Chapter Twenty-Eight
Word spread. Just how she didn’t know, but over the next few weeks Rynn was approached several times to attend to wounded
soldiers of the IRA. Although after that first, terrifying experience she stopped her regular walks to the Point unless someone—Granny
or Glenna, mostly—was with her, the next fighter needing medical attention simply came to the house. When Mrs. Frampton went
down to the kitchen one morning there he was, slumped on the bench in the kitchen garden, asking for “the lady” when she went
out to see what he would be about.
Alerted by Mrs. Frampton, Rynn went outside warily, only to discover that the visitor was a gangly boy still in his teens.
He was half sitting, half lying on his side, his head propped on his haversack. His eyes were clouded with pain as he rolled
them up at her.
“I’m after finding the lady who helped Barney McShea,” he said when she asked what she could do for him. “That would be you,
eh?”
“It would.”
“They said you’d help me.”
“Who did?”
He shrugged and closed his eyes, panting.
The bloody gash on his left cheek wasn’t serious, was her lightning assessment.
His thick coat, however, was pierced with holes and stained with blood, and further examination revealed the cause of his distress.
His left arm and side had been peppered with shotgun pellets.
“Can you walk? You’re going to have to help me get you inside.” She didn’t ask his name, or anything else. It was safer not
to know.
“I can.”
With her help, he managed to get to his feet. But he slumped against her, surprisingly heavy although he was quite thin. She
took him inside, into one of the small back parlors that had been closed off for lack of use. There she treated him, telling
Mrs. Frampton that he’d suffered a hunting injury: he’d tripped over his own shotgun and, knowing she was a nurse and near,
had come to them for help.
“Out after grouse there in the woods, I’ve no doubt.” Mrs. Frampton shook her head sympathetically as she brought the bowl
of hot water Rynn had asked for. The woods technically belonged to the Crown, and to take grouse from them was technically
poaching. But since the Great War, and with all that was now going on in the country, such petty crimes were largely overlooked.
“Hard as times are, I can’t see anyone blaming him for that.”
But Rynn noticed that Mrs. Frampton never, as she normally would, asked the young man his name, or where he was from, or who
his kin were or any information that might serve to identify him.
That in itself was enough to convince her that Mrs. Frampton knew the truth. And when the young man left, having had the pellets
removed and his wounds cleaned and bandaged, and having rested, and been fed, Mrs. Frampton didn’t say another word about
him.
The very next day, another young man appeared on the kitchen bench.
Like the first, he was already there when Mrs. Frampton came downstairs not long after dawn.
Taking one look at him with his bloody foot propped on the bench in front of him, Mrs. Frampton went in search of Rynn.
He was more open than the first visitor, and admitted, amid groans as Rynn cut off his damaged boot, to accidentally having shot off two of his own toes with his own gun in all the excitement of his first engagement.
But to see the thrice-damned Brits run as they had when their patrol was taken unawares was worth it, he maintained.
The injury was at least twenty-four hours old, and Rynn suspected it had been sustained in the same skirmish that had left her previous patient peppered with shotgun pellets.
The damage to his foot was done. All Rynn could do for him was clean the wounds and cauterize the stumps. He clomped off toward
the woods late that same afternoon with a sawed-off broomstick for a cane, his bandaged foot shoved into a new boot Cyril
had found for him.
Rynn stood with Mrs. Frampton at the kitchen window watching him go.
“And so I suppose we’re now set to lose the rest of our young men to yet another war. May God curse the English,” Cyril said
bitterly behind them. Surprised, Rynn turned in time to see Mrs. Frampton nodding agreement.
“May they all die without a priest.” Mrs. Frampton’s expression was grim, and Cyril patted her arm in solidarity. Then they
both looked at Rynn with dismay as if they had only just remembered who she was and that she was there.
“And may the devil take their souls,” Rynn said. Glances were exchanged, the two retainers visibly relaxed and then they all
went their separate ways. But that moment had clarified the bond of allegiance that linked them: they were Irish above all.
To Rynn’s mind, trust among the three was no longer in question.
Yet another soldier solicited her help by simply stepping out in front of the DeLion when she was driving it back from the village.
With Higdon gone, only she and Cyril ever drove the car, as Mrs. Frampton, Anna and Lynnette didn’t know how and had no desire to learn.
Rynn left most of the errand running to Cyril, as she didn’t wish to cause any more talk in the village than she had to and the sight of a female driving a car was rare enough to give rise to plenty of that.
But she did go into the village to Mass often enough to keep Father Doherty at bay, and to visit Granny and Glenna, and on this particular occasion was returning from the cottage—well before dark—when a trench-coated man walked out of a hedgerow squarely into the DeLion’s path, pointing a pistol at her as he held up one hand in a silent order to stop.
She slammed on the brakes—she was getting quite good at stopping where she meant to—and he walked around to her window, which, at his imperative gesture, she rolled down.
“You’re the nurse.” His tone made it a statement rather than a question. Even before her nod confirmed it, he was beckoning
to someone apparently concealed in the hedgerow. Moments later a wounded soldier and the comrade supporting him slid into
the back seat, while the pistol wielder got into the passenger seat beside her.
“We’ve little time,” the pistol wielder said. “Bandage him up, then take us to the train station in Ballyshannon. We’ll pay
well for your help.”
His pistol, a luger she thought, lay across his lap in such a way as to serve as a reminder of the consequences if she didn’t
agree. She’d already ascertained, not that there’d ever been any real doubt, from his accent and demeanor and the military
belts and bandoliers they wore, that the three of them were IRA. Wounded stragglers from a flying column? Though she’d heard
of no attacks in the vicinity in the last day or so, she was sure the answer was yes.
“I neither want nor need your money,” she said coldly as she got the car going again. “And there’s no need to threaten me. I help where I can. And please, point your gun somewhere else.”
After a long, measuring look at her unyielding profile, he stuck the gun in his belt.
The wounded man had taken a bayonet to the side that seemed to have missed any vital organ, although the gash was large and
jagged and the bleeding copious. Rynn did the best she could to pack the wound and bind it up with the supplies she had in
the car, because the pistol wielder refused to allow her to stop at Ballyshannon Court for anything else, and insisted that
it was a matter of utmost urgency that they be in Ballyshannon in time to catch the four-fifteen to Galway.
They made it with scant minutes to spare. As she drove away from the train station, relieved to be rid of her unwelcome passengers,
she spotted the big clock on the Belfast Bank building and realized that she had only about three-quarters of an hour if she
was to get back home before twilight turned the roads into a veritable no-man’s-land. Roadblocks, usually by the Crown forces
but sometimes by the rebels, were a constant hazard; armed stragglers from either side had been known to waylay travelers
at night, and getting caught up in an ambush or military action was a growing danger.
Maguire returned on the Friday afternoon before Christmas.
The day was cold and gray and intermittently rainy, which exactly matched Rynn’s mood.
Having turned down Granny and Glenna’s invitation to join them at Glenna’s school’s annual Christmas bazaar, she had instead forced herself to tackle the long-dreaded, heartbreaking task of sorting through and packing up Thomas’s things.
The Duchess had written, requesting that she be sent an assortment of personal items including Thomas’s signet ring, his pocket watch and the cufflinks that had belonged to his great-grandfather.
Rynn packed those up as well. She was on her knees in her bedroom, fighting back tears as she folded garments into boxes, when she happened to glance out the window as the big Vauxhall pulled up in front of the house.
Recognizing it, her spirits immediately lifted.
Jumping to her feet, she flew down the stairs in time to reach the entry hall just as Cyril admitted Maguire into the house.
Maguire’s hair was black and glistening with rain, his head was bent slightly as he listened to Cyril, who lacked his height
by a considerable amount, and his long coat hung open to reveal an elegant suit. He looked handsome and prosperous and vitally
alive, and his surprise visit was the perfect antidote to the doldrums she had fallen into.
“. . . believe she is upstairs,” Cyril was saying as she approached at a far more decorous pace than the unladylike run that
had taken her as far as the entry hall. “If you’ll wait in the—”
“I’m here.” With Cyril’s gaze on her, Rynn just managed to suppress the wide smile that threatened to break through when Maguire
looked past Cyril to find her coming toward him. Knowing Cyril and Mrs. Frampton as she now did, she knew that Cyril would