Byrne paused before he replied. He pulled a small branch from the tree above him and peeled the twigs off one by one as he made his points.
‘I think it should be a bomb. We’ve got four lads just discharged with good records from the Royal Engineers. They’ve served all over the place and they know all there is to know about making bombs. Two of them have settled in Hammersmith, not far from the bridge. Two more have come back to Dublin and they’re living beyond the brewery.’
He paused. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the surface of the lake and sighed its way around the trees that guarded its presence.
‘I think it has to be Dublin,’ he said finally. ‘It will be easier to organize in our own city. A bomb early in the morning of Jubilee Day. There must be some bloody statue we could blow up. Then the Castle people will be worried all day in case there are more to come. Maybe even in London. I think that is going to be our best plan.’
He held his hand to his lips suddenly.
‘What was that noise?’ he said ever so softly. Three pairs of ears bent to one side, straining for the noise of policemen on the march, soldiers on patrol. Behind them the lake continued to murmur, the roar of the waterfall on the other side occasionally breaking through.
‘Nothing, Michael, it was just the wind in the trees,’ said Finn, rather loudly.
‘We’re all too jumpy. Even here.’ Byrne began demolishing another branch. ‘There have been too many arrests in the last six months. Too many of them the right people too. I think we should go. Could you both draw up some possible targets before the next meeting on the beach at Greystones?’
Finn and Docherty left at five-minute intervals to return to their homes. Byrne heard their steps gradually fading on the path back to the village. He turned and looked at the dark waters of the lake. For months now he had suspected that Finn was an informer. He had set the meeting up as a trap. All informers were encouraged to press for the most extreme action, to provoke the terrorists to the most violent measures. He had learnt this from two members of his own organization whom he had encouraged to sell their services to Dublin Castle. The information he obtained from their instructions was invaluable; the payments the two men received strengthened the terrorists’ arsenal. Within two days, he thought, possibly three, news of this meeting would have reached the authorities. He hoped they would believe what Finn had to tell them.
For Michael Byrne, implacable opponent of English rule, rated by his enemies as the cleverest foe they had, intended to make a noise in London all along.
He knelt down to the water’s edge and splashed his face. He made the sign of the cross. He tapped his jacket pocket to make sure his pipe was inside. Then, like the others, he left the lake to make his plans.
9
Lady Lucy Powerscourt had been practising her German for some days.
‘Don’t worry too much if there are pauses while you turn the English into German in your head,’ her husband had told her. ‘Old Miss Harrison wanders in and out of the last fifty years, so a second or two here and there won’t make any difference.’
She began with the rituals of sympathy. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your brother’s death, Miss Harrison,’ she said very properly, sitting in the same chair in the same salon that her husband had sat in the week before.
‘Death comes for us all,’ the old lady said firmly, ‘maybe it will come for me very soon. Nobody can escape it in the end.’
‘I’m sure you will be with us for a long time,’ said Lady Lucy brightly. ‘You look remarkably well to me.’
The old lady smiled a thin smile. The lines on her face suddenly multiplied as she did so, running down in crooked lines from the corner of her mouth.
‘I believe you wished to talk to me about my brother.’ The old lady looked up at Lady Lucy. ‘I find it so much easier to talk in German. You speak it very well, my dear. When we came here I found it so very difficult to learn English. Such an illogical language, English.’
Lady Lucy remembered her husband’s advice to her as their carriage rolled up the curving driveway of Blackwater House. ‘The most important thing, Lucy, is to get her on to her brother and his worries as soon as you possibly can. If you go in for the normal pleasantries her mind will have left before you get to the business. There is not a moment to be lost.’
‘My husband tells me that your brother was worried about something in the weeks before he died.’ Lady Lucy leant forward to make sure Miss Harrison could hear her. She wished she had a notebook. Now she understood why all those policemen were forever writing things down.
‘Yes, he was worried.’ The old lady paused, staring at a classical landscape on her wall. ‘Always worries in the bank, Father used to say. Always worries.’
Lady Lucy remembered Francis’ account of their first meeting, repeated virtually word for word in the drawing room in Markham Square, Francis changing seats for the different characters in the little drama, laughing at himself as he neared the end of his little play. This mantra, always worries, had cropped up over and over again. Oh dear, oh dear, Lady Lucy thought to herself. Don’t say her mind is going to start wandering already. I couldn’t bear to tell Francis I’d failed him.
At that moment her husband was greeting Samuel Parker just outside the door of his little cottage.
‘I’ve brought you that book of photographs, Mr Parker, the one I mentioned last time. The book with the photographs of the mountains in it. Look at this one here. It’s extraordinary.’
The two men gazed in awe at a photograph of the high Himalayas, taken some way off, but their snow-capped peaks looked majestic, the two tribesmen in the foreground like ants on the ground.
‘Thank you so much, my lord.’ Samuel Parker took the book with great reverence, ‘I shall look at it later if I may. But come, I promised to take you round the lake and all the places where Old Mr Harrison stopped off.’
Parker suddenly disappeared back into his cottage. He returned with a large ring with a number of different keys on it, each one labelled in stiff awkward capitals.
‘The keys, my lord. I always had to bring the keys with me. For the buildings and that.’
The two men set off down the path. In front of them was the lake, bright in the morning sunlight. Across the water a classical temple stood improbably in the middle of the view. To their left was a fine stone bridge – Palladian again, thought Powerscourt. Verona, or was it Vicenza where he had seen its like before?
‘So you would be walking, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt, slowing his pace to that of that of the old man. ‘Old Mr Harrison would be on his pony with his portable table and his papers. Tell me, did you always have keys to the buildings? I mean, were they always locked up in the past?’
‘They were not, my lord.’ Samuel Parker was indignant. ‘Old Mr Harrison only had the locks put on them in the last couple of years.’
‘Did he say why, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was looking curious.
‘He did not, my lord. But the man who made them said to me afterwards that they was mighty strong locks. You’d think the old man had the Crown jewels inside them old temples rather than a couple of mouldy statues, he used to say to me. He’s still there. Harold Webster, my lord, up at the big house, the man who fitted them.’
They had reached the path that ran round the lake, disappearing out of sight from time to time as it curved round the water’s edge. A couple of rooks greeted their arrival, striking out over the water to the woods beyond.
‘Which way do we go here, Mr Parker?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Well, my lord, we can go left or we can go right as you can see. I never knew which way the old gentleman wanted to go until we got here. But I think at this time of year we would have turned right.’
Soon the flowering chestnuts and the rhododendrons would paint the path with colour. This morning they walked on, the old man leading, through green conifers and huge oaks.