16

Douglas Tyrrell had never deceived his father before, and if he did so now it was only partly to spare him. The perfect measure of Sir Hugh’s position in the middle of the Anglo-Irish conflict was the fact that both his children, each having embraced an opposite side, expected him to disapprove of what they’d chosen. Douglas knew that, while his father could accept his role as an Irish officer in the British army, even without enthusiasm for the war, he could never have supported his function as a British spy in Ireland.

It was for a different reason that he maintained the fiction of his position with Pamela. If he’d confided in her, she’d have had to abet his deception. He couldn’t ask her to do that, particularly where Jane was concerned. Not that Jane was home. She’d refused to visit Cragside since Douglas’s return, and now she was simply gone, her whereabouts a mystery. But her absence made Douglas’s charade possible. To his father, to his wife, to the Cragside community, to their neighbors in the surrounding Clare and Galway countryside, he showed the same face.

It was a disturbing face, and no one who came into contact with Douglas Tyrrell in those months was unaffected by it. He had been a local hero, a young lord, held in esteem and affection by farmers and townspeople alike. He had always seemed happy and full of spirit, the liveliest son, husband, father, neighbor, or friend anyone could want. And now, after the nightmare of trenches and prison camp, he had returned a shell of himself, deprived of his youth, elegance, physical gracefulness, warmth and vigor. The community felt sorry for him, but they didn’t know the half of it.

At the very first, while they were still in London, Pamela had not noticed the difference in him—hadn’t he seemed the perfect wartime woman’s dream?—but she came to assume that that had been because of her happiness at having him back. When the army doctor had told her of his condition, her first reaction had been gratitude because it meant he wouldn’t have to return to France. But once they’d come back to Cragside, his oddness began to affect her. He was listless and solitary, spending hours alone in the dusty Cragside library or, if it wasn’t raining, walking the edge of the high ocean cliffs, watching birds through his binoculars. Sometimes he went off in the automobile for entire days. Christmas came and went without perking him up, and not even the children seemed to interest him. He was like a ghost. Everything that had set him apart was gone, and it was obvious to all who had known him why the army sent him home. Douglas became the meaning by which the people of Connaught measured that other new term the war had introduced—shell shock.

One day in late February, the week news came of the ferocious German assault at Verdun, Sir Hugh saw the distant figure of his son on the cliff’s edge, withstanding the winter wind and the wet spray shooting a hundred feet up from the crashing sea below. The sight of his boy, bereft and alone in that stark landscape, filled him with such sadness that he felt compelled to go to him. He mounted his horse and slowly rode across the sweeping pasture.

Douglas was watching the turmoil of wave upon rock, and the subtler motion beyond of the vast ocean swells that had traveled, building all the while, five hundred miles. The waves hurled themselves against the rock of Ireland as if to move it. But Ireland had always held her own against the western weather. She would not be moved toward England. If Douglas could once have taken consolation from that dogged stability, now it meant to him only that Ireland should not be moved toward Germany either.

He appeared to be staring at the sea vacantly, as if its rhythm had hypnotized him, but he was not. He was staring at it, as he had been now for weeks, as German navigators would. The fierce weather of the Irish coast was their main problem, and what Tyrrell understood was that the date for the Irish uprising had been set according to the weather’s pattern. April was when the winter broke and the seas flattened; it was the soonest an ad hoc landing of troops and supplies would be possible. The Dublin Castle intelligence officer had sneered at the mindless piety of the Catholic rebels, presuming piety had moved them to choose Good Friday for their rising. But there was nothing mindless about Pearse or Connolly or Casement. And Douglas, after poring over the old charts and tide tables in the Cragside library, understood that Good Friday’s significance two days before Easter lay in the fact that the date of Easter is tied to the moon. The thought had come to him while idling through the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. “Easter Day,” a random passage read, “is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon which happens upon or next after the Twenty-first day of March.” And the full moon, of course, is when the tides are highest. Along the west coast at the full moon in April, landing ships would have for a brief time a rare depth of water, fifteen feet of it at least, above the mean. Therefore, he told himself, the landing will not come at one of the protected harbors—Killary, Galway, Kilrush, Castlemaine, Kenmare, or Bantry—that lie at the heads of the fjordlike bays, in which the German vessels would be easily trapped by British patrols. Look instead to a lightning landfall at high tide on a spit of sand jutting from the headlands themselves, minimally protected and close to the open sea, into which the unburdened ships could escape on the ebb. Tyrrell felt confident that he knew what the enemy was going to do, but the charts indicated there were not dozens of possible sites for such a strategy, but hundreds of them along the thousand miles of curving shoreline. During his own forays up and down the coast, he’d found populations that seemed genuinely indifferent to the cause of Irish freedom, or were they simply closed to him? He felt a growing despair that he could uncover in time the coastal nests of revolutionaries who were planning to receive the German landing. He knew what they were going to do, he was sure, but he still didn’t know where.

He sensed the rider’s approach behind him, and he raised his binoculars to watch a bird, a white, goose-sized sharp-angled gannet, wheeling high in the air and then plunging a hundred feet into the sea, violently upon its prey.

“An early comer,” Sir Hugh said behind his son. Gannets, like most seabirds, don’t begin returning from their migration until mid-March. Then the west coast of Ireland becomes an ornithologist’s paradise. Local men easily distinguish among the dozens of species that pass through the region after meandering the North Atlantic.

Douglas lowered his binoculars and faced his father. “We should have taken lessons from them.” He nodded toward the sea. “Fishing, I mean. How is it that Ireland is an island with no relationship to the sea?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Douglas.”

“We have no fishing tradition. For centuries our peasants have been starving while food-laden waters all around us go unharvested. Look!” Overhead a gannet soared, its razor beak stuffed with a large fish. It seemed a bizarre, unconnected statement, but the realization had been a central one for Douglas. Because Irishmen didn’t fish, except singly or in pairs in small, primitive canoelike curraghs, there were no fleets of fishing craft or workboats of the sort needed to offload cargo and men from oceangoing ships. Only in Cork’s harbor, Cobh, which the English had begun calling Queenstown after Victoria’s visit, were there true seamen and real vessels. But Cork was on Ireland’s southern shore and British patrols had it sealed off. The recognition that the remote western harbors lacked the boats and facilities to receive a true landing force supported the idea that the Germans would bypass them for a high-water beach.

Sir Hugh said, “No one’s starving this year. London buys all the butter and cheese we can turn out. The Irish peasant has his first abundance because England is hungry for a change. There’s the irony.” Sir Hugh shook his head. “They think well of the war at the co-op.”

Douglas turned away. It was an affectation of his, part of his charade, never to discuss the war. His father had brought it up, no doubt, because doctors had told him it would be beneficial for his son to talk about it.

Douglas raised his binoculars again. “Look, a fulmar!” The men watched a circling white bird.

“It’s a common gull, Douglas.”

“No. I’m certain of it; that’s a fulmar. Thick neck, short, hooked yellow bill. Its wings are stiff. Gulls fly more loosely. It’s a fulmar, I tell you.” Douglas gave the glasses to his father.

Sir Hugh followed the bird. Because they were considered a delicacy by coastal people and because their feathers supplied down for their beds, fulmars had been hunted nearly to extinction in the previous century. In Sir Hugh’s youth local rocks and cliffs had provided thousands of colonies of fulmars with nesting places, but it had been years since they were known to nest away from the Skellig Island off Kerry nearly a hundred miles to the south. “You’re right,” he said. “He’s a long way from Skellig.”

They watched the lone bird until it disappeared.

“Have you been there?” Douglas asked.

“Where?”

“Skellig.”

“Years ago.”

“There’s a ruined monastery, isn’t there?”

“That’s about all, and several million birds. Puffin and kittiwake, razorbills, shearwaters. They’ll be coming back, beginning now.”

Skellig was actually a trio of stark, pointed sea crags towering above the ocean. They marked the southern extreme of the western coast. “I’d like to go there.”

“It would make a fine summer journey.”

“I mean now.”

“Now?” Sir Hugh swung down off his horse and began stroking its withers. “You couldn’t get out there now, Douglas. Winter waves break over the lighthouse road. The lighthouse keeper doesn’t come ashore until April.”

Douglas looked forlornly out at the sea. The wind feathered his hair. “I’d like to see the birds coming back.”

Sir Hugh put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “They come back here.”

“I’ve been watching them.”

“I know.” What were these birds to his son? Ghosts, perhaps, of the boys whom he’d seen die? His son’s obsession frightened him.

“I’d like to see where they make their nests.”

“They do that many places besides Skellig.”

“Yes, up and down the coast. I think I’d like to see.” Douglas faced his father. The concern he saw in his eyes stunned him. This was wrong, to so deceive the man and to so worry him. He had an impulse to tell his father everything. He checked it, but only partly. “I’m all right,” he said in his own steady voice. “You mustn’t think I’m not all right.”

For a moment Douglas displayed a resolve that his father hadn’t seen since before he’d left for France. But when it faded, as Douglas dropped his eyes like an adolescent, Sir Hugh was more confused than reassured.

To offer a rationale for his obsessive bird watching, Douglas said, “At Messines a lad in Signals carried pigeons in the charge up the hill. He died in my arms, watching the birds soaring off to H.Q. with the news that we had made it. ‘Ireland did this for us!’ It was in my mind that those birds cried out to all of England, ‘Ireland did this for us!’” The seabirds overhead were steady in the wind streaming up off the cliffs. “‘Ireland did this for us!’ It became a dream of mine that England would finally see us for what we are—brave, noble people, worthy of freedom.”

“You are brave and noble, Douglas. I’m proud of you.”

“But you wouldn’t do what I’ve done.”

“In my own way I did. I was in Her Majesty’s service for a long time.”

“But you renounced it.”

“Times were different when I was laying out my fields.”

“England wasn’t vulnerable before. In your time she seemed invincible. But now . . .” He gave his shoulders a hitch to convey the impossibility of this conversation. He restrained his impulse to confide in his father. No one can know what I am doing, he thought. Not even him.

Douglas knew that deceiving his father like this was a mortal breach. Once more, far more in relation to this man than to Ireland, he felt the naked horror of what he was doing. And he felt disgusted with himself. His sudden impulse was to throw himself on his father, to tell him everything, to ask for his forgiveness. That his violation was so secret made it even more dishonorable.

But even so, his resolve held. He had to think only of Verdun, where for two weeks now the Germans had been throwing a hurricane artillery bombardment at the French. It was unlike anything the world had ever seen before. Already the eastern pillar of French defenses had fallen. If the western one fell as well, France was out of the war. Well, I’m not. Tyrrell was more in the war now than he had been at the Front. Lying to his father, like killing people, was what the war required; it was that simple. He said, in the teeth of his guilt, like the birds flying into the teeth of the wind, “I’ll be going off for a time, down to Kerry.” He smiled thinly. “I want to find those nests.”

His father stared at him. “You’ll be going through Tralee, then.”

“I suppose so. Yes. Why?”

When his father did not answer, Douglas realized that he had secrets too. He suspected at once what they were. His father looked away with uncharacteristic embarrassment, as if he’d uttered an indiscretion in company.

“What’s in Tralee?” He remembered it from the charts: one of the typical small harbor towns at the head of a narrow bay. Tralee Bay was bordered on the south by the Dingle peninsula, which reached farther out into the Atlantic than any promontory in Europe, and on the north by Kerry Head, which formed the lower jaw of the mouth of the River Shannon.

Sir Hugh ignored the question and swung up onto his horse.

Seeing that his father was becoming ensnared in the rats’ nest of subterfuge too, Douglas wanted to say, Oh, let’s tell each other the truth! It’s Jane, isn’t it? You have heard from her! And she’s made you promise not to tell me where she is. But without meaning to, you just did, because to you she’s not an accomplice of Republican extremists, but first and still my sister, who could take care of me because I’m ill.

Sir Hugh said nothing, which confirmed it. Instead he looked down at his son, mystified and forlorn.

Douglas said nothing either. It did not occur to him to ignore what was clearly his father’s unintended slip, nor did he question the propriety of taking advantage of it. He had the instincts now of a man whose damnation was sealed, if only to himself.

The older man clucked his horse and wheeled away, to gallop back toward the house, away from the cliffs that gave the place its name, away from Douglas, who remained there on the edge, but not away, for this was impossible, from the flooding tide of a conflict that had drowned him long ago. It was rising again—he grasped this viscerally without understanding how it could be so—upon his children.

Douglas was moved by the sight of the hurrying, bent rider. For the first time, his father seemed old to him. He had become accustomed to the deaths of young men. It surprised him to realize that this old man would die too. Would that he could die without knowing what I’m about to do.

When he had disappeared, Douglas turned to face the sea. The wind had come up even stronger. Plumes of spray rose off the crests of countless breakers, making the ocean seem like a black field of white-maned galloping horses. He let his eyes drift like a vane toward the center of the wind, southwest, and he squinted to see what was out there. Naked Aran, where no tree grows because the wind is so fierce, where islanders wear the look of the rock to which they cling like a thin layer of soil. The stone tower houses dotting the coast of Clare, with their secret narrow stairs spiraling clockwise so that defenders, but not attackers, would have room to use their right arms. The Cliffs of Moher, where the sheer fall defies scale, the only place in Ireland where the sea seems small. The storied Shannon, the largest river in Britain, running down from Ulster, dividing the island in half, more barrier than roadway, its banks pocked with a litany of holy ruins. Then the enchanted mountains of Kerry rising on the misshapen fingers of peninsulas formed by the long sea inlets, fingers clawing on the charts toward the sea route from America. How the Germans could make use of that wondrous southwest coast, with its hundreds of deep-water coves, its massive tidal caves, its offshore islets from which lights flashed to show navigators the way. One of those islands was fang-shaped Skellig, home only to seabirds and a lighthouse man. An inadvertent mention of it had led to this opening, to this new sense he had of where to go.

His resolve had held against his self-contempt. No decent man would do this, but I am doing it. He shook off the inhibiting guilt like rain off his shoulders. He put the glasses to his eyes. Irish Catholics had placed Skellig under the patronage of Saint Michael because it was a mountaintop island, and such places were considered by that religion as belonging to the archangel. In Normandy a similar island was called Mont-Saint-Michel, and in Cornwall a third was Saint Michael’s Mount. For more than a thousand years each had drawn its monks and saints. It amused Douglas to think of himself as setting out now on a pilgrimage—such holiness!—but the ruins to which he was going in the name of all that was, by his meager conscience, holy and good, were not of a monastery, but of his own family.

He lowered the glasses because the spray had blinded him. He saw nothing of what was out there.

But it was not Skellig Michael, anyway, that he had to see.

Tralee. He was going to Tralee.

The uneasy relationship between England and Ireland dates to the year 1171, when an invading army under Henry II ended once and for all the Gaelic hegemony. The distinctions, of course, are not what they seem to be and make little sense according to present references. Henry, the King of England, for example, was a Frenchman, and the first English conquest of Ireland was in fact the Norman Conquest. That conqueror who was French was acting as an agent of a pope who was himself English. Adrian IV was the only Englishman ever to sit in the chair of Peter, and he considered Irish Catholics lax and heretical. That Norman invasion is remembered by Catholics as the source of Ireland’s agony, yet it resulted in her first respite from tribal wars, her first centralized agriculture, the building of the great cathedrals, Ireland’s first step toward democracy with the establishment of a parliament, and the first settling of true towns, one of which was Tralee.

In 1916 Tralee was the largest town in Kerry, with a population of twelve thousand, and though it was near the coast, it was oriented to the land, not the sea. Founded as a medieval market town, it had remained a place where farmers from the surrounding country brought their produce. Its largest industry was the butchering of pigs and the making of bacon. As had happened in all the agricultural centers of Ireland, the bloody war in Europe had brought a rare prosperity to Tralee. In such times there were good reasons to think well of a people who had brought juries and cathedrals to Ireland. Thus, most of Tralee’s citizens found the traditional uneasiness with England softened now, both by true sympathy for her beleaguered army and by being well paid to help feed it. In Tralee the English army was well thought of, and that was why its representatives came there with its recruiting campaign.

In a heavy, dank mist that threatened to become an outright drizzle, a military band was playing in the square opposite the Great Western Hotel. The hotel was hung with bunting, and a mammoth banner above the entrance proclaimed, your nation’s hour of need. The broad lobby of the hotel had been transformed into the recruiting office, and a line of young men stretched out to the street, each one waiting patiently for his chance to sign up. They were not necessarily patriots. Conscription may not have come into effect in Ireland yet, but young men were newly motivated to enlist by a recent government decree that did apply. It forbade employers to offer available jobs to males between the ages of sixteen and sixty-two. Loyalist employers cooperated with London by firing all but their most essential workers. Those sacked had little alternative but to join the army, and employers were rewarded by being able to pay lower wages to the women they were then “forced” to fill vacant positions with.

On the far side of the modest square, beyond the army band, was the Catholic church, an undistinguished drab structure whose tower had more the feel of a battlement than steeple. On the steps of the church a dozen women had gathered in stoic vigil. Half of them held hand-lettered signs aloft: ireland first! england’s war is not our war! women won’t blackleg! The women stared impassively across at the line of men. Between them, in addition to the bedecked musicians, were knots of police and groups of idling onlookers, men in butchers’ aprons or farmers’ heavy boots, women with baskets under their arms and hands on their children’s shoulders. Others could be seen peeking out from windows.

Despite the jaunty music, which alternated between “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay” and “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go,” an ominous air hung over the square, as if the townspeople were waiting for something to happen—for the music to end, the police to move against the women on the church steps, the priest to appear and tell everyone to go home. For a long time none of these occurred. The band played on while the line of recruits wound steadily into the hotel. The police stayed on their corner. The butchers and tradesmen drifted in and out of their pubs. Dairymen and pig farmers went off to buy their feed, and then came back to watch again. For a time a few children cavorted near the band until their mothers snared them. The mist never became rain and the women with their signs never budged from the steps of the church.

Finally, though, the band stopped playing through sheer fatigue, and it was then that one of the women began calling to the people to gather around.

“It’s Maud Gonne!” someone murmured.

But it wasn’t Maud Gonne. The woman who stepped into the central position, flanked by other Daughters of Ireland and framed by the sharp arch of the church’s stone doorway, was dressed in Donegal tweed. She wore a cape and black leather gloves and a dark woolen bonnet. As she waited while the people of Tralee pressed close around her, she conveyed a sense of the self-possession and dignity that was associated with the legendary Maude Gonne. The women who had been active in her group, which in Irish was called Inghinidhe na hEireann, and the women who were causing it even then to evolve into the more revolutionary Irish Women’s Council, Cumann na mBan, were not ordinary women. They did not work for a living, their husbands were not unemployed or in the British army, and they weren’t up to their elbows in babies. If they were married, their husbands were members of Pearse’s wing of the Irish Volunteers. If they were not married, they were the daughters of men whose prosperity made their unsalaried idealism possible. The harried mothers and the hardworking clerks and factory girls, the worried wives and even war widows regarded the elegant ladies who publicly spoke out for Ireland not with envy or disapproval or class resentment or even bitterness, but with awe. Ordinary women did not share the politics of the Daughters of Ireland, but they were not indifferent to the wonder it was when a woman of whatever class or political position dared to stand openly in a street in Ireland and protest against a world that men had made.

It wasn’t Maud Gonne, but to the mothers and workers around the steps of the church, the young woman about to speak was not less the miracle for that. To the men who were more circumspect, though not less efficient, in giving her their attention, she represented a force that threatened London, and they liked it for that, even if they were certain that London barely noticed. But they sensed too that these women threatened something of theirs, and so even as they assumed the air of men enjoying the show, they watched it somewhat warily.

“My name,” she said when everyone in the square had fallen silent, “is Jane Tyrrell. Those of you who deal with co-ops may know of my father, a Cope man and dairy farmer in County Clare, Hugh Tyrrell. I am a west-of-Ireland woman, born, raised, and educated on this magnificent coast, the truest part of our country, and I consider it an honor to address you.” Jane stretched to her full height to look beyond the fifty or so immediately in front of them toward the young men waiting to gain entrance to the Great Western Hotel. “And to you, our brothers, our sons, our fathers . . .” Her voice had gone up in pitch and volume, resounding across the square with a clarity that startled all who heard it. She raised her hand toward the recruits and waited until some looked at her. “. . . We the women of Ireland, your sisters and mothers and wives, we who love you, have come to ask for a moment only of your attention. Before you give your lives to them”—she pointed to the hotel—“give your ears to us.” She waved at them to come closer, but they didn’t move. “Draw nearer, please.” But they ignored the request, and that seemed to fluster her. She hesitated and stood there mutely. The crowd in front of her shuffled in embarrassment.

A man’s voice cried out, “Go back home where you belong!” Then someone else added, “Sure, if it’s a husband you’re after, take me!”

A look of desperation crossed Jane’s face, and she turned slightly to find Nora Guinan on the steps below her. Nora was staring up at her with fists clenched at her mouth, not a hint of softness in her, no give and no sympathy. Nora had an actor’s contempt for the public display of self-doubt. At that moment her focus was not on Jane’s problem, but on Ireland’s. The sight of her resolute friend made Jane remember why they were there. She looked across the square again, at the recruits. Those who’d found it possible to ignore her forceful opening had been drawn in by the awkward drama of her hesitation. They were the ones she sensed sympathy from now and they were the ones she felt it for.

“I know you,” she said loudly. “My brother is one of you, a volunteer with the Connaught Rangers and a veteran of Ypres.” Was it shameless of her to refer to Douglas? She didn’t care. “And I want to say to you what I would say to him if I could.” Was it deceptive to let them think he was still in France? Her speech came of its own momentum now, and the peripheral elements of the scene—the other Daughters, the church, the hotel, the throng before her—dropped away as the field of her concentration was taken over by the men staring back at her and by what she so desperately wanted to say to them. It was true; she wished desperately that she’d known what to say to Douglas when it might have influenced him. “You want only to do what is right for your people. You want to uphold the honor of your families. You want to respond to the call of your nation. And we admire you for your courage and your selflessness. But you are making a terrible mistake. Your people are the Irish people. Your families are Irish families. Your nation is the Irish nation. And the war to which England would send you has nothing to do with Ireland. It is an evil war, and going to it is no test of your courage. It is the result of the same moral blindness that has made us Irish into the invisible people of the British Empire. Does London see our farming people when their crops fail and by the hundreds of thousands they starve to death? Does London see our city dwellers living ten to a room, infecting one another with rats’ plague and watching helplessly while more Irish infants die than in any nation in Europe? Does London see our most gifted boys and girls who for generations now have had no alternative but to turn their backs on their homeland in the genteel treason of emigration? No! London sees none of it, not because we’re invisible, but because she is blind. Blind to everyone in Ireland except you! You stalwart sons of Erin! For you she sends officers and musicians. She puts up bonuses. She hangs banners on our hotels. And why? Because once her soldiers get to France, they become invisible again. They disappear. They are gone forever. In this war England had begun to treat her own sons as if they were Irish. And because all the English boys have disappeared, they’ve come for you! But you don’t have to join the British army to be invisible. You are Irish! You are already invisible!”

Jane paused, staring across the square at them. Even from that distance they knew her eyes had filled with emotion. There was not a sound in the entire square. She said more softly, though still audibly, “But you are not invisible to us. We are your women and we have seen you since the first moment of your birth and we will see you even if you leave us. We see your faces and your bodies. We see your strong arms and your proud shoulders. And we see what a difference you could make not only to Ireland but to the world. Refuse this war because it is England’s and because it is wrong!”

The police had begun drifting toward the church steps, but no order was given and they eyed each other nervously as they advanced. Jane ignored them.

“Then accept the cause of Ireland, which is the cause of our famine victims and our city dwellers and our dead infants and our relatives who’ve been forced to abandon us. We want to make England see us all and all the time. Then let her come to us for help, and let us consider whether or not to give it. But now, refuse them!” Jane’s arm shot up and she gestured. “Refuse them by coming over here to us!”

The army band members took up their positions in the center of the square.

Jane repeated herself. “Come over here to us!”

One man left the recruiting line and began to cross the square. A policeman stepped in front of him, but he pushed him aside. Two other policemen quickly grabbed the man, and when he struggled, they clubbed him and dragged him away.

Jane pointed and cried, “We are not blind! We see what you are doing! We are not blind and we are not invisible! Leave that man be!”

Then other recruits left the line, a pair first, then five, then seven. Some tried to melt into the fringe of onlookers. A few walked, without bravado, toward Jane.

Jane pointed after the police who’d hauled the first man away. “Irishmen doing England’s dirty work! But we see! We see! On England’s crosses even the body of Christ is invisible!” Was it a lie now to make them think she wasn’t Protestant? “But we see! We see whom they have crucified! This is what I’d say to my brother: Don’t do England’s dirty work!”

The band struck up, a ragged attack, but effective. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!” The recruits who had been hesitantly crossing the square stopped. The police began to herd them back toward the hotel. They did not cooperate, precisely, but neither did they resist. The few who moved promptly to retrace their steps found that the recruitment queue had disintegrated. An army sergeant was ushering the remnant inside the hotel.

It was pointless to continue trying to speak above the music, and Jane stopped. It wasn’t clear to her what had happened. The crowd dispersed.

But then Nora embraced her and said, “You were wonderful!” The other women pressed close, congratulating her.

Jane was mystified. If her eyes had filled before, now in the backwash of her anger, they threatened to overflow, which horrified her. She didn’t want to cry. “But they would have come over to us,” she said, and her disappointment was palpable.

“We’re not recruiting, dearie. They are, remember?” Nora smiled in triumph. “But not today, they’re not. Look.”

The recruitment line was completely gone. The sergeant and an officer in his Sam Browne stood side by side in the hotel entrance staring out at the people who were scattering as if the rain had come.

“Don’t they look miffed?” Nora kissed Jane. “I tell you, you were wonderful. I feel like Lady Gregory.”

Jane shook her head. It was a mystery to her how Nora and the others could take satisfaction in such an aborted rally. She hadn’t considered yet that it was even more aborted for the English than it was for her.

When the women had folded their signs and had themselves begun to disperse, Jane stayed behind, promising to meet them later. After her friends, including Nora, had drifted away, she turned and went into the dark church to look at Christ on His cross, knowing that there at least she could find some solace.

Two men watched her go into the church, one from behind the curtain of the window of an upper room in the Great Western, and the other from an automobile parked across the square. Each had seen everything, but only one moved now to go after her.