Rubbing her smudged cheeks, she made her way back down Cupar Street to the remains of her home. Choking back sobs, she peered into the smoking rubble, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Where was Mam and Da and the others? Two black lumps lay in the center of the floor, one on top of the other. Meghann ventured further into the room and bent down to study the curiosities more carefully. She was ten years old and had never seen a dead body. She recognized her father’s jacket and trousers, but where his head should have been was a mangled pulp of mess and blood.
“Da?” she whispered, holding out her hand, afraid to touch. Beneath him lay her mother, flat on her back. Her dark hair, normally so smooth and tidy, was caked with dirt, her face gray with ashes but still reassuringly familiar.
Meghann’s voice quavered. “Mam, it’s Meggie. Wake up. Please, wake up.” She was crying in earnest now, silver tracks running through the dirt of her face, her breath coming in great hiccuping gasps.
Through the darkness, a voice spoke and a gentle hand sifted through her hair. “There, there, child, it will all come about. You’ll see.”
Meghann lifted her head and stared. Where moments before there had been only darkness and silence, now stood a striking woman with long red hair and green eyes dressed in the robes of a postulate. Outlining her figure was an odd pale light, or perhaps it was only the whiteness of her clothing that gave her that netherworld aura. “My mam won’t wake up,” Meggie whimpered.
Her eyes warm with sympathy, the woman beckoned Meghann to her. “Poor darling. Come, sit beside me.”
Meghann felt no fear. Sighing, she sat down in the circle of the stranger’s welcoming warmth and leaned against her. Within seconds she was asleep. Two hours later Michael Devlin found her alone in a corner, still unconscious, her face streaked with tears, her hand clutching her mother’s brooch.
In the worst of the chaos, Annie had remembered her godchild and insisted on learning the fate of her neighbors on Cupar Street. Michael volunteered to find out and when the worst of the night had passed, he slipped through the entries and the empty, burned-out homes to the waste that only yesterday had been a neighborhood of families, grocery stores, taverns, and shops.
He took one look at the mutilated bodies of Meghann’s parents and, for the first time in his life, cursed like a man.
Meghann woke and looked up, her eyes very bright against the black grime covering her face. At first she didn’t recognize the thin, black-haired boy with fury spewing from his lips. But when his face gentled and she saw the blueness of his eyes, she knew him. She stood and ran straight into his arms.
Instinctively Michael closed them around her, holding her against his chest, feeling her tears soak his shirt. “Hush, love,” he murmured against her hair, “It’s all right now. I’m here t’ take you home with me.”
Her words were muffled against his chest. “Are they dead?”
Michael closed his eyes. Never before had such a responsibility been his. “Aye, Meggie. But you’ll see them again in heaven.”
This Meghann could understand. Meghann knew all about heaven and that other place she wasn’t allowed to mention.
Michael set her away from him and searched her face. “Will y’ come with me now?” he asked gently.
Nodding, she tucked her hand in his and walked with him down the middle of Cupar Street, keeping well away from the dark, smoking buildings.
They were a stone’s throw from the monastery when shots rang out between the men positioned at the Springfield Road barricade and the torches from the Shankill. Frozen with shock, the children watched as row upon row of homes went up in a display of fiery explosions.
Michael dragged Meghann into the church, pushed her to the floor and covered her body with his. Minutes passed, or maybe it was hours. He couldn’t tell. Meggie was warm beneath him but she hadn’t moved in a long time. “Meggie?” he whispered into her ear. “Are you alive?”
Her head moved up and down. He breathed a sigh of relief and reached down to help her up when he heard pounding and angry voices at the door. “Bombay Street is burning, Father,” a man shouted. “Ring the bell. We need more help. Ring the bell.”
The cry was taken up by a dozen more voices. “Ring the bell. Help us, Father. Ring the bell.”
Father McLaughlin’s resonant voice silenced them. “I’ve called the barracks. The army is already on its way. We can’t risk the bell. They’ll hear it in the Shankill and come for us.”
Michael had seen British troops assemble on the Falls Road, separating the Catholics of Clonard from the Catholics of Springfield, sandwiching the Protestants in between. He shook his head at the foolishness of a British captain who couldn’t read a map. There was only one solution.
“Stay here, Meggie,” he whispered urgently. “I’m going t’ ring the church bell. Don’t move until I come back.”
Again the brief nod. She was conscious. Hopefully she understood.
The door near the altar led to the belfry. Michael climbed the stairs two at a time until he reached the bell. Grasping the rope, he pulled with all his strength. The clear, piercing chimes peeled through the smoke-filled air of the Falls, across the Springfield Road barricade and the silent streets of the Shankill until even the meager showing of tourists, safe in their lodgings on Malone Road, stopped their conversations and listened.
“Mother of God. We’re in for it now.” Father McLaughlin crossed himself and ran to the belfry door.
As it turned out, nothing on that unholy night had been as effective. For the first time since the riots began the British Army marched toward the sound of the bell and came upon Cupar Street, heart of the war zone. Hardened men raised on stories of Irish terrorism took one horrified look at the devastation, dropped their weapons and stepped forward to wield fire hoses, lift the injured to stretchers, bandage wounds and flag down automobiles to evacuate the homeless.
The rope tore through the skin on Michael’s hands. Blood ran up his arm and into his shirtsleeves before he dropped the rope and fell back against the narrow wall. His slight body shook with pain and rage and something new, something that Catholics from the Falls rarely experienced.
Father McLaughlin, his round head and frayed Roman collar appearing above the trap, recognized it immediately. Michael Devlin, fists clenched in the fighting stance that all lads in the slums learned soon after taking their first steps, appeared lit from inside with pride.
The priest climbed into the belfry, pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. “As I live and breathe, it’s Mick Devlin. What in the name of heaven are you doing, lad? Was it you who pulled the bell?”
“Aye, Father, I did.”
“You’re a brave lad, but I fear they’ll be down upon us in no time.”
“There’s nothing worse can be done, Father. They’ve burned out Bombay and Cupar Streets. Half of Kashmir is gone, and most of the houses on the Springfield Road.” His eyes burned. “Meggie’s family—” he stopped unable to continue.
“Dead?”
Michael nodded.
“What of the little girl?”
“Downstairs on the floor.”
“We’d better see to her.” The priest clasped Michael’s shoulder affectionately. “Come along now, lad.”
Meghann was exactly as Michael had left her, with her face pressed into the crook of her elbow. Her pallor and the stillness of her body worried the priest. It wasn’t until he lifted her into his arms that she moaned and buried her face in the folds of his neck. He offered up a prayer, thanking God that she was unharmed except for the hidden wounds afflicting her heart. Father McLaughlin had spent enough time in the confessional to know that she would heal, except for the scars that would mark her forever.
They passed only one patrol on the silent, burned-out streets and were allowed to pass without questioning. Perhaps the sight of a schoolgirl in a plaid jumper with flame-lit coppery hair, a sharp-cheeked boy, his mouth tight with pain, and a Catholic priest whose level gray eyes brooked n
o interference, shamed them. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps they’d waged enough of King William’s war that day, wanting nothing more than a dram of whiskey, a bowl of hearty stew, and the comfort of a strong pot of tea.
Annie Devlin took one look at her son’s face and another at Meghann’s and reached out to pull them all, girl, boy, and priest, inside the well-lit room. Clucking under her breath, she bustled about lighting the stove, filling the bath, and pulling out clean sheets and a quilt to make up Bernadette’s old room.
Not until Father McLaughlin, restored by a sweet bun and a pot of tea, left for the monastery and Meghann was washed and sent to bed did Annie sit down beside Michael and demand to know what happened.
Stone-faced, Michael spared her nothing. Words describing the horror of the night that would make television screens the world over, with the exception of those in British living rooms, tumbled from his lips.
Two of Meghann’s sisters working in hotels outside of Belfast had escaped their parents’ fate. But the boys were dead, two gone up in flames trying to run the barricade into the Falls and another blown up by his own petrol bomb as he lobbed it over the Peace Wall.
It was never really decided that Meghann should stay with the Devlins. She simply settled in, and by her eleventh birthday it seemed as if she had always been there. The boisterous Devlin boys minded their manners with Meghann as they never had with their older sister and some of Meggie’s serious dignity wore off with the constant barrage of teasing and practical jokes administered by Michael and his brothers. Sometimes Annie would see an expression flit across Meghann’s heartbreakingly expressive face that would make her bite her lip and blink quickly. But it never lasted for long. No one born in the Falls grew to adulthood without experiencing a good deal of personal tragedy. Still there was a serene, otherworld quality about the little girl that made Annie feel protective, more than with her own children.
As Meghann grew, so did her love for learning. It was quite clear that she would go on to university and, as Michael was already there, the two spent a great deal of time poring over the books. Annie smiled fondly at the two of them, their heads together, Meghann questioning, Michael pondering before answering her. It was good to see children enjoying their schooling. She had given up hope of any more of her children learning anything but the basics. With the exception of Bernadette and Michael, none of them had shown any interest in books. Not that there was any point in a Catholic educating himself in Northern Ireland. Learned or not, there were too many Protestants anxious to fill the best jobs. If Annie had looked beyond the pleasant sight of her son and goddaughter attempting to better themselves, she would have seen what was still an unformed notion in the girl’s mind.
Meghann was fourteen years old to Michael’s eighteen, but already she felt the tension between them and knew, long before he did, that it was only a matter of time before he noticed it too.
While Meghann was gentle, unobtrusive, and enviably serene, she was also intelligent and singularly focused on whatever goal she set for herself. She wanted Michael to notice her, and she knew him well enough to understand that he wouldn’t be pushed. The realization that little Meggie McCarthy was growing up must come from him. He was his own man and would not appreciate an adolescent girl setting his pace for him. Meghann didn’t mind waiting. After all, she was quite young and would most likely improve as she grew older.
But Michael posed another problem. He was tall and lean as a deer rifle, and his sharp-cheeked, square-chinned features set beneath startling blue eyes were attracting a great deal of attention among girls his own age. It would not do to have him become attached to someone else before she had time to grow up. It was time to act, even if nothing could come of it until later.
And so it was that Michael, on his way home through the entry from Blaehstaff’s pub, came upon Malachy Conlin kissing Meghann McCarthy as if he had been doing it for a very long time. Rage swept the shock from Michael’s brain and within seconds a very bruised Malachy, blubbering that he would never do it again, ran home holding his nose.
Breathing as if he’d run a great distance and not all from trouncing Malachy, Michael turned on Meghann. “What in bloody hell were y’ doing?”
Keeping her eyes on his face, she shrugged. “No one has ever kissed me before. I wanted to know what it was like.”
“We kiss y’all the time.”
She looked at him disdainfully. “I wanted t’ know what it’s like when a man kisses a woman.”
Under his breath he muttered a word that Meghann had never heard. “Malachy Conlin isn’t a man.”
“No.” Meghann rubbed the toe of her shoe in the loose dirt. Pink-cheeked at her own daring, she looked up at him through her lashes. “But you are.”
He stiffened warily. “What does that mean?”
She spilled it out in a tumble of words. “If y’ don’t want me kissing Malachy, why don’t you kiss me instead?”
He stared at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re a child,” he managed. “It wouldn’t be right.”
“I suppose not.” Meghann picked up her books, dusted them off and started to walk away. “I’ll ask someone else.”
“Meggie, wait.” Michael’s hand was on her arm. “If y’ really must have it, I’ll be the one.”
Delighted that his capitulation had come so quickly, Meghann repressed a smile, lifted her lips and waited.
Strong hands gripped her upper arms and Michael lowered his head. “Close your eyes,” he said hoarsely.
She closed them and his lips touched hers in a chaste salute. The firm pressure unnerved her and after a moment she stepped back, blushing furiously.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Is that always the way it is?” she asked curiously.
“Why?”
“Malachy’s kiss was different. His mouth was open and he—”
Michael groaned. “Meggie. Have y’ no shame?”
“Is kissing shameful?”
“No,” he said, furious at his own inconsistency.
“Then why should I be ashamed?”
Michael was baffled. He’d completely lost control of their conversation and worse, he couldn’t think of a single reason to dissuade her from what she was determined to have from him. He only hoped no one saw them together. His mother would kill him and there would be no end to his brothers’ teasing. “All right, Meggie,” he said at last. “I’ll show y’ the proper way of it.”
Dutifully she lifted her lips again and closed her eyes.
He took the books from her arms and dropped them beside her. She waited for the grip of his hands on her shoulders but it never came. This time one arm circled her waist to pull her close and the other reached behind her to cradle the back of her head. She felt the beat of his heart against her chest. His sure fingers sifted through her hair as if he’d explored the way many times before.
This time the kiss was neither chaste nor sweet nor warm. It was electrifying and insistent, his lips moving against hers, his tongue sweeping through her mouth, tasting, filling, pleasuring, seducing until she forgot everything, even the need to draw breath.
When Michael lifted his head and saw her swollen mouth and dilated pupils, he realized what he’d done. Every schoolgirl between ten and marriage believed that tongue-kissing was a mortal sin. Meggie probably thought she was going to hell. “My God, Meggie,” he breathed. “I’m sorry. I never meant—”
She shook her head and pulled away, hoping he couldn’t see what he’d done to her. “Don’t.” She sounded nothing like herself. “It’s all right. I asked you. I didn’t know—”
Michael waited for her to finish, but she never did. Turning, she ran through the entry and into the street without a backward glance. He picked up her books with shaking hands and slowly followed her home.
Fifteen
Meghann remembered other riots in the Falls, the later ones much worse than the bombing of Cupar Street. But none affected her as much
as the one that had left her orphaned. In 1972 the loyalists had gone on a rampage, evicting Catholic families, burning schools, and bombing churches while the British Army watched from the sidelines. This Rape of the Falls, as it came to be known, caused such devastation that entire streets were leveled to the ground. The Housing Authority erected high-rises that forever changed the flavor of the community and became slums far worse than the tenements and row houses had ever been.
Cupar Street was never again inhabited by Catholics or Protestants, and eventually the row houses were torn down and a twenty-foot brick wall known as the Peace Line was erected. There was no more shopping in the Shankill for Catholic mothers, and never again did Protestants and Catholics socialize outside their own neighborhoods. Wrapped in the secure cocoon of the Devlin family and later in the haze of her feelings for Michael, Meghann healed, or so she thought. Bernadette Devlin had brought out the truth on their last walk through the Falls. Meghann had never reconciled Cupar Street. Perhaps it was time.
She unplugged the kettle and slipped on her shoes. There were very few personal belongings in her office. Except for her books, which she would have packed and delivered later, one trip to the car would do it. Tucking Michael’s files into her briefcase, she walked out of the office, through the beautiful mahogany doors, and down the steps to the car park without encountering anyone.
Placing her things in the back, she slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine turned over. Maneuvering the car down the exit ramp, she stopped at the guard tower and waited until the gate opened. A crowd carrying banners had gathered outside the building.
Irish Lady Page 18
