“I don’t know that either. But I don’t want you to be afraid. Being fearful only makes things worse.”
Precious considered his words for a few moments, then stood up and brushed off the back of her flannel nightdress. “I understand,” she said gravely. “Thank you, Uncle Henry.” She held up her arms. “It’s past my bedtime. Will you carry me pickaback and tuck me in, please?”
As Henry carried Precious upstairs on his shoulders, he thought his heart would break. Her weight was too slight, too sweet. Too mortal.
Protect her, God. Whatever you do to the rest of us…protect this one.
HENRY bought a new notebook and began carrying it everywhere with him, jotting down events and his impressions. There was in him an urgency to record the world as it flew past him. He could not have explained the impulse, and he could not justify it by calling it reporting. He was an ad writer now.
But still…
JOHN Dillon and the Parliamentary Party were organizing their constituents to resist conscription. A National Defense Fund was opened and people throughout Ireland contributed wholeheartedly. From their annual meeting at Maynooth, the Catholic bishops issued a manifesto proclaiming. “We consider that conscription forced in this way upon Ireland is an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist by every means that are consonant with the law of God.” Eamon de Valera declared: “It is in direct violation of the rights of small nationalities to self-determination, which even the prime minister of England—now preparing to employ naked militarism and force his Act upon Ireland—himself officially announced as an essential condition for peace at the peace congress.”2
Backed into an indefensible corner, the British government took action.
ONE night in May when Ned returned late to number 16, instead of going straight upstairs to Síle he knocked softly at Henry’s door. “Are you awake?”
“I am now. Come in.”
Henry propped himself on one elbow and hunted for a match on the locker beside his bed. When the little oil lamp which he kept close by him flared into life, he took a good look at Ned’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve just come from an IRA briefing. Mick Collins told us that a couple of months ago he recruited a fellow called Eamonn Broy who works out of Dublin Castle and—”3
Henry sat bolt upright. “You mean Ned Broy? Isn’t he the top detective in G Division?”
“That’s right, Henry. The political division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. G-men are stationed at every harbor and railway station these days, spying on Republican movements.”
“Sweet merciful hour! How ever did Collins persuade a G-man to—”
“Never mind about that. Broy said the Castle is planning wholesale arrests of Sinn Féin party members. Mick has corroboration from his other Castle sources, and it’s definite.”
“His other Castle sources? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—how many does he have?”
“Listen to me, Henry!” Ned cried in exasperation. “We haven’t time to go into all that now!”
“But I’ve never heard anything about this.”
“Of course not—Mick’s a genius at secrecy. Will you pay attention! I’m trying to tell you we’re in danger of being arrested!”
Henry blinked. “I don’t belong to Sinn Féin, and the last time I asked, you said you didn’t either.”
Ned gave a harsh laugh. “Things change, don’t they? And it’s not just Sinn Féiners they’re after—they have one of their damned lists. They’re likely to drag in every nationalist they can lay their hands on.”
“When?”
“It could be as soon as tonight. Mick warned us not to even go home, but I wanted to get you all out of here before—”
The house reverberated to a thunderous knock on the front door. Ned swore fiercely.
“Go get your women,” said Henry in a quick, tight voice. “I’ll keep the police here while you take Síle and Precious down the back stairs and out through the scullery. Hurry around to number 33 and knock at the back door of the confectioner’s shop. Mrs. Gill will take you in.”
“I hate running from those bastards,” Ned said through gritted teeth.
“I know, lad, but you don’t want them arresting Síle, either.”
While Ned raced up to the attic, Henry pulled on the first pair of trousers he could find and put on his suitcoat over his nightshirt. Then he stepped out onto the landing. He could hear loud voices in the front hall. Louise Kearney was remonstrating with someone, but it did no good; within moments half a dozen men hurried up the stairs: four members of the DMP and two men in British army uniforms.
Henry stood waiting for them on the landing, deliberately blocking further upward progress. “What’s all the ree-raw about?” he asked with a composure he did not feel. “Working men are trying to sleep here, you know.”
“We have orders to search this house,” replied an army officer whose face looked vaguely familiar.
“Whose orders?”
“That’s none of your business, Mooney,” the man snapped, meeting his eyes.
Henry noticed and remembered eyes.
The British captain who had followed him from the GPO produced a piece of paper from his pocket. He glanced at it far too briefly to read anything, though he said, “Just as I thought—your name’s on here. You’re to come with us.”
“On what charge?”
“Conspiring with enemies of the Crown.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I assure you I am.” The captain rattled off by rote, “ ‘Certain subjects of His Majesty the King, domiciled in Ireland, have entered into treasonable communication with the German enemy. Therefore such persons are to be taken into custody immediately under the Defense of the Realm Act.’ That includes you, Mooney.”
“This is ridiculous,” Henry protested, shifting to the right. “I don’t even know any Germans.” He moved again, attempting with his body’s bulk to divert the man’s attention from proceeding farther up the stairs.
“Take this one and tie his hands to the stair rail, then search every room and…why do you keep dodging around like that, Mooney? What are you trying to…Edwards!” the captain bellowed abruptly to someone in the hall below. “Take a party around to the back! The servants’ stairs! Hurry!”
Running feet, shouts. Lodgers began emerging from their rooms in various states of undress, complaining vehemently. The sight of uniforms subdued them. The captain began questioning each in turn, checking names against his piece of paper.
Louise stomped up the stairs. “I’ll have you know I’m a respectable woman,” she announced with her hands on her hips, “and this is a respectable house! How dare you bleedin’ Tommies come in here and disturb my lodgers!”
“Ladies,” the captain reproved, “don’t say ‘bleedin.’ ”
“Then I guess I ain’t your kind of lady, you wretched streak of misery!”
The stairwell was cold, but Henry was sweating under his nightshirt. How long will it take them to get to Mrs. Gill’s? When he heard the front door open again, he peered over the banister. More policemen entered the hall below, shoving Ned and Síle ahead of them. Ned’s hands were fastened behind his back. Síle was carrying Precious.
“We’ve caught Halloran,” one of the policemen called.
The captain leaned over the stair rail. “Well done. Now let’s get this lot out of here and into some nice safe cells, eh?” Straightening, he flicked a disdainful gaze over Henry. “Not as nice as your rooms, of course,” he added sarcastically.
“You have a long memory.”
“Long enough,” the captain agreed. He untied Henry’s wrists, then hit him in the back with the flat of his hand to urge him down the stairs. When they reached the group waiting at the bottom, the captain wanted to know, “Who’s the woman?”
Ned said, “Just my wife, she doesn’t know anything.”
“Being a Shinner’s wife is crime enough. What do you papists call
that? Original sin?” The captain smirked; the two soldiers laughed. “Handcuff her and bring her along.”
When a policeman tried to take Precious out of Síle’s arms, she whirled away from him with an agility that caught him unprepared. In a single movement, she set the child down and produced a Luger pistol from under her skirt. “Don’t you dare lay your hands on my little girl!” Síle aimed the weapon unwaveringly at the nearest British uniform.
For a moment the tableau was frozen. Then Ned cried, “No, Sile, we’ve been warned—they want to make the IRA fire first!”
“Who told you that?” asked a startled policeman with a thick Dublin accent.
Before Ned could answer, the captain shouted, “Just get them out of here! Now!”
Chapter Fifteen
AS soon as they were out of the house, Henry was separated from Ned and Síle and hustled into one of several closed motorcars waiting at the curb. Precious was left behind with Louise Kearney.
Henry was taken to Store Street Police Station. There was no sign of Ned and Síle there, but Matt Nugent was leaning across the desk, chatting with the duty sergeant. When the white-haired reporter saw Henry enter between two policemen, he hurried over. “What in God’s name is happening tonight? Don’t tell me you’ve been arrested.”
“It’s a mistake,” Henry replied.
“It’s always a mistake. Here, you,” Nugent addressed one of the policemen, “what’ve you done this fellow for?”
The man nodded toward the British captain. “Ask him.”
The captain said truculently, “What business is it of yours?”
“I’m on an assignment,” Nugent told him, flashing his Irish Times press card, “and I happen to know Henry Mooney because he’s a colleague of mine.”
The captain glowered. “This doesn’t involve the press.” “It does if you’ve arrested this man. He’s no criminal; didn’t you know he’s a reporter at the Times? They love him down there,” Nugent elaborated with a glint in his eye. “Why in God’s name have you put handcuffs on him? I can just see the headline tomorrow. ‘Irish Times Reporter Manhandled.’ They’ll have heart attacks in the Castle.”
“Here now, there’ll be none of that,” the captain said, but he freed Henry’s hands. “Don’t you try anything,” he warned. “Stand right where you are while I go and book you. What’s your full name?”
“Henry Price Mooney.”
“Sixteen Lower Gardiner Street?”
“You know that already.”
“Occupation?”
“Journalist!” Matt Nugent almost shouted.
While the captain was busy at the desk Henry rubbed his wrists, then took his ubiquitous notebook from his pocket. Thank God I brought this coat. He scribbled a few words like any reporter taking notes. The policemen watched but made no move to stop him. Henry paused, chewed thoughtfully on his pencil, then tore the sheet out of the notebook and wadded it up as if he had changed his mind. When he was led away he let the little ball of paper drop from his fingers. No one paid any attention—except Matt Nugent.
Henry was taken to a small holding cell that already contained three men. Their faces were unfamiliar. Everything seemed unfamiliar: iron door slamming behind him, bleak sound echoing down the passageway; other iron doors clanging elsewhere in the building; dingy gray walls; pervasive smell of stale urine from a tin bucket in the corner; chill draft at ankle height sweeping across the floor.
The occupants of the cell stared silently at the newcomer, but one gave a sharp nod of his head to indicate someone might be listening outside. Henry looked around for a place to sit down. There were neither stools nor bunks. The other men were sitting on the bare cement floor with their backs against the wall.
Henry willed himself to stay calm, but it was surprising what latent feelings of paranoia were brought to the surface by being arrested. A small voice deep inside—a voice that sounded remarkably like his mother’s—suggested he was getting what he deserved for the sins of a lifetime.
“Your braces are hanging below your coat,” one of his cellmates remarked. “It’s a wonder your trousers don’t fall down.”
“I came away in rather a hurry.”
“Didn’t we all, boyo. Didn’t we all.”
Another silence ensued. One of the men began gnawing at his hangnails. Henry sat down on the floor and tried to make himself comfortable for what remained of the night. Eventually he stretched out on his side with his head pillowed on the crook of his arm.
THERE was in Henry’s mind a flat eerie echoing place as sinister as a murder scene and giving off the same chill. When his family still lived in Clare, the old folk had gathered to tell tales around the hearth on winter nights. The small boy who was Henry sat on a stool in the chimney corner, eagerly absorbing every detail: battles and massacres and streams clotted with gore; a desolate field where people lay dying of the famine; a blackened church in which people were burnt alive for their religion.
“Nothing’s too awful for that one,” his father had boasted to the neighbors. “He’s a little man, so he is.”
Although during the day Henry appeared undisturbed by tales of violence, the tortured landscape of the past became the backdrop of his childhood nightmares. He was simultaneously frightened and…fascinated. He became convinced he was dreaming of his own future.
When Henry became a reporter, one of his first assignments had been to cover the Limerick morgue. He had been shown the charred victims of a house fire, twisted into grotesque configurations. A baby drowned in a sack like unwanted kittens. The half-decomposed bodies of a couple shredded by the blast of a shotgun. “Hunting accident,” the morgue attendant remarked cynically. “Her husband thought they was deer.”
For hours Henry had gazed at human wreckage, trying to probe the secrets locked in dead minds. These unfortunates had entered the dark realm of Henry’s nightmares. They knew what he had yet to discover.
Then, all at once, he had had enough. He was disgusted by the darkness in himself; the fatal attraction of violence.
“I don’t want to cover the morgue anymore,” he told his editor. “Being a reporter’s a great job for someone who’s interested in people, and that’s me. But I’m interested in live people. You can assign somebody else to the dead ones.”
IN the holding cell at Store Street Station, the old fascinating terrors came flooding back again.
If there is a hell, he thought as he lay on the gritty cement floor with his head pillowed on one arm, for me it will be like this. A desolate place where any sort of outrage may happen, and myself at its center, victim or perpetrator, waiting.
Victim or perpetrator—which was worse?
Sometime during the night he fell into a troubled sleep.
HENRY awoke achingly cold and stiff. The gloom of the cell was permanent; he could not tell if it was night or day. A voice was shouting his name.
“Here!” he called groggily. A warder appeared and ushered him from the cell while the other three watched impassively. Henry was taken to a small room containing a plain table and two chairs and told to wait. After an interminable time the door opened. The man who entered was as powerfully built as a professional boxer, yet dressed like a company director in an immaculate suit. Although he stood a little under six feet, he gave the impression of being much bigger. Lustrous gray eyes were set wide apart in a broad, fresh-complexioned face. Full cheeks, a wide mouth, and wavy, dark brown hair that sprang thickly from his scalp. Henry guessed him to be in his late twenties.
The stranger sat down at the table and held out a pack of cigarettes. “D’ye want a fag?” he asked in a lilting Cork accent.
“I do indeed, I’m all out. Thank you.”
The stranger produced a box of matches and handed them to him with the cigarettes, saying, “Keep the pack. I borrowed them off your guard anyway.” He flashed a sudden, totally irresistible grin. Boyish, reckless, full of high good humor. Henry could not help grinning back.
When Henry h
ad lit a cigarette and drawn the smoke deep into his lungs, the other man remarked in a conversational voice, “I assume you’d like to get out of here?”
Henry exhaled in an explosive cough. “I would of course!”
“Then we should leave now. I’ve your signed release slip, but it would be a good idea to be out of the building before the new duty sergeant comes on.”
“Do I know you?”
That irresistible grin again. “You know me well enough to send a message to me.”
Michael Collins. Of course!
Collins sprang to his feet. “So now that you’ve had a smoke, are you ready to leave? Or had you rather stay for breakfast?”
“I think I’ll forgo any more police hospitality, thank you. Let ’em save my breakfast for the next fellow—it’ll prob’ly taste like old shoes anyway.”
They emerged from the police station into a dismal drizzle. “This country must be God’s urinal,” Collins remarked as he turned up his collar. He collected a bicycle leaning against the side of the building but did not ride it. Instead, he set off down Store Street wheeling the machine beside him, and gesturing to Henry to walk with him.
The drizzle became rain, soaking rain that penetrated Henry’s suitcoat and nightshirt. He felt damp to the soul.
“No one’s likely to come looking for you,” Collins said as they walked. “In spite of what you were told, your name wasn’t on the list to be picked up. If ye’ve a nervous disposition you might want to avoid your own place for a while, though. A pal of mine called Harry Boland who fought in Fairview during the Rising has a tailoring shop in Middle Abbey Street. Call in to him and tell him I sent you. He has a room at the back where you could stay and no one would be the wiser.”
“I know Boland—pleasant young fellow with a high forehead and a great talent for fitting suits and waistcoats. But I’d rather go home, if it’s all the same to you. Which reminds me—what about my friends? Did you understand my note?”
“I’ve deciphered far more cryptic notes than yours. ‘Halloran and wife arrested. Can you help them. H. Mooney. Store Street.’ A schoolboy would have understood. What surprises me is that you didn’t ask for help for yourself.”
1921 Page 11
