by Ann Moore
Grace leaned forward in her chair. “Why did you not come home, then?” she asked. “Your mam would’ve taken you in.”
“Too proud for that, and of course it cost me dearly in the end.” She glanced out the window, collecting herself. “I went to his rooms at the college, but he wouldn’t see me and I … I fell into madness. I set fire to the place, and he put the guards on me, so I hid—moving from room to room, selling off my things.” She looked directly into Grace’s eyes. “I, too, bore a son. By myself, though the landlady come in with a knife to cut the cord, wipe him off, and hand him to me, saying to keep him quiet so’s the other girls could sleep, sharing a room as I was.” Her forehead creased with pain. “I tried to keep him warm and fed, as best I could, but the money run out and I’d nothing left to sell. We lost our place in the room, and took to sleeping in the alleyways, begging at back doors. I’ve never been so feared in all my life as I was then.”
“And where is he now?” Grace asked gently.
Aislinn’s eyes filled with tears, which she ignored. “He fell ill and I couldn’t bear to watch him die, so I took him to the nuns.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I tried to forget him, but I still had milk and my arms felt empty and I missed the smell of him. So, I went back and begged to know where he was. He was better off, they said, and so was I. I could repent, and thank God my son would have a decent life.” She lifted her chin. “They were right. But not an hour passes I don’t pray for him.”
“I’m sorry, Aislinn,” Grace said, taking her hands. “’Tis a terrible tale. And what of this man, then? Does he care for you?”
“Aye,” Aislinn said without hesitation. “He saved my life. I was low after the boy, and didn’t care anymore.… When a man offered me money to go with him, I did. He took me to a house and I just stayed there—I had my own room, it was warm and there was food, and every night I earned my keep and more. But I was sick at heart. My gentleman took a special interest in me, and after a time I agreed to an arrangement. I have my own rooms—which are lovely—and he comes there as he pleases. I entertain no friends, take no risks in public, and bear no children.”
“And in exchange?”
“Peace of mind,” Aislinn said. “Title to my rooms in London and clear ownership of everything he gives me, including a small bank account into which he puts a monthly allowance. You see, I have become a businesswoman,” she said wryly. “I do go out to entertainments in the company of my maid, though I am careful.”
“He’s married?”
“Aye, and I believe he loves her, though she’s older even than he. They have grown children. He’s very wealthy and imposing, but I trust him. Even if he is an Englishman.”
Grace nodded. “There are good ones,” she allowed. “Henry Adams, and Lord Evans …”
“Lord David Evans?” Aislinn asked. “The Black Lord?”
“I never heard him called that, but aye—he’s the one gave Morgan his own ring. They were great friends. Do you know him?”
“No, but he’s all the talk in London! They call him the Black Lord because he sided with us. He’s been brought here for trial.”
Grace’s heart fell. “I’d not heard.”
“The magistrates are delaying his trial for fear of public rioting. He’s ill, and they think he’ll die soon. Then it will be out of their hands—no angry crowds or burning effigies.”
London, Grace thought. How far away was that? “Is there any way to see him?” she asked. “Maybe your one could help?”
“I’d never dare ask,” Aislinn admitted. “He’s sympathetic to the cause, but he considers Lord Evans the worst kind of Englishman. And you certainly can’t just go strolling in …” She stopped.
“What?” Grace leaned forward.
“Well, there are women who go strolling into prison. But only after midnight, and no one the wiser.”
Grace understood at once. “I could be one of those women.”
Aislinn looked her up and down with a practiced eye. “Aye.” She grinned. “I believe you could.”
Three
SEAN O’Malley sat in the very back of Mighty Dugan Ogue’s saloon, the Harp and Hound, sipping the publican’s famous dark ale and working his way through the New York papers in front of him. He’d already covered the endless headlines of the Sun and the Herald, along with several sheets of extras bought from the newsboy on the way in. There was little point in perusing the others—the old-fashioned Journal of Commerce, Courier and Enquirer, the Express, although he might have a look at the Tribune—they had all banded together on wire service time during the Mexican War and now monopolized the most current information. Calling themselves the Associated Press, they had reporters in any town with access to wire service and received daily, sometimes hourly, reports from which they drew the next day’s news. It made for exciting reading, though much was repeated throughout the various papers. The new telegraph lines now linked New York with the nation’s capital, Boston, and Albany, and there was talk of trying an overseas line to England.
Sean still awoke most mornings with the dizzy feeling of having stumbled far into the future, into a fast-paced modern life that was a century away from the mud huts, potato fields, and backwoods warfare of Ireland. Adding to this displacement was the proliferation of paper plastered to every surface around every corner of nearly every street—advertisements for everything from Man About Town Hair Dye and True Liver Pills to Famous Gypsy Palm Readers and Circus Oddities from Around the World.
Every saloon, oyster house, melodeon, and museum had its name stuck to walls, fences, carriages, and sandwich boards. Bill-stickers made the rounds after midnight with buckets of paste and brushes, covering up yesterday’s notices with today’s, slapping new announcements over the minutes-old notices of their rivals so that each day the landscape was slightly altered and one could not remember which corner one had turned the previous day.
Men with sandwich boards walked up and down the streets, and trade cards promoting everything from cough remedies to prostitution were pushed into Sean’s hands on every block. As if this weren’t enough to overload a simple man’s eye, the entire place seemed to be festooned with banners and ribbons to mark the latest political rally so that street signs were often masked. He had become lost so many times in his first month here—despite the maps and guide books he’d been given—that he’d learned this district by sheer foot travel. Even asking for directions had been problematic because so many people were foreigners with heavy accents and a great deal of gesturing that often led nowhere. When he did encounter Americans, they spoke so quickly and with such clipped enunciation that he had difficulty keeping up. Their speech was more nasal and less lyrical than the Irish to which he was accustomed, though not without colorful idiom that tickled him now he was beginning to understand it.
“Here you go, Sean—hot off the press, as they say!” Tara Ogue, Dugan’s hardworking wife, set the current edition of the Democratic Review down on his table, along with a fresh pint. “That ought to hold you for a while, eh, boy?” She reached out and plucked the glasses from his nose, wiping the lenses carefully with the hem of her apron. “It’s no wonder you’re half blind,” she scolded good-naturedly, “trying to read through the likes of these. There”—she handed them back—“that’s better now, isn’t it?”
“Aye, Tara, and what would I do without you?” He grinned and reached for her hand, then winced.
“It’s that shoulder again,” she pronounced, peering at it. “Mind what the doctor said, boy, and quit hunching yourself up like that! Are you not wearing that harness contraption?”
Sean stretched carefully, massaging the crippled arm. “I forgot, Tara. Truly I did.”
“Well, you march right up to your rooms, then, and put that thing on,” she ordered. “Haven’t you been breathing so much easier since you got that, and not half so sick in the chest?”
“Aye,” he agreed enthusiastically. “And isn’t it a miracle? Me who’s been wea
k with the cough most of my life, on death’s door more times than I can count … and here I am, strutting around Manhattan in good health and with barely a limp, thanks to the special shoes. Life is good, Tara. Life is grand—there’s always hope. If a man can dream it, he can achieve it here. Ah, Tara, isn’t America wonderful?”
“Ah, go on with you now.” She cuffed him gently. “Sure and there’s nothing crippled about that silver tongue God or the Devil give you—I don’t know which!”
“Tara!” Sean exclaimed in pretended offense. “How can you say such a thing? ’Tis the Lord’s work I’m doing here, and you know that as well as anyone.”
“Won’t be doing much of it if you take ill again,” she reminded him.
“Just let me finish up these papers, and I promise I’ll go straight up and put that harness on.”
“See that you do,” she admonished, snapping at him with her towel before rejoining her husband at the front.
Sean watched Dugan slip an arm around the waist of his wife and draw her in for a kiss, which she playfully tried to resist; he thought again how lucky he was to have ended up here, as the lodging came with Mighty Ogue’s street wisdom and Tara’s motherly attention. They were the ones who found the German doctor, and arranged to have the shoe built and shoulder strap made so that Sean might move about the city more like a man than a cripple. He owed them so much; he raised his glass to them now, blowing them a kiss, which made them laugh.
“Back to work, boyo!” Dugan’s massive voice boomed across the room, turning the heads of the old drinkers who smiled with pride at the young Irishman working so hard for the cause.
Sean laughed and returned with pleasure to the paper in front of him. The Democratic Review was edited by John O’Sullivan, one of the many new friends he’d made in New York. John had introduced him to Evert Duyckinck, who sponsored the magazine and served as mentor to a group of young businessmen interested in making money and creating a wholly American culture, not a subservient one that simply imitated Europe. They were loosely known as the Young Americans, and stood in opposition to the old guard, a group of prosperous gentlemen—Whigs and anglophiles mostly—who dined out more than in, and amused themselves by writing lightly ironical essays for Knickerbocker Magazine, currently the most influential literary review in America … something that disgusted Sean. But then, everything about the Knickerbockers disgusted him—they were overprivileged snobs, too narrow-minded to embrace a new culture of political idealism and literary radicalism.
The Young Americans, however, put their money and their hearts into supporting Western expansion and European revolution, which Sean found thrilling as well as inspiring. They published Arcturus, which fostered American literature and essays, and they had formed a copyright club in order to force the Knickerbockers to pay for the European writings they so casually pilfered. O’Sullivan and Duyckinck had also made an ally of publisher George Putnam, and Duyckinck was general editor of the Library of American Books; they had just launched the Literary World, a magazine to which Sean was contributing even though he had not yet developed what the others called “an authentic American voice.”
His Irish voice was strong enough and welcome in the Democratic Review, and the issue he held in his hands contained an article he’d written on the failings of British government in Ireland and the detriment of the influence of that culture on a new America. It was not all his original thinking—he had allowed himself to be steered by O’Sullivan—but it was a start in making his own cause more broadly known.
He’d found himself in the protective hands of the Young Americans from the first day of his arrival, and had gladly let O’Sullivan shape his days with speaking engagements, rallies, dinner parties, and work at the magazine. They did not hide the fact that they were using him to further their own political agenda, nor did he hide the fact that they were of use to him only when they opened their bankbooks and wrote drafts for guns and ammunition, food and clothing—all to be shipped to Dublin on specially chartered packets. They respected him for being an inside man with the Young Irelanders and for fighting in the physical world when they had only ever fought with words.
But sometimes it occurred to him that he was being swept up so completely, he had trouble knowing where Young Ireland left off and Young America began. He’d begun to realize that what turned his head most was the excitement of democracy, and of the progress this excitement fueled, an excitement he could not translate—no matter how hard he tried—to weary, starving Ireland.
More and more, he found his attention turned to American politics. In the coming month, New York would hold its first election under the new Constitution, an election the Whigs faced with confidence, bragging that they would take every branch of state and city government. The circle in which Sean moved was working diligently to oppose them at every step, and the debates stimulated and moved him. He was meeting prominent, intelligent people every time he turned around—people like O’Sullivan, Putnam, and Duyckinck, Jay Livingston and his sister, Florence—and all of them walked in the larger world of ideas, dreamed the grander dreams of progress and the future. They included him so readily in this walk and in these dreams, he sometimes forgot that his life here was only temporary, that one day he would return to Ireland.
But more and more frequently, he wondered what was really happening in Ireland. Communication was sparse and unreliable, and though he was raising money and had sent two small ships laden with supplies, he knew not how they fared. William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel had both been detained, though William was rumored to have been released, and the latest report from London said Captain Evans would be tried for treason. But what troubled him most was the report that Morgan had been captured during a raid. There had been nothing after that of his best friend, and no one off the boats sailing daily into the city had anything other than hearsay.
“Ah, there you are now, all hunched over those papers and scowling like bad weather. Don’t mind if I sit, do you?” The handsome young Irishman pulled out a chair, not waiting for a reply.
“How are you, Danny?” Sean smiled at his colorful friend, poor as any man, but always sporting a clean vest and a silk tie around his neck.
“Well, now, myself is just fine, but I hear your Miss Osgoode is home in bed and isn’t that a lovely thing to dwell upon?” His eyes twinkled mischievously.
“Shame on you, Danny.” Sean tried not to smile. “That’s no way to talk about a fine Christian woman like Marcy Osgoode.”
“Certainly not round her father, mind you, but here between two friends such as us, what harm in being manly?” He laughed and picked up Sean’s glass, downing half the ale in a single gulp. “Thanks, boyo. ’Tis warm in here.”
“Not that warm.” Sean retrieved his drink. “What’re you doing here, anyway? Why are you not out working like an honest citizen?”
“I’m my own man, am I not?” Danny puffed out his chest. “I keep my own hours, don’t I?” He glanced out the window. “Well and anyway, ’tis raining, sure enough, and no one stopping to get their boots shined in this lousy weather.” He turned his attention back to Sean. “Are you coming to the meeting tonight, even without your sweet miss?”
Sean grimaced. “I forgot, to tell you the truth, but don’t say that to her father. I’m speaking to a group of dockworkers tonight—mostly Irish—reminding them of their duty back home.”
“Plenty don’t want to be reminded, you know, boyo,” Danny told him. “Plenty just want to get on with their lives, make the best of things here in the new land.”
“I know that. But those who’ve gotten out alive owe it to those who’ve stayed behind to fight. When Ireland is free, they’ll want to be able to say they did their part.”
“They’ll say that anyway, being Irish.” Danny grinned.
Sean laughed. “Fair enough. But I’m still going.”
“You really think we’ll win this thing, Sean? Beat back the English, and reclaim our land?”
“I do,” Sean said with more conviction than he felt. “But not without guns and ammunition, not without food and medicine.”
Danny nodded. “Maybe I’ll skip prayer meeting myself and come along with you tonight, then.”
“And disappoint all those young women?” Sean teased.
“Ah, ’tis true, ’tis true,” Danny sighed with mock humility. “Lord knows I love to inspire my sisters to greater heights of devotion.” He grinned waggishly. “But I’m feeling the need to be with men—Irishmen. I’ll stand in the crowd, and loudly agree with everything you’re saying, like you’ve won me over with your fine persuasion. Inspire my brothers, for a change. Besides,” he said, lowering his voice, “that bastard Callahan’s bound to show up, him and his guards. Thinks he’s the only Irishman good enough to live in this city, always looking for ways to run the rest of us out.”
“That’s the sorry truth of it.” Sean rubbed his arm. “You’d think having an Irishman high up as he is in the police would work to our advantage, wouldn’t you?”
“Naw,” Danny said scornfully. “He’s just like them land agents back home—English on the inside, but Irish on the out and hating anyone who knows it. That’s it. I’m coming. You need a bodyguard, and I’m your man. Get you out of there quick-like if a scuffle breaks out.”