in his expression that amuses Charlie, because she smiles.
‘You get used to them.’
‘You see them?’
‘Not so often these days, but when I was younger I did. There was one who sometimes came into my bedroom. I would wake up and find an elderly woman looking down at me. She wasn’t frightening – more reassuring, if anything. Billy used to say she was our great-grandmother, looking for the child she lost to cholera, but he was just teasing. There is another in the kitchen, a cook, we think, who used to give Mrs Driscoll all sorts of trouble, moving things about. But once Mrs Driscoll left them where the old cook preferred them, things became much quieter.’
Harkin sees that she is regarding him expectantly, as though he might be about to say something. He finds his mouth opening.
‘I think I saw Maud last night,’ he says abruptly. ‘She was sitting over by the window.’
Char
lie walks over and places her hands on the back of the chair. She seems unsurprised.
‘She did like to sit here,’ she says, leaning forwards, as though looking for traces of her sister’s presence. ‘Do you think she wanted something?’
‘From me?’
‘You’re the one she came to see.’
Harkin thinks back to the Ha’penny Bridge. It was a few minutes after the bells of Christ Church rang for midnight. If Charlie is right about the ambush being at two minutes before, then whatever guided him across the bridge did so at the very moment that Maud died. Perhaps they were saving him for a purpose. He wants to laugh at the idea and finds he can’t. Instead he shakes his head in the negative.
‘I don’t think so.’ He allows a brief silence to develop. ‘Do you think she might have had a lover? Or someone who wanted to be her lover?’
He can see Charlie’s shoulders stiffen.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I’m looking for a reason why someone might have killed her.’
Charlie’s head drops a little lower. He thinks she might be crying.
‘She was different, recently. She was almost her old self. She would go on little trips. She even went to Paris with a friend from school and when she came back, we would talk about moving there, the two of us. How many Frenchmen would fall in love with us. She said she had come into some money – she wouldn’t tell me how . . .’ There is a sob in her voice and she breaks off.
Harkin wonders about the money; the solicitor’s letter had concerned a bequest for a few hundred pounds, no more. What is more interesting is her plan to leave. Might that have been what drove her lover to despair?
