1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  After the surrender, when many Volunteers might have slipped away through the Dublin streets and escaped, they had chosen to stay with their units and lay down their arms in the correct military manner. Pádraic Pearse had ordered them to behave as honorable men who would do credit to Ireland, and they did. Some even went home to wash and shave first, then returned to present themselves for arrest.5

  Ned Halloran bitterly resented the wound that had kept him comatose and allowed Henry to rescue him. For him there had been no surrender.

  Perhaps there never could be.

  The door opened behind Henry, the floorboards creaked, and then his mother peered over his shoulder. She smelled like the old newspapers she used to line the shelves in the cupboards. “Who are you writing to?”

  “Just a friend. Sheila Duffy.”

  Hannah picked up the envelope and rubbed it with her thumb to test the quality of the paper. Too heavy, said her frown of disapproval. Henry putting on airs again. “This is addressed to someone called S-í-l-e.” She sounded out the name letter by letter.

  “Síle, Mam. You know that’s the Irish spelling for Sheila.”

  “The trouble is, I can’t read your handwriting. I thought you was supposed to learn handwriting in school. Or is that why you never write me letters?”

  Henry put both hands flat on the table he used as a writing desk and pressed down hard. His mother could barely read; she merely wanted the letters to show to the neighbors, proof of her absent son’s devotion. “I do write you, Mam,” he said in a voice flattened with the effort to control his anger. “As often as I can.”

  Chapter Four

  LIMERICK ceased to exist for Henry by the time his train was halfway across Ireland. When he reached Dublin, he felt the relief of having once more outrun his past.

  With electric trams, cinema houses, and an increasing number of public telephone callboxes, Dublin had a toehold in the twentieth century. The city held some of Europe’s worst slums, but also the magnificent monumental architecture of James Gandon and street after street of eighteenth-century Georgian houses, which, though begrimed and neglected, still retained hints of their former elegance. Henry’s pulse quickened. It’s good to be home.

  From the train station he walked home along the stone quays that contained the Liffey. Having grown up beside the Shannon, he was drawn to rivers. And Dublin was a city for walking. Henry had a bicycle that he kept in a shed at Louise Kearney’s house, but he used it only when absolutely necessary. He hated what bicycle clips did to the legs of his trousers.

  The damage from Easter Week was being replaced by new construction. Competing with the muddy stench of the Liffey was the smell of brick dust and freshly sawed planking. Yet ragged urchins still clambered over mountains of wreckage, searching out scraps of timber to burn for fuel. Roofless, windowless buildings stared blindly outward, waiting for rescue like shocked survivors of catastrophe.

  James Connolly, that militant socialist, had believed the British would never destroy capitalist property.

  He was wrong.

  Although the British put all the blame on them afterward, it was not the rebels who had ruined Dublin. A massive pounding by British artillery and incendiary shells had reduced the heart of the thousand-year-old city to rubble in order to flush out a few hundred insurgents.

  The walls still standing were covered with recruiting posters exhorting the young men of Ireland to enlist for the Great War. The Great War, Henry thought contemptuously. Calling it “Great” to lend glory to a nasty stinking bloody horror. Telling our lads it’s their duty to march off and die for England. Their privilege to be sacrificed to rampant imperialism and someone else’s family feuds. All the Irish will get in return for their lives is a muddy grave in foreign soil.

  He could almost hear Ned Halloran saying, “Is it not better to fight under an Irish flag and win freedom for our own country?”

  THE debris in Sackville Street—now more commonly called O’Connell Street—had long since been cleared away. The city’s main thoroughfare was carrying its customary traffic. Shops and hotels, many of them new, were doing a brisk business. Men and women hurrying in and out, up and down, seeking, finding, buying, selling.

  Above them loomed the burnt-out shell of the General Post Office like a specter at the feast. Some wanted it left as it was, a terrible warning of the consequences of rebellion. The men and women who had brought all their brightest hopes to the GPO on Easter Monday were gone, but the massive ruin was not empty. It was filled with a haunted silence.

  Bullet holes pocked the Corinthian columns of the portico. Behind the portico was…nothing.

  The flags that had floated so proudly above the GPO, proclaiming the Irish Republic for all to see, were gone too.

  Henry slowed as he walked by, imagining Ned Halloran in that hell on the last day while burning timbers crashed around him and machine-gun fire strafed the street outside.

  THE first memoirs of the 1916 Rising had begun to appear in print—some from one side, some from the other. Henry read each as soon as it was published. In a book review for the Dublin Evening Mail he commented, “Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.’ The same may be said in relation to history. Facts are slippery. Already the truth of the Rising is escaping us. Soon all we will have left is the myth, so be warned: Myth may be rewritten to suit the purpose of the moment.”

  HALF a dozen uniformed British soldiers were standing in front of the GPO, smoking cigarettes and watching passersby. A man wearing the insignia of a captain met Henry’s eyes. Abruptly the officer snapped his cigarette away with thumb and forefinger and strode toward him. “Your name and business here, sir?” he inquired politely. He had a square face and large ears crammed under the rim of his hat. A razor cut on his chin had bled recently.

  “I was just walking past.”

  As soon as he heard Henry’s Irish accent, the captain took an intimidating step closer to him. “Your name?” His tone was not so polite now.

  “Henry Mooney. And as I said, I was just—”

  “Your business?”

  “I’m a newspaperman.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In lodgings in Middle Gardiner Street. I have rooms there.” Henry was careful not to give the exact address.

  “Rooms, plural?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have a wife and children?”

  “I’m a bachelor.”

  “A bachelor with rooms, plural? Sounds as if you’re doing all right for yourself.”

  “Things could be better.”

  “Things could be better,” the captain mocked. “I daresay. Well, move along, Henry Mooney. There’s nothing for you here. Those rebels are dead and gone to the hell they deserve. Most of them were certifiable lunatics anyway.”

  To his consternation, Henry spoke before he could stop himself. “That’s the myth you want to peddle, is it?” He kept his hands at his sides but could not help knotting his fists.

  The British officer glanced down, then raked his eyes back up the length of Henry’s body. Slowly. Insultingly. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

  Henry forced himself to turn and walk away.

  The eyes that followed him dissolved the boundaries of his body, invading his inner space.

  WHEN he first moved to Dublin, Henry naively had thought of the city as his; his chosen home, where he could be his own man at last.

  The British had disabused him of the notion soon enough. Their attitude made plain that Dublin was theirs as Ireland was theirs, by right of conquest. Unlike the officer Henry had just encountered, however, most of them individually were decent people. Among his friends he numbered several of the civil servants working in Dublin Castle, seat of the British bureaucracy in Ireland. The castle also housed the Dublin Metropolitan Police force and the main offices of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which policed the countryside. Both were under direct control of the British governmen
t, as was the educational system.

  Most Irish people knew nothing of their history. The national schools taught English history exclusively and stressed that English superiority was the natural order of things. Only in private Catholic schools such as those run by the Christian Brothers, or through nationalistic periodicals such as Ireland’s Own, the Shamrock, Irish Nationality, and Sinn Féin, could young minds discover a different truth.

  Since the twelfth century the situation between Ireland and England had been that of a small country struggling against domination by a larger one. Step by step England’s control had tightened over not only Ireland, but the entire area known as the British Isles.

  Wales was forced to submit to the English crown in the thirteenth century. During the seventeenth century, four-fifths of the land of Ireland was forcibly confiscated by Protestant English and Scottish settlers.1 In 1707 Scotland was compelled to join England in a polity known as Great Britain, wherein the English parliament simply absorbed the Scottish parliament. Then in 1800 Great Britain subsumed Ireland through the Act of Union, abolishing the Irish parliament, and the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland came into being.

  Eighty years later the British prime minister, William Gladstone, had said of the Act of Union, “There is no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man. We use the whole civil government of Ireland as an engine of wholesale corruption. We obtained that union against the sense of every class of the community by wholesale bribery and unblushing intimidation.”2

  When Henry Mooney began writing political commentary, he sometimes took the Act of Union as a starting point. “In spite of the words on that document,” he told readers of the Independent in 1915, “the Irish can no more cease being Irish than the English could cease being English. The English have an advantage, however. In the United Kingdom all real power lies with them. Their monarch wears the crown—even though the English monarch is of German descent.”

  Henry understood why the Crown considered the Easter Rising to be a stab in the back. Any rebellion in time of war was treason. But he also appreciated that Irish nationalists saw the Rising as a desperate bid for freedom at the most opportune time, with Britain distracted by the Great War and her troop strength in Ireland reduced.

  “Two different viewpoints, two different truths,” he had written.

  And of course, this being Ireland, there were complications. The Rising was funded largely by American sympathizers acting through the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. The rebels had compounded their crime in British eyes by seeking aid from Germany as well. In spite of the blood ties between their royal houses, the two nations were making every effort to destroy one another on the battlefields of Europe.

  Meanwhile America, against whom Britain had fought two wars, was being urged to enter the conflict on the British side.

  Henry found the irony amusing.

  In the months preceding the Rising, he had attempted through his writings to explain the Irish nationalists to the British government and vice versa. He often labored until late at night, striving to get exactly the right meaning for every word, every phrase. Understanding was crucial. His rational mind had insisted that with enough understanding on both sides, an accommodation could be reached. But the British remained unalterably convinced of their God-given right to rule, while the Irish remained equally convinced of their right to freedom from domination. The two viewpoints were irreconcilable.

  The Easter Rising was the result.

  The rebellion had been put down savagely and its leaders executed. Yet the struggle was far from over, Henry knew. Not while men like Ned Halloran lived with a passion simmering in them.

  As he walked, the journalist noticed a poster advertising a film called Ireland a Nation at the O’Connell Street Picture House.3 A paper ribbon had been pasted over the poster: CANCELLED BY ORDER OF HIS MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT. Henry began framing a new article in his mind.

  For a while he was unaware that the British officer was walking a few paces behind him.

  Chapter Five

  THE headache was agonizing today. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Ned whispered “please” to a God who did not seem to be listening.

  A hand touched his shoulder. “Is it very bad?”

  Ned looked up at Síle through slitted eyelids. Though it was past noon, her russet hair tumbled around the shoulders of her calico wrapper. In the privacy of their rooms, she let it fall free because Ned liked it that way. She had so many small ways of pleasing him: warming the sheets with her body before he got into bed, touching his shoulder for a moment when she passed behind his chair…

  He forced a smile. “Not so bad.”

  “So you say. Why not lie back down?” Her voice caressed the sore places in his brain. “The washing is done and Precious is downstairs with Louise, so I can lie beside you for a while. You always say that eases your headaches.” As she spoke, she was unbuttoning her shirtwaist.

  He sat watching her. Sat naked, watching her. In their bed Ned was always naked for Síle.

  The warmth of her. The fragrance of her. A glimpse of the soft down on the curve of her cheek, sweet as the down on a peach.

  With a little moan he surrendered and let her press him back against the pillows.

  She did not press her body against his, but kept a small space between them; a space charged with desire. For the moment it was better than touching. In that tiny space the mingling of memory and anticipation became a passionate form of lovemaking all its own. Ned’s senses rioted with heightened awareness and his headache receded, relegated to a distant pounding he could not separate from the pounding, rising tide of his blood.

  When she shifted her weight ever so slightly, his flesh knew exactly how it would feel if she were moving against him. Her soft, full breasts dragging across his bare chest. The tingling of his nipples as she teased them with her own. The sweet, moist…

  “Síle.”

  “Yes, love.”

  “Touch me.”

  “I will.”

  “Now.”

  “Where? Here?”

  She held her hand palm-down over him, maintaining a hair’s breadth of space between them. Yet the heat of her hand scorched him.

  “Or here?”

  She moved her hand lower. The heat followed.

  She shifted her weight again, bringing her hips fractionally closer to his. His erection leaped out to bridge the gulf between them, but without seeming to move she avoided him. “Not yet…not yet.”

  He closed his eyes. She entered into the darkness behind his eyelids and now they were touching, now her hands were moving sweetly down him, now her bare flesh was inviting his caresses, now her thighs were pressed against his thighs and then parting, parting sweetly, parting hungrily, and he was sliding into her, moist as he had known she would be, opening to him, sucking him into that secret, hidden mouth that was like a homecoming. The bliss became a knot at the base of his spine that moved out along all his nerves, gathering strength, and she with him, she with every movement, she inseparable from him, one flesh, one soul, one great long shuddering explosion of joy that rocked the world and filled the universe with a silent shout, and it was the two of them together, the two of them together always…

  Then the slow, sweet shuddering, and the gentle drifting down, down…to find himself lying in Síle’s arms and the pain gone, magically gone.

  He never let himself think about how she had acquired the skills of which he was the beneficiary. She was Síle. There was nothing else.

  NED stood up slowly, one section of himself at a time. “I have to get up. Henry’s coming back today.”

  From the bed Síle said wistfully, “Everything’s been so lovely with just the three of us up here under the eaves. Like having our own house, almost.”

  “It’s thanks to Henry that we have a roof over our heads at all,” Ned reminded her.

  When Ned and Henry worked together at the Independent they had shared a room, second-story fr
ont, in Louise Kearney’s lodging house for single men. There they dueled across a chessboard and became close friends. After the Easter Rising Henry had taken his cousin aside to explain, “Ned’s been badly wounded, Louise. I have him well hidden until the repercussions die down, but it’s only a temporary arrangement. I want to bring him back here so we can keep an eye on him while he convalesces.”

  Louise Kearney was a sturdy, middle-aged widow with a perpetual Celtic flush. Her jutting chin gave her the profile of a chest of drawers with the bottom drawer open. Yet a man had loved her once, and the warmth of that love would last her until the day she died. She had borne the late Mr. Kearney no children. “That was our cross to bear,” she said simply.

  When Henry told her about Ned, her reply was, “You go fetch that poor lad home right now. Sure, where else would he go?”

  “Ah…there’s a little more to it than that. You see, as soon as Ned’s got his strength back, he wants to get married. So I’m asking you to bend your rules about men only.”

  She was going to refuse; Henry could read it in her face. He spoke first. “Looking forward to marrying his sweetheart has been the only thing that’s kept Ned alive.”

  Louise drew a deep breath. “Well…I suppose rules are made to be broken.”

  “So they are. I knew you would understand. And…ah…there is one other thing. Ned and his wife will be needing a bit of privacy, and I should like to have an office at home myself, come to that. So I’ve been thinking…”

  Louise had listened with amazement to what Henry was thinking. “Go on out of that! It’s impossible, I could never afford it.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a businesswoman, and this is a sound investment—it will increase the value of your property.”

  “I can’t afford it,” she had repeated less emphatically.

  “ ‘There is no need like the lack of a friend,’ ” Henry said, quoting the old proverb. “Ned needs all his friends now, and that includes you, surely.” He sensed victory; it only remained to deliver the coup de grâce. “Besides, I’ll pay for half the work myself.”