Song of the Silent Harp (15 page)

“But perhaps you're not as lazy as some, after all, eh?” the agent was saying. “At least you had the industry to go in search of food.”

Daniel frowned, puzzled as to what Cotter was getting at. “I'm not lazy, sir. I'd work if there were work to be had.”

The agent straightened a bit, giving Daniel a long look of appraisal. “You'd welcome a job, would you?”

“Aye, sir,” Daniel said uncertainly. “It's not that I haven't tried to find work.”

Cotter smiled, but the smile only increased Daniel's apprehension. Something lay behind the look that he did not understand. “What's your age, boy?”

“My—I'm thirteen, sir.”

“Mmm.” Cotter went on studying him carefully. “You're old enough, I suppose. None too strapping, though you're tall for your age. Are you strong enough for hard work, do you think?”

Daniel now began to feel a surge of hope. “Oh, I'm that fit, sir! I could do any work I set my hand to.”

Again the agent stroked his chin, and Daniel squirmed inwardly under his keen inspection. He felt as if every inch of his frame was being measured. Even as his hope increased, his stomach knotted. There were stories about the agent, murmured stories and accusations about some terrible, unspeakable aberration in his nature that was only spoken of in whispers.

“I suppose there's always work to be found around this place for a boy who is fit,” Cotter proclaimed loudly, jarring Daniel out of his uncomfortable thoughts. “How soon could you start?”

He was offering a job! The ground tilted beneath Daniel's feet, and his legs went weak with relief.

Forgetting the rumors, dismissing his feelings of uncertainty, Daniel answered him quickly before the man had time to change his mind. “As soon as you'd want, sir! Today, if you wish.”

Cotter slapped the open palm of his hand with the riding crop. “Good enough. I'll give you bed and board and a fair wage.”

Bed and board?
“I—I wouldn't have to stay here, would I, sir? I can come up in the mornings just as early as you like, and stay late in the evenings, but—”

The agent's eyes narrowed, and his mouth thinned to a tight line. “If you work here, you stay here. I need somebody I can count on, day or night.”

Daniel's mind reeled. His mother couldn't do without him, couldn't manage Tahg and Grandfar on her own. But the money—he
must
take the job!

His eyes went to the fair-haired man, who was studying him with an expression that startled Daniel.
Pity.
The man was staring at him with open pity.

Daniel looked away, pretending he hadn't seen. He lifted his chin; he wanted no pity, least of all from an
Englishman.

“All right, sir. I'll have to go home and tell my mother, but I'll come back whenever you say.”

Cotter twisted his mouth to one side, raking Daniel's face with his eyes. “See that you're back before sunset this evening.” He raised a hand, pointing a finger warningly. “If you're
not
back when I say, you need not come at all, do you mind? I'll find a boy I can
depend
on.”

Daniel nodded, eager now to get away and tell his mother the good news. As soon as Cotter waved him off, he bolted around the side of the house.

He ran all the way down the hill, ignoring the cramps in his stomach and the burning pain in his chest.

Sure, and I do thank You, Lord…I can't tell how much it means to know You're looking after us after all…

He couldn't wait to see his mother's face, to see relief in her large sad eyes instead of the ever-present fear that lately seemed to grow darker and darker. Perhaps she would be able to smile again. It had been so long since he had seen her do more than force a thin smile for Tahg's sake.

Reaching the bottom of the hill now, he slowed and started down the road toward home. Despite his exhaustion and dizziness, he knew a sense of hope and expectation he had not felt for a long, long time.

Suddenly, in the midst of his relief and excitement, he recalled something he'd overheard Sean O'Malley say to Morgan the night of Timothy's wake:
“Sure, and I'd go to work for the devil himself, Morgan, would it put food in my family's bellies again.”

At the time, Daniel had caught his breath at the man's blasphemy. Now, he could only try to ignore the possibility that he might be about to do what Sean O'Malley had only threatened.

She was coming to. Morgan quickly rose from the chair, bending over her as she attempted to focus her eyes in the dim light from the lantern.

“Nora?” He had covered her with his cloak and now tucked it more snugly under her chin.

A large bruise discolored her left cheekbone, just below the small cut near her eye. Her hair had come loose from its pins, and he moved to smooth it away from her face. She watched him through heavy, dull eyes.

“How do you feel?” he asked her, taking her hand. She blinked, her eyes still uncomprehending. “You must have blacked out. I found you on the floor.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. “My head…”

“Aye, I expect it hurts.” Again he stroked her hair back from her forehead, and turned to tug the chair closer to the bed.

Suddenly her eyes widened, and she tried to lift her head from the pillow. “Tahg—”

“Tahg and the old man are both all right,” Morgan quickly assured her, putting a hand to her shoulder until she dropped her head weakly back onto the pillow. “You must rest, now. Just lie still.”

He sat down, taking her hand between the two of his. “I got worried when nobody came to the door, so I came inside to check on you. You gave me quite a fright, lass.”
Frightened him out of his wits was what she did.
“Nora…how long since you've eaten?”

She turned her head away.

“Nora?”

Keeping her face turned from him, she gave a small, weak shrug beneath his cloak.

“I've brought food, Nora,” he told her. “Enough for several days.” When she still made no reply, he went on. “Did you hear me, lass? As soon as Daniel John comes in, we'll have something to eat. Where is he, by the way?”

At last she turned back to him and spoke. “He went looking for food. He's not back yet?”

Morgan shook his head. Guilt lay heavy on his heart. He should never have stayed away so long. The small, forlorn figure beneath his cloak was little more than a ghost of herself. He shuddered involuntarily as a memory of the young Nora flashed across his mind. Gone were the laughing eyes of her youth, the vibrant energy of her nature. The raven tresses that had shone in the summer sun hung lank and graying around her ashen face. Cheekbones jutted above sunken hollows, and her deep gray eyes were darkly shadowed. He had known a moment of total, blood-chilling panic when he found her slumped on the floor beside the old man's bed, looking for all the world as if the life had left her body.

Well, he would not leave her again. From this time on, for as long as she remained in the village, he would be here, too, to take care of her.

Without thinking, he lifted her hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles. “It will be all right,
ma girsha,”
he murmured. “Everything will be all right, you'll see. But you must continue to fight for a little while longer.”

As if she had not heard him, she turned her face to the wall. “I just want it finished,” she said woodenly.

He lifted his head, frowning at the defeat he heard in her voice. “No,” he said firmly. “You must not allow yourself to think so. You have to fight, Nora.”

Slowly, she dragged her gaze back to his face. “Fight?” A low moan of bitterness escaped her. “For
what?”

He rose from the chair, and, bending over her, pressed his hands into the mattress on either side of her shoulders. “For your sons. For yourself. For
life,
Nora. You must fight for life.”

She closed her eyes as if to block out the sight of him, and he was struck anew by the frailty of her fine, delicate features. Dear God, she was so small, so thin and weak!

“Nora—look at me.”

Her eyes opened, and he saw the unshed tears. Stabbed by the fear and misery in her eyes, he dropped down beside her and scooped her up in his arms. “Cry, lass…it's all right to cry…cry it out…”

She made a small, choked sound and allowed him to press her face against his chest. “I'm so
afraid,
Morgan,” she whispered against him. He felt her shoulders sag, then begin to shake. “I know it's wrong…I should have more faith. But I'm so frightened all the time. I try not to show it to the others, but I'm…terrified, Morgan…
I'm terrified…”

The dam of her grief and fear burst then, and Morgan felt a spasm of shudders wrack her fragile body. As he held her, he tried to will some of his own strength into her.

After a long time, she turned in his arms, her face damp, her eyes haunted and glistening. When he saw a look of uncertainty, then embarrassment, steal over her features, he tightened his embrace before she could free herself.

She stared up at him. “I—I'm sorry…I can't think what—”

“Shhh, none of that,” he said firmly, resisting her effort to slip out of his arms. “Nora, listen to me, now. As soon as the boy comes in, we'll have some supper, and then we'll talk. There's something I need to tell you, and I want Daniel John here when I do.”

“What?”

“It will keep,” he said, drinking in her face and her hair tumbling free over his arm, cherishing this rare, precious moment of holding her again, if only to comfort her. “We must get some food into you before—”

“Mother?”

They broke apart at the sound of Daniel John's voice, calling out from the kitchen.

Morgan got to his feet. “In here, lad.”

The boy's eyes were large with excitement as he came charging into Nora's bedroom. “Mother, wait till you hear my news! I—”

He stopped, his eyes going from Nora to Morgan. “Morgan? What is it? What's wrong?”

“Your mother has had a fall, lad.”

Nora extended her hand to the boy, and he hurried to her side to grasp it.

“Are you all right?”

“It's nothing,” Nora assured him. “I—I fell, that's all, and Morgan found me. I'm perfectly fine. Now, what's this about your having news?”

Daniel John straightened, still holding her hand. Morgan thought the
boy's enthusiasm seemed a bit strained, but there was little doubt as to his eagerness to tell Nora.

“I have a job!” he announced. “A real job.”

Nora's hand went to her mouth. “A
job,
Daniel John? But how—” Smiling at her surprise, the boy nodded eagerly. “Didn't I tell you things would be getting better for us soon?”

“That's grand news indeed, lad,” Morgan said carefully, sensing the boy's forced cheerfulness. “And what is this job you have found for yourself?”

Daniel John blinked, hesitating for only an instant. “I'm going to be working for the land agent,” he said, not looking at either Morgan or his mother. “I start tonight.”

12

Borne on the wheel of night, I lay
And dreamd as it softly sped—
Toward the shadowy hour that spans the way
Whence spirits come, 'tis said:
And my dreams were three—
The first and worst
Was of a land alive, yet cursed,
That burn'd in bonds it couldn't burst—
And thou wert the land, Erie!

T
HOMAS
D'
ARCY
M
CGEE
(
1825-1868
)

S
prawled indolently in a tattered armchair, Cotter smirked at Evan over his tumbler. “You look a mite green, Whittaker. Was our tour of Sir Roger's holdings a bit much for your delicate sensibilities?”

Evan simply shook his head, unwilling to expose what he privately thought of as his “sentimentality” to anyone as coarse and unfeeling as Cotter. His normal reserve was so shaken he did not have the energy to dissemble, so he could only keep silent.

For hours, his head had been hammering with a fury that threatened to prostrate him—indeed it had made him violently nauseous for a time. The hour's rest he'd taken late in the afternoon had done little to ease his misery. At the moment, he was only vaguely aware of the agent's drunken rambling, which had been going on for the better part of the evening. His mind still reeled from the ghastly scenes he had witnessed earlier in the day, and he felt a desperate need to flee the room, knowing he needed both time and solitude to absorb the day's events. No matter how much he might wish to avoid doing so, he had to confront his rioting emotions.

Never in his wildest imaginings could he have conceived the succession of horrors he had encountered in this suffering village. Dante's nine levels of hell seemed little more than a glimpse of the misery of Killala. Within hours, the nightmarish experience had engulfed him, reaching deep into his spirit to pierce some dark, undiscovered depth, touching and altering something vital to his very being. Instinctively, he knew he would never be quite the same man he had been before today.

Across from him, Cotter downed another long pull of whiskey, then nodded to himself. “They're a disgusting bunch, eh? Live like pigs and die like dogs. The esteemed Sir Roger will be well rid of the lot of them, wouldn't you say?”

Evan didn't miss the way the agent slurred his employer's name as if it were an obscenity. He was appalled by this dull, slovenly creature, and could scarcely believe that Roger Gilpin continued to allow him to manage his properties. For his own part, he had all he could do to remain in the same room with the man.

A sudden thought of the comely boy with the soulful blue eyes struck Evan, and he found himself greatly relieved that the youngster had not returned to the agent's house that evening. Watching Cotter when they'd first encountered the boy, Evan had sensed something in the agent's rapacious stare that had both sickened and alarmed him. Only now did he identify the man's glazed, oddly feverish expression as one of undeniable lust.

Most likely the boy's failure to show up accounted for the agent's foul mood. As the evening wore on, Cotter had grown increasingly surly, until now, intoxicated and hostile, he no longer made the slightest attempt to be anything less than offensive.

“To my way of thinking, we can't turn them out fast enough,” the agent muttered, seemingly as much to himself as to Evan. “Worthless bunch of savages.”

His patience about to snap, Evan fought to keep his voice even. “I-I'm sure,” he said, “that when I r-report to Sir Roger the extreme circumstances of his tenants, he will d-do the Christian thing and d-delay all scheduled evictions.” Even as he voiced the words, Evan knew he was attempting to convince himself as much as the agent.

“At any rate,” he added more firmly, “I shall send a letter to London immediately t-to apprise him of the conditions here.”

Cotter uttered a short, ugly laugh and straightened a bit in his chair. “Oh, he
knows the conditions here well enough! Why do you think he chose to turn the lot of them out when he did?”

Evan looked at him. “Wh-what, exactly, do you mean?”

Cotter stared at his near-empty glass for a moment, then lifted his eyes to Evan. His smirk plainly said he thought the younger man a fool. “You saw it for yourself, did you not? Those poor devils are in no shape to defend themselves! Why, they're starved to the point of death. They'll not be lifting so much as a hand for their own protection. Sure, and we won't have to
force
them out of their squalid huts—we'll simply let the death cart driver
drag
them out! Oh, yes,” he said, grunting out a sound that might have been amusement, “old Gilpin knows what he's doing well enough.”

Evan could feel the sour taste of revulsion bubbling up in his throat, and he had all he could do not to choke on his own words. “Nevertheless, Sir Roger has not seen the circumstances of his tenants for himself. I shall spare no details of their plight.”

Cotter fastened a bleary-eyed, contemptuous stare on him, all the while rooting inside his ear with his little finger. “How long have you worked for Gilpin, Whittaker? Ten years or more by now, I shouldn't wonder.”

“Eleven,” Evan replied coldly.

The wide gap between the agent's upper front teeth seemed to divide his mouth in half each time he flashed his insolent grin. “Well, then, you can't possibly believe for a shake that the old goat has so much as a hair of charity in his soul. You needn't defend him to
me,
man. Haven't I been working for either him or his blackhearted father for nigh on twenty years by now? I know full well what a devil he is.”

Evan rose from his chair, disturbed as much by his uneasy awareness of the truth in Cotter's remarks as by the agent's crude disrespect. “Mr. Cotter,” he said stiffly, placing his empty teacup on the scarred table beside the chair, “I hardly think it p-proper to discuss our employer in this fashion. Besides, I find myself quite exhausted, and I still have to write to Sir Roger. If you don't mind, I'll retire to my room now.”

The agent's only response was a distracted smirk and a drunken wave of the empty tumbler in his hand.

Steeling himself not to run, Evan held his breath as he crossed the dimly lighted room. So unsteady did he feel, so furiously was his stomach pitching, he feared taking a deep breath lest he disgrace himself by losing his dinner in full view of the leering agent.

The initial shock of Daniel John's announcement about Cotter's job offer had finally waned, although the boy's frustration was still evident. It had taken an hour or more of argument among the three of them, no lack of
pleading on Nora's part, and, finally, a few stern words from Morgan, but eventually they'd managed to talk without shouting at one another.

The bedroom was swathed in deep shadows, lighted by only one squat candle. Nora sat ashen-faced on the edge of the sagging bed, watching her son, wringing her hands worriedly. Daniel John stood as fixed as a rock in the middle of the room, his fists tightly clenched, his eyes sullen.

Morgan's own emotions were scarcely less turbulent. Upon learning of Cotter's attempt to lure the lad into his employ, a fresh surge of hatred for the degenerate land agent had roared through him. Even now, his temper was still stretched tight as an archer's bow.

“Whatever
possessed you to go to the hill in the first place?” He hurled the question at the boy more sharply than he'd intended, immediately aware that his anxiety was making him unreasonable.

From his rigid stance in the middle of the room, Daniel John met Morgan's eyes without flinching. “Hunger,” he said evenly. “I only went as a last resort. I had looked everywhere else I knew for food, and found none. The big house seemed the only possibility left.”

“And Cotter came upon you by surprise.”

The boy nodded.

“And offered you a job.”

“He did.”

“Which you accepted without conferring with your mother first,” Morgan said, making no attempt to soften the rebuke in his tone.

Daniel John lifted his chin. “I thought my having a job would please her.” He paused, then added defensively, “At the least, I thought it might save us.”

“Oh, Daniel John, I still can't believe you did such a foolish thing!” Nora exclaimed, pushing herself up off the bed and making an effort to stand. “To resort to stealing? You know that's wrong; it is
sin!
And to think that you might have been shot!”

“And is it less sin to watch my family starve while that pig on the hill wallows in his greed?”

The boy's quiet retort made Nora pale. Seeing her sway, Morgan grabbed her. “Nora! Here, sit down; you're entirely too weak to be up yet.” Carefully, he helped her onto the chair beside the bed before turning back to Daniel John.

“Your mother has told you that you must not take Cotter's job, lad, and she is right. You have heard the stories about the agent, have you not?” When the boy made no reply, Morgan pressed. “Well?”

“I—rumors, is all,” Daniel John muttered, looking away.

“No, and they are not
rumors!”
Morgan closed the distance between them to snatch the boy roughly by the shoulders. “There is all too much truth to the tales, and you'd do well to mind what you have heard. Cotter is a sick, depraved man—don't be thinking you're a match for the likes of him!”

Daniel John surprised him by twisting free. “I can take care of myself!” he burst out. “And I still say it's foolish to turn down such a job when we're starving to death!”

For an instant Morgan's own temper flared, but just as quickly he banked it. “Now, you listen to me, lad. The subject is no longer up for discussion—your mother has said you're not to go back on the hill, and that is that. If you need any further explanation as to why Cotter was so eager to get you under his roof, the two of us will go outside and I'll explain it to you more clearly. But for now I want your word that you will obey your mother.”

He winced at the desperation in the boy's eyes. No longer a child, yet not quite a man, the lad looked like a young animal caught in a trap. Morgan could almost feel the conflict raging within Daniel John.

The boy stared at him another moment, then turned to Nora. “And what are we to do, then, Mother? What choice do we have?” His voice sounded thin and childlike, and Morgan yearned to pull the boy into his arms and somehow shelter him from all the ugliness hovering just outside the cottage walls.

His mind went to the letter he had written Michael. With every day that passed, his impatience grew. He had been so sure that this time when he returned to Killala, he would come with a letter in hand. The ship was to be in the bay in a matter of days; he must broach the subject of emigration to Nora before much longer, or it would be too late entirely.

He cast a look at Daniel John. Even as lean and coltish as he was, with his long arms and legs, and his shoulders crowding the seams of his shirt, there was no denying that he was growing into a winsome, grand-looking lad. God only knew what that demented animal Cotter might yet try to get the boy into his clutches. He would not be stopped by one failed attempt. Not Cotter. He had tried once, and he would try again, perhaps something more devious or even dangerous next time.

His eyes went to Nora. Dear Lord, she was so terribly weak, so frail! Just to look at her and see the way she had failed made him heartsore. No wonder the boy had been driven by desperation.

Daniel John's question, asked for the second time, roused Morgan from his grim musings. “Mother? What choice do we have? What can we do?”

When Nora did not answer, Morgan made his decision. Clenching his fists, he looked first at the boy, then to Nora. “You can leave Ireland,” he said at last, making no attempt to gentle his words. “There is that choice, and it would seem the time has come for the both of you to give it serious consideration.”