Work Text:
July 28, 1798
Ellen looked up from the stack of bank notes she had been meticulously inspecting.
Charlie was sitting across the room next to the printing press, trying not to look impatient. He knew she hated it when he hovered.
“So?” he asked. A nervous energy hovered behind his smile. She hated to let him down, but…
“The typeface is all wrong,” she said.
Charlie’s face fell.
“Nothing gets past you, does it?” he asked. He stood and closed the distance between them, coming in behind her and leaning down to inspect the notes over her shoulder. “I swear I got the closest match I could find,” he promised. “What gave it away?”
When Charlie hovered, he hovered, and currently he was standing so close that his lips were brushing against the curve of her ear. She closed her eyes and relaxed into it for a moment. Seven years they’d been married, and the touch of his lips on her ear was still enough to drive her to distraction.
“Back off, Charlie,” she warned, “or I won’t be able to answer your question.”
Charlie backed off, ever so slightly, and she picked up a bank note in each hand.
“This is the real one,” she said, holding up the one in her right hand, “and this is ours. Notice the curve of the C, the shape of the S, the spacing on the M. Subtly different.”
Charlie sighed heavily.
“How many people are honestly going to notice that?” he asked.
“Not many,” admitted Ellen. “They could probably pass muster with most vendors. But then when those people took them to the bank… I won’t rip off the coal man, the grocer, or the chemist. They’ve done nothing wrong. If we’re going to do this, we have to make sure there are no innocent victims. I have no qualms with ripping off the bank itself, but I don’t want anyone else catching our flak.”
Charlie pulled Ellen’s chair back away from the desk and came around in front of her, meeting her eyes with a look of sheer adoration.
“Every day I love you more, Ellen,” he breathed.
August 23, 1798
Ellen peeked around the corner to where she could get a clear view of the bank’s back door.
There was one armed security guard, as expected, posted beside the door. He appeared alert. She knew there were two more out front, and two inside the bank: one outside the vault, and the other by the safety deposit boxes. But neither of those locations were their target.
“How much longer?” whispered Charlie.
“Should be going off in about a minute,” she replied.
Jonah had parted ways with them some five minutes ago. He carried several glass jars full of black powder, and a length of cotton twine soaked in whale oil. Jonah’s job was to cause a diversion. The rudimentary bomb would not blow a hole through the stone wall of the bank. But it didn’t need to. It merely needed to draw the guard away from the door for a minute or two.
A loud bang shattered the silence of the night.
Perfect timing.
The security guard jumped, looked around, then turned and jogged toward the sound.
Ellen and Charlie slipped out of their hiding spot and padded swiftly and silently up to the back door.
Ellen stood guard as Charlie inserted his picks into the lock mechanism, gently coaxing the levers up and down in a practiced dance.
There was a soft click and Charlie turned the handle. The door swung open.
“After you, my lady,” he whispered.
Ellen slipped inside. Charlie followed her, closed the door behind him, and locked it again. They were in.
Ellen pulled up her mental map of the bank. The map had been sketched by a friend of hers, an ally in the resistance, who had, some time ago, worked as a maid there after hours. She hoped nothing had changed in the years since. She and Charlie had spent the last week studying it and making their plan.
Ellen and Charlie slipped quietly down the halls of the empty building.
First right. Second left. First right again.
Their route was planned to avoid the guards, which meant steering clear of the ‘high value’ areas that were prone to robbery attempts.
“Here it is,” she whispered, as at last they reached the door labelled ‘printing room’.
Of course, completed bank notes were not kept here. Not even unsigned ones. Not even the blank paper that they were printed on.
But the type case — containing the letters of the Bank of Ireland’s proprietary typeface — was kept in here, if Ellen’s source remained correct.
Once again, Ellen stood guard as Charlie expertly picked the lock. Charlie slipped inside while Ellen remained outdoors to watch for any wandering guards. There was no reason for them to be in this hallway. Their places were at the vault and the safety deposit boxes, she reminded herself. But one could never be too careful.
Inside the printing room, Charlie picked a third lock — the lock on the job drawer — then pulled from his satchel a wooden box of his own. He opened it and retrieved a large lump of clay which he started breaking into many small pieces.
Charlie had to make 68 impressions.
He needed 24 in the cursive font used for the main text of the notes: 5 capital letters, 18 lower case letters, and a period;
He needed 24 in the printed font used for numbers and currency words: 5 capital letters and 19 lower case letters;
He needed 13 in the large print font used for the text BANK of IRELAND: 4 italic capitals, 7 regular capitals, and 2 lower case letters;
And he needed 7 stamps: the Seal of the Bank of Ireland, and the 6 different denomination stamps used for the six notes they intended to replicate.
Charlie had 23 minutes.
The guards changed at 2 am. At that time, Ellen was confident that the guard being relieved at the back door would want to take the guard relieving him over to the side of the building to show him the bomb attempt. She and Charlie had to be back at the back door, waiting, when that happened.
If it didn’t happen, they were fucked.
Charlie worked quickly, consulting his list of the letters needed and taking only those impressions. He started with the Bank of Ireland seal, and the denomination stamps. Then he took the letters they needed to spell BANK of IRELAND. Then he took the letters they needed in the cursive font. Finally, he took the letters they needed to spell the numbers. They had planned to have the ability to spell every number up to nineteen, seeing as how there were twenty shillings in a pound. But if he missed some of these letters in his rush to finish, they wouldn’t be able to spell every number, but they should still be able to spell some . They would just have to be careful about what numbers they tried to print.
Ellen watched the hallway. She watched her pocket watch. And she called out the time to Charlie.
At 1:57 am, Charlie packed his clay back into his satchel.
He closed and locked the job drawer.
He stole out of the printing room and locked the door behind them.
Ellen and Charlie carefully retraced their steps to the back door.
They reached it at 1:59 am.
Ellen pressed her ear to the door and waited.
She was just beginning to worry, when, at 2:03 am, she finally heard something through the door.
“George!”
“Liam.”
“Quiet night?”
“Not tonight. Some goon tried to blow a hole in the east wall. Rudimentary bomb. No damage.”
“Did you get a look at who did it?”
“Caught a quick glance of him running away, but decided not to pursue. Seemed like it could have been a diversion. No trouble at the doors though.”
Ellen was holding her breath. Please, go check it out. She knew Jonah had looped back around after running away and was ready to cause another diversion if need be to let them out. But two diversions in one night would be far more suspicious, and there was no guarantee that both the incoming and outgoing guards would respond to the second diversion.
“Maybe you’d better show me, just so I know what we’re dealing with.”
Ellen slowly let out her breath.
She listened as the footsteps receded.
Charlie unlocked the door, and they slipped out. Charlie turned and set to picking it shut once more, as Ellen set off to stall the guards just a little longer. She rounded the corner and spotted the mess. The two guards stood staring at a cloud of shattered glass. The stench of black powder rose cloyingly to the nose.
“My god, what is that smell?” she demanded loudly.
“Ma’am!” exclaimed one of the guards. “What are you doing out alone at night? These streets are not safe for an unaccompanied lady.”
“Oh, no need to worry,” she insisted. “My carriage is just over there,” she said, nodding to Jonah, who waited nearby with a curricle.
“My shift has just finished. I shall walk you to your carriage,” insisted the guard.
Ellen smiled a placating smile as she glanced over to check on Charlie. He had just finished and was stealing away.
“Oh… well… if you insist,” she allowed.
September 30, 1798
Charlie was hovering again. Ellen tried doggedly to ignore him as she painstakingly signed each and every bank note of the September print run.
Bank of Ireland notes were signed by Mr Patrick Murphy, President of the Bank of Ireland. Ellen had signed Mr Patrick Murphy’s name thousands of times now, and she knew it almost as well as she knew her own signature.
Charlie had suggested making a casting of it and printing it right on, but that was foolish. A teller would notice if every signature was identical. Bank notes had to be signed by hand so that the subtle variations shone through.
“Remarkable,” he whispered, picking one up and comparing it to a genuine bank note. “I’ve already forgotten which one is real.”
Ellen looked up and smiled.
“‘Real’ is a social construct,” she said with an impish grin. “Hell, money itself is a social construct.”
Charlie bent down and kissed the smile from her lips.
“We’re going to be rich!” he whispered.
“It’s not for us, Charlie,” she reminded him, kindly.
“I know, I know. For the revolution. The battle is lost, but the war…”
October 14, 1798
Ellen and Charlie approached the Bank arm-in-arm.
“I still don’t like that you won’t let me do it,” said Ellen, under her breath. She knew Charlie’s mind was made up. But she needed to take one last chance to register her dissent.
“You know as well as I do that women with bank accounts are few and far between,” he pointed out. “You would attract notice. Notice is exactly what we do not need.”
“I know,” she admitted, matching his stride. She didn’t want anyone to notice that they were arguing. It would attract notice.
“Besides, I need you to watch my back. Warn me if anyone’s looking at me funny. I need your keen eyes.”
Ellen knew that this was true, as well. But she didn’t have to like it.
“Don’t worry,” said Charlie, reassuringly, as they passed through the front doors of the bank. “The hard part’s already done. This is the easy part.”
Charlie’s reassurance did not put her mind at ease.
Sure, comparatively, this was the easy part.
But complacency was the death of caution.
There was a small cluster of women just inside the lobby, waiting for their husbands to finish banking so they could continue on their walks. Ellen dropped Charlie’s arm and joined this cluster of women as unobtrusively as she could. Charlie went on ahead and got in line for a teller.
Ellen kept a pleasant smile painted on her face as she cased the joint.
There were two security guards flanking the front door. They were armed. Griffin and Tow flintlock blunderbusses. A third security guard stood behind the row of tellers. She couldn’t see his weapon from her vantage point, but it was probably safe to assume the blunderbuss was standard issue.
The customers were all blissfully unaware of anything being amiss.
She swept the faces of the tellers and guards. No familiar faces. Good.
Charlie was approaching a teller now. She watched carefully as he spoke with the man, signed his name (not his real name, obviously — they’d settled on an alias for him to open an account under, and she’d forged him a military ID which bore the name) and passed over a small handful of bank notes. It was not a remarkable sum. This was only a test. And he was only depositing it, not trying to cash out any gold. They simply needed reassurance that her notes would pass muster before they started putting them into circulation.
The teller inspected them only very briefly before slipping them into his drawer. He made a note in his ledger.
Ellen’s eyes flitted back and forth between the security guards, the tellers, and Charlie. They were nearly home free.
Charlie was now turning to go.
He was halfway back to Ellen when something finally went wrong.
It was another customer, in line for the same teller.
He turned, a look of recognition on his face, before calling out to Charlie.
“Well, well, well! If it isn’t Charles fucking Walsh!” said the man, loudly.
Ellen’s eyes flew back to the teller. The teller who had just watched Charles Walsh sign the name John Murray.
The teller raised a hand to the security guard.
Ellen coughed loudly.
Charlie broke into a sprint.
Ellen and Charlie burst out of the doors of the Bank of Ireland with the guards only steps behind.
She glanced frantically to and fro.
There he was, just as they had arranged, in a closed freight wagon not twenty paces away from the door. Jonah.
Ellen grabbed Charlie by the arm and pulled him toward their getaway vehicle.
They were nearly there when she heard it. The sound of the blunderbuss firing.
The first shot missed.
A fraction of a second after the second shot sounded, Charlie stumbled.
“Are you hit?” she demanded, as they reached the cart.
“Barely grazed me,” gasped Charlie.
Ellen hauled him up into the cart and closed the door as Jonah urged the horses into a canter.
As she pulled Charlie into her lap, she saw and felt for the first time the extent of his wounds. The shot hadn’t merely grazed him. Warm, sticky blood was blooming from two entry wounds, soaking his shirt. Ellen lifted it up to inspect him. She found no exit wounds. The buckshot was still lodged in him, somewhere in his lower abdomen.
“We need to get him to a hospital!” she shouted. She shifted Charlie in her lap so that her leg pressed up against the entry wounds on his back, staunching the flow of blood.
“If we do, the constabulary will meet us there!” countered Jonah. “There’s a surgeon who practices in the basement of St. Audoen’s. We’ll have sanctuary there.”
Ellen was glad she had someone who could keep his head in a situation like this. She turned back to Charlie.
“Hang on for me, Charlie,” she whispered.
Charlie’s eyes were already glassed over, and he had a far-away look about him. His face had gone pale.
“Charlie! Stay with me!” she begged, louder now. She tapped lightly on his cheek.
For a moment, Charlie seemed to return to her. His eyes focused, meeting hers.
“Ay, a scratch, a scratch,” he whispered.
The gall. The audacity. Only Charlie Fucking Walsh would have the impertinence to quote Shakespeare at a time like this.
Ellen had once thought it strange that an Irish loyalist like Charlie was fond of Shakespeare. But he had laughed and said ‘Just because I don’t want them running our country, doesn’t mean I despise everything about their culture.’ Ellen found his attitude on the matter refreshing.
His choice of quote, though, was… not encouraging.
“Charlie, that is not funny,” objected Ellen. She couldn’t lose him. Not now. Not ever.
“Oh, come on,” replied Charlie. He raised a shaky hand to stroke Ellen’s cheek. “It was a little bit funny.”
And Ellen — shut in the back of a moving cart with her dying husband in her arms — Ellen laughed. Because somehow, in his dying breath, Charlie’s only concern was with lifting her spirits. And she could not deny him that.
Charlie smiled a weak smile.
Then suddenly, the smile fell from his lips and his eyes lost their focus again. He exhaled a long, heavy breath. His hand dropped to his chest. Ellen felt the weight of him in her arms, limp and heavy like a rag doll.
Ellen’s laughter twisted itself into a tortured wail.
Her world dissolved around her.
Gone was the cart, and Jonah, and the constables that were surely chasing them down as they drove. Her entire world was Charlie and that empty stare. She laid him down on the floor of the cart and beat on his chest, trying desperately to knock the breath back into him.
It was all her fault.
She was the one who insisted on the bank notes being perfect enough to pass muster at the tellers themselves. It was a foolish, completely unnecessary risk. The July print run had been good enough to pass muster with just about anyone. They should never have set foot in the bank to begin with.
It was all her fault.
And Charlie would never have the chance to forgive her for it.
She buried her face in his chest and sobbed.
Some time later, the cart jolted to a stop and the doors were thrown open.
Ellen picked herself up off his chest, peeling her face away from his soaked shirt. She noticed that her throat was sore from crying.
She felt strong hands grasping her and pulling her away from him.
Was this it, then? The constabulary had caught up to them, and now she was to be dragged away from her husband’s corpse and thrown in a cell?
But the voice which barged in on her grief was considerably kinder than that.
“Ellen,” she heard.
Jonah.
“We have to go.”
“Are we at St. Audoen’s?” she asked, finally turning toward her brother.
“No. When your laughter turned to wails, I changed course,” he explained. “Charlie is gone. I am sorry. We are at port. I’m going to put you on a ship that will take you far away from here, where no one will know your face. You will have to start a new life.”
“I won’t leave him,” she sobbed.
“You have to,” said Jonah, patiently. “We’ve evaded the constabulary for now, but they won’t be far behind. You’ve been identified. Your face will be on every storefront within days. You cannot stay in Dublin. Nothing is to be gained by clinging to his body and getting yourself caught. Ellen, if you stay here, you will hang.”
Jonah gave her a moment to absorb his words before he continued, slowly, empathically.
“Charlie would want you to go on.”
Ellen met his eyes for the first time and she knew that it was true.
Jonah pulled her from the cart. He wiped away her tears. He tucked the wild strands of her hair back into her bun. He pinched the color back into her cheeks.
He took off his own overcoat and wrapped it around her, tying it shut over the warm wet crimson blood that stained the whole front of her dress.
Then he led her, and she followed woodenly, to a ship.
Jonah paid for her passage with counterfeit notes. It was all they had left, and by the time it was discovered, she would be long gone anyway.
Jonah squeezed her tightly as he bade her farewell.
“Go to London,” he whispered. “It’s the last place they’ll look for you. I will get Imogen and the children and we will find you there.”
“...See that he is buried?” begged Ellen.
“You know that I cannot promise that,” answered Jonah. “But I will do my best.”
He let her go.
A cabin boy waved her onboard.
“Welcome aboard, Ma’am!” said the chipper young lad. The liveliness in his voice drove pangs of sorrow straight into her chest. “I’ll show you to your cabin. The name’s Edward. You can call me Eddie.”
Ellen followed without a word.
Her silence was not tolerated.
“And you are…?” asked Eddie.
Ellen faltered. She couldn’t be Mrs. Walsh anymore. They’d find her. But she desperately needed to keep a piece of him.
“Ch… Varley,” she responded. “Mrs. Varley.”
“Right then. Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Varley.”