Irish Gold
Page 1
ANDREW M.
GREELEY
“A fascinating novelist . . . with a rare, possibly unmatched, point of view.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Greeley writes with passion and narrative force.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Spins wondrous romances.”
—The New York Times
“A genuinely fine novelist.”
—Associated Press
“An expert on the emotions that make us human.”
—Minneapolis Star
“A master storyteller.”
—Cincinnati Enquirer
“A genius for plumbing people’s convictions. . . . That and his rich literary imagination make him truly exceptional.”
—Cleveland Press
BOOKS BY ANDREW M. GREELEY
FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Nuaia Anne McGrail Novels
Irish Gold
Irish Lace
Irish Whiskey
Irish Mist
Irish Eyes
Irish Love
Irish Stew!
Irish Cream
Irish Crystal
Irish Linen
Irish Tiger
Bishop Blackie Ryan Mysteries
The Bishop and the Missing L Train
The Bishop and the Beggar Girl of St. Germain
The Bishop in the West Wing
The Bishop Goes to The University
The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood
The Bishop at the Lake
The O’Malleys in the Twentieth Century
A Midwinter’s Tale
Younger Than Springtime
A Christmas Wedding
September Song
Second Spring
Golden Years
The Senator and the Priest
All About Women
Angel Fire
Angel Light
Contract with an Angel
Faithful Attraction
The Final Planet
Furthermore!: Memories of a Parish Priest
God Game
Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and
His Relationships with Women
The Magic Cup
Star Bright!
Summer at the Lake
The Priestly Sins
White Smoke
Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)
The Book of Love: A Treasury Inspired by the Greatest of Virtues
(editor with Mary Durkin)
Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy (editor)
IRISH
GOLD
ANDREW M.
GREELEY
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
IRISH GOLD
Copyright © 1994 by Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.
All rights reserved.
The verses by Patrick O’Connor are reprinted courtesy of the author. The Michael Collins—Catherine Kiernan letters are reprinted from In Great Haste by Leon O’Broin by permission of Gill & Macmillan. publishers.
Cover art by Jeffrey Terreson
Maps by Ellisa Mitchell
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8125-5076-4
ISBN-10: 0-8125-5076-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-29745
First Edition: November 1994
First Mass Market Edition: September 1995
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
For Andrew, Neil, Kathryn, Kristine, Nora, Brigit, et al.
The description of Ireland in the time of the Troubles in this book is historically accurate. However, the story of the Galway Brigade of the Irregulars, its achievements, leaders, and conflicts, is the work of my imagination. There were no real-life counterparts of either Daniel O’Kelly or William Ready.
Moreover, as far as I know, nothing like the Consort of St. George and St. Patrick or any of its members actually exists.
The death of Michael Collins continues to be a mystery. My attempt to explain it is a work of imagination, not a description of what actually happened but of what might have happened.
A chronology of the Troubles appears at the end of the book.
Lovers should treat one another like shy children.
—Ingmar Bergman
Young lovers think they have forever
Hormones, however, have social origins
Intent and consequences.
Private minutes of affection
Celebrated in ecstatic interludes of spring freedoms
Inevitably involve the families from which they come
And the family toward which they are going.
—Patrick O’Connor
The tragedy of his death went far beyond the manner of it or the place where it occurred, and far beyond the killing in combat of a young Irishman of notable appearance and physique. . . . he was a guerrilla genius and much more besides. At the age of thirty-one, and in a public life of barely five years, he was already a national and international figure. Greatness had touched him, leaving him on the threshold of a career that could well have brought him to heights to which no Irishman before him had attained. It was in such terms that the common people of Ireland thought of him, expecting that his gallantry, his leadership, and the gifts of organization and statesmanship he was displaying would surely be at their service for many years to come. . . . the most tragic element in Collins’s death was that it occurred at all, for it was as unnecessary as the bitter and furious civil war which the compassionate realist strove so hard and risked so much to avoid.
—Leon O’Broin, Michael Collins (1980)
“Between 11:00 and 11:15 P.M. there was a knock on the door of my house. My housekeeper answered it. She called me and said I was wanted outside. A soldier and a civilian, who lived locally, were standing at the doorway. The soldier asked me to come outside as there was a soldier shot.
“It was a dark night and the soldier carried in his hand an old carbide lamp which was giving a very bad light. I walked out to the roadway where the convoy had stopped. There was a soldier lying flat with his head lying on the lap of a young officer. The young officer was crying and sobbing and did not speak.
“There was blood on the side of the dead man’s face. I said an Act of Contrition and other prayers and made the Sign of the Cross. I told the officer to wait till I got the Holy Oils. I went to the house but when I returned the convoy had gone.”
—Testimony of a parish priest in West Cork
–– 1 ––
“THE IRISH,” I insisted to the
black-haired young woman whose face might have belonged to a pre-Christian Celtic goddess, “are different. They look like some of the rest of us and they speak a language that’s remotely like ours. Many of them even have the same names as we do. But they’re different—almost like aliens from another planet.”
I’ve never met a pre-Christian Celtic goddess, but the girl looked like the images I formed in my head when I read the ancient sagas.
“Pissantgobshite.” She peered at me over her dark glass of Guinness, mildly offended but intrigued.
Not very goddesslike language, huh?
I had sworn off women, for excellent reasons I thought. But, as my brother George the priest had insisted, the hormones tend to be irresistible.
“Womanly charms,” George had observed, “are not of enormous moment compared to intelligence and personality. However, especially for the tumescent young male, they must be reckoned as not completely trivial.”
That’s the way George talks.
I avoided the distraction of telling my Irish goddess that the words of her scatological response ran together like a phrase in the writings of her man Jimmy Joyce. I was homesick, baffled, and a little frightened. My body ached in a hundred places from the brawl on Baggot Street the day before. I was worried that Pa, my beloved grandfather, might have been a terrorist and a murderer when he was a young man. I wanted some sympathy.
Womanly sympathy.
Young womanly sympathy.
“That’s an example of what I mean.” I leaned forward so she could hear me over the noise of the student-filled pub—O’Neill’s, on Suffolk Street across from St. Andrew’s Church (C. of I., which means Anglican). “What did you say your name is?”
“I didn’t.” She frowned, a warning signal that I had interrupted her pursuit of world economics and that, if I didn’t mind me manners, she would stalk away from the table.
“Mine’s Dermot,” I said brightly. “Dermot Coyne, Dermot Michael Coyne—son of the dark stranger, as you probably know.”
“Fockingrichyank.”
The child—she was twenty at the most—was strikingly beautiful. At least her cream-white face and breast-length black hair promised great beauty. The rest of her was encased in a gray sweatshirt with “Dublin Millennium” in dark blue letters, jeans, and a dark blue cloth jacket with a hood—not goddess clothes, exactly. Her face, slender and fine-boned, was the sort that stares at you from the covers of women’s magazines—except that the cover women don’t usually have a haunting hint in their deep blue eyes of bogs and druids and old Irish poetry. The bottom half of her face was a sweeping, elegant curve which almost demanded that male fingers caress it with reassurance and affection. However, the center of the curve was a solid chin that warned trespassing, or potentially trespassing, male fingers that they had better not offend this young woman or they would be in deep trouble.
I’m a romantic, you say?
Why else would I loiter in O’Neill’s pub around the corner from Trinity College with nothing to do except look for beautiful faces, the kind whose image will cling to your memory for the rest of your life?
The mists swirling outside the darkened pub, which smelled like Guinness’s brewery on a humid day, seemed to have slipped inside and soaked the walls and floors and tables and the coats of the noisy young people with permanent moisture. My friend across the table was an oasis of light and warmth in a desert of wet and gloomy darkness. Blue-eyed, druid maiden light.
All right, I’m a terrible romantic. I’m worse than that, as you will see when I have finished telling my story. I’m a dumb romantic.
“That established my point.” I continued the argument, unable to look away from her suspicious but radiant blue eyes. “Do you speak Irish?”
“Better than you speak English,” she snapped. “And I’m trying to study”—she gestured with a slim elegant hand—“for my focking world economics quiz, which is why no one is sitting with me at this table.”
“Ah, but someone is indeed: one Dermot Coyne. Now tell me, nameless one”—I smiled my most charming dimpled smile—“what obscene and scatological words exist in your language?”
She tilted her head back and her chin up, ready for a fight. “ ’Tis a pure and gentle language.”
“Ah, ’tis all of that.” I leaned closer so that her inviting lips were only a foot from mine—and felt the pain in my ribs from last night’s brawl. “I’m surprised that you didn’t say it was a focking pure language.”
Did I detect a hint of a smile? What would she look like if she took off her jacket?
As George would say, a not completely trivial issue.
“Now,” I continued reasonably, “let me tell you about an event I observed when I was doing research on this alien race that claims some relation to my own harmless Irish-American people. In pursuit of this project I am attending a cultural exercise in an artistic center with which, O lovely nameless one, I am sure you are familiar—Croke Park.”
The ends of her lips turned up a little more. I was a big Yank, probably rich like all Yanks, probably preparing to make a pass like all rich Yank males, but I was also ever so faintly amusing. My heart, which ought to have known better after my earlier failures in love, picked up its beat.
I must add for the record that I was not preparing to make a pass. I had enough troubles in life as it was without becoming involved with a woman. All I wanted at that point was a little maternal sympathy because of my recent and unfortunate encounters with the Special Branch, a euphemism for the local secret police. Nonetheless, at twenty-five an unattached male of our species will inevitably evaluate a young woman of the same species as a potential bed partner and perhaps even as a remote possibility for a mate—even if my mother is convinced that I am destined to be a typical Irish bachelor. Such an evaluation will be all the more intense if the young woman across the table from him in a smoke-filled Dublin pub possesses the most beautiful face he has ever seen, a face all the more wonderful because of its total innocence of makeup.
“Maybe you’ll find a sweet little girl in Ireland and bring her home,” Mom had said brightly during our last phone conversation.
“Like your mother?”
Mom laughed. “Well, she was little anyway.”
I was beginning to fall in love, you say? Ah, friend, I begin to fall in love almost every day and, having been badly burned twice, rarely get beyond the beginning. When I begin to fall in love, the issue is infatuation and flirtation, not the kind of love out of which permanent union might be fashioned. I’d known that kind of love too, and I didn’t want any of it now, thank you very much.
This lass from the bogs was more appealing than most of the women who stir my heart, you say? And I had actually talked to her, which is a rare event when I begin to fall in love?
Too true.
The nameless one had already forced me to reevaluate my contention that all the beautiful female genes had migrated to America.
“You went to the All Ireland match at Croke Park, did you?” She tapped her notebook impatiently with a Bic pen. I didn’t have much time to tell my story or her royal majesty would dismiss me to the nether regions of her empire.
Most Irish conversational dialogue, I had discovered, ends in question marks. I tried to adjust to the custom, with only modest success.
I will not try to write English the way the Irish speak it in this story. For that I strongly recommend the books of Roddy Doyle. Thus when you see the letters “th,” you must realize that their language has (sometimes) no sound to correspond to those consonants. Moreover, the vowel “u” is often pronounced as if it were “oo,” as in “Dooblin.” For example, if the Gaelic womanly deity to whom I was talking should say “The only thing to do is to tell the truth when you’re thinking about it,” you must imagine her as sounding as if she said, “De only ting to do is tell da troot when you’re tinking about it.”
“Didn’t I now?” I continued my tale of Croke Park. “And didn’t Cork beat Mayo?
And wasn’t I sitting next to a nice old Mayo lady who prayed her rosary beads before the game, uh, match began? And didn’t she put away her beads and shout encouragement to the players? I now recite a typical expression which I had the foresight to jot down in my notebook.” I removed a spiral pad from my Savile Row jacket pocket. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Slattery, for the love of God, will you get the load of shit out of your focking pants and kick the focking ball into the focking net, instead of standing there like a pissant amadon!”
I snapped the notebook shut, my case having been made. The nameless one laughed, a rich, generous, and devastating laugh. She probably had no idea how beautiful she was or that she was even beautiful—an innocent child from the bogs.
Time would prove that the first part of my estimate was accurate enough. The second remains even now problematic.
“At least for an alien race,” she conceded, “aren’t we colorful now?”
“About that, lovely nameless one, you will get no argument from me.”
“A song, Nuala,” some large oaf with a thick Cork accent demanded. “ ’Tis time for one of your songs!”
“Can’t you see I’m studying me world economics?” my companion protested with a notable lack of sincerity.
“You’re not studying,” a woman shouted, “you’re chatting up the fockingrichyank. Sing us a song.”
“A song from Nuala,” a chorus joined in, emphasizing their demand by pounding their mugs on the shabby and unsteady tables.
“Holy Saint Brigid.” Nuala—for that must be her named—sighed loudly.
She winked at me, stood up, doffed her jacket, and stretched for a guitar under our table.
In this exercise her torso came enchantingly close to my face. It exceeded my wildest, or should I say my most obscene, expectations.
A matter of trivial importance for a young male, no doubt, but nonetheless, she was so elegantly lovely that a spasm of pleasure and pain raced through my nervous system and caused me to bite my lip.