Bring Larks and Heroes (18 page)

‘Just as dead either way. I want you to help me, Halloran.'

Now it's time to go, Halloran thought. He could actually feel his flanks itching as if to turn away.

‘Even if it wasn't mad,' he said, ‘I still couldn't help you.'

‘Your oath?'

‘Yes.'

‘But remember how they gave us that oath?' Byrne asked suddenly, sounding rational enough to terrify anyone who knew him of old. ‘The oath rushed through by a sergeant and then they lock you in the gunner's mess, just before they go ashore to get drunk on the bounty of the free recruits. What sort of oath is that?'

‘I can tell who's been talking to you,' Halloran told him.

‘I have a vision,' said Hearn, his irony so tight-reined that you hardly recognized it for irony at all, ‘of God hanging on every gasp of that groggy sergeant's breath, the unknown God standing by to be bound by what a sergeant says in between drinks on the deck of a little ship in Wexford Bay.'

‘Take no notice, Terry Byrne,' advised Halloran. ‘He's after your soul.'

But some distance away, a bough creaked and fell
down the tall night, affirming by its purposelessness the large purpose that lies over all things.

‘I'm within a spit of thirty,' Byrne said, ‘and I have to get started on my atoning.'

‘You silly bugger!'

‘There's something to atone for, surely,' Hearn claimed. ‘In the three of us. You, for example, stood in line at the Crescent.'

‘I have an oath to stand in line.'

Hearn waited, to let the words set in the cold air.

‘You have an oath,' he said at last. ‘Be honest now. You didn't stand in line because of your oath.'

Halloran wanted to lie of course, but how useless it was in the face of the large purpose.

‘I'm thinking of my oath now.'

‘Then let's pretend your oath might be one God takes an interest in.'

Hearn
did
pretend it. Someone had schooled him in the infamy of kings and parliaments. He spoke of Henry Tudor, who took an oath to King Richard and broke it to return and put a sword into Richard's bowels and pick the crown up out of a bramble bush. How good were the oaths men then made to Henry?

Collecting his breath, he went on to create a riotous picture of oath-taking and -breaking out of the odd-ends of history – King James and his perfidious in-law, the coming of the Germans, the arrogance of the Crown towards the oaths men made
to join honourable societies and strive for honourable ends.

‘A stew of bad faith,' he said finally, ‘and in the middle of it, Corporal Phelim Halloran still believes himself bound.'

While Hearn was being thus fluent with oaths as a species, Halloran reproached himself for being badly prepared to stand by his. Since the day he had met Hearn for the first time, he had known that he would one day need to have ideas on the matter, something more than an emotion of perverse loyalty. He had tried so strenuously to be safely and rationally bound by his oath's reality as a man is bound by the reality of the earth on which he stands.

As things were, he could no nothing but argue meanly.

‘Terry Byrne, do you really want to be strangled up high bogging yourself in front of multitudes? I don't believe it.'

Byrne said nothing. Hearn kept a long damning silence.

‘Come on, Terry, you get his legs and I'll get his arms and we'll cart him back to the town with us.'

‘Not me,' Byrne said. ‘I know he's right.'

‘You're oak right through, aren't you, Terry? Head, heart, belly of oak. A hero of your race.'

‘I know he's right. That's all.'

Now the prophet was beginning to be in need of
his rest. His wheezy breath could be heard, biding their argument.

‘Halloran,' he said when he was ready, ‘say you sell your pig to a man for five bags of barley, which he'll pay you at harvest. Harvest comes and he doesn't pay. Can you take back your pig?'

It would be an indignity to answer. Halloran didn't.

‘Well, can you?' eager Terry Byrne asked for the winded seer.

‘My mind keeps choking on this stores business,' said Halloran.

Byrne called, ‘Back to the pig!'

‘Damn the pig!'

‘You give your oath to a king, but the king is unjust to you,' Hearn said. ‘Can you take your oath back?'

‘No.'

‘Even though the king swore at his crowning to rule with justice?'

‘That's his affair.'

‘You know that the king,
your
king, swore to keep faith even with us?'

‘I had a notion.'

‘This is all the French and Americans have said. If you can take your pig back from an unjust man, you can take your oath back from an unjust king. Now, do you think the French and Americans are all damned for this opinion?'

There was no doubt that they were not all damned. On the other hand, Halloran felt safe in that getting stores was the final impossibility.

‘And you're going to work through Byrne,' he said. ‘He can't be trusted. You're a fool.'

Byrne coughed. His better side was that he couldn't bear grudges and that deep-dyed insults embarrassed him. When seen against Halloran as Halloran was at that moment, he seemed a man of considerable dignity.

‘We're all leaky boats,' Hearn said. ‘In any case, Terry doesn't worry you. Because you're what is known as a man of faith. That means that you know peace with your Ann isn't had by luck. It's earned. It's earned by Halloran joining himself to some divine purpose. A divine purpose uses yourself, Byrne and me with equal ease. Now there
is
a purpose working in us. Against all odds, it has brought the three of us together here in the dark.'

Halloran raised his arms and stiffened them to show his freedom.

‘No damned purpose has its hands on me. If it has, it can get them off again.'

For a second time, Hearn laughed.

‘I don't think it hears you,' he said.

And they held, the three of them, a listening silence to see if Hearn were right. Halloran wanted to go. The ring of cold around his heart and the nag of events had him squirming.

‘I can't promise I won't give you up,' he told Hearn. ‘Not for a price either, I'd like to do it for nothing.'

‘Very well,' Hearn said. ‘You could tell them I intend taking perhaps three hundred pounds of beef and two hundred and eighty of flour . . .'

‘I don't want to hear any of that.'

‘Eighty-four gallons of rice, eighty-four of pease. Four firkins of cheese.'

Halloran insisted, ‘I'll tell them, don't you worry. I'll tell them.'

‘He will,' Byrne said, having become sober and responsible to the point of provocation.

‘I have means to get inside the warehouse,' Hearn admitted, ‘and I know the place on the inside, having worked there.'

‘Not wise, Mr Hearn,' Terry kept counselling. ‘Not wise.'

But the man had not finished burdening Halloran yet.

‘Taking the food by night, I'll load it into a cutter and take it to a place within the bay where a boat from the whaler can take it and myself on.'

‘You'd sink your cutter for one thing,' Halloran said like a true Marine. Which he wasn't.

‘It
would
be well-laden.'

‘It would be twenty fathoms well-laden, that's how well-laden.'

‘It can be done.'

‘I'm sure. You've got a key, you said.'

Somebody's joints cracked knowingly. Hearn's or Terry's.

‘You could say we had,' said Hearn.

‘I don't want to know what I can say. Have you got a key?'

‘We can get one. We know a man who has one,' said Byrne.

‘There was a time when Byrne and myself considered taking a cutter and stores and sailing to the East Indies. Only a week ago we were thinking of it.'

‘Why not?' Halloran said. He sounded feverish with sarcasm.

‘On the other hand,' Hearn told him, ‘it can easily be done, this whole thing. I promise you that much.'

‘Whether it's easy has nothing to do with it.'

‘I see.'

‘I'll be back in the morning. Perhaps with an armed guard.'

‘You'll find me in this same place.'

‘You're sure of yourself, aren't you?'

‘I'm sure of the purpose working in us.'

‘Damn you.'

They said goodnight. Halloran walked away, and lost his patience with the wind palpable in his eye-sockets and in the back of his jaws as a pain. He heard Hearn speak but pretended not to, having heard enough already.

‘Hoy, Phelim,' called Byrne like a friend, and shamed him into turning.

‘Yes?'

He even walked back part of the way.

‘Everything has worked together in a way that will shock you,' Hearn said. ‘People who tell you that God is with them are an abomination. But it's very likely that the true God is with us.'

‘If that's so, why isn't there a sign?'

‘It would only fit in with the pattern if there were. I wouldn't be the man to say an adulterous generation required a sign.'

‘You wouldn't want to be the man,' Halloran said, hated his own bluster and turned back into the wind. He felt very like a man who has signed an august contract, and the keeping of it is utterly beyond him.

21

Some optimism of the blood had kept Ann awake half the night. In the small hours, she felt strong and became feverish with expectations of the future. She woke before dawn in a very still morning of tonic cold. No sound came from indoors where Mr and Mrs Blythe would not rise, each from his own unbridal bed, till seven or later. The roof creaked with soft and sudden sleeping noises this morning, noises quite unbidden, quite unintended. She lay and enjoyed the sting of her morning strength untouched in her belly and shoulders and legs. To live on, she thought, it is needed only for a person to keep within her daily strength. It was one of those simple pre-dawn truths which by eight o'clock become not so much untrue as wholly beside the point.

Once she had decided to be canny with strength, she rose to squander some. She took her chamber-pot
with its baize cover and walked slowly out of doors. The wet trees had just stopped shivering and looked a little like exiles themselves. The earth was wet and grey and was, surprisingly, tamed. Down her throat went the smooth pink of cock-crow air in mouthfuls. The sleek cold rushed up her nose, nettled her brain until it threatened to crack into chilblains along the bottom. Of course, she found herself capable of believing that she would walk out one morning mistress of her own home. She would see sleeping cattle and listen to the sound of stirring house and husband.

Fifty yards into the morning, however, and already she wished she had slept more. The presentiments of a sweet destiny had turned tight and indigestive at the back of the throat and belly. She went on some way, emptied the pot, seeing herself for what she was, a skinny girl tipping out her slops. Coming back to the kitchen, she stopped at a cassia tree. It had hard winter pods that had taken her interest. She put down the pot and picked a pod and began to strip its shell. There was a man in a military coat lying in the grass only four yards or so away. Nearly flat out, he had his sideways eyes on her and breathed heavily.

‘Don't call out!' he said to her. ‘It's Terry Byrne, but please don't call out!' And then, as if it went to prove his good faith, ‘I rushed down here fast as I could soon as they changed the guard.'

Terry Byrne it was, even though all the saggy skin
on the earthward side of his face made him look uneven and dangerous.

‘What is it, Terry?'

‘It's about Halloran. It's about Halloran's safety.'

‘Is it?'

‘If you just step into the woods about a hundred yards to the other side of that hut up there, there's a feller wants to talk to you about it.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Ann, it's a man in his forties.'

‘I see. Tell him to come down here.'

‘He can't.'

‘Why?'

Byrne sighed, lifting his head straight to do it.

‘Have you ever heard of Robert Hearn?'

She squinted or even winced.

‘He was here once – six weeks ago. Doing paper-work for Mr Blythe.'

‘Halloran's been helping him.'

‘I don't believe that.'

‘Just this week. Before God . . .'

The urgency of the matter had him on his knees.

‘Lie down, Terry!' she told him.

He flattened himself back into the grass.

‘I'll go straight on home from here, you won't see me again today,' he said, ‘but you've got to talk to this feller.'

‘Is it like the Crescent?' she asked him savagely.
‘Are you lining me up for some sort of steel in the belly?'

She couldn't see his eyes amongst the yellow spikes of grass. He must have been very cold there, hiding his face against the lean earth.

‘No,' he said.

‘Go home now,' she told him as tenderly as she could afford.

But they couldn't move off together, and she had to leave him behind her in the grass, his plan being that he'd battle upright after perhaps five minutes, as if he'd been felled hours before and in that very spot by drink or sickness.

So she felt vulnerable at the back and approached the woods sideways, with pauses, having no workable idea of how much was a hundred yards.

‘You'll have to find me,' she muttered, and stepped into the forest, all of whose tongues were furred with frost soon to melt to a dribbling olive.

‘Hallo,' she said conversationally. She walked circumspectly, not wanting to find him with a start. Once or twice she looked over her shoulder. What she expected to see was that she had come maze-deep into the trees. Yet both times the open spaces showed luminously only a short dash behind her.

‘Hallo!' she said again.

‘Here,' the man said.

She had not seen him stepping out of any shadow.
He was revealed whole to her in a long cowled smock made of seal-skin. He tried to produce a smile of buoyant leniency, of the type that priests use who pretend they know of the special agonies of being a woman. It was from the plentiful grey coils of his hair, bard's, scholar's hair, avuncular, that she took most of her hope.

‘Do you remember me?' he asked. ‘I did some work once at Mr Blythe's.'

‘Everybody expects you to be dead.'

‘I hope I haven't disappointed you.'

He grinned. He couldn't deal easily with women. Mrs Hearn, whoever she was, must have felt she was living with a monument.

‘I think you have,' she told him. ‘What's this about Halloran?'

‘You know that strong box the Blythes have? It's usually in the front parlour. It's iron, it has brass bands across its top and leather-work on the front.'

‘I can't remember it.'

‘Well,' he said. ‘Anyhow, its twin is in the warehouse. The same key opens both of them, the one you must have seen and the one in the store.'

‘I wouldn't know.'

‘It's the truth. I wouldn't mislead you. I need an imprint of the key.'

‘Not from me,' she said. ‘How much do you need it?'

‘Halloran and myself want something out of that box. We have reasons.'

Though, across the valley in the hutments, Halloran had not been told of them yet. For Halloran needed to believe that the plan had dropped whole and mandatory from heaven, that it was woven all of a piece. He could not be permitted to see the thing customarily put together out of oddments.

‘Halloran didn't tell me.'

‘You don't see him often. In any case, he wants to save you anguish.'

A sudden wind alighted in the tree-tops and shook beads of frost all over Hearn's unaware shoulders.

‘You have to understand this,' he said, leniency going. ‘We have an enterprise on hand. There's no danger. We are able to get inside the store and out without leaving a trace. With the key to the strong-box, all will be by stealth. Again, not a sign left behind us. The other course, not having a key and breaking the lock, that
is
dangerous. I told Terry Byrne to say that I wanted to speak of Halloran's safety. It is just that. Halloran's safety.'

He coughed.

‘Let me show you how to take an imprint in soap.'

‘Is Terry Byrne in the
enterprise
too?'

‘He's my messenger.'

‘Sweet heaven!' she laughed.

‘Terry doesn't know about the strong-box. No one does, except the two of us. Certainly not Byrne. Certainly not Halloran. Though for different reasons.'

Again she laughed. ‘Byrne,' she said.

‘Why laugh?' he asked her. ‘We are all leaky boats. But this is a matter of conscience with Halloran and Byrne and myself alone. A matter of conscience and atonement. You must have the imprint this evening if a key is to be made in time.'

She stood in silence and at her ease for some seconds. Rods of light shone in the wet tree-tops, saying, ‘Nearly half-past six.'

‘You made a mistake telling me, Mr Hearn. You don't have me. After I see Halloran, you won't have him either.'

He began to smile at her, not with an assumed smile as before. It was so evenly triumphant and so long that Ann became afraid, worse than when she had first entered the forest.

‘If you wanted to put him on the rack,' he explained, ‘or pull him into three pieces, if that's your purpose, then of course you'll tell him all about what I've asked. But before you
do
tell him everything, say that you've seen me. Pretend you got a glimpse of me by accident, but that you're sure it was the notorious Hearn. Ask him what you should do. Judge by his answer whether you should give me what I'm after. But, as I say, don't tell him that I asked you for it. He'd rather break the
lid off the thing than have you as a part to the plan. That is, he'd rather be caught.'

He spoke to her quickly, dominantly, presuming that she had nothing cogent to put into the dialogue.

‘Suppose that you tell him how I've asked you for the imprint. What does he do then? If he takes no more part with us, he has already conspired. He's already guilty, he's in as much danger as we are. What does he do then? Does he go to those in power and kill Byrne and myself? Of course not. Does he merely keep his silence, having stood out of an enterprise of conscience and atonement? And does he let the others be caught for lack of him? Does that sound like him?'

She said, ‘I don't know. We seem to be talking about a different man.'

But he cleared this idea away with the heel of his hand.

‘He'll stay with the enterprise, you know he will. How much of the lover's talk between the two of you has been made up of Ewers and Quinn and the slaughter at the Crescent?'

She wouldn't say.

‘Begin by telling him you've had a glimpse of me,' he said again, ‘that you were sure it was me. And then judge.'

And he went through his whole argument again, more gradually, schooling her in the alternatives and saying in the end that there was no choice for her.

She said, ‘There's always a choice.'

‘If there is, how did you end in this town?' he asked her, off-handedly spiteful, like the very sunlight which put a false youth on his briary hair. ‘Let me tell you how an imprint is taken.'