Authors: Jane Urquhart
Tags: #Romance, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sagas, #Historical, #General
“The antidote to the poison of Cromwell,” said Seamus.
“The offspring of the sons of Usnach,” said Sean.
“The treasure of the old world.”
“The pleasure of the new.”
Aidan Lanighan twirled meteorically around the room, grasping, in welcome, the hands of everyone near him, slapping the biceps of all he knew, ruffling the hair of his special friends, and finally running his fingers almost absently through Eileen’s long red hair. In minutes everyone in the room had felt the ephemeral, lightning strike of his touch. He skidded to a momentary stop in the centre of the floor, then exploded into a jig that was at once an expression of vehement gaiety and furious lament. Head, arms, hips, legs, feet, fingers, and facial muscles engaged in a frenzy of precise motion, gathering energy from the lake, the light, the blood pumping through the arteries of all the other men around. It was as if Aidan Lanighan were at once creating and annihilating the room, taking it with him into his own space, his vitality causing the late afternoon
sunlight to plunge recklessly through the west window, the lake to push its rhythmic song under the door, the old accordion to become orchestral, the hair and the eyes of the men to shine. He sprang out of the jig and into a combination of sudden leaps, step-dancing, and violent turns. In a miracle of tone, stress, time, pause, tempo, silence, and thrust, the histories of courtship, marriage, the funeral, famine, and harvest were present in the inn.
Eileen’s embroidered flowers fell from her lap to the floor. Her throat was dry, her heart flailing. An Irish phrase
Rian fir ar mhnaoi
rattled in her head, the sound of it in the gestures of the man before her; her father’s lost language, alive and leaping, miming its own story in a new world by a Great Lake. The Fianna, the Children of Tuireann, desperate departures, centuries of reunion, her mother’s withdrawal, and every wicked manifestation of Great Lake weather was in this dance which was now airborne and drumming at the same time. In the midst of the last alacritous gesture, a dive through yielding waters, Aidan Lanighan moved one hand again through Eileen’s hair and swept the other across the floor. He smoothed over her thighs the piece of cotton she had dropped, and disappeared into the crowd of joyful lake sailors.
Eileen stared for a full minute at the unfinished rose on the white cloth. It is scarlet, she thought. The thread from which her needle still hung looked like a line of blood descending to the spot on the floor where Aidan Lanighan had bent to retrieve it.
She stood up and walked across this place, up the stairs, and into her room.
“Hey,” called one of the Captains O’Shaunessy, “I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. Your brother said …” But by the time he could tell Eileen what Liam had said she was
leaning against the closed door, gazing directly across the room, through the window, out to the lake.
Liam returned in a new frock coat, gold watch, white shirt, bow tie, bowler hat, and spats, looking self-satisfied and prosperous. He was carrying a load of cotton dresses in his arms as he entered the inn.
“She’s gone to her room,” he was told by one Captain O’Shaunessy or the other.
“And she won’t come out.”
The captains exchanged meaningful glances and cleared their throats noisily, waiting for Liam to question them further. But knowing his sister was safe, Liam was swollen with his own news, bursting with it, eager to announce it. He tossed the bundle of dresses over the bar, where they reclined like a swooning woman, removed a map of the lakefront from his waistcoat pocket, smoothed it out with the palms of his hands, and prepared to address the proprietors of the inn.
“There’s a terrible lot of lake on that map,” said Seamus.
“She dominates it … she rules the map, she does,” agreed Sean.
“See how small Port Hope is compared with the vastness of her.”
“Insignificant.”
“Trifling.”
“Gentlemen,” Liam interrupted, before the captains could gather the steam necessary for a full-scale sermon on lake currents and nautical disasters. “Gentlemen, I have purchased a hundred acres of land, a mile and a half of lake frontage, ten cleared acres, a hardwood forest, two springs, and a creek.”
The captains were silent.
“Best farmland in Northumberland County, in Upper Canada, possibly in the world!” Liam thumped the bar with his fist. “Grows apples, potatoes, corn, barley, wheat, oats, alfalfa, and any kind of garden vegetable. Excellent pasturage for sheep, goats, horses, cows.”
“And how is she getting along, your cow, in the stables?” asked one Captain O’Shaunessy, politely.
“Fine. Comes equipped with two barns, toolshed, a wharf, and a boathouse.”
“A wharf?”
“A boathouse?” the captains raised their eyebrows.
“And a small log house, a well, and a chicken coop. It’s right here,” Liam pointed to a spot on the map, some twenty-five miles east of Port Hope. “Just below this village called Colborne.”
“Colborne, is it,” said Sean. “Now there’s a place.”
“A real hellhole,” said Seamus.
“What kind of a fool would want to start a village two miles up from the lake?”
“Only an American of British descent.”
“A United Empire Loyalist – Joseph Keeler – a cursed Orangeman.”
“He’s dead now, God be praised.”
“But his son isn’t, and he another cursed Orangeman.”
Liam ignored these comments. “All this year’s crops are up and flourishing, some harvested, barns bursting, livestock included in the price, and we take possession September first. Drinks all round!”
“What’s today?” asked Seamus.
“August twentieth.” Sean put his arm on his brother’s shoulder. “It’s a terrible pity, that, don’t you agree Seamus, and we willing to sell the Seaman’s Inn for a fair price.”
“Knowing, of course, that you and your sister would take such fine care of it.”
“And us planning to build another inn downshore a bit.”
“With a solid floor. Hardwood.” Seamus rubbed the toe of one boot back and forth across a worn pine board under the bar.
“What do you think of that, boys?” Sean addressed the room. “Captain O’Shaunessy and I planning a fine new inn for all of you and this youngster here breaking his part of the bargain … and he an Irishman.” He shook his head sadly.
“But you said you’d never sell the Seaman’s Inn,” Liam reminded them.
“That’s what we said.”
“But that’s not what we meant.”
“We meant we’d never sell it to an Englishman.”
“Or an Orangeman.”
“Or a Frenchman.”
“But you are an Irishman.”
Liam was dumbfounded. “It was a whim,” he said, lamely. “I remembered this building from when I was a child. I fell in love with it.”
“And now you’ve fallen out of love with it? Now there’s a fickle character.”
“Inconstant.”
“Listen, I can’t farm railway trestles and wharves and warehouses.” As if to prove Liam’s point, the six-fourteen roared overhead, heading west, towards Colborne.
One of the Captains O’Shaunessy slowly poured the young man a whiskey. “Now would you be calling that a problem, Sean?” he asked. “This youngster, here, wanting the Seaman’s for a house and wanting also to farm that land down by Colborne? Would you be calling that an insurmountable problem?”
“No, Seamus,” the other man polished a glass, thoughtfully. “I’d be calling the British Empire a problem, or the famine, or the coffin boats, or the fact that our own Prime Minister has become an Orangeman. Things like that are problems, but certainly not living in this building and farming that land.”
“Drinks all round!” cried both Captains O’Shaunessy in unison. “Drinks all round! On the house!”
W
HEN
in residence at the Seaman’s Inn, Aidan Lanighan danced twice daily, at five in the afternoon and then again at eleven. He spent the rest of the day sitting pensively by the window, brightening when greeted by an incoming sailor, then sinking again into a reverie that appeared to have nothing to do with his whereabouts. This state of mind was exactly the opposite to the one in which he exploded into the dance. The other men in the room glanced at him with fondness – sometimes adoration – often touched him on the arm or the shoulder in passing, danced a little better, themselves, in his presence, but mostly left him alone to think his mysterious thoughts.
Eileen, who had now taken to spending most of the day sitting on the upstairs verandah staring out at the lake, crept downstairs each afternoon, ostensibly to find her brother, but really to watch Lanighan perform. She was always wearing one of her new cotton dresses – high at the throat and tight at the sleeves. Her childhood had glided away from her on dark wings. She had only recent memories in her mind: the lantern-lit night walks, the rattle of the trestle bridge, the traffic on the Great Lake, and this man’s disturbing dance. His eyes, she realized, were greener than her own. She thought that he was beautiful.
She ate some but not much of the lake fish and potatoes presented to her in the tavern room. Slim already, she had begun, after her first glimpse of the dancing, to lose weight.
Liam was distracted, paid little attention to her, embroiled as he was in long, difficult negotiations with the O’Shaunessy brothers or visiting the land agent on Walton Street. At night he stayed downstairs until two or three a.m. Eileen lay on her metal cot, watching the reflecting harbour lights flicker on the ceiling until she heard the sound of Lanighan’s dance begin at eleven o’clock. Fifteen minutes later, when it ended, she turned her face to one side and wept quietly until she fell asleep. She never remembered her dreams. Both she and her brother had forgotten her birthday, but she awoke on one of these mornings knowing she was seventeen years old.
On the fifth morning after Lanighan’s arrival, the weather became sultry, the lake agitated, pitching six-foot breakers at the end of the pier for no apparent reason – there being no wind – and Eileen, innocent, until quite recently, of large bodies of water, watched from her verandah with a combination of fascination and horror; much the same way as she watched Lanighan’s dancing. It seemed the waves had become somehow trapped in her head so that when she moved she was dizzy with them. Her premonitions, which as a child she had never doubted, had completely deserted her. She realized she had no idea what would happen to her – believed that she might be trapped in this world of pounding waves and leaping men and shrieking trains and shuddering trestles for eternity. She stepped back into her room, walked around it three times, and decided to go downstairs.
Lanighan was sitting quietly at his table. Behind his head, through the window glass, Eileen could see the spray from the pier leap and descend.
She walked up to the bar and faced whichever Captain O’Shaunessy stood behind it. “I need to know one thing,” she heard herself whisper.
“And what’s that?” The Captain O’Shaunessy leaned towards her.
“Why does he never speak?”
O’Shaunessy beckoned her closer still. “He never speaks,” he hissed into her ear, “because he has had his heart torn out by the traitor McGee – who was
our
voice, mind you,” the bearded man gestured to all the Irishmen in the room, “until he turned his voice against us, a few summers ago in the old country, and has been doing so ever since, at every opportunity. And he having to flee the homeland when he was younger than Lanighan, there, with a price on his head because of the Young Ireland uprising. And now, in the
Montreal Gazette
, he says he will list, with no proof, mind you, the names and addresses of his fellow countrymen he claims were part of the Fenian uprisings. It’s a strange world, my dear, that allows a man to turn against the longings of his own native heart, and when he does there’s a cloud hanging over the heads of all Lanighan’s brothers.”
“Do you think he talks to his brothers?”
“I’m speaking of those of the spirit, not of the flesh. They all turned silent when D’Arcy McGee turned traitor to the cause, joined forces with that Orangeman Macdonald. This was to be
our
nation, you see – that’s at the heart of it. There’s more of
us
in the bowels of the lakeboats or in the city factories, or on the roads, or building the canals. McGee talked great lakefuls of words, but, in the end, he turned traitor. They’ll stay quiet until he turns back again, as, being Irish, he should, turn back again to the cause.”
“Is that all, then?”
“Is that
all
? The entire hope of the Irish population trampled into the dust by the political greed and ambition of the one we looked to for our solace and salvation? Are we to be ignored,
used as workhorses, as badly treated here as we were there? I’d be silent myself if it were in my nature … but it’s not, nor in my brother’s neither.”
“Is he a Fenian, this Aidan Lanighan?”
“He is a patriot.”
“But he
can
talk?”
“Talk, is it? Talk? Oh, he can talk. But most important, he can dance.”
Eileen was drugged by the lake, but, with repeated exposure, she was developing tolerance.
This she accomplished by long vigils on the verandah, which were offset by pacing the dark hall of the second storey of the Seaman’s Inn – all the doors closed at noon, the noise of the Great Lake cushioned.
We’ll be leaving soon, Liam had said, to go to the land south of Colborne. Then, he told her, everything would be perfect, forever.
“Have you ever been in love, Liam?” she had asked him one evening.
“No, but I intend to be soon. I’ll need sons for the farm, and a wife.”
“Aidan Lanighan’s had his heart torn out by that man Father talked about … that man called McGee, the member of parliament. They say he’ll be silent as long as McGee is silent … about the Irish misery.”
“What does this Irish misery matter, Eileen? We’re in Canada now, we’re Canadian, not Irish. I don’t even remember Ireland and you were born
here
. Soon we’ll be living on the new farm and I’ll have a wife, some sons, a hundred cows.”
“And what will I have, Liam?”
He smiled indulgently at his sister. “You’ll have a large room of your own with a wonderful view of the lake.”