Dawn of the Golden Promise

by BJ Hoff

  “Didn’t you tell your mother?”

  Quinn stared down at her hands. “Aye, I told her. She said I must be doing something to displease the man, else he wouldn’t be so bitter toward me. She told me I must try harder to win his favor, or we would all pay.”

  She looked up and saw the shock mirrored in the eyes of Alice Walsh. Shamed, Quinn quickly dropped her gaze and went on with her story.

  She had not known a human being could perpetrate such cruelty on another. Although her mother had always been cold and indifferent, she had never raised a hand to Quinn or her sister. Quinn hardly remembered her da—he had died when she was seven—but her vague recollection was that of a bearded man with mournful eyes and a quiet voice. A gentle man.

  There had been nothing in her life or limited experience to prepare her for a madman like Millen Jupe. Almost daily he inflicted an entire gamut of abuse on her, the depravity of which grew darker as his drinking increased. At the end, on those rare occasions when he was sober, he wounded her with his words instead of his hands.

  It seemed to Quinn the man had been taken over by the devil himself, and in his madness he had resolved to exorcise his demons by destroying her. She spent her days in a prison of physical pain and emotional terror. She spent her nights in hell.

  Perhaps, like Jupe, she went a bit mad after nearly two years of his abuse. Or perhaps her action was spurred by the latest in a particularly vicious series of beatings. More than likely, though, it was the sound of her sister’s name on his leering mouth that finally drove her to that mindless deed of desperation which resulted in her fleeing her home…and her country.

  “That last night, he beat me harder than ever before. Then he threatened me and my family, and beat me again. At the end, he said he was going to replace me with my little sister, Molly.

  “He taunted me, said Molly was nearly as old as I had been when he brought me up to the Big House. He said…he said he liked to raise up his little tarts to suit himself.”

  He had sat up in bed and, as was his habit, began to peel himself an apple with a kitchen knife. He continued to mock her and, seeing her fury, he flicked the knife at her face, as if to cut her.

  Quinn snapped. She dived at him, wresting the knife from his grip and raking it down the side of his face.

  Roaring like an enraged bull, he kicked her from the bed, onto the floor, then stood over her and kicked her again. And again.

  The knife went clattering out of her hand, across the floor. Somehow Quinn found the strength to lunge after it. As she rolled over onto her back, the knife in hand, Jupe fell on her with a demented scream, as if to murder her.

  Instead, he fell onto the knife. With her last remaining shred of sanity, Quinn realized what had happened, and, hoping to save herself, twisted the knife into his heart even farther.

  Dazed and in pain, she eased out from under his lifeless body and stumbled to her feet. He was dead, or looked to be. She did not wait to be sure. Her mind screaming, her body rebelling against the agony of the night’s abuse, she bolted from the house and ran like a wild thing all the way home.

  “Your mother…actually told you it was your fault?” Alice said incredulously. “She told you to leave?”

  Dear God in heaven, what this child had endured! It was a miracle she had survived at all!

  The girl nodded. She had not met Alice’s eyes more than once throughout her narrative. Even now, although she lifted her face, she kept her gaze averted.

  As carefully as if Quinn were made of fragile china, Alice touched her hand to the girl’s chin, turning her face gently toward her. Tears spilled from those pain-filled eyes, tracking that splendid face. Alice felt her own eyes sting and knew that she, too, might weep at any moment.

  “Listen to me, Quinn. What happened to you—that horrible time with the agent, that last night, the knife—none of it was your fault. None of it! Do you understand?”

  The girl looked at her. “I should never have gone with him in the first place, I had a choice.”

  “Did you?” Alice probed. “Did you really? And what was your choice, Quinn? To let your family be thrown out of their home and die of starvation? Good heavens, girl, your own mother urged you on! You had no choice! You were only a child!”

  “But if I could have gotten away from him before then…at least he wouldn’t have died…” The girl squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could not bear the memories.

  “If you could have gotten away from him, you would have!” Alice said sharply. “You tried, child—you tried. It wasn’t your fault you couldn’t get away! Oh, Quinn, Quinn, you must understand—none of it was your fault!”

  The girl opened her eyes. Alice could not bear the sight of such despair any longer. Gently she gathered the girl into her arms and pressed her head against her shoulder.

  “Oh, my dear…my dear,” she murmured, agonizing over the devastation, the evil, that had been inflicted on the girl. “You bear no guilt for what was done to you. You are not a murderer, child. You’re a victim!”

  They sat there for a long time, the shadows deepening in the room. Alice held her and let her cry away her shame and agony, the entire time repeating soft reassurances.

  “God doesn’t condemn you, Quinn, and you must not condemn yourself,” she told her when the girl had quieted. “Why, there’s a promise in His Word about this very thing,” she said, trying to recapture from her memory the words she herself had learned to cling to in the days after the hearing.

  “‘For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things…if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before Him.’”

  “No court in the land…at least not in this land,” Alice went on, “would hold you responsible for that man’s death. Look at me: I shot my own husband! Yet the court declared me innocent of any wrongdoing. And I accept that decision. I can’t take back what I did, can’t change anything that happened. But I believe God has pronounced me innocent, just as the court did. And if I believe I am innocent in God’s eyes—then I must not condemn myself in my own heart.”

  The girl eased back, lifting her face to look at Alice.

  “That’s what you must do, Quinn. You must accept your innocence. Give God all those years of torture and fear and hurt. Give Him your pain, your broken heart, your guilt. Give it all to Him…and begin to live.”

  As Alice watched, she saw a faint light of awareness, understanding…something…dawn in the glistening eyes. And in her own words of comfort to Quinn O’Shea, she seemed to hear the voice of her forgiving Father speaking to her with the same admonition…

  “Give Me your pain, your broken heart, your guilt. Give it all to Me, Alice…and begin to live.”

  39

  The Abomination of the City

  This is the place: these narrow ways,

  diverging to the right and left,

  and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth.

  Such lives as are led here,

  bear the same fruits here as elsewhere.

  CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870)

  FROM AMERICAN NOTES

  The squalor and misery of the Five Points immeasurably exceeded everything Morgan had been led to expect.

  Within minutes after entering the area ludicrously known as “Paradise Square”—a triangular space into which the five streets giving the slum its name converged—he began to wish he had not insisted on seeing the place for himself. Both Michael and Whittaker had done their utmost to dissuade him. Even Jess Dalton, who apparently spent much of his time here in ministry, warned that nothing in Morgan’s past experience could possibly prepare him for the Five Points.

  Morgan now saw for himself why they had been so adamant in their objections. The place was an abomination, a nightmare world which would surely defy any attempt to capture its ugliness and horror, its wretchedness.

  He had seen the slums of London and Paris, knew the treacherous laneways of Dublin’s Liberties all too well. But none of the
se had stunned him or sickened him quite like this American lair of filth and depravity.

  He would have thought that by now he was past being shocked or horrified. He had seen enough suffering and rampant injustice in his own country to callous one’s soul. But to find such a pit of human misery in the midst of a city often hailed as having “streets of gold”—and to know the place was chiefly populated with his own countrymen—was beyond belief.

  As Sandemon wheeled him down one garbage-littered alleyway after another, flanked by Michael and Jess Dalton, with Daniel John out in front of them, Morgan felt as if he were journeying through the very streets of hell. Every building in view seemed to have a crumbling facade and broken windows, doors hanging ajar, torn free of their hinges. Broken whiskey bottles and animal offal literally paved the rutted lanes. The stench alone was enough to make a strong man retch. On almost every corner lounged inebriated beggars and slatternly women—these also drunk—while from each open doorway came the sound of shrieking or brawling or weeping.

  The farther they ventured into the depths of the slum, the more unspeakable their surroundings became. But upon their return to the “Square,” one building in particular caught Morgan’s attention—a singularly hideous monstrosity that resembled a distorted, overgrown crab. He was certain he had never seen anything so extraordinarily ugly.

  They came to a halt in front of the structure, and he glanced up at Michael. “What is that, pray?” he said, making no attempt to conceal his disgust.

  “The Old Brewery,” Michael said, his own voice laced with bitterness. “We will not go inside.”

  Morgan studied him for a moment, then turned his attention back to the building.

  “The place looks almost alive,” Sandemon commented. “Alive, and crawling with evil.”

  “It is that,” Michael replied. “The sights inside that den would give you nightmares for months.”

  “But it is finally coming down,” Jess Dalton said quietly.

  “Coming down?” Michael’s surprise at the pastor’s announcement was evident.

  Dalton nodded, the ghost of a smile touching his mouth. “I just learned for certain this week. The Ladies Home Missionary Society will finally see their prayers answered. Oh, it’s a ways off yet; the actual demolition and rebuilding will have to wait until more money can be raised. But the Society has entered into an arrangement to purchase the building. They hope to see it leveled within two years.”

  Dalton crossed his arms over his massive chest and stood staring at the building with a look of satisfaction. “It seems fitting somehow, don’t you think, that a new blow for the Kingdom will be struck in the very spot where darkness has held title for so many years? A hostel of vice and degradation is to be razed, and a new mission building erected in its place.”

  “Well, thanks be!” said Michael.

  “Thanks be indeed,” Jess Dalton echoed, still smiling. He turned to Morgan and Sandemon. “Without knowing the background of the place, you can’t be expected to understand what a victory this represents. But as much as anything else that’s been accomplished here in the Five Points over the past several years—possibly more than anything else—this news reaffirms my faith that God is at work in New York City.”

  Morgan gave a nod, but he could not still the anguish of his heart as he saw firsthand the conditions under which his people were existing. Thousands of them, fleeing their own country for the sole purpose of survival, had come to this “Promised Land” in hopes of finding a better life for themselves and their children. Instead, vast numbers of them had ended up here, in this pit of squalor and despair. Was Ireland’s tragedy destined to continue unabated, even in the Land of Promise?

  Worst of all, at least in Morgan’s eyes, were the children. They broke his heart. Raggedy little beggars, obviously without provision of any kind for their very existence, scurried along the streets pleading for money, for food, or, in some cases, looking as if they had come in search of a touch that wasn’t a blow. Morgan emptied his pockets in minutes, unable to resist their hollow eyes, their clawlike hands grasping at him.

  Some, little more than babes themselves, carried infants on their backs. They had no doubt been tossed out, Jess Dalton explained, by abusive or indifferent parents. Many wore little more than tattered blankets to hide their nakedness; shoes were almost nonexistent.

  And there were hundreds of them, scuttling through the streets like stray animals. For the first time Morgan caught a glimpse of just how sacred a work, how enormous a burden, Whittaker and Nora had taken upon themselves. And right there, in the midst of the gutters and garrets, he breathed a prayer for divine provision for their efforts.

  “Now I understand what Whittaker meant,” he mused softly. “Once, on the docks of Killala, the man stood and issued a caution to me, which I later came to suspect was more from the Lord than from Whittaker himself. We were little more than strangers at that juncture, Whittaker and I, but even then the Englishman did have a way about him. ‘Fitzgerald,’ he said to me, peering through those spectacles of his, ‘Fitzgerald, you are a very big man, a strong, powerful man. But even you are not man enough to bear the pain of a nation, to carry the burden of an entire people, unless you in turn allow Jesus Christ to hold your heart and carry you.’”

  Morgan looked about him, at the hopeless souls, the drunken wretches, the lost children of the Five Points. Then he turned back to the leprous old building which, according to Jess Dalton, sheltered evil beyond all imagining.

  “Whittaker was right,” he said quietly. “All this”—he made a sweeping motion with his hand—“this would surely crush even the mightiest of men, were they to undertake God’s work on their own.”

  He looked up at Michael and Jess Dalton, then at Daniel John, who had dropped to one knee and was adjusting a filthy sling on the arm of a dirty-faced little boy. The child called Daniel John “Doc.”

  Morgan swallowed and raked a hand down his beard. “What I see here, in this place, makes me yearn even more to have the use of my legs again. It makes me want to walk through these alleys and pitiful dwellings and help somehow—as all of you are helping.”

  Michael put a hand to his shoulder. “Would you forget your writings, Morgan? The truth you have placed in the hands of so many? Heaven bless you, man, you have virtually assured that untold thousands will know the truth about the famine—and England’s part in it!”

  Jess Dalton also spoke up. “Michael’s right. Because of your efforts, the history, the very heritage, of an entire people will be preserved for other generations.”

  Morgan lifted a hand to acknowledge their words, but they did not understand. He was not ungrateful for the agreements that had come to him this week: first from Greeley, who had promised to serialize Joseph’s famine diary in his newspaper; and from S. W. Benedict, Dalton’s own publisher, who was drawing up a contract for the book rights to the diary, with the promise to go to press just as quickly as possible.

  But none of it seemed enough, somehow. He wanted…ached…for the mobility to go among his people, here, in the place of their exile, as well as back in Ireland, where thousands upon thousands still faced possible extinction.

  He wanted…he needed…to walk again.

  Ah, well…tomorrow, he reminded himself with no small amount of trepidation, he would take the “first step” to accomplishing just that.

  40

  An Encounter in the Park

  Forget not that no fellow being yet

  May fall so low but love may lift his head…

  JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY (1849–1916)

  That evening, as she started toward the park, Quinn O’Shea wondered why Daniel Kavanagh wasn’t going to the concert with the rest of his family. The Whittakers and the Burkes were escorting their Irish visitors to Castle Garden tonight, joining vast numbers of others in New York City for an evening of music with Jenny Lind.

  According to the papers, it was to be only one of many concerts performed by the famous soprano
, and it promised to be a grand affair entirely. Quinn would have thought Daniel would want to be in attendance, to hear the one the newspapers called “the Swedish Nightingale.” But she had seen nothing of him throughout the afternoon or early evening, and the family had left without him.

  Earlier in the day, Quinn had thought she might be asked to stay with Teddy. She had hoped for an excuse to postpone this evening.

  But Johanna and the Fitzgerald daughter had volunteered to keep the two babes, giving the grown-ups an evening to themselves. Under the watchful supervision of the big black man called Sandemon, they would keep an eye on the boys at Whittaker House.

  Apparently, there was no way out. She had to do this—and she had to do it tonight.

  As he sat in Castle Garden, surrounded by the largest crowd he had ever seen, Morgan marveled at the contrast between these surroundings and what he had encountered earlier in the day.

  Apparently this island at the southern tip of the city, where the vast circular concert hall stood, had once been the site of a famous fort. Now it was the largest place of entertainment in New York.

  They had been here since a little past five, even though the concert was not to begin until eight. The place was mobbed. Morgan estimated an audience of at least six or seven thousand inside, with hundreds of others bobbing about in small boats on the water surrounding the island.

  Their own party was a large one; besides Morgan and Finola, it included Lewis Farmington and his wife, Winifred, a delight of an English lady who also happened to be Evan Whittaker’s aunt; Nora and Whittaker; Sara Burke; and her grandmother. Daniel John should be joining them any time now. Michael would not be sitting with the rest of them, being one of the many police captains who, along with their men, were attempting to keep order within and outside the premises. As for Sandemon, he had opted to remain at home. Although he had not said as much, Morgan suspected the black man preferred the company of the children to the noisy throng of concert-goers.