Cathedral Read online

  She opened her eyes and began to sit up in his arms. “I don’t know. Breast.”

  “Can you run?”

  She nodded, and he helped her up. In the streets around them they could hear whistles, motors, shouts, tramping feet, and dogs. Flynn carefully wiped his fingerprints from the Thompson submachine gun and threw it into the alley.

  They headed north toward the Catholic ghetto around New Lodge Road. As they entered the residential area they kept to the familiar maze of back alleys and yards between the row houses. They could hear a column of men double-timing on the street, rifle butts knocking on doors, windows opening, angry exchanges, babies wailing. The sounds of Belfast.

  Maureen leaned against a brick garden wall. The running had made the blood flow faster through her wound, and she put her hand under her sweater. “Oh.”

  “Bad?”

  “I don’t know.” She drew her hand away and looked at the blood, then said, “We were set up.”

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Coogan, maybe. Could have been anyone, really.” He was fairly certain he knew who it was. “I’m sorry about Sheila.”

  She shook her head. “I should have known they would use her as bait to get us…. You don’t think she …” She put her face in her hands. “We lost some good people tonight.”

  He peered over the garden wall, then helped her over, and they ran through a block of adjoining yards. They entered a Protestant neighborhood, noticing the better built and maintained homes. Flynn knew this neighborhood from his youth, and he remembered the schoolboy pranks—breaking windows and running like hell—like now—through these alleys and yards. He remembered the smells of decent food, the clotheslines of white gleaming linen, the rose gardens, and the lawn furniture.

  They headed west and approached the Catholic enclave of the Ardoyne. Ulster Defense League civilian patrols blocked the roads leading into the Arodyne, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British soldiers were making house searches. Flynn crouched behind a row of trash bins and pulled Maureen down beside him. “We’ve gotten everyone out of their beds tonight.”

  Maureen Malone glanced at him and saw the half smile on his face. “You enjoy this.”

  “So do they. Breaks the monotony. They’ll swap brave tales at the Orange lodges and in the barracks. Men love the hunt.”

  She flexed her arm. A stiffness and dull pain were spreading outward from her breast into her side and shoulder. “I don’t think we have much chance of getting out of Belfast.”

  “All the hunters are here in the forest. The hunters’ village is therefore deserted.”

  “Which means?”

  “Into the heart of the Protestant neighborhood. The Shankill Road is not far.”

  They turned, headed south, and within five minutes they entered Shankill Road. They walked up the deserted road casually and stopped on a corner. It was not as foggy here, and the streetlights were working. Flynn couldn’t see any blood on Maureen’s black trench coat, but the wound had drained the color from her face. His own wound had stopped bleeding, and the dried blood stuck to his chest and sweater. “We’ll take the next outbound bus that comes by, sleep in a barn, and head for Derry in the morning.”

  “All we need is an outbound bus, not to mention an appearance of respectability.” She leaned back against the bus-stop sign. “When do we get our discharge, Brian?”

  He looked at her in the dim light. “Don’t forget the IRA motto,” he said softly. “Once in, never out. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t answer.

  A Red Bus appeared from the east. Flynn pulled Maureen close to him and supported her as they mounted the steps. “Clady,” said Flynn, and he smiled at the driver as he paid the fare. “The lady’s had rather too much to drink, I’m afraid.”

  The driver, a heavy-set man with a face that looked more Scottish than Irish, nodded uncaringly. “Do you have your curfew card?”

  Flynn glanced down the length of the bus. Less than a dozen people, mostly workers in essential services, and they looked mostly Protestant—as far as he could tell—like the driver. Perhaps everyone looked like Prods tonight. No sign of police, though. “Yes. Here it is.” He held his wallet up close to the driver’s face.

  The driver glanced at it and moved the door lever closed, then put the bus in gear.

  Flynn helped Maureen toward the rear of the bus, and a few of the passengers gave them looks ranging from disapproval to curiosity. In London or Dublin they would be dismissed for what they claimed to be—drunks. In Belfast people’s minds worked in different directions. He knew they would have to get off the bus soon. They sat in the back seat.

  The bus rolled up Shankill Road, through the Protestant working-class neighborhood, then headed northwest into the mixed neighborhoods around Oldpark. Flynn turned to Maureen and spoke softly. “Feeling better?”

  “Oh, quite. Let’s do it again.”

  “Ah, Maureen …”

  An old woman sitting alone in front of them turned around. “How’s the lady? How are you, dear? Feelin’ better, then?”

  Maureen looked at her without answering. The citizens of Belfast were capable of anything from murder and treachery to Christian kindness.

  The old woman showed a toothless smile and spoke quietly. “Between Squire’s Hill and McIlwhan’s Hill is a wee valley called the Flush. There’s an abbey there— you know it—Whitehorn Abbey. The priest, Father Donnelly, will give you lodgings for the night.”

  Flynn fixed the woman with a cold stare. “What makes you think we need a place to stay? We’re headed home.”

  The bus stopped, and the old woman stood without another word and trundled off to the front of the bus and stepped off.

  The bus started again. Flynn was very uneasy now. “Next stop. Are you up to it?”

  “I’m not up to one more second on this bus.” She paused thoughtfully. “The old woman … ?”

  Flynn shook his head.

  “I think we can trust her.”

  “I don’t trust anyone.”

  “What kind of country do we live in?”

  He laughed derisively. “What a bloody stupid thing to say, Maureen. We are the ones who helped make it like it is.”

  She lowered her head. “You’re right, of course … as usual.”

  “You must accept what you are. I accept it. I’m well adjusted.”

  She nodded. With that strange logic of his he had turned the world upside down. Brian was normal. She was not. “I’m going to Whitehorn Abbey.”

  He shrugged. “Better than a barn, I suppose. You’ll be needing bandaging … but if the good rector there turns us in …”

  She didn’t answer and turned away from him.

  He put his arm around her shoulders. “I do love you, you know.”

  She looked down and nodded.

  The bus stopped again about a half-mile up the road, and Flynn and Maureen moved toward the door.

  “This isn’t Clady,” said the driver.

  “That’s all right,” answered Flynn. They stepped off the bus and into the road. Flynn took Maureen’s arm. “That bastard will report us at the next stop.” They crossed the road and headed north up a country lane lined with rowan trees. Flynn looked at his watch, then at the eastern sky. “Almost dawn. We have to be there before the farmers start running about—they’re almost all Prods up here.”

  “I know that.” Maureen breathed deeply as they walked in the light rain. The filthy air and ugliness of Belfast were far behind, and she felt better. Belfast—a blot of ash on the green loveliness of County Antrim, a blot of ash on the soul of Ireland. Sometimes she wished that the city would sink back into the bog it grew out of.

  They passed hedgerows, well-tended fields, and pastures dotted with cattle and bales of fodder. An exhilarating sodden scent filled the air, and the first birds of morning began to sing.

  “I’m not going back to Belfast.”

  He put his a
rm around her and touched her face with his hand. She was becoming feverish. “I understand. See how you feel in a week or two.”

  “I’m going to live in the south. A village.”

  “Good. And what will you do there? Tend pigs? Or do you have independent means, Maureen? Will you buy a country estate?”

  “Do you remember the cottage overlooking the sea? You said we’d go there some day to live our lives in peace.”

  “Someday maybe we will.”

  “I’ll go to Dublin, then. Find a job.”

  “Yes. Good jobs in Dublin. After a year they’ll give you the tables by the window where the American tourists sit. Or the sewing machine by the window where you can get a bit of air and sun. That’s the secret. By the window.”

  After a while she said, “Perhaps Killeen …”

  “No. You can never go back to your own village. It’s never the same, you know. Better to go to any other pig village.”

  “Let’s go to America.”

  “No!” The loudness of his own voice surprised him.

  “No. I won’t do what they all did.” He thought of his family and friends, so many of them gone to America, Canada, or Australia. He had lost them as surely as he had lost his mother and father when he buried them. Everyone in Ireland, north and south, lost family, friends, neighbors, even husbands and wives and lovers, through emigration. Like some great plague sweeping the land, taking the firstborn, the brightest, and the most adventurous, leaving the old, the sick, the timid, the self-satisfied rich, the desperately poor. “This is my country. I won’t leave here to become a laborer in America.”

  She nodded. Better to be a king of the dunghills of Belfast and Londonderry. “I may go alone.”

  “You probably should.”

  They walked quietly, their arms around each other’s waists, both realizing that they had lost something more than a little blood this night.

  CHAPTER 3

  The lane led into a small, treeless valley between two hills. In the distance they saw the abbey. The moonlight lit the white stone and gave it a spectral appearance in the ground mist.

  They approached the abbey cautiously and stood under a newly budded sycamore tree. A small oblong cemetery, hedged with short green plants, spread out beside the abbey wall. Flynn pushed through the hedge and led Maureen into the cemetery.

  The churchyard was unkempt, and vines grew up the gravestones. Whitehorn plants—which gave the abbey its name and which were omens of good luck or bad luck, depending on which superstition you believed—clogged the narrow path. A small side gate in a high stone wall led into the abbey’s cloister. Flynn pushed it open and looked around the quiet court. “Sit on this bench. I’ll find the brothers’ dormitory.”

  She sat without answering and let her head fall to her chest. When she opened her eyes again, Flynn was standing over her with a priest.

  “Maureen, this is Father Donnelly.”

  She focused on the elderly priest, a frail-looking man with a pale face. “Hello, Father.”

  He took her hand and with his other hand held her forearm in that way they had of claiming instant intimacy. He was the pastor; she was now one of his flock. Presto. Everyone’s role had been carved in stone two millennia ago.

  “Follow me,” he said. “Hold my arm.”

  The three of them walked across the cloister and entered the arched door of a polygon-shaped building. Maureen recognized the traditional configuration of the chapter house, the meeting place of the monks. For a moment she thought she was going to face an assemblage, but she saw by the light of a table lamp that the room was empty.

  Father Donnelly stopped abruptly and turned. “We have an infirmary, but I’m afraid I’ll have to put you in the hole until the police and soldiers have come round looking for you.”

  Flynn didn’t answer.

  “You can trust me.”

  Flynn didn’t trust anyone, but if he was betrayed, at least the War Council wouldn’t think him too foolish for having trusted a priest. “Where’s this hole, then? We don’t have much time, I think.”

  The priest led them down a corridor, then opened the door at the end of the passage. Gray dawn came through stained glass, emitting a light that was more sensed than seen. A single votive candle burned in a red jar, and Flynn could see he was in the abbey’s small church.

  The priest lit a candle on a wall sconce and took it down. “Follow me up the altar. Be careful.”

  Flynn helped Maureen up to the raised altar sanctuary and watched the priest fumble with some keys and then disappear behind the reredos wall in back of the altar.

  Flynn glanced around the church but neither saw nor heard anything in the shadows to signal danger. He noticed that the oppressive smell of incense and tallow was missing, and the church smelled like the outside air. The priest had told him that the abbey was deserted. Father Donnelly was apparently not the abbot but served in something like a caretaker capacity, though he didn’t seem the type of priest that a bishop would exile to such a place, thought Flynn. Nor did he seem the type to hide members of the provisional IRA just to get a thrill out of it.

  The priest reappeared holding his candle in the darkness. “Come this way.” He led them to a half-open door made of scrolled wrought iron in the rear of the altar. “This is the place we use.” He looked at the two fugitives to see why they weren’t moving toward it. “The crypt,” he added as if to explain.

  “I know what it is. Everyone knows there’s a crypt beneath an altar’s sanctuary.”

  “Yes,” said Father Donnelly. “First place they always look. Come along.”

  Flynn peered down the stone steps. A candle in an amber glass, apparently always kept burning, illuminated a wall and floor of white limestone. “Why is it I’ve not heard of this abbey as a place of safety before tonight?”

  The priest spoke softly, evenly. “You had no need of it before tonight.”

  Typical priests’ talk, thought Flynn. He turned to Maureen. She looked down the stairway, then at the priest. Her instincts, too, rebelled against entering the crypt. Yet her conditioned response was to do what the priest urged. She stepped toward the stairway and descended. Flynn glanced at the priest, then stepped through the doorway.

  Father Donnelly led them along the limestone wall past the tombs of the former abbots of Whitehorn Abbey. He stopped and opened the bronze door of one of the tombs, marked Fr. Seamus Cahill, held up his candle, and entered the tomb. A wooden casket lay on a stone plinth in the middle of the chamber.

  Father Donnelly passed the candle to Flynn and raised the lid of the casket. Inside was a body wrapped in heavy winding sheets, the linen covered with fuzz of green mold. “Sticks and straw,” he said. He reached into the casket and released a concealed catch, and the coffin bottom swung downward with the bogus mummy still affixed to it. “Yes, yes. Melodramatic for our age, but when it was conceived, it was necessary and quite common. Go on. Climb in. There’s a staircase. See it? Follow the passageway at the bottom until you enter a chamber. Use your candle to light the way. There are more candles in the chamber.”

  Flynn mounted the plinth and swung his legs over the side. His feet found the top step, and he stood in the casket. A dank, almost putrid smell rose out of the dark hole. He stared at Father Donnelly questioningly.

  “It’s the entranceway to hell, my boy. Don’t fear. You’ll find friends down there.”

  Flynn tried to smile at the joke, but an involuntary shudder ran up his spine. “I suppose we should be thanking you.”

  “I suppose you should. But just hurry on now. I want to be in the refectory having breakfast when they arrive.”

  Flynn took a few steps down as Father Donnelly helped Maureen up the plinth and over the side of the casket onto the first step. Flynn held her arm with one hand and held the candle high with the other. She avoided the wrapped figure as she descended.

  Father Donnelly pulled the casket floor up, then shut the lid and left the tomb, closing the bronze d
oor behind him.

  Flynn held the candle out and followed the narrow, shoulder-width passageway for a distance of about fifty feet, grasping Maureen’s hand behind him. He entered an open area and followed the wall to his right. He found candles in sconces spaced irregularly around the unhewn and unmortared stone walls and lit them, completing the circuit around the room. The air in the chamber was chilly, and he saw his own breath. He looked around slowly at the half-lit room. “Odd sort of place.”

  Maureen wrapped herself in a gray blanket she had found and sat on a footstool. “What did you expect, Brian—a game room?”

  “Ah, I see you’re feeling better.”

  “I’m feeling terrible.”

  He walked around the perimeter of the six-sided room. On one wall was a large Celtic cross, and under the cross was a small chest on a wooden stand. Flynn placed his hand on the dusty lid but didn’t open it. He turned back to Maureen. “You trust him?”

  “He’s a priest.”

  “Priests are no different from other men.”

  “Of course they are.”

  “We’ll see.” He now felt the fatigue that he had fought off for so long, and he sank down to the damp floor. He sat against the wall next to the chest, facing the stairway. “If we awake in Long Kesh …”

  “My fault. All right? Go to sleep.”

  Flynn drifted off into fitful periods of sleep, opening his eyes once to see Maureen, wrapped in the blanket, lying on the floor beside him. He awoke again when he heard the casket bottom swing down and strike the wall of the passageway. He jumped up and stood at the entrance to the passage. In a shaft of light from the crypt he could see the coffin floor hanging, its grotesque mockery of a dead man stuck to it like a lizard on a wall.

  The torso of a man appeared: black shoes, black trousers, the Roman collar, then the face of Father Donnelly. He held a tea tray high above his head as he made his way. “They were here and they’re gone.”

  Flynn moved down the passageway and took the tray that the priest passed to him. Father Donnelly closed the coffin, and they walked into the chamber, Flynn placing the tray on a small wooden table.