A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, at least today,” I said.

  I allowed the butler to hand me down from the carriage. Dan followed. We were led down a long center hall covered with swords and armor and frowning portraits of earlier Gorts. The library was a large, pleasant room with a fire in the massive fieldstone fireplace. We walked over to it, moving deep into the room, and stood with our backs to the door, gazing up at an oil painting of the mansion by an artist who must have been aboard a boat in the lake. We had plotted every move, studied every alternative, and decided nonchalance was the key to success. It was better by far to lure him into the room rather than lurk by a door, something no lady would do.

  Five minutes stretched into ten. I could see Dan’s jaw tightening with impatience and the fear drifting like fog into his eyes. “All will be well,” I whispered.

  Footsteps in the hall. Then a cheerful voice crying, “My dear, why didn’t you warn me of this American invasion? What is this about not staying for din—”

  I was turning as he spoke. Lord Gort stood about six feet away, incomprehension befuddling him as he saw my face. From the rear in my rich black wig I could easily pass for Mrs. Ronalds. Face-to-face he saw a different woman.

  “But you’re not—”

  “No,” I said. “The name is Fitzmaurice. John Fitzmaurice’s daughter. The Fenian girl.”

  I was drawing my gun as I said these deadly words. Terror banished puzzlement from Gort’s face. He threw up his hands as I fired, aiming point-blank at his chest. My little gun sounded like an artillery piece in the closed room.

  “Oh, my God, I’m shot,” Lord Gort screamed in a shrill woman’s voice.

  He whirled, clutching his chest, and staggered toward the door. I fired two more shots that I know struck home, but still he stayed on his feet. From the beginning Dan had argued that he should use his heavier gun with its far more destructive bullets, but I had insisted on my right to vengeance. Now beside me I heard Dan curse, and an instant later his gun boomed. The impact of the single shot sent Lord Gort hurtling out the door into the hall on his face.

  We raced for that same door. As we rushed toward it, a terrified face, then the body of a young girl, no more than ten or eleven, appeared in it. She was wearing a white organdy dress with a blue sash, not unlike ones I had worn at that age. She flung herself on Lord Gort, screaming, “Father, Father!”

  Incredibly, Gort was still alive. Blood gushed from his back onto the girl’s dress. He flailed at her. He was trying to crawl away. We burst into the hall and confronted Lord Gort’s wife and two other daughters, both younger than the girl on her knees, and the butler. The wife and the two other girls were shrinking back, screaming hysterically.

  We stood there for a pandemonium-filled second. I was numb with the horror and shock of it. Nothing had happened as I imagined it. I had envisioned Gort toppling, dismay and fear on his face, from a single shot, then swift escape while servants cowered beneath our guns. Somehow I had even avoided noticing that Lord Gort was married and had children, daughters. The Sassenach was human!

  If I had been alone, I might have died there. I might have handed my gun to that young girl and whispered, “We are even, now you may kill me.” My hatred, which I had imagined was as imperishable and impenetrable as tempered steel, had vanished. I see now that it had been shriveling, withering, from the day I landed in Ireland and began to doubt the cause. This scene of horror and death had been a final ruinating blow.

  But Dan McCaffrey had been ordered to kill Lord Gort and paid a thousand dollars to do it. He had seen ten thousand men die in four years of war. No doubt some of them had cried out and tried to run and may even have had a friend if not a daughter plead for them when they fell. But war—which was what we claimed to be fighting here—allowed no place for soft hearts or guilty nerves. Brutal years of experience were Dan’s armor against the weakness that was disabling me. With a snarl he shoved the daughter aside and aimed a final shot into the back of the dying man’s head. The gun crashed amid the echoing screams.

  And crashed again. The butler had seized a sword from the wall and rushed heroically at us, like a man from another century. His reward was death.

  “Come on,” Dan roared, and seized my arm with a wrench that almost amputated it. The pain was what I needed to restore some semblance of reality. We raced for the front door. Behind us the screams continued, with one voice, a daughter’s voice, louder than the rest: “You’ve killed my father! Killed my father!”

  Outside, Red Mike was on the coachman’s box and the horses were turned to the gate. We sprang in and were instantly on our way. Out the gate we rumbled and down the road to the north. As we expected, there was no pursuit. In ten minutes of furious driving, we were at the turn to our forest track. Into it we crept. There stood our chaise and faithful gelding, still munching a bag of oats we had provided for him. We leaped from the coach and struggled back into our middle-class clothes. Fiercely to work went Hanrahan, our makeup artist. In ten minutes we had recaptured the wrinkles and gray hair of old age. Dan’s mustache was in place, and the handsome young couple who had called on Lord Gort had vanished as if they never existed. Red Mike put on countryman’s clothes and discarded the black-haired wig he had worn as our coachman. He lay down beneath our feet in our chaise, and we covered him with a blanket. In ten minutes we emerged from the woods and trotted sedately up the north road around that end of Lake Fergus and headed back to Limerick.

  About a mile from the city, on a deserted stretch of road, Mike slipped from beneath the blanket and headed for the railway station on foot. By nightfall, if all went well, he would be in Cork. Within another day or two he would be aboard an immigrant ship for America. Mr. and Mrs. Stowecroft would take a train to Dublin and resume their sightseeing.

  “What happened to you in there?” Dan said, as we left Mike behind us on the road.

  “It was the blood—and the children.”

  Dan nodded. “I was afraid it was goin’ to be messy. Shootin’ a man in his own house.”

  “I’ll never get it out of my mind.”

  “Yes you will. I remember the day I got my first Yank. Split his head with one swing of my saber. I was sick as a skunk for a while. Then they killed some of my friends and I killed a few more of them. It stopped botherin’ me.”

  “How? Why did it stop?”

  “It just does. You stop thinkin’ about it. You tell yourself to stop and you do.”

  I wondered if I could ever learn to do that. Or would I hear for the rest of my life that girl’s parting scream? “You’ve killed my father.” Desperately I searched within myself for my hatred. I all but prayed for it to return, to armor me once more against thought and feeling. There was nothing within me now but a hollow dread. I stared at Dan’s grim warrior face beside me in the chaise. I had neither love nor hate to console me.

  Honest but Not Level

  Lord Gort’s murder caused a tremendous furor in Limerick. The British garrison was placed on full alert. Soldiers patrolled the streets with fixed bayonets. The crime dominated the conversation at our hotel. We listened, appropriately wide-eyed, while our American friends, Messrs. Balch and Havemeyer, told us the gory story at dinner. They had gotten it from an English officer. The next morning, we rode in a hack through the tense city to the railroad station and boarded a train to Dublin. No one gave the elderly American couple more than a passing glance. In Dublin, after two more days of leisurely sightseeing, we took a steamer to London. We had scarcely time to do more than goggle at the immensity of the imperial capital. At our hotel was an expected cable from Pittsburgh informing Mr. and Mrs. Stowecroft that one of their children was seriously ill.

  We sailed immediately for New York. It was a lack-luster voyage. I let Dan have me when he wanted me, but I could muster neither enthusiasm nor passion. I was still numb from what I had seen and heard at Gort House. I could only wait and hope for my normal feelings to return. My mind seemed detached from the rest of me,
circling my body like a moon around a planet. Again and again, it told me that I did not regret killing Lord Rodney Gort. He deserved to die for what he had done to my father, for what he and his class had done to Ireland’s poor. But my body, my feelings, refused to cooperate with these assertions. The same was true of my feelings for Dan McCaffrey. I had lied to him and to myself about him in so many ways, I could no longer trick rapture from my flesh. I could only watch, in my moon-mind, while my earthly body went through the motions of love.

  In New York we disembarked, a solemn, shuffling pair. One would almost think our elderly disguises had penetrated our very souls. A familiar face and voice temporarily lifted our doleful countenances. Red Mike Hanrahan came prancing toward us in a brand-new suit of violent green and white checks, singing a favorite Irish song, “The General Fox Chase.”

  “They searched the rocks, the gulfs and bays, the ships and liners at the quays,

  The ferryboats and steamers as they were going to sea.

  Around the coast they took a steer from Poolbeg lighthouse to Cape Clear

  Killarney town and sweet Tralee, and then crossed into Clare.”

  “Mike,” I cried, tears starting down my cheeks. “Thank God you’re safe.”

  “I’ve lit a candle or two at the side altar for you both,” he said. “Now come on with me and collect your money. I lost half mine last night bucking John Morrissey’s tiger, but at least I got this new suit out of it. I’ve bought everything new, from the inside out, in the hope of getting the immigrant smell off me. So help me God, I don’t think I’ve taken so many baths in me life as I have in the past two weeks. Steerage stink, they call it. Not a woman will come near me.”

  He had us laughing halfway to Fenian headquarters. Then he turned serious and told us that our bloody deed had caused almost as much of a sensation in New York as it had in Ireland. “Roberts put out a statement that Gort had been executed by order of the Fenian Brotherhood. The newspapers have been battling over it ever since. The Anglos—the Times and Harper’s and their ilk—have been damning us, and the Herald saying hurrah, though not very loudly.”

  “The cowards,” I said.

  “But it worked wonders among the Irish. O’Mahoney and your brother are thrown into the shade entirely. We’ve shown we can strike in Ireland while they’re talkin’ about it.”

  “So the way is clear for Canada?”

  “Yes and no.” Mike said as we entered the noise and traffic of Broadway.

  The sight of the great buildings, the hurrying pedestrians, the tumult of cartmen and coachmen and omnibus drivers, worked magically on my spirits. I wondered if it was New York, its energy, its excitement that I needed.

  “What in hell does that mean?” Dan snapped.

  “We’ve got nothing to worry about from our own dear kind. Nine out of every ten Irish are with us now. But there seem to be signs of trouble in Washington, D.C. They introduced a bill in the House of Representatives authorizing the United States to annex any Canadian province that wanted to join up. Nothing’s happened to it. Everyone goes deaf when it’s mentioned.”

  “Why?” I asked, half-knowing the answer.

  “The Negro. It’s all they talk about in Congress from morning till night. The Negro and the unrepentant rebels, like this bucko. I’ll tell you what. Let’s teach this one the act of contrition and have him stand on the Capitol steps in his Confederate uniform and recite it ten days running. It might work.”

  Mike gave us a crooked grin. I knew he was upset. He always blathered when he feared the worst.

  “What’s to be done?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Roberts thinks—if that is the correct word—that there’s nothin’ to worry about, but I say it’s time for another delegation to Washington. The British are spendin’ money by the ton down there and everywhere. They’ve speakers goin’ around the country tellin’ people the newspapers got it all wrong, they didn’t back the Confederates in the last war, it’s all a dreadful misunderstandin’. And people are listenin’ to them. Even Irish people. I went to a talk by that fellow who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Half the people were Irish. Not a one but me stood up to call him a liar when he started on about the misunderstandin’ of Her Majesty’s policy toward America. Our love of English literature will ruin us yet.”

  At Fenian Headquarters in the Moffat mansion, President Roberts greeted us warmly. “I wish I could give you a banquet and write your name large across every newspaper in the land,” he said in his oratorical style. “But it’s better for your sake and the sake of the cause if your identities remain secret. The mystery will strike added terror into our enemies.”

  “Suits me,” Dan said. “When can I get back to work with the troops?”

  “Colonel O’Neil wired only yesterday, requesting your assistance in Nashville.”

  “I’ll take a train out tonight.”

  “Now, now. You and your lovely partner here deserve a few days’ vacation.”

  “I had my vacation on the boat.”

  The coldness in Dan’s voice saddened me, but I deserved it. I thought mournfully of how I had imagined our trip home, one long orgy of love and triumph. I began to wonder if I was a failure as a revolutionary or as a woman. I neither understood nor foresaw the spiritual crisis I was approaching.

  “I told Bess about our troubles in Washington,” Red Mike said. “She agrees we ought to go down there in force.”

  Roberts shook his head. He began spouting about his “position.” As president of the Fenian Brotherhood, he was a head of state, but Washington would not accord him that recognition. He would be subjecting Ireland to needless humiliation if he accepted this refusal, or involving us in needless quarrels if he insisted on recognition.

  This attitude struck me as plain silly. It was like the ostrich who tried to hide from his foes by sticking his head in the sand. William Roberts was not qualified to lead a daring political enterprise. How I longed for someone with the coolness, the realism, of Fernando Wood.

  I asked after Robert Johnson, from whom I’d heard nothing since our unfortunate meeting in New York. Had Roberts heard from Seward? From anyone in Congress? What was Tammany saying about it all? Roberts gazed at the ceiling. “I’ve been keeping Tammany at arm’s length. Everything I hear about the conduct of Connolly and Tweed since they took over the city fills me with disgust. When we raise our banners high, we want no Tammany mud on them. As for Seward, he equivocates so much it’s pointless to see him. Robert Johnson was never an important part of our plans. He was an insurance policy. The important thing is the proof of American backing that we have in the hands of our men—thirty thousand rifles bought from American arsenals, with enough ammunition for a ninety-day campaign, thirteen batteries of artillery of various calibers, with ammunition, a thousand miles of telegraph wire, ten thousand tents—”

  He reeled off an array of statistics for a good five minutes—all the “sinews of war” that we had purchased from U.S. government arsenals, with the silent blessing of the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of war. “How can they deny such cooperation?” Roberts asked in a tone that implied there was only one answer to the question.

  “All true, all true,” Red Mike said. “But could there be any harm in me and Bess going to Washington, in an unofficial way? Not to represent the Fenian Brotherhood but to make a full report on what we see and hear?”

  Roberts could hardly say no without convicting himself of inexcusable ignorance. He agreed with the plan and advanced the money we needed. Dan McCaffrey watched all this manuvering with sour eyes. He was a soldier. The politics of our enterprise did not interest him. The answer Roberts gave to our worries satisfied Dan. It was proof that a real army, fighting men with guns in their hands, had been brought into being by the Fenians. This was his reality, his profession. Beyond that, he did not at all like the idea of my going to Washington, D.C.

  Back at the hotel, with exclamations of relief we stripped away our disguises.
The crow’s-feet and the withered folds of flesh were scraped away. A bath restored the luster of my hair. Dan’s gray wig and mustache hurtled into the wastebasket. I confronted my Donal Ogue, young and handsome once more. I thought of how he looked that first night in our doorway, his blond hair wild with the rain and wind, the glow of battle in his eyes. Now I saw only puzzlement and hurt. With a gasp of pain I flung my arms around him and pressed my head against his chest.

  “Forgive me for not loving you more,” I said. “Tell me you forgive me.”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

  “You know,” I said.

  “You’re a crazy woman, you know that?”

  “I wish I was blind so I saw nothing, felt nothing, but your hands and lips.”

  It was the first genuine thing I had said to him or to anyone since my hatred possessed me. He left on the five o’clock train for Nashville feeling a little better about his wild Irish girl, even if she did not feel much better about herself. Still, that hour of honesty was enough to steady my shaken nerves and restore my sense of purpose, my commitment to the Fenian Brotherhood, no matter how many doubts I had about its leaders and its goals. I told myself I would somehow find my purpose in my wounded love for Dan, in my continuing wish to strike a blow at British arrogance and greed.

  I had others close to my heart to think about as well. I took my thousand-dollar payment for our murderous mission in Ireland and bought a postal money order with it. I mailed it to my sister Mary in Killarney, urging her to emigrate and bring Mother with her. I felt uneasy about using blood money this way, but I had no choice. I said nothing about seeing her in Killarney or knowing of Michael’s letter. I simply said Michael and I had parted company and he was telling a great many lies about me and Annie.