Pay the Devil - Jack Higgins [9]
“Suit yourself, Colonel.” Burke swung into the saddle of his horse and gathered the reins in his left hand. “One thing more,” he said. “Mind how you go when you reach Drumore. They don’t take kindly to strangers.”
“Not even to one called Fitzgerald?” Clay asked, with a smile.
Burke’s face was grim. “These are hard times, Colonel, as I think you’ll be finding out for yourself before very long.” He spurred his horse forward and disappeared around a bend in the road.
Clay stood gazing after him, a frown on his face. He turned and said to Joshua, “What do you think?”
Joshua shrugged. “It can’t be any worse than some of the places we slept in during the war, Colonel. One thing’s for sure, I don’t like that man.”
Clay grinned. “As usual, we’re in complete agreement. There’s something unpleasant about him, something I can’t quite put a finger on, but it’s there.”
Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance and he reached into the coach and, taking out a heavy overcoat, pulled it on. “It looks as if the weather intends to get worse before it gets better, and I’m beginning to get bored with this particular view of the countryside. If you’ll get in, we’ll move on.”
For a moment, Joshua hesitated, as if he intended to argue the point, and then he sighed heavily and climbed inside. Clay slammed the door behind him and then pulled himself up into the driver’s seat and reached for the reins. A moment later, they were moving along the muddy road.
Rain dripped from the edge of his hat, but he ignored it, his hands steady on the reins. He considered his conversation with Burke and asked himself again, and not for the first time, why he had come to Ireland.
Certainly there had been nothing to keep him in Georgia. Four years of war had left him with only one desire—peace. It was ironic that he should have come to Ireland of all places in search of it. If the stories he had been told in Galway were true, and the events of the past hour seemed to bear them out, he was stepping straight into the heart of an area racked by every conceivable kind of outrage and murder.
The elementary justice of Ireland’s claim to self-government was something he had learned at his father’s knee, together with harsh, bitter accounts of the treatment meted out to the unfortunate peasantry by English landlords. Later, his years as a medical student in London and Paris, and then the war, had all conspired to push the matter into a back corner of his mind as something relatively unimportant, in that it did not affect him personally.
However much the native Irish had right on their side, highway robbery was no way in which to attract sympathizers, he reflected, thinking of the two thieves. It occurred to him for the first time that although their clothing had been rough, their horses had been superb animals and he frowned, wondering who they were and what had driven them to such a deed.
Perhaps they were members of this Fenian Brotherhood he had heard so much about? He brushed rain from his face and dismissed the thought from his mind. Whatever happened, he intended to keep strictly neutral. At most, he would stay at Claremont a month or two. After that, Sir George Hamilton could have his way and buy the place at the price suggested in the letter Clay had found waiting for him in Galway on the previous day.
It was dusk as they came into Drumore and rain was still falling steadily. The cottages were small and mean, with roofs of turf and thatch, and the blue smoke from their fires hung heavily in the rain. There were perhaps twenty or thirty of these dwellings scattered on either side of the narrow, unpaved street for a distance of some hundred yards.
About halfway along the street, they came to a public house, and as Clay heard the sounds of laughter from inside, he reined in the horse and jumped to the ground.
The building was rather more substantial than the others, with a yard to one side and stables in which several horses