In the Time of Famine

by Michael Grant

  Michael thought his heart would burst in his chest. For so long he’d dreamed of her saying those words, but he never imagined that he would actually hear her say them. “Your kind is not for the likes of me,” he blurted out.

  “I think I’ve loved you since the first time I watched you saddle Shannon in the barn.”

  Shafts of sunlight, shining through the stained-glass windows, highlighted her gleaming auburn hair in dazzling colors. Her face, the color and texture of those lovely, delicate porcelain figurines he’d watched her pack, seemed to glow in the light. The sight of her was almost painful. “I can’t even read.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  Since that day he’d seen her riding through the village in her father’s carriage, he knew he would never love anyone but her. “I’m a clod. You said so yourself.” Jasus, the voice in him cried. Must you always try to turn her away?

  “That can be fixed.”

  Suddenly she was standing in front of him and he smelled her familiar, intoxicating scent. Without thinking, he opened his arms and she moved into him. He held her tight, remembering the time he’d held her after the gombeen man told her he owned the Manor. He never wanted to let her go then. And he didn’t want to let her go now. But this time it was different. Then she’d been seeking comfort. Now she was clinging to him because she loved him. She’d said so herself. And Michael knew—he’d be able to hold her for the rest of his life.

  “I love you, too,” he whispered into her hair.

  Then the spell was broken and the reality of the world intruded. “Emily, I have no money.”

  “You have a guinea and I have this.” She held up her mother’s sapphire ring.

  “But who has money to buy it?”

  “The gombeen man.”

  “No. I’ll not deal with the likes of him.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him and Michael wondered if it were possible to die of joy.

  “You don’t have to,” she whispered in his ear. “I will.”

  Emily knew what had to be done, but still, she dreaded coming to the Manor house, fearing that seeing the house again would dredge up too many painful memories. But to her surprise it hadn’t. What she’d learned gradually during the past four years, as more and more of her possessions were sold off and her station became lower and lower, was that it was people who were important, not material things. Of course, she was saddened by the loss of all those she had come to love—her father, Da, Mam, even surly, troubled Dermot. And she always would. But to her surprise, she realized that she didn’t miss the tapestries, the silverware, or the Waterford goblets. They were merely trappings—things. And things could always be replaced.

  As she and Michael sat in the great room waiting for Kincaid to appear, Emily sensed that an era was coming to a close. The famine would end eventually. It had to. But the day of the landlords and their great estates and their tenant farmers was over. She didn’t know what the future would hold for Ireland, but she knew that the old ways were lost and gone forever, and she was glad of it. It had caused too much misery, heartbreak, and death. Perhaps, the famine was a necessary malevolence, sent to scour the country of an evil way of life. She prayed for a brighter future for Ireland.

  As she looked around the great room, she couldn’t help but be amused by what Kincaid had done with the room. The furnishing were a muddled crush of mismatched chairs, sofas, and tables, clashing in color and style. Apparently, that dreadful man labored under the misconception that more was always better than less.

  The door opened and Kincaid came in wearing an orange silk dressing gown. Emily stifled a laugh. The ridiculous man reminded her of a character in a Molière satire she’d seen in London.

  “I understand you have a ring for sale,” he said, slipping around his desk and keeping a watchful eye on Michael.

  Emily handed him the ring. Kincaid slipped a jeweler’s loupe out of pocket in his dressing gown and carefully examined the ring. After a moment, he said, “It’s mediocre at best. I know I shouldn’t, but I’ll give you fifty pounds out of respect for your late father.” He slid the ring across the desk.

  “It’s worth four times that,” Emily said, sliding the ring back to him. She had no idea what the ring was worth, but if he was offering fifty pounds, it had to be worth much more than that.

  Kincaid studied the ring again. “Very well.” He slid the ring back to her. “Seventy pounds is my final offer. And generous it is, I must say.”

  Emily put her hand over the ring and didn’t slide it back. “One hundred pounds.”

  Kincaid saw her cup her hands over the ring and knew she was through negotiating. He licked his rubbery lips and his black eyes glistened with unbridled greed, as he pondered his next move.

  Emily stood up. “Well, then.”

  “No—wait.”

  He was desperate to get the ring. He was certain it was worth at least three hundred pounds. But he couldn’t bring himself to part with a hundred pounds—a full third of its value. He was accustomed to paying a mere fraction of a property’s actual worth and he bridled at paying a farthing more, especially to this vacuous girl who obviously knew nothing about jewelry.

  “You should take the seventy pounds,” he said, almost pleading. “You’ll not find anyone around here who’ll pay more.”

  “I will in Cork City.”

  While they had been negotiating, Michael had been sitting stiffly beside her, saying nothing. She’d made him promise that he would not interfere. But it was all he could do not to reach across the desk and strangle the little weasel.

  “Come on, Michael.”

  Michael exhaled in relief and jumped to his feet, anxious to get out of the sight of the gombeen man.

  As they reached the door, Kincaid shouted, “All right. But it’s thievery, I tell you.”

  “A hundred pounds?”

  Kincaid nodded in defeat. “A hundred pounds it is.”

  As Michael and Emily made their way to the train station to catch the train to Cork, they passed through the ruined village of Ballyross. The forlorn, abandoned village looked as though it had been laid waste by some terrible plague of Biblical proportions. There was not a soul on the streets, stores were boarded up, and as far as the eye could see every cottage was without a roof—a sure sign that those who had once lived there had been evicted.

  January 1850

  Hampton Hall, England

  Charles Trevelyan was asked to address a select group of Whig merchants about the current condition in Ireland. Speaking to a packed audience, he concluded his well-received remarks by saying, “Posterity will credit the famine for starting a revolution in the habit of a nation long singularly unfortunate. Future generations will acknowledge that supreme wisdom created permanent good out of transient evil. The Irish people have profited much by this famine. To be sure the lessons were severe, but no earthly teacher could have induced them to make the changes which this visitation of Divine Providence has brought about. The Ministry of the Treasury has much to be proud of as well, I might add. After all, in the final analysis, the famine was stayed.”

  He paused to bask in the applause, and then, sticking his thumbs in his lapels, he continued in his clipped, pompous style. “Armies of antiquity have been fed before, but history cannot furnish a parallel to the fact that millions of people were fed every day by administrative arrangements emanating from and controlled by this office.”

  The next day the London Times reported that Charles Trevelyan received a standing ovation.

  Chapter Forty

  January 1850

  Cork City

  Michael and Emily took the train to Cork City. They left the train station and walked toward the quay. When they came around a corner, Michael suddenly realized where he was. It was this very same quay, five years earlier, that he’d foolishly thought they could make a stand against the British Empire.

  Although the streets were now teeming with passengers heading for the quay,
in his mind’s eye, Michael could still see the deserted street on that rainy dawn so long ago. He heard the crunch of soldier’s boots on the cobblestone and the sharp crack of rifle fire. The pungent smell of gunpowder filled his nose. He saw men falling—some dying, others wounded. He heard the echo of gunfire against the stone warehouses, the desperate screams of dying men. Painfully, he felt once again, the loss of innocence. His loss of innocence.

  Emily saw that Michael had suddenly gone pale and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead. She thought it was because of the impending voyage. Earlier, he’d confessed to her that he had never been on a ship and that he did not know how to swim very well.

  She wiped his brow. “Are you not well, Michael?”

  He looked into her lovely eyes, now clouded with concern. He couldn’t tell her about that morning. Maybe someday. But not now.

  He took her arm. “It’s nothing,” he said, turning away from the past and leading her onto the quay.

  The quay teemed with scores of dazed and cowered travelers. Most of them had never ventured farther than twenty miles from their villages, but now they were about to embark on a frightening journey across a great ocean to an uncertain future in a unknown land. The thought of the impending voyage was made all the more terrifying by the notion that they might be sailing on a “coffin ship.”

  Michael, too, was concerned. To satisfy his own unease, he’d gone to the front of the quay to inspect the ship. He came back to Emily smiling. “I think it will be all right,” a relieved Michael said. “She appears to be a stout ship.”

  To pass the time while they waited to board, Michael studied his fellow passengers. Some were so destitute that they had no possessions save the ragged clothes on their backs. Others carried their belongings in old potato sacks and the occasional battered suitcase. Standing off to the side, he saw a dozen well-dressed men and women and their children surrounded by stacks of proper suitcases. A sailor had told him that these people were wealthy Protestants who would be berthed on the main deck where the cabins had windows and doors that locked.

  Earlier, when they’d purchased their tickets, Michael had discovered to his dismay that they had only enough money to afford steerage. Michael, unwilling to subject Emily to the horrific conditions in steerage, suggested that they stay in Ireland until they’d earned enough to pay for main deck accommodations. But Emily would have none of it.

  “You and I,” she said, affectionately patting his cheek, “have survived much worse than a long ocean voyage in steerage.” When he started to protest, she put her finger across his lips. “Michael, I want to go to America right now so we can begin our new lives.”

  Michael could only shrug helplessly and say, “All right.” Over the years he would learn there was no profit in arguing with his headstrong wife.

  The ticket agent handed the manifest to the captain, a grizzled man with a permanent squint from years of staring into sun-glared seas.

  “Will ya look at this wretched lot?” the ticket agent said out of the side of his mouth.

  The captain squinted at the crowd of his soon-to-be-his passengers and chuckled. “I almost feel sorry for the Americans. Sure they’re gettin’ the dregs of the country.”

  “Their loss, our gain,” the ticket agent grinned. He looked at his pocket watch. “It’s time, Captain.”

  The captain raised a megaphone to his lips. “Attention. When your name is called, step forward lively and have your ticket ready.”

  Reading from the manifest he called out the passengers’ names, some of which would in the fullness of time resonate in America’s history. “Crockett … Ford… Fitzgerald… Kennedy… Poe… Reagan… Foster…” And finally, “Moynihan… Barrymore… Ranahan ….”

  After the ship slipped her dock lines, it took almost an hour for her to tack carefully through the crowded harbor. But once freed of the constraints of the harbor’s jetties, the ship, with all canvas unfurled, laid into the breeze and gently plunged through the rolling sea.

  In silence and with tears streaming down their faces, almost all the passengers crowded the stern of the ship to get their last glimpse of Ireland, knowing they would never again return to their homeland.

  Michael took Emily’s hand and pulled her away. “Come on, Emily.”

  “Where are you taking me?” she said, laughing as the wind whipped through her long, auburn hair.

  “To the bow. I want to see where I’m goin’, not where I’ve been.”

  Standing in the bow, Michael wrapped his arms around Emily and, together, the young couple watched the brilliant sun slowly sinking toward the horizon.

  “It’s goin’ to be a long and difficult voyage,” he whispered into her ear.

  She squeezed his hand. “It’ll give me plenty of time to teach you how to read.”

  He turned her around and kissed her, still barely able to grasp that this magnificent woman was going to be his wife.

  Then, arm in arm, they turned to watch the sun, now a bold red, finally sink into the rolling seas to the west.

  Toward America.

  Epilogue

  The Great Irish Famine started in 1845 and, according to the British government, officially ended in 1850. But in truth, the impact of the famine lasted much longer than that.

  Because so many dead were buried in unmarked graves and ditches, it can never be known for sure how many people died during the famine years. But, it is estimated that more than one million men, women, and children died of disease and starvation and at least another two million emigrated to America and Canada.

  It is also estimated that over the course of the famine, 500,000 people were evicted and their cottages tumbled.

  It was years later that scientists finally discovered the cause of the blight—a fungus called Phytophthora Infestans. However, it was not until 1882, almost forty years after the famine, that scientists discovered a cure for it.

  For his work during the famine, Charles Trevelyan was knighted by Queen Victoria.

  In October of 1852, Squire Kincaid, the gombeen man, was assassinated on the Cork road by person or persons unknown. He had no heirs, so his estates, which were considerable, reverted to the Crown.

  The Great Famine sounded the death knell of the landlords. Over the next fifty years more and more landlords went bankrupt. Those who remained sold off their holdings to Irish farmers who used the land for grazing.

  Michael and Emily settled in that notorious part of New York City called the “Five Points.” They eventually had three sons and two daughters.

  The Ranahan Construction Company, run by future generations of Ranahans, would play a part in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and, later, the Empire State Building, and the World Trade Center.

  Descendents of other immigrants who survived the famine and the coffin ships found their own success in the New World.

  One created an automobile dynasty.

  May more became writers.

  And several became presidents of the United States.

  ###

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Grant joined the NYPD in 1962. He worked as a police officer in the Tactical Patrol Force and the Accident Investigation Squad. Upon being promoted to sergeant, he worked in the 63rd Precinct, the Inspections Division, and finally the Police Academy. As a lieutenant, he worked in the 17th Precinct and finished up his career as the Commanding Officer of the Traffic Division's Field Internal Affairs Unit. He retired in 1985 and went to work for W.R. Grace Company as a Security Coordinator.

  Mr. Grant has a BS in Criminal Justice and an MA in psychology from John Jay College. He is also a graduate of the FBI National Academy.

  In 1990, Mr. Grant moved to Florida where he wrote his first three novels: Line of Duty, Officer Down, and Retribution. In 2006 he returned to Long Island where he has written five more novels: The Cove, Back To Venice, When I Come Home, Dear, Son, Hey Ma, and In The Time of Famine.

  Mr. Grant can be contacted at mggrant@gmail.c
om and at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mggrant