Only with Blood Read online

  Text copyright © 2015 Thérèse Down

  This edition copyright © 2015 Lion Hudson

  The right of Thérèse Down to be identified as the author of this work has

  been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Lion Fiction

  an imprint of

  Lion Hudson plc

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road

  Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com/fiction

  ISBN 978 1 78264 135 3

  e-ISBN 978 1 78264 136 0

  First edition 2015

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Cover image: Woman © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images; Red ribbon © Lisa

  Thornberg/iStockphoto.com

  “Rich in historical detail, Only with Blood vividly recreates the Ireland of the 1940s. Part family drama, part political thriller, this well crafted book will introduce you to characters you can really care about.”

  – Gerard Kelly, author of The Boy Who Loved Rain

  “Beautifully written, with crisscrossing, captivating storylines, Only with Blood reveals tenderness and trauma. A great read.”

  – Catherine Campbell, author

  “Thérèse Down is an exciting new talent – a wonderful wordsmith who weaves compelling stories around evocative landscapes and unforgettable characters who stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.”

  – Pam Rhodes, author and broadcaster

  For God, who makes all things possible, and for my

  children, James, Michael, and Grace, who never fail to

  inspire me.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks go to my colleague, Andrew Jackson, who helped me find the title of the book. And to Pam Rhodes, for all her encouragement.

  “The altar of liberty totters when it is

  cemented only with blood.”

  Daniel O’Connell

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was cold. Frost stopped the breath of the land, seized the breath of those who moved upon it. Winter would come early and it would be harsh. Jack Flynn thanked God for a good harvest, for the cows would need early hay. Lately, he felt more keenly the pain of rheumatism in his hands. This creeping infirmity and a cough which daily grew fiercer were insistent reminders to Flynn that he could no longer put off marriage if he were to have sons to inherit his land. The alternative of selling to strangers the land his great-grandfather had purchased over a hundred years before was unthinkable. And so, this evening in 1943 at the age of forty-three, though he would rather have faced any kind of physical test of his courage, he put on his only suit and set off on foot towards the village of Dunane and the house of Malachai Brett, the matchmaker.

  “Jack Flynn, come in, come in.” Malachai Brett was a small, wizened man with a red nose from too much poteen and a cap and braces without which it was impossible to imagine him. His hands were raw and gnarled with years of picking rocks, handling baling twine and rough ploughshares, but their gestures were expansive and he greeted his visitor with a ready smile. He was, though, greatly puzzled by this visit from Jack Flynn, who, in thirty years of neighbourly acquaintance, Malachai had never seen down a pint or laugh out loud.

  “Will you have a drop of the hard stuff with me, Jack? ’Twill drive out the cold.”

  “No.”

  “Of course, of course – ’tis early, right enough. Will you have tea?”

  “No, no.”

  Jack shifted uneasily, spat into the open grate, then spoke. “I want to get hitched, Brett. I have enough money and land…” He could not go on. Malachai struggled to suppress an amazed guffaw but he checked himself – he had seen what a thump from Jack Flynn could do to a mocking face. He could not, however, think of anything to say in response to this most unexpected of announcements. After what seemed a long time, Jack turned to face the matchmaker, fully expecting to see him purple with suppressed laughter. Instead he found only a mildly bemused expression and Brett’s eyes fixed on the hearth.

  “Well?” barked Jack.

  “Well,” answered Malachai distantly. Then he seemed to arrive at definite thought. “Did you have anyone in mind?”

  “That’s what you’re for!” came the gruff reply. The clock in the corner ticked smugly and the shadows grew longer as the early winter evening seeped across the village. Malachai busied himself adding coal to the fire, poking it into embers till it smoked and caught.

  “Now, Jack, forgive me, but you’re no young fella.” Without turning to face him, Malachai registered the sharp rise of Jack’s head and he continued quickly, “So we have to be careful – extra careful – about this match. You don’t want an auld one that’s no good for… breeding.” Malachai met Jack’s eye, risked a conspiratorial wink, regretted it, and moved on. “Now let’s see… there’s Nancy Madigan, over near Darcy’s. She’s not a bad catch – ten years in the convent at Cashmel and a fine pair of hips on her. I’d say she’s good for a few years yet, Jack.” Jack was startled at the image of Nancy Madigan swaying full-hipped through his milking parlour, stirring stew on his range with her wisps of carroty hair and plump, veined cheeks. People would say it was all he could get.

  “She will not do.”

  “Ah, now, Jack,” began Malachai slowly, beginning to relish a little Jack’s discomfort and intrigued by the idea that Flynn was finally succumbing to carnal desire, “it never pays to be too hasty. Nancy’s a good woman. She’ve a fine strong back on her and she’d make a fine mother. She’ve a hundred or two coming to her, too, when her auld fella goes – won’t be long now.”

  “I don’t want money. Who else?” The clock ticked itself to sleep. Malachai rose from his fireside chair, wound the clock, and lit a gas lamp.

  “Is it a looker you’re after, Jack?” Jack scowled more intently at the fire. “Well, now,” continued Malachai, already seeing the incredulity on the faces of the other men as he related this extraordinary episode over a few pints at the local bar, “that’s a different league altogether. Tell me, Jack, was it a young one you were looking for?”

  “For crying out loud, Brett, will you stop your codding around!” Jack rose from his chair and rounded on Brett so that the matchmaker leapt backwards in alarm, dropping his taper. “You’re like a dog sniffing round a heap of dung with your stupid questions. It’s a simple enough request, isn’t it?”

  “Ah, now, Jack, calm down. It’s not often I have to do all the asking! Usually, the man have someone in mind at least, or else it’s the father who comes, looking for a match for his son.” Malachai, seeing Jack’s jaw clench, did his best to feign matter of factness but Jack did not miss the tremor in his hands as he retrieved the
taper and put it back in its tin on the press. “Now I’m only trying to help you, Jack.”

  Flynn crossed the room and threw open the door with such force it smashed against the wall and made the little window pane shudder in its frame. In the doorway he turned.

  “To hell wit’ you, Malachai Brett! Sure what could the likes of you do for a real man, anyways?” With his pride momentarily restored by this show of bravado, Jack Flynn set off to his lonely farmhouse. The door shut, the fire roaring like laughter in its grate, Malachai hugged his knees in anticipation of relating this meatiest of events to his wife and sons when they returned from evening mass.

  * * *

  The following evening saw Malachai in his usual corner seat of the little bar in Dunane, surrounded by sceptical farmers. “I swear to ye, lads, he be after a woman to warm his old bones. She have to be good-looking, too.”

  “Did he mention any names?” asked one listener.

  “He did not. I suggested Nancy Madigan, but he turned up his nose – ‘She will not do!’” Malachai adopted Flynn’s snarl, narrowed his eyes, and scowled at each farmer as Flynn had scowled at him the previous evening. The imitation was a good one, capturing the tight-lippedness and barely controlled fury which seemed always to set Flynn apart from his fellows. The listeners laughed.

  “Who the hell would want to marry him anyway, the dirty auld beggar – and him past forty?” enjoined a younger man who would have liked the means to marry himself but was some way off yet.

  An older man, married with several children, added, “Sure, would he know what to do with a woman, Brett? Could you show him?” More raucous laughter. A few became uncomfortable at the turn the conversation was taking and glanced nervously at the door as if Flynn could walk in at any moment, though he hadn’t been known to do so in twenty years.

  “Away wit’ you, O’Riordan, you dirty dog,” replied Malachai, determined to regain his position as respected narrator. “What he does wit’ her is his own concern and none of mine.”

  “’Tis a skivvy Flynn is looking for – nothing else. He’ve no time for the rest of it,” said another quietly, from the depths of his pint.

  “Ah, he’s not a bad-looking man now,” mused Malachai. “A fine dancer and a handsome man in his youth.”

  “What?” The young man spoke again, inexplicably piqued by this turn of events. “Sure he’ve less hair than Malachai, now, and a scowl on his puss, boy, would stop a clock!” The company erupted in laughter at this petulant put-down and someone slapped the young man on the back.

  “Don’t worry, Dan – he’ve no chance against you in these races.”

  “He’s big, mind,” conceded the lugubrious man from his pint mug. “I wouldn’t like to take him on.”

  A new voice carried clear above the others from the bar. “Have he much brass, do you think, Malachai?” The company turned to observe Mick Spillane, leaning against the bar and listening with increasing interest to the banter.

  “Well, now, Mick,” began Malachai in his best narrative tones, “he must have a fair few shillings in it for he’ve no one to feed except himself and he never drives a cow back home from market. That farm was paid for a long time ago. Then his auld fella must have left a tidy sum…”

  There was a silence during which the older, weather-beaten men considered how well off they’d be without their families to feed. And in that moment, the germ of a plan took root in Mick Spillane’s head. Mick had four daughters and no sons. Times were hard and two of the daughters were still at home. The elder, Maureen, was no looker and likely to take the veil. The youngest of his daughters, on the other hand, was a wilful one with a mane of dark hair and a brain beneath it which was causing Mick considerable consternation. She would not, she insisted, be married off to some ignorant culchie. She would, she declared, go to Dublin and study at Trinity. She will and her foot! thought Spillane and snorted into his pint. “Malachai,” he said at last, resolutely wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and indicating outside with a jerk of his head, “a word.”

  In 1921, aged twenty-one, Jack Flynn had been part of a flying column which ambushed and killed four Black and Tans posted to the village of Cappawhite. The column had been instructed by Michael Collins himself, and by the time the ambush occurred, the men were as familiar with the press of a rifle as a ploughshare on their shoulders. That was the high point of Jack Flynn’s life. Now in his forties, life was a maelstrom of labour in all weathers, long, lonely evenings and dark, quiet mornings. He had immersed himself in hard work, first intent on impressing his brutish father, then on making more money than any of his fellow farmers.

  Immediately following the murders of the four “Tans”, Jack imagined he had achieved heroic status in the village. His vicious temper, he was convinced, would be regarded as the mark of a Republican activist of the highest calibre. He half expected Michael Collins to knock on his door and recruit him to the cause. His inability to relate to anyone on a social level Jack chose to view as evidence of an intellect disdainful of trivia. But within a year, guilt had usurped the triumphalism he had felt following his part in the Cappawhite ambush. He woke sweating from nightmares in which he relived that night and heard with a clarity he could not consciously recall, the pleas for mercy and cries of terror uttered by the four men whose lives he and his comrades had extinguished. Alone and with no one to reassure him of his righteousness in dispatching enemy occupiers who had undoubtedly committed their own acts of atrocity, Jack grew increasingly saturnine and depressed. More than anything, he was ashamed that he had shot men in their beds. No matter how much he tried to justify to himself what he had done, he could not escape the fact that there was no bravery in killing men who could not defend themselves.

  Jack threw himself entirely into hard work and abandoned all attempts at social intercourse. No one invited him to drink in the local bar, and, in spite of his good looks, no girl had the opportunity to soften the line of his mouth with a life-giving kiss. His only part in village life was when he drove his horse and cart to the chapel on Sunday mornings. He had never missed mass.

  Jack never discovered exactly what had happened to his mother. She disappeared when he was a small child. His father, one still-black morning, had left for the fields as usual. Jack had listened to his sighs and curses as he heaved himself out of bed, the heavy tread of his boots to the ladder, the descending knock of boot on wood. Then there was silence, broken intermittently by the hiss of spilt water on the hob, the clatter of metal on metal as he made his tea and the bang as he set his tin mug upon the table. Finally, there was the resounding thud of the door slamming shut and the house shuddered into breath. But on this occasion, his mother did not quietly open Jack’s door, tread lightly across his room, and part the curtains on the early morning. She did not turn to his bed, smiling broadly, and say in a half-whisper, “And how’s my Jack? There’s porridge and nice warm milk in it for good boys – come on downstairs now, pet.” She did not bend to kiss him, her plait curling around the nape of her neck and falling against his face, tickling.

  He had waited. He waited and waited until the sun clearly burst through the curtain gaps and he could hear the hens scratching and cackling in the yard. When the voice of Tom McCormack the dairyman called his father’s name and asked him for the churns, Jack began to panic. This late and no sign of his mother! Leaping from his bed, he ran into her room. No sign. Heart thumping, he descended the ladder to the kitchen. It was cold. The range had not been stoked and the porridge can was still hanging in the corner. He reached for the door handle and heaved the heavy oak door towards himself. Then, using his right hand, he pulled himself around it to stand uncertainly in his night shift, not daring to cry out her name. No one noticed him. No one came. He turned and went back inside, pushing the great door away from himself and shutting out the metallic clangs of churns being hoisted onto Tom McCormack’s cart, the gruff exchanges of his father and Tom Mac as they calculated the day’s milk value.

  S
hivering with cold, Jack hauled himself up the ladder and climbed back into his bed, covering his head against the light. If he just waited long enough, she would come. He remembered his father, a few days later, on the only occasion of near-tenderness he could recall, roughly taking Jack on his knee and saying in a tone jarringly confidential, “Remember this, Jackie-boy, women are dirty, treacherous whoores and they rot a man’s soul, d’you hear me, soneen?” Jack had nodded, wanting to disagree, to say that Mammy was not those things, but he did not dare. “Good boy,” ended the brief homily and his father had ruffled his hair. Suddenly overcome with sorrow and disarmed by the moment of rare warmth, Jack had been unable to prevent the screwing up of his face and the outpouring of hot tears.

  “When is my mammy coming back home?” He had hit the floor with a thud and began to bawl, his mouth a startled tunnel from which issued at once all his childish despair. Rivulets of snot poured with tears around the curves of his mouth and chin while his tiny chest heaved with the effort of drawing breath. “Mammy, Mammy!” he gasped again and again until his father roared, “Will you stop your wailing, you scut! Your mammy’s not coming back, d’you hear me? She’s not ever coming back, so get that through your thick skull. Get used to it.” Jack had stopped calling, but, still sobbing, he pushed himself up on all fours, then to his feet. He crossed the kitchen to the ladder and the sanctuary of his bed. He never cried aloud for her again. Forty years later, as he walked his cows back to the field after milking, Jack spat at the memory. He had never dealt with the terrible grief at losing his mother so suddenly and inexplicably. It waited for him, just below consciousness. He often woke from dreams of abandonment.

  Over the years, he had come close to hating her. He understood that somehow she was to blame for his fear of womankind. Now, Jack was sure that Brett would have told the whole parish of his wish to wed. He blushed in the biting wind and lashed at the nearest cow’s hindquarters. Her startled lowing set all ears twitching, and the herd’s heavy shoulders moved faster away from the man and towards the sanctuary of their frozen field.