1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  That same day a young Galway woman called Ellen Quinn was sitting on a wall beside the road, nursing her baby. As a party of Black and Tans drove past in a lorry, one of them casually shot her in the stomach. It took her seven hours to bleed to death. The military later claimed her shooting was a precautionary measure.

  “And wisely so,” Henry commented in the Bulletin. “Taking the precaution of killing an Irish mother will prevent her giving birth to more rebels. It is certain, however, that this sort of action will create other rebels sprung from the wombs of other Irish women.”

  Six unarmed Republicans were captured by Black and Tans near Cork City. When their mutilated bodies were finally returned to their relatives by the RIC—without explanation or apology—they could be identified only by their clothing. One’s heart had been cut out; another had lost his tongue; a third’s nose had been cut off.

  IN the days following Síle’s death Henry hardly thought of Ella Rutledge. She was at the far periphery of his thoughts, which formed concentric circles. Precious was on the innermost ring; his work beyond that. Ned was somewhere farther out, unreachable. He was only at home intermittently, but he had begun writing again. He showed some of his novel to Henry. It was no longer a lighthearted adventure tale; jagged angry words slashed the page like shards of broken glass.

  Henry understood all too well. There was a darkening of the world. The streets were grayer, the skies were lower. Hope walked arm in arm with her ugly twin, despair.

  At night he slept with one arm on the side table by his bed, where his revolver lay in easy reach. During the day, if he did not have it on him, it was under his mattress. Louise found it there but never commented; she merely put it back.

  AS for Precious, she confounded them all by drawing into herself and healing from the inside out. Immediately after the funeral she had unable to sleep, unable to eat, hardly able to talk. When Father O’Flanagan called at the house, she listened politely as he offered spiritual consolation, but her eyes were distant. Nothing he said touched her. Yet with each day that passed she battled her way back. They watched her forcing herself to eat without being pressured, heard her first valiant efforts to make normal conversation. Saw the child they loved returning, unbroken.

  Michael Collins inquired about Ned’s family one morning when he called in to the Bulletin. “I don’t know where Precious gets her inner resources,” Henry told him.

  “Was she not born poor?”

  “She was,” Henry replied, surprised as ever by how much Collins knew.

  “Well, the poor learn early that they must rely on themselves. Didn’t your mammy ever tell you, ‘Like the river, we sparkle more in sunshine, but our strength comes from the rain’?”

  “Were you born poor, Mick?”

  “Not really; I was born lucky. My ancestors were once lords of Ui Chonaill, though all that’s many times gone. But my family still has ninety acres near Clonakilty, a place called Woodfield. It’s a good farm. With so many of us in the family it’s quite self-sufficient.”

  “I didn’t know about Woodfield.”

  “I imagine there’s a lot about me you don’t know. For instance, my father was the seventh son of a seventh son. He was sixty years old before he finally married a local girl called Marianne O’Brien, and seventy-five when I was born—the youngest of his eight children,” Collins added.

  “An exceptionally vigorous man,” Henry commented admiringly.

  “You don’t know the half of it. He lived through the Famine and was educated in an outlawed hedge school before he joined the Fenians. Then he went right on educating himself. He had a great love of learning, my father did. He was fluent in Irish and French and had a working knowledge of Latin and Greek. I was seven when he died, but I remember him well.”

  “My father’s dead too. I was older than you, though, when it happened. Not that it makes it any easier.”

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “She is. But we’re not close.”

  Collins gave Henry a look of focused concentration, diamond-hard. “Both our friends and our enemies think we’ll never die, but we will. In the meantime you should cherish your mother. Mothers are sacred.”

  “If you knew my mother,” Henry said, “you wouldn’t be so reverential about her.”

  Collins was sitting on the edge of Henry’s desk, swinging one foot. He had brought a top-secret government document to be published in the Bulletin to embarrass the British, but it was temporarily forgotten as he reminisced. “You wouldn’t know it to hear me swear now, but I was a reverential kid. Reverence was not only instilled into me by my father; it seemed a natural trait. Great age held something for me that was awesome. I was much fonder of old people in the darkness than I was of young people in the daytime. It’s at night that you’re able to get the value of old people. And it was from listening to the old people that I got my ideas of nationality.”7 He paused, rummaged in his pockets. “Say, Henry, do you have any fags on you?”

  “I gave them up.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” No point in admitting how hard it was to Mick Collins, for whom nothing is hard.

  “Maybe I should give them up too. I’m becoming a slave to cigarettes, and I’ll be a slave to nothing.”

  “There speaks the Fenian’s son,” said Henry.

  “ ‘Sure and what would the cat’s son do but kill the rat?’ ” Collins quoted in his broadest West Cork accent. Producing a folded document from an inside pocket, he dropped it on Henry’s desk. “Here, print this in the next edition. Show the feckin’ bastards we know their secrets. Make ’em squirm.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  November 16, 1920

  RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR ENDS—BOLSHEVIKS TRIUMPH

  OUTSIDE lay the cold sunshine of a winter afternoon. Inside the dark, malt-scented sanctuary of the Oval Bar, Henry Mooney sat alone at a table, playing with his empty pint glass on the tabletop, making interlocked wet rings, blurring them, making new ones. He had come in for his customary Tuesday pub lunch and lingered, unwilling to face the world again. So many terrible stories to tell. His mind wandered. Síle. Exquisite pain in the remembering. An affirmation of the futility of striving. Why bother? It all came to the same thing in the end.

  At the other side of the room a man stood up against the bar and began singing in a clear tenor voice. Such impromptu performances were a part of pub life, rewarded with appreciative audiences who might or might not sing along as the spirit moved them.

  Oh think not my spirits are always as light

  And as free from a pang as they seem to you now;

  Nor expect that the heart-beaming smile of tonight

  Will return with tomorrow to brighten my brow.

  No, life is a waste of wearisome hours

  Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;

  And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers

  Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.

  Henry joined in the last lugubrious lines, then raised two fingers to signal the publican for a refill.

  The singer launched into the second verse.

  The thread of our life would be dark, Heaven knows!

  If it were not with friendship and love intertwined;

  And I care not how soon I may sink to repose,

  When these blessings shall cease to be dear to my mind!

  But send round the bowl, while a relic of truth

  Is in man or in woman, this prayer shall be mine—

  That the sunshine of love may illumine our youth,

  And the moonlight of friendship console our decline.*

  A fresh pint arrived, brimming, at Henry’s table. “The moonlight of friendship…” God help Ned. He raised the drink to his lips. “The sunshine of love…” He set the drink down untasted. Sunshine. Precious, battling back.

  Henry, who had always decried the Irish habit of making an icon of tragedy, suddenly realized he was doing the same thing
.

  Ella Rutledge. He said the name in his head like a talisman. Ella Rutledge.

  HENRY stood on the footpath, gazing at the front door. Once or twice he turned to look at the gleaming black Delage motorcar parked at the curb. At last he went up the steps and knocked. The housemaid seemed surprised to see to him. “Why, good afternoon, Mr. Mooney. Are you expected?”

  The Irish Times lay on the table in the hall atop several other newspapers. While he waited for Ella, Henry scanned the headline story about the end of Russia’s bloodbath between the Whites and the Reds. Civil war: the most uncivil of all wars. Brother against brother, father against son. How could they? Thank God it’s over, anyway.

  His eye fell on a brown envelope that had slid off the table when he picked up the Times. The address was in Anna Fitzsimons’s familiar handwriting. He bent to retrieve it just as Ella appeared. “Henry! What a pleasant surprise.”

  “I’m surprised myself,” he said, handing her the envelope. “I didn’t know Edwin subscribed to the Irish Bulletin.”

  “Why? Because it’s nationalist? And what makes you think it’s for Edwin?” As she put the envelope in her pocket there was an edge to her voice: unexpected steel beneath the plummy accents. “Perhaps you should have asked me before you jumped to conclusions, Henry.”

  Before he could respond Edwin appeared in the door of the drawing room. “I thought I heard your voice, Henry. Wonderful bit of timing. Come inside with us; we’re looking at sketches for a proposed conservatory and I should value your opinion. Oh, I don’t believe you’ve met Major Wallace Congreve? He’s an old friend of ours—he served with Father in the army.”

  The major was a heavyset man in his early fifties, with brilliantined hair and a pencil mustache. His features might have been handsome once, but were blurring under the influence of too much food and drink. When he moved he creaked slightly, as if he were wearing a corset. His conversation was liberally peppered with the names of mutual friends and references to shared history. Henry had no opportunity for a private conversation with Ella until she walked him to the door after less than an hour. He did not really want to go, but Congreve made him feel like an intruder.

  The maid brought his coat and held it while he shrugged into it, then vanished at a wave of Ella’s hand. Henry could not ask the question on his mind about Major Congreve; not with the doors still open and the man just inside. Gesturing toward the papers on the hall table, he asked instead, “Is that your Bulletin, Ella?”

  “Of course it is. I read every article you write.”

  “Surely there’s very little in them that you agree with.”

  “How would you know? You and I discuss everything under the sun except politics. And religion.”

  Henry found himself defending his good manners. “I was taught that those two are forbidden subjects in polite conversation, Ella.”

  “Yet in Ireland they are central to who we are,” she retorted. “How could you possibly propose marriage to a woman without knowing her opinions on both?” Suddenly her cheeks dimpled; her eyes danced. “Or perhaps you weren’t proposing marriage at all, but something else?”

  Caught off guard, Henry floundered. “Of course I was proposing marriage. I would never dream of…I mean…But it was just a wild notion, I thought you understood…”

  “So on mature reflection you take it back?” She was definitely laughing at him. Henry made a grasp for emotional equilibrium and missed. His face betrayed his confusion.

  Ella was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be teasing you at a time like this. We read Mrs. Halloran’s obituary in the Times and I know she was a friend. You have my sympathy.”

  The mention of Síle was like cold water poured over Henry. He drew a deep, steadying breath and buttoned his coat. “Thank you.”

  “She must have been an extraordinary woman.”

  He paused in the doorway, forced, as always when confronted with such a statement, to be objective. “I don’t suppose you could call Síle Halloran extraordinary. Come to think of it, there are hundreds like her in Dublin. You couldn’t tell the story of the city or the times without them.”

  IT was too late in the day to go back to work, and he was not in the mood anyway, so he set out on one of his rambles through the city. Picturing Ella’s face as he walked, listening again to her words: “I read every article you write.”

  Major Congreve’s features swam into memory and shattered the mood. Is that man courting Ella? He certainly seemed attentive. But what could she possibly see in a man old enough to be her father? Him and that ridiculous mustache. Surely she wouldn’t…Henry reached in his pocket for cigarettes, remembered he had quit. Swore under his breath.

  Who knows what’s going on in the mind of a woman? And why did she mention my proposal?

  On the morning of November twentieth Michael Collins paid another visit to the Bulletin. He handed Henry a decoded memorandum on Dublin Castle stationery. “For some time we’ve known there’s a deliberate shoot-to-kill policy to eliminate what the government calls “Sinn Féin extremists.” In this document is proof that Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the imperial general staff, has assembled a company of specially trained British intelligence officers and sent them to Dublin with orders to destroy my organization.”1

  “Rather like your squad eliminating G-men and spies,” Henry commented dryly.

  Collins ignored the remark. “They’re lodging in private houses around Dublin and posing as ordinary citizens. They’re old Mideast hands, most of them, and they tend to meet at the Cairo Café, so they’ve been nicknamed the Cairo Gang. I have no doubt that if they can get me out of the way, Wilson will have them target the members of the Dáil next.

  “We’re meeting in Vaughan’s Hotel tonight to finalize a plan of our own. That’s where you come in, Henry. Today’s Saturday; I want the Bulletin to publish this document verbatim on Monday. Stencil in the Castle letterhead if you can.”

  “Why on Monday in particular?”

  “Do you recall our conversation about political assassinations?”

  “I do of course.”

  “Well, let’s just say no one’s going to wipe out the government of the Irish Republic again.”

  NED Halloran left number 16 without explanation that evening. He had not returned by the time Precious went to bed, so Louise took the child a cup of hot cocoa and Henry read to her from the evening papers until she fell asleep. In the kitchen later he told his cousin, “I made Little Business a promise before Síle died and tomorrow would be a good time to keep it. Whatever about Ned, life goes on for that child.”

  Sunday morning dawned clear and crisp. There was no sign of Ned, who either had not come home at all or had left the house before anyone else was awake. Henry and Louise took Precious to the earliest Mass. Henry did not stand in the back of the church with his arms folded, but occupied a pew with his womenfolk. Afterwards they went back to number 16, where Louise helped Precious dress for her first horse-riding lesson.

  When they competed in sidesaddle classes at the Dublin Horse Show, Ascendancy ladies wore beautifully fitted broadcloth riding habits custom-tailored by Wm. Scott & Co. Ursula Halloran would learn to ride wearing an old woolen jumper and a pair of boy’s knickerbockers from a secondhand clothes stall in Moore Street—and the gloves Henry had given her.

  For his sake she was pretending more enthusiasm than she felt. Síle’s death was still too recent. Yet as they neared Smithfield, Precious began to walk faster. Henry trailed along in her wake, amused that the girl could be excited by something as commonplace as horses.

  Animals of every description were part of Dublin street life. The cobbles were always smeared with fresh dung. Livestock markets proliferated. Drovers brought herds of cattle up the North Circular Road, with unruly bulls occasionally breaking free to demolish a shopfront or trample an onlooker. Flocks of sheep clogged side streets while dogs barked and frustrated pedestrians prodded the creatures out of their way.
Homegrown pigs and poultry were pursued down laneways by barefoot urchins. Thousands of screeching caged birds were transported through the city to the bird market in the Liberties, sold to hang in residential windows and sing their sad lives away.

  The horse was special, however. In the years following the Great War Dublin was still heavily dependent upon horsepower. Sometimes as many as five hundred horses would be lined up along O’Connell Street in the morning, harnessed to the service of coal merchants, bakeries, dairies, breweries, delivery wagons of every description, and, in spite of the growing influence of the motorcar, a predominance of horse-drawn cabs.

  Central to this equine power grid was the Smaithfield Horse Fair, where almost every horse, pony, or donkey in the city was sold at some stage in its life. Although the fair was held only on the first Sunday of every month, in her imagination Precious could see thousands of animals on display. They drew her like a magnet. She could not have said why; she knew only that the attraction had always been there. By the time they reached the livery stable her heart was racing. A row of equine faces gazed at her from the loose boxes. “Hello,” she called softly. Ears pricked; a blaze-faced chestnut nickered.

  While Precious went from one horse to another, crooning in a wordless language, Henry took the liveryman aside. “You understand I want her to have proper lessons?”

  “Same as I’d teach me own children. By spring she’ll be riding like one of them centenaries.”

  “Centaurs,” Henry corrected absently. “Listen here to me. She’s not to get hurt.”

  “Well now, horses ain’t house pets, they—”

  “She’s not to get hurt!” Henry paused, dropped his voice to a conspiratorial level. “You know Michael Collins?”

  A respectful light came into the man’s eyes. “Don’t know him, know of him. The Big Fellow.”

  “That’s the one. He’s a close friend of mine, and neither one of us would like it if this child got hurt. Do I make myself clear?”