Peter Lovesey - The Tick of Death

When the dumb-language was done, Cribb saw with satisfaction that her expression was still friendly. ‘Father has asked me to take him indoors now,’ she told him, ‘but there are things I must say to you, important things. If you will wait here for me, we can take a turn around the garden in a few minutes.’

Leaning there against the apple-tree while Rossanna wheeled the invalid chair towards the house, Cribb tried to account for the peculiar effect he seemed to have on her. A man the wrong side of forty needed to guard against miscalculations where young women were concerned, but he was strongly of the opinion that she was making overtures to him. It was not the sort of thing one was accustomed to, working for the Yard. He supposed adventurers encountered it more often, by the nature of their work. That rope-ascent the previous night had been a stirring demonstration of agility, he was bound to admit. Yet he would have thought the brutal dressing down he gave the girl after she shot Malone would have put a stop to any sentimental stirrings. Not at all: it seemed to have stimulated them. The breakfast she had cooked him, the unpinning of her hair, the invitation to use her Christian name had not indicated much hostility or resentment. Nor had the business beside the hammock.

The odd thing was that Devlin had given the impression that the girl was exclusively devoted to her father. The presence of two strapping young athletes in the house had not moved her in the least. One way of accounting for it was that she was play-acting, coldly and deliberately putting the recruit through some kind of test. The only other explanation Cribb could supply was that she was one of those unusual members of her sex uninterested in young men, preferring to submit to the authority of older, more masterful partners. To such women, a reprimand was an affirmation of affection. He pulled a leaf off the tree and thoughtfully dissected it.

She came across the lawn again in a muslin shawl she had not been wearing before. ‘Being so near the river, we get droves of gnats and flies invading the garden late in the afternoon,’ she explained. ‘It invites disaster to walk about with one’s arms exposed.’ She linked her left hand lightly and naturally under his right forearm and they set off slowly in the direction of the river-bank. ‘Do you know what impressed Father most about your story? You made no claim at all to be a patriot of Ireland. That would have been the most obvious way to curry favour with us.’

‘I told you,’ said Cribb in his most masterful manner, ‘I’m a mercenary. A professional adventurer. I don’t care a tinker’s damn for Ireland unless the money’s right.’

‘It will be. Tell me, Mr Sargent, have you ever heard of the Skirmishing Fund?’

Cribb shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Then I must educate you. It is a sum of money which has been raised in America by public subscription, to finance the skirmishing of England until Ireland gains her freedom. It was started some years ago in the columns of a New York newspaper, the Irish World, by Diarmuid O’Donovan-the Rossa, as he is known.’

‘The Fenian,’ said Cribb.

‘The same. We don’t talk much of Fenians now, Mr Sargent. They were totally discredited when the Rising failed in 1867. Imagine the incompetence of an organisation which postpones its revolution and fails to get the information to County Kerry! The men of Kerry had captured a coastguard station and a police barracks before they discovered their mistake and had to be sent home. And when the Rising did take place three weeks later it was in a blinding snowstorm and never looked like succeeding. You may still hear talk of Fenians, but the organisation is dead. There is only one revolutionary body of any importance, and that was founded in 1869, when most of the Fenians were in prison. Clan-na-Gael is its name.’

‘Clan-na-Gael,’ repeated Cribb ingenuously.

‘It is pledged to deliver Ireland from the English oppressors,’ said Rossanna, squeezing Cribb’s arm at the thought. ‘In 1877 it gained control of Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund, which now amounts to not less than a hundred thousand dollars.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Cribb. ‘That’s a lot of subscriptions.’

‘A lot of Irish-Americans have suffered at the hands of the English, Mr Sargent. What you would refer to as the Irish Famine, people like my father remember as The Great Starvation. Every concession since then, every clause in the Land Act, is written in the blood of Irish patriots. England has given us nothing we have not fought for tooth and nail-nothing that is, except rack-renting, evictions, Coercion and the Crimes Act.’

‘You were telling me about the Clan-na-Gael,’ Cribb reminded her firmly.

She regarded him intently. ‘You’re right. I keep forgetting that you have no affiliations. The Clan? It is a massive organisation, Mr Sargent, with camps in every city of importance in America. It has rituals and proceedings which every member is bound to keep secret, under penalty of death. But if you wish to be one of its agents, you will have to join.’

‘I’m not in any position to refuse.’

‘Then we shall arrange it soon. There are ways in which you can be of important service to us. Four years ago O’Donovan Rossa broke with the Clan. It was not doing enough active work for his taste and there was even talk of a pact with Parnell and the parliamentarians-the New Departure, as it became-mere peddling with reforms. Rossa gathered together what was left of the old Fenian Brotherhood and organised raids on public buildings in Britain, mostly with gunpowder. The explosions at the Glasgow gasworks and the Local Government Board were the work of the Rossa agents. It was all handled with the usual Fenian ineptitude. Ten of them were captured and brought to trial in Edinburgh at the end of 1882. Five got penal servitude for life, the rest seven years. Another four of Rossa’s men were arrested after one of them was found with the infernal machines upon him as he stepped from the Cork steamer on to the quay at Liverpool. They each got a life sentence last July. It was the finish of Rossa’s campaign.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Cribb. ‘Fourteen convictions is not the sort of record that encourages recruitment.’

‘Rossa is a spent force,’ Rossanna went on. ‘There is too much of the Blarney about him. He served his purpose in raising the Skirmishing Fund, but he should have left the active campaigning to men like my father. Fortunately, the Clan is better organised. Our dynamite policy was authorised in November 1881, at our National Convention in Chicago, but it wasn’t until the end of 1882 that the first agent of the Clan travelled to England to inaugurate the campaign. The organisation was in the hands of the Revolutionary Directory and the agents were selected and trained in America. The selection had to be most carefully done, because we had information that forty of the Royal Irish Constabulary had been sent to the States on full pay with the object of insinuating their way into the Clan.’

‘Diabolical!’ said Cribb.

‘It didn’t happen, Mr Sargent. Soon enough, parties of trained men were crossing the Atlantic with the means to cause havoc in London. The first was led by Dr Tom Gallagher, with his brother Bernard and six others in support. Tom, being the swell he is, set up residence in the Charing Cross Hotel in the Strand, while the others frequented small hotels and retired lodgings in the south of London. Before long, as the world knows, they had established a nitro-glycerine manufactory in Birmingham and were conveying the stuff to London in india-rubber fishing boots contained in boxes. It was pure chance, a singular catastrophe, that caused a Birmingham detective to have his suspicions aroused and visit Whitehead, the chemist of the party. Tom and two others as well as Whitehead were convicted and gaoled for life, thanks to the testimony of the wretched Mr Norman.’