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dressing gown with a green shawl held around her shoulders. Michael tried to remember her name, but the only name that came to mind was Caitlin. He knew the girl was Clifford’s sister. A stranger would have known that, so close was the family likeness between them. She lived at home in this old house and looked after her mother who was dying of consumption. Her father was already dead, drowned on the Titanic more than eight years ago. A sad house, it had always seemed to Michael.
‘Is this the man you know as Michael Carrick?’ the military officer asked the young woman.
‘Yes, Timmins, he’s a friend of my brother’s.’
‘Very good, ma’am.’ Timmins walked away down the hall, while removing his cap and pulling the wet cape over his head.
‘I’m sorry to intrude at this time of the night, Miss Hamilton,’ Michael said, ‘but I have to see Clifford. It’s very, very urgent. Is he here?’
‘He is. I’ll go and fetch him for you.’ She climbed the broad, carpeted staircase to the upper floor, leaving an increasingly agitated Michael waiting in the hall. He heard her knock on a door and call, ‘Clifford! Clifford! Michael Carrick is here looking for you. He says it’s urgent.’ Silence. Then in a louder voice she repeated, ‘Clifford! It’s Michael Carrick. He’s waiting downstairs. He has to talk to you.’
She came back down the stairs. ‘Clifford will be with you shortly. He was asleep already.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said, ‘but it could be a matter of life or death.’
‘That sounds very melodramatic.’
‘Yes, perhaps it does,’ Michael agreed, without knowing exactly what was meant by ‘melodramatic’. Then he asked, ‘What’s going on here? The locked gates, the army officer.’
‘B Specials. We have a small platoon of B Specials protecting the house.’
‘You mean Auxies. RIC Auxiliaries.’ Michael was referring to Royal Irish Constabulary auxiliary forces sent by the British government to keep order in the unquiet land of late-1920 Ireland.
‘Oh no. The Auxies, as you call them, are as thuggish and brutal as the Black and Tans,’ said Clifford’s sister. ‘Fortunately we don’t have any Auxiliaries in this northern part of the country.’ She spoke with what Michael considered a cultured, educated voice, a high-society voice of the kind of woman who attended classical music concerts and theatre in the city and made trips to London and Paris. She looked about eighteen or nineteen, tall, slim, attractive, with long, straight, brown hair …
Libros Libertad 