The next morning, in the early hours before dawn, fourteen men were gunned down across Dublin, many of them members of the special unit sent in to deal with Michael Collins and his squad.
By afternoon, the Crown forces were in an uproar. Reeling from the blow to their officers, they sent armoured cars and military lorries to Croke Park, where Dublin was playing Tipperary in a football match. When the ticket sellers saw the armoured cars and the packed lorries, they ran inside the park. The Tans chased them down, claiming they thought the ticket sellers were IRA men. Once inside the park, the Black and Tans opened fire into the crowd of spectators.
People were trampled. Others were shot. Sixty injured. Thirteen dead. I spent the evening offering my services to the wounded, riddled with guilt at my part in the mayhem, seething with anger that it had come to this, and filled with longing for it all to end.
T. S.
11
BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE
If I make the lashes dark,
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed;
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
—W. B. Yeats
Thomas knocked on my door after the O’Tooles, clearly reassured that all was well, left. I watched the couple walk past my window, their arms laden with loaves of bread and the mutton, potatoes, and gravy Eleanor had prepared for dinner.
I was burrowed in my covers, my face hidden and the light extinguished. The door was not locked, and after a moment, Thomas opened it carefully.
“Anne, I want to check your wound,” he said, coming no farther than the threshold.
I feigned sleep, keeping my swollen eyes shut, my face buried, and after a moment he left, closing the door softly behind him. He’d said I should go. I considered pulling on the clothes that sat on my top shelf, dressing myself for the life I’d lost, and tiptoeing out to the lough. I would steal a boat and sail home.
I pictured the morning dawning as I sat in a stolen boat on the lough, waiting to return to 2001. What if nothing happened? What if Thomas had to rescue me again, me dressed in my odd clothes with nowhere to go? He would think I was truly crazy. He wouldn’t want me near Eoin. I moaned, the thought snatching my nerve and quickening my heartbeat. But what if it worked? What if I could go home?
Did I really want that?
The thought brought me up short. I had a beautiful apartment in Manhattan. I had enough money to comfortably last a lifetime. I had respect. Acclaim. My publicist would worry. My editor would fret. My agent might even grieve. Would anyone else?
I had thousands of devoted readers and no close friends. I had hundreds of acquaintances in dozens of cities. I’d dated a handful of men a handful of times. I’d even slept with two of them. Two lovers, and I was thirty years old. The term lovers made me wince. There had been no love involved. I had always been married to my work, in love with my stories, and committed to my characters, and I’d never wanted anyone or anything else. Eoin had been my island in a very lonely sea. A sea I’d chosen. A sea I’d loved.
But Eoin was gone, and I found I had no desire to cross the waters if he wasn’t waiting for me on the other side.
Thomas had left before I rose the next day and was home again after I retired that night. I changed my bandages with very little trouble, confident that Thomas wouldn’t have to tend them again, but he obviously didn’t agree. When he knocked the following night, I had not yet extinguished my light and was sitting at the small desk. Feigning sleep would not be possible.
I knew Eoin’s birthday was coming on Monday, and I wanted to make something for him. I’d found paper in the drawer in Thomas’s office, along with a few pencils and a fountain pen that I had no idea how to use. Maeve had helped me put a long, fat stitch down the center of a thick stack of paper, binding the pages and making a spine. Eoin had danced around, knowing it was going to be for him, and I’d let him help me spread glue on the stitches to strengthen and harden them. When it dried, I’d folded the pages in half over the seam. Now I had to create a story just for him. He wouldn’t see the finished product until Monday, which was only three days away.
Now Thomas was at my door, and I didn’t want to see him. The memory of his words made my chest burn. I had not gone like he’d asked, and I’d been dreading the moment when I had to face him again, with no answers, no explanations, and no invitation to remain under his roof.
I wore the sweater and trousers I’d worn the day Thomas pulled me out of the lake. I hadn’t expected company, and I had no pajamas other than the voluminous nightgowns that tangled around my body and strangled me in the night. I was still flirting with the future, with going home. Plus, wearing the clothes made me feel more like myself, and I needed to be Anne Gallagher, the writer, to create a special story for a perfect little boy.
Thomas knocked again and gently turned the knob.
“May I come in?” he asked. He had his medical bag in his hand, the dutiful doctor till the end.
I nodded, not looking up from the small stack of paper I was using to jot down my ideas before I committed them to the pages that waited.
He drew up behind me, a warm presence at my back. “What’s this?”
“I’m making Eoin a book for his birthday. Writing him a story that’s never been told before. Something just for him.”
“You’re writing it?” There was something in his voice that made my heart quicken.
“Yes.”
“You always made Declan read to you. You said the letters moved when you tried to read them. I assumed writing would be difficult as well,” he said slowly.
“No. I don’t struggle with reading or writing,” I whispered, setting the pencil down.
“And you’re left-handed,” Thomas said, surprised.
I nodded hesitantly.
“I guess I never knew that. Declan was left-handed. Eoin is too.”
Thomas was silent for several seconds, musing. I waited, afraid to resume my writing for fear he’d notice something else.
“I need to check your wound, Anne. It should be sufficiently healed to remove the stitches.”
I rose obediently.
His brow furrowed as his eyes traveled down my clothing and back up to my unbound hair.
“Countess Markievicz wears trousers,” I blurted, defensive. Constance Markievicz was a leading figure in Irish politics, a woman born to wealth but more interested in revolution. She’d been imprisoned after the Rising and enjoyed a certain notoriety and respect among the people, especially those sympathetic to the cause of Irish independence. The fact that she’d married a Polish Count only made her more fascinating.
“Yes. So I hear. Did she give you those?” he countered, a sardonic twist to his lips. I ignored him, walking to the bed and stretching out carefully on the crisp spread. I’d caught Maeve pressing it. She’d then given me a quick lesson in using the iron, though she’d insisted I wouldn’t need to press my own clothes. They’d already been ironed and hung in the huge wooden wardrobe in the corner.
I raised the hem of my sweater to uncover the bandages, folding the bottom over my breasts, but the waistline of the trousers still covered the edge of the bandage. I unbuttoned them and eased them down an inch, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. Thomas had seen me in less. Much less. But baring my skin this way felt different, like I was engaging in a strip tease, and when he cleared his throat, his discomfort magnified my own. He pulled the chair from the desk to the side of my bed and sat, removing a small pair of scissors, some tweezers, and a vial of iodine from his bag. He removed the bandage I’d applied the day before, swabbed the area, and with steady hands, began to pluck the neat stitches from my side.
“Beatrice Barnes informed me when we were at the department store that there were several things you still need. Since you had to resort to wearing Countess Markievicz’s trousers, I am inclined to believe her.”
“I didn’t intend for you to pay for my clothes,” I said.
“And I didn’t intend for you to think I wanted you to leave,” he countered softly, slowly, making sure I understood him.
I swallowed, determined not to cry, but felt a traitorous tear scurry down the side of my face and disappear into the whorl of my ear. I had never cried much in my life before Eoin died. Now I cried constantly.
“My car is filled with parcels. I’ll bring them in when I am finished here. Beatrice has reassured me that you now have everything you need.”
“Thomas . . .”
“Anne,” he responded in the same tone, raising his blue eyes to mine briefly before he continued his careful snipping. I could feel his soft breath on my skin, and I closed my eyes against the flutter in my belly and the curling of my bare toes. I liked his touch. I liked his head bowed over my body. I liked him.
Thomas Smith was the kind of man who could quietly slip into and out of a room without drawing much attention. He was handsome if one stopped to contemplate each feature—deep-set blue eyes, more glum than glittering. Long grooves in his cheeks when he flashed a brief smile. Straight white teeth behind well-formed lips that perched above a dimpled chin at the apex of a clean-cut jaw. Yet he had a slight stoop to his shoulders and an air of melancholia that had folks respecting his space and his solitude, even as they sought him out. His hair was dark, more black than brown, though the glint of stubble he removed from his cheeks each morning was decidedly ruddy. He was lean, his ropey muscles giving his spare frame girth. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t a big man. He wasn’t a small man. He wasn’t loud or obtrusive even as he moved and acted with an innate confidence. He was simply Thomas Smith, as ordinary as his name, and yet . . . not ordinary at all.
I could have written stories about him.
He would be the character that grew on the reader, making them love him simply because he was good. Decent. Dependable. Maybe I would write stories about him. Maybe I would . . . someday.
I liked him. And it would be easy to love him.
The knowledge was sudden, a fleeting thought that settled on me with butterfly wings. I had never met someone like Thomas. I’d never once been intrigued by a man, even the men I’d temporarily let into my life. I’d never felt that pull, that pressure, that desire to discover and be discovered in return. Not until now, not until Thomas. Now, I felt all those things.
“Tell me the story,” Thomas murmured.
“Hmm?”
“The story you are planning for Eoin’s book. I’d like to hear it.”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment, putting the threads of my ideas into sentences. “Well . . . it is about a boy who travels through time. He has a little boat—a little red boat—and he takes it out on the water . . . on Lough Gill. The boat is just a child’s toy, but when he sets it in the water, it becomes big enough for him to climb inside. He rows across the lake, but when he reaches the other side, he is always somewhere else. America during the revolution, France with Napoleon, China when the Great Wall was being built. When he wants to go home, he simply finds the nearest lake or stream, sets his little boat in the water, and climbs inside.”