Chapter Thirty-Three
Chaos was the immediate reaction to Cyril’s desperate warning.
“Mary protect us!” Mrs. Frampton cried, then immediately clapped a hand to her mouth as though to stifle any further utterance.
The men who could scrambled to their feet, pulling on clothes and cursing the fact that their rifles had been carried away
by their flying column brethren when they left. Only Jack’s rifle and the one Cyril kept for protection remained, and they
were quickly snatched up.
“How many?” demanded Kevin Toomey, who was one of those Seamus had left behind. His multiple wounds had included a bullet
through the left knee. Kept precariously upright by the brace that stopped his wounded leg from collapsing and his one sound
leg, he had Jack’s rifle.
“I didn’t get a count, but the lorries were full—eight in each, I’d say,” Cyril said.
Sixteen against two: impossible odds. No one said it, but from the moment of appalled silence that followed everyone recognized
it.
“Close the cellar door.” Rynn stayed carefully calm even as her heart lurched into a mad gallop. Cyril ran back up the stairs
to obey. Fleeing upstairs would be a possibly fatal mistake—they could be seen through any of a dozen windows. She put the
last suture in Alfie’s head wound, snipped the thread and stood up.
“What are we going to do?” Anna moaned, bursting into frightened tears, while Brian Nolan, who’d grabbed the other rifle, tried to comfort her. Even Rory O’Keefe struggled into a sitting position on his cot. Only Alfie remained insensible to the disaster that was at hand.
“Did they see you? Do they know you saw them?” Rynn asked Cyril as he came back down. Frantically, she tried to work out the
best thing to do.
“They didn’t see me. I didn’t make it as far as the car.” Cyril cast a wild glance around the cellar. “They’re coming for
this lot, I’m as certain as can be. Someone will have told them they’re here.”
A muffled thudding froze everyone in place for the split second it took them to figure out what it was: the Tans pounding
on the front door.
“The lights are on. The car’s here. They’ll know someone’s inside. They’ll wait for the door to be answered.” Rynn hoped and
prayed that was the case, because it gave them a little precious time. Panic spread like wildfire through the cellar as the
hopelessness of their position hit. It infected her, too, although she tried not to let it show.
“When no one answers, they’ll surround the house and break the door down,” Rory O’Keefe said. “There’ll be no keeping them
out.”
“They have us like rats in a trap,” Brian Nolan groaned. With the rifle in one hand, he had an arm around Anna, who wept against
his chest.
The pounding on the door was so loud and insistent now that it resounded through the cellar. Distant shouts—the words were
indistinguishable, perhaps a demand to be let in?—raised gooseflesh all over Rynn’s body.
“They’ll have to come down those stairs. We can hold them off.” Brave words from Toomey. He was a banty rooster of a man with
a pugnacious-looking jaw, already turning the rifle he held toward the stairs.
Until the bullets ran out. Until a Tan decided to drop a grenade into the cellar. Until . . .
“No.” Rynn removed the IV needle from Alfie’s arm as their only possible escape route became crystal clear. “Everybody grab
a blanket and help the ones who can’t walk. We’re going now, out the door in the west back wall while we have a chance. Jack,
can you carry Alfie a little farther?”
He could, hoisting a blanket-wrapped Alfie over his good shoulder with her help, while Mrs. Frampton rushed to unlock the
outside cellar door. Rynn quickly extinguished the lights behind them as the others straggled in that direction. The booms
from upstairs were heart-stopping now. The rush of cold air when the cellar door was opened was as terrifying as it was galvanizing.
Once they were outside, all it would take was one Tan posted as lookout where he could see them, or rounding the corner of
the west wing, or . . .
“Follow me. As quietly as you can, and as fast as you can.” Rynn was first through the door, first up the shallow flight of
stairs, first to push through the mass of tall rhododendrons that partially blocked the belowground entrance. A fearful glance
around told her that, for the moment, the way was clear. She beckoned the others on.
The night was dark, but not dark enough. A three-quarter moon and a sky blazing with stars made attempting to escape past
the kitchen garden and across the open field to the woods too dangerous. The only saving grace was that it was windy. Swaying
trees and shrubs and tall grasses and the house itself cast dancing shadows everywhere. If they were lucky, to any casual
glance they would be just that many more shadows. With Cyril supporting O’Keefe, Mrs. Frampton acting as a crutch for Toomey
and Anna helping keep Alfie steady on Jack’s shoulder as Brian Nolan brought up the rear with Cyril’s rifle, Rynn chose the
only other possible route: toward the cliffs.
“Hurry,” she urged them. Speed, however, was beyond them. Gerry Healy, the last of those of the flying column who had been left
to her care, hobbled beside her with the aid of Thomas’s sticks. When she’d first provided him with them, the sight of him
using them had brought a whole host of memories rushing back. Now, seeing them in use made her think that perhaps Thomas was
with them in spirit, and she took some small comfort from that.
“That’s it! Knock it down!”
A splintering crash plus that shout from the front of the house sent Rynn’s heart leaping into her throat and electrified
them all. Ensuing shouts left her in no doubt: the front door had been breached. Moments later, windows lighting up in rooms
that had been dark confirmed it. Tans were in the house.
They had just made it to the Point when a group of Tans ran around the outside of the west wing, darting right past the sunken
exit they had used. The Tans came from the back, running toward the front, which made Rynn think they’d been outside all along,
keeping watch on the kitchen door.
Thank God they hadn’t tried to exit that way!
“They didn’t come out the back. They must still be in the house,” one of the Tans shouted to someone ahead of him, someone
Rynn couldn’t see.
“Here. We’re going down to the Strand. The way is steep. Watch your step.” Voice hushed, Rynn pointed out the mouth of the
path. With the cliff edge dropping away in front of them and no place left to go, the group had huddled together, ducking
a little as the Tans ran past in hopes that the strip of tall grass between them and the house would provide something in
the way of concealment. Now they looked down at the Strand from their present dizzying height with varying degrees of horror.
“Eh, we’ll never do it,” Mrs. Frampton breathed.
But with the moon riding high over Ben Bulbin now, illuminating cliff and beach and sea in a shimmering glow, there was no choice. Situated as they were, there was no place to hide.
They went down. In short order Rynn changed from cursing the moon to blessing it. As the moonlight hit the twisty, treacherous
sheep path, the exposed small stones embedded in the hard-packed earth gleamed like a thousand tiny stars, showing the way.
Without that, Rynn thought, they wouldn’t have made it. Breathless, panting, the wounded members of their party dropped to
the beach as soon as they reached it to sit, or lie in the case of Alfie and some others, in the dark shadow of the cliff
they’d just descended. In front of them, beyond the edge of the shadow, the wide expanse of golden sand was being swallowed
by the hungry surf in its relentless march up the shore. The moon itself was reflected in the dark, rolling waters of the
bay. Farther out, the wild Atlantic, endlessly black until it melted into the sky, roared.
“. . . hiding in the house.”
“. . . cellar . . .”
“. . . them alive.”
“Over there! . . . shed!”
Ripped apart by the gusting wind, shouts from what sounded like a search of the grounds going on above their heads blew past
them in fragments. Terrified that at any moment a Tan might stumble across the entrance to the path or might think to come
to the cliff edge and look down, Rynn ventured out as far as she dared—to the edge of the shadow—and looked up. She couldn’t
see much because of the angle, but she could see electric lanterns darting to and fro. One bobbed along the cliff edge in
a systematic sort of way. Watching, Rynn realized that her worst fear was in danger of being realized: if whoever held that
lantern kept on his present course, he might well discover the path down.
Heart thumping, Rynn sped back to the group.
“What’s to do?” Cyril asked, low voiced, as she reached them.
Already standing, he darted nervous glances up toward the top of the cliff and all around.
Brian Nolan stood as well, rifle in hand.
Anna clung to him like a limpet. Mrs. Frampton, clearly spent but game, rolled onto her side as the first step in the process of getting laboriously to her feet.
“We have to move.” Rynn spoke to Cyril, to all of them, the urgency in her voice galvanizing them once more. “If they find
the path . . .” Stiff from the descent, impeded by sand, but moving with purpose, they were already struggling to their feet.
“There’s a cave. This way.”
She led them to Dead Man’s Hole.
Once inside the narrow fissure, the darkness was absolute within a few steps. The vastness of the cavern could only be felt,
not seen. The world outside seemed far away. Even the sound of the sea was muffled. What could be heard instead was a steady
drip, drip, drip as if some crevice up near the ceiling had not dried out from when the last high tide had come rushing in.
The smell of damp was strong.
It was a reminder that they could only hide in the cave for so long. The reason that, as children, she and Donal and the others
had named the entrance Dead Man’s Hole was because if you stayed too long inside it, you were a dead man.
Venturing too far from the entrance with such a group in such unforgiving darkness posed a different risk, one they didn’t
need to take.
“We’re safe here,” she said to the group she could no longer see, and forbore to add for now. “We need to stay together. Everybody can rest now.” Various rustling sounds told her that people were sinking to the sand.
“Jack, where are you?”
Jack answered. Rynn moved to stand over him. Not that she could see him, but it was clear from the position of his voice that
he’d sat down.
“Are you all right? Is Alfie all right?”
“I’m all right. So’s he, far as I can tell.”
“I hate to get you up again, but will you come with me to the entrance? I want to talk to you, and I’d like to be able to
see you while I do it.”
“I can do that, sure.”
Rynn called to Mrs. Frampton to come and sit with Alfie until she got back, waited until the other woman found her and sank
down, then walked with Jack toward the patch of purplish light that marked Dead Man’s Hole. She stopped just inside it, and
he stopped beside her. He was wearing his coat, she saw, buttoned up over the nightshirt Mrs. Frampton had given him, along
with his trousers and shoes. He held his arm stiffly, but that wouldn’t be obvious to a casual observer and other than that
there was no outer indication that he was wounded or of the ordeal he’d been through. That, plus his youthful energy and knowledge
of Alfie and his family, made him the best available candidate for the vital task she had in mind.
“I need you to do something,” she said to him, “but if you don’t feel strong enough, or if you don’t think you can, I need
you to tell me so. Will you do that?”
“I will. What is it?”
“I need you to run down the Strand, all the way down the Strand, to the Great Northern Hotel.” To get there, he would have
to traverse a series of connected beaches with a total distance of perhaps eight kilometers. “Major Maguire is staying there.
Find him and bring him back here. Tell him he needs to come in a boat, a skiff or a currach, something small that won’t attract
attention. Two boats, perhaps. Tell him that on the return journey he’ll be carrying ten passengers. Can you do that, do you
think?”
“I can do that.” He looked older than his—what, seventeen?—years as he nodded solemnly. Rynn was reminded that many of the young men who’d gone off to fight the Huns had been no older than him.
“Jack—” She stopped him when he seemed prepared to set off immediately. “We only have a few hours. When the tide comes in,
the cave floods. The beach as well. Tell Major Maguire that, too.”
His expression changed as he absorbed the full impact of what she was telling him.
“What do I do if he’s not there?”
That was the part she didn’t like to think about, the part that terrified her. She thought, hoped, prayed he would be there—but
there was no way to be sure.
“Do your best to find him,” she said.
“Don’t worry, Lady Thomas. I won’t fail,” he said. His voice was full of resolve.
“Be careful,” she warned. “You don’t want to be seen.”
He nodded and set off. She stood watching as he jogged away, following the curve of the beach, until darkness swallowed him
up.
Then she returned to the others to wait.