1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Until recently anyone—aside from the police—could enter Union Headquarters whenever they pleased. But times had changed. Now there was a guard at the ground floor entrance. He stopped Ned and asked his business just as Constance Markievicz arrived.

  She was wearing a complete Citizen Army uniform, but had covered the trousers with a skirt to avoid shocking the good people of Dublin.4 “It’s all right,” she assured the sentry. “I know this man. His name’s Ned Halloran and he’s a Volunteer.”

  “I’m here to see James Connolly, Madame.”

  “You’ll find him up on the first floor; anyone there can point him out to you. When you’ve finished, come back to me if you have time.”

  Ned was pleased by the invitation. “I’ll make time, Madame.” He knew her friends called her “Con,” but such familiarity was beyond him. Not with a countess!

  The dilapidated printing press in the basement was propped up on bricks and made a fearful clatter that reverberated through the building.5 Ned was glad to escape to the first-floor offices, although they were not much quieter. Dingy corridors opened into small, equally dingy cubicles crowded with a jumble of boxes, cartons, paper stock, and makeshift filing cabinets. A youth in shirtsleeves directed him toward a bull of a man who was giving a coworker a blistering tongue-lashing. Ned waited until the tirade stopped, then politely cleared his throat.

  James Connolly whirled around. “And what the hell do you want?”

  It was Ned’s first face-to-face meeting with the labor leader. Short and stocky, bandy-legged, with unkempt eyebrows and a thick mustache, he was very much one of the working class he championed. When Ned introduced himself, Connolly’s handshake crushed his fingers. “You’re one of Pearse’s lads, are you?”

  “I was, sir; a student at Saint Enda’s. I’m a Volunteer now.”

  Glowering, Connolly turned Ned’s hand over. “No blisters on your palm. You elitists have life too bloody soft.”

  Ned had never been dismissed as an elitist before. The assumption startled him.

  “I met Pearse last September in the Gaelic League offices,” Connolly remarked, “when it looked like the IRB was going to put together an insurrection and employ the Volunteers. But nothing’s come of it. That’s what happens when you have a lot of idealists sitting around philosophizing. Since then I’ve talked with Pearse several times—and with Eoin MacNeill, too—but it’s a waste of energy. They’re too cautious to be revolutionaries; it’s up to the Citizen Army now. Everything’s always up to the working man. We carry the whole world on our backs and don’t get a blind bit of thanks.”

  As he spoke Connolly simultaneously watched the work going on around him and added a column of figures on the back of an envelope.

  He’s like Mr. Pearse, Ned thought; busy every moment. “We’re not as idle as you think, sir. In fact, that’s why I’m here. The Military Council would like you to come meet with them so they can inform you of their plans.”

  Connolly raised his bushy eyebrows. “The Military Council?”

  “Will you meet them, sir? Now?”

  “Bloody hell, can’t you see we’re busy here? Who the hell do they think they are?”

  “Pádraic Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Seán MacDermott, Eamonn Ceannt,” Ned replied literally. “And Thomas Clarke, of course.”

  Connolly fixed him with a hard stare. The silence lengthened. Then, “All right. I’ll spare an hour, no more. Where do we go?”

  “There’s a motor cab waiting in the service alley behind the hall.”6

  Connolly raised his eyebrows still farther. “Is there indeed? They were that sure of me, were they?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Connolly. If you don’t come out in the next thirty minutes the cab will drive away without you.”

  “And you, are you coming with me?”

  Don’t be seen leaving with him, Tom Clarke had said.

  “I’m afraid I have to go back to my own work, sir.”

  “But it’s all right to take me away from mine, is it?” Connolly gave an angry snort as he turned on his heel and left the room.

  He then disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him.7

  HIS assignment completed, Ned went in search of Constance Markievicz. He found her in a small room in the basement where she was packing grenades into straw-filled boxes.8 Other boxes were plainly marked “Gelignite.” The thundering printing press made the whole area vibrate.

  Ned felt his scrotum tighten. “Are those things safe?”

  “Of course not, that’s the whole point.” She wiped her hands and turned toward him. “Are you hungry? Since it’s almost two o’clock I assume you’re here instead of eating your dinner. I always bring a bag of cakes for the sentries, and I may even have brought a couple of sandwiches for myself. Shall we go upstairs and see?”

  Ned was glad to leave the basement, but he remained acutely conscious of the potential explosive power beneath them.

  He wondered what Mama would say if she could see the company he was keeping. “It’s hard to think of you as a countess, Madame,” he confessed as he lifted a slice of bread and found cheese and pickle. Ned was fond of cheese and pickle himself.

  She laughed an easy, full-throated laugh, throwing back her head like a man. “Sometimes it is for me, too. A title was never my ambition.”

  “What did you want, then?”

  She stopped chewing to consider the question. “Simply to be the person I needed to be. Looking back, I suppose I was a disappointment to my parents. You see, they were so very English. From the first they assumed I’d marry a wealthy man of my own class, have a fine home, and raise more little aristocrats in the same mold. I don’t think they ever considered any other possibility. Surely they didn’t expect me to become an Irish revolutionary. But for me, being Irish was not a condition of birth but an option. It was something I chose of my own free will.”

  “Forgive me for asking, Madame, but why?”

  “Ah. How to answer that? Let me just say…magic came into my life.

  “I have pictures of my sister and myself as young girls in white lace and elegant poses.9 We had such complexions! The young men clustered around us like bees to the lilacs. Eva was considered one of the greatest beauties in Ireland, and I wasn’t so bad myself. I was presented to Queen Victoria and went to London ‘for the season.’ But then in 1894 a man called Willie Yeats came to visit my family at Lissadell. He spoke of fairies, and magic, and old Irish legends, and though I was a grown woman I was enchanted. Not by Willie—by Ireland.

  “Marriage didn’t interest me. Being some man’s adjunct looked like a trap, and I had no intention of falling into a trap. I ignored the plans Mother had made for my life and set off for Paris to study art instead. Women in our set didn’t do that—but I did. I lived, ah, how I lived! I even”—she smiled reminiscently—“had a photograph taken of myself smoking and wearing knickerbockers that showed my legs below the knee. People at home were scandalized, but I enjoyed every minute.

  “Then when I was thirty and a confirmed spinster I finally fell in love. It was as much a shock to me as to everyone else. Casimir Markievicz was huge and gorgeous and good at everything he did. But he wasn’t an Anglo-Irish Protestant. He was Polish, a second son living on an allowance, and his title was only a courtesy inherited from an obscure ancestor. Worse still, he was Roman Catholic. And years younger than myself. And had already been married and had children.

  “If I had wed a Hottentot my family could hardly have been more dismayed,” Madame concluded airily.

  Obviously what her family thought was of little importance.

  Ned was enthralled. The freedom she had taken for herself was one most Irish women did not dare dream about. There were rumors that she had allowed her husband to sunbathe in the nude at her country cottage before he went off to the Balkans as a war correspondent. Subsequently, a visiting French journalist had written of her Rathmines home, Surrey House: “The salon of Madame Markievicz is not a salon, it�
��s a military HQ.”10 Any militant friend who needed a bed was welcome, and several of the Fianna were always in residence.

  Ned entertained a delicious daydream of being invited there himself as he drank the last of his tea and finished his sandwich.

  Dining with Madame.

  WALKING back across Butt Bridge—which Dubliners more descriptively called the Swivel Bridge11—Ned was hardly aware of the bustling boat traffic beneath him. As a navigable tidal river, the Liffey had brought Dublin into being more than a thousand years earlier and remained its commercial gateway to Europe. Without the river the city’s economic base would collapse. Dublin Port provided thousands of jobs.

  Usually Ned found the river’s commercial activity fascinating. What cargo was that ship bringing from what exotic port? Where were those laden barges going? What sort of lives were lived by the men who owned them? He could stand on the quays for hours if he had the time, spinning romances in his head.

  On this afternoon, however, his thoughts about the river were different. He was trying to shape abstractions into words which he might, someday, write down.

  Someday.

  He envisioned the Liffey’s dark current as Now, separating Past and Future. One must cross over that darkness to get from one to the other. They would all have to cross. But what were they leaving?

  As surely as Gaelic Ireland had seduced Pádraic Pearse, it had captivated Constance Markievicz. And how many others?

  He paused in the middle of the bridge to stare down into the water.

  Perhaps Ireland had never been what they imagined. Perhaps the looted, impoverished land the emigrants fled was all there was of Cathleen ni Houlihan, and her ancient splendor was only the landscape of the heart.

  Did that make her less real—or more?

  THE next day was Friday. The Workers’ Republic was published, as usual, bearing Saturday’s date. Connolly customarily wrote his editorials a week ahead. The editorial of the twenty-second was defiantly critical of the republican movement for its perceived lack of revolutionary will. It condemned the non-labor patriot for believing that “patriotism needs no foundation to rest upon other than the brainstorms of its poets, orators, journalists and leaders.”12

  On the surface everything seemed normal at Liberty Hall. But an astute observer would have noticed increased activity, with more members of the Citizen Army arriving every hour.

  Late Friday afternoon Constance Markievicz sent a message to Ned. The note was handed to him by a small boy in a tweed cap as Ned was leaving the Carlisle Building. “Must talk to you,” was all it said. “Hurry. Con.”

  When Ned reached Liberty Hall one of the first people he saw there was Mary Cosgrave’s friend, Eliza Goggins. With a preoccupied expression on her face, she was just leaving the building. Ned nodded to her but she gave no sign of recognition.

  Con Markievicz met him just inside the door. This time there was a Browning automatic pistol in her belt. “Where is Jim?” she demanded without preamble.

  “Is he not here?”

  “Of course he’s not here; surely you know that. You were the last person to see him yesterday. What happened between you?”

  Ned kept his voice steady. “I delivered a confidential message to him and then had a sandwich with you and went back to the Independent. Where Mr. Connolly went I cannot say.”

  Her gray-blue eyes flashed fire. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Please don’t ask me to lie, Madame.”

  “Pádraic Pearse has a long reach,” she observed wryly. “No, I won’t ask you to lie. But tell me this, was he kidnapped? Or arrested?”

  Ned did not answer.

  In an urgent voice she said, “You must understand. We’ve already telephoned his family in Belfast but they know nothing.13 This is very serious. We had an agreement among us—Jim, his second-in-command Michael Mallin, and myself—that if any one of us was arrested, the other two would act immediately.14 I am determined to start the revolution myself, today, if anything’s happened to James Connolly!”

  This was the very thing Pearse had feared. There was no time to ask anyone else’s advice, Ned would have to handle it himself. All right, he thought. All right.

  He chose each word with utmost care. “Madame, I can assure you Mr. Connolly was not arrested. I can also assure you he is safe.”

  A little of the tension went out of her face. “And you don’t lie.”

  “I do not lie.”

  She drew a deep breath. “All right, then, I believe you—though hundreds might not. Michael Mallin is convinced the IRB’s behind it and has gone to deliver an ultimatum to them. We’re on the brink of an explosion, so I urge you to get word to whoever is with Jim, wherever he is, that unless he returns to us soon there will be dire consequences!”

  Chapter Forty

  NED was afraid Madame Markievicz might never speak to him again. He felt the loss keenly. In the peculiar way of people who appreciate something most after it is gone, he realized that her singular personality carried a message for him. Pádraic Pearse admired her, this woman whose reputation shocked the establishment.

  If Pearse approved of Markievicz, might he not approve of Síle Duffy?

  But it was too late to go back and take Síle to Saint Enda’s for Christmas.

  ON Sunday afternoon Ned made a telephone call to Larkfield and waited impatiently while a maid summoned Joe Plunkett to the phone. In the background he could hear a clamor as if a party was in progress.

  “Is there any news of Mr. Connolly?” Ned asked when Plunkett came on the line.

  “I understand he showed up very late last night at Surrey House and told Con Markievicz he’d ‘been through hell.’ But he wouldn’t tell her anything else.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Of course he is. Superb, in fact. A good man with a fine mind, James Connolly. We’re delighted that he’s seen where our common interest lies and is throwing in his lot with the Brotherhood. The Citizen Army and the Volunteers will be working together from now on.”

  Ned digested this news with a sense of relief. If the Citizen Army and the Volunteers were going to be allies, surely Madame Markievicz would forgive him for the small part he had played. She was far too bighearted to hold a grudge. He hoped.

  Suddenly a blast of laughter came through the telephone receiver. “What’s going on over there?” he asked Plunkett.

  “Can you hear them? That’s just the lads skylarking about.”

  “What lads?”

  “Since the war began quite a few Irish men are coming home from England to join the Volunteers. We’re putting up as many as we can here. Larkfield’s turned into a garrison. We’ve made the old mill on the estate into a barracks for them, but they’re in and out of the house all the time. And you’ll enjoy this: they’ve begun calling themselves ‘Pearse’s Own.’”1

  “How does your family feel about seeing their home turned into a military camp?”

  Plunkett laughed. “The girls enjoy it tremendously, and Father’s hired one of the lads, Michael Collins, as his bookkeeper. Mick is a West Cork man who was employed in London as a civil servant. Father gives him a pound a week and his lunch.” Plunkett interrupted himself with a fit of coughing.

  James Connolly might be all right, but Ned had serious doubts about Joe Plunkett’s health. Since the trip to America it had been going downhill.

  The day was bitterly cold. When Ned stepped out of the call box the wind hit him like a fist to the face. I hope Joe doesn’t go out in this, he thought.

  He was not surprised to find Tom Clarke in a good mood. “Well done,” he said as Ned entered the news agency. “Have you heard anything?”

  “I just talked to Joe Plunkett. He told me Connolly’s with us at last.”

  “We’re going to make real progress now, and not a moment too soon. The Rising’s coming, Ned. Our Rising.” In an ebullient mood, Clarke leaned his elbows on the counter. “My mother was from Tipperary and my father was a Fermanagh man, but
the aftermath of the Famine drove them out long before I was born. I didn’t see Ireland until I was ten years old—the year of the 1867 Rising, that was.2 The air was full of talk about the Fenians then. For a time, just a very short time, there was hope in Ireland. I remember. I remember how my parents lit up with it like a flame.”

  That flame has never been extinguished, Ned thought as he watched Tom Clarke. “Has Miss Duffy been in today?”

  Clarke’s eyes glinted mischievously. “Strange thing about the two of you; I’d swear you know what each other’s thinking. She was in here not ten minutes ago asking about you.

  “My Katty and me are like that. Let me yearn to be out in my garden, and even if I don’t say a word, she knows somehow. See that jam jar on the shelf behind me? It’s empty now, but when the first daffodils bloom she’ll cut some for me so I’ll have flowers in here.”

  Ned was impatient with the digression. “Do you know where Síle went?”

  “Back to the house, I expect.”

  Back to Mrs. Drumgold’s, though Clarke was too tactful to use the name.

  “If I had any courage…”

  Clarke gave Ned a sharp look. “What’s that you say?”

  “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He knew where the house was. In his rounds he had learned every street and laneway in Dublin, but had assiduously avoided Faithful Place. Until now.

  Returning to his room, Ned shaved and dressed in his best clothes. He was glad Henry was not there to ask embarrassing questions; his friend had not returned after Mass that morning. Ned fumbled under the mattress until he found a jam jar of his own, the one containing his savings. Then he put the entire amount into his pocket and set off for the brothel.

  At the corner opposite Faithful Place he noticed the latest recruiting poster.3 Plastered on a wall was a large, brilliantly colored picture of two women and a small child standing in an open window, gazing out at the landscape. Uniformed soldiers were marching away through that landscape. The women were clasping each other and wearing exalted expressions. The slogan on the poster read “Women of Britain say GO!”