“You’re a most persuasive man, Henry Mooney.”
“It’s my stock-in-trade.”
The next day a pair of workmen had arrived at number 16 Middle Gardiner Street, where from disused maids’ rooms and storerooms in the attic they created two new apartments. One consisted of a large bedroom with a bookshelf-lined alcove that Henry called his study, while the other apartment had two bedrooms and a small sitting room for Ned’s family. Unlike the other lodgers, they took their meals with their landlady.
The arrangement seemed ideal; yet in spite of her gratitude Síle resented Henry’s presence at the top of the house. The walls had been hastily erected and were thin. She tensed at the creak of his footstep on the floorboards, the rasp of his cough in the passageway, even his gentle chuckle when something amused him. Awareness of another man in their private space was like a splinter under Síle’s fingernail, A painful reminder.
“I appreciate all that Henry’s done for us,” she assured Ned. “It’s just that—”
“I know, I promised you a cottage on Howth.” He paused; an Irishman did not discuss finances with his wife. Yet society’s rules never applied to Síle. “For now all the money we have is what my brother sends me from the farm income,” he said. “But Frank has our little sisters and our aunt to take care of, and the farm’s not making much these days. If you and I didn’t work around the house for Mrs. Kearney to help earn our keep, we’d be totally skint. No one else would employ me while my health’s so uncertain.”
“You were invited to teach at Saint Enda’s,” she pointed out.
“Ah, Síle, imagine what would happen when I had one of my dizzy spells and collapsed in front of the students. They would be frightened and I would be humiliated. No, teaching is out of the question. But when I sell my first novel we’ll buy that cottage. You’ll see.”
Ned was getting dressed as he spoke. He was tall, dark, very thin, with intense green eyes fringed in heavy lashes. Síle thought he was beautiful. Their marriage was the fulfillment of the only dream she had ever allowed herself.
Ned’s dreams were more ambitious. At the Independent he had been training to be a reporter, but he really wanted to be a novelist. Pádraic Pearse had told him he had a talent for creative writing, and to Ned, everything Pearse said was gospel.
Abruptly Síle threw back the sheets and stood up, gathering her abundant mane in both hands and twisting it atop her head. Proper married women put their hair up. She secured her willful locks with the tortoiseshell combs Ned had given her for Christmas, then busied herself dressing. She kept her back turned to her husband so he could not see the doubt in her eyes.
Sometimes Ned read aloud to her from the novel he was trying to write. The words sounded fine and grand, strung together so they danced on the tongue, but they did not relate to any life Síle knew. She could not believe in a future built upon fanciful adventures in faraway places. Castles in the air.
In her experience reality had a harder edge.
MRS. Kearney met Ned at the foot of the stairs. “Is Síle coming down soon, Ned?” she asked as she dried her hands on her apron. “I need her in the scullery.”
“She’ll be here in a minute. She’s tidying our rooms now.”
Louise Kearney gestured with a nod. “Precious is inside, tidying the parlor.”
Ned grinned. “Precious would tidy the world if we let her.”
From the parlor doorway they observed a little girl enveloped in one of Louise’s aprons. The garment went around her twice and was held in place by a wooden clothes peg. On the floor beside her was a basket containing a large tin of beeswax, a supply of rags, and a box of Keating’s Powder, “Guaranteed to Kill Moths, Fleas, and Bugs.”
Biting her lower lip in concentration, the child was polishing a tabletop. She swiped diligently, then squinted along the surface. When she found a tiny smear, she polished the entire table again.
Henry Mooney called her Little Business.
After the third time she found salt in her sugar jar, Louise Kearney had suggested a better nickname might be Mischief.
Strangers sometimes felt sorry for the child because she had not inherited her parents’ good looks. Although Ned and Síle were both tall, Precious was small for her seven years, and plain. Her hair had darkened from an infant blond to a nondescript brown. But there was a good reason why she had neither Ned’s crisp black curls nor Síle’s dramatically slanted eyes. The little girl was a waif from the Dublin tenements. She literally had fallen into Ned’s arms during the Bachelor’s Walk Massacre in 1914, when British soldiers fired on Dublin civilians.
Ned had rescued the terrified child and taken her to the Charitable Infirmary on Jervis Street. When the nuns asked her name, all she could tell them was, “My mama calls me Precious.” In the days that followed, no one claimed her. Dublin was teeming with tenement children; an abandoned one was not uncommon. Eventually Precious was consigned to an orphanage under the name of “Ursula Jervis.” Thereafter, Ned visited her as often as he could.
When the center of Dublin was under bombardment during Easter Week, Ned’s fiancée, Síle Duffy, had gone to the orphanage to take Precious to safety. The matron had refused until Síle brandished a pistol in her face. The terrified woman surrendered the little girl at once.
Precious had been theirs ever since. Theirs by right of love.
She called Henry “Uncle Henry” and Mrs. Kearney “Auntie Louise,” and would not go to bed without kissing them both goodnight. At her recent First Communion, Henry and Louise had sat with Ned and Síle. The family.
“Precious?” Ned called softly.
The child’s sudden smile lit candles in her blue eyes. “Look, Ned-Ned, I’m doing housework.”
“So I see.”
“I’m helping earn our sub-sis-tence.” She ostentatiously returned to her dusting.
“You have another new word,” Ned observed.
“Uncle Henry gave it to me.”
Ned exchanged a knowing glance with Louise. Precious’ vocabulary was a source of amusement. As soon as the child heard an unfamiliar word she seized upon it like a collector and allowed the adults in the house no peace until one of them told her its meaning.
“I didn’t ask Precious to help with the housework,” Louise said. “It was her own idea.”
“I know.”
“I would keep the three of you for nothing if I could afford to, Ned. It’s small enough thanks for what you lads tried to do.”
“You’ve done more than enough for us. You even let us get married in your parlor, when plenty of people in Dublin wouldn’t have allowed Síle through their front door.”
“Whisht, go ’way out o’ that!” Louise Kearney cast a furtive glance toward Precious, who seemed absorbed in her task. “You wouldn’t want the child to be hearing such things about her mother.”
“Síle has become her mother, hasn’t she? And myself her father. Who’s to know?”
“It’s not that simple. Precious should be going to school, and when she does there’ll be questions asked. They’ll be wanting a copy of her birth certificate from the Customs House.”
“We’ve decided not to send her to school, Louise. The national schools have windows, but no light comes in. We’re going to educate Precious at home.”
“Can you?”
“Did I not have the best education in the world with Mr. Pearse at Saint Enda’s? I can instruct her in Irish, Latin, Greek, history, literature, maths…and English grammar, of course. It’s important that she speaks well. I don’t want her labeled because of a Dublin tenement accent.”
The front door opened, then closed gently, stealthily. Louise motioned to Ned to stay where he was and went out into the hall. “God between us and all harm!” Ned heard her exclaim. “Henry Mooney, why are you sneaking into my house like an early autumn? Come into the parlor this minute.”
Henry immediately went to one of the tall front windows and peered out from behind the curtains.
&
nbsp; Precious tugged at his sleeve. “I’ve been ever so anxious for you to come home, Uncle Henry! I want to ask you—do men with beards put them under the bedclothes when they sleep, or leave them outside?”
“I don’t know; I don’t have a beard,” said Henry distractedly, keeping his eyes on the street.
“It’s not like you to ignore one of her questions,” Ned observed. “What’s wrong?”
“I think a British officer followed me from the GPO.”
Ned made shooing motions at Precious. “Run along upstairs, pet. Go to Síle.”
“But I haven’t finished doing the—”
“Shift!”
She trotted obediently from the parlor and halfway up the stairs, then crept back down to sit on the bottom step, straining to overhear their conversation.
Ned joined Henry at the window. Together they scrutinized the street. Red brick boardinghouses, their once elegant Georgian facades smoke-grimed and shabby. A Jack Russell terrier lifting his leg against an ornate iron lamppost. A shawl-swathed woman with a shopping basket on her arm.
Louise Kearney went to the other window. “Just look at Dympna Dillon. Always late, that one. Pity her poor lodgers! I must remind her to do her shopping in the morning when everything’s fresh. I don’t see any soldiers, though. Perhaps you were imagining things, Henry.”
“Or perhaps he recognized my name from my articles.”
“If they were going to arrest you for sedition, they would have done it while we were still under martial law.”
“What makes you think we’re not now?” Ned snapped. “When Maxwell was recalled, it was supposed to be lifted, but I can’t see much difference. They’re still arresting people for singing rebel songs or insulting British soldiers. Do you realize that over two thousand were deported without any trial at all after the Rising? Including women? Many were innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Henry said, “To be fair, at Christmas they did release the untried deportees. They only kept back the ones who’d been sentenced.”
“They had no choice. So many angry Irishmen were turning British prisons into universities for revolutionaries,” Ned countered.
Louise suggested, “If someone was following Henry, he may really have been after you, Ned.”
“If they’re going to start harassing my friends, I’ll make it easy to find me.” Ned thrust his jaw forward stubbornly; the inherited Halloran cleft stood out in sharp relief.
“I despair of you, lad,” said Henry. “One would think you want to go to prison.”
“Better men than me have done. Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins…even Madame.”
Henry chuckled. “Countess Markievicz would be delighted to hear you classify her with the men. I hear she’s furious because she wasn’t executed with Pearse and the others. Next thing you know, Madame will have the suffragettes demanding she be allowed equal rights to face the firing squad.”
“Perhaps we could arrange to be shot together,” Ned suggested. “Is there someone you know in the Castle who could organize that for us?” Gazing toward the ceiling he drawled, in an excellent imitation of an upper-class English accent, “How impressed dear Mater would be if I died beside a countess. She would welcome me into heaven with the best tea service.”
Henry laughed out loud, but Louise said angrily, “That isn’t funny. I don’t know how you can joke about such things. Tempting fate, that’s what you are. I won’t have you arrested and dragged out of this house, Ned Halloran!”
Ned sobered at once. “Perhaps I should leave under my own power, then. I don’t want to bring trouble down on you, not after you’ve been so good to us.”
Louise Kearney looked horrified. “Take that sweet innocent child out of here to God knows what? I won’t hear of it.”
Chapter Six
HENRY Mooney leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, gritty with the residue of energy wasted. Soon the lamplighter would be making his rounds. Gaslight pouring down from the street lamps onto the cobblestones, painting the tired, tense, battered city with a deceptive romance.
Another day gone and nothing accomplished.
On the table in front of Henry was an article he could not sell. In the aftermath of the Rising, censorship had taken hold with a vengeance. Most newspapers sympathetic to the Republican cause had been suppressed. Arthur Griffith’s weekly, Young Ireland, was still in business, but Henry’s usual markets were drying up.
Before he went to Limerick he had offered his analysis of Lloyd George’s recent speech in the House of Commons to several of the larger Dublin papers, only to have it refused. Upon returning to the capital he had expanded the article, polished it with the patience of a lapidary, and tried again.
No sale.
He sat staring down at his writing in a mood of dejection.
Maybe my work is simply not good enough. I don’t have Ned’s facility with words; I’m just a hack writer and that’s all I ever will be.
A muscle worked in his jaw. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mooney. This is important, damn it. These are things that have to be said and no one else is saying them.
He put on his coat and went out in search of a stiff drink.
Henry’s local was the Oval Bar on Abbey Street, a favorite haunt of journalists: dark paneling, a permanent haze of smoke, newspaper clippings pasted over the mirror behind the bar, ribald conversation on tap. He and Ned had spent many an hour together there. Before Síle.
Henry ordered a drink and found a vacant stool halfway down the bar, beside Matt Nugent, a red-faced, white-haired journalist with a beer belly and a whiskey voice. International news was Nugent’s specialty. After a few minutes’ conversation about the current state of the Irish newspaper business he remarked, “You’re a decent skin, Henry, and I like you. But you’d better start conforming with the Irish Times point of view if you want to work in this town.”
“The Squirish Mimes, you mean. They’re too pro-British for me.”
“Are you saying you’re anti-British? That’s not very smart these days, Henry—particularly not in Dublin. My round.” Nugent lifted two fingers to signal the barman for refills before their glasses were empty.
Henry nodded thanks. “I’m not anti-British, I’m pro-Irish.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. That’s just another way of using labels to set us at one another’s throats. Unionist against Republican, loyalist against nationalist. It’s a dangerous—”
Another newspaperman peered owlishly over Nugent’s shoulder. “Don’t you be encouraging Henry to write Irish Times material, Matt. There’s too many of us doing that already. Let the man keep his own voice.”
“You mean his integrity?” Nugent asked.
“If that’s what you want to call it,” the man replied.
Nugent turned back to Henry. “Pay him no mind—he just doesn’t want competition. I don’t worry about being shot by British soldiers, but I worry like hell about finding a knife stuck in my back by one of my colleagues.”
“Listen here to me, Mooney,” intoned a colleague on Henry’s other side. A forest of empty glasses stood before him on the bar, and he spoke with the slow deliberation of a drunk imparting great wisdom. “Journalism today is about the subordination of truth to myth. People don’t want to read the truth. They’re afraid it won’t agree with their own opinions. They want to read myths that confirm their prejudices.” The inebriated philosopher wagged his finger at Henry. “Stop prattling about the decency and heroism of the Irish. We don’t believe you. For centuries we’ve been told we’re subhuman brutes. Criticize us and we will believe you. Or better yet, concentrate on the war. Write about brave Britain defying the forces of evil for the sake of small nations.” He picked up the nearest glass and drained its last drops. “An inspiration to us all,” he added sourly.
Henry said, “I happen to believe the truth’s important whether people want to hear it or not.”
Nugent snorted. “And you know what the truth is, do you?”
“It isn’t what the Irish Times wrote during Easter Week. They dismissed the entire Rising as no more than ‘a few evilly disposed persons disturbing the peace.’ Those words are burned in my brain.”
“When they were published in the Times, Henry, they became the official truth. You know that as well as I do.”
“No newspaperman with any integrity should let statements like that go unchallenged.”
“Maybe you can’t, but I have to,” interjected the philosopher. “I have a wife and family to feed. Barman? ’Nother pint of porter here. An’ a round for my friends.”
And that sums it up, Henry thought. The British won and it’s over, and people are doing what they must in order to get on with their lives. You can’t blame them.
He went back to the boardinghouse still sober. Wishing he were drunk.
The Hallorans had retired early, but a few male lodgers were still talking in front of the fireplace in the parlor. One of them beckoned Henry to join them. He smilingly refused and made his way upstairs. In the alcove he called his study, Henry turned up the gaslight and read his unsold article again.
Asquith, Britain’s very English prime minister, had been forced to resign in December of 1916 in the aftermath of the Easter Rising executions. He was replaced by David Lloyd George, who formerly had held the posts of chancellor of the exchequer, minister of munitions, and secretary of state for war. The new prime minister found himself at the helm of a Conservative-Liberal coalition. Managing this uneasy alliance of opposed philosophies was a challenge even for someone whose nickname was “the Welsh Wizard.”
Strangely enough for a Celt, Lloyd George seemed more inimical to the Irish than Asquith had ever been. But he was clever; one had to give him that. On the seventh of March he had proclaimed in the House of Commons: “Centuries of brutal and often ruthless injustice—and, what is worse when you are dealing with a high-spirited and sensitive people, centuries of insolence and insult—have driven hatred of British rule into the very marrow of the Irish race.”1
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