Song of Erin

by BJ Hoff

  Samantha nodded. “Do you know him?”

  “Only by reputation. He’s said to be a fine doctor.”

  “Oh, he is, I’m sure! But…I wonder just how much he can do. She’s very ill, Jack.”

  “Aye, so it would seem. We came none too soon, I’m thinking.” He paused. “I wonder if she shouldn’t be moved to the hospital.”

  Samantha expelled a long breath. She was only now beginning to feel the signs of a dragging fatigue and a kind of numb inability to think clearly. “I don’t know if it would make any difference, but I suppose we could ask. Doctor Leslie said he’d be back around ten.”

  She looked up to see him watching her, his dark eyes sharp with concern. “You look exhausted,” he said bluntly. “How long have you been here?”

  Samantha evaded his question. “I’m all right. I thought I should stay, at least until Cavan got here.”

  “Well, he’s here now. I’m going to take you home.”

  “No, not yet,” Samantha told him firmly. “Didn’t you see his face? He shouldn’t be alone…if something happens. I believe I’ll stay awhile longer.”

  Impatience sparked in Jack’s eyes but quickly subsided. “If you must,” he said. “I’ll stay for a bit, too, then. I’d like to see what the doctor has to say.”

  Samantha was too tired…and too grateful for his presence…to argue. The truth was that she wanted him to stay. She felt the need for the strength and steadiness he seemed to impart simply by being in a room. And at the moment, she feared they were going to need all that and more as the night wore on.

  Yet at the same time she puzzled over the strange mood that had come over him. He seemed restless—even agitated—as though something more than sadness for Cavan and Terese Sheridan were gnawing at him. Now that she thought of it, he had been peculiar since he first walked into the room.

  “Jack—is there something wrong?”

  He shook his head in reply, not quite meeting her gaze. “No, nothing’s wrong. I’m a bit tired is all.”

  Samantha could almost see the shutters slam closed over those dark eyes. She supposed it was possible that her own turbulent emotions and exhaustion were simply playing tricks on her, but she didn’t think so. Still, there was no point in thinking he would explain. She had seen the hard set to his mouth, heard the edge in his tone that plainly spoke of barriers that would not be breached.

  At least not until she was willing to risk more of her own heart, her self, than she had ventured so far.

  Back inside the dormitory, Jack could feel Samantha watching him. He stood leaning against the wall nearest the door, while she stood beside Sheridan at his sister’s bedside. He hadn’t meant to be short with her, but there was no explaining what had come over him at the sight of the Sheridan girl.

  He didn’t understand it himself; he certainly hadn’t expected it. But one look at her, lying there, so tragically young, so dangerously ill—so obscenely violated—had sent a wall of bitter memories crashing over him like an avalanche.

  She didn’t look a bit like his mother, this girl. She wasn’t dark or delicate, instead appeared tall and almost lanky. Her hair was a copper blaze, where his mother’s had been black as jet. And she was younger, this unfortunate lass—quite a bit younger than his mother had been…at the last.

  He supposed it was her pitiful condition: the illness, the delirium, the pregnancy, the utter tragedy of what had happened to her. The savage assault and its bitter consequences.

  No, Samantha couldn’t possibly understand, couldn’t begin to comprehend how the sight of the poor girl on the bed had ripped through him like a reaper’s scythe, tearing through years of grief and a suppressed rage that even he knew to be irrational. He had no way, no words, of making her understand why the sight of a victimized girl he had never seen before tonight should suddenly threaten to undo him.

  But she had seen the change in him, Samantha had, and was troubled by it.

  Her eyes had been filled with questions, questions he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t explain this, not even to Samantha. No one knew the secret that ate at him. No one. Not even Rose or Brady.

  Especially not Brady. After all, it was because of Brady he had bottled up the pain and kept his silence all these years, even though there had been times when his insides virtually screamed to tell someone the truth.

  He glanced around the room, his attention caught by the child who had been sitting beside the Sheridan girl’s bed all this time. The little Madden tyke, Samantha had explained. The hollow-eyed wee girl had lost everything—parents, home, brother—and now it seemed she was in danger of losing the one familiar face left to her, the one person who at least knew her and perhaps could relate to her.

  His thoughts went to Rose, his own younger sister. She must have been about the same age as the little Madden girl when he’d brought her and Brady across. No doubt she had been just as frightened, too, although at least she had had a big brother to turn to.

  His mouth twisted in remembrance. A big brother indeed! He had been all of fourteen and as terrified as his younger sister and baby brother—Brady—had been, though he had steeled himself to conceal his fear from them. With nothing but the clothes on their backs and a pittance in his pocket, he had led them out of the harbor into a veritable nightmare.

  New York. A city teeming with strangers who spoke in unknown languages. Dogs and pigs running rampant in the streets, rooting through heaps of rotting garbage and waste. Painted women crooking their fingers at him despite his youth and the two wee wanes clutching at him. Filthy street urchins diving in and out among the bustling crowds, shoving and shrieking and begging.

  The stink of the sprawling city had seemed like the stench of hell itself, and the angry voices and jostling bodies pressing in on them might have been a legion of demons, so terrifying had they appeared to them that day. Jack had wanted nothing so much as to turn and run, to bolt back onto the ship with his siblings and head home.

  But of course by then there had been no home.

  Somehow they had survived, at first on the squalid streets, then later in the sordid warrens of the Five Points—ah, now there was a place that could easily be construed as a demon’s den.

  He knew what was said about him, now that those ugly years were all in the past: that he’d built an empire with nothing but Irish brass and the devil’s luck. In truth, he had built it all from a boiling well of rage and an equally fierce resolve to never again be at the mercy of another human being.

  But somewhere inside him, buried so deep he had thought never to confront it again, there had always been the memory of what had driven him here in the first place…and a sense of dread he had never admitted to another soul.

  And tonight it had taken but a brief glimpse of another’s misery to newly ignite his own.

  He looked at Samantha and found her watching him. Quickly, he glanced away, but not before he had seen the questions…and the hurt in her eyes. And suddenly, for the first time in a long time, he found himself wanting—needing—to unburden himself, as much to break down any remaining barriers between him and Samantha as to purge himself, at least once, of the dark secret that had driven him out of Ireland, only to ride his soul for all the intervening years with the relentless ferocity of a bloodthirsty vulture.

  But this wasn’t the time—and certainly not the place. The people in this room had their own pain, their own dark agonies, to deal with. He had come to help, if he could, not to add to their misery. They already had more than enough of their own.

  He hesitated for only an instant, then pushed himself away from the wall and started toward the lonely looking little girl beside the bed.

  24

  A MEETING IN THE MISSION HOUSE

  There should be more than trials and tears

  For those of young and tender years.

  ANONYMOUS

  Samantha watched with growing curiosity as Jack went to stand beside Shona. From all appearances, he was managing to carry on a conv
ersation of sorts with the little girl, although the tone of his voice was so low that from the opposite side of the bed one couldn’t make out more than a few words of what they were saying.

  The child’s face was lifted toward Jack, her countenance just as solemn and intent as ever, though perhaps slightly more animated than before. Jack, on the other hand, was smiling: a different kind of smile for him, one with not even a hint of cynicism, no sardonic twist of the mouth, no mocking glint in the eye. There was a gentleness about him now, a softness in his eyes rarely seen.

  It occurred to Samantha, with a twinge of guilt, that she really ought to be reassuring Cavan rather than trying to eavesdrop on Jack and the little Madden girl. But Cavan seemed to have withdrawn to a private place occupied only by himself and his sister, and Samantha almost felt that to speak to him at this time would be to intrude. He and Terese had been separated for years, after all, and in spite of the grim circumstances, this had to be an extremely momentous occasion for them…and one not necessarily meant to be shared.

  Besides, she couldn’t help but be intrigued by the scene on the other side of the bed. So she moved away a little, and Jack, seeing her, gave her a smile and gestured that she should come around the bed and join him and his new friend.

  She was a sober little thing, the Madden tyke, but then she had reason to be, given all that she had likely endured in her few brief years. The child was so gossamer thin that Jack fancied she would snap like a butterfly’s wing under the slightest amount of pressure.

  He recalled Brady’s writing that the girl was ten years old, but she might have been two or three years younger, so small and fragile was she. She had a cloud of flaxen hair, so fine it might have been spun silk, and the biggest, most sorrowful blue eyes Jack had ever seen, eyes that seemed enormous in that thin little face. For some incomprehensible reason he suddenly found himself wondering if those eyes had ever lighted with a childish delight instead of the fear and the unhappiness that now looked out at him.

  What would it take, he thought, to coax a smile from such a child as this, a child who looked as if she might never have known what it was to smile?

  “You’ve met Shona, of course?” Jack said to Samantha as she came to stand beside him. “She’s ten years old, it seems, and comes from Limerick.”

  Samantha smiled at the girl, who ducked her head down as if confused by all this attention. She would have been quite a lovely child had she not been so thin and pale as to appear unhealthy. Even in her malnourished state, with her fair hair in tangles and her face all sharp planes, there was a winsomeness about her that tugged at Samantha’s heart.

  She was surprised to realize that the child had apparently evoked a similar response in Jack. She looked from one to the other. Jack had stooped over to reduce the distance between himself and the little girl, who was watching him closely with something akin to awe—and perhaps a measure of fearfulness as well. It occurred to Samantha that to one so small, Jack must appear a veritable giant, and a somewhat dark, forbidding one as well.

  “Do you understand who we are, lass?” he asked the child, his tone as quiet and as solemn as Shona’s countenance.

  Shona stared up at him, studying him as if bewildered by his attention. “Mr. Kane.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s exactly right, just as I told you. And this is Mrs. Harte, my…good friend and one of the editors from the newspaper.” He paused. “Do you know what that is, Shona—a newspaper?”

  The child shook her head, her gaze never leaving Jack’s face.

  Interesting, Samantha thought, that Jack had realized right away that a child like Shona would very likely have no conception of something as common as a newspaper. Not many would have even thought of such a thing, herself included.

  “Well then, we shall have to bring you a copy when we come again,” said Jack cheerfully. “A newspaper is a little like a book, you see—though with not as many pages. People read it to learn what’s going on about the city and perhaps find stories of particular interest to them. The name of my newspaper is the Vanguard, by the way.”

  He motioned toward Cavan. “The lad there with your friend, Terese, is her brother, Cavan. They haven’t seen each other for a number of years, did you know that?”

  Shona glanced across the bed to watch Cavan and Terese for a moment but made no reply.

  The exchange went on like that for several minutes, almost entirely between Jack and the child, with Samantha merely looking on and nodding her agreement every now and then as called for.

  She supposed she should have found it curious, how Jack seemed to have managed to win over the girl—if not her trust, exactly, at least her interest—in such a short time. Yet watching the two, his rapport with the child seemed so easy, so natural, that anyone who didn’t know better would have assumed he was an old hand at dealing with children, that he almost certainly had a family of his own.

  Samantha knew, of course, that he had raised his younger brother and sister almost entirely single-handedly; that might account for the ease with which he communicated with the Madden child. Still, she couldn’t help but remember how quick he had been to insist that he could accept a marriage without children, once he’d learned that she was barren.

  As she stood there, watching him with the forlorn little girl, a sudden wave of sadness rose in her. The painful realization of what she would be cheating him of, should she ever agree to his proposal, nearly doubled her over, and she had to struggle to keep from bolting from the room.

  But in the same instant she told herself she was fretting over nothing, because she wouldn’t agree to his proposal; she couldn’t even consider it.

  “Samantha?”

  She looked up to find him watching her with a question in his eyes. Samantha shook her head a little to clear it. “I’m sorry?”

  “I was telling Shona that perhaps one day soon she could come and have supper with us. Would that be all right with you?”

  Samantha looked from one to the other, barely managing a smile. “Yes, of course. I’d…like that very much.”

  She deliberately avoided looking at Jack. “Perhaps I could have you both to my place for a meal,” she said with forced enthusiasm. “We’ll have to make plans.”

  Jack seemed to be caught off guard as much as Samantha by the child’s reply. “Thank you very much, but I’d want to wait until Terese is well enough to come, too, please.”

  Samantha didn’t know what to say and looked to Jack for help. He straightened, taking his time to answer. “I’m sure your friend, Terese, wouldn’t mind if you came just once without her,” he said carefully. “Later, we’ll all of us celebrate your arrival in proper fashion.”

  Samantha turned to look at Cavan, who had risen to his feet and now stood staring down at his sister. She despised herself for giving in to the pessimism that had been lurking at the edges of her mind all evening, but at this moment it was difficult to believe that Terese Sheridan…or Cavan either…would be likely to have cause for celebration in the near future.

  Unwilling to give in to her own dismal thoughts, she walked quickly around the bed and took Cavan by the hand. “Would you like me to pray with you?” she asked him. His eyes filled as he nodded, and Samantha squeezed his hand. She wished she could do more, but at this point she believed the most important thing she could do for Cavan or Terese Sheridan was to pray, and pray unceasingly.

  As she and Cavan knelt beside the bed, she saw that Shona had followed their lead and was kneeling, hands folded, looking up at Jack as if she clearly expected him to join them.

  He looked at the child, then at Samantha, but merely stood aside, his jaw set in a stubborn line, his gaze carefully averted from Terese Sheridan.

  By the time David returned to check on Terese, it was after ten. He stopped just inside the room, surprised by the contingent surrounding her bed. Samantha Harte and a young man were kneeling, obviously praying, as was Shona, while a startlingly tall, dark-haired man in a well-tailored overcoat
stood watching them.

  The man locked eyes with David for an instant, then returned his attention to Samantha Harte, still deep in prayer. Although David suspected that the young man kneeling beside Terese’s bed might be her brother, he couldn’t think who the other man might be. After another moment, he bowed his own head and added a fervent request to that of the others.

  Afterward, Samantha Harte introduced him to Terese Sheridan’s brother, a likable young fellow who was obviously devastated by what had happened to his sister. David wished there were something he could say to alleviate Cavan Sheridan’s fears, but under the circumstances false reassurance would be worse than nothing at all.

  The dark, imposing man he’d noticed on entering turned out to be Jack Kane—the Jack Kane. Upon their introduction, David had all he could do to conceal his surprise. From everything he had heard about the publishing giant, he would hardly have expected Kane to show up here on behalf of an immigrant Irish girl. Of course, Kane was thoroughly Irish himself, and it was his newspaper that was funding a number of immigrant resettlements. Even so, it seemed more than a little peculiar to find him making a personal call at a mission house.

  For that matter, Jack Kane himself wasn’t at all what David might have expected. Oh, it was easy to sense a certain…hardness in the man, a self-confidence, perhaps, even a kind of arrogance, not to mention the unmistakable aura of power that seemed to vibrate in the very air around him. There was no mistaking the fact that this was a man accustomed to having his own way; he wore authority like an outer garment. Yet there was an openness about Kane when he shook David’s hand and looked him square in the eye that seemed to instantly draw him in and include him as an equal.

  It soon became apparent to David as well that Jack Kane’s concern for Terese was wholly genuine, if unexpected.

  “I was wondering what you would think,” Kane inclined his head toward Terese, “of moving her to the hospital.”