“What happened to her, Doc? Who did this to her?”
“I don’t know what’s happened, Eamon. Or what she’s gotten herself into. And I need you to be quiet about this until I do.”
“I thought she was dead, Doc!” Eamon gasped.
“We all did,” Doc murmured.
“How’re ya gonna keep this a secret? You can’t exactly hide a person,” Eamon protested.
“I’m not going to keep her a secret . . . but I need to keep this a secret until I know where the hell she’s been all this time and why someone shot her and dumped her in the lough.”
The man named Eamon was silent then, as if something had been communicated without conversation. I wanted to explain, to protest whatever misunderstanding had developed. But the desire was no more than a disintegrating thought, and when they laid me in the cart—a cart that reeked of cabbage and wet dog—it slipped away entirely. I felt their urgency and their fear, but the fog, not unlike the mist that hid the men with guns, stole my questions and my consciousness.
24 February 1917
Michael Collins was campaigning for Count Plunkett in North Roscommon, south of Dromahair, and I went to hear him speak. It’s only been two months since he was released from Frongoch, yet he’s already in the thick of things.
Mick saw me in the crowd and bounded down the steps when he was finished speaking, grabbing me up in his arms and swinging me around like I was his dearest friend. Mick has that way with people. It is something I have always admired, as it is not a trait I possess.
He asked after Declan and Anne, and I had to tell him the news. He didn’t know Anne well, but he knew Declan and admired him.
I took him home to Garvagh Glebe for the night, anxious to hear what was simmering in Brotherhood circles. According to Mick, the public perception is that we’re all Sinn Féiners. “But Sinn Féin’s core principles vary from my own, Tommy. I believe it will take physical force to rid my country of British rule.”
When I asked him what he meant, he refilled his whiskey and sighed like he’d been holding his breath for a month.
“I’m not talking of holing up in buildings and burning down Dublin. That doesn’t work. We made a statement in 1916, but statements aren’t good enough. It’s going to take a different kind of warfare. Stealth. Strikes on the important players.
“We’re going to reorganize the Irish Volunteers and invite Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood to join us. All the factions that came together in some form or other during the Rising need to come together again with one goal: getting the British out of Ireland, once and for all. It’s the only way we’ll ever win a damn thing.”
When I asked him how I could help, he laughed and pounded me on the back. He stewed for a minute and asked about my house in Dublin. They needed safe houses all over the city to hide men and stash supplies at a moment’s notice.
I agreed immediately, giving him a spare key and promising to contact the old couple who looked after the residence in my absence. He pocketed the key and said mildly, “We’re going to need guns too, Tommy.”
I was silent, and his dark eyes grew sober.
“I’m setting up networks to smuggle weapons throughout Ireland. I know how you feel about taking a man’s life when you’re sworn to save them. But we have to be able to fight a war, Doc. And the war is coming.”
“I won’t run guns for you, Mick.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” He sighed. “But maybe there’s another way you can help.” He eyed me for a moment, and I was certain he’d thrown the idea for arms smuggling out first, knowing I’d say no and that it would be harder to refuse him twice.
He asked if my father was an Englishman.
I told him my father was a farmer. His father was a farmer, and his father before him, back for hundreds of years. I told him the land they farmed now lies fallow since my great-great-grandfather was accused of being a croppy and was dragged away by the yeomanry to be flogged and blinded with pitch. I told him my great-grandfather lost half his family in the famine of 1845. My grandfather lost half his children to emigration. And my father died young, working land that didn’t belong to him.
Mick’s eyes grew bright, and he clapped me on my back again. “Forgive me, Tommy.”
“My stepfather was an Englishman,” I admitted, knowing all along it was what Mick meant but feeling the sting of past wrongs that I hadn’t righted.
“So I thought. You are well respected, Tommy. And you don’t have the taint of Frongoch like the rest of us. You have a position and connections that may be of use to me here and in Dublin.”
I nodded my assent, not certain that I really could be of use to him. But Mick said no more, and we began to talk of better days. But even writing of the conversation here, in a book I keep hidden away, makes my heart pound.
T. S.
5
A CRAZED GIRL
That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where.
—W. B. Yeats
I awoke to ruddy darkness and dancing shadows. A fire. A log cracked and fell in the grate, sending splinters hissing and making me jump and then cry out at the flash of pain along my side. The crack sounded like a gunshot, and I remembered, though I wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a new story. It was like that for me sometimes. I would become so immersed in writing that the scenes and characters I created came alive in my head, fleshed out and independently animated, visiting me as I slept.
I’d been shot. I’d been pulled from the water by a man who knew my name. And now I was here in a room that looked a little like my room at the Great Southern Hotel, though instead of carpet, the floors were wood and covered with flowered rugs, the paper on the walls was less purple, and the windows were adorned with long lace curtains instead of the heavy drapes that allowed the guests to sleep in darkness at midday. Two lamps with pleated fabric shades trimmed with drops of glass sat on end tables at each side of the bed. I breathed deeply, trying to determine how badly I was injured. I fingered my abdomen carefully, tiptoeing around the thickest section of bandaging along my right side. It burned and pulled when I moved even slightly, but if the placement of the bandage was any indication, the bullet hadn’t done any serious damage. I’d been cared for, I was clean and dry—though completely naked beneath the blankets—and I had no idea where I was.
“Are you leaving again?” The child’s voice came from the base of my bed, disembodied and startling. Beyond the bars of the brass footboard, someone stood, peering at me.
I raised my head slowly for a better look and immediately abandoned the effort, the muscles of my abdomen contracting painfully.
“Will you come closer, please?” I asked, breathless.
There was a weighty silence. Then I felt the brush of a little hand at my feet, and the bed shook faintly as if the child hugged the edge and used it as cover. The approach took several long seconds, but curiosity clearly won out over trepidation, and a moment later I found myself eye to eye with a small boy. He wore a white shirt tucked haphazardly into dark pants held up by a pair of suspenders, making him look like a little old man. His hair was a red so deep and warm, it was crimson. He had a fine, pert nose and a missing front tooth, the hole visible behind his parted lips. Even in the flickering light, his eyes were blue. They searched mine frankly, wide and measuring, and I was sure I knew him.
I knew those eyes.
“Are you leaving again?” he repeated.
It took me a moment to separate his accent from his words. “Air ya leavin’ agin?” he’d said.
Was I leaving? How could I? I didn’t know how I’d even arrived.
“I don’t know where I am,” I whispered, my words strangely slurred even as I copied his accent. Morphine. “So I don’t know where I’ll go,” I finished.
“You’re in Garvagh Glebe,” he said simply. “No one ever sleeps in this room. It can be your room now.”
“That’s very nice of you. My name’s Anne. Can you tell me your name?”
“Doncha know?” he asked, his nose wrinkling.
“No,” I whispered, though, oddly, the confession seemed like a betrayal.
“Eoin Declan Gallagher,” he answered proudly, giving me his full name, the way children sometimes do.
Eoin Declan Gallagher. My grandfather’s name.
“Eoin?” My voice rose in wonder, and I reached out to touch him, suddenly certain he wasn’t really there at all. He stepped back, his eyes swinging to the door.
I was sleeping. I was sleeping and having an odd, wonderful dream.
“How old are you, Eoin?” my dream-self asked.
“You don’t remember?” he responded.
“No. I’m . . . confused. I don’t remember very much. Can you tell me? Please?”
“I’m almost six.”
“Six?” I marveled. Six. My grandfather was born in 1915, less than a year before the uprising that took his parents’ lives. If he was almost six, it was . . . 1921. I was dreaming about 1921. I was hallucinating. I’d been shot, and I’d almost drowned. Maybe I’d died. I didn’t feel dead. I hurt—despite the pain medication, I hurt. My head. My stomach. But my tongue was working. In dreams, my tongue never worked.