Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  I made myself some crude sandwiches, enlivened them with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s mustard, then, before eating and because the broken kitchen window was filling the house with bitterly cold air, I lit a fire with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s kindling and logs. I found some of my tenant’s cardboard and masking tape, which I used to make a crude repair to the window, and afterwards used her coffee and grinder to make myself a pot of fresh-brewed that I carried with the sandwiches to my fireside.

  Food had rarely tasted better. It was like the magic moment at the end of a sea watch, after a bitter trick at a frozen wheel in a stinging spray and a cold wind, when the worst of junk food thrown together in a pitching boat’s galley tastes like a banquet. It made me wonder why more five-star restaurants did not feature Spam and mustard sandwiches on their menus.

  I also wondered what had happened to modern art for, as I ate, I stared in puzzlement at Sarah Sing Tennyson’s paintings. Two or three of the canvases were recognisably pictures of a lighthouse, and the rest were recognisably like the two or three that had some remote relationship to reality, but beyond that the canvases were a drab mess. She did not seem to brush the paint so much as trowel it on like rough plaster, yet clearly she was some kind of recognised artist for she had claimed to make a living from her painting. Her most puzzling effort was a splatter of purple and brown and white paint which, when I turned it round on its easel, bore a small and helpful label on its reverse: ‘Sunset, Nauset, October 1990.’ If that was a sunset, I thought grimly, then the environment was in a worse state than the most fearful doomsayers suspected. I turned off the electric lights and carried the coffee to the big window.

  The wind gusted at the black panes. Over its fretful noise I could just hear the roar of distant water where the ocean breakers tumbled on the outer face of the barrier beach. Closer, in the cold darkness, a thousand rivulets of salt water were creeping up from the bay, flooding the salt marshes and rippling the eel grass where the most succulent scallops grew. There were oysters out there too, and the best clams in the world, and mussels, and lobsters to make an appetite drool. And when a family tired of lobster there were cod cheeks or fresh swordfish steaks or bluefish or herrings, and in the old days it was a rare house that did not have a whole deer carcass hung up at winter’s beginning, and in the fall there were ducks and beach-plums and cranberries and wild blackberries. It was a good place to live. And to die, I remembered, and so, the sandwiches finished and the coffee drunk, I went back to my unearthed box.

  I took out the Colt’s remaining magazines, then lifted out my second gun, my favourite, a semi-automatic M1 Carbine. It was a simple battle-ready rifle, also dating from the Second World War, yet it felt balanced and it fired beautifully.

  I cleaned and loaded the M1 which, like the Colt, had been stolen in Boston for eventual delivery to the IRA. I had kept both guns back from their shipment, wanting them for myself, and now they would help protect Saddam Hussein’s gold. Thinking of the gold reminded me that in the morning I must find a public telephone to discover if Johnny had any news of Rebel Lady.

  In the meantime I carried the two guns upstairs. Sarah Sing Tennyson had installed no electric lights on the second floor so I had to find a candle to light my way to the bedroom where I discovered my antique whaling harpoon back on the wall. The harpoon was a nasty piece of work; its rusting iron head was six feet long, wickedly barbed, and socketed on to a wooden pole handle that gave it another six feet of reach. I used the harpoon to brace the door in case an enemy tried to surprise me in the night, then I undressed, laid the guns close to hand, climbed under Sarah Sing Tennyson’s patchwork quilt, and slept.

  I slept like the dead. I slept through the dawn and into the morning, I slept through the night’s rising tide and through the forenoon’s ebb and I did not wake till the seas were pushing in again to the marsh channels. A bright winter sunlight streaked the yellow panelled wall and lit the stripped-pine chest of drawers on which Sarah Sing Tennyson had placed two Staffordshire dogs. I could smell the ocean, and I could smell her scent on the sheets and pillowcases. It had been so long since I had smelt that in a bed, a woman’s smell, and I immediately, predictably, thought of Roisin.

  There had been women enough since Roisin, but none like her. Sometimes I told myself that I had romanticised Roisin’s memory as a shield to protect myself from other entanglements, yet in truth I wanted entanglement. I wanted to be like Johnny. I wanted to wake to a house full of noise and children and dogs and muddle. I wanted a wife. I wanted what passed in this world for normality, and yet was such a rare privilege for it was only made possible by love.

  I rolled over. Sarah Tennyson had hung four prints on the wall which divided the bedroom from the stairwell. They were old prints of faraway cities, all domes and spires and arches. Where had she bought them? With whom? And what men had come to my house and lain on these sheets and shaved in my bathroom and taken their evening drinks on to the deck to watch the shadows lengthen across the marsh? Had browbeaten William slept here and wakened to the sound of tidewaters creeping through the marsh? I smelt the woman-smell on the warm sheets and was jealous.

  I turned on to my back. The bedroom dormer faced east towards the sea and once, when the bay’s tide had been unusually high, I had seen the water’s dappled ripples reflected by the rising sun on to this bedroom ceiling, though usually the high tides stayed a hundred yards off in the intricate channels beyond the deck. I had always dreamed of putting an old duck punt in the closest channel and, at the bay’s deep-water edge, where a secret tideway wriggled past Pochet Island, I had planned to moor a small cat-boat that a child could sail down past Sampson Island and Hog Island and Sipson Island and Strong Island and so to the new raw cut where the great Atlantic had ripped the barrier beach apart and clawed the houses off from Chatham’s foreshore. This was a place for kids to grow, for this was God’s adventure playground. It was a place where a child could play wild and yet feel safe. It was a place to romp with dogs along the tideline and to scratch for clams in the mud and to climb on fallen trees and to take a canoe across the bay to where the ocean beaches stretched empty. It was a place where God had so arranged matters that television reception was bad and a child could therefore grow without the worst corrosion of all.

  Except I would raise no children here. I was forty, I had never been married, and Roisin, whom I had thought to bring here because she would love the bay and the beaches and the sea beyond, was dead. God, I thought, forty years old! In the trade of terror that made me an old old man. Most kids started in their teens and were burned out by their early twenties. They met girls who wanted babies, and mothers do not like their babies’ fathers to be serving life imprisonment in Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh or in Eire’s Portlaoise Jail, and so the milky new brides would nag their menfolk into giving up the gun. A few men, like Seamus Geoghegan, survived longer, but only because they had never been henpecked out of the business. I smiled, thinking of Seamus watching the Celts play netball.

  There was a sudden noise above me. I froze, then slowly reached out with my right hand for the carbine. The noise was a scuttling sound, sudden and fitful, and I realised it was nothing but a squirrel come to the roof from its nest in the scrawny stand of pines that stood to the north of the house. I relaxed, resting the rifle’s stock on the patchwork quilt so that its muzzle faced the ceiling. I stared at the gun’s lean and efficient lines.

  That was my fate, I guessed. Just as my brother had died in Vietnam, so I would die with a bullet in my guts, or in my heart, or exploding the blood vessels in my skull. I would die in a rage of adrenalin, snarling and shooting back at my enemies, but shot down like a dog all the same. But better to die of a bullet, I told myself, than to die alone and old and unloved. I had chosen my path, though now, smelling the smell of a woman in my bed, I doubted that the choice had been wise or even fair, for there would have been nothing drab about raising children in this good place.

  But now I would face my enemies here. Li
ke a beast seeking refuge, I had come home, but only to play for the biggest stakes of all, gold and life. If I won I would be left here alone with all the money a man would ever need, and a deep-water sailing boat and a high-bowed fishing boat and what else? Bed-sheets losing their scent? A cat-boat no child would ever learn to sail? But they were just maudlin regrets for the long nights, and now, in this light-flooded morning, I had to think ahead and see where danger lay.

  Brendan Flynn was dangerous. But Brendan was far away and he would be loath to set an operation on American soil, for the first commandment of the IRA was Thou Shalt Not Upset The Americans With The Truth. Brendan would therefore leave things to Michael.

  Michael was angry, because I had stung him and a stung Michael Herlihy was a relentless enemy, but he was not a fool. I knew he would make some effort to retrieve the gold, but the effort would be subtle and, in the end, like the lawyer he was, he would probably agree to a settlement. Maybe one million? That seemed fair, and certainly I could make the price of all five millions much too steep for Michael’s taste.

  The Brits? I doubted they were in the game. Michael Herlihy liked to imagine that the British kept a team of killers on the American coast, but that was Michael’s wishful thinking. He did not like to think of other men facing danger each day in the slums of the Bogside or across the hedgerows of South Armagh while he lived easy in the New World, and so he wove a fantasy that he too, in his city office or in his bleak apartment near Boston Common, faced the horror of a knock on his door in the night’s black heart. But there were no SAS killers patrolling the streets of Boston looking for Michael. I could forget the Brits.

  Which left the most dangerous enemy of all, il Hayaween, but would he really come for me in America? This was not his turf. There were no Palestinian slums to hide his men in America. America was an unknown land to il Hayaween, it was a glittering heaven that would dazzle a Satanic archangel. I dared not underestimate him, but I had come to the one place that would give him pause for, though the Palestinians understood Europe, America unnerved them. Besides, van Stryker would always help protect me if he thought there was the slightest chance of il Hayaween pursuing me into the New World and so, for the moment, I felt safe.

  Then tyres suddenly crunched loud on the clam-shell drive and I flung back the bedclothes, pulled the harpoon away from the door and, taking the safety catch off the loaded carbine, ran down the steep stairs. I was crouching behind the front door even before the approaching vehicle had come to a halt. My heart rate had doubled in just fifteen seconds.

  I listened. The crunching sound of the tyres stopped and I heard the ratchet of the parking brake. A click as the vehicle’s door opened, then I too ripped open the house door and aimed the carbine straight at the intruder’s chest.

  Straight at Kathleen Donovan.

  Who stared at me, and I suddenly knew there was no one else I had rather see, for I had so much unfinished business with her, and if my conscience was ever to be clear then she was as good a person as any to begin the process. Then I saw her eyes widening in alarm at the sight of the gun. “No!” she said. “No!”

  “I’m sorry.” I made the gun safe, put it aside and straightened up. “I’m sorry,” I said again, for she was still looking horrified, and then I realised I had come downstairs stark naked. “It’s all right,” I said, “you just woke me. Come on in. I’ll get dressed. Come in. I’ll only be a minute,” and in that utter confusion I ran back upstairs and prayed to God that this time I would not miss my chance. Not this time, not now that I was home at last and so utterly alone.

  She waited outside the house, refused my offer of coffee, refused even to come into the house, but instead asked to walk towards the sea. She was nervous, but perhaps that was hardly surprising for she must have known I had lied to her in Nieuwpoort and it must have taken real courage for her to come and accost me in my Cape Cod retreat. “How did you know I was here?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t. I was just hoping.” She walked ahead of me on the narrow track, staring down as she walked. “If you must know” - she finally turned and looked defiantly back into my face – “I hired a private detective to discover more about you, and he found this address.”

  “So you just came here?” I asked.

  “Because I want to know why you lied about Roisin,” she said. “Or do you still insist you never knew her?”

  “I knew her,” I admitted.

  We walked on in silence. The sand on the path had been bleached white as bone by the dry winter air and by the day’s bright sun. Small streaks of snow lay in the shelter of the far dunes and shards of ice glinted at the margins of the small pools between the brittle pale grasses. The wind was light, coming cold from the north-east. Kathleen wore a black overcoat edged with red cuffs and a tall collar that stuck up to meet her tasselled woollen hat. “Is she dead?”

  “Yes. Four years now.” We were speaking very stiffly.

  “How?”

  I could feel myself shaking, and I only trusted myself to answer with one word. “Shot.”

  “In Ireland?”

  “No.”

  “Then where?”

  I sighed. My breath misted in the air, blew away over the salt marsh. “She died,” I said, “in a Palestinian training camp called Hasbaiya. She’d gone there to learn about bombs and killing, but instead they killed her.”

  “Why?” A terrible intensity in the voice.

  “Because they thought she was a CIA agent.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  I thought for a second Kathleen was going to sit down on the path, and I held out a hand to steady her, but she shook my help away and walked on alone. We were threading the path that twisted erratically about the head of the bay between stands of reed and clumps of grass and which led eventually to the great stretch of beach where the Atlantic rollers crashed against the strand.

  She turned after a few paces and raised her green eyes in a challenge. “Why didn’t you tell me this in Belgium?”

  “Because…” I began, then faltered into silence. The truth would sound so stupid, but I had promised myself I would tell this girl the truth and so I launched myself into the lame excuses. “I know it’ll sound stupid, but I kind of thought you might be working for the Brits.”

  She laughed. Not with amusement, but in bitter scorn. “First Roisin is the CIA, now I work for the British?”

  I tried to explain. “Concealment’s a way of life. Lying is a response to any question. I’m sorry, I really am. I wanted to tell you, but I dared not.”

  “So why tell me now?” She had begun walking again.

  “Because I’m out of it now. It’s all over for me.”

  “Out of what?” she asked derisively. “The IRA?”

  “I was in the IRA,” I said carefully, “but only because this country asked me to join.” No, that was not true. I would have joined anyway because it was tribal, because it was adventure, but would I have stayed? Could I have stayed after seeing an adult shrunken to the size of a child by a bomb made from gasoline laced with soap-flakes that make the fire stick to flesh like blazing napalm? “I worked for the CIA,” I told her.

  She glanced at me, looked away, and I saw that she did not believe me, although she was too polite to say as much. “And Roisin?” Kathleen asked. “Was she in the CIA as well as the IRA?”

  “She wasn’t in the CIA.”

  “Then why did they shoot her?”

  So I told her about Seamus’s betrayal, and that too sounded lame, and I was beginning to wish Kathleen Donovan had not come to see me on this bright dry morning, but then I went back to the beginning, right to the very beginning in the smoky Dublin pub when Roisin had come in from the night with raindrops glistening in her hair, and on through to the day when I had piled the stones on her grave. I left Axel out of the tale, and I sketched over the end of our relationship, but the rest was truthful enough.

  “So she has no gravestone?” Kathleen asked when I had finished the story.
“No memorial?”

  “I paid for masses to be said for her in Dublin,” I told her truthfully.

  Kathleen shrugged, as if doubting that the masses would do a scrap of good. She walked in silence for a long time, then suddenly spoke of her elder sister, saying how even as a child Roisin had been obsessed by Ireland. “She didn’t go there till she was fourteen, but by then she already spoke Gaelic and she could tell you the name of every county, and the name of every street between St Stephen’s Green and Phoenix Park.”

  “I remember watching the television news from London with her once,” I said, “and at the end they would always give the weather forecast, and that day they said it was going to be a lovely sunny day over England, Scotland and Wales, but there’d be clouds and rain over Ireland, and Roisin got so angry because she thought the English meteorologists were just being anti-Irish.”

  Kathleen smiled in recognition of the story and I thought how like Roisin she looked, and I turned away because I did not want to betray anything, not on this cold day when, at last, I was confessing most of my sins.

  We walked on, heading south now. To my right I could see my house across the bay’s headwaters while to my left the ocean seethed beyond the dunes. “I always wanted Roisin to come and live here,” I confessed to Kathleen. “I had this dream of raising children and of going shopping on weekends and of sailing on the bay.”

  Kathleen looked up at me, surprise on her face, and for a second I thought she was going to cry, but then she offered me a rueful smile instead. “Roisin was never very motherly, not unless she changed when she reached Ireland?”

  I shook my head. “She never changed. She was Cathleen ni Houlihan till the very day she died.” Cathleen ni Houlihan was the great fighting heroine of Irish legend.

  Once again Kathleen smiled in recognition. “When Roisin was eight she offered to pay me her allowance for the rest of her life, all her allowance, mind you, the whole weekly dollar, for ever, if I would just change names with her. She so wanted to be called Kathleen.” We had reached the innermost dunes and now threaded them towards the sea. “She wanted me to sign our name-changing pact with drops of real blood. She even had one of Mom’s kitchen knives all ready.” Kathleen laughed at the memory, then gave me an accusing look. “Did Roisin join the IRA because of you?”