The Convictions of John Delahunt by Andrew Hughes Read Free Book Online

contained bloody rags and a stoppered bottle of red laudanum with brown sediment gathered at the bottom.
    Craddock himself looked small beneath the covers. His head was cocked back and away from me; his breath short and ragged. One eye was closed over by a swelling so neat and round it was like a tumour. Gashes and welts distorted his features, gouged in silver mutton-chop whiskers. Most striking of all were the colours. Like some demented jester, his face was painted in the deepest crimson and violet, flushed in the firelight. His shoulders and chest were dressed in stained bandages, girding his broken frame.
    When he failed to sense my presence I spoke his name. After a few seconds his head rolled towards me.
    ‘Sir, can you speak? You must tell me anything you can of the people who did this to you.’
    His dry tongue extruded and scraped along his lower lip. I looked around to see if there was a jug of water.
    My doubts as to whether he could speak at all were dispelled when he said, at the edge of hearing, ‘Is that you, Richard?’
    His son, I presumed. I leaned over the bed and tried to meet his eye. I told him that men had come to his house. I described how they had broken through his door and beaten him for failing to cast a vote. ‘They shall go unpunished unless you can tell me what they looked like, what they wore, how they spoke.’
    But it was no use. His good eye swivelled unfocused, and the few things he uttered were muted and nonsensical.
    Then an unsettling change came over him. Even in his mangled features I could recognize panic, but I couldn’t fathom its source. I soon gleaned that he simply felt the approach of a coughing spasm, which was terrible to witness. He gasped to fill his lungs before great racking coughs were dragged from his chest and throat. Every heave caused him to lean forward, compressing his broken ribs. After each cough he attempted to suck in air that wouldn’t come, resulting in terrifying inward groans.
    I stood above him, unsettled by my inability to help. I took his hand to offer some kind of comfort, but then realized his arm was broken, and that I was adding to his torment. I was sure he was about to expire, and began to wonder how I could explain his death to Mrs Skerritt.
    But the Captain’s fit subsided and the room quietened. I took up the bottle of laudanum. The label had no indication of dosage, but I couldn’t leave the man to this ordeal. Thinking back, I’m sure I believed an overdose was a lesser evil. I removed the tapered glass wand attached to the stopper, and watched the russet liquid form droplets at its tip.
    ‘One of them had a cleft lip.’ The Captain’s eye fixed on me for the first time.
    I put the bottle aside. ‘How many were there?’
    His eye began to waver, but he brought it back. ‘There were three. I first heard them on the stairs shouting my name. I left my bed to lock the door and fetch my sabre.’ I saw the sword propped in a corner. ‘They put a hole in the door and one stuck through an arm to turn the key. I sliced him across the knuckles.’
    I looked again at the door and spotted a smear of blood beneath the broken panel. That’s what earned him his beating. The men had only come to drag him to the polls.
    Craddock grew weaker as he described how they kicked in the door, wrested his sword away and began their assault.
    ‘You said one had a harelip. Are you sure?’
    He said he was. Also he thought the man he cut came from Belfast.
    He was spent. A tear ran from his good eye. ‘Let me drink the bottle,’ he said. I told him his physician was on the way. His eye began to wander again. ‘Let me drink the bottle.’ And he lost consciousness.
    Craddock’s chin slumped forward on red-flecked sheets. I took a deep breath and detected a tang from his soiled bedclothes. I went to the window and opened enough of one shutter to look outside. Mrs Skerritt was bustling from the corner with Pembroke Street; the doctor in tow was pulling at