Song of the Silent Harp (12 page)

If only he could help the boy to see what
he
had seen—the poverty, the defeat, the squalor…the
misery.

“Morgan didn't leave,” the boy said with a calm that fired Michael's anger even more. “He chose to stay and work to make things better.”

“Morgan is Morgan—and perhaps a bit of a fool! Thousands upon thousands are fighting to get out of Ireland, to come here to America! They want what you already have—what you seem to hold so cheaply. Doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that all those hordes of people are so anxious to leave behind
what you seem to think is so grand?”

“I still want to go. I want to go because I'm Irish.” The maturity and strength in the boy's voice chilled Michael.

“You're an
American.
And you should thank God every day for it!”

Tierney stared at him and, not for the first time, Michael felt a stirring of apprehension at the hooded, unreadable expression in his son's eyes.

Furious with the boy—and even more with himself for once again losing his temper with his son—Michael shoved his chair back from the table. “Eat your supper. Your foolishness has cost me my appetite. I'll be doing some reading.”

He half-expected the boy to defy him; he did so often lately. But Tierney simply lowered his eyes and went on eating.

In the bedroom, Michael sank down onto the rocking chair that had been Eileen's. For a long time he sat there, unmoving, staring at the bed he had slept in alone for so many years. A longing for his wife welled up in him, bringing him close to tears. He had not missed her this much in a long, long time, and he suddenly felt a dreadful, cold loneliness. His wife was lost to him, and he was beginning to wonder if his son wouldn't one day be lost to him as well. He did not understand the boy—in truth, he never had—but that did not diminish his love for the lad. He only wanted…what? For Tierney to be like him?

Sure, and that was a joke. Tierney was like no one else—not himself, nor Eileen, nor anyone else that Michael could think of. Tierney was different. And it was a difference Michael did not understand, a difference that almost frightened him at times. What would the boy come to down the years?

He had such dreams for his son—for both of them. He wasn't going to stay a police sergeant forever. He had set his sights on Tammany Hall, had already made some contacts he believed would take him there. By the time Tierney was fully grown, he hoped to be in a position to help him become whatever he wanted to be. But the boy seemed to have no dream, no dream at all, except to be as…as
Irish
as possible. And what kind of a dream was that?

Michael closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the cushion of the chair. Suddenly he wished he didn't feel so old. So old and so tired and so fiercely alone.

Da would never understand. He expected his son to share his dreams, not to have dreams of his own.

Tierney pushed his plate away and propped one elbow on the table, resting his chin in his hand. Well, he
did
have his dreams, and they had nothing at
all to do with his father's.

It wasn't that he didn't love his da. Of course, he loved him, and he didn't relish making him sad. But he couldn't help the way he was nor would he change. Sometimes he wished that a man like Morgan Fitzgerald had been his father. He would have understood, would have encouraged his love for Ireland. Da never would. He loved New York and simply could not understand anyone who did not.

Well,
he
did not love New York—he
hated
it. He hated its filth and noise, its churning masses of people. He hated it most of all for the way the entire city hated the Irish.

Tierney got up, walked to the window, and looked out upon the snow falling into the city night.

They'd keep us beggars if they could. In their eyes we're nothing but dumb animals, fit only for hauling the manure from their streets, killing their rats, ironing their clothes, putting out their fires
—
or policing their precious city.

Well, he wanted no part of this ugly place—he would
be
no part of it, not ever. He belonged to Ireland. In a way he couldn't begin to understand, in a way he could never have put into words, the country owned him.

One day he would go. He would travel the length and breadth of it, absorb it, merge with it, become one with it. Ireland was his home as New York could never be. Ireland was the mother he longed for, the bosom friend he craved, the missing part of his heart.

Somewhere in Ireland, Tierney Burke would find his destiny.

9

Ill fares the land, to hastening iils a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

O
LIVER
G
OLDSMITH
(
1728-1774
)

London

R
oger Gilpin was no gentleman.

Evan Whittaker had been in the man's employ only days before making that judgment, and now, eleven years of service later, his opinion had changed not a whit. Sir Roger could be incredibly crude in his manners and attitudes; he had a problem with spirits, and his behavior when he had been drinking ranged from disagreeable to intolerable. He seemed to delight in ignoring the authorities, insulting his contemporaries, and destroying his enemies—who numbered many. Even in the eyes of his few friends, he was often a bore. To his servants, he was thoughtless, bullying, and downright intimidating. Evan seemed to be the only soul in his employ to whom Sir Roger gave even a measure of grudging
respect. More surprising yet, he seemed to have actually become somewhat dependent on his reserved, mild-mannered secretary.

Evan supposed he was nearly indispensable to his difficult employer. He didn't arrive at this conclusion by way of conceit; it was just the way things appeared to be, however inexplicable the reasons. It was a fact that he wasn't in the least intimidated by Sir Roger. He stood steady in the face of Gilpin's frequent storms of rage. Indeed, Evan's mother had always called him “unflappable,” though his father had thought him hardheaded. At any rate, his phlegmatic disposition seemed immune to whatever cruelty Roger Gilpin had a mind to inflict.

Evan Whittaker was, in fact, the only employee who had ever remained at Gilpin Manor for longer than a year. The vulgar, self-important Sir Roger certainly did not inspire loyalty on the part of those who worked for him. Evan was an oddity, and perhaps that was a part of his appeal.

He had often been asked by his peers, and on occasion by one or more of Gilpin's acquaintances, why he
had
stayed with the difficult Sir Roger all this time. He had been offered a number of other positions over the years, and admittedly, he had considered leaving more than once. After careful thought, however, he always managed to talk himself out of the idea. His wages were outstanding, his living quarters more than comfortable, and he had grown used to the irascible widower.

Another possibility loomed in his mind, but he preferred not to dwell on it—it made him appear so
dull,
even to himself. Could he have become so complacent about his life and indifferent to the monotony of his days that he was unwilling to muster either the energy or the courage to make a change?

Of course, there
had
been a time when he would have welcomed an adventure. A shy, quiet youngster, he'd grown up as the only son—and a somewhat frail one, at that—of an aging clergyman in a small, depressed village near Portsmouth.

As a boy, Evan had been plagued by a dreadful stammer, mocked, and ostracized by his peers in the schoolyard. His father had encouraged him to be brave and to trust God, and the lad had managed to obey at least half of his father's injunction. He learned to trust God, but the bravery never seemed to follow.

And so Evan retreated into his books. Only there did the young outcast find what he was looking for—adventure, romance, the opportunity, through his
imagination, to become the swashbuckling hero of his dreams. There he did not stutter; there he was not ridiculed by pig-faced schoolboys; there, at last, he liked himself.

Evan Whittaker found his courage, and he found his faith. But he never seemed to find both in the same place.

Even now, in his mid-thirties, Evan had difficulty reconciling the two. He still read avidly, and his literary tastes remained very much the same. He
did
enjoy a good adventure novel about explorers or pirates, and he had no trouble at all imagining himself as the danger-defying hero, complete with a cape slung casually over his shoulder and a sword on his hip.

And Evan still trusted God. His faith, marked by a simple life of devotion, sustained him in his encounters with his ill-tempered employer and supported him in the mundane execution of his duties.

Have faith and be brave,
his father had said. Well, Evan's life incorporated both—his heart rooted in the reality of Christ, his imagination caught up in the vast possibilities of fantasy.

Yet something was missing. When Evan allowed himself the luxury of thinking about it, he realized with a pang of regret that the two significant parts of his life had never merged. There was no bravery in his faith, no courageous acting out of his love for God. And there was no faith in the bravery of his imaginative heroism—no spiritual life beyond the sheer joy of adventuring with the fictional characters that populated his books.

Something, indeed, was missing. Somehow, somewhere, the two should have come together.

These days, however, he had little time for considering such philosophical imponderables; he had all he could do to keep up with his regular duties. This exasperating business in Ireland kept Sir Roger in a continual fit of temper, which in turn kept the household in a constant state of chaos. Evan invariably found himself with more letters to pen, more dinners to plan, and more frequent tantrums and bouts of rage to placate.

At the moment, Sir Roger was using Whittaker's presence in the library as an audience for his rage. And, as always seemed to be the case these days, the object of his wrath was Ireland.

“Killala!”
Sir Roger spit out, pacing the length of the library. “I have never laid eyes on the squalid little pit—only
God
knows and cares where it is!”

His employer's reference to God made Evan blink and draw a tired sigh, for the man certainly had no acquaintance whatever with the Creator. “I believe it's located near a bay in western Ireland, sir,” Evan offered, going on with his careful copying of the letter Gilpin had just dictated to George Cotter. “Very remote.”

“I know
that!”
Gilpin snarled. Sir Roger had been pacing the room for the better part of an hour as he dictated. At last he stopped and turned to Evan, who lifted his eyes from the letter he was transcribing.

A tall, gaunt man with long legs, white hair, and large, slightly bulging eyes, Roger Gilpin never failed to remind Evan of an aging, frost-coated grasshopper. Indeed, “Grasshopper” was Evan's private name for his employer.

“I
asked
you your opinion of that fool Cotter's letter!” Sir Roger crossed his long, thin arms over his chest and fixed Evan with a baleful glare. “Well?”

Clearing his throat, Evan stared at the pen in his hand. “Ah, w-well, of course, the agent had no right…n-no right at all…to defy your instructions, Sir Roger.” Knowing how annoying the Grasshopper found his habitual stammer, Evan now gave it free rein. “Ah…although I must s-say I can appreciate that an undertaking of this n-n-nature might well contain difficulties we haven't c-c-considered. P-perhaps, if m-mass eviction is the only feasible solution, we need to give the agent m-more time.” Evan beamed a slightly vacuous smile at his employer from his chair at the desk.

“Oh, for pity's sake, man, can't you just say whatever you mean and stop that hemming and hawing?” Sir Roger's mouth thinned even more. “Can't you get that fixed somehow, that tic of yours?”

So now it was a tic. Only last week it had been a plague. Over the years the dreaded stammer had evoked such misnomers as “croak,” “twitch,” and “splutter.” Perhaps the Grasshopper was mellowing.

“I'm sorry, s-sir, but I don't b-believe there's any…f-fixing for it.” Evan did his best to look humiliated.

Sir Roger grunted and again began to pace. “Well, as to Cotter—he's supposed to be in charge out there! He's the land agent, and the land agent's job is to take charge of the tenants, isn't that so?”

Matching his words to his quickening pace, he spilled them out in a frenzy. “I don't pay him to let those shiftless freeloaders make a monkey out of him! Not that it wouldn't be easy enough to do—the man is a fool!”

After one more pass across the room, he stopped in front of the fireplace, where only a thin, feeble flame continued to fight its way between the logs. Reaching for the poker, Sir Roger began punching the fire back to life. When he straightened, he resorted to a mannerism Evan had always found oddly intriguing: after opening his mouth to a wide, gaping cavern, he snapped it shut with a smacking sound.
The Grasshopper.

He now came back to the desk and picked up the letter from Cotter which lay near Evan's hand. “What were you able to find out about this—Fitzgerald creature?”

Evan shifted slightly on his chair, fastening his eyes on the book-lined wall across the room. Intense concentration seemed to relieve the stammer somewhat, and at the moment he thought it best to be precise. “Apparently, Morgan Fitzgerald is something of a…an enigma. Part p-poet, part vagabond, and p-part folk hero. He sounds f-formidable: big—very big—with an unruly m-mane of copper hair and, according to Quincy Moore, our c-correspondent, the ‘strength of a Druid oak tree.'” Evan felt a delicious shiver wind its way down his spine; Moore's description could have been right from the pages of one of his favorite adventure novels.

Aware of Gilpin's impatient squirming but entirely unperturbed by it, Evan smoothed the sheet of vellum in front of him, aligning its four corners with those of the desk, just so. Then, fastening his eyes once more on the bookshelves—this time on the brass candlesticks—he continued. “Apparently F-Fitzgerald is a writer held in great esteem—a ‘poet p-patriot,' Moore says.” Evan glanced from the candlesticks to Sir Roger. “Ah…then there's the…association with the Y-Young Irelanders, as you know.”

Sir Roger swore and again waved the letter in his hand. “The man is a common thug! He almost killed George Cotter!” He paused, then added sourly, “Not that it would be any great loss.”

Evan bristled. Fitzgerald might be a great many things, but he was certainly no common thug. No, indeed. The man sounded anything but common.

Perversely enjoying his employer's agitation, Evan warmed to his subject, paraphrasing parts of Moore's letter as he went on. “Fitzgerald s-seems to be quite well known f-for his writings in the…
The Nation.”
Oh, dear, now he'd done it. Even the mention of the radical Young Ireland news journal was enough to set Sir Roger's teeth to rattling.

Hurrying on before his employer could let fly one of his florid streams of profanity, Evan explained, “Fitzgerald seems to be a highly…educated m-man. Until recently, he was best known for his p-poems and satirical essays, but it seems these days he's d-dipping his pen more and more into the ink of rebellion.”

Sir Roger's eyes bugged out, and his mandible dropped down, presumably preparing for an expression of disgust, but Evan hurried on; he had saved the juiciest morsel for last and was not about to be denied his thunder. “As for this next observation: Moore stresses that it's p-purely rumor, although George Cotter is apparently convinced it's so.”

The letter in Sir Roger's hand now crumpled as he clenched both fists and waited, his long, homely face set in a terrible scowl.

Evan drew a long, steadying breath and set his gaze on the list of instructions he'd been copying. “It seems that for months now there have been…s-stories of a mysterious rebel leader and his men who are up to all manner of mischief in C-Connacht, especially in County Mayo.”

Gilpin's eyes narrowed, and he looked to be in the throes of some sort of fit.
“A rebel leader?”

“Yes. Well…Mr. Moore says these p-primitive folk in the west have a tendency to imbue their outlaws, as well as their heroes, with l-larger-than-life attributes, even supernatural traits. This rebel leader would seem to be a case in point. They c-call him the, ah, the Red Wolf.” A chill of delight gripped Evan as he uttered the name. What a
splendid
tale this was!

“Those who claim to have seen him, this…Red Wolf…say he and his marauders ride only at night. They say he has a head of c-curly copper hair and rides an enormous wild red stallion. Supposedly he and his men come charging down out of the hills when least expected, d-do their dirty work, and then simply…d-disappear back into the mountains and the mist.”

Really, this would make the most wonderful novel…

Realizing Sir Roger had asked him a question, Evan blinked, then looked up at him. “I'm s-sorry, sir?”

“I
said,
what
sort
of dirty work?”

“Oh—well, nothing too violent, actually. They've k-killed some c-cattle from time to time—a few head of yours, I'm afraid, Sir Roger. They steal grain, drive horses out of their p-paddocks, provide p-protection to men on the run—that kind of thing. The peasants adore them, it seems, because they drop…b-baskets of food at cottages throughout the villages and do other miscellaneous…good deeds for the poor unfortunates.”