Trinity: A Novel of Ireland

by Leon Uris

  "I suggest you are not leaving here until I find out."

  "I think you'd better tell Lady Caroline," Swan said.

  "I'm sorry but I shall have to refuse."

  "Then I'll tell you," Caroline said. "You went to this girl's priest and coerced him into betraying the confidence of the confessional by threatening her life, isn't that so, Mr. Herd?"

  Silence devoured the library.

  "Oh, God," Caroline cried, "don't act so shocked, Roger, you either, Max. It's so unbecoming."

  "How did you find out!" Roger shrieked crazily.

  "Our son told me, that's how."

  "Jeremy told you! Jeremy!"

  "The priest was distraught to the point of insanity for what he had been made to do and he came to Jeremy for forgiveness, then turned himself in to his Bishop. What a bunch of gangsters!"

  "But . . . but you've known all along. You've known and put us through this whole charade . . ."

  "Yes, I've known, Roger. I've known about Molly O'Rafferty from the day Jeremy met her. You see, gentlemen, you've gone to a lot of trouble for nothing."

  At that, Caroline stalked from the library and left them gaping.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Atty Fitzpatrick closed the cottage door behind her. She walked over the room and stopped before the rocking chair where Conor sat limply as he sat for most of his waking hours. He glanced up to her for an instant, then lowered his stare to the floor.

  "We've all been worried sick over you," she said. "We've spoken of little else."

  He made no reply.

  "I'm going to stay with you for a while."

  "You'd clear out if you were wise," he mumbled.

  "I've not been accused of that particular quality," she answered.

  "Don't moon over me, Atty. I'll not have anyone braying in sympathy. Take your motherly love elsewhere. I'm nae worth the trouble any longer."

  "Live if you can, Conor, die if you must, but you cannot go on in limbo any longer."

  "You don't know what's going on in this room, Atty. The agony and sickness of it will murder you if you stay."

  She held her ground, showing no iota of intention to turn back. Since his escape from Portlaoise Prison he had flooded her thoughts. Strange, strange, strange. Atty Fitzpatrick, the righteous champion who exhausted herself giving to causes and causes and causes. Yet in all that giving she had never really given herself to a single person unabashedly. No true emptying of oneself to another human. She craved to give it all to Conor Larkin without hope of reward, self-fulfillment or even so much as a thank you. Why?

  "I'm not going to let you sink, man," she said strongly.

  Conor looked up to her curiously.

  Oh, Lord, she cried inside, the pain in him. One of his eyes danced off wildly in another direction, the stare of a madman. I must do something about it.

  "I am going to touch you, Conor," she said. "It will not be the touch of Shelley MacLeod. You'll not feel her again. But what you will feel from me is life. The life inside me begs to transfuse to you. Don't fight me, man, please don't fight me."

  She reached out tentatively and, frightened, placed her hand gently on his head. He accepted it, registering neither joy nor resentment. Ever so slowly Atty pressed closer until she stood above him within whispering distance. Her hands drew his head to her belly and she held him hard against it.

  For a time he remained rigid, then he closed his eyes and groaned and brought his own arms about her waist and buried himself in the compassion that flowed out of her every pore.

  *

  The Baron Louis de Lacy's estate, Dunleer, lay hauntingly in the lunarscape of Connemara in County Galway. His barony stretched thousands of acres, encompassing dozens of the hundreds of lakes that pocked the area. The land drifted up into the Twelve Bens, mountains of naked stone mass, Benbaun, Bencorr, Benbreen, Benbrack and the rest, hovered over a moor like bog and a fairy coast of hidden coves and strands and plunging fjords. This mystic De Lacy domain was all but bidden to the human eye, a wonderment of emptiness. Once out of the foothills an island-inundated archipelago peppered a water world from bay to open sea.

  The De Lacys were old Norman Catholic aristocracy of the vaunted "Tribes of Galway" eccentricized by generations of Connemara wilderness. Dunleer demesne was part of that tragic heritage, the land to which Oliver Cromwell had condemned the Irish into exile.

  The present Baron, affectionately called "Lord Louie," had recently closed out a distinguished career in the British Navy and consular service and retreated to Dunleer to breed Connemara ponies and continue his mania as a Gaelic scholar.

  Lord Louis was also an ardent republican and made no bones about it. Secretly, he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Although he remained outside of the Supreme Council, he was in constant communication with Long Dan Sweeney and Dunleer figured heavily in Brotherhood plans.

  On the day Conor Larkin made his escape he was spirited to Dunleer and hidden. Gored and within himself, the only human presence he allowed or even recognized was Atty Fitzpatrick.

  But even Atty could not reach him. Truly reach him. There was only enough contact between them to keep hell from devouring him. She was able to force him out of the cottage where the gloom was not so consuming and she would ride behind him at a safe distance as he blurred off into the foothills of the Twelve Bens where he contemplated endlessly above the scatter of lakes and islands and the morbid flats of granite and bog. In that bittersweet wilderness he was in places and things unknown to Atty.

  She asked nothing and gave everything. Her patience was endless and she rewarded herself in fractionary signs that he was returning to life. Bits and pieces, but life, nonetheless.

  Although Conor touched her, lay down beside her, broke often in her arms, he showed no inkling of desire to make love. Atty wondered if that was dead in him forever.

  As Conor inched back it was also time for him to move on from Dunleer. Lord Louie was dispatched by the Supreme Council to see the German ambassador in London, where a working contact had been established. Both the Brotherhood and the Germans were in the business of disrupting the British and so they had grounds for mutual cooperation. An arrangement was made for a rendezvous at sea.

  Months later on a night in October of 1908, Lord Louie de Lacy and Conor Larkin made their way to the nearby fishing village of Roundstone where his yacht Grainne Uaile was docked. At sunset they slipped from the harbor and sailed past Slyne Head where a meeting at sea was kept with a small German freighter, the Baden-Baden.

  Two weeks later Conor crossed over the Canadian border into the United States to contact Joe Devoy, leader of the American Dan of the Gaels. His mission, to raise money for an underground newspaper and arms, those two most vital instruments of insurrection.

  *

  In Conor's absence, growth of the Brotherhood remained stunted, weak and without the ear of the masses. It had but a single canon, freedom from England. As a revolutionary movement it made its own legitimacy by infiltrating the Gaelic League, the Athletic Association, the labor unions, Sinn Fein Party, the boy scouts, the intellectual societies and even the Church.

  Yet the Brotherhood meticulously wrote the textbook for future revolutionaries of the century and Conor Larkin had indelibly inscribed his name in it. His principle of non-recognition of British institutions on Irish soil and disobedience to British authority became a universally accepted cornerstone for breaking the yoke of the colonizer.

  It was largely the hold of the Church on the Irish people that deterred them from rising against their masters. A few priests here and there, acting on their own, identified with the movement, but the bishops deplored the Brotherhood no less than the Devil hated holy water.

  What the Church really feared was the free thought that emanated from the urban society. Dublin of the era was the cesspool of Europe, owning the highest mortality rate, with Moscow running a distant second. Yet the Church was the bitter enemy of the trade unions, the Gaelic revival
and all that intellectualism that challenged their stranglehold. Moreover, the cities fomented secret societies whose members were not divulged in the confessionals. The Church deplored secret societies although none was more secretive than the Church itself.

  The cities bred dangerous ideas such as freedom from England. Obviously, any movement which won Irish independence would seek liberation from the totalitarianism of the Church as well. In church politics, the British had bestowed privileges and exclusive domains which had to be protected.

  Its essential grip on the people was locked into an agrarian culture. Out in the small villages and towns the parish priest was able to impose a doctrinaire hold with little question or opposition.

  In 1908 the Vatican poured queer oil on the troubled Irish waters, hastening unrest by the decree of Ne Temere.

  It had been the custom to accept mixed marriages with the sons following the father's religion and the girls taking after the mother. After centuries of holy wars, inquisitions, crusades, Reformation and Counter Reformation, the twentieth century was greeted as a coming of light. It was not to be.

  Ne Temere in a fell swoop invalidated all mixed marriages except when performed by the Catholic Church with the coercion that children of such marriages be signed away at birth to be raised as Catholics. Ne Temere plunged Ireland back into a dark age. The bigotry of it fell right in line with the most dire predictions of Ulster's frothing Protestant clergy. The Oliver Cromwell Maclvors lost no time in reacting and no St. Bartholomew's massacre could have supplied more fuel for their paranoia.

  *

  Two months after Conor Larkin arrived in America the first trial and execution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood took place halfway around the world in Australia. A special task force located, abducted and tried Doxie O'Brien, finding him guilty of the most heinous of Irish crimes, informing. After a written confession he was dispatched by a single bullet to the brain.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hubble Manor lay in a week-long coma. The upstairs maids who changed bed linens gossiped down the news that the Earl and Countess had not slept together during this period, which coincided with them not eating together and canceling all joint engagements.

  It was Roger who crossed no man's land into his wife's boudoir. Caroline showed pasty effects of the silent warfare. She had gone over her arguments again and again, justified her anger, tossed sleeplessly, brinked on surrender, then stiffened each time.

  What would she say now? Should she explode on him or adopt an attitude of conciliation? She knew how rooted his feelings were. She toyed with the idea of capitulation. At any rate Roger would be the epitome of calm, that was for certain. Roger never brooded this long on a problem without becoming deadly. Listen, don't leap, she told herself. Don't let him egg you into a rage.

  "I think we'd better have a go at it," he said, "bearing in mind that a single misdirected spark is liable to blow this place apart. This is serious, Caroline, terribly, terribly serious. The worst that's happened to us in our twenty-five years."

  Caroline unfolded herself slowly from the chaise longue. Her hair was down, long and sensuous as she wore it to bed, and she was without cosmetics. Lines of aging had deepened in the past week. Still, she looked hauntingly lovely.

  "You humiliated me," he said. "Made a complete ass of me not only in the eyes of the Brigadier and Herd, but in your own eyes as well."

  "Is that what's bothering you, that you were made to look foolish?"

  "It's damned well part of it. What really hurt was you and Jeremy in this conspiracy behind my back."

  "Conspiracy? What conspiracy? The boy wrote to me months and months ago that he had fallen desperately in love but begged me not to tell his father. I told him he had to but he was afraid. Father wouldn't understand, that's what he said, Father wouldn't understand. It's the understatement of the decade. Father has never understood, not from the first day of his life. Father has made a career out of not understanding."

  "Are you done?"

  "Company spies in your son's bedroom, Roger. Why didn't you get photographs of them making love as well!"

  Roger held up his hand for her to stop. "I shall overlook the insinuations you've built into your remarks."

  "Insinuations, hell," she snapped, "they are accusations. Second-story snoops taking a count of sheets and towels. It's the most despicable, utterly disgusting thing I've ever heard of."

  "Jeremy Hubble is not some greengrocer's son. Nothing on God's earth can change the fact that he will become the Twelfth Earl of Foyle. He is the logical and legitimate inheritor of lands and factories valued at tens of millions. I have not only the right but the duty to protect the interests of this family . . . your father included."

  "Perhaps, if you had given the boy some sense of friendship, he would have sought you out when he had a problem."

  Roger laughed sarcastically. "Lovely how all of this has been twisted around to being my fault. I suppose it is also my fault that I'm his father and he was born to be Viscount Coleraine."

  "What's that to do with a boy falling in love with a girl?"

  "Everything, Caroline. The boy has had obligations all his life that preclude this kind of romantic nonsense."

  "Yes, poor Jeremy, through no fault of his, or ours, is the Viscount Coleraine. Alas, he is not so cunning as his father when he was Viscount. Lord Roger would fathom nothing less than a suitable marriage calculated to razor's edge. Jeremy just went out there and fell in love like some untitled slob. Well, Roger, he's in love and he didn't ask his daddy's permission. What on earth are we going to do?"

  Roger allowed her sparks to fizz out and waited for her to calm. "I suggest that Jeremy hasn't the faintest notion if he is in love or baying at the moon like a dog in heat."

  "Not entirely unlike his mother used to be," Caroline cracked. "Isn't it strange that you found my Paris attic capers so wildly exciting but see the same thing in your own son as vulgar. Or maybe you'd care to strike me off the list as well."

  "Stop distorting things, Caroline. The point of it is that his mother's skirts have shielded him through his entire life from his responsibilities."

  They glared, both realizing they were peaking their anger too harshly and too quickly and knew it had better come under control, for they were reaching a plateau where permanent damage could be inflicted.

  Caroline paced, wrung her hands and tears welled in her eyes. "Roger," she pleaded in a whisper, "what do you want from the boy? He's a plain, simple, loving sort of young man whose friends adore him. He hasn't a mean bone in his body. The reason you're alienated is because you've tried to make him into something he isn't. He's neither a driven tycoon like Freddie, a righteous Ulster man nor pretender to any ancient thrones. He's not his brother Christopher, all perked up to assume the family glory. Why in the name of God can't you accept him for what he is and love him?"

  Roger stared from the window to the great stretch of green below, then turned slowly. "I'll tell you what Jeremy is," he said grimly. "He is the recurring nightmare that has cursed the Hubble family."

  "All right, you've said it," Caroline snapped. "Jeremy and your father, Arthur, are one and the same. Dear old stuttering Arthur living on the dole, terrified of the drums and marching, terrified of life. Resolved: Jeremy is Jeremy is Arthur."

  Roger slumped and held his head for a moment. "I've fought it," he said, "but there is no use fighting it any longer. Do you know what it means to give up on your own son?" he moaned. "I know he'd destroy in a decade what we've taken generations to build, I know that. And so he will become Christopher's ward . . . just as my father was mine."

  "Make an arrangement that will let the boy live in peace," she pleaded. "He's known all along that Christopher will run things. He accepts that and doesn't resent it."

  "Oh, Lord, if it were only that simple," Roger answered. "What diabolical quirk of fate made Christopher the youngest? No arrangement can ever change the fact that Jeremy will become the Earl of Foyle. Caroline
, understand this clearly. I and I alone am responsible for the continuation of our line. I shall not permit some trollop carrying someone's bastard to become the Countess of Foyle and have . . . that .. . become our future Earl."

  "Stop it, Roger!" Caroline cried. "Stop it! Molly O'Rafferty is an exquisite, delicate little creature blindly in love with our son. Don't speak lies. Speak to her, meet her, but for God's sake don't speak lies."

  "Is it a lie that she's a Roman Catholic?"

  "She'll convert in a minute."

  "She'll convert! She'll convert! How decent of her! We're not Belfast shipyard workers swapping wives, neighborhoods and religions."

  "Find it in your heart to bend, Roger, I beg you."

  "No," he said bluntly, "no."

  "Roger . . ."

  "Even if it were in my heart. . . even if she were half of what you claim, it would still be out of the question."

  "But why!"

  "We have entered the arena for the death struggle. War for this country will crash down on our heads within our lifetime. Do you think I can impose upon the people whose loyalty is vital to our existence a debauchery of their beliefs?"

  Caroline gaped and saw the man for the first time in her life. There seemed neither a shred of compassion for the two young people caught in his web nor an iota of ability to yield. Caroline was frightened.

  "Somewhere along the line" — her voice quivered — "we are going to have to make peace. If we don't, Jeremy and Christopher and their children will have to fight this whole thing over again. All we'll have managed in the end is to delay an Armageddon and pass this madness down to another generation. Can't we make our own little start by the simple human act of letting two young people in love show that there can be love in this place?"

  "You're being a bore, Caroline . . ."

  "Roger, you're frightening me."

  "And a hypocrite!"

  "How dare you!"

  "This latter-day Gladstonian liberalism is highly out of character," he said, coming to his feet and waving his arm in a sweep. "If my recollection does not fail me it was the Lady Caroline standing in the rear of the Long Hall cheering us on while Randolph Churchill played the Orange card. Where were you when your father and I and our cronies sliced Ireland up like a pie? Where were you when we were covering our dung after the shirt factory fire? Oh, you were there, all right, clear up to here, because you believed in what we were doing. And why? Because you wanted your million quid to gussy up Rathweed Hall and Hubble Manor and acquire art and culture and become a great and powerful lady. Oh, you were there all right, because your precious money and your precious power came from the same imperial experience that now makes you hold up your hands and wail. . . "Oh, Roger, why can't we get along with these people?" You, madam, in your heyday spending more money a week than the wages of every man in Weed Ship & Iron and the shirt factory combined. You and your token little house Catholics can neither absolve you of your sins nor transfer them conveniently to your husband and your father."