Heart of the Lonely Exile

by BJ Hoff

  The hall was filled with Old Irelanders, shrieking, whistling, stamping, and swearing in the barbaric accents of Ulster. Of all Ireland, Morgan favored the North least, mostly because of its grimness and hovering phantom of intolerance. He would be vastly relieved when all this was over and they could leave for home. As much as he wanted away from Belfast, even more did he want shut of all this talk of revolution.

  While Smith O’Brien was still holding back from any planned peasant rising, Mitchel’s speech had left little doubt as to his intentions. The man had a vision of the tenants rising as one, bursting their bonds, raising the green flag, and finally sweeping the British into the sea.

  That was no vision, Morgan reminded himself. It was delusion. Amid them all, O’Brien was the only voice for sanity. And yet the voice was growing dimmer, Morgan feared. Smith O’Brien was tilting more and more toward Mitchel, toward armed rebellion.

  When the pathetic attempts at speech making were done, someone raised Morgan’s name, and soon a weak chant from the back of the room began to swell. Vexed, Morgan shook his head firmly. O’Brien tried to persuade him to speak, and Morgan snapped at him, more harshly than was usually his manner. “This mob is in no mood to hear a voice for reason, only the rattle of drums and the sound of muskets! What I mean to do is get us away, before things turn even nastier!”

  Even as Morgan spoke he began to press O’Brien and the others from the hall. He had been witness to riots before, and he did not doubt but what they were only moments away from one.

  Glaring back in the direction of the group chanting his name, he lifted a hand in protest, then continued to urge the other Young Irelanders through the crowd. Only O’Brien went with him; Mitchel and the others insisted on staying behind to debate with a group of mill workers.

  They found the street outside almost as loud and raucous as the hall. Swarms of hard-looking men stood huddled in front of the dismal buildings, gathered around fires rising out of barrels, as they warmed their hands and grumbled, condemning both Ireland and the Queen in the same breath.

  Tough-looking youths seemed to be everywhere, both lads and lassies, ragged and dirty and miserably thin. Most were running wild in the street. Others were begging money or food from the passers-by. Morgan thought again, as he had before, that Belfast’s children were born old and desperate and hard.

  In front of one building milled a group of women. Wives of those inside, more than likely, fearful for their husbands, more anxious still for the wages they knew would be spent on the drink once things got rowdy.

  “Not exactly a resounding triumph, eh, Fitzgerald?” said O’Brien with a sardonic smile.

  “Had you really thought it would be anything other than a failure?” Morgan bit out. At the moment, he was altogether irritated with O’Brien, Belfast, and politics.

  Smith O’Brien shrugged lamely and put a hand to Morgan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, old friend. I should never have asked you to come. It wasn’t worth any of our efforts, that’s certain. The fault is mine, but I’m nevertheless grateful for your loyalty.”

  “’Tis done, and that’s what matters,” Morgan said, relenting somewhat. ‘The thing to do now is to leave this abominable place. I tell you, no other place in the world sets my teeth on edge as much as mean old Belfast.”

  “Yes,” O’Brien agreed with a sigh, “it’s not one of my favorite cities, I admit. Still, if we could have made any progress at all, it would have seemed worth—”

  O’Brien stopped, both he and Morgan whirling around when someone behind them shouted a warning.

  From out of nowhere, or so it seemed, came a squad of burly, mean-faced men charging toward them. Dressed in the rough clothing of laborers, they were waving bludgeons and roaring curses as they came.

  Keeping his voice low, Morgan grabbed O’Brien by the arm. “Run, William! Now!”

  For an instant, Smith O’Brien seemed transfixed, frozen. Not waiting, Morgan began to drag him into the street, hoping they could lose themselves in the crowd before their attackers could reach them.

  But they were too late. The mob was upon them, fists flying, clubs coming down hard.

  “Get away!” Morgan shouted at O’Brien. “Go for help!”

  He could not hear his own voice for the cries around them. Their attackers were roaring, spitting out curses and threats, while all around them the swelling cries of the spectators in the street drowned out Morgan’s and O’Brien’s pleas for help.

  Morgan snapped his big body back and forth like a whip, holding one assailant after another off O’Brien, who had all he could do to stand.

  Around them the street had exploded into a full-blown riot, men fighting, women shrieking, children screaming. Morgan’s blood raged with a blazing anger, yet his spirit was seized with a terrible coldness at the palpable presence of evil hemming them in. The swell of madness closing in on them seemed borne of demons rather than men.

  His breath came hard and ragged. Pain sent flames of light streaking before his eyes, yet he dug his feet into the street and went on fighting. He caught a fleeting sense of savage faces, dark with hate and intent on blood.

  He felt the metallic taste of his own blood as it tracked his cheeks to his mouth, heard the fabric of his shirt give and tear. His legs were lead, his chest caught in a vise of pain. He felt himself weakening, and he fought to stand. He was trapped, walled in, about to die.

  Suddenly, the darkness shattered, rent to pieces by a thunderous explosion. A fire broke out in Morgan’s spine, hurling his feet out from under him. A hot blaze of pain went roaring up the length of his body, and he toppled, hitting the cobbles with a terrible crash and a fierce, terrified scream.

  “God deliver me!”

  A final groan of protest ripped from his throat. Then the clamor of the night faded to silence.

  By the time the other three Young Irelanders reached them, the police had managed to break up the mob of attackers, arresting all who did not escape.

  Smith O’Brien was mostly scratched and battered, but not badly hurt.

  Morgan Fitzgerald lay motionless. His face was bludgeoned and bleeding, his right eye cut from brow to cheekbone. He lay in a pool of his own blood. To those gathered near, the life seemed to be pouring out of his big body from the gunshot wound at the small of his back.

  He was alive, but barely.

  Annie Delaney had seen it all, from the ruckus inside the Music Hall to the attack on the two men—and then the shooting.

  Her wee size had enabled her to sneak into the hall earlier without being seen. She had high hopes of engaging the sympathies of some of the better class of lads inside—of which there had proven to be few.

  On a good night she would have been able to beg enough to see her through a week or more. This had not been a good night. She’d been leaving the hall almost empty-handed when the chant for Morgan Fitzgerald began, stopping her in her tracks.

  Oh, she knew who the Fitzgerald was, Annie did! The other street sweepers might scoff all they liked when she claimed to be able to read, but she could read, and that was the truth! She might be but a lassie, and she might be on her own keeping—but she was not ignorant. Not Annie Delaney.

  Before her real da had passed on and left her mum to take up with old Frank Tully, he had taught her to read some, enough to make out the news and the articles in The Nation he left lying about.

  Of course, once Da was gone the lessons were finished, but Annie had not left off the reading. Even when she ran off, leaving her mum to old Tully, she took her clippings from The Nation with her.

  Annie would not have left her mum except for Tully. The ape could not keep his filthy hands off her, and Mum wouldn’t listen when Annie tried to tell her what her new husband was really up to.

  Until the last bad incident with the dirty-minded sot, Annie had been able to fend him off by a swift kick where it hurt most or by simply darting past him and running off. He was clumsy and slow, and no match for her once she took off.


  But one evening when her mum was working late at the linen mill, Tully climbed the ladder to where Annie slept. She was lying on her cot, reading. Worse luck for her, Tully wasn’t so drunk this time that he hadn’t the wits to block the doorway with his bulk. Her attempt to squeeze past him failed.

  Annie screamed and fought like a wild thing, clawing at his eyes, kicking and biting. In the end she managed to escape before he could work his unspeakable acts on her—but not before his hands had turned savage. He went after her like a lunatic, pounding on her and tearing at her clothing, all the while shouting such depraved filth that Annie thought she would feel dirty and spoiled forever.

  Finally, she managed to land a fierce blow against his throat, winding him enough that she got away and bolted down the ladder. By then he had pummeled her so hard with his fists that she carried the bruises and the soreness for weeks.

  She knew she would carry the disgusting memories much longer.

  She had run straight to the mill to wait for her mum’s shift to end. But when Annie told her what Tully had done—even though she could see for herself how he’d beat on her—Mum had stopped just short of blaming Annie for the entire episode.

  “Well, you’re growing up is all,” she muttered nervously, looking everywhere else but at Annie. “And Tully is no different from any other man when he’s been at the bottle. It makes a man weak in the flesh. You’ll just have to stay out of his way, you will! I can’t say a word to him, or he’ll be after beating up on the both of us.”

  Annie realized then that her mum was terribly afraid of Tully and would go on ignoring his wickedness—no matter what it might mean for her daughter.

  Annie left the flat that night and never went back. She tied her few pieces of clothing on a stick, and went on the streets, carrying all her treasures in a small poke. Her da’s books were her treasures—them and the verses of one Morgan Fitzgerald.

  Da had fancied this poet more than any other writer, had even taught Annie some of her lessons from Fitzgerald’s writings. Little by little she had come to know his verses by heart, and she could recite whole chunks of his essays. Da always said there was no denying the fact that Morgan Fitzgerald had a great, noble heart—and a voice for Ireland—if only Ireland would listen!

  So tonight, when a small group at the back of the Music Hall had begun to call for Morgan Fitzgerald to speak, Annie had taken notice. And sure, hadn’t she identified him easily enough? There was no mistaking him, his being the giant he was!

  There he stood, scarcely any distance at all from her, trying to make his way out of the hall with one of the Young Irelanders who had spoken earlier—the dandified-looking fellow who talked like a Britisher, the one called Smith O’Brien.

  Annie had caught the startled look on the big Fitzgerald’s face when he heard his name, saw him shake his great head with its copper mane once or twice, then lift a hand in protest to those who were calling him. On his way out of the hall, he passed by her so close that she could have reached out and touched him, had she dared.

  My, and wasn’t he huge and fierce-looking at that moment, with that thick, bronze beard and those green eyes flashing fire? As resplendent as one of the old High Kings, and that was the truth!

  But just see what he’d come to, lying in the street in a sticky pool of blood because of those apes with their fake Irish brogues! Why,they were no more Irish than the Queen herself, and that was the truth!

  Annie knew who they were well enough—old pig-faced Johnnie Dorton and his cronies. A bunch of toughs from the mills who went around beating up Irishers for money. They’d done in two Catholic lads from West Belfast last month. While the motives back of their nasty business were always a mystery, it was no secret at all that most of their wages came from the soldiers.

  And now just see what they’d done! With all the excitement and clamor in the street, nobody—including his political cronies—seemed to be paying any attention to the fallen Fitzgerald.

  Furious, Annie pried her small frame in between two of the women at the front of the crowd circling Fitzgerald, then bolted toward him.

  The three Young Irelanders were down on their knees trying to bring him to, while the mob in the street kept pressing closer and closer to the place where Fitzgerald lay.

  Squeezing in among them, Annie dropped to her knees and listened to his chest. He was still breathing! The breath was coming in great, ragged gasps—but he was alive!

  On her knees in the street, enraged with the mob milling about and doing nothing, she raised a grimy fist to the air and screamed: “Don’t ye know who this is, ye great fools? This is Morgan Fitzgerald himself, the nation’s poet! Won’t somebody be goin’ for the doctor? Or will ye just go on flappin’ your gums and lettin’ the man die here, like a dog in the street?”

  One of the women in the crowd jumped, then took off running. Annie pressed closer to the slain Fitzgerald.

  “Don’t ye go dyin’, Fitzgerald!” she demanded, her voice hoarse and desperate. “D’ye hear me, now? Wherever ye be, ye must not be dyin’!”

  William Smith O’Brien knelt on the cobbled street beside the great form of the unconscious Morgan Fitzgerald.

  With only half a mind he took note of the small, sooty-faced youth with the straggling black hair and the tattered clothing. He paid little heed to the cries of the child, aware only in the vaguest sense of the other Young Irelanders hovering over Fitzgerald.

  Beyond grief, O’Brien knew only guilt: guilt that he had bidden Fitzgerald accompany him to Belfast, guilt that his friend had taken a shot almost certainly meant for him.

  He would have wept had his soul not been seized with a terrible, paralyzing chill.

  It was the dream…

  Horribly, eerily fulfilled, the spectral-like dream of the weeping women, with their dread announcement about Morgan Fitzgerald, now came gruesomely to life in front of his eyes.

  “He is fallen…Fitzgerald is fallen.”

  PART TWO

  WINTER LAMENT

  Gathering Shadows

  So I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.

  LAMENTATIONS 3:18–20

  19

  A Pocketful of Money

  Happier days may yet await us,

  Scenes more pleasant glad the eye,

  But even these shall not elate us

  While o’er Ireland’s fate we sigh.

  FROM LAYS FOR PATRIOTS,

  PUB. BY SAMUEL B. OLDHAM, DUBLIN (1848)

  New York City

  December

  Sitting in his study late Saturday morning, Patrick Walsh turned to look out the window. The Burke boy was shoveling the snow that had fallen overnight, clearing the walk on this side of the house. With the ease of a much larger man, the youth scooped, lifted, then tossed the snow to the side, his movements smooth, almost rhythmic.

  Walsh took one last sip of coffee, draining the cup. With a faint smile, he continued to watch Tierney Burke.

  Tall and lean as a whip, the boy fairly hummed with good health and restless energy. He was a bright rascal, too. In some ways, he reminded Patrick of himself when he was younger. Clever and sharp as they came, as agile in wit as on foot—with an ambition designed more for excitement and adventure than for steady, hard work.

  Tierney Burke already displayed the telltale signs of a certain ruthlessness that Patrick admired—the kind of relentless determination it took for an Irishman to succeed in America. His character was not without its weaknesses, of course—the most potentially damaging being the boy’s near-irrational zeal for Ireland and all things Irish.

  Walsh had despised it all his life, this misguided passion of the Irish patriots. He thought of it as the national madness, a madness that turned humdrum lives into romantic adventures, meaningless jobs into holy callings. It was the very spark that fueled their endless secret societ
ies wherein plowboys became heroes—martyred heroes, more often than not.

  The madness had crossed the Atlantic with thousands of immigrants, riding the waves to America only to run rampant among the tenements and push its way into Tammany Hall. Never quite able to escape the lure of mythical Old Ireland and its warriors, hotheaded youths bent on dying for Eire continued to espouse the Cause. Even the few who managed to succeed in the States regularly sent enormous chunks of their money back to Ireland—a foolish, sentimental gesture, as far as Patrick Walsh was concerned.

  He had sensed, almost from the beginning, that Tierney Burke bore all the markings of one of those wild-eyed rebel zealots in the making. Yet the boy would bear watching, for with the right sort of guidance he might in time turn out to be useful in a number of ways. It was even possible that the young scamp’s raging Irish fever could be turned to benefit.

  Not for the first time, Patrick found a delicious irony in the fact that an Irish policeman’s son had become, albeit unknowingly, a part of the Walsh “business enterprises.” He had never met the boy’s father, but the bullish Mike Burke had himself quite a reputation among the pub owners and gamblers of Five Points, that of a hardheaded, uncompromising copper who wouldn’t bend. Honest cops held him in high regard, while those on the take thought him a fool.

  In other words, he couldn’t be bought.

  Walsh picked up a long, narrow envelope containing a generous Christmas bonus for Tierney Burke. His smile turned faintly contemptuous as he thought of the boy’s straitlaced father. It might shake a bit of the starch out of Officer Burke if his son were to end up on the wrong side of the law.

  As things stood now, the boy had no knowledge of certain transactions being passed across the desk in the hotel lobby. His part was entirely innocent: He accepted envelopes and mailbags, routed them to the proper boxes, and made an occasional delivery for Hubert Rossiter or Charlie Egan.