“I trust her to keep Eoin safe,” I argued. “That is my only concern.”
“That is your only concern?” Thomas cried, his volume rising with every word. “Well, it isn’t mine! Good God, Anne. Liam tried to kill you. For all I know, Ben tried to kill you too. I’m bloody relieved that poor Martin Carrigan and the unfortunate Brody are dead because now I only have the feckin’ Gallagher brothers to worry about.”
Thomas never yelled, and his vehemence surprised me. When I stared at him, dumbstruck, he gripped my shoulders, pressed his forehead to mine, and groaned my name.
“Anne, you have to listen to me. I know you care about Brigid, but you feel a loyalty to her that she does not return. Her loyalty is to her sons, and I don’t trust her where they are concerned.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“She has to know that I will no longer allow them anywhere near you or Eoin.”
“She will blame me,” I mourned. “She will think she has to choose between us.”
“She does have to choose, Countess. Ben and Liam have always been trouble. Declan was the youngest, but of the three, he had the best head on his shoulders and the biggest heart in his chest.”
“Did Declan ever strike Anne?” I asked softly.
Thomas reared back in surprise. “Why do you ask?”
“Brigid told me that she understood why I—why Anne—left when she had the chance. She insinuated that Declan wasn’t always gentle, that he and his brothers had inherited their father’s temper.”
Thomas gaped at me. “Declan never raised his hand to Anne. She would have hit him right back. She slapped his brothers around enough. I know Liam bloodied her lip once, but that was after she’d hit him over the head with a shovel, and he went in swinging, trying to take it away.”
“So why would Brigid think Declan was violent?”
“Declan was always covering for Ben and Liam. I know he took the blame, more than once, for things they’d done. He paid their debts, smoothed things over when they got into trouble, and helped them find work.”
“And you think Brigid will try to cover for them now.” I sighed.
“I know she will.”
And with that belief, Thomas sat Brigid down soon after we were married and questioned her on the whereabouts and the activities of her sons. When she’d been reticent to speak about them at all, he told her, in no uncertain terms, that Liam and Ben were not welcome at Garvagh Glebe any longer.
“You are in this fight up to your eyebrows, Dr. Smith. You have been for years. You are not innocent. You are no better than my boys. I hold my tongue. I keep your secrets, what little I know. And it’s precious little! Nobody tells me anything.” Her chin began to tremble, and she looked at me, her eyes filled with questions and accusations. Thomas regarded her soberly, his face devoid of emotion.
“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will hurt Anne,” Thomas said, his voice low, his eyes holding hers. “Do I have reason to be afraid?”
She began to shake her head, to babble something incoherent.
“Brigid?” he interrupted, and she fell silent immediately, her back stiffening, her expression growing stony.
“They don’t trust her,” Brigid bit out.
“I don’t care,” he snarled, and for a moment, I saw the Thomas Smith who had carried Declan on his back through the streets of Dublin, who had infiltrated the Castle and the prisons for Michael Collins, who faced death daily with flat eyes and steady hands. He was a little frightening.
Brigid saw him too. She blanched and looked away, her hands clasped in her lap.
“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will harm Anne,” he repeated. “I can’t allow that.”
Brigid’s chin fell to her chest.
“I will tell them to stay away,” she whispered.
Thomas held my hand tightly in his as we maneuvered through the crowd and into the packed chamber of the Mansion House. Michael had assured us there would be seats reserved for us, and we slid between nervous congregants, who were smoking and shifting and making the room smell like ashtrays and armpits. I pressed my face into Thomas’s shoulder, into his clean solidity, and prayed for Ireland, though I already knew how she would fare.
Thomas was greeted and hailed, and even Countess Markievicz, her beauty faded by the ravages of imprisonment and revolution, extended her hand to him with a slight smile.
“Countess Markievicz, may I introduce my wife, Anne Smith. She shares your passion for trousers,” Thomas murmured, tipping his hat. She laughed, her hand covering her mouth and her broken and missing teeth. Vanity was not easily relinquished, even among those who eschewed it.
“But does she share my passion for Ireland?” she asked, her brows quirked beneath her black hat.
“I doubt one passion is identical to another. After all, she married me,” Thomas whispered, conspiratorial.
She laughed again, charmed, and turned away to greet someone else, releasing me from her thrall.
“Breathe, Anne,” Thomas murmured, and I did my best to comply as we found our seats and the session was called to order. Before it was all said and done, Constance Markievicz would call Michael Collins a coward and an oath-breaker, and my loyalty was firmly with him. But I couldn’t help but be a little awestruck by her presence.
I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.
But sitting in the crowded session, seeing men and women who had lived only in pictures and in print, hearing their voices raised in argument, in protest, in passion, I was the furthest thing from objective and detached; I was overcome. Eamon de Valera, the president of Dáil, towered over everyone else. Hook-nosed, thin-faced, and dark, he clothed his height and his spare frame with unrelenting black. Born in America, he was the son of an Irish mother and a Spanish father and had been sadly neglected and abandoned by both. Above all else, Eamon de Valera was a survivor. His American citizenship had saved him from execution after the Rising, and when Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and a dozen others fell under the swath of civil war, Eamon de Valera would still be standing. There was greatness in him, and I was not immune. His political longevity and personal tenacity would be his legacy in Ireland.
He spoke more than everyone else combined, interrupting and interjecting, shifting and sidestepping every idea but his own. He’d introduced a new document he’d drafted during the break, an amendment that wasn’t much different from the Treaty, and insisted on its adoption. When it was rejected on the grounds that it was not the document that had been debated in private session, he threatened to resign as president, further muddying the question at hand. I knew my feelings about him were colored by my research, but I had to remind myself that he had not known how it would all play out. I had the advantage of hindsight, where history had already unfolded and pointed the finger of blame. The committee clearly held him in high regard; their respect was evident in their deference and in their attempts to appease him. But where de Valera was venerated, Michael Collins was loved.
Whenever Michael spoke, the people strained to hear, barely breathing so they wouldn’t miss it. It was as though our heartbeats synchronized, an inaudible drumbeat reverberating through the assembly, and it was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I’d read about some of Michael’s speeches, and I’d even seen a picture a photographer had snagged from a window above the crowd assembled to hear him speak in College Green in the spring of 1922. The picture had shown a small stage surrounded by a sea of hats, giving the appearance of pale, bobbing balls, every head covered, nothing else visible. The numbers were fewer in the chamber, but the effect was the same; his energy and conviction commanded attention.
The public debates droned on. Arthur Griffith, gray-faced and ailing—he reminded me of a slimmer Theodore Roosevelt with his handlebar mustache and circular glasses—was the most adept at holding de Valera accountable, and when he came to Michael’s defense after a particularly nasty attack by Cathal Brugha, the minister for defense, the entire room erupted in applause that didn’t end for several minutes.
I’d been wrong about one thing. These were not average men and women. Time had not given them a gloss they had not earned. Even those I wanted to loathe, based on my own research and conclusions, conducted themselves with fervor and honest conviction. These weren’t posing politicians. They were patriots whose blood and sacrifice deserved history’s pardon and Ireland’s compassion.
“History really doesn’t do them justice. It doesn’t do any of you justice,” I murmured to Thomas, who regarded me with ancient eyes.