Three of their own brigade’s men had been captured coming out of a pub two weeks before and taken to Dublin Castle for interrogation, which was a polite word for what was done within those thick stone walls. An informant inside the Castle had leaked word that the men were to be moved and thus they had been waiting every day for a week for the convoy escorting their boys to come by.
There was a volley of sneezes that echoed even over the howl of the wind. Terry was startled out of his thoughts. He looked around, panicked lest the convoy was in sight and they had just betrayed their position with the noise. But as far as the eye could see, there was only falling white and rock strewn hills.
“I’m killin’ the next one of ye that sneezes,” Brendan said, and sounded as though he meant it. Terry looked over at him, wiping the sleet from where it was stuck fast to his lashes. Brendan’s head of dark curls was hidden beneath a poor boy cap, which was itself hidden beneath a layer of snow. He was sitting in the shelter of a large boulder, his rifle standing barrel down beside his left leg, with a view to the road below. Terry fished a sodden handkerchief from his sodden pocket and tried to muffle a sneeze into it. Brendan shot him a dark look from under the brim of his snowy cap and then grinned at him, one of those flashes of humor in the midst of misery that made his men love and follow him without question. Terry knew that the man could ask him to dance through the gates of hell with him, and Terry would merely ask if he should bring a change of clothes, in case they had to stay the night.
Married just the one year and awaiting the birth of his first child, none could blame Brendan if he gave up on the rebel life, crawling hillsides in the snow and rain, waiting on an enemy that hadn’t the good grace to show up when he was meant to. A body would never know if Brendan was frustrated or exhausted or just entirely fed up and done with the bloody mission they were on. A born leader was Brendan Riordan, but the mantle of such responsibility did not always sit easily on his young shoulders. He was often silent during brigade meetings, but no one ever mistook his silence for a lack of care. He would weigh both sides of an argument and then let the men know what he thought. Invariably, they obeyed him, as though it were pure instinct to do so, though most times the man spoke sense and he understood the tactics, such as they were, of guerilla warfare like no one Terry had ever known other than Mick Collins. Brendan came from a long line of Republicans, men who had fought all their lives for something better, for a dream of the future, a future that they had likely known they would not live to see. Terry had often wondered if such things were passed in the blood, or if it was merely a matter of what you were taught as you grew to be an adult.
He changed his rifle from one hand to the other and blew on the free hand, though it only made his mitten clammy and didn’t do a great deal to warm his fingers. Terry wondered how many more days they were going to spend lying on this freezing fecking hillside before the lot of them died of pneumonia. He reached out and shook the boy next to him. He was asleep, youth knowing no impediment to an ill-timed nap. The laddie would be taking something far more permanent than a nap though, if he didn’t wake soon.
Half the men were country lads, and needed to return to their farms. The boys from the city weren’t used to this sort of exposure and most were sick. Brendan, with the Riordan constitution in his favor, was disgustingly healthy and cheerful.
“Is it to be forty days on the mountainside then?” Terry asked, as Brendan slid down beside him, dark eyes somber, and apparently impervious to the weather, for there wasn’t so much as a shiver in the man.
“We’ve got a job to do, but aye, if they don’t show today, we’ll have to pack it in. We’ll all be comin’ down with the gallopin’ consumption with this weather. I’ll tell the lads this afternoon, an’ they can head home for a week.”
“What will you do?” Terry asked, thinking longingly of tea and toast browned over a warm fire, and a good book in hand, with only the ticking of the clock for company.
“Go home, sleep in a warm bed with my wife, an’ catch up on all the chores an’ repairs that have needed my hands these past two weeks,” Brendan said, wiping one of those hands across his eyes, to clear the sleet away. “Jaysus, but this weather is brutal.”
“Have ye had word from the North?” Terry asked, stifling another sneeze, though he felt as if he might rupture something with the effort.
“Aye, I have, but none of it is good,” Brendan said. Indeed it wasn’t, Terry thought, as Brendan filled him in, but then it never was. Terrified of being absorbed into a green and worse yet, Catholic Ireland, Orangemen had been lashing out at their neighbors over these last several months and kept on lashing out. Catholic men were hounded out of their jobs, their homes, their city and their country. Houses were burned, men, women and children beaten and shot in the streets. Though originally from Connemara, the North was home to Brendan, and Terry knew the events in Belfast weighed heavily on the man. He had a stake there that the men surrounding them did not.
After a thoroughly depressing rundown of the situation, Brendan went back to his post, where the best view of the road was to be had. He stopped along the way for a word here and there, patting men on their shoulders, asking them questions, and making, Terry knew, each one feel important and necessary. Brendan had a way of spreading just a wee bit of magic in his wake that gave heart and courage to the men around him.
Cass Neely sat down beside Terry then, cheeks ruddy with the cold and blue eyes bright as a candle wick. He had a jaunty blue scarf tied round his throat that matched the color of his eyes, no doubt by design, Terry thought with no small cynicism. Cass was by way of being a bit of a dandy.
“It’s feckin’ perishin’out here. I’m like to have permanent chilblains with another day or two of this.” It was said with Cass’ normal exuberance, for like Brendan, he was blessed with rude good health and an ebullient nature that life rarely squelched, regardless of what it encountered. Terry sometimes felt like the subdued angle in the equation of the three of them. They had been fast friends since childhood, running the fields and ditches together, having adventures, building forts, and taking the cows to pasture in the summer for long twilit weeks on a mountaintop. Those summers would always be, regardless of how long or well he lived, some of the finest times of his life. Not blessed with brothers himself, Terry considered Brendan and Cass as the apology God had given him in recompense for the five older sisters he had in his blood family. He and Cass had been united in their worship of the older Brendan, six months their senior and six inches taller than either of them.
As if Cass sensed his thoughts, he too looked over at their commander-in-chief, who was talking in a low, terse voice to one of the older men in the brigade, one who had spent more time in the heather than all of the rest of them put together.
Terry shivered, wishing he was as immune to the weather as Brendan was. Right now, he would give up a few years of his life to have a hot pot of tea laced generously with whiskey.
“Does he ever think about her, I wonder?” Cass said, gloved hands tucked in his armpits in an effort to warm them.
“Think about who?” Terry asked, his mind still on the luxuries of whiskey and tea.
“About Peg.”
It was on the tip of Terry’s tongue to say that he didn’t imagine there was much chance of anyone who had ever known Peg, much less been her lover, forgetting her, but he decided discretion was the better part of valor and kept the thought to himself. Brendan never spoke Peg’s name and likely never would again.
“I don’t know. Do I look like a friggin’ mind reader? The man isn’t one to talk about such things, as ye well know.”
“D’ye think he’d mind were I to look her up next time I’m down in Dublin?”
Terry turned, shocked that Cass would even think of such a thing. “Are ye mad? Leave her be, she’s had enough heartache to do with the Brotherhood to last her a lifetime. Besides, last I heard she’d gone off to England.” He forbore to add that he knew firsthand just wh
ere Peg was now because she wrote him letters every other week. He knew why—he was her last tenuous tie to Brendan, and she could not bear to let that last link go. He also knew that if Brendan ever found out, he might well put an end to Terry’s life, presuming that is, he didn’t die of exposure on this godforsaken hillside first. He pulled his scarf tighter around his throat and stifled the incipient sneeze that rose up.
He knew Cass had always believed if Brendan hadn’t been there that night in Dublin, he would have been in like a shot with Peg McBride. While there was some truth to that, perhaps, for Cass was a charmer and never short on attention from women, Peg was a one-man-woman, and for her that man would always be Brendan Riordan. Any man who courted her from here on out would do so in the shadow of Brendan, and that was a shadow very few men would be able to manage. To be certain, Cass’ ego would never stand it, and he wondered that the man didn’t know it. Terry’s oldest sister, Sadie, had once summed up Cass. ‘Sure an’ he’s got the devil in his eyes an’ he’d give a girl a good time, but he’s not one ye’d want to settle with. Now Brendan Riordan, he is the sort a woman would want to settle with, could she catch him an’ tame him just the wee bit.’ Sadie sighed then, one of those dreamy sighs that Brendan seemed to inspire in the female of the species. No woman had been able to tame the man though, until Peg had come along. Sometimes it seemed to Terry that it was only yesterday he had seen her across that theater lobby in Dublin, and sometimes it seemed a lifetime ago.
Brendan would drag them all to Dublin once a month, telling them they were going to get some culture even if he had to force it down their throats with the promise of a week of debauchery to follow. It was at a performance of The Prodigal where they met Peg. During intermission they had been in the lobby, having a drink, chatting, looking about to see who was who and what was what, when this wee bit of a girl had come up to him and said, ‘Well, Terence McGinty, have ye not the manners God gave ye? I’ve been standing over there waiting for you to come and say hello for a full ten minutes now.’
It was as though the Queen of the Fairies had stepped out of a far realm right there into the lobby of the Abbey Theatre and queried why he didn’t know her at once. He never had the gift of the blarney, but generally he could keep up his end of a conversation, but this woman rendered him entirely mute. He could not fathom where in his socially graceless life he would have met such a creature. And so it was he stood there, with his jaw on a hinge, and watched as she turned to Brendan.
‘Mr. Riordan, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me as well?” The cheek of her was amazing, no more than nineteen and flirting bold as brass with the most feared and hunted man in all of Ireland, as if he were no more than a schoolboy. Brendan looked at her for a long moment and then he took her little white hand in his own and said, ‘It’s hardly likely a man would forget you, Miss McBride.’ Terry could have dropped right there, for there was no way to connect the vision in front of him with the grubby little ragamuffin he had known back home as Peggy McBride.
Brendan had insisted on taking Peg and her friend out for a late dinner after the play. Though the establishment was considered one of the finest in Dublin, the food tasted like sawdust in Terry’s mouth, the grandness of the place completely lost on him, for he found himself capable of no more than gawping like a ripe eejit at Peg McBride. Brendan, fortunately, retained his faculties and the manners God had given him and was charming to both women. But then Brendan was a Riordan, and the Riordan men were known for their ability to lure the bees from the wind. Part way through the evening, though, it became apparent to Terry that Brendan was not in the perfect control he generally exerted so effortlessly on those around him. Peg was a dreadful flirt and was no doubt enjoying pulling the strings of the big man from back home and Brendan, to Terry’s surprise, seemed all too susceptible to her.
After dinner, they went dancing at a place Brendan knew. It had been, again, at Brendan’s suggestion and it surprised Terry for he knew Brendan had planned to leave for Derry that night. Terry, being the possessor of two very uncooperative left feet, had the privileged agony of watching Brendan whirl Peg around the dance floor as if she were no more than a feather.
Terry was as vulnerable to a beautiful face as the next man, but there was something more to Peg, something that drew every eye in the place, where they lingered with yearning gazes, longing for things they hadn’t ever thought to long for in their lives. Her dress was so fine and pretty that he, country bumpkin that he was, thought it must be woven from violets. She had a white orchid tucked behind one ear, and even that perfect bloom looked coarse against the fineness of her skin and the silken flame of her hair. The eyes on the woman were the color of the sky, just before night set in, and so big that a man felt he could happily drown in them and lose himself forever. To see her so tiny and exquisite in Brendan’s arms, her so fair and him so dark and powerful—well, it had been poetry right there come to life in front of him, and hadn’t he hated the both of them for it.
All dreams of the soul,
End in a beautiful man or woman’s body.
Yeats would know the truth of it being no great looker himself, Terry thought, as he watched them dance.
They had all been a bit in love with her, the entire bunch of them who followed Brendan. Peg had been blind to anyone but Brendan though, and when the two of them were in the same room, they had been scarce aware that anyone else so much as inhabited the same planet. A backwards, ungainly sot like himself hadn’t a prayer with such a woman, but common sense he found, had very little to do with feelings of the romantic variety.
Brendan had resisted getting into a relationship with Peg at first. It was a year before she convinced him to give in to her. A more stubborn woman he had never known. It was only a measure of Brendan’s own pigheaded nature that he was able to resist her for that long.
Peg would always arrange to see the two of them when they were in Dublin, and they would take her to dinner, the three of them getting along well, laughing and having great craic altogether. Then one day he knew the balance had shifted, that Brendan and Peg must finally be lovers, because Brendan never spoke of her to Terry anymore, and he began to make trips to Dublin alone that in the past he would have assigned to another man. But lovers were a world unto themselves, and when it was a rare thing such as Peg and Brendan shared, it made anyone close to them feel as if they were standing outside a glass in the freezing cold, condemned to only look upon that which their own heart desired.
Peg was wrong for Brendan, even a jealous fool like himself could see clearly the sort of damage their relationship was likely to do to the both of them. Peg was not made for survival in the sort of life Brendan had chosen. The attraction was only too obvious though, what with the highly disciplined life Brendan led, for as much as he demanded of others, he expected more from himself. He kept everything in his head, masses of detail about the organization and every man in it. He knew which warders in which prisons were susceptible to bribes and could generally name their price on the first try. He knew which postmen were sympathetic to the cause, and where and when they came on duty. On any decision his mind was made up instantly, and any orders he gave were never rescinded. If a man or a member of said man’s family was sick or down on his luck, Brendan was the first to know and if possible would pay a personal visit and if not he provided for him until such time as the man was able to support his own family again. In the midst of all that, of a thousand crises on any given day, the man had found time to study politics, literature, economic development and anything else which might benefit Ireland once he reached his goals. Eventually, he trained himself to function brilliantly on very little sleep and he gave up the drink altogether. Brendan had once told him he would be a slave to nothing and Terry thought he almost believed he wasn’t. He was, though, he was slave to his own ideals and for a time, to a wee redheaded bit of a lass.
The break between Peg and Brendan came two years later. Terry had thought he would be relieved to s
ee it over, not to envy the man he had loved as a brother all his life, anymore. All he felt though, was a great and overwhelming sorrow for Brendan. Brendan didn’t let it show, and never mentioned that anything was amiss, but sometimes late at night, when it had been a particularly trying day, Terry would see his face in an unguarded moment and the pain there would make him want to weep for the man. He had no envy then, only relief that he did not have to bear the same burdens.
Aye, he thought looking now at the man staring hawk-eyed out over the merciless terrain that surrounded them, Brendan would think of Peg, but not more often than he could help. It wasn’t the sort of hurt that ever healed entirely.
“Look sharp you gossipin’ bastards,” Brendan said in a voice that carried neat as a blade across them all, “the convoy is comin’.”
Terry swung his head around, looking west along the winding road. There were no cars in sight, but he could feel the thrum in the ground of their approach. He felt the tension in his body ratchet up, the cold suddenly a secondary discomfort.
The first car came into view seconds later, followed by a lumbering troop lorry. Christ, he hoped that the lorry wasn’t full of soldiers, because if it was, they might not stand much of a chance beyond that which surprise granted them. The tension was thick as old mutton in the air about them, every man waiting for Brendan’s signal.
The convoy stopped suddenly, the grind of brakes reverberating upon the air, taking the tension up another notch. Terry felt like he might be sick. It was a dreadful mix of fear and excitement that washed through him, both of which always went straight to his belly and banjaxed his courage altogether.
Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series) Page 5
