Chapter 23 #2
Yet these soldiers had still been tasked to fight in this conflict.
They hadn’t asked for the assignment, but they’d been given it by their government anyway.
They’d been forced to try to negotiate a struggle in which both sides utilized vile and ignoble methods, but still keep their consciences intact.
And all for what? To force a people who had been subjugated by us for hundreds of years to once more bow to authority despite the wishes of the majority and the perfectly legitimate votes they’d cast?
I didn’t want that for anyone! And I firmly believed most of my fellow Britishers would say the same. All our government had to do was fairly negotiate. Instead, they chose to sacrifice men like these to a cruel and unjust war.
The nightmares I’d long feared had also begun. The night following the assassinations, I’d woken up soaked in sweat with Hardy’s voice still ringing in my ear. After hearing of McKee, Clancy, and Clune, they’d grown even worse until I began to dread laying my head on the pillow.
Consequently, I was in a prickly mood as we made our way home through the crowds after the procession.
We didn’t even attempt to board one of the trams, which were crammed full of people, but instead made our way down Great Brunswick Street beneath a gray sky.
I listened dully as Sidney and Max debated something about the armored motorcars while I sullenly scanned our surroundings.
I noticed a figure lurking near a rear gate leading into Trinity College’s grounds, but paid him little heed until I realized he was looking directly at me.
I had to blink twice, for I recognized him, even dressed in the flat cap and worn garments of an Irish laborer when normally he wore Savoy suits.
But as soon as the realization penetrated my tired mind that the man was, indeed, Captain Lucas Willoughby, I was off like a shot.
Sidney shouted after me, but there wasn’t time to stop and explain.
Not when Willoughby had already darted off into the grounds.
Sidney and Max had longer legs than I did anyway.
They would catch up. In the meantime, I wasn’t about to let Willoughby get away.
He sprinted around a corner and I followed, fearing at first I’d lost him, until I spied him again around a group of students.
“Verity, what are you doing?” I heard Sidney demand, the thud of his footsteps just behind me, but I didn’t answer.
When we veered off the path onto an expansive green, he must have caught sight of the man I was pursuing and realized I wouldn’t be doing so unless I had a very good reason.
By the time Willoughby skidded to a stop beneath the expansive branches of an oak tree, Sidney was running alongside me, with Max just a step behind on my other side. We halted just steps away, all of us panting as we sized each other up.
“Tell me … one reason … I shouldn’t lay you out flat … and call for the police,” Sidney threatened.
“You’d never land a punch on me,” Willoughby retorted defiantly.
“You wouldn’t have even caught me … if I hadn’t wanted you to.
” He turned to me, making it clear he’d wanted to grab my attention.
That he’d wanted me to follow him. His pale eyes narrowed.
“Because I want to see Ardmore swing as much as you do.”
“I warned you he’d betray you,” I said, harking back to our last conversation. “I asked for your help then in stopping him, and you refused.” I sneered belligerently, pressing a hand to my aching side. “Why should we trust you now?”
“Because you have no choice. You need me. You need what I know. Or else Ardmore would already be, at the very least, a persona non grata.”
“He’s honest. I’ll give him that,” Max grumbled.
There was a leanness to Willoughby’s features that hadn’t been there a month before, a hunger that had replaced his previous resignation and nonchalance. That hunger, I realized, was for revenge, crucially, against Ardmore. That fact and that alone convinced me to ease my vigilance.
In any case, our behavior was attracting attention. As if our running through the college grounds hadn’t been alarming enough, now we were standing in a circle, looking ready to pounce. So I softened my stance and took a step nearer to close the gap. “And what is it that you know?”
“I know that he’s not done. I know that he’s planning something else.”
“We know that much,” Sidney scoffed.
Willoughby’s blond eyebrows arched. “Yes, but did you know he’s been stockpiling gelignite?”
“The explosive?” I queried and he nodded. I glanced at Sidney and then Max. “I wonder if Harlow procured it for him.”
“Lieutenant Harlow? Undoubtedly some of it,” he replied, demonstrating he knew what we were talking about.
“Did you know Harlow was murdered?”
“Yes. Not by me, if that’s what you’re asking. But I knew Harlow had become suspicious of Ardmore’s intentions. For good reason, since he was being set up as another patsy. Ardmore wanted him dead. He must have had one of his other men do it or killed him himself.”
“Is Ardmore capable of doing it himself?”
Willoughby gave me a disparaging look. “You think of Ardmore as just this charming but immoral older gentleman directing everyone behind the scenes, but I assure you he is quite capable of viciousness.” He tilted his head. “I understand you were acquainted with Flossie Hawkins.”
I stiffened in disbelief, not having heard that name in over a year. She’d been a witness in an investigation connected to Ardmore.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed someone being held down and forced to inhale cocaine, but it is not pleasant. And yet Ardmore quite enjoyed doing so to Miss Hawkins.”
We’d found Flossie’s death by overdose to be suspicious despite the suicide note found in her pocket. We’d even suspected Ardmore of being involved. But we’d not gone so far as to suppose he’d actually killed her with his own two hands. It jolted me.
“I know that’s not the only hostile act you witnessed,” I replied. “You could come forward. You could testify.”
A bark of humorless laughter erupted from him. “In custody? I’d be dead before I ever got the chance. And given the frame-up he did on me for the phosgene incident, my word would be worth less than nothing.”
“He’s right,” Sidney agreed, crossing his arms. “If Willoughby is arrested, he’ll be no use to anyone, least of all himself.”
Willoughby might have resented him for stating it so succinctly, but he seemed to have come to terms with the direness of his situation.
Even so, he wasn’t ready to give up. I supposed his upbringing had fostered that resilience.
Having been born the impoverished great-grandson of a duke, he’d been orphaned soon after birth and raised by a dowager aunt within spitting distance of the aristocracy but perpetually made to understand he would never be a part of it.
As such, everything he’d achieved had been through his own resolve and hard work.
It had also left him with a chip on his shoulder the size of Ben Nevis, which Ardmore had been able to exploit.
“The gelignite,” Sidney pressed. “What are Ardmore’s plans for it?”
“That, I don’t know,” he admitted with a frustrated grimace.
“He never shared what he didn’t have to, and never before he had to.
I can tell you where it was being stored four weeks ago, but I’m certain it’s been moved.
Ardmore wouldn’t have trusted that Harlow hadn’t told anyone, and when I managed to thwart his efforts to have me killed or arrested, he would have moved it again for good measure, to someplace I’m not familiar with. ”
A group of young men was approaching from across the green, and we shifted even closer to one another, attempting to act like we were just having a normal conversation rather than discussing murder and treason. We all kept our faces carefully diverted, lest we be recognized.
“Much like you moved the phosgene,” I couldn’t help but retort, still disgruntled about that.
“Yes, well, Ardmore had his sources within the Castle,” he replied without remorse, confirming what we’d already suspected. That someone had tipped them off, be it Bennett and Ames or another lackey. “Your mistake was not going to the rebels first.”
I scowled.
“Are you sure about that?” Sidney countered with a glance over his shoulder to be sure the young men were gone. “Because we’re not entirely sure Collins isn’t privately working with him.”
Willoughby shook his head adamantly. “I was present during their meetings, and I suffered the lash of Ardmore’s tongue after.
I can assure you, Collins is not working with Ardmore.
He saw straight through Ardmore’s usual assurances and manipulations.
” He frowned. “But I can’t say the same of everyone within the republican government.
Ardmore has recently begun wooing Brugha”—Dáil éireann’s minister for defense—“who is most decidedly not an admirer of Collins’s.
And through Brugha, I believe he hopes to get to de Valera. ”