Patricia Falvey (56 page)

I stood and walked toward the stone wall and sat down. I looked out across the dark fields. Dawn was beginning to break. In the distance, I heard the metal clang of buckets echo as farmers trudged to their milking sheds. Lights, like tiny stars, twinkled in cottage windows. A halo formed around the shoulders of Slieve Gullion as the darkness greeted the light. A sudden breeze made me shiver, and I shifted against the coldness of the stone wall beneath me. A sound from somewhere in the distance startled me, and I rolled off the wall and crouched behind it. Was it ghosts?

Jesus, Eileen, I thought, catch yourself on. You’re too old to be frightened by headless horsemen anymore. But a child of the country has that odd mixture of practicality and superstition. Maybe it was the echo of Tommy McParland’s stories that was playing on my mind or the fact that I was in a graveyard, but a shiver of fear went through me that I couldn’t shake. And so I lay still and peered out over the wall. The sound of a car motor growled as it drew closer to the house. Then it stopped. I watched the car door open and a shadowy figure get out and stand looking up at the house. I held my breath. The figure walked around to the back of the car and lifted something out of the boot. Without warning, Cuchulainn sprang from my side and raced toward the car. The stranger bent down and petted him. Well, it was no ghost, I thought. Slightly embarrassed, I stood up, straightened out my clothes, and opened the gate. As I made my way down the hill, my heart began to thump in my chest. Darkness had finally given way to light, and there stood Owen, the golden dawn light haloed around him. I began to run toward him, and with each step a stone weight lifted from me. He stopped and swung around, the soldier in him wary. Then he laughed.

“I thought you were a ghost.”

I was breathless. “I thought you were, too.”

“I’m sorry I missed the party,” he said. “The ferry from England was held up on account of the weather.”

We stood in silence. Cuchulainn ran around both of us, barking in joy.

“I see you haven’t painted yet.” Owen inclined his head toward the house.

“No. The time didn’t seem right.”

“Maybe it is now?”

“It is,” I said.

He bent and picked up a metal tin he had taken out of the car and handed it to me. “Canary yellow, as I recall,” he said.

“Aye.”

a cognizant v5 original release september 16 2010

1924

I
n the summer of 1924, a boundary commission was formed that ultimately agreed to the border drawn earlier by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. With the skill of surgeons, the politicians had amputated part of the province of Ulster from the rest of Ireland. Glenlea was imprisoned within that border. Slieve Gullion spread her robes and welcomed home Ulster’s warriors and dreamers. The warriors now lie in her bosom in a restless, bitter sleep, while the dreamers pen their songs and laments for their lost land.

I, too, have drawn my own borders around myself. I have drawn close to me those things that matter—love, family, and home. I have left outside the borders anger, fear, and regret. I am at peace now for a time, just as is my beloved Ulster. Now my warrior sleeps while wisdom stands watch. Wisdom is my new companion, a wisdom forged from the fires of battles fought and lost, and life lived. And my dreamer lies awake, guarding memories past and memories yet to be born.

And so the summer has come again to Glenlea, and time hovers between day and night like a gift from heaven.

A brief historic overview of events leading up to the establishment of Northern Ireland

In 1897, when Eileen O’Neill was born, the island of Ireland was divided into four provinces—Munster in the south, Leinster in the east, Connaught in the west, and Ulster in the north. The entire island was under English rule and governed from Westminster in London.

The two main religions in Ireland were Roman Catholic and Protestant. Catholics formed the majority in all provinces except Ulster. In three of the provinces, the Protestants were predominantly aristocratic families that had received land grants for generations since the sixteenth century. Ulster Protestants were different. They consisted mostly of Scottish and English agricultural workers and tradespeople who had been “planted” there by the English government, beginning in 1610, for the purpose of heading off future rebellions in Ulster—that having proved the most resistant of the provinces toward English rule. All Irish-owned lands in Ulster were confiscated and redistributed to the “planters” whose allegiances lay with the British government. There were also a number of Quakers throughout Ireland. The Quakers (the Society of Friends), separate and distinct from the Protestants, played a role in Irish social and economic issues for centuries.

The Irish famine years 1840–1860 were still vivid in people’s minds when Eileen was born. During those years, death and emigration had shrunk Ireland’s population from eight million to four million. The famine had also caused massive displacement of Catholics from their land in the provinces of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught.

In Ulster, where the concentration of Protestants was the highest, political and economic power rested in their hands. In 1690, the Protestant king William III of England, also known as “the Prince of Orange,” had won a decisive battle over the Catholic king James of Scotland at the Battle of the Boyne. Protestants in Ulster showed their loyalty to the British Crown by donning orange sashes and lilies each July 12 to begin their marching season celebrating the victory. Marches were led by members of the Orange Order, Orange being the region in Holland that was originally William’s seat. A major facet of the celebration was the reenactment of the Battle of the Boyne in the town of Scarva each July 13, to the accompaniment of the beat of
lambeg
drums—a practice that continues to the present time.

The main industries in Ulster in Eileen’s time were linen manufacture, in which Quakers like Owen Sheridan’s family played a prominent role, and shipbuilding, which was controlled by Protestants. Although Quakers did not discriminate against Catholics in entry-level hiring, the skilled jobs generally went to Protestants. In Protestant-owned industries, preferential treatment in employment generally was given to Protestants.

At the time of Eileen’s birth, while Protestants and Catholics were coexisting in relative peace throughout the land, a movement known as Home Rule for Ireland had begun to gain traction after having been started in 1870. Home Rule would have given Ireland its own parliament within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought the Home Rule movement to a halt. Irish Protestants in general opposed Home Rule, but none more vigorously than the Ulster Protestants, who feared they would be subordinated to a Roman Catholic regime as well as lose their political and economic advantages. As early as 1905, Ulster Protestants began to take measures to defend and protect their position with the organization of the Ulster Unionist Council. By 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed and at its height was hundreds of thousands strong.

With the advent of World War I, it was widely thought that the Home Rule movement would be stayed. Meanwhile, a movement proclaiming an independent Irish Republic took hold in the south. It consisted of groups called the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, and on Easter Sunday in 1916, these groups took their cause to the streets by capturing the General Post Office in Dublin, holding out for almost a week against British troops. At the time, this movement did not have great support among Irish Catholics. However, when the British government executed the leaders of the rebellion as traitors, the tide of public opinion turned sharply in favor of the Republicans, or Sinn Féiners, as the rebels became known. As violence began to escalate all over the country, the Republican movement found its military leader in 1918 in the charismatic Michael Collins, and the movement gained strength. While most of the characters, including the O’Neills, Sheridans, and Conlons, are fictional, Michael Collins was a real person, though his actions and dialogue in this novel are used fictitiously. Irish Republican Army brigades were formed all over the country, including Ulster. Men fought under the IRA banner, and women enlisted in the auxiliary corps, known as Cumann na mBan. Eileen and James were members of these organizations.

When World War I ended in 1918, negotiations were renewed with Westminster to establish a separate parliament for Ireland. While violence raged in the streets, politicians negotiated, and in December 1920 the Government of Ireland Act was passed in Great Britain. Under pressure from Ulster Unionists, the act effectively partitioned six of the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster from the rest of Ireland, and Northern Ireland came into existence. However, the new Irish government, called the Dáil, refused to take their seats in the British House of Commons, setting up instead an independent Irish parliament called the Dáil Éireann. Thus, the battle raged on. Finally, in July 1921, Collins reluctantly agreed to a truce and in December of the same year signed a treaty that gave quasi-independent status to the twenty-three counties in three provinces of Ireland (Munster, Leinster, and Connaught), as well as three counties from the province of Ulster. The “Twenty-six” counties became known collectively as “the Free State.” The Free State gained complete political freedom from England in 1949 and became known as the Republic of Ireland. The treaty was unpopular everywhere in Ireland, and violence raged not only between Republicans and the British Army, but within the Republican ranks as pro- and antitreaty forces fought the Irish civil war. In August 1922, Collins was shot to death on a country road in County Cork. The identity of his assassins has never been confirmed. Even after Collins’s death, Republicans in Ulster, like James Conlon, continued to fight a guerrilla war, but little by little they were rounded up or driven out of the country with prices on their heads.

In 1998, following a peace accord known as the Good Friday Agreement, Republicans and Unionists in Northern Ireland formed a power-sharing assembly with the freedom to legislate a wide range of issues not reserved specifically for the British Parliament in Westminster.

Patricia Falvey was born in Northern Ireland. She was raised in Northern Ireland and England before immigrating to the United States at the age of twenty. Formerly a managing director with an international financial services firm, she now devotes herself full-time to writing and teaching. She divides her time between Dallas, Texas, and County Down, Northern Ireland.
The Yellow House
is her first novel.