On the evening before the coronation, Conor almost gave himself away. Run ragged by stitching and mining, he began to behave like the lunatic he was supposed to be. When Billtoe collected him for his shift, Conor’s face hung from his skull like a wet cloth and his lips flapped in a dull mumble.
He is breaking, thought Billtoe satisfied. It was the sheets that did it. Sometimes reminders of home are too potent to bear. The work will go quickly now; he will be desperate to please me.
The guard clapped on the handcuffs and led the way down the flooded corridor. He enquired on Conor’s progress regarding the revolver, but all he heard in reply was a burble of counting.
Billtoe stopped suddenly, wavelets scurrying from his boot heels.
‘What’s that you’re saying? Numbers is it? A count of some sort?’
Conor barely managed to avoid shunting his keeper. He had been making a count. A vital and secret one. He realized that one slip of the lip could be disastrous to his plan.
‘A nursery rhyme, Mister Billtoe,’ he mumbled, flushed. ‘Nothing more.’
Billtoe looked him square in the face.
‘You’re red as a boiled lobster, soldier boy. Are you up to some scheming? Some numbers’ plan?’
Conor hung his head. ‘Just embarrassed. Those sheets set me thinking of my mother. Of the rhymes she used to recite for me.’
Billtoe laughed. Perhaps Conor Finn was not as fearsome as supposed. Then again, he had seen bigger men than him with Mummy’s handkerchief clutched in one hand and a bloody dagger in the other.
‘Come to your senses,’ he advised the prisoner. ‘A diving bell is no place for daydreamers. You’re away with the birds.’
Nearly, thought Conor. Very nearly.
The final day whirled past. For months, time had mocked him, prolonging itself elastically. Each second a yawning chasm. But now there was not time enough to squeeze in the day’s work. To Conor, it seemed to take an age simply to thread a needle. His fine mind was fuzzy with fear. Twice he sewed sections of his contraption upside down, and was forced to pick out the stitches. Sweat dripped constantly from his brow, speckling the silk sheets.
This is ridiculous. I am a scientist. Look upon this as an experiment.
It was no use. He could not calm himself. The spectre of failure tapped his shoulder in time with the water dripping from the ceiling. There would be other plans certainly, he already had the bones of half a dozen. Some more convoluted, some less so. He had designed a diving helmet, like a miniature bell, which should contain enough air to get him to open water, after that he could manually inflate a pig’s bladder and swim to shore by night. To amass the materials for that plan would take five years, at the very least.
Five more years. Unbearable.
Conor redoubled his efforts, blinking the fog from his eyes, pressing his fingertips together until the shake subsided. The coronation was tonight, he must be ready.
CHAPTER 11: TO THE QUEEN HER CROWN
The Saltee islanders were preparing for celebration. The British royal yacht, HMY Victoria and Albert II, a 360-foot paddle steamer, lolled regally in Fulmar Bay with the waves of Saint George’s Channel tipping her gently like the fingers of a child on a rubber balloon. The queen herself was happily ensconced in one of the palace’s sumptuous apartments. Her diary records that: I find the air of industry in this miniature kingdom wonderfully exhilarating. Looking down from my balcony window at the commerce far below, one almost feels as though one has arrived in Swift’s Lilliput.
Almost every patch of Great Saltee’s 200 acres had been appropriated for the celebrations. The South Summit was festooned with clusters of pikes decorated with crimson and gold flags. The streets of Promontory Fort were painted in the same coloured stripes. Every man with a hammer was banging in nails, and every man without one was hanging bunting from those nails. Even the weather gods were proving benevolent on the day, pouring down sunshine on the little principality, setting the waves dancing with sparkles. The southern cliffs lost some of their gloom, fringed in beards of white spume.
It seemed to the gentlemen of the world’s press as though the kingdom of the Saltees was an oasis of calm amid the political consternation of Europe. They sat in seaside taverns in Fulmar Bay, boiling up their gullets with traditional spicy gull pancakes and cooling them off again with tankards of Irish stout. No journalists were permitted on Little Saltee, and none had been invited who might press the matter.
On the surface, happiness and contentment abounded, but as in many things the surface gave a treacherous reading. Many were unhappy in the kingdom. Taxes had been reintroduced, and heavy tithes on imports. Public services were so skimped on that they were almost non-existent, and residency had been granted to an assorted bunch of motley characters who were then spivved up and handed commissions in the Saltee Army, the best barracks too. Common scarred veterans most of them, landing on the port with clanking sacks of weapons. Bonvilain was filling his ranks with mercenaries and turning away raw recruits. Building his own private army many said, though the marshall claimed that he was merely protecting the princess from revolutionaries.
Captain Declan Broekhart would, once upon a time, have objected vehemently to Bonvilain’s politics, but now he was too besieged by his own demons. Catherine Broekhart too was haunted by sadness, though she concealed it for the sake of their eighteen-month-old baby son, Sean.
Declan was consumed and ravaged by grief. He wore it like a coat. It was more a part of him now than his eyes and ears. It took his hunger and his strength. It ate away his girth and his stature. Declan Broekhart had grown old before his time.
Often Catherine would encourage him to fight his way clear of his dark mood.
‘We have another son now, Declan. Young Sean needs his father.’
His answer was always a variation on the following:
‘I am no father. Conor died at my post, doing my duty. My life is gone. Spent. I am a dead man still breathing.’
Declan Broekhart shunned close contact, eager for punishment. He grew tight-lipped and short-fused. He returned to his duties at the palace, but his manner had changed. Where before he had inspired devotion, now men obeyed him through fear. Declan worked his men hard, chastising honest soldiers who had been at his side for years. No dereliction of duty was left unpunished, however slight. Declan prowled the Great Saltee Wall at night, clothed entirely in black, searching for an inattentive sentry. He demoted soldiers, docked their pay and on one occasion had a watchman dismissed for nodding off in the guard hut.
This last was three days before the coronation, when Declan was at his most tense. When the news trickled through to him that the punished watchman was worn out with newborn twins and a wife still in her bed, Catherine believed her husband might come to his senses, but instead Declan Broekhart turned a degree colder.
Little Sean cried from the bedroom, his midday sleep disturbed.
Catherine wiped her eyes, so the baby would see her happy. ‘Do you think Conor would want this?’ she said, making one last attempt. ‘Do you think he looks down from a hero’s heaven and rejoices at what his father has become?’