What the Wind Knows(61)

I stood and extended my hand to Anne. She didn’t refuse me but begged patience with her abilities, just like she’d done with Mick.

She was light in my arms, her curls brushing my cheeks, her breath tickling my neck. I am an accomplished dancer. Not from any desire to be so. It is actually the opposite. I feel no pressure to impress, no desire to be noticed, and I approached dancing with the same attitude I have approached most everything else in my life. Dancing was just a skill to be learned and, in the case of traditional Irish dance, an act of defiance.

Anne followed along, stepping as little as possible, swaying against me, her pulse thrumming, her lip caught between her teeth in concentration. I reached up and set it free with the pad of my thumb, and her eyes found mine, looking at me in that very un-Anne-like way. We didn’t speak of her confession, of the growing feelings between us. I didn’t mention the missing guns at Garvagh Glebe.

Then something cracked, and someone screamed, and I pushed Anne behind me. Laughter ensued immediately. It wasn’t a gun; it was champagne. It bubbled and overflowed from a newly uncorked bottle, and Dermot Murphy raised his glass and made a traditional toast about death in Ireland. Death in Ireland meant a life in Ireland, not a life as an immigrant somewhere else.

Glasses were raised in agreement, but Anne had grown still.

“What day is it?” she asked, a note of panic in her voice.

I answered that it was Friday, the twenty-sixth of August.

She began to mumble, as if trying to remember something important. “Friday the twenty-sixth, 1921. August 26, 1921. The Gresham Hotel. Something happens at the Gresham Hotel. A wedding party. Who is getting married? Their names, again?”

“Dermot Murphy and Sinead McGowan,” I answered.

“Murphy and McGowan, wedding party. Gresham Hotel.” She gasped. “You need to get Michael Collins out of here, Thomas. Right now.”

“Anne—”

“Right now!” she demanded. “And then we have to figure out how to get everyone else out as well.”

“Why?”

“Tell him it’s Thorpe. I think that was the name. A fire is set, and the door is barricaded so no one can get out.”

I didn’t ask her how she knew. I simply turned, grabbing her hand, and strode to the corner where Mick was drinking and laughing with hooded eyes.

I leaned over and spoke in his ear, Anne hovering behind me. I told him there was a threat of arson from a man named Thorpe—I had no idea who he was—and the room needed to be cleared immediately.

Michael turned his head and met my gaze with an expression so weary I felt my own bones quake. Then he snapped to attention, and the weariness fell away.

“I need a man at every exit, boys. Right now. We might have some fire starters on the premises.” The table cleared at once; glasses were emptied and slammed down again, and hair was smoothed back as if vigilance demanded a certain appearance. The men scattered, moving towards the doors, but Mick stayed at my side, waiting for a verdict. A moment later, a shout rose up. Gearóid O’Sullivan was kicking at the main entrance door, which appeared to be barricaded. Just like Anne had said.

Mick met my gaze, and then his gaze touched on Anne briefly, his brow furrowed, his eyes troubled.

“This one’s open,” Tom Cullen cried from behind the bar.

The bartender stammered, “You can’t go out that way!”

Cullen just shouted over him. “Everybody needs to file out! Let’s go. Girls first, gents! We’re okay. Just a little precaution to make sure the Gresham isn’t on fire . . . again.” The Gresham, sitting in Dublin’s city centre, has seen more than its fair share of havoc in its hundred years. Mick was already striding towards the exit, hat in his hand; Joe was at his side, loping to keep up.

There was some nervous chuckling, but the wedding party made haste, filing out the door into the damp darkness of the August night. Even the bartender decided staying was foolish. I was the last to go, pushing Anne and O’Sullivan—who had abandoned his efforts to break down the other door—out before I scanned the room once more, making sure we’d left no one behind. Smoke had begun to billow through the vents.

T. S.





15





ERE TIME TRANSFIGURED ME


Although I shelter from the rain

Under a broken tree,

My chair was nearest to the fire

In every company

That talked of love or politics,

Ere Time transfigured me.

—W. B. Yeats

It was the groom’s toast—death in Ireland—that had triggered my memory. I’d read about an attack on a wedding party when I’d researched the Gresham Hotel. I’d planned to stay there when I returned to Dublin after my pilgrimage to Dromahair. I’d chosen the Gresham for its history and for its central location to the Rising of 1916 and the tumultuous years that followed. I’d seen pictures of Michael Collins standing at her entrance, meeting contacts in her restaurant, and drinking in her pub. I’d read about Moya Llewelyn-Davies, one of the women who’d been in love with him, staying at the Gresham after she’d been released from jail.

The Gresham plot—yet another attempt on Michael Collins’s life—was just one of many. But the fact that it had come after the truce and that so many people had been targeted made it notable. The British government had vehemently denied any knowledge or responsibility in the conspiracy. Some believed it was an attempt to undermine the peace process and was ordered by people who profited from conflict. A British double agent known only by the name Thorpe was also suspected. Michael Collins fingered him in his personal accounts. But no one ever knew for sure.