Patricia Falvey (52 page)

“And what about the future?” Lizzie asked. “What will you do?”

I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “At one time I had this dream of bringing us all back together at the Yellow House. It was what kept me going for the longest time. But I finally saw how foolish it was. I gave it up.” I looked at her, tears stinging my eyes.

Lizzie put her arms around me and hugged me. “It was not a foolish dream,” she whispered.

I held on to her for a while. As I held her, a warmth, sweet and smooth as honey, filled me, a sensation I had never felt before, not even with Owen. I felt a gap in my soul, empty these years with longing, fill up and close. At last I pulled back.

“Well, now that you have heard the whole story of the O’Neills, what about Lizzie Butler Donnelly? What kind of a life did she have?”

Lizzie smiled. “It was nothing like yours, Eileen. Not nearly as dramatic, or sad, or tormented. Certainly not on the outside. But on the inside…”

Lizzie had indeed been brought up with a well-to-do Protestant family in Belfast. She was never told she was adopted, even though she faintly remembered another family she had lived with out in the country. The Butlers had told her that she had been sent to those people for a short time while Mrs. Butler recovered from an illness. They were of no consequence, she was told. But still, Lizzie said, she always felt like an outsider.

“I was the replacement child,” she said, gazing at me with shadowed blue eyes. “Their only child, also named Elizabeth, had died at the age of nine. They took me because I looked like her, but I could never live up to their idealized image of her. I found myself competing with a ghost.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Oh, I was comfortable enough,” Lizzie said briskly. “I wanted for nothing. My father was kind, and my mother… well, I suppose she did her best.”

Lizzie paused for a moment, then her face lit up with an impish smile. “I got my own way in the end, anyway. I became a nurse at the hospital, despite my mother’s objections, and I ran off and married Eugene Donnelly, a Catholic farm boy. Mother was so scandalized, she took to her bed!”

“Aye, you’ve the O’Neill stubbornness, so you do,” I said.

“I see that now,” said Lizzie. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and shivered slightly. We let the silence creep around us for a while, each absorbing what the other had said.

“And Boston?” I ventured. “What is there for you now in Boston, with Eugene gone?”

Lizzie hesitated before she spoke. “I suppose my future is as uncertain as yours, Eileen.” She smiled. “Funny, how we should both end up at the same place after all.”

“Aye.” Then I whispered, “Must you go back tomorrow?”

“Today, now.” She smiled. “Yes. I have obligations—the hospital, friends. And I have a life there, even without Eugene.”

“And you have family here.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

We held each other’s hands. My eyes filled with tears. “I will not lose you again, Lizzie,” I said. “Not after all this time.”

“And I will not lose you, either, Eileen.”

The sun was rising as I walked her down to the taxi rank at the end of the street. There was a taxi all right, but no driver to be seen. “This isn’t Boston.” I laughed. “It could be hours before John Hurley gets his arse out of bed. He’s a lazy bugger.”

I knocked on the door of Hurley’s grocery shop. Mrs. Hurley came down the stairs in her slippers, gruff as an oul’ bulldog, but she sweetened up when she saw Lizzie.

“Och, I’ll be after getting John now so he can drive you over to the hotel and then to the train station. He told me he dropped you off last night with Mrs. Conlon here, and then you came back out and told him to go on home.” She was out for the gossip, I could see, but I gave her nothing.

“If you’ll be so good as to get him, then,” Lizzie said sweetly, but I could see she was used to giving orders.

As John Hurley shuffled to the taxi and started up the motor, Lizzie and I gazed at each other. We were both in tears. At last she came forward and hugged me. She was small and slight as a winter leaf. I had an awkward awareness of my own height and strength compared with hers. But yet I felt a steel core in her equal to my own.

“I’ll be back, Eileen,” she whispered. “Just give me some time.”

She got into the taxi and rolled down the window. “Give my love to darling Saoirse,” she said as the car sped away.

I stepped back onto the pavement, tears still in my eyes.

I forgot that Mrs. Hurley was still standing there. She pounced.

“Saoirse? Is that what you called the wee one, love? Saoirse Conlon, now isn’t that a grand name?”

“It’s Saoirse Sheridan,” I said, and turned on my heel and left.

I
badgered Owen to set it up for me to visit James in jail. I could not explain why I needed so much to go. I just had this gnawing feeling that my future could not move forward until I had seen him and talked to him. At first, Owen tried to talk me out of it.

“What is the point, now, Eileen?” he said, exasperated. “What will it achieve? It will only upset you. The man will be executed—there is little doubt of that. Why don’t you just wait until it is over?”

“I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t explain it, but I have to go.”

Owen gave me his familiar look that said he knew once my mind was made up there would be no talking me out of it. He sighed. “I’ll arrange it, then.”

THE VISITING ROOM
was a small rectangle with barred windows set high up in whitewashed walls. It reminded me of the Newry Hospital. Even the smell of stale urine was familiar. I sat at a wooden table and waited. Owen had arranged for me to meet James at a time when there would be no other visitors. Keys clanged in a lock and the heavy metal inside door squealed open. James stood there. I could not believe my eyes. I hardly knew him. He was stooped like an old man, and his face was pale and flecked with stubble. A dirty bandage covered his right arm where he had been burned. I thought back to the blinding white bandage he’d worn when I first met him. Only his eyes showed any sign of life. They blazed when he looked at me, reminding me of the holy pictures of martyred saints the nuns gave out to frighten children.

“What do you want?” he said.

The guard shoved him toward the table and ordered him to sit down. He went over and stood beside the door. I recognized him as a lousy oul’ turncoat named Mulcahy—a Catholic who had taken a job with the Royal Irish Constabulary. He’d have his ears wide open for information. There would be no privacy after all.

“I came to see you,” I said.

James eyed me up and down. “I see you had the bastard.”

I nodded. “Aye, a girl.”

His anger filled the room. Its power crowded in on me. Sweat drenched my hands and face.

“How are you?” It was a stupid thing to say, but I could think of nothing else. “Are the burns healing?”

James laughed aloud. “Aye. Sure I’ll be the healthiest man ever to stand before a firing squad!”

“Och, James,” I said. I put out my hand to touch his, but he pulled it away.

“What do you want?” he said again. “Why are you here? To gloat, is it?”

“No, you know it’s not for that.”

We sat in silence. As I looked at him, I tried to bring into my mind the young James I had fallen in love with—the tall, dashing, passionate James with his glorious plans for a free Ireland! How I had loved his restless spirit and his courage. He was so different from the other lads at the mill. I remembered how we sat and talked long into the night. I was caught up in his fervor for freedom and for justice. It was what I had wanted for myself. But it turned out James wanted freedom and justice on a much grander scale, while I yearned for it only in my own life. I supposed now that I had known it all along, but at the time I believed James was my savior. I never would have imagined the price I would have to pay for his vision. It was not his fault, I realized. He had never misled me. I believed only what I wanted to believe.

“I did love you, James,” I said softly.

“Fine way of showing it. You would have shot me dead if Sheridan hadn’t stopped you.”

“Aye, I could have. And I would have been in the right. You had no business trying to burn down the mill. It had nothing to do with the Cause. It was jealousy. You lost your head altogether.”

James attempted a smile, but there was no mirth in it. “I made the biggest mistake a soldier could make. I let my own emotions get in the way of the real fight. But it was you that drove me to it. No man would blame me for what I did. Och, why did you do it, Eileen?”

“What did you expect after the way you treated me?”

“You knew what you were getting into.”

“No! I didn’t,” I shouted. “How could I know you would abandon me and take my money? How could I know you would steal my child and turn her against me? And how could I ever have guessed it would go on this long, you still fighting after everybody else in Ireland gave up? Why, James? Why did you have to keep it going?”

His eyes blazed. “We had to keep it going for Ulster’s sake. Who else was going to do it?”

“You did it for your own bloody stubbornness. Even Collins and the other leaders gave it up!”

“Aye, bloody double-crossers,” he shouted. “They got what they wanted and stranded the rest of us here with the Volunteers and the B-Specials and the rest of the Protestant gits. What kind of future do you think the Catholics here in South Armagh are going to have with the Protestants in charge? You see yourself how they are taking away our jobs and our rights. They want to drive us out or kill us. Then they’ll trample those of us left into the ground.”

I sighed. James would never admit there was anything more important in his life than the Cause. And he had always been ready to pay the price.

“But you have nobody behind you now, James. Even the commander of the Northern Division gave the word to stop the fighting. It’s over!”

“It will never be over. Mark my words, Eileen, there’ll be them that will come after me. There’ll never be peace in Ulster until it’s part of a united Ireland.”

He shook with the effort of talking. His burns had weakened him something terrible. I almost cried at the sight of this strong, vigorous man trembling like an invalid. I put out my hand again. This time he did not pull away.

“They’ll give me a grand funeral, anyway,” he said with a small smile. “The Irish are great ones for that. They love burying their heroes.”

I nodded. The tears escaped now. I wiped them from my cheek.

He watched me. “I’m not sorry about taking Mary Marg— Aoife, Eileen. I was justified. And I’d do it again. But I wish I hadn’t had to take your savings—I know what the money meant to you—but there was no choice. The Cause needed it.”

I realized that was as close to an apology as I was ever going to get from him. This was the first time he had ever called our child Aoife. That was apology enough. We sat, both of us lost in our own thoughts. There was nothing more to say about those things. They were in the past. The future was what mattered now.

I smiled up at him. “Lizzie came to see me. Och, she’s as lovely as I remember her.”

He nodded. “Aye, Terrence told me. That’s grand news, Eileen.” He gave me a small, tender smile.

Mulcahy took out a pocket watch and made a big show of looking at it.

“Time’s almost up,” he growled.

James laughed. “Don’t I know it.” The smile faded. “What will you do, Eileen?”

“What do you mean?” I said, knowing full well what he meant.

“Will you marry that Sheridan fellow?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“I’ll never understand you wanting a Prod like him. I hate the thought of him rearing Aoife.”

“He’s a Quaker,” I said automatically.

“It’s all one and the same.” He hesitated. “But I suppose you should marry him, if it’s what you want.”

“Jesus,” I cried, anger spiking my voice. “Did you think I was waiting for your bloody permission? For your blessing?”

Another small smile crept across his ashen face. “I see nothing’s dampened the temper in you. I hope Sheridan is man enough to stand it.” He reached over suddenly and squeezed my hand. “You’ve had a hard enough life. God knows I didn’t make it any easier. You deserve a bit of happiness.” A sudden thought struck him. “The bastard is willing to marry you, isn’t he? He’s not leaving you stranded? Because if he is…”