The Lost and the Blind

by Declan Burke

  She agreed. Kingsley sent her on ahead to Delphi Island in Donegal, via the Highlands, where Morag saw her mother for the first time in two years. It wasn’t needed or even asked for, but she was nevertheless pleased to receive her mother’s blessing on what she called her ‘arrangements’ with Kingsley. She stayed a week, then left for Delphi.

  By the time Kingsley arrived the following month, Morag was fully at home. She’d hired islanders for the dig, established a rapport with the local priest, Father Cahill, who initially resisted the idea of excavating beneath the beehive cells, and discovered that the Scots Gaelic she’d used in her youth had much in common with the Irish language many of the islanders still spoke. ‘Her accent was on the peaty side, but not so different from the Donegal brogue that a frightened young German sailor might notice.’ With little to do in the evenings, and with the consent of the priest and the island’s mayor, she began to teach English and history and geography, even some archaeology, although, as she insisted the lessons be conducted through the local dialect, the teaching was as much for her own sake as it was the children’s.

  Kingsley didn’t stay long. He stepped off the boat trailed by a younger man – younger than Morag by four years – and introduced him as Sebastian Devereaux, Cambridge graduate and archaeological neophyte. With war on the way, and non-essential budgets being slashed, Kingsley had much by way of string-pulling to attend to in London. Satisfied that Morag had the Delphi dig in hand, he left a week later, promising to return as soon as he could get away. She never saw him again.

  Sebastian, she said, was a difficult man to like. Tall, blond and awkward were her first impressions, awkward physically and socially. A polite Viking, she said. He announced himself a pacifist and a conscientious objector. Those islanders who didn’t translate the concepts as ‘coward’ and ‘traitor’ thought the idea of a pacifist Englishman hilarious, although they waited in vain for the punchline.

  Sebastian, in his self-deprecating way, accepted their judgement. If he was a coward, he was at least an honest one.

  He was infuriatingly clumsy on site, so much so that it took Morag a number of months to realize his awkwardness was a kind of spiky cloak he draped over his hesitancies, his uncertainties and what she called an unfocused gentleness. He’d spent eight years in a boarding school, which didn’t excuse but certainly explained.

  Even so, on such a small island, it was inevitable that they would gravitate towards one another. Morag had always been fonder of Peter Kingsley than she was in love with him, but there were some aspects of their arrangement she missed more acutely than others. She spent long and late hours in Sebastian’s company as they pored over their few finds, and plotted to persuade Father Cahill to allow them to expand the dig. It wasn’t inevitable that she would become pregnant, but she did.

  She told no one. Not even Sebastian. By then Germany had invaded Poland and informing her employers of her condition would have risked compromising the dig, or at the very least her position, on practical as well as moral grounds. But her concerns were less for herself than for Sebastian. Far better he be laughed at in neutral Ireland for his conscientious objecting than find himself, should this latest war follow the pattern of the last, shamed, jailed or conscripted.

  The secret couldn’t stay hidden forever. They wintered quietly, suspending the excavations for three months, and Morag told Sebastian on Christmas Eve. By early spring, the entire island knew. The news broke as a three-day wonder that might even have constituted a scandal if Sebastian had made a local girl pregnant, not least because he’d very likely have been drowned for his troubles, or at the very least keelhauled. But the islanders considered the pair half-mad to begin with, cooing over bits of stone and slivers of what might have been bone, and Father Cahill was secretly pleased, now that their long-suspected immorality – and by contrast, the islanders’ virtue – had been confirmed for all to see. ‘Actually,’ Carol said, ‘he proved very useful. A pragmatic man, when you got past all the theory and down to the nitty-gritty. Gave the midwife his blessing and so forth.’

  Their plan was to wait until the baby was born and then apply for political asylum. ‘It was actually Father Cahill’s idea. He offered to write a letter, based on how important Morag was to the island as a teacher. A long shot, of course, but the idea was to string out the process for as long as they could and hope the war would be over before the process was.’

  ‘Except then Gerard Smyth washes up on the island and Rheingold gets arrested in Derry.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The ghost of a smile. ‘Not the first time they were overtaken by circumstance.’

  ‘He guessed, you know,’ I said.

  ‘He guessed?’

  ‘Gerard Smyth. At the time. He knew straight away that Sebastian was a British agent. The Morrigan the Germans were looking for when they came ashore.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It was Smyth who identified him. To Richter, the German leading the—’

  She waved it aside. ‘You don’t need to explain Richter to me, Tom.’

  She tapped the pipe against the bench’s leg and began scraping dead dottle from the bowl with a matchstick. I sat back and basked in the sunshine, listening to the twee-whips of the birds behind us in the trees. The lough glittering blue, hypnotic in its ceaseless glimmering.

  ‘I do understand,’ I said. She was tamping tobacco into the bowl with the ball of her thumb.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Emily,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What a man might do,’ I said, ‘to protect his own child.’

  ‘Or a woman.’

  ‘Or a woman, of course.’

  ‘You would have done the same?’ she said.

  ‘I’d like to think that I would.’

  The match scratched and burst into flame and was nipped out by the breeze. She tried again, cupping her hands, but another flared and died. I sat forward and cupped my own hands to form a windbreak. She gripped my wrist.

  ‘You would like to think?’ she said.

  ‘What I mean,’ I said, ‘is that I believed all along Sebastian shot that old man and allowed those children to burn to death for the sake of whatever was on the submarine. Because he was a spy.’

  She puffed a bluey cloud from the pipe and released my wrist. ‘But if he was protecting his pregnant lover …’

  ‘It’s different.’

  ‘And all those other lives are worth that of his unborn child?’

  ‘All I’m saying is, in his shoes I’d have done the same.’

  ‘And what if he simply didn’t know?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The information Richter needed. What if those children died not because Sebastian wouldn’t tell, but because he couldn’t?’

  Sebastian suffered irrevocable damage that night. He never spoke about it to Carol. What she knew had been handed down by her mother.

  ‘His mind was never the same. He was crippled, shell-shocked, by survivor’s guilt. Sometimes, just sitting at the dinner table, he would begin to shake, and then weep for hours.’

  Richter had emptied his Luger of all but one round, then whispered in Sebastian’s ear, telling him that he, Sebastian, would now begin to execute the villagers one by one until he gave up the information. If Sebastian refused, Richter would kill them all in one fell swoop.

  ‘So the old man died,’ I said, ‘for the sake of all the others.’

  ‘He was shot dead,’ Carol said, ‘because my father didn’t know.’

  Sweet, awkward Sebastian was no more a British agent than he was a polite Viking. A cut-out, she said. A sacrificial lamb.

  ‘Protecting the identity of the real spy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you telling me,’ I said, ‘that the spy, Morrigan, was your mother?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  It was a lot to take in. My mind went scrambling for connections, riffling back through Gerard Smyth’s account.

&nb
sp; ‘Smyth mentions her trying to help him,’ I said. ‘The pregnant teacher. He thought she was a local.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘He remembered her because she tried to speak to him in German.’

  ‘He was alone and frightened and far from home. I would imagine she sympathized with his plight.’

  Not quite. What was it he’d written? Blue eyes devoid of compassion. And no wonder.

  She’d been recruited on Crete by Peter Kingsley, Carol said. Posted to Donegal to dig and sift and report back on the fishermen’s gossip.

  Last seen by Gerard Smyth disappearing into the church, heavily pregnant with her unborn daughter, and locking the doors behind her.

  ‘I don’t qualify, exactly, as an eye witness,’ Carol said in that dry tone. ‘But you might well agree that my account is the more compelling.’

  Mined from ancient times, the island was a honeycomb of tunnels and crosscuts and shafts and passages. Morag had taught the children history and geography and they’d taught her a little in return.

  They’d smashed up the wooden pews and torn down the few hangings. Once the children were safely in the tunnel behind the altar, Morag set the pile alight.

  ‘They made it out?’

  ‘We made it out, Tom.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Gerard Smyth saw the church burn, heard the children screaming.

  Heard them his whole life.

  ‘You can’t imagine the scenes,’ Carol said, ‘when my mother reappeared with her sooty brood.’

  She’d waited a couple of hours, to make sure the Germans weren’t regrouping. Long enough that grief and despair had taken hold. The children exhausted and filthy, pale behind their smoke-blackened masks. The first women to see them thought they were ghosts.

  I tried to picture it. Emily dead, then suddenly wandering into the village square, tottering with tiredness but alive again.

  It didn’t work. My mind wouldn’t let me see Emily dead.

  ‘There was no massacre,’ I said.

  ‘You seem disappointed.’

  ‘Just trying to adjust. It’s a lot to take in.’

  ‘You’re wondering,’ she said, ‘why the story took hold. Maybe you’re even trying to decide whether it would be better, for the book, that the atrocity never happened.’

  She was right on both counts.

  ‘I can help you with the first,’ she said. ‘As for the second, that is between you and your conscience.’

  The children were quickly shepherded away from the square. Shielded from the sight of awkwardly hunched corpses and blood congealing black on the cobbles.

  The old man Sebastian had shot was called Rory McGinty. A demon fiddler and a good man for a wild story late at night in the pub, he kept goats at the back of the mountain. He’d never married, although whether that was down to the stink of goat, Carol couldn’t say.

  ‘No one blamed Sebastian, exactly. They knew Richter had forced him to shoot. But Rory was dead and Rory was one of their own.’

  Morag had tried to speak with Sebastian and turn him away from the dead man. It was as if she wasn’t there. He simply stared, his right hand flexing.

  ‘Something slipped that night,’ Carol said. She tapped her temple. ‘A cog or a gear. Left his clockwork jumpy, erratic. He’d be fine for weeks on end and then,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘gone, just gone.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘He never forgave himself. My mother tried to persuade him that if he hadn’t pulled that trigger then the consequences would have been far worse. And even before they’d buried Rory, the islanders understood that Sebastian had bought my mother time, provided the distraction that allowed her to get the children into the church.’ She puffed on the pipe, which had long gone out. ‘It never took. With my father, I mean.’

  ‘He was a hero, then.’

  ‘An honest coward.’

  Gerard Smyth saw the church burn, heard the children scream. He wasn’t the only one.

  ‘It was decided it would be best to allow the story to be believed. Richter was dead. His men might consider he should be avenged.’

  The Germans hadn’t invented the idea but they were particularly ruthless when it came to reprisals.

  ‘This was the fear,’ Carol agreed. The burning of Cork by the Black and Tans was still fresh in the memory, although a few of the islanders mentioned Cromwell too.

  One of the German raiding party still lay unconscious in the square. Those who wanted to toss him into the harbour were persuaded otherwise. When he woke the following day, and Morag tried to question him in her rudimentary German, he only stared at her. Concussion, she believed at first, and then she realized he simply didn’t understand.

  ‘He was no more than a boy,’ Carol said. ‘Fifteen years old, if that.’

  When his own gun was cocked and pointed at his face, he began to cry.

  He hadn’t understood Morag’s German because he wasn’t German. He came from Castlemartin, a small town not far from Magherafelt across the border in Derry.

  It was his first time out, he told them.

  A family tradition. His uncle the area’s IRA O/C.

  He knew very little about Richter, he told them, a Belfast man he’d met for the first time only three days before. What he did know was Richter wasn’t long returned from Berlin, where he’d been for two years.

  The submarine, he said, was carrying a consignment of gold. It was intended to fund an IRA campaign aimed at destabilizing industrial targets, the most important of which was the Belfast shipyards. The unit responsible would operate across the border, out of the South. The idea was to force Britain to stretch its already meagre resources to keep open the crucial North Atlantic shipping lanes. Ideally, and ultimately, the hope was that a successful campaign would provoke Britain into invading neutral Ireland to protect its back, an act that would not play well in Washington.

  When Richter’s contact, Klaus Rheingold, was blown in Derry, Richter was left twisting. He knew the submarine was in Lough Swilly, and that the rendezvous was planned for Delphi Island. What he didn’t know – the finer details were subject to weather conditions and tides – was the exact time and place.

  He’d been ready to abandon the mission when word reached him that a German sailor had washed up on Delphi, and that the sailor had been interrogated by an Englishman. An archaeologist who went about declaring himself a conscientious objector. A man so shameless in his cowardice that when some of the locals mockingly dubbed him ‘Morrigan’ for the goddess of war, he pronounced himself delighted, and thereafter introduced himself to visitors and strangers as such.

  Richter, desperate, made a new plan.

  ‘The rest you know,’ she said.

  But there was a lot I didn’t know.

  ‘According to Smyth,’ I said, ‘it was the man guarding him who shot Richter.’

  ‘So it would seem. At the time they only knew Richter was shot in the back. It could only have been one of his own men.’

  ‘A cowardly act.’

  ‘A noble kind of coward.’

  ‘It wasn’t one of his men, though, was it? It was the boy from across the border. Smyth knocked him unconscious with his own gun.’ His masked shadow, Smyth called him.

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘You know who he was, Tom.’

  It had to be Shay Govern.

  When he had told the villagers all he knew – the blow that knocked him unconscious played havoc with his mind; the last he remembered was the Englishman shooting the old man on his knees – they took him out and showed him the smouldering ruins of the church. He thought they would kill him but they sailed him across to the mainland and cut him loose, to report back to his comrades about the dead children, the blood on their hands.

  Months later they heard he had stowed away on a merchant ship bound for New York.

  Morag began writing the book that became Rendezvous at Thira as a therapeuti
c exercise. ‘A catharsis,’ Carol said, ‘as much for her as for my father.’

  But Sebastian wanted nothing to do with it. The very thought of dredging up that night was horrifying. To put it down on paper, record it for posterity, was an obscenity too far. When she insisted that it would stand as a record of heroism he threatened to throw himself from the cliff. She let it go, put it away.

  Years later she took it up again. She changed the names, the setting and the ending. Now it was set in the Greek islands, and the children burned to death in the church. It ended with a wounded young German soldier – no more than a boy, really – being set free by the islanders and coming to terms with his evil deeds from the sanctuary of America, where he’d fled once the war was over.

  She typed up a manuscript and posted it to Shay Govern in Boston, by then a multi-millionaire already legendary for his reputation for employing young emigrants from Derry, Donegal and Tyrone. In her covering letter she said that she was a Donegal-based writer – she used her mother’s maiden name, but announced her intention of employing ‘Sebastian Devereaux’ as a pseudonym – who was having trouble getting her story published in Ireland, possibly because it climaxed with the murder of children in a burning church. If he knew of any American publishers who might be interested in her story, she would be very grateful indeed.

  ‘Blackmail,’ I said.

  ‘The island was dying, Tom. The young were leaving in their droves. My mother did what was needed to keep the place alive.’

  It was discreetly done. Shay Govern endowed a foundation with a remit to foster Irish-American cultural links, with a boutique publishing house at its heart. The young Irish author Sebastian Devereaux was one of the first recipients of a surprisingly handsome advance. It and all subsequent monies earned over the next two decades, royalties included, were paid to the newly formed artists’ cooperative established by Morag Devereaux on Delphi Island.

  It was entirely incongruous, in that sun-dappled meadow high above the sparkling blue sea, to think now of the Moloch and children sacrificed to the flames.