Emer gazed at him, wide-eyed.
“Don’t worry, I’m not advocating rebellion. Far from it, for the Pope has issued a decree to all Irish clergy saying it is strictly forbidden to give succour to any rebels. At any rate, I do believe it would do far more harm than good, in some fairly unpredictable ways. Any attacks will be severely punished by the British government, and will only alienate them further from our cause. If the potato crop is bad again this year, we will need their help. A rising now would only serve to make them turn their backs on us utterly,” Father Darcy predicted.
At Emer’s worried expression, he nodded. “There no way of knowing whether the crop will fail again, but with the wet spring and summer we've had so far, it's always a possibility. Some folk around here say you can already smell the stench of putrefaction and corruption coming from the fields again, like a black cloud hanging over the land. I’m not so fanciful, but I can see many will give way to despair if they have to face yet another winter with nothing but grass, nettles and seaweed to eat."
Emer sighed heavily. She recalled only too well what the tenants at Kilbracken had had to endure, and they were by no means as badly off as others had been.
“But there is no sense in worrying about that which we are powerless to change. We will just have to wait for the first crop in August to find out whether the famine will continue. But I fear that even if it doesn’t fail, the people will still starve, for not enough seed potatoes would have been planted to meet the demand, even leaving aside the dwindling population, now that so many have been carried off by disease, hunger, and emigration.”
Emer was haunted by the priest’s bleak predictions, and the faces of the poor despairing wretches who came to the door for a thin, watery bowl of soup or gruel which Father Darcy made every day out of his own meagre rations, and paid for out of his small stipend.
Emer helped keep the house, and cooked the soup or gruel, while Father Darcy worked in the field, harvesting the poor miniature carrots and turnips he had planted in spring.
She grew fiercely determined to regain her health and help the suffering famine-stricken residents of her homeland, and so she indicated to Father Darcy that she wished to try to re-learn how to walk.
When Father Darcy wasn’t going about his parish duties, he supported Emer’s endeavours, even making two crutches for her to lean on so that she could use her strong arms to propel her around the room.
More than once Emer ended up in a heap, but with more scalding hot baths in some seaweed that the priest kindly gathered for her from the beach nearby, Emer could feel her legs and back strengthening.
By day she kept busy, but her nights were the same as they had been on the ship, full of fears over what had happened to her son at the hands of Frederick Randall.
When she wasn't worrying about William, visions of Dalton, and how much they had shared, filled her senses, and left her aching with longing, so much so that she would finally cry herself to sleep.
And yet every day brought her new hope, that she would get well. That she would see her beloved again, hold him in her arms once more. Above all, she prayed that she would get her son back, no matter what Frederick Randall or anyone else tried to do to keep them apart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
One day, about a fortnight after she had arrived, Father Darcy said, “I have to go in to town for a meeting today, and I’ll take in your letters to your friends to be posted. I’ll be back Sunday night from Cork. Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?”
Emer nodded, but she suddenly felt very uneasy. The black fever had been rife in the area recently, and she didn’t think Father Darcy looked well enough to walk all the way to Cork.
But Father Darcy reassured Emer that he was fine, and set out through the pouring rain with an almost jaunty stride.
“Take care of yourself, and God bless!” he called.
But that was the last Emer ever saw of the kind young priest. For true to her predictions, Father Darcy died on the road to Cork, and his body lay for several days until the parish authorities found him, and gave him a decent burial.
Fortunately for Emer, they found her letters in his pocket, and eventually one of the men got around to posting them to Canada.
Meanwhile, Emer waited for Father Darcy to return to the cottage, keeping herself busy making soup and using her crutches.
But when Tuesday came and he had still failed to arrive, Emer decided it was time for her to move on. She had a roof over her head, true, but little food, and was not strong enough to continue farming the sodden land herself.
She tied a black strip of cloth to the door knocker to signify that the priest had died, and indicated to several people who came past begging for food that she was leaving, but they could stay if they liked, and take advantage of the turf and the farm as best they could.
Then Emer took the rest of the bread and a bottle of water, and with only a small bag of carrots and one of her crutches, she set out for Kilbracken, certain Lord Devlin would help her once he knew of her plight.
Emer walked and rested, walked and rested, and occasionally even got a lift in a passing cart when someone felt sorry for the poor lame young man who couldn’t speak very well.
A couple of days into her exhausting journey, a wagon had left her out the outskirts of the city, near an old ruined seventeenth-century fort.
Emer trudged on purposefully until she reached the river. The quays were lined with warehouses, which at first gave an impression of prosperity to the town, until Emer looked more closely and saw that most of them were shut, and indeed had fallen into complete disrepair. Even a wealthy trading town like Cork had fallen prey to the ravages of the famine.
Emer entered Cork, a city built on a small island in the middle of a marsh, encircled by the river Lee, via the Parliament Bridge, and then hobbled up the Grand Parade, a row of fine Georgian buildings, and past the market square, which was nearly deserted.
Only a few tradesmen were out selling their paltry wares, and Emer was able to secure more provisions for herself with the last of her coins. She found one trustworthy-looking young man, and pointed to her wedding ring.
“You can sell at the South Mall. Just go back down the way you came, and turn right. You’ll see all the banks and shops you need on that road,” the man informed her.
Emer shouldered her crutch, and headed on purposefully.
She sold the ring for a fairly good price, and after having the shopkeeper pay her in pennies only, she distributed the coins in her various pockets and hem of her blouse. Taking up her crutch once again, she moved on.
As Emer journeyed, she noticed that there were hundreds of troops patrolling the countryside, and Cork was full of police constables.
Ever conscious of her status as an escaped convict, however innocent she might really be, she hurriedly left Cork behind, and headed for Mitchelstown, the next large settlement in the area. The ground rose steeply in front of her, and it began once again to teem down with rain.
Emer was just about to take shelter in a disused cow byre with only half a thatched roof when she saw something glowing in the distance. Climbing up the steep road a bit further, she discovered a small group of men, women and children, all gaunt like skeletons, crouching around a blazing turf fire as they cooked a scanty repast.
Emer approached timidly, not sure how desperate the people were. Opening her small burlap bag, she held out her last remaining carrots and a small piece of cheese as an offering.
They were seized gratefully, and she was allowed to approach the fire and sat soaking in the warmth as the rain steamed off her drenched clothes.
They were more than kind to her when she indicated she couldn’t speak very well. Emer sat and listened to all they had to tell her. Her jaw was healing slowly, but she thought it best to say nothing and save her strength for eating the small portion of rabbit stew and carrots with a square of melted cheese on top that she was given in a crude wooden bowl.
The starving men
and women recounted how they had all been evicted by a landlord nearby who had emigrated to Canada, and how even the more prosperous farmers in Ireland were all leaving for foreign shores rather than run the risk of enduring another winter of deprivation.
The caves had afforded them a modicum of protection from the harsh elements of that unusually inclement spring and summer, but they knew that sooner or later, when the food ran out, or they grew too weak to range far enough afield to find more, they would surely die.
Emer slept badly in the gloomy limestone cave, and awoke stiff and sore in the morning. Though Emer longed to stay and rest for a time, she had little to eat herself, and knew that as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t share her paltry wealth with the cave dwellers if she wished to survive the long journey north to Kilbracken to get help to return to Canada to find her son and Dalton.
After a mouthful of porridge from the oats she had brought, she donated the last of her food to one of the women, who was nursing a babe who reminded her painfully of William.
Then she once more took up her crutch and set off while there was a slight lull in the almost unrelenting rain.
After several more days and nights of alternately walking and resting, about three weeks after she had started her long trek, Emer came to small town called Ballingarry, in County Tipperary.
Emer hoped to find some food and a dry barn to settle down in out of the teeming rain.
As she limped up the small main street, Emer suddenly noticed a barricade put up at the far end of the town, manned by about thirty men, only four of whom had firearms of any description.
She hobbled warily towards the barricade, and was pulled to the ground by a very tall, dashing young man with an odd accent, which she guessed to be Irish tinged with a hint of Liverpudlian influence.
“Glad to have another recruit, lad,” he said with a grin. “I was beginning to give up hope of any one else being willing to support our glorious cause.”
“Recruit for what cause?” Emer managed to mumble in confusion, as she struggled to rise from the ground.
“Why, for our uprising, of course!” the young man declared boldly. “The time is ripe for victory. We are going to have a magnificent revolution, just as they did in France this year, and drive the British out of Ireland once and for all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The tall young man who had mistaken Emer for a revolutionary supporter helped her up off the ground and introduced himself as Terence McManus from Liverpool.
He outlined for her how he had come especially all the way from England to take part in this splendid endeavour, which he was convinced would make himself and his comrades immortal in the annals of Irish history.
Emer listened patiently to Terence’s patriotic rhetoric, and when she finally managed to get a word in, she tried to explain his error.
“I’m not here to volunteer, Terence. I’m trying to get back home from Cork to County Meath,” Emer insisted.
Now someone shouted, and another declared in an awed whisper that about four dozen policemen were coming up the road to storm the barricade.
“Now we’re really going to see some action,” Terence gloated.
Emer looked away from his fanatically gleaming eyes, and noticed another extremely tall man, very quiet and reserved, standing at the barricades, and priming his pistols with a resigned air of finality.
When the man turned around to ask if they were ready, Emer found herself looking straight into the eyes of none other than William Smith O’Brien, one of the greatest leaders of the Young Ireland movement.
Tall, full of energy and intelligence, with a dignified bearing, Emer was astonished to see him leading such a motley band of rebels.
O’Brien was from one of the most powerful of all Irish families, a Protestant, and a serving Member of Parliament for the constituency of Limerick for over fifteen years. To realise he had decided to resort to open hostility against the might of the English government he had once been a part of took Emer aback.
She suddenly realised the gravity of their seemingly hopeless situation. With four guns, three pistols, a few pikes and pitchforks, and a pile of stones, they were planning to take on a greater force, on armed with rifles and a full magazine of ammunition.
But Emer had no time to pause to consider this bizarre turn of affairs which had brought her into the fray completely unexpectedly, for O’Brien called upon them all to get ready to defend the barricade with their lives.
Emer looked through a chink in the wood planking which blocked the street as the police began to march steadily forward up the long, straight road.
They came to within a mile of the small town, and then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the police began haring to their right, and charged into the only farmhouse for miles around, a small two-storey structure on a hill to the left of the rebels.
“After ‘em boys,” someone shouted loudly.
Before Emer knew what was happening, she saw the men abandon their barricades, and go charging up the hill.
“Come on, lad, we might as well join the fun,” Terence said, a bit less confidently than before, but spoiling for some action all the same.
Terence tugged Emer up onto her feet by her shirt, and then moved on at a trot to catch up with the others.
Now Emer was certainly not keen to be caught up in an armed rebellion, but she estimated that there were about fifty well-armed police holed up in the farm house, which excited voices told her belonged to the Widow McCormack.
She was afraid that with the present mood of the crowd, they might foolishly try to rush the house and all be picked off like so many sitting ducks. There would be casualties if the mob didn’t remain in control of themselves, and Emer was not about to leave the scene if she were needed to help the wounded.
So Emer hobbled on purposefully up the hill behind the others. By the time she had struggled to the farm house, she saw that the jaunty Terence McManus, having failed to persuade his less than courageous comrades to follow his orders, had taken to single-handedly moving some bales of hay to the back door, and then setting them afire.
“If we can’t shoot them out, we’ll burn them out,” Terence boasted arrogantly to O’Brien, while Emer stared at the dozens of rifles trained on the rebels through the casement windows.
Emer held her breath, waiting to see if Terence’s ploy would work, when all of a sudden she heard a loud shriek behind her.
She turned to see a woman, obviously the Widow McCormack, just coming back from town with her shopping.
The widow stormed up the path towards O’Brien to demand that her children be allowed to come out before they were all burnt alive.
After a heated exchange between the two parties, O’Brien turned away from the woman, and looked at the cabbage patch bleakly.
“Put the fire out, McManus,” O’Brien ordered flatly.
He then used the widow’s hysteria over the fates of her six children to call a halt to the hostilities, and give the police time to surrender.
Terence put the fire out, and while Mrs. McCormack’s children were allowed to leave the building unharmed, O’Brien stood up on one of the window ledges, and talked to the policemen about terms for surrender.
But rather than agreeing to submit, the only reply O’Brien received from the police could be heard loudly through the open window by all in the farmyard: “We would forfeit our lives, rather than give up our arms.”
“I’ll give you five minutes to decide amongst yourselves whether you wish to fight and die, or give in peacefully,” O’Brien offered generously, and climbed down from the windowsill.
Emer hoped that since O’Brien couldn’t make good his threat to fight the well-armed force, that the rebels would realise their absurd position, and disperse.
But as O’Brien descended to the ground, suddenly there was a shout of, “Slash away, boys, and slaughter the whole of them!” from one member of the crowd, and several rocks were thrown. One gun discharged
in the air.
Emer gasped and flattened herself to the ground as bullets began to fly, as round after round was now fired upon the defenceless crowd.
O’Brien continued to stand in front of one of the windows, almost as though rooted to the spot. One of the men nearest him begged him to retreat, but O’Brien merely blinked at him owlishly, and declared in a commanding voice, “I refuse to turn my back on the enemy and retreat.”
But Emer, having seen three men fall right next to O’Brien already, including the flamboyantly irrepressible Terence, grabbed him around the knees and pulled him down to safety.
“Get down! Terence has already been wounded, and this man is dead. Do you want to be killed yourself because of your own stupid pride!” she asked impatiently.
“You’re a woman!” O’Brien exclaimed. He stopped struggling to stand up again.
The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) Page 18
