As they drove away he dared not look back.
ON the train for Dublin he sat with his pasteboard suitcase on his lap and tried to ignore the itching caused by his new woolen trousers, a gift from Dromoland. He felt certain that Mama would somehow know if he scratched himself in public.
Reminded of her, he removed his cap—his father’s beloved old Scarriff hat—and held it on his lap with the suitcase until he noticed that other passengers were heaving their luggage onto racks above the seats.
A few moments later a deep voice asked, “Is the seat beside you taken?”
“It is not taken,” Ned assured the stranger standing in the aisle.
The man introduced himself as Henry Mooney, and the two shook hands before he sat down. Mooney was of medium height, with rounded shoulders and brown hair. A heavy jaw dominated his face, but laugh lines bracketed his clear blue eyes.
At first their conversation was limited to an exchange of names and family connections. The trip was a long one, however, and soon they were chatting compamonably. “I’ve been working as a reporter for the Limerick Echo,” Mooney told Ned, “but now I’m going to Dublin to look for a job with one of the city papers. It’s my ambition to write feature articles. Something pungent and witty, perhaps,” he added with a chuckle.
Beyond the window a green blur of landscape swept by, foaming with billows of golden gorse—a plant always to be found in bloom somewhere in Ireland, no matter what the season. The newspaperman idly quoted, “When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of fashion,” then was surprised to see his young companion blush.
Was I ever that young and innocent? Henry Mooney wondered as he lit a cigarette. I’m not yet thirty, but he makes me feel ancient.
“Look out the window there, lad,” he said, leaning across Ned and enveloping him in a cloud of cigarette smoke and bay rum. “We’re in Tipperary now. See the signpost for Clonmel? The Irish Labor Party was founded here just this past June.”
“What do you know about them?” Ned asked as he peered through the smoke-grimed window. “Are they anything like Mr. Parnell’s Home Rule Party was?”
His seatmate smiled. He had taken an instant liking to the lad; there was a country softness in Ned’s speech, a country shyness in his gaze. But there was something proud in him as well, a set to his shoulders and a lift to his chin.
Henry Mooney discoursed, with humorous asides, on the labor movement as seen from the Limerick perspective. Ned listened with gratifying interest. Mooney spoke next of the recent death of Dublin-born Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, then moved on to the protest staged by British suffragettes in Dublin, the high cost of tobacco, and the recent riot in Belfast between Protestant and Catholic football supporters. He seemed to know something about everything.
“Where were you schooled, sir?” the boy asked admiringly.
Mooney gave a hearty guffaw. “Schooled? Why, most of what I know I found out for myself, lad. That’s how anyone learns anything. I went to the Boys’ National School at Killaloe with my cousins, the Reddens—don’t suppose you know them?—and then to Michael Walshe’s Intermediate until I realized there was more to the world than anyone was teaching me out of books. So I set out to find it.”
On impulse, Ned confided, “I’ve seen something of the world. I was on the Titanic.”
Mooney turned in his seat to stare at him. “Are you serious?”
“I am serious. My mother and father…” His words ground to a halt.
Mooney already had his notepad out and was scribbling furiously. A Titanic survivor! Providence had dropped the boy into his lap.
Ned regretted having spoken. He had grown wary of a river inside himself, a river of memories he kept dammed lest they flood through him and sweep him away. Staring fixedly out the window, he replied to the reporter’s questions with monosyllabic answers.
“You really don’t want to talk about this, do you?”
“I’m not bothered,” said Ned, but the older man recognized the polite lie. It was a deeply ingrained Irish trait, this business of telling people what they wanted to hear whether it was true or not.
Mooney put his notepad away and tactfully changed the subject. “So now you’re going up to Dublin. That’s a journey many Irish people never make in a lifetime. What do you know about the place?”
“Not very much.”
“The most important thing to remember,” Mooney said in a confidential tone, “is that it’s a foreign city. Always has been.”
“Sir?”
“Dublin was founded by the Vikings, overrun by the Normans, and now is English to the core, from Dublin Castle to the Viceregal Lodge. When you enter the Pale you leave Irish Ireland behind you.”
“You know Dublin well, sir?”
“Well enough to convince me it’s the place for a journalist to be now. Things are happening, my lad. Stirrings in the wind.” Mooney gave a wink and a nod but for once did not elaborate.
When Ned’s stomach began to rumble he produced a packet of bacon sandwiches his Aunt Norah had prepared for him and offered to share them with his seatmate. Mooney laughingly refused. “I don’t like to eat on an empty stomach.” Instead he withdrew a battered tin flask from his jacket pocket and took a deep pull.
The train lurched and shuddered on. Ireland sped past the windows.
“We’ll be in the Big Smoke before long, Ned,” Mooney said at last. “Is someone meeting you at the station?”
“No one is meeting me, but I am to go straightaway to…” The boy dug into a trouser pocket and produced a scrap of pasteboard. “To this address.”
Mooney took the embossed calling card and saw Lord Inchiquin’s name, then the name and address scrawled below: “Robert H. Beauchamp, solicitor, 25 Fitzwilliam Square South.” He gave a low whistle. “Very posh. I expect you will be well looked after, my young friend. But here…” He turned the card over and scribbled something on the back. “I shall be staying with a widowed cousin of mine, Louise Kearney, at number sixteen Middle Gardiner Street. She lets rooms to bachelors like myself. If you need someone to show you around the city, or if you’re simply lonely for a West of Ireland accent, call on me.”
“That’s very kind of you; I shall. But how do I find Gardiner Street?”
“Same way you find anything in Dublin; same way you find anything down the country, come to that: ask at the nearest public-house. Use Nelson’s Pillar as your landmark; Gardiner Street is but a short walk away. Where will you be lodging? Not with a solicitor in Fitzwilliam Square, surely.”
“I’m to be a boarding pupil at Saint Enda’s. It’s run by a man called Patrick Henry Pearse.”
“Pearse? Don’t know that I’ve heard of him.”
“You will,” Ned assured Mooney. “My parish priest says he’s going to revolutionize education in Ireland.”
KINGSBRIDGE Station, headquarters and terminus of the Great Southern and Western Railway Company, possessed an imposing sandstone facade in the style of a Renaissance palazzo. The colonnade was thronged with people. More spilled out into the roadway, competing for the horse-drawn hackney cabs lined up at curbside.
Ned was immediately conscious of being out of place, “up from the country.” His tweed jacket had a rustic cut he had not been aware of before. When he sought to engage a hackney cab the driver gave him a look that measured his age, his ignorance, and his ability to pay in one swift glance before signaling him to climb aboard.
The back of Ned’s neck burned red.
The blinkered bay mare trotted across Steevens’ Lane and headed east along the quays that lined the river Liffey. The street was paved with cobbles; iron horseshoes struck sparks from embedded tram tracks.
Ned almost choked on a cloying, yeasty aroma that struck him like a blow to the stomach. “What’s that smell?”
The driver chuckled. “Hops and grain to make Guinness, boyo. Mother’s milk. That’s the brewery wall there to yer right. Ye couldn’t begin to count the barrels of export stout
ferried from James’s Gate to the ships on Custom House Quay. Once ye’ve had Guinness and oysters at the Red Bank ye can die in a state o’ grace.”
As they whirled along the quays, the smell from the brewery was replaced by the pungent odor of the river with its load of sewage and industrial waste. The day darkened. A misty rain made the streets glisten and conferred a deceptive softness on the scene. Throughout Dublin electric lights winked on like stars.
A “foreign city”? Perhaps it was. Certainly one of the bridges spanning the dark waters of the Liffey was exotic. The cabby volunteered, “That’s the Wellington Bridge there, but we call it the Metal Bridge or the Ha’penny. Foot traffic only and a ha’penny to walk across it.1 See the tollgate on this side?”
The humpbacked bridge was surmounted with ornate curves of lacy ironwork forming arches reminiscent of cupolas in a Victorian garden. “It’s beautiful,” Ned breathed. “Like something out of a fairy tale.”
The driver flicked his whip at the mare, who slanted one ear back at him but continued to clop along at the same steady pace. “I can show ye much better sights than that, young fellow-me-lad. Only cost ye a…shilling, say?”
The man must take me for a fool, thought Ned. A shilling indeed, when a penny would buy a packet of Lyons’ Tea or a pint of paraffin oil for the lamp. “Just Fitzwilliam Place, thank you.”
The driver shrugged.
Ned felt a pleasurable stir of anticipation. Since the Titanic he had been aware of a numbness, an echoing hollow at the center of his being. He had been too dazed to appreciate New York properly. But the numbness was beginning to wear off. Perhaps it had begun when Síle Duffy touched his hand. Unconsciously, he smiled.
Chapter Eight
THE cab threaded its way among countless bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles of every description, while an occasional Humber or Panhard testified to the increasing prominence of the motorcar. At the widest of the bridges spanning the Liffey a number of electric trams converged, bells clanging, beneath a spiderweb of overhead cables. Showers of sparks flashed from the trolley heads as the heavily laden transports swung and swayed. A massive Daimler with goggled chauffeur cut out of the traffic and sped past with hooting horn, only to find its way blocked by a motorized Argyll delivery van.
There were not thirty automobiles in all of Clare; seeing even one had been an event. And as for double-decker electric trams…! To a boy from the west of Ireland, Dublin was as alien as New York.
Ned observed that Dublin men dressed in suits ranging from Saville Row tailoring to charity castoffs. The prosperous sported shiny top hats. Most of the others, even laborers replacing stone cobbles in the street, wore bowlers.
Ragged barefoot boys scurried from one corner to another, delivering laundry baskets almost larger than themselves or trying to cadge pennies from pedestrians. Adult peddlers shouting colorful slogans pushed hand barrows selling everything from fish to clothing.
Fashionable women wore long narrow skirts, and no costume was complete without an eye-catching hat and pristine gloves. The poorer classes dressed in shabby secondhand goods, often layering their entire wardrobes over their bodies. Among them were the traditionally garbed women known as “shawlies,” who looked much as their great-grandmothers had.
Faces from every social class bore mute testimony to the ravages of smallpox, while over all hung an effluvium composed of coal fires and horse manure, public abattoirs and private slaughterhouses.
As the cab progressed through the city, they encountered a Scots Guards band piping its way in advance of a small detachment of troops. A handful of small boys strutted along behind in irreverent imitation.
Ned had never seen so many uniformed soldiers before. They were everywhere. Not content to parade in the streets, they strode the footpaths of Dublin as if it was their town. The citizenry gave way to them with lowered eyes. Ned recalled something Father Hagerty had once said under his breath, as if afraid the bishop would overhear him: “The army of occupation…”
The driver drew up with a flourish. “Ho, Bella! Twenty-five Fitzwilliam Square,” he announced.
Ned looked up to find himself in front of a handsome five-storey Georgian house, one of a terraced row built of cut stone with polished brass door knockers, classical fanlights, and pelmetted draperies visible through tall windows. Each house staked its claim to individuality by painting its front door a different color.
There could be no mistake; this was an enclave of the gentry.
Ned exited the cab in an undignified scramble and stood holding his cap in his hand while the cabdriver set his suitcase on the pavement.
The man cleared his throat.
Ned’s cheeks burned as he dug into his pocket, seeking coins. Then he hefted his case and started up a flight of well-scrubbed marble steps. Behind him, the driver called, “Gee up, Bella,” and cracked the whip, but Ned did not look around. His eyes were fixed on the door, which was painted a glossy dark red and bore a discreet brass nameplate reading “R. Beauchamp.”
Tentatively he fingered the lion’s head knocker. Before he could hit the striker plate the door opened and a spare, elderly man gazed out at him. “Sir?” He managed to inject both courtesy and chilly dignity into the single syllable.
“I’m here to see Mr. Beauchamp.”
One eyebrow lifted fractionally. “May I have your name?”
“I am called Ned…er, Edward Halloran.”
“And your business, Mr. Halloran?”
Ned felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck. “Lord Inchiquin sent me,” he claimed as he fumbled for the bit of pasteboard that could identify him. He could not find it.
His inquisitor waited impassively.
One last, frantic dig in his jacket pocket produced the precious card. Ned held it up with a flourish. “Here!”
At once the butler relieved him of his suitcase and took a half step backward. “This way,” he said, drawing the boy inside with a sweeping gesture of his free hand.
“EVERYTHING has a price, Ned. The price of your education was your parents’ lives, if you want to look at it that way,” said Robert Beauchamp later that afternoon as they sat beside the fire in his high-ceilinged drawing room. The solicitor, a heavyset man in his mid-fifties whose buff waistcoat strained across his ample paunch, frowned when the boy flinched at his words. “Forgive me, I am a blunt man. I find it saves time. I appreciate the same quality in others, though it is in rare supply in this benighted land.
“My lord Inchiquin fortunately shares my view to some extent. He sent me only the briefest of missives concerning you, but that was quite sufficient to allow me to make the necessary arrangements. I am to pay the school direct for the cost of your tuition and books, and you are to receive a small personal allowance every month so you will have a few coins to jingle in your pocket. I trust you appreciate my lord’s generosity.”
“I do sir,” Ned said hastily.
Beauchamp went on. “You will spend the night here with us, then tomorrow my coachman will take you to Saint Enda’s. They are expecting you. Though why Lucius O’Brien is willing to fund an education in such an establishment is quite beyond me.”
“It was my family’s choice, sir,” the boy replied.
“But surely there are more appropriate schools. You are Church of Ireland, I assume?”
Ned met his eye squarely. “I’m not a Protestant, sir; I’m a Catholic.”
“Ah. I see.” Beauchamp leaned back in the satin-striped wing chair and tented his fingers. “Lucius did not bother to explain that in his letter. It makes all the difference, of course. No Trinity College for you then, and a school in England is quite out of the question. Saint Enda’s it is. First thing in the morning.”
“Is it not a good school, sir? I was told—”
“Oh, I’m certain it’s quite good enough,” Beauchamp assured him.
The unspoken qualifier hung in the air between them. Ned could hear it. Good enough for an Irish Catholic.
That night Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp held one of their “musical evenings,” an occasion that included dinner for a select group of friends, followed by a piano performance in the drawing room. Ned was not invited. He ate his supper in the servants’ hall under the stern eye of the cook, then went to bed in a small bedroom on the top floor. As he lay sleepless he could hear the music drifting up to him and found himself missing the sound of Frank’s snoring.
The next morning he was driven to Saint Enda’s by the Beauchamps’ coachman. A bobtailed gray gelding, its head drawn unnaturally high by a check rein, was harnessed to the solicitor’s sidecar. Once Mr. Beauchamp had used the sidecar for business around the city, but he now preferred his Peugeot. He liked to drive himself and had no compunction about parking the motorcar on footpaths and blocking pedestrian traffic.
Ned wondered what Mama would have said if she could see her son traveling like gentry with a liveried coachman.
Then Beauchamp’s words came back to him: The price of your education was your parents’ lives…
The city dwindled behind them. In the distance rose the gentle shoulders of the Dublin mountains. Black-and-white sheepdogs sat guardian beside cottage gates, cats slumbered on windowsills, cows grazed in fields beside the road. Ned and the coachman chatted; rather, the coachman talked and Ned listened attentively.
“Rathfarnham up ahead,” said the man, interrupting a rambling tale about himself, his brother, and a three-legged dog.
Rathfarnham was no great distance from Dublin geographically, but miles away in atmosphere. Though it boasted paved roads, a variety of shops, and even a tram station, like other villages ringing the urban center it was still a country town. People greeted the sidecar with a wave or a friendly nod.
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