“Isn’t it frightful dear here?”
Henry chuckled. “Don’t worry about that today. There’s going to be no expense spared where my ladies are concerned—you can even have a meal if you want.” He stood up to look for a waiter, but they all seemed busy with other patrons.
Henry’s eyes met those of a woman just entering the room.
Eyes the color of sweet sherry.
Ella Rutledge’s arm was linked with the arm of the woman in the blue fox coat. When she saw Henry, she nodded in recognition and guided her companion across the crowded room toward him. There was an exchange of introductions during which Henry referred to Precious as Ursula. The child promptly stood taller, growing into the name. Louise was flustered to be presented to “such grand ladies,” as she afterward described the sisters, for the tall woman in the fox coat was none other than Ava Mansell.
She held out her hand to Precious with slightly mocking formality. “We’ve already met, Ursula. You are the Littlest Republican.”
Precious knew she was being patronized. She shook hands but broke contact first.
“We were just about to order tea,” Henry said to Ella. “We should like it very much if you and your sister-in-law would join us.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind. Does the invitation extend to Edwin as well? He should be here any minute.” When she smiled, her dimples winked at him.
“By all means,” Henry replied. What a wonderful day this is!
“My husband is a solicitor,” remarked Ava Mansell, “but he’s currently serving as a captain in the army.”
Henry’s stomach knotted. Please God, no. Not a captain. Not that captain. Don’t do this to me. Please.
The headwaiter himself materialized beside them without being summoned: striped waistcoat, immaculate morning coat, and beaming deference. “Would you prefer to go into the coffee room, Mrs. Mansell? It’s less crowded there.”
“This will be fine, thank you. We require tea, and we shall sit by the windows.” Within moments a table was cleared in front of one of the great windows, then laden with fresh starched linen, a silver tea service and a decanter of sherry, a tray of meatless savories, sweet biscuits, and a pitcher of milk for Precious.
The little girl eyed the savories with suspicion.
“Meatless days have been compulsory for hotels and restaurants because of the war rationing,” Ella said to Precious, “but if you would like some meat, we bring our own when we come to the hotel. I’m sure the chef would be happy to prepare something for you.”3
If Henry expected Precious to be overawed, he was mistaken. Without missing a beat the little girl replied, “I should like some roast chicken, please, and thank you.” She laid one hand confidingly on Ella’s arm. “I’m most awfully fond of roast chicken.”
Conversation flowed while Ava Mansell poured the tea. Only Louise did not take part. She sat rigid on her chair, a woman very much in charge at number 16 but intimidated in the Shelbourne. Precious had no such problem. She chattered away to Ella as if they were old friends.
Ava remarked to Henry, “Your daughter is quite a little chatterbox, isn’t she?” In polite society, her tone implied, children were seen but not heard.
“She isn’t my daughter. Her father is my friend Ned Halloran.”
“I remember Mr. Halloran very well,” said Ella. “We met him with you at the Mansion House. That explains Ursula’s accent, of course.”
Henry was puzzled. “What accent?”
“Why, she sounds so educated. Not that you don’t, Mr. Mooney,” Ella said hastily, a delicate blush creeping into her cheeks. “But your accent is Irish, whereas I recall Mr. Halloran speaking like someone educated in England.”
Henry could hardly admit that Ned had been employing his gift for mimicry in order to impress Ella Rutledge. He was rescued when Ava leaned forward to beckon to someone in the doorway. “There’s Edwin now.”
Ella beamed. “Brother mine!” she called softly.
Henry dreaded turning around, certain he would see the captain who had arrested him. Instead, Edwin Mansell was a fine-boned, hollow-cheeked stranger with a black patch over one eye. In his relief Henry pumped the other man’s hand effusively. “You’re very welcome, so you are. Here, let’s get another chair for you. And a whiskey? Waiter!”
Precious was trying not to stare at the eyepatch but could not help herself. Edwin did not take offense. “I was wounded in the war,” he explained to the child.
“Oh, I am sorry. Does it hurt very much?”
“Not now,” he told her gently.
Ava cut in. “We’re hopeful of a new treatment that may restore Edwin’s sight. After Christmas we shall go to London for it.”
“I’ll pray every night for you to get better,” Precious promised Edwin.
Watching Ella Rutledge, Henry saw the way her face melted. “And will you also pray for our Edwin, Mr. Mooney?” she asked him.
“I shall, of course. If you’ll call me Henry.”
She blushed again. “Henry.”
Conversation flowed back and forth across the table. Henry engaged Ava on the subject of genealogy. “My husband is descended from Sir Rhys Mansell,” she announced proudly. “The family name originally was Maunsell, Norman nobles who arrived in England with William the Conqueror. They intermarried with the Welsh nobility, which is where Sir Rhys got his Welsh Christian name. He was knighted by Henry the Eighth and sent to Ireland to help surpress a rebellion by the Earl of Kildare. The family has been here ever since.”
“Oh, my,” said Henry, trying to sounding suitably impressed. He saw Precious looking at him across the table and winked at her. Imagine trying to impress Republicans with crowns and titles.
Understanding perfectly, Precious winked back at him.
She was enjoying herself until Ava asked a question about her father. Precious nonchalantly replied, “Oh, Papa’s away at the moment. My mama’s in Dublin, but she didn’t feel like celebrating without him, so she stayed home.”
Ella nodded. “I would feel the same myself.”
But Ava would not leave it at that. “Where is your father, Ursula?”
The child’s face tightened. Looking Ava straight in the eye, she said, “He’s in prison in Britain. My papa fought in the Easter Rising. He’s a hero.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Edwin cleared his throat. “You must be very proud of him. I think we should be proud of all brave men, don’t you?” He swept his gaze around the table, demanding concurrence.
“Well, I’m sure that’s true,” drawled Ava, “but the fact remains, the Sinn Féin Rebellion was a great inconvenience. Our cook couldn’t get to the shops because of the barricades, so we had no fresh food for days.”
Ella said, “Oh, Ava, that sounds so petty. Men dying and you complaining about eating leftovers! I agree with Edwin—courage is to be admired, and the Republicans certainly had courage. They also believed they had right on their side, we must not forget that.”
“I daresay the Germans believed they had right on their side too. But it may have cost my husband his eye.”
“Must you always reduce everything to the personal?”
“War is personal,” Edwin interjected. “To every man who fights on whatever side, in whatever battle, it’s intensely personal. Only you who sit safe at home are afforded the luxury of distance. Let me tell you a little story…”
Precious leaned forward eagerly. “Is it true? I like true stories best.”
He smiled at her. “This is true, I assure you. It happened in December 1914, and I was there. My company had just been ordered to Messines, on the front lines. Casualties had been enormous, and we men from Ireland were the replacements. We were welcomed with rain, mud, snow, and sleet, sometimes all at once. I have never been more frightened or confused in my life. All I could be certain of were the fellows on either side of me. We spent hours knee-deep in icy water, trying to improve a position that could not be improved short of a hot August. It
wasn’t the danger that depressed us so much as overfatigue and appalling conditions.
“Between us and the Germans lay No-Man’s-Land, twenty to seventy yards across and flanked on either side with barbed wire. The only living things were a few shell-splintered trees, and I doubt they were actually living anymore. For a man to attempt to cross that space under the guns of both armies was almost certain death. Our ears were constantly assaulted with cannon fire, rifle fire, officers shouting, occasionally an artillery horse screaming when it was hit. War is a hellishly noisy business…Forgive me, ladies.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Ella said. She reached across the table and touched her brother’s hand. “Go on, Edwin.”
“On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, a Scottish major got a group of us together to sing Christmas carols. It was as much to drown out the other noise as anything else. To our amazement, the Germans joined in. We could hear them clearly across No-Man’s-Land. And as we sang together, one by one the guns fell silent. Farther along the trenches we could hear other men begin to sing. At first their officers ordered them to keep on firing, but they ignored the order.
“For a stretch of four or five miles along the front lines, as we learned afterward, the firing ceased that Christmas Eve. We kept on singing; the other side kept on singing. The same hymns in different languages. At last a German who had the most pure, perfect tenor I’ve ever heard began ‘Silent Night.’ Everyone else stopped to listen. Some of us were crying. Lying there in the mud on bags of sand, we were crying. But not for ourselves. We were crying for the beauty of it.
“When he finished the carol, several of us scrambled up out of the trench. We fashioned a white flag and held it over the barbed wire just as a similar flag was raised on the other side. We crawled over the barbed wire and went out into No-Man’s-Land to meet the Germans in the middle. We were wary at first; then a man from one side held out his hand and said ‘Happy Christmas,’ and a man on the other side shook the hand and repeated the greeting. After that, everything was all right. Some of us had a bit of German; many of them spoke English. But we all spoke Christmas.
“We swapped cigarettes for wine and showed one another photographs from home. I had somehow obtained a bar of American chocolate that I gave to a young German boy. In return he gave me a linen handkerchief, beautifully monogrammed with a ‘C’ in Gothic script by some loving hand at home. I have it still.
“But the astonishing thing is…the war stopped. Simply stopped. We helped the Germans carry away their wounded and they helped us fortify our trenches. The ordinary fighting men did that, the men to whom war is personal.”
Henry, deeply moved, glanced at Ella Rutledge. Her eyes were moist.
“What happened then?” Precious wanted to know.
“Some deuced general—German or English, I never knew which, but someone miles from the trenches and very safe—heard about the Christmas truce and ordered the war to resume.” Edwin Mansell dropped his voice so low they could hardly hear him. “Later I came across the dead body of the German boy who had given me his handkerchief. I’ve always been afraid mine was the bullet that killed him.”
Chapter Nineteen
SÍLE was furious. “How could you do such a thing!” she shouted at Henry. “When I was in Stephen’s Green with Madame Markievicz, the British fired on us from the Shelbourne. They were shooting at us like ducks on a pond—we could hear them laughing and encouraging each other. They killed a girl who was fighting right beside me. I never knew her name, but that’s her pistol they took away from me when they arrested Ned. Yet you took my child to the Shelbourne just as if—”
“We need to put that behind us, Síle. We mustn’t drag the past into the future like a stinking corpse.”
But she would not listen. Not with Ned in a British prison and the unfinished revolution all around them.
WITH the war over, the British prime minister turned his attention to domestic matters. Within days he reiterated that self-government for Ireland would not be possible without first partitioning the island.
“This has been Lloyd George’s intention from the beginning,” Henry wrote in an article for the Freeman’s Journal, “the method by which he means to divide and conquer the Irish permanently. That word ‘permanently’ is important. Lloyd George assured the late John Redmond that any partition of Ireland would be temporary. However, this reporter has learned that as far back as May of 1916, Lloyd George, while still secretary of state for war, sent a private letter to Sir Edward Carson of the Ulster Unionists in which he wrote, ‘We must make it clear that at the end of the provisional period Ulster does not, whether she wills it or not, merge in the rest of Ireland.’ ”1
When the editor asked where he had obtained his information, he replied, “You know I can’t tell you that.” The Journal printed the piece anyway.
People read Henry’s words over the breakfast table or in the barber’s chair or on the tram, but they read them.
“Partition is a price we cannot afford to pay,” Henry insisted in the Evening Herald. “Partition would leave a large Catholic minority stranded in northern Ireland, effectively deserted by the rest of the country in the effort to achieve independence for twenty-six counties. Similarly, the Protestants in the south would find themselves separated from those who share their heritage. In founding Sinn Féin Arthur Griffith envisioned one Ireland large enough in heart to encompass all traditions, Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and loyalist. That is the vision to which we must aspire.”
IN December of 1918, the British government declared a general election. The Sinn Féin Party made the Irish electorate two promises: they would establish a native government functioning independently of Britain, and they would appeal to the International Peace Conference to recognize the Republic of Ireland.
Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in Parliament, an astonishing achievement. Most of the newly elected had been asked to run for office simply because they were being held in British prisons. All vowed never to take the seats they had won.
One of their number, Constance Markievicz, was the first woman ever elected to Parliament. Precious cut out every newspaper article about the countess and gave them pride of place in her scrapbook. “My papa knows Countess Markievicz personally,” she boasted to Henry. “I think she’s wonderful and I want to be just like her when I grow up.”
“I don’t think anyone could be quite like the countess,” he replied rather absently. He was wondering, When did Precious begin calling Síle “Mama” and Ned “Papa”? He could not pinpoint the exact time, yet it seemed important, a milestone.
In an article about Sinn Féin’s victory, Henry wrote, “These are people who fought for Irish freedom, but for the most part they have had no training in politics. Never having been allowed to run their own country, they have not developed the arts of compromise and manipulation. But they will learn. With the 1918 election the struggle for independence has become not only military but democratic.”
There was a fever in the air in Ireland now; a sense of gathering forces.
The government in Dublin Castle grew increasingly edgy. The number of raids and house searches accelerated dramatically. Meetings were suppressed; men and even women were thrown into prison on the slightest pretext if they were suspected of Republican sympathies; and baton charges against crowds became a familiar part of the urban scene.
DURING December, Henry Mooney received two personal letters on the same Saturday afternoon. The first was a note from Ella Rutledge, hand-carried by one of the urchins who made a precarious living by delivering such messages—boys who lived in Dublin Corporation housing and cleaned their teeth with chimney soot. While the messenger waited, shifting from one foot to the other and whistling tunelessly, Henry opened the envelope and took out a formal calling card that bore her name in embossed copperplate script, and a single folded sheet of creamy notepaper. “Dear Henry,” she had written in a clear hand, “Please do call on us during the holidays
. We are ‘at home’ from two to five on Thursday afternoons.”
Dear Henry.
Henry dug into his pocket and handed the boy a coin. The lad gaped. “Jaysus, misthur, I don’t have change for a shilling! People usually give me a ha’penny, or a penny for somethin’ special.”
“This is something very special, and I don’t want change. Just wait while I write an answer, then carry it straight back to Mrs. Rutledge.”
“I’ll wait for ye till the Divvil goes to Mass,” the lad assured him.
The second letter was hand-delivered by a man Henry did not recognize. On a scrap of brown paper Ned had written, “I have no money at present, but if you will select a nice Christmas present for Síle for me, I shall repay you when I can. Which may be soon.”
ELLA Rutledge lived in Herbert Place, in the Ballsbridge area of south Dublin. The imposing house, which stood on a large corner site, possessed four storys over a ground floor. Beside the front door was an oval brass plate simply inscribed MANSELL. A parlor maid in a starched apron and cap answered Henry’s knock, took his bowler and his topcoat, and showed him into a room aglow with peach-colored moiré wallpaper. From a ceiling of rococo plasterwork hung a crystal chandelier. A French-polished table was crowded with silver-framed photographs of family and friends. Embossed invitations were prominently displayed on the Italian marble mantelpiece, including hunt balls in the country and receptions at Dublin Castle.
Definitely not our crowd.
Ella swept into the room with her dimples dancing and her hands extended in welcome. “I’m so glad you could come. I hope you won’t think me forward in inviting you, but I was delighted to find someone who enjoys good conversation as much as my family does.”
“I was afraid I might have bored you that afternoon at the Shelbourne.”
“Far from it. Most men don’t talk to a woman as if she had any intelligence, but you do.”
“I’ve always found intelligence attractive.”
1921 Page 14
