Redemption. - Redemption. Part 27
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Redemption. Part 27

Her desire for Conor continued strongly after his kind rebuff, and she knew she loved him even though he would command whatever. Without rancor, Atty realized that Shelley MacLeod was the right woman for him...not her...but Shelley. Atty as Atty was incapable of what Shelley as Shelley was.

This became a transcending experience, the knowing that she could love greatly and accept the possibility that it would be unrequited. This love she would carry quietly, for Conor Larkin made her pleased with herself just in the realization.

Once it became settled in Atty's mind, then loving Shelley as her own sister followed easily. It seemed the stuff of bad plays, Atty believed at first...an awful cliche-of two sisters mad for the same fellow.

To make matters even more serene and velvety was Shelley's realization of how deeply Atty Fitzpatrick loved her man. She felt great empathy for Atty, as well as great respect for Atty's dignity.

What an utterly mad triangle, Atty thought! I love them both and want them for each other! I must be coming unhinged! As she discovered the impossibility of disliking Shelley MacLeod, Atty sensed she had come to a new capability of loving. If, indeed, she was able to love so unselfishly, then there might be a love for her sometime, someplace.

Once married to Des, Atty believed that a Jack Murphy intensity of love would elude her for all of her life, until she set eyes on Conor Larkin. "I can love now, without reservation," and this gave her a new and lovely path she must explore someday.

There was no getting around Rachael with child's talk and, having no sister of her own, Shelley and the girl filled each other with laughter and hugs.

Poor Theo was burdened by being sixteen. Naturally, he had secretly fallen desperately and eternally in love with Shelley. All he could do was suck in his frustration and continually demonstrate how charming and witty he was.

"I have a new thesis," Theo opened one evening. "God, we all agree, transcends all creatures, plants, livestock, and inanimate objects. God may choose to be whatever the hell God wishes to be-a mountain, a shark, ten trees, a lighter-than-air balloon. God, God forbid, may even be a priest. The only thing God cannot do is transform himself into a female. God only knows why, but God must be a man and certainly a man of our color. But, let us say, for the sake of argument God decided to be a trout, a male trout, naturally, and in his own infinite way let the clergy and the masses alike know that henceforth he will not be known as God, but as Trout. This would make a ponderous difference in our lives."

Rachael, attuned to such gobbledygook, looked up from the desk and her homework. "We could never eat Trout again," she said.

"Goes much deeper than that, Rachael. Take the British anthem, 'Trout save our noble king, Trout save our noble king, Trout save the king.'"

"For Trout's sake, Theo, you're being ridiculous," Shelley said.

"'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Trout,'" Theo bellowed.

"What Trout has joined, let no man put asunder."

"Trout damned you, Rachael Fitzpatrick. Trout knows I try to be a kind and loving brother, but in the name of Trout I find it trying."

"Trout Almighty, Theo, Trout is on my side."

"No, Trout is on the Protestant side."

"Beware the wrath of Trout, you two," Shelley said, being drawn in against her will.

"This matter is in Trout's hands...rather fins..."

Atty came from the kitchen and announced dinner.

"What are we having, Mom?" Rachael asked.

"God. Do you want yours off the bone or on the bone?"

As the days wearied on with no word of Conor, the two became extremely close and extremely dependent. Shelley freed Atty to pursue her calling and her calling now was speaking out at mass meetings on behalf of the Sixmilecross men.

When their days were done, they would retire to the library and light a turf fire and talk the hours away with words that took root in a fierce attachment.

43.

"Free Conor Larkin! Free Conor Larkin!"

A small but boisterous clump of students marched with torchlights and placards, passing beneath the window of Lord Jeremy Hubble's flat on Merrion Square. Ad hoc groups of young people from Trinity College and central Dublin were merging for a rally at St. Stephen's Green.

It was unusual for Trinity College students to be involved, for the school had been the stronghold of the Anglo gentry from the time of Queen Elizabeth. It remained a gentrified Protestant institution. Sixmilecross had occasioned more than a hundred young people and a half-dozen teachers to a new and public awareness that they were Irish, if not precisely republicans.

Jeremy allowed the thick velvet drape to fall over the window, dulling the street noise.

"You'd think they'd be hanging him as a traitor," Jeremy mumbled, "instead of treating him like a national hero. No doubt that Fitzpatrick woman will be bellowing her lungs out at the Green. Beastly mouth, she has."

Molly O'Rafferty remained sadly silent, as she had tried to do since Sixmilecross. Jeremy swayed this way, then that way. He tossed in his sleep, awakened sweating. He cursed Conor Larkin for betraying him and making him a dupe. And he still loved Conor, confusingly.

"Latin has its way of turning the old mind about," Molly said. "Back to your studies and on with them."

Jeremy returned to his desk and once again questioned the value of Latin.

"Just think, when you've conquered Caesar, you get a go at Cicero."

"I'd rather dine on a pail of maggots."

Thank God, Molly was determined to tutor him. Thank God for Molly for everything. Jeremy's snarling dimmed as she soothed him with the chords of her guitar.

Jeremy glanced back at her and fell in love with her once again, as he always did every time he glanced at her or touched her or held her.

It had been that way from the very first eye contact. He and his mates went to the Lord Sarsfield, a student pub on the river Liffey quay, where Molly sang folk ballads on Saturday nights. The voice that reached him was more pure than the tinkle of any crystal or silver bell in Hubble Manor.

I spied a fair damsel far fairer than any, Her cheeks like the red rose that none could excel, Her skin like the lily that grows in yon valley, She's my own bonnie Annie, my factory girl.

That was it, then, now, and forever, Jeremy lad. Molly O'Rafferty barely past sixteen, newly out of convent school, and an apprentice teacher.

The marchers outside had passed for the moment and Jeremy was lulled into his Latin. He went at it diligently. When she saw him tire, Molly set down her guitar and hovered behind him checking his work and at the same time keeping enough distance to duck her skirts out of the way of his constant reaching back for her.

Mal Palmer burst in! One knock and in! Mal discombobulated the atmosphere of serenity once again.

"Oh, if Napoleon had the breastworks of that Atty Fitzpatrick, he'd have won at Waterloo."

"For God's sake, Mal," Jeremy snapped.

"I just wanted to hear what the Fenian avengers had to say." Mal touched the Sixmilecross button on his jacket. "Oh, oh," he said slipping it quickly into a pocket.

There was no use insulting or dressing Mal down. He was uninsultable, undressdownable, and had little sensitivity to Jeremy's situation. Somehow, he remained a pal. He was a good rugby player and terribly humorous at times...otherwise useless.

"Well, it is Saturday night. Are we off to the Lord Sarsfield to hear our Molly girl's angel voice?"

"You take Molly over," Jeremy said, "I'll catch up with you."

"I was saving a surprise for you, Jeremy," Molly said. "Nell McCaffery is singing in my place tonight."

"Pity, what," Mal said. "I hope old Nell knows some frog songs to harmonize with her voice. Jeremy, this pains me, old chap, but can I ding you for a fiver? Damned allowance hasn't arrived."

"You shouldn't gamble, Mal, you're no good at it," Jeremy said.

"Well, I am pressed for a fiver so on with your sermon."

Jeremy gave him the money and Mal said he loved them both and was off to scour the square for other mates for additional fivers.

"Poor Mal," Molly said, "what an ugly game he and his father play. Mal deliberately runs up gambling debts and Daddy pays them in a rage. This proves to Mal that his daddy truly loves him, although his daddy truly despises him."

"Trinity College is the bottom of the toilet bowl for all us good Anglo chaps who have disappointed our fathers by failing to get into Oxford."

"That's enough Latin, Mal, and rallies for one evening," Molly said closing his books.

"You didn't tell me you weren't singing at the pub tonight."

"I wanted to surprise you before himself burst in. I'm planning to give you a private performance tonight, m'lord. Jeremy, I can stay the night and all day tomorrow."

"Oh, that's bully! How did you manage it?"

"I told my folks I had a singing engagement at the girls' school in Dun Laoghaire and that I'll be staying over with a friend."

He was out of his chair in a blink and seized her. "No profanity till after dinner," she managed between kisses and his fumbling with her buttons. "Or we'll starve...once we start up...and everything like that...you know..."

"Oh Molly, Molly, Molly."

They stood huffing in each other's faces, eyes drifting off to dream stuff... .

"...you hungry?"

"...not really."

"...me, either."

"...the translations?"

"...tomorrow... ."

Thump, thump, thump, thump. Outside, a bloody drum! A blurred message from marchers whooping it up, "Free Conor Larkin! Free Conor Larkin!"

Jeremy went into a quiver of clenched fists and clenched teeth, nearly shutting off his own breath. "I love Conor so!" he blurted without meaning to do so. "Molly, we must have done something terrible to make a man like Conor turn on us. It was that bloody factory fire!"

Molly turned away in frustration. Everyone had warned that her affair with the Viscount Coleraine was doomed from the start. Every year gentrified college lads fell desperately in love with nice sorts like her, away from their parents' eyes. And one day their college was done and they were gone.

But did not she and Jeremy have something grander? Somewhere, somehow, someday the diverse peoples of Ireland would have to start getting along with one another. The cases in point would have to be strong, like her and Jeremy. If two people could love each other so and not make it, then the country could never make it.

Jeremy now roiled against Conor and the Brotherhood. Molly closed her eyes and moved from his view. She wanted to shout at him, "You'd better learn about the potato famine, Jeremy, and before that the penal laws, and before that, death by Oliver Cromwell!"

Why must two decent people find out that their love always has to be a defiance of history? It was not that Jeremy wasn't one of the lads. He'd done the Irishtowns of the Midlands. His hero was a Catholic rebel. Yet, when one is raised in Hubble Manor, no matter how liberal the countess was, privilege was divined into him so that below a certain line of compassion, Jeremy was unable to understand suffering, humiliation, and slavery.

Jeremy was like the "decent" slave owners of Alabama and the Caribbean. He could only delve so deeply into black men and women before his "natural" order of superiority took over. His love of Conor was the exception. His love of Molly, yet to be resolved.

Jeremy merrily rolled along thinking everyone a fine fellow. This worried his father and grandfather enormously as they worked him into a ceremonial role in life. For the Weed and Hubble Ulster scheme to work, the Catholics and Protestants needed to be pitted against one another.

Molly O'Rafferty awakened frightened many mornings, knowing that Ireland's tragic past had breezed by Jeremy. If he deeply felt the injustice, he'd have to do something about it, and he didn't have the mustard to buck his father.

His mother never went over the first floor of the factory because she didn't want to know the misery above. Jeremy's dilemma about Conor was of the same cloth. He didn't really want to know why Conor was Brotherhood.

Molly, sweet Molly, what had she gotten herself into? She loved this boy as only a bedrock virgin could love after giving him her treasure.

"You'll have to make your way to Conor Larkin. You know the people to let you into his prison. You're going to have to make peace with him, and perhaps Conor will enlighten you about the treacherous waters you and I are in."

"Mother will stand up for us."

"There's more to it than that, Jeremy."

"I'll not let anything happen between us."

"We're in Ireland, Jeremy, and you're an Ulsterman with a golden set of credentials which excludes me. If we are to come through this together, you're going to have to start making some strong decisions."

As she embraced her lad, Molly knew that this was not the time to bring up the possibility of her pregnancy.

44.

The house descended into a sadness, yet with a feeling that something majestic had come to them along with tragedy. A surge of wonderment and a sense of dignity as strong as their fears of death.

When only Shelley and Atty were left in the study they sat silently, held hands, and lowered the level of the whiskey bottle.

"I'm leaving for Belfast tomorrow," Shelley said, breaking the silence.

"Please," Atty said, "I need you, Shelley."

"My father needs me more," she said. "He's called for me. He wants me. My place is beside him now. We have to make our peace with each other."

"What's happening?"

"Robin phoned. Morgan's back is broken. He's in excruciating pain...just keeps calling for me."

"You'll let us give you protection?"