time.
'Slaine, you're asking me to risk my life and possibly betray my countrymen, no matter how misguided they may be. Don't you think you owe it to me to tell me how you came to work for MI-5? Most Irish I know, no matter which side of the fence they're on, would call you a traitor.' I waited for the word to take hold, to light a fire hot enough to explode into a reaction. She turned her face to me. It was flushed a bit, but she was a fair-skinned Irish lass in a burning hot climate, so it could have been from the heat.
'And what will they call you, Billy Boyle, when all is said and done?'
CHAPTER FIVE
I lost track of the hours, even the day. I had started off in a Bristol Beaufighter, cramped in the single seat behind the pilot, for a short hop to Alexandria, where I switched to an RAF Sunderland Flying Boat to Malta, where it refueled, made another stop at Gibraltar, then began the long flight over the Atlantic, arcing out as far as possible from the German fighter bases along the coast of France.
The Sunderland was like a flying house. It had a wardroom, a small stove, bunks, and even a washroom. I drank, I read, I slept, but mostly I wondered. What was Diana doing now? Had she come to her senses and given up on the SOE mission? Or was she on a ship or a plane somewhere, launched with doubtful chances of survival?
I held an empty mug cupped in my hand, the sweet tea warming my stomach, as I watched the sun rise over the North Atlantic. Gray clouds brightened and I looked for the first sight of land. The sea below was dark and choppy, and I realized this was the stretch of water my grandfather must have steamed across on his way to America, heading west with Ireland at his young back. He'd come to America alone at the age of eleven, the last survivor in his family of the Great Hunger. His uncle, also alone after the death of his entire family, had saved enough to send Granddad Liam off in steerage with a loaf of bread, a few coins in his pocket, and a note pinned to the inside of his jacket.
Did he regret anything he left behind? Did he worry as he watched the waves beneath him, unable to fathom what America might be like? I felt the pull of the familiar as I waited for the unknown to reveal itself. And I missed Diana. It was a pure longing, separate from the fight we'd had, but tangled up in it nonetheless. What I felt was desire for her and an unselfish wish for everything good for her. What I thought, instead of felt, stirred up angry notions of how she'd ruined everything. Did Granddad weep or feel joy, I wondered, as Ireland fell away and the unknown land drew closer?
'Watch off to starboard, Lieutenant,' the navigator said as he opened the wardroom door. 'We'll make the cliffs of Donegal in a few minutes.'
'Thanks,' I said, pressing my face against the window as streaks of moisture raced across it. We were descending, beneath the clouds now, where the sunlight shone brightly on the crests of rolling waves. I wondered how my grandfather, crammed into the hold of an old wooden ship, had endured the voyage in steerage, and how many times he'd read that note.
I knew it by heart. When he was alive, he would take it out and read it on his birthday. My dad kept up the tradition, with all the family gathered around. He would remove the paper from the family Bible, where he kept it folded in the book of Exodus. He handled it carefully, afraid that smoothing it out too much would brush away the lines traced by a pencil stub in the middle of the last century. Then he would clear his throat, take a sip of whiskey, and read.
Never forget your name is Liam O'Baoighill, and you were born in County Roscommon. Your father, my dear brother, was named Patrick, your mother Cliona. Never forget the English took our farms and let your parents, brothers, and sisters starve. I know this. I earned your passage working at the Galway docks, loading freighters with sacks of grain, firkins of butter, barrels of barley, sacks of lard, ham, and bacon. British soldiers guarded the ships until they set sail. Such are the men who rule our land. Grow strong in America. You or your sons, or their sons, must one day return to smite them. God indeed gave us the potato blight, but the English gave us this famine.
His accusation and admonition had struck deep in our hearts, and as a child I learned to hate the red-coated British soldiers I conjured up in my mind, bayonets at the ready, guarding food being shipped to England while poor Cliona and her children starved to death.
By the time my father and his two brothers, Frank and Daniel, went off to fight in France in 1917, Granddad was dead. And a good thing too, Uncle Dan always said, that he did not have to suffer the sight of his three boys going off to fight for the English, and only two of them returning, with poor Frank, the oldest, left in a grave on the outskirts of a village called Chateau-Thierry.
Dad and Uncle Dan came home to a hero's welcome, but they never thought it fitting. While they were mustered out, the IRA was fighting the English for a free Ireland, and they felt no elation in having helped England keep its empire. They joined Clan na Gael, raising money for the cause, and taking in IRA men on the run. Some of them, according to the stories, were from the Squad, Michael Collins's assassins who targeted British intelligence officers throughout Ireland.
Uncle Dan's involvement went deeper. When raising money through Clan na Gael wasn't enough for him, he secretly became an IRA man. But it seemed to me that with the IRA, secrets were meant to be bragged about to those you trusted. Uncle Dan came to the house after he'd been sworn in as a member of the North American IRA, and told us all about it. Mom was worried, and said maybe he joined because he didn't have a wife and kids to keep him from storing guns in the cellar and inviting hard men with cloth caps pulled down over their faces to sleep on his couch whenever they pleased. Dad listened, and stayed with Clan na Gael. They both rose in the ranks of the Boston PD, they and their buddies doing what they could for the Cause, turning a blind eye when they needed to. Slaine O'Brien thought this was keeping a wound from healing but in my family, a wrong still demanded righting, a silent hand from the past reminding us of it every year.
For the first time since Granddad's uncle had charged him and his descendants with the duty of smiting the English for their crimes, a Boyle was returning to Ireland. On a British aircraft, working for the British, against the IRA. I hoped Granddad Liam wasn't watching and weeping for what had become of his clan. What would he make of Slaine O'Brien, working for British counterintelligence? What did I make of her? What secrets, if any, drove her to wear the British uniform?
I felt the Sunderland descend and saw the tall, sharp cliffs of Donegal, the sea raging against them. We went lower, and the green fields of Ireland appeared, distant patchworks of foggy emerald that gave me no joy at all. Sunlight danced on lakes, and as we flew over the largest, Lough Neagh, I saw Belfast to the north, a sprawl of smokestacks and industry fronting the Irish Sea. The plane banked south, headed for a landing in Dundrum Bay, an inlet close to Newcastle, where I was to report to 5th Division headquarters. I shivered as the damp chill seemed to rise from the ground and penetrate the metal skin of the flying boat, and I made a mental note to ditch my tropical khakis for a good thick woolen uniform.
The Sunderland slowed as Dundrum Bay came closer, rushing up at the last second, and finally it thumped once, then twice, before settling into the water and easing up on the props until it chugged along, almost quietly, to a long dock built out into the bay. As soon as the engines shut down, a small boat motored out and pulled up to the main hatchway up front. As I got in, an old gray-bearded fellow revved the small engine and headed for the dock.
'Welcome to Ireland,' he said. 'There's some who are in a hurry for your company.'
'I'm a popular guy,' I said as I extended my hand. 'Billy Boyle.'
'Grady O'Brick I am,' he said. We shook, and I couldn't help but notice the old man had no fingernails to speak of. The tips of his fingers were thin, with rutted scar tissue where the nails had once been.
'You're Catholic then, by the sound of your name.'
'Aye, as are you. You have the look of the altar boy about you. Mind how you go here, lad.'
'Where?'
He only nodded toward the dock as he eased up on the motor and gently brought the boat alongside as he leaned close and spoke softly. 'If you find yourself in Clough, at the head of the bay, stop in the Lug o' the Tub Pub. Most nights you'll find old Grady there.'
