‘Port wine,’ Hennessy breathed.
‘Pinched it from a bottle on the dresser.’
‘They’ll miss it and you’ll be in trouble.’
‘There were three half-finished bottles in a row. They’ll never guess.’
‘Somebody must be partial to the cup that cheers.’
‘Father Giffley, I imagine. The other man is a bit prejudiced in that direction. He doesn’t like the smell of drink at all.’
‘God bless the thought, anyway,’ Hennessy said. He drank deeply.
‘What do you think of my little place here?’ Rashers asked, as they feasted.
‘If I was you I’d bunk down here at nights instead of in that bloody oul basement in Chandler’s Court.’
‘I would, only for the dog. I can’t very well leave him on his own.’
‘Bring him with you,’ Hennessy suggested generously.
‘That would be a class of a sacrilege,’ Rashers objected, ‘bringing an unbaptised animal into a church.’
‘This isn’t the church.’
‘It’s all sanctified ground.’
‘Not the boiler house,’ Hennessy argued. ‘Sanctifying the boiler house would be a bit Irish. You might as well say the toilet at the back of the vestry was sanctified.’
The point impressed Rashers.
‘You might be right,’ he conceded.
‘Of course I’m right.’
‘Maybe I’ll chance bringing him down an odd night,’ he agreed. Again he passed the bottle to Hennessy. He thought in silence for a while.
‘A bit of music mightn’t be out of place.’
‘What music?’ Hennessy asked.
‘This,’ Rashers said. He rooted in his inner pockets and drew out a tin whistle. It was a superior toned Italian Flageolet.
‘I got a present of a shilling at Christmas from Father Giffley,’ he explained, ‘and I squandered it on this.’
‘Are you not afraid they’d hear you above?’
‘Divil the bit.’ He held the whistle towards Hennessy. ‘What do you think of it?’
Its slender column took on the rosy hue of the firelight. They both regarded it, Rashers affectionately, Hennessy, his mouth full of food, with an expression of bulbous curiosity.
‘You spent a shilling on that?’ he asked when it was physically possible.
Rashers turned it about and about in the firelight and said: ‘I often spent a shilling on less.’ He took a swig from the bottle and passed it to Hennessy.
‘Isn’t this the life of Reilly?’ Hennessy exclaimed. They bent forward together to let the fireglow play on their bodies, unaware of the antics of their gigantic shadows in the flickering candlelight.
‘I knew you’d like the wine,’ Rashers said. ‘It’s made out of grapes.’
‘Play the oul whistle,’ Hennessy invited. He disposed himself comfortably to listen.
Rashers began to do so. The notes came out sweetly and slowly. Hennessy, listening politely, now and then gathered food crumbs from the paper on his knee with fingers that courteously avoided noise. Rashers thrust his chin forward and found again a simple consolation he had lost months before in race crowds and drink.
Celebrating late mass in the church above them, Father Giffley bent down to the altar and breathed the Domine Non Sum Dignus. The act of stooping sent a stab of pain shooting from his neck to his throbbing eyes. The server struck the altar gong three times with the felt-headed hammer and the worshippers bent low also and beat their breasts.
BOOK TWO
1910–1912
CHAPTER ONE
At fifteen minutes to midnight on the sixth day of May 1910, in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princess Royal and the Duke of Fife, Princess Victoria, Princess Louise and the Duchess of Argyll, Edward VII breathed his last.
The Archbishop of Dublin had called for prayers for his recovery. When these were seen to have gone unanswered, the city did the next best thing. It went into deep mourning. Prescott’s, the cleaners, who claimed to have enormous facilities for such work, offered to dye all articles of clothing black at the shortest notice. Mrs. Bradshaw availed of their services and during his lying-instate she began to read the newspapers closely, keeping her husband well informed on the day-to-day events. The report of a storm, particularly, caught her interest. It occurred on the Wednesday and involved the historic scene at Westminster in a wild splendour. It broke about the heads of his loyal subjects who waited hour after hour to pay their last tribute. Vivid flashes of lightning streaked the sky and thunder crashed above the hall in which the King lay, guarded by his silent and motionless watchers. He was the least troubled of them all. The Liberals had threatened to abolish his house of peers; they could do so now without causing him the least pain. John Redmond had urged his Irish followers to hasten Home Rule by supporting the Liberal policy; he could now lean over to bawl it in the King’s ear and no flicker of the royal eyelids would reprove or admonish him. For months his subjects had wondered if in such a crisis the King could remain above politics. Death, with an unexpected gesture, had assured them that he would.
‘What a terrible storm last night,’ Mrs. Bradshaw said to her husband, when he had returned from his morning walk along the front.
‘A fog,’ he corrected. ‘I’d hardly call it a storm.’
‘I mean in London.’
‘Oh—that.’
‘It’s all here in the paper.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, ‘the Kish was going all night.’
She had heard it too. All night the boom of the fog signal had disturbed her rest, a regular, disembodied moan that made the night restless.
‘There’s a thick mist at sea,’ he reported.
‘I felt there would be. How I pity the poor sailors.’
‘Didn’t stop the Navy. Part of the Home Fleet have anchored down below—I could make out the Lord Nelson.’ Bradshaw was very good at ships. He knew their names and could tell the difference between battleships and cruisers, gunboats and destroyers. The gentlemen of Kingstown, of course, took a very special pride in such things. Naturally so.
‘It’s a beautiful name—the Peacemaker.’
Bradshaw looked puzzled. Then he understood.
‘You mean the King?’
‘Of course. That is what they are calling him.’
‘Ah. For a moment I thought you meant one of the battleships,’ he explained.
The next day public departments, banks and business establishments closed. The Most Reverend Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, presided at Votive Mass in the Pro-Cathedral.
Yearling, who was staying at a remote hotel in Connemara for the mayfly fishing, forgot the significance of the day until very late that night. He was drinking whiskey, not in the hotel, but unobtrusively in a little public house. One of the local people was playing a fiddle and Yearling had the seat beside the turf fire. There was a smoky oil lamp hanging from the ceiling which gave the room a small, shadowed look, and the men near him, to his delight, were speaking quietly together in Gaelic. Their voices, unaccountably, reminded him that this had been the day of the royal funeral. He thought of William Martin Murphy and, with the merest ghost of a smile, he remembered his refusal to be tapped on the shoulder by the dead king’s sword.
The high grey walls of the workhouse shut out almost everything; they were a fortification against the life of the city, a barrier against time, which passed yet did not seem to pass. The visitors who came weekly were few; the inmates were many. Carts passed in and out on stated days with a jingling of harness and a creaking of shafts and a stumbling of hooves on the uneven cobbles, but these meant little to the old women who hobbled about the grounds in shapeless grey dresses, and nothing at all to those lying in the close-packed wards, their eyes fixed on the high ceilings for hours of silence. Here, too, Death came most frequently and with no noise at all. From where, Miss Gilchrist sometimes wondered: through the great arched gateway whether closed or open, up from the deep earth or down from the insubstantial sky? Three times it had come for her in the space of almost three years: once in daylight, when from beyond the screens about her bed the voices of the others and the clatter of crockery told her it was tea-time; once in the small hours when the candle in the hand of the sister lit the priest’s bending face; once when a giantlike thumb stretched down to anoint her from a limitless absence of either light or darkness. Yet she struggled back to the world again and at breakfast time the old woman whose turn it was to be on ward duty said: