J. Janes: Betrayal

Still untouched, he set his whiskey aside to take out his pipe and tobacco pouch.

‘The Belfast organization is by far the strongest at the moment,’ he went on, choosing not to look at her but to busy himself. ‘They’ve the whole of the nine northern counties to slip into and away, not just the six of Ulster, and as anyone knows, they’re not to be tampered with.’

‘Jimmy was just being insufferable, Hamish. He knows I can’t stand him-I wish I could, a little, that is, but I can’t. I’ve had nothing to do with those people-how could I have?’

Still he would not look at her. ‘My thoughts exactly,’ was all he said and, striking the match, brought it to the bowl of that pipe of his to look down its length at her.

‘Scotland Yard are certain Liam Nolan was the man who set off that bomb and took the life of that little girl, Mary, the poor wee thing worried only about having to leave her mother. Nolan’s been keeping himself out of sight since those Belfast bank jobs they pulled off last spring. Gone to ground, as they say, but …’ He waved the match out and flicked it into the grate. ‘But perhaps the Yard have got it all wrong.’

Mary knew she would have to say something, but that she’d have to still the panic in her. She didn’t know of this Nolan; Brenda Darcy had said nothing of him. Nothing! ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to think the Irish Sea would stop him in wartime?’

‘There are fishing boats. They still do get across-the IRA, that is, and others.’

It was her turn to stare emptily at her whiskey. Her voice lost, she sadly whispered, ‘It seems such a horrid thing to have done. Utterly senseless.’

To let his gaze settle on her would take some doing when her eyes were downcast like this, Fraser warned himself, but he’d have to look for signs and not give in. He knew she was an enigma to him, that beneath the lie of innocence a herculean struggle was going on, that she had a conscience, a strength and depth of character he’d yet to fathom.

The slender hands that had been folded in front of her flattened themselves against her thighs. ‘I didn’t go to the dentist, Hamish. I … I just had to get away again. This place … You know how it is. I know you do. I stayed at the White Horse Inn on Wilton Terrace, overlooking the Grand Canal. I went for walks. I …’

Those lovely eyes of hers lifted to meet his gaze, she giving him that shrug he knew so well. ‘Mary … Lass, there’s no harm in that. Did you enjoy yourself?’

Must they play this game? ‘Not really. I missed you. I … I felt awful.’

Fraser told himself to say nothing of the cigarette butts they’d found in the motorcar-Jimmy Allanby was just being himself, a bitter, lonely, overly suspicious man with a chip on his shoulder and one she knew well enough. Och , he would reach for his glass-aye, that’s what he’d do.

But he didn’t. Mary heard him get up. He set his pipe aside and stepped around the coffee table. ‘You must be tired,’ he said, and she felt him take her by the hand, wished he’d say something sharp-anything! — before it was too late.

In the morning, the rain had gone. A grey mist hung over the fields and woods, and in the gardens behind the house droplets of water lay on every petal and on all the blades of grass.

Each day had its hushes. The most intense was, of course, not just before dawn but as now when the light of a struggling sun tried to break through the tops of the most distant beeches which stood dark in clusters on the endlessly rolling crowns of the drumlins, and the land, with its meadows, fields, hills and hedgerows of mossy stone and bushes or bracken gave to the world but a whisper and the brown-eyed cattle returned from their milking.

Mary stopped by the bridge where the Loughie ran dark amber with its taste of peat and the reeds were turning brown. Breathing in deeply, she listened to the hush, picking out the faint sound of Parker O’Shane’s lead cow and best milker, named Mary just like herself. Though she wouldn’t go there today, the sly laughter and swift asides of each exchange came readily enough, Parker with his gumboots mired in cowpats and sucking on that fire of his just as Hamish sucked on his. These visits, she knew, were bright spots in this life of hers, but was it a day for confessions?

Getting on the forest-green Raleigh with its wicker carrier basket up front, she started out again, a lone woman on her bicycle amid the green, grass-green of a landscape that had gone to grey with a mist whose trailing tendrils felt their way into every hollow.

The house, situated a good three miles from the village of Ballylurgen, was some twelve miles as the raven flew to Armagh in the County Armagh. She’d had such an idea of the place, such a picture of it when Hamish had first told her about it. Romance and him wanting to get away from the war, wanting to keep her safe from it. Escape.

There were a good four acres of gardens to look after or let go-mainly the latter-a stable of sorts and a stableboy because Hamish preferred to use the pony trap, what with the petrol rationing and all, and the wagging tongues of the critical.

Besides the gardener and William, there were Mrs. Haney and Bridget, so a staff of four she’d just as soon have liked to dismiss long ago for various reasons. Love at first, and privacy, but then … why then, the slow and patient withdrawal. Whose fault had it been? Her own? Hamish’s? Had they both expected too much of the other? Had this place simply got to them, made her vulnerable but not let her realize how it must have shown?

In any case that was all over and done with, but at the crest of Caitlyn Murphy’s Hill, the girl who had died up here during the Troubles just like Nora Fergus, Mary stopped to look back and away to the north, to the house and beyond.

It was lovely. Georgian as she’d said so many times. Not the usual Georgian of Northern Ireland. Solid-still exuding wealth, position, power and paternalism. Well-built by one Royal George Morton in 1770 and not all of that pale grey Armagh granite, but mainly of English brick from Kent, and with only the granite at its corners, sills and lintels or above the front door and in its three low steps.

The trim had been painted white but was green in and under the eaves and over the shutters which were never closed, not since her arrival anyway.

The drive was circular, the broad oval of the fishpond being enclosed by gravel. The fountains were of beautifully sculpted, bronze-green naked boys riding dolphins and misbehaving. There were three of them, the water pissing outwards in long streams so that against all other sounds at night, one had a constant urge to urinate.

‘I’m being wicked,’ she said. ‘The water has now been turned off and the pond drained. The pipes were corroded.’

The house had eighteen rooms plus kitchen, pantry, mudroom and laundry, not to count the attic. It had its wings of equal size and of two storeys, dormers on the fourth floor of the main and a grey slate roof with six good, sturdy chimneys and fireplaces in all the important rooms.

Bay windows, too, and a solarium full of hothouse plants-a jungle-on the ground floor at the back, overlooking the gardens.

Yes, it was lovely, and yes, Hamish had bought it especially for her, but was it not also, like the land, inherently sad?

Royal George Morton had been well settled by his family, with land holdings in excess of some 582 acres most of which he’d all too soon gambled or drunk away. In the end, he had died of a bullet to the brain from a horse pistol. Not suicide, nothing so grand as that. Murder, foul murder but ‘justified, the Lord God willing, for debts unpaid,’ Mrs. Haney had said often enough, ‘and the dishonouring of a young girl.’