The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) (31 page)

 

They both
shuddered, and went on
their respective errands with that image haunting them both.

 

 

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

 

 

Emer delayed the
inevitable for a
few more days, trying to truly come to terms with her sentence
of treason and
punishment of transportation, but finally, late one night,
when she knew she
could put it off no longer, she wrote to her friends in
Canada, and finally
explained her full predicament.

 

 

She was sure now
that she would
never see her son again, and decided that it was unfair to
make Dalton wait for
her for so many years.

 

 

So she wrote a
second letter to
Dalton, renouncing any claims upon him, and trying to make her
future sound
positive. Tasmania
was not the end
of the world, and seven years was not forever. She would
survive, and thrive,
no matter what, but any chance of coming back soon was well
and truly gone.

 

 

Only Terence could
see the bitter
tears as she hastily pushed the papers to one side and tried
to wipe her eyes
with the back of her hand.

 

 

“It’s no good, you
know, Emer. I
can see you’re upset, though you're
trying to be brave for my sake.”

 

 

“I have no right to
complain,"
she sniffed. "Seven
years
will fly past, and I won’t even be thirty by the time they
release me. And
I hear that plenty of people who
start out at Botany Bay as convicts end up being prominent
citizens once they
are freed. There
are a lot of
Irish down there who need help, I’m sure. It’s you I’m frightened
for, Terence. Having a sentence of death hanging over
you can’t be easy,”
Emer said sympathetically.

 

 

“I’m not saying it
is, and sometimes
I do wake up in the middle of the night trembling, but I
fought for what I
thought was right, and I’ll face the consequences of my
actions head on,” Terence
said firmly.

 

 

Then he asked
softly, “When are they
going to transport you?”

 

 

“The Governor said
there won’t be a
ship for me until the spring, so in the meantime, I'm just
going to do what I
can while I'm here. Thanks
to
O’Brien, they're looking into the cases of the young
offenders, and seeing if
they can get funds from the prison service, or private
subscriptions, to go
ahead with the prison farm for them. He figures with the money they
would save in shipping
costs to transport
all the lads, it would be well worth a try,” Emer revealed.

 

 

He smiled briefly
at that good news.
“I’m glad it’s worked out for you. And who knows, perhaps they won’t
transport you after
all. Maybe they
will let you stay here for
seven years to help run the scheme. At any rate, I would be sorry to
see you go. Sometimes I think you are the only thing
that stands between
me and complete insanity in this hellish place,” Terence
confided quietly.

 

 

“Oh, Terence, I
know how you feel,”
Emer sighed, taking his warm hand in her own. “If I had to be stuck
in prison, I’m glad
it was with you. We
will just have to jolly each other along. Things look bad for both
of us at the minute, but we
can’t afford give
up hope.”

 

 

“But you have,
Emer. The way
you’ve been talking, it sounds
like you don’t think you'll ever go back to Canada,” Terence
observed.

 

 

“Oh, Terence, it’s
not that I don’t
love Dalton, but how can I go back after my son has been taken
from me, and
knowing how much his father and Madeleine Lyndon hate me, so
much so that they
wish I was dead? I’ve
had no
letters, no indication that they're worried about me. It could take
months or even years to
appeal against my
conviction, and at any rate, how can I be acquitted unless
their evil deeds are
brought to light?”

 

 

“They deserve to be
punished for the
way they’ve persecuted you!”

 

 

“But how can Dalton
ever forgive me
for exposing them, if the
whole
truth comes out? I’ll
be free, but
at the expense of two people he cares about. I lied to him, well,
kept things from
him. I don’t
know, Terence, I’m beginning to
believe Dalton and I just aren’t meant to be together after
all,” she admitted
tearfully.

 

 

Terence sat down on
the bed and put
his arm around her. “Be
patient. He
might not even know
where you are, and there could be a million reasons why no one
has come to find
you yet. Now
come on, Emer, it’s
late, and you look exhausted.
Get
under the blanket before you freeze.”

 

 

“It's bitterly cold
in here, that’s
true, but I ought to go look in on the infirmary patients, and
in any case, it’s
your turn to go to sleep.”

 

 

“Look, we’re both
tired. It’s been
a long day, and I don’t want
to be alone. I’m
not asking you to
become my lover, Emer, because I can see you aren’t ready for
it.  But
I'm cold and tired, and need
some human warmth and comfort.
I'm
asking you to trust me, and for us to lie down together and go
to sleep,”
Terence said quietly, his blue eyes serious for once.

 

 

Emer was touched by
his plea, and
nodded. “I trust
you,
Terence. All
right. Let’s go to
sleep now. We’ll
make a fresh
start in the infirmary in the morning.”

 

 

From that night on,
Terence and Emer
shared the narrow wooden bed as friends, and though the
confined space meant
some fairly intimate contact, at least they were a great deal
warmer as the
bitter November weather set in.

 

 

Soon Emer grew used
to being with
Terence as though they had been friends and shared a bed all
their lives. Only
in her private moments did she
admit to herself how much she still longed for Dalton and
William.

 

 

But with a heavy
sigh, she acknowledged
that her life was in Clonmel prison now with her friends, and
Quebec was a lost
dream.

 

 

At any rate, there
was far too much
to do around the jail for Emer to allow herself to repine for
long. The
governor announced several days
later that the prison reforms were going to go ahead, and
Emer’s medical skills
were always in heavy demand.

 

 

“It’s my destiny,”
Emer sighed to
herself, smiling at Terence or O’Brien reassuringly when they
sometimes fell
into despair, and once again recalled Lord Devlin’s words as
she had left
Kilbracken so long ago.
“They all
need me. I can’t
let them down.”

 

 

And though she
would have given
anything to be able to go back to Canada, despite the
appalling conditions of
her imprisonment, she began to blossom again like a flower in
the desert, as
she helped improve the conditions in Clonmel jail, and began
to wonder if she
would have the same opportunities in Tasmania once she
arrived.

 

 

She only wished she
had an atlas or
reference book so she could learn more…

 

 

And her mother's
rosary beads. They
would have comforted her as she prayed, which she often did,
for the souls of
the departed, and the lives of her comrades.

 

 

And above all, for
little son, who
would never get to know how much his mother had loved him…

 

 

She swallowed hard
and reminded
herself of the story of Job. He had lost hundreds of sons, and
still never
cursed his fate. She
would show
his patience, and wait on the will of the Lord. And in the
meantime, she would
go empty the bedpans.

 

 

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

 

 

While Emer remained
in prison
awaiting trial, Dalton was enduring with great impatience a
five-week voyage in
the
Pegasus,
landing
at Cork on the evening of the sixth of October.

 

 

He wasted no time
in searching for
Emer, but set out that very night with the Jenkinses and
Charlie to search both
sides of the harbour for any sign of a red-haired crippled
woman.

 

 

They spent several
days combing each
coastal inlet where she might have ended up, thanks to the
letter which had
said she had jumped ship.

 

 

Many a weaker
person would most
likely have drowned, but
Dalton
had no doubts that Emer would have been resourceful enough to
escape death yet
again. Now it was just a question of what she would have done
next. He calculated
that she would most likely have tried to find work in order to
earn the money
for a chance to take ship back to Canada to locate William.

 

 

Eventually they
were told by the
people who had taken up residence in the deceased Father
Darcy’s house that a
red-haired woman had been washed up on the beach in July, and
taken in by the
priest, and she had indeed been crippled and unable to speak.  

 

 

They speculated
that she would have
gone to Cork, since the neighbourhood was so poor that there
was little left in
the area, or even growing in the fields.

 

 

Dalton witnessed
their extreme
suffering and gave them the little change he had in his pocket
as payment for
their help.

 

 

The old woman had
also told Dalton
that she was fairly sure the priest had died of fever on the
way to Cork, and
so Dalton and the others searched every work house and fever
hospital to see if
she had been forced to take refuge in any of those places
after she had left
the priest’s house.

 

 

But the
institutions were so
overcrowded, that the staff were far too busy to pay much
attention to any of
the patients and workers who came in.

 

 

However, most of
them admitted that
they would have remembered a crippled woman who couldn’t
speak, and so Dalton
became fairly certain that Emer had not resorted to any of
these grim
institutions.

 

 

“Well, then, where
is she?” Charlie
wondered.

 

 

“So far we know
that she was dressed
in men’s clothes, and had cut her hair, and that she had a big
bandage tied
around her jaw because it had been broken, probably by Pertwee
when he attacked
her. She must be
very thin and dirty,
and no doubt just about without a penny by now unless she
could find work and
food somewhere,” Dalton said to the others at his hotel room
in Cork at the end
of a week of searching.

 

 

“I think she would
have headed to
Kilbracken if she were going to look for help anywhere,” Emily
Jenkins opined.

 

 

“But it’s miles
away and she could
barely walk,” her husband disagreed. “I think she might try to find
some work somewhere to
support herself
and earn her passage back to Canada.”

 

 

“But not many
people would hire a
cripple boy or woman for that matter. And at any rate, she
always did say that
Lord Devlin had been very kind to her. She wouldn’t want to stay
here in Ireland. She would be desperate to get back to
Canada, and find
William. So I
think the Emer would
have believed Lord Devlin was her best chance of accomplishing
that,” Mrs.
Jenkins argued logically.

 

 

Dalton nodded. “I
agree with Mrs.
Jenkins. She
would be worried to
death about our son, and so long as she held out any hope of
getting back to
him, she would have moved heaven and earth to do so. Let’s get some
maps, then, and find the
most direct route
from Cork to Kilbracken.”

 

 

Charlie went out to
see what he
could find, while Dalton made notes on all they had learned,
and began to pen a
letter to Lord Devlin.

 

 

The entire south of
the country was
still alive with infantry to ensure that no other rebellious
subjects took it
into their heads to disturb the Queen’s peace, a distinct
danger now that the
potato crop had failed again, and yet the English still
continued to export
food out of the starving country.

 

 

Dalton began to
grow uneasy as he
entered his second week of searching for Emer, and found no
trace of her. All
four of the small party had covered
miles on horseback, to no avail. More worrisome was the fact
that thus far,
there had been no word from Lord Devlin’s estate in reply to
Dalton’s enquiries
as to whether or not she had been or was there.

 

 

Dalton began to
wonder whether she
had actually been arrested again, or perhaps had been forced
to hole up
somewhere because of hunger, illness, or her crippled state.

 

 

At last Charlie
found word of her in
Fermoy, on the way to Mitchelstown, so the group moved hotels,
and resumed the
search along the road from Mitchelstown to Cahir.

 

 

“We know now that
Emer passed that
way on crutches at the end of July, so she's walking
reasonably well, but she
must be fairly exhausted by now.

 

 

“The weather has
also been extremely
inclement, and is now getting much colder. She could have resorted
to a workhouse
or fever hospital by
now, or perhaps she got so desperate that she turned herself
in,” Dalton
reasoned.

 

 

“We're going to have to try every prison
and work house in
every large town, and leave no stone unturned,” Mrs. Jenkins
said.

 

 

“That’s right. And
I think that
perhaps we should notify the authorities after all, and ask
they if they have
re-taken her. I
do have her
acquittal in my pocket, so there’s no longer any danger to her
if they do find
her.”