Chapter Sixty Six
"Dulce Et Decorum Est ..."
The district of Dublin to which Kelly had driven Tom for his clandestine meeting was Kilmainham. Lying to the west of the city centre, on the south side of the Liffey it was where the Guinness brewery at St. James's Gate was situated, where Tom himself had once worked as a messenger boy and for which Donal once drove a dray and where he still worked as a clerk. As Tom made his way to the place assigned for his meeting, the languid summer air was heady with the smell of roasted barley, drifting across from the nearby brewery.
Despite the particular circumstances which this evening, and at very short notice too, had brought him over to this part of the city, Tom found himself smiling, remembering how Sybil had remarked unfavourably on the same smell shortly their arrival in Dublin, just after they had left Westland Row station. They had been walking down Cumberland Street when, wrinkling her decidedly aristocratic English nose, Sybil had asked him what was the unpleasant smell.
"Don't ever let an Irishman hear you say that love". Tom chuckled.
"Why ever not?" asked Sybil.
"Just don't. That's all" said Tom with a grin, intending to let the matter drop there and then. He might have known that his answer wouldn't satisfy Sybil.
"But ... you're an Irishman" she said doubtfully. "So..."
"To be sure," said Tom with a laugh. "But, since I love you, darlin', in this, I don't count".
"So what is it then, the awful smell?" Sybil persisted.
When Tom had just grinned at her, made it clear by his continuing silence that he was not intending to say anything further on the matter, Sybil had stopped walking, set down on the pavement the case she was carrying, and stood stock still.
"Tom Branson, I'm not moving from this spot until you tell me!"
"Do you really want to know, darlin'?" laughed Tom likewise putting down the two cases he was carrying.
"I really want to know," said Sybil, pouting.
At her facial expression, Tom made to kiss her soundly, but she pulled away from him.
"Oh no you don't" giggled Sybil. "Now tell me what I want to know, Branson" she ordered him with mock solemnity.
"Very well, milady" said Tom with a broad grin and an equally mock bow, as finally, he set about explaining to Sybil what the smell was and where it was coming from.
He had said that for him as a Dubliner, if only by adoption, the smell, smelt again after living abroad for so many years in England, told him that at long last, finally, he was home.
"All that fuss over some silly beer" said Sybil dismissively.
"Silly beer?" gasped Tom. "Is that what you call it? Guinness is the nectar of the gods".
"The nectar of the gods?" Sybil arched an eyebrow; shook her head in mock disdain. "Oh Tom, really!"
"Sybil, do you know just how long Guinness has been brewed here in Ireland?
Sybil shook her head again.
"No, I don't. Does it really matter?"
"Of course it matters! For well over a hundred years. That's how long".
"Really? A mere hundred years; is that all? Then I'll have you know, Mr. Branson, we English could teach you Irish a thing or two about brewing".
"What do you mean by Is that all? And just what can you English tell us Irish about brewing, milady?" Tom folded his arms across his chest, tried to look serious, and waited patiently for Sybil to explain herself.
"Well, not brewing exactly, but we were producing wine in Gascony in the thirteenth century. I think you'll find that was over seven hundred years ago" said Sybil archly.
"That's the time you English have been oppressing us Irish!" laughed Tom. "Anyway just how the devil do you come to know that – about the English and, where was it you said, Gascony?" he asked, genuinely astonished at Sybil's unexpected store of knowledge.
"Carson told me," laughed Sybil, "which just goes to show..."
"Goes to show what?" asked Tom.
"Why, that some servants are worth their very weight in gold of course" said Sybil impishly.
At that, not bothering to wait for Tom, she had picked up her suitcase, cast a provocative, decidedly aristocratic, backward glance over her shoulder, and resumed walking down Cumberland Street. Hurriedly picking up his own two cases, Tom had run to catch up with her, provoking yet more laughter on Sybil's part. Thereafter, Tom had tried, unsuccessfully, to explain that Guinness was actually a porter or stout, but to no avail. In fact, Tom had reflected ruefully, he might just as well have been speaking Gaeilge.
But Kilmainham was also the site of somewhere far less pleasant - Kilmainham Gaol. Built in 1796, officially known as the County of Dublin Gaol, Kilmainham had as grim a reputation here in Ireland as Dartmoor Prison did over in England and for very good reasons. It was insanitary and overcrowded with, in many cases, up to five prisoners at a time, men, women and children - there was no segregation - crammed into dirty, small, candlelit cells.
However, the gaol's evil reputation had been made even grimmer by what had happened there in the aftermath of the Rising barely three years before. Having been adjudged guilty of treason and court martialled by the British authorities, some dozen or so of the leaders of the abortive coup were shot by firing squad within the high, grey stone walls of the prison yard.
Among them had been the writer Patrick Pearse – with whom Tom himself felt a great affinity – who had read the proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office when the Rising began; and also Willie Pearse his younger brother. But of all the executions carried out at Kilmainham in May 1916 it had been that of James Connolly which had sickened Tom to the very pit of his stomach and a great many others besides as well. So badly injured in the fighting that he could not even stand, Connolly had been stretchered in to the prison courtyard, tied to a chair and then brutally shot.
And it was within this grim place that Peadar, Emer's husband was now confined, apparently "assisting the forces of the Crown" - the British authorities - with their enquiries into the missing firearms stolen from the police barracks in the north of the city shortly before Tom and Sybil had been married. It was the theft of these firearms, as yet still unrecovered, which had precipitated the army's raid on Ciaran's farm on the night of the céilí. Tom shuddered; did not wish to dwell on what form assisting the British might take. There were sickening rumours of a dimly lit, arched tunnel, known only as "The Gauntlet", where prisoners were beaten repeatedly either until they "co-operated" or worse still ... died.
No, thought Tom, it did not do to dwell on such things. But try as he might, despite what he and Ma had both said, he found it difficult not to do so; wondered if ever he found himself in such a situation akin to that of Peadar, whether he would he stay true to his beliefs; or would he tell his interrogators whatever it was they wanted to know, simply to stop the pain. Anyone who said they would never succumb to such duress was, thought Tom, at best a fool; at worst a liar.
Tom was no coward; he abhorred violence. But a matter of days before, Sybil had told him that he was the gentlest and the strongest man she knew. Nevertheless, Tom still thought that there were some things worth fighting for. He believed implicitly in the cause of Irish freedom, independence for the land of his birth, but now that, finally, he was married to Sybil, he found himself wondering if there were not greater claims on a man's loyalty than love of one's country; love of a good woman certainly; wondered if it made him a hypocrite. He openly voiced his misgivings to Sybil lying pleasurably naked with her, face to face in bed, the morning after their wedding, when they were discussing what had happened to Peadar the night before.
"My dearest dear" said Sybil cupping his face softly in her hands, "Tom, you are the gentlest and the strongest man I know. To have such thoughts, which you call misgivings, doesn't make you any less a patriot, and certainly doesn't make you any less a man. What it makes you is a realist, but it also makes you something far more important, far more precious to me than that".
"And what's that?" asked Tom softly gazing into her eyes, searching her face intently.
"My lover and my husband; now, my darling, come here and show me what you mean to me".
At her earnest entreaty, Tom enfolded Sybil in his strong arms, and with all thoughts of Ireland's manifold sufferings, of what might be happening to Peadar banished to the furthest recesses of his mind, found himself responding immediately to Sybil's urgent physical need of him, and his of her.
However, it was not to Kilmainham Gaol that Tom was now bound, though his journey did have to do with Peadar. The anonymous caller to the offices of the Independent on Talbot Street had told Tom that he, a colleague of Peadar's, had information regarding Emer's husband; could not, or would not, say what that was over the telephone – it was known that the British tapped the wires – had suggested a meeting.
On the basis that no news was so far good news, at least that was what both Ma and he had told Emer in the continuing deafening silence over what had become of her husband, breathing a silent prayer for Peadar's health and safety, Tom now set off in an entirely different direction from that which would have taken him over to Kilmainham Gaol. He made certain that he followed precisely and to the letter the directions hurriedly given to him but an hour or so earlier.
Although he had said little to Kelly of his own misgivings of what he was about to do, it was not without a sense of foreboding and trepidation, that slowly Tom headed off towards his intended destination.
By rights, he should have been on his way home; it was Tom's turn to cook supper. However, given the nature of the information the man said he had to impart to him, Tom had made a hurried telephone call to the switchboard at the Coombe and left a message for Nurse Branson, saying that her husband had called: something, he said, had come up at the paper at the last minute, that required his attention.
It had happened before, and Tom knew that Sybil would not be unduly alarmed; in fact she would be more concerned about having to start preparing supper without him; Tom added that he would be home just as soon as he could, albeit later than envisaged. That done, he had asked Edmund Kelly to run him over to his hastily arranged, mysterious evening rendezvous in the west of the city.
The route he had been instructed to follow now took Tom through a rabbit warren of smoke blackened, dirty alleyways, courts, and passages, all of which looked remarkably the same, twisting and turning this way and that to lessen, Tom presumed, any chance that he might have been being followed.
Somewhere, just ahead of him, a whistle sounded, then another, buffers clanged, and a passenger train, its windows brightly lit, thundered past him in a deafening roar and a cloud of sulphurous smoke and steam, pounding up the bank leading from Kingsland station but a mile or so distant.
In front of Tom there now loomed a dark mass of cabins, sheds, and other nondescript structures. For the most part, these baulked black and large in the gathering dusk of the summer evening, and, even at this comparatively early hour, here and there a few lights showed dimly behind grimy, broken windows.
The buildings ahead of Tom housed builders, carpenters, chain-makers, engineers, masons, and smiths, along with a whole host of other crafts and trades too numerous to mention. All worked somewhere in the sprawling, huddled mass of buildings, among the erecting shops, the engine and carriage sheds, the foundries and repair shops which formed the huge Inchicore Works of the Great Southern and Western Railway, among them the office where, until but recently Emer's husband Peadar had trained and worked as a draughtsman.
In the gathering, smoky gloom, Tom espied the building he had been told to look out for and which would, he thought, despite its industrial setting, not have looked out of place on the Downton Abbey estate; a castellated stone tower, which formed part of the engine sheds. Tom was to keep out of sight and wait in its shadow until he was met. Of course, as Tom soon found out, this was far easier said than done, as, here at the Inchicore works, all manner of workers, including drivers and fireman, were constantly coming on or else going off shift.
Keeping close to the smoke blackened walls of the sheds, dodging cautiously from one stone buttress to another, passing flickering braziers filled with coke, huddles of large oilcans and hefty tubs of grease, skirting piles of coal and pools of dirty water, snaking hoses, discarded shovels, and with, despite his best efforts to avoid doing so, his feet crunching noisily on piles of ash, clinker, and cinders, Tom made his way towards the tower.
As he did so, an engine puffed past him on the line next to the sheds, its whistle shrieking like a banshee. At that very same moment, Tom felt himself grabbed forcefully from behind, found himself toppling over, falling down a grassy bank, where, before he could even shout out, make any attempt to resist, everything suddenly vanished out of sight, replaced by a cloying black noisomeness as a hood made of dirty sacking was pulled roughly over his head. He was jerked roughly to his feet.
"Got you at last Branson, you bloody bastard!"
"What now Michael?" asked a voice close at hand.
"Bring him inside," replied the other.