‘The Conscience Round’ by Ronan Ryan

A volley of gunfire shattered my dreaming and I opened my eyes as a single shot followed. Who among my friends had been martyred?

A second volley ripped through the air and into another man. I covered my face with my blanket, trying to concentrate on its mouldy odour and the scratch of tangled wool against my cheek, and yet I still flinched when another pistol shot sounded.

I lay there in my cell until the third volley erupted and I rose from the floor, shedding my blanket. I trembled below the window: ten sashed panes, too deeply set within a recess for me to touch. All I could glimpse was the violet sky. My hands against the damp wall, I steadied my legs. Not that it mattered, but I wanted to place the direction of the shooting. When the punctuating shot came, I turned from the wall and went to the thick door, where I pressed my ear next to the peephole and strained to hear beyond the silence.

Emptiness gnawed at me from inside my stomach. I rubbed my right arm, stiff after three nights on that hard floor. The cold had discouraged me from stripping off my tunic or my breeches to check my skin for bruises. I knew they were there anyhow.

I flexed my fingers and recalled squeezing the trigger of my Mauser. Its kick would reverberate through my knuckle and elbow, jolting my shoulder. Every time I aimed, I was scared of committing an irreversible act and, every time I fired, I was excited by the knowledge that we were justified.

Although the light passing through the window was a shade brighter, my cell remained dark. Kilmainham Gaol had no electricity and the gas works had been cut off during the fighting so the guards were reduced to doing their rounds with lanterns in hand. While we were their prisoners, we were not ‘common criminals’, whatever they claimed. We were uncommon soldiers and we knew it and we did not need their respect.

We had each been given a stump of candle in a jam jar – we were lucky, they said, to receive that much – and a guard had lit the wick when he brought me my early-evening ‘meal’. My candle was out now. I knelt on the floor and cupped the jar in my hands, fantasizing that it possessed residues of heat, and I dipped my nose in, as far as the rim permitted. In other circumstances, I would have been averse to the scent of melted tallow, but I was so starved of stimulation that its jaundiced foulness was invigorating.

So as not to spoil myself, I set the jar aside and shifted over, wedging my back into my favourite corner. I wrapped my blanket around me and surveyed my domain. Apart from my jar of tallow and blanket rag, there was a bucket too, which I had used sparingly. My captors had provided a slab of wood for a lid.

I suspect I would not have been granted this luxury if I was a man.

When the sun rose on that morning of the first executions, rectangles of light were cast against the wall and, pretending I was in a portrait gallery, I imagined my loved ones framed within them, their every feature rendered vividly.

*

Between meals, I was marched off by a pair of guards, who both sniggered each time the more daring one poked me in the small of my back with his rifle.

At my brief trial, I faced two charges. First: participating in an armed rebellion and in the waging of war against His Majesty the King with ‘the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy’, meaning Germany. I pleaded not guilty. None of us were ‘assisting’ the enemy. We were the enemy. They made us so. Second: attempting to ‘cause disaffection’ among His Majesty’s civilian population. I pleaded guilty, telling them that what I did was right. I did not care for the sneers of the judge and the prosecutor or for how they insisted on addressing me as ‘Countess’. Neither did they care for my sneers or for how, without fail, I insisted on correcting them: ‘Lieutenant Markievicz’. When, at the end, the fatigued judge suffered a slip of the tongue and accidentally addressed me as ‘Lieutenant’, his face turned the most marvellous rage-red.

That night, I slept no more than an hour, partly because of the usual discomforts and partly because sleep seemed like a waste of my time.

I was sitting in my corner and rubbing my arms and shoulders, as the shimmer of precious dawn filled my cell, when I heard, ‘Ready! Present! Fire!’ followed by the blasting of rifles and, seconds later, the inevitable pistol shot. Then a second execution. A third. A fourth.

*

As long as there was daylight, however faint, I refused to lie or sit on the floor. I paced as much as I could. When my legs shook, I leaned against the wall.

The food they gave me was meagre: desert-dry bread, potato slop, a scrap of meat from some manner of obscure beast. No matter, I wolfed it all down.

When darkness descended, I submitted to the floor. I pulled my blanket to my chin, and tucked up my knees, making myself as small as my limbs allowed.

Another night, another execution at dawn. Only one of my friends had been shot this time, and that should not have felt as bad, but it was worse. He had been alone. I hoped he had not doubted himself and I wished I could have told him, ‘Your conscience should be clear. Your soul is pure now. It must be.’

*

Late that night, an eye appeared at the peephole. I stared at it until it blinked, then I asked, ‘Do you wish to come in or do you only wish to watch?’

The eye vanished. A key turned in the lock and a private, no older than nineteen, stepped inside, shutting the door behind him – he had delivered food to me before but we had not spoken.

As I lurched to my feet, he raised a hand and, putting down his lantern, he whispered, ‘I thought you might like –’

I snarled, ‘Like what?’ so he would know I was not to be trifled with.

Even in the dim light supplied by his lantern and my candle, his blush was discernible. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘A fag. I could kill for one and reckoned maybe you could too.’

‘Whatever makes you think I smoke?’

Showing me his fore- and middle fingers, he grinned. ‘Yellow fingers.’

I did not need to inspect my hand to confirm his observation. ‘Go on then.’

He popped two cigarettes between his lips and, after lighting them with a match, held one out. When I took it, he stepped back, looking pleased with himself, his cheeks shined by the flame of his cigarette. His face was round and soft, one of those that could be regarded as honest or perhaps guileless. I decided he was not a spy or a threat of another sort.

I savoured two drags of my cigarette and said, ‘Why are you being kind?’

He confided that his mother was Irish. When I asked if I reminded him of her, he said, ‘She’s fond of the fags too.’ I gave him the look I normally reserved for my Fianna boys whenever one of them offered me an insufficient answer. He cleared his throat and said, ‘She wouldn’t be keen about the whole rebellion thing, and she don’t sound like you. Doesn’t have your glamour.’

‘You think me glamorous? Here?’

‘It’s more in your bearing than in your circumstances. And I know who you are. You’re the countess.’

‘Yes, well, let me tell you a secret: between us, my husband is not really a count, so I am not really a countess.’

He smiled at that, but I do not think he believed me.

I summoned my courage and asked him who had been executed. He said, ‘Some of the leaders. Mr Pearse and Mr Clarke. Don’t know the names of the others. Men who signed that proclamation.’

Pearse. Clarke. I gritted my teeth, but let no tears well in my eyes.

I pressed him, specifically about Connolly. He swore he did not know. He looked ashamed about something though so I asked if he had been a member of any of the firing squads. He said no and took a deep drag of his cigarette, then exhaled a cloud of smoke that hovered between us.

‘If I ever had to, afterwards I’d do my damnedest to convince myself that mine was the conscience round.’ Seeing my confusion, he added, ‘One man’s rifle gets a blank so nobody can be certain of being the killer.’

‘I hope they do not make you shoot me, but, if they do, I will forgive you.’

‘I wish I wasn’t here.’

He gave me another cigarette. I held this one to my mouth and leaned into his match to light it. He lit his own and told me about growing up poor in Leeds. I said he should become a socialist and suggested that he read Socialism Made Easy and The Condition of the Working Class in England. He pocketed the evidence of my cigarette butts and humoured me by vowing to ‘get reading’ once he returned home. As he was about to go, I thanked him for his gifts and his company, and cautioned him that visiting again would be unwise.

*

The next morning, an officer with an aggressively crooked pencil moustache came to announce that I had been found guilty of my crimes and sentenced to death. He studied my face, but, when I did not react, he sighed and said that my sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life ‘solely and only on account of your sex’. I was disgusted by such flagrant discrimination and told the officer so, which perked him right up. He left me alone then, and I fumed over how I had been cheated, and I refused to feel the tiniest amount of relief because relief meant: rather them than me. I could not allow myself to feel something so unworthy. It was better to embrace my anger instead.

*

My young private friend brought lunch: a bowl of stew that was a hue of green few mortals have ever encountered. He touched his finger to his lips, and winked for good measure – with the door ajar, I could hear footsteps in the corridor. I returned the wink and that seemed to make him happy. He set the bowl on the floor. As I reached for it, he put his hand, lightly, on my forearm. When I looked at him, he pressed a ball of paper into my palm and squeezed my fist around it. Before I could open it up, he walked out and locked the door.

The lad had written: Pearse (Patrick). Clarke. MacDonagh. Plunkett. O’Hanrahan. Daly. MacBride. Pearse (William). No one else yet. I’ll get it in the neck if they see this.

Every name was a blow to the gut and the last one was the most staggering. Willie Pearse had no real rank of note – he just happened to have the wrong brother. My heart went out to their mother.

I tore up the paper and dropped the strips into the stew, or, rather, onto it – they floated. I had no cutlery, so I lifted the bowl to my mouth and slurped. Swallowing the paper was no bother, but, ever since, I have associated grief with the taste of that putrid stew. I wiped my mouth and chin with my sleeve, then my sleeve with my blanket.

I prayed for my fallen comrades, and for Ireland, for her deliverance and ours.

*

They moved me to Mountjoy Prison. My new cell was as cold as my old one but it was slightly bigger and there was more light. I had a bed, although the mattress sack felt like it was stuffed with elbows.

After a few days, the wardress came. I received her sitting down so as not to invite agitation by towering over her. Addressing me as if I was a schoolchild with a history of insolence, she said I had a visitor, the person I wanted to see most in the world: my sister. We would be granted twenty minutes together, which sounded like nothing and an eternity all at once, and we were not to discuss anything ‘political’. Elated, I managed to refrain from educating the wardress that everything was. She still looked cross-eyed at me when I nodded in acquiescence.

‘Together’ meant tolerating the absurdity of being separated by two doors and a passageway, in the middle of which the wardress stood. I stared through my barred window, waiting and waiting, until a square shutter on the far door was snapped aside and Eva appeared, or her head and shoulders did, behind another grille of bars. Her bespectacled and pale face was fraught with anxiety, but she was as beautiful as ever. With her feeble eyesight, I may have been only a blur to her, a familiar one though.

She asked how I was being treated and, conscious of the wardress’s fish-hooked eyebrow, I replied, ‘Words cannot express “The Joy”. Do not worry, I feel robust.’ I knew that was untrue as soon as I said it, and I had to ask, ‘What about Connolly?’

The wardress barked at Eva not to answer, but I saw from her forlorn eyes that the best of us was lost. I transformed my grimace into a smile and said, ‘Yes, robust!’

Eva said that, since disembarking in Kingstown early that morning, she had been repeatedly mistaken for me. She was not safe then, and I said she should return to England posthaste and that this advice was coming from someone who was now commonly viewed as the most dangerous woman in the country. She told me not to worry about her and I told her not to worry about me, and we both continued to worry.

She believed in a free Ireland too, but she could never have agreed with our methods. Yet she uttered no reproach and, whatever she could not understand about my nature, she forgave.

*

Later on, I learned the details of how Connolly died. They brought him by ambulance from the hospital at Dublin Castle to Kilmainham. In the stonebreakers’ yard, they carried him out on a stretcher. During the fighting, he had been shot in the arm and the leg. Gangrene had set in and death was guaranteed. They decided to execute him in his pyjamas anyhow, to demonstrate the principles their ‘Empire’ was built on. He was strapped to a chair because his pulverised ankle could not bear his weight. They blindfolded him. Not, I believe, for his sake, but to spare the soldier-boys from looking into the gentle eyes of a defenceless, fatally injured man. A white piece of paper was placed as a target over his heart and thirteen executioners readied, presented, and fired. Twelve rounds with no conscience hit their mark with such force that his chair was smashed apart and he collapsed face-first to the gravel, showered upon by splinters.

*

On so many occasions since, I have wished with all my being that Connolly had lived and that I had been shot in his stead.

I would have died unaware of the breaking of oaths to come, of how we would turn our guns on each other. I would have died marvelling at our glorious heroism. My belief that our cause was worth any sacrifice would have been unshaken.

I would not have had to live, choking back so much regret.

From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019

About the Author
Ronan Ryan is a writer from Clonmel. His debut novel, The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice, was published by Tinder Press. The Irish Independent named it as one of their Books of the Year and it was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Fiction.