A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “My first intent was simply to guide Michael and the American—Dan McCaffrey—to the coast,” I said. “By the time we reached it, I was partner to a half dozen serious crimes and had no choice but to flee.”

  Patrick seized my hand like a desperate man, up to his waist in a sucking bog. “I was hopin’ and prayin’ you’d say that, Bess. Hopin’ against hope that you’d give fresh thought to my suit.”

  For a moment I was shaken to my depths by that perfectly ordinary Irish expression, “suit.” It sounded so old-fashioned, it was a cruel reminder of how far I had traveled, mentally and spiritually, in the last six months. It reminded me that for all my publicity and notoriety, no man had so much as hinted at asking me to be his wife. That reflection led to an even sadder one—the difference between the woman who sat here letting Patrick Dolan hold her hand and the girl who had sat beside him on Knockadoon Island near the ruins of Lord Desmond’s castle on May Eve. Was she the one who was worn and woebegone beneath her bright makeup? The innocence of that May Eve girl, even some of the pride, was lost beyond recall.

  I had not yet learned to hold tight to my hatred, to grasp it to my heart until by a slow deadly process it turned that organ to icy metal. It slipped away from me, and I heard my sad voice saying, “Patrick, I’m not the wife for you now if I ever was. I’m a revolutionary. I’ve done things that would make me ashamed, if I didn’t have a cause to justify them. You want a good honest girl like my sister Mary. I can’t be that now.”

  “Bess, what the devil are you talkin’ about?” he said. “I’m sittin’ here face-to-face with you seein’ with my own two eyes that you’re twice as beautiful as when I last saw you. Anything you’ve done is between you and the priest in confession and can be cleared up in five minutes. There’s no ring on your finger. That’s all that I feared to see.”

  The word “priest” restored my hatred to me with magical violence. “How can you talk of love with the news you brought?” I said. “If you were a true man, you’d offer me your good right hand and say, ‘It is at your service, Bess, to pull the trigger or wield the knife that puts Lord Rodney Gort in the ground.’”

  Patrick Dolan thought for a minute in that calm, steady way I found so infuriating. “What would we gain from that, Bess? I’d probably die on the gallows for it. Even if I got away, I’d have a murder on my soul. Lord Gort’s done me an injury, to be sure, and done you a worse one. But is anything to be gained from doin’ the worst of all to him?”

  “Revenge is what’s to be gained, the dearest thing in the world to me,” I said. I had my hatred now, gripped to my heart like a mother clutches a diseased babe, careless of the infection’s menace. “I have a man who’ll do it for me, and that man will have my love, as long as there’s breath in my body.”

  “I hear no love in your voice, Bess,” Patrick said with that calm unflinching stare.

  “He’ll think it’s love,” I said. “’Tis the same thing, in this world.”

  “Not to those that truly love Bess Fitzmaurice, who watched her grow from a wild skinny thing to a proud comely woman. I’ll wait for that woman to come back to me. This Fenian girl is a stranger.”

  “You’ll have a long wait,” I said. “That Bess Fitzmaurice is as dead as Red Hugh O’Donnell.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said, standing up.

  “What will you do?” I said in my icy voice, refusing even to look at him. In a strange way I feared this man, I felt he had some power over me that I did not understand. I thought of Archbishop McCloskey, entering this same room to confront me with those sad eyes. I told myself it was the power of the past, on which I had turned my back. They wanted to chain me as they had chained Ireland to the humiliations of piety and obedience. America proved the futility of those ideas. Violence, blood, was the only test of power, and power was the only gateway to pride and pleasure.

  “Do?” Patrick said sadly. “I’ve brought my little capital with me, what I could get my hands on quickly. About five thousand pounds. Mayhap I can go into business with it somewhere. Not in New York, but in some neighboring city, some smaller place, where a man can get a footing without fear of being washed away in the torrent.”

  “Good luck to you,” I said, and let him go without another word. Even while he spoke of his sober hopes, my hatred was forming my plan of revenge. I lay awake most of the night elaborating it to the utmost detail. The next morning I rose with the dawn and was on my way to Moffat House by eight o’clock. I paid no attention to Michael. His door was closed, and I supposed him to be in his room.

  Because I wrote a good hand, I had been working in Moffat House as the secretary of the cabinet, handling the correspondence with the bond-selling committee in the various cities. Occasionally I made a brief tour to New England or Baltimore or some other place that had not yet heard the Fenian girl, but Mike Hanrahan, who had the instincts of an impresario, had warned me against wearing out my welcome with the public and had persuaded Colonel Roberts to let me retire to the wings for a time.

  It was as secretary that I stumbled into the scene that tore the Fenian movement to shreds. I journeyed up Broadway, feeling more like a corpse than a girl of twenty. Because I often worked late, I had a key with which I let myself in the big oak door, with its brass knocker in the shape of a harp. In the office where I usually worked, I discovered Michael, John O’Mahoney, and two others poring over books and ledgers, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. There were papers strewn over the tables and on the floor.

  “What in God’s name is happening here?” I said.

  “We’ve launched a final call—for the truth,” Michael said. “I’ve at last convinced the president that we’re surrounded by the greatest bunch of thieves since Judas betrayed Jesus, and we’re gathering the evidence to convict them.”

  “Why do this now, when all is going so well?” I said.

  “The news from Ireland—Michael told me about your father—should be the best answer to that,” O’Mahoney said.

  “You know what you are?” I said to him. “A damned old fool. And you’re another,” I said to Michael. I stalked to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Michael said, following me.

  “To tell the men you’re trying to ruin. Good God, Michael, does it matter if they stole a few thousand? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Others are stealing ten times that much every day down at City Hall, and no one is putting them on the block. In Washington, I saw generals and politicians gambling and whoring, and no one says a word against the virtue of the United States of America. Expose us to this disgrace and you’ll ruin us.”

  “On the contrary,” Michael said. “We’ll rescue two million dollars in the treasury, to be spent in Ireland, on Ireland, for Ireland.”

  “If you were more of a hero and less of a politician, you’d only want to spend one thing in Ireland—a bullet in the black heart of Lord Gort.”

  “We’ll see what you think of heroes before we’re through with this investigation,” Michael said. “Your Donal Ogue is one of the biggest thieves, from what we’ve found so far. There may be a few even bigger, like Roberts and Hanrahan.”

  I started for the front door, Michael pushed me away and threw an inside bolt. “We need a few more hours,” he said. “You’ll stay here by order of the president.”

  I tried to wrestle past him to the door. He dragged me down the hall and locked me in a sitting room. He was so hurried that he did not notice the windows faced the street. Soon there was a great commotion, as other members of the staff tried to get in. They banged the knocker and pounded on the door. I flung up a window and shouted the news to them. Two of them went scampering downtown to tell William Roberts. Red Mike Hanrahan appeared next, and I gave him a summary. His face went white. I knew then that there was something to hide, which made things all the worse.

  Within the hour, Roberts, Red Mike, and a dozen Fenian senators arrived, with a small army of police. They battered the lock off the front door an
d marched into the mansion. I was released from my prison room in time to see Roberts serve papers on O’Mahoney informing him that a meeting of the Fenian senate had found him guilty of dereliction of duty and had deposed him as president. A Tammany judge had issued an injunction forbidding the old man access to the mansion. He and his cohorts were barred under pain of imprisonment from taking any documents with them from the files.

  Michael acted like a madman. Shouting denunciations, he tried to stuff papers in his pockets and under his shirt. The policemen seized him and solemnly extracted every document. They marched him and O’Mahoney and their helpers to the door of Moffat House and warned them not to return. Michael went straight to the New York Times, a paper that was slavish in its admiration of England and inveterate in its hostility to the Irish.

  The next morning, we were treated to a juicy story on the front page, describing the Fenians as swindlers who had cajoled millions from the Irish poor. Our accuser was, of all people, John O’Mahoney himself. He claimed to have only just recently discovered the extravagance, misappropriation of funds, and misdirection of the movement that had supposedly been raging for years. The Times pointed out with nice sarcasm that this did not speak well for O’Mahoney’s perspicacity, but it praised his “sensitive conscience” and agreed with his condemnation of the Canada invasion not only as a land-grabbing scheme but also as a plot to embroil America in a war with England.

  John O’Neil, who was heading our operations in the Midwest, reported consternation when this story was reprinted in newspapers there. Dan McCaffrey, who was spending much of his time in that part of the country, sent similar alarms. We shuddered to think of what our lukewarm supporters in Washington, D.C., were saying.

  A meeting of the cabinet and senate leaders was convened. Connolly and Peter Barr Sweeny attended, to offer Tammany’s support and testify to their solidarity with our side of the quarrel. These two veteran politicians were less troubled by the imbroglio than the Fenians. Tammany Hall had a long history of splits and feuds. There was only one way to settle them—by beating hell out of the other side. They offered their battery of orators to talk the spoilers down in New York and urged us to recruit similar support elsewhere.

  The Celtic temperament is naturally pugnacious, and this advice was accepted as wisdom. We launched a furious counterattack on O’Mahoney and Michael. We called them would-be dictators, hungry for power, guilty of the very extravagance and peculation of which they were accusing us. We vowed we had nothing to hide; our books and our plans were open to the whole world. They wanted to return the Fenians to the narrow path of the secret society. We had opened our ranks to the onward march of a whole people. The American government was endorsing our plan to conquer Canada and letting us buy guns from its arsenals. Our regiments were drilling openly in the streets of Chicago and Nashville and New York.

  O’Mahoney and Michael and their circle replied in kind. They draped themselves in the mantle of O’Mahoney’s purity and declared they alone were the true Fenians. They began raising their own funds and recruiting their own army. To counter Michael, who was making most of the speeches, I was often dispatched to address the same audience and call him a madman—which was not far from wrong. I was made the subject of a cartoon in Harper’s Weekly for my efforts. I was pictured as the Fenian Joan of Arc, with a whiskey bottle on my head for a crown and a shattered broom in my hand. My face was that of a monkey, a favorite trick of the anti-Irish cartoonists in England and America. They regularly drew on Darwin’s theory of evolution to portray the Irish as closer to simians than humans. Another issue of that same English worshipping magazine portrayed the two factions as a pair of drunken Irish apes, fighting over a battered harp.

  It was a ruinous melee, but it did serve one good purpose—or so we thought at the time. Beyond question, our plan to conquer British Canada in Ireland’s name became as public as the knowledge that Andrew Johnson sat in the White House and Victoria on the throne of England. The relative lack of public opposition, beyond snipes from pro-English publications like the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly, and the studied silence from the American government encouraged us to think that we had support in both these vital quarters. In fact, powerful newspapers such as the New York Herald and the New York Tribune repeatedly cheered us on and helped us belabor O’Mahoney and Michael and their friends into relative insignificance.

  My part in the quarrel was as exhausting as it was heartsickening. It was not easy to heap scorn and opprobrium and even a little slander on the head of a brother whom I once worshipped and in my heart still loved. I could never have done it without my hatred. It was easy to include Michael within its icy circle, to sacrifice him to its inexorable necessity. His stupid idealism was interfering with my consummation, and he had to be destroyed.

  Mike Hanrahan, who traveled with me to many of my performances, was amazed and puzzled by my transformation when I stepped upon a stage or speaker’s platform. “You’re not the same person, so help me God,” he said. “’Tis like an avenging angel possessed you.”

  “He has, Mike,” I’d say. “I hope one soon possesses you, so there’ll be an end to bucking the tiger.”

  “Ah, Bess, a man needs a bit of pleasure in this life,” Mike would say with his crooked grin.

  There were times when I lost hold of my avenging angel, or he lost me. One snowy December night, I was in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, speaking to a hall full of Irish coal miners and their wives. Michael had been there the previous day to ask for their money and their sons to invade Ireland in the Fenian fleet. I began by ridiculing my brother the admiral, telling how seasick he was when we crossed the Atlantic. Then I discussed my brother the coward, telling how Dan McCaffrey and I had had to carry him like a whimpering baby across half of Ireland with the police after us. “Sure he wet his pants so often,” I said, “I put diapers on him.”

  Then I told them of the marching men in the other cities, the American government’s sure support of our conquest of Canada, the great chance it represented to carve off one of the main limbs of the British hydra. I held up to them the hope of a home on the St. Lawrence or the western prairie instead of a hovel beside a mineshaft. Finally I reminded them of the fate of the convicted Fenians, in the prison camps of Tasmania. I ended with a poem that Mike had written for me. Someone, I think it was the New York Herald, called it the “Fenian Marseillaise.”

  “Away with speech, and brother, reach me down that rifle gun.

  By her sweet voice and hers alone, the rights of man are won.

  Fling down the pen; when heroic men pine sad in dungeons lone,

  ’Tis bayonets bright, with good red blood, should plead before the throne.”

  As the applause thundered to the roof, I glimpsed Michael’s face in the back of the hall. Defeat and humiliation were written upon it in such scarifying terms, my hating heart faltered. I was destroying him, my own brother, the one who taught me to love Ireland with passion and pride. For a moment I almost cried out begging words of contrition and forgiveness. But long before I could get off the stage, he had turned away and vanished into the night.

  Through all this turmoil, I seldom saw Dan McCaffrey: When he was in New York, I was usually en route to some distant town like Wilkes-Barre, and when I stumbled off a train in Jersey City and trudged to the ferry with Mike, it was to discover that Dan had just departed for Boston or Pittsburgh. When I did encounter him I had to struggle to produce a loving smile. But I managed it, just as I managed to write him words of passionate endearment in my letters. Not because I loved him. Except for stray moments, like that episode on the stage, I loved nothing but my hatred—and my Donal Ogue remained an important part of my dream of murderous revenge.

  With the cruel humor that fate seems to prefer, Michael’s going berserk and plunging us into an Ireland-first versus Canada-first quarrel played neatly into my hand. Toward the end of January in the new year 1866, when we had him and O’Mahoney well on the run, I went to William Robe
rts with my plan.

  “It’s not enough to go about making speeches about rifle guns,” I said. “We must show we can use them.”

  “We will, as soon as the snow melts in Canada,” he said.

  I shook my head. “We must also show we can use them in Ireland.”

  He glanced up in alarm from the latest bond-sale reports, wondering if I was about to change sides on him. Like most men, he saw a female as fickle, swayed by every contrary wind.

  “We must concentrate our strength, not scatter it,” he said, giving one of the standard military answers we had devised to counter the Ireland-firsters.

  “Of course,” I said, “but surely we can spare three people, two men and a woman, to strike a blow that will reverberate through Ireland and America. A blow that will prove no one can abuse Ireland and live in safety.”

  Roberts stopped reading and started listening.

  “Lord Gort of Limerick has become head of the landlords’ association in Ireland. You know what he did to my father,” I said. “He’s bent on terrorizing and humiliating everyone within his reach—and if the association gains strength, it will reach everywhere in Ireland. I want to go there and kill him. On the orders of the Irish Republic. As an act of war.”

  And revenge, I added silently, my true love, dear sweet savage revenge.

  “Can it be done?” he asked.

  I had him hooked. He saw it would be the perfect answer to the Ireland-firsters. Tell us what you have done in Ireland, we could sneer, and point to Gort’s corpse.

  “It can,” I said. “With the help of Dan McCaffrey and Mike Hanrahan.” I told him of my plan.