Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals II

Perhaps remote, feeble and pitiful chances were all one ever got when it came to changing history.

It was insane. He could not possibly fail his daughter on her day of days.

Days that would never exist for her at all were he to follow the angel. Were the dire promise to prove true.

Had he certainty, he might have steeled himself to the task. But the possibility, the probability , remained that he was deluded. And grasping at a false chance held consequences as dire as those of which the angel spoke-no less dire for their lack of global importance.

His daughter's confusion, anger, tears, humiliation in front of everyone. The question why ? She would never forgive him. The pain in Clarice's eyes. She would carry the betrayal like a wound for the rest of her days. Walk in shame on his arm. Shrink from the whispers behind hands- Did you hear what he did?Even his enemies could not speak of it without wincing. Poor Sarah. Poor Clarice.

Fumbling fingers rattled the cuff links in the drawer. He could not fasten them. Had to ask Clarice.

She fit them tidily into his cuffs. Straightened his collar, while their son John went outside to bring the car.

"You look grand Mr. Dowding. But pale. You feel cold. Are you well?"

He took her palm from his cheek, kissed it, pressed it back to his cheek. "I have all a man could ever ask heaven for. Ah, here's the car."

John bounded round the car to open the rear door for his parents. Snugged up the armband required of men in uniform in public.

Hugh Dowding's throat constricted. Sweat broke in pinpricks on his scalp. He drew his pocket watch to check yet again the advancing hour. Clarice's hand touched his. "Do stop."

Time dwindled as they rode toward the church.

Needles of fear stung under his tongue. Heartbeat shook his throat.

An overturned lorry brought them to a halt behind a line of cars. Progress continued by creeping starts and stops. Even Clarice became anxious.

"Not to worry," John said, turning hard down a side street. He negotiated a few more turns to come out on a parallel avenue.

One block north of the angel's church.

"What time is it?" Clarice asked. "Hugh? Hugh!"

Dowding was clawing at the back of his son's seat. Aryan grandchildren. "Let me out of the car. I cannot breathe."

Was already opening the door as John braked.

"Hugh! Where are you going! We are late !"

Shutting the door after himself: "John, take your mother ahead. I- You won't even know I'm gone."

Tyres screeched. Stopped just short of the man who had stepped off the curb.

Heedless, he proceeded at an old man's fragile running gait, straight across the path of the Air Marshal's motor car.

Dick Trafford sat up. "Good lord, is that Dowding?"

"Can't be." The Air Marshal watched the huddled figure go, kitted up in his best, running to a church. "I thought his daughter was marrying today."

"She is. He's gone to the wrong ruddy church!"

He looked terribly fragile. Seemed to have shrunk from the days when they had been adversaries. The Air Marshal regretted the visitation. The words. The burning manuscript. "That was… harsh."

"Did he not deserve it!" Trafford cried. "Pompous coward! Old twit!" Angry at Dowding's presumption. Angry that he should land the task of shutting him up.

"Do you think he will stay quiet? What if he rewrites his book?"

"I don't care." Trafford snarled the gears. "It is not as if anyone of any importance will listen to him."

The Air Marshal nodded, sat back. "Still. I cannot help thinking we treated him shabbily."

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 (a bank holiday), a band of seven revolutionaries and perhaps seven hundred men ignited an uprising in Dublin against British rule. Doomed by nonsupport from the Irish Volunteers and the country at large, the rebellion failed after a week of bloody house-to-house combat that leveled much of Dublin's center and resulted in 130 British soldiers dead.

The rebels had solicited German aid, and a gunrunning ship, attempting a landing, was scuttled by its crew outside Queenstown harbor to avoid capture. The British used this pretext to quickly try the leaders by military courts-martial for treason and abetting the enemy. They were shot, rather than hanged, before Irish or British public opinion could be mustered in their behalf.

The iron chair leg scraped across the pitted floor.

The poet looked up from his notebook to his cellmate. MacBride's eyes were calm, the mustache fierce. Perhaps ill tended was a better word. Prison cells-these kind, without mirrors and with little enough light-did not lend themselves to careful barbering or even routine maintenance of facial hair.

Yeats was clean shaven, or had been two days ago. His hand rubbed over his chin, feeling the rasp of his own stubble. He was unused to this, sleeping in unwashed street clothes, the inability to shape his outward image. He was unused to the larger implications of confinement and imminent death.

"How do you do it, MacBride?" he asked in a low voice, and got back a cocked eyebrow of questioning, no words. Yeats waved an arm about him.

"Does soldiering prepare you for this?"

"It does," MacBride said.

"And death, too?"

"Ever at a soldier's back."

Yeats stood up, took a step or two to stretch out the kinks. A hangman's rope would do that as well. But this was a military barracks, and the others had been shot.

"Sheehy-Skeffington, that harmless, fey man! Can one credit it? The man's a pacifist and still they shot him. So why are we alive?"

MacBride smiled thinly. "Your literary reputation with these barracks types? I doubt it. Maud has been agitating and stirring up her contacts here and in London, I'm thinking."

Yeats nodded and tried to make sense of this. Maud Gonne had been and was the love of his life. She had offered Yeats spiritual love and friendship. She had married Major John (Sean) MacBride, choosing the organizer and leader of the Irish Brigade of the Boer army over Yeats. Yeats had asked Maud to marry him many times. MacBride had asked once-had it been with more decisiveness, less diffidence? — and she had accepted. Though long separated, in the Church's eyes the two were still wed.

What the Church would not put asunder the Crown might, and probably would. Little good that would do Yeats. He and MacBride would continue their link in death.

What had it been? The crowds, duty, or a lonely impulse? All these and the madness of what was Ireland.

What had led him to this tumult?

Sunday was not a day for selling pipes and cigarettes in Dublin. Most fellows might think a fine March afternoon the occasion for a walk on Stephens Green with a favorite girl, or a rougher time at it with the lads on the soccer pitch. Tom Clarke was rather too old for either. Too frail, some might say-but not many. Certainly not the military and constabulary powers at Dublin Castle who knew him well.

Tom Clarke was a naturalized American citizen who played a harder game than soccer. In his youth he had been convicted and imprisoned in London for bomb making. Now he was back in Dublin again, doing business in a modestly sized but highly aromatic tobacco shop on Great Britain Street that announced itself in Gaelic as belonging to T. S. O'Clerigh.

Another type of business altogether was being conducted this day. Present were seven rebels comprising the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who would later elect one of their number, Patrick Pearse, as President and Commandant-General of the Irish Republic. Pearse was a poet, playwright and headmaster of St. Enda's Irish-Speaking School, himself possessed of a mystical but highly compelling vision of restoring Ireland to its days of splendor and heroism. In stark contrast was the trade unionist, James Connolly-hard-nosed and almost equally a socialist and an Irish revolutionary. He had organized and commanded his own Citizen Army, apart from the Irish Volunteers who made up the far larger body of Irishmen covertly under arms. Also in the conclave was Thomas MacDonagh, university lecturer and critic, and a dynamo of talk and action. Others included Joseph Plunkett, the movement's battle tactician and a man about to undergo an operation for glandular tuberculosis, and Sean McDermott, an upbeat but tough motivator of men.