1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “And do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Oh.” A small word, softly whispered. She leaned toward him and laid the tips of her fingers against his cheek. “I’ll be honest with you. The first moment I saw you again, down by the quays that day, I liked you. Is that very bold of me?”

  “I don’t know.” Ned stared with unseeing eyes at the sea. He was trying to envision Mary Cosgrave sitting beside him, but the image eluded him. There was only Síle. He could not look at her. Her fingers on his skin felt as if they were made of fire.

  She flattened her palm against his cheek and gently turned his head toward her. “Have you ever kissed a girl, Ned? Shall I be your first?” Without waiting for his answer—he could not have shaped coherent words anyway—she laid her lips on his.

  The first touch was as light as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. He was not certain she was kissing him at all until the pressure intensified.

  Her breath smelled of apple. When he hesitantly returned the kiss, her lips parted and began moving against his with tiny, drinking motions. Learning from her, Ned opened his mouth. But when he felt the tip of her tongue he almost drew back.

  She sensed his reaction and tightened her arms around him. Her body fitted itself against his with a skillful pliancy, molding to every contour until the tops of her stays dug into his chest. “Hold me, Ned. Yes. Hold me. Ah, just like that!” His innocence excited her. She was still very young, but she had already seen so much; most of it old and cynical and exhausted. Ned was new. Clean and new.

  The feel of her in his arms was intoxicating. Ned forgot all about Mary. Only his flesh was conscious. His mind had gone somewhere far away.

  A twinge of anxiety brought him back. This was so new, the reality so different from his dreamy imaginings. What did she expect of him? Not…not that ultimate act, surely…the act his aroused body was clamoring for…

  She was a woman, she must be treated with delicacy and respect.

  Ned moaned with the effort of controlling himself.

  In response Síle pressed even closer. His hand found its way to her bosom; fumbled over the lace of her shirtwaist. The garment opened more easily than he had expected and he felt bare flesh.

  The first touch of a woman’s body was electrifying.

  When she did not recoil and push his hand away, he allowed his fingertips to stroke the swell of her upper breast. He dare not go farther. But oh, the magic!

  Síle was struggling to conceal her impatience. Did he not know, could he not feel, what was required? The cattle dealer who had first seduced her at Ennis Fair had shown no such restraint. She twisted in Ned’s embrace so his hand inadvertently slipped lower.

  He was touching her nipple! The next moment he felt her hips move against his agonized erection and the world exploded.

  “I didn’t mean it to go that far, Ned. Really I didn’t. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “No…no, it was me…. I’m sorry, I don’t…I mean, I didn’t…” Ned was mortified, but he could not allow a woman to take the blame for his own lack of control. The sin was his; the contrition must be his also.

  They returned in silence to Parnell Street. The sticky wetness in Ned’s trousers made him acutely uncomfortable. He pedaled awkwardly while Síle sat behind him, trying to look respectable for his sake.

  For a few hours she had been with a young man as other girls might be with their young men. She could even pretend to herself that she was going home to one of those proper houses in Fairview with flowers in the garden, there to eat supper with her family and sleep in a chaste bed, dreaming of Ned Halloran.

  The dream evaporated as the smell of the city replaced the clean sea wind. “Let me off anywhere,” Síle called to Ned. “I have to collect the papers for Mrs. Drumgold. She likes to have them in the house of an evening.”

  He went to Tom Clarke’s, since that was where he had met her earlier. “You can get the papers here.”

  “I know.”

  Ned leaned his bicycle against the wall and escorted her inside.

  The man behind the counter nodded at him as coolly as if they had never met. Had Ned been less dazed, however, he might have noticed the flash of recognition in Clarke’s eyes when he saw Síle.

  As the young woman selected several newspapers Ned hovered nearby. The hour was growing late, he would be expected back at Saint Enda’s, but he could not leave. Not yet. For some reason Síle would not let him accompany her to her lodging house, but he could at least see her safely as far as her street.

  Over her shoulder he glimpsed the headline in the Evening Mail but it meant nothing to him, not with Síle so close and the feel of her still tingling on his fingers.

  There is a light around those two, Clarke thought. He took off his glasses for a moment and polished them vigorously on his sleeve.

  During his long years in an English prison he had been asked again and again why he espoused violence. His replies had never satisfied his captors. But as his wistful eyes followed Ned and Síle out into the street, Tom Clarke knew the answer. It was so that young lovers—and old people who had once been young—might live in a free Ireland.

  June 28, 1914

  ASSASSINATION OF AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE

  FRANZ FERDINAND IN SARAJEVO SHOCKS WORLD

  Chapter Twenty-one

  MRS. Drumgold’s brothel was not a flash house, one of the luxurious houses catering to the top of the trade, but in the hierarchy of the Village it was considered upper-middle-class. The madam looked after her girls and usually gave them their fair share of the earnings. Prosperous businessmen and senior civil servants were frequent visitors to Faithful Place.

  Unlike the squalid kips where rooms were rented by the half hour, Mrs. Drumgold’s girls “lived in” and had their own rooms. There were coal fires, carpets on the floor, and a man had to knock at the front door for admission rather than simply walking in.

  Dolly Drumgold was particular about her clients. In her youth, it was rumored, she had been the star attraction in one of the great flash houses.

  The eight current inhabitants of her kip were young, attractive, and intelligent enough to carry on a conversation. Several came from respectable families. Sex was a business to them, with special services on offer as required. For the more exotic requests the rate could go as high as fifty pounds. A clever girl who saved her money could secure her future by buying a brothel of her own. One of the more successful Dublin madams had even sent her daughters to a finishing school in England.

  Mrs. Drumgold had three unbendable rules. “Let no client leave without paying, do not bring disease into the house, and do not fall in love,” Síle had been warned on her first day. She and the other girls kept themselves as clean as they could and submitted to a doctor’s examination periodically. But love was another matter. Love could make a girl uncontrollable.

  Síle had schooled herself never to use the word love, even in the most intimate conversations.

  Following her afternoon with Ned, she returned to Mrs. Drumgold’s in a mood of euphoria. She wanted to laugh aloud and dance up the stairs; she wanted to throw open the windows and shout “Ned Halloran!” into the street below for the pleasure of hearing his name.

  After eighteen months in a brothel, Síle Duffy had seen enough to know that many a romance which blossomed in love and lust withered in guilt and duty. Husbands sought relief with Dolly Drumgold’s girls. They complained about wives who did not understand them, wives who understood them too well, wives who lavished all their attention on the children, wives who had turned into replicas of their mothers.

  For such men Síle had become expert at simulating the lost rapture of youth, but it was a rapture life had denied her. Until Ned. Until, for a few brief hours, they had been an innocent boy and girl together.

  She paced the confines of her room, keeping her eyes averted from the bed with its piled cushions. When she heard the knock on the door summoning her to go below and greet the evening’s custom
ers, she took a large drink of brandy from the decanter on the table by the bed. Then she threw back her shoulders. “Party time,” she announced to the silent room.

  Her breath caught on an unexpected sob.

  FOR several days Ned was preoccupied. He wandered along the paths where Robert Emmett had once walked with his sweetheart; he smelled the fecund air of the woods and scuffed the soft earth with his shoe and searched for forget-me-nots amid the ivy, but his thoughts were far away. He had no one with whom he could sort out his confused emotions. By every code of honor he knew, a decent man did not talk about a decent girl to his friends.

  He very much wanted to believe that Síle was a decent girl. Did that mean he cared for her? If so, what about Mary Cosgrave? Was something wrong with him that he had feelings for two women that should be reserved for one?

  More than ever he regretted the loss of his father. Most Irish men of his acquaintance were singularly devoted to their mothers, yet the deep, quiet steadiness of his father seemed the greater loss now. Patrick Halloran would have listened without judging and advised without preaching, would have puffed on his pipe and quoted a pertinent bit of poetry.

  Ned tried not to dwell on such thoughts. His memories had been folded neatly, one by one, smoothed with the hand, and put away; it was the only way he could go on. Some day when they had lost their power to hurt he would take them out again.

  Oh, Papa!

  On the fifth of July, Ned Halloran joined the Irish Volunteers.

  He called first to Tom Clarke to deliver a note from Pearse. The shop brought back memories of Síle. Her scent seemed to linger in the air as he browsed through the stacks of newspapers and periodicals, many of them with a decidedly nationalist slant, then bought one he had not read before and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

  In front of the modest Volunteers’ recruitment office in Middle Abbey Street Ned noticed a battered bicycle leaning against a lamppost. He parked his own beside it and went in. Seated behind a table was a man smoking a cigarette while he checked names off a list. As the door opened he looked up.

  Ned recognized him at once. How could he forget that challenging glance like a shout in the blood?

  “Failte isteach,” said Seán MacDermott, rising to his feet and extending his hand across the table. The Irish welcome seemed a portent, a secret password in a shared language. “Are you here to join the Volunteers?”

  “I am,” Ned replied, feeling excitement mount in him.

  “You understand our aims and purposes?”

  “I do.”

  MacDermott handed Ned a piece of paper. “Then repeat after me, ‘I, the undersigned, desire to be enrolled in the Irish Volunteers, founded to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland without distinction of creed, class, or politics.’ And sign down there at the bottom.”

  “Is that all there is to it?”

  MacDermott laughed, a flash of white teeth in his darkly handsome face. “What were you expecting, a flourish of trumpets? Would you feel it was more of a ceremony if I asked you to sign in blood?”

  Ned laughed too. “I don’t need that much ceremony.” He repeated the oath and signed at the bottom in black ink.

  MacDermott searched for a piece of fresh blotting paper, found none, and instead blew on the paper. Then he tucked it into a drawer.

  “Would you care for a cigarette?”

  “Uh…I don’t smoke.”

  “You’re right too. Say, business is slow right now. I’m alone here today but I can close up shop for a little while. Why don’t you come along to Kirwan’s in Parnell Street—that’s my ‘local’—and I’ll buy you a wee drop.1 It isn’t every day a man joins the army.”

  As the two men made their way to the public house Ned observed that girls flirted openly with Seán MacDermott. In spite of his limp, there was no denying he was handsome. He had a finely shaped head with glossy black hair, dark eyebrows, and incredibly long lashes. When the girls smiled, he smiled back. He tossed a lighthearted quip to this one, made a date to meet that one later, teased a third until she blushed and gazed rapturously after him as he walked away.

  At Kirwan’s, MacDermott received a clamorous welcome as he called out, “God bless all here!” After only a few minutes in his company Ned understood why he was so popular. Seán MacDermott brimmed with an irrepressible gaiety. His painful limp made it obvious life had not been easy for him; his cheap suit and twice-turned collar said it was not easy now. Yet being with him made people feel good.

  The pub was paneled in dark wood made darker by years of tobacco smoke. The plank floor was carpeted with sawdust, footprinted and furrowed like dirty snow. Wall ornamentation consisted of advertising posters, framed photographs of various unrecognizable men, and in the place of honor over the bar, an ancient pikestaff. At one end of the bar was a gleaming brass scale for weighing grocery items. Like many public houses, Kirwan’s sold tea, sugar, meal, and a few other necessities in addition to dispensing drink.

  The majority of customers were under thirty. Only three or four elderly men could be seen at the bar, talking with the barman across bowls of boiled eggs and jars of pickled pigs’ feet.

  From a tiny, high-walled cubicle at the rear came the muffled sound of female voices. Ned had never heard of women being allowed in a pub. He glanced quizzically at MacDermott, who explained, “Those are shawlies in the ‘snug,’ Ned. The grannies can drink because they’re beyond sin, and female street traders are such good customers a publican would be a fool to keep them out. You won’t see them, though. They stay in their own preserve and smoke their clay pipes and have naught to do with the likes of us.”

  MacDermott began introducing Ned to his friends. He identified a tall, handsome man with a neatly waxed mustache as Michael O’Rahilly, Director of Arms for the Volunteers.

  He was promptly corrected. “I am The O’Rahilly, if you please. I use the archaic title that means Chief of the Name.”

  There was a ripple of good-humored laughter. “And sure won’t I be Ard Ri when Ireland has a king again!” someone cried.

  A yeasty fragrance filled the air, reminding Ned of his first day in Dublin. When Seán MacDermott asked him what he would drink, he said, “Guinness.”

  “A pint,” MacDermott told the barman.

  The stout was “pulled” from a tap and the big glass allowed to sit brimming on the bar until the bubbles stopped rising. Then Ned was handed a beverage so dark as to appear black, with a creamy white collar. “Here’s yer parish priest,” said the barman.

  MacDermott had a pint as well, then laughingly excused himself. “I could stay here all afternoon, but potential Volunteers will be beating down the doors.” Ned started to go with him, but MacDermott waved him back. “That’s all right, you stay. These are good lads; you’ll be serving with most of them.”

  Ned felt he had truly become a man among men.

  After MacDermott had gone, a redheaded man with a face full of freckles confided to Ned, “The real reason our Seán rarely has more than one drink is because he has a swarm of brothers and sisters down the country. Most everything he makes he sends to them. He’ll save up enough to stand us all to a shout from time to time, but we don’t like to put the pressure on him. Say, though…your jar’s empty!”

  Another pint was pressed into Ned’s hand. When the glass was empty he attempted to buy a round for his new friends, but no one would let him. “Your money’s no good in Kirwan’s on the day you join the Volunteers,” The O’Rahilly insisted.

  Another pint materialized. While Ned was drinking, The O’Rahilly led the other men in a rousing song of his own composing titled “Thou Art Not Conquered Yet, Dear Land.”2 “They even sing that in the London music halls,” a burly tenor told Ned. “He’s a great man for the songs, is our Michael.”

  By the time Ned left the pub his head was buzzing. The afternoon had sped away unnoticed and the summer night had fallen, soft as the petals of a dark flower. The light of
the street lamps was too kind to reveal Dublin’s squalor. The city looked beautiful.

  My city, he thought to himself. My country. And I’ve sworn to defend her.

  Unthinking joy burst in him like a skyrocket. The emotion was too big to contain, so he released some of it by breaking into song. He sang the first tune that came into his head, a legacy from his native Clare: a satiric Percy French ditty titled “Shlathery’s Mounted Fut.” When passersby stared at him he gave them a lopsided grin.

  Ned retrieved his bicycle from in front of the Volunteers’ office, which by that time was closed. He was about to set off for Rathfarnham when an image of Mary Cosgrave flashed across his mind.

  Of course! His sweetheart—that was Mary, wasn’t it?—must be the first person he told.

  When he reached Dorset Street he could smell food cooking, the fragrance drifting out through open windows. The Cosgrave house was one of a row of modest terraced houses fronted with red brick, aggressively respectable. Ned leaned his machine against the front steps and thumped the door with his fist. He could not seem to find the door knocker.

  After a considerable wait the door opened halfway and a man peered out. “What is it? Is there trouble?”

  “I’ve come to call on Miss Cosgrave.”

  The man regarded him owlishly. “And who might you be?”

  “Edward Halloran. You remember me, Mr. Cosgrave, I—” His words were interrupted by an embarrassing belch.

  The man took half a step out the door to get a better look at him. “I remember. You came to my aid on Bloody Sunday and I’m grateful. But I don’t recall you as a drunken lout, Mr. Halloran. In your present condition you can hardly call on my daughter.”

  “I’m not drunk. I just want to see Mary.”

  A soft voice inquired from the shadows of the hall, “Who is it, Papa?” Mary peered around her father’s shoulder. “Ned! Is that you? What are you doing here?”