Redemption. - Redemption. Part 7
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Redemption. Part 7

Atty made two life decisions by the age of sixteen. She hated the injustice of the British rule and she loved Jack Murphy. Both decisions were logical to her and both inseparable.

Jack's departure was soothed somewhat by kindly letters from rare and exotic surrounding places...Tampico...Bora Bora...Christchurch...Monrovia...Montevideo.

"I do love you, Atty," Jack Murphy wrote, "but not in the mating way. Even if I had the right to love you with physical passion in mind, it still might not be possible. Too many things we came into the world with have frayed our tapestry from the beginning. We might as well have been born, you in India and me in Argentina, there are so many differences between us.

"To be utterly honest, there is you, Atty, who is the real difference. You are so soft and beautiful to look upon, yet so hard and frightening to know. You are bitter, Atty, determined to throw your life into changing an unchangeable world. The odds you have placed on reaching your goals are insurmountable. While I adore your courage and determination, I don't adore my own that much. I know I could never be a proper partner for you in such a venture. I seek much less from life. You are too strong for me, Atty, and I dare say you are too strong for almost any man, for he must be willing to subvert himself to your insatiable drive.

"Only myself sees that inner rage in you now, but soon all of Ireland will know about it. Nae, all the world. Do I make any sense to you at all? Now I close as I opened this letter. I love you, but not in that way."

Was Jack Murphy too weak for her or simply too wise? He knew her truths and said he could not match them. It was an elegant rebuff. He called himself a quitter. Nonetheless, Atty felt anger with her pain. Why couldn't Jack hold up? Or was it all just his way of saying he didn't really love her?

After her seventeenth birthday, Atty announced to her parents that she was not returning to London for further schooling but was off to Dublin instead.

"Is this an advisement or a consultation?" her father asked.

"I've made my decision, Father. Seek whatever justifications you need."

There was no call going into all that trash about disinheriting her, Charles Royce-Moore wisely concluded. It was a small miracle he was able to keep her close for seventeen years. "I suppose," he said, "that you are intent on joining this Gaelic mutiny going on in Dublin."

"I'm not all that certain."

"Well, since Parnell," he said, trying to manage not to make a mock spit, "the clans have been gathering to run the Anglo rascals out with a new birth of ancient Celtic tribalism. Gaelic sports, Gaelic literature, and all those bloody newspaper articles-how in the name of the Almighty did this one little place sprout so many writers? They're like mushrooms growing wild near a moldy swamp."

"Perhaps it is because you have made Ireland a moldy swamp," she answered.

"Can we negotiate?" her father said candidly.

"One does not negotiate with the English without getting buggered," she replied, only half joking.

"I've watched you wander among the lepers for years," he said. "I've had my moments of great consternation. More than once I've asked myself, what the hell are we doing here? Well, I was born here. My estate is out there. Things have been done a certain way for centuries and despite a pang of conscience now and then, I have always known I could not change things."

"That's a very pleasant line of justification for picking the Irish carcass clean in a most hideous way. Your class-"

"Our class, Atty."

"Your class," she continued, "has reduced these people to the most destitute in Western civilization. Their larder is empty," she said.

"That's a fact. The time of the estates is coming to an end. Although it is all beyond my reach, there must be a supplanting of new ideas, the kind that you are up to. Look here, my velvet collar has turned shiny. I'm not going to keep up the pretense, and I know you won't, either. This is a shabby place, growing shabbier."

"I will say, Father, that you have been better than some."

"I shall not turn against my class, Atty. The radical goings-on in Dublin are beyond me, yet I see a time coming when we will completely fade from the landscape. I suggest there will be very few Irish tears shed for us when we leave. Now, do you want to listen to my proposition or not?"

Atty loved her father almost as much as she despised his class. Is it more evil to be aware of his evil and not do anything about it? Most of his goodfellows accepted the fortunate circumstances of their inheritances without a ha'penny of guilt. Sneering down on the inferior croppy Irish justified the exploitation. At least her father did not do that.

"Here is my proposal. As you know by your study of the estate books, I have transferred a decent sum to London to see out your mother's and my days. I am quite provincial myself and am actually very fond of Ireland. Yet, I cannot bear the thought of doing my declining years in a townhouse in Dublin. Dublin is seedy. A few stone facades scarcely cover a shantytown soggy with all those pubs and their bad poets. I am going to retire to the comfort of London. You have my major sins on the table-my class loyalty, my inability to change the world.

"The estate is in rather decent order," he continued. "Murphy and my land agents have done an admirable job in the framework in which they've been allowed to operate. We have tried not to inflict too much more pain on our tenants. I have set aside a tidy little trust for you to conclude your education, which you now reject. So, go to Dublin and use this money to keep yourself. All I ask is that you indulge your mother now and then and let her give a few parties a year so you can examine and guillotine her newest collection of eligible suitors."

"No, Daddy, you want more. Now what is it?"

"Atty, for seventeen you are a monster. All right, then. By the time you reach your twenty-first birthday, the barony will be yours whether I survive or not. You have to promise me that you'll keep things in balance with Murphy. Once Mother and I die, you can do with it what you will."

"Why the wait, Father?"

"I want to live in London as a retired member of the gentry and not as some sort of traitor."

Atty's answer would be quick-in five years she would be able to make of Lough Clara what she had dreamed of doing since she was a child.

"Meanwhile, join the bloody rising," he finished.

"I agree, Father. Lough Clara will still bear the family crest until you and Mother die. I hope that won't be for a long time. But understand what I'm doing in Dublin."

"Oh hell, we all know that. You see, Atty, I have known all along what I am and cannot be otherwise or even pretend to be otherwise. The potato famine turned me into a lump instead of a crusader. I was happy when I was called off to do my naval duty and did not want to return to Lough Clara. But I did, and I did nothing new or stunning, only what was expected of me. I am an Englishman and all that implies, good and bad. I'll stand aside for you. Let me have my dignity."

Tender kisses from Atty had been hard to come by. He treasured this one.

"And now, willful, wonderful, wise, angry Atty, allow me to offer you one piece of advice."

"Of course, Father."

"Forget about Jack Murphy."

"I can't and I won't."

"You're far too strong for him. Forgive me for saying this, Atty, but you're far too strong for any man I've met. But Jack Murphy will not be ground under and unless you can reach an accommodation with him, as you just have with me, then you will grind him under."

"And if he doesn't come back? No one else will have me?"

"No one else can hold you, Atty. Unless...and I find this highly unlikely...you fall in love so desperately that you completely lose yourself."

"What do you believe?"

"I told you. Find an accommodation with Jack or someone, a way you can live together without great passion or great desire to destroy each other. You see, my girl, the man who can make my Atty lose herself does not exist. Be British in this instance. Make an accommodation."

13.

1890.

Lord Randolph Churchill had come. The Long Hall of Hubble Manor was packed. Every member of the landed gentry and aristocracy west of Westport and north of Athlone had come. All men of the cloth who were the inheritors of the Reformation had come. Every loyalmost of the loyalmost, the Orange Grandmasters, had come. Beribboned veterans of the Queen's loyal Ulster regiments had come. And their women.

Shivering from Charles Stewart Parnell's smashing victory and fearing for their continuation in isolated Londonderry, they heard the archconservative of England play his Orange card. His voice, couched in words to reach beyond the wall and over the sea to Parliament, took dead aim at intimidation of the Liberal Party.

His young son Winston sopped it up for future reference. His father had splayed the unsuspecting foe, broken their ranks, left them reeling.

It was also the first successful adventure of the partnership of Western Ulster, defended by Roger Hubble and the Belfast establishment controlled by Sir Frederick Weed. Between them now, they had a lock on the province's political direction. Their relationship was consummated by the marriage of Caroline Weed to Roger Hubble. Churchill at Long Hall became one of the most consequential events in the history of Ulster. The moment was a culmination of two different men with two different careers suddenly and daringly merged.

Weed was the bully Scotsman, an entrepreneur in an age of British entrepreneurship. The self-made magnate whose mighty industrial plant was now laying the hulls for steel ships of up to ten thousand tons. The rail king with his Red Hand Express engine and personal train, the envy of every South American dictator and Indian maharajah. Steel from his mills spun the rails that eighty percent of Ireland's trains ran on. He had accomplished it all, by God, with his great derring-do.

His bastion of Belfast, unfortunately, was the only place where the British had made substantial investments. It stood unique on an Irish landscape bereft of manufacturing. Manned with loyal Protestant workers, Belfast was the solitary enclave of enterprise.

Out on the land, the days of the great estates were ending. Since the potato famine, the gentry had been reduced to tattered curtains and mumbled their pledges to the Crown by rote.

Viscount Roger Hubble, the pending Earl of Foyle, proved an exception. He snatched the earldom from his bumbling father, pensioned him off with his mistress, and not only survived but created a new chapter to add to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution.

Roger Hubble was an ultimate master of creating a cradle-to-grave labor force, which was always in his debt. On the land, his tenant farmers cultivated the raw product he needed and he allowed them just enough acreage to farm food for a marginal existence. Hubble carefully nipped off the weaker farms, evicting the tenants, and converted the land into a growing cattle ranch, the prime export product to England.

He set the price for planting seeds and carried the peasant's debt, which was paid off at the next harvest with obscene interest. He then set the price of the flax that was harvested. Conversion of flax to linen was a slimy job, done mostly with labor provided by the younger children of the peasants, often to keep even with the family debts.

Evictions on the land assured a constant flow of desperate and jobless people into Londonderry and into their squalid neighborhood of Bogside. Thus, he always had a surplus of cheap labor. Unemployment of men ran around fifty percent, and those who worked had menial jobs.

The big profit-maker was his shirt factory, the largest in the British Isles, which used the linen produced by his peasants.

Roger Hubble's control of everything from seed to finished product, power over the political machinery, and labor force represented all that was deemed glorious in colonization and imperialism.

The decent positions in the municipality, in the shipyard, in the schools as well as the mercantile were locked in for those who swore loyalty to the Crown. This was Ulsterism.

Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Party dented the system and opened their own salvo for Home Rule. Londonderry both historically and geographically belonged in County Donegal, which would have been outside Ulster's boundaries. By shamefully gerrymandering the borders, Roger Hubble was able to shift Londonderry into Ulster.

In the beginning of the new political era, Sir Frederick Weed and the Belfast industrialists wanted to expend Londonderry as a liability. Roger Hubble, and later Randolph Churchill, threatened civil war if the sacred Protestant city was lost to the Catholics. The marriage of Roger and Caroline set the alliance in stone.

Caroline was an exciting lady with a recent past that included a marriage to a penniless gigolo, an Italian count. Her main purpose was to enrage her father, which she did. Many thousands of pounds sterling were spread around the Vatican, which ultimately came up with an annulment.

The heady lady smashed up a hotel suite filled with priceless antiques, bolted Rome, and took on Paris. Here she shared a garret with a struggling but extremely talented artist painting in the new Impressionistic style. When his garlic and gout and the climb to his attic no longer endeared him, she returned to Ulster, where she became the model of decorum, a queen of culture and charity, and awaited her fate, which appeared in the form of Roger Hubble.

They realized the power of their union. Titillated by whispers of Caroline's past, Roger's sexuality was unearthed and aroused to a point that he became an excellent lover. Roger adored her.

Caroline bore him two sons, one for the earldom and one for Weed Ship & Iron. Lord Jeremy, the elder and heir, seemed to be a throwback to Roger's own father, the dawdling Arthur Hubble, a boy too frivolous to do the stern stuff necessary to run the hard course.

Fortunately, Christopher, the younger son, showed all the ice of his father. So be it. Jeremy would be the ceremonial earl while Christopher would be schooled to run the machinery.

Caroline! Caroline the magnificent! She turned Londonderry from a cultural blob to a cultural way station. Every touring Shakespearean company, every second-rate troupe of operatic Italians, every lecturer, poet, musician, orchestra who touched Ireland made the now mandatory trip to Londonderry. Most were brought there through her cultural foundation. Caroline was the grande dame of Western Ulster.

Life was complete for Roger Hubble, except for one grating habit of Caroline's. She never stopped remodeling. Hubble Manor was a historic monstrosity with its dozens of fish and gun and knife rooms and ice houses and fowl rooms and stables and a Buckingham Palace-size kitchen, subkitchens, a poultry room, twenty linen closets, and workshops for the drapers, rug menders, upholsterers, painters, glazers, gardeners, and a boathouse on the Lough Foyle, and butlers, maids, carriage drivers, and footmen, all two hundred of them in their hideous mint green uniforms with vile lemon piping.

Roger played the role of woeful wounded husband opening the bills, but Caroline's seduction kept his sexual appetite always hungry enough for the marriage to work. Fortunately, when the bills came due, Caroline had an enormously wealthy daddy and funds of her own.

The place for any great event...Caruso singing, a world collection of scholars, the Queen's state visit...was always the Long Hall, which could house almost a thousand people at a seated dinner and more for a concert.

Having been repaired, remodeled, rebuilt, and added on with nonstop activity for a decade, Hubble Manor was transformed from a seedy weed-covered haunted house to a palace of legendary grandeur, the epitome of what the ultimate colonizer could do with his imperial appetite.

Another ultimate was Lord Hubble's shirt factory. Conditions within were filthy, numbing cold by winter, darkness, suffocating heat by summer, a void of human facilities, and a page-long list of miseries that were direct leftovers from the blackest days of the Industrial Revolution.

With all the new liberalism in the air, Roger Hubble became uneasy that industrial and labor reform might find its way into Londonderry and, particularly, his shirt factory, which was the chief supporter of Lady Caroline's excesses. To make matters worse, a Catholic peasants' and workers' rights solicitor had won the seat in Commons.

Having redone everything redoable, Caroline turned to the final great project, restoration of the great screen in the Long Hall. It was forty feet wide and forty feet high, forming a majestic entrance gate. It might have well been a copy of the gates of heaven, inspired by the Almighty.

Tradition had it that the screen was the work of Jean Tijou, a great French ironmaster who had been brought to England centuries earlier during the reign of William and Mary. Much of its history, as well as its twisted agony, remained hidden by legend.

Obviously, Lady Hubble searched out the foremost living ironmaster, one Joaquim Schmidt, the German. For two years Schmidt worked on what had become an enigma. As a good German would, Herr Schmidt believed things would happen if he commanded and hollered. His shouting dimmed to a disoriented mumble and he departed.

Then Caroline brought in the Italian, Tustini. At first he made some progress but he became torn emotionally between the screen and a number of the upstairs and downstairs maids. Ulster weather sent him into long depressions, followed by too much vino, and he sobbed all the way to Cork to catch his ship back to Italy.

Her failure gnawed at her every time an event was held in the Long Hall, as the great screen remained limp and disoriented.

14.

1895.

Lady Atty Brooke Royce-Moore, the Baroness of Lough Clara, burst on the scene of the Gaelic revival as though she and Dublin had been waiting for one another for a century.

Her first act, which endeared her to the native Dubliners, was to dehyphenate and degentrify her name and titles to a simple Miss Atty Moore.

Atty's generous per annum allowance enabled her to purchase a four-story Georgian row house at 34 Garville Avenue in the suburb of Rathgar. It was neither an aristocrat's home nor a poor man's dwelling. A spacious drawing room hosted most of those who identified with and spearheaded the Gaelic revival. Spicy conversation rang from writers, journalists, pamphleteers, leafleteers, republicans, actors, playwrights, and new-breed politicians.

Atty's basic identification was with Arthur Griffith, whose newspaper the United Irishman was a growing force. Griffith had also formed a new political party, Sinn Fein, whose translation meant "Ourselves Alone." Sinn Fein was born to replace the Irish Party, whose spirit had died with the death of Parnell. Once a determined force, the Irish Party members became lackeys in the British Parliament, incapable of pushing the Home Rule agenda.

Atty kept quiet about her age. She was seventeen when she arrived in Dublin like a Celtic myth riding out of the west. Her physical stature, keen mind, and willful personality revealed a persona beyond her years. She was more than at home in this moment of Gaelic revival. She spoke the ancient language to perfection and soon discovered the speaker's platform at street corner rallies where she decried the evils of imperialism.

All of it was euphoric, the ringing cries for liberty by the pamphleteers, the circle of intellectuals, the old games of the Gaels on the sports fields, the spawning ground of awakening.

Shortly after her arrival, three of her closest friends, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and William Butler Yeats declared the beginnings of an Irish National Theatre.

We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year, certain Celtic and Irish plays, which, whatever be their degrees of excellence, will be written with high ambition and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature...We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.

Well, that was a marriage in heaven waiting to happen for Atty Moore. A permanent home was found in the rebuilt Mechanics' Theatre on Abbey Street. Atty followed her physical stature and commanding presence onto the stage. In the beginning her presence was so powerful, all she had to do was walk on and stare at the audience to chill them.

She was a star, but there was a problem. Atty's enthusiasm and her ability as an actress were not quite on the same page. With a blunderbuss cry from the dock or dying of TB from linen mill dust, she could overact to move any Irishman to tears.

Because her acceptance of a script assured a playwright a production, she was heavily courted by aspirants. One playwright who caught her fancy was a young journalist out of Donegal.

Atty sensed from the onset that, despite her power, Seamus O'Neill did not seem quite as awed as those in her court.

Seamus had written two ten-minute readings, the kind of lyrical prose that any actress would want as a part of her repertoire. She sensed that he was not happy that she merely took his writing for herself, when in fact she had been expecting Seamus to swoon over the honor.

They went to work, one-on-one, and he rolled his eyes to the heavens once too often. Down flung the script and off stomped the actress. Seamus picked up his pages and repaired to an always handy pub.