Redemption. - Redemption. Part 16
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Redemption. Part 16

"Tuesdays," she said, "you always worked late. I knew you would be alone at night and I would wait all day with my heart in my mouth till your crew left, then I'd slip out on the balcony and watch you wash up and put your shirt back on."

"I knew you were watching," he said.

"I knew you knew, and you took your time."

All of the fierceness came out in the most gentle kisses and exploration. Their hunger was vast and had to be fed slowly. Conor's arms were the steel and the velvet of the screen, power and tenderness. He was not the self-adoring Roman or self-flagellating Parisian. Conor Larkin was all new.

He was mysterious Ireland, so wanting and so needful of compassion. But this laid did not smother it in drink. He let it go in the sweet misty words of his poetry, the poems she had never seen.

They slipped into an easy melting and molding and tasted and teased.

Come, on croppy lad, I've a few things of my own to show you...and I'm going to...

She backed off.

Come and get it, she thought...slowly...to the brink...

She turned away, walked till the fireplace halted her, faced him and took her blouse apart, laying her breasts open for him to gaze upon. They were still gorgeous, almost like those of a young lass.

Now, take them, Conor, no gift will ever be so glorious...just reach...just take them now...they are pleading for your touch, Conor.

"We've been on fire from the moment you first stepped into my forge. I'm clear faint with passion, Caroline. We shouldn't have willed this to happen."

"I don't want to hear any bloody Catholic guilt now!" She took his hands and placed them on her. His thumbs and forefingers whispered over her nipples and they burst out...and he slipped down and tasted them as though they were the most precious of breasts, like from a perfect statue.

An exquisite nip shot sensation through her, which she felt in her teeth and down to her thighs. Now, it was her hand, curious and skilled, finding him and they tugged each other's hair and bit each other's knuckles....

"Oh you're something, lad," she gasped, "I mean, you're something." He was trying to break loose softly, get back from her. "No, no, no, no..." Her fingernails played down his back, striking him defenseless. She split his shirt open and her mouth licked the beautiful muscles of his neck and shoulders.

Conor sank to his knees....

Caroline loosened her grasp and hovered above him. "All right, Conor boy, go if you can. You've your princess now...feel me...I'm wet all over.... I'm bursting inside over and over and over just from the sight and the touch of you."

Conor doubled over and shook. "What do you want from me, God!" he screamed.

Caroline fell to her knees before him, took his hands away from his eyes. He reached out softly and tried to close her blouse.

"You're afraid!"

"I have little to lose, Caroline, but I'm afraid of the havoc we'll wreak. If we cross this line we're on a one-way path to hell. If it were you and me alone, I'd cross it. This could end up killing hundreds of people we don't even know. What about your sons? Your father?"

"I don't care what happens!"

"All we can be is in each other's spirits, Caroline. See, the pity of us is that we are utterly star-crossed."

"The most intense experiences of my life have been the births of my sons. I have had that intensity for you, just looking at you for three years. We're not the first man and woman who have risked. To hell with what happens. I want you, man!"

"And you get everything you want!"

Caroline came to her feet. "Do I? Do I now? Do you believe my father's arrangement with Roger and fourteen years of fidelity is what I wanted? Do you think that being the clay queen of the west is what I want? Oh yes, they let me play with my drapes and banquets and concerts to keep their dirty alliance alive, and I carry disgust deep in me for doing their bidding. Once, Conor...now...now..."

"You're selfish, Caroline. It's a lie that will never go away."

"Conor."

"Don't you ever think of anyone but yourself?"

The lust had been scarred, tempered, and confusion and futility had set in. Conor made to the couch and slumped down, and she went to her knees and rested her head on his lap. He stroked her hair sweetly.

"This is more my fault than yours," he said. "I wanted you to fall madly in love with me for all the wrong reasons. To inflict the most heinous pain on Roger Hubble and all his breed. But you see, Caroline, I failed because I have fallen desperately in love with you. Look up at me."

She managed to.

"Funny part of it," she whispered, "all I would have to do is throw a tantrum, only to establish I could get what I wanted, not that I particularly wanted it. You are the only man I've ever really wanted."

"Thank God fantasy is perfection. Fantasy is pure. Reality between you and me spells disaster."

As Conor stood and snapped his toolbox closed, she stood as well, unsnapped her skirt and made herself naked, then sank into a deep rug covered with silk pillows, beckoning him with her body. He looked upon her, this once, so it would be with him all his life, then he knelt beside her once more.

"It's wrong," he said firmly and covered her with a lap robe.

Caroline's hand grabbed his arm.

"Conor," she implored.

Firmly, surely, Conor released her grip.

"Get out, croppy boy!" she cried slapping his face and burying herself in the pillows.

He backed away and reached for the door.

"Conor!" she cried. "Don't go!"

Caroline heard the door shut softly and looked up. He had left.

"Conor," her voice screamed after him, "come back! Do you hear me! Conor! Damn you! Come back!"

26.

The Century Turns In full pregnancy Atty Fitzpatrick was as close to depicting "Mother Ireland" as a mortal could be. Carrying children in her womb and bearing them proved much simpler than juggling them on her hip at rallies, or rocking the cradle with the left hand while holding a script to read in the right.

Their first child, Theobald, was followed in eighteen months by Rachael. They were the "royal" republican family.

Ireland would never be at a loss of an issue to contend so long as a British soldier remained on her soil. The caseload for Desmond was full, but legal fees for republican causes were scarce to nonexistent. However, Des seemed oblivious of the necessity to collect them. It was up to Atty's acting and inherited income to keep the family larder full.

In those days he worked desperately to keep the Irish Party from going under after the crucifixion of Charles Stewart Parnell by political enemies, aided full-out by the Irish bishops. Parnell had the temerity to live with and have children by his beloved, Kitty O'She a, who was unable to divorce her perfidious husband.

He continued to struggle for an Irish Home Rule bill that would liberate the country, even partly. Des was one of the forces behind the Irish Party's boycott of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

The Irish affront to the old queen, who still slept under the painting of her late husband and had his clothing laid out thirty-five years after his death, should have sounded a sobering note in England. The message was apparent. England's first colony was neither integrated nor pacified after more than three centuries of occupation, hundreds of subversion laws, forced acts of union with the home island, a famine, and harsh measures reserved solely for the Irish.

Far from Ireland another, greater warning shot was fired, in the Transvaal of South Africa. Cecil Rhodes was the epitome of imperial man. In a bald-faced snatch at the Transvaal's gold fields, he tried to incorporate two territories inhabited by Dutch Boers into a now-accepted "union" with Great Britain. It was resisted by Boer arms.

The British woke up to the realization that they had not engaged a modern army in nearly a century, since Napoleon, and were compelled to call in units from all over the empire until they had amassed a half-million men.

Although the Boer field army was a fraction of the size of the British force, their hit-and-run and ambush tactics compelled Lord Kitchener to subdue them in a most brutal manner, applying scorched earth tactics. He ordered massive numbers of Boers, mostly women and children, into what he termed "concentration camps," where conditions were so deplorable that tens of thousands died of hunger and disease.

In Ireland, the plight of the Boers brought on vivid memories of the potato famine. In Dublin, Atty Fitzpatrick headed the country's anti-British Transvaal Committee.

Although fine old Irish imperial brigades fought for the Crown, there were the usual bond of Irish volunteers on the other side.

Atty's journalist pal Seamus O'Neill went to the Transvaal, writing for a world press association of Irish weeklies and magazines. He gained great note when he exposed the horrors of the Bloomfontein concentration camp.

Then Atty got unexpected news when another pregnancy announced itself. She would be one hip short to juggle her family on. Theo and Rachael carried placards as soon as they were able to walk, and their first words were not of Ma and Dad, but of Irish martyrs. It had worked well enough until Emma made her appearance.

Three wanes notwithstanding, it was not time for Atty to slow down because the Gaelic revival was in full bloom, having the new cause of the Boers to espouse. Words, the most dynamic, penetrating, sarcastic, and damning of all Irish weapons, rained from her stages, leapt from her occasional columns and from the speakers' stands in torch-lit rallies.

As the British added the Transvaal to their empire, returning Irishmen reignited Ireland's own struggle with the British.

A journalist named Arthur Griffith formed a new and aggressive political party called Sinn Fein, meaning "Ourselves Alone," a first political step in disclaiming the inept Irish Party. They made their rallying cry, "HOME RULE!"

Desmond Fitzpatrick and the legal battle had been the first prong of the Irish assault. Arthur Griffith and the Sinn Fein Party became the second prong.

The third prong, armed insurrection, arrived in the form of Long Dan Sweeney being slipped back into the country. He was a minor folk hero, a relic of the disastrous Fenian risings and resident of a half-dozen British prisons, where he underwent every sort of humiliation.

Sweeney had worked the world wherever a handful of Irishmen of fighting persuasion would gather. He kept the fires of rebellion fanned, dim though they were. He was the bare bones of the eternal revolutionary, created of acid. He was sloganless and loveless. He had been denounced by the church but a crucifix always hung above the cot where he rested for the night.

With the courts already in battle with the British, the political WORD and the rebel's GUN had come back to Ireland in the form of Arthur Griffith and Long Dan Sweeney.

Into this scene Seamus O'Neill made his reentry with a fine reputation from the Boer War. He was immediately employed by the Dublin Journal, a large daily paper tilting toward the republican point of view but most interested in handicapping the horses.

Seamus took a flat at the edge of the Liberties with the Guinness Brewery on one side and the governing Dublin Castle on the other. He was an immediate and welcome addition to the revival, and Des and Atty Fitzpatrick picked up on the earlier contact they had established with him through the Transvaal Committee.

Sure, Seamus O'Neill out of Ballyutogue, a rare Catholic educated on scholarship at Queens College, a war journalist hero and a swordsman with words, was soon a real Dublin dandy.

In addition to covering his beat for the Journal he poured out essays for Irish-American papers and periodicals and served notice to Atty Fitzpatrick that a play was in the writing.

Seamus O'Neill, man about town at the pubs, the track, and the theatre, lived another life. As soon as he was able he made contact with Long Dan Sweeney and became a secret member of the illegal Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Desmond came into the dining room for a quick hello to the family, then retreated up to the library with his plate. This was par for the course at the Fitzpatricks'. Atty gave the children an extra half-hour, then sent them up to have a good-night tussle with Des, then joined him, thankful the theatre was dark tonight.

It was not always quite so hectic. Both parents made the effort to give their children companionship and comfort. They had set up a program of reading and discussing events to create a closeness.

By the age of twelve Theobald was already doing apprentice clerking for his father, able to pick his way through the law library.

Rachael played through her childhood using her sister, Emma, as her live doll and found rich hours in her mother's theatrical wardrobe. She showed little inclination for much other than being a little girl who enjoyed being a little girl.

They were well behaved and moved in a crowd of adults with ease in the salons of discussion, debates, and poetry readings.

Supreme times were the family trips to Lough Clara, and one was always on the schedule up ahead. Horseback riding with Mom and fishing with Daddy and getting to know each other again about the fire.

When Des came in pressed as he did this night, the children always feared a sudden cancellation of the journey to Lough Clara. Theo went up to the library and stoked the turf for them. Things seemed iffy these days. Theo could tell by the radiation of tension, the quickening of their speech, and the short duration of their toleration that something was amiss.

When Rachael led the children in, their parents gave them perfunctory kisses as Des gobbled down the contents of his plate and punctuated it with a strong shot of whiskey.

"Are we calling off next week's trip to Lough Clara?" Theo asked at the door.

"It's still on with me," Des said to his son's relief.

"We'll go," Atty assured.

When the door shut, they slowed obvious tension with another clout from the bottle.

"Will your trial spill over into our holiday time?"

"Oh, the mood around the Four Courts seems to be conciliatory these days. The second reading of the Home Rule Bill is ready for Commons. They always get polite. I suspect a deal might be in the making." Des took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was done in.

"You really need the time in Lough Clara," she said. "If the trial goes long we'll just pull the children out of school and bring a tutor with us."

"That might be a little difficult for Emma," Des said. "She's just getting her teeth into school."

"It's never been a problem in the past," Atty answered. "Theo and Rachael are the smartest kids in Dublin."

Des looked at the bundle of briefs confronting him.

Atty looked grim.

"What's up?" he asked directly.

"I saw Seamus O'Neill today," she said.

"How's his play coming?"

"It wasn't about the play."

"So is it you, not me, reneging on Lough Clara?"

"Damn you, Des, let me work up to it in my own way." His undivided attention had been attained.

"Des, would it be dreadful if you took the kids with a nanny and tutor? Maybe I can join you for a long weekend."