A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  The Voice of the Jersey Devil

  A few days later, I was finishing Rawdon’s French lesson when Hannah, the big, heavy-footed (and-handed) upstairs maid, appeared at the door of his bedroom. “Have y’heard the news, Miss Stark?” she said. “Sure it will make your orange garters pop, it will.”

  “What news?” I said. “This is not the time to interrupt us.”

  “The Fenians are blowin’ up London,” she said. “It’s here in the paper.”

  “Really, now,” I said, my mind frozen to the variations on the French verb aimer that I was teaching Rawdon. Aimer à l’idolâtrie, to idolize, aimer passionnément, to be passionately fond of, aimer mieux, to prefer. Hannah was waving the newspaper like a flag of triumph. Rawdon ran to get it from her. Together we sat and read the story, which was reprinted from the New York Tribune.

  At 4:00 P.M. on September 27, a powerful bomb was exploded in Bowling Green Lane beside the wall of Clerkenwell Prison. A hole ten feet wide was blown in the wall. Houses along the block were leveled and windows smashed for a radius of almost a mile. At least three persons, one a girl of six, were killed and forty, including a dozen other children, were seriously injured. Many more bodies may be buried in the debris. In a letter to the London Times, the Fenian Brotherhood takes credit for the outrage, declaring it to be the opening shot in a war that will destroy London and every other city in England unless Ireland is given immediate unconditional independence. They declare themselves to have unlimited supplies of the new explosive, nitroglycerin, at their disposal and agents throughout England ready to use it.

  “Great!” Rawdon cried. “Don’t you think so, Miss Stark?”

  I could only shake my head numbly. My mind was clotted with images of the mangled bodies of women and children. Was it possible that Dan McCaffrey, the man to whom I had pledged my love, and Mike Hanrahan, who had sent me to this refuge, were committing these atrocities in Ireland’s name? I thought of the words in Michael’s last letter to me. There are some things a man must not do for his country.

  “It’s not an honorable way to make war,” I said.

  “What’s honor to England?” Hannah said. “Didn’t the Americans kill a million here in this country to free the coloreds? Why not kill a few thousand English to free Ireland?”

  “Get out of here, you blatherskite, before I have you dismissed for interfering in my duties,” I said.

  She pranced out, leaving the newspaper behind her. Rawdon read the story again. It was uncanny, his fascination with newspapers. He enjoyed reading little else. He was a typical American of his age. Few of them read anything but newspapers.

  “I’m going to put it in my Fenian scrapbook, anyway,” he said.

  This was the first that I had heard of a Fenian scrapbook. The American Fenians had been quiescent for months now. I asked to see it, and he produced it from beneath his bed. He had been well supplied by the maids. There were all the stories I knew so well, including a vivid account of the exploits of the Fenian girl, complete with an illustration of her famous gunfight on the cliff’s edge at Bantry Bay. There was equally thorough coverage of the murder of Lord Gort and pages of information, little of it correct, on the battle of Ridgeway in Canada.

  “I’d like to marry a girl like that,” Rawdon said, turning back to the story of the Fenian girl. “Someone who was brave. Not like my mother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother was a coward. She cried all the time after Father joined the army. She talked about killing people being a sin. She tried to make me think that way. And she didn’t stop Father from hurting her when he came home.”

  “Hurting her?” I was more and more amazed. “Why would your father hurt her?”

  “What men do to women,” he said. “That hurts them, doesn’t it? They cry and say they don’t want to do it. Cowardly women like mother. But men like Father—they do it anyway.”

  “Where did you hear this? You’re surely having bad dreams.”

  “I got up and listened by their door in the middle of the night. Later, after he went back to the army, I heard Mother telling Grandmother that she never should have let him do it. They were downstairs in the library. They didn’t know I was in the hall listening.”

  “That was a very bad thing to do. Dishonorable. It’s ungentlemanly to listen at doors.”

  He had learned too much to be intimidated by my moralizing. I shifted my ground. “You’re too young to understand everything about married men and women, but I assure you that they don’t hurt each other. They use their bodies to express their love. There’s nothing of hurt in it. It’s beautiful and exalting.”

  “How do you know? Has anyone ever done it to you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, feeling a hot blush redden my face. I didn’t like the way Rawdon was looking at me.

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I’ve read books on it. I’ve talked with older women. Married women.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know. They probably lied to you. Grown-ups lie all the time. I asked Mother why she let Father hurt her. She said she didn’t, but when George was born you could hear her screaming all over the house. It hurt her so much she died.”

  “But your father didn’t know that would happen. He wanted another son. He wanted to give you a brother. Don’t you love George? Isn’t he the sweetest little boy?”

  “Why won’t Father let me near him? Is it because he’s afraid I’ll tell him the truth about how he was born?”

  I was staggered to discover how deep and complex were the roots of the boy’s antagonism to his father. Imagine my uneasiness when Jonathan Stapleton, in the best humor I had ever seen him, appeared at the luncheon table and announced he was in the mood for a drive in the country. He invited me and Rawdon to accompany him.

  It was a beautiful fall day. The trees were turning red and gold on the hillsides before us as we crossed the marsh of the river’s west branch. We rode in a chaise pulled by two powerful trotters, one white, the other black. Jonathan Stapleton made the wheels fairly skim along the plank road, and he scarcely diminished his pace as we entered the hills. The beating hooves made conversation difficult, which I decided was just as well. At length Rawdon asked if he might take the reins. After some hesitation, his father agreed, but he proceeded to give Rawdon so many orders and admonitions that after a mile the boy quit the task in a rage. Jonathan Stapleton grimly resumed control.

  After about a half hour, we turned off the main road and laboriously climbed a narrower winding path to the top of a considerable height, probably tall enough to merit the name of mountain. From the summit there was a marvelous view of the city, the river, and the rolling country southward to the coastal plain. We watched a toy train chug along a track no wider than my thumb.

  “This is my favorite spot,” Jonathan Stapleton said. “Somehow, it relaxes my mind, just thinking of it. My brothers and I used to picnic here when we were boys.”

  “Can I go look at the mine?” Rawdon said.

  “Yes. But don’t go inside,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

  As Rawdon disappeared around a curve in the road, the father continued his reverie. “My brother Charlie, who tended to be blasphemous, used to reenact the temptation of Jesus with me as the Savior. He used to do it American style. ‘Unanimous votes shalt thou have in the legislature, and perpetual control of the congressional delegation. A gold pass for first-class passage on the New York Central.’”

  “What grand fun that must have been,” I said, delighted to hear him recalling happy memories.

  I saw him rub his eyes and detected tears on his cheeks. I quickly turned away and wondered if we should find Rawdon. “What did he mean by a mine?” I asked.

  “The family’s old copper mine,” he said. “It was worked out a year or two before the Revolution. We used to go down in it, against Father’s strict orders, of course.”

  “Let us hope Rawdon is more obedient,” I said.

  I sus
pected it was a vain hope even as I said it. Sure enough, there was no sign of Rawdon at the entrance to the mine, a gaunt square aperture in the limestone cliff face. We halooed in vain. Jonathan Stapleton began to look very angry. “It’s one thing to disobey a general prohibition,” he said. “Boys have done that since time began. But to disobey your father to his face—”

  “Rawdon!” he bellowed into the mine.

  No answer.

  We ventured down the narrow passage, which sloped steeply into the bowels of the mountain. I slipped and fell against Jonathan Stapleton, who caught me with one of his long arms and pressed me close to him. “Rawdon,” he said. “I’m getting angry. Come out of here immediately. If you’re there, answer me.”

  Not a sound.

  We continued, with the light from above fading and him still holding me in a way highly indelicate for an employer and a governess. He stopped and began lighting matches to guide our way. I saw that the walls around us were oozing moisture and noticed passageways that ran off to right and left.

  Suddenly the narrow tunnel was filled with an eerie wail. An oracular voice said, “Greetings, General Stapleton. This is the Jersey Devil.”

  I felt Jonathan Stapleton’s arm tighten around me. The match in his hand went out. He fumbled another match from his pocket and tried to strike it, but the wet walls prevented him.

  The voice wailed again, then resumed. “I have come for your soul, General Stapleton. I have lured you down here to collect your soul. We will continue together in our downward journey to join the legions of the dead.”

  “Stop it, Rawdon,” Jonathan Stapleton said. I felt his heart pounding wildly. He was close to mindless panic.

  “Yes, stop it, Rawdon,” I cried. “I’m here, too, and you’re frightening me.”

  Jonathan Stapleton finally struck another match. An instant later, a shape sprang from the darkness and scampered past us up the slope. Jonathan Stapleton released me. I gazed into his pale, twitching face. It oozed moisture like the walls. He seized my arm and half dragged, half carried me back up the passage to the surface. There stood Rawdon, smiling like an angel, Jonathan Stapleton stretched him on the ground with a blow to the face.

  “I told you not to go in there,” he roared.

  “I only wanted to play a joke,” Rawdon said, clutching his bruised cheek. “Like Uncle Charlie.”

  “You’re not him and you never will be. It was a rotten joke.”

  At home came more carnage. Mrs. Stapleton had left us to dine with a friend. Since I had come to regard the mother as a subtle irritant, I thought we might have peace, but Rawdon began a whole new argument by asking his father what he thought of the Fenian bombers. Jonathan Stapleton denounced them in the most scorching terms.

  “Only cowards make war on women and children,” he said.

  “We killed a million men to free the Negroes,” Rawdon said. “Why can’t the Irish kill a few thousand English to free Ireland?”

  “I begin to think you’re morally degenerate, Rawdon,” Jonathan Stapleton said.

  “I’m sorry you think so. But I don’t intend to change my opinion, General Butcher.”

  “Rawdon,” I said. “Go to your room instantly.”

  He departed. In a rage Jonathan Stapleton started after him, no doubt to administer another beating. I caught his arm. “Please,” I said. “I’d rather have you strike me. I take responsibility for Rawdon’s opinion of the Fenians. When the maid gave him the newspaper this morning, I was too mild in my disapproval.”

  “But you do disapprove?” he said, still half enraged.

  “Yes,” I said, and began to weep genuine tears. “I’m filled with horror, loathing. It makes me ashamed of my very blood. I find myself wishing I could cease to be Irish.”

  Appalling words, yet true ones, spoken to this American, words that were both a confession and a plea to this man who had come to personify so much of the America I once hoped to find.

  To my amazement his anger vanished. He took my hand. “My dear Miss Stark,” he said. “I know how you feel. I felt the same way when I saw some of the things Americans did during the war. I wanted to quit the race, the country.”

  He realized Jackson and the downstairs maid, Ellen, were watching us and withdrew his hand.

  There was no sleep for me that night. I lay in bed, listening to a cold rain beat on the roof. I was haunted by a new sense of fatality, of having cut loose from the few inner moorings that linked me to my old self. I went on like this for several days, dazed from sleeplessness, while more news of the Fenian bombers filled the newspapers. Each blast shattered another piece of my spiritual landscape. I listened numbly to Rawdon defending the Fenians in the face of his father’s rage. It was absurd on both their parts. My sleeplessness gave me a strange clarity about the cause of their antagonism. For the first time I saw that people were driven by blind emotion to quarrels and hatreds that had nothing to do with their true feelings. These existed beneath the surface of their lives, grappling them the way an octopus seizes a swimmer and blinds him with a gush of his inky fluid.

  One night I heard a clock in the upper hall strike three. I decided to try once more that sovereign remedy for insomnia, a cup of tea. I descended to the kitchen. Within five minutes I was joined by Jonathan Stapleton. This time he did not have his pistol in his hand. Nor did he say he was worried about burglars. He said he was worried about me. And Rawdon.

  “I see the toll these Fenian outrages are taking on you, Miss Stark. I gather you have to put up with stupid sallies from the maids. It’s obvious that Rawdon agrees with them and disagrees with you and me out of sheer perversity. I’ve decided it might be best for you—and him—if we separated for a while. We have another house, Kemble Manor, down on the shore in Monmouth County, where we used to spend our summers. I’d like to send you there. You can hire a local cook. We’ll discontinue his scientific tutor. You can continue his French and English literature and add some American history, for which I’ll give you an outline—

  “Of course, you’ll visit us from time to time,” I said.

  “I doubt it. The less I see of Rawdon, the better.”

  “No,” I said. “You must not abandon him. There’s good in the boy. I don’t agree with your doctrine of moral perversity. I think I know what’s troubling him. It has nothing to do with the war or your role in it. All that is as much subterfuge as the Fenians. It’s a delicate thing that I almost hesitate to broach to you. Rawdon told it to me in a moment of boyish impulse, without an iota of prurience.”

  With a good deal of stumbling and blushing, I told him that Rawdon had conceived the notion that his father had caused his mother’s death. I carefully omitted all mention of listening at doors. “His mind is confused, one might even say ignorant, about the whole process of—of sexual love. He thinks of it as a hurtful thing. He heard his mother’s cries when she was giving birth.”

  I looked up from my teacup to find Jonathan Stapleton staring at me like a man transfixed. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “It cannot be approached directly. It would only rub the wound raw again. You must somehow find the patience to wait for him to grow out of it—to discover a woman’s love for himself. Or better, to see you marry again. Have you not thought of it?”

  “No,” he said. “I—I made such a botch of it the first time.”

  “I—I can’t believe that,” I said.

  His two hands were on the table, gripping each other convulsively. “I’m not a lover by nature, Miss Stark. I’m not at ease in women’s company. I don’t know how to please them. My wife—and my mother—made that very clear to me.”

  “But—but you can’t let the verdict of one or two women condemn you for life. Who—who knows what flaws there were in your wife’s feelings for you? For life itself. I want to speak no evil of the dead, but—”

  Now I saw the wound within the wound, the pain beneath the pain, in this man’s haunted gray eyes. I wondered if it was in my
power to heal that wound, soothe that pain. I simultaneously shrank from and welcomed the idea. Perhaps within me I already sensed the possibility of a terrible explosion of love, hope, and desire, that could destroy us both.

  “I—I appreciate your kind thoughts of me,” he said. “I fear they’re wasted. But I’ll accept your feminine wisdom about Rawdon. I’ll try to be patient. I’ll come visit you—often.”

  House of Happiness

  The next morning, Rawdon raced up from the kitchen after breakfast with an Irish-American paper carrying the latest news of the Fenians. I braced myself for more carnage. What I read was something worse.

  FENIAN BOMB FACTORY EXPLODES

  The Fenian bomb war in England may have received a fatal setback if there is truth to a story carried in the London Times on October 15. As police surrounded a house in Warrington, outside Liverpool, it exploded with devastating impact, killing several officers. Two bodies found in the wreckage were said to be Dr. Thomas Gallaher and Michael Hanrahan, both American citizens of Irish descent. Fenian spokesmen in New York confirm that these men were part of the “dynamite brigade” led to England by General O’Neil’s chief of staff, Colonel Daniel McCaffrey.

  Alas, poor Mike, I thought as tears started from my eyes. An end to blarney, an end to bucking the tiger. You have finished something at last.

  “Do you know any of them?” Rawdon said, noticing my agitation.

  “No,” I said. “Besides, we have more important things to talk about. Your father wants us to go away together, to Kemble Manor, and live there for a while.”

  “That’s all right with me,” Rawdon said. “Kemble Manor is a nice house. We used to have fun there.”

  Pleased that he was accepting the transfer so well, I went downstairs in search of Jackson or his wife, Bertha, to learn more about the house and where we could buy food, the sort of cook we might hope to hire, the clothes I might need. I walked into the kitchen and saw a man in a white apron delivering something to Bertha. She stepped over to her cashbox to pay him, and I got a full view of him. It was Patrick Dolan. He stared at me as if I were an apparition. God knows what might have happened if I had not held out my hand and said, “My goodness, is this Mr. Dolan from Limerick? You remember me, Elizabeth Stark? My mother rented a house not far from your parents’ house, remember?”