I’d tucked into the pages of the journal before rowing out into the middle of the lake to say goodbye to Eoin. It was the same picture, but it had aged another eighty years.
“This one is something else,” Kevin breathed, his gaze captured by the next picture in his hand. His eyes widened and narrowed before lifting to meet mine. “That woman looks just like you, Anne.”
It was the picture of Thomas and me at the Gresham, not touching but so aware of each other. His face was turned toward me—the line of his jaw, the slice of his cheekbone, the softness of his lips beneath the blade of his nose.
My pictures had survived the lough. The journal too. But I had not. We had not.
28 August 1922
We left for Cork early on the twenty-first. Mick tripped going down the stairs and dropped his gun. It went off, waking the entire house and increasing my sense of foreboding. I saw Joe O’Reilly framed by the window, watching us depart. He, like all the rest of us, had begged Mick to stay out of Cork. I know he felt better because I was with Mick, though my value in a fight has always been when it’s over. My war stories are all the surgical kind.
It started well enough. We stopped at Curragh barracks, and Mick carried out an inspection. We stopped in Limerick and in Mallow, and Mick wanted to swing by an army dance, where a priest called him a traitor to his face, and I had a pint poured down my back. Mick didn’t even flinch at the insult, and I finished my whiskey with a wet arse. Mick showed a little more outrage when the lookouts at the hotel in Cork were fast asleep in the lobby when we arrived. He grabbed each boy by his hair and knocked their heads together. If it had been Vaughan’s Hotel in Dublin a year ago, he would have left immediately, certain that his safety had been compromised. He didn’t seem especially concerned and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. I dozed sitting in a chair in front of the door, Mick’s revolver in my lap.
Maybe it was my weariness, or the fog of grief I’ve been walking in since Anne disappeared, but the next day unfolded like a motion picture, jerky and dreamlike, with no colour or context to my own life. Mick had meetings with family and friends in the early part of the day, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that we left for Macroom Castle. I didn’t accompany him inside but waited in the courtyard with the small convoy—Sean O’Connell and Joe Dolan from Mick’s squad and a dozen soldiers and extra hands to clear any barricades—assigned to escort Mick safely through Cork.
We ran into problems near Bandon when the touring car overheated twice and the armoured car stalled on a hill. One debacle fed into another. Trees were cleared, only to discover trenches had been dug behind them. We took a detour, got lost, got separated from the rest of the convoy, asked for directions, and eventually reunited for the last appointment of the day, heading towards Crookstown through a little valley called Béal na mBláth. The mouth of flowers.
The road, narrow and rutted, was more suited to a horse and a buggy than a convoy. There was a hilly rise on one side and an overgrown hedge on the other. Daylight was slinking away, and a brewery cart missing a wheel lay tipped on its side in the middle of the road. Beyond that, a donkey, freed from the cart, grazed benignly. The convoy slowed, and the touring car veered into the ditch to avoid the obstacles blocking the road.
A shot rang out, and Sean O’Connell yelled, “Drive like hell! We’re in trouble.”
But Mick told the driver to stop.
He picked up his rifle and tumbled out the door, eager for the fight. I followed him. Someone followed me. Shots rained in from the left, high above us, and Mick whooped, ducking behind the armoured car where we crouched for several minutes, punctuating the steady stream from the Vickers machine gun with shots of our own.
The back-and-forth continued, riddling the air with volleys that thunked and whistled over and around us. We had the firepower on our side, but they had the better position. Mick wouldn’t keep his head down. I kept pulling him back to the ground. He kept popping back