Games of The Hangman

Book One

The Hanging

"Irish? In truth, I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds with other nationalities, having a quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death..."

—Edna O'Brien, Mother Ireland

1

Fitzduane slept uneasily that night but awoke with no conscious premonition that anything was wrong. It was raining when he climbed out onto the fighting platform of the castle keep and looked across the battlements to the dawn. He reflected that rain was something anyone brought up in Ireland had plenty of time to get used to.

More than seven hundred years earlier the first Fitzduane had stood in much the same spot for much the same reason. Inclement weather or not, the view from the castle keep brought satisfaction, even in the grim, dull month of February. The land they saw was theirs, and the Fitzduanes, whatever their personal idiosyncrasies, shared a ‘what I have I hold’ mentality.

The rain stopped, and the sky lightened.

The castle stood on a rocky bluff, and from his vantage point Fitzduane could see much of the island. It just qualified as an island, a windswept finer of bog, heather, low hills, and rough pasture jutting out into the Atlantic and separated from the mainland by a mere twenty meters. A bridge set well into the overhanging cliff tops spanned the divide.

Farther inland was a freshwater lake by whose edge stood a small white thatched cottage. A trickle of smoke emerged from its chimney. Inside, Murrough and his wife, Oona, the couple who looked after the castle and its lands, would be having breakfast. Murrough had been Fitzduane's sergeant in the Congo nearly twenty years earlier.

The Atlantic crashed and spumed against the rocks that formed the seaward base of the castle. Fitzduane savored the familiar sound. He huddled deeper into his heavy waterproof as the gusting wind, even at this height, blew salt spray into his face.

He glanced at his watch. Half past eight. Time to go. He closed the roof door behind him and descended the circular staircase with some care. The stone steps were worn by centuries of use, and it was five flights to the storeroom and the armory below. The old names for the rooms were still used. Although sides of salt-cured bacon no longer hung from the blackened hooks of the storeroom ceiling, any self-respecting Norman knight would still have been impressed by the reserves of weaponry that were on display in the armory. If the same knight had been familiar with firearms and the matériel of modern warfare, he would have been dazzled by the collection of rifles, pistols, and automatic weapons concealed in the deeper recesses of the castle. Illegal though it was under current Irish law, Fitzduane maintained the family tradition of collecting weapons of war.

* * * * *

In its original from the castle had been a rectangular tower of five floors topped by the fighting platform, with the entrance, accessible only by ladder, on the second story. Over the centuries the castle had been adapted, strengthened, and modernized. A three-story slate-roofed extension now nestled up to the original rectangular keep. Stone steps replaced the ladder. A curtain wall surrounded the bawn, as the castle courtyard is known in Ireland, and stables and outhouses had been built inside the enclosed perimeter. A network of concealed tunnels and storerooms had been added in the sixteenth century.

The entrance, always the weakest part of a castle, was through a small two-story tower, known as the gatehouse, or barbican, set into the curtain wall. The floor of the protruding upper story was pierced with openings — murder holes — from which missiles and boiling water could be dropped upon attackers.

The original iron portcullis, the heavy spiked gridiron gate that could be dropped into place at a second's notice like a guillotine, had long since rusted away, but it had been replaced during the Napoleonic Wars. It now hung, its windlass oiled and in working order, awaiting an attack that would never come. Externally the castle was guarded by the sea and the cliffs on two sides, and a deep ditch secured the rest.

Duncleeve, the ancestral home of the Fitzduanes for more than seven hundred years, had never been taken by direct assault. That was reassuring, Fitzduane sometimes thought, but of limited practical advantage in the twentieth century.

* * * * *

Hooves clattered upon the wooden bridge over the defensive ditch. Fitzduane applied a slight pressure with his knees, and Pooka turned to canter up the slope to the cliff top. The sea crashed against the rocks far below, and though the ground was wet and slippery, Fitzduane rode with confidence. Pooka was surefooted and knew her way.

The island was just over ten kilometers long and about four kilometers across at its widest point. Besides Fitzduane and Murrough and his wife, the only other inhabitants lived in the isolated school on the headland.

The school was officially the Draker World Institute. Originally the site of a monastery destroyed by Cromwell's troops in the seventeenth century, the land had been bought by an eccentric German armaments manufacturer toward the end of the nineteenth century. With his profits from the Franco-Prussian War, he proceeded to design and build his conception of an Irish castle.

The construction lacked certain desirable features. Von Draker forgot to install either bathrooms or toilets. Not realizing his error, von Draker came to stay in is apparently completed castle. Tragedy struck. While relieving himself behind a rhododendron bush, he was drenched by a sudden squall of rain — the weather in Connemara being nothing if not fickle — and pneumonia resulted. After a short struggle for the sake of form, von Draker died. He left behind a large fortune, no children, a wife he had loathed, and the request that his Irish estate be turned into a college for students from all over the world “who will mix together, learn each other's ways, become friends, and thus preserve world peace.”

Those who knew von Draker well had been somewhat taken aback at such sentiments from such an unlikely source. His actual words were: ‘Find a way to keep that hag's filthy paws off my money.”

The fortune of the Von Draker Peace Foundation, derived in the main from armaments and explosives, increased and multiplied. In the fullness of time the Draker World Institute opened its doors for business. It took a select group of pupils aged sixteen to twenty from various corners of the globe and subjected them to a moderately difficult academic curriculum heavily leavened with boating, climbing, hill walking, and other physically demanding activities.

Draker was a success primarily because it was so isolated. It was a perfect out-of-sight, out-of-mind location for rich but troublesome youths. It was also coeducational. The children could be dumped there during that difficult phase. All it took to gain entrance to Draker was money and the appropriate connections. Draker parents had both in commendable quantities.

* * * * *

Fitzduane slowed Pooka to a walk. He could feel the wind off the Atlantic in his face and a hint of salt on his lips. He was beginning to unwind. It was good to be home despite the unfortunate weather.

He was getting tired of wars and of what was arguably more unpleasant: the grinding hassle of modern travel. The older he got, the more he thought there was much to be said for peace and quiet, maybe even for settling down.

Fitzduane spent two-thirds or more of each year away from Ireland. This was something he regretted, but the action tended to be in alien climes. For nearly twenty years he had been either a soldier or a war photographer, a hunter of men with either a gun or a camera. The Congo, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli wars, Vietnam again, Cyprus, Angola, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Lebanon, Chad, Namibia, endless South American countries. His Irish island was his haven, his place to recover, to rest his soul. It might offer little more excitement than watching the grass grow, but it was the one place he knew that was free of death and violence.

Down below, he could see the small beach, boathouse, and jetty of DrakerCollege. The sheer cliffs had made access almost impossible until von Draker had brought over some of his company's explosive gardens down to the beach.

Fitzduane rode between the walled gardens of DrakerCollege and the cliff edge. The gray stone of the Victorian castle loomed in the background. Gargoyles competed with crenellations; flying buttresses crash-landed against half-timbering. A structure loosely modeled on the Parthenon topped the clock tower. Irish history had been complex, but even it was not up to von Draker's creativity.

Ahead lay a small wood, and beyond that was the headland itself. If the weather permitted, Fitzduane liked to turn Pooka loose to nibble at the salty, windswept grass, and then he would lie down near the cliff edge, look up at the sky and the wheeling sea gulls, and think of absolutely nothing.

War and death could be forgotten for a time. Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to hang up his cameras and find a more adult occupation.

* * * * *

Von Draker had a passion for trees. There had originally been only one oak tree on the spot and, nearby, a peculiarly shaped mound. The locals gave the vicinity a wide berth. They said that the oak tree was a bille and special, and that no man could remember when it was planted. They said that in the days before St. Patrick and Ireland's conversion to Christianity, terrible things had been done under the shadow of its twisted branches. They said that even after the Church was established throughout the rest of the land, bloody sacrifice continued on the island.

Von Draker had regarded such tales as nonsense. Since none of the Connemara men would help him level the mound and plant the wood, he had brought in a crew from his estate in Germany. He left the old oak tree, not for reasons of superstition but because he just liked trees, even gnarled and twisted specimens like this one. The mound was leveled with his explosives. His workers found pieces of bone in the debris and fragments of what appeared to be human skulls. A small wood was planted. Trees from many parts of the world were brought to the spot, and despite the keen wind off the Atlantic and the heavy rain, an adequate number prospered.

Von Draker did not live to see the success of his project. His death came one year to the day after the demolition of the peculiarly shaped mound. The wind that day around his wood sounded like laughter — or so they said.

Such tales were absurd, Fitzduane thought, yet there was no denying that the overgrown wood was a dismal, depressing place. Rain dripping from the trees made the only noise in an otherwise eerie silence. Obscured by the interlocking branches, the light was dim and gloomy.

The forest reeked of decay and corruption. Pooka had to be urged on, as always in the wood, despite the many times she had walked that path before. The sound of her iron-shod hooves was muffled by the damp mulch of rotting leaves. The place seemed deserted, and Fitzduane realized that he had seen no living soul since leaving his castle nearly an hour before. Halfway through the wood the undergrowth became particularly dense, and the path inclined upward and twisted more than usual. He could see the thick trunk of the bille up ahead.

Horse and rider came level with the tree. He glanced up into its labyrinth of interlocking branches. It was a fine tree, he thought, impressive in its ancient strength.

He saw the rope first, a thin pale blue rope. It hung from a protruding branch of the tree. The end of the rope had been formed into a hangman's noose, and it contained the elongated and distorted neck of a hanged man.

The long, still body formed a silhouette in the gloom. Fitzduane raised his eyebrows and stared for perhaps ten interminable seconds. He thought he'd close his eyes and then open them again because a hanging body on his own doorstep just couldn't be true.