Death and Nightingales

by Eugene McCabe

  Fairbrother nodded towards a door behind Billy’s desk and asked:

  ‘Are we alone here?’

  ‘At the minute . . . yes.’

  There was quite a pause.

  ‘I’ll not waste your time, Mr Winters. My brief here has to do with Lord Frederick’s murder.’

  ‘I thought the heroes who did that were hung, all but young Brady?’

  ‘We need more detail. The knives, as you know, were smuggled by a Mrs Byrne and procured by a Dr Hamilton Williams from Weiss of Bond Street. She had an accomplice, we suspect he is both neighbour and tenant of yours . . . man called Ward . . . Liam Ward.’

  Billy was staring at the floor. He glanced up as Fairbrother said:

  ‘You must know him, Sir?’

  ‘He was in this room a few hours ago. Is he one of them? An “invincible”?’

  ‘He knows them well enough to steal their funds.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Billy muttered, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Inspector Mallon has him on a long rein; he’s been watched this last year very closely.’

  Maurice Fairbrother hesitated, looked up at the wall-clock and then straight into Billy’s eyes, where cold pewter met a hard gravel stare:

  ‘As I’ve said we need more information, Sir.’

  ‘I can’t help: I know nothing.’

  ‘But you will if you can, Mr Winters?’

  ‘How? if I know nothing?’

  ‘You’re a benign landowner, you’re congenial with both sides, a successful businessman and, as a Unionist, you would, I presume, lean toward a progressive view of a pacific world under the Crown?’

  ‘You presume too much, Sir.’

  ‘Is Mr Parnell your guiding light?’

  ‘Where did you get this stuff about me?’

  ‘Common sense. You’re like a million other Ulster men.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Look, we’re not talking about backstreet cut-throats, we’re talking about the evil that guides them: the cells in Dublin, Boston, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sydney, Paris and God knows where else. We’re talking about hatred versus loyalty to progress and a benign democratic Empire, we’re talking about improving the lot of mankind here and elsewhere . . . with God’s help, and with yours.’

  Billy shrugged and shifted uneasily.

  ‘No, I think you can help, Mr Winters . . . and I believe you should.’

  Billy Winters looked away to the dusty window. How could this man utter such stuff with a straight face? Does he believe it? The big battalions of the blessed plot? ruling half the world. He presumes too much, presumes I’ll tell him something. Why me?

  ‘As you can see I have a quarry here,’ Billy said, ‘a stone-cutting business. My cows milk, my dovecotes are full, my hens lay, my cattle and pigs fatten, my garden yields, there’s an orchard full of Bramleys, I have ditches growing timber and bogs full of turf, and when the rain rains the grass grows, and when it shines we make hay or cut corn, and so on it goes from Lammas to Lammas. I believe in that, Mr Fairbrother, and in damn little else, and I’m not over-fond of informers.’

  ‘No one is.’

  ‘Most other men would by now have shown you the door; some would have kicked you down the stairs.’

  ‘I daresay you’re right . . . you haven’t.’

  Billy pointed at the door:

  ‘There’s the door, Mr Fairbrother; I think you should make for it.’

  Maurice Fairbrother did not move for about half a minute. He then got up and stood beside the window, put his valise on Tommy Martin’s high desk, unstrapped it and took out a carbon copy of notes and placed them in front of Billy Winters.

  ‘What’s this?’ Billy asked, feeling about his jacket pocket for spectacles, half-looking round the top of his desk, half-glancing at the blurred words on the sheet of paper as Fairbrother said:

  ‘It’s the copy of a complaint lodged by your late wife Catherine at Enniskillen barracks fourteen years ago. She withdrew it the following day. You must know what it’s about. Police reports tend to use words like “molest”. I looked it up. It means interfere harmfully, to cause acute distress, to abuse, to brutalise, to debase.’

  Fairbrother paused. He could see a tremor in Billy Winters’ hands. Glancing up he saw the fresh face had become like a death mask.

  ‘I tell you this only because I think you should know what’s happening in your own house, to be forewarned.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘You have an island in the lower lake.’

  ‘Corvey Island, my wife’s . . . now my daughter’s.’

  Behind the masonry shed a hand-siren began to wind. The whining noise rising gradually to a steady howl. As it began to lessen Maurice Fairbrother went to the window and looked down.

  ‘To be forewarned of what?’ Billy asked.

  Fairbrother ignored the question.

  Quarry workers and police were now walking towards the quarry exit. Fairbrother watched till they were out of sight:

  ‘You have a foreman down there; would he, for example, know or suspect anything about missing dynamite?’

  Billy Winters did not reply. Maurice Fairbrother waited at the window for over a minute before speaking:

  ‘You have six tenements in the village, the post office-cum-grocery and two cabins on your land.’

  Fairbrother paused again, looking for the words he had rehearsed; found them:

  ‘Are you saying from all these people there’s none can tell you anything, none in your debt who can oblige a query?’

  ‘What could poor folk know about a man like Ward?’

  ‘A great deal if you ventured to ask.’

  Billy Winters’ breathing became visibly affected, causing his voice to wobble angrily, oddly:

  ‘You’re in the wrong shop, Sir, and your tell-tale foolscap can’t dock me for old sorrows.’

  ‘What I’m asking is simple, from someone we presumed loyal.’

  He moved from the window, suddenly lifting the sheet of paper from Billy Winters’ desk. He replaced it in the valise, saying as he closed it:

  ‘She “knows” him.’

  The silence that followed forced Billy Winters to ask:

  ‘What are you saying now?’

  ‘I’ve just said it. She “knows” him.’

  ‘Talk plain, Sir.’

  ‘Your daughter spent a night with Ward in a shack on Corvey Island. Is that plain enough? Also there were at least two protracted “assignations” in the woodland that flanks your avenue. That’s what the report says: “assignations”. And now there’s a fresh detail. It says your daughter twice sought refuge this past year in a maidservant’s bed, Miss Mercy Boyle, to avoid . . . and again the word used in the report is “molestation”.’

  Oh Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, tattling my idiocies and privacies to Shanley? Have you betrayed me, girl?

  Billy Winters’ voice was scarcely audible as he asked:

  ‘Have you tortured me enough, Sir?’

  Fairbrother paused on his way to the door:

  ‘You know where to come if you find out anything. Ask for Chief Inspector Mallon.’

  ‘You can find your way to hell, Fairbrother, if they’ll have you.’

  Maurice Fairbrother shrugged slightly, opened the office door and let himself out into the early-evening light. There was a crack followed by an earth rumble as five thousand tonnes of limestone collapsed along fifty yards of quarry face causing a vibration at the office window, and sudden twilight as dust shut out the view of lake, field and sky.

  8

  For half an hour now the afternoon sun had dipped behind the black mass of cloud, making the requiem of daffodils seem unnaturally livid under greening beech. High above the apple blossom, the air was tense with the screech and swoop of swallows. Are they early or late? Arriving the day I leave. Where from? Spain? Africa? My favourite sound long ago and now. Is it mating or eating, or the joy of coming back? Same families coming since the house was built. Two hundred summers of swall
ows. More? Thousands of them on the outhouses, on the stone ridge-tiles of the yard, on barns, garden walls, guttering. Every September the place alive with them before leaving . . . waving to them as a child from Mother’s bedroom . . . Goodbye swallows, lucky swallows, goodbye, goodbye . . . see you next summer. After tomorrow there’s no returning . . . ever; goodbye, goodbye.

  There was an alarm clock on a bedside table alongside a vase of bluebells, and a book of William Carleton’s, Traits and Humours of the Irish Peasantry. The story ‘Wild Goose Lodge’ she had read last night, a story based on fact and so disturbing she lay awake for hours trying to exorcise it from her mind.

  She could hear Mercy clattering below at the stove, wetting and sugaring a gallon of golden-brown tea, buttering and jamming wedges of soda bread, peeling the brown hard-boiled eggs for men in the bog. She’ll be up soon to call me. Do I tell her I’m going? Of course. When? How? On our way to the bog? On the way back? Tonight? She might lie awake then and make everything awkward. Send her home for a few days? Yes . . . that’s it. She’d jump at that. Not sure what I’ll say till I say it. When she comes in now she’ll see and know I haven’t been resting. She’ll wonder what I’ve been doing for two hours.

  She prised off her shoes and lay on the bed coverlet, her heart a stumbling counterpoint to the tick of the alarm as she tried not to think of the coming night, the dawn to follow, the train and boat journey. Once again during the last two hours she had counted her money: twenty-two pounds and twelve shillings, enough to take her to America and back twice; two cases, one full of gold. The gold was never far from her mind. When talking with Ward the words used were ‘take’ or ‘get’; when I ‘take’, when we ‘get’ the gold. In fact, she knew the word was ‘steal’. When I steal, when I rob, with stealth, with cunning, I then become a thief, a robber, a guilty person, deserving of condemnation in a Court of Law, deserving only jail, humiliation, punishment. Do I understand what I am risking tonight? Am I in my right mind, or just stupid?

  Why risk everything with one move? A punishment for Billy Winters for the beatings and humiliations overheard long ago, for using me as a dairymaid-cum-housekeeper, for the drunken gropings, for the shameful suggestions. Do I hate him enough to take such a risk. Do I hate him at all? Sometimes. And do I love Liam Ward? I’m besotted. Yes, but do I love? Now that the hour of stealing was close, it was a lot more frightening than when planned three weeks before.

  She could be arrested on arrival in Belfast, or boarding the Glasgow or Liverpool boat. The more she thought about this, the more she realised that possession of the gold would mean a kind of continuous terror about the degradation of being caught and imprisoned. ‘Take it,’ Ward had said, ‘we’ll bury it and you stay on, brazen it out.’ Not possible. The Constabulary asking questions. Billy’s eyes boring into her growing unease. He might not suspect at first, but in time her guilt would grow with his suspicion. In any case, she couldn’t act. On stage once at school she had almost fainted when she had to utter two lines, as a messenger in The Merchant of Venice.

  There was a knock at the door. Mercy Boyle came into the room and placed a cup of steaming tea on the bedside table. Beth swung her legs to the floor and remained sitting on the side of the bed.

  ‘You didn’t pull the curtains, Miss?’

  ‘It was too beautiful outside.’

  Clear-eyed, Mercy looked into Beth’s glazed eyes:

  ‘Did you sleep itself?’

  ‘I dozed a little, I think.’

  ‘You still look wore out.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  As Mercy moved to the window and looked out, a small gust loosened thousands of beech husks into a brown flurry soundlessly tumbling against slates, windows and walls and on downwards into the maze of wistaria running the length of the house:

  ‘Oh God! Look Miss, could anything be nicer?’

  Beth looked out.

  ‘It’s like heaven,’ Mercy added.

  Both women stared at the fawn snow against beech green and the navy of sky till Beth asked:

  ‘Where then is hell?’

  ‘The pong of porter and dirty socks in Mickey Dolphin’s room. God knows when that cratur last washed himself . . . Men are filthy, dirty devils.’

  Mercy turned and stared into Beth’s smiling face:

  ‘All’s ready below Miss, you don’t have to come.’

  ‘I want to.’

  Mercy picked up Carleton. Beth could see her spelling the title, pronouncing the words in her head:

  ‘Traits?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Beth said: ‘Traits and Humours of the Irish Peasantry’.

  ‘Peasantry! I’d be one of those!’

  ‘It means a countryperson.’

  ‘And traits,’ Mercy persisted, ‘is that like a picnic, an outing?’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ Beth said. ‘You could say hospitality is our best-known trait, laziness our worst.’

  ‘Aye, or spite, or gettin’ mad-drunk.’

  ‘Or superstition.’

  ‘What’s the plain word for that, Miss?’

  ‘Pishogues,’ Beth said.

  ‘I’m sick of them.’ Half the girls of the country were looking down wells last week to see the face of the man they’d marry . . . Eejits!’

  ‘Did you do that, Mercy?’

  ‘There was worse torture in our house . . . every May Eve up to this our old one made me and the sisters wash our hands and faces in our own pish, to scare off the fairies; true as God, Miss. In the end we ganged up agin her and said, “to hell with the fairies”. Even so, she lies awake in fright on the every May Eve.’

  Mercy flicked over some pages of Carleton:

  ‘Is these good yarns?’

  ‘I’ve only read one: “Wild Goose Lodge”.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Teedjus?’

  ‘No, frightening.’

  ‘God, I’d love that; we’ll read that together some night.’

  Beth glanced at the time on the alarm clock. Seeing her do this Mercy said:

  ‘Aye . . . we should shape to go, Miss.’ In the kitchen they divided evenly the carrying of cans, crockery and baskets, crossed the upper yard and went through an entry leading to the lower yard. Beyond an arch on their left, in an outhouse, they could see Albert through the fine wire mesh of a half-door. He was upside-down, a potato in his mouth to allow clearance of the blood dripping into a large earthenware crock on the stone floor. Tomorrow Blinky Blessing would come back to gut and dismember for salting or smoking. Both girls avoided looking at the slaughtered pig. It was Mercy who spoke first:

  ‘You’d wonder sometimes,’ she said, ‘about killin’ craturs at all.’

  ‘Small wonder,’ Beth said, ‘we seem good at it.’

  ‘Poor Albert. When he saw Blinky and our three men, he started to screech. I kep telling him lies, kep saying “it’s all right, Albert, it’s all right.” Then Blinky did the business.’ She paused and muttered:

  ‘A bad dog, that fella.’

  ‘There’s no harm in him,’ Beth said.

  ‘And less good . . . He asked me for a porringer in the yard . . . I didn’t know what he wanted it for so I got it. Then he cut Albert’s throat, filled the porringer with blood and drank it down hot. I was fair sick, I can tell you, but I wouldn’t plaze him to show it. And all the silly spakes out of him: “that beats Arthur Guinness” and “that’s the boy id grow hairs on your Mickey” and all our men laughing and telling him he was “a holy terror and a fright to the world” . . . He’s a right sickener. Then when Albert was hung up, and our men gone, he said “How’s about a belt of a coort, Mercy.” Then he angled me into a corner and began to push agin me. I pushed him off very wicked and told him all he’d get from me was a thick ear. Then he blocked the door, put his hand in his pocket and started in to jiggle and ogle so I said: “Is that what you be at every night above when you’re saying the Rosary with Blind Wishie and Mammywee!” Didn’t shame
him a bit! He just went on jigglin’, so I lifted the crock of blood.” If you don’t quit that carry-on,” I said, “I’ll smash this over your head”; I meant it. That shifted him. I’ll not tell you the names he called after me . . . A bad dog that fella, and my father says bad dogs should be put down.’

  ‘You’d wonder sometimes,’ Beth said, ‘about killin’ craturs at all.’

  It took ten seconds for her irony to register. Then they were both laughing.

  To get to the bog-pass from the yards they had to go through the low end of the haggard, through a gap into the rushes of the gut bottom, then down into poorish pasture of thorn and rabbit warren into a wilderness of alder scrub, birch and cut-over bog: the type of landscape comprising the bulk of Ward’s thirty acres at Brackagh. The pass now began to slope down through a flame of whins. Faraway they could hear the pulse of a corncrake. Beyond the birch and alder, mirrored in pools about a quarter of a mile away, they could see the black figures of three men, one wheeling a barrow to spread out turf, another catching and loading a second barrow; the third man, Jim Ruttledge most likely, out of sight on the floor of the bog, cutting and throwing sods with one flowing movement, a turf sod in mid-air every five seconds or so.

  The bog-pass now dwindled down to a narrow track merging into the bog and established year after year by the traffic of cart-wheels, barrows and slipes. Now on the flat they could no longer see down to the turf bench where the men were working and were forced to go singly to avoid stumbling on tussocks of bluegrass and heather. Every now and then they had to bend to avoid briars, low-growing alder and sally. Yellow catkins powdered their hair and dresses. When they stooped to avoid branches, the smell of bog rosemary filled their heads, its orangey bloom vivid as the creamy florets of emerging meadowsweet. The sun had reappeared. It was hot for early May, and the baskets and cans which had seemed light in the yard now dragged at their arms. The buttermilk was in a heavy metal can and Beth offered to swop. Mercy said no and suggested sitting a minute; Beth agreed. At a small clearing with tree stumps they put down the cans and baskets and sat leaning back against the stumps.

  Beth sat looking down on Mercy stretched out and wondered would this perhaps be a good time to broach her leavetaking, and thought: no . . . it’s too sunny; I’ll wait till we’re on our way back to the house. She was about to close her eyes against the brightness when she saw something move in the bracken ten yards away. A second later a half-grown fox cub emerged, a raffish cunning snout that almost seemed to be smiling. Two other cubs joined it. They stared a while at the girls, decided there was no danger, and began to frisk and mock-fight: pranking, tumbling and racing in circles. Beth watched fascinated. Very slowly, she moved her hand towards Mercy’s shoulder, squeezing it gently. Mercy opened her eyes, stared across the clearing and whispered: