Northern Spy(53)

“Stop it, Tessa,” she snaps. She’s furious with me, I realize, and hurt. “We need to stay together now, okay? You need to believe me.”

She sounds more like herself, in this moment, than she has for months. “I believe you.”



* * *



—

Eamonn curses when I tell him about Colette. “We have to leave her in place,” he says. “Or the IRA will know our information came from you and Marian.”

“Colette can’t be left there. Do you know how easily she could kill someone in that room?”

That might be their endgame, to wait until the prime minister is in her studio, or the home secretary.

Eamonn says extra security measures will be used. The studio will be bugged, presumably, and the lock will be disabled, so Colette can’t bolt it from inside.



* * *



—



When my burner phone rings early the next morning, I don’t want to answer. I want to fling it against the wall. Seamus says, “Did I wake you?”

“No.”

He did wake Finn, though, and I hold the phone against my shoulder while lifting him from his crib.

“Colette learned that Maitland will be at his friend’s house in Mallow this week,” he says, and I feel vindicated. Maitland is already gone, swept away by his power and connections, out of reach. Mallow is in the republic, five hours south of us. “But he’ll be spending the weekend at his holiday home in Glenarm. He told Colette he wants to sail one last time before putting his boat in dry dock for the winter. We’re going to bomb the boat.”

Seamus describes the harbor, the sailboat, and the location of Maitland’s home, on a hill above the village. “We need you in Glenarm starting on Thursday for surveillance.”

“Of course.”

Afterward, I hold Finn closer, blinking across the room above the top of his head. They want me to help them plant a bomb.

I remember talking with Marian by the lough this summer, when she first asked me to pass messages to Eamonn. “You won’t need to do anything yourself,” she said.

This is my own fault. I should have left with Finn that night.



* * *



—

Today Lord Maitland is with his friends in Mallow, where, he told Colette, they will be fishing in the River Blackwater, having long suppers, and playing charades. That is the part I keep returning to. This old man, with his plummy voice, acting out a charade, while my sister and I work to save his life.

His friend’s home is a castle on the Blackwater between Mallow and Fermoy. The castle has been photographed often, and at work I look at pictures of the arched windows, the chinoiserie-papered walls, the deep fireplaces, the paintings and piles of books, with a degree of envy.

I would like to be served tea in those cups, to sleep in that four-poster bed, to have dinner at that long dining table. It’s not fair that Maitland is there, being cossetted, while Marian and I are out here. He’ll never know of our efforts, either. Maybe, once he’s home, MI5 will advise him not to return to Ireland, will imply that they had to intercede on his behalf, but he’ll never know about me or Marian.

It feels like we’re serving him, the way our great-grandmother served men like him. She went to work at age twelve, and the landowner who hired her wouldn’t let her ride to the house in his carriage, she had to walk behind it for miles. No one comforted her once they arrived at the great house, either. No one mentioned that she was a child, or that it was her first night in her life away from her mother. After four months of work, she was paid five pounds.

In the lane, Marian listens to me rant about our great-grandmother, then gives a small smile. “But you still don’t understand why I joined the IRA?”

“No.” The man who hired our great-grandmother was a Protestant, she was Catholic. I understand how things have traditionally worked here, but it doesn’t justify Marian’s decision. “I’m just saying someone like Maitland won’t understand what we’re doing for him.”

“It’s not about him,” she says.

Except it is, in a way. Some people are more unacceptable as victims than others. Eamonn has assured me that this murder cannot and will not happen, and I don’t know if he would have spoken with the same conviction about a police officer in Saintfield.

I think about my mother, working for the Dunlops for fourteen years, then being fired with no notice, no pension. They should at least have paid her two weeks of severance, but a contract was never signed, no one is coming to hold them responsible.

Seamus’s mother was in service, too, and his grandmother, and his great-great-grandmother died in the famine. He has good reason to want a socialist republic. All of us do. Maybe the problem is me, and people like me, for standing in the way of the rebellion, for believing this version of civilization can be improved.

If I tell someone this story in sixty years, they might consider Seamus its hero. They might hope for his plans to succeed, and they might be right. Seamus is willing to die to bring about a fair future. It’s hard to say anymore which of us has Stockholm syndrome.





33


THE LIBRARY IN GREYABBEY is open late tonight. In the children’s corner, Finn sits on my lap while I read him a board book. Our book has pictures of animals with tufts of fake fur. Finn doesn’t want me to turn past the page with the rabbit, and so we stare down at it together.