Pay the Devil (v5) (8 page)

Clay picked up one of the banknotes and stared at it reflectively. “Very artistic,” he said. “But unfortunately I’ve seen what an industrial nation can do in time of war to another which isn’t. You’ll never win. England has all the big guns.”

“Is it afraid ye are?” Marteen interrupted.

Kevin rounded on his brother fiercely. “The Colonel is no coward. You of all people have seen sufficient proof of that.” He turned back to Clay. “Where
do
you stand in this, Colonel? We’ve told you too much for comfort this night.”

“I’ll not betray you, my word on that,” Clay said. “I can’t pretend to any liking for Sir George Hamilton or Marley or the rest of the breed I met at Drumore House, but I won’t take sides. I’ve had enough trouble during the past four years to last any one man a lifetime.”

Shaun Rogan extended his right hand. “That’s good enough for me, Colonel.”

They shook hands and Clay nodded to the others and followed Kevin Rogan, who escorted him back outside. As he strapped his saddlebags into place and swung up into the saddle, Kevin said quietly, “Whatever my father may say, no man can stay neutral forever, Colonel. There’ll come a time when you have to choose sides, and if you don’t want to make that kind of decision, you’d be better a thousand miles from Drumore.” He went back into the house and closed the door before Clay could reply.

As he followed the path toward the head of the valley, many things passed through Clay’s mind. The filthy hovels owned by Sir George Hamilton in Drumore, the boy dying of consumption on his pallet against a wall streaming with water. And then there was Eithne Fallon. What would have been her fate if he hadn’t brought Captain Swing to life for a few hours?

He was beginning to feel tired and his eyes were sore from lack of sleep and too much straining into the gloom. He seemed to see in the darkness an immense five-dollar bill, and flames moved in from the edges devouring the words IRISH REPUBLIC and then they blossomed into great streamers that flickered toward the sky as Claremont burned.

Pegeen scrambled over the rim of the valley and Clay shook his head to bring himself back to his senses and waved a hand to Dennis Rogan, invisible in the trees. As he thundered along the track at full gallop, he knew, with a sinking heart, that already he was having to choose sides, despite himself.

7

The day was exhilarating and the blue sky dipped away to the horizon, but as Clay rode out of the courtyard and took the path which led up through the trees, his face was grave and somber.

Earlier that morning, he had gone down to the village to visit the boy with consumption and had arrived to find Father Costello administering the last rites. Despite everything Clay had done to make the child’s last moments on earth easier, he had hung on to life tenaciously for another hour and his ending had not been pleasant to see.

The moor was purple with heather and Clay reined in beside a black tarn where bog-lilies floated and the wind whispered through dry whins. A plover cried plaintively as it lifted across the lower slopes of the hill, and then there was silence, and a strange sadness fell upon him at the thought of the young life ended before it had really begun.

He touched spurs lightly to Pegeen, taking her away from that quiet place and galloped toward the sea. The haze of the fall was over the land and the wind that moved in from the Atlantic to meet him was warm. He dismounted, and leaving Pegeen to crop the long grass, sat by the edge of the cliffs and stared out to sea. It was there that Joanna Hamilton found him half an hour later.

She slid from the saddle before he could rise and moved toward him, her face solemn. “I called at Claremont and Joshua told me about the boy. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Don’t be. I’ve seen so much of death on the grand scale during the past four years that another one more or less doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference.”

“But this one was so unnecessary,” she said fiercely. “We both know that. If these people were given decent homes to live in instead of being treated like animals, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.”

“I wouldn’t advise you to keep to that line of argument,” he said, “unless you want me to visit your uncle for the express purpose of putting a bullet through him. That’s exactly how I felt when I stood by that child’s bed.”

There was a slight pause and she made an obvious effort to change the subject. “Did you hear what happened in Kileen last night?”

Clay shook his head and said calmly, “No, should I have?”

“The whole of Drumore is buzzing with it. Hugh Marley of Kileen House was waylaid on his way home from our reception last night and flogged in the main street of Kileen with most of his tenants looking on.”

She filled in the details with remarkable accuracy, and when she had finished, Clay smiled. “I can’t say my heart bleeds for him. From what I heard last night, he deserves everything he got.”

“That seems to be the general opinion,” she said. “The mysterious Captain Swing has become a hero overnight.”

“Have you any idea who he might be?”

She shook her head. “I had thought of Kevin Rogan, but it could be anyone.”

“And what does your uncle think about all this?”

“He’s sent a letter by special messenger to Galway asking for the cavalry to turn out, but they’ve got better ways of spending their time than scouring the country looking for one man, especially with the country in the state it is.”

“It all seems so melodramatic,” Clay said. “What could he ever hope to achieve on his own, this Captain Swing of yours? To ride masked through the countryside by night and waving a pistol is all very fine, but how much can it help the present situation?”

She flushed and there was an edge of anger in her voice. “He’s already brought hope back to people who’d forgotten the meaning of the word. For that, at least, we should be grateful to him. Surely you can see that?”

“I’ll give you the same sort of answer I gave Shaun Rogan last night,” Clay replied. “Having just spent four years at close quarters with melodrama on the grand scale, you’ll appreciate that lost causes now have little appeal for me.”

She looked surprised. “How did you come to meet Shaun Rogan?”

He told her what had happened, and when he had finished, she bit her lip in vexation. “I knew nothing of this trouble at Cohan’s last night. Now things will be even worse between my uncle and the Rogans. What did you think of them?”

Clay shrugged. “I liked them. The boys are a trifle wild, but they’ll turn into fine men if they live that long.”

“Meaning you think they’ll all come to a bad end?” she asked.

“A rope’s end,” Clay told her, “unless they change their ways and abandon this wild scheme of taking part in a rebellion against England. It’s doomed to failure.”

“But they’ve got right on their side,” she insisted.

“Might is right,” he said. “The English invented that saying, and have spent a great deal of time and effort proving it in practice.”

For a little while, she sat with a slight frown on her face, and then she said slowly, “I want to understand you, Clay, but I know so little about you. Why did you really come to Drumore?”

“I wanted to see Claremont. It was as simple as that.”

“But what’s left of it is of no great value,” she persisted. “If it was money you were hoping for, you’ve had a wasted journey. Even to my uncle it isn’t worth a great deal.”

He lay back in the grass, hands locked behind his head. “Money is the least of my worries. My father bought ships and made a fortune running the Yankee blockade from Nassau to Atlanta. He was killed just before the end of the war. He left me a million pounds sterling on deposit in the Bank of England.”

She gasped. “I feel like a pauper by comparison,” she said, with a light laugh. “He must have been a remarkable man.”

“Some men swore he had the Devil in him,” Clay said. “He was the most dangerous man I’ve ever known. My mother was a gentle, lovely creature, the only person who could ever control him. She was never very strong. She died when I was ten.”

For a moment, he brooded quietly, alone with the past. “After that, he sold the plantation and we moved away. Things had been going from bad to worse for some time. He wasn’t a notable success as a cotton planter. We never stayed anywhere for long. He was a natural gambler, and for several years he worked the Mississippi riverboats, earning a living at it. Later, he went to Virginia City and opened a saloon.”

“And what did you do?” Joanna asked.

“Hung on to his coattails,” Clay told her. “I had a remarkable education, believe me. I first saw him shoot a man dead when I was twelve. After that, we never looked back, but all good things have to come to an end. He decided it was time I had some formal schooling, and I went back East to live with my mother’s brother in New York. When I was eighteen, my father discovered my interest in medicine and sent me to London and Paris to complete my studies. He never did anything by halves.”

“And then came the war?”

“Not quite. He sold out in Virginia City and returned to Georgia, bought a great plantation and tried to live like a gentleman again. It was too late, of course. He’d been living by the twin senses of action and passion for too long. But passion is no substitute for love. Love grows, passion consumes. He was mixed up in one damned scandal after another. Other men’s wives—the usual things. The war came just in time to save him from drinking himself into the ground.”

“And yet he didn’t join the army?”

Clay nodded. “No, he left that to fools like me, as he said on the day I left to join my regiment.”

“You’d been living with him then?”

“For two years after I got back from Paris,” Clay told her.

“Didn’t your father agree with the South’s reasons for going to war?” she said.

Clay shook his head. “It wasn’t that—he knew we couldn’t win, that’s all”

“Then why did
you
fight?” she asked simply.

He frowned. “I don’t really know. There were so many reasons. Because I was born in Georgia. Because my friends and neighbors were going to war. Isn’t that really the only reason any man ever fights?”

“And so you rode off to your lost cause after all.”

“In the beginning, it was anything but that,” he said. “It was gallant men and horses, bugles faintly on the wind—all the mystique of soldiering. In the early days, it wasn’t too far to Richmond, pretty women in ball gowns and handsome men in magnificent uniforms.”

“And afterward?” she demanded.

He smiled grimly. “Afterward, it was the Yankee blockade and slow starvation. I thought we were going to pull it off in July ’64, when Jubal Early erupted from the Shenandoah Valley and frightened ’em to death in Washington, but it was too late. I can’t begin to describe the kind of hell those last nine months were.”

“One thing still puzzles me,” she said. “You started out as an army surgeon and ended as commander of a brigade of cavalry. How did that happen?”

“The fortunes of war,” he replied. “In the summer of ’63, I was on detachment with General Morgan when he made his famous raid into Kentucky, Indiana and Idaho. We were captured and the Yankees, not taking kindly to raiders, refused to treat us as prisoners of war. I was included with the other officers, surgeon or not. We were all imprisoned in the Illinois State Penitentiary.”

“But that was infamous,” she said indignantly. “You were only obeying orders.”

“It didn’t really matter, we’d no intention of staying.” He chuckled deeply in his throat. “We stole table knives from the dining hall, dug through two feet of concrete floor and tunnelled under the prison yard to the outer wall. Naturally, we left the governor a polite note telling him how much we’d appreciated his hospitality.”

“Did you have much trouble in reaching the Confederate lines?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not really—one of the few advantages of a civil war. It’s so difficult to know your enemy when he’s out of uniform. When I rejoined the army, I asked to become an active cavalry officer. The Yankees had me on their list and obviously would not treat me as a noncombatant in the future, so I didn’t really have much choice.”

“It seems you had a talent for it,” she said, with a slight smile.

“Mostly it consisted of trying to stay alive. And of taking only calculated risks. Not like Morgan. He took the pitcher to the well once too often and raided into Tennessee. His command was cut to ribbons at a place called Granville. They caught him hiding behind some vines in a garden and shot him through the heart.”

He wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes, trying to pierce the limitless depths of the sky, as he thought of Morgan and his father, so much alike in their attitude to life. She sat quietly beside him and said nothing.

She stared out to sea, immersed in her own thoughts. He gazed at her dispassionately and it was as if he had never really seen her before. How could he possibly have thought her not beautiful? She was lovely, with the wind bringing the stain of roses to her cheeks, and the dark deeps of her eyes were places a man might drown in willingly.

She turned and discovered him looking at her, flushed and said hurriedly, “And what do you intend to do when you leave Drumore?”

He shrugged. “There’s no rush, I want to get the stink of war out of my nostrils. I came here to find a little peace, but already forces beyond my control are pulling me in several directions. Whatever happens, I’ll never return to Georgia. I’ve been considering California. Now there’s a fine country for you.”

He closed his eyes and she said slowly, “Sometimes we have to stand and meet the problem that faces us here and now, Clay. No man is an island. Isn’t that what a poet once said? I think in a way, that your father tried to live amongst other people and yet apart from them, and found in the end that it wouldn’t work.”

He sighed. It was only to be expected that she would think that way, that the problems of these people would be her problems. She was young and she was lovely and had the kind heart. Somewhere a lark sang high in the sky, but it only touched the edge of his consciousness. Her voice moved on and then began to rise and fall and finally became the timeless, sad sough of the sea.

He awakened suddenly. Above him, clouds turned and wheeled across the sky and hinted at a break in the weather. She had disappeared. For a moment, a strange irrational panic caused him to rush to the edge of the cliff and then he saw her down on the beach at the water’s edge. A crazily tilted path fell away beneath him and he began a careful descent.

She was standing knee-deep in the sea, and held the skirt of her riding habit bunched in one hand while she splashed in the water with the other like a small child. His boots grated upon the shingle and she turned at once and waded toward him.

“You deserted me,” he said. “I awakened to find you gone, like some enchanted princess in a fairy tale.”

“After you fell asleep, I came down to the beach. The water looked so inviting I couldn’t resist it,” she said.

Her boots and stockings stood on a boulder at the foot of the path. She started toward them and gave a slight exclamation as she stepped on a jagged stone. Clay swung her up into his arms without a word and carried her quickly across the shingle.

When he reached the boulder, he stood for a moment holding her, gazing down into her eyes, her warmth and softness quickening the blood in his veins, and after a while, she turned her face into his chest.

He set her down and said awkwardly, “I’ll go back and see to the horses. Can you manage the path on your own?”

She nodded, averting her eyes. “I’ll only be five minutes.”

When he reached the top of the path, his hands were still trembling. He lit a cheroot with some difficulty because of the wind, and then collected both horses and led them back toward the cliff top. As he did so, she appeared over the edge.

She moved through the long, dry grass and the sun was behind her. He crinkled his eyes and her image blurred at the edges until, when she paused for a moment and looked out to sea again, she might have been a painting by one of the great masters. She looked unreal and ethereal and completely and utterly beautiful.

He dropped the reins and moved toward her, and this time there was nothing of fear in her eyes, only a great warmth, and she came to meet him, a steady, grave smile touching her lips.

She held out her hands, and as he took them, there was a sudden cry in the distance and the sound of hooves drumming on the turf. He turned quickly and saw Joshua approaching at the gallop mounted on the coach horse.