Chapter Ten #2
The wind was cold and the sky was heavy with clouds.
The smell of rain was in the air although so far today not a drop had fallen.
In the distance, Killybegs Peninsula and the towering sea cliffs of Slieve League dominated the horizon.
The Great Northern Hotel, all but empty now as the tourists that filled it in summer were gone, crouched close to the bay.
Closer at hand, she sought out Brennan’s, where Molly had worked.
It was located on the one main street that was divided into two halves by the narrow slice of muddy water that was the Dobhran River as it joined the sea.
Its roof was just visible among the neat rows of shops and houses that made up the town.
The pub was closed and the village all but deserted as nearly everyone had come out today to bid farewell to one of their own, unjustly taken from them as the feeling was.
The mood in the crowd was ugly and growing uglier by the minute.
Even the bay, which from that elevated vantage point seemed as endless as the sky, frothed with anger, throwing out waves like weapons that crashed against the rocks with distant booms. Everywhere Rynn looked was as gray as the low stone walls that crisscrossed the countryside for as far as the eye could see.
Her life felt gray.
And then her heart lurched as she realized that the boats she could distantly see belonged to the Royal Navy fleet. They trawled
the bay, back and forth, leaving ruffles of pale foam in their wake. It was obvious from the deliberation with which they
charted a grid through the rough water that their purpose was other than the netting of fish. That they were, in fact, searching
for something—probably the bodies of the missing men, or the smuggled guns. Or both.
Father Doherty’s voice rang out: “‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,’”
Knowing the words, knowing what they portended, Rynn clutched the ends of her mantilla-like veil together so that the prickly lace would lie close against her face and thus, perhaps, hide her expression in case it revealed too much.
Head bowed, she forced herself to focus on the funeral service, which was ending.
Ropes lowered Molly’s coffin into the grave. Molly’s mother’s weeping turned into sharp cries of grief that rose above the
ritual prayers as the casket disappeared from view. Her remaining daughters surrounded her, sobbing loudly, too, as they did
their best to comfort her in her grief. In the crowd nearby, among the Kellys and McCarthys and Ryans and Walshes and other
neighbors who made up the fabric of the village and her life, she spotted Fergus’s family, and, next to them, Donal’s. Pale
and slumped with grief, Donal’s mother leaned against her daughter, her only other child.
Rynn set her teeth, looked away. Impossible to comprehend that Molly, her laughing, lively friend, was dead. That Paddy was
dead. That Donal and Seamus and Fergus were gone away, perhaps forever.
The church spire pointed up toward the clouds like a finger showing Molly the way to Heaven. The mound of dark, fresh earth
that was Paddy’s grave was farther up the hill to the right.
They’d buried him yesterday.
Reality crashed down on her like one of those thundering waves. The force of it tore at everything that made up the foundation
of her existence. She felt unmoored, rudderless, a boat adrift in a raging sea. Dropping her head, she closed her eyes and
faced the truth. This was real. All that had happened could not be undone. Choices had been made, lives had been lost, families
and futures had been forever changed.
Now was the time to face the consequences.
As soon as the last word was spoken, as soon as the family finished dropping handfuls of dirt down on the coffin and the grave diggers set to work with their spades, Rynn turned and started back down the hill, threading her way through the dispersing crowd, leaving Granny and Glenna to commiserate with the friends who were nearby.
She couldn’t wait, couldn’t bear a repeat of Paddy’s funeral, where she’d had to pretend to the families of Donal and Seamus and Fergus that she, too, was in agony over their fate, had to say nothing of what truly had befallen him to Paddy’s family, had to present a false front to the entire community and, terrifyingly, to the soldiers sent by Colonel Pelly to spy on the gathering.
Khaki-uniformed soldiers with their weapons and military lorries who even now, knowing that they were unwelcome at the service and that the mood of the crowd could turn against them at any time, lined the road at the bottom of the hill.
Watching and waiting. For what? Were they expecting the missing men to turn up?
“Rynn! Rynn, wait!” Donal’s sister, Sarah, called from behind her. Recognizing the voice with a sinking sensation, Rynn turned
to see Sarah, who resembled Seamus more than Donal with her curly black hair and tall, angular frame, hurrying toward her
with both hands outstretched.
She’d known Sarah forever, although since she was a year younger than Glenna they hadn’t been in the same group of friends.
But Sarah was Donal’s little sister, and they were fond for that reason. They embraced, and then Sarah stepped back and caught
her hands. What Sarah had in common with her brother were his eyes. Rynn met those achingly familiar thickly lashed brown
eyes, damp now with fresh tears, and her own eyes stung.
She was so, so sorry it had come to this. So sorry for their pain.
“Will you come talk to mam? She thinks if anyone knows where Donal is, it will be you.”
“I do not,” Rynn protested, resisting the pull of Sarah’s hands. It even had the benefit of being partially true. What she did know was that he wasn’t dead, and that was the secret that tormented her.
“Please,” Sarah begged. Glancing beyond her, Rynn saw Donal’s mother, Brigid, beckoning and gave in. No matter how distressing
such an encounter would be, it was not in her to simply turn and walk away.
“Ah, Rynn.” Mrs. O’Reilly practically collapsed against her, wrapping her in her arms, hugging her as if she never meant to
let go. Not yet fifty, she was small and plump, with neat salt-and-pepper hair and a smooth, round face. She stood back at
last and looked at Rynn beseechingly. “Have you heard from him?”
There was only one him as far as Mrs. O’Reilly was concerned. Donal was the center of her world, her only son.
How could he put his mother through this? was the thought that instantly popped into Rynn’s head. But then she remembered the fate Donal most likely would have faced
if he’d stayed and knew that if Mrs. O’Reilly had been asked to choose, she would have chosen this way.
That didn’t make it any easier.
It seemed to Rynn that dozens of pairs of eyes fixed on her, dozens of breaths were caught and held, as the entire O’Reilly
clan and Fergus’s family too, along with Granny and Glenna, who’d caught up, and what seemed like at least half the mourners
present, gathered round to hear what she had to say.
Under the weight of all those eyes, she felt as if she might suffocate.
I could end this. I could free Mrs. O’Reilly and Seamus’s and Fergus’s people from such suffering.
All she had to do was tell the truth. In confidence, say, by pulling Mrs. O’Reilly aside and whispering in her ear. Or she
could do it later, visit her in her home, before making her way back to Ballyshannon Court.
Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.
“No, I haven’t. I’m sorry to have to say it,” she said to Mrs. O’Reilly, to everyone who had stopped to listen.
“It’s been a fortnight.” Mrs. O’Reilly’s voice shook. “He’s been gone a fortnight. I can’t—he can’t be—” Her face crumpled as she broke off, and then she laid a hand over her heart and whispered, “I would
know. In here, I would know.”
“Ah, mam.” Sarah gathered her mother in her arms as the older woman broke down in tears. She was still weeping as Sarah led
her away.
Rynn fought the urge to close her own eyes.
“This waiting, it’s a terrible thing.” Fergus’s sister Trena Doyle, some fifteen years his senior and as much a mother to
him as a sister, came up on Rynn’s other side and looked at her with sad eyes. “Although why I’m telling you, I don’t know.
It must be as hard on you as it is on us.”
Rynn managed a nod and glanced away. With Trena was the red-haired woman who’d stood beside Maguire earlier and that’s where
her gaze landed. Seeing Rynn’s eyes on her, Trena said, “Are you acquainted with Moira Clary, from out near Magheracar? She’s
sister to Owen Maguire, who’s very kindly sent his boats out to search the coastline for any sign of our men.”
Magheracar was about a twenty-minute walk from the western edge of Bundoran and was about the same distance from Ballyshannon
Court. Although they’d never met to Rynn’s knowledge, she had seen Moira Clary around the village, she realized. Even as Rynn
nodded acknowledgment of the introduction, Moira snorted and said, “’Twas nothing ‘very kindly’ about it. The army came to
him, as a former officer, to do it. He didn’t feel he could say no.”
“Mam, Owen says you should come away now.” Tim the helmsman came up behind Mrs. Clary.
It was her he was calling mam, Rynn realized, and that’s when she made the connection: Tim the helmsman must be Tim Clary, Moira Clary’s son, and thus Owen Maguire’s nephew, which explained the familiar Owen he’d called Maguire on the boat.
The younger boys and the two little girls were with him, his siblings without a doubt.
This, then, must be the widowed sister with her fatherless children that was part of the brood Maguire had taken responsibility for.
Tim studiously avoided meeting Rynn’s gaze, but everything from the pinkening of his cheeks to the uneasy shifting of his feet told her how uncomfortable he felt in her presence.
A quick, almost involuntary glance around found Maguire himself standing a short distance away.
He was talking to a group of local men, but as his sister called to him, he excused himself and came to join them.
Mrs. Clary took her brother’s arm as he reached them and drew him into the circle.