Trinity

by Leon Uris

  Conor touched his sister's cheek with his lips, held her hard for a moment, then turned and went back to the village alone.

  In a moment Myles appeared and they stood questioning each other silently.

  "I heard," Myles said.

  "So you did," she whispered.

  "Maybe Conor is right. If I could go to Derry and work for a few years and save and learn a trade, then I could come back as someone."

  "Nae," she answered, "no one ever returns to Ballyutogue."

  "Oh, Jesus," Myles said, "our situation at home is desperate. I'm next in line to emigrate. My brothers in America have sent my passage. I can't stay any longer. Brigid, my only choice is to become like Rinty Doyle. I know I'm not strong like Conor, either, but I'll not become anyone's hired man. Don't you see, lass, I've got to leave!"

  She became lightheaded and half crumbled to the rock, her face contorted as the look of madness crept its way back in.

  "I'm after talking to Conor," Myles said. "I'm after going to Derry with him and learn. If I'm in Derry I won't have to go over the water . . . I'll be able to see you from time to time."

  "Oh, Myles," she wept, "Myles, Myles, Myles . . ."

  "You'll see. We'll beat this thing. In a year or two some land will come open here and I'll have the money to buy it. You'll see."

  *

  When Conor left the cottage Tomas was asleep. Shortly after, he awakened. His sight was reduced to vague shadows and his left foot throbbed with excruciating pain.

  "Conor?"

  "Conor is away for a time," Dary said, "I'm here with you, Daddy."

  "Is it you, wee Dary?"

  "Aye, Daddy, can't you see me?"

  "Oh, surely I can," Tomas lied, "it's the sand in my eyes." The pain tore through his leg as though a white poker had branded him.

  "Dary," he groaned, "would you ever run and fetch Father Cluny. I want to talk to him."

  "Aye, Daddy."

  As the boy dashed off, Tomas Larkin summoned the last of his strength and dug about under the mattress for the bottle of poteen.

  *

  Conor arrived at the cottage the same moment Dr. Cruikshank dismounted. The aging villagers inched in closer in hushed fear, for if Tomas Larkin truly got away it marked their own time with terrible clarity. In the best room all were on their knees in low prayer.

  Finola, Dary and Father Cluny clustered around the bed. Conor and Dr. Cruikshank spotted the empty bottle at the same instant. The doctor snatched it up as the two exchanged terse glances. When the doctor cleared the room, Conor reeled out to the byre.

  lan Cruikshank came to Conor in a few moments, tapped his shoulder and the two walked away from the cottage until they reached the stream beyond the village.

  "How long?" Conor asked.

  "Hours, perhaps a day or two."

  "What happened?"

  "He knew it would be fatal to take a drink. I warned him of that some time ago and I repeated the warning. But I suspected he kept a bottle."

  "Why didn't you try to find it?" Conor demanded.

  "I think I know Tomas."

  "So you let him kill himself," Conor raged suddenly.

  "Can you take it, boy?" the doctor said.

  Conor backed off trembling.

  "Your father went blind this morning. I'm going to have to go back in there now and amputate his foot."

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Cruikshank," Conor moaned.

  "Don't worry, lad. I'll make it as painless as possible."

  Conor wavered until Dr. Cruikshank disappeared, then staggered aimlessly, aimlessly, and fell to his knees and doubled over with grief and vomited on the path. "Daddy!" he screamed his torment. "Daddy!"

  *

  For sixteen days Tomas Larkin, the son of Kilty, lay in a coma. Inishowen itself shuddered. The villagers and Fergus O'Neill were sick with fright at facing life without Tomas Larkin. His powerful heart refused to give as if to repudiate what he had done to himself.

  On the seventeenth day, the giant fell.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Caroline Hubble seemed to grow more lovely with the years. Stylishly exquisite in her late thirties, she had been entrenched as cultural partroness of western Ulster for a decade with Hubble Manor the center point The Hubbles never ceased to be the object of gossip, with the social humanization of Roger her subtle masterpiece, and the taming of Caroline his. It was said they were a kind of magic couple of one mind working in two bodies in total and constant communication.

  There was no lack of tittering innuendoes in the narrow confines of Irish society about their long visits to exotic places, whispers of opium parties and other excesses away from Ulster's puritanical reaches. The whispers spilled over about their hunting lodge in the Urns Hills, said to be done up as an erotic fantasy, and whispers about a mirrored, tented, hidden apartment in the Manor. Their public life remained picture perfect, their private life tantalizing in its mystique.

  Roger was entrenched as western Ulster's political major-domo. Within the enterprises he pressed on relentlessly to reduce unwanted land and to convert to cattle and flax and what was necessary to feed raw material into the manufacturing complex. A series of inter family arrangements with Weed solidified holdings so it became difficult to tell where Hubble began and Weed ended and vice versa. Their moves were concisely calculated to that master plan that would hack Ulster away from the other three provinces of Ireland, should the Irish demands for liberation become imminent.

  The marriage produced two male heirs, Jeremy, who became Viscount Coleraine upon Roger's accession, and Christopher, who followed a year later. They were different and complementary, an answer to their grandfather's dreams. Jeremy, the apple of Sir Frederick's eye, was cut of the old cloth, a boy's boy who would become a man's man. Christopher showed Roger's studious mind from the beginning, so their contrast would make a perfect combination to direct the family empire.

  With the question of heirs solved, Sir Frederick's cavernous appetite for expansion slowed. From here on out it would be consolidation of holdings, direction of the Ulster scheme and training of the grandsons. Sir Frederick embarked on his own campaign to achieve peerage. A program was devised to support the proper charities, attend the proper conferences, serve on the proper committees, give the proper public service.

  He envisioned himself as the Baron of Holywood, perhaps even Viscount Holywood. The latter was not out of range. A well-deserved seat in the House of Lords, just deserts, homage. Oh yes, Weed growled, contented. Caroline had done well by him and she had made her marriage work brilliantly and Roger was like his own son.

  *

  Renewal of Hubble Manor had taken almost six years, creating an acclaimed home at a cost reputed to have run over three hundred thousand pounds. Yet there remained a single ogre, the wrought-iron screen in the Long Hall. As it remained uncompleted, it became a bone of contention and a hovering challenge. On two separate occasions Caroline imported iron masters from Italy and Germany. The Italian succumbed to the mystery of the screen and gave up after several months into the ordeal with frenzied bravado. When he stormed from Ulster, leaving a trail of curses, Caroline found Joachim Schmidt, who held the reputation as Europe's greatest in restorations. The screen refused to give up its secrets and mocked his methodical attacks of historical logic. When Schmidt left, beaten and shaking his head, Caroline was tempted to remove it and replace it with a wood-carved screen. This would have inferred defeat, and dogged stubbornness inherited from her father demanded otherwise.

  *

  Gary Eagan, the new apprentice boy, stuck his head into Conor's office wide-eyed, then made & jerking gesture toward the shop with his thumb.

  "Talk up, Gary," Conor said.

  "There's a swell lady outside. Came in a carriage with a driver and footman, she did, and she's asking after you."

  "Well, show her in."

  The forge skidded to a gawking halt as Lady Caroline raised her skirts off the blackened floor and whisked through. "Mr. Larkin?
" she asked from the doorway.

  "Aye," he answered, coming to his feet. He looked about his cluttered space. "Gary, go up to my room and get the lady a chair, a clean one." He extended his hand, then withdrew it rather than dirty her.

  The chair arrived in Gary's hands as he was assisted by a pair of blacksmiths, but the office held no room for it. Conor looked about chagrined. "Would you mind terribly if we went over the way to Nick Blaney's? I'm half crowded into the street."

  "Not at all."

  As he led her through the forge, work ceased again. He stopped at the door. "It's not O'Connell's birthday!" he barked.

  Conor ordered a pint of Derryale and a sherry for the lady.

  "I'd like to talk to you about some work," she said. "First, let me introduce myself."

  "Only the village idiot doesn't know who you are. As a matter of fact, I met you personally on one occasion but I don't think you met me."

  "Really. Where?"

  "The Shakespearean Festival of a year ago. My shop was one of the small patrons as it is for the concerts and opera season as well."

  "How delightful. And do you attend regularly?"

  "Aye, I do. I wouldn't miss a one. And by the look of you, you're wondering what a blacksmith would be doing at the concert hall, right? It's a well-known fact that St. Patrick was a Roman living in England and was spirited off to Ireland as a slave by our coastal raiders. Not so well known, but equally as true, is the fact that Shakespeare likewise made a secret voyage to Ireland before he embarked on his career in order to learn proper use of the English language. From the time the shanachie told me that authentic story, my interest in Shakespeare was aroused."

  "Go on with you, Larkin," Caroline laughed, you're awful."

  "The question is not how I know you, Countess, but how do you know of me?"

  "I saw the balcony you made for Andrew Ingram as a birthday present and he led me to some other work you've done."

  "Ah, Andrew, I should have known. So now you want me to come up to Hubble Manor and see if there is anything I can do about the screen in the Long Hall?"

  Caroline smiled, shook her head and wiggled her finger at him.

  "Well, Countess, you are public property of a sort and, being in ironwork, stories of the screen somehow got back to me. I was wondering when you were going to get down to the bottom of the barrel and see me."

  Caroline smarted. It was one thing to be friendly with artisans but another thing to have them forget their place and this young man was obviously delighting in her dilemma. "Tell me, Mr. Larkin," she said with deliberate curtness, "are you always so brash?"

  "Only when I've got something a customer wants badly enough. You know, I wouldn't be human if I didn't glory that you finally had to look right here in Derry, right in the Bogside, for what has evaded you all over Europe."

  Caroline toyed with the notion of setting him down and leaving. On the other hand, she had dealt with artisans long enough to know they insisted on artistic dues. She had never truly considered an Irish Catholic to be in that category. The damned screen had been haunting her for years. She didn't really believe this Larkin was capable where a Joachim Schmidt had failed, but at that point she had to give it a last try.

  "May I expect you at Hubble Manor tomorrow before noon?" she said.

  "Sorry, Countess, the shop is backed up with work. I’ll not be able to get out until next week." Now why the hell did I go and say that? Conor wondered. He knew, of course, there was pleasure in one of the earldom's croppies giving a bit of comeuppance to the Countess of Foyle but was it also because she was a beautiful woman? Or both?

  Caroline lifted her sherry glass with studied coldness. Conor knew she had been waiting for a decade and had come to him as a last resort and she wondered, Was he establishing male ego, artisan ego or some basis of future equality? He was a handsome chap, and he probably knew it well enough. There was that intriguing business with his unlikely cultural pursuits. All right, little boy, she thought, have your sport.

  "Next week will be just fine," she said.

  *

  The mighty bronze doors to the Long Hall gave way. Conor walked over the vestibule toward the screen with the reverence of an impoverished monk approaching the Pope. He asked Lady Caroline if more light could be allowed in and if any of the original sketches of the screen existed.

  "I'm afraid the drawings were destroyed in some war or another," she said. "I do have the architectural plans of the recent restoration of the hall and some renderings by Joachim Schmidt and Tustini before him."

  "Yes, I could use them all. What I should like is a tall ladder and an hour or so to study this. I hope I can talk to you sensibly then."

  After Caroline withdrew, Conor came before what, illuminated, was a delicate concerto in iron. Each welded joint was covered by leaves and scrolls, a classic of repousée decoration. What was left of the screen was perhaps a third of the original. In full glory it had soared to forty feet in height and was just as broad. It might have been among the three or four most magnificent ever executed, he thought.

  "Oh my," Conor Larkin whispered, "my, my, my."

  *

  Lady Caroline returned in two hours with a tea bearing servant. The plans she had sent earlier were spread out on a heavy oaken-slab bed refectory table which Conor had moved directly in front of the screen. His own sketches were mixed with the others. He was steeped in them as she peeked over his shoulder curiously.

  Feeling her presence, he looked up, dropped his pencil and made an expression to relate that just seeing this work was in the nature of a religious experience. His eyes continued to linger on it as a lover viewing his naked lady in adoration.

  "Tijou," Conor said, "Jean Tijou."

  In that instant Caroline deflated. She had hoped he would be able to live up to her hidden expectations. He had been so cocksure. It was obvious that he was unable to determine between an ultimate master and a very good imitator. Yet one had to be gracious at this point. It would have been poor form to downgrade a Catholic workman.

  "Yes, I know," she said. "Everyone believed it to be a Tijou. Schmidt thought so too at first. I'm afraid it's not Tijou."

  "It's Tijou," Conor repeated quietly.

  Caroline's patience was ruffled. She did not want to get into a long discussion over the matter. "It's not possible," she said. "We have researched the matter with an Oxford historian among others."

  "What is your understanding of it?" Conor asked.

  "That Jean Tijou was a French Protestant who took refuge in Holland, in Orange. We know he came to England around 1690 with King Billy and was patronized by the court of William and Mary. His work was done between 1690 and 1710. There is no record of his ever having come to Ulster."

  "But he did come to Ulster," Conor interrupted.

  "Mr. Larkin, we have letters proving that this screen was built some sixty years before Tijou's time and these letters are irrefutable."

  "That's not correct," Conor said bluntly. "You've pieced together wrong information."

  As she arched her back, Conor stood before the screen in a semidetached euphoria.

  "Mr. Larkin, I'd like to know what you're talking about."

  Conor returned to the table sipped at the tea, thanking her for her consideration. He checked the sketches and doodled for a moment and as something unlocked in the screen's secret he smiled, then set his pencil down. "Daddo Friel probably knew as much about this castle as most of the earls who lived here."

  "Would you mind telling me who Daddo Friel is?"

  "Was," Conor corrected. "He was a shanachie, a master storyteller. My best friend and I were two of his favorites. He could go on with us for hours, even days."

  "And did he tell you that coastal raiders spirited Tijou out of England?"

  Conor laughed. "Ah, I don't blame you at all for that," he said. "Seriously, Daddo's history has proved unerringly accurate when it came to the local sieges and risings."

  Caroline had a feeling that
a bit of Irish charm was being worked on her but she was too intrigued to halt the discussion and too mystified about Larkin himself; he seemed so positive of his ground.

  "During the Peasants' Rising of sixteen and forty-one," Conor began, "the Earl of Foyle led Cromwell's counter insurrectionist forces, as you know. At one stage he rounded up five hundred croppies and put them into the Long Hall and locked them behind the screen. I need not go into the subsequent torture, starvation and massacre of these prisoners."

  "I've not heard of such an event," she challenged.

  "I have a two-volume work on the insurrection in western Ulster by the British historian, Wycliff, published a year ago by Oxford University. His accounts are amazingly close to Daddo Friel's."

  "Continue," she said tersely.

  "The point is that the screen became a hated symbol. It is still part of the language in my village of a mother trying to frighten her child . . . ‘I'll put you behind the Earl's screen.’"

  Caroline managed a small smile, warning herself at the same time not to be drawn in too completely.

  "During the siege of Derry in sixteen and ninety, Hubble Manor was attacked by the forces of James, whose first target was the screen. It was completely destroyed, as was most of the Long Hall and the original castle."

  Folklore as history was doing well up to this point, Caroline thought.

  "In gratitude to the Earl of Foyle for his service to the Crown, King Billy personally dispatched Jean Tijou to Hubble Manor to replace the destroyed screen."

  Caroline's complacency faded. She was puzzled. It was logical that the original was destroyed. The time period and events indicated-the screen was newer than she had believed and might be a Tijou. Yet so much Irish fantasy was woven into it and one knew the shanachies could be frightful liars.

  "There was a short local rising in seventeen and twenty two," Conor went on. "The Long Hall was again razed and when the roof collapsed two thirds of the Tijou screen was destroyed. The balance is what we are looking at right now."