Of Irish Blood (35 page)

“They’ll enforce their own laws.”

“Exactly,” he says. “Now, the two last women are coming next week—one on Monday, the other on Wednesday.”

“More poets?” I say. I’m joking. I mean, how many more could there be over there?

But Father Kevin only nods, smiles. “They are. Katharine Tynan and Alice Furlong. And speaking of poets, you must ask Katharine to tell you about her friend Hopkins.”

“Who?”

“Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit, the poet,” he says.

“Who wrote patriotic verse?” I ask.

“Not at all. Taught at University College Dublin. Not very happy in Ireland I’m afraid. He was a convert, you know. Never found his footing in Dublin. Still, Katharine tells me he did love excursions into the countryside. She sent me a lovely verse of his. I often repeat the first line to myself: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things.’ Hopkins was one of the family for Katharine and her husband.”

“She has a husband?” I say.

“She does.”

“And he’s alive?”

“He is,” Father Kevin says. “Nice fellow, a barrister. She chose him over Willie Yeats.”

“But I thought Yeats has been in love with Maud his whole life.”

“He has. But he’s practical, too. Tried for other women when Maud married but he’ll be coming around again now that MacBride’s out of the picture.”

God, these people live complicated lives, I think.

Katharine Tynan and Alice Furlong come one after another during the first two weeks of March. I take each one separately on my standard tour. The Panthéon, the Louvre, tea at Fouquet’s, and photographs at the Eiffel Tower. Even being a secret agent can become routine, I think.

Katharine won’t be drawn into any gossip about her proposal from Yeats, but offers to send me a book of poems by Hopkins.

Alice Furlong is the third Alice I’ve had. She tells me she’s published dozens of books.

“They’re popular, thank goodness. I live on the royalties.”

It’s impressive to think that these women not only write books but sell them. I wonder, would anyone buy one of my photographs? I think of Matisse, so obviously anxious to turn his canvases into cash. As much for the approval as for the money, I suppose. But of course, these Irishwomen want to rile up their audience, not just profit from them. Still nice to earn something from your work.

Imagine having one of your books on the shelf in some stranger’s house. Or a painting on the wall, or even a photograph. I try to say this to Alice Furlong and she understands.

“A great feeling altogether,” she says. “As soon as I finish one book, I start writing the next one. My audience expects a steady stream from me.”

“Great,” I say. “But I have to ask you one thing. Why are so many Irish women called Alice?”

“Well, for myself, my mother admired Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice.”

“Oh,” I say. “But I thought Irish people want to get rid of royalty.”

“Oh, not necessarily. And Alice was special. Then she had to go and marry some German. All those princesses seem to do that. But she worked with Florence Nightingale and even questioned the Victorian version of Jesus.”

“You sound as if you admire her, too,” I say.

“I do. Yet I helped Maud stage demonstrations against her mother, Queen Victoria, when she came to Ireland.”

She’s smiling at the memory. “You see the government had organized an outing for Dublin children in the park to meet the queen and eat sweets. They were sure all the little Dubs could be bribed into bowing to Her Majesty. But Maud and I and the rest of the Daughters of Erin put on our own children’s picnic. And thirty thousand children came. Many more than the governments could coerce. A great show and one on the eye for the British.”

She laughs.

“Do they serve Irish whiskey in this place?” she asks me as we enter Fouquet’s.

“Fouquet’s serves whatever you want,” I say. A bit flighty, this Alice. And I’d bet that’s rouge on her cheeks. Attractive in a tweedy kind of way. And the waiter does find a bottle of Jameson’s and brings it to us. We’ll be singing before the evening’s over, I think. I almost wish Monsieur Rugby were here so we could stand up to him, but I haven’t seen him again since that woman who called herself Madame LaSalle came to Madame Simone’s. Father Kevin was very relieved that he hadn’t appeared again.

“They must be convinced you’re innocent,” he said.

Now Alice is sipping her whiskey and telling me, “You know Daniel O’Connell himself could never believe that ‘the little queen’ was coldhearted enough to let millions of Irish people starve. ‘She didn’t know,’ he said. You have to understand, Nora, the Irish people see the royal family as a kind of drama. All the display and plenty of tragedy. Two of Alice’s children died of the blood disease Victoria’s children all seem to have. Odd, isn’t it? That their prized royal blood destroys them. Alice was only thirty-five when she died and it’s her daughter that’s married to the czar of Russia. Their son has the disease.”

“Oh,” I say. “Too bad.”

“And then there’s her niece, Alice, the Countess of Athlone…”

“Irish?”

“No. The royals make up titles for themselves and their friends. Dish them out as rewards. The Baron of Killarney, the Duke of Cavan, the Countess of Donaghmore.”

“And Irish people don’t mind?”

“It infuriates many of us, but for lots of ordinary folk the royals are characters in storybooks who exist in the newspapers and in the songs that are written about them. And the gossip. Rumors about Victoria’s mother and the Irish soldier who ran her household. Maybe the Famine Queen’s not so royal after all. Anyway they’re our time’s versions of Bread and Circuses,” she says. “I suppose you can’t understand as an American.”

“Well, we had our own Alice,” I say, “Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. And there was a song about her. ‘In my lovely new Alice blue gown.’” I don’t sing it.

It’s after her third whiskey that Alice asks me a whole string of questions about John Quinn. I tell her I’ve never met the man.

“But I thought you were one of his women,” she says.

“What?”

And she tells me this long rambling story about how when John Quinn came to Dublin ten years before he’d charmed them all.

“Even Lady Gregory,” she says. “And I believe he and she had, well, a liaison when she visited New York.”

She takes another sip. “Hard to believe. But Augusta is a woman after all. Maud never succumbed. Maybe she’s so good at keeping men at arm’s length because she’s very tall.”

Alice giggles.

“A funny picture that.” And she stretches out her arm as if holding a fellow at bay.

“But me,” she says, “I—well I wasn’t the only one he courted. Mae Morris is another. I understand she is besotted with him—and her an Englishwoman with that famous father. And then he brought his American mistress with him to Ireland. Yeats flirted with her. Caused an awful row. John writes to me but then he writes to us all. Dictates the letters to his secretary.”

“And you thought because I’m an American I was another one of his…” I stop. “For God’s sake, Alice, I’m a suffragist!”

“So am I,” she says. “It doesn’t help.” She finishes off the whiskey.

“Ah well. A broken heart’s not a bad thing for a writer,” she says. “I even sent him a poem.”

She holds up her glass.

“Fueled by this.”

And doesn’t she recite the last verse to me:

“I know you not, I never knew you,

And yet unto you all my heart goes forth,

As the sun-kissed needle seeketh the black north!”

I don’t know what to say. But now this Alice is away with the fairies. Tipsy, Aunt Máire would say.

Sober enough to hand me an envelope of money and a signed copy of her book.

Later that night, I page through her
Heroes and Queens
hoping for a chapter on Maeve and then I think, why not forget the whole idea of royalty? Old Irish nobles or new. Americans don’t miss kings and queens at all. If we want storybook figures, we go to the movies. I think of Maud playing the Countess Cathleen, Ireland as a queen. Why not portray her as a regular woman? And John Quinn. Where does he fit in? All these women have too much imagination. But quite a collection!

Well, that’s it. I’m done. I lodge the last ten thousand francs into my account and ask for a balance. I expect the manager to congratulate me but he just opens a file drawer and takes out a sheet of paper. “Fifty thousand and one hundred forty-nine francs,” he says. And now the hard part.

“I’d like a draft in dollars please,” I say, and begin to explain how I’m buying a house in Chicago and need to send a dollar check but he’s not listening, only smiles, calls in his secretary, and in ten minutes I have the bank draft—ten thousand dollars! Incredible.

But isn’t the Fairy Woman waiting outside. A blustery day and the rue Saint-Honoré jammed with umbrellas.

“Why not just go,” she says. “Leave all this nonsense behind. Italy would be full of sun—or Spain. Haven’t you always wanted to see Granada?”

But I turn away from her. Me, betray the Cause? Never! I’m one of the Women of the Revolution. And I’m delighted with myself when I hand the draft to Father Kevin.

“There,” I say. “I’ve completed my mission.”

“Wonderful!” Father Kevin says. “And with what Peter brings, we should have more than enough.”

“He’s sold the fragment,” I say. “He’s coming back?”

“Nothing confirmed, but I had a note from one of the priests in Louvain. Very short. Prepare the professor’s room. It should be freshened up.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

“You won’t, Nora. No women are allowed on the upper floors except the maids,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. I guess poetry can’t ferry women across some boundaries.

“Now the money needs to be taken to an agent in Strasbourg.”

“Oh,” I say.

“And Strasbourg’s a place where American tourists often visit,” he says. “A place someone like you would want to see.”

“Yes, I’d love to see Strasbourg. It’s Madame Simone’s home…” I stop. “You mean you want me to deliver the money?”

“I do,” he says. “Maud’s back. She came here last night. Delighted with all you’ve done. She thought you could be the courier and…”

“She did? Well she can think again. Absolutely not,” I say. Smuggling money across borders and meeting a German agent? Me who doesn’t even have a proper passport. Judge Craig’s letter works well enough in Paris, but at the border?

“I’m sorry, Father Kevin. No.” What if I got arrested? I tell him that my family would be devastated. Henrietta would die of shame. And Madame Simone? Me working for the Boche? I could just imagine the
Tribune
’s headline. “Nora Kelly of Bridgeport Arrested as a Spy.” Or worse. “Executed!” Devastating for the family. And Rose and Mame, with her winning patriotic essay. And Ed? My God. “Cousin of Chicago Official Is German Agent.”

I babble through all this to Father Kevin, even tell him about my very temporary passport. He seems a bit dazed as I finish with “I’m sorry but I can’t.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “You’ve done your part. We’ll find someone. I’d do it myself but I have no reason to go. Don’t want to raise suspicions.”

“I hope you’re not angry with me.”

“Not at all. I appreciate what you’ve done. Forget it, forget it. Just remember that Peter Keeley’s coming home and you can start your studies again. But Nora, you should get a proper passport. Britain requires them now, so does Russia. France will soon enough.”

“I will,” I say.

But as I walk into the almost spring of Paris, it’s Peter I’m thinking about. I’ve done my duty for Ireland. Peter’ll be proud. I imagine the two of us married and on our way home to Chicago. Fantastic? Not when I’m walking through the Tuileries with the chestnut trees ready to pop into green and the sun warm on my back.

Peter’ll say, “Thank God you didn’t agree to go to Strasbourg. Much too dangerous for a couple about to become man and wife. We have to think of our future children.”

And I’ll respond, “We do, Peter. We do.” I go to the American embassy that very day and get my temporary passport made permanent.

14

MARCH 31, 1914

A miserable afternoon. Spring has stalled. Rain floods the streets. I leave wet footprints on the steps as I climb up to Madame Simone’s studio. Quiet; no clients today. Madame Simone seems to have forgotten about Molly Childers and the “femmes irlandaise.” She has convinced herself that such respectable women could never plot against the government of France.

I haven’t seen Maud since the special St. Patrick’s Day Mass sponsored by l’Association de Saint Patrice at Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. I stood with her on the steps of the church as she pointed out le Comte d’Alton O’Shea and Capitaine Patrice de Mac-Mahon—the countess and duchess were there too, dressed in emerald green gowns.

The assembly processed through the great doors followed by a crush of students, seminarians, and young women clutching shawls around them. “Irish servant girls,” Maud explained to me after Mass. Later they were the ones who came up to Maud offering her coins “for the Cause.”

“Only we Irish could assemble such a strange collection of royalists and republicans,” Maud said. “Still we’re all of Irish blood and in agreement on one thing—the Home Rule Bill. It’s not everything we want. But it’s something. We need a victory after the horrors of the lockout.”

She and Father Kevin moved among the groups chatting in front of the gray stone church with me trailing behind hearing “The bill is moving through Parliament—keep the pressure on.” “Write to anyone you know.”

Maud explained to me that Asquith needed the Irish Party’s votes to stay in power. The party leader, Redmond, was sure Ireland would finally have her own government, Home Rule, and would be in charge of all domestic affairs.

“But still within the empire,” I said.

“For now,” she said.

I’m glad Maud’s not angry at me anymore for refusing to carry the money to Strasbourg, I think as I sit down with Madame Simone at her desk. I present the red ledger. Very few tourists. I need money. Time for another visit to the Louvre, a regular thing now. Thank God there’s so many paintings.