by Leon Uris
Jeremy looked at her puzzled and shook his head. "What do you mean, Molly?"
"It doesn't matter to me if you're delivering ice for a living or dressed in a business suit or tending bar in a public house. I'll take you as you are any place, but I'll not share you with that family of yours."
"You . . . you want me . . . to . . . to renounce my title? Give up my inheritance?"
"It's not what I want but it's the only way for Jeremy and Molly. I know plain old Jeremy and I know how to take care of him, sure enough."
"But, darling, I don't believe you understood me. Once we are married and they have to accept you, then they will."
"I don't care whether they accept me or not, Jeremy. I don't accept them."
"What?"
"They are sick people living in a sick place. Do you really expect me to live within their walls after offering me money to destroy our child?"
"But . . . but . . ."
"Do you expect me to spend my entire life trying to become a woman who, in the end, will destroy Molly O'Rafferty?" she said. "If I go up there and adopt their ways I’ll come to hate. I'll adopt their hatred and their cunning and I'll wait around for your father to die and then I will have become just like him in the end."
"You're confusing me, Molly, you're confusing me."
"I'll put it plainly. I'm afraid your family is too common and low a breed for the daughter of Bernard O'Rafferty."
Jeremy gaped. Molly got up and took his place at the rail and became consumed for a moment by a passing barge.
"What do you want me to do?" Jeremy croaked.
"Just go along your way, lad. Do what your father tells you. You've not the strength for anything else."
As the moments ticked off, the truth sank into him as truth. He was ashamed to look at her. She was so God-awful strong, this little girl. Where did she find it? It was there, all the treachery of his family laid out in simple view. Yet he had no iron to rebel. Any notion of running off with her became totally squashed by visions of muddy alleys and peeling rooms.
With all his tugging and hauling with his father, he liked being Jeremy Hubble, Viscount Coleraine. He liked the well-cut tailored suits, all three dozen of them. He liked riding in his grandfather's opulent car and buying rounds for the crowd. He liked being good old sporting Jeremy. He liked that more than anything . . . Molly . . . their child . . . anything . . . To go with her, to pretend it could work, would only delay disaster.
"I can't go with you," he mumbled.
"I know, Jeremy."
It was done. He dared lift his eyes. "You'll go to Switzerland, of course."
"I think not," Molly said.
"But you've got to get it taken care of."
"Not to bother," she said, walking away.
Jeremy raced up behind her and turned her about to face him. "Look, I've got to know!"
"I'll not be a party to a murder along with everything else. I'll have my child and I'll raise it."
"Oh, my God, Molly!"
"If you're worried about yourself and your own twinges of conscience I suspect you'll get over it in time."
"But you'll take the money . . ."
"Jeremy, please . . ."
"Molly . . ."
"My family will see me through. Even though I've brought them shame, we do love one another. I'll certainly go to where our existence will be of no bother to you or your lovely family. I have my hands and I have my voice. Bearing a child will do nothing to harm either."
"Let me help. Promise to let me help."
"I give you only one promise. You'll never see or hear from either of us again."
Molly O'Rafferty, touching upon her eighteenth year, left Jeremy at the bank of the River Liffey. She departed from Dublin and Ireland a few days later . . . forever.
CHAPTER SIX
In the year that followed Conor Larkin's return to Ireland he took on his new role with the same studious zeal that had made him an ironmaster, a great rugby player and the Brotherhood's best fund raiser in America. His immediate goal of setting up training camps on "friendly farms" was achieved. Outside the Dublin area a major site was established in each of the provinces of Connaught, Munster and Ulster. The Connaught friendly farm of Dunleer was the most important
A training regimen was established in small arms weaponry, dynamite, urban tactics and rural ambush along with sabotage. In this period Conor all but wrote the military textbook of the Brotherhood.
He traveled underground constantly, keeping control of the units from Cork to Derry, establishing a coherence of commanders, communications, intelligence, supplies, weapons, medicine and political indoctrination. It was an army of tiny magnitude with only a few hundred men in each province, but secrecy and dedication had been meticulously preserved. Fanaticism was expected to compensate for lack of growth.
Conor's home of sorts was a remote cottage in the backwater of the Dunleer barony. The main manor house and farms stretched along Lough Ballynahinch and forest where it met the bottom of the Twelve Bens. Bits and pieces of an original fifteenth-century Norman castle remained, including a keep in total preservation. A mile into the woods a natural draw along Lough Fadda hid the Brotherhood training area and Conor's cottage from all outside view.
Men were trained at odd times and in odd numbers depending on when they could get away to Dunleer. These were barracked at an ancient, restored monastery around the lough from Conor's cottage.
He set up a forge where he manufactured a reasonable replica of the British Army Webley revolver and made the ammunition for it as well.
He met Atty infrequently, always in the midst of Brotherhood business, and they seemingly avoided personal contact out of mutual design.
*
One evening at twilight early in autumn, the intercommunication signal from the manor house rang in the forge, signaling Conor that a safe person had been passed through into the training area.
He went outside to the lake front and sighted a lone horse and rider through his field glasses. As horse and rider circled the lough against a backdrop of pines and the first reddening of the water by a plunging sun, they came clearly into view.
It was Atty Fitzpatrick.
Her posture on the animal was magnificent, of one who had spent many hours at it. Of course she had been Lady Royce-Moore once, out of the same County Galway, and she had spent a good part of her growing days astride a Connemara.
As she came within shouting distance Conor called and she spurred, galloping the mount along the water's edge, sending her hair flying back in a brown cascade. She pulled up and leaped down into Conor's grasp.
"What a grand sight at sunset," Conor said.
"I'm terribly out of practice and out of shape. I used to be very good at this," she replied, gasping for breath.
"Don't get too close to me," Conor said, holding her back at arm's length, "I've the dirt of the forge on me. Before I find out what brings you here, are you game for a nice sobering swim?"
"Where?"
"In the altogether in that lough," Conor said, getting out of the leather apron, peeling off shirt and trousers and running, then leaping into the water, emitting a yowl of painful delight in the boyish flash that seemed to overwhelm him the instant he saw her. He beat himself on the chest, dunked and hollered.
"Well, are you joining me or not?"
"I think I'd follow you anywhere, Conor, except that lake."
"Then go into the cottage and fetch me a towel."
Atty returned with a towel in hand and another wrapped about herself, flashed it off and jumped in, sending up an icy spray. It was an unabashed surge of joy, holding hands and jumping up and down screaming and splashing. He picked her up in his arms and flung her, then both crawled breathlessly up the bank filled with blue goose bumps of cold, applying the towels vigorously.
"Jaysus!" Conor said. "I forget from one night to the next how desperate that lake is. Jaysus, let's get inside."
It was a good Irish cottage in
that the turf was always smoored and ready to flare and it soon glowed, warming them along with a fiery measure of poteen while the sun seered violent into the ocean. They dressed wondering about the crazy exhilaration on seeing one another. Both of them had pondered long about such a meeting and felt it would be filled with guilt and evasions and half spoken truths.
"Well, what grievous tidings do you bear?" Conor asked as the leading edges of night crept down from the Twelve Bens.
"Dan Sweeney sent me. He wanted to send Seamus but Seamus is apt to become gullible when dealing with big brother Conor. The two of you rarely fail to set off on flights of Celtic fantasy."
"And at this moment I'm thanking Long Dan," Conor joked.
"Besides, I asked him if I could come."
A wind rushed through the cottage. Conor studied the sky outside, feeling the first tiny drops of rain ride in on the winds. The peaks of the Bens were suddenly covered beneath massing clouds and these would be rolling down on the loughs.
"There's a head beetler on the way," Conor said. "It moves in here as swiftly as it moved in from Scotland up in my home. I'd better get you back to the manor house before the storm."
"Lord Louie's in London and you've no men training here now. If I remember, the cottage does have an extra bedroom."
"Aye."
"Why don't we button in and see what the cupboard holds in store?"
"Sure," Conor said. He secured the barn and the windows, barely beating the rain, which swept down in a single hard stroke from Benlettery. Atty fired the turf stove and applied odds and ends to a stew after proper appreciation of the contents of Lord Louie's larder and pantry. She knew her way around a peasant's cottage among other things the woman did without flaw. He had seen her in the same room two years before but so much of that had been in a haze that this was like watching her here for the first time. He hovered between a desire to wrap his arms about her and a feeling of being trapped.
The meal was unlike any since he had left America.
The storm cracked in for fair. Atty sat before the turf, knees tucked close to her chin and her arms draped around them. Conor was above her on a creepie lightly filing and oiling four new pistols he had completed at the forge.
"Dan's angry with you," she began.
"The usual state of affairs between himself and myself."
"Louie set up to meet a German freighter off Slyne Head and take on a load of guns. You countermanded the order."
"Aye, I did," Conor agreed.
"We want to know why."
"I don't want his yacht used for that purpose any longer."
"I'm afraid we don't understand. The Germans are willing to make offshore rendezvous on a regular basis. They're even considering running in a submarine with arms."
Conor aimed the pistol at an imaginary target, cocked it and clicked the trigger. He filed softly, blew, squeezed the trigger again.
"The risk isn't worth the gain," Conor said.
"I don't consider that a sufficient answer," Atty said.
"Gunrunning with that particular yacht in this particular area will quickly lead Lord Louie to the scaffold and we'll end up losing the finest and most secluded and irreplaceable training site the Brotherhood will ever have on Irish soil."
"Sorry, Conor, we don't accept it," Atty pressed. "Louie is aware of the risk and accepts it. He also accepts the decisions of the Supreme Council. Perhaps, I should say, a little better than you do."
"He's a nice aristocratic gentleman, a noble Gaelic scholar, but otherwise apt to be a bit of a clod from too much Connemara moonscape and too much inbreeding with the Court of St. James's. I'll make Louie's decisions, at least the ones concerning his boat and his home."
"I suggest that the Supreme Council will and has," Atty said.
"Well, I suggest that Seamus work up a good speech for Lord Louie to deliver from the dock prior to his hanging."
"Conor, dammit, you're being both obstinate and disobedient." She unraveled herself and stood above him, taking the pistol from his hand and tossing it on the table
"Sit down, Atty, and listen. There are informers in both Roundstone and Clifden who mark down every time the Grainne Uaile leaves and enters port. They have watchers on every cove and beach in the area. Commander Weatherton of the Royal Navy is just champing to knock him over. It takes a party of ten to twenty men to transfer and beach a load of guns. You can bet your last quid that one or more will be on the British payroll."
Atty fumed. "Why in the hell didn't you tell us this in the first place!" she demanded.
"Oh, mind your tone, Atty. You're not at a Council meeting. If I am commander here, then you've got to allow me to use my judgment. I'll not have Dublin overriding me on a whim. They've got to convince me first I've made a wrong decision. Otherwise, don't bugger me just because you have a set of Irish maps to play with."
She loathed his arrogant softness. Of course he was dead right, and had he not interceded the Council would have blundered into a tragedy. But more than his self confidence, Conor remained among the two or three men she had ever known whom she could not control. After the initial urge to conjure up a scene, she accepted it with amazing quiet.
"Anything else on Dan's mind?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, reorganizing herself for a calmer discussion. "It's between you and Dan. He asked me to speak to you in his behalf because he has trouble speaking for himself. He detests your independence, which in many ways goes against the grain of Brotherhood discipline."
"Oh, Dan knows how to say that for himself."
"What he can't bring himself to do is beg you to join the Supreme Council. He has to have you, Conor. He simply has to have you. Independence, arrogance be damned. The man needs you."
Conor gathered up the pistols slowly and wrapped each in a cloth. "What would I be doing debating with all those fine Dublin intellectuals?" he said.
"You're running half the Brotherhood now."
"Sure the Council's not for me, Atty."
"We're overloaded with mystics and scholars. Dan tells me that I'm the only practical one he can rely on most of the time. He also says you've learned more about weapons, tactics and training men in a single year than he has in a lifetime."
"I'd only be a pain in everyone's ass," Conor fenced. "I know my job here. I've no stomach for arguing in endless circles."
"Dan's wearing out. Conor, it can't leave this cottage but he told me he's looking around for his successor."
"Me?"
"You."
A shutter blew open. Conor watched it beat under a whiplash of wind for many moments. "I'd have to respectfully refuse him," he whispered.
"That needs an explanation."
"I'll tell you something that also cannot leave this cottage. To become the commander of the Irish Republican Brotherhood I would have to be a liar and a traitor to things I know to be the truth. The truth is . . . we cannot win. We cannot defeat the British with arms in a hundred years, we cannot defeat them at a conference table and we can never reconcile the Ulstermen. Those are truths. Brutal truths that no wild-eyed revolutionary's fantasy can change."
He came over the room to her slowly and gripped her arms hard. "All we can ever hope for is a glorious defeat. A defeat that may somehow stir the dormant ashes of our people into a series of more glorious defeats. Every man in the Brotherhood must defy, scream, kick, die hard, bloody, shake consciences. You see, the true job of the Brotherhood is not to expand to win but to sharpen its teeth to die hard."
"What would you do, Conor?"
"See to it that not a single death can go silent and unheard. Destroy British will by our will." He dropped his hands from her arms and turned away. "So you see, Atty, I can never be the maker of dreams, for there is no dream, only a nightmare. Do you understand that, lass?"
He walked off and she followed him, touching his back, and he turned and they stared at one another.
"Oh, man." Atty Fitzpatrick's voice shivered. "I've missed you so."
<
br /> "Myself as well," he whispered.
"I made myself a fool over you once and it mattered to me. I'm going to make a fool of myself again and I don't care. I've not been right for any man or myself since I met you."
They held their places rigidly.
"I cannot help but batter you, Atty, and bring you to pain. At times, I'm frightened, you're so strong. I don't know how damaged I am. I don't know what's left for me to give or if I've already given it all. I've even got scars from our damned Church . . . aye, that as well . . ." he said.
Atty's face was locked and pale. She closed her eyes and let the tears fall as they might.
"I've never forgotten what you did for me, Atty. Each night coming to that room in the darkness, opening your robe, laying beside me, holding my head to your breasts and letting me weep. Only by your mercy am I alive. I was glad when they sent me to America in a way, for I was becoming ashamed of my tears and ashamed of needing you so desperately."
"Do you think I did what I did out of mercy, Conor? All of a sudden I was able to do that for a man! Knowing for the first time I owned that capacity was like the first day of life for me. And then you took it away. Do you know what it is for a woman to realize she has this much to give and be spurned by the man who has opened it all to her?"
"You should never have come, Atty . . . I'll hurt you . . ."
"Conor! Because Shelley died doesn't mean you'll kill me! I'm trembling for you, man!"
He slumped at the table and turned his back to her.
"God Almighty, I don't know what's in it for either of us," she said, coming up behind him. "But I've got to know. I'm worn out from waiting. I won't go beyond this day. Conor . . . my door will be open and this night it is I who needs you to come to me. If you don't, it will never be open again."
"Run if you've got the brains!"
"No!"
He bolted out into the rain and let it beat at him.
Oh, Shelley, he cried to himself, I cannot hold onto you any longer . . . I want to live, Shelley . . . please let me live . . . please let me live . . . please let me live . . .
He opened the door of her room and filled the frame. The light of the best room fell over her. Atty stood beside the bed and unloosed the drawstring of her blouse and pulled it over her head proudly and freed her breasts and unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall to the floor. Conor moved into the room slowly and kicked the door shut behind him.
