Chapter Four #2
Fortunately Maguire showed no interest in commenting on the matter, and instead continued with, “Whatever the rights and wrongs
of how you came to be in this situation, Miss Carmichael, as far as the Brits are concerned, the fact that you’re here now and you were in that boat with the guns is more than sufficient.
It might be unlikely that they’d put you in front of a firing squad, seeing that you’re a woman, but they still could. And
they will certainly shoot you—” he looked at Donal—and Seamus “—if they get their hands on you. As well as your idiot friend who has no more sense—or gratitude—than
to pull a gun on a boatload of men who’ve just done him a huge service.”
“Fergus loved Paddy like a brother,” Rynn said in Fergus’s defense.
Raw with grief herself, she still shivered intermittently despite the insulating folds of the wool sweater that enveloped her from her neck to halfway down her thighs.
The fact that her hair, despite having been blotted with a cloth as she changed, was still damp and loose now about her shoulders as she tried to let the thick fall of it dry might have had something to do with her inability to get warm, but she suspected that a combination of shock and fear was more to blame.
“You left Paddy to the sea without benefit of a priest, or any prayers said over him or any words at all! Without asking or telling us what you meant to do! And you wonder that Fergus is upset? The wonder would be if he was not!”
“Upset, is he?” Maguire gave her a hard look, then expanded that grim glance to include the men beside her. “So, too, am I
upset. That a bunch of want-wits should have no better judgment than to be bringing the Crown forces down upon us here in
our home territory, where we have heretofore been able to go about our business without notice or interference, is something
for any rational man to be upset about, don’t you agree?”
“To hell with the Crown forces! To hell with the King, and bloody England!” Seamus burst out. “We’re done with them! They’ll
rule over us forever if we let them! Driving them out by force is the only answer. And for that we need guns! Yes, I’m bringing
them in! And I’ll be bringing in more, and so will others! If they won’t give us our freedom, we’ll take it!”
“You were with the Sixteenth, were you not?” Maguire’s tone was measured. His glance included Donal.
“All of us were. The ten of us,” Seamus said. “Donal and me, Fergus and Paddy, Brian Meagher, Sean O’Leahy, Liam McCarthy,
Cormac Byrne, Tyrone Walsh, Joseph Murphy.” His tone turned bleak as he said those last names. “We joined up, all of us together,
volunteered! Like damned fools! We missed the Somme, maybe, but after that we were in the thick of it. Meagher, O’Leahy, McCarthy,
Byrne, Walsh and Murphy fell in battle. Four out of the ten of us made it home. Only four.”
“So, like myself and my men, you were at Messines. And Passchendaele. And the rest.”
“We were,” Seamus said, and Donal nodded.
“Then I’d think you’d have had your bloody fill of bloody war and bloody killing.” A barely leashed savagery whipped through Maguire’s words.
“We’ve had our fill of them. Six years ago, they promised us Home Rule. Six years! But what happened? Nothing. They blamed it on the war. Just wait till
it’s over, they said. We’ll give you back your country that we took. We trusted their word, trusted that it would happen,
fought alongside them and shed our blood and died, by the tens of thousands as you know. But now the war is over, and the
time for waiting is at an end, and still they say, wait. Waiting’s what we’ve had our fill of, and we’ll wait no more!” Seamus’s
face flushed crimson as he spoke.
Maguire’s lips tightened. But before he could reply, Donal burst out with “Aye, and while we were off fighting, they arrested
Eamon de Valera and his men on false charges of traitorously plotting with the Germans and locked them away in British prisons!
Where they still rot with the Crown’s good will! And now the evil bastards have gone and killed Paddy!”
“The evil bastards!” Seamus repeated with loathing. “Even when we fought alongside them, they looked down their noses at us!
They treated us like we were less than them, less than human even, sending us in first to catch the brunt of the machine gun
fire and the flame throwers and the rest of it while they hung back. Behind our backs they called us drunks and cowards, when
it was us saving their bloody arses! For generations they’ve starved us, run us off our land, taken our homes. They’ve outlawed
our language, made us into serfs in our own country! We’ve had all of it we can stand.” Passion blazed from Seamus’s eyes
as they rested on Maguire. “You’re known, Maguire. A war hero! You could join us, help us run the bastards out once and for
all. A man like you, people will listen.”
“So you think to get what you want by fomenting revolution?” Maguire shook his head. “I prefer to wait and give the results of the election a chance.”
“Are you a bloody Unionist, then?” Seamus’s tone made the word a curse.
“I’m a bloody Irishman. I lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war. That’s three widows left behind, and a passel of fatherless children.
And thousands like them throughout the country! Who’s to provide for them? See that they have food and a roof over their heads
and the like? It’s left to me to provide for mine, and that’s what I’ll be doing, not fighting some damned useless fight that’ll
leave our people in worse case than they’re in already.”
“We have to fight. It’s the only way we’ll ever win free,” Seamus said, low and fierce, as Donal nodded agreement.
“Stop! Enough about fighting! I’ll hear no more of it! None, do you understand? Isn’t it enough that Paddy’s dead? Do you
want to die, too?” Rynn’s chair shot back with a harsh scraping noise as she jumped to her feet. This talk of revolution terrified
her. Eamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, had been imprisoned afterward and had barely escaped with his
life when the executions were halted after their swift brutality shocked the world. Now the head of Sinn Fein, de Valera had
been in prison in England since May—and she could not think that was an entirely bad thing, as he and his cohorts were bound
and set on overthrowing British rule at whatever the cost in Irish blood and anguish. That more violence and death would come
to the people she loved and the land she loved, and especially so soon after the end to the worst war the world had ever seen,
was unthinkable. Anything, anything was preferable to that. Her glare encompassed the two men beside her before landing on
the one in front of her. “And what about Paddy? A boat must be launched. If we’re to have any chance at all of recovering his body, there’s no time to be lost.”
Those surprisingly light eyes met hers again.
“His body will be recovered. Did you think he was left on the currach by accident? Whether you know it or not, the currents
where he went down are such that he will wash ashore with the morning tide,” Maguire said. “And he will be found.” His gaze
shifted to Seamus. “As will the remains of your boat. And if you are very, very lucky, those hunting you will think that you,
too, all of you, went down with the boat and drowned and will, in good time and when nothing more is seen of you, call off
the search. Leaving you to carry on with your life in some degree of safety, providing, of course, that you do it somewhere
else until these matters settle down.”
“Owen,” the helmsman interrupted, looking around at them. “We’re nearing the harbor. If you’re meaning us to go elsewhere,
you’d best be telling me where.”