1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “Ned’s my best friend,” Henry said simply.

  “Ah.”

  “He was Pearse’s personal courier, so I worry about what the British might do to him. Successful rebels are patriots, but failed rebels are criminals.”

  “We haven’t failed, Mooney. We’re not going to.”

  “Answer me one question: How did you get me out?”

  “Knew who to ask, that’s all. The police are still Irish lads underneath, in spite of the indoctrination the British give them, and some of them help me from time to time.”

  “How far up does that go?”

  “You don’t need to know, Mooney.”

  “IRB secrecy, eh?”

  Collins shrugged his broad shoulders.

  “What about Ned? Did you get him and Síle out already?”

  “They weren’t taken to Store Street. When I got there I found your name on the arrest log, but not theirs. I was told she’s being held at Kevin Street Barracks and he’s in the police depot in the Phoenix Park.” Abruptly Collins turned into a narrow, litter-strewn laneway where they would not be overheard. Henry followed him. As he maneuvered his bicycle across rain-slick cobbles Collins asked, “How much do you know about what’s going on?”

  “Ned didn’t have time to tell me much of anything before we were arrested.”

  “Our dear Lord-Lieutenant French decided he was going to ‘put the fear of God’ into Irish nationalists,”1 Collins said, “so he requested a massive new supply of bombs and machine guns from British Ordnance.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Collins’ teeth flashed in a jaunty grin. “A cousin of mine who works in Dublin Castle’s been put in charge of handling the most secret coded messages because the British want to be sure they’re in safe hands. She puts ’em in safe hands, all right—mine. Makes you wonder how in the name of Jaysus those people ever got an empire.”

  Henry laughed.

  “Anyway,” Collins went on, “the Castle’s decided they need an excuse for all this new weaponry, so they’re accusing Sinn Féin of being in league with Germany against Britain.”

  “The Volunteers were eager enough to buy German weapons during the Rising,” Henry reminded him.

  “I know, but this is a different situation. Last month the police arrested a man on an island off the coast of Galway. He’d been sent on a German submarine to communicate with the leaders of the ‘Irish resistance movement.’ It was the Germans’ own idea; the Sinn Féin executive didn’t instigate it and didn’t know anything about it. A link with Germany would do us no good in the international community now.

  “The incident was unfortunate, to say the least. It’s allowed the Castle to concoct a whole new conspiracy to justify arresting prominent Republicans.”

  “Apparently that doesn’t include you,” Henry remarked.

  “That’s because I know how the authorities think. To them we’re all Paddies fresh off the bog, so I’m careful not to conform to their image. Joe Plunkett always said, ‘If you don’t think of yourself as being on the run, you aren’t a fugitive,’2 and it’s true. Special Branch and the G-men would both like to get their hands on me, but dressed like a businessman I can go anywhere in Dublin and the police tip their hats to me.” Slipping into an even broader West Cork accent, he added, “And other times, sure I’m just a shadow in the rain.”

  “You’re damned near invisible as far as I can tell,” Henry said admiringly. “But you still haven’t told me if you can get the Hallorans released.”

  “It may be possible to help her—though I understand she threatened a British officer with a pistol, which complicates matters somewhat. But I don’t want Ned released just now.”

  Henry caught hold of Collins’ arm. “Why ever not? He’s clever, resourceful…”

  “Exactly. Ned Halloran will be a lot more use to me in prison than out of it.” Beneath the sleeve of Collins’ coat Henry felt the tensing of iron muscles. “Understand this, Mooney. From now on we’re going to fight the government with their own weapons—spies, informers, a whole network of contacts infiltrating every level of their damned bureaucracy, and that includes the prison camps in Britain. A number of our people are going to be there in a matter of days, if not hours, and I need Halloran and a few more like him as conduits for communication.”

  “But,” Henry protested, “he has a family.”

  “Most men in Ireland have families—who d’ye think we’re doing this for? I don’t have any children yet, but when I do, I don’t want them growing up with King Georgie’s foot on their necks. Come on, I need to be ten other places in the next five minutes.”

  At the mouth of the laneway Collins stopped and cast a swift glance up and down the street. “I must leave you here, Mooney, but I’m glad we met—I’ve been impressed with your articles. Why haven’t I seen any of them lately?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not working as a journalist these days. The Dublin papers aren’t exactly clamoring for my stories. And call me Henry, please.”

  Collins rubbed his jaw with his thumb. “You know, Arthur Griffith says we should make the most of our natural resources. I don’t agree with him about a lot of things, but on that subject I do. It seems to me you’re one of our resources. Tell you what—I’ll see that you have inside information from time to time, if you make good use of it. Understand me?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Good on ye.” Collins clapped Henry on the shoulder, then stepped on the pedal of his bicycle and wheeled off down the street. After a few yards he called back over his shoulder, “Oh, by the way—you will look after our friend’s family until he comes home, won’t you?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  LOUISE Kearney greeted Henry with a gasp of relief. Precious flung herself into his arms, but Louise pulled her away. “I’m putting more kettles on, and not just for tea. You get those clothes off right now, Henry Mooney, and give yourself a good scrubbing. I won’t have prison lice in my house.”

  After he had bathed, Henry put on fresh clothes and stretched out on his bed. It felt good to have a mattress under his spine again, but he could not rest. In a few minutes he was up and peering out the window, hoping against hope he would see Síle and Ned coming up the street.

  Louise Kearney tried to keep herself busy. With the exception of Henry all of her lodgers had gone to work, and there were rooms to sweep and linen to change. She started each chore with a flurry of determination that soon faded. Only baking offered relief; she pummeled the dough unmercifully, for once not caring if her bread was tough.

  Eventually Henry went looking for Precious. He found the child in her parents’ sitting room. Instead of playing she was seated in Síle’s customary chair, with her back ramrod-straight and her hands folded in her lap. Her dangling feet did not reach the floor.

  “What are you doing in here all alone, Little Business?”

  “I’m not alone,” the little girl replied matter-of-factly. “I’m being with myself.”

  “Is that not the same as being alone?”

  Precious shook her head. “Alone is when nobody’s with you. When I’m being with myself I have company.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Uncle Henry, I’m lots of different people. So are you. You’re a little boy who used to ride in a pony cart, and a grown-up who talks to me like a grown-up too, and my papa’s best friend who laughs a lot, and a lonely man who looks sad sometimes when he thinks no one is watching.”

  Henry was taken aback. “Who told you all this?”

  “Nobody. I just pay attention.”

  “What about you? Who are you right now?”

  “Well…I’m being an adult because adults are braver than children are. Ursula Jervis Halloran, that’s my grown-up name.”

  “Is Precious gone for good, then?”

  “Course not,” the little girl said firmly. “I don’t want to lose any of my bits.”

  Henry went down the stairs shaking his head. Fey, fanci
ful child! Old people down the country might suspect she was a changeling, a fairy exchanged for a mortal. They still believe in fairies as surely I believe in electric light.

  William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory had presented a romanticized image of the fairies of Ireland, but their whimsical tales overlaid something quite different. Even Christian zeal had not quite destroyed the last remnants of an older, darker faith.

  In 1910, one of the stories Henry had covered for the Limerick Leader was the release from prison of Michael Cleary. Fifteen years earlier, a young Tipperary woman called Bridget Cleary had been tortured over the grate of her own kitchen fireplace, soaked with paraffin oil and burned alive. Her husband, Michael, her father, and nine other men and women had taken part in the murder because they were convinced she was a changeling.1

  Children in Tipperary still sang a skipping song that went, “Are you a witch or are you a fairy, Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”

  The deed was committed not in some isolated rural backwater, but on the outskirts of the large town of Clonmel, fourteen years after electric cables were laid in Dublin. The overlap of past and future had an eerie resonance for Henry Mooney.

  THE rain continued throughout the day. The streetlamps were lit by the time Síle returned. Louise was in the kitchen, polishing the range with Zebra Black Lead, while Henry was trying to distract himself by reading newspapers in the parlor. Precious was keeping a vigil at an upstairs window. They heard her come racing down the front stairs, shouting, “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

  Ursula Jervis Halloran, adult, was forgotten.

  Accompanying Síle was a man in a nondescript Crombie coat. Once she was safely inside the house, he touched the brim of his hat and left without speaking.

  Síle’s clothes were rumpled and she looked very tired. “You come inside and sit down close to the fire,” Louise said.

  “Don’t fuss over me, please; I’m fine,” Síle replied.

  “What you need is a cup of tea with a drop of something in it. And beef tea, and some nice cheese-and-onion sandwiches. Drag the couch close to the fireplace, Henry, and fetch some blankets. Would you ever listen to the cough on her? I’m going to make a mustard plaster for her chest.”

  Soon Síle, half-smothered beneath layers of wool, was reclining on the black horsehair couch in front of a blazing fire. Undeterred by the fumes of the mustard, Precious snuggled into the curve of her arm. Every time Síle moved, the little girl pressed closer.

  “Was it very bad so?” Louise asked solicitously. “Drink your tea now, while it’s hot.”

  “Just unpleasant. They shouted at me and demanded I tell them everything I knew, but I pretended to be too stupid to understand. Finally they decided I was nobody important. ‘She’s just some ignorant whore off the streets,’ one of them said.”

  If she weren’t so tired, Henry thought, Síle never would have repeated that with Precious in the room. “Did anyone tell you why you were being released?”

  “They just said a man had come to take me home. That was him at the door. He’s IRB, I know that much, but he wasn’t much of a talker. May I have more milk in this, Louise?”

  “What about Ned?”

  “I never saw him after we left here. I was hoping he would be back by the time I got home.”

  Louise said indignantly, “They can’t hold people forever on trumped-up charges.”

  Henry and Síle exchanged a long look. “I hope you’re right,” said Henry.

  USING the mythical German plot as pretext, the authorities arrested leading Republicans as a “preventive measure.”2 Every Sinn Féin member who had been elected to Parliament, with the exception of one man who was visiting in America, was consigned to prison for an indefinite time without charge or trial. Officers of the Republican Army were taken in the dragnet as well. Henry, who had the list of names before any other reporter in Ireland, took it to The Irish Times.

  “The Castle hasn’t released these names yet,” the editor, John Healy, said in surprise. “Where did you get them?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “You know we can’t give you a byline on this.”

  “I do know, John. Just remember who brought it to you.”

  In its next edition, the Times scooped all other newspapers by reporting that seventy-three individuals had been deported to Britain, including Eamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith, Count Plunkett, W. T. Cosgrave, Seán MacGarry, Countess Markievicz, Kathleen Clarke, and Ned Halloran. Michael Collins and Cathal Brugha were not on the list.

  There would be demands from many quarters for the government to produce hard evidence of the alleged German plot, but none was ever forthcoming.

  THE days became weeks—weeks in which Henry did his best to be a second father to Precious. Every time someone came to the front door the child’s face lit briefly in a way that broke his heart.

  Without any formal agreement, in Ned’s absence the others took over the schooling of Precious. Henry, who wrote a fine copperplate hand, somehow found extra time to instruct her in penmanship and grammar. Louise taught her the practicalities of weights and measures, pounds, shillings, and pence. And Síle, though her own formal schooling had been scanty, revealed an unsuspected gift for maths and drilled the little girl relentlessly. Schooling was conducted throughout the day, knitted in and around the business of living.

  Henry halfway expected to be arrested again, but it never happened. “I was a minor minnow caught in their net,” he told Louise, “and they don’t care that I slipped away. Perhaps I should be insulted, but I’m just thankful.”

  Síle was holding herself under iron control. Her drawn face and hollow cheeks testified to the strain she was feeling, but she never spoke of it. Outwardly she was the same as ever. Henry found himself thinking of all those other courageous women who had lost sons and husbands to the dream of Irish freedom. They too went on washing clothes and baking bread and going to Mass and caring for children and sometimes arranging a bunch of flowers in a jam pot for the table.

  How do they do it? The waiting is the worst; I never realized. How do women do it?

  Henry wrote to Ned’s brother Frank, explaining the situation to him, and Frank promised to keep sending Ned’s share of the farm income for Síle and Precious. “Although,” as Henry told Louise, “I could apply to the Irish National Aid fund on their behalf. Michael Collins would take care of it, he’s the secretary there now.”

  Louise peered at him over her new wire-rimmed spectacles, which she wore perched on the end of her nose. “Is that man running everything?”

  “Just about,” Henry said. “He keeps opening more offices.”

  He thought of writing to Ned’s sister in America and telling her of his arrest, but there was nothing she could do. Besides, Henry had never met Kathleen ní Halloran Campbell. All he knew from Ned was that she was very pretty, an ardent supporter of the Republican cause, and had left her husband. The last was, in Henry’s experience, almost unprecedented behavior for an Irish Catholic woman. What does one say to a woman in those circumstances? How does one even address her?

  He decided it was best not to write to her at all.

  When his former quarters in the attic became vacant, Louise assumed he would reclaim them, and was surprised when he demurred. “It wouldn’t be proper for me to be up there with Síle, unchaperoned.”

  “Oh, Henry, if she can’t trust you, who can she trust?”

  But he was adamant. He stayed on the first floor.

  He was beginning to hate writing advertising copy, persuading people to buy things they did not need instead of helping them understand the forces affecting their lives. When his pocket notebook was filled, he bought a new one. Every night after work he assiduously recorded the day’s political events.

  On the fifteenth of June, the cities of Cork and Limerick and a number of counties suspected of harboring too many Republicans were designated proclaimed districts, meaning anyone arrested there could be tried elsewhere at the go
vernment’s convenience. “The Castle wants to keep them in its own pocket,” Henry wrote in his notebook.

  On the twenty-first of June, a by-election took place in Cavan. Henry recorded afterward: “Although John Dillon did his best to secure the seat for his party, Sinn Féin nominated Arthur Griffith. Griffith, who is still in prison, won by twelve hundred votes.”

  On the fourth of July the Sinn Féin Party, Cumann na mBan, and the Gaelic League were proscribed, and their meetings declared illegal. Their members ignored the ban. “The Fourth of July is also Independence Day in America,” Henry observed in his notebook.

  The Royal Irish Constabulary undertook a new recruitment drive. More police barracks were opened, studding the country. It was impossible to travel from Dublin to Swords, a distance of seven miles, without passing three RIC stations and being stopped and questioned at each of them.

  Arrests continued throughout the summer. The police even broke up sporting events—if those events were considered of a seditious nature, such as Gaelic football or Gaelic hurling matches.

  When Henry saw Michael Collins in the street he made a point of never calling attention to him, but Collins always gave Henry a cheery nod. From time to time a sealed note addressed to “HM” was pushed through the letter box at number 16. The notes did not come by way of the postal service. Catching a glimpse of the delivery boy one day as he sped away on his bicycle, Henry thought, It’s astonishing the Castle hasn’t picked him up by now. They don’t seem to have any idea who he is.

  Letters from Lincoln Jail addressed to Mrs. Halloran also bypassed the government post office. Síle would run upstairs with the sealed envelope and reappear later, glowing, to report, “Ned’s all right. He sends his love.” She never said more than that to Henry and Louise. Ned’s letters were too tender to share. They were written in pencil, sometimes on sheets of toilet paper, and Síle slept with them beneath her pillow.