Authors: Redemption
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #Literary Collections, #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Australian & Oceanian, #New Zealand, #General, #New Zealand Fiction, #History
The door on the tenant’s cottage had been posted with a cholera notice. Atty held Jack Murphy’s hand so hard it hurt as he gingerly shoved open the forbidden door. Atty was seven. Jack Murphy, the foreman’s son, was fourteen.
Their eyes played over a misery. Four wanes, all under ten years of age, lay moaning or beyond the strength to moan in a fogged, then comatose, crawl toward death. A thin voice of desperate prayer from their mother was the only pointless tad of hope.
The entire village was stricken, as was much of the region. The mother’s prayer was interrupted by her sharp hack from the tuberculosis. Atty knelt before the children laid out on a mattress of bog peat before the fire.
“God has abandoned us,” the farmer’s wife said. “You shouldn’t be bringing her up here in the heather.”
Atty turned loose from Jack and felt the children’s faces, then smiled at the smallest wane, who managed a smile back. Atty held the child’s hand until he passed on to death. She stood and went outside, her mouth in a vise grip as the sounds of sobs and wails mixed with prayers and preparations for yet another wake and burial.
Jack was about to say that they had better leave but was stunned speechless by the incredibly ferocious
expression in Atty’s eyes. He had not seen the likes of it, ever. The fires lit in Atty would burst in fury all her life, like sunspots flaring into space.
It became apparent in a few years that she would be the sole inheritor of the Barony of Lough Clara, a landowning family institution of County Galway dating back nearly three centuries.
It was also apparent that she loved Jack Murphy and would love no one else, forever. As the foreman’s son, Jack had a privileged social position among the Catholics on the enormous estate. He had fetched the doctor for Atty’s birth and watched over her ever since.
Lord Charles Royce-Moore was not disconsolate at being unable to produce a proper male heir. Atty was as capable as any man and her willpower was of the stuff that made empires. She would do all right by Lough Clara.
His feelings for Atty ran deeper than any frantic efforts for continuity. In fact, somewhat the opposite. The summation of his family’s generations in Ireland disturbed him: After three centuries, they were still strangers in a strange land.
The defining event of his own life had been the potato famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s. For the first few years of the crop failure he bore witness to the sweeping scythe of death littering the fields with starved corpses, their mouths green from eating grass…then came the typhoid and TB and the mass flights from Ireland, many on infamous death ships.
All of this was too harsh for a young lad of the gentry, so he and most of the family sat out the great hunger in the more hospitable atmosphere of England. In order to save the barony, Lord Charles’s father shipped off every head of cattle to England rather than go on a plan to share food with the peasants.
Charles returned to Lough Clara eventually, but his innards were too soft to further invoke the harsh rule when he ascended to baron and lord of the manor.
Baron Royce-Moore did what most of the Anglo landed gentry did, let his estate drift into an unkempt and undirected holding. While many of his class went under, he was skillful enough to keep the lifestyle grand and the manor house stocked with vintage cognac, mainly through his horse-breeding operation. At the same time he socked away enough in London to be able to have that city as his eventual retreat, living out his days in the comfort of a plush leather chair in some fine club.
Shrewd consolidation of the barony would afford Atty and a husband of her choice a handsome way of life and the continuation of the aristocracy for at least another generation. Charles would be long gone and really didn’t give a damn what happened after Atty took over. She could reinvoke the ugly edicts necessary for large profit or simply get rid of the estate, as she wished.
In 1884, when Atty was ten, she was whisked off to schools in Switzerland, then London, considerable continental travel, and a “rounding out” of a proper lady, often in the company of her mother. They occasioned themselves at Lough Clara only during the summers. At first Atty did not protest, but every time she returned she fell in love with Jack Murphy all over again. More and more Jack recognized the rage of sunspots flaring off her angry star, but he didn’t recognize that some of her passion was aimed at him. Because Atty was very young and there was a substantial age difference between her and Jack, the relationship resembled older brother to little sister. They made many extended horse excursions into the lunarscape of Connemara and along the sea.
But there was more to it than Atty and Jack just enjoying themselves. What soon seemed deeper and more important than winning Jack’s love was what she saw—the destitution of the peasants. Aye, her fury over their bottomless agony became stronger than any personal feeling toward another human being.
Atty simply leapt over the awkward years when one’s
teeth usually required straightening or the skin was sprinkled with spots. She left Lough Clara as a girl of ten and returned as a completed young lady of thirteen, erect, a full glorious body, and a face of chilled beauty. She made no attempt at the games of coquetry, for there was no nonsense in her, no time for the frivolous things that amused her mother and her mother’s circle. The male hunt occupied them…the gossip…the next ball. The girl was an off-horse, too serious and too determined. Her mother wondered, to what end?
Atty chopped off the heads of the parade of suitors with a belittling quick glare. Moreover, she was tall as most men and a specimen to intimidate them. She became comfortable with her ability to keep the eager lads in step and exercised that power without pity. There were no backside slappers and sneaky pinchers pursuing that one.
Atty’s escapes from Mother’s inane pursuits were her great escapades to Jack Murphy’s cottage. Jack’s father, as estate foreman, had been able to see to a fine education for all his children. Jack had been schooled by the Christian Brothers in Galway and he responded with a keen love and grasp of the classics. He would read to Atty or play the guitar with winged fingers and sing out phrases of poetry he had set to his own music. Jack was a dandy-looking lad, for sure, and never at a loss for female company. He loved them all a little but never too strongly, never so he might fall into the Irish mating trap. Not a lass could put the bell around his neck.
This was fine with Atty. It would give her time to blossom to that point where she would be noticed by him as something other than his little friend. Then she could end her long silence and make her feelings known. In Atty’s sixteenth summer she studied herself in the mirror and declared herself ready. She seldom asked but often commanded. With Jack Murphy she knew she had to be clever. He was a full-grown man of twenty-three edging toward a life decision.
Over the years the two had developed a physical relationship, that of buddies, a pair of mates up for a little horseplay and “innocent” wrestling. Atty would always break it off and leave before her sighs and outright panting of passion gave her away. Now sixteen, she was satisfied she could elicit the same feelings from him. Setting the scene carefully, after a gallop, she jumped him in the hayloft of the barn.
“I’m still your master!” he roared.
Her legs parted and her pelvis rolled about searching for what had made her vastly curious to feel. She found it and rocked back and forth. Jack’s trying to hide it failed, and it began to grow and search for her. Atty, sitting on him, loosened the buttons of her blouse. Jack held her off and crawled away.
“Jaysus,” he said, “I think you’ve grown a bit too much for us to go on with our kid games.”
Atty grabbed his hand as he came to his feet. “Or maybe I’ve blossomed enough to start a real game.”
Jack knew that Atty would always be direct and he had learned never to be at a loss. This was different. He held out a hand for her to halt, then sat beside her. “If we rolled around in past summers it was all for the sport. I never meant to lure you into temptation.”
“To hell with that, Jack. Let’s let our feelings do what they may,” she said.
“We can’t, luv.”
“I can do anything I want,” she responded.
“You’re a young woman now and all kinds of new sensations are churning up inside you. We’re very good pals, the best ever, and I’m familiar to you. That makes you comfortable with me. However, I’m just not the lad you should be experimenting with. You’ll easily find the young man you’re meant to do these things with.”
“I don’t like any of them, Jack. You know that. I hate almost all of them and what their fathers and my father have done to this place.”
“Well, now, just because you hate someone doesn’t mean he isn’t the right fellow. Besides, Atty, some of those young suitors are rather decent sorts. Only problem is, you don’t give them half a chance. When you look at them in that blood-curdling manner you can put on, I can see them shrink down to midgets before my very eyes.”
Atty pouted.
“You can have any of those fellows you want when the time comes.”
She opened her blouse. Jack reddened and closed it. “I’m not your man, only a little girl’s fantasy gone amok. Let us not go into all the reasons this isn’t right. I’ve only got one suit, Atty, and that was passed to me by my da and I’ll probably pass it to my son.”
“That’s not true,” she snapped. “We are exactly suited. It is in every line of poetry you write and every song you sing. Jack, you and I together can do something about all this wretchedness here.”
“But I see you as my sister and always will.”
“I’m not leaving this barn as a virgin,” she all but commanded.
“The only way you’re going to lose your virginity here now is by a good spanking.”
As the summer wore on, Atty measured the situation. To flirt? To set up an accidental injury from a fall off a horse far out in the hillsides with him? To pout and rant?
She concluded Jack meant his words and decided it was better to go on as loving friends than not go on at all.
At the summer’s end, she returned to London and he caught a ship out of Galway, another son of Ireland who had to seek a life away from his country.
“The dray is all loaded, Mr. Lambe,” Conor said.
Josiah Lambe, the blacksmith of Ballyutogue, both upper village of the Catholics and lower village of the Protestants, checked the donkey cart his apprentice boy had loaded. “Is that charcoal box secure?”
“Aye. Why are we bringing our own coal?”
“The coal they use at Hubble Manor couldn’t build up enough fire to light my pipe.”
The cart sagged, a wheel going down in the mud. “Jaysus,” Conor said, “looks like we got the entire forge on the dray.”
“Aye, we’ll be working at the manor for ten days.”
“Hope we don’t bust an axle.”
Mr. Lambe surveyed, grunted, and took a few extra pieces off to lighten the load. That apprentice of his was a gift. And what a touch he had twisting iron at the anvil.
“Hitch up the team, Conor lad. Did you tell your ma you wouldn’t be home till after dark?”
“Aye, I did.”
Mr. Lambe pinned a note to the front door:
WORKING AT THE MANOR. LEAVE YOUR WORK OR A NOTE FOR ME INSIDE. WE’LL OPEN AT FIVE
TOMORROW MORNING IF ANY OF YOUR NAGS NEED SHOES.
“Take off your filthy boots,” the second assistant housekeeper of the manor commanded with all the authority vested in her. She led them into the Long Hall of Hubble Manor, a massive room well over a hundred feet long and half as tall. The place reverberated with activity: window cleaners washing the stained glass; painters, polishers, brick repairmen, carpenters in organized frenzy to prepare the pre-Cromwellian navelike space for some very important event.
The second assistant housekeeper led them toward a knot of people all trying to get the attention of a woman in their midst.
Conor Larkin’s twelve-and-a-half-year-old eyes became locked on her powerfully. She was neither tall nor short, but quite erect…but not erect in a stiff aristocratic way…bouncy, like a very beautiful girl balancing a pail of milk on her head with ease. Her hair was the most silken golden shimmering mane he had ever seen, and it flew, just so, at half speed when she turned it. And Jaysus! The top of her dress was like nothing in the upper village. It was all open and showed rounded parts of the gorgeous things tucked under a line of lace…and a sweet smell from her almost put him in a trance.
“Excuse me, m’lady,” the second assistant housekeeper said with the humility of her station. “Mr. Lambe has arrived.”
“Mr. Lambe?”
“The blacksmith.”
“Oh yes, how do you do, Mr. Lambe?”
He nodded in a semibow and elbowed Conor to stop gawking and bow likewise. “Me assistant, young Conor Larkin.”
“You’re staring at me, Master Larkin.”
“Aye, you’re very beautiful.”
Mr. Lambe groaned and ordered Conor to unload the dray. “Sorry about that, Countess. Catholic lad, you know. Sometimes they’re a bit short on manners up in the heather.”
“Actually, I thought he was disarmingly charming. Isn’t he rather young to be an apprentice boy?”
“They start ’em young. They have to. This lad has the magic of the faeries at the forge.”
“Well now, Mr. Lambe. Lord Hubble and I were suddenly recalled from our honeymoon, no less.”
“Oh now, that’s a pity.”
“One must get used to the ways of the west. It seems that politics hereabouts has number one priority…after an heir is produced. However, his lordship and myself have hardly had the time to accomplish that, so it’s politics with a capital P.”
Mr. Lambe liked her. No snot about her. She had a gist, a pleasant gist, a smart woman who would get you to work your arse off for her, he thought.
“We were returned from paradise because it seems like Charles Stewart Parnell’s victory in the election has caused a panic. Lord Randolph Churchill is landing at Larne, perhaps at this very moment, to rally our loyal Protestant forces against the pending Irish Home Rule Bill. A final rally will take place here in the Long Hall. The great screen is very unsteady and my blacksmith is shorthanded.”
The manor’s blacksmith, Mr. Leland, was born shorthanded, Mr. Lambe thought.
Lady Caroline continued. “I trust you can help him shore it up so that it won’t be a safety hazard.”
Mr. Lambe studied it. Once it had been most likely the greatest single example of wrought iron in Ireland, if not the world. Fires, explosions, and all those things that came with the insurrections had taken their toll. He went over it with Mr. Leland and reckoned it could be made safe in a few weeks.
“Good, that is how long it is going to take Lord Churchill to talk his way across Ulster.”
Each night when the workmen had cleared out, Lady Caroline inspected the day’s progress. Often as not, Mr. Lambe’s apprentice boy, the Harkin or O’Leary lad—whatever his name was—would still be there staring at the screen. He’d inspect it from a few inches’ distance, running his fingertips over the more circuitous parts and speaking to himself. The boy was obviously taken by the work.
A fortnight went by and the lad’s fascination had not waned.
“Master Harkin,” she said one evening late.
“Larkin, ma’am, Conor Larkin.”
“You always seem to be the last one to leave.”
“I hope you don’t mind, ma’am. Mr. Lambe leaves me one of his horses to ride home.”
“What is it that you find so awesome in this tangle of iron?”
“It was the masterpiece of Jean Tijou, the greatest man who ever put a hammer on a hot piece of iron.”
“You know about this screen? Its history?”
“Aye. It’s legend. I mean, the legends are really old schanachie tales. Our schanachie, Daddo Friel, he’s near blind now…. Anyhow, he told me about this screen for hours on end.”
“That’s fascinating. Care to share your secrets?”
“Oh, you know how it is. Most schanachie stories are pretty wild…they shoot them past you like comets. Just old stories.”
“I insist.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I insist.”
“Well, it might not be to your liking.”
“I insist.”
“It is an utter paradox,” Conor said, “how the most beautiful work of its kind could be used for the most cruel…”
“Go on. I was born in Belfast. I do know my Irish history.”
“During the insurrection of seventeen hundred and fifteen, a local rising, the earl at that time imprisoned three hundred and fifty women and children behind the screen as hostages. The rest is not too important.”
“They died?”
“Something like that. Probably a faerie’s tale.”
“Yes,” she said rather harshly, “the schanachies can be frightful liars. Anyhow, Londonderry seems to be filled with tales I’ll need catching up on.”
Conor’s cheeks turned crimson. Daddo Friel does not lie, he thought angrily! And it’s
not
Londonderry…it’s
Derry
.
“Well, perhaps some day in the future, when you are older and have earned your ironmaster certification, you can work on a full restoration of the screen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied without enthusiasm.
“Anyhow, just make certain it doesn’t fall down on Lord Churchill’s head.”
Oh, if it would only collapse and squish Randolph Churchill like an ugly bug, Conor thought.
“You see,” she said backing off a bit, “Lord Churchill is very important….”
“I know who he is. He’s no friend of Charles Stewart Parnell.”
Conor and Lady Caroline had nothing to say to each other after that. However, once or twice a day, and sometimes even more often, there was a direct look from one to the other and sometimes it lasted for several seconds.
Conor Larkin’s dearest friend, Seamus O’Neill, was born as an afterthought, the scrapings of the pot. With a family of more than enough O’Neill men to work their fields, young Seamus had a childhood of exceptional leisure. For an Irish mother, no greater pleasure in life could come than spoiling the youngest son. To his credit, Seamus did not spend his time creating mischief as he
might, but rather enriching his everlasting and deep and monumental friendship with Conor—who was also his hero, because Conor was destined to become a great republican fighter like all the Larkin men and particularly Conor’s grandfather Kilty, God rest his soul.
When the new national school opened in Ballyutogue for the villages around, Seamus talked his parents into letting him enroll. Being one of three Catholics in a roomful of Protestants and being the runt of the litter had its disadvantages.
Although the teacher, Mr. Andrew Ingram, was a Scottish Presbyterian, he was an enlightened man who would tolerate no bigotry within his eyesight. Mr. Ingram was fast to realize that Seamus was his best student and supplied the boy with books that would otherwise be inaccessible. Moreover, he tutored Seamus to fill the boy’s longing to become a writer.
Seamus had protection outside the schoolyard if he could make it to Mr. Lambe’s forge close by. When chased, he would scurry to his eternal friend Conor for help.
Finally, the boys made a pact. Seamus would teach Conor to read and write and Conor would teach Seamus to fight. It was difficult going for both of them in the beginning, but when Seamus punched the school bully bloody and Conor conquered the first primer, their battle was won.
Conor now had access to books, and the worlds they told of that he never dreamed he would know. A magic planet burst open. Each school day Seamus ran to the forge and when Conor closed it down the two would go off to their secret place near the old Norman keep to explore their new world beyond Ballyutogue.
It was not only of places and things they read, but great ideas. Mr. Ingram exposed them to Thomas Paine and assured them that all the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were Presbyterians. They were sure as hell different than the Ulster Presbyterians, Seamus thought.
Conor was a wizard, soon caught up to and passing Seamus. Suddenly, something went haywire with Conor. After he and Mr. Lambe had worked at Hubble Manor fixing the screen, Conor seemed suddenly to lose interest in books and just about everything else. His mind drifted away from republican matters, which was very disconcerting to Seamus. After a week of it, Seamus rebelled.
“Your face looks like the potato mush at the bottom of me ma’s crock, Conor. What’s the matter with you!”
“Nothin’.”
“Is your ma pregnant again?”
“Christ, no, praise Mary.”
“Then what’s wrong with you?”
“Ugh, forget it.”
“Ah shyte, Conor, you’re a blister, that’s wot!”
“If it is that evident then maybe I’d better confide in you, but this is even more sacred a secret than the confessional, understand? If you ever breathe a word about what I am about to tell you, I’ll really kill you.”
“When,” Seamus protested, “have I ever betrayed a confidence? Name me just one time!”
“Then hold up your right hand.”
Seamus did, proudly.
“Do you swear on your republican honor that this is our eternal secret?”
“Aye, I do. Have you killed somebody?”
“Christ, no. I’m in love with Caroline Hubble.”
“Caroline Hubble! You’ll not live to see another harvest harboring thoughts like that! This one time, you’d better go to confession.”
“That’s the last place I’d tell.”
“I mean, really in love with her?”
“Aye, deeply, fiercely, tenderly. I think about her all the time and these wonderful sensations just shoot through me. I think about her before I fall asleep and you know what happens down there.”
“Jaysus!”
“I’ll tell you something. I see her look at me, too. Now, maybe she’s not in love with me or anything but I know that she wants to tell me something. I know that!”
“You ain’t got nothing she’s looking for.”
“Yeah, it’s crazy-like,” Conor agreed. “I’ll just have to get over it.”
“And fast-like. Suppose the utterly worst thing happened. In a trance induced by the faeries, she was to fall in love with you, despite the vast difference in your ages. And suppose she took you into a secret room and you and her did it. I mean really did it and while you were doing it, the viscount walked in and caught youse! Oh boy! Protestants would be rioting all over the world! And they’d take her out to the Guildhall Square in Derry and march her up to the chopping block like Anne Boleyn and hoick off her head, or maybe they’d burn her at the stake like Joan of Arc…and as for you, croppy boy, they’d draw and quarter you with four horses and hang your head up on a pike and every Protestant would come for miles just to spit on it…and she’d haunt Hubble Manor walking around whooing with her head tucked under her arm and all the potatoes in the fields would rot again and there’d be another famine because of your foul lust!”
“All right, all right. I’ve forgotten about her!”
“You swear!”
“Aye, I swear. I’ve forgotten about her.”
Seamus sighed in relief at having waylaid his best friend on a certain path to self-destruction. “I don’t believe you,” he said at last.