The Healing Blade

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: General Fiction; Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

An epic of the days when personal honour and patriotism were more important than any one man's life. John Regan has a secret mission crucial to the success of the infamous United Irishmen's Rebellion of 1798. A thrilling historical adventure for younger readers from the bestselling author of Rape of the Fair Country, first published in 1971 and now available as an eBook for the first time.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 128

Sample

‘LIGHT on the larboard bow!’ wailed the helmsman.

Thunder crashed and reverberated over, the black wastes of the sea. The little fishing smack put her nose down into the rollers and rose high, spraying foam, and her scuppers ran full, hissing above the roar of the Channel tide.

‘There it is again!’ cried Patrick, pointing, and we gripped the heaving rail and wiped spray from our faces. Distantly, waning and brightening through the misted dawn, a lantern waved on the rocky headland of Pas de Calais. Above the treble shrieking of the wind I heard the agonized creaking of the blocks; the sails volleyed and beat like drums above the rushing sea. Glancing aloft, I saw the pennant of Ireland as stiff as a bar at the head, and lightning forked in jagged flashes across a watery, red dawn.

‘Light on the larboard bow, I say!’ shouted the helmsman, and he fought the wheel astern, his squat body leaping against the faint stars.

Marcelle Robet, the skipper, came on deck then. ‘I hear the helmsman call?’ he asked. Patrick gripped him, pointing, and shouted above the wind:

‘Look – two points larboard – the lantern!’

‘Aha! Very good navigation, eh? Where would you Irish patriots be without French sailors, aha!’ Turning, he shouted into my face, ‘When Bonaparte burns the town of Bristol, it will be because of us, you agree?’

‘Better take us in,’ said Patrick.

‘I not take orders from you – I take orders from the master. Voila!’ He spat at our feet and grinned happily.

‘Is this the rendezvous, Robet?’ I demanded.

‘It is the rendezvous, Monsieur, as I promised. The place, the time is as I said. Now it is up to you. I return to the peace of Ireland, and you go on to Hell. Mes enfants! I pity you in the chambers of the French counter-spies.’

I glanced at Patrick. No emotion was in his face, this my companion in this fatal mission for the honour of Ireland. To Patrick Hays, strong, mature, one mission was like another. The fact that we might end up on an oar in the whip-lashed galleys of Spain, or rot in some French dungeon, did not seem to occur to him. I was eighteen years old, Patrick was nearer twenty-eight. Arid in the ten years between us he had packed more danger and excitement as a spy for our country than most men did in their lives.

Marcelle Robet said, at the companionway door, ‘You have heard of the Black Midget?’

Patrick gripped the rail to a sudden buck of the deck. ‘We have, Robet.’

‘And you will not forget him, I vow. More than one Irishman he has sent to the galleys. You turn your back on Petit Pierre, the midget, and whoof!’ Robet drew his finger across his throat. ‘He will cut it deep from ear to ear.’

‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Patrick. ‘Now get below to Caine Adams, man, for I can hear him calling. You are wasting your time up here, for you are frightening nobody but yourself.’

‘One day, Irishman, you will laugh on the other side of your face. When Petit Pierre is done with you, he will sell you to the galleys of Spain.’

I shrugged, turning away, and the Frenchman winked at me as he went. He was a strange concoction of loyalty and hate, this one, and I envied the way Patrick handled him. I also envied his courage.

Death, as my father had taught me, was acceptable when one is in the service of a country as beloved as Ireland, and the manner of the death usually cost me no sleep. Yet, strangely, the thought of ending my days in the galleys never failed to terrify me. Once, when my father was alive, he brought home a friend to Milford. This man, in his twenty-fourth year, had spent six of them aboard the Spanish galleys. Enfeebled, tottering on the edge of the grave, he was a man broken: a blinded wretch, his body mutilated by the whip, his wrists and ankles cankered by the overseer’s chains.

Patrick grinned at me. ‘They have to catch ye first, son,’ he said. ‘Come, get below, too, I can hear the old man calling.’

I glanced shorewards as I followed Patrick down to the little cabin where Caine Adams, the Irish patriot, was waiting to brief us: and I saw the lantern again, withering and dancing; a sign of weird, unearthly evil.

I shivered.

I STOOD with Patrick before Caine Adams, the master-spy, with justifiable pride, though pride in any form, said my father, spells death to manhood. Motionless sat Caine Adams at the table, his eyes stilled and blanked in the marble rigidity of their blindness: he had given his soul to Ireland in her fight for freedom: his eyes he had given to the dreaded Hompesch, the German mercenary regiment brought in by the British to help suppress our rebellion. Caine Adams said then:

‘Are ye listening, John Regan, for though I can hear Pat Hays breathing, there’s not a sound of yours.’

‘I am here, sir,’ I answered, and squared my feet to the rolling deck.

‘And is the cabin door shut fast, men, for I don’t care for the smell o’ that Robet Frenchman.’

‘Give me five minutes with him before we leave, sir,’ said Patrick.

‘None o’ that! He’s warranted by the highest in the French Directory; they reckon, for all his cheek, he’s a fine patriot man. Save your energy for the midget, where you’ll need it.’

‘Yet ye don’t trust him yourself, sir?’ I asked.

‘I have no option, for he’s a fine navigator. Is it true the light’s bright off St Valery?’

‘Like a shooting star,’ said Patrick.

‘Right,’ said the blind man. ‘Then we’ll get the hang o’ the plan once more, for I’m not repeating it again. Come closer.’

As some ancient patriarch he looked, sitting there, the shadows flung by the lamp deep in his wrinkled face, for his youth was bleached by his scheming and suffering for an independent Ireland. His snow-white hair dropped in gentle waves to his shoulders. I held the hilt of my rapier, staring down at him.

‘Place your right hands on the table before me,’ he said, and we obeyed and he gripped our wrists with astonishing strength, saying, ‘Let me drive a beloved name through your veins, you two, for you’ll be carrying in these hands the life of the greatest Irishman of the age, Wolfe Tone!’

I saw Patrick’s eyes open wide with astonishment. ‘Wolf Tone!’ he breathed.

‘Aye, the great man himself. And ye’re privileged indeed that the Rebellion Committee should honour your names with the risk of it. This is the saviour we have prayed for since 1791. Bring him safely to Ireland’s shores and you’ll be entered on the scroll of Ireland’s glory. Fail her, and your children’s children will be cursed for a thousand years from Cork to Londonderry by decent Irish people. Are ye listening?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.

The sea took the little smack and heeled her then, hitting her brutally along her shanks, and she shrieked high in pain, like a stallion under the whip. The rollers thundered beyond the cabin, the wind howled at us in fury.

And Caine Adams said, ‘On the face of it our rebellion against the rule of England is defeated. Our motherland is abandoned to the brutal English soldiery. Our rebellion leaders, from Bagenal Harvey of Wexford to the wonderful Father John Murphy, have died the deaths of felons on the scaffolds o’ the English conquerors. Our country blazes from Antrim to Cork; the bayonets of a foreign infantry are driving our women and children into the bogs and fastnesses, as they were driven into barren Connaught two hundred years ago by the swords of the Beast Cromwell.’ He raised his haggard face to the ceiling. ‘Dear God, have pity on this unhappy land! Put an end to the picketings, the floggings, the transportations, O, God, take pity!’ Still gripping our wrists, he lowered his head, whispering, ‘For never, even under Robespierre in France, has there been such a terror: nor did a government of civilized men pursue extermination with so bloody a hand!’

Stilled by his passion, I stood white-faced before him.

For our rebellion against England had been crushed, and the red-breasted dragoons of England were taking revenge for the uprising. Under the terrible Britisher General Lake and puppets like Lord Kingsborough, the noble lord of the North Cork Militia who invented the blazing cap of pitch; under the tyranny of such as these, my people were being quelled. Sixty and more of our most prominent rebel leaders had been hanged on Wexford Bridge and their heads paraded around the town on pikes. And with these, the heroes of my generation, were now dying the thousands of their followers, from the patriotic priests like Father Roche and Father Sweeney to innocent peasants and merchants of the cities. And at the head of the atrocities against the helpless stood the turncoat Irish yeomen and militia who were licking the heels of England for favour, and the terrible Hompesch, the German mercenaries, who killed for a pastime and subjected the patriots to the most revolting atrocities. Now Caine Adams cried:

‘But although the Wexford rebellion has been crushed, we will rise again. We will rise again under the leadership of the greatest leader of all – Theobald Wolfe Tone. And, with the help of our French allies, he will invade the shores of Ireland and bring peace to our beloved land. Wolfe Tone!’ The old man rose feebly; tears were on his face.

‘May God bless and preserve the beloved name, sir,’ whispered Patrick.

‘Then let us to it,’ said Caine Adams, gripping the bulkhead against the rush and pitch of the cabin. ‘Enough of the idle, impassioned speeches. They brook no action, these wasted words but a heap o’ wasted breath, and it’s breath you’ll need, Patrick Hays and John Regan, to obey all that Ireland orders. Listen ag. . .