Nell

by Jeanette Baker

  “I suppose so.”

  Are you accepting compensation, land, titles, gold?

  “It isn’t done that way anymore.”

  Isn’t it? Nell smiled mysteriously. Her voice was fading quickly. Think on it, Jilly. What could the prime minister of England do for you?

  Jillian panicked and scrambled off the bed, her eyes searching the room frantically. “Nell, wait. Don’t go yet. I don’t understand.”

  She was gone. Of course she was gone. Nell Fitzgerald didn’t exist, at least not outside Jillian’s imagination.

  The night was warm, but goose bumps stood out on her arms. She shivered. Nell’s apparition came more frequently when she was troubled, just as it had when Jillian was a child, before Frankie had become part of her life. What would a psychologist say to this invasion of an alter ego who had answers that Jillian did not? She was a grown woman, long past the need for an imaginary friend. Perhaps all this was too much for her. Perhaps she was losing her mind.

  She walked over to the dressing table and sat down. The faintest scent of rose petals lingered in the air. With shaking fingers, Jillian traced the oval of her face in the mirror. What could the prime minister of England do for her?

  ***

  Jillian stared in horror at the front page of the Belfast Telegram. Huge headlines, “UDP Responsible for Eight Catholic Deaths,” dominated the front page. Groaning, she gulped down her tea, grabbed her satchel, and picked up her car keys on her way out the door.

  George Mitchell, the American arbitrator for the peace talks, had called an emergency meeting. A Protestant paramilitary group linked to the Ulster Unionist Party had claimed responsibility for the murders. Violence was in violation of the Mitchell agreement. All parties were to vote on expelling the UDP from the peace talks.

  David Temple’s furious face was on every news station, claiming the murders were retribution for the murder of King Rat, Billy Wright, a rabid anti-Catholic paramilitary who had boasted of nationalist murders while serving his sentence in Long Kesh.

  Jillian could feel the tension thickening the air of the conference room at Stormont Castle. She bypassed the room where Sinn Fein and the SDLP, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, argued behind closed doors and, without knocking, walked into the unionist meeting. Smoke filled the air. Jillian waved it aside, sat down at the long table, and waited. Slowly, one by one, the men joined her.

  “Well, gentlemen,” she said crisply, “it may appear that you have won, but you haven’t.”

  A stunned silence greeted her pronouncement. Gary McMichael, president of the UDP, broke the silence. “I beg your pardon?”

  Jillian’s varnished nail tapped lightly on the gleaming tabletop. “Those of you who despised the very idea of negotiating with nationalists believe you have found the means to destroy the process.”

  McMichael cleared his throat. “I don’t understand.”

  Jillian’s face was a mask of icy calm. “Come now, Mr. McMichael. The man who drafted his party’s objection to an all-Ireland council, breaking down the ramifications of unification according to international economic systems, employment, industry, wage structures, dispersion rates, income tax, currency, social charges on labor, and European integration, doesn’t understand?”

  McMichael cleared his throat but remained silent.

  “Let me make it clear for you,” Jillian said coldly. “It won’t work, Mr. McMichael. I don’t care if you’ve killed eight Catholics. I don’t care if you kill ten thousand Catholics. Neither you nor your group of small-minded men will ruin what this government is attempting to do here.” She leaned forward. “There will be an agreement, Mr. McMichael. You will not be expelled from the talks. You will participate, and when this is all over, your signature will be on a document that will serve as a manifesto to all political and paramilitary organizations in this country. Do I make myself clear?”

  “What if we cannot agree?”

  She stood and smiled sweetly. “We will. Until tomorrow, gentlemen.”

  Outside the room, Jillian leaned against the wall and took in deep, steadying breaths. One down, one to go. Bracing herself for the worse of two evils, she marched into the nationalist conference room, effectively terminating a half-dozen conversations.

  Frankie Maguire straightened, his face expressionless, waiting for her to speak.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said firmly. “Due to certain developments, we will not be able to meet today. However, we shall meet tomorrow as scheduled.”

  “All of us?” Seamus Mallon, the SDLP deputy leader, challenged her.

  “All of us,” Jillian repeated.

  Frankie swore audibly. “If the IRA had broken the cease-fire, Sinn Fein would have been out yesterday.”

  Jillian’s voice, low and clearly pitched, cut him off. “No one is leaving the talks until we have reached an all parties agreement. These negotiations will not be dictated by terrorists.” She lifted her chin. “I will not give the Irish Republican Army or the Protestant paramilitaries that kind of power. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Reluctant admiration softened the edges of Frankie’s anger. Jillian Fitzgerald was no quitter. He had to give her that one. Now, if he could just get beyond the rest of it, the jumbled, warring parts of his brain that called up two different images, the one where she lay on the wet grass beneath him, her face flushed with sun and passion, and the one where she stared, stricken and guilty, caught in her own deception.

  He’d lost his father, his sister, his wife. She knew it all, and still she hadn’t told him about Cassandra, his niece, all that remained of his blood family except for Connor. If she’d planned it deliberately, she could have found no greater way to hurt him. She hadn’t planned it, of course. She didn’t have it in her to be cruel, and he wasn’t so embittered that he’d lost all grip on reality. But he wasn’t ready to forgive her, not yet, not when she still held all the cards.

  ***

  Over the next two days, a drug dealer from Armagh and a loyalist paramilitary leader were shot. The IRA denied responsibility, but public opinion was against them. Jillian refused to discuss expelling Sinn Fein from the talks. Negotiations would continue. The deadline for an agreement was September, and she was determined that it would come from party negotiations, not Downing Street.

  Frankie continued to treat her with the same professional courtesy that characterized their first meeting. Her heart ached. There was no other way to describe the sick, helpless feeling in her chest when he looked at her across the conference table as if there had never been anything more between them than the future of Northern Ireland.

  She loved him. She always had. It came to her one night, all at once, without warning, as she sorted through old photographs. She found the one she wanted, a badly exposed black-and-white, its subject a dark-haired boy walking through long summer grass surrounded by collies.

  Tears rose in her eyes. She blinked them back She loved Frankie Maguire. There was no other way to explain her mad flight from all rational behavior. Her mother had been right, after all. For years, she’d lamented Jillian’s preference for the difficult, the exotic, the road less traveled. Her casual disregard for the necessary restrictions of a woman of her class would bring her only heartbreak, Margaret had predicted, and so it had.

  Jillian watched Frankie pore over yet another document, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair falling over his forehead, mouth tight with sleepless strain, as he ruthlessly cut through unionist rhetoric, reshaping lengthy, unmanageable language into brilliantly clear, concise proposals, proposals the unionists would do little more than glance at because they were composed by a Catholic from West Belfast.

  What can the prime minister of England do for you? Nell’s words came back to her. This time, she knew the answer. Perhaps Frankie Maguire would never feel the same debilitating, stomach-tightening longi
ng that she felt for him, but she could give him back his past.

  ***

  Jillian pulled over to the side of the road and stepped out of the car to stretch her legs and admire the beauty of Lough Erne. County Fermanagh, the unspoiled lake country of Northern Ireland, was empty of crowds even in midsummer. Leaning against the car, she shaded her eyes and looked across the glassy water. Whooper swans dove for roach, perch, bream, and rudd. Dragonflies skimmed across the surface, and somewhere, high above the guano-stained limestone cliffs, a raven cawed, piercing the pristine stillness.

  The town of Enniskillen in the heart of Fermanagh was the medieval seat of the Maguires, chieftains of Fermanagh who had policed the lough hundreds of years ago with their private navy of fifteen hundred boats. The origins of the island town were steeped in history in those long-ago days when the nexus was the main highway between Ulster and Connaught. It was also the site of Our Lady of Refuge, Catholic Orphanage for Girls.

  Mother Cecily Agnes stood near the window of the richly paneled room that served as her office and watched the well-dressed young woman walk across the car park and up the stone steps. She hadn’t seen Jillian Graham in ten years, but they had kept in touch. On the basis of their acquaintance, Mother Cecily had revised her opinion of Protestants.

  She would not ordinarily have honored the woman’s request, but there was a soft spot in her heart for the little girl with the fly-away curls and the embittered young man who had become a force in Irish politics. Mother Cecily was content with her role as abbess of Our Lady of Refuge. She had no priestly aspirations. Remorseful deathbed revelations did not have the same sanctity as those relayed within the confines of the confessional. She would tell what she knew and perhaps hold out a semblance of hope where before there was none.

  ***

  Thomas Putnam greeted Jillian in the study of his residence at No. 10 Downing Street. It was a masculine room, dimly lit, dark with burgundy leather and mahogany furnishings. “Please, sit down, Jillian,” he said, waving her to a wing-back chair. He noticed what he always did when Jillian Graham entered the room. She moved in an aura of natural elegance that came from generations of aristocratic breeding. She was immaculately coiffed, slim and elegant in a sage-colored linen dress, pearl earrings, and bone pumps. Eschewing the desk, he chose the Queen Anne reproduction across from her. “What can I do for you?”

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she began.

  He folded his hands. “You’ve done a marvelous job with the negotiations. Refusing to allow terrorists to dictate your policies was a masterful stroke. Perhaps we’ll see some progress now.”

  “Are you interested in a true assessment, Tom?”

  “Of course.”

  She spoke directly, honestly, keeping her eyes on his face. “There will be a compromise. The unionists will keep their council majorities, the nationalists will insist on a north-south referendum, to which I believe we should agree. A type of quota system will be configured in order to promote civil rights for Catholics, and our courts will be filled with affirmative action lawsuits.”

  Putnam frowned. “In your opinion, is there a graceful way for England to remove itself from Northern Ireland entirely?”

  “The unionists will never allow the North to become a sovereign nation, if that’s what you mean. But eventually, the problem will take care of itself.”

  “How so?”

  “Catholics are outbreeding Protestants at a rate of two to one. In twenty years, they will have the majority vote if we insist on keeping articles two and three of the Irish Constitution.”

  “So we wait?”

  “Yes, Tom. We wait.”

  Thomas Putnam could read people. Jillian’s white-knuckled hands and the delicate bruising under her eyes meant something. He leaned forward, his brown mop of unruly hair falling over his forehead. “Tell me why you’re here, Jillian.”

  She wet her lips. “I need a favor.”

  Two hours and three phone calls later, a bewildered Thomas Putnam walked Jillian to the door, locked it behind her, and returned to his desk, where he sank down into the leather chair, leaned his head back against the warm grain, and closed his eyes. He needed a moment or two to internalize what he had just done. Jillian Graham was a force to be reckoned with. Good God. Had he really agreed to such a thing? How in bloody hell would he ever explain it?

  Twenty-Eight

  Casey squinted at the fading numbers on the peeling door frame of the building that faced the street. The number was the same as the one she’d ferreted from the clerk in the housing office at Trinity. She swallowed, slung her bag over her shoulder, and climbed the stairs. Tim Sheehan was a hard man to track down, but she wasn’t giving up.

  An older woman with bright black eyes and pink cheeks answered the door. “No, love,” she said when Casey asked for Tim. “He lives next door. But he’s not home much since he went down to the Republic. His da should be home shortly. I’m Cora Flynn. Would y’ care to wait here?”

  “If it’s no trouble,” Casey said politely.

  “No trouble at all,” replied Mrs. Flynn. “I’ll be happy t’ have the company. Come in, love. Y’ can help me with Connor.”

  “Connor?”

  “Aye. Himself’s wee brother. He’s a dear lad but a bit of a handful for a woman my age.”

  Casey quelled the sudden surge of her heartbeat. There must be a thousand Connors in West Belfast. “When will he be home?”

  “Anytime now. Sit down. I’ll make a pot of tea. What did y’ say your name was?”

  “Casey Graham.”

  The door opened, and a child’s cheerful voice called out, “I’m home, Mrs. Flynn. Is it time for tea?”

  “Aye, laddie,” she answered from the kitchen. “We’ve a visitor today, so wash y’r hands and mind y’r manners, in that order.”

  Connor’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room. He stared at Casey, and his blue eyes widened. “Casey?”

  “Connor, is it you?” she stammered.

  “Have you come to see Da?” he asked.

  She improvised quickly. “Yes. When will he be home?”

  “I don’t know,” said Connor matter-of-factly. “Sometimes he comes late. Mrs. Flynn knows.”

  “I see.” Casey bit her lip. This was too much irony to take in at once. Tim, her Tim, must be Frankie Maguire’s stepson. “What about your brother?” she asked Connor. “Will he be home today?”

  Connor’s forehead wrinkled, and he sat down beside her on the couch. “I don’t think so.”

  Mrs. Flynn set the pot of tea on the table and arranged three place settings. “I’ve a tasty lamb stew on the stove,” she called out from the kitchen. “There’s plenty for all.”

  “Please don’t go to any trouble, Mrs. Flynn,” Casey protested.

  “’Tis no trouble, lass. Sit down now, and tell us how y’ know our Tim.”

  Casey tucked a springy curl behind one ear and walked slowly to the kitchen table. “We met at Trinity,” she said slowly. “He helped me with mathematics.”

  “Ah.” Mrs. Flynn dished a healthy portion of stew into Casey’s bowl. “Isn’t an education a grand thing? Our Tim was always a bright lad, just like Connor here.”

  A firm knock sounded on the door, followed by a voice that made Casey’s heart beat quickly again.

  “Mrs. Flynn, I’m home. Is Connor here yet?”

  “Aye, Danny,” the old woman said. “Come in. We have a visitor.”

  Frankie stepped into the small kitchen, and for an instant, his smile of welcome froze on his lips. Almost immediately, it was replaced by a genuine grin of pleasure. “Casey,” he said, holding out his hand. “’Tis a pleasure to see you, lass.”

  Casey’s face burned. Deception did not come easily to her. She gave him her hand. “Hello, Mr. Browne.”
/>   “She’s come to see Tim,” offered Mrs. Flynn.

  Frankie’s eyebrow lifted. “Tim?”

  The delicious stew churned in Casey’s stomach. “I met Tim Sheehan at Trinity,” she explained. “He tutored me in mathematics. We became friendly. Until today, I didn’t know he was related to you.”

  Frankie’s mind leaped to a hundred different possibilities. “Is Tim expecting you, lass?”

  “No,” Casey confessed miserably. “He has no idea I even know where he lives. It’s just that—” She looked down at her hands. “May I speak to you privately, Mr. Browne?”

  “Of course.” Frankie stood. “Save some of that stew for me, Mrs. Flynn.”

  “What is it, Casey?” he asked when they were settled on chairs in the living room of his flat.

  Casey laced her fingers together to stop the trembling of her hands. “Do you remember the night of my birthday?” she asked.

  Frankie nodded. It was a night he wasn’t likely to forget.

  “I was stopped at a barricade on the way home. The men wore balaclavas. They had guns. I recognized Tim’s voice.”

  A thin white line appeared around Frankie’s mouth. “Are you sure?”

  Casey nodded. “Yes.”

  Frankie’s eyes moved across her face, noting the delicate flush in her cheeks, the rapid breathing, the trembling mouth. “How well do you know Tim?” he asked carefully.

  “I thought I knew him very well,” she began, “but he didn’t come back to school after his mother’s funeral. Now I know why.”

  “Are you—?” He paused, uncertain about continuing.

  “No,” she said quickly. “It wasn’t like that between us. We didn’t have the opportunity.”

  “I see.” Frankie’s mouth twitched. What a predicament. His stepson and his niece. “Does Jillian know?”

  “No,” Casey said quickly. “How could she? I didn’t know myself.”

  Frankie was silent for a long time. The hard, grim-faced man seated across from her was nothing like the Frankie Maguire who had charmed her at Kildare. “Uncle Francis,” she said softly, “is Tim involved with the IRA?”