Heart of the Lonely Exile

by BJ Hoff

  And, always, like an undercurrent beneath a deceptively calm lake, ran the memory of Morgan Fitzgerald—a memory that, to Nora’s great surprise, seemed to be ebbing and drifting further away with time.

  He had not hanged after all, thanks be to God. Indeed, he was out of gaol and had astounded them by discovering an English grandfather with whom he was living in Dublin—a grandfather who had immediately set about making Morgan his sole heir!

  She was relieved that Morgan was safe, thankful that his neck had been spared—but in some inexplicable fashion, the very fact that he was now out of harm’s way had served to push him to the back of her memories. Perhaps because she no longer spent so much effort fearing for his life, so much energy in prayer that God would spare him—perhaps that was why she had finally been released from her obsession for the man.

  When the letter had come telling them of his pardon, her first foolish thought had been that now…perhaps now, he would come to her. Just as quickly, she had dismissed the wild notion. Nothing had changed with Morgan, except that he was in a better position than ever to spend his life and his passion for Ireland. He had made his choice long ago, had wed an island rather than a woman, and there would be no separating them—now, or in the future. Morgan belonged to Ireland. He always had. He always would.

  She would never forget him. He was a part of her life that, even though it no longer existed, could not easily be put away and forgotten. He had been her first love—a wondrous, great, and fiercely painful love—and she did not think she would ever think of Ireland without a thought of Morgan as well. But that’s all he would ever be for her—a memory.

  With thoughts of Morgan came the image of Michael as well. They were much alike, those two—the friends of her youth. Morgan, ever the wild poet, had swept her heart away with his passion and power. Michael, the rock-steady support, had always waited on the sidelines for her to turn to him. She loved them both, and always would. But now, in the present, Michael was here, still waiting, wanting to protect her, to shelter her.

  Sure, and it was a fierce temptation for Nora to say yes to Michael’s offer of marriage. Michael wanted it; Tierney wanted it; even Daniel John wanted it. The security Michael held out to her was a powerful attraction; he would take care of her and Daniel John.

  But something in Nora rose to the surface in the face of the mighty temptation to be cared for—a memory of a prayer she had prayed near the end of those long, terrible days on the Green Flag. She had asked God to give her the strength to depend upon Him alone, to make her equal to the challenges that lay before her.

  And hadn’t He answered that prayer, after all? Hadn’t He opened the door to a new life, a life determined by His direction? Aye, God had given her a chance to prove herself, to trust in Him to care for her. And now, in Michael’s insistent proposal, she found herself drawn backward to the old way of life she had known in Ireland. And she knew she could not go back. She could never again be Nora, the girl; God had grown her into Nora, the woman.

  Suddenly Nora understood her vague reluctance to accept Michael’s offer of marriage. It seemed so logical to marry him; yet somehow it didn’t seem right. If she married Michael, she would become, once more, the dependent, protected woman, overwhelmed and swallowed up in his strength. And she knew, instinctively, that she had passed beyond that portal when she stepped onto the Green Flag to come to America.

  Michael loved her, in his own way—of that Nora was certain. But she needed more than love and protection. She needed…respect, the kind of respect she found in her friendship with Evan Whittaker. He knew her not as the girl she had been, but as the woman she was. And he accepted her—cared about her—for herself. He treated her not as a child to be coddled, but as an equal, an adult, a woman to be honored.

  It was hard, ever so hard, to let go of the past! And yet she must. Even if she had to live her life alone, she must look only to today, and to the future. God had opened the door. For the sake of her son…and for the sake of her own life…she must be done, finally done, with yesterday.

  Later that night, Sara Farmington found her father dozing at his library desk over a stack of ship designs. As quietly as possible, she edged his teacup a few inches away from his hand so he wouldn’t knock it over when he awakened.

  She should have remembered that the slightest noise would rouse him—he was a man who thrived on little sleep and came instantly awake at the least movement.

  As he did now. With a muffled grunt, his head came up and his eyes snapped open.

  “Don’t go taking my tea, daughter! I was just resting my eyes for a moment.” He gave a huge stretch, yawned, and, watching her over the rim of the cup, took a deep sip of tea that was, Sara was certain, quite cold.

  He refused her offer to make fresh tea, motioning instead that she should sit down across from him. “Now tell me what you’ve been up to this evening, why don’t you? You disappeared right after dinner, and I haven’t seen you since.”

  Taking the chair on the other side of the desk, Sara eyed her father with amusement. “Actually, I’ve been conferring with Nora about a proper gown for the opera,” she replied dryly.

  His dark eyes fairly snapped. “Hah! So he asked her, did he?”

  “Oh, yes. He asked her—if we’re talking about Evan. I suspected it was entirely your doing; it seems I was right.”

  Her father shrugged, lifted both heavy brows, and shot her an ingenuous look. “I had extra tickets. I thought the two of them might enjoy seeing the new opera house.”

  “I’m sure they will.” Sara folded her hands in her lap.

  “Well, neither of them ever does anything but work,” her father argued, waving a hand with a defensive air. “Work and church—that’s their life! I believe they need to have some fun, don’t you?”

  Sara arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  Her father stared at her for a moment, then grinned. “Surely you’ve seen that the man is enchanted with her.”

  Drawing in a deep breath, Sara nodded reluctantly. “So it appears.”

  “Well, you needn’t sound so put out. I think they’d be splendid together.”

  “Father…” Sara paused uncertainly. “What about Michael Burke?”

  “What about him?” her father shot back, his forehead creasing in an obstinate frown.

  “He’s expecting Nora to marry him.”

  “Oh, pshaw!” Lewis Farmington reared back in his chair, his chin thrust forward in a terrible scowl. “I’m getting more than a little sick and tired of hearing how Nora and Sergeant Burke are going to be married—one day! If Nora wanted the man, she’d have done something about it by now! And if he was as serious about her as he fancies himself to be, he’d have carried her off long ago! Let Evan have a try, I say.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Father, you make it sound as if this were a footrace!”

  He smiled slyly. “A fair enough comparison. Two suitors vying for a lovely woman’s hand—yes, I think that sums it up rather nicely.”

  Exasperated with him, Sara got up from the chair. “You’re dreadful! You must be one of the busiest men in New York, and here you are playing matchmaker.”

  “I should think you’d encourage the idea of a courtship between Evan and Nora.”

  Uncomfortable under his close scrutiny, Sara glanced away. “Why would you think that?”

  She could feel his eyes locked upon her, even though she refused to look at him.

  “Well…they’re obviously drawn to each other. You seem to care about both of them. And—”

  When he stopped, Sara held her breath, waiting for what she was sure would come.

  “It would settle this thing between Nora and Sergeant Burke. I thought that might be to your liking.”

  Sara turned to face him, doing her best to manage a noncommittal expression. She found his dark eyes gentle, but appraising.

  He knew.

  Sara almost moaned aloud. “Father—”

  “It’s all right, my dea
r. You needn’t defend yourself to me, nor should you feel the slightest need to deny or admit anything. I’m not at all sure how I feel about your…attraction to the sergeant, because to tell you the truth, his so-called attachment to Nora has made it unnecessary for me to examine my feelings up until now. However, if Nora is even half as taken with Evan as he obviously is with her, the time may soon be coming when both you and I will have to make an honest evaluation of our feelings about Michael Burke.”

  Sara stared at him in dismay. She moistened her lips and found them bitter and dry. She attempted to smile. “Father, you’re really making entirely too much—”

  The tenderness in his eyes gave way to an expression of fatherly concern. “Sara, let’s just—wait and see, shall we? I think that’s the thing to do. For now.”

  He could read her too easily. He always could. She could not—would not—lie to him.

  “Yes, Father,” Sara said quietly. “We’ll do just that. We’ll—wait and see.”

  14

  Lament for the Land

  Day after day, mile after mile,

  I roamed a land that knew no smile.

  AUBREY DE VERE (1814–1902)

  Killala (Western Ireland)

  Joseph Mahon sat hunched over his journal, his head nodding, his burning eyes drifting in and out of focus.

  Lately, his right eye had taken to twitching and drooping, making it next to impossible to write legibly in the dim candlelight. Fatigue, more than likely. He had never known this kind of exhaustion. There was no part of his body free from the ache of weariness. Even his teeth, the few he had left, pained him from daylight to dark.

  At the height of last winter’s misery, he had managed three or four hours of fitful sleep most nights, enough to keep from keeling over through the day. But for weeks now, rest had been sporadic. Few nights passed without his being awakened by a desperate parishioner who came begging food or last rites for a family member. Joseph could no longer remember when he had last slept more than an hour or two at a time.

  The days were frantic and turbulent, crammed with endless work and packed with heartache. Like most of the other priests in the county, Joseph somehow made the time to write numerous letters to the relief officials. In addition, he attended every meeting he could, relentlessly plaguing every last mother’s son of them, trying to eke out some sparse sustenance for his people.

  His efforts in this regard were the least of his tasks, of course. Above all else came the ceaseless duties of comforting the suffering and ministering to the dying, all the while trying in vain to find some slight vestige of hope—in lieu of food—for the starving.

  Of late, Joseph, like many among the clergy, had also taken to nursing those who were ill. A number of physicians in the area had themselves succumbed, victims of either the Hunger or its shadowing fevers. Disease and death wildly outdistanced the supply of both doctors and clergy. Physicians, priests, and Protestant ministers were dying in ever-increasing numbers.

  In truth there were days when Joseph found himself almost longing for death, his deteriorating flesh crying out for rest, blessed rest. But then he would remember his people and their dependence on him, and with an exhausted sigh he would once more pray for the strength to go on.

  Now his head nodded, and he jerked awake. Steadying his pen, he waited for the trembling of his hand to cease. He had become obsessed with keeping the journal, with the need to record what he could of the horrific conditions in his parish—conditions which were, he knew, representative of most parishes throughout County Mayo and much of the rest of Ireland.

  What was happening to the people must be remembered. The survivors…the world…must somehow, someday, be required to take notice of Ireland’s suffering.

  Propping his elbow on the table, he braced his head with a fist and renewed his writing:

  Now that winter is upon us again, it is to be expected that things will be even more dreadful than before. No longer does a day pass in Killala without death, and throughout our poor Mayo the suffering defies all imagining.

  This evening on my way to investigate a rumor about the Hegartys, I passed through scenes one could not envision except in their worst nightmares. The streets now swarm with gaunt wanderers, roaming aimlessly to and fro like lost souls cast into the void. Homeless and hopeless, they are near naked—starving, some raving with madness, they will upon occasion mob one who appears in better circumstances than they.

  The children and the aged are the worst. They break the heart with their pitiful swollen bellies and their bewildered, pleading eyes. Oh, God, they are enough to crush the strongest of spirits, the stoutest of hearts!

  But I digress from my accounting of the Hegartys. Their mean abode is off to itself a ways and appeared deserted when I reached it. Silence reigned; at first I thought the entire family had left to go on the road, but when I entered I found the ghastly reason for the quiet.

  Poor Nessan and Mary were both dead, propped together in the corner on a mound of filthy straw! The babe was dead as well, in Mary’s arms. The other three children—more specters than living beings—were huddled beneath a piece of soiled horsecloth. Only one, wee Kathleen, found the strength to whimper when she saw me.

  I went at once to fetch Dr. Browne, and, the Lord bless that good man, he helped me to bury Nessan and Mary and the babe before taking the sick children to his own house!

  The kind doctor is a shadow of himself, and I fear he will not be long after helping those he treats with such charity. God help us, we are all dying, some more slowly and painfully than others…but we are all of us dying. The land itself is dying, and that is the truth.

  Joseph stopped, laying his pen down long enough to remove his spectacles and rub his burning eyes. He shook his head in an attempt to stay awake, but he was almost numb with fatigue.

  A hood of darkness slipped down over his head, masking his vision. He bent over the table and put his head down upon his folded arms. He would rest his eyes, then, for a moment.

  Only for a moment…

  In his Spartan, drafty bedroom at Nelson Hall, Morgan Fitzgerald was packing for a trip he did not want to make.

  He regretted now that he’d agreed to accompany Smith O’Brien to the Belfast meetings. That in itself would not be such a bad thing, although he found the northern city bleak and depressing. It was more the fact that Meagher, McGee, and Mitchel were also going. All three were avowed militants, bent on stirring the people to a rising—and all three thought Morgan had gone soft.

  He crossed to the bureau and rifled through the clean linen stacked in the middle drawer, checking to see what he might have forgotten. Returning to the open valise on the bed, he stood staring down at it, his mood growing more and more dour.

  In truth, the only reason he had agreed to the trip at all was his concern for Smith O’Brien. The man had made himself some real enemies over the past months, as had most members of the Young Ireland movement, either wittingly or unwittingly.

  Oddly enough, it was not the Orangemen—the northern Protestants—who worried Morgan most. He suspected O’Brien’s real foes were a number of troublemakers bent on destroying the entire Young Ireland organization, along with its leader.

  They had been at their mischief here in Dublin for some time now, as well as in Limerick and Tipperary. More than one Young Irelander had been attacked on his way home from a night meeting last summer, including Mitchel and Meagher.

  These days the Young Irelanders were accused of an entire assortment of sins and seditions, from O’Connell’s death last May to a wave of atheism, racism, and political unrest. Smith O’Brien, in particular, had come under heavy criticism, both for his support of “secret societies” and for “hobnobbing with the gentry” at the expense of his commitment to the common folk.

  A Protestant, O’Brien had joined both the Catholic Association and the Repeal movement. At first he had worked well with Daniel O’Connell, the most popular hero in Ireland, both of them endeavoring toward th
e same ends: relief for the famine victims and repeal of the union between Ireland and England.

  When the time came, however, that O’Connell insisted all members of the Repeal organization disavow physical force or armed rebellion, a number of dissidents refused. With such men at the front as Thomas Davis, a young Protestant barrister and poet from Cork, Charles Gavan Duffy, and John Blake Dillon, the Young Ireland movement was born.

  Through its journal, The Nation, the movement began to attract some of the finest minds in Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, and the aristocratic Smith O’Brien gradually became one of the most prominent figures. With the acquisition of John Mitchel and John Martin, however, an increasingly militant tone began to issue from The Nation. More vigorous language in favor of rebellion arose; stirrings and murmurings for a rising of the people grew louder.

  After the death of Daniel O’Connell, his son’s weak and ineffective leadership all but destroyed the Repeal movement. With this weakening of “Old Ireland”—O’Connell’s followers—the radical, militant John Mitchel began to speak out with even more force. Smith O’Brien continued to insist he would have no part in a rising, but Morgan sensed that in spite of his protests, O’Brien was being caught up in the wake of rebellion.

  And where do I stand in all this? Morgan asked himself, restacking the contents of the valise to make room for his pen and papers. After years of indulging in violence and renegade activities, he had been spared from the gallows by an English grandfather whose existence had been unknown to him until a few months ago.

  Right on the heels of this unexpected pardon came a renewal of his faith, a spiritual reawakening Morgan would have thought impossible for an outlaw such as he. Turning back to his Savior, he found he had not been forsaken as he had once thought. Like the Prodigal Son, he had thrown himself, sins and all, at the feet of a forgiving Father, to find himself healed and accepted.

  He desired to do nothing that would grieve the Lord who had so graciously restored him. Although he was still a Young Irelander, still committed—at least in principle—to the movement, he had begun to feel more and more uncomfortable with the militant turn of The Nation and its supporters.