Scarlett (92 page)

Daniel O’Hara was buried on Thursday. The funeral was almost as big as Old Katie Scarlett’s had been. Scarlett led the procession to the grave his sons had dug in the ancient walled graveyard at Ballyhara that she and Colum had found and cleaned up.

Scarlett filled a leather pouch with soil from Daniel’s grave. When she spread it on her father’s grave, it would be almost as if he was buried near his brother.

When the funeral was over, the family went to the Big House for refreshments. Scarlett’s cook was delighted to have an occasion to show off. Long trestle tables stretched the length of the unused drawing room and library. They were covered with hams, geese, chickens, beef, mountains of breads and cakes, gallons of porter, barrels of whiskey, rivers of tea. Hundreds of O’Haras had made the trip in spite of the muddy roads.

Scarlett brought Cat down to meet her kinfolk. The admiration was all that Scarlett could have wished for, and more.

Then Colum supplied a fiddle and his drum, three cousins found pennywhistles, and the music went on for hours. Cat waved her hands to the music until she was worn out, then fell asleep in Scarlett’s lap. I’m glad I missed the ship, Scarlett thought; this is wonderful. If only Daniel’s death wasn’t the reason for it.

Two of her cousins came over to her and bent down from their great height to speak quietly. “We have need of The O’Hara,” said Daniel’s son Thomas.

“Will you come to the house tomorrow after breakfast?” asked Patrick’s son Joe.

“What’s it about?”

“We’ll tell you tomorrow when there’s quiet for you to think.”

The question was: who should inherit Daniel’s farm? Because of the long-past crisis when Old Patrick died, two O’Hara cousins were claiming the right. Like his brother Gerald, Daniel had never made a will.

It’s Tara all over again, thought Scarlett, and the decision was easy. Daniel’s son Seamus had worked hard on the farm for thirty years while Patrick’s son Sean lived with Old Katie Scarlett and did nothing. Scarlett gave the farm to Seamus. Like Pa should have given Tara to me.

She was The O’Hara, so there was no argument. Scarlett felt elated, confident that she had given more justice to Seamus than anyone had ever given her.

The next day a far-from-young woman left a basket of eggs on the doorstep of the Big House. Mrs. Fitz found out that she was Seamus’ sweetheart. She’d been waiting for almost twenty years for him to ask her to marry him. An hour after Scarlett’s decision, he had.

“That’s very sweet,” Scarlett said, “but I hope they don’t get married real soon. I’ll never get to America at the rate I’m going.” She now had a cabin booked on a ship sailing April 26, a year exactly after the date she was originally supposed to have ended her “vacation” in Ireland.

The ship wasn’t the luxurious
Brian Boru
. It wasn’t even a proper passenger ship. But Scarlett had her own superstition—if she delayed again until after May Day, she’d somehow never leave at all. Besides, Colum knew the ship and its captain. It was a cargo ship, true, but it was carrying only bales of best Irish linen, nothing messy. And the captain’s wife always travelled with him, so Scarlett would have female companionship and a chaperone. Best of all, the ship had no paddlewheel, no steam engine. She’d be under sail all the way.

T
he weather was beautiful for more than a week. The roads were dry, the hedgerows were full of flowers, Cat’s feverish sleeplessness one night turned out to be only a new tooth coming in. On the day before she was to leave Scarlett ran, half-dancing, to Ballyhara town to pick up the last of Cat’s frocks from the dressmaker. She was confident that nothing could go wrong now.

While Margaret Scanlon wrapped the frock in tissue paper Scarlett looked out at the deserted dinner-time town and saw Colum going into the abandoned Protestant Church of Ireland on the other side of the wide street.

Oh, good, she thought, he’s going to do it after all. I thought he’d never listen to reason. It makes no sense at all for the whole town to be squashed into that dinky little chapel for Mass every Sunday when there’s that great big church standing empty. Just because it was built by Protestants is no reason for Catholics not to take it over. I don’t know why he’s been so stubborn so long, but I won’t fuss at him. I’ll just tell him how happy it makes me that he’s changed his mind.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Mrs. Scanlon. She hurried along the weed-ridden path that led to the small side entrance, tapped on the door and pushed it open. A loud noise sounded, then another, and Scarlett felt something sharp hit her sleeve, heard a shower of pebbles on the ground at her feet, a booming reverberation inside the church.

A shaft of light from the open door fell directly onto a strange man who had spun to face her. His stubbled face was twisted into a snarl, and his dark, shadowed eyes were like a wild animal’s.

He was half crouching, and he was pointing a pistol at her, held out from his rag-clothed body in his two dirty, rock-steady hands.

He shot at me. The knowledge filled Scarlett’s mind. He’s already killed Colum and now he’s going to kill me. Cat! I’ll never see Cat again. White-hot anger freed Scarlett from the physical paralysis of shock. She raised her fists and lunged forward.

The sound of the second shot was an explosion that echoed deafeningly from the vaulted stone ceilings for a time that seemed forever. Scarlett threw herself to the floor, screaming.

“I’ll ask you to be quiet, Scarlett darling,” said Colum. She knew his voice, and yet it was not his voice. There was steel in this voice, and ice.

Scarlett looked up. She saw Colum’s right arm around the neck of the man, Colum’s left hand around the man’s wrist, the pistol pointing at the ceiling. She got slowly to her feet.

“What is going on here?” she enunciated carefully.

“Close the door if you please,” said Colum. “There’s light enough from the windows.”

“What… is… going… on… here?”

Colum gave her no answer. “Drop it, Davey boy,” he said to the man. The pistol fell with a metallic crash onto the stone floor. Slowly Colum lowered the man’s arm. Quickly he moved his own arm from its stranglehold around the man’s neck, made two fists with his hands and clubbed the man with them. The unconscious form fell at Colum’s feet.

“He’ll do,” Colum said. He walked briskly past Scarlett and quietly closed the door, slid the bolt across. “Now, Scarlett darling, we have to talk.”

Colum’s hand closed around her upper arm from behind her. Scarlett jerked away, whirled to face him. “Not ‘we,’ Colum. You. You tell me what is going on here.”

The warmth and lilt was back in his voice. “It’s an unfortunate happening to be sure, Scarlett darling…”

“Don’t you ‘Scarlett darling’ me. I’m not buying any charm, Colum. That man tried to kill me. Who is he? Why are you sneaking around to meet him? What is going on here?”

Colum’s face was only a pale blur in the shadows. His collar was startlingly white. “Come where we can see,” he said quietly, and he walked to a place where thin slats of sunlight slanted down from the boarded-over windows.

Scarlett couldn’t believe her eyes. Colum was smiling at her. “Ach, the pity of it is, if we’d had the inn this would never have happened. I wanted to keep you out of it, Scarlett darling, it’s a worrisome thing once you know.”

How could he smile? How did he dare? She started, too horrified to speak.

Colum told her about the Fenian Brotherhood.

When he finished, she found her voice. “Judas! You filthy, lying traitor. I trusted you. I thought you my friend.”

“I said it was a worrisome thing.”

She felt too heartsick to be angry at his smiling, rueful response. Everything was a betrayal, all of it. He’d been using her, deceiving her from the moment they met. They all had—Jamie and Maureen, all her cousins in Savannah and Ireland, all the farmers on Ballyhara, all the people in Ballyhara town. Even Mrs. Fitz. Her happiness was a delusion. Everything was a delusion.

“Will you listen now, Scarlett?” She hated Colum’s voice, the music of it, the charm. I won’t listen. Scarlett tried to close her ears, but his words crept between her fingers. “Remember your South, with the boots of the conqueror upon her, and think of Ireland, her beauty and her life’s blood in the murdering hands of the enemy. They stole our language from us. Teaching a child to speak Irish is a crime in this land. Can you not see it, Scarlett, if your Yankees were speaking in words you did not know, words you learned at the point of a sword because ‘stop’ must be a word you knew to the very pit of your knowing, else you would be killed for not stopping. And then your child being taught her tongue by those same Yankees, and your child’s tongue not your own so that she knew not what words of love you said to her, you knew not what need she told you in the Yankee tongue and could not give her her desire. The English robbed us of our language and with that robbing they took our children from us.

“They took our land, which is our mother. They left us nothing when our children and our mother were lost. We knew defeat in our souls.

“Do you but think of it now, Scarlett, when your Tara was being taken from you. You battled for it, you’ve told me how. With all your will, all your heart, all your wit, all your might. Were lies needed, you could lie, deceptions, you could deceive, murder, you could kill. So it is with us who battle for Ireland.

“And yet we are more fortunate than you. Because we have yet time for the sweetnesses of life. For music and dance and love. You know what it is to love, Scarlett. I watched the growth and the blossoming with your babe. Do you not see that love feeds without gluttony on itself, that love is an always brimming cup, from which drinking fills again and still more.

“So it is with our love for Ireland and her people. You are loved by me, Scarlett, by us all. You are not unloved because Ireland is our love of loves. Must you not care for your friends because you care for your child? One does not deny the other. You thought I was your friend, you say, your brother. And so I am, Scarlett, and will be until time ends. Your happiness gladdens me, your sorrow is my grief. And yet Ireland is my soul; I can hold nothing traitorous if it be done to free her from her bondage. But she does not take away the love I have for you; she makes it more.”

Scarlett’s hands had slid on their own volition from her ears down to where they now hung limply by her sides. Colum had enthralled her as he always did when he spoke that way, though she understood no more than half of what he was saying. She felt as if she were somehow wrapped ’round in gossamer which warmed and bound at the same time.

The unconscious man on the floor groaned. Scarlett looked at Colum with fear. “Is that man a Fenian?”

“Yes. He’s on the run. A man he thought his friend denounced him to the English.”

“You gave him that gun.” It was not a question.

“Yes, Scarlett. You see, I keep no more secrets from you. I have concealed weapons throughout this English church. I am the armorer for the Brotherhood. When the day arrives, as soon it will, many thousands of Irishmen will be armed for the uprising, and those arms will come from this English place.”

“When?” Scarlett dreaded his reply.

“There’s no date set. We need five more shipments, six if it can be done.”

“That’s what you do in America.”

“It is. I raise the money, with help from many, then others find a way to buy weapons with it, and I bring them into Ireland.”

“On the
Brian Boru
.”

“And others.”

“You’re going to shoot the English.”

“Yes. We will be more merciful, though. They have killed our women and children as well as our men. We will kill soldiers. A soldier is paid to die.”

“But you’re a priest,” she said, “you can’t kill.”

Colum was still for several minutes. Dust motes turned lazily in the stripes of light from the window to his bowed head. When he lifted it, Scarlett saw that his eyes were dark with sorrow.

“When I was a boy of eight,” he said, “I watched the wagons of wheat and the droves of cattle on the road from Adamstown toward Dublin and the English banquet tables there. I also watched my sister die of hunger because she was but two years old and had no strength to carry her without food. Three, my brother was, and he, too, had too little strength. The smallest always were the first to die. They cried because they were hungry and were too young to understand when they were told there was no food. I understood, for I was eight and wiser. And I did not cry because I knew that crying uses strength needed to survive without food. Another brother died, he was seven, and then the six-year-old and the one who was five, and to my eternal shame I have forgot which was the girl and which the boy. My mother went then, but I have always thought she died more from the pain of her broken heart than from the pain of her empty belly.

“It takes many months to starve to death, Scarlett. It is not a merciful death. For all those months the wagons of food rolled past us.” Colum’s voice sounded lifeless. Then it livened.

“I was a likely lad. Once ten, and the Famine years past and with food to fill me, I was quick at my studies, good at my books. Our priest thought me full of promise and he told my father that perhaps, with diligence, I might in time be accepted in the seminary. My father gave me everything he could give. My older brothers did more than their share of work on the farm so that I need do none and could be diligent at my books. No one grudged me for ’tis a great honor to a family to have a son who is a priest. And I took from them without thought for I had pure, encompassing faith in the goodness of God and the wisdom of Holy Mother Church, which I believed to be a vocation, a call to the priesthood.” His voice rose.