“Wallace?”
“Major Congreve. Surely you remember him.”
“Surely I do. How could I forget him? More to the point, how can you forget him?” The words were tumbling out without his permission.
To his relief, she laughed. “Why Henry Mooney, you’re jealous.”
“I am not jealous.”
Ella smiled. “A man hates for a woman to suggest he’s jealous, while a woman hates if a man is not.” Her dimples mocked him.
“Are you ever jealous?”
“My goodness, Henry, what a direct question! If I answered I should lose all my womanly mystery.”
She was playing, but he was serious. “You’ll never lose your mystery,” he assured her, “not for me. Sometimes when you put your hand to your chin just so”—he demonstrated—“and gaze off into space with that faraway look of yours, I imagine that’s exactly how the moon must regard the earth.”
For once Ella was caught off-guard. “What a poetic thing to say.”
“I mean it. I always mean what I say to you.”
They stood looking at one another. Around them the atmosphere thickened, throbbed.
Ella’s social graces came to the rescue. Gesturing to Henry to take a chair, she plied him with the distractions of tea, biscuits, and light conversation. He sat in the chair, drank the tea, and responded automatically to the conversation while he tried to bring his rebelling emotions under control.
Since she agreed to marry him Ella had permitted Henry certain liberties—a tender kiss on the mouth, a lingering hug that left the shape of her body imprinted on his. He had not attempted to go farther. Either they were out together in public or there were other people in the house who might enter the room at any time. He had never been invited upstairs, nor did he expect to be. A respectable courtship had certain rules.
Suddenly he was tired of rules. Tired of flirtatious games. I’m too old for this.
She went on talking vivaciously, but he who made his living through words had no interest in words, could not even hear them, was receptive only to the fall of light on her skin, the halo of light trapped in her hair. His eyes fastened on the delicate blue vein visible on the inside of her wrist when she made some graceful gesture. Within that vein pulsed life. Hot. Insistent.
“I want you,” he said.
The flow of chatter stopped abruptly. “I beg your pardon?”
“I want you. Desire you. Want to make love to you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Of course I do, Henry, and that’s very flattering, but—”
“But nothing, damn it.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Damn it,” he repeated, emphatically, so there was no mistake. “I’m a grown man and yes, sometimes I swear. That’s me. I won’t apologize for being what I am. Or for desiring you. Wanting to make love to you. Making love. Surely you’ve made love before,” he added with a cruelty he did not intend and immediately regretted.
“Of course I have. With my husband.” Her cool tone carried no inflection whatever. He had no way of telling if she was angry.
But he had gone too far to turn back. “What do you think that phrase means, Ella? I’ll tell you: making love means building something. Do you want to make love with me? If not, tell me now.”
“What’s this about? Wallace Congreve?” Still cool. Still self-possessed.
“Not at all; it’s about you and me. I hate games playing; I see it all around me every day, and I don’t want it in my personal life as well. Perhaps the men in your set conform to—”
“The steps of a dance,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“I’m just telling you I want simple honesty. You haven’t set a date for the wedding; you haven’t even announced our engagement. There must be a reason. I’m not a wealthy man and never will be. Sometimes, with enough provocation, I am a profane man. And I’m Catholic, we mustn’t forget that. If you have the slightest reservations about marrying me, say so now. I won’t hold it against you. I only want your happi—”
“Hush.” She rose from her chair and crossed the space between them in one graceful step to take his hand. “Come with me, Henry.”
“Where?”
“Come with me. Now.”
He followed her upstairs.
Up three flights of stairs, to the rooms on the top floor.
Deep inside him was a harpstring tuned too tight, right to the breaking point. He could hardly bear to watch as she turned the key in the door. “Welcome to my studio,” she said.
They entered a long room that ran halfway across the front of the house. A row of windows let in a flood of clear light. “Edwin had this fitted up for me, and no one ever disturbs me up here,” Ella said. “They have strict orders.” But she locked the door anyway.
Henry absorbed the room through his pores. Her private place.
Faded floral wallpaper, bare floorboards, a worktable spread with newspapers, an old daybed with a chintz cover. In her studio the elegant and fastidious Ella Rutledge became a different person. Carelessly scattered around the room were canvases, stretchers, unfinished oil paintings, and dozens of sketches and watercolors. A charcoal drawing in progress waiting on an easel; a wire armature for figure study slouching on a candle stand. Jam jars crammed with brushes, pens, pencils. Smeared palettes, wadded cloths, tubes of paint, a half-empty bottle of turps, pots of watercolors, art books opened to illustrations for study and weighted down with a variety of unlikely objects.
“What’s the daybed for?”
“It’s warm up here, so sometimes I get sleepy in the afternoons. I like to lie down for a little while and then go back to work.”
“Are you sleepy now?”
“No.”
“Ella, are you sure you—”
“Hush,” she said again. She opened her arms and gathered him in.
Watching his face as if his thoughts were printed there, she let him undress her. It certainly was not the first time Henry had undressed a woman, yet never before had he handled garments of such daintiness. The delicate ribbons and frothing laces and tiny pearl buttons of Ella’s underclothing were meant to be handled only by a lady’s maid. Being allowed to touch them was a greater triumph than any he had experienced with women whose clothing was blatantly intended to entice the male. Henry was elated—and awed.
“You are very beautiful,” he whispered.
“Not as beautiful as Ava.”
This time he said “Hush.”
The skin over her collarbones was as thin and fine as silk. He brushed it with his lips almost reverently, then moved farther down. Seeking. Finding. Losing himself in her.
She inhaled sharply.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No.”
He knew a great deal about giving pleasure to a woman, but surely the skills learned from Monto whores were not appropriate here. He fought to control himself, to be a gentleman. Be gentle. So…
Flooding incandescence, and the enormous release of energy that follows giving in to a long-suppressed desire.
A great moan was wrung from him.
Much later, deeply moved, he murmured, “You leave me speechless.”
He could feel her laughter. “That’s a first.”
“Do I talk too much?”
“Sometimes you don’t talk enough. I never realized there was so much passion in you, damn it.”
Henry raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her in surprise.
“I swear too,” Ella Rutledge told him.
He was halfway back to number 16 before he realized she still had not set a date for their wedding.
EAMON de Valera leaned back in his chair and surveyed Henry across his desk. He remained an austere figure, but an element had been added. His spectacles did not quite conceal a new wariness in his eyes. “Is this interview for the Bulletin?” de Valera inquired politely.
“I freelance as well,” Henry r
eminded him. “In the Bulletin you’d be preaching to the converted, so you might prefer me to offer this to some of my connections abroad.”
“When I appointed Desmond as minister for propaganda, perhaps I should have made you his deputy.”
Henry shook his head. “I don’t want to be part of government. I think I have more to contribute this way.”
“And fewer limitations,” the other said surprisingly. “Go ahead, then. Ask your questions.”
Taking out his notebook, Henry read, “ ‘Dáil Éireann has supported President de Valera by unanimously rejecting the peace terms offered by the British government. As a result threats of renewing the war are being made in the House of Lords. Meanwhile Lloyd George has been quoted as saying that dealing with de Valera is like trying to handle mercury with a fork.’ ” Henry looked up. “May I have a quote from you, sir, on the prime minister?”
De Valera put two steepled index fingers to his lips and withdrew into a brief, contemplative silence. When he flung his hands apart the decision was made. “As the president of the Republic I think it best not to engage in personal remarks. I am no longer to be regarded as a party leader—and you can quote me on this—but as one who represents the entire nation.
“I have one allegiance only: to the people of Ireland. The whole and united Republic of Ireland, that we genuinely believe to be the only means by which this island will have peace. We have fought honorably to achieve this end. We cannot change our position because it is fundamentally sound and just, as the rest of the world recognizes.”
I wonder if he can speak without making a speech? “May I have a few words on your vision of the Republic, Taoiseach?”
At the word Taoiseach de Valera allowed himself a very faint smile. Then he reached out and peremptorily helped himself to Henry’s notebook and pencil. Turning to a fresh page, he began sketching a series of geometric figures. To each he ascribed an identity: the government, the economy, the educational system, the agricultural community—the Church. Interconnecting lines showed the relationships of these entities to one another, presenting a balanced structure.
Just what one would expect from a mathematics teacher, Henry thought.
Underneath his drawing de Valera printed in block letters, BY CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
At the conclusion of the interview Henry thanked de Valera and rose to go. One final question hovered on his lips, however, and de Valera saw it there. “Is there something else?”
“In reappointing the ministries, Michael Collins was returned to finance. Considering the fact that it was he who forced the British to the truce table, do you not think he should be offered—”
“No,” said Eamon de Valera.
“DEAREST Girl,” Henry wrote, “I am running between appointments all day and may not see you until after tea time, but I want you to know you are in my thoughts. If you remember where I left my last kiss, imagine that I just put another one there.” He folded the note, tucked it into an envelope, and sent it via the first small boy. He had begun keeping an assortment of small change for the express purpose of paying for such messengers to Ella.
Their relationship had entered a new realm. He was allowed caresses of the most intimate nature when no one was looking. The glances Ella gave him in public were those of a woman in love. With difficulty, Henry refrained from insisting that she set a wedding date. From his own experience he knew that grief was heavy, leaden, but happiness was ephemeral and must not be examined too closely. His possession of Ella Rutledge seemed a miracle of such ephemeral magic that pressure would destroy it, just as a touch would destroy a cobweb pearled with dew on a May morning.
He would trust, and wait. In the fullness of time all would be arranged.
Henry very much wanted to believe that.
In the meantime he held long, one-sided conversations with her in his head when he first woke up in the morning, conversations in which he expressed anxiety about the difference in their backgrounds, concern over the uncertainty of his financial future, and most of all his need for reassurance on a level other than the sexual. When they were together he never repeated these conversations. Instead he was relaxed and confident, the very picture of an accepted suitor.
ONE night after a cabinet meeting Henry saw Michael Collins in Devlin’s. Collins greeted him by asking, “D’you happen to know the Irish synonym for ‘deceit’?”
Henry chuckled. “ ‘The smile of an Englishman.’ ”
The other man nodded, unsmiling. “Precisely. Henry, I worked as a civil servant in England; I know the bureaucratic mind over there. I’ve tried to warn Dev, but he won’t listen to me. Lloyd George and his crowd have dazzled him with all that fancy show. All that smiling. He’s still exchanging letters and telegrams with them, trying to arrange a peace agreement, but he doesn’t appreciate the nature of the people he’s dealing with.”
“Oh, I think he does,” Henry replied, recalling the wariness he had seen in the president’s eyes.
The duel between de Valera and Lloyd George became a war of words as each sought a phraseology that would seduce the other into a compromise. Desmond FitzGerald kept Henry apprised of developments. Understanding the language of persuasion, the weight and nuance of the most insignificant word, the journalist felt a mounting sense of frustration.
Michael Collins was equally frustrated. “I’ll tell you exactly what’s happening,” he told Henry. “We won the war, but now Lloyd George is trying to claw back everything we won.”
Lloyd George was arranging another conference, but when de Valera asserted that Ireland would enter negotiations as an independent and sovereign state, the prime minister cancelled it.
De Valera wrote to Lloyd George, “We request you to state…whether this is a demand for surrender on our part, or an invitation to a conference free on both sides and without prejudice should agreement not be reached.”1
The prime minister replied, “The position taken up by His Majesty’s government is fundamental to the existence of the British Empire and they cannot alter it. My colleagues and I remain, however, keenly anxious to make in cooperation with your delegates another determined effort to explore every possibility of settlement by personal discussion. We therefore send you a fresh invitation to a conference in London on 11 October, where we can meet your delegates as spokesmen of the people whom you represent with a view to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations.”
FitzGerald showed Henry a copy of the prime minister’s letter. “This isn’t for publication, of course; matters are far too delicate. But I want you to see what we’re dealing with.”
Henry read the letter twice. “Christ in a convent! Lloyd George makes it sound as if he’s offering everything, but he’s offering nothing. Surely Dev won’t fall for that.”
“He can’t afford to be seen as refusing to enter into discussions, either. We’ve fought bloody hard to be recognized as a constitutional government, Henry, and now it’s time to behave as constitutional governments behave. We must be willing to talk rather than shoot.”
“You’re right so. We’ve won everything we can with the gun. We’ll just have to trust that Dev’s too clever to let them take it away from us.”
Arthur Griffith drafted de Valera’s reply to the latest British offer. “We agree that conference, not correspondence, is the most practical and hopeful way to an understanding. We accept the invitation and our delegates will meet with you in London on the date mentioned.”
So far, de Valera had not given anything away.
A new wave of excitement was building in Ireland. People were aware that treaty negotiations were in the offing, and many considered the acceptance of the Republic a foregone conclusion. “Sure,” they said to one another on the street, “between the Big Fellow and the Long Fellow the British stand no chance.”
In advance of the actual negotiations the conservatives in the Brit
ish parliament began placating Sir James Craig. He received surreptitious disbursements of arms and money on a grand scale, enabling him to fund a new militia called the B-Specials, composed almost entirely of members of the Orange Order. The purpose of the B-Specials was to carry out a campaign against Irish nationalists in the north similar to that undertaken by the Black and Tans in the rest of Ireland. The conservatives wanted to be certain Craig had enough firepower to resist any effort to unite Ireland. In return the Unionists would continue to support them in Parliament.
When the IRA learned about the B-Specials, anger boiled over. The most militant of the Republicans was Cathal Brugha—who in his body carried twenty-five metallic reminders of 1916. In the almost daily cabinet meetings now being held, he repeatedly urged that all attempts at negotiation with the British be broken off.
“The only thing keeping him in check is his personal loyalty to Dev,” Collins told Henry.
“De Valera’s in much the same position as Lloyd George,” the journalist commented. Collins gave him a quizzical look. “By that I mean Dev’s trying to hold disparate factions together and carry them along with him, just as the prime minister’s trying to control a coalition. I don’t envy either man.”
Collins said, “People think I’m a firebrand, but I’m nothing compared to Cathal. A few months ago he proposed sending a squad to London to assassinate the entire British cabinet.”
“My God! That really would have put the cat among the pigeons. The British would not have stopped until they’d exterminated our whole race; it would be Cromwell all over again, only worse.”
Collins nodded. “I told him he’d get none of my men for that. And do you know what he said? ‘I don’t need any of your men.’ ”
In the months to come, those words would take on a sinister meaning.
Now that de Valera had agreed to the October conference there was intense speculation as to who would constitute his party. On the night when the cabinet met to take that decision, Henry waited for Desmond FitzGerald in the Wicklow Grill until long after closing time. The proprietor cleaned tables and mopped the floor around him, and out of sympathy kept his cup filled with strong tea. He twice refilled the small sugar bowl on the table.
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