A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  Leaving the town, we mounted a hill at a slow pace. As we approached the crest, about twenty or thirty people emerged from an old lime-kiln, where they had been sheltering themselves from the wind and rain. They were mere skeletons, wrapped in the coarsest rags. There was not a pair of shoes among them. They stretched out their lean hands, fastened upon arms of skin and bone, and turned their wan ghastly faces and sunken lifeless eyes imploringly up to us, with feeble words of entreaty. The Englishmen made some cold remarks about their indolence and worthlessness and gave them nothing. I flung them some coins, almost weeping with shame and vexation at the sight of them. Why did they accept their very deaths with such resignation? If they had to die, why didn’t they at least go down striking a blow? Their passivity and hopelessness shrank the significance of my revenge to a small, selfish, possibly meaningless gesture.

  We approached Killarney along a road that commanded a view of the famous lakes. In the evening light, the surrounding mountains were clothed in purple like kings in mourning; great heavy clouds were gathered round their heads. The main lake lay beneath us on the right, dark and blue, with mist-shrouded islands toward the center. We were met at Kenmare House by servants with blazing torches and by the usual swarm of beggars, urchins, and idlers. My thoughts had little to do with the scenery or the creature comforts of the hotel. I was obsessed with how to find my sister Mary and my mother, without exposing our true identities to them.

  The next day I inquired at the desk if a girl named Mary Fitzmaurice was employed here, or at any neighboring hotel. I told the pompous little clerk she was the sister of a girl I had in my employ in America, and I had gifts for her. He said he knew no one by that name, and inquiries at other hotels produced no results. So we had to proceed to play the interested tourists for the next two days, while gazing in vain at every passing face for a glimpse of my mother or sister. Our guide, said to be the finest in Killarney, was Sir Richard Courtenay, a small, lean man of sixty, descended from the earls of Desmond. The bitter history of Ireland had deprived his family of lands and wealth, leaving him only his title. He was an educated man, spoke Gaelic fluently, and always had an appropriate bit of poetry on his lips, but there was a vein of sadness in everything he said and did. No wonder.

  Sir Richard led us about the lakes in boats, telling us legends that swarmed on every hill and crag and island. The next day we ascended Mount Mangerton, riding surefooted little ponies that picked their way along the perilous path to the summit and the finest view in Ireland. Halfway up, we were assailed by a squad of girls in their teens and early twenties, seeking to sell goat’s milk and poteen—Irish whiskey—to quench our thirst. It was clear from their deference to him that they were in Sir Richard’s employ. With a desperation that may have been accentuated by the time of the year—a month or two before the start of the usual tourist season—they begged us to take a drink.

  Each was uglier than the next, peasant types, with streaming hair and dirty skirts. I hesitated, glancing over the lot of them, and gasped with shock. At the rear of the squad, looking as forlorn as a creature in a fairy spell, was my sister Mary. The sadness on her face was enough to destroy me on the spot. I let the rest pursue the half dozen other tourists with us. Bridling my pony, I dropped back until I was abreast of Mary.

  “Land’s sakes, child,” I said in my American accent. “You don’t look like you are enjoying this outing.”

  “I’m feeling a bit weak, ma’am,” Mary said. “I’ve had nothing to eat since yesterday breakfast.”

  “Why in the world not?” I asked.

  “My ma is sick, and I’m giving as much of the little we’ve got to eat to her, to keep up her strength.”

  “Have you taken her to a doctor?” I asked.

  “We haven’t the money. It’s the weather. She caught cold when the warm winds left us, and we hadn’t a penny for a bit of turf.”

  “Oh, did you hear that, Mr. Stowecroft?” I said to Dan. “This poor girl—what’s your name, dear?—hasn’t a cent for a sick mother. Surely we can spare her something.”

  “I’d be eternally grateful,” Mary said. “I’d pray for you for the rest of my life. My name is Mary Fitzmaurice, and I’ve two sisters and a brother in America.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” I said.

  “Here,” Dan said, and handed her a five-pound note.

  “Oh, dear God,” said Mary. “You can have all my whiskey and milk for that, twice over. I’ll go down the mountain and get another serving.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “What you have will do us nicely. Have you thought of going to America yourself?”

  “I have. But now I’m not sure. I had a letter from my brother, Michael, just the other day, telling me the sad tale of what’s become of my sisters.”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said.

  “They’re ruined women, ma’am, if you’ll excuse such language,” Mary said. “Michael says America will do it to everyone who goes out. It’s either that or working as a slavey for some rich family. ’Tis a better life by far in Ireland, he claims.”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said, “but your brother sounds like a fool.”

  “With all due respect, ma’am,” Mary said, “I must resent that. He’s fine and true. He went to America to rally the Irish there for Ireland. But he says there’s no hope of it. They think of nothing but making money.”

  I was in torment. I longed to fling aside my disguise and speak in my natural voice. Dan was glaring at me, already fearful that I had said too much. “Come on, Mother,” he said. “We’re goin’ to lose the view. Sir Richard’s already there and talkin’ a blue streak.”

  He seized my pony’s bridle and fairly dragged me up the path to the summit, where we admired the vistas in all directions, following Sir Richard Courtenay’s gesticulating arm. To the west glittered Dingle Bay and the Bay of Kenmare; to the east, wild mountains and desolate glens, broken by numerous little lakes bespangling the landscape like stars in the firmament of heaven. Resting, we partook of Mary’s milk and poteen, which she served and then stood at a respectful distance until we drank it.

  “Don’t say another word to her, Mother,” Dan muttered to me in his true voice.

  “Go to hell, Father,” I said.

  But what else could I say, without risking everything? Even if it were worth the risk, what would it accomplish? Would Mary take advice from her ruined sister, whom she had reason to envy and suspect, even before she heard the worst from Michael? What could I tell her, anyway? Come to America and marry Patrick Dolan? I had no such power to dispose of her or him.

  Though it almost strangled me, I could do nothing but return the cup to her, express more sympathy for her plight, and descend the mountain, mute in my American identity. I did manage to inquire about her mother’s illness and was dismayed to hear that she was coughing blood. I expressed some alarm, and Mary sighed hopelessly. “I suppose it’s a charge against us, for the sins my sisters have committed,” she said. “God help them, is all I can say. When my mother goes, I hope to enter the convent in Limerick and give my life over to praying for them and the souls of her and my poor father.”

  “How—noble of you,” I said in my American voice, while shame scalded my cold hating heart.

  Back in our room overlooking the lake, Dan cursed and threw things. “I told you to stay away from her,” he said. “To look right past her if you saw her. She was eyein’ you pretty strange by the time we got down that mountain. Why didn’t you shut up when I told you?”

  It was his fear speaking. I knew it, but I had lost my will to control it. “If you want to quit this, do it now,” I said. “I’ll undertake it alone. Go back to New York and tell them why you ran out. Don’t waste your breath on me.”

  He glared at me with something close to hatred in his eyes. Gone was the lovely camaraderie of shipboard. Ireland was destroying my ability to play the passionate girl. “I made a deal,” he said. “I don’t walk out on my promises.”

&n
bsp; Except to women, I thought bitterly, remembering the ragged woman on Priest’s Leap. I suddenly saw her demonic face, screaming that curse at us in the wind. With a shudder I turned the memory aside. We made no attempt to console each other that night. I lay beside my “husband” in the big double bed and wept bitter silent tears.

  We spent another day in Killarney, traveling through the Gap of Dunloe in jaunting carts, admiring the wild view and enduring a sudden hailstorm. The next day, harried by the usual swarm of beggars, we boarded another coach and headed for Limerick. Our hotel was in the new town—Newtown Pery, as it was called, after the man who owned the land. It fronted the handsome main street, which was a mile long and considered one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in Ireland. The houses were all bright red, and the street was full of carriages and chaises containing numerous well-dressed women. Along the sidewalk strutted dozens of young British officers, with tight waists and absurd brass shell epaulets on their absurd little frock coats. They stared at all the women, even one as old as I was supposed to be, with cold, nasty eyes.

  The sight of the enemy uniform and the knowledge that Limerick was a major military base inspired me and Dan McCaffrey to forget our differences and concentrate on our roles. We leaned hard on our canes and tottered to our rooms croaking of our weariness.

  The next day, still complaining of exhaustion, we confined ourselves to wandering about Limerick. At dinner we met two upstate New Yorkers, William Balch and Frederick Havemeyer, retired merchants on a tour similar to our own. Balch was small and exciteable, Havemeyer heavy and stolid. They were from Buffalo, a city with a large Irish population, and several Celtic friends had urged them to visit Ireland after touring England, Scotland, and Wales.

  In the morning we all strolled from the new town into old Limerick, which is divided into Irish and English sections. In the Irish part Balch and Havemeyer gazed aghast down St. Giles, St. Mary’s Gate, and other narrow streets. There were hundreds of people sprawled against the grimy buildings, or lying in the gutters, or staggering about bawling songs. Every second house was a gin, beer, or slop shop. On the faces was everything from smutty childhood to bloated dissipation to ruined old age.

  “There’s nothing in Buffalo or even New York to match it,” gasped Mr. Balch, and his friend Havemeyer solemnly agreed.

  “We have the better class, who had the strength to emigrate,” Havemeyer said.

  I was stunned speechless, which was just as well. Limerick was a city I had visited a hundred times, but my aunts lived on a comfortable street in the new town, and my convent school was on the outskirts of this same section. I had never ventured into old Limerick. All I knew of it was some vague words of disapproval spoken by my parents or my aunts.

  The English town was not much of an improvement on the Irish town. It, too, swarmed with poor Irish. The major difference was the presence of hundreds of prostitutes in the streets around the English barracks. They stood in the doorways of their houses or leaned from the windows, combing their hair. Many of them were young, and some were as beautiful as any Broadway demimondaine. Mr. Balch and Mr. Havemeyer were embarrassed by the sight of them and spluttered about the “inevitable depravity” of army life.

  Returning to our hotel, I began to wonder if I might die of shame, or of undischarged hatred. What should I see lounging on the hotel steps but the most welcome sight I could imagine: Red Mike Hanrahan. He was wearing rough countryman’s clothes, chatting away with the hackmen. He tugged on his right ear and began talking loudly about the weather in Dublin. Nothing but rain, he said. It was good to see some sunshine here in Limerick.

  It was the agreed-on signal that all was well. Mike had bought a large touring coach and four good horses and was supposedly en route to Cork to meet an American millionaire who was the real buyer. That night after supper, Dan and I announced we needed some fresh air before bed. We strolled into the Irish town, and Mike followed us. We paused on the corner of St. Giles Street, and he tipped his hat and pretended to strike up a conversation with us.

  “His lordship is waiting for us,” he said. “He’s busy evicting tenants in a five-mile swath. Seventy-two families, five hundred and twenty-two souls, in the past month. His fellow landlords have pitched in to bring the total to seventeen hundred. Never was there a better moment to strike a blow.”

  “Where’s the coach?” I asked.

  “At the livery stable owned by your hotel,” Mike said.

  “What have you found out about his lordship’s daily routine?”

  “Not much. Except that he spends almost all his time upon his estate and seldom comes to Limerick.”

  “That’s good enough. Tomorrow we’ll begin our trips into the country. You can do the same, exercising your horses. We’ll meet you here tomorrow night.”

  Limerick was not a tourist center. It was primarily a commercial city, so there was no system of guides. Therefore no one made the slightest objection when we rented a chaise the next day and asked for suggestions of sights to see in the countryside. Lake Fergus and the ruined castle of Lord Desmond, Gort House, and the cairn of the old kings nearby were among those suggested—as I knew they would be. We now had every reason to be in the vicinity of the man we wanted to kill.

  Red Mike Hanrahan was meanwhile telling his friends at the livery stable that he had received a telegram from his American employer, informing him that he’d decided to stay in London an extra week, so there was no need to hurry to Cork.

  The dutiful groom had decided to remain in Limerick for a few more days, because the roads were infinitely better than those in the hills around Cork. Each day he hitched his team of fine dappled grays and rode out for an hour or two. The livery stable manager was of course delighted to keep a customer who paid hard cash and tipped liberally.

  Dan was my chief worry. Each day his doubts multiplied and his questions grew more numerous. He saw a hundred ways for the plan to miscarry. I was finally reduced to crooning to him as if he were a baby, “All will be well, all will be well.” Meanwhile, deep within me, other voices whispered the opposite. I was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of rallying people so far gone in degradation. I had already lost faith in the power of my act of hatred, but my will to perform it was still intact. The hatred itself was still alive within me and would swell there like a tumor, I thought, unless it was vented.

  The next day, the tenth of March, 1866, we arose from our sleepless beds and descended to breakfast, took our picnic lunch from the head porter, and trilled our enthusiasm for another day in the country. It was perfect weather, a soft spring breeze and a warm sun in a blue sky. In an hour Lake Fergus was in sight, shining like a blessing below its guardian mountains. We avoided the west side, where Ballinaclash and the Fitzmaurice farm lay, partly because I could not bear the agony of seeing them close, and partly because we feared a familiar eye might, by some quirk, recognize me. Our single horse, a sturdy brown gelding, trotted by the gate of Gort House and along a narrow road to the north where thick stands of trees masked the shores of the lake. A woodman’s track ran into this little forest. We followed it into the silent shadows.

  We sat there for an hour, saying little. We nibbled a bit of our lunch. Dan took his pistol from the carpetbag at his feet and loaded it. I did the same with the pistol in my purse. Across the lake I could see our old house and the cottages of the laborers. They were the size of toys at this distance. It was all unreal. Was I the same Bess Fitzmaurice who had sat outside Malloy’s cottage in the sunshine, listening to her prediction that I would marry a rich man? The same headstrong girl who had refused Patrick Dolan’s offer of marriage while knowing, dreading, that eventually she would accept it? It was hard to believe anything was real, once you mounted history’s whirlwind.

  A clatter of hoofs on the road. We both stiffened. Red Mike was here. The coach came creaking down the woodman’s path to where we sat. Mike did not have to assure us that he had paid his livery bill and told his friend the manager that he was off to Cor
k. Dan glanced at his watch as Mike and the horses became visible in the trees. Eleven o’clock. Time to get busy.

  With scarcely more than a nod to Mike, we hauled the trunk from the back of the coach. Within it were bottles of cleansing fluid, which quickly enabled Mike to daub the traces of age from our faces. A black wig was fitted over my gray head, and a red wig replaced Dan’s gray one. Off came our sedate middle-class clothes. I stepped into a gorgeous dark green traveling dress and donned a velvet hat of the same color, with a dark veil. Dan shrugged into an English tweed suit. A shoulder holster held his gun. A walking stick was another weapon. Mike buttoned me up the back, cursing his thick fingers. “Jesus God,” he muttered. “Who’d think that a sergeant of the Fighting 69th would end up a ladies’ maid?”

  By eleven-thirty we were ready. In my purse were my gun and my calling cards, which read MRS. PIERRE LORILLARD RONALDS. I was impersonating Annie’s old benefactor. Dan’s card read GEORGE DANGERFIELD. He would have no trouble playing one of Mrs. Ronalds’s many male friends. We had a firm grasp on these identities, lest his lordship be out and we had to sit and converse with some other member of the family.

  By noon we were turning in the gate of Gort House. Mike Hanrahan, wearing the red and yellow livery of a well-tailored coachman, boldly announced our arrival with a call on his bugle. It had taken him the better part of a week to learn it. We should have had another man on the box, but rather than worry about a fourth confederate, we decided it would be easier to explain his absence by a story about an illness that left him sick in bed in Limerick.

  We clattered to a stop in front of the house. A scrawny gray-haired doorkeeper ran out. I handed him my card and Dan’s. “Is his lordship at home?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Our first hope was that Lord Gort would come out to greet us personally. We had no great desire to enter the house, which could easily become a trap.

  Within sixty seconds a husky, fair-haired English butler appeared on the steps. “His lordship has just returned from the fields. He begs you and Mr. Dangerfield to wait for him in the library and hopes you can stay for dinner at the very least.”