Leon Uris (30 page)

Dunleer, the landed estate of the Baron Louis de Lacy, lay hauntingly in the lunarscape of Connemara in County Galway. His land stretched over thousands of acres, encompassing dozens of the hundreds of lakes that pocked the area. The barony drifted up to the Twelve Bens, small but respectable mountains of jagged naked stone hovering over a moorlike bog, and a fairy coast of hidden coves and strands and plunging fjords. Most of the mystic de Lacy domain was all but hidden to the eye. Once out of the foothills, a prolific archipelago peppered a water world from the bay out to the open sea.

The de Lacys were old Norman Catholic aristocracy of the legendary “Tribes of Galway” eccentricized by generations of Connemara wilderness. Dunleer demesne was part of the tragic heritage, the land to which Oliver Cromwell had condemned the Irish into exile and mass death.

The present Baron, affectionately called “Lord Louie,” had recently closed out a distinguished career in the British Navy and consular service and had retreated to Dunleer to breed Connemara ponies and continue his mania as a Gaelic scholar.

Lord Louis was also an ardent republican and secretly a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a close confidant of Long Dan Sweeney and Atty Fitzpatrick. Dunleer figured in Brotherhood plans early on, a safe place for men in hiding and a place to store arms.

From the day Conor Larkin made his escape, he was spirited into Dunleer and hidden so deeply, so far back in a lakeside cottage, it would be impossible to find him.

Well now, we had the most hunted head with the greatest bounty on it in our keep. Dan wanted to get Conor out of the country and let a few years pass. Even I could see the rationale of having him leave Ireland, but I feared it, greatly. The man was in no state to take care of himself.

In prison he lived in a survival mode. In Dunleer Conor now had open spaces and time to think. The wound of Shelley’s death would never fully heal, we all knew that. As the weeks passed he still was not able to function normally. He would show the four of us periods of clarity, but the longer he remained clear, the more her murder and his guilt were laid bare.

After a time he’d flare and plunge into a nether world. Conor had locked himself with higher walls than Portlaoise. He was a prisoner of himself. His escapes now were his distorted journeys into madness. He could only face his torment head-on for so long, then fall.

Dan’s frustration had to be tempered by reality. Conor had to be taken out of the country. Only Atty held out now.

“We’ve got to lay it on the table, Atty,” Dan argued to her. “Conor is never going to come out of this. He will never be reliable to the Brotherhood again and he is a danger to himself.”

“Give me some time,” Atty pleaded. “I’ll go to Dunleer and stay with him. Dan, we owe him that much.”

“Seamus, you know him best,” Dan challenged, “will he ever come out of it? And you fucking better speak the fucking truth.”

“Aye, I’ll answer that, Dan,” I said. “Conor has shown us his iron will has an iron will. He has borne the unbearable. Yes, he will find a framework to live in. Yes, he will return to the Brotherhood. But Dan, he can’t do it in five minutes.”

“I’d keep him in Dunleer forever,” Dan said, “if I could. For the moment the Brits are looking in every monastery and church in the country. Sooner or later they will focus on other likely places. If they find him here it would be a disaster the Brotherhood might not overcome. The Brotherhood comes first…over any man…even Conor Larkin.”

“Maybe he never will come out of it, Dan,” Atty retorted, “but to exile him in his condition now might do to him what the Brits were unable to do. It would kill him.”

“Aye, it might well kill him,” I agreed.

“Give me some time, Dan, and I will work with you,” Atty begged.

“All right, Atty, I’ll give you time. It will take us a couple of months to work out a fail-proof escape. I will give you those sixty days.”

Atty took each of our hands and looked at us, fiercely. “I’ll not let him go down!” she swore.

The woman exhausted herself trying to bring him back. Her devotion tested her beyond the breaking point.

Conor would warn her that if she were wise she’d clear out. He saw nothing but death all around him. Well, one does not think of Atty Fitzpatrick crying herself to sleep night after night. Time began to grow short and Atty grew desperate.

At wit’s end, one day, she shrieked at him.

“Damn you! Don’t you think of anyone but yourself? What makes you think you’re the only one who has grieved for Shelley! She was the sister I never had. I adored her!”

Conor blinked in disbelief. He dared emerge from his winter’s cave.

“I let her down, Conor. I failed her! I was responsible for her guard in Belfast.”

“Surely you can’t take that on yourself,” Conor said. “She went into the danger with eyes opened. You were in Dublin. You’re not to blame.”

“I am to blame,” Atty cried, “and my sister is dead.”

She felt Conor’s hands on her arms and he shook her gently. “Why couldn’t I see it? Why haven’t I helped you, Atty…my own self-pity, that’s what!”

Atty tore loose from him. “I’m done in with pain and guilt, man!”

This time the embrace was too powerful for her to run from and she let his power and his compassion wash over her.

And so it was…so it was. The two of them, both traumatized by the brutal murder, made a discovery in each other’s arms.…

It was bound to be. Shelley MacLeod had left them a legacy to care for one another.

I know, for actual fact, that no sexual stirrings overtook them as they clung to each other night after night. Their hunger to overcome the tragedy was now a hunger for continuation of life itself.

Thanks to God for Atty Fitzpatrick. Conor returned to the living in bits and pieces in their bittersweet wilderness. There was no time left for them to discover their capacity to love again, for as he healed and found the will to take charge of himself, the time came for him to leave Ireland.

Lord Louis made a trip to London to see the German ambassador. Although the Germans were supplying weapons to both the Brotherhood and the Protestant Ulster Volunteers, they had reason to cooperate with us in the Larkin matter.

A few months later, Lord Louis and Conor Larkin made their way out of the barony to the nearby fishing village of Roundstone, where his yacht,
Gráinne Uáile
, was docked. They sailed from the small harbor past Slyne Head where a meeting at sea was kept with a small German freighter.

Two weeks later Conor crossed the Canadian border into the United States and made secret connection with
Joe Devoy, the leader of the American Clan of the Gaels. Conor’s mission was to raise funds for arms and an underground newspaper, the two most vital components of future insurrection.

’Twas a beautiful spring day in County Galway. In actual fact, it was raining cannonballs and razor blades, but it was the day that Conor Larkin slipped back into Ireland. His mission in America had been a grand success, separating Irish-Americans who had made it big from substantial mounts of money by his charm and persuasion.

Lord Louis’s Barony of Dunleer had become a small training base as well as the best place to hide men on the run in Ireland. Atty was stuck in a play in Dublin for several weeks and Dan Sweeney had been laid low by illness, so I was first to see him.

I held my breath, fearing the kind of Conor Larkin that might have emerged. My fears were for naught. He was in command of his work and in control of the past miseries. Life as a fugitive, moving by darkness from hiding place to hiding place across Canada and America, had exacted a price, and the “collector” had taken his toll. But thanks to God, he had not turned cynical.

“What about Atty? Are you aching to see her?” I said.

His brow furrowed in thought, showing his aging, but he spoke with a slightly different voice, one that had picked up keen wisdom through time and suffering.

“I’ve had a lot to wonder about.”

“You’re not ambivalent, are you, Conor?”

“I am about both of us. Nothing was promised when I left and we have not been in contact with each other for a long time now.”

“She’s never had eyes for anyone but you, if that’s your concern.”

“I have to tell you, Seamus, I would wake up from a hundred nightmares drenched with sweat until I trained myself to control my own dreams. I clutched up a hundred times when I saw a slim strawberry blonde in the streets and she’d turn and her face would not be Shelley’s.”

“Atty will understand, but she will be devastated if you reject her again.”

“I know that Shelley is dead and Atty is alive. I know, also, that Atty is the strongest person I’ve ever met. She saw me groveling in weakness, totally dependent on her to survive the night. I don’t know what is left of me as a man for this woman. I don’t know if I have the capacity to love, even a different kind of love. She’s too valuable for me to keep dragging her down.”

I heard him now. Shelley had an ethereal beauty. Atty was a fair-sized woman, but everything was in a perfect state and her beauty was a kind that belonged to nobility.

Atty did not have the lithe wispiness of Shelley but made up for it with bottomless inner strength.

Shelley wore her emotions close to the surface. Atty was dark with her real feelings…

Leaving a ponderous question. Can a man emerge from an ultimate tragedy with one love and find another love to walk the rest of the way with?

I did not leave Dunleer dejected. There was an unbreakable thread between them that had held them together for many years and through terrible ordeals. They’d either find it on sight of one another or shortly thereafter, for I felt they could not be in the same country and live their lives apart. Was I wrong?

At first I thought so. Their initial meetings were uneasy, in the midst of Brotherhood business. She came
to me, at last, containing what I felt was a sense of desperation.

“Conor must have a final exorcism of guilt,” I told her. “Shelley has left the two of you a legacy—each other. You’d better take what is rightfully yours, Atty, or walk away and mean it.”

Atty Fitzpatrick, a glorious figure of a horsewoman, rode from the manor house to Conor’s hidden den along Lough Ballynahinch, then into a natural draw at Lough Fadda. At sight of her his heart thumped and a marvelous glow rushed through him and drove him to silliness and he jumped into the icy lake naked and challenged her to follow.

Atty took the dare and threw off her clothing. On seeing that woman bare and coming toward him in the lake, Conor felt that wonderful stirring again, only slightly modified by the freezing water. He carried her from the lake and wrapped her tightly in a blanket and dried her.

The sky closed in, ugly, billowing down the bens and making the landscape all gray now. The cottage grew deadly silent with anxiety. As he knelt and pondered at the fire, Atty filed away the dinner dishes.

“Conor,” she said calmly but with utter finality, “I’ll wait no longer. My bedroom door will be open tonight. If you don’t come to me, it will be closed forever.”

Conor looked to the comfort of the bottle, but as the heavens burst apart he found himself wandering in the rain outside, screaming to the unkind gods and to Shelley to free him.

His soggy figure filled her door frame, the clothing lashed against his body, still fine of structure. Atty rose from her chair and stood beside the bed and took her blouse off and opened her breasts to his sight. Her skirt fell to the floor.

“I’ve waited so long,” she managed to murmur.

Conor moved in slowly and kicked the door shut behind
him leaving them both as giant figures dancing in the lamplight.

“You’re glorious, Atty,” he said, “and I’m going to love you with all of my soul.”

I can vouch that their fears of the moment had melted by morning, when I made an unsaintly visit to their cottage. They came to the cottage door, arms about the other’s waist, half-croaked from weariness and dazed by the wonderment of discovering one another. It was forever after. And this was the love that brought him peace for the first time in his life. Strange, that in the imminent danger of the Brotherhood they discovered a constant sense of bliss and serenity.

After that, when the two of them were together, their eyes always seemed to be tied to the other’s. It became as right as anything could be between a man and a woman. They had arrived at a good place only after mutual grief and longing. But they had discovered their own fine high meadow and had great strength and compassion to draw upon. The unity of their life’s work did not hang over them like a guillotine.

How’s it all going to end, Atty girl? There was no normal life for them. He would never live another day as a free man. He would always be Ireland’s most wanted fugitive. She knew in her innards that Conor would author his own demise before he turned into a musty wheezing number like Long Dan Sweeney, brain soaked with revolution and unaware of the gnarl of bare walls and sheetless cots and sunlessness. So long as Conor was walking through, she would walk with him.

They both confided in me that Shelley came to them individually, often at first, but always in such a manner as to bring a smile of sweet memory and never as a threat.

In the months and years that followed Conor’s return, the
Irish Republican Brotherhood took its first tottering steps, but it was developing two hearts and two heads.

In Dublin, the Supreme Council set the lofty philosophical canons, published the underground newspaper, arranged our scanty finances, and made a firm political alliance with the legal Sinn Fein Party led by Arthur Griffith. The Council was partly quite capable, greatly visionary, Irishly irresponsible, and always argumentative.

Conor Larkin became the big fellow outside of Dublin, refusing a seat on the Council that would compromise his growing independence. Constantly on the move, Conor trained a few hundred men and broke them into highly secret skilled units. Using former soldiers of the Boer War as instructors, his elite squads drilled in countryside sabotage. Scattered all around Ireland, Conor picked out a dozen tempting targets for each unit, and each unit learned what there was to learn about these targets and conducted dummy exercise after dummy exercise for the day they would become operational.

Conor ran the arms-smuggling operation, manufactured some small arms at Dunleer, and established a dummy company in Belfast under the guise of an Ulster sporting club. The “club,” fronted by Protestant sympathizers of the Brotherhood, was actually allowed to import weapons by a quasi-legal route used by the Ulster Volunteers.

I think Conor’s masterwork was the Brotherhood’s espionage network. Our lads in the constabulary and in Dublin Castle kept us informed that there was fine intelligence on every move the British made.

The bedrock rule of Conor’s elite squads was not of things particularly appreciated in the Irish psyche: discipline, patience, silence, physical readiness, and moderation.

The loyalty of Conor’s men to him made the Supreme Council nervous. There was constant grumbling over Conor’s secrecy and fears that he was forming a personal army.

Louis, Atty, Dan, and I knew that Conor had no aspira
tions for personal power and so long as Dan Sweeney supported Conor there was little the Council could do, but the old man was slowing down and wearing out. So, the brilliant minds on the Council came up with a highly suspect tactic. With Dan’s approval, they voted for Conor to succeed Dan as chief of staff. This move would compel Conor to have Council approval on his plans.

Like the great Caesar himself, Conor rejected the throne with the terse message, “An underground army is not a democratic institution and that goes double for an Irish underground army. If you can’t live with that, fire me.”

Conor’s answer was very clear indeed.

However, that grand old war that England was going to engage in on the European continent was about to erupt, and this brought on a whole new set of circumstances.

Should the Brotherhood declare Irish independence in the event of war? Should the Brotherhood’s elite units become operational? Would the Irish public look kindly on the Brotherhood’s attacking the Crown while tens of thousands of Irish lads served in the British Army?

The Irish Party under John Redmond caved in in the mother of Parliaments, pledging Irish loyalty in any coming war and taking the Home Rule Bill off the table till such a war ended. It was repugnant to even the most simple-minded Irishman, the last hurrah of a party that had begun with such promise under the late Charles Stewart Parnell.

The Sinn Fein Party—“Ourselves Alone”—swiftly moved into the political vacuum created by the vanishing Irish Party.

As for Ulster, they had made themselves immovable on all matters. In a blood-curdling crescendo, the Protestants took an oath of covenant, swearing to fight to the last drop to keep Ulster British.

Back to the matter of naming Conor Larkin as chief of staff designate. It was apparent even to me, Conor’s most ardent supporter, that the Brotherhood could not go north
and south at the same time. I understood Conor’s ethereal moods and his drifting off into his own universe better than anyone. He had established himself as a loner from the time we were lads up in the heather above Ballyutogue.

Before the British ambush at Sixmilecross, Conor had acted largely on his own in setting up the gunrunning scheme on the Red Hand engine.

After the ambush, he defied Brotherhood orders to enter a guilty plea.

From the moment Conor returned to Ireland after his escape, I realize, he had thought his way through the ideological swamps and had come up with his own plan of what was possible. He must have realized that he could not accomplish what he had planned under the burden of being chief of staff. Indeed, were there deeper and more dire reasons why he refused the Brotherhood’s command? Perhaps it was something very simple…that Conor had never given an order to have an informer kneecapped or executed. Part of him was still a poet, a gentle man. Did he lack the needed sense of “killer,” and did he realize it?

I caught up with Conor at the hideaway over Sam Grady’s Monument Works in Cork. I locked us in with a couple of bottles and a view down to the latest tombstones awaiting delivery from Sam’s yard. He knew what I was up to and I knew he knew, so we slid into it gingerly.

“The organization can’t keep going like it is.”

“It can and it will,” Conor said.

“I know your opinion of the Council but can you blame them for fearing a one-man rule?”

“So long as Dan Sweeney knows every move I make and approves it, the Council should be satisfied. The more they know about clandestine plans, the more vulnerable those plans become. We’ve a long and tormented history of informers, Seamus. It’s the bane of Irish life.”

“Then that’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“Everyone knows you are reluctant to give an execution order.”

“That’s part of it.”

“Then we’ll relieve you of the burden. All executions will have full Council approval in the future. You’ll have nothing to do with giving the orders.”

“That’s a British kind of word game, Seamus. Informers must be put away if we are to exist.”

“But you won’t do it?”

“Aye, and I do not aspire to be chief of staff.”

“But, Jaysus, you’re running the show now.”

“Then take my resignation back to the Council.”

“Shit, man!”

“Control yourself, runt.”

“Shit, Conor! Now you fucking listen to me. I’m Seamus O’Neill, the most loyal man you’ll ever know. But you’ve had a wild hair up your ass driving you crazy since we were kids. Think I don’t know you’ve dirty doubts? What are they, Conor? Why won’t you take command of the Brotherhood?”

“Because I’m not a liar,” he snapped suddenly. “I won’t command men I’m lying to.”

“Well now, it’s becoming interesting,” I said.

“You’d better start emptying the bottle, Seamus, because you won’t want to be sober after you hear what I’ve got to say.”

I respectfully did as he suggested. His face, always glowing with kindness, grew dark and hard-edged. In these moments his years of agony pushed through and I saw the rebel boy’s cynicism.

“Let me ask you a question, Seamus. Would the Catholics of Ireland ever, of their own free will, declare themselves a part of England?”

“That’s pretty stupid, Conor.”

“Is it? Let me ask it again. Would Catholic Ireland freely declare itself loyal to the Crown?”

“Of course not,” I said fearing what was coming.

“Then what makes you think that Protestant Ulster will
ever openly and willingly declare themselves part of Ireland?”

“We know all that, Conor,” I replied angrily.

“And do you know that the Ulsterman is incapable of rising above self-imposed ignorance fired by raw fear? Their minds have become vacuums and under the total manipulation of preachers who have shut out the light and air of ideas and beauty. Ulster has enslaved itself. The only ecstasy they are capable of is to demonize themselves into religious fanatics and sorely mistake their unlimited capacity for hatred as some form of joy.”