17

If Lot’s wife turned to salt, what happened to Lot? As Dan Curry mounted the stairs of the drab church, he felt like a man going back to what had been forbidden him. He wasn’t thinking of Pearse, but of the time he and Jane had last been together. It was in Hyde Park. He had told her days were coming when she could not have a divided heart, and she had said he could not love her while hating her people.

Behind him the army band was packing away its instruments and the square was nearly deserted. Before making himself conspicuous like this, he had waited to be sure the police and army showed no interest either in following the young woman into the church or in waiting for her to come out.

His hat obscured his face, and so he didn’t take it off until he’d closed the heavy church door behind him. He crossed the small vestibule and quietly pushed open the inner door. At once the flickering blue votive candles drew his eyes to Mary’s statue in the sanctuary. The Mother of God was standing on a blue ball, and under her bare feet was the writhing form of the world’s first snake.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Dan looked for her. He saw no one and panicked. Had he imagined the scene outside? Or had she simply disappeared, becoming, in her own stunning image, invisible? He squinted, moving his eyes from pew to pew, until finally they fell upon a form hunched over. She was on her knees, bent over the back of a pew halfway up the side aisle. For some moments, he simply stood looking at her. She was as still as a statue, and he thought there should be votive lights. Quietly, he made his way over to the aisle, then up it. Without genuflecting, he slipped into the pew behind her. Only when he coughed did she become aware of him, and at once she knelt upright, listening like an animal.

Churchgoers keep their distance from one another unless the press of attendance forces them close. When Jane realized that someone had taken a seat directly behind her, she knew at once his business was with her, not God. She waited, not moving.

Curry was content to sit there in her incredible presence. Was it possible that he’d forgotten this sensation, the pleasure of just being near her? With his eyes, he stroked her neck at the place below the brim of her hat where her hair swept up from her skin. Only that inch of skin was available to him, but it seemed enough, a piece of the flesh in which he knew her. He remembered that, in writing his letters to her, there had always been that moment when, after taking hold of his pen with one hand and placing the other on the paper, he had tried to manufacture in his mind just this experience—her simple, factual nearness. And he could never do it.

Now, if he had paper, what would he write to her? She was waiting, he knew, for him to make himself known, and it was cruel not to, but he had no wish to speak. He had finally, talker that he was, nothing to say.

“Jane? Hello, it’s me.”

He saw the spasm of her shoulders and took it for stiffening.

But he misunderstood. To Jane his voice was like a note struck, the beginning of music. That her physical surprise registered before her pleasure only made her pleasure more acute, made it into something else—relief or rescue or redemption. Dan Curry was elusive now to everyone, not just her. For months she’d been longing for the chance to see him, to tell him that, yes, she understood now and that, yes, she believed now. Slowly she turned to face him, and at once she had to smile. “You have your beard again,” she said quietly.

He nodded. “The British didn’t know me without it, but neither did I.”

“My Barbarossa . . .” The sight of him as he’d been in the beginning made her relax. She would have touched the smooth hair of his face, what had seemed once like feathers on her skin, but the back of her pew separated them. She was kneeling still, only the upper half of her body twisted toward him.

“I heard you speak. I never heard it put so well.”

“I was speaking, I think, to you.” She raised her hand toward him, moving from the kneeler to the seat. They intended only to clasp hands, but the movement carried them past what they intended. Their faces came together and their arms entwined about their necks and they kissed passionately above the rigid wood of the pew that kept their bodies apart.

Then Curry laughed, pressing his cheek against Jane’s. His eyes went to Saint Mary’s statue, the Immaculate Conception. “Good God,” he said. “In church! It’s like doing this in front of Ma!”

“What would she say?”

He pulled back to point at the statue. “See that snake she has her foot on?”

Now Jane laughed. “I thought that was Cromwell or someone, some Protestant.”

Dan shook his head. “It’s anyone who has a carnal thought in church.”

“Then I’m right, it is some Protestant. It’s me!” Jane drew his face to hers again, kissing him with more feeling still. “Let’s go someplace, Dan, where there isn’t wood between us.”

“You must tell me first what happened. The woman I left in Hyde Park, trembling between two nations, is not the woman I heard just now, speaking with the very voice of Ireland. You had those lads walking away from the army bonuses. I’ve never seen that before. Your words had real bite, Jane, as if you believed them.”

“Because of you, I saw the truth of what’s been happening.”

“How we Irish have been invisible in our own country.”

“I was invisible. You were the first person who ever saw me, me. I couldn’t see myself before because Douglas—” The sound of his name was like a wrong note; it jarred her and she stopped.

“Because Douglas was at the Front. He was a prisoner. You couldn’t ignore that.”

She nodded. “Then he came home. And . . .” She wanted to explain what had happened, but she had yet to explain it to herself. “. . . things changed. I changed. I returned to Ireland. I looked for you. I couldn’t find you . . .” She shrugged. “. . . I found something else. My faith, my country. I kept praying the way you told me. ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ And He did.” She caressed his cheek, stroking his silken red whiskers. “Once I asked what you loved more, me or Ireland.”

Curry remembered having answered, You. But when Pearse later asked for his promise never to see her again, he had given it.

“It was wrong of me,” Jane said, “to put such a choice to you. You will never have to choose between me and Ireland again.”

Words he’d dreamed of hearing, but what of Pearse? What of his promise? Pearse would say, Don’t trust her. She has a divided heart still. Without wanting to she will betray you. Grace, yes, he thought, but danger also. He put his fingers inside the collar of her coat, to touch the skin at her throat.

She shivered and creased her forehead at him. Here?

He traced his fingers along her throat into the cup of flesh at the base of her neck, as if feeling for the flame of a vigil light or for the exact place where the wax is melting into water, then for the place where throat becomes bone and bone becomes breasts, as if her breasts were what he wanted.

He let out a little gasp of disappointment when his fingers found it, the cold, hard thing he’d felt obliged to search for. “Your locket,” he said. “You still wear it.”

He imagined Pearse saying, Fool! What did you expect?

He brought the locket out from inside her blouse and coat and held it before her.

Her eyes did not waver. “Of course I wear it, I’ll always wear it.”

He didn’t have to open it to see the sharp image of that man whose face he carried, as if in the locket of his own brain. He imagined the hair dark and slick, the brow strong, the mustache perfect above the pleasant mouth. But oh, how those eyes hated him!

Still, he opened it, flicking his fingernail between the two edges.

And it was empty. The wings of gold were empty. He looked up at her. “But there’s no one’s picture,” he said.

“That’s because the picture I have of you is too large.”

Curry stood and went around to her pew and, as he took her into his arms, she lay back and he followed her down onto the hard bench. He opened her coat and found the curves of her body. When he kissed her, her mouth was open and the taste of her tongue shocked him. Only whores had opened their mouths to him like that, but Jane Tyrrell was no whore. She was the best woman he would ever know, and for the first time it did not seem wrong to want her body.

Abruptly he pulled away and stood, drawing her up after him. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he said.

Jane knew they had to leave the church, but she teased, “I don’t mind if God watches.”

Curry smiled and nodded toward the statue of the woman on the snake. “It’s not God I mind. It’s His mother.”

He pointed down to the beach. A lone fisherman dressed in black was hauling his tiny black curragh out of the water. When it was beyond the reach of the lapping waves, he flipped it over and at once, from that distance, the curragh assumed the exact appearance of a large beetle. “He flips it like that because the tide comes in quickly and if his boat is upside down it won’t float away.”

They were standing at the window of the cottage in which Curry lived. It was in the hills outside the village of Fenit, six miles from Tralee. Spread below was the widest part of Tralee Bay. The looming Dingle peninsula across the water was invisible, obscured by the rain that had finally begun to fall, but its presence could be felt in the calm of the water it protected from the prevailing weather. The thin beach they were looking at reached into the bay from Fenit, stretching out half a mile like a line trailing from a boat.

“It’s beautiful,” Jane said. “I can see why you love it.”

“And me a Dublin lad.” He put his arm around her. The feel of his own heavy sweater on her shoulder gave him an unexpected pleasure. It wasn’t a proper robe—she was naked under it—but it was just long enough to cover her nicely and keep her warm. She’d left his bed to make tea. When he saw her standing at the window while waiting for the kettle, he’d thrown on his shirt and pants and joined her.

“In the mouth of the bay—you can just make them out in the mist there—are the Magharee Islands. The Seven Hogs, the locals call them. You’d want to keep your eye on them if you were a ship out there.”

“You talk like a local. You’ve come to know the area well.”

“I’m taken with the place.”

The whistle on the kettle began to blow, musically at first, then shrilly. Jane went to it, her bare feet slapping the cold, stone floor.

Dan remained at the window to watch the fisherman trudge along the beach. The man limped. It was Peter Hunt. Dan knew him from the Fenit pub. In his first weeks, just when the weather had turned rough and men like Hunt had begun taking their curraghs out less and less, Curry had sat in the same chair at the pub for hours every day until they began to talk to him. The more they told him about Fenit—the bay, that particular strand, and how the tides played upon it—the more certain he became it was the place. It had remained for him to plot the relevant coastal hazards, like the Seven Hogs, which he’d done with the help of the lighthouse keeper at Kerry Head. He drew up as precise a table of local tides as the expertise of curragh men could give him.

The fruit of that first phase of his work had gone on to Pearse. In the second phase he had selected from among the Kerry Volunteers a contingent of twenty men to serve as the shore party for the German landing. It was such a small party because the German soldiers themselves would accomplish the transfer of weapons crates to lifeboats and thence to the beach, but also because—and this was the most disturbing discovery of Curry’s time in the west—Pearse would not trust any more than that with knowledge of what they were doing. The men whom Curry recruited were the most reliable IRB men in the west, though not even they knew exactly what they were being drilled to accomplish. The importance of the sliver of beach below him was a secret Curry shared only with Pearse. And Pearse, through Devoy in Washington, had shared it only with the German navy.

More recently, with the coming of March, it had become time to begin the immediate preparations, the training of the larger force of Volunteers—a thousand each from Galway, Clare, and Kerry—to seize the important western towns from Kenmare to Listowel. They would serve as the initial mustering points from which the first of the German weapons would be distributed to the fully mobilized Volunteers. Casement had been promised two hundred thousand rifles and a thousand machine guns, enough to equip the army that would rally once Irishmen saw that their freedom was within reach. That army would hold off England forever.

But the initial strike was Curry’s concern. Within a day of the landing, a two-pronged force of ten thousand newly armed Irishmen, led by a thousand battle-hardened Germans, would advance simultaneously against Limerick and Cork before the British had a chance to reinforce their token garrisons. Within two days the entire southwest, including Ireland’s only true port city, would be free. On the third day the southwest army and the force moving out from Dublin would link up in the ancient cathedral town of Kilkenny, and all Ireland, save parts of Ulster, would be theirs!

The thought of it made Curry’s heart race, though his eye remained outwardly steady on the narrow beach where it would all begin.

“You take it without lemon, as I recall.” Jane appeared at his side, offering him the cup of tea. “Which is just as well, since there isn’t any in the kitchen.”

“Oh sorry. You do take lemon.”

She raised her brow at him, a good-humored gesture. “And the cream is curdled. The place lacks a certain touch, Dan.”

“It’s where I keep my pillow, Jane. I’m often away.”

A small silence fell between them.

Jane knew better than to ask the seemingly natural question: Doing what? She returned to the kitchen for her own tea. When she came back into the parlor, Curry had taken one of the two wooden-backed chairs in front of the smoldering turf fire, the only source of warmth. She sat in the other, curling her feet under her legs and pulling the sweater down to cover them. They sipped their tea in silence. When Curry lit a cigarette, Jane asked for one. His surprise showed, but he gave it to her and struck a match. When she bent over it to inhale the flame, her hair fell around her face, and for a moment it was all he could see of her, the downpour hiding her exquisite face the way his overstretched gray sweater hid the miracle of her body.

When she looked up at him, she said, “Thanks,” then sat back. Her eyes went to the fire. The smoke of their tobacco mingled with the musty smoke of the turf, a pungent burnt aroma that overpowered, to his regret, the acrid smell of sex.

“Whose is this place?”

“A friend of Pádraic’s. A Gaelic folktale man at the university in Dublin. He comes out here summers to listen to the Irish-speakers.” Curry paused, then added, “He’s a priest.”

Only at those words did Jane notice the crucifix on the wall above the fireplace. At that moment the writhing figure of Christ seemed grotesque to her. She had to remind herself that the corpus had become her symbol of life’s hard truth, of Ireland’s agony. But Christ’s nakedness called to mind Dan’s, which she preferred. It wasn’t torture she wanted, but consolation. She flicked her cigarette toward the fire and looked at Curry. His eyes had followed hers to the cross and remained on it. She said, “So no matter where we go, one of them is watching. God’s mother, God’s son; they’re a family of voyeurs.”

Dan bristled inwardly at her mild blasphemy, but he forced a laugh. “You said in Tralee you wanted to be seen.”

“Not in a priest’s bed.”

“But you aren’t with a priest.”

But at last he seemed like a priest to her, in the purity of his devotion. Did it matter that it was devotion not to a religion but to a nation? The gay ebullience she’d loved in him in those first days at the Abbey had given way to a fierce, politically motivated asceticism. She was herself the great exception, she saw, to the rigor of his single-mindedness. She assumed that he felt sullied, the way a married man would after such sexual passion with a woman not his wife. Or more to the point, the way a priest would. Well, Jane didn’t feel sullied, and if he had, for his own reason, to be guarded with her, she didn’t have to be guarded with him. “You seem distressed, Dan. I wonder why.”

He stared at the tip of his cigarette. “‘Distressed’? I wouldn’t think ‘distressed.’”

“What, then?”

“It’s common, isn’t it, for lovers to feel a certain”—what was the word he’d heard applied to this?—“tristesse?” He looked up, but away from her.

“With me, Dan, the tristesse just stopped.”

He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. Instead he fixed his gaze rigidly upon the glowing bricks of turf.

“What makes us different, do you think?” She had refused to push against such awkward feelings all her life, but this time she was going to push through them.

“History.”

“You think my history is unlike yours? I’d never been with a man before you.”

“I didn’t mean personal history, Jane.”

She answered sharply, “Are you thinking of Wolfe Tone, Dan? Or Oliver Cromwell? William of Orange? Or is it dear old Henry the Eighth? There comes a point when that history can be made to mean too much. What else does my being here like this mean but that you and I have reached that point?”

“But this isn’t a bubble of air, untouched by what surrounds us.”

“Enemies surround us, is that it? Why are these feelings of yours the result of what we’ve done together? You came inside me and touched me where no one has ever touched me before. But for you, instead of physical communion, our intimacy is the revelation of all that separates us. When we scrape away the glow, we see that even I’m your enemy. Is that it? Is that what you are feeling?”

“What I’m feeling is closer to you than I’ve ever felt to anyone.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I can’t put it into words.”

“You must. You simply must.”

Yes, he knew that. But the heavy silence had gripped him again, and for a long time he could not speak.

Jane never stopped looking at him. She would outlast his inhibition.

Finally he said, “I left Maynooth because I was terrified of being alone. To have been so at the mercy of such a fear fills me with shame. Everyone is alone. I know that now. At the Abbey Theatre I was surrounded with people who thought well of me, were even fond of me, but I felt more alone than ever. And what assuaged the pain of that, what took it away, really . . .” He looked at her now. What he was going to say would hurt her. “. . . was the feeling of being at one with my people. Don’t you see, Jane, the Cause is more than the Cause to me. It’s been my salvation. Communion, you said. Yes, that’s the feeling, but communion with my people. It’s what I was supposed to feel as a priest, but couldn’t. I feel it now, working for their freedom.”

Jane put her teacup on the floor and reached across to him, touching his arm. “But Dan, I told you. You don’t have to choose between me and your people anymore. I am one of them.”

“But you’re not, Jane.”

Now she did flinch. She withdrew her hand. “Because I’m a Protestant?”

“Yes.” A simple declaration, his affirmation glistened with its own purity.

And Jane was stunned, but not at all in the way she’d have expected to be. She knew the obvious arguments, how Protestants had played, and were playing now, central roles in Ireland’s great struggle—the litany of heroes ran from Tone to Parnell to her own father, to Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz, to Casement himself. The important divisions were not religious—she could recite this line in her sleep—but economic. But Dan Curry knew all those arguments too. He’d been at the Abbey, after all, and knew Synge and Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde and Oliver Gogarty. He was talking about something more fundamental, the bedrock reality that had yet to fully manifest itself but that would be clear to all in a short time. The oh-so-rational syllogisms—All Daughters of Ireland are Irish patriots. Some Protestants are Daughters of Ireland. Therefore some Protestants are Irish patriots—that should have made it seem absurd hadn’t yet and never would. He was talking about Catholic Ireland, Ireland Catholic, a Catholic nation for a Catholic people. He was saying its moment had finally come. And what stunned Jane was her visceral recognition, after all this time, that he was right.

Perhaps what made her know it was her own new experience that intense religious faith—and wasn’t this the secret that lay beyond the grasp of “reasonable” people who were indifferent to belief?—could make a crucial difference to one’s life. “Reasonable” people would never grasp that religion could be Ireland’s central problem because they could not imagine that religion could have first been Ireland’s main solution.

She said, “What I tried to explain before, Dan, is that when I lost you I felt completely set adrift. I was in England, but I discovered I wasn’t English. Not English in any way. My brother came home and I discovered that my ties with my family had somehow been cut. I went to Dublin looking for you, but you were gone, and I faced the truth that I was alone. Perhaps that’s what you did on leaving Maynooth, facing that aloneness. But you were ahead of me. You already had something I lacked. You had your faith. Well, now I have mine. I believe in God, Dan.” The statement was momentous to her, and having made it, she fell silent. The words reverberated in her.

Curry sensed that she’d stopped short, and he knew that her commitment—to him, to Ireland—required more. He said, “Will you become a Catholic, Jane?”

Not a demand or request. An invitation, rather, but also a test.

She nodded. “Yes.”

And Curry saw that, in her one word, her half of the pact was made. And what of his? He could make his commitment now only by telling her the truth. “Jane, I’m here to prepare for a German invasion on the beach below this cottage. It’s coming, in barely more than a month, the weekend of Easter. Collusion with Germany is what siding with Ireland and with Catholics has come to require. It’s terrible, but true.”

She didn’t flinch. “I know what’s required, Dan. And I’m prepared to be a part of it.”

He looked away from her, moved by her refusal to let barriers stand between them. The great obstacle that made their love impossible did not exist. Now the only obstacle was in him. He said quietly, “But you may not be prepared for everything. Being with me may involve something you’d rather keep your distance from.”

“You mean the Rising? I’m in it, Dan. What must I do to declare myself? What must I do to convince you? Is it distance you think I want?” She sensed his reluctance, and suddenly doubt filled her. Was any of this true? Her wanting to be a Catholic? Her wanting to be Irish? Her wanting to help bring about a free Irish nation? Or was it only that she wanted him? And wouldn’t that make her ridiculous now if what he wanted was all of that but her?

He said quietly, “No, I don’t mean the Rising. I mean my fear.”

When he looked at her, she saw that his eyes were brimming.

He said with bewilderment, “I’m afraid of you.”

“Why?” Her voice was a whisper.

“Because I love you, and I see now . . .” He stopped.

“. . . that I love you,” she said.

He nodded, full of an emotion that had gripped him his whole life, since the earliest gloom of the crowded rooms on Henrietta Street, where he’d fought through the chaos of a dozen howling or morose siblings for the scraps of his mother’s distracted fondness, then later for scraps only of bread. In those rooms he learned to be his defeated father’s son. It was his father’s emotion, this certainty that in the center of himself—where a woman’s love collects and from which hope and faith radiate and in which the resolute sense of self-worth quickens—there was a core of nothing. Curry’s pretense collapsed, and he saw the nothing, nothing, nothing from which, as a spoiled priest, posturing actor, and now solitary patriot, he had been in lifelong, headlong flight. He fell onto his knees before Jane and crushed his head into her lap. “I love you, Jane,” he repeated desperately, “I love you.”

She stroked his head, pressing him with what she had—her experience, her strength, and now, ironically, the faith she felt he’d given her. Believing in God, she understood, was how certain human beings believed in themselves. She was distressed at his pain, of course, but relieved too, for she understood that his reluctance had been reluctance to feel this anguish. Like the Irishman that he was, he had yielded to his emotion in courage and now was handing it over to her, his first gift. This was his virginity, she saw. How surprising that she should feel prepared to take it from him. That she welcomed his expression and could receive his fear made her feel as Irish as he was. She saw what she could do for him—make him see that if he was truly nothing, nothing, nothing, how could she love him so and why would she do anything now—whether for God or Ireland or not—for him?

When he came up, their faces were only inches apart. Jane tried to read his eyes for their hard, dark secrets. She had never before been so close to a man’s anguish; of course it frightened her. With her forefinger she traced the tearstain on his cheekbone, down to where it disappeared into his whiskers. She lowered her face to his, to kiss him. She welcomed it, despite the cold, when his hands went under the sweater. She expected that he would push it up to expose her, so that he could touch his face to her breasts. But instead he leaned against the soft, beaten wool, his hands pressed together at the small of her back. Instinctively she began to rock slightly. The small movement brought to mind her mother.

She tried to imagine her mother rocking her father in this way, him half kneeling, half leaning on her. But she knew her parents had never been together like this. Her father had never exposed such need, had never felt it. She said, “Let’s move to the bed, darling.”

It was a narrow bed, meant for one person. Jane pulled the sweater over her head and dropped it. She sat on the edge of the bed, drawing Dan close. He remained standing, unbuttoning his shirt. Jane worked at his trousers. For the first time, all self-consciousness left her, and she realized that he was submitting to her initiative. When he was standing naked before her, she pulled him down onto the bed.

Her legs opened and he pushed into her. His passion outran him, and he was afraid that he would come too quickly again. But no. As if their emotional turmoil bound them in a new way—they had made their commitment—she stayed with him perfectly throughout that carnal flight, that brief ecstasy of rescue, from all life’s grief.

“So you want to be a Catholic, eh?” He was up on his elbow, smiling down on her. His meaning was clear enough: she’d have to learn a Catholic’s distaste for sex. She had the heavy brown blanket pulled to her chin, but out of cold, not modesty.

“Blatantly,” she said and laughed. “And I shall require you to be my sponsor.”

He shook his head vigorously. “That’s a canonical impediment.”

“What?”

“You’ve a lot to learn, my love. A canonical impediment. If I was to be your baptismal sponsor, I wouldn’t be permitted to marry you.”

“Why?” Jane had to stifle a native repugnance. He was making light of it, but she’d been taught to regard such legalism as the surest sign of the religion’s morbidity.

Curry shrugged. “Spiritual consanguinity.”

“What rubbish.”

“Get used to it, darling.”

Curry’s gloating seemed inappropriate to Jane. He should have been embarrassed. “But what does that mean? Spiritual what?”

“Consanguinity. I’d be like your brother.”

An unfortunate reference, it shocked them both. Jane faced away. “I hope not.”

“Where is he, anyway? Back at the Front?”

Jane shook her head. “He’s at home.”

“In London?”

“No, Cragside. With my father. Pamela and the children are there as well.”

“How can that be? He’s an officer. It’s been four months.” Curry felt a visceral alarm. It shocked him to realize that he hadn’t asked her this before, that she hadn’t told him. “Why is he at Cragside?”

“Apparently he’s unwell, after what he went through.”

Curry sat up, indifferent to the chill air on his naked torso. “He was well enough in London. I saw him. He was perfectly well.”

“I thought he was too, but . . .”

“But what? What haven’t you told me?”

Jane had yet to admit this to herself. How could she have admitted it to him? Her refusal to confront the fact shamed her as much as the fact itself did. “I think he’s after you.”

“And when you learned that, you were . . . ?

“It’s what changed me. It changed everything.” Her mind was full of that scene: Douglas, in his brilliant uniform, coming at her with his riding crop. “He called me your whore.”

Curry wanted to turn away from her, but how could he? He sensed at once the danger Tyrrell represented to him and to the entire plan. He should have put aside everything else to consider it. But put aside Jane? Her devastation overwhelmed him. He put his hand on her shoulder. “The bastard,” he said.

Jane turned her head aside, tears spilling onto the pillow. When Curry touched her face, turning it back to him, she said, “I’m not your whore, am I?”

“You’re going to be my wife, if I have my way.” When he embraced her, she clung to him. His consolation meant everything to her, as hers had to him. The circle of their need was now complete.

But Curry’s mind returned to Tyrrell—Tyrrell in the west of Ireland, pretending to be unwell. He knew he should report this to Pearse; it was the very link Pearse had warned him of. But Pearse would make him obey his own vow never to see Jane again, as if she were the threat. Pearse, of course, would see the way in which she was. He would remove Curry and abandon his plan for the German landing, devising another. Dan Curry, the spoiled priest, would be a spoiled patriot.

No. He would do what Jane had done: squeeze his eyes shut against the uncertain power of Douglas Tyrrell. Jane had promised Dan he’d never have to choose again between her and Ireland, but she was wrong. As he held her, his face in her hair, he knew he’d blurted out the truth that first time. Ireland was nothing to him, compared to her.

It was raining when they left the cottage early the next morning. Jane was returning to Dublin. Even in the weather, Curry paused in front of his automobile to point in the direction of the finger-thin strand, the long peninsula poking into Tralee Bay. The landing at half tide; a brilliant plan and a perfect place for it.

Curry’s cottage was on the narrow plateau along which the Fenit road ran. The plateau was halfway up the broad hill that sloped back from the bay. On top of the hill, huddled by a trinity of huge boulders that once might have marked a Druid holy place, Douglas Tyrrell followed through his field glasses the direction of Curry’s arm. Tyrrell saw the beach. He surveyed the waters of the rain-shrouded bay, which even in that downpour, protected as it was by mammoth Dingle, was flat calm, as if ready, waiting like the bay between the legs of a willing lover.

He turned his binoculars on Jane just as she took Curry’s hand to climb into the motorcar. He had hoped to read her face, but he never saw it. It was just as well.

Curry cranked the motor efficiently, then climbed in beside her. Tyrrell followed the car, as it headed off toward Fenit and Tralee, until it disappeared.

Then he stepped out from behind the boulders, applied his glasses once more to the broad bay, memorizing it through the filter of the blowing rain. When he lowered the binoculars, he stood there impassively, looking down at the cottage, the beach, Tralee Bay, the Dingle peninsula, the Magharee Islands, the bleakness of it, the despair.

The rain streaked his face. After a long time he said to himself, Right.