Of Irish Blood (54 page)

He walks away.

The next two days Yeats avoids Maud, taking long walks on the strand with Iseult while Maud rages at me. “Why couldn’t he let John MacBride be a hero? If only for Seán’s sake. His father’s sacrifice atoned for the wrongs he’d done us. A true martyr,” she says to me as we sit alone in the garden. “To call him ‘drunken, vainglorious.’ I sometimes wonder if British agents didn’t buy John drink. Did he feel I had denied him his son? Not true really but fathers and sons … I don’t know.”

“Maud,” I say. “MacBride was transformed. Isn’t that the point of the poem?”

I’ve been repeating those words over and over in my mind. “A terrible beauty is born.” An odd kind of comfort in the phrase. Yeats might be a stick-in-the-mud but he’s certainly a very great poet.

That next afternoon Barry insists we go to St. Clair’s fountain in the village. As we walk, Maud says, “I had a letter from the Franciscan priest who gave John the last rites. He told me John faced death bravely and with great faith.”

Barry speaks up. “As courageous as an early Christian martyr. He told them, ‘I have looked into the barrel of guns too often to be afraid of them now. Fire away.’”

The words Quinn had quoted. “I intend to use the phrase in a poem dedicated to him,” Barry says.

A hive of writing here in Normandy. Every thought turned into poetry. What would people in Bridgeport think about adults spending their days this way? Is the Rising for them only one more moment in Irish history to remake into verse? But not fair to condemn them, I think. After all, weren’t Pearse and the others poets too?

And Yeats is right. The executions have transformed everything. Quinn said in his letter the British care about Irish-American opinion. I can just imagine the speeches being given, not only at Clan na Gael meetings, but among the wealthy Irish at the Irish Fellowship Club who might have opposed the Rising. No division of opinion now.

We arrive in a small village. One big farm, really, and a woods with a stone fountain cut into the side of a hill. St. Clair’s face has worn away, his features disappeared.

“He was Irish and a very handsome man,” Barry says. “Hard on him because a noble English woman fell in love with him. She was furious when he became a celibate. He had to escape from her to Normandy. And did quite a good job of converting the pagans around here. But the woman sent her agents after him. They found him in his hermitage and split his skull.” Barry says this with a certain amount of relish. “He’s the patron saint of people with headaches.” She stops and looks at me.

What could I say? “That’s nice”? “Poor fellow”? But I have to ask her, “Does being killed by a jealous woman really count as martyrdom?”

“He died because he’d vowed purity,” she says.

A trickle of water drips into the stone basin. “It comes from a stream in the hills,” Barry says. She dips her finger then blesses herself. “Good for the diseases of the eye, too.”

Well, St. Clair, I think, we’re standing here twelve hundred years later not because you fought or conquered but because you were martyred. Like John MacBride and the others. Isn’t anyone celebrated for living for a cause?

Maud stares at the broken statue. Is she picturing images of her martyred husband and friends? But dead is dead—Yeats’s finest words can’t bring them back.

When we come back, I find Yeats alone on the porch.

“Oh Mr. Yeats,” I begin. “Your poem is a masterpiece.”

He nods his head.

“I’m sorry Maud doesn’t…” I stop.

“Maud doesn’t understand what the years have done to her. Many men have admired her beauty but only I love her pilgrim soul. I want to give her rest. Make a home with her where artists can gather. Why doesn’t she want that?”

What can I say? He only knows the Maud of his imagination.

“Iseult is so like the young Maud—before politics hardened her,” he says.

Iseult—beautiful, young. She might stand still and let Yeats make her into a metaphor. And have his children. That night Maud tells me Yeats proposed to Iseult.

“He’s too old for her,” I say.

Iseult won’t give Yeats an answer.

He leaves that evening.

We go to Lisieux the next day. I kneel at St. Thérèse’s coffin. “Little Flower in this hour show your power,” I pray. News of Peter please. Let me know he’s safe.

One powerful woman, St. Thérèse, because the very next day a Connemara man shows up at Maud’s door who says he was sent by Professor Keeley.

*   *   *

“I was with the professor in the Galway unit Liam Mellows commanded,” he says.

His name is Michael O’Malley. He was landed from a fishing boat down the coast and made his way to Colleville because Peter told him Maud would help. He sits at Maud’s table eating slabs of cheese on crusty bread. Someone who has actually been through the Rising. A firsthand report. He said he wasn’t a member of the Volunteers or any other rebel group.

“My brothers and I were building a wall for a fellow in Galway City when we heard about the uprising in Dublin and that Mellows and the boys were going to take on the Peelers. ‘We’re with you,’ we said. Two or three young priests came along. Gave everybody general absolution so if we were killed, we’d go straight to heaven.” He pauses, then turns to Maud. “Very good tea, missus,” he says.

Maud nods at Barry, who refills his cup.

“Not much of a battle really,” Michael goes on. “We set up camp at a farm near Athenry. Thought we’d get the military to attack and then we could fight them from a good position but by the time the enemy came half the fellows had drifted away. The one constable we killed, Whelan, wasn’t a bad fellow and a Catholic, but the inspector pushed him forward and well…” He shrugs. “Somebody let loose with a shotgun and Whelan got it. Too bad really. It was the bailiffs who evicted my neighbors and the battering-ram bastards knocked their homes apart I wanted to fight.”

“But what about Peter Keeley?” I ask.

“I saw him during our scrimmage with the army but then everyone scattered. The Peelers started mass arrests. Jailing men and women who did no more than get together to speak Irish. The people who used to go to Pearse’s cottage—have a bit of ceili with the students from Dublin—all of them were picked up. And, of course, the British knew that Professor Keeley had been telling fellows not to join the British army. They would have arrested him even if they didn’t know that he had been with us at Athenry. I heard the professor was hiding out in the mountains near Carna. But that was a while ago. Cousins of mine found out there were French boats fishing out of Killybegs Harbour. Took me a month to get up there, but got on one of them and here I am. So Professor Keeley might’ve done the same.”

“Found some way out you mean,” I say.

“Could have. Mellows made it to New York. Then was arrested as a German spy. In jail now,” Michael O’Malley says.

He eats the last bit of cheese.

“Jesus, if the British had just ignored us the whole Rising would have been over and forgotten by now. It’s the executions that made the difference. Changed everything,” he says.

“Changed utterly,” I say.

Maud arranges for the café owner in town to drive Michael to Le Havre. She gives him money for his passage to New York and a letter to John Quinn.

Peter is alive, I think. He could be on his way to Paris right now.

He’ll come striding across the place des Vosges to me. “Little Flower, in this hour show your power.”

Except when I give Father Kevin my news, he only says, “Let’s hope.” Not optimistic. The two of us in the Irish College parlor.

“Tom Kettle was killed in the Battle of the Somme,” he says. “Haven’t found his body. Resting somewhere in the France he loved, I suppose. Serving the Cause in his way, Honora. Will no one from this generation be left to build the new Ireland?” he says.

21

DECEMBER 1916

“Here, look,” Maud says, handing me her passport. “Signed at the English consulate, countersigned at the French prefecture.” Permission to go to Ireland at last.

Father Kevin and I are at rue de l’Annonciation to say good-bye to Maud, Iseult, and Seán. She gave up her apartment, so we are in the attic storage space where they are staying for the next two days until their departure.

I spent the last month helping Maud pack away a lifetime in Paris. She’s going home to Ireland to join the other widows of the 1916 martyrs who are continuing the fight. So many of the leaders dead or in prison. The women of the movement have taken over. I am glad to have something to do because I am still not welcome at the American hospital.

“Somebody’s put the kibosh on you, Nora,” Margaret told me. “I tried to speak to Mrs. Vanderbilt. But she just murmured something about the reputation of the hospital.”

“Wilson, it’s Henry Wilson,” I said.

“We’re leaving very early,” Maud says. “So don’t come to see us off. I hate train station farewells. Besides you will be coming to Ireland soon, Nora. We need your help.”

“Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to, Maud,” I say. Haven’t dared to confront the clerk at the British consulate. Hard enough to get my residence permit approved at the police station. Not sure how far the kibosh extends. But the gendarme said to me, “Perhaps it’s time for Mademoiselle to return to her own country.”

“I am very impressed with my efficiency,” Maud says. “I have my tickets bought and places on the boat reserved. Barry went ahead to Dublin and has found us a house. Two days camping out here, and then we’re off.”

Maud’s convinced that John Quinn used his influence with the British to have the order banning her from Ireland lifted. Some of her old energy now.

Cold and dark in the little space. Harder and harder to get coal in Paris, and electricity is rationed. Impossible to get sugar, vegetables, or fruit.

Maud calls to Seán, “Drag over the barrel.”

He’s made a place for himself under the eaves and is reading by candlelight under a pile of blankets. Iseult sits in the other corner staring out the dormer window and smoking. The wooden barrel Seán pushes to the center of the floor reminds me of the ones in Piper’s store in Bridgeport. Maud takes the lid off the barrel. A smell I know.

“Apples,” she says. “John Quinn sends them every year for Christmas. We’ll take some with us and leave the rest for you.”

“Thank you, Maud,” Father Kevin says. “Very kind of you.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Let’s have some now,” she says.

Sean gives each of us an apple. Bigger than the
pommes
of France, I think, as I bite into the apple. More of a crunch and so juicy. The taste of America, of home.

“John Quinn says the apples come from his native state, Ohio,” Maud says.

“Apple orchards all over the Midwest,” I say, “because Johnny Appleseed scattered seeds after the revolution.”

“A great country, America,” Father Kevin says. “After the French Revolution, the guillotine. After your revolution, apples.”

“It is,” I say. The imaginary cottage where I live with Peter Keeley recently moved to the shore of a lake in Wisconsin. Still no news of him.

“We’ll be going, Maud,” Father Kevin says, as we finish our apples. “Getting dark.”

Few streetlights now and the streets of Paris very empty during these December nights.

Maud’s theatricality doesn’t extend to hugs and kisses but now she takes me by the shoulders.

“Thank you, Nora,” she says. A quick embrace for me and one for Father Kevin. I’ll miss her, I think. Might never see her again.

We are just at the door when we hear someone on the steps. “Must be the concierge,” Maud says. “No one else would be coming up here.” She opens the door.

“I am Major Lampton,” the British officer standing in the doorway says.

“Come to make sure we’re leaving?” Maud says. “I assure you we are.”

“I can see that. However, I have just received a telegram from the War Office in London,” he says. “You may travel to England but you are not allowed to go on to Ireland.”

“You are mistaken, Major. Here, look at my documents.” Maud thrusts her passport at him but he doesn’t even look down.

“Countermanded,” he says.

“But they can’t…” Maud begins.

The major interrupts her. “We are fighting a war. Ireland is under martial law and you are a threat to national security.”

“Me? But I’ve done nothing. You’ve released the prisoners arrested after the Rising. Constance Markievicz is free and she led a unit in the battle,” Maud says.

“The War Office cannot direct political policy. Unfortunately,” he says.

I remember Henry Wilson’s contempt for the politicians he called “frocks.”

“But Madame MacBride only wishes to visit her husband’s grave. Couldn’t she be allowed a short period in Ireland?” Father Kevin asks.

“You’d do well to stick to your religious duties, Father,” the major says.

“Madame MacBride has been nursing soldiers and helping in the war effort…” Father Kevin goes on.

“You people do not seem to understand plain English. Mrs. MacBride is not allowed to go to Ireland. Perhaps her American friend, here, can suggest a place for Madame MacBride to settle in the United States. Your home is in Chicago I believe, Miss Kelly.”

Oh, dear God. He knows me. The kibosh all-encompassing. Though he doesn’t seem aware of my death. Probably just checked up on me in the American embassy. But he recognizes me. Scary.

“The French are losing patience with foreign nationals who spy for the enemy,” he says. “And being a woman will not save you.”

“That’s an outrageous statement, Major,” Maud says. “I demand an apology.”

It’s only then I notice Iseult and Seán standing right next to me. She’s weeping but he’s cocked his fist and is pulling his arm back. I grab his wrist and stand in front of him.

“No, Seán,” I say.

The major looks over at us. He starts to laugh. “Typical Paddy. Hiding behind a woman.” And then he’s gone.

Ructions. Thank God the major wasn’t standing behind the door or he would have heard enough sedition to hang all of us.

Maud doesn’t go to England because she’s told she will not be allowed to return to France. Nor will the British permit her to travel to America.