‘This is all Billy Winters’.’
‘No,’ she’d said, ‘my mother promised me this when I was four. Billy put cattle on it once and then complained it wasn’t worth the trouble. My mother said Cuchulain summered here, drinking mead and setting snares for deer, and out from the island there were nets and ropes to the kitchen window and a bell on every rope, to ring out a run of salmon.’
‘That’s handier than an otter-board . . . A body could live well here.’
‘Paradise must have been something like this.’
‘Billy Winters could double well enough for a God . . . of sorts.’
‘Why don’t you like him?’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I asked first.’
‘He’s the breed of landlord: they’re all the one, that class: bad.’
For ten minutes she had found herself defending Billy Winters and pointing out that Parnell was a landlord. Ward would have none of it.
‘Why do you talk and think like no one hereabouts?’
‘I’ve been away a long time.’
‘When you were hired here as a child, what were you put to?’
‘Pickin’ spuds, gathering stones.’
‘Then what?’
‘Florencecourt, the Earl of Enniskillen. That’s where I got to know about horses. He swapped me with Lord Erne for a Scottish butler. Erne sent me over to his place in Mayo; run by his agent, Boycott.’
‘You worked with Captain Boycott?’
‘Under . . . not for long, slave, slave, slave till you drop. He had a system of fines . . . if you hummed of whiskey from the night before, he’d smell your breath and you’d be fined as “unfit”. He’d fine you for being a minute late, for losing or breaking a spade or a billhook. Some of the lads ended up owing money at the end of the week! Didn’t suit the Mayo men one bit.’
‘Then where?’
‘America . . . for six years, Boston mostly, and New York, then back to Dublin for a few years, then the uncle here died and left me Brackagh and four years’ unpaid rent.’
‘And what were you doing in Dublin?’
‘The aunt had properties . . . I minded them.’
‘You collected rent, Liam.’
‘I fixed doors, slates, floors, gathered the odd shilling.’
She had laughed and repeated: ‘You collected rent . . . You’ve been a rent collector like the people you profess to hate, so tell me again why you hate Billy Winters?’
‘Did I say I hated him?’
‘Something very like.’
‘I said he was of the hated class . . . landlords . . . and they’re all alike . . . criminals.’
‘Tell me Billy’s crimes, the ones I don’t know about, because I know he doesn’t cane you for rentor Blessing or Ruttledge or anyone else.’
Ward looked impassively at the clay floor for quite a while, then out at the glittering water. For a minute she thought he was not going to elaborate till she heard him say quietly:
‘They say he works for the Castle.’
At first she did not understand. When she did, she began to laugh, awkardly, unnaturally. Ward turned to look at her, his face immobile as she said:
‘A spy! An informer! I’ve never heard such silliness!’
‘Why is that?’
‘Spying on neighbours for money! He doesn’t need that sort of money.’
‘He might do it for nothing, for loyalty, for the Crown, for Ulster, for the Union, to keep the grip on us . . . all gentry are ready-made spies, everyone knows that.’
‘You’re not joking . . . are you?’
‘No, he’s been to the Castle twice this last while, Billy Winters, his twin or his double . . . so they say.’
She thought about this for a moment.
‘How could you know such a thing? Who are “they”?’
‘Talk.’
‘Then you must talk with people who talk that way about Billy Winters . . . Fenians, are they? Are you?’
‘Everyone here talks that way.’
‘I know he goes to the Castle for import licences, for Italian marble, for Swedish dynamite, for German spare parts; it’s all business, all very strict . . . informing is not one of his crimes.’
‘He has others?’
When she did not answer Ward took out a gold pocket-watch, and pressed it open. She saw that it was almost two o’clock. He left the watch on the table and then doused the burning turf with a wet hessian bag.
‘Why are you doing that?’
‘The “Coolmore” passes here at three every day, comes back at six . . . we can light it again later.’
As she reached for the pocket-watch she asked:
‘May I look?’
She pressed the spring clip. An elegant white face with black Roman numerals. Inscribed on the inside of the gold cover she read:
For my darling Stewart
This timepiece is
For all time
Love from Susan
Christmas 1828
‘Oh dear,’ she muttered, ‘poor Susan, poor Stewart.’
‘It’s American,’ Ward said.
‘Who were they?’
Ward shrugged.
‘I won it at poker.’
‘I thought maybe it was your mother and father’s.’
Ward gave a quick short laugh.
‘Stewart! . . . Susan? . . . Packie and Mary Josephine; Packie Ward from Aughaward, where we mattered once, long ago before the Stewarts and the Billys and the Gilberts and the Cecils took it from us.’
‘We still matter.’
‘With nothing? You count for nothing.’
‘Things don’t matter, Liam.’
‘Easy said when you’re reared at Clonoula. You talked early on about men sitting half the day in the kitchen with cows half-milked, pigs not cleaned out, everything half-done throughother, a mess . . . that’s because of “things”, because it’s part yours.’
‘Nothing’s mine at Clonoula nor likely to be.’
‘You’re his only kin.’
She paused and looked at him steadily:
‘You know I’m not.’
‘Is that not talk?’
She shook her head.
‘And you’re certain sure?’
‘Since I was twelve.’
‘And does he know you know?’
‘It came out once when he was drunk. Next day he let on he couldn’t remember, but he knows I know. I think sometimes he hates me. Oftentimes I hate him so much . . . I could kill him. If I could . . . kill him.’
‘You’re having me on.’
She shook her head.
‘Is he worth hanging for?’
Ward took out tobacco and cigarette papers, rolled and lit a cigarette before asking:
‘Why would you take on to murder him?’
‘Kill I said . . . not murder.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘I couldn’t plan it . . . anyway, when I’m not hating him I sometimes think I maybe love him: in a way.’
‘“Oftentimes,” you said.’
‘Once I heard him hit my mother . . . I was very small. From that night out, I feared and loathed him and wished him dead . . . I still do.’
‘For hitting her?’
‘And for what I didn’t understand at first. When he’d kiss me not fatherly, I couldn’t tell my mother. Maybe she guessed . . . I think he did it to make her unhappy . . . for revenge, and he should answer for that . . . That’s what I felt at her burial, and ever since.’
‘Black thoughts,’ Ward muttered.
‘Don’t you have them about some things?’
Ward turned, looked into her eyes and smiled in a way that she would remember afterwards with extraordinary vividness. He stood and walked to the doorway. A mile away across the placid water, the heavy thrum of a marine engine driving the ‘Coolmore’ paddle-steamer reached them, muted by the distance.
‘We should go out a while.’
There was
a map of Corvey Island hanging in her bedroom. As a child it had fascinated her with its graphics of goat and cormorant, trout and curlew. There was a compass sign, at the top, a lined reference on the right-hand side giving acreage, description and detail: bog, rock, wood, lough-shore, well, garden. The total acreage was thirty acres, two roads and three perches. The ‘garden’ was a small circle of rich soil behind and below the bothy, protected on all sides by rock, whin and thornbush. They walked through its cushioned greenness and up a steep path to a clear view of the island, lough and landscape beyond.
The ‘Coolmore’ was well on its way to Ballyshannon, exhaust plumes in the air, the corrugations on the water levelling, the faraway-heartbeat of the engine dying away into an absolute silence. Through that afternoon silence and well into evening, they made love as naturally as they had eaten and talked earlier, though she was conscious later that she had eaten more hungrily, talked more openly and made love more passionately than he. It was dark when the ‘Coolmore’ passed, going back to Enniskillen.
In the bothy the fire was re-lit, the settle-bed opened and what seemed like an embarrassment was accomplished without awkwardness. The mattress was placed on its side before the fire, the bed linen and blankets strung up like love emblems on a string from wall to wall. The door was closed and candles lit against the dark, and they ate again, the cheese and bacon sandwiches she had brought. He persuaded her to try hot whiskey with sugar, which she did, and they placed the mattress on the floor, made love and watched the fire, half-talking, half-sleeping. Every now and then Ward kept returning to what they had talked about earlier. Had she ever, he asked, wondered about her true father? ‘My untrue father. Every other day and often in dreams.’ In one dream, she said, he was a young boy washed out to sea and drowned and oh the grief of it and yet she felt her father must be heartless, a betrayer or liar, or already married perhaps; weak, unkind; and that her mother, if you thought about it, had been foolish as a girl, dishonest to marry carrying another’s child, and you could understand Billy but not forgive . . . Blame on both sides. After a long silence, Ward asked:
‘Has he quit?’
‘What are you asking me?’
‘Interfering.’
‘Only when he’s drunk . . . It’s more silly than frightening.’
She then told him about the night of the safe, the beaver hat, the drawer of gold, and how he pretended to have forgotten all about it the following day. She could tell that Ward was listening very intently. When she stopped talking, he lay very still for some minutes and suddenly got up on his elbow to look at her in the light of the fire.
‘Gold? How much is there?’
‘A steel drawer full; the bottom of the safe.’
‘What would that weigh?’
‘I don’t know . . . a lot I’d say.’
Ward whistled quietly, lay back and asked:
‘How long is it there?’
‘Before Napoleon’s time . . . a hundred years.’
‘Empire loot,’ Ward said, ‘the stuff that makes Winchesters to shoot Indians and Africans,’ and then he added, after a moment,’ . . . and us.’
When she awoke, Ward was asleep. She went to the door and looked out. The sun was gold on the grass of the enclosed garden, on the whins and thorns above and on the lough below a blinding of silver. When she went down to wash in a baylet, a fish belly-jumped far out. The surface flashed like diamonds and it seemed to her that nobody in the round world could be as completely alive and happy as she felt at that moment.
In the bothy Ward was still stretched on the mattress, his eyes closed though she could tell that he was awake. She was startled when he spoke:
‘Killing is a small thing . . . Getting away with it . . . that’s not easy.’
Was he lying there planning to murder Billy Winters or was he clowning or half in earnest:
‘What are you saying Liam?’
He got up on his elbow and looked over and said:
‘Why not take what we need . . . what he doesn’t need? What’s locked away a hundred years . . . the ill-gotten gold.’
The bothy was so quiet she could hear the faraway fluting of a curlew. When it stopped she knew she was blinking unnaturally and was surprised when she heard herself say:
‘How?’
‘I’ve bromides can pacify a nervous horse; they’d put a man asleep for two days . . . Some of that in his nightcap and we’ll be in Dublin or Belfast before he’d waken.’
She could see the excitement in his face: gold more real to him than love, honour, beauty or truth. It could buy anything in the world but the spirit of Christ. She understood his excitement all too well. Since that night, the image of fistfuls of gold had recurred over and over again. Like Ward she had thought of different ways it could be taken with absolute safety. With every scheme there were two or three impossibilities. Ward’s suggestion now was so simple, so cunning that she found herself looking at his face, trying to read behind it into his mind and heart:
‘And if we’re caught?’
‘We can’t think of that.’
‘And do I just walk out of the house where I was born and grew up, and where my mother died, away from Billy Winters – forever?’
‘You said you’d be glad to.’
‘In one way; another way it’d be a kind of death.’
Ward thought about this for a while before smiling oddly and saying:
‘If what the clergy teach is true, that can be a beginning of sorts.’
‘You’ve an answer for everything, Liam!’
‘Almost,’ Ward said.
7
Billy Winters was eating a bacon sandwich and checking sandstone lengths when he heard Tommy Martin shout through the noise of the crusher. Tommy was pointing towards the quarry entrance:
‘Boss, a gentleman for you here.’
Billy Winters turned and saw Kinsella’s hired gig in the quarry. A young man dressed more for city than country had just stepped down. He was carrying a valise and listening as the cabby pointed up the stone staircase leading to the quarry office. He then pointed at Billy Winters. The young man then had a further word with the cabby, asking him to wait before moving across the quarry floor, picking his steps between cart-ruts and pot-holes averting his head from the pervasive crusher dust. He had a longish face, beech-hued hair and pale eyes and spoke first, holding out his free hand; an English voice; regional:
‘Mr Winters?’
‘That’s me,’ Billy said.
‘Maurice Fairbrother; are you free to talk a little?’
As they moved towards the staircase leading to the quarry office Billy Winters asked:
‘Are you buying or selling, Mr Fairbrother?’
‘Enquiring.’
‘I’ll answer as best I can . . . You go on up, tell Tommy Martin up there I want a word with him down here . . . I’ll be with you in five minutes.’
Maurice Fairbrother went lightly up the stone staircase to the quarry office and gave Billy’s message to Tommy Martin. A wall-clock ticked behind a cluttered desk. It said half-past four. A window looked down on the monumental works, the lower lough and its islands. He could see Billy Winters walking and talking with Tommy Martin and two policemen.
Last night, in the dining-room of the Westenra Arms Hotel in Monaghan Town, he had been sitting with an American couple and three commercial travellers. The dining-room was quiet. They could hear a noisy hubbub coming from the public bar, voices angry about ‘grippers’, process-servers, agents, Parnell and landlords, all of it so familiar that he listened without hearing until a voice louder than the rest shouted: ‘Poor Lord Frederick! Yis are a pack of hypocrites. Wasn’t he a Duke’s son from a palace in England, and where did they get what they got? Where did Shirley down the road get sixty-seven thousand acres of our land. From the crooked crown! from that old whore Elizabeth! And what have they ever give us? The workhouse, torture, rack-rents, starvation, coffin ships, the graveyard . . . Poor Lord Frederick my arse! I’
ll shed no tears for poor Lord Frederick or any English Lord . . . I’d cut the fuckers’ throats, every last one of them, and that wouldn’t half pay for what they done to us, and still do if they were let . . . Mister Parnell’s right! . . . get shot of them now, forever!’
When he saw the Americans half-smiling, half-anxious, he left the dining-room, went up to his bedroom, and opened the details copied from Mallon’s file. He read again the cryptic sentences:
‘Ward, Liam (32), listed I.R.B. Dublin, London and Boston branches. Helped smuggle surgical knives that murdered Lord Frederick Cavendish. The informant James Carey his uncle-in-law. Addiction to gambling. Absconded with I.R.B. funds (Dublin). Says very little. Reckoned cunning and cold. Tynan described him as “a conniving rat”. Threatened with death if funds not returned. Presently lying low on uncle’s small farm at Brackagh, part of Clonoula Estate, Co. Fermanagh. Tenant of William Hudson Winters. Keep on a long rein.’
Winters, William Hudson (49), Clonoula, Co. Fermanagh. Petty landlord. Church of Ireland. Old-fashioned Butt-type Unionist. Not a member of the Land League. Parnell stayed with him Feb. ’83. Prone to drinking bouts. Fluent Irish. Attends Catholic funerals. Station masses at the house. Widower. Employees and tenants half R.C., half Protestant. Only daughter R.C. Well got with Catholic and dissenting clergy. Married Catherine Maguire (R.C.) deceased. Complaint to R.I.C. Enniskillen (1869) that he beat her drunkenly and once locked her out. Complaint withdrawn two days later. A maidservant (Mercy Boyle) says he molests his only daughter, Elizabeth. Incipient incest? Ward has spent a night with her in a shack on Corvey Island. Also at least two other protracted night assignations. Winters ignorant of this. A kite worth flying?’
Mallon had put his bony forefinger on the word ‘incest’ and said:
‘There’s your lever . . . if you care to use it.’
‘How?’
‘I’ve no notion. Throw it out – more as a hint than accusation – he might nibble, if guilty.’
As Billy came in the office door Maurice Fairbrother turned from the window:
‘I’d no idea Fermanagh was so beautiful.’
‘Its all the water,’ Billy said, ‘and the light in the water, and on the water. Fair Fermanagh: no place on earth quite like it.’
Death and Nightingales Page 8
