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  ‘But I’m supposed to hand this to Daker himself.’

  ‘Daker’s somewhere out in the hills trapping birds.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘What about the hospital?’

  ‘Hospital looks after itself. You just take this letter and keep your nose out.’

  He led Halloran resentfully to the end of the building, to the surgeon’s office, an eaves-high partition of wood with a locked door. The orderly opened it with a key which, clearly, he kept tied round his neck no matter what the occasion. Inside was a table and chair and two hospital registers in suede covers bearded with dust. There was a letter also, which said in a tiny hand that it was from Surgeon Daker, Magistrate and Medical Superintendent, the Crescent, To His Excellency the Colonial Governor, concerning the Irish felon, Eris Mealey. Halloran read all this and pocketed it.

  ‘Mealey was flogged?’ asked Halloran. ‘You said his back was rotten.’

  ‘I said his back was rotten,’ the orderly repeated in Halloran’s rather moist East coast accent. ‘See for yourself!’ He pointed to the corner across from the office.

  Halloran peered, the other two peered. What’s it like to have death on your back, death triumphant already? the three of them thought. Show us, in your face, why you can’t will your back unrotten again.

  Naked and stomach-down on a pallet by the wall, with his own water bucket by him, Mealey seemed to have a heavy shadow on his back and buttocks and upper legs. The smell of him, the mass of the smell and its tart edge of dreadful sweetness, stood out above the routine stenches of Daker’s infirmary, and once Halloran had linked it with the shadow on Mealey, he stumbled away across the aisle to find a waste-pail and be sick in it.

  Hearing him, the man who knelt by Mealey, continually wiping the neck and the side of the face with a wet handkerchief, glanced up.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s one pair of sympathetic bowels in the damned place.’

  There was no time for him to do more than glance up, because Mealey whimpered in a querulous soprano if the sponging stopped for a second.

  Shaking his head, Halloran returned to the enigma of man flogged three-quarters to death. He nodded to the man with the sponge, who was a yeoman type in a grey, high-collared coat only a year or two past its best. The fellow’s nose Halloran had seen on other men in Wexford; beaky, pugnacious, it was often found on large, strong, melancholy men. Here, by Mealey, you had a bear-like, strong, melancholy man, who snorted gently but continuously in comment on the patient.

  ‘I was supposed to be taking him back to Partridge’s hospital,’ Halloran told the yeoman.

  ‘No chance of that.’

  The yeoman nodded at Mealey’s unspeakable wound. It was so huge an injury that you needed to verify your first sight of it, were compelled towards it, pushing your nose through its solid reek. But it was very dim in the corner, and the putrefaction got in behind the eyes and fogged them. You got an impression though; at least that. Halloran’s impression was that from neck to knee Mealey was half-way wrapped round by a fat, black, vampiring slough.

  ‘He has entirely the wrong sort of skin,’ the yeoman said. ‘One of those blue, girlish skins. Haven’t you ever met a boy with that type of skin and neat, straight nose and wished his sister had come with him, she’d be such a beauty?’

  The boy gibbered at his pillow. The message came out in silvers of sound, as if the mirror of his mind had smashed; only the urgency was intelligible.

  ‘He has none of the blue skin left here, as you can imagine,’ said the yeoman, gesturing with the sponge towards Mealey’s back. ‘On Sunday, in fact, you could see the shoulder-blades, the white bones themselves. This that’s so rotten and stinking is junked muscles and jellies. What’s your name?’

  ‘Halloran,’ said Halloran, with small patience for anything but Mealey.

  ‘Mine is Robert Hearn.’

  ‘Then why are you preaching anger, Mr Robert Hearn?’ Halloran asked shortly. ‘What damned difference does it make whether his skin is blue and whether his sister’s lovely? Who’s going to ever tell anyhow, with his sister across the world and his skin in this state?’

  The yeoman acknowledged the point with a lift of the eye-brows.

  One of the Marines had gone outside, hiccoughing. Halloran sent the other one now to collect him and take him down to the boat. Then he himself sat on the floor and wept.

  ‘Don’t ask me to weep,’ said Hearn, dipping his handkerchief into the water-bucket and padding it under the boy’s mouth. ‘With the first tear, a person starts to forget. I won’t ever forget.’

  ‘Hurrah!’ said Halloran flippantly through his tears.

  Yet there was a force somewhat greater than bombast about the yeoman. Halloran’s mockery did not touch him, and he spoke off-handedly, his words incidental to the work of getting moisture into an upside-down man. And without doubt, he was right about tears. Having wept for Mealey, the mind felt justified in reducing him to an anecdote, a parable, a ballad; or something else digestible.

  ‘What was he punished for?’

  ‘Nothing!’ said Hearn so lightly but with such finality that Halloran was limited to asking,

  ‘Will he be taken soon?’

  ‘Taken.’ Hearn blinked. He despised the timid word and deliberately played upon it. ‘He’ll have to die first.’

  But he swallowed and shook his head then.

  ‘No, I am sorry. I’m not an irreligious man. I cannot see though that when God bears the blame for so much he must bear it for Mealey too. I’ll say this. Mealey is burning to death. Surely he’ll burn out during the night. Please God.’

  ‘Please God,’ said Halloran. ‘Did he confess to you?’

  ‘To me? No. I’m a Wicklow Presbyterian. Eris Mealey makes me think there’s something to be said for a religion one carries in here,’ he punched his own chest, ‘as against one which requires ritual even in the hour of death.’

  ‘You understand, I’m not being bitter,’ he went on to explain with a certain rueful care, ‘but grateful. If a man doesn’t happen to be grateful for his religion, where’s his good faith?’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself,’ said Halloran. ‘The kingdom of God is within, even in Mealey’s case.’

  ‘I see,’ said the yeoman politely.

  A solid cheer and a whistle came from the middle of the hut. There someone had achieved something ironic. Perhaps the orderly.

  Hearn drenched another cloth in the pail and replaced the one the boy was sucking on. While one was taken away and the other put down, Mealey whimpered, certainly. Yet it was not the whimper of a flayed man but, instead, of a man whose meat has burned or who’s been given small beer instead of spirits. It was hardly more than a whine of petty complaint. The young fellow’s mind, wherever it waited, at a place remoter from Halloran than Moscow, did not believe in its own torment. Which was a hint, a genial one, that a person would drown without believing in the gagging waters; go black with typhus and wag his head in disbelief; get the lead in his belly and find it harder than the Trinity to give credence to.

  ‘You’d think the magistrates would have arranged to have him pressed into the army or navy,’ said Hearn. ‘He’d have been better off. Wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Would he?’ Halloran asked.

  ‘Ah-ah,’ Hearn cautioned, ‘your coat’s Hanover all over. You are the King’s man, as they say.’

  ‘As they say,’ said Halloran.

  Drowned in the stench, he forgot it for seconds at a time. The long room sizzled with the consequential gluttony of flies, and that too he no longer adverted to. But to see in an instant and by surprise a seam in the boy’s purple back and a herd of black flies, whose bite is maggots, drinking from it, that made him flee.

  He fled fifty y
ards into the open. Ending under a smooth and tolerant eucalypt and jumping to snatch down some of the leaves from its high branches, he crushed them in his hands and sniffed up their clean astringency. They stung his brain, and he dropped the ones he held and jumped for more.

  Hearn had followed him and watched him with sad forbearance.

  ‘Where do you come from, Corporal?’

  ‘Wexford Bay. Erriscombe village,’ said Halloran, crumpling and inhaling.

  ‘Ah, Wexford’s peaceful. There aren’t that many Wexford men serving, army or navy.’

  ‘No. It might be their good fortune, mightn’t it?’

  There was silence, to fill which Halloran took a further three long sniffs. Then he said:

  ‘I despise that sort of talk.’

  ‘What sort of talk?’

  ‘The sort of talk you’re trying to provoke. The sort of talk that will end in my asking what you’ve done for the ruling powers, since you’ve got a good coat on and look so well.’

  ‘I’m government clerk here at the Crescent. I’ve had some experience in that type of work. That’s how I wear a good coat.’

  ‘Transported, of course?’ asked Halloran, meaning the yeoman, not the coat.

  ‘Yes, of course. With less good luck, I could be off in the forest somewhere, dragging timber.’

  You could certainly have said that Hearn was honest. But he never laughed with his own honesty, and gave only an occasional half-smile when Halloran said anything sardonic. He failed to smile as he himself leant forward now and whispered.

  ‘Secret Society. Illegal oath.’

  Halloran laughed unequivocally. ‘Three Christmasses back, I went to a meeting of a body called the Land Tenure Committee. I went with my father and shouldn’t have, considering what I was.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A scholar from the bishop’s house in Wexford.’

  ‘Amazing! And they got the lot of you?’

  Halloran nodded, but said, ‘Oh no, not everyone. The father got away by the grace of God. Besides, he’s a lucky old beggar. German mercenaries. Ugly big fellows. A boot in the cods was their specialty.’

  ‘Was this in Wexford?’

  ‘The Wexford magistrates were the ones we ended in front of, yes. But I hardly remember Wexford jail. Inside a week an officer of Marines off one of the ships in the Bay came for me.’

  While they had been speaking, the aspect of the world had changed. From the unknown south-east hove wet clouds of badly tarnished silver, keeping blockade on the harmless little port. The light was intimidated to thin yellow and gave a luminous fringe to the Irishman’s shoulders. A wind had begun blowing, sluicing the hospital reek away. It gave a sharp sense of refreshment to Halloran to see crooked shrubs of yellow and olive on the layered cliff across the river, shaking themselves in the wind.

  Of course, it all meant nothing, a show of leniency from the southern ice-regions from which came all that was sufferable in summer. Including this temporary vigour in the air. Halloran savoured it and looked up at the eucalyptus, thinking that now it might endow the yeoman and himself with some of its placidity.

  But the yeoman was a hard one.

  ‘And with your young arm,’ he said without notice, ‘you uphold the system which did for Mealey.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, oh yes! Indeed!’

  ‘And did you cry out when you recorded Mealey’s sentence?’

  ‘He was never sentenced.’

  ‘Never sentenced, my foot!’

  ‘I said that he was never sentenced. He and four other men were heard to have spoken of pikes. The Irishman’s cure-all, pikes. After church-parade on Sunday, Daker had them marched out under sergeant’s guard. The sergeant couldn’t do anything. Not against Daker the Mighty. The landscape was as usual. Empty of officers. Over there, on a hill behind Government House, Daker had them flayed to get evidence. The poisonous thing was that they had none to give, none of the startling stuff that Daker wanted. However, that’s apart from our argument. I admit to you, Corporal, that had Mealey been sentenced, I’d have recorded his sentence without a whimper. This is how they have us divided one from another.’

  ‘One from another be damned!’ said Halloran. ‘And Daker had him flayed. Daker isn’t the system I uphold with any young arm of mine.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Hearn. ‘True enough, in a way.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose I have to worry about being reported to the authorities for what I’ve said this afternoon?’

  ‘What do you think? Do I look like Judas’s young brother?’

  ‘No. In that case, you might want to know what Eris Mealey has said to me about the affair.’

  The yeoman glanced easefully over his shoulder. Mum as Satan then, he stared into Halloran’s eyes.

  ‘He’s in a fever, of course, but he claimed that Mrs Daker rubbed poison into his stripes. Came to him where he lay and rubbed rust into his cuts.’

  ‘Gossip!’ said Halloran.

  ‘If you think my motives are gossip, so be it. I neither believe nor disbelieve Mealey. But Daker was in danger. Now Mealey will die, and the Governor won’t be seeing him or hearing his story, and the corps of gallant officers will tell their lies. And Daker will be safe again.’

  Above the sound of the wind, Halloran could hear Hearn’s bated, interrogative breathing. Hearn went on staring at him from under grey eyelids as big as hearty moustaches. The eyes said what Hearn’s yeoman rigorousness would not allow himself to say: Admit it. You know she looks a poisoner.

  ‘I have to take the boat home,’ said Halloran.

  ‘You have, too.’ Hearn stood up straight. ‘I was pleased to meet you, Corporal Halloran.’

  ‘And I you, Mr Hearn.’

  ‘Thank you, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘What don’t you think?’

  ‘That you were glad to meet me.’

  ‘Because you were trying to recruit me.’ Halloran smiled, and indicted Hearn with his finger. ‘I was recruited all the morning by a Scotsman, for his own motives. And now you . . .’

  ‘I hope I do a better job,’ said Hearn, and blinked. He really did hope it. There was no whimsey in him.

  ‘Oh, I consider you a far more dangerous style of man.’

  ‘Dangerous? I am responsibility itself.’ Hearn’s disaffected eyes flashed. All that he said now was a recital of disenchantment rather than of pride of class. ‘I have held seventy acres at Roundwood, County Wicklow, in the days of my respectability. I was surveyor of roads and hired the gangs who remade the Roundwood to Rathdrum road. As well, I was county Alnegar, a post I held under Sir Andrew Price, Wicklow’s Chief Magistrate.’

  The final sentence would have been, And I spit on it all. But it wasn’t spoken – only, once more, conveyed by the eyes.

  ‘It’s no use fishing for me,’ said Halloran. ‘I have such a thing as the soldiers’ oath to keep.’

  ‘Oath to whom?’ asked Hearn, all deliberate bemusement.

  Halloran smiled.

  ‘Oath to whom?’ Hearn repeated.

  ‘Oath to God, Mr Hearn.’

  ‘No!’ Hearn was just audible. The force of his vision did not make him shout, but reduced him to a pin-point of sound. ‘A God conscripted by a realm to give inhuman power to its purposes. A God conscripted, as you were, Halloran, to give binding magic to the links which chain each clod of human dust to its King. That is, no God at all.’

  The top of the eucalypt flurried in dissent.

  ‘There is no god-forged chain of power from Daker to His Excellency to George to God. The true God is not coerced into anyone’s army, the true God fills no navy’s sails. To the true God, the House of Hanover is just a house. Therefore, Corporal Halloran, oath to whom?’

  Halloran was mi
ndful of the burning bush. ‘To the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whether that was the God they wanted me to swear to, I don’t know. But that’s the oath they got from me. So Halloran, like God, is a little beyond recruiting.’

  Prophets disgruntled him. He promised himself that the next time Hearn said anything at which some offence could be taken, he would storm away. The chance came immediately.

  ‘Why do you think that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob comes low enough to hear your oath, Corporal?’

  Halloran picked up his flint-lock and his disputed vows.

  ‘Who are you to say I live in a pit?’ he said with a good show of anger.

  Downhill stood a fringe of very dry she-oaks for which he made. He stopped before disappearing amongst them.

  ‘I’ll ask about Mealey whenever the boat comes in,’ he called. ‘I’ll sweat on his death, as they say.’

  ‘Corporal,’ said Hearn. ‘I meant low enough to hear my oath, your oath, anyone’s oath.’

  Halloran turned his back.

  ‘You won’t sweat for long,’ said Hearn after him.

  As he came down around the corner of the vegetable garden, he wondered to what a degree the true God, the transcendent God, I am Who am, was involved in the listless faith he kept with George R. Beside this, Mealey, Daker, the fat orderly, the sick and the hale in Daker’s hospital, all were minor puzzles.

  7

  The three o’clock drum called Hearn back to his work in the cramped ante-room of Government House. For his rarefied place there, amongst decent, marbled ledgers, he felt improperly grateful. He could remember being grateful in a similar way on the day he’d seen a petrified skeleton found by a slip of the spade in the side of a chalk hill. He could have touched the clean shape of the bones, he came so close to them. They had been no more than the numerals, the ciphers of a man; and this had consoled him, that from them the mountainous frenzies of living and of the last gasp had been eroded.

  Similarly rinsed clean of frenzies were the returns he was handed every Tuesday. They came from the Surgeon, the Surgeon as Magistrate, the Commissary clerk, the overseers at the brickfield, quarry, gardens, farm, timber-pits. He recorded these and made skilful abstracts of them; and when he had finished, his masters had something as adequate and as sterile of human truth as were those bones in the chalk hill.