A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “It’s dangerous,” he said. “Can we ask the men to do it?”

  “Make it worth their while,” I said. “Pay them for it. A thousand dollars each.”

  This was the most painful part. Admitting my Donal Ogue had the soul of a mercenary. Letting go, perhaps for good, that dream I had in Ireland of teaching him the nobility of sacrifice. But my hatred consoled me. It was a small price to pay.

  I did not know what a liar hatred was.

  The Sassenach Was Human

  A telegram summoned Dan from his training duties. Red Mike Hanrahan, busy with staging Fenian rallies, was similarly recalled. We met in President Roberts’s office. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have an assignment for you. A very dangerous assignment, but one that will bring you imperishable glory in the history of Ireland.”

  Dear God, I thought, watching frowns grow on the foreheads of both these veteran soldiers. They had seen too many bullets fired at them to put much stock in glory. Roberts went on to describe the proposal “he and the cabinet” had devised to strike a blow in Ireland and solidify the movement. I had persuaded him without much difficulty to take credit for the idea. I knew Dan and Mike would look askance at a plan drawn by a woman.

  “Because of the danger of the assignment, I’m authorized to offer you a thousand dollars each to undertake it.”

  That was more like it. Dan accepted on the spot. Red Mike was less enthused. He said he had spent most of his courage in the charge up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. “But I’ll do it if we can buck the tiger for a few nights in London on the way back.”

  “It can’t be done without you, Mike. You must be the stage director of the whole business,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mike said, “if I’m lookin’ at the real director.”

  Dan glowered at me. “Is that true?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Henceforth,” William Roberts continued in his oratorical style, “you shall consider yourselves under the orders of the government of the Republic of Ireland. You, Major Daniel McCaffrey, and you, Captain Michael Hanrahan, are to choose one other volunteer and proceed to Ireland. We will obtain the necessary false identities and provide you with the money and weapons for the expedition. In Ireland you are to make your way by the safest route to Limerick, and thence to the village of Ballinaclash, where you are to execute Lord Rodney Gort, landlord, for atrocious crimes against the Irish people. I wish you well.”

  He handed us our orders. I was, of course, the other volunteer. We immediately set to work on our plan. Mike obtained the services of one of the best actors in New York, Charles Everett, and he spent the next two weeks teaching me and Dan how to impersonate old age. Next, he showed us how to apply the makeup that made our speech and our mannerisms supremely realistic. With powdered hair, a gray mustache, crow’s-feet around the eyes, and a raddled neck, Dan grew old before my eyes. I did the same, with the aid of the same powder, a pair of eyeglasses, and expertly added wrinkles. I cut my hair short, the way older women wore it in America. Under Everett’s tutelage, Mike Hanrahan became our makeup man. Again and again, while Everett timed us with his watch, Mike took us from youth to age in fifteen minutes. Furious effort and concentration finally enabled him to do it in ten—five minutes for each. We were ready.

  Meanwhile, Secretary of State Seward was asked to prepare two passports for Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Stowecroft, aged sixty-five and sixty-six, who were leaving on an extended tour of Ireland, England, and Scotland. The secretary had been providing us with false passports for almost a year now, so there was no difficulty about obtaining them. Mr. and Mrs. Stowecroft, who were supposedly from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, booked their passage on the Cunard line steamer Servia. Their tour was arranged by the New York office of Thomas Cook, and their meeting with the agent, Mr. Soames, was (unknown to him) a dress rehearsal that was thoroughly successful. Mr. Soames, a balding little bulldog of a man, said he was delighted to discover two Americans in the evening of their lives with such a penchant for visiting the mother country, if he might call it that. Mrs. Stowecroft (me) assured him in her tremulous old voice that she thought of England as the mother of our arts and sciences, our very speech. Mr. Stowecroft (aka Dan), who was a “railroad man,” said he was looking forward to riding every mile of track in the United Kingdom. Mrs. Stowecroft fluttered and said he could do what he pleased, she was sick of railroads and was going to enjoy herself in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh. Mr. Soames assured them that they would enjoy themselves immensely no matter what they did.

  So we embarked from Jersey City in Cunard’s big, dowdy steamer, which was brand-new but looked, with typical English bad taste, as though it had been built twenty years ago. A decade later, I read a paean of praise to the Servia by that hopeless Anglophile Henry James. He canted on about how she was “spacious and comfortable, and there was a kind of motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned gait.” Almost certainly, Mr. James sailed in the spring or summer. On the North Atlantic in February, the long nursing rock was closer to the careen of a hopeless drunkard. The decks were awash morning and night; the ship resounded with the crash of crockery, the clang of falling ornaments, and the screams of nervous passengers. The stench of seasickness drifted from every corridor into the ornate grand salon. The food, normally poor in the great tradition of British cooking, was atrocious. But the ordeal suited us well. It enabled us to remain in our cabin most of the time. When we did emerge, everyone was much too frightened and disconsolate to pay much attention to us. On every hand we heard “Cunard has never lost a life,” repeated like a pleading litany. We recited it along with everyone else, but never for a moment did I doubt that the good ship Servia would carry me safely to Ireland and my revenge.

  To guarantee my moment of consummation, I made sure Dan McCaffrey thought of little else. Day after day, I gave myself to him until he was all but drunk with the love of me. He thought it was my worship of his daring, his cunning, his deadly aim with a gun. He did not know he held a woman of ice in his arms, a woman who lied her love to him, who worshipped nothing but her hatred. I began to think I did not know what I thought or felt about him, or anyone.

  It was necessary to mesmerize him, narcotize him with my body, because when he thought of our plan he was afraid. He tried to hide it from me, but my hatred gave me a preternatural ability to scent his fear. He lacked my fierce faith in my hatred’s predestined consummation. As a veteran soldier who had seen the best of plans go wrong and men die in writhing agony, he weighed our chances and knew they teetered on a knife edge. If even one thing went wrong, we were doomed. Every so often he would look at me as if he were seeing his death. That was when I crooned my lying love to him, opened myself with a high exultant lust that I imagined Emer offered her warrior hero on the eve of battle, and promised him unimagined delights if he fulfilled my wish. Simultaneously I was proving my passion to myself. I took no precautions against pregnancy nor asked Dan to take any. I was ready to sacrifice my reputation, even my life, on the altar of my dark god.

  Below us, in a narrow third-class compartment, Mike Hanrahan no doubt sweated the same fear. I could do nothing for him. Mike’s risks were slight compared to ours. He carried a passport that identified him as one Peter Kinkaid, going home to Limerick to visit his aged mother. He, too, had a patter, well rehearsed, which he talked night and day about his career as a brakeman on the Erie Railroad.

  At last, toward dusk on the fifteenth day, the Servia lumbered into the calm waters of Cork’s great harbor. We stayed aboard until the next morning, listening to the bells of Shandon drift out to us on the chill evening air. The nearness of Ireland tempted me to drop my disguise a little. “There’s a lovely poem that goes with those bells,” I said. I began to whisper it to Dan.

  He cut me short with an impatient wave of his hand. “Remember what Red Mike told you? Even when we’re alone, we should think and talk like old, rich Americans. You go Irish on me and I’
ll take the first boat home.”

  We strolled to the stern and watched the third class passengers emerging like moles into the fresh air. A fiddle began to play. Someone started singing a Come All Ye.

  My love Nell

  Was an Irish girl

  From the Cove of Cork came she.

  I left her weeping and awailing

  And the big ship sailing

  For the shores of Amerikay.

  Perhaps he was coming home to claim his Nell, with American dollars in his pocket. I entertained myself with these sentimental thoughts until the singer pranced out of the crowd and tipped his hat to us. It was Red Mike Hanrahan.

  The next day we went ashore in smaller vessels that carried us to quays on the River Lee. The approach to Cork in the morning sunlight was grand. Superb gardens, parks, and villas covered the shore on each bank. The city closed the view, rising with its roofs and church steeples on two hills on either side of the Lee.

  The illusion of splendor and beauty ended abruptly at the dock. We were set upon by the most ragged, noisy swarm of beggars, hackmen, and baggage boys I have ever encountered. The boys fought and cursed over our luggage, and the losers beseeched pennies of us for consolation. The hackmen were ready to commit murder, until Dan sternly chose one suppliant and banished the others. We could not resist the female beggars, who ranged in age from tots of five and six to girls as old and as large as I. We were sprinkling coins into their hands when a stern voice interrupted us. “Here now. If you take my advice you’ll stop that.”

  A ruddy-faced little Englishman in a bowler hat and long tan raincoat confronted us, his brush mustache quivering. “Noticed you on the boat. The captain told me you were Americans. Beastly weather made sociability impossible. Name’s Quackey, as in the duck. Feel I should tell you there’s no point whatsoever in dispensing charity to these lazy curs. All for helping the worthy poor, but if you can find one of these in Ireland, I’ll give you a fiver. These are the laziest people God ever made. Drain you dry if you give them half a chance. Professional beggars, every one of them.”

  “Why, thankee, friend Quackey,” said Dan, tipping his hat. “You’ve saved us a power of money. Wouldn’t you say so, dear?”

  “My stars, yes,” I trilled.

  I looked around me, staggered and ashamed by the way the beggars, the baggage boys, and even the hackmen, most of them twice the Englishman’s size, shrank back and accepted this abuse. If an Englishman said such things to Irish-Americans, he would have been beaten black and blue on the spot. I realized my disguise was going to be much more difficult to maintain than I had thought it would be. No wonder Red Mike, no slouch at judging human nature, had urged me to think and act like an American as much as possible.

  Friend Quackey was delighted that we were staying at the Royal Hotel. So was he. Would we have dinner with him? We could hardly say no. At the hotel, he laid about him with his lash of a tongue and quickly scattered another swarm of beggars and baggage boys. The cabman asked for a shilling. Quackey advised us to give him twopence and tell him he was lucky to get it. While John Bull was snorting at the beggars I took a shilling from my purse and slipped it into the fellow’s hand. He was wasted to a skeleton. “God bless you, ma’am,” he murmured.

  We endured Quackey for dinner. Here was a good chance to test our performances as aged but still sturdy Americans from Pittsburgh. Quackey was so interested in dispensing his own opinions, he gave us little time to talk. He discoursed on the hopelessness of civilizing the Irish. They were incurably lazy, dishonest, dirty. He could not understand how God, whom he sometimes called “the Great Engineer,” could have permitted such awful people to inhabit such a beautiful country. “Ireland would be the jewel of the empire, if we could just get rid of the Irish,” he said. “But they breed like rabbits, if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Stowecroft. Like rabbits.”

  Quackey was a railroad engineer. He had been to America making a survey of the nation’s railroads, with a view to advising some British capitalists who were thinking of investing huge sums there. He thought the prospects were good. America was ready for a great burst of railroad building, now that they had settled the Civil War. “But I intend to advise my clients not to invest a red cent,” he said, “until the American government does something about the Fenians in America. The beggars are forming regiments and talking of invading Canada. The Americans had damn well better smash them, as we did here, if they want to see any British capital in their railroads.”

  “Oh, it’s all talk,” I said. “You know how the Irish are. I have an Irish servant girl at home in Pittsburgh. You should hear the moonshine she serves up about the Irish conquering England someday.”

  “Damndest people I’ve ever seen,” Dan (as Mr. Stowecroft) said.

  “Lower on the evolutionary scale, that’s the only answer,” Quackey said. “Study the faces as you go. You’ll see amazing numbers that belong in a zoo.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking how pleasant it would be to shoot him between the eyes.

  The next day we began our stint as tourists. We had at least a week to wait, while Red Mike Hanrahan journeyed to Dublin and bought a closed touring coach and returned with it to Limerick. We jogged about Cork on our first day, taking in the sights of the town. It was an unnerving experience. Everything looked so shabby, so dismal, to my eyes. I could not believe it was the same city I had visited more than once with my mother and father, admiring it as if it were imperial Rome in its glory. Compared to New York and other American cities, the shops were drab and empty of attractive goods. In several places, the merchants did not have change on hand for a one-pound note. Patrick Street, the chief thoroughfare, had less bustle than the main street of battered Vicksburg. The greatest shock was the market on the outskirts of the poor section of the town. I winced at the ragged women and boys gazing hungrily at dirty apple pie stalls; at fish frying and fish raw and stinking; at clothes booths, where you might buy a wardrobe for scarecrows; at battered old furniture that had been sold against starvation. In the streets roundabout, in the thin March sunshine, squatted women with bare breasts nursing babies. Idle men, as dirty and desperate looking as any in New York’s Sixth Ward, lounged in the mouldy doorways or stared from the black, gaping windows.

  Gradually, I realized that my American identity was not a complete lie. It was part of me, and I was seeing Ireland with American eyes. I stood in the Cork library and stared disapprovingly at the years’ worth of dust and dirt on plaster ceilings and walls. I gazed at the still uncompleted Catholic cathedral and listened impatiently to a priest explain that they were waiting for more money to arrive from America to finish it. I fumed when Dan informed me that the post office did not have money on hand to cash a five-pound order. I writhed when I overheard clerks in the stores fawning over English tourists, telling them how they went to London for their holidays. Everywhere I was dismayed or distressed by the lack of pride, energy, or enterprise among the people, both high and low.

  The following day we hired a guide and rode out to Blarney Castle. The fellow must have kissed the stone every time he visited it. He never ceased talking, one story after another about this ruin and that house, all a jumble of historical events and names from a half dozen centuries, scrambled together. He was an ignoramus who depended on the ignorance of his visitors to escape challenge. He had St. Patrick fighting the Vikings and Brian Boru battling Queen Elizabeth and Red Hugh O’Donnell of the sixteenth century a friend of Wolfe Tone, Ireland’s hero of the 1798. He was a monological example of a man who had lost touch with all but the scraps and tatters of his heritage, which he wore as lackadaisically as his patched coat and drooping trousers. Eventually he led us to the tower of Blarney Castle to enjoy the view and then to the turret where the small blue boulder lies embedded. I kissed it with more than ordinary emotion, hoping it would give me and Dan the powers of deceptive speech we needed to complete our mission. I was more and more shaken by my sight of Ireland with American eyes. I needed to draw fresh s
trength from something like this mystic stone.

  The next day in a cold drizzle whipped by gusty March winds, we left Cork for Killarney in a battered old coach with the paint rubbed off. Our only companions were a morose British naval officer and a commercial traveler from a British hardware company. At least forty men in long ragged coats and battered steeple hats stood around, watching us depart as if it were some great event. The two Englishmen made no attempt to introduce themselves and spent their time damning the fate that had driven them to Ireland, which they agreed was the worst assignment in the empire. The steaming jungles of West Africa, the miseries of the Punjab, were nothing compared to the vexations of Irish indolence and stupidity.

  The commercial traveler told of ordering some coals brought to his room to start a fire against the chill of the late afternoon. The servant girl arrived with the coals, not in a scuttle, but upon a plate. The naval officer told of a well-to-do Protestant Irishman who had fought a duel over some trifling political disagreement with a neighbor who lived in a house across the road. He lost and received a bad wound. In revenge, he tore down his house and built a castle, to “plague” his neighbor’s house. In the process he went bankrupt, and the castle was now sliding into ruin.

  At the village of Millstreet we stopped for lunch. A loaf of bread, a half cheese, and a huge piece of cold baked beef were set upon the table in the dirty barroom of the inn. Each went and cut for himself, filling mouth, hands, and pockets, if he chose. The Englishmen crammed all they could manage into these receptacles, as did Dan. As we returned to the coach, we were set upon by a band of beggars, who literally pleaded the food from Dan’s hands.

  “There’s been a reign of terror hereabout,” the coachman told us. “One of the new breed of landlords, as they call themselves, has been evicting all who won’t sign new leases, at double the rent.”