The Moonlight Runner
Chapter One
Please God, don’t let me be too late.
With no breath left for speech, Rynn sent the plea silently winging away into the night. The racing of her heart far outpaced
her frantic footfalls on the slippery grass. She had to get there before the trap was sprung, had to warn them. The prospect
of violent death was no stranger, not after the Easter Rising, not after years of war. But minutes before, out of nowhere,
it had sprung up terrifyingly close at hand.
It wasn’t that she, the Honourable Mary Rynn Carmichael, had the Sight, as Granny did and, for most of Rynn’s twenty-two years,
had claimed Rynn did as well. It had nothing to do with the color of her eyes, so dark a brown as to be almost black, which
Granny said appeared once in every second generation and were a sign and a throwback to Granny’s own Romany grandmother. It
was, merely, that she had ears like any normal person and could hear. And what she had heard, or overheard, on this Christmas
night in 1918 a few steps outside the crowded ballroom at Ballyshannon Court had upended her world, which had just started
to seem safe and settled again. It had sent her flying out into the cold and windy darkness toward the treacherous cliff edge
that overlooked the stormy waters of Donegal Bay.
“It’s tonight. They’re bringing in the guns,” Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Pelly of the British Army’s Fifth Infantry Division had said in a confidential tone.
Resplendent in his uniform, he was there, in the officers’ convalescent hospital that the formerly private seaside mansion that was Ballyshannon Court had been turned into in the last years of the Great War, to put an official stamp on its decommissioning now that the Armistice had been signed.
“The bloody buggers think we’re blind and deaf.
But we know what they’re up to and we’re ready and waiting. ”
“Your men are in place?” Chief Inspector George Fallon of the Royal Irish Constabulary leaned toward Pelly as he spoke. Like
Pelly’s, his voice was low. The music and laughter filling the house almost drowned out the conversation. But it was the almost that made the difference. Coming upon the two men standing apart from the party in a hallway window embrasure as they blew
smoke from their cigars out a cracked-open window, Rynn caught the exchange and stopped dead.
“On the beach as we speak,” Pelly replied. The satisfaction in his voice sent gooseflesh racing over her skin. Their backs
were to her. They didn’t know she was there, clutching the tray of medicines that she, a trained nurse, was on her way to
administer to the patients who were too ill to join the party, including one very important one, Lord Thomas Dunne, the second
son of the Duke of Hartford, who owned the property. Listening for all she was worth, Rynn didn’t dare so much as breathe.
“As soon as the boat lands, we’ll have them. Given the mood the Castle’s in, the traitors will be facing a firing squad within
a month.”
The Castle being a reference to Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in Ireland. Rynn’s mouth went dry as she grappled
with the realization of what must be afoot.
“You ask me, shooting’s too good for them. Turn them over to us, and we’ll take care of them, and in the process make sure
to send a message to any who might be contemplating the same.” The anticipatory cruelty in Fallon’s tone made Rynn’s blood
run cold.
The conversation wasn’t over, but she’d heard enough.
Taking care that the bottles on the tray didn’t rattle and alert the men to her presence, Rynn backed away until she no longer feared being discovered.
Then she shoved the tray onto a convenient table, picked up the skirt of the hand-me-down ball gown she’d pulled from an old trunk of her late mother for this festive occasion, turned and ran.
The tuneless voices of a houseful of tipsy men bellowing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” followed her through the kitchen garden
and across the fields until the sound of the ocean drowned them out. The wind whipped her skirt, tried to snatch away the
shawl she’d flung around her shoulders, tore her long black hair from its pins. It was cold out—and so dark. The pale quarter
moon hid behind a blanket of heavy clouds. She was fortunate that she knew the way along the cliffs as well as she did. A
fall from such a height onto the rocks below would almost certainly prove fatal, as everyone who’d grown up thereabouts knew.
She had to mind her feet and yet she couldn’t keep her eyes off the vast expanse of undulating blackness that was the bay
and, beyond it, the white-tipped turbulence of the wild Atlantic.
Out there somewhere, if what she’d overheard was right, two boats were headed for a secret rendezvous. One was on a mission
to deliver its illicit cargo. The other was there to claim that cargo and bring it to shore.
When it did—Rynn shuddered at the thought of the soldiers lying in wait. In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, sixteen
of the ringleaders had been summarily executed while hundreds more had been killed in the fighting. Since then, the British
had been merciless in their zeal to put down any hint of rebellion.
And now, with the war over and the December election having lit a fire under the nationalists by handing a major victory to
Sinn Fein, rebellion was what the brainless lunatics bringing in the guns would be about.
Tiocfaidh ar la. Our day will come. The Irish had been promising themselves that for generations. Overthrowing the British oppressors had
become akin to a second religion for many, and like true fanatics they were willing to lay down their lives in its cause.
At the thought Rynn’s stomach cramped. With her pulse pounding so loudly in her ears now that she could barely even hear the
unsettled ocean’s roar, she ran like all the demons from hell were giving chase.
She had to reach the Point, the farthest end of the promontory that jutted like a thumb out into the bay, in time to signal
them not to come in. Her grip on the electric torch she’d snatched along with the shawl from the hook by the kitchen door
tightened until the metal edges of the square box felt like they were cutting into her palm.
Whipped by the wind, her increasingly unmoored hair was in her face, her mouth, all but blinding her as she slid to a stop
just short of the outermost cliff’s edge. Shaking the wayward strands back, sucking in great gulps of briny-smelling air as
she fought to recover her breath, she narrowed her eyes against the blow. Her hands were unsteady as she took the few steps
out onto the very edge of the Point, then lifted the light high and turned it on, and as quickly turned it off again.
A thousand one, a thousand two—
In an almost perfect echo to her count, the incoming tide slammed thunderously against the ancient arched stones of the Fairy
Bridges that edged the bay to the north, sending geysers of seawater shooting up through their blowholes to rain back down
on the bay.
Quelling her fear, her anger, her disbelief—any emotion that might hamper her ability to do what she needed to do—she carefully
kept the count, flashing the light at four-second intervals in the age-old signal that screamed “Mariners beware! Turn back!”
They—all of them who’d grown up in this string of fishing villages by the sea—knew what that signal meant.
If only the men out there in the turbulent waters somewhere below would look up in time to see!
Donal O’Reilly—the boy she’d grown up with, her love—was among them. She knew it with a fierce certainty that, again, had
nothing to do with the Sight, but everything to do with knowing her man. He’d be out there in the thick of it, with his cousin
Seamus and their cronies.
Even though he’d given her his solemn promise he would not.
We’ll be bringing in guns to match their own, see if we don’t, and then you just watch how fast the cowards turn tail and
run home to England. I’ve been talking with some boyos from Liverpool. They can get us anything we need. Seamus, the idiot, had bragged about it openly in the pub.
You’ll have no part in that, I trust. Seamus’s words having been passed on to her as a warning by Molly Kincaid, the pub’s barmaid who was Seamus’s sweetheart
and her good friend, Rynn had confronted Donal with it. Her tone, and the look she gave him, were fierce with warning. He
knew how she felt about the horrors she’d seen during the disaster that was the Rising, when the British Army had turned their
overwhelming numbers and weapons on the ragtag band of rebels whose efforts to wrest control of Ireland from Crown rule had
ended so tragically. At the time, she was still in Dublin, having just completing her nurse’s training there, and the deaths
of the innocents she’d witnessed were forever branded on her soul.
Don’t fash yourself, acushla. If it’s true—and I’m not saying it is, you know what a big talker Seamus can be—it’s nothing
to do with me.
Promise me. She’d caught his arm, looked up at him searchingly.
He’d only been back from the war for a little more than a month.
The fear that had haunted her every day of the two years he’d been gone raised its monstrous head once more.
If she lost him—she could feel the familiar cold dread start up again until she reminded herself that, well, she wouldn’t lose him, because he was safe home.
I promise. He’d smiled at her, that same beguiling smile that he’d been using to get around her since they were children. And she’d believed
him.
Until she’d overheard the soldiers in the hall. Then she’d known.
Now, icy with fear, she aimed the light out to sea, carefully counting off the seconds between flashes as she desperately
searched the all-enveloping darkness for sign of a boat. The sting of the wind, the unaccustomed cold, the danger to herself
if she were caught—none of that mattered compared to the enormity of what was about to happen to people she loved if she couldn’t
stop it. When, finally, the moon ventured out from behind a cloud, spilling its light down over flat-topped Ben Bulbin Mountain
to paint the fields and then the water silver clear to the horizon, she caught her breath.
There it was, the Merrow, Seamus’s currach, unmistakable because of the bright red hair of the mermaid painted on its prow. She’d been looking in
the wrong place, it seemed. It wasn’t out in the ocean, or even in the middle of the bay. It was, rather, battling through
the waves less than a furlong from shore. And it was coming in. Watching, she knew they hadn’t seen her, hadn’t seen the flashing
light or her warning.
Turn back! She opened her mouth to scream it at them, then caught herself before so much as a squeak left her throat. They would never
hear—the distance was too great, the wind would snatch away her voice, the sea would drown it out—but even if they did not,
the soldiers might.
Desperately she flashed the light again. A thousand one—
Where were the soldiers? Were they even there at all?
They would have come from nearby Finner Camp, and a rowdier bunch she had yet to meet.
Impossible to imagine them staying silent for so long.
A frantic glance up and down the Strand revealed no sign of them.
Neither rocks nor shadows were proof against the sparkling moonlight.
Cut off by the cliffs that walled it in, the long, pale crescent of sand appeared deserted.
Had she somehow got it wrong?
Hope died stillborn as the answer hit her with the force of a blow. The soldiers were in the cave, Lion’s Paw Cave, as it
was known. They must be; there was nowhere else they could hide. It was part of an enormous cave system that burrowed under
the cliffs. It filled with water on the high tide but would be safe enough now. The fissure in the rock that opened onto the
beach was narrow, allowing no more than a single person to pass through at a time. As children their name for it was Dead
Man’s Hole, and they’d spent many an hour exploring inside it as far as they dared. The cavern just beyond the opening was
large enough to conceal a hundred men and a labyrinth of passages connected it to many more as large.
Shutting off the light, Rynn snatched up her skirt and ran. Her every sense was on high alert as she went down the twisty
path to the Strand like one of the mountain sheep that had carved it out of the rock. Giant boulders, long shadows, waves
flinging themselves at the shore—the moonlight revealed everything, and nothing.
An ambush was in the offing. Rynn could feel the building danger like a storm charge in the air.