Chapter Twenty-Two
She should have seen it coming. Of course someone—one of the servants probably—had mentioned her prolonged absence to Thomas.
Why had she not expected it and been preparing herself? Panic set her heart to racing.
I can’t lie to him. Her first instinctive reaction was almost instantly replaced by I must. If someone searching for Bingle should come to the house, he won’t have to pretend to know nothing if he actually knows nothing.
Donal’s and Seamus’s lives are at risk if the truth is found out, and so is mine.
And Maguire’s. Too much is at stake, and telling Thomas would put him at risk, too.
I’m a party to murder. That was the horrifying reality she had to accept. There was no fixing it, nothing to do. Except pray the truth never came
out.
She could almost hear Granny saying it: Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Thomas’s eyes held hers. She returned his gaze, unblinking, her smile frozen in place as those and a thousand other thoughts
ran through her mind between one heartbeat and the next.
“Oh my, yes. I was going to tell you, but you got in so late and so much happened today that I forgot all about it. It was
terrible! This poor dog . . .”
And so she lied, and told him the story that she’d told Parry.
And, miraculously, he believed her, commiserating with her over her terrible experience, saying what a lucky dog and owner to have had her there to help.
Then she launched into an account of her afternoon, most particularly her call on her half-sister, as a distraction, and somewhere in the middle of that the gong rang, summoning them to dinner.
Talking animatedly all the way, she went down with him in the hand-cranked lift that had been installed for his convenience.
The family had just gone into the dining room, drinks in hand.
Everyone glanced in their direction as they entered, and all conversation immediately ceased.
The Duchess, as expected, was overcome with emotion on seeing Thomas upright and walking, albeit with his sticks, and fell upon him, hugging him as she burst into tears.
Geoffrey said, “Glad to see you on your feet, old man,” and clapped his brother on the shoulder.
The Duke expressed his happiness with a gruff “I knew no boy of mine would let the damned Huns defeat him,” swallowed the
rest of his drink in a gulp and demanded that dinner be served.
In all the excitement Rynn’s lie about the dog was lost, buried and hopefully forgotten. But guilt weighed on her, for the
lie and even more heavily for a man’s death, and it was all she could do to keep up an untroubled front. The park assumed
such a sinister aspect in her mind that even on sunny days it felt dark and threatening, and she doubted that she would ever
be able to bring herself to step foot in it again.
The fear of being found out was a constant, gnawing at her over the days and nights that followed.
On a happier note, Thomas’s health continued to improve, although he still spent more time in his wheelchair than up on his sticks and he still had that troublesome cough.
When his mother suggested that perhaps he was pushing himself too hard, he replied that no matter the cost he was determined not to spend the rest of his days as a semi-invalid and meant to reclaim the life he would have had if the war had not intervened.
To that end, he applied himself diligently to learning the ins and outs of investing and threw himself into reacquainting himself with the friends and social life he’d left behind.
Rynn found that adjusting to the life of an aristocratic lady was more difficult than she’d imagined. To begin with, the contrast
between her working-class existence in Bundoran and the sheer opulence of the lifestyle the Hartfords and all their circle
took for granted was staggering. Even in London, the stark differences between the rich aristocrats in their mansions and
the poor living in the overcrowded tenements and filling the teeming streets was eye-opening. But those around her, even Thomas,
seemed oblivious to the disparity, and she was once again left to contemplate the fundamental truth behind the Irishman’s
forever lament of oppressors versus the oppressed. To add to her inner unease, it seemed like she was always in company. She
increasingly longed to be outdoors, to go for solitary walks and breathe fresh air and leave her worries behind. But fear
of who might be lurking made her wary, and London itself was too crowded and dangerous to explore on her own as more and more
people flocked to the capital in the face of the widespread unemployment and homelessness that plagued the country.
The warmer weather brought back the terrifying scourge that was the Spanish flu, although it was mainly reported in the western
port cities and this wave seemed milder than the ones of the previous year. Other diseases were on the rise as well. Except
for her work with Thomas, her nurse’s training was expected to be put aside. The Duchess counseled her that if Thomas was
to be a success, it was up to her to do her part by cultivating the wives of the influential. This she did to the best of
her ability, although the fact that she was Irish and not of their world meant that the barriers never really came down.
Many evenings were given over to socializing.
She accompanied Thomas to victory balls, which were grand events celebrating the war’s end and were all the rage, and fundraisers for the veterans and families of the fallen as well as more intimate dinner parties and soirees.
They attended the theater and the opera and visited the zoo.
Glenna wrote to say that she and Granny would be postponing their visit while she went to Dublin with her class to participate in the July victory parades, which meant that searching for their own London house took on less urgency.
Still, she and Thomas looked, and between those excursions and his early-morning exercises that she oversaw and their now almost nightly social engagements they spent much of their time together.
Despite the anxiety that was never far away, Rynn enjoyed her husband’s company. But she couldn’t shake the near certainty
that unseen eyes were following her whenever she left the house, and that someone was out there watching and waiting when
she was inside.
She was desperate to talk to Maguire but saw and heard nothing of him and finally was forced to ask Thomas, in what she hoped
was an offhand manner, where he was. Thomas said that he’d returned to Ireland to try to reason with the rebels, with apparently
indifferent success. Along with gloomy reports on the ongoing riots and labor strikes in their own country, the London newspapers
carried almost daily stories about the turmoil rocking Ireland. Lloyd George was being urged by Churchill and others who had
his ear to send in more soldiers to deal with the rebels once and for all, and those calls grew louder after the rebels killed
an RIC officer as they tried to free a prisoner and began launching attacks on RIC barracks for the purpose of acquiring explosives
and guns. Listening to cooler heads, Lloyd George kept the British retaliation proportional, as the Duke, who felt that there could be no compromising with the rebels, reported bitterly.
The rebels responded to this restraint with a series of lightning ambushes against RIC officers and others loyal to the Crown, and the situation grew more volatile by the day.
To the fury of the British establishment, de Valera turned up alive and well in Ireland and was subsequently elected president
of the Dail Eireann. He immediately proclaimed that the Crown had no authority there and that the only authority in Ireland
was the elected government of the Irish people. The British, in turn, placed an enormous price on his head and launched an
all-out hunt for him. He managed to evade capture, which Rynn considered remarkable in a country where he was so well-known,
but there were multiple reports of him traveling the country in disguise and in the opinion of most it was only a matter of
time until he was arrested. Finally, any fear of that was taken off the table when he caught a ship to America in hopes of
persuading the American Congress to back the rebels’ cause. The British, meanwhile, declared counties Limerick, Tipperary,
Cork, Kerry and Roscommon, where the rebel activity was heaviest, to be in a state of disturbance, putting them under strict
military control including a curfew from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. Unsurprisingly, this stirred up great resentment among the
citizenry of those areas.
In the words of one Irish columnist, it was a right mess.
Glenna wrote again to say that the area around Bundoran was mostly quiet, although the soldiers from Finner Camp were patrolling the streets and in general making a nuisance of themselves, and a failed attempt by some youths to break into the Garda station in the dead of night to steal guns had ended with two of them being carted off to Kilmainham Gaol.
Also, she added, her students were learning to play “Molly Malone” on tin whistles, a bit of artistry they meant to perform in upcoming victory parades in Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin.
Just picturing Glenna at the head of a gaggle of nine- and ten-year-olds tootling loudly away as they marched down the main streets of the various towns made Rynn smile.
During all this time Rynn saw and heard nothing of Donal. She also heard nothing to indicate that he or Seamus had been captured
and could only assume Maguire had taken them away with him or otherwise gotten them to safety as he’d promised. Of Bingle
she tried not to think at all, but she couldn’t help but fret about what had been done with his body and whether it would