The bus rolled up Shankill Road, through the Protestant working-class neighborhood, then headed northwest into the mixed neighborhoods around Oldpark. Flynn turned to Maureen and spoke softly. “Feeling better?”
“Oh, quite. Let’s do it again.”
“Ah, Maureen …”
An old woman sitting alone in front of them turned around. “How’s the lady? How are you, dear? Feelin’ better, then?”
Maureen looked at her without answering. The citizens of Belfast were capable of anything from murder and treachery to Christian kindness.
The old woman showed a toothless smile and spoke quietly. “Between Squire’s Hill and McIlwhan’s Hill is a wee valley called the Flush. There’s an abbey there— you know it—Whitehorn Abbey. The priest, Father Donnelly, will give you lodgings for the night.”
Flynn fixed the woman with a cold stare. “What makes you think we need a place to stay? We’re headed home.”
The bus stopped, and the old woman stood without another word and trundled off to the front of the bus and stepped off.
The bus started again. Flynn was very uneasy now. “Next stop. Are you up to it?”
“I’m not up to one more second on this bus.” She paused thoughtfully. “The old woman … ?”
Flynn shook his head.
“I think we can trust her.”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“What kind of country do we live in?”
He laughed derisively. “What a bloody stupid thing to say, Maureen. We are the ones who helped make it like it is.”
She lowered her head. “You’re right, of course … as usual.”
“You must accept what you are. I accept it. I’m well adjusted.”
She nodded. With that strange logic of his he had turned the world upside down. Brian was normal. She was not. “I’m going to Whitehorn Abbey.”
He shrugged. “Better than a barn, I suppose. You’ll be needing bandaging … but if the good rector there turns us in …”
She didn’t answer and turned away from him.
He put his arm around her shoulders. “I do love you, you know.”
She looked down and nodded.
The bus stopped again about a half-mile up the road, and Flynn and Maureen moved toward the door.
“This isn’t Clady,” said the driver.
“That’s all right,” answered Flynn. They stepped off the bus and into the road. Flynn took Maureen’s arm. “That bastard will report us at the next stop.” They crossed the road and headed north up a country lane lined with rowan trees. Flynn looked at his watch, then at the eastern sky. “Almost dawn. We have to be there before the farmers start running about—they’re almost all Prods up here.”
“I know that.” Maureen breathed deeply as they walked in the light rain. The filthy air and ugliness of Belfast were far behind, and she felt better. Belfast—a blot of ash on the green loveliness of County Antrim, a blot of ash on the soul of Ireland. Sometimes she wished that the city would sink back into the bog it grew out of.
They passed hedgerows, well-tended fields, and pastures dotted with cattle and bales of fodder. An exhilarating sodden scent filled the air, and the first birds of morning began to sing.
“I’m not going back to Belfast.”
He put his arm around her and touched her face with his hand. She was becoming feverish. “I understand. See how you feel in a week or two.”
“I’m going to live in the south. A village.”
“Good. And what will you do there? Tend pigs? Or do you have independent means, Maureen? Will you buy a country estate?”
“Do you remember the cottage overlooking the sea? You said we’d go there some day to live our lives in peace.”
“Someday maybe we will.”
“I’ll go to Dublin, then. Find a job.”
“Yes. Good jobs in Dublin. After a year they’ll give you the tables by the window where the American tourists sit. Or the sewing machine by the window where you can get a bit of air and sun. That’s the secret. By the window.”
After a while she said, “Perhaps Killeen …”
“No. You can never go back to your own village. It’s never the same, you know. Better to go to any other pig village.”
“Let’s go to America.”
“No!” The loudness of his own voice surprised him.
“No. I won’t do what they all did.” He thought of his family and friends, so many of them gone to America, Canada, or Australia. He had lost them as surely as he had lost his mother and father when he buried them. Everyone in Ireland, north and south, lost family, friends, neighbors, even husbands and wives and lovers, through emigration. Like some great plague sweeping the land, taking the firstborn, the brightest, and the most adventurous, leaving the old, the sick, the timid, the self-satisfied rich, the desperately poor. “This is my country. I won’t leave here to become a laborer in America.”
She nodded. Better to be a king of the dunghills of Belfast and Londonderry. “I may go alone.”
“You probably should.”
They walked quietly, their arms around each other’s waists, both realizing that they had lost something more than a little blood this night.
CHAPTER 3
The lane led into a small, treeless valley between two hills. In the distance they saw the abbey. The moonlight lit the white stone and gave it a spectral appearance in the ground mist.
They approached the abbey cautiously and stood under a newly budded sycamore tree. A small oblong cemetery, hedged with short green plants, spread out beside the abbey wall. Flynn pushed through the hedge and led Maureen into the cemetery.
The churchyard was unkempt, and vines grew up the gravestones. Whitehorn plants—which gave the abbey its name and which were omens of good luck or bad luck, depending on which superstition you believed—clogged the narrow path. A small side gate in a high stone wall led into the abbey’s cloister. Flynn pushed it open and looked around the quiet court. “Sit on this bench. I’ll find the brothers’ dormitory.”
She sat without answering and let her head fall to her chest. When she opened her eyes again, Flynn was standing over her with a priest.
“Maureen, this is Father Donnelly.”
She focused on the elderly priest, a frail-looking man with a pale face. “Hello, Father.”
He took her hand and with his other hand held her forearm in that way they had of claiming instant intimacy. He was the pastor; she was now one of his flock. Presto. Everyone’s role had been carved in stone two millennia ago.
“Follow me,” he said. “Hold my arm.”
The three of them walked across the cloister and entered the arched door of a polygon-shaped building. Maureen recognized the traditional configuration of the chapter house, the meeting place of the monks. For a moment she thought she was going to face an assemblage, but she saw by the light of a table lamp that the room was empty.
Father Donnelly stopped abruptly and turned. “We have an infirmary, but I’m afraid I’ll have to put you in the hole until the police and soldiers have come round looking for you.”
Flynn didn’t answer.
“You can trust me.”
Flynn didn’t trust anyone, but if he was betrayed, at least the War Council wouldn’t think him too foolish for having trusted a priest. “Where’s this hole, then? We don’t have much time, I think.”
The priest led them down a corridor, then opened the door at the end of the passage. Gray dawn came through stained glass, emitting a light that was more sensed than seen. A single votive candle burned in a red jar, and Flynn could see he was in the abbey’s small church.