Cashelmara (68 page)

“Perhaps one day you’ll be saying Mass at the chapel at Cashelmara, Father,” I said, smiling at him, and he said that would be a great day indeed and he hoped so too.

It was a considerable time before Drummond’s escape could be arranged, but this eventually worked to his advantage. It was spring by the time all was ready, and I knew the spell of mild weather would lessen his discomfort as he traveled north back to the valley.

For I insisted on seeing him before he left. I would have entrusted my letter to Charles to no one else, and besides I wanted so much to see him again. It was worth the risk. The thought of seeing him made it possible for me to endure the long months of waiting, and I knew that after the meeting I would have fresh courage for the months that lay ahead.

May came, May the thirteenth, and the promise of summer breathed a magical life into Patrick’s garden.

Drummond escaped. The jailer looked the other way as he filed through the bars on the window and lowered the rope that had been smuggled into the cell, and when he reached the main gates he found them unlocked and the guards asleep. And outside the Brotherhood was waiting to take him through the night to safety in the dark rabbit warren of the Claddagh.

The next night he traveled to Oughterard, and waiting for him in an isolated cabin was a hot meal and a place to sleep before the hearth.

They were searching for him by this time, but of course no one imagined he had gone north. They searched the Galway docks and they combed the Claddagh and they blocked the road to Dublin, but they didn’t find him.

The next night he traveled to Maam’s Cross and the next to Clonareen, where Father Donal gave him clothes and money and helped him bathe, cut his hair and rid his body of lice.

The following morning before sunrise he walked up into the hills and struck westward along the valley to Cashelmara.

“There’s a ruined cabin above Cashelmara,” I had said to Father Donal. “It’s on the mountainside about half a mile from the walls.”

I was quite unable to sleep that night, and I lay awake until I could see the sky lightening beyond Clonareen. I was still terrified that something would go wrong, and when I rose I avoided lighting the candle and dressed in darkness. The night before I had selected a plain gray day dress and a pair of boots suitable for the long walk up the mountainside.

Since there was no light I was unable to put up my hair, but I brushed it in the darkness and tied it back from my face with one of Eleanor’s ribbons. I knew I must look very plain, but I accepted that. Better to look plain than risk rousing MacGowan or Edith by making an elaborate toilette. Besides, I knew I had lost my looks. The strain of the past months had made me haggard, and I had been too thin since Jane’s birth.

Taking a cloak, I wrapped it around me and tiptoed out of the house.

No one saw me. I made an elaborate detour around Patrick’s immaculate lawn and turned uphill through the shrubbery. It was dark in the Azalea Walk, and I was so nervous that I kept stumbling as I looked over my shoulder. But no one was following me, and presently the gray ghostly tower of the chapel rose before me in the trees. I passed it. By this time the backs of my legs were aching because the path led so steeply uphill, but at last I came to the wall that bounded the grounds and the thick wooden door that led onto the mountainside. I fumbled for the key, dropped it, stooped to pick it up. My hand was trembling so much I could hardly turn the key in the lock, but a moment later the door was closing behind me again and I was looking up the bare mountainside toward the ruined cabin.

My feet slipped on the loose stones. I kept thinking: Supposing he’s not there, supposing something’s happened to delay him, supposing something went wrong. For all I knew for certain then was that Drummond had escaped from prison three days before and no one had seen him since.

The sky was growing lighter, and when I looked back for the last time I saw that the dawn was casting great golden fingers across the lough far below.

The doorway of the cabin was empty. I was sure then that he wasn’t there, but I went on, my legs aching, gasps for breath tearing at my throat and tears pricking behind my eyes. A minute later I had to pause; I was too out of breath to continue, and then as I glanced uphill once more I saw a shadow fall across the ruined doorway and I knew with a great joyous surge of relief that he was there.

He had lost weight, but that somehow made him look taller. The lines were deeper about his mouth, but that made no difference to his smile. His hair seemed darker than ever, untouched by silver and shaggy from Father Donal’s scissors.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t even move forward from the doorway to meet me. He merely stepped back a pace, and as I crossed the threshold he took me in his arms and drew me aside so that my back was pressed against the wall.

We still didn’t speak. He began to kiss me. He kissed each cheekbone, each eye, my hair, forehead and nose, and finally he began to kiss me on the mouth. His hands slid from my waist to my hips, then back to my waist, and as they paused before moving upward again I knew I would do anything he wanted.

I was terrified. I managed to say in a halting voice, my eyes blinded by tears, “Please, no … I—I’m not a very … passionate person … so useless … such a failure.”

There was a silence. I could hardly bear the weight of my grief, and so, unable to look at him, I merely strained my ears for the sound of his voice.

At last he asked very gently, “Who told you that? Your husband?” But when I nodded in an agony of shame he threw back his head, roared with laughter and exclaimed incredulously, “And you believed him?”

The distorted glass I had faced all my married life cracked from side to side. I found myself suddenly before a different mirror, and after that there were no words. I simply stared dumfounded at my new reflection until when at last he touched me again my tears were gone and so was the burden of failure I had carried for so long.

I was cured. For the first time in my life I began to live, and the passion burst within me in a vast and violent tide.

[ROGER MORTIMER WAS] DETERMINED
, ambitious … without scruple … reputation for bravery … a way with women … seems to have had all the instincts of a modern gangster …

The Three Edwards

—
THOMAS COSTAIN

SHE LEFT HIM.

She left her husband, she left her home and she even left those children. Of course she had a plan for getting hold of them later, but once she saw that MacGowan would never let her leave with all four children clinging to her skirts, she set out for America alone.

I was already there, waiting for her. I’ll never forget how I waited. All through that summer I waited and all through that autumn into winter. I waited until it seemed I’d been shut up forever in that hell of a city which was surely hotter than hell ever was, with the shirt clinging to your back as early as eight in the morning and the nights so stifling you’d feel it easier to suffocate than sleep. I thought I knew all about waiting after I’d been slammed into the county jail in Galway on a trumped-up charge—Jesus, that jail in Galway!—but I didn’t know a damn thing about waiting until I was shoved off that immigrant boat in New York in the June of 1884.

I had a lot to learn, but I learned it fast, and all the while I was waiting, waiting for Sarah to slip through MacGowan’s net, waiting for the ice to melt on the Hudson River, waiting for her fancy ship to come steaming into New York harbor in the spring. I waited until I couldn’t imagine a time when I didn’t have to wait, and when at last the time came and I didn’t have to wait any more I went down to the docks and I saw her fancy ship come in and it was as if it was all a dream, and indeed I’d have sworn blind it
was
all a dream if the river hadn’t been such a smelly blue and the noise of the wharf hadn’t made my ears ache. That city was beyond belief. It was a bastard place belonging to no one, a roughhouse, a free-for-all, a nightmare trip to purgatory. Dear God, I used to pray, deliver me from evil, danger and the whole city of New York. Amen.

They put the gangway down, a very smart gangway, white and shining, and the ships’ officers in gold-braided uniforms were bowing and scraping over all the smart passengers, and I waited, my eyes straining to see her, my neck aching and my fists clenched and my mouth dry as forgotten bread. I waited and went on waiting, and suddenly, like a miracle, she was there.

I went crazy then. I elbowed people out of the way—New York had at least taught me how to do that—and I heard someone say, “Christ, another drunken Irishman!” (for the prejudice in that city was terrible, with so many nationalities scrambling around the bottom of the ladder of fortune). But I didn’t care about being slandered, I didn’t care about anything except getting to Sarah before that high-stepping brother of hers got there and swept her off to his poky little palace. I saw Charles Marriott, his flunkeys beating a path for him through the crowds, and he saw me, for he flinched as if I were scum from the Five Points. But I reached the bottom of the gangway before he did, I beat him to it, and I was the first to welcome Sarah back to her stinking, swarming, hellhole of a city. She rushed down the gangway, stumbling in her haste, and I rushed up it, and then the worst was all forgotten, the exile, the waiting, the endless, gnawing longing that soaked me in sweat night after night. I grabbed her in such a fever that it was a wonder we didn’t both topple over the side into the water, and all I remembered as I crushed my body against hers was seeing Lord de Salis in court on the day I was sentenced to jail and vowing that I’d lam his lover and lay his lady or else crawl forever dishonored to my grave.

My enemies say I’m nothing but a felon who should have served every day of his ten-year sentence in jail. Even my wife Eileen, who’s never denied I’ve been the victim of injustice, is probably still telling our children that I was no better than a peasant and never had a proper education. But that’s all lies, for I went to the best hedge school west of the Shannon—at least we called it a hedge school because it was still held in the same barn as in the bad old days when the Saxon tyrants had forbidden Irishmen to receive a Catholic education, but in truth it was better than a hedge school and its reputation stretched to places as far away as Clonbur and Cong. Anyway, even before I went to school my father had taught me to read and write. My father was an Ulster man, and the only reason he went to Connaught was because he was the youngest of nine and there was no land left for him at his father’s home near Donaghadee. Now, my enemies say he was a Scotsman, but that’s a lie too; Connaught men will say that about anyone from Ulster, but sure everyone should know there were Drummonds who were bishops in County Fermanagh in days past, and my mother’s family, the O’Malleys, are all descended from Queen Grace O’Malley herself of immortal fame and glory.

So I’m an Irishman to the bone, and as for my first name, which everyone thinks is such a Saxon mistake, all I can say is I was named for a good friend of my father’s. He may have been descended from Scottish heretics, but he must have been a good Catholic, because my father would never have named me for a Black Protestant. Besides, I like my name. It has a ring to it and gives me a confidence which maybe I wouldn’t have had if I’d been called Paddy Murphy. Eileen told me when we were courting that it sounded like a gentleman’s name. I’ve always remembered that. It’s true I was born on a humble farm in Connaught, but I was born with a gentleman’s name.

Anyway the farm wasn’t so humble. Eileen said it was, but it was the best farm in the valley and always was, ever since my father married high up into the O’Malley family and began to work himself to the bone growing wheat and oats instead of contenting himself with only a potato patch. We had twenty-five acres of arable land with another twenty-five acres of bog, and of the arable land ten acres were under crops and the rest was in grass. The land in grass was too rocky and hilly to cultivate, but the sheep liked it and my cows did well too. In the winter the cows would find their way down to the bog and draw up the black rushes, which had white succulent roots over six inches long—indeed, I think the cows flourished better there than they did on the grass. The bog had other uses too, for it gave me heather for bedding my donkey and an ample store of fuel, and I’ll always be agreeing with those who say a little bit of bog is a great thing for a clever farmer.

In the old days the rent we paid was twenty-six pounds, being calculated at one pound per acre for the arable land and one pound for the acres of bog, but after the famine old Lord de Salis favored my father with a special grant of land at a reduced rent. It was a leasehold, which meant the land was as good as ours for fifty years, and we weren’t ordinary tenants any more. Like a miracle it was, I can still remember my mother shedding tears of joy and my father exultant with poteen and singing Lord de Salis’s praises to the skies.

So we lived well, even having books in the house, and Lady de Salis (the old man’s second wife) would call and we were grand, not as grand as Eileen would have liked, perhaps, but grander than any other family on the estate of Cashelmara.

I was the only child. I liked that, for it meant my father always had time for me, and my mother wasn’t driven wild by half a dozen others constantly under her feet. It meant too that there was always enough food and I always wore decent clothes and had a pair of shoes. So whatever Eileen may say I wasn’t giving myself airs when I told her long ago in Dublin that my father was a squireen. I truly did feel myself a cut above the others in the valley for all my mother was an O’Malley and kin to half Clonareen, and when Father Donal told me in my teens that for the sake of my immortal soul I’d best marry young, was it any wonder I looked past all the peasant girls to a schoolmaster’s daughter?

Eileen thought I was good enough for her when we first met in Dublin. Old Lord de Salis had given me money when he sent me to study at the Agricultural College, and I spent most of it on clothes so I wouldn’t have the other students looking down their noses at me. Those Dubliners always look down on a Connaught man if they have half a chance, and sure enough despite all my fine clothes they would look at me as if I were fresh from cutting turf on the bog. I didn’t like the Agricultural College. To be honest, it was a waste of time, all talk about things that didn’t interest me, and when they said I hadn’t enough education to profit from it I thought, Well, if it’s education I need, to the devil with it, for I’m educated enough already. Didn’t I know Latin and Greek from the hedge school and all the classical mythology, and couldn’t I recite every detail of the Battle of Clontarf when Brian Boru (may the saints bless his glorious memory) triumphed over the Vikings? To be sure I was educated! Eileen thought I was when we read the newspapers together and discussed politics. She’d listen well enough when I’d talk of the day of Ireland’s liberation from tyranny, and when I paused for breath she’d say I was certain to end up a politician at Westminster alongside the hero O’Connell.