Song of Erin

by BJ Hoff

  Mustering as much composure as she could, she stood. “I—should be going. It’s after nine.”

  Jack studied her for a long, tense moment, then, almost as if he had read her thoughts, gave a reluctant nod. “If you must,” he said, slowly getting to his feet.

  “Don’t take offense, Samantha. Please? I simply can’t pretend any longer that all I want from you is friendship.”

  Samantha deliberately kept her gaze averted. “Just promise me we won’t speak about this again. It’s an impossible situation for me, Jack, it really is.”

  “Nothing,” he said, his voice the low rumble she had come to recognize as an indication of his resolve, “is impossible, Samantha. Nothing.” He stopped, and with one finger tipped her chin up to make her meet his eyes. “I won’t raise the subject again for now. But eventually…” He shrugged, his meaning clear.

  At the front door, she waited while he helped her with her coat. “Do you mind if I ride along while Ransom takes you home?”

  “I—suppose not,” Samantha said, aware of his hands lingering for perhaps a moment too long on her shoulders. “But it’s not necessary.”

  He squeezed her shoulders lightly, then turned to shrug into his topcoat. “But I want to,” he said. For a long moment, he stood looking down at her. “Samantha,” he finally said, “thank you.”

  Samantha gave him a questioning look.

  “For coming tonight,” he explained. “It meant a great deal to me, your trusting me enough to come to my home.”

  Only then did it strike Samantha that she did trust Jack, in spite of all the very real reasons she probably shouldn’t. Even now, after the discomfiting scene in the study, she found it impossible not to trust him, or at least his affection for her.

  But at the moment he was standing much too close, and Mrs. O’Meara seemed to have disappeared. Samantha was keenly aware of his dark handsomeness, his almost black eyes searching hers. Her throat tightened, and she took an involuntary step back from him.

  Nothing registered in his expression, no sign that he had noticed, other than a slight tightening of his jaw as he turned away from her to open the door. Outside, he took her arm on the way to the carriage, but it was purely a courteous gesture, impersonal and even perfunctory.

  Samantha knew that she had hurt him, and for an instant she wanted to touch him, to take his arm and tell him she was sorry. Sorry she couldn’t be what he wanted her to be, couldn’t give him what he seemed to want from her. She almost wished that she dared tell him that she did care for him, perhaps cared too much—and that was why she couldn’t possibly be anything more to him than a friend.

  Instead, she allowed him to take her to the carriage. They ventured nothing more in the way of conversation than polite small talk for most of the drive home. When he had delivered her safely to her door, he merely gave her that quick little mocking bow that was his way, leaving her with an aching sense of disappointment—and an unaccountable feeling of loss.

  Jack would have flatly denied that he was sulking. But the truth was that all the way back to the house, he had to struggle to keep from doing just that. He recognized that part of his dark mood had to do with the fact that he was simply not accustomed to being rejected. The more common scenario had him doing the spurning, not the other way around.

  But he had been rebuffed all right, and with enough firmness that his pride was still smarting. He had backed off the instant he’d seen her eyes go cold with that familiar closed look of withdrawal. It would have been a fatal mistake to press her, and he’d known it.

  But what Samantha most likely did not know was that a challenge had never yet sent him packing. To the contrary, a bit of a struggle served merely to raise the stakes, so far as Jack was concerned.

  His mood lightened somewhat as he pondered his next move. The first thing was to retrench and consider where he’d miscalculated. Samantha wasn’t the type who simply wanted to be coaxed. When she said no, she meant just that. At the same time, he found it difficult to believe he’d been reading her wrong all this time. She was attracted to him, and he knew it; before tonight he would have said it was more than attraction.

  Perhaps he’d been rash in springing the idea of marriage on her so abruptly, without a proper job of courting beforehand. But hang it all, he had tried to court the woman, hadn’t he? Samantha didn’t make it easy for a man, after all, with that wall she kept so squarely in place most of the time.

  Well, and what about that wall? The thing to do was figure a way to break it down, wasn’t that so? If his memory served him correctly, he’d tumbled more than a few walls in the past.

  Granted, he knew more about breaking down business opponents than a woman’s resistance, but it all called for strategy, didn’t it? And even if he said so himself, he did know a little something about strategy.

  Indeed.

  4

  WHAT KIND OF WELCOME?

  We came to the city in search of a dream, but the high gate to hope was closed against us.

  CAVAN SHERIDAN FROM WAYSIDE NOTES

  STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER

  Terese Sheridan had spent her first two weeks in the United States in a quarantine hospital.

  Tompkinsville, as it was called, sat on a hill across the river from New York City. Terese and a host of others from the Providence were taken there in a skiff and dumped on the beach like bags of rotten potatoes. The grounds were virtually littered with immigrants. Entire families huddled together: men with gaunt faces and angry expressions, women with frightened eyes, and restless, fretful children in raggedy clothing. All manner of languages could be heard, but mostly Irish or else English that was laced with a thick Irish accent. Some seemed to have set up camp as if they anticipated making their homes there.

  Their arrival in America had been a nightmare from the beginning. Terese and both of the Madden children, Shona and Tully, caught cold the last week of the crossing. By the time they arrived in the harbor, their coughs sounded severe enough that after a hasty examination, the medical inspectors pronounced the three of them as “possibly consumptive” and ordered them to be quarantined for an indeterminate length of time.

  Terese tried to protest, but the officials ignored her claims, refusing to even read the letter from Brady’s brother, which clearly stated that she and the Madden children were under the sponsorship of the Kane newspaper—the Vanguard.

  Subsequently she, Shona, and Tully were pressed back into the line. As they stumbled forward, Terese heard one of the men mutter an aside to his companion. “Filthy Irish rabble! They wash up on the docks like starving rats with their dirt and disease and expect to be treated like royalty! I’d send them all back to their miserable pigsty island if it were up to me.”

  Furious, Terese would have turned and flown at him had she not glanced down over herself, then at the children. The sight of their shabby homespun clothes and her own faded dress and worn-out shoes stopped her where she stood. Even the fine emerald cloak Brady had given her back in Ireland was soiled and crushed from weeks aboard ship. She had made an attempt to tidy the children upon their arrival, but Tully’s nose continually needed wiping, and there was a rip in the hem of Shona’s dress. Shame coursed through her as she realized they looked no better than the rest of the woeful souls traveling with them. No wonder the Americans treated them with such contempt.

  Now, close on two weeks later, they were still at Tompkinsville, and fear had begun to seep through her every waking hour. Not long after dawn, she sat on the sagging, lumpy cot that served as a bed, thinking about their situation and trying to figure a way out of it.

  The humiliation of being confined to such a dismal place would have been bad enough if she had been ill. But she was not ill, and her resentment and frustration at the injustice of their predicament had begun to eat at her like acid.

  She couldn’t imagine how the people from the Vanguard would ever find them. They wouldn’t go on trying forever, sure. How long would it take before they
simply gave up, thinking them lost or perhaps assuming they had never sailed at all?

  And then what would she do? How could she possibly manage on her own, with two frail children to drag along and Brady’s child growing bigger in her belly every day?

  No, not Brady’s child, she corrected herself. She must not forget the story Brady had concocted for her, the tale he had already written to his brother. She must remember that so far as Jack Kane was concerned, her condition was the result of having been raped by an unknown attacker. Brady had insisted it was the only way, that his brother was sure to withhold any hope of assistance if he knew the truth.

  So she and the Madden children had become a part of a much larger program, initiated by the Kane newspaper. A few carefully chosen individuals and families would be the subjects of an ongoing series published by the paper, and thereby provided the means to start a new life in America.

  More than anything else under heaven, Terese wanted the opportunity for that new life, and so she would keep the bargain with Brady. She would stick to their story, no matter what.

  Aye, well, little matter about the story if there was nary a one to hear it!

  She had to find a way out of this place and get back to the harbor. She must! If need be, she would even take the children into the city in search of Jack Kane and his newspaper. But to stay here seemed an almost certain end to her plans—if not certain death!

  She glanced at the youngsters who lay dozing on the next cot. The girl, Shona, was listless and wooden, almost as if she took no notice at all of her surroundings. But it was the boy who concerned Terese even more. His fever seemed never to abate. By now it was raging almost out of control, and his cough was so deep and hard it pained her to hear it.

  This place—this hospital—was in truth little better than a prison. They were packed in among hundreds of other immigrants, many of whom seemed desperately ill. In fact, Terese lived in dread that she and the children would contract some sort of terrible disease from the other poor wretches before they could make their escape.

  Just yesterday she had heard that there was typhus among them. In cold terror, she had squeezed a place for herself and the children in a corner across the room, but there was no real protection in such cramped quarters.

  She had begun the voyage with no end of resentment at being saddled with the responsibility of two orphaned children, and strangers to her at that. At some point during the crossing, however, she had actually begun to feel a certain fondness for her young charges. The girl, Shona, was a sad little thing whose eyes were already old with untold sorrows. But her brother, Tully, was different. Fragile as he was and crippled from a severe case of frostbite, the small boy was invariably cheerful and tried to boost his older sister’s spirits at every opportunity.

  Her growing affection for the children only made their present circumstances that much more difficult. If she could have managed to remain indifferent to them, perhaps she might have been able to break free of this accursed place and strike out on her own. As it was, she felt trapped and frightened not only for herself, but for the two young ones as well.

  At times she allowed herself the hope that surely someone from the newspaper would be searching for them by now and would show up any day to take them out of here. On the heels of this thought, however, came the stark reminder that a man as rich and important as Jack Kane would not likely go to much trouble for a trio of raggedy strangers.

  Terese turned on her side, away from the children, her mind still groping for a solution to their plight. Her condition could no longer be concealed. Although she was still lean everywhere else, her swollen midsection blazoned the fact that she was with child. She felt awkward and extremely vulnerable.

  And ugly.

  In frustration, she ran a hand through her hair—what was left of it. She had been forced to submit to having her hair cropped upon their arrival at the quarantine center. To rid her of lice, the officials claimed.

  Terese had protested, had even tried to break free and run once she learned their intention, fiercely protesting that she did not have lice. They had ignored her entirely, dragging her back to the chair and threatening her into submission.

  “All the Irish have lice,” the fish-eyed matron had sneered, giving Terese’s hair such a vicious yank that she cried out. “Bugs breed in your filth. Now sit down and hush your impudence, or I’ll have you tied down. You’re in America now, and if you want to stay here, you’ll obey the rules. You can be sent back, you know.”

  In the end, Terese had had no choice but to sit and be sheared like a sheep. Later that night she wept for the first time since leaving Ireland. While not exactly vain about her hair, she had not cut it for years, and it had grown long and thick with a heavy natural curl.

  It would grow back, she reminded herself, dropping her hand away from her head. She wouldn’t look like a poorly thatched roof forever.

  But Terese could not forget the way she had felt, watching them lop off her hair and then sweep it up into a dustpan like a pile of dead leaves. It had been not only her hair that had been lost to her that day. They had taken something else from her, something that went much deeper than what Brady had often called her “shining glory.”

  Aye, her hair would eventually grow back, but in her heart of hearts, Terese could not help but wonder how long it would take to recover her self-respect.

  5

  A MEETING IN THE MARKETPLACE

  A vulture preys upon our heart; Christ, have mercy!

  RICHARD D’ALTON WILLIAMS

  THE CLADDAGH, CO. GALWAY, WESTERN IRELAND

  Roweena caught her breath at the sight of Brady Kane near the far end of the quay. He seemed intent on something at one of the other food stalls, and her first inclination was to gather her baskets and flee the marketplace before he saw her. But she needed to sell more of her brack and breads if she was going to take Evie to the auction later, as she’d promised. So instead of leaving, she simply turned her back, hoping Brady wouldn’t notice her in the crowd.

  It was a mild morning for November. The fog was already clearing, and the sun showed signs of breaking through the clouds soon. Roweena’s spirits had been high until now. At the sight of Brady Kane, however, confusion and doubt had set in, combined with a niggling sense of guilt that threatened to steal her earlier cheerfulness.

  She could all too easily imagine Gabriel’s displeasure if he should happen to see her with the “troublesome Yank,” as he was wont to call Brady. Although he hadn’t strictly forbidden her and Evie to stay away from the American, there was no doubt but what he expected them to do just that.

  After Terese Sheridan had left the Claddagh, her shame a secret known only to a few, Gabriel had explained about the affair with Brady Kane that had left Terese with child. Although his features had been set in a careful mask, there had been no mistaking the fact that he was deeply troubled about the situation.

  Some thought Gabriel a hard man, but Roweena knew better. While he seldom showed his deepest feelings, he was nevertheless a man of sensitivity and great compassion. Roweena sensed that he carried a heavy burden for Terese Sheridan and for the American artist also, to whom he had opened the door of their home.

  Her own heart still ached, not only for the island girl, who must have loved Brady Kane very much to surrender to him in sin—but for Brady as well. She found it difficult to reconcile the man who had behaved so dishonorably toward Terese Sheridan with the same lively, spirited artist who had been nothing but kindness itself to her and wee Evie.

  Although Gabriel had made it clear enough that he did not trust the American, at the time Roweena had thought he was simply being overly protective, as was his way where she and Evie were concerned. For herself, she found it difficult to imagine Brady as anything but the fun-loving, good-natured soul he appeared to be: thoroughly American yet possessed of a genuine affection for Ireland—especially the Claddagh—and its people.

  Unfortunately, his affection for Terese S
heridan had turned into something else, something deceitful and debasing.

  After everything that had happened, Roweena no longer knew exactly how she felt about Brady. There was no mistaking Gabriel’s feelings, however. Even now, months after the trouble, he remained unrelenting in his attitude, so much so that Roweena knew she would be going against his will simply by speaking with Brady Kane.

  This, too, made her very sad, although she had encountered him no more than two or three times in recent months, and each time in the marketplace, surrounded by people. Even so, guilt suffused her after each meeting, for she knew that Gabriel would be sorely disillusioned—perhaps even angry—if he should happen to come upon the two of them together.

  She had long sensed Gabriel’s disapproval of the American’s attentions to her. Yet for her part Roweena could not bring herself to believe that Brady Kane meant her any real mischief. There was something in the way he looked at her that was kind and even careful, something that hinted of a tenderness belying any casual motives or deviousness.

  But she sensed there was no convincing Gabriel of this, and she had no heart to go against his wishes if she could help it. So how was she to manage the unavoidable encounter with Brady without incurring Gabriel’s disapproval or causing Brady further indignity?

  He had seemed genuinely hurt by Gabriel’s scathing rejection and subsequent notice to stay away from their home. Apparently, Gabriel had even gone so far as to advise that perhaps Brady should avoid the Claddagh altogether.

  The American artist’s outrage had been fierce and explosive when he managed to catch Roweena long enough to tell her of Gabriel’s pronouncement. “He’s not your father after all!” he stormed. “Why do you allow him such control over you?”