Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Irish Books LLC
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: February 2010
ISBN: 978-1-599-95267-3
For my grandmother
Ellen Jane (Hayes) Toner
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my agent, Denise Marcil, for her invaluable guidance throughout the development of this novel. I am deeply grateful for the way she challenged me to reach levels beyond which I believed myself capable. Her expertise, experience, practicality, and caring concern are everything an author could ever hope to find in an agent and more. In addition, I would like to thank Anne Marie O’Farrell and Katie Kotchman of the Denise Marcil Literary Agency for their assistance and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank Christina Boys, my editor at Hachette Book Group, for her immediate and sustained enthusiasm for this book. Thanks also to her assistant, Whitney Luken. My appreciation and thanks also go to Alan Tucker, who edited this manuscript with courteous attention and elegant diligence. The manuscript was indeed “ready to meet the queen” when he was finished. Also thanks to Dr. John McCavitt, Northern Ireland historian and author of The Flight of the Earls, for sharing his expertise on Irish political and religious history. Thanks also to Dr. Marilyn Cohen, anthropologist, head of women’s studies at St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, and author of Linen, Family and Community in Tullyish, County Down, for her insights into the social conditions in the linen industry in Northern Ireland. Thanks also to Rosemary Mulholland, president of the Bessbrook Historical Society, and Pat O’Keefe, Irish musician, for generously assisting me with my research.
Thanks must also go to many friends scattered throughout the United States and abroad for their support and belief in my dream. They include the Good Eats and Lucky’s Gangs in Dallas; the Reno Crowd; Spa Sisters in New York and Pawley’s Island; former colleagues at PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP; and many, many others. I would especially like to thank Marjorie Jaffe, who introduced me to Denise Marcil and so was the reason it all started. Thanks also to my dear friend Susan Grissom for her unflagging optimism and encouragement and for her research assistance. A special thank-you to Bernard Silverman for his sustained caring and support and for all the jokes! And last but not least, my appreciation to my family, especially my beloved sister, Connie, who has kept the spirit of Ireland alive in me all these years.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Glenlea, County Armagh: 1905
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Queensbrook Linen Mill: 1913
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
War: 1914–1918
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Insurrection: 1919–1920
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Truce: 1920–1921
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Passion: 1921
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Secrets: 1922
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Choices: 1922
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Home: 1922
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue: 1924
Author’s Note
About the Author
Glenlea, County Armagh
1905
1
I remember the summers best, when the days rested in the long arms of the evening and the sounds around Slieve Gullion were as muted as benediction. Only the faint barking of distant dogs cut the stillness as farmers drove their cattle home. Smoke curled from cottage chimneys and children gulped down tea so they could return to play while time hovered between day and night like a gift from heaven.
On such an evening, when I was eight years old, I lay in the tall grass in front of our house with my ear pressed to the ground. If you listened hard enough, Da had told me, you could hear the fairies dancing down below. But this evening all was quiet. I sat up. My brother, Frankie, a year older than myself, was torturing the life out of a worm, hacking at it with a sharp stone.
“Stop that, Frankie,” I said.
Frankie shrugged. “I’m only trying to see if it’s true.”
“What?”
“That it grows itself back again if you cut it in two.”
I sighed. Frankie was always doing things like that—cruel wee things. I put it down to his being a boy. I lay down on my back. A brown-and-orange butterfly circled above me. I put up my hands, lazily tracing its flight.
“I wish Da was home,” I said.
I heard his voice long before I saw him. His lovely sweet tenor carried from the distance, lilting across the fields that spread out below our house. I scrambled up and raced toward the road. Frankie dropped the worm and followed me. Our old Irish setter, Cuchulainn, pricked up his ears and barked. We shaded our eyes as we squinted into the setting sun. Da appeared at the brow of the hill. He stood up in the cart, his hands loosely holding the pony’s reins. His crop of red hair glowed like a halo around his head as the fire of the sun caught it. I imagined him the great Irish warrior Hugh O’Neill himself, returning from the battle, riding out of the sun. How I loved my da.
“Da’s coming, Mammy,” I shouted back to the house, “Da’s coming.”
Frankie and I ran toward the cart. Da stopped singing and waved at us.
“Hello, darlin’s. Up with you now.”
Da was a wiry man of medium height, with a face so full of life that it shone even on the dullest of days. He was dressed today, as always when he went to town, in a brown suit and a white cotton shirt with a clean starched collar. “Dandy Tommy,” the villagers called him. He wore no cap, and his curly hair sprang out around his head like a laurel wreath.
He slowed the pony and the cart stopped. Frankie and I clambered up, shoving each other to get in the seat beside Da. Da chucked the reins again, and the pony began to walk. She was a sweet little Connemara pony, gray and white, with eyes like silk.
“On now with you, Rosie,” Da said.
Mammy stood at the front door, holding my little sister, Lizzie, by the hand. Lizzie strained to get away.
“Dada, Dada,” she crowed.
“She was lovely and fair as the Rose of the summer.” Da crooned the words of “The Rose of Tralee.” It was his favorite song, one that he sang often to Mammy. The girl in the song was named Mary, the same as Ma, and Mammy always smiled when he sang it. The cart trundled through the gate that led to our farm. It had broken long ago and was n
ever closed. Red summer roses clung stubbornly to the rotted, splintered wood, trailing down over the low stone walls on either side. They were Mammy’s roses. She loved flowers.
“What’s this, Da?” Frankie said. “What’s in these buckets?” Frankie tried to pry the lid off a tin bucket in the back of the cart.
“Wait and see.” Da laughed.
Rosie halted in front of the house and we climbed down. Ma came forward, still holding Lizzie’s hand. She looked down into the bed of the cart.
“And what in the name of God have you there?” she said. Mammy’s voice was always soft and slightly hoarse, as if she had a catch in her throat.
“Paint, my lovely Mary Kathleen,” said Da, jumping down from the cart.
“Paint?”
“Aye, paint. Buckets of lucky yellow paint to mark the grand anniversary.”
“What are you talking about?” Mammy dropped Lizzie’s hand, and the baby toddled forward and wrapped her arms around Da’s leg.
“The anniversary of the day my grandda Hugh O’Neill won back this house and the O’Neill family’s honor along with it. In 1805—a hundred years ago this very day!”
Frankie and I giggled, while Ma shook her head and sighed. Wisps of long black hair played around her face. She put up her hand to shove them back.
“Will you go on with yourself,” she said. “Sure you have no notion of when or even how your grandfather got this house.”
Da straightened his back and put on a look of mock outrage. “Don’t I know my own family’s history, Mary? Didn’t I hear the story many’s a time from Hugh himself? He won this house back from the Sheridan family…”
“In a game of cards,” put in Mammy, resting her hands on her hips.
“Aye,” said Da, “but the house rightfully belonged to the O’Neills. The Sheridans only had it at all because King James gave it to them. Stole all the land off the Catholics, so they did, and gave it away to the English who were loyal to the Crown, and—”
“Och, we’ve heard it all before,” said Ma, cutting Da short before he could gather steam for one of his big speeches.
“Da, Da. What’s the paint for?” Frankie cried. He had managed to lift the lid off one of the buckets with the help of the sharp stone he still had.
Da turned to us. His blue eyes were bright with excitement.
“For the house, darlin’s. We’re going to paint the O’Neill house yellow. You’ll be able to see it from the top of Slieve Gullion itself, so you will. It will be like a giant sunflower standing in the middle of the fields, so bright it would dazzle a blind man.”
“Did you bring the meat? And the flour?” Mammy wasn’t smiling like the rest of us. I thought maybe she didn’t like the yellow color.
Da slapped his forehead. “Ah, love, sure didn’t I forget in all the excitement. I’ll go back for it tomorrow. But in the meantime I have a case of porter—enough for a good party. P.J. and the boys will be up tonight and we can celebrate.”
Da put his arm around Ma, but she pulled away from him.
“The paint was half price, Mary,” he said quietly. “I just took the notion and bought it. To cheer us all up, you see. To celebrate.”
Mammy sighed. “I don’t see much to celebrate.”
There were tears in her eyes. She cried sometimes at night when she thought no one was watching. I didn’t want her to be sad. I walked over and patted her sleeve. She pulled me close to her.
Frankie stirred the paint in the bucket with a stick. It was the color of daffodils, but it had a sharp smell that made me wrinkle my nose. “Can we start painting now, Da? Can we?” he asked.
Da turned away from Ma and lifted the buckets down from the cart. He lined them up outside the front door like tin soldiers. “Of course you can,” he said. “There’s still plenty of light. I brought brushes for everybody.”
“But Da—it’s too high,” I said, frowning up at the two-story house with its massive chimneys on each end of a gabled roof.
“Ah, my little Eileen, don’t you be worrying your head. My friends and myself will climb the ladders. You just start where you can reach. Here’s the brushes. You too, Mary.”
Da held out a brush to Ma, but she turned away and shoved me toward the side of the house.
“Eileen, help me take in the washing.”
“Och, Ma—”
“Now, Eileen!”
Mammy’s voice was sharp. It frightened me. I didn’t want her to be mad at my da.
“But we’re supposed to be celebrating, Ma,” I whined.
“Fetch the basket,” was all Ma said. Furiously, she unclipped the pegs from the line, tossing the white sheets into the basket. Her lips were pursed in a thin line. Then she took the basket from me and walked into the house, slamming the door behind her. Da took a stick and stirred the paint in each of the buckets. The golden yellow crust, like the foam on top of fresh buttermilk, dissolved through the rest of the liquid, leaving only bubbles on the top. Frankie had already started slapping paint on the graying white walls of our house, and it dripped down in uneven ribbons.
“He’s doing it wrong, Da,” I said. Frankie glared at me.
“Ah, he’ll get the way of it, Eileen. Here, you start over there.”
Even Lizzie had a brush, although she dabbed more paint on the grass than on the walls. She trailed after Frankie, calling his name and laughing. She was the only one of us who could coax a smile out of our Frankie. His brown eyes softened as he looked down at her. “You’re a wee pest,” he said as he guided her hand so she could dip her brush in the paint. At last Ma came out of the house. Her face was softer now, but tiny red lines ringed her eyes. She lifted a brush and started painting along with us. She smiled at Da.
“Don’t be getting paint on my flowers, now,” she said, indicating her rows of scarlet poppies, yellow anemones, and blue forget-me-nots planted in a bed along the front of the house and in the window boxes.
Da laughed. “I’ll mind the flowers,” he said, “but I can’t say I’ll mind you.”
He danced toward Ma and daubed yellow paint on her arm, then danced away.
“Tom!” she squealed. “If that’s the way you want it, here goes.” She landed a daub of yellow paint on his cheek. Frankie and Lizzie and I laughed, and the knot that had formed in my stomach went away.
I recall that day now through the haze of time and memory. But the yellow has never faded. It is as vivid in my mind as the day we covered the house and ourselves in yellow paint and danced like canaries around the garden.
WE LIVED IN the village of Glenlea in the south of County Armagh, in the northern province of Ireland called Ulster. Glenlea, standing at the foot of the grand mountain Slieve Gullion, was one of many villages that ringed the mountain, each village having its particular view of the grand stone duchess. Slieve Gullion was sixty million years old and cradled a sleeping volcano deep within her. In winter, she stood proud and naked like an ancient scarred warrior. In spring, she wrapped herself in green bracken, while bluebells and white hawthorn blossoms cascaded down her great bosom and raced across the fields toward our house.
The night we painted the house yellow, the Music Men came. They came often in the long summer evenings when the pale moon hung in the still-light sky. They came whistling, swinging their fiddles and accordions with stout arms, cloth caps pushed back on reddened foreheads.
Mammy opened the big oak door wide to our guests.
“You’re very welcome,” she called in her lovely, deep voice.
“God bless all here,” said P. J. Mullen.
P.J. was the leader of the Music Men. A fiddle player like my da, he was a short, burly man with coarse red hair and a long red beard that fanned out across his chest. I was sure he was one of the fairies. His voice was so loud, you jumped to hear it coming out of so short a man. P.J. was my godfather.
The men removed their caps and bowed their heads as if entering a church. I shot past them and sat on the wooden bench next to the big hearth
in the kitchen, my face warm with joy.
“How’s yourself, P.J?” said Ma.
“Fine as the day is long, missus.”
“Hello, Fergus, Billy,” Ma said, nodding at two of the other men. “How’s your ma, Fergus?”
“Not too bad, thanks, missus,” said Fergus Conlon. “She’d be great only for her legs.”
A bachelor, Fergus still lived at home with his ma, who by all accounts was an oul’ witch. Ma often said Fergus was earning indulgences in heaven right and left for having to put up with her.
Billy Craig handed Ma a bunch of wildflowers, his big round face red as a beetroot. Billy, a giant of a man but a bit simple, was madly in love with my ma. Every time he came to the house he brought her a present of some kind, and Ma always made a great fuss over it. She took the wildflowers from Billy, put them right away in a vase of water, and set them in the middle of the table. Billy beamed.
The fourth Music Man was Terrence Finnegan. No one knew much about Terrence. It was whispered he used to be a priest who had fallen in love with a girl and was thrown out of the priesthood. No one ever asked him, of course. We all preferred a good mystery.
Da came downstairs, a broad smile on his face, and shook hands with each of the men.
“Well, I see you didn’t get far with the paint job,” said P.J. as he dragged a small stool away from the wall. “No bother. The boys and I will be up with the ladders this week to finish the job.”
“You’d better hurry,” I said. “Great-Grandda Hugh’s anniversary will be over.”
The men laughed. Da turned his back to P.J. to reach up for his fiddle, which sat on a shelf on the kitchen wall. “She’s right,” he said.
I watched Da as he took down the fiddle and laid it across his knees. I loved the way he ran his long, slender white fingers along the length of its dark wood. Ma said Da’s fingers reminded her of the stems of flowers. Reverently, he brought the instrument up to his shoulder and tucked it under his chin. With his right hand he raised the bow and brought it down across the strings. The sharp, high notes were both sweet and melancholy. I held my breath while the haunting strains ran themselves out. Then Da looked up and flashed a smile at me, and suddenly the fiddle seized on a merry jig. I clapped my hands and laughed.
Patricia Falvey Page 1