Chapter One Hundred And Twenty Nine

A Second Opinion

With a police constable despatched post-haste on his bicycle to Skerries House to let them know what had happened down at the station, the corporal was as good as his word, re-appearing a very short while later, not as it turned out with one of his own Medical Officers, but with a civilian doctor from Cork in tow and who, in the aftermath of the ambush, had but recently arrived at the station.

Tom was soon made infinitely more comfortable with an injection of morphine, before, having removed the temporary dressings, the elderly doctor then cleaned his wounds with a solution of sodium hypochlorite and then redressed them with proper sterile bandages, observing that whoever had attended to them previously had clearly known what to do. The doctor looked enquiringly at Sybil who, realising some explanation was called for, now went on to explain patiently and for the second time in the last half hour or so that she was indeed a qualified nurse.

"Then, sister, I'm sure they could do with your help over there". The elderly doctor nodded in the direction of the shattered coaches of the train.

"Corporal, I suggest you escort this young woman to your own Medical Officer and let him know she is a fully trained nurse".

"Sir!"

The corporal, now more or less practically in complete awe of Sybil, found himself almost saluting the old man; checked himself just in time from so doing. Seated next to Tom, with his head resting on her shoulder, with Danny in her arms, Sybil looked questioningly up at the doctor.

"But what about my husband, my child…" she began.

"He'll be perfectly all right. From now on, it's all just a matter of time. He lost a lot of blood to be sure. But, there's no sign of any infection and thanks to you there's no reason why he shouldn't make a full recovery. He'll have a scar on his arm, but not much of one. But, if it will set your mind at rest, then I'll stay here with him while you're gone. As for your infant, Mrs. Mahony here will look after him, now won't you? She's a patient of mine from down in Kinsale". Seated a few feet away from them, a shawl clad, middle-aged woman, one of the few uninjured civilian survivors from the train, nodded her head.

"To be sure, doctor. Why, he's a good-looking little lad" she said as, not without some reservations on her part, Sybil placed Danny gently into her arms. Not that she need have worried. Mrs. Mahony turning out to be as instantly smitten with the little boy as had been the garrulous, kind-hearted Mrs. O'Keefe, the proprietor of their hotel back in Cork, and no less loquacious.

"Well, if you're certain..." Sybil still sounded doubtful, even as her burgeoning desire to be of some practical use in the present crisis overcame her maternal and wifely reservations about leaving both Danny and Tom. Standing up, she began swiftly to unbutton her overcoat.

A short while later, in a borrowed white apron and headscarf, at the behest of the Medical Officer, accompanied by two soldiers, one of them being young Private Atkins, Sybil began a thorough search of the wrecked carriages of the train to see if, in their earlier hasty evacuation, anyone injured but still alive had been overlooked. Obviously one of the old school, who by his peremptory tone had made it perfectly clear just what he thought of female nurses, it was more than probable that the officer intended this grim duty to be a test of Sybil's stamina. But in this, he had clearly underestimated her mettle. Not for nothing had Sybil been born and raised a Crawley and married a Branson.

Moments later and Sybil's shoes crunched noisily again on the broken glass littering the platform. Grabbing a firm hold of the brass handle, she wrenched open the nearest door. As it swung back, she now gasped at the scene it revealed.

Within, three people lay dead.

One was an elderly woman dressed in black, the meagre contents of her wicker basket, a small package wrapped in brown paper and a few vegetables, lay scattered across the floor. Next to her was a young woman probably the same age or thereabouts as Sybil herself, and a middle-aged man. He appeared to have been a commercial traveller, much like the one they had encountered at breakfast in the dining room of their hotel in Cork; judging by the badge in his lapel, a dealer in confectionary, neatly packaged samples of which, many now flecked with blood, littered the seat next to faces of the three victims all bore the same dreadful expression; their eyes wide open and staring, their features twisted in death.

"God, Tom" she whispered. "Is your precious Irish independence really worth all of this?" What a needless, needless, bloody waste. Sybil's blue gray eyes glistened momentarily, wet with tears, as they roved over the three bodies lying slumped across the blood soaked seats of the compartment. It was now that she recalled to mind a heated conversation between Tom and herself, shortly after agreeing to him coming down to Cork, to report for the Independent on what was happening here in the south of Ireland; when he had been dismissive of her fears of what might now ensue given that, in all but name, open warfare had broken out down in Munster between the British Army and the IRA.

"To be there, to report on the birth pangs of a new nation, to record it, to be part of history. Love, sometimes, sacrifices have to be made, for a future worth having ..." His words had been more or less a repetition of something which he had once said to her long ago in the lamp-lit garage at Downton.

"No, Tom, you're wrong! Do you honestly believe that, after all the suffering I've seen here in Dublin at the hospital, let alone at Downton during the war, that I don't know what's coming? And as for birth pangs, what the bloody hell do you know about those?"

Tom could have told her that actually he knew a very great deal, indeed more than most men, about the pains of child-birth, having been present with Sybil when she had given birth to Danny in the Cottage Hospital at Downton in the aftermath of the fire. In fact, both his shoulders and his wrists bore the imprint of Sybil's fingernails for several weeks thereafter. But, now, when Tom had tried to remind her gently of the same, Sybil had all but shouted him down.

"And if you so much as mention randy officers to me... War means death, Tom. It means killing. It means suffering. And mark my words, this war, here in Ireland, will be no different from any other. Good people are dying now and others are going to die in the future. On both sides. Is that the kind of history you want to be part of? Is gaining your precious freedom really worth paying such a terrible price?"

At that Tom had bristled, said she did not understand, after all, how could she when she was... Catching sight of his wife's face, he had trailed off into silence. At that, Sybil had shot Tom a final angry, contemptuous backwards glance over her shoulder before storming out of the sitting room, slamming the door behind her and making her way upstairs on her own to bed.

Sybil was very well aware of the old adage about not letting the sun go down on one's anger, but on this occasion she did. Indeed, they both did.

That night, after Tom had come upstairs, as ever their physical need for each other being undiminished, indeed perhaps even heightened, as was their wont they had made love, but for once, more or less in silence. As for Sybil, her mind was decidedly elsewhere.

After all they had shared, she had been angered beyond belief, when Tom had implied that because she was English, which in essence amounted to nothing more than an accident of birth, she was therefore incapable of understanding his desire to play his part, as Tom saw it, in the birth of Ireland as a free nation. Although she would not admit it, even to herself, Sybil was frightened too, by what the future might have in store for all three of them down there in the south, so much so that she found it impossible to concentrate on the present.

She had agreed Tom could go down to Cork, but only if she and Danny went with him. Was that reasonable? To demand that they went as well, simply so as to be with him? Would that keep Tom out of danger? No, it would not. Despite what he had once promised her, she could not be with him every waking minute. Tom had enabled her to pursue her own dream of becoming a free-spirited, independent, working woman, well away from the frippery and foolishness of the gilded cage of Downton. Should she not let him now pursue this opportunity to further his own career, without both her and Danny in tow? Would her own selfishness, in wanting to be with Tom, for that was how she now viewed it, serve for nothing except only to put all their lives in danger?

Even Ma had said she was being foolhardy. So too had her mother when she had written home to Downton. And when Sybil had then written and told Mary what they intended to do, Edith being away from Downton on some archaeological dig in the Near East, Sybil had found to her dismay that her eldest sister was of exactly the same mind as both Ma and her own mother.

For, on her return from honeymoon on the French Riviera, Mary being Mary had not shrunk from writing and telling her little sister just what she thought of Sybil's hare-brained demand that the price of Tom going south was that she go with him. But then, of course, Mary had never really understood the true depth of Sybil's passion for Tom. None of her family ever had. Nor for that matter had Tom's. No-one ever could.

When Danny had been born, Sybil had done as most mothers do with their newborn; had fallen in love with him at first sight. From that very first moment, the maternal bond between her and her child was both deep and unbreakable. But, in her heart, Sybil knew too that even if she and Tom went on to have a baker's dozen of children between them, to her they would be merely what, in her grandmother's day, were termed "proofs of affection"; that what she felt for any of their offspring would pale into insignificance with what she felt for Tom. Put simply, she absolutely adored him, could not envisage life without him.

But even so, would it not be best if...

Belatedly Sybil had suddenly become aware that Tom was still. This took her by complete surprise, for she knew he had not reached his climax. Looking up she found he was looking down at her; perhaps had been doing so for some time.

"Are you bored?" he asked of her softly. When she had said nothing by way of immediate reply, he had rolled off her and over to the other side of the bed. A short while later she heard Tom snore softly, knew he was asleep. Long after that, she herself lay awake, aware that if he had hurt her, she had hurt him and in a way that she could never have envisaged to be possible.

With that thought in mind, a while later she had snuggled herself close against Tom, wrapped her arms tightly about him; would she ever tire of doing so? She knew the answer to that before she asked herself the question: she never would. He was her very life; her lodestar. A moment later and she felt Tom turn in her arms, so that he was now facing her and in that instant realised too that he had been crying.

"I'm so very sorry" he had whispered brokenly.

"So am I, my darling. Hush now. Go back to sleep. There's nothing to reproach yourself for. Let's talk in the morning". At that, she had kissed him gently and but a moment later, both of them were fast asleep, wrapped in each others' arms.

Down here in the beautiful countryside of County Cork, in the warming rays of the late afternoon July sunshine, seated on the wooden bench at the side of the station at Skerries Road, stripped to the waist, his shoulder heavily bandaged, his left arm in a sling, Tom sat resting his bare back against the brick wall of the bullet-ridden building. Had he taken up smoking, he thought now would have been the ideal time for a cigarette, but smoking was one vice he had never pursued. Aged all of thirteen years, Tom's first and only attempt at smoking had ended in abject failure; with him retching his guts into the Liffey and no wish whatsoever to try and repeat the experience.

"How are you feeling? Rotten but alive, lad?"

Groggily, Tom looked up, to see the kindly, old doctor from Kinsale, who he thought must have come upon him unawares, was seated next to him and was regarding him with thoughtful eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had called Tom a lad and now with a young son of his own, for someone to describe himself thus, struck Tom, in his present befuddled state, as faintly ridiculous.

"Uh huh… That... that about sums things up. Unlike those poor buggers!" Tom nodded his head slowly in the direction of several blanket-covered stretchers which lay on the ground out in the station yard. Suddenly his head swam. He blinked and shook his head and the stretchers now came back into focus; the covered forms upon them being only all too obvious for what they were, even without the pairs of boots and shoes protruding from beneath the improvised shrouds. The doctor himself nodded again and jabbed a thumb in the same direction.

"Such a needless bloody waste. I would have thought after four years of war, with God knows how many killed, wounded or else missing, we would have all learned something. Not just the British, but also ourselves. But that seems not to be the case. What's it all for? Do you ever find yourself asking that?" Having now done all he could for the injured civilians from off the train, shaking his head, the old man began methodically rolling down his white shirt sleeves.

"You should talk to my wife! She's of the same opinion as you. But, since you ask me, doctor, yes, frequently!" Tom nodded his head in agreement. Unthinkingly, he moved his upper torso too quickly and then grimaced with the resulting pain.

"You may not think it, but you were lucky. The wound to your shoulder was no more than a nick. It will heal very quickly indeed".

Despite his head now beginning to swim with the effects of the morphine, Tom looked up in obvious surprise.

"I can assure you, doctor, it didn't feel like a nick at the time!"

The old man ghosted a smile; nodded his head sympathetically.

"Painful, of course to be sure, but that will soon pass. However, the bullet which hit you in the arm, that could have been much more serious, but thankfully, it passed through without hitting the bone. Messy to be sure. Likewise also painful. And you lost a lot of blood as a result of it. But given time, there should be no lasting damage and very little by way of a scar. But, as I said, you must let things take their course. The morphine I gave you should help with the pain. Be thankful that you're fit and healthy. In a couple of months you should be as right as rain!"

"A couple of months" repeated Tom tonelessly. The morphine was beginning to further dull his senses.

"Or thereabouts. The healing process is never that exact a science".

Tom nodded again.

"Branson..." mused the old doctor. "Would you be being related to the Bransons of Skerries?"

"Distant kin" offered Tom evasively and now bone-weary.

"To be sure. Distant. And the nurse... your wife. She..."

"What... what about her?"

"She's very fine. A wonderful nurse too. And I'm sure she'll have no difficulty whatsoever in administering further injections of the morphine as and when you need them, as undoubtedly you will. At least for the next week or so".

The doctor patted the small cardboard box he had placed beside Tom on the bench. Despite his increasing weariness, diligently, Tom searched the old man's face for any trace of insincerity, but finding there none, he smiled with obvious pleasure at the doctor's kind words.

"My wife... she... she would be very pleased... to hear you say that..." Tom yawned. "I...I mean about her... being a wonderful nurse". He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on what the doctor was saying. For his part, the doctor must have sensed Tom's suspicion, that he was merely making conversation for the sake of it, while awaiting a motor to take him back into Kinsale.

"No, it's not humbug. I mean every word I say. A born nurse if ever I saw one. Calm, capable and thoroughly professional in her manner. And one thing more. She has that rare gift too, of being able to put patients at their ease, whatever their status, whatever their situation. Even here amid all this…" The doctor spread his hands expansively and gesticulated at the surrounding scene of carnage.

"English, is she?"

Again Tom nodded drowsily.

"Where did she train?"

"At York … during the war". He yawned again.

"Did she see service in France?"
"No". Tom sighed sleepily. She worked at Dow… at… at a con... con... convalescent home, for … wounded soldiers, in Yorkshire. That's... that's... where... where we met".

"So you were wounded too, during the war?"
"No". Tom shook his head slowly. He was still alert enough to deftly change the subject away from matters best left in the past. "After... after we were married, she worked..." He yawned again. "She worked at the Coombe, in Dublin... until... until our son was born".

The morphine was taking further hold of him now. Tom smiled stupidly and rolled his eyes at Danny, still seated contentedly in the lap of Mrs. Mahony, sucking his fists and kicking his chubby little legs in the warm air of the summer's afternoon, blissfully unaware of all of what had come to pass.

"A good-looking little chap!"

Feeling increasingly light-headed, Tom chuckled unashamed and with pleasure at the doctor's praise of his young son.

"Hm, yes. Everyone... everybody... says so. He is. He... he takes after his ma". Tom yawned, felt himself drifting, at which point, as if from far off, there came another voice.

"Oh, I don't know about that, not having met her of course. But, if you ask me my opinion, Tommy, I'd have said this little lad takes after his father. That being the case, he's bound to be handsome. After all, as a boy, you always were so good-looking. You still are!"

Despite Tom's bandaged state, Maeve's bright eyes glittered, missed nothing, roved with undisguised interest over his half-naked body, taking in his muscular physique, the thick mat of light hairs on his chest, saw where they darkened, thickened and disappeared below the waistband of his trousers.

Good looking as a boy undoubtedly and now a fine, handsome figure of a man to be sure!