

### Tommy and John

a novel

William O'Neill

Copyright 2011 William O'Neill

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

I. The Hunger

1. Starvelings

2. An Irish Jig

3. In the Hall of the Great Liberator

4. Five Shillings the Romp

5. Nibbling

6. Sedition

7. John Gillespie

8. John and Sean and Rory

9. Rising

II. Sea Drift

1. Van Diemen's Land

2. Coffin Ship

III. Americky

1. One of Jimmy O's Boys

2. America

3. 1850s New York

4. McMasters, Mitchel, and Sickles

5. Remembering Fontenoy

IV. Marye's Children

1. Bull Run

2. Soldier Again

3. Westward Again

4. One Over the Usual Allotment

5. Canada, Home

Sources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

### I

### The Hunger
1

Starvelings

_A cabin was seen closed one day a little out of town, when a man had the curiosity to open it, and in a dark corner he found a family of the father, mother and two children, lying in close compact. The father was considerably decomposed, the mother, it appeared, had died last, and probably fastened the door, which was always the custom when all hope was extinguished, to get into the darkest corner and die. —_ Asenath Nicholson, Lights and Shades of Ireland

November, 1846

The day before, John had heard Nora's voice calling weakly for their ma, but today lying in the loft of the cottage with the others silent he heard nothing but the rain on the thatch and the water dripping in at the far end near the hearth where it always did. There had been pain a day or two ago, but now his mind was clear and there was no pain. He thought to call to see was Nora still there. He lay thinking he would call, closing his eyes to gather the strength, slipping away to sleep again, dreaming at times that he was calling out, waking to realize that he had not.

Later there were voices of strange men in the cottage and the moving shadows made by a lantern. "These have been gone for a week, maybe. Or longer. Look at this one."

Another voice said "Ach" and murmured a thing John could not hear.

The lantern shone above the edge of the loft and he saw lying next to him, open-eyed and open-mouthed, the protruding front teeth, the face of his ten-year-old brother Patrick, too still for sleep. The man who held the light was masked with a kerchief. He looked John squarely in the eyes, squinting with a look of disbelief or fear and said, "Come up here, Handrick, I think it's one we've got here among the quick."

Another masked face appeared beside the lantern, this one with a full beard showing around the edges of the kerchief. "Ah, so it is. Reach his foot there and slide him out. There. I've got him. A small sack o' bones, this one. Among the quick but not for long, I'm thinking."

They carried him, one by his arms, the other by his feet, keeping their masked faces as far away as they could, around the dung heap in front of the door to a covered carriage waiting on the road, laid him on the seat and covered him in a blanket. On the seat opposite sat a staring green-eyed girl of about eight, her sticks of legs protruding from a similar blanket. She continued to stare him in the face as the carriage moved, its single horse clopping at a slow walk. He saw after a minute that he knew her. One of the Tierny girls from the far end of the valley—Megan. Entranced with the hunger now in a way he recognized from his own brothers and sisters. Red hair she had, one strand of it coming out of the wrapped blanket. Through the opening in the carriage door he saw the mist moving against the stony hills. He had wondered sometimes what it would be like to ride in a carriage. They stopped again several times, and he felt the jounces as the two men dismounted from their perch in front and went away and returned in silence. A light rain tapped the roof. Several stops later the bearded man brought an unmoving bundle and laid it on the floor. A baby from the last cottage, Walsh's, it would be.

"We'd better take this lot over. The girl is still sitting upright. We might have the one survivor out of it anyway."

The horse swung into a slow trot and the carriage bounced with the stones and ruts in the road. John found himself sliding off the seat and was mildly surprised that, wrapped as he was, he could move neither arm nor leg to prevent his falling. He watched as Megan slid herself to the edge of her seat and slowly raised a dirty bare foot, which she propped on the seat against his chest. He closed his eyes, but he felt it there through the long trip, the slight warmth of that place on his chest.

When the carriage door opened they took the baby first, then a different man reached John down from the seat. As he was lifted out, Megan's voice surprised him with its strength and evidently surprised the bearded man, too, for he stopped with John in his arms and listened to her.

"That's John Gillespie you have there. Mr. Frayne the schoolmaster says he's the best pupil ever in his school."

The man stood a moment regarding her, as if wondering what her message had to do with the present situation.

"So, treat him gently, if you would, sir," she added with a little loss of confidence.

"I will that, miss. You can walk by yourself, so walk along with me and we'll take a ride in a great ship to the latter end of the world."

He lay at Megan's feet against the gunwale of an old skiff. Dark branches overhead moved against the clouded sky dark with evening. The rain had stopped, but he felt the wet of the boat through the blanket. The oarsman, an old man in a heavy coat, his face nearly invisible in the dark, pulled them over the smooth, steaming water, which still held a little of the day's light. The bearded man sat in the bow holding the bundle. The other man pulled the oars in their creaking oarlocks and the water made its quiet splash under the boat. They approached an island with a large stone building like a great church.

John Gillespie woke to the voice of a woman. "There it is. Just relax now. I'm going to just let thee lie back in the water, but I'll hold thee. I'm Mrs. Parrin and I'm from America. Isn't that a remarkable thing now. I've come all this way just to give thee a bath." The plump and strong woman in her plain blue dress with the white apron held him in the warm water and ran a soapy cloth over him. He had never been in a bath and it frightened him a little to think his face might submerge. They had given him some pale watery liquid to drink, rice water the other matron had called it, and he felt an ache in his stomach. Mrs. Parrin washed his nether parts, which within his memory not even his mother had touched. The woman had gray hair tied firmly in a bun and very clear gray eyes and she puffed a little with the effort of holding him. Then she took him from the water, dried him, and put a gray flannel gown on him.

"There, that will keep the chill of this old place off thee. And now we'll find a nice warm bed."

She carried him to a large room with two rows of beds. There were other boys in the room, some of whom scurried back to their beds when Mrs. Parrin came in.

"A new starveling have you brought us, Mrs. P.?"

She placed him carefully in a bed at the end of a row, near an old wall with broken plaster.

"His name is John Gillespie," she said in her flat American accent. "And he needs quiet for his rest. I am sure thee will kindly keep that in mind."

When Mrs. Parrin left, a tall red-haired boy came and leaned on the next bed. Behind him in the bed a very pale child of maybe four years slept on his back with his mouth wide open. A couple of others stood at the foot of the bed.

"Gone for a ghost," said one at the foot. "There's three in this bed in the past week, John Gillespie, and they're all in the ground now, neighbor to a sod of turf, and you'll be joining them soon I'm thinking."

"His skin is brown like the last one, Francis whatever his name was," said another.

"Hush you, Tim Fagin," said the red-haired boy. "Look, his eyes are moving. It's when the eyes go still they're gone. His eyes are going all around. He sees us all and hears what we're saying. Welcome to the bug-eye brigade, John me boy. Soon you'll be fat as the rest of us."

John looked them over. Sunken cheeks, front teeth straining their thin lips, sticks of arms protruding from their gowns.

"Whist, now." Mrs. Parrin had come back. "Let him sleep. Get back where you belong, all of you."

John closed his eyes. The ache in his stomach was less now. It would be good to sleep here in this bed. He said the Lord's Prayer to himself, hearing it in his grandmother's deep calm fervent voice, she who taught it to him, imagining her there. He wondered where Megan was and thought about her foot on him, the way it felt.

He was awakened in the morning by a commotion about his bed. The red-haired boy was doing something under it with a stick. Mrs. Parrin and the other matron, a very tall and slender woman much younger than Mrs. Parrin, bustled about the place. Both women wore white kerchiefs tied tightly around their heads.

The younger woman spoke now to the red-haired boy. "Rory, thou can sweep without all that unnecessary stirring up. I'll show thee again." She took the broom. "Here—slow, smooth. Then the dust stays on the floor instead of flying all about, you see? Slow with the broom makes a clean room." She returned the broom and turned to John. "Ah, awake, I see. Small wonder with this dervish at work under thy bed. Thee'll be needing the pan."

With calm efficiency she pulled back his blanket, pulled up his gown and placed a pan under his bottom. "There, now. Do something for the English." This brought a laugh from the boys, in spite of its being, as he was to discover, one of her many oft-repeated expressions. It also brought, John noticed, a disapproving look from Mrs. Parrin.

She fed him more of the watery stuff he'd had the night before. "I'm Miss Baxter, thou should know. From Pennsylvania. We are Mrs. P. and Miss B. and this is the Friends' hospital. And this delicious broth is rice water. It will put thee to rights again and in a day or so there will be soup and after that who knows? A roasted capon and a glass of claret followed by a good cigar, perhaps."

"Miss Baxter," came a singsong reminder from Mrs. P. that the younger woman was beyond her bounds. The boys were laughing and he could see that she enjoyed her audience.

It tasted a little like stirabout and looked like the cloudy potato water his mother had used to make bread in the days when they had had the flour. He did feel stronger, less sleepy. He felt when he had finished that he could speak. "Oh," he said, a tentative try of the voice.

"Ah," she answered, "hello. And have thee something to say to us, John Gillespie?"

"Are they gone, then?" he whispered.

"And are what gone, pray?"

"Me mother and them."

"Ah. Mrs. P.? Come, please. He wants to know are his family gone."

There was a long time of silence as she came slowly and stood by the side of his bed and looked at him. "They are. It is very sad all through this country. But thee are spared us and shall stay here."

He had known the answer but for some reason wanted it spoken.

Mrs. P. believed in exercise and had him up every day, holding him as he walked a few feet at first, then the entire length of the room and back. He didn't feel like his former self, the second oldest of seven children in the family of Aidan Gillespie. The chores, shoveling out the cottage after the animals, tending the few sheep, the walk to church over Mass Hill on Sunday carrying his shoes to save them, the running battles with his brothers and sisters, the meals—when there had been meals—of potatoes and buttermilk had all gone for a gray gown and a bed in this strange place.

He liked the Bible stories that the two matrons read in the evening. They were about the world a long time before, when the things that happened were stories. Things that happened now were not stories. Then God gave you instructions and if you obeyed, everything was all right. Now you went to mass and confession and said your prayers and still the potatoes rotted. His mother had said it was a curse on them, but his father had said that was the priest's _dith céilli_. His nonsense. She had shrieked in horror and cried and his father had apologized.

He was a reader himself. Mr. Frayne had taught him Latin and given him Ovid, fantastical stories about yet another world, an amorous world with a different god. He had puzzled the Latin slowly at first but gained a fair fluency by the time the school was closed. Mr. Frayne left because of the hunger and the _fiabhrus dubh_ , the black fever that took so many.

Mrs. P read the story of Job and the story of Jonah in the whale and told them they must not give up hope, but the boy in the next bed, whose name he did not know, died after a few days and another one was put in his bed, a white-haired boy who died also. Rory Lynch, the tall red-haired one who had predicted his recovery, was the oldest. He spoke little, but when he did speak the boys deferred to him, except when he said one day that there was plenty of food in the country only the landlords took it from the people and sold it across the seas for money. Mrs. P said there was to be no talk of that kind, that they would close this little place in a second if they thought it was giving rise to that kind of sentiment.

The little place was a former monastery and the surrounding water was a lake. The two women ran it by themselves, doing the cooking, sewing, and once a week a whole day of laundering, the two of them carrying the water from the outside pump to the fire and then to two great wooden tubs. John had never slept on linen; it felt dry and strange. Lying in it at night waiting to sleep he felt in his stomach and throat something like the hunger. It was there in the daytime too. It was always there. It was his feeling, and in bed he could feel it more intensely. One night he awoke with Miss Baxter's hand on his shoulder. He had been dreaming that he was back in the silent house too weak to move and Nora crying. Miss Baxter rubbed his shoulder and said "You're all right," and he went back to sleep.

John could see from the window the hills where his house was. Demolished now, though, probably. They tumbled the houses when the people left them. The Crofton-Booths were the landlords and they were not bad ones, according to the talk he had heard among neighbors. Some landlords were rack-renters, ones who would raise the rent impossibly high so they could evict the tenants. Many of the rack-renters lived in England and never came to see their property or its tenants. The Crofton-Booths lived nearby, though, and John had seen the family once on the road to Tobercurry, in their carriage—going all the way to Dublin, said someone. There were two children: a daughter, very proud in an elegant gray coat and white hat—people said she was an excellent rider—and her older brother, about to go off to university in England, a bored looking fellow whose plump face lolled at the carriage window and whose eyes seemed to focus on nothing.

After the boys were well enough to be up and about on their own, fresh air became a part of the daily regimen. There was a small yard, a former garden gone to weeds. Those who were able pulled weeds and Miss Baxter hoed. The girls lived in the other wing of the old monastery. They worked in the garden too, but later in the day. John watched them sometimes from his window. They were young girls, maybe one or two were twelve, but most were around Megan's age. Megan was a very methodical worker, never joining in the horseplay with the others who sometimes tossed dirt lumps or weed clumps at each other. The Tiernys were always hard workers. They had a large garden and her father had kept the largest flock of geese in the valley.

Next spring the children of the Friends' hospital or their successors would plant a garden if they could get the ground ready. It rained often and no one was capable of sustained work, so the reclamation did not progress much. Tim Fagin suggested a football to exercise with, but Mrs. P would not hear of it. "A ball rolls to the lowest place. Frivolous play is the devil's work."

As they were hoeing on a rare sunny day, Tim Fagin began a fight with Pat Courtney, saying that he was black Irish. "Pat Courtney, black as soot, hair burned black by the devil's foot," Tim chanted. They rolled on the ground, punching each other until Miss Baxter pulled Tim Fagin away. "Well, your strength returns and this is how you use it," she said, shaking him. John had noticed before that she forgot the thee and thou when she was angry, and she was very angry now. Her lips were white and she was shaking. "It was the same in America where I worked with the poor. The lowly and despised worsen their trouble by despising themselves and each other. There is a sufficiency of powerful people who would destroy you. There is no need for you to help. Now, we'll have no more of this. Is that understood?"

John wondered was it true, then, what Rory said about the landlords taking the food? He had always heard that the Crofton-Booths were good landlords. Or who were these, the powerful people? It was obvious that he wasn't to ask.

John O'Rourke said that they would all be black soon enough anyway from eating the corn meal, "Peel's brimstone" as everyone called it. Peel was the English prime minister, and it was he who had the meal imported into Ireland. "It's what the Indians in America eat, and they're the same color as it," John O'Rourke said. "We eat praties and milk. It's why we're so white. Sure, we'll be alive but we'll be hell-scorched as Indians. I think I'm seein' meself getting darker already."

"'Twas never the brimstone did it, ya gaby," Rory answered him. "'Tis from workin outside. Sure, you get darker workin' in the field. Anybody knows that. You don't turn yellow when you eat a turnip or red from beets. Gaby!"

When the outdoor time was over they washed their hands at the pump and, holding their mouths under the spigot, took a drink of water. John bobbed for his drink and came up coughing, having got a bit down the wrong way, laughing with the fun of it.

"I'm drowned entirely."

"Help for the drowning," Rory shouted and pounded him on the back. Several others joined in the shouting and the pounding. John ducked and ran behind the monkey puzzle tree down the hill. He came out when they had passed and fell in with Rory.

"The question is, are we getting rich at this rate?" John said.

"The answer is yes, of course. A turnip here, a carrot there, before long you'll be a tycoon of vegetables, rich as an American."

"The John Jacob Astor of the turnips. Ah, it will be grand." He shoved his hands into the pockets of the men's trousers that Mrs. P had given him to wear. "What will we ever do when we get out of here? I've no house. No place at all."

Mrs. P is working at getting us positions. How old are you?"

"Thirteen."

"I'm fourteen and she says I'm to go to the Crofton-Booth place as a stable boy. I'm going in a week. Sure, you may all be going off soon. She says the bishop is objecting to this place."

"And why would he do that?"

"It's Quakers running it. They're prods, you know."

"Does he want us to starve in the road?"

"Remember the story. 'He will roll you up tightly and throw you like a ball into a land of vast expanses.' That's the bishop doing the throwing. Curl up and get ready, me boy."

"But none of us is ready and there's no place to go. We'll die in the ditch."

"Then you'll only be dead. If you stay here you might be converted. Think of it. Your immortal soul." He flapped his elbows like wings.

John was shocked. The Murphys at the crossroads where the girl Peg had the love child mocked the church and didn't the priest shame them so they had no one that would talk to them in the parish. "You mustn't mock the church and its teachings."

Rory laughed heartily. "Sure, you're turning transparent from all the water you've been drinking. I can see to the bottom of you like a font of holy water, and there's nothin' down there but a wee rosary bead. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and in our time of need."

One evening the rain turned to snow, and in the morning everything was covered in it. John looked from the window near his cot at the dead gray waters of the lake through the black branches of the wood. After the story last night it had been announced that Rory would be leaving. And this morning he had left without saying goodbye. John watched him walk with one of the men down the path to the boat dock.

Sometimes the girls came out to work as the boys were going in. They could say hello if they knew someone, but there was to be no joking or shouting. John always said hello to Megan when they passed, which made the other girls laugh, but she always replied, smiling a little, "Hello, John." Did she smile because she knew she would be teased? He wished he could talk to her, but that was forbidden. He imagined them as the two lovers in Ovid whose names he had forgotten who lived in adjoining houses and talked through the hole in the wall. He liked that part of the story but not the ending where the boy killed himself because he found her bloody scarf. Just because a person's scarf is bloody does not mean that the person is dead. He liked to improve the Ovid story. In his version, he rescued her from the lion and they went on meeting secretly by the well in the forest. With Rory gone secret imagination occupied him more.

Mrs. P. became morose and distracted from her usual affection for the boys. She sat sometimes looking out the window for long periods, not attending to her work with her usual bustle. One day she scolded John O'Rourke in harsh tones because he had not cleaned his boots. And the next day she told them all, after Bible stories, that the old monastery belonged to the church and that the bishop had decided not to allow them to continue the hospital. They had only a month and then they must be gone. She said she would do what she could for them. "It's a sad and hopeless country where the mind can be so imprisoned. Imprisoned," she repeated and sat on the edge of Tim Courtney's bed and stared a minute. "A country of moldy dungeons for the mind, and I'm not speaking only of Catholicism, although that is one of them. The Protestants here are narrower and meaner than any I've met. And the politicians, English and Irish alike are a caution to the world. And they come out of universities of great repute. You wouldn't find such a collection of blockheads governing the poorest county of Mississippi." She laughed to herself and closed her eyes. "Well, maybe you would, but that's where you'd have to go. You certainly would not find anyone as dense as Lord Russell as governor of my state of Ohio. And not a one in this country who could stand against him. I've been in the Belgian Congo and Madagascar and, God save me, not until now have I been tempted to wash my hands and walk away."
2

An Irish Jig

September, 1842

Thomas Francis Meagher raised his arm in a gesture of farewell and declaimed,

Fare thee well, King; since thus thou will appear

Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.

The auditorium erupted. Lear roared, collapsing onto his throne. The Reverend William Johnson's seldom-heard goose honk sounded above the rest. Even the little group of scenery makers in the wings, usually oblivious to the rehearsal, stopped their work and joined the hilarity.

"Oh, dear, dear, dear," said Johnson, professor of rhetoric at Stonyhurst and director of the play, climbing the three steps to the stage. "Kent, Kent, Kent, my good fellow, that gave us all a start. The Earl of Kent is an old friend and ally of the king. As such he would not have the filthy brogue of a turf digger from the bog of Allen. Can you not read it in something like English?"

Meagher tried it again. The Reverend Johnson gave him a swat on the back of the head with his rolled-up script. "You are thus demoted from the peerage. You have a fine Shakespearian bravado, and a handsome and slender form. The gestures are perhaps a bit exaggerated and jejune, but charming in their way. But that accent, my friend, that accent . . ." He broke off, shaking his head. "You will rattle the thunder and crank the wind, and you may wear a brown bill for the army, but you are not, you cannot be the Earl of Kent."

Meagher, with a flourish of an imaginary cap, recited the next lines:

"Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu;

He'll shape his old course to a country new."

To renewed laughter and a bit of applause, he exited stage left and sat on the old sofa, its springs broken and its upholstery worn through by generations of Stonyhurst students waiting in the wings. Onstage, the Reverend Johnson instructed Meagher's replacement in the part of the Earl of Kent.

"Sorry, old boy. Meager, is it?"

"Marr," Meagher corrected him.

"Ma-her," the old man said, walking with him across the quadrangle after rehearsal.

"Marr, actually."

"Well Ma-her, we can't have the audience in stitches for _Lear_ , you understand. Nothing more embarrassing than an audience laughing at your tragedy. You're our valedictorian from Clongowes Wood, are you not?'

"I am that, sir."

"Ah, oy am that, sorr." The priest laughed in a kindly way, almost silently. "Come and see me, Thomas. Come round to my office after your classes tomorrow. Four, say. Plan on an hour every Friday. We can't have one of our best boys going around in your condition."

It was in the vowel sounds, of course. Meagher thought of how the director said the word "sir." Get from the sss to the rrr with as little a vowel as possible. On the way to the dining hall he practiced. _Surr. Srr_. If he put his voice down a half-octave it was easier. Fayer thee well, King. And take all the singing out of it. Monotone. Make it flat as a fart. _Fare thee well, King_. It's really rather simple, he thought. "It's rilly rother s'mple," he said aloud.

On the following afternoon he appeared in the Reverend Johnson's office.

"Good afternoon, sir." He removed his straw boater with a flourish and gave it a short toss to a peg on the hat tree. "I believe that I may have corrected that minor problem we discussed."

"Well, well. You have done very well indeed in such a short time. How old are you, pray tell?"

"Eighteen."

"Ah, just the age to master a new accent. You'll never be as bright again as you are at eighteen." They chatted for a quarter of an hour. Meagher, in a passable English accent, told his ideas about Kent, Lear's courtier and later simply his servant. He had written the passage out and rehearsed it for accent. "Seeing a larger world than Lear does, Kent finds himself in the position of trying to teach his master from a subservient position. Kent must teach him that there is another possible Lear. And the surprising thing is that Kent, coming back in disguise after being banished, succeeds. Before Lear dies, with Cordelia in his arms, he understands. And when Kent comes back in disguise, he also disguises his voice, of course. Kent could have an Irish accent for those scenes."

"Watch the r's, Meagher. Don't roll them around on your tongue so. 'Surprising.' See? A bare hint of a sound. But well done. Bravo, Meagher, you're an altogether amazing fellow.

But there was no word from the old boy about his getting the part of Kent back. Meagher had taken up a swaggering air which he had learned from some of the older boys. The feeling of losing the part rang inside him. He was numbed by it. Banished Kent would work the thunder sheet and turn the cylinder of swan shot that made the sound of rain

A few weeks later, in his room, Meagher played his penny whistle. In the orchestra he played the clarionette, but that was no Irish instrument. He played a slow air, slurring the notes and holding them long. Sustained. And they sustained him as he held them long. Band members pounded on his door and pled with him. The conductor came and put in his tuppence. "The concert will have to be canceled if you don't come. You know there's only one clarionette."He gave them a bit of "The White Cockade." Not that they would know that it was an old marching tune for King James who lost at the Boyne, a loss that condemned Ireland to more centuries of English rule. But Meagher knew. That was enough.

He opened the door and greeted his fellow band members, several of them Irish. "I told you weeks ago I'd not play for the one-armed adulterer. He is no hero of mine. You may celebrate Trafalgar as you wish. It was the occasion of the defeat of people of my religion—and yours, I'd say. This is a Catholic school, I believe. Therefore this is no holiday of mine. Is it because we're in England and being gracious? To hell with such graciousness. Do they celebrate Brian Boru when they're in Ireland? _Beannacht libh_. Good day, gentlemen."

It was true that he had attended all the rehearsals and only mentioned once that he would not play in the concert. It was an act of sabotage. Disciplinary action would be taken, he was sure of that. They would not rusticate him for this, although he would be confined for a weekend, no doubt. He closed the door and began a jig. The thing about a jig is you can go on forever with it, the endless repetitions of the same theme. Lying on his bed, he played it on and on, repetition after repetition of the bouncing rhythmic tune, he had no idea how long.

He knew that his father would hear of it. Thomas Meagher, senior, was a prosperous merchant and a great admirer of Daniel O'Connell, the "Great Liberator," the first Catholic MP, who broke the religious barrier that had kept Catholics out of government and universities, and had reduced nearly all Catholics to peasantry. The paterfamilias would not be amused by his son's wrecking of the Trafalgar Day concert. He would take the pragmatic view that such customs do no harm and that one should do nothing to interfere with one's own getting on. His father's parting words as Thomas left for Stonyhurst had been on this subject. "If you wish power and influence for our people you can do no better thing than become powerful and influential yourself. And that path proceeds through education to business or to government. And there is no other." So he would be displeased that his son had fallen into disfavor at school, but he would not be outraged. He respected a strong stand, and he respected his son. In his last year at Clongowes Wood Meagher had written a history of the Clongowes Debating Society, which the faculty had published in morocco covers. His father's comment was a terse "well," but he remembered the look. They got on very well, perhaps because they rarely saw each other. They spent Christmas holiday together. This year it would be at the newly acquired house at Carrig-on-Suir, a modest ten-room country house. Their conversations were always formal, of the "How are your studies proceeding?" "Well, sir," variety. After a few glasses of wine the old man sometimes got a little sentimental about his wife, Thomas's mother, who had died when he was three years old.

Thomas was not sure he remembered her at all. He did have a vague memory of a red-haired woman, the sound of her voice even, but could not tell whether he had imagined it from her portrait and what he had been told or if he really remembered it. His mother's sister, Callie Quan, had been his mother in fact. She lived with his father still, and it was fairly obvious that they had an "arrangement." This had bothered him a little when he first surmised it, but now it made him smile.

He heard from his open window the voices of the crowd as it milled about. He played his whistle a while longer and then took up a book.

Late in the afternoon Meagher heard a soprano singing to piano accompaniment. Apparently this was a substitute for the canceled concert. She sounded rather good. He opened his window wider and looked to the band shell across the green. This was better than the college band. He had done them all a favor. A week later, by vote of the discipline board he was expelled from the band, but, by a narrow margin, not from Stonyhurst.

At home for summer holiday in Waterford he hiked with Mike Condon, a friend from early childhood, to Mount Misery, sometimes called Cromwell's rock for the great battle that had taken place on it two centuries earlier, in which the locals had, at great cost, prevented Oliver Cromwell from taking the city. The two stood at the top of the path and surveyed the rolling landscape: an ancient ring fort on a little hill below, the winding dirt road they had come on, and, just visible in the distance, a glint of the sea. The River Suir gleamed through light summer haze under dappled clouds. Misery and beauty linked, like the whole country.

"And what has your father written you about the band episode?"

"He sent me his greetings and did not mention it. The old fellow surprises me now and then." They walked in silence a while. "And what is the world made of, Michael?"

Michael was still puffing from the climb. He had gone a bit pudgy since going to Dublin to study the law. "Porridge, I believe," he said.

"Porridge?"

"Mostly porridge."

"That is an interesting thesis. It slops about us and sticks to us in an irritating, porridge-like way. It is impossible to give it a shape, save when we climb to a high place and look down as from Olympus. But then you'd never climb Olympus to look at porridge. Have you ever done so?"

"I have not, I must confess."

"Nor have I. I sense a weakness in the concept. Think of another possibility."

"There is no other possibility. It's porridge or nothing."

"Nothing is perhaps the correct answer. 'Anything of nothing first create,' as the bard says. The fire and the water, the earth and the air consume each other and cancel to nothing. It has the look of something to be sure. But it is a trick. Have you ever been to a brothel?"

"I have not. Some of the fellows from the Inns go, but I have not."

Thomas climbed the rocks to the summit, with Michael following. "It is a splendid thing, it is not?" Meagher asked when the other had caught up.

Michael looked without answering.

"That all this porridge muck should have poetry in it?"

"I thought we were off the porridge thesis."

"Why don't you go to brothels? Are you a wank artist?"

"A what?"

"A wankist. You are an innocent young fellow. Eighteen is it?"

"I am eighteen, yes."

"Time you lost your maiden's flower."

"I don't have the money, for one thing. My father is not rich like yours. He's a farmer. It's a fairly near thing keeping me at Inns without fair maidens at ten shillings the romp."

"Five would do it in Dublin, you know," Meagher said as he climbed ten feet to a ledge of rock and sat with his legs dangling. "One, if you're not particular. So you make do with palmistry and the consolation of philosophy. You don't bugger your fellow fledgling barristers?"

Condon sat on a large stone below the ledge. "Really, Meagher, you are supposed to be a model young fellow, you know. What if your fond tutor at Stony heard this?"

"Mmm," Thomas answered in a weary tone. "I am the very _sine qua non_ of a model young fellow. I stopped shitting at the age of twelve, you know. Unspeakably dirty habit. I trust you have also given up that hobby?"

"Of course."

"One plays the game for its rewards. Isn't that what one does? It is what we learn from our masters. A morality of fine distinctions won't serve in a country that has been grabbed by main force. We live under the eyes of the warder, thus we learn to be secret."

"You defend your little pleasures on very global ground indeed. Why not just say you like your bit of crumpet from time to time and let it go at that?"

Meagher tossed a stone and watched it carom down the hill. "Excellent, Condon. Good man. Do the tutors at law, or whatever you call them, bugger you?"

"No. They do not. And you? I hear the reverend fathers sometimes make use of the boys for their pleasure."

"No. Not me. They don't. Time to head back for our lunch."

"Oh, ho," Condon shouted as Meagher skipped down the steep hill. "Then who do they do?" Meagher did not answer, keeping well ahead until they entered the house.

Aunt Callie quizzed them about their adventure as Mrs. Anderson gave them tea. The household occupied his aunt's time so that she rarely got out these days, and she worried about the dangers of the outdoors. Had they encountered wood kernes, she wondered.

"Wood kernes!" Meagher repeated, delighted with the antiquated expression. "We saw no wood kernes, only two beggars. There are no more highwaymen on the mountain now the Connolly brothers are in prison. Did you hear? They were arrested in Waterford a month ago. They've been arrested three times before and escaped each time, but this time they've been put in irons. It seems they had decided to go to America. They had their tickets brought to them by an accomplice, one of the farmers out that way. The rural people all think robbing toffs on the highway is a happy pastime and no more than the toffs deserve. So they had their tickets, and had they gone directly to the quay in the early morning of the day they'd be sailing merrily for America. But they thought they should appear more respectable, so the day before they were to travel they went into the city to buy new hats. New hats! There they were in Galvin's, trying them on."

Thomas stood and mimicked looking at a hat in a mirror, fingering the brim, adjusting the angle. He had a flair for storytelling and his audience, the two women and Michael, smiled with pleasure. "When the police," he went on, raising a silencing finger in the manner of an experienced orator, "one of whom had recognized them in the street, came in and collared them. They are this moment in the round fortress wearing the convict's cap in place of their fine fedoras, contemplating the sin of vanity and the brevity of the mortal span. They'll be hanged Tuesday next. And that will be the last of our wood kernes."

"New hats," exclaimed Mrs. Anderson. "And them without an entire pair of breeks 'twixt the two of 'em. The last time I saw Daltry Connolly, didn't he have his linen hanging out behind him and one of the tails of his coat missing entirely. Sure they never had a mother to take care of them, naught but that old wastrel of a paudeen drinking up every penny that came his way until he died of it." She refilled their tea cups and returned to the sideboard, where she remained standing. In the tradition of Irish household servants, she freely joined the conversation at table but did not sit with the family. "Holding down the bottom end of a rope was all any of that brood was ever good for."

Aunt Callie simply looked at Thomas admiringly. He knew that she appreciated the literary aspect of his tale, When he was in a buoyant mood he could bang out sentences that rang in the mind. That was the point of the tale, really, to display the skill that had won him all the honors.
3

In the Hall of the Great Liberator

_Someone will say, perhaps, "Why wasn't a law made to protect the people from the injustice to force the people to sell the corn and not to keep anything for themselves to eat?" I'm sorry for your want of knowledge! "A law to protect the people," you say? Airiu, if you had spoken to the gentlemen of England at that time of a law to protect the people, they would have said you were mad.—_ Peadar O'Leary, My Own Story

July, 1846

Then, my lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it profane to say that the God of Battles bestows His benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword in the hour of a nation's peril. Abhor the sword? No, my lord, for, at its blows a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic the crippled colony became a proud republic—prosperous, limitless, and invincible!

It was mid-afternoon of a sunny midsummer day in Dublin, but the gaslights in Conciliation Hall were lit, the window light of the crowded hall being shut out by men standing on the sills. This was the hall built by the Great Liberator himself, Daniel O'Connell, and most of this crowd were O'Connell's followers, but on this day there were also a large number of so-called Young Irelanders, young men eager for Irish home rule, there to hear the maiden speech of Thomas Meagher. O'Connell was ill now, gone into a decline after his three months in prison for seditious speech. The warden being a great admirer of O'Connell, had given up the warden's home on the Mountjoy prison grounds for Dan, and, with the help of other admirers, had seen to it that he dined better than the executives of the English government did at Dublin Castle. There were great dinners and late nights at the warden's residence nearly every night of the week. O'Connell had grown fat and senile with overindulgence. Worse, he had fallen in love with his jailer's twenty-year-old daughter, pursuing her to the embarrassment of his friends, and the girl's father, who, in spite of his lifelong admiration of the Great Liberator, had to decline the foolish septuagenarian's request for her hand in marriage.

The meeting in Conciliation Hall on this July afternoon was chaired by John O'Connell, the old man's favorite son, and the crowd was his crowd. Meagher's opening remarks had been greeted with jeering and catcalls, but, as he warmed to his subject—a direct attack upon the old man's pacifism—the crowd warmed to him, and a good part of the audience was now cheering at every pause.

My lord, I honor the Belgians. Sixteen years ago they—by the sword—threw off their Dutch oppressors. I admire the Belgians, I love the Belgians, for their enthusiasm, their courage, their success, and I, for one will not stigmatize, for I do not abhor, the means by which they obtained a citizen king, a chamber of deputies.

John O'Connell rapped his gavel repeatedly to quiet the cheering. Still in his forties, he had grown nearly to his father's state of rotundity and his jowls shook with his rapping. The gavel having failed, he rose now and held his hand up for silence.

"The sentiments—" he began in his Irish tenor's voice. There was still shouting in the back. He pounded again and waited. His smooth, round face streamed with perspiration.

"The sentiments Mr. Meagher avows are regrettably opposed to those of the founder of this Association . . . and therefore—" He pounded again and waited. "And therefore this Association must cease to exist, or Mr. Meagher must cease to be a member of it."

Meagher was surprised at the thunder of chairs being pounded on the floor. He watched one young military-looking fellow with waxed mustache who had been screaming abuse at him earlier now turn his eye-popping, vein-bulging wrath upon John O'Connell. Thomas Francis Meagher, twenty-three-year-old Stonyhurst graduate, had won the day at Conciliation Hall. He was disgusted. In his debating years at Clongowes and Stonyhurst he had learned to despise an uncritical audience. Limp rags flapping in the breeze of the latest speech. He knew that, if he wished to, he could have them back on O'Connell's side in five minutes. Such fluthery flappers—could they ever move in one direction long enough to accomplish anything?

As John O'Connell went on with his denunciation the Young Irelanders walked out of Conciliation Hall forever.
4

Five Shillings the Romp

"I think you're too drunk, love." Mullingar Fanny emitted a little puffing sound into his ear at each thrust.

Thomas did not reply but rather redoubled his efforts. With a crashing of old bedsprings, they bounced nearly off the mattress until after another two minutes Meagher emitted a roar. It was answered by cheers from his friends in the parlor below.

He strapped up his galluses and emerged, buttoning his shirt.

"Ah jasus, what have ye done to me dear Fanny? Is she still alive at all?" Poxy Rose stood at the foot of the stairs smiling. His friends, lounging with some of the other girls, laughed and applauded his triumphal return.

"Sure, 'tis a great detriment to me fine girls, not to mention me beds, when ye go out and drink yourself peluthered before ye come here. Here, now don't be fallin' down the stairs. Why is it then that ye don't come here before ye go dhrinkin?"

It was true that he had missed a step and had to grab the banister with both hands, but he righted himself well enough and completed his descent with dignity. "Because I so love a challenge, Rosie, my dear. Sober, it would be too easy. Fanny will be along in a minute." Meagher sat in a large, somewhat broken-down chair and closed his eyes. "The vicissitudes of her work have left her a bit disheveled."

"She must have been Belgian," said Gavan Duffy. "He loves the Belgians."

Meagher shook his fist. "She dared to question the ability of an Irishman to perform his duty."

"Sure, he doesn't talk like an Irishman at all," Rose said, following him into the parlor. "Where did you get that accent, love? You sound like an Englishman with a potato up his arse."

"Two great performances in one day." John Mitchel, lolling on the divan with the girl who called herself Guinevere, held his arms aloft. "And let it be written in an annals of Loch Ce that Thomas of Carrick-on-Suir, descended of Olild Olum, Chieftain Crich-Ui-Cairin, did on this twenty-eighth day in July of the year of the deathly wind eighteen and forty-six, deliver himself of a resounding speech, a resounding fuck, and did between the two quaff seven pints of Guinness's fine stout."

"It was only five," Duffy corrected. "I paid for them."

"Ah, but the epic poet is entitled to a bit of license. Let's make it eight pints and two resounding fucks while we're at it. And here's the damsel herself."

Fanny, entering the room, held her white petticoat and curtsied.

"Let's have a report from the battlefield. And was it as epic as it sounded from here?" Duffy asked.

"Ipick I don't know. It took a great while and it wore me out." She flopped into an overstuffed chair, took her fan from the lamp table, and fanned herself.

"As good a definition of 'epic' as I've heard," said Mitchel.
5

Nibbling

John Mitchel sat at his desk in the corner of the small office of _The Nation_ in Middle Abbey Street and, reading from a scrap of paper, declaimed for all the office to hear.

O! He stands beneath the sun, that glorious Fated One,

Like a martyr or conqueror, wearing

On his brow a mighty doom—be it glory, be it gloom,

The shadow of a crown it is bearing.

"I put two questions to all assembled: first, who has written these memorable lines and, second, whose brow is wearing this mighty doom?"

Meagher, who had just emerged from the editor's office, had paused at the rail to listen. "The shadow of a spavined meter," he said. "I detect the pegleg Pegasus of Doctor Wilde's intended bride, the divine Speranza. Lord defend us from all such." He crossed himself.

"Speranza it is. Now tell us the hero of the piece. I'll give you another hint."

So he stood before us then, one of God's eternal men,

Flashing eye, and hero mold of stature,

With a glory and a light circling round his brow of might,

That revealed his right royal kingly nature.

"Ach, mother moichree," said Meagher. "On this of all mornings when the miasmal gasses of Guinness past are rising in me brain I must listen to stature rhymed with nature. I suppose it refers to a speech of yesterday, since you're all smiling like jackals, and I suppose she sat up all night producing it. And I further suppose, since she puts up a good part of the lucre that supports this worthy journal—shameless hucksters that you are—that you are going to publish it."

"Three correct suppositions," said the editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, who had come out of his office to see what the hilarity was about. He clapped Meagher on the back. Duffy, a husky, square-jawed man in his early thirties, laughed loudly. "You are to be coagulated."

"And have you heard that Dan junior has been named Her Majesty's consul to Boulogne," John Mitchel asked.

"It's been rumored for weeks, of course," said Duffy. "There's a few pounds to be made out of repeal yet. The Liberator's offspring are selling their patrimony for every shilling they can get."

"And they want us out of the Association because we ask for an accounting of the funds," said Mitchel. "The repeal rent has been private funds for the O'Connells for years, and for that damned puppy John it's the whole reason for the Association. Repealing the Union is the last thing on his mind. It would mean the end of the rents."

"An honored Irish tradition," Mitchel said. "Didn't all who voted for Union end up with handsome pensions? Most of the shabby aristocracy of this miserable country got their titles and fortunes by selling out. Place-begging whores, the lot of them."

"Write it, John," suggested Duffy.

"Write it, indeed," said Mitchel. "We've written and spoken ourselves half to death. No one is listening. Or reading. Now the potato crop is failing and there is hunger again. It's time to do something or close up shop."

"What do you propose?" Meagher sat on the rail and looked Mitchel straight in the eye. "Armed insurrection? Who dares speak of '98? We all dare speak of it and do so with depressing redundancy, but do we want to repeat it? Ten thousand dead?"

A young man who had been sitting at the far end of the room spoke up. "And so we'll expel the English army with long speeches and bad poems. They'll all run home out of boredom and dyspepsia."

"I haven't had the pleasure," Meagher said.

"Tommy Meagher, John O'Leary," said Duffy. "John's one of our new young fellows, contributing pieces on public wants."

"We could have an endless supply of those, couldn't we?"

"Point taken," O'Leary replied.

"The crux of the matter"—John Mitchel liked to speak of cruxes, and when he did so he tilted his head in a judicial attitude and his voice became deep and sonorous—"is that you've got on the one hand the O'Connell clan working the grievance game, selling protection to the English in return for favors to the family, and on the other hand you've got us, dying to do something, but damned if we can think of what. And we've got the crawling Catholic trouble. 'Oh, father, I've been therrible bad in me thoughts lately.' He imitated a simpering penitent, hands held in prayer. 'Ah, I'm nearly perished with thinkin' bad thoughts.' What kind of man is that? Crawling to the priest, wallowing in his iniquity. There's no way a creature like that could ever stand up and fight for himself."

"Well I don't know that we can solve that, but we're seceding from the Repeal Association, for a starter," said Duffy. "And Mr. Meagher has given us our title: The Irish Confederation. You are all hereby dubbed charter members. We are going to organize Confederation clubs in every hamlet of this country. And further, gentlemen," he placed a hand on Meagher's shoulder, "I give you John O'Connell's successor in Parliament, Mr. Thomas Francis Meagher."

The voice of John O'Leary pierced the scattered applause. "Parliament! Talk about pissing into the wind. The clubs are something like it. Clubs can become rifle companies. But running for Parliament." He spit out the word. "Our people are starving in the ditches and our Irish MP's are at their London clubs drinking toddies. Parliament."

John Mitchel in his clipped Derry accent seconded O'Leary's outburst. "Put a bomb under the bastards. Let's see their tripes hanging from the branches. The sight of Lord Russell's guts on a sidewalk would be a wonderful thing. I'd hang a picture of it on my wall. 'Twould cheer me better than roses."

"No reason we can't do both," said Duffy. "A few tripes, a bit of obstruction in Parliament. The mouse fights the lion by nibbling where he can. All Confederation candidates must take a pledge that they will accept no place or position offered by the government. There'll be none of your Association shave-beggars in the Confederation."

"Nibbling," muttered O'Leary. "That is the sum and total of us. I am unaware of any case in which a lion was influenced by nibbling of any kind. Are you organizing a Confederation club?" he asked, looking at Meagher.

"Three, in fact. Waterford, Tipperary, and Kilkenny," Meagher replied.

"Teach your men to make a pike," O'Leary fairly shouted. "Use your family money and buy them rifles. The people are dying. It's too late for 'Amendments to the motion' and 'I rise to protest the gentleman's statement.' Kill the bastards."

The famine worsened throughout the year and continued into the next. No accurate figure of deaths was available, but Lord Russell's famine relief commission estimated in December of 1847 that more than a quarter of a million people had died during that year from famine and famine-related causes. This figure did not include the approximately one hundred thousand who had perished in 1845 and 1846. Sir Charles Trevelyan, director of government relief, was quoted in the _London Times_ : "The great evil with which we have to contend, is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the Irish people." In June of 1847 the public works program that had employed people building roads was discontinued after its superintendent observed that most of the workers were too debilitated to do any work. Sir Charles expressed concern that the number of Irish deaths would be insufficient to reduce the population to a sustainable level.

The government did import Indian corn from America, but this was distributed slowly and sporadically. The only government officials in Ireland with any experience in such distribution were the guardians of the workhouses and the army's commissariat officers, but these were prohibited from assisting in the distribution of food by the Poor Law, which forbade all "outdoor relief," relief given to persons not actually residing in workhouses.

Daniel O'Connell, dismayed by the situation and by his failure to persuade the government to send aid of the magnitude and kind required to relieve the problem, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome. Before leaving he fired one last salvo at the Irish Confederation, referring to them as "the paltry Young Ireland party" who "while vaporing about physical force and vindication by the sword . . . would be afraid to look at a poker." He died in mid-journey—in Genoa. In accordance with his deathbed instructions his heart was removed and taken by his son John to Rome for burial. His body was returned to Ireland.
6

Sedition

December, 1847

Meagher, back in Carrick-on-Suir to prepare for his election campaign, arrived home just as the servants were bringing his father's traveling trunks to the foyer. The old man would be leaving for the new session of Parliament. Thomas found him in his usual chair in the study, reading. His father, a square-faced man with a shock of black hair falling forward, regarded him with his customary curious turn of the head, a result of having poor vision in his left eye. He smiled and greeted his son almost inaudibly.

"Good afternoon, sir. You look well." His father was no conversationalist, and, in his presence, neither was Thomas junior.

He tried again. "It seems you are bound for Westminster."

"And it seems that you have a mind to join me," his father answered with a mirthless half smile.

"I will confess to that. Perhaps you will give me your benediction?"

"My what?"

"Your blessing. Your endorsement. We are not precisely of the same party, but we do have the same goal, separation from these thieving thugs who have reduced half our country to starvation. Give us a chance to try it our way."

His father turned back to his book. Despising small talk and political cant, he had been successful in politics through heartfelt and unquestioning loyalty to Daniel O'Connell. After a minute, he dropped the book to his lap and spoke."Carry on about your Wolfe Tone and your men of '98 all you like, but O'Connell is the only—let that soak in, my good man—the _only_ man in all of modern history to help the cause of Ireland. And he did it at great personal expense. Didn't he give up a prosperous legal practice? And now the Young Irelanders, wet behind the ears, their heads full of folk tales and sentimental poetry, try to shove him aside. Ingratitude isn't the half of it. You'll lose your battle as the Irish have lost all of their battles, and the English army will rule, and all of O'Connell's hard work will be undone.

Meagher knew that his father would say nothing more. He went to his room, where Mrs. Anderson was unpacking his trunk. He sat in the old straight back chair that had been in his room, the one in Waterford and now this one in Carrick, since childhood. "How has father been?"

"He has the shooting pains down his legs, still. I've wanted him to see the doctor, but he won't go."

"Maybe Aunt Callie could persuade him."

"Callie's no better herself. Taken to her bed as she always does when himself's about to leave." Mrs. Anderson took one of his suits from the trunk and eyed it carefully, brushing it with her hand. "And now he's furious about you and your politics and Mister O'Connell just after dying. You shouldn't aggravate him so. You know the affection he has for you. There must be some other thing for a young man to do than go pothering about with all this commotion."

"The country is starving, Mrs. A."

She continued to work as she spoke, taking up his suits one at a time, setting one aside that had a button missing, shaking the others and smoothing them before hanging them up. "The devil a bit of good politics ever did to anyone who was hungry. It's the praties has died. Does your politics have a way to bring them back? What was it ever but the rich people having themselves a bit of gas with their speeches and their corn laws and their bills for this and that that never has anything to do with the people. Ach," she said, examining the frayed cuff of a shirt and tossing it aside onto the bed. "I hope you haven't been wearing it that way. Even your Mr. O'Connell, rest his soul, collecting his penny a month repeal rent from all of the poor families, never did a thing for them. It's fine that Catholics can go to university and run for Parliament and buy land and all that, but that's not for the likes of most people. It takes a pretty penny to do any of them things."

"And did you make any of your barmbracks this year?" When Mrs. A. had a head of steam on a subject it was just as well to drop it.

"I did," she said smiling a little. "But you're too late for it. It's gone this week and more."

"Maybe you'd make another one, as a favor to an old acquaintance? It's that you're so good at it. No one can hold a candle to you."

She swatted him on the shoulder and laughed. "I can see you'd be good at the politics. It's the same barmbracks as everyone else makes. No better and no worse. I'll see if I have the makings. You talk to your master now, before he leaves."

"And what shall I say?"

"Ask him to stay for dinner tonight and leave in the morning. I'll roast a good haunch of lamb, tell him."

But his father would not assent to stay. He left for Dublin in mid-afternoon. He would stay the night at the Star and Garter and take the Holyhead packet in the morning.

A few days later Smith O'Brien came to see what help he could give Meagher in the election, and Mrs. Anderson prepared the haunch of lamb for their dinner with a barmbrack for dessert. The only Confederacy MP, Smith O'Brien of Tipperary had just served a month's imprisonment in the cellar beneath the clock tower of Westminster. The leadership had assigned him to serve on a committee for railroad development, hoping to keep him busy with non-Irish issues, but he had refused the assignment, thus committing a felony. Meagher and a few other Confederacy members had visited O'Brien in prison at Westminster, a gesture which had greatly moved him.

"They jailed me for a month, and not a word of protest from our friend John O'Connell, but I'm not to take it personally. Damn these things." O'Brien scratched his beard. The prison had been infested with fleas and they were still at him. "Why do politicians do what they do? Why does anyone? Why do Irish politicians sell out and take the first government post offered? Why are these damned creatures inhabiting my skin?"

"Nesting. Nesting is your subject," Meagher rejoined. "Instinctive behavior. All species. Even the starving peasants. Give them a supply of potatoes and a place to nest and they'll be as quiet as you please. 'Yis, yer honor, saving yer grace, 'tis a fine day, sir. So, you conquered me country, sir, an' stole all me land. That's all well, sir. Don't give it a second thought, sir. Top o'the morning, sir.'"

The two men sat in silence for a while, then O'Brien asked, "Has there been any disorder in these parts?"

"There was a bit of interference with a grain caravan this fall. It amounted to no more than noise. The people had no weapons."

"It's the priests that have them whipped into submission. The landlord's best friend, if only he knew it. This is a damned fine dinner, Meagher, and I'm feeling worse and worse eating it." O'Brien put his fork down and slumped in his chair.

"We mustn't starve ourselves out of sympathy. A few of us need strength enough to do something."

"Have you done anything for the people here?"

"My father contributes to the Waterford relief commission, as do I. What I can. They have soup kitchens."

"Soup kitchens. Yes. We had them in Limerick. A paltry gesture. Make starving people walk miles for a little soup. And they're required to bring a bowl and wait till their names are called. They're too proud to do that, you know. Stand in queue with a bowl. Half of them would rather starve than do that. In Limerick they attacked the kitchen and destroyed the stove."

The two sat in silence. Meagher sipped his wine. Smith O'Brien looked profoundly tired and dejected. His skin had a gray, papery look and his hands were not steady.

"Do you really want this seat in Parliament?" he asked after a few minutes. "Damn all your one vote is good for, out of six hundred. I've thought of resigning mine. There isn't an English MP out of a hundred who gives a damn whether this island perishes. After a couple of centuries of deliberately impoverishing us with penal laws and trade laws, John Bull now believes that the Irish are poor because they have no character. It is the kind of convenient

absent-mindedness by which empires are justified." O'Brien took one more pick of the lamb and laid his fork down again. "The debates on famine relief went on in empty chambers. Except for my little plea for help, which was greeted with laughter."

Meagher gestured for his wine glass to be refilled. "I'm not likely to win the seat in any case. My own father is supporting the Repealer, and there's old Sir Henry, you know. Sir Henry Winston Barron, who sells his favors to the government. He was a Repealer till he found that Whiggery paid better. He hasn't declared yet, but I suspect he will. And he'll probably win it. And get a few more of his relatives into Her Majesty's service."

Meagher cajoled O'Brien into staying on in Waterford.A week of Mrs. A.'s cooking and walks in the fresh air restored his color, and daily baths with strong soap vanquished the fleas **.** He and Meagher canvassed Waterford together and the results were heartening. In speech after speech Meagher's every line was greeted with cheers. " _I am not against Old Ireland_ ," he said at every stop, alluding to O'Connell's followers, " _but I am against that which has made Ireland old. Down with the place beggar, he who would traffic on a noble cause and beg a bribe at the expense of the people who elected him._ " Meagher's striking good looks—he was six feet tall and slender—and his air of confidence on the platform served him well. He wrote to Duffy back in Dublin:

Everything goes on splendidly. A glorious canvass today! All the people—emphatically the people—and the girls, and the women. My God! I can hardly believe my senses! If Sir Henry Barron will not stand, my return (I could almost swear) is certain.

But the women could not vote, of course. Nor could the men who did not own property or pay rent of at least forty shillings a year. And Sir Henry Winston Barron, a former Repeal MP from Waterford, did stand—as an anti-Repeal Whig. The Waterford election took place in late February of 1848. Meagher and the Repeal candidate split the anti-government vote, which allowed Sir Henry to win the seat. And as a thank-you gift from the queen for his anti-repeal votes in Parliament, Sir Henry's son Edward was appointed attaché to the British embassy.

But the election results went almost unnoticed amid the other news of the day. In France, revolutionaries had deposed the King. After three days of rioting and barricades in the streets of Paris, Louis Philippe had fled to England, the only remaining haven for monarchs in western Europe. Revolutions were underway in nearly every country on the continent. In Dublin the French tricolor flew from apartment windows and pubs. _The Nation_ printed instructions on pike-making and bullet-casting. John Mitchel, impatient with, as he saw it, the timidity of _The Nation_ , founded his own paper, _The United Irishman_ , and was promptly arrested for publishing an article suggesting that people carry bottles of vitriol to be thrown in the eyes of the police.

At a Confederation meeting in the Music Hall in Abbey Street, Meagher, too, fell afoul of the sedition law.

When the world is in arms—when the silence which, for two and thirty years has reigned upon the plain of Waterloo at last is broken—then be prepared to grasp your freedom with an armed hand . . .The Viceroy declares that it is the duty of every man in the kingdom to say whether he is the friend or the enemy of this government. I think so too, and I declare myself an enemy of the government.

That evening the Police Justice called upon Meagher and served notice that he appear with bail at police headquarters before noon the next day. The word spread throughout the city, and the next day he was accompanied to police headquarters by several thousand men marching in broad formation through the streets and a crowd following on both sidewalks. At headquarters twenty policemen scuffled with the other Confederation leaders who demanded that they also be arrested. O'Brien and Mitchel had also been summoned to post bail and had come from different directions, each with his own crowd. When the men met, it was amid a cheering throng of more than twenty thousand. After paying their bail, the three went to Meagher's hotel, the Star and Garter, in D'Olier Street. By late afternoon the crowd had still not dispersed. It filled the streets around the offices. Meagher opened the window of a second floor room and spoke to them.

_Informations have been sworn against me for a seditious speech, and I have been bound over to appear in the Queen's Bench upon the fifteenth day of April. From this moment out it will be my sole aim and study to aggravate that crime, and devote the few days that I may be at liberty to the utterance of nothing else but sedition. As I speak to you now, so I shall speak to the judge, the jury, and the prosecuting underlings of this thug-like government. I shall tell them to their faces that I have spoken sedition but that I mean to commit high treason. And I ask all of you to commit it, too. The news of this morning announces that Vienna is in the hands of the people. Get a good rifle or musket, and get yourselves ready_. _It won't be long._

In Paris, on the first Monday of April, 1848, Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine welcomed a delegation of the Irish Confederation, Meagher and O'Brien among them. A plump little man, wild black hair framing a sensualist's face, the poet-leader of the revolution spoke of his opposition to violence and alluded to the long history of friendship between France and Ireland. He said that he was pleased that the revolution had involved little bloodshed thus far, and he was determined to keep France at peace. This time the French Revolution would succeed, he felt, because it would avoid the militarist excess of the Napoleonic era. Then he and his cabinet listened politely for more than two hours as Confederation representatives read statements, dull things prepared by committees of their clubs: "In imitation of your example we propose to exhaust all the resources of constitutional action before we resort to other efforts for redress." And so on.

Lamartine rose, thanked the delegates for their support of the new French Revolution. He said that France wished not to entangle itself in the internal disputes of other nations. In the anteroom they were greeted by a group of women who presented them with a flag—an Irish tricolor in orange, white, and green.

That evening, Meagher and O'Brien attended the _Theatre Francais_ to see the renowned Rachel in the title role of Racine's _Phaedre_. O'Brien did not care for the high theatrical style and found the whole thing ridiculous, but Meagher, who had less French than O'Brien, loved melodrama when it was whole-hearted, as it was here. The audience thrilled to the stark injustice, the perfidy of royalty as the queen falsely accused her stepson of attempting to seduce her. Shouts rang from the stalls as the curtain fell on act two. At the close of the play, the weak and sinful queen having killed herself, Rachel bowed to enthusiastic applause and cascades of flowers, after which—to even greater cheering—she sang _La Marseillaise_ , holding the tricolor of the revolution aloft. Meagher left the theater with tears in his eyes.

That evening he experienced absinthe for the first time. " _La diable vert_ ," he announced to O'Brien, who sipped a glass of burgundy, "it should be the Irish national beverage." He watched the other absinthe drinkers in the café and imitated them, pouring small amounts of the green liquid into a glass of ice water and sipping slowly. It had a bitter licorice taste.

"No race on earth more beset by devils," O'Brien answered. "We've no need of new ones. It does not solve."

"It _dissolves,_ though. Don't you feel a kind of a lump in your brain from that useless exercise we went through today? All those blathery statements? The pat on the head?"

O'Brien nodded in agreement. "But think how it looks from London. The dumpling in Buckingham will read in her paper that the Irish are congratulating the French, who have just chased their king away with a piece of his trousers missing. Her scones and marmalade will taste a little off that morning. Lord Blithersly will be discomfited. He will give a speech and call for something to be done. These are little victories, but they are victories."

Meagher felt the sudden effect of the drink. "Little," he laughed. "Little they are. They are the littlest damned victories in history. Here's to them."

O'Brien raised his glass. "It is a little planet, the astronomers tell us. If you insist on trumpets and flags on all occasions, you will be dissatisfied."

Packing to leave, Meagher carefully rolled up the tricolor and put it in his trunk. It would be something to return with at any rate. Better than hands utterly empty.

In Dublin, John O'Connell, faced with the mass exodus of Repeal Association members to the Confederation, agreed to merge the two organizations into a new entity, the Irish League. At its first meeting Smith O'Brien was elected president and the O'Connell family disappeared from Irish history. At the same meeting, Meagher presented O'Brien with the orange-white-green tricolor, which became the flag of the republic in progress.

The sedition trial took place near the end of May and, in spite of the all-Protestant jury, Meagher and O'Brien were acquitted. John Mitchel, for his advocacy of violence against the police, was sentenced to fifteen years on a prison ship in Bermuda.

The hunger continued. The western clubs advocated a rising to seize whatever part of the harvest they could—an attack on the grain caravans as they went to the ports. The harvest was less than two months away when O'Brien and Meagher began an inspection tour of the clubs to ready them. They began on O'Brien's home turf, in Limerick.

The meeting with the Limerick Club began well, but in mid-evening a gang of O'Connellites—whether unaware of the new agreement or actively opposed to it was not clear—threw stones at the meeting house, breaking windows. When O'Brien went out to speak with them they pelted him with stones, giving him a black eye and severely bruised ribs. Then, recognizing him, they apologized for their actions and escorted him to his home.

After a day at his home in nearby Cahermoyle, he retired to the country, to the family home, Dromoland Castle at Newmarket-on-Fergus, now possessed by his brother, Sir Lucius O'Brien, thirteenth Lord Inchiquin.

When Meagher, accompanied by some repentant O'Connellites, visited him the following day he remained in his bed and sent down a note. "Tell those idiots to go home and then come up and see me." The O'Connellites apologized profusely once again before leaving, claiming that they had meant nothing personal by the attack.

O'Brien laughed briefly and immediately cringed with pain. One blow to his face had momentarily dislocated his jaw, so that he was forced to speak through clenched teeth and swollen lips. One eye was only slightly blackened, but the other was discolored several inches down his cheek and swollen shut. "Oh, God, Tom," he said in the monotone forced by his unmoving jaw. "'Nothing personal.' Don't say anything as funny as that. My sides hurt enough without laughing."

"They're a sad lot." Meagher rose from his chair and went to the window. A morning haze lay over the green fields across the lake, a sunny day coming. The grain looked healthy. It had the makings of another good year for the crops. 1847 had been a good one for all crops, even the potato, but few of them had been planted because the peasants had eaten their seed potatoes. This year most had sold what furnishings and extra clothing they had to get seed and the planting had been plentiful. There was optimism that the hunger was nearing its end. Still looking out the window, he said, "The worst of it is that they're speaking the truth. Taking instruction all their lives from one authority or another, they've no idea what they think. Someone shouts and they swarm like bees."

"I'm retiring from public life," O'Brien said quietly but with finality. "I'm burned up with the hopelessness of it."

"I think it would be a shame for your great career to end on such a note."

"My great career," O'Brien repeated. "How have all the Irish leaders ended? At the end of a rope like Emmett, or dying sick and deserted in prison like Tone. Ours is a geographical misfortune, being only a hundred miles from the strongest imperial power in the world. It is a hopeless enterprise. Give it over, Tommy. Get out of Ireland. Make a life for yourself. How old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four." O'Brien closed his eyes. "I am twenty years older than you." He rested a few minutes before he spoke again, still with his eyes shut. "If this were twenty years ago and I twenty-four and newly out of Cambridge . . ." Another pause. "And armed with what I know now. That's the trick, of course, to be twenty-four and know something. I would sell my property in Cahermoyle, auction off the furniture, get rid of everything Irish, even my tweed cap, and go to America. I would change my name to something non-Irish—Brian Smith, say—and I would buy a farm in Virginia and marry a good, healthy Norwegian immigrant girl with blond braids and wide hips and raise crops and a brood of children, grow plump and prosperous, and if anybody mentioned the starving Irish I would click my tongue sympathetically, contribute five dollars and go about my business. When you got rid of your accent, Meagher, you took a step in the right direction. It's a pity you stopped there. Top of your class at Clongowes and at Stonyhurst and then this dreary, interminable mess. You've got this boiling stuff in your blood. It's the Irish affliction. It gets us dashing around blindly. What are they calling you now? Meagher of the sword?"

"Ah, Thackeray wrote a piece of light satire about the famine. I'm in it.

Then we summoned to our board

Young Meagher of the sword.

Tis he will sheathe that battle axe in saxon gore.

Meagher tried to make O'Brien laugh by miming a strike with a battle axe. "Something like that" he said."Poems about me never scan. Why is that?"

O'Brien was not amused. "O'Leary has changed it to Meagher of the words."

"They do have the idea that the Irish deserve the hunger. And they do laugh at it. It's the lion and the mouse right enough, as Duffy says. But, my friend, there is only one thing for the mouse to do, and nibbling at the lion is not it. Get away."

"A cowrin' timorous beastie sleeking off to Americay. But I believe you're having me on, old chap. You could have the life you describe, even at your advanced age, But you don't. You write letters to _The Nation_. 'When will the Irish nation strike?'"

Smith O'Brien smiled and closed his eyes again. His injuries had not obscured his strikingly handsome features, a slender face with high cheekbones and broad forehead, ascetic in appearance now with the color gone. In the fashion of the day he wore full side whiskers down to the jaw line.

"You have the true Irish affliction," Meagher replied. "The one we all have. Many ideas, brief passions, no convictions."

Meagher decided to continue the tour, and Duffy came to take O'Brien's place, meeting Meagher in Carrick. As Meagher and Duffy proceeded by open carriage into Waterford the crowd grew to monster meeting proportions. Meagher stopped his carriage on the quay, directly before a British ship of war with the word "DRAGON" on its bow. Although with the wind he could be heard by only a few hundred people near him, he said that he had chosen this place to remind his audience that their country was not in their own hands, that it was held by force.

_The starvation of our people proves to us that when a people loses control of its own country it loses all. It loses the right to the produce of its land, the right to sustenance, the very right to exist on this planet. That is what the traitors who voted for union with Britain have approved and that is what we must disapprove with our arms and with our lives_.

"Well, wasn't that a thing, now," said Duffy. They had retired to a hotel for the night, where Duffy sat with his feet on the fender of a smoky peat fire in the bar room. "There must have been fifty thousand in the streets this afternoon."

"More, I should say," Meagher answered. "I was amazed myself when I got up to speak. It wasn't just the quayside that was filled but the street leading to it. For blocks. And there are only twenty thousand living in Waterford. They must have come from miles away. It's a pity they aren't armed and trained. We'd run the blithery bastards out in an hour." He stood with his arms folded. He was avoiding all drink since the Paris trip. The night of the absinthe had been lost to memory. It frightened him.

"We must train them," Duffy said. "The only pause being that we know nothing of military matters ourselves."

"I beg your pardon, my good fellow. You are forgetting that I am a Stonyhurst man. Military drill and classes in strategy and tactics. Only one of me, of course, and a marked man now. There are police following me everywhere, taking down anything I say in public. What we need are some Frenchmen. A cadre of commanders, one to each five clubs. They lent LaFayette to the Yankees, and he found some German drill masters, and they came up with a passable army. We could do the same, although outdoor drill under the eye of John Bull's army is not easy. Still, there are secluded meadows and pastures where you could get by with it for a time. If you could get the cadre in place it could be done in two months. But, of course we have no weapons and no money to get them. This romanticism about beating the English with pikes is of the silliest. In the days of muskets it was possible to fight that way—just. But now they have rifles. They can hit you at a hundred yards, and there you lie with your stick at your side." He sighed and slumped into the overstuffed chair beside Duffy's.

"There's money in the millions to be had for the asking," Duffy said quietly.

"And where would that be, pray?"

"Americay, friend. New York, Boston, Philadelphia. All over. Even Canada. There are Irish who'd give anything to knock the English out of the old country. They attack them on the street in New York. Irish gang snipped a Limey's ears off and gouged his eyes out, and just for his accent. Now there's enthusiasm could we but harness it."

Meagher watched enviously as Duffy sipped his whiskey. "Our boys did him a favor," he said. "He's now qualified to be a prime minister."

The two laughed easily and then sat quietly for a minute. It had been a cold day, but the turf fire glowed warmly and gave off a comfortable smell. "It's a terrible feeling," Duffy said, finally, his deep voice growling softly. "An empty, shaking rage. I feel it every minute, day and night." He said this in a tone of interested surprise; his feeling had surprised him. "Now I've seen the people on the roads, I understand Mitchel and O'Leary. I want to kill."

"We have nearly a hundred thousand in clubs now," Meagher said. "Father Byrne of Carrick is very popular in these parts and he fully supports us. He suggests we come out just after the harvest in August. A rising to seize the harvest."

"And Father Kenyon in Templederry is with us. Says there's not a man in his parish wouldn't turn out to seize a corn convoy. But . . . weapons. Training."

"Maybe there's something in what Mitchel says—smother them with sheer numbers. If we could come out with a hundred thousand. There are several thousand in Cork alone, and they have had some close-order drill. There would be slaughter, but famine reaps surer than the bullet. And we might get away with some of the harvest. It is still possible the French would come if we make a good beginning."

The fire settled with a tiny sound. A clock chimed tinnily. It was midnight. "And _they'd_ come," Duffy said in a barely audible growl.

"Indeed, they have come. Are coming. Five new English regiments in Ireland in the past two months. We've made them nervous, at any rate."

"With their regiments and canon," Duffy continued quietly. "And mow us down as they did in ninety-eight. And drink toasts with the French officers in Dublin and shake their hands, as they did in ninety-eight. Still . . ." He drained the last drop of his whiskey. "Still, you're right, it's a better death than starving. Let's make a stand. We've done a little too much talking to let the whole thing drop."

Meagher lay in bed, unable to sleep. Every night the argument raged in his mind. Ireland was starving and the government, with the fanatical certitude of a small mind in the grip of a theory, was insisting on _laissez faire_. It was not _laissez faire_ when English armies conquered the country and gave the land to English landlords. It was not _laissez faire_ in the times of the penal laws when the vast majority of the Irish were barred from universities, prohibited from owning more than small tracts of land, disenfranchised, even forbidden to own a horse worth more than five pounds—deliberately reduced by force of law to poverty. But now that all this had been accomplished by direct action of the government and the people starving— _laissez faire!_ Government must not interfere with free market forces.

To be in possession of Dublin Castle, to commandeer the English men of war in the harbors of Dublin, Cork, Bantry, and establish a perimeter defense of the coastline, to announce that the lands of all English landlords are immediately forfeit and are now the property of the tenants who farm them, to announce that all stores of food are to be made available to the hungry and that all food in harbor or on its way to harbor shall also be distributed. The hunger would end in a matter of a few weeks. Meagher rolled on his side. "God damn it to hell," he said, and lay studying the pointless pattern of the wallpaper in the moonlight. He rose and pulled the bell. After a minute the hall porter knocked and Meagher opened the door a crack. He spoke softly—Duffy was in the next room. "Bring me a small bottle of your best whiskey."

In early July Lamartine's peaceful revolution turned abruptly violent. Bloody fighting erupted in the streets of Paris. The Red Republicans, whom the author of the recently published _Das Kapital_ saw as representing the proletariat, staged a coup in which thousands were killed, including the archbishop of Paris. Come to the barricades to plead for a ceasefire, he was shot through the spine. The _London Times_ cited it as proof that the rebels were atheists.

Reverberations in Ireland were immediate. Denunciations of the Young Irelanders rang from the pulpits. Priests who had supported the movement went silent. In London the government rushed a suspension of _habeas corpus_ through Parliament. It was obvious that new arrests were planned and that this time the leaders would be kept in prison.

On July 9 Duffy was arrested. A crowd gathered, chanting, "Take him out," as he was being conveyed to Newgate. One young man climbed onto the carriage and asked Duffy if he wished to be rescued. "Certainly not," was the reply. "You must wait for the harvest."

Meagher continued alone for a few days, but, in Waterford, the day after a speech in Rathkeale in which he advised his audience to arm, Meagher was also arrested and taken to prison amid a crowd of protesters. Both were released on bail the following day.

In one month the harvest would begin.
7

John Gillespie

December 1847

John Gillespie rode in the back of a dog cart in the luggage box, his knees folded up to his chin. He was headed to the Crofton-Booth estate where he would be a stable boy along with Rory Lynch, already there six months. John shared the little box with a wardrobe trunk destined, the driver told him, shouting over his shoulder, for Millicent Crofton-Booth who was now eighteen and about to attend her first society party in Galway. This was her gown from London and other "accoutrements." He pronounced the word with all the French accent he could muster—"the _accootremoh_ necessary for such an occasion, but then you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Paddy me boy?"

John, leaning on the side board of the cart, took a sidelong look at the driver. Dirty wrinkles on the back of his neck, stubble of beard, skin gone to purple with drink, black coat out at elbow, a bit of white linen showing in the hole. Showing off a new word he has learned. "And how many such have you attended, sir?" he asked.

The driver turned his head, as if he may not have heard properly. "What's that?"

John turned his gaze back to a boy, younger than himself, who had been following the cart for several minutes, walking barefoot in this chill, extending his hand whenever John looked his way. "I have nothing," he said to the boy.

"Listen, you watch your talk, sonny. This is a fine family and they're employing as many as they can. They've no need of you with a thousand to take your place. If you're smart you'll keep yourself the height of a cricket's ankle. Any of that smartness and you'll be out on the road with the rest you see here. A situation like this where you get a fine board and a place to keep is a rare privilege." He turned to wag a mottled gray finger at John. "A rare privilege indeed. Don't get yourself flung out. They're dying in the ditches. Look at this." He indicated a lean-to made of scraps of lumber at the roadside. It was open at either end and there were several people huddled under it, motionless. An old woman's face with startling blue eyes watched them pass.

They had seen a dozen of these shelters in the hour they had traveled. And they had seen a woman at the roadside sitting on a child's coffin, begging for money, and another holding up her dead baby for them to see.

"The road is black with funerals, boy, and nobody cares if yours is among them. Practice a little deference. Do you know what that is?"

"Yes, sir." Deference to the family was one thing; deference to this fellow was another, John thought. After a minute the driver seemed to realize the omission in his argument.

"As for that, I may be Irish born, but my father was English and I was taught at Simon's academy four years till my father died, rest his soul. And I am the driver for the family, as you see. You are the second stable boy. This is not the house you came from with everyone the same from the father down to the pig and the chickens all in the house together and all equal as mud."

A work crew fifty yards distant was making a new road leading off toward the hills. Several of them paused in their shoveling and watched as the cart passed. Thin scarecrows, too weak for such work, but the relief went only to those who worked. New roads that led nowhere were going in all over the country.

"This is a great country estate where you're going and you'll learn something about order and rank. You'll learn that a driver is over a second stable boy. In fact, I am your direct superior. Ned Sloane, by name. You'll take your orders from me."

John pantomimed for the boy following the cart, turned out empty pockets and shrugged. "I've nothing to give." The boy continued to follow. " _Daibhir_ ," said John, repeating the gesture. The boy stopped suddenly and stood watching the cart until it rounded a bend. It had rained earlier in the day and the way was muddy and rutted. The few leaves remaining on the trees were yellow and brown. He did have four copper pennies that Mrs. P. had given him. One of them would be enough for the boy to buy flour for his mother to make a loaf of bread, or a half-pound of corn meal, but a total wealth of four pence does not permit philanthropy, he reasoned, especially when there are so many needy about. The boy disappeared from sight as they turned along a stone wall. Mrs. P had also made him a good woolen jacket and a cap and had given him a pair of corduroy trousers, stockings, and a good pair of boots—taken from some unfortunate, no doubt—but the best he'd ever had. He felt unusually snug and comfortable. She had also given him her book of Bible stories, the one the priest had objected to and which had been one cause of the closing of the Quaker hospital. It was the second book he had owned; Mr. Frayne had given him Ovid's _Transformations_ , but it was left behind in the house and the house was no doubt tumbled by now, so that one was gone. He had enjoyed the Ovid more than this book, which was written for children.

The cart made a sharp turn, passed through an open gate, and Ned indicated with his whip a large stone building ahead. "Lissamore," he announced. Although it was surely a great estate with its wide, level lawn grazed by fat sheep, the house itself was not what he had thought it would be. He had imagined a great castle on a craggy hill, like an engraving in a book. This very plain two-story structure, its flat gray front mottled with the damp, was more like the government customs building in Sligo. Still, it was remarkable that such a large building was the house of a family.

"When you're introduced to the master or any of the family just take your cap off and bow. Do you know how to bow?"

"Yes."

"Yes, _sir_. Don't forget the "sir" or "madam" or "miss" if it's the young lady. And do not ever address them first. Only when you're spoken to."

He drove the long road through the park which contained two white marble sculptures, a female archer with the remnants of a bow in her hand, and a male nude looking away from her, both somewhat melted by long years in the rain. He took the cart around to the side, where they slid the trunk off and carried it to the door. A girl of about five let them in and they carried it into a room where two women were washing linen in a great steaming tub.

"La, she's been waiting for that. I'll just run and tell her," said a large woman as she wiped the soap from her splotchy red arms and shook her hands over the tub.

"I shouldn't be surprised if it needed cleaning," said the other woman. "She buys them second-hand, you know, from Dublin. We were a whole day sponging the stains from last year's ball dress."

"You're speaking out of turn, Dee Caffrey. 'Tis no concern of yours if she gets them from the poor bin at the parish. And who's this?"

John removed his cap and bowed. "John Gillespie, madam."

"Gaa," she replied, laughing, and gave him a thump on his head with a knuckle as she passed.

The others laughed, too, and John felt himself reddening.

"That's only a char. Don't be removing your cap and bowing to the likes of her," Ned Sloane said as they returned to the cart. "I'll be taking you now to your new domicile, your baronial estate in the stable. You'll be quartered nearly as well as the horses here, and that's a good bit better than most of your countrymen can say."

Rory Lynch was coming out of the stable door with a barrow filled with straw and horse manure. He set the barrow down and stood without speaking as they approached. Somewhere he had acquired a many-colored sweater and a great tweed cap. John jumped from the cart and waved diffidently. "Hullo."

"I've brought you an apprentice, a colleague from an earlier career of yours, I believe," said Ned.

"Hullo, John." Rory seemed to have grown smaller in this setting. He had been the one person in the hospital with any swagger about him, but here it seemed to have vanished.

"I'll show you where you sleep. Do you have a bag?"

"Just this." John proffered the book.

"The sum of his worldly possessions." Ned Sloane laughed merrily, showing rotted stumps of teeth. "'Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face,' I believe the saying is. I will leave you here to be ensconced in your new apartment by this young worthy. I'll come back later and introduce you to your duties." He touched the horse with his crop and drove off toward a brick barn at the far end of the weedy flagstones which constituted the barnyard.

Rory showed John to a tiny slant-roofed room at the end of the stable which contained two cots, a board shelf over each, and a small cobwebbed window with an old chest under it upon which stood a chipped wash basin and pitcher. A stained and faded floral print curtain hung on either side of the tiny window, some long ago half-effort to make the place cozy, or at least to distinguish it from a horse stall.

"We are to share this," he said.

"I'm sorry to have come. There's precious little room here for you and now you must share it."

"I've been sharing it," he said sitting down on his cot. "The last fellow was let go for insolence to the young master, Mr. Stewart Gore Booth. They put him on the road. You will have to be very careful. He's got an eagle eye for a crossways glance."

John lay on his cot. It was straw tick and, even in a stable, had a distinctly unpleasant smell. "No one has told me anything. What is it we do here?"

"We're grooms. Stable boys. Brush horses, clean hooves of horses, muck out after horses, feed horses, water horses, saddle and unsaddle horses, walk horses. The situation has a great deal to do with horses. And we're to be on the lookout at night for desperadoes. We're guards, too."

"Desperadoes?"

"Come on," he said, rising suddenly. "I've got to move the barrow. If Master Stewart sees it left there. . ." He ran to the door with John following, looked both ways, and resumed his hauling.

"What about the desperadoes?" John asked.

The metal tire of the barrow squeaked on the flagstones. Rory shook his head and half whispered, "Not here. Your voice carries. Inside we can talk." They went around to the back of the stable. "This is where we put the manure," he said in a louder voice. "It will be taken from here by the gardener. We put the fresh on this end of the pile," he dumped the barrow with a vigorous heave, "and he takes from the other end."

John helped Rory muck out the stalls and put down new straw. Master Stewart was home on holiday from school and was out riding with a school friend. "If the stalls for the two horses are not perfect when they get back we'll be in for it. Straw, just so," he indicated, arranging it carefully with the pitchfork. "No deep places. Now," he said, handing the pitchfork to John, "do the other half while I fill the feed and water troughs."

He returned with a large scoop of oats and grain. "We can hear them coming on the flags." His voice was low and sharp. "When we hear them, we stop talking. Say nothing now. Just listen. There are ribbon men out all over the country. Whiteboys. Two landlords have been killed this month past, one with his daughter. In this part of the country it's Captain Kelly and it's the Molly Maguires. They steal the livestock, cattle and sheep, they hock the cattle—cut their leg muscle so they can't walk and have to be killed—and they burn stables like this one. That's why there's a bell over there near the door, so we can sound the alarm."

John looked around the stable. Six stalls on one, five on the other side and a room with saddles and bridles and bins of grain, but only four horses, six with the two in use.. He had heard a little of the Whiteboys, the priest at home had spoken strongly against them, but they had seemed in the category with other things that priests spoke about, things remote and unreal, like the Holy Ghost. "Might they come here?"

"Sure they more than might. They have been. Very near, anyway. The feed comes up to two inches from the top, so. See? Level. Just so." He leveled it carefully with his fingers. "No more. Too full and it spills. Wasteful. They're death on waste here. Not quite as rich as they pretend at being. They whinbushed young Stewart three months ago—the Whiteboys—just after I got here and just before he was to leave for school. Caught him when he was out riding after dark, pulled him from his horse and beat him with a thorn bush. I went out with the lantern when I heard him and wasn't he covered in blood and groaning like something from the other world. He had blood even in his eyes. Frightened the bejasus out of me. Howling half the night he was with the doctor pulling the thorns out. He had to go off to university looking like the chicken pox. You can still see the scars in his face, but don't let him catch you looking."

Rory walked to the far end and tossed the scoop into the oat bin. He took a tin pail from a shelf above the bin and hung it on the pump spout just outside the door. John watched over the stalls, through the door, as he worked the handle, his elbows moving slowly, skinny arms barely strong enough to get it started. He returned with the filled pail. He hoisted the pail to the tin water trough and poured slowly. "Just watch me and take your cue. I'm very eager to please."

John had never handled a horse, but Rory gave him a short lesson. "Just act confident. If they think you know what you're about they'll follow. Here, take this one for a walk down the path. That's Polly. She has a sweet disposition. Don't you, Polly, sweet Polly?"

John took the bridle and led her out of the stable. He had not gone fifty yards when the two riders were upon him. John took a quick look. They were about his age, and the one nearest him did have scars on his face, bad ones. One eyelid drooped and his lips were misshapen with them.

"Ah ha, look at this. Damme if we don't have the new stable boy. Look at the red hair and freckles. A real carroty Paddy. Hard at it, are you, Paddy me boy?" They turned the horses about and followed John.

"Yes, sir. Just giving the mares a bit of a walk." My hair is more brown than red, he thought. It annoyed him to be called red-haired when he was not.

"Givun the maares a bit of a wack," Stewart mimicked. "And what bog did we dredge you from?"

John kept walking, made no answer.

"You know, Paddy, if you want to exercise a horse properly you should run it a bit. Can you run? Run, Paddy."

John began a slow run. There was a crack of riding crop and a flash of bright pain across his neck. Stewart and his friend laughed.

"Run, Paddy. Look at that flat-footed run. Have you ever seen anything so pathetic?"

"They are deficient in the track and field sports here, I've noticed," said the friend. "Crack him another one."

"Look at him run around the far side of the mare. Come out here, boy, I've something for you. Come out here I say. Don't you be running from me."

John ran back toward the middle of the path, tilting his head, raising his shoulders. Better not increase his wrath. Might get by with one more rather than ten. The second one was harder, made the back of his neck go numb.

They turned back toward the stable, laughing.

"At least we're alive," Rory said, trying to console him. Hating himself for crying, John had come back to the stable red-eyed, wiping tears. "Mrs. Caffrey will put some salve on those. We take our meals in the kitchen with the others. Let's see you take that bridle off, now. That's all right, now. I've had a stripe or two myself from him. That's it, just unbuckle the one strap and you can pull it right off. They'll have a good bit of supper there for us, mutton stew and good bread and buttermilk, I've no doubt. At least we're not starving like those poor caffers out on the road. Where are you going to put it now?"

"Tack room."

"Tack room it is. Good man."

John hung the bridle in the little room opposite the feed bin.

"Come along with me, now, I'll show you a place where we can talk a bit." They walked back to a place where rocks from the field had been piled under a beech tree.

"There's the seat of honor, now. You can have that tonight." Rory indicated a flat stone with a little indentation, something in the shape of a chair seat, and sat himself on a lower rock. The place was concealed by the weeds, nettles and grasses, which had grown up through the rocks. He took from his pocket a dull-colored watch with a cracked crystal and showed it to John. "Look at that, would you. Mrs. P. gave me that. It's a grand thing. I can tell when it's time to go to supper without anyone coming to call." He stopped suddenly and looked at his watch. "It's half six," he said quietly. "What ever happened to Mrs. P.?"

"Gone back to America, I should think. The priest said she had no business preaching the Bible to us like that."

"Do you think that's right?"

"I don't know. It was only stories she was reading. I don't see the harm. She got everybody placed somewhere before she went. No one went on the road. Still, she was a heathen Protestant, so he said."

Rory whispered, leaning close, "Listen, now. If you see an odd thing happen today or tonight, or any time—no matter what—you didn't see it." He held up his hand to prevent reply.

Dinner was at the far end of the room he had already seen, where the maids did the laundry.

"You'll sit just there," the large red-faced woman who had thumped his head directed him, pointing to the end of the bench. The basement room with its whitewashed walls held a dampness and a strong smell of soap and cooking, and it was loud with conversation. Ned was poking a finger at the lapel of a well-dressed man, asserting something about Caraway, the name of a horse, John guessed. Two younger girls were busily setting the table and the large woman and her fellow laundress, Dee, brought the food, which consisted of two large tureens of stew, bread, and a great pitcher of buttermilk, all the while arguing about the adequacy of the new gown to the great occasion in Galway.

Rory introduced John to the woman who appeared to be in charge of the kitchen, Mary. "Welcome. I'm sure you've been instructed well. It would be a great shame if you ended up like your predecessor."

"I have been, thank you."

"Sure, she'll be a laughing stock," Dee Caferty, continued, "wearing that old thing, and her going with young Gregory, the son of Lord Gregory himself, but he'll never have her, no matter what dress she's in. Sure, and why would he? The threadbare country cousin."

"It's a grand dress," Mary corrected her. "They'll have no cause to say anything of the kind. Mind where you're putting that pot. It goes by Ned's place at the head. Ah, now what's happened to the scruff of your neck?" This addressed to John.

"Master Stewart gave him that, and for no good reason," Rory said. "With his crop. John was only walking a mare."

"Tcha, I'd like to give him one back," she said. "I'll tell you what to do. Come 'round tomorrow morning at ten. Miss Millicent will be here for the fitting of her gown. I'll make sure she sees that."

"Only don't _you_ say anything about it," added Ned. "You say it was nothing, an accident.

"Master Stewart will be off to school again in a week. Until then keep your neck in," advised Mary, showing him by raising her shoulders up to her ears. "Like a turtle."

There was much merriment at this advice. John himself laughed a little at the jolliness of the group.

"Did you ever see a sea turtle?" Dee Cafferty asked.

"I did not."

The well-dressed man rapped the table with a serving spoon and all bowed their heads as he said the blessing.

"Sure, neither did I," she said. "Only in Miss Millicent's picture book of the animals. It looks like a green coal scuttle upside down with legs and a head it can put out when it wants. If the lord cared about servants he'd have made us like that. Give us a little something to hide under. But he didn't, and he doesn't, I think."

They were trying to jolly him, and he was glad of it, but he felt such a fear inside him that the jollying was only temporarily successful. The back of his neck did not hurt much, really, it was just the thought of it.

Later, lying in his cot, listening to the dry scratch and scurry of mice, he felt the empty ache. He should be strong like the Count of Monte Cristo in the book of Mr. Frayne's he had read. For a Mercedes he had only Megan Tierny. She seemed to like him. He remembered what she had said to the man who carried him. "Mr. Frayne says he's the best student ever in his school." That was good of her. He had thought of it many times. Where was Megan now? They were all scattered. There would be no way to even write her a letter.

Scratch and scurry and gnaw and squeak, the mice were at their work. John cried and bit the back of his hand to keep from making a sound that Rory would hear and wondered why it was that even when you had no reason to be alive and no place to be alive in, still you stayed alive. Maybe that was why God had sent the hunger. All those people on the road and living in the ditch, that boy begging behind the cart. He, John Gillespie, lying here on this old straw tick, a good meal in his stomach, gnawing his hand, was a lucky one. After dark Rory had left quietly, without a word. John watched him faintly silhouetted at the door. He seemed to be wearing a long coat that flared at the bottom. John was surprised that he had such a thing. A young girl might have a good dress hanging somewhere, but it was true of all the young boys he had known that all their clothes were on them. He whispered the Lord's Prayer and thought a little more about Megan. He could write to Miss Pennington at the Society of Friends in Philadelphia. Maybe she would have Megan's address. He wondered what the postage would cost for a letter across the ocean. More than fourpence, no doubt. But then what? He couldn't imagine what he would say to her. Still, he held on to the idea of her. He needed it, the feeling of it. He held his hand to the place on his chest where her foot had been.

At the earliest dawn he heard the door creak as Rory came in. He looked, blinked himself awake and looked again. It was not a flared coat Rory was wearing. It was a woman's dress.

"Never you mind about this," Rory said, quickly pulling the dress over his head. "Remember what I told you. Go back to sleep." He had on his undershirt and trousers underneath. Pulling the tick mattress from his cot, he laid the dress neatly on the boards and replaced the mattress. He hopped onto the bed and pulled the blankets about him. In a minute he was asleep and snoring.

John soon learned Master Stewart's schedule and kept out of his way the best he could. When the young master was about John busied himself in the tack room, or went to the granary and filled sacks. The return of the two young men from their daily ride was a problem. It required both Rory and John to unsaddle the horses and rub them down. He kept quiet and busy and relied on Rory's palaver to keep the young master off of him. "Well, sir, and it was a fine day for it today, right enough. Just a little nip in the air. And are the swans still on the pond, sir? A lovely sight, sure. It's a grand thing that your friend, the master from Galway, has had a chance to see them while they're here." He smiled ingratiatingly, taking the young man's horse. "I hear there's more of them than ever now, sir. Ah, you've given them quite a riding today, gentlemen. I'll just rub them down and cover them and walk them a bit to quiet them now."

Stewart's answers were few and brief, and his friend, William junior, the son of Lord Gregory, said not a word, but the chatter did seem to forestall the riding crop. Apparently Rory had discovered that the "speak only when spoken to" rule did not apply to chat about horses. As soon as the portly young guest dismounted, John took his horse to the far end of the stable, removed the saddle and put the blanket over its back. He was glad he could stay out of the way and keep silent. Rory made all this sound as natural and jovial as could be, a thing John could not imagine himself doing. "And it's too bad you didn't fall off, ye damned worthless gossoons, and break your damned necks for yourselves," he said in a half-whispered singsong as soon as the young men had left the stable. "They are students at Harrow in England," Rory explained as they walked the sweating horses, "and the both of them plan to go on to Oxford. Neither one is much of a scholar, they say, but they have colleges at Oxford set aside just for the blithering rich."

On Sunday a skinny old priest came and conducted mass in the servants' quarter. This was unusual, Mary had explained. Most Protestant houses did not permit priests on the premises. The priest intoned the mass in Latin while the servants knelt on the stone floor, giving the responses. The whole thing was perfunctory until the sermon.

The priest stared off at the back wall preparing his words. "There are those among you," he began, "who have not been to confession in a long while. And I believe that I know why you have not." His face went white with anger, his lips straight and thin. He looked for a moment at Rory. "I am sure that there is no need to remind you that murder—" There was a gasp from Dee Cafferty. "Yes, I said murder. There's two landlords of Connaught killed this past two months. Did you not know it? There's beatings with whin bushes. There's even the murder of the wife and children of the Marquess of Sligo, the littlest one her neck broken by being swung against a tree by her feet, and she only four years old." The silence was long. "And I have heard there's members of this staff—I don't say I know it for a certainty, but I have heard it—members of this staff in with the Molly Maguires. There are other crimes enough, too. Hocking cattle, burning barns and stables and houses. And if anyone thinks this is helping the cause of the poor people on the road they are mistaken. It only makes the landlords turn them out the faster. And makes the collecting of the poor rates and the collecting of charity the harder. The Marquess had been giving all he could. Now he's left the country for good with his manager under instructions to collect the rents or evict and to give nothing. This is what the Molly Maguires have accomplished on the greatest estate in the west of Ireland. The misery of thousands is on their heads and no mistake."

John did not dare to look at Rory, but he sensed the stillness next to him.

"I'm going from here now to another estate where there is more than one outlaw on the staff. I don't report them to the master. That would be an abuse of priestly confidence. But I will tell them what I tell you. Cease. In the name of your suffering countrymen, cease. In the name of God, cease."

The priest gave communion to several, but Rory did not present himself. John had fasted and rose to go forward, but sat again when Rory refused to move his legs to let him out of the row and gave him a quick stare.

"That blackguard is selling us out. Trying to scare us," Rory said after they had returned to the stable.

"Will that get back to the family do you think?"

"No."

"Not even Mary? She seems awfully sympathetic to the family."

Rory smiled and considered his words. "Don't worry about Mary," he said.

Late one afternoon as they were sitting on the rock pile Rory held his hand for silence. The sound of a man's voice speaking as if to a large audience carried on for several minutes. The boys stood and peered through the weeds toward the stable yard. There, standing upon the weedy flags, Crofton-Booth, one arm raised in orator fashion, held forth to the surrounding buildings. The word "entail" figured prominently in whatever it was he was saying. At the door of the barn, back a little in the shadows, Ned could be seen also watching the proceedings.

"He's drunk again," Rory whispered. "He gets stocious and comes out and carries on. Gives speeches about how he'd like to sell this estate and go to England away from the savages and blackguards—that's us—but the entail won't let him."

Crofton-Booth stood hatless, a balding man with unruly hair on the sides of his head, his waistcoat unbuttoned, very red in the jowls and neck. "This is a poisoned trap, a damned trap and it has me by the leg." He turned toward the barn door and Ned disappeared. He continued for another minute before the butler, along with Mary and Millicent, came to get him. He went off toward the house with them quietly and without protest.

"Dee Cafferty says they've no money. The tenants here don't pay their rent and the old man is too soft to evict them. They've borrowed and borrowed until it's beyond them to pay it back. They're hoping that young Gregory will marry Millicent and save them all. The whole family's courting him, she says."

"What is that, an entail?"

Rory thought a moment. "I don't know. Something that holds you by the tail, like. I don't think they have them for the likes of us."

"And are you going to kill him?"

Rory held up his first finger and wagged it. But as he watched the retreating portly form with its slumped shoulders, his mouth and thrust-forward jaw answered the question. "It's the father of young Gregory, you know, that killed your people."

"No one killed them but the hunger itself."

"And do you know why couldn't they get into the workhouse or get Indian meal? It's because of the Gregory law. No one with a quarter acre of land can get relief. Sir William Gregory himself is the author of that masterpiece. It's too bad we can't put a musket ball through _his_ tripes. He's passed on to his reward in the sky."

Early on the day of the ball the driver from Tobercurry, along with Ned and Rory and John, harnessed two horses each to two great black carriages with gleaming brass fittings, the grandest one borrowed from relatives at Tobercurry. Ned, in a new suit of livery, and the borrowed driver, a silent, austere man, very much aware of the dignity of his position, drove the two carriages up to the house. John and Rory watched from the stable yard as the house servants loaded great traveling trunks on top of the carriages and tied them down. The morning mist was rising; the day would be fine.

The family came out dressed in their traveling outfits, the women wearing blue or gray capes and enormous hats, the men in black with top hats. The loading of the carriages was silent and ceremonial, several crows flying about the house making the only sound. Crofton-Booth chatted with Ned, giving directions. Millicent momentarily took the arm of the portly William, looked up at him and said something that appeared by the tilt of her hat to be admiring.

The excursion party, including the two drivers, would take the boat from Sligo and arrive in Galway in the late afternoon. After the ball they would stay at the Gregorys' country house in County Galway. The servants at Lissamore would be left alone for nearly two days.

"We find ourselves in a condition of blessed freedom, "said Rory. "Let us get these great beasts provisioned and I'll take you on a bit of a walking tour of the neighborhood."

In an hour they were walking along the road toward Sligo. It had been only a month since his cart ride along the roads, but it was evident that the hunger had grown worse in that time. John had forgotten the hunger, nearly. They walked along the bay, and near Drumcliffe Rory showed him the parish almshouse. There were a hundred or more lying and sitting on the ground near the water. "There's too many to fit inside, so they must sleep on the ground. And the fever is very bad. They all die, or nearly all. The almshouse is nothing but a dying house. They think if they die there the parish will pay for a coffin and that's why they go. But there's too many now and the parish can't afford the coffins. A truck takes the dead every morning and they bury them in a deep wide hole near Roughley Head. There's thousands buried there by now—and no coffins."

They skirted the east end of Sligo lest the family, still on the road, should see them, but there was no sign of them. "They must be on the boat by now, well on their way," Rory said. "Still, keep an eye out. If we're caught, we're sacked, and we'll join these."

They headed south toward Collooney. As they were well dressed and had boots, several of the beggars along the road approached them, but they were meek and gave the boys no trouble. Soon bound for the grave, and they knew it. A bit to eat now would only prolong it. There were crows busy in the ditch. John stopped. The bodies of a man and a woman lay under the cover of the little shelter they had built. The crows were at them and did not fly up as the boys approached. And, farther along, one lying on the shoulder, open-eyed.

"There were road projects when I came before. To give them money."

"All done now," Rory answered. "Imagine getting these to dig ditches and build roads. And they had to bring their own shovels, which mostly they haven't got. And their pay was in arrears, some a fortnight and more. They worked themselves to a point of worse starvation and they didn't get paid. A hard day of shoveling when you haven't eaten in a week will finish you. They died along the roads going home. That's Lord Russell's idea of teaching self reliance."

"Who's Lord Russell?"

"The Sassenach prime minister. Wouldn't I like to turn him over to the Rossa."

They walked a bit in silence. It was a day of weak sunshine, cool and misty.

"Do you know who the Rossa is?" Rory asked.

"I don't."

"His name is secret. They call him the Rossa. They say he's killed twenty and he only sixteen years old. He'll walk right up to a landlord or any of his family in broad daylight and cut their tripes out. He enjoys it. He does it so he can watch their faces. Kills the children. Takes them by the two feet and swings them across a tree trunk. Snaps their little necks for them. And the women. You wouldn't like to hear what he does with them. Come along."

John had stopped. He stood staring.

"You don't like to hear any of this, do you? I can tell by that squinty look you've got."

He tried to answer, but words did not come. He made a sound: "Puh."

They walked on. In a couple of hours they had gone through Ballisdare and Collooney and had come into the Ox Mountains. They passed over a bridge near a little waterfall and John recognized his valley. The Blackwater this stream would be, and on the narrow road that ran along the mountainside halfway up were the houses of his townland. He could see as they climbed the hill that something had changed. Where Walsh's place had been there was only a pile of whitewashed stones with thatch from the roof mixed in. And the next two houses on their lane had been similarly knocked down. As they turned into the lane he saw the tumbling crew working on the fourth house, Kerry's. Four policemen in their dark green uniforms stood in the road, rifles slung over their shoulders. He had imagined that all of the people here had died of the hunger, but Tim Kerry and his wife, a very cross person whom he had always avoided, stood in the road with their two children, two boys who had been mean-tempered like their mother, the sort who would as soon throw a rock at you as say hello. Their few possessions—enameled pitchers, an iron kettle, a pile of blankets—stood on a deal table in the road. The Kerrys looked subdued enough now as a man sawed the supporting beam that connected the gables of their house. Six men had hold of a rope that ran out of the house through the door. Another man worked with a crowbar to remove the wall plates at the angles of the gable. John and Rory came up behind the crowd, which included a few others that John recognized. Some people had had food supplies after all. The Kerrys evidently had a good one; the missus was still plump. The man with the saw slid down the thatch of the roof and made the short jump to the ground. He joined the others with the rope and shouted "Ready, heave!" The beam cracked and down came the roof with a heavy crash. None of the Kerry family made a sound. Mrs. Kerry raised her hands a little toward her face but dropped them again to her side and turned away. Her ruddy face, plain as a potato, looked stunned and stupid.

"They're tumbling your whole lane," Rory said. "Grazing land is more profitable to them than tenants who can't pay the rent. They're offering passage to Boston or Canada to any of these who want to go. Ned says they've sent more than a thousand already."

"Would they send us, do you think?" John asked. They walked on through the crowd to get a look at John's house where the lane turned again down the hill.

"Would you want to go?"

"I don't know. What's it like there, do you suppose?"

"Wild Indians and cowboys and great rich people smoking big segars. I don't know. Lots of Irish there must be. And some Quakers like Mrs. P. I don't think they'd send us, though. They're trying to clear the land for sheep. They'd clear no land by sending us. It costs nearly five pounds to send one person."

"And they've sent a thousand." The two were silent thinking about such a quantity of wealth.

They came to John's house. The nettles had grown up around it and the thatch had rotted and fallen through around the chimney. His father and eldest brother Michael had repaired it with new reeds every spring. The door was standing open. Rory went to have a look inside. He returned to the doorway. "Come. Don't you want to have a look, then?"

The house looked small and dead. "No."

"And why not? It's empty. There's nothing here."

"No. Let's go on."

"Go on where?"

"I don't know. I don't want to stay here."

Rory came out and they walked down the road toward the river without speaking. They stood on the bridge and watched the water sluice around the rocks. "Are there trout in this?" Rory asked.

"No. Farther up. Not here."

The crash of another roof beam from up the mountain reverberated in the valley.

"Did you ever go fishing?"

"A few times, with my grandmother."

"You had no further use for the old house anyway. You weren't coming back here to be a starving tenant, were you?"

John gave no answer.

"How long until you're fourteen?"

"In the spring. April."

"Maybe we can tell them it's January. Or December, next month. Would you like that?"

"Yes."

They returned to Lissamore and a feast.

One of the younger maids had got a big salmon from her brother and supper was especially festive, with potatoes and fresh green beans from the garden. When the family was away the servants were permitted to eat the fresh green vegetables. It was the best meal John had ever eaten.

After dinner the butler, Roddy—John had gotten his name at last—showed John and Rory around the house. In the entryway there was a stuffed bear with sawdust coming out of one nostril and in a corner of the dining room a sad looking black lump of a thing which Roddy said was a stuffed seal. "The men go on a seal hunt now and again. I often act as gun-bearer. We go along the coast north of Sligo up toward Donegal in among the rocks and coves. These little fellows will swim right up to you." He patted the seal affectionately. Painted on the plaster of the wall were some humorous caricatures of family members, done by Sir Robert Crofton-Booth himself. The rooms were immense, one after another. One was just for billiards, another with a great marble staircase and portraits one above the other of the family for three hundred years, and one room in a semi-circular shape with windows overlooking the bay. They climbed the servants' stairway, narrow with several sharp turns in it, and saw the bedrooms with their flowered wallpaper and covered beds.

"And yet they say that he is short of money," John said as they walked back to the stable.

"It's a different short of money from ours. If the charms of Millicent can land the young William, all is saved."

"She is very beautiful."

"Do you think? I'd say she's a bit skinny and she has those long English teeth out in front, big as tombstones."

"She carries herself like a princess and her form and her hair—I've never seen such. Ever."

"Anybody can have shining hair if they have all day to brush it and not another thing to do in the world. And as for her form, as you call it, it may or may not have anything to do with the Millicent beneath. Her bosom has grown since Mr. Gregory came into the picture, and with something more than pride, I'm thinking. The whole household staff has been at work on her night and day. It's their situations at stake and ours, too."

The day was ending clear and windy cold under a violet sky. They hadn't walked the horses, but one day wouldn't matter. John held the lantern as Rory filled water troughs.

"So, you've gone sweet on Miss Millicent, have you?"

"No."

Rory laughed. "No," he imitated. "Listen to me," he said.

d in a much changed tone. "You mustn't have any feelings for this place or the family in it if you're about to come our way. We've plans for it and them and they don't include any hugging and kissing."

Rory returned the pail to its hook and John moved a small bench into position, climbed up and hung the lantern on its rafter. They retired to their room and lay on their beds.

"Would you kill her?"

"We have no orders. I'm sure we'll at least burn them out. All the big houses are to be burned. Dozens of them have already. It's a war, you know. Our country is occupied and being looted by an enemy."

Rory's breathing became heavy and regular. He always fell asleep in a minute. John lay awake in the moonlight, which he had never seen so bright as it was this night. He could see the knots and cracks in the wall boards and the faded picture of Jesus hanging crookedly on the wall past the foot of his bunk. _Our country is occupied and being looted by an enemy_. Our country. It's a war. Our country. Those were words from the boys of '98. The words set John's imagination going. When he joined them he would be fighting in a war, he would be like a musketeer. Yes. It was a clear idea, a way of thinking about himself. He imagined himself saving Millicent from the fire. She would love him and leave her family and join the rising. The mice scurried in the walls as they always did, but tonight it was a pleasant sound.

When the family came back it was without William, and it was obvious that their hopes had come to nothing. The family stayed indoors quietly as if they were in mourning and Stewart did not come to ride. After a few days he left for school dressed in the Harrow uniform: gray flannel slacks, blue jacket with tie, and straw boater. The railroad came as far as Boyle, now, so it was a mere two hours in the carriage and he would be traveling in comfort.

The servants, too, were quiet at supper, speaking only of weather, food, and other routine. There were significant glances, there had obviously been much whispering.

After nearly a week Millicent sent word one afternoon that she would ride Dancer. Rory and John saddled the horse and walked it around the yard. It was a skittish horse, not the one she usually rode, and needed to be gentled before riding. Millicent appeared in a blue riding habit looking pale and unwell. Rory began his palaver about the day being a fine one for a ride, but she interrupted. "How are you, boys? Are they feeding you well?" She addressed this to John.

"Yes, fine, Miss," John answered as she mounted.

"It's a tragedy, the hunger we saw in the land on our travels. You may be unaware of it, sheltered here as you are. We are going to establish a soup kitchen for our people. Maybe you will help us. What's your name?"

"John Gillespie, Miss."

She looked at him intently for a moment as if this were important information, then mounted quickly and cantered across the flags and down the path.

"Oh, my," Rory said. "John Gillespie, Miss," he mimicked, but got no reply from John, who watched the girl as she rode into the wood. "I'd so like to feed the poor peasants," Rory went on in a mincing voice. "Would they eat from my hand, do you think? Do they bite? You're right, me boy, she has a fine haunch on her. Did you see when she swung her leg over? I wouldn't mind savoring a bit of that up in yon hayloft."

"Do be quiet, please." John walked into the stable to get away from Rory's whispering laughter.

She stayed out riding an unusually long time. Rory had gone to his rock pile and purposely left John alone to wait for her. John heard the hooves on the flags but continued to rake the floor near the doorway so as to appear occupied.

"Did you have a pleasant ride, Miss?" he asked her in his best Rory manner.

"Yes, thank you." She dismounted and instead of going directly to the house as he led the horse away, she followed into the stable. "Where's your compadre?"

"I beg your pardon, Miss?"

"Your associate. Your friend."

"Oh, he went off for a stroll, as you might say." As you might say. He was talking like Ned the driver. Nervous. The horse was still a little skittish, backing away as he led it into the stable. He tied the reins to a post and bent to unbuckle the cinch.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Fourteen soon, Miss."

He glanced at her as he removed the saddle and saw that she was smiling a little.

"I thought you were older. You're tall. You could pass for sixteen."

He stood holding the saddle, wondering if it was permissible to walk away from her. She said nothing further, only stood looking at him, so he took the saddle to its place and returned.

"You like me, don't you?"

He removed the saddle blanket, hung it on a stall and began to rub down the sweating horse.

"I see you looking at me. Women notice things like that, you know. It's all right if you do. I could use some of that sort of bolstering up just now." He had been looking away from her but she moved around so she could see his face. "I've been wondering as I was riding today how we must look to you. My family, I mean. I suppose you think that we live in some kind of heaven of luxury and happiness. You must resent us for it. Do you?"

"No, Miss."

"Really, you can talk to me and say whatever you like. I'm not like my brother." She came closer to him and spoke directly to the side of his face. "You know what's happened between me and Gregory. Of course you do. The servants always seem to know. If it is bad news. In the house they treat me like an invalid now. And it's all because I told Gregory that the system of this country is unfair. And I have since come to the conclusion that I really know nothing about it. I see the country people on the road and I see their cottages, but I have almost never spoken to one of them, except for the servants. We live in the same place and it's two different worlds. Talk to me. Tell me what you think."

"I think I am very lucky to have this position, Miss, with the people dying on the roads."

"But you must think something more than that. I saw the corn wagons going to the port at Galway with the soldiers guarding them. This is corn that was raised in Ireland by the very people who are starving. And yet it is taken away. Doesn't it make you angry?"

"It's an unfair question, Miss, begging your pardon."

"What do you mean, an unfair question?"

"I mean that a conversation like this is a very dangerous thing for me. If I say one thing wrong I could be out there on the road with them. In a minute. A wrong word could cost me my life."

She was indignant. "You know I would never do a thing like that." She backed away and stared at him accusingly.

"I'm sure you wouldn't, Miss. But you could repeat what I said to someone who would do it. Something like it happened to the boy who was here before me. He complained to your father of being beaten and later your brother had him dismissed on a pretext. Now I've already said too much."

"Of being beaten! No one is beaten here."

John changed the rag to his other hand and pulled down his jacket collar to reveal the stripes on his neck.

She gasped as if she had been struck herself. "Who has done this? Was it Stewart?"

He stopped and looked her straight in the face. "It was no one, Miss," he said.

She moved away as he led the horse into its stall. He busied himself with its feed and water and when he came out, she was gone. All his imagined encounters with her—and then finally a real one. He felt the welts on his neck with his fingertips. It seemed that he would never be able to talk to her in the way he had imagined. He was surprised at what had come out of him. And facing up to her like that—why had he done that? It wasn't her fault, after all, what her brother had done.

"Well," Rory's deep voice boomed from the door. He came in with an exaggerated saunter. "Tell me, Romeo, did she give you a great moist kiss of her sweet lips?"

John, with his hand still to the back of his neck, regarded Rory without answering.

Rory sighed a comical lover's sigh. "I see you are savoring the moment. Excuse me for interrupting your reverie." He leaned against a post, chewing a straw.

"No, it wasn't like that at all," John answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "I showed her the marks on my neck. She had no idea anyone was beaten here. She knows now."

Rory's expression changed in an instant. The straw dropped from his mouth. "You never." He slapped his hands against his sides in disgust. "Ach, ya gaby." He spoke with quiet intensity, directly to John's face. "They're not to know we're angry. That's the whole point. It's why I left you alone to chat her up. You didn't make a speech, did you?"

"No."

"No matter," he snapped. Pacing to the end of the barn and back, he continued. "It'll be only a day or two now, and maybe not that, until she tells her father that you're complaining of your treatment here and you'll be out on the road and me too, maybe, eating the nettles of the ditch. I thought you knew better than that." He paused in his pacing, then slumped and stared at the floor. "They're afraid of us, you know. That's why we're fed so well. I don't want them to be afraid. That's why I chat them up every chance I get. So when I cut their guts out they'll be surprised. Surprise is the key. Well, we'll have to move now. It's all right. Don't worry now." He patted John on the shoulder. "It would have been soon anyway, with that priest knowing what he knows. I'll go to our local head tonight and get instructions. Get your things together and wrap them for carrying. We'll both go to dinner and act just as contented as can be. Enjoy your meal this night, me boy. It'll be your last on these premises, I'm guessing."

John took only one small potato and a sliver of capon from the platter as it came around.

"Is that all you're eating?" Dee Cafferty asked. "Have your corsets been a bit tight lately and you're slimming for the ball?"

"I'm just feeling a bit off this night," he said. "I'm sure it will pass."

Mary rose from her place and put her hand on his forehead. "Well, he doesn't have the fever, praise God. The famine fever is taking them off, even them that don't have the hunger. There's a dozen dead of it in Sligo this month and one of them the wife of the magistrate."

"Sure there's something wrong," Dee said, pointing at his hands. "Look at him trembling."

"He had a bit of a conversation with Miss Millicent this afternoon," Rory said. "He's a bit sweet on her, don't you know." He held his hands over his heart and made a comic smile.

The servants laughed, and Rory joined them, but John heard the loud emptiness of his laugh and saw that the quick glance of his pale green eyes from across the table had not a trace of humor in it.

"That's all right now," said Ned Sloane. "Sure, he has a great eye for one so young, I'd say. She is a pretty thing. You'd make a fine couple. Too bad you are some fifty thousand short in your estate. If you could find a way to lay your hands on that," he rubbed his fingers together, "you could lay your hands on her, me boy, and wherever you liked."

Dee squealed, but Mary reproved Ned for his free talk and the conversation moved on to other subjects. There was talk of the queen coming to visit Ireland the next summer.

"Sorry to embarrass you," Rory said when they were back in their room in the stables. "Had to get them off the scent. They're not all with us. It's near dark now, I can go. I'll be back in an hour. Remember the signal if there's trouble."

John lay in his bed in the dark, shivering, aching with it. There was a bit of a wind and no moon. A branch creaked against the roof. The horses were restless, chuffing and shifting in their stalls. He tried to think of Megan or Mrs. P., something to make him comfortable, but his thoughts would not form. Rory appeared suddenly in the little room. He sat on his bed and whispered rapidly. "We get up at midnight by my watch. I'll give you orders as you need them. Are your things ready?"

"Yes."

"Well, unpack them. We're to leave all our belongings. They're to think we burned in our beds."

"How are they to think that? We'll be gone."

"That is a thing you will discover presently. Unpack now."

"I've only the book and my extra stockings and linen, Master Stewart's castoffs that Mary gave me."

"Leave them. Put on all your best things and leave the others in the chest." He leaned closer and put his hand on John's shoulder. "Remember, these people are the enemy of your country. Their lands should be the lands of you and your family. And if they had not stolen your land, your family would be alive still. They are killers. They've had no mercy on you or your family. You must feel no mercy." In his whisper, the words sounded like prayers, _Mother of God, in our hour of need, have mercy_.

After he had followed Rory's instructions, they lay in silence. It wasn't true, exactly, John told himself. Some of the landlords had tried to help, but they were mostly without funds themselves. Still, if the people had all these lands, and if they could keep the main crops of the fields and not just the potatoes, they could survive. He knew better than to try to discuss this with Rory. Perhaps it was true in the main. He didn't know. Finally Rory's hand reached again and shook his shoulder. He had nearly dozed after all. He sat bolt upright as he realized that they were not alone in the room. Rory had lit the candle, illuminating two husky men, each holding a large object covered in muslin material. John saw a bare foot under the muslin of one.

The men laid the forms on their cots and uncovered them. Two boys. Dead. Their faces dark.

"That's us," said Rory.

"No scarcity of those in the land," said one of the men.

They followed the men into the main room of the stable. The two men went out the door and disappeared in the direction of the house. Rory used his candle to light a lantern. Deliberately he selected a place and tossed the lantern against the wooden wall, breaking it. Its oil quickly flared and John felt the heat on his back as they ran through the door and out to their place in the rock pile. The fire grew till he heard its roar, and the horses screamed and kicked the walls. Ned came out from his room in the carriage house and stood a moment on the flags of the stable yard, then ran to the bell and gave the alarm. Fire shone from the windows lighting up the stable yard and the undersides of trees as the horses' screams went higher. Then, as part of the roof fell, the roar and snap of the fire was all they could hear.

"Time to leave," Rory said. They walked away along the path he had used to walk the horses. "Buck up, old boy. I've done six of those now," he said. A short report and then another sounded behind them. "The boys are hiding near the house with their pistols. As the family come out they'll be greeted as befits the gentry. They won't burn the house until they're sure the staff is all out of it."
8

John and Sean and Rory

John looked back just once to the boiling penumbra of the fire above the humped shoulders of trees, its roar trembling in the earth. As he walked backward an explosion sent a great flurry of sparks spiraling into the upward blackness, resisting extinction in the drizzling rain, spiraling and spiraling. John stopped, Rory turned, and the two stood and watched. "The gunpowder, I suppose," Rory said. After a minute they turned together and resumed walking. The fire gave no light for the road, only a faint orange opacity to the sifting drizzle, with black voids that would be the shadows of trees, and they walked the wet invisible road holding sticks out ahead of them like blind men.

They climbed down under a bridge and sat a long while in tall grass.

"Do you know where you are?" Rory asked.

"I do not," he answered.

"Good. You're not to know where you are. We'll be meeting at our center's farm, not far away from here. You'll see some people you know there. At the house don't speak unless you're asked. First we must wait for the soldiers to pass so they'll not meet us on the road. They'll be along soon. As they pass you must be perfectly still. They carry lanterns and watch the ditches, but they're too lazy to search under bridges."

John was tired but too cold and wet to sleep. After a long time in which the two spoke little, the soldiers passed, their horses' hooves loud on the wooden bridge. One soldier talked steadily, and laughed loudly once—at his own remark, apparently. His was the only voice, but John could not understand the strange accent.

At a darkened farmhouse they were admitted and shown through a crowd of nearly silent people to a place near the fire. A woman gave them each a cup of hot milk and a piece of bread. The bread was fresh and very good. Several people watched them with solemn eyes—a bearded man, an old woman wrapped in a black shawl, a couple of children, their faces faintly visible in the glow of the turf. No one spoke to them. The door opened again and others were admitted.

"The annals of the Crofton-Booths are written," said a voice he recognized as Ned's. "Amen," said a voice he knew. Mary. He looked at Rory, who smiled a little, acknowledging his surprise.

After a bit it was Ned himself who came and sat curled next to the fire and spoke to them. "Another nest of weasels burnt out. Good work, lads. Not a horse escaped from your little enterprise." He filled a pipe, then took a piece of kindling from the small pile and held it in the fire until it caught. With the burning splinter he lit his pipe, sucking the whole flame repeatedly into the bowl. "Think of all the trouble they'd have saved themselves if only they'd lost at the Boyne. They'd be snug as kippers in some nice country house in Shropshire and we enjoying the harvest of our fields. But they did win at the Boyne." He paused and looked at John for a moment as if considering a new thought. "And at Aughrim. And it is our sad but necessary duty to make sure that they come to regret it."

"Amen to that," said Mary from across the room, all her former gentility of voice gone.

"Did anyone escape?" Rory asked.

Ned gave Rory a look to let him know that his question was out of line.

"There was not much money in the house," Ned continued, "as you might guess from that shabby lot, but we have some from our earlier ventures. I am going to give you five pounds each. An extravagance for such gossoons as yourselves, maybe, but maybe not. We use the funds we take for national purposes only. And I'm hoping that the two of you will justify the expenditure. Come in close here. I have a word to say to you."

He took the two of them by the scruff of their necks and bent their heads close to his. He did not whisper but spoke in the quietest voice he could manage. "There's a rising afoot, my Confederation friends tell me. Go to Dublin by tomorrow's train and then to this place." He handed Rory a folded piece of paper. "Put that where you won't lose it and give it to a hackney driver. He'll take you there. Tell them at this house that you have money to buy muskets for yourselves. The people there in Dublin will set you in the right direction. Now, I want you to agree to this. Solemnly. This money is to be used for your necessary expenses and for the cause of Ireland. We are not burglars. Do you agree?"

They agreed with nods of the head.

"Good. You'll walk to Boyle this night. Now, before it's light. You're not to be seen around here. Officially dead, you know, poor fellows. We'll be having your funeral in a day or two. You'll be properly mourned. It protects the staff from suspicion, having some of us dead in the fire. And we'll all be at the Crofton-Booth funeral as well with our arm bands on, cursing the perpetrators of this outrage. You're starting life over now. Take new names for yourselves. John," he said, his hand on John's head, lifting the mop of hair from his forehead with a rough thumb, appraising. "No Irishman should be named John. Call yourself Sean. It's the same name, Irish version, you know. You can keep Gillespie. Sean Gillespie. It's what the university boyos are doing now, taking their Celtic names. Take it as a medal of honor for your victory in battle this night."

As they were leaving, Mary wished them luck.

Outside it was not raining, but colder. The horizon no longer glowed; the fire had burnt itself out. John's clothes had not dried through, and his teeth chattered as he walked.

"Are you scared or cold?" Rory asked.

"Cold."

"Cold," Rory imitated in clipped expression. "I think it's both. It's both for me and that's a fact. I've never been on a train or anywhere near Dublin. We're going off the far end of the world. Let's walk as fast as we can. That will keep the shivering down."

They picked up the pace on the muddy lane, walking single file in the center to avoid the wet ruts. "And don't mention, now or ever, any member of the Crofton-Booth family," Rory said. "Not a word. If you want to pity someone, look at the hunger graves piled along the shore, and everywhere in the countryside, hundreds buried together in each one of them. There is no space left for any keening over lost Saxons."

They walked in silence for several minutes. "And so, Sean me boy, are you going to take that name?"

"I've never heard that name. How do you spell it?"

Rory spelled it for him, running a few steps to keep up.

"It sounds strange. Like a drunken person trying to say John. Are you going to take a new name?"

"You could go just a bit slower. I'll never make it to Boyle at a run. It's a great pair of long legs you've grown with all this good food you've had lately. No. I'll stay Rory Lynch. In Dublin no one will know me or care what my name is or was. Watch it here. There's a great mire in the path. Go that way around." Rory reached forward and took John's shoulders to steer him. "You should take the name. Johns are tuppence the dozen. Sean is someone to reckon with. You'd have to be someone important to be Sean Gillespie."

"Is Ned an Irish name?"

Rory laughed. "It is not. But it's part of his disguise, I suppose. Keeps the suspicion off of him. If his name was Devin O'Reilly they'd watch him more. Go right up against the wall here."

John held the low stone wall and placed his feet carefully along the edge. There was one place still where he sank to his ankle in the mud. "What I am at the moment is an arsonist."

"And what is that, pray tell."

"An arsonist is someone who deliberately burns buildings."

Rory jumped the muddy place, not quite clearing it. "Damn. Soldiers burn buildings, too. You're a soldier in a war. And I threw the lantern, so you didn't burn a thing." Back on the road, walking the center berm, he added, "You have a conscience on you that will tie you up in knots so you can do nothing. You've paid too much heed to the priests, I fear. A priest is just another jackeen who knows where his meals come from. Half of them don't believe what they say themselves. Arsonist. They've stolen your country. Scorch their arses. That's what arsonist ought to mean. Someone who burns Sassenach arses."

John did not laugh at first, so Rory grabbed his arm and pushed and pulled until he did. "That's us. We're arsonists," Rory shouted to the empty countryside, "Sean Gillespie, scorcher of arses."

They turned on to the main road where the walking was firmer. Voices came from the dark ditches on either side. Murmurs. A woman's words to a sleepless child. "Scalpeens along here," Rory said. They walked an hour without speaking, feeling like intruders. There were others on the road, listless walkers, headed nowhere, walking the road simply because there was no place for them to stop. The gray windless day dawned an hour before they reached the railroad terminal at Boyle. Three hours later they were drowsing off to sleep in the train's single car, still cold, for the car had a roof and low walls only and was otherwise open to the air.

Nine hours later, in late afternoon, the train came into the city and glided among a mile of buildings, thoroughfares, vacant and derelict places, the sound of the engine so long in their heads now that it was like silence. It slowed more and eased into an enclosure, hissing in an impressive way as the passengers stepped down onto the broad platform of new flagstone. Rory and Sean—he had decided to take the name—stood admiring the engine for a minute, feeling its fierce heat on their faces. The engineer, standing in the warmth of the open fire box door, watched his passengers in a proprietorial way. Rory obviously wanted to engage him in a bit of conversation, but it was clear from the look of him that he held himself above chatting with the boys. They stood a minute. They had eaten nothing all day, and Sean's stomach felt the familiar empty ache. Rory pressed his lips thin, then said in a voice that caught a little "Well, let's get on with it." They left the terminal through broad doors to where a line of cabs stood at the curb.

There was no hunger evident in the city. In the station and outside on the street the men were dressed smartly, none of the dirty, depressed look of the countryside. The women wore voluminous dresses of starchy stuff, trimmed elegantly, like the ladies of great houses, all of them. The air was quick with the smell of horse piss and soot and the rattle and squeal of metal tires on cobbles.

The hackney took them through streets of gray stone buildings and along a river quay where high-masted ships lay at anchor. They turned and crossed a wide bridge and went down a street with brick buildings on either side, then down a side street and came finally to a building much like the others except for a tri-colored flag of green, white, and orange above its entrance. They paid the cab man sixpence, entered the building and found themselves in an empty foyer with a doorway on either side and an archway ahead, which framed a bit of the wall of a wainscoted hallway. They had stood there only a moment when a banty little man, red-haired, balding, dashed past the archway. As he passed he shouted, "Hallo, have you heard? The game's afoot. They're _up_ in Waterford." After a few seconds he returned, peeking around the corner at the two of them. "Who are you?"

They introduced themselves and explained their mission.

"Purchase a musket, is it?" the red-haired man exclaimed in a rasping voice. "Purchase a musket! Have you not heard of the Arms Act? Dublin is proclaimed. You can't even purchase a pitchfork, let alone a musket." He had a spraying way of speaking; white dots of saliva formed at the corners of his mouth. "You can be arrested for baring your teeth in this city. And what part of the country are you from?"

"Sligo. Near Sligo," Sean answered.

"Ah, that explains a good deal. It does. Well, you're a splendid couple of young fellows, just off the road, I see from the look of you. Come in here where we can talk a bit."

They followed him into a room which contained only a small table and one cane-back chair. The man sat in the chair and placed his elbows on the table and asked them their names and what connection they had with the club in Sligo. Rory said they had no connection. He told the man where they had worked and said that it had burned down, house and stable both, and the family died.

"Just burned down by itself did it?" the man asked, smiling.

"Yes sir, by itself," Rory answered, smiling also.

The man laughed. "Spontaneous combustion, was it?"

"I suppose so, sir," Sean answered

"And the family died, too. Combustion also?"

"Yes, sir. Combustion also," Rory answered.

"A sad thing, entirely. The apoplectic nature of the Saxon, his choleric personality, renders him susceptible. But I'm forgetting my manners. My name is Tom Halpin, pleased to meet you, and I'm sure we can find a duty for you. Notice I said a duty and not a job," he said, holding up a finger to emphasize the distinction. "For there is no pay. No pay for any of us. You'll have to provide for yourselves. I myself am secretary of the Confederation, but I also work for _The Nation_ , the newspaper. I am secretary there too. Do you know it? _The Nation_? No, you wouldn't in Sligo. Or near Sligo. Do you have any means?"

"Means, sir?" Rory asked.

"Money. If you have more than two pounds you are Irish aristocracy. Are you Irish aristocracy?"

"We are," Sean volunteered. "But we were to use it to acquire muskets for the rising."

"Muskets for the rising. Yes. Excellent plan. Your master just expired from combustion and you have quite a bit of money on hand. I understand. I understand. We will have to make inquiries. About the muskets, that is. It may be possible. It may be possible for you to acquire muskets. Or rifles. Rifles are much better. More accurate, you know. Indeed, it must be possible to acquire them if there is to be any rising at all, mustn't it?"

"Has it begun?" Sean asked.

"Has what begun?"

"The rising. You said they were up in Waterford, I believe."

"Well, as to that, it's not entirely clear. There was word last night, but today nothing. Meagher is arrested in Waterford and the reports are there were thousands in the streets, you know. We have no telegraph in Ireland. We need a telegraph, you know. We have one in the city now and north to Belfast but nothing to the remainder of the country. And we need organization. That's what we're working on here. Organization, the key to military success. A great deal depends on Smith O'Brien. The fact is, as regards Smith O'Brien—" He gestured in circles with both hands. "I don't know. He has been staying home in Cahermoyle, claiming that he has retired from public life. Perhaps he has. Perhaps not." He looked at Sean as if he expected him to give his opinion of the matter.

"I don't' know who that is," Sean said.

"You need a place to live," said Tom Halpin, clapping his hands. "Do you have a place to live?" He left no time for an answer. "You can stay with Cavanagh. Mike Cavanagh. He's a bit short of the ready and needs a lodger or two. He sprung from his chair. Here, come with me. He's down this way."

Halpin strode down the hall to a small room at the end. In it sat a young man with curly brown hair, wearing a dark vest and a shirt with a high collar up to his chin, looking through spectacles at index cards, sorted into stacks on the table before him. He looked up over the spectacles with an amused expression.

"This is my assistant, Mr. Cavanagh. Make cards for these two. They wish to help the cause. Two worthy gentlemen from Sligo. Aristocrats. Near Sligo. Mr. Cavanagh is helping us with organization. That's the key. What he's doing there may look very ordinary and even pedestrian, but it is the very key to—" And Tom Halpin disappeared out the door as suddenly as he did everything else.

Mike Cavanagh wielded his pen ceremoniously, tapped a drop of ink back into the inkwell, and inscribed carefully, pursing his lips. He had a cowlick above his forehead which made the dark hair stand straight in that place, but the rest was wavy and silken brown like a girl's, and he had a small mustache coming. "I'll give you my address if that will be satisfactory," he said. He looked to them for an answer.

"How much is the rent, then?" Sean asked after a minute.

"Shall we say a shilling a month each? It's only the one room. You can get cots for one and six at Wren's, or let them for a farthing a day. Since you're aristocracy you should buy. The let ones often have an odor, not to mention various forms of animal life. Is it settled then?"

"Yes," Rory replied. "It's bound to be better than what we've just come out of, which was—" A loud sound of cheering came from the street. Sean was glad that Michael Cavanagh did not hear the word "stable."

The ruckus outside was evidently not a normal occurrence, for Cavanagh rose and fairly sprinted down the hallway to the front door, with Sean and Rory following. A crowd of men swarmed down the street. Some, farther down were cheering, but the object of their enthusiasm was not visible.

"He stays at the Star and Garter, just there." Tom Halpin pointed to a hotel in the next block. "He must be there now."

"Who is?" Sean asked, shouting.

"Thomas Meagher. There he is at the window, see?"

There was a head poked out a second floor window, a man with a mustache and wavy hair and a high collar, a mature version of Mike Cavanagh. The crowd, a bobbing sea of black hats, seemed to be responding to his words, which were inaudible at this distance, and it was impossible to move nearer. Indeed people were scrambling and pushing, vying for the vantage of their stairs. Tom Halpin motioned them back into the building and they went to a room with a large window, which they opened. Leaning out, they could just hear the speaker's voice.

"I was arrested yesterday." Meagher's voice was a high baritone, smooth as a singer's and penetrating. "And brought out of Waterford by a troop of the Fourth Light Dragoons, and two or three companies of the Seventh Fusiliers."

The crowd laughed and cheered.

"Do you know who that is?" Rory asked into Sean's ear.

Sean drew his lips thin and shook his head slightly. He had never seen this many people in one place. Sometimes there had been more than a thousand for mass on the hillside near his home but this was many thousands. He had heard that Dan O'Connell had drawn a million people to his monster meeting at Tara.

"Do you think that's a million people?" Sean asked.

"I don't. There aren't a million people in Ireland," Rory replied.

"Oh, there are, though," Tom said. "There are nine millions. Or there were before the hunger. It was in the newspaper."

"I go from this city tomorrow," Meagher continued when the crowd had quieted, "to appear at the next assizes of Limerick to stand my trial—that is, if I feel like it." The crowd roared again. "For speaking seditious language at Rathkeale the other night. I was not aware that there was a government reporter in the audience. They all looked like decent people, but I afterwards found that this duty was performed by two police constables, who will no doubt soon be captains. I go without apprehension of any consequences. I am determined they shall not have me in Newgate." The crowd cheered again. "I advise you now to disperse peacefully. That is difficult advice for an Irishman to follow, I know. But there will come instructions more to your liking, and it won't be long."

His final words were drowned in a fierce howl from the crowd. Cavanagh, from the next window, cupping his hands to his mouth, joined in the roar. Meagher waved from the window. The cheer went on and turned into a chant. A six syllable chant, ta _dum_ ta dum ta _dum_. Sean could not make it out. Meagher appeared again and waved. The cheers were even louder now, thousands of men screaming themselves red in the face. In the side street opposite a dozen green-uniformed police had gathered. They stood and watched, looking a little bored. Cavanagh joined in the chant. "Remember ninety- _eight_ , remember ninety- _eight_."

"They'd be gone for a goal if the crowd went after them," said Rory, indicating the police. "I hope they do."

But the crowd began to disperse as instructed. "That is the greatest man in the world you have just seen," Cavanagh announced in an unsuccessful imitation of Meagher's accent. After a half hour, during which Sean and Rory watched from the window, the street was hardly more crowded than it had been when they arrived.

Mike Cavanagh took them to his room, only a few minutes' walk from the Confederacy offices. It was humble enough for a person of such splendid collars and manners—a square room of about twelve feet on a dirty and narrow hallway, with one small window overlooking a narrow street.

"It's too late to get any cots today. You can sleep on the floor tonight. We can get a meat pie for thruppence in Malarkey's just across."

As they sat in a dark booth eating their supper with half pints of ale, Sean asked what it was that they had all shouted.

"Oh, 'remember ninety-eight,'" Mike replied.

"What is that?" Sean asked.

"What is ninety-eight?" Mike Cavanagh could not believe his ears. "It was the greatest rising ever in Ireland. The French came. Have you never heard of ninety-eight?"

The two sat in silence. "So tell us then," Sean said, finally.

"I did. It was a rising in 1798."

"Did the Irish win?" Sean asked.

"Did the Irish win? Defeat the mighty British army? That's the greatest army in the world. Of course they didn't win. What a question."

Sean blew on his spoonful of meat pie to cool it. "Then why do they wish to remember it?"

"Because there were heroes of ninety-eight. Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. They were put in prison just as Mitchel is now, and Duffy. Mitchel's transported to Bermuda. He's held in chains on a prison ship."

Sean had never tasted ale, or any alcoholic beverage for that matter, and found that he did not much like it. The meat pie, though, was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten. After finishing it and taking a last sip of the ale, he was sleepy and wished to go back to the room, but Rory and Mike talked interminably about risings and the Confederation and the clubs all armed with pikes and ready at a moment's notice. "Whenever the trump shall sound," declared Mike Cavanagh.

There was a shout of excitement among the patrons and Mike pointed to the new arrivals in the pub. "There's Meagher now, and John O'Leary from _The Nation_. He's the boss now Duffy's in prison. And Terence McManus from the Liverpool club. T.B. he's called. There's to be a rising in the fall when the crops are being transported. T.B. is going to bring guns, muskets and rifles. Even a cannon. We'll use the cannon to sink English ships in Dublin Harbor."

"Hello, Mike," John O'Leary said as they passed to the large table near the back wall.

"Are these the recruits from the west?"

"They are." Mike introduced them.

"Tom Halpin was telling me about you. 'Just appeared on the doorstep, he said. Said they had money to buy muskets, wanted to join us. Just like that. I was taken aback, I was.' Come and join us, lads. Come and meet our friends."

Mike and Rory were up in an instant, Sean following. Meagher was talking to some men at the bar. Sean watched the yellow-haired barmaid top off a glass of dark brew and hand it to Meagher with a great smile on her face. He winked and said something to her that made her laugh and squeezed her hand as he took the glass.

Sean could see what Cavanagh admired in Meagher: his easy manner and impressive appearance. It did depend, though, on elegant clothes and the appearance of great wealth. Most Irish Catholics were poor and therefore much impressed with anyone of wealth who undertook their cause. It had been an important source of O'Connell's popularity that he had an estate of forty thousand acres in his native Kerry. But to Sean the understated gentility of John O'Leary— his considerate manner and his powerful appearance, high forehead, handsome features—was much more impressive.

Meagher came to the table with his pint and sat down. He winked at Sean, whom he had seen watching. "She has all the appointments of a well-made woman. Don't you agree?" He laughed at Sean's silent discomfiture. "That's Kate. I'll introduce you. What's your name?"

"Sean Gillespie."

"From somewhere west of the Shannon, I'd say."

"Yes, sir." Sean had never heard anyone speak like Meagher; a cold precision in his words. Not English, not Irish. Nothing. And the coldest laugh he had ever heard.

"A fine name, Sean. Pity there isn't an Irish equivalent of Thomas. I'd take it in a minute. Well, Sean Gillespie, she'd be just the one to take the green sap from your shillelagh, give it a bit of a curing, you know," he said the last in an imitation western accent. "Firm it up for the work ahead. Not much chance of that where you come from, I dare say. The land of milk white virgins."

John O'Leary covered a grimace by taking a sip of his pint. The conversation turned to matters of the newspaper and what should be printed in it.

A drunken man came from the dark rear of the room and watched them, swaying. "When are you going to smite the Sassenach shoneens? Cut their wind pipes?" He saw Sean watching him and drew a finger across his windpipe and laughed. Sean looked away. The man blathered on, but no one paid him any attention. "Spill their worthless guts, their watery Saxon blood, don't just sit here. Altogether too much celebrating before the fight . . ."

"Slievenamon," Meagher was saying. "The Fiann Eireann gathered at _Suidhe Finn_. A calling of the clans to the throne of Finn. And the home of John Mitchel. The clubs of Waterford, Carrick, Clonmel, Tipperary, mustered. Get their mettle up. A peaceful assembly, no weapons. Just to get them out, give some practice at assembling, and some coherence, so when we call them after the harvest they'll know who they are and what they're about. Let Russell and Clarendon see fifty or a hundred thousand of us in close formation."

"Worthless blatherskites, the lot of yez," the drunk went on with no one but Sean heeding. "Sit here laughing as if you'd already done something."

"Pardon me, but, as I've told you, I think that is a very bad idea," said John O'Leary. "Wait until harvest time, then use your meeting to get started. If you do it now you'll force the government into action. It will bollix everything."

"Bollix," the drunk repeated, and laughed silently, closing his eyes, savoring the word.

"It's a pot, John. You have to put it on the fire a half hour ahead of when you want it boiling. As for the government, we have had meetings across the land and other than these ridiculous arrests for sedition, out on bail in an hour, they have done nothing. Dense as they are, they have still a little regard for world opinion. They starve the country to death and arrest anyone who complains, but they don't quite dare to really punish us. Duffy will be released in a year, Mitchel in three."

The drunk drifted off, muttering.

"They have Mitchel in irons," said a man at the far end of the table in a thick Liverpool accent.

"That's Terence McManus," Cavanagh said to Sean and Rory. He was a stocky little bull of a man with heavy eyebrows that lowered in anger. "On a prison ship in the far Bermoothes. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?"

"He's not in irons," Meagher answered. "I made that story up myself to add a bit of a fillip, you might say. The crowd in Rathkeale was a little torpid. I said a few things to wake them up. Tell it all you like, it's useful, but don't believe it yourself."

The argument continued. Sean heard the voices but lost track of what they were saying. Rails clicked in his mind, trees passed, the steam engine chuffed. Meagher was its engineer and told him it was a fine name he had. Kate smiled at him and agreed it was a fine name, Sean. He laughed with her as she drew his pint. She asked if he had his own cot and he replied that he soon would. Rory called him to Slievenamon. Finn MacCumhaill the great chieftain with the bushy eyebrows of McManus flashed his great sword as he led them into battle. They must be up and going.

"Sean. Sean. Wake up, man. It's off to our quarters we'll be going," said Mike Cavanagh. "You're done up with all your miles and travels."

They slept the night on the floor of Cavanagh's room and woke to the screel and clank of metal tires, hoof clop on cobbles, a shout, street voices, city shuffle. Sean's whole body ached with cold and with sleeping on the hard floor. He sat up and hugged his knees. Cavanagh was already about his morning preparations, washing at his basin. Rory and Sean watched with interest as he combed, buttoned, inserted devices in his cuffs, tied his tie, adjusted, brushed, studied himself in the small mirror which hung from a nail, further adjusted, combed a little more, wetted his comb, touched up around his cowlick. Having slept in most of their clothes, as usual, they got up from the floor and put their jackets on.

"Are you ready, then?" Cavanagh asked.

"Yes."

"Ready," said Sean.

"Excuse me. Don't you even wash your faces when you arise?"

"No."

"It isn't dirty, is it?" Sean asked.

Cavanagh looked at them. "You both look as if you just emerged from a coal chute. You have the soot of your railroad travel on you still. Dublin is not a city of exceptional personal hygiene, but you will have to do some slight ablution to avoid attracting attention." He gestured toward the basin. "You can get fresh water, if you like, at the pump in the garden."

The council rooms in D'Olier Street were crowded and bustling. "Slievenamon" was the word in the air. Sean and Rory, their faces and necks newly washed, stood at the back of the meeting hall and listened to the proceedings. Halpin would lead a delegation from the Dublin clubs, but most of the clubs in attendance would be from Waterford and the neighboring towns. It would happen soon, in a week. The English Parliament had laughed at O'Brien's call for help. They would not laugh at fifty thousand Irishmen of fighting age assembled at a week's notice.

After an hour, Cavanagh came for them. "Come now, we have work to do," he said. He led them back to the room with the card files. "Hand me that box of cards there. Do you read?"

"Yes," Sean answered.

"We're to alphabetize these within each club. Can you do that?"

They sat at the table and sorted cards for a time. They heard the sounds of a meeting in progress down the hall. Cheers, applause, jeering. At one especially loud episode Cavanagh left the room.

"I've got a new name for him," Sean said. "Meagher Minor. He even tries to walk like Meagher."

"And what's so funny?" Cavanagh asked as he resumed his seat.

"Why are we doing this?" Sean asked.

"Organization. The key to military success. Put all the 'Macs' at the head of the M's, then the rest of the M's after. Same with the O apostrophes."

"The O's are all O apostrophes so far except one," said Rory. "What was all the noise about?"

"They're arguing about whether to rise now or try to wait for the harvest. If they wait all the leaders will be in jail. If they rise now there'll be no food for the men."

At noon they went to a bakery next to the hotel where Meagher had spoken the day before and bought bread rolls for a penny each. They returned to the Confederation offices and stood outside the meeting room, eating their bread. The door was ajar and they could hear the speaker.

"Not sufficiently prepared . . ." The words were spoken by a giant of a man, standing amid the audience. He spat out his words angrily. "There are some people who will never be prepared. Fellows who, if the Almighty rained down rifles ready-loaded, would ask him to send down angels, too, to fire them."

"That's the Rossa," Cavanagh said as they returned to their office. "He's killed six policemen with his bare hands, and any number of landlords, and he only eighteen."

There were boxes and boxes of cards. By mid-afternoon Sean ached with boredom. "Were there to be some duties at the newspaper as well?" he asked.

"Had enough of this, have you?" Cavanagh asked.

"I have. And I don't see what good it is."

"It has on each card what type of weapon the man has, see? He has a pike. Some have rifles, some muskets, some pikes."

"And?"

There was no answer.

"And so, what good does it do to have them in alphabetical order?"

Again there was no answer.

They left work early to purchase the cots. The man asked did they want pillows and blankets and a straw tick mattress, but said it would cost four shillings more. They declined. Sleeping on the taut canvas was a little better than sleeping on the floor, but only a little.

They sorted cards for three days and still had many boxes left. Friday noon they ate their bread as they walked to the newspaper office. There they joined a line of boys and in their turn were given heavy cloth sacks and a hundred and eight papers. By six o'clock they were to return the sack, empty, and pay eight shillings to the cashier. If the papers were all sold at a penny each, they had one shilling profit for themselves.

"It's an easy way to earn a bob. Any of the nationalist papers, _The Irish Felon, The Freeman's Journal, The Nation_ , they'll take them as fast as you can hand them out and collect the pennies. Only stay where the respectable shops are. Don't go near the sailors' bars or the kips or you'll be robbed. And after we're done, we can get an extra bob sweeping out the office. It's a bit of a chance to get in and say hello to the writers, you know. O'Leary and the others. I used to talk to Duffy all the time, but he's in jail now. Look, here." Cavanagh indicated a front page article. "'Who will draw the first blood for Ireland?'" he read, his voice a half-pitch higher with excitement. "'Who will win a wreath that shall be green forever?"

They returned when they had sold the papers and paid the cashier, but two other boys were already sweeping the office. With the four shillings for the train fare and a week's expenses, they had each spent nearly a pound of the original five. It would be necessary to earn more.

On Sunday they went with Mike to mass at a great cathedral where the priest spoke against the atheistic revolutionaries of the continent. "France has been from time immemorial the center of the devil's work on earth. The atheism of Voltaire, the desecrations of Bonaparte, and now the hedonism of the poet Lamartine, the unspeakable degradation of the city of Paris, the assassination— _the assassination_ . . ." He repeated the words in a theatrical cry of agony and allowed them to reverberate. ". . . of the Archbishop of Paris—all of a piece and of a kind. And that kind has nothing to do with Ireland." He exhorted those in attendance in the name of God not to become a part of this anti-clerical, anti-Christ confederacy. Rory said, "I'll see you on the street when this is done," He stood and walked out, along with several others. They were hissed as they walked up the aisle.

The streets of the city had begun to look familiar now that they had been among them for nearly a week. They walked along the quays, identifying the countries of the ships, guessing at some. The Scandinavian names were indistinguishable one from the other. "Lisboa" was an indecipherable mystery.

"I believe that I have just attended my last ceremony of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church," Rory announced.

"Is it because they oppose the rising?"

"It is because of that and because they preach nonsense. Didn't they close down Mrs. P.'s hospital? And now they tell us not to seize the harvest, and they all with bellies like lords."

"What of your soul?"

Rory laughed. "My soul. I've been through my catechism and I've heard the priests go on about my soul, but honestly, I've never had the slightest idea what it is. The pooka that lives in your stomach that goes on after you're dead but you can't see it?" He stopped and put his elbows on the parapet. A forest of masts and rigging crowded together, leaving only a narrow lane of open water. "Think if the whole thing were made up as a great cod on the lot of us. All of us putting our pennies in the collection basket so they can build their great cathedrals and so the priests can go about with great bellies on them and everyone else starving, and them telling us not to make any trouble for those robbing us, all because they're afraid it will disturb their fine dinners." He took a breath.

A red-nosed sailor with a pockmarked face rose and came to the near rail where he unbuttoned and pissed into the water. He looked at the two boys as he did so.

They turned away and resumed their walk. "That is the way it has begun to look to me, Sean me boy."

The pub was closed, it being Sunday, so they met Cavanagh at a penny dinner place, where they stood in line for bread, tea, and soup.

"Do you know, it's happening now. The gathering at Slievenamon," Cavanagh said in a wistful tone. They held their bowls in turn as a matron filled each one with a grayish, watery soup and placed a slab of bread across the top of it. They carried their dinner to a long table and sat on the bench.

"And what is the purpose of this Slievenamon meeting?" Rory asked. "Are they to begin the rising?"

"No. It's a gathering of the warriors at the throne of Finn. You were there when they discussed it."

"Yes, but what are they gathering for?" Rory insisted. "Is it a pilgrimage, like Reek Sunday at Croagh Patrick?"

"Don't mind him. He's contrary today," Sean explained. "A while ago he was saying how he'd never go to mass again."

"He's right there. Meagher says the priests are half of Ireland's problem, though he daren't say it in public. They're gathering at the throne of Finn to hear speeches of encouragement. If you've grown tired of the cause you may leave at any time."

Rory took a sip of the watery soup and made a face. He tried dipping his bread as the others were doing and seemed to find this a little more palatable. "I've been here only a week but I've grown tired of membership cards and endless palaver. Out west when we've decided on a thing we set about doing it. Everybody knows of the plans for a rising, the government included, I'm sure. They talk of it in the pubs, they hint about it in speeches. 'Soon there will be instructions more to your liking.' You'd have been expelled from the circle in Sligo for that kind of loose-mouth bragging."

"I am sure the famous rebels of County Sligo could teach us a great deal," Cavanagh said in as acid a tone as he could manage.

On Monday morning Cavanagh announced that he was wanted at _The Nation_. He would make inquiries. Perhaps he could get them positions as well. A half-hour later he was back at the room, breathless.

"They're _up_ in Tipperary. This time for certain. Meagher and O'Brien are leading it. We'll leave this day. I'm to take you to get weapons. Orders for the Dublin clubs to rise are expected any hour."
9

Rising

July, 1848

When the news came, the Dublin club leaders were mostly away from the city, trying to get the countryside ready. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the English correspondent for _The Nation_ , a small man known for his frowning pugnacity, _was_ in Dublin and came to the Confederation office to see Meagher. He and Terrence McManus had a plan. They would go immediately to Glasgow where a large and especially bellicose club had already clashed several times with the police and had the police patrolling in squadrons and avoiding the Irish quarter. He knew the leaders and believed he could raise two thousand good soldiers, overcome the small Glaswegian military force, commandeer two or three ships in the Clyde, force their captains at gunpoint to sail around the north coast of Ireland and land at Sligo where he would form up his troops and, after a brief time for training, fight his way across the Shannon and join the main force at Tipperary.

Meagher looked across the table at this pugnacious little fellow, not much above five feet tall, his bare pink face frowning above leprechaun whiskers that fanned out below his chin. "Do you really think you can do that?" he asked.

"I do, and I will."

Meagher took a deep breath. "Well, then, by all means do it. You have my approval."

D'Arcy McGee had departed the same day on the Belfast packet. From Belfast it was only six hours to Glasgow.

John O'Leary had volunteered to travel to Paris and ask again for a French invasion. This, too, Meagher approved and O'Leary, if all went well, would be arriving in Paris in a few hours.

The Wexford train was crowded with troops. In accordance with club rules, Meagher sat apart from his traveling companion, John Dillon, leader of a prominent Dublin club. They were traveling to meet with O'Brien, who, in spite of continuing pain from his injuries, had returned to the fray after all. Meagher found a seat next to a young woman. Facing him in the seat opposite were a thin, frightened-looking soldier and a plump unpleasant looking fellow with graying whiskers. The whiskered man had a bulbous nose and a yellowish complexion. The fellow was a familiar Irish type: the idle scion of some threadbare ascendancy family, a hunter of small birds and player of short whist in some mildewed country house, the veteran of many an evening with the claret and the port.

"Well, they've passed the Coercion Bill, and high time, I say," he said by way of striking up a conversation. "Now we can have these damned Fenians in jail where they belong. Country's gone halfway to the devil already. These dashed Whigs infernally slow to act. Infernally slow. Leave it to the Tories to get something done. Take the blasted leaders off the streets. " He looked to Meagher for a response.

Meagher saw the soldier suppressing a smile. The young woman who sat beside Meagher laughed outright. He had been recognized by some of the passengers.

"I suppose they are," Meagher replied, smiling a little himself.

"Right, then," the fellow said, perplexed at the laughter, but not lowering his voice. "Given these fellows too much rope. Altogether too much rope. But they'll hang themselves yet, I'd swear to it."

As the laughter spread he reddened even more, looking around for someone to explain the mirth. Two more women across the aisle, evidently friends of Meagher's seat mate, were very merry, and one of them, Meagher had noticed when they boarded, was remarkably attractive, with black hair and dark eyes. Meagher forced a laugh too, but felt panic. The government obviously knew that a rising was planned to seize the harvest and had rushed through a suspension of _habeas corpus_ so they could imprison the leaders before the harvest began. Meagher had known the suspension was coming but had thought it would take weeks to pass. It had gone through Parliament in three days with Irish Protestant members supporting it unanimously. It occurred to Meagher that the spectacle of his being led off the train in chains would cheer up the red-faced fellow no end.

After the unpleasant fellow got off, Meagher asked the soldier where he was headed.

"Aughrim," he replied.

"You're Irish."

"I am. Wicklow born. Are you Mr. Meagher?"

"I am. And would you fight against your countrymen if there was a rising?"

"I'd be court-martialed for saying no."

"So, what's the answer?"

"The answer is I'm not saying anything. You've a great many admirers among us. The army is two-thirds Irish."

"Well said, Wicklow," came a voice from behind Meagher.

"We've admirers aplenty," said Meagher. "If admirers could win a war we would be victorious in a moment."

"You must not fight against your own," said the black-haired woman from across the aisle. "The king's shilling is nothing. Treason is fighting against your own people. There is none in fighting against your paymaster." She blushed charmingly, Meagher thought. Obviously not the sort who spoke to strangers, especially military ones, in public.

"Thank you," he said. "I will remember that argument. It's too bad you can't speak to the whole army for us."

He thought she looked a little pleased, but she looked away to prevent further familiarity.

The women got off at Aughrim, as did the soldiers. Meagher took one last glance at the beauty, her trim waist, remarkable figure. She smiled a little at his attention, he thought. There were such partings every day in his life and he regretted them, always.

As the train made its way through the scrub woods and the drab towns, he thought it through. The rising must begin before the leaders are arrested. Even the most pacifist of O'Connell's men had said repeatedly they would come out—"sound the trumpet and pitch our tents," were John's words—if the constitution were violated, as now it was. Kilkenny was the place to begin it. The railroad stopped fourteen miles short of Kilkenny, so the troops would have to march through the wooded and hilly country. He would make a plea for the Irish soldiers to come over with their weapons. Maybe there would be enough to form a company. As for the rest, it would be good terrain for ambushes. And the annual Irish Cattle Show was in progress there with several members of the peerage in attendance. Hostages. The clubs in and around Kilkenny had seventeen thousand members. Templederry with their ally Father Kenyon was not far away. Neither was Carrick-on-Suir and Father Byrne. The thousands that had rallied and followed Meagher and Duffy into Waterford—they could form an enclave that would include Waterford and Kilkenny. Supporters would come from all over the country.

Smith O'Brien paced the floor of his host's Wexford parlor, then parted the curtain and looked out as if there might be some useful information to be gained in the farmyard. "No," he said finally. "A precipitate rising before the crops are in is exactly what the government wants. The original idea was to provision ourselves from the food caravans and to attack in all parts of the country, so that the army would not have a fixed target. This enclave of yours would be a rabbit in a snare. A few regiments from Dublin would make quick work of it, ambushes or no." He turned and faced Meagher. "We have no weapons, my friend. You can't ambush an English regiment with sticks and stones. As for the regulars coming over, that's no more than a daydream, I'm afraid. In '98, in spite of all their hints and even promises, none of the troops came over."

"Then we must surprise a police headquarters," John Dillon said. "Seize a few weapons and use them to get more."

"To what purpose? Is it only to prevent our going to prison? Let them put a few of us in prison. The fall rising is fixed well enough in the minds of our club leaders. It is only a few weeks, two or three, perhaps, and the first of the harvest will be on the roads. We must hold off until then. When the time comes they'll undertake it without us if need be. No, I will leave this house this morning and head toward my home. I do not wish to compromise my host by being arrested in his house. I'll spend a little more time as her majesty's guest. Indeed, I'm not much of a military man. I may be more useful in prison than out. You must do as you see fit. Perhaps you can hide."

As O'Brien was saying his goodbyes in the yard, a neighbor he had not seen before came up the road and delivered another piece of news: Suddenly, in a day, the potato blight had struck the whole country again. It was as bad as in '46. The crop would be a total loss. The famine would be worse than ever.

Meagher returned to the house, took his valise, and slung it into the cart with O'Brien's luggage. During the trip to the station he persuaded O'Brien that they had to begin raising the country. Two or three weeks would be required to get the clubs ready to fight. Meagher would return to Dublin, give the necessary instructions there, and join O'Brien in two days in Carrick, where they would meet with Father Byrne.

Mike Cavanagh pried up the floor boards of his room with a pike blade. When he had pried an end up Rory and Sean lifted the board, pulling its nails from the joists. It was necessary to pull up several boards to stow the two pikes and one musket they had been able to buy from the dealer that Halpin had sent them to, a red-eyed old man, trembling from a mixture of anger and drink, who sold weapons from his cellar. His stock in firearms had consisted of this musket and one other, which was in worse condition and for which he wanted a greater price because of its value as an antique.

"I had that blade from Mitchel himself," Cavanagh announced, turning it so they could admire both sides of the two-foot-long spear head dimpled with the blacksmith's hammer marks. He removed the protective cork from its tip. "That was used in ninety-eight, it was. Put that on an eight-foot pole of ash wood and it'll be a weapon right enough." He caressed the point with his fingertips, then held it out before him, threatening an imaginary redcoat. He stowed it carefully alongside the two pikes and the musket, the latter old but well-oiled and serviceable—at least in appearance. There had been no opportunity to test it. He opened a wooden box which held the black powder, wadding, flints, and balls.

"Do you know how to use that?" Sean asked.

"There will be someone at Cashel who knows," Cavanagh replied.

They took turns pounding the nails back in place as best they could with the little flatiron Cavanagh had used on his shirts, bending some of them double in the process.

"We had better hope no one comes to search," Sean said, looking at the splintered mess they had made of the floor.

They slept their last night on the cots. In the morning they had a biscuit and tea at their usual shop, then returned to the room, where they pried the boards up again, breaking two of them. A loud knock on the door froze them in the act of removing the weapons.

"It's me, boys."

Halpin. Cavanagh opened the door.

"Gah," Halpin said. "What is it you're doing here. Are ye tearin' the buildin' down?"

"We had to conceal the weapons, pikes and such," Cavanagh explained.

"Pikes, is it? Ye'd better get away before the landlord catches ye. The place is destroyed. Pikes. And how are ye going to conceal pikes on the train, pray? Do ye think ye can just get on a train carryin' the likes of that?" Halpin went to the window and looked up and down the street.

"There's a space under the benches, like," Rory volunteered.

"Gah," Halpin said again, incredulous. "There's police at the train station. There's police and soldiers everywhere. And they see you walking along with something like that, ye'll be in jail. Ye'll be in jail in a minute. And me carrying orders for the Dublin clubs in my pocket and half out of my mind. What if I'm caught? If I'm caught it'll be up a rope, or VanDiemen's Land at the least of it, and all my family on the street."

Halpin opened the door and looked down the hallway. He closed the door quietly and spoke in a low voice, opening his jacket to show an envelope protruding from his pocket.

"That's the order from Meagher himself for the Dublin clubs to rise as soon as we get word from Kilkenny. Barricade the streets. Kilkenny, that's your destination. Go to Cashel and join the local club and then to Kilkenny by night. Clubs from the whole region will be converging there. And for God's sake, leave the pikes here. They have ash trees in Cashel, I'm sure. Make pikes when ye get there. Here now, carry the good blade you have inside your jacket and maybe we can find a way to conceal the musket. Leave the poles here."

The musket was a problem. Almost four feet long and a bit bulky in the stock, it was not easily concealed. Sean being the tallest by nearly a foot, it was logical to conceal it on his person somehow. Rory held it up to Sean's back to measure, but it was too long. "Take off your breeks," he said.

Sean undid his belt and lowered his trousers. Rory held the musket alongside his leg and Sean got them back up, but he could not button them, and the barrel protruded well below the ragged bottom of the trouser leg, which came only to mid-calf.

"If we had a long coat for me to wear, I could tie it alongside my body and leg and walk stiff-legged like a war veteran."

"Let's give that a try," said Halpin. "Michael, you have a fine long coat."

"No."

"I've seen you wearing it all last winter. The long gray."

"No, not my coat. It wouldn't look right on him. He's in rags and then with a fine topcoat tailored in France? He'd look . . ." Cavanagh waved his hands for want of a word.

"He'd look fine. The coat would cover his rags. Let's have it."

"He's not even wearing stockings and his trousers are a foot short. A fine topcoat like that and his bare legs stuffed into those old brogans?"

"Come, Michael. He's willing to give his life for the cause but not his fine French coat. Come Michael, the coat."

Cavanagh reluctantly produced the coat from the wardrobe and Sean tried it on. The sleeves were nearly long enough. With the musket strapped to his leg, the butt against his hip, and the coat buttoned, the weapon was indeed concealed. Sean practiced hobbling about the room.

"Ah, sir, a ha'penny for the old soldier of Waterloo, sir, if you please," said Sean, holding out his hand.

"You'll need more than ha'pennies if you ruin that coat," said Cavanagh. "At least give your neck a wash before you wear it."

They were off again. Sean followed the odd-looking pair, Cavanagh looking like a country squire in tweeds and hunting cap, Rory in nondescript black jacket and trousers with his damaged bowler hat, carrying Cavanagh's suitcase which held the box of musket gear and a few changes of linen for Cavanagh. Sean hadn't noticed it much until now, but it was true that in the city the men, even the young ones, had trousers that went all the way to their shoe tops. And it seemed that they all wore stockings, a surprising thing to him.

Trying various limps and gaits along the crowded sidewalks, dodging across busy streets, he sweated under the coat, but only from the exertion; it was a cool day. He settled finally on a limp-and-skip that enabled him to keep up. The lower binding irritated his calf painfully and there was some hollowness in the region of the stomach having to do, maybe, with fear. Where was Cashel? Or Kilkenny? Did this really have any prospect of success? He had seen the English troops in formation marching the streets of Dublin, and here were they, boys with a couple of old weapons. Did the Americans defeat them with the likes of this? And were the Americans now settled people in their houses, on their farms, with their families? To be done with this scampering like a mouse, an end of the shaking and sweating, would be worth a throw of dice, or a throw of oneself into whatever this was. He had no confidence in Halpin, a quaking mouse himself, but no doubt there were higher leaders. Meagher. Meagher certainly knew what this was.

The Cashel train was newer than the one they had taken nearly two weeks earlier. It had glass windows and even a coal stove, although there was no fire in it. The tracks had been completed only as far as Thurles, however. Eighty-six miles of easy travel and then they would have to take the Bian, an open horse-drawn coach, named for the Italian owner of the company, Bianconi. Sean realized, after he had taken his seat and a plump woman with the look of a housemaid had sat next to him, that he should have asked Rory or Cavanagh to take that seat. The woman took more than one look at his bare legs between the bottom of his coat and his boots. The weapon under his coat was nearly rubbing her and he was wedged in so that he could not move it.

"Are ye lame then. Is that it?" she asked as the engine gave its first great chuff.

"I am."

"Was it an accident you had?"

"It was. Yes, an accident. Right." He wondered in a panic what kind of accident it could have been. He couldn't think. I fell. Off of what?

The look on her face was hard to read. It looked a bit like anger. She was on to him, he thought.

"That's a shame," she said after a minute. "And will it be like that permanent?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She shook her head and clucked her tongue. "'Tis a pity. And you so young to be lepping about on your one good leg for the rest of all your days. But there's others have it worse, you know. Count the blessings we have, I say. God in his wisdom. That's what I always say. Ye'll have to take extry care of the other one now, that nothing happens to it." She opened her purse and gave him a penny. "Take that, then," she said.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said.

She was on holiday from her work in a wealthy Dublin household, she explained. Even the viceroy had visited the house she worked in. "A finer man you never met and his lovely wife. So busy with their work, you know, but they always have time for a word. 'Delia,' she said—Lady Clarendon it was—she said, 'Delia, if one half of your countrymen were as reliable and hard working as you are, this country would be a heaven on earth.' A heaven on earth, she said. That was Lady Clarendon herself said that."

She went on about herself and the important personages she had met. As she talked, she clenched a fist as if to grasp some thing that was in the air before her, a thing about herself and the important people. Sean watched her grasp and gesture as if her hand held something, but then open after a little, empty after all. She reminded him a little of his own grandmother, although this woman's accent was not of the west. He found a leaning posture with his weight on his left hip that made his encumbrance bearable, and adjusted his coat from time to time. When she got off he signaled to Rory to take her place. Several green-uniformed peelers had boarded and he did not want one next to him.

The conductor told them when he punched their tickets to take the Bian to Tipperary and then another to Cashel. "Three hours, only, Tipperary, and then, I don't know how long you'll have to wait, but another half hour to Cashel once you're on the road. Eight pence the person, I believe. Sixpence to Tipperary and then tuppence to Cashel. That adds up to eight pence. Did you know that?" The conductor, along with several passengers, laughed at his joke.

The Bianconi car waited at the terminal, its horse looking a bit spindle-legged and undernourished. They sat in side-facing seats in the open air, Sean with his stiff leg extending beyond the foot rest, and rode through the pleasant and prosperous looking town of Thurles on paved streets, not at all like the muddy little towns of the west with their rutted roads. They crossed a bridge and rode out into the countryside where the wheat fields were still mostly green but beginning to ripen. There were whole fields of onions and turnips. The farms were large, as were the farmhouses, and the roads were nearly empty of people. Sean had never seen a country like it.

Still there were, here and there, beggars who held their hands out as the car passed and then dropped them in listless despair when it had gone.

"You need feel no obligation to give to them," the driver said. "Mr. Bianconi of Clonmel makes a great contribution to poor relief each year so that his passengers need not be disturbed in their travels."

Their rule was to keep to idle conversation in the presence of others, but since they were alone on their side of the car, Sean asked Cavanagh why there weren't more of the common people.

"Moved off. Long ago. Hell or Connacht or America or God knows. Thurles is nearly all Prod now. You're traveling through the conquered land."

"It looks very nice, really."

"Looks very nice!" Rory said, a bit louder than he should have. "It _is_ very nice, except for what they did to get it. You don't see that."

"A little of this will go to the markets in Dublin, but all the rest, nearly all of the crop, will go to port in the next month unless we stop it," Cavanagh said.

Well before they arrived at Tipperary, the villages had become impoverished looking. In Tipperary a large unit of perhaps a thousand redcoats was standing in formation in the square, their rifles stacked in wheat-shock shapes all along the side of the formation. An officer was speaking to them. A little way down a side street the Bian stopped at the station, where they learned that the car for Cashel would leave in three hours.

When they were alone in the street wondering how to pass the time, Sean said, "If we had any idea how to operate this thing I have, we could go to the square and shoot any number of them before they could get to their rifles."

To barking commands, the soldiers marched off down the various streets to set up guard posts around the city. One column of a hundred or so passed them, marching to a tapping snare drum, rifles and packs on their backs, marching down the street of the Bianconi station. A captain and three lieutenants, all in tricornered hats, marched at its head and a sergeant alongside shouted commands. Expressionless faces, all eyes straight ahead. The drummer passed, lightly tapping the march cadence, and then a horse, slowly pulling a canon after them.

Sean limped around the corner with the others and they watched the red column march several blocks, posting side-guards at the intersections, then, with another shout from the sergeant, turn again, rank by rank, and slowly disappear down another street.

"A poxy, red-faced lot," Rory said. "I'd swear half of them are rotten with it."

"That fellow will make a good hole in a red coat," said Cavanagh, tapping the musket in Sean's trouser leg with a knuckle.

Sean, still looking where the soldiers had gone, said nothing.

They idled about the square for an hour, Sean sitting on a bench most of the time because the straps had worn the skin of his leg raw. Rory wandered back to the Bianconi station and came back to report that there would be no car to Cashel this night. It had been cancelled because of unrest along the way.

"Well, lads, it's only thirteen miles by the road. As soon as it's dark you can unlash your musket and carry it. It's only three hours and a little more. Let's walk it this night."

The sky gradually cleared and the July evening grew brighter; the lingering twilight would last till past eleven. Rory brought a beer pail filled with stew from the hotel and a loaf of bread, and they took turns with the spoon.

"That cost a shilling," Rory said.

"A shilling," Cavanagh repeated. "You were robbed. It's an animal that died of age."

Two hungry boys came and watched them eat. Presently a third came long, a girl of no more than six. The three of them barefoot and sunken-cheeked, but not quite at the last stages, as some they had seen on the road were.

"Are you brothers and sister?" Sean asked.

They watched without answering. The girl began to cry. Sean handed her the crust. She took it and began to run away, but the older boy caught her. She doubled over, protecting her bread.

"Here! Stop that!" Sean shouted. "Here's a penny, then."

The boy came meekly for his penny. Rory gave one to the younger boy.

"Come here and eat," said Sean to the girl. "We'll keep the gossoons from you. There's a bit of the gravy left, though it isn't very good."

She sat on the bench next to Sean. The three of them watched her chew grimly at the heel of bread, dipping it in the pail. Blue-veined forehead, bulging eyes, teeth bared like an animal's, tearing at the bread.

Sean asked again if they were her brothers, but she said nothing. When she had finished the crust she grabbed at the pocket Sean had taken the penny from and made a voiceless sound from her throat.

"Do you want a penny?"

She made a sound.

He gave her a penny and she walked away in the slow, stunned walk they all had.

When it was finally dark and Sean untied the musket, his knee had gone gimpy and stiff. He limped and hopped about the square until he was able to walk with a nearly normal gait. By loosening the strap of his musket, he found he could hang it from his shoulder and carry it under his arm.

"Cavanagh squad, forward, march," said Rory, and the three of them laughed.

They walked along the Cashel road, which became dark and empty as they approached the edge of the city. They walked without speaking, increasingly aware of the sound of their footsteps, until they came to a steep hill that looked down on the bridge.

"It may be that there are soldiers checking everyone crossing," Cavanagh said.

They stood and stared into the dark valley for a minute, but the new moon gave little light. A faint reflection on the water silhouetted a bit of the arch. The few dots of light in the field opposite were maybe the soldiers' tents.

"I'll go," Rory whispered. "You wait here. I'll come back for you."

He was gone a long time. In the silence of this street of dark houses it seemed that even a whisper might be heard by the people in their bedrooms. A muffled church bell struck once, like a thump on a washtub. Cavanagh could not stand still. Sean worried that the sound of his scuffling feet would attract attention. In faint light the eyes play tricks, but Sean thought Cavanagh looked frightened. The feeling came to him strongly now—what he had felt all day: These rebels were dreamers, self-admirers, barroom illusionaries. This whole thing might be a mistake. Rory returned finally with the word, which he whispered. "It looks clear. Come on."

"You must be mad!" was all Father Kenyon could say. He said it again and left a ringing silence in the air. "There'll be no harvest if you disrupt everything now. It's only two or three weeks. To spoil the harvest in a country in famine? You must be mad. You _must_ wait."

The priest's argument sounded at first like O'Brien's. "And we can't wait," was all Meagher could answer. "In three weeks we'll all be in prison, the harvest will be gone abroad, and there'll be no rising at all."

"Better no rising at all than butchery."

The argument went on for an hour in the parlor of the priest's house. Meagher had been incredulous at first. Kenyon had been one of their prize assets, a fiery advocate who had preached rebellion from the pulpit.

"If we can wait two weeks, hide out, perhaps, would you support us then?"

The priest, a tall, slender man with gray hair that stuck out over his ears and sprouted in great bushy eyebrows, took a sip of his tea and made a face of grave displeasure; it had gone cold with all the arguing. He leaned forward meditatively and replaced the cup on the low table. "The thing of it is, Tom, we aren't prepared. You know that yourself. When the grain wagons went through last autumn they came six at a time guarded by a full company of armed cavalry—and with three regiments of infantry nearby in case of trouble. That's the hard fact that you're facing. That's what you'd have to defeat to get grain sufficient to feed the country for a week, and there aren't enough armed men in the entire country to do it. We find ourselves in a situation where the threat of a rising is a valuable thing. It gives us some . . . weight in the discussion. The English above all are practical people. They take the threat into account and make some little concession—a few extra tons of American corn, perhaps—to avoid it. But the thing itself would be a catastrophe. We have enough corpses on hand as it is, without a few thousands of our young men shot. There is—" He held up a hand to prevent Meagher's attempted answer. "There is a role in all of this for you and your Confederation. Keep up the threat. Keep the fire stoked. You provide something we need very much. You are a person who does not play the abject. We are not all illiterate peasants, hat in hand at the beck of the master. So go on, have your meetings. March your men up and down. See if you can get them to stick their chests out a little. But remember, they are pitiful poor people. They are not roughneck Yankee woodsmen with their long rifles. They could never fight a rebellion. Don't have their blood on your hands."

"Excuse me." Meagher knew that the next word the priest expected was "father," but he did not say it. If the Irish were abject, they had had good training in it from these fellows. "But that would make us hypocrites, would it not? Going about advocating something we had no intention of carrying out?"

"If that is the purist point of view you wish to take. But remember, this is politics. Do you think the members of the Parliament, the prime minister, do not sometimes play by indirection?"

Meagher took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. He rose from his chair and made his farewells.

"Orders from Rome, no doubt," said Smith O'Brien, who had paid a visit to Father Byrne in Carrick-on-Suir with the same result. "Well, we must continue, priests or no. After the promises we have made, we must be at least as bold as the government. His heart was panting for the day, he said at Slievenamon." O'Brien's tone was sarcastic, a thing Meagher had never heard from him. They were having a rather poor dinner in the hotel in Waterford, Meagher not wishing to face his father at home. "Russell has bought off the pope with a concession somewhere, permitted a papal legate in the Punjab or some such."

"They shot the archbishop in Paris," Meagher reminded him.

"True. They'd never do that in this country, more's the pity."

Sean, Rory, and Michael reached Cashel in the early hours, the sliver of a moon almost down in the west, no sign of dawn. Cavanagh knew where the leader's house was, just outside the town on the main road from Tipperary. He had been there on an organizing trip with O'Leary two years earlier.

"First we must watch," said Cavanagh. "From here." He went into the ditch opposite the house, jumped a bit of water and came up the other side. Rory and Sean followed. "We sit here quietly for an hour to see if there are any police about the place."

The house stood alone on the road. Sean watched it for a time. There was no movement. He turned up the collars of Cavanagh's coat and raised his knees to rest his forehead on his forearms, but Cavanagh elbowed him. "Stay awake. Watch." He rested his chin instead. The coat was not as warm as the jacket he had left in Dublin. Watching the motionless scene, the small whitewashed house by the road with no other building near, he thought of the soldiers in their great numbers marching, rank after rank, their strong boots crunching in unison on the cobbles. And the three of them shivering in this ditch, mice in the house of the giant. The moon had set behind the western hills, and the stars multiplied and came down to the plain. In the distance he could see now the faint and uncertain silhouette of a tower and castle on the side of a hill. He saw it, and, still staring in the same place, did not see it. He blinked and it came back. After a time it was steadily there, huge, ungainly, the only shape on the horizon, a looming void in the stars, particles of blackness swirling, roaring in his ears, a vortex pulling him, a hole to the center of nothing. Finally a bright line showed the rim of the world, and the ruin returned to a possible size.

"I'll go and see if there is anyone there," said Cavanagh.

Meagher and O'Brien, after being rebuffed by the priests, went directly to the club leaders of Carrick. At the house of one of the leaders, a Dr. Purcell, they held another discouraging meeting.

"Why in heaven's name have you come to this little town to begin it?"

"Is Carrick able to fight the British empire?"

"Were you rejected everywhere else and come here as a last resort?"

O'Brien sat slumped in a corner of the parlor, observing each new speaker with what looked to Meagher like bored disdain. "We have to begin somewhere," he said finally. "If we could raise six hundred armed men here, we could go on our way with some protection as we raised the country."

"Six hundred armed men!" The doctor, a small, gray-haired man, was apoplectic. "You'd have every English army unit in the country on you in an instant. You wouldn't get two miles on the road and you'd have six hundred corpses for your day's work."

A young Confederation leader named John O'Mahoney rose and offered his men to protect the leaders for the night. They would bivouac around the town. The offer was accepted and O'Mahoney sent out the order for his men to assemble. He sent word to other nearby clubs to join them. By midnight more than twelve thousand men were converging on Carrick. Meagher and O'Brien, meanwhile, under the impression that one club only was coming, and to protect them for one night only, had left the city in disgust. As the clubs arrived in Carrick, O'Mahoney, after a frantic search for the leaders, who had left without telling him, instructed them to return home.

Cavanagh spoke with the woman of the house as the two others watched from the ditch opposite. She pointed off down the road. They talked a bit longer. Cavanagh tipped his hunting cap and motioned them to follow. "He's at Carrick," he said as they caught up. "It's twenty-five miles. There's a Bian from the town will take us there in two hours."

In Cashel they went to the hotel for some breakfast, only to find that their money was not accepted. A hand-lettered notice on the door advised that because of the unrest and uncertainty in the land, cash coins alone would be honoured. Sean had two silver shillings and Rory one shilling and a few coppers, but they would be needed for the bian. Cavanagh was penniless. The rest of their money was pound notes of the Bank of Dublin. At a small table in the corner they had a breakfast of tea and shared a penny loaf.

They rode the bian to Carrick. In a wood as they came down the mountain toward the town, there were men cutting and trimming young ash trees to make pikes. As they passed, one of them held up a pole defiantly and shouted something.

Another ran from the wood right up to the road with his ash pole and shouted, "If you're carrying any weapons, get off the car now. There's an arms search of everyone in Carrick. They're stopping the carriages."

Sean took the musket from under his coat and handed it to the man, then jumped down from the carriage. Rory and Cavanagh jumped also. From the far side of the car a skinny old fellow had also got down and had fallen in the road.

The pike man helped the old fellow up. "What, have you come to fight the war?"

The man found no words but gave a nod of his head and wiped his long nose on his sleeve.

"Where's your weapon?"

The old fellow rummaged under his coat and slowly withdrew a rusty, handleless pitchfork, its tines wrapped in a rag.

"There it is, my friends," shouted the pike man to all in hearing. "The Irish army. Behold, Albion, and tremble!"

"Easy, Brian," said a portly young fellow. No famine at his house, thought Sean. "Come on, men, get off the road. There's a troop of redcoats by every hour or two. Come on, man, we'll find work for you. You'll need a bit of a handle for that."

Meagher went to see the once radical priest Father Tracy in Waterford, who now threatened to excommunicate any man who would join the rising. After arguing for an hour in the rectory parlor, Meagher gave up and took a train to Tipperary, where several of the leaders had gathered, including Terence McManus, whose plan with d'Arcy McGee to bring shiploads of men from Liverpool had evidently fallen through. A young railroad employee named James Stephens had also joined them. Traveling west, they went into the towns and villages and spoke in the public squares. Their audiences were sympathetic, but there were few volunteers. The men, many of them near starvation, would not come if there was no food, and there was no way to procure food for any sizable number. In Mullinahone only three club members turned out for the meeting. One of the men explained that the local priest had countermanded the order to assemble. But at McManus's urging the leaders made the rounds of club members' homes all afternoon and evening, and by midnight six thousand men had assembled in a blighted and evil smelling potato field near the town. They stayed the night milling about, for they had no blankets or tents for camping.

At morning formation it appeared that they had only about three hundred muskets and rifles among them, the rest would be armed only with pikes. O'Brien contracted with the town's baker for bread sufficient for the day and paid him out of his own pocket, but the baker informed him that he did not have sufficient flour to supply another order of that size. He was sympathetic to the cause and said he would try to order some from Kilkenny or Waterford, but he could promise nothing.

Meagher assembled the captains of the clubs and gave them instruction on close-order drill and basic battlefield movements. He had the captains drill their men for the balance of the morning and all of the afternoon. By evening the potato field had been reduced to mud, but the six thousand looked something like the beginnings of an army. At day's end O'Brien addressed the assembled men and told them that food for the next day was doubtful and that they should each try to bring something to eat.

Most of the men returned home for the night. O'Brien had access to a friend's cottage nearby, the friend having gone to England to earn money harvesting. They arrived at the cottage around midnight and had a drop of poteen before retiring.

"Is this it? The revolution?" O'Brien asked.

"They seemed ready enough," Meagher replied. "Weapons and food are the crux. What did Napoleon do? You simply commandeer what you need. There is no other way. We must raid a police barracks for weapons and ammunition and then go fast for Kilkenny and all those fat cattle, and hope that the news will attract others. I'll take a few men into Mullinahone in the morning early. We'll take what weapons they have there. It won't be enough, but it will be a start."

"I'll go," O'Brien said.

"You'll come with us?" Meagher asked.

"No. I'll take a few men and do as you say. I am sorry, but I must insist. This must be done delicately, and I fear you are a bit too rash. We must be sure there are no police killed yet. That would bring them on us in great numbers before we're ready. I will take two men and surprise them. Early, as you say. Come now, don't look at your shoes that way. There will come a time for Meagher to lead the charge, but it is not yet."

In the morning their number had shrunk by half. It was raining softly from a dull sky. The field was too muddy for drill. Still, about three thousand men were there by dawn, some standing under the trees along the stone fence, others, indifferent to the rain, standing on the road. Meagher walked among them, telling them they would get underway that morning. He asked one club which was especially reduced over night if the others would be coming.

"If there's to be no food they shan't come," an older man replied. "They can't be making off with food from the house." The man looked angry, but Meagher knew he was merely frightened because he was speaking to gentry.

Meagher thought about the delicate matter of apportionment in a household near starvation, and nodded his understanding. "And have you anything?"

"Ah, I'm right enough if I can get me a bit of water. I've anger enough to feed me a while yet."

"Good man."

"Lucky's the man can choose how to spend his last breath," said another, raising his pike.

Meagher shook his hand and walked to the end of the field and into the copse they used for headquarters. O'Brien's expedition was just returning from Mullinahone. They were empty-handed and clearly dejected. It had taken an effort for Meagher to conceal his feelings about O'Brien's taking over this first mission. He would scrupulously avoid asking why it had failed.

"I believe we had better get the men on the road. I think we have nearly three thousand this morning. No doubt we have been reported by now."

"Yes," O'Brien replied. "You may take charge of the military operation. Proceed as you wish." His face was ashen, his voice flat, as if he had taken a severe wound.

They continued westward, trying to raise men, but instead their numbers dwindled. As they approached the village of Ballingarry in O'Brien's home county of Limerick, their numbers down already to five hundred, they encountered a company of Irish Hussars and thought for a moment that they were in for a battle, but the captain of the Hussars came forward with his hand raised and explained to Meagher and O'Brien that they were ordered to enforce an eviction. He had no orders in regard to rebels and planned no action against them. As they passed the rebels there were jovial greetings and complicit smiles. Several hundred Irish Hussars had been in attendance at Slievenamon and had been among the most enthusiastic for the rising.

Along the way, John Dillon, who had gone to Mullinahone with O'Brien, caught up to Meagher and told him what had happened that morning. "He let them talk him out of taking the rifles. 'Would ye give us your weapons?' O'Brien says, gentle as you please. 'Ah, no, I'm sorry. Tis against the regulations, ye know. I'd lose me job. We'd go on the road.' 'Ah, I see,' says O'Brien. And so back we come empty-handed. The chief of police would lose his situation, and we can't have that, can we? Holy Mary. Sure, he's a lovely man, but I'm thinking he's too genteel like to be leading a revolution. And he knows it himself now. He's silent with the shame of it, and well he should be. Just between the two of us, sir."

In Ballingarry the leaders conferred. Most of them favored going underground until the harvest was on the road, but O'Brien was adamant: He would not become a fugitive in his own country. It was finally resolved that Meagher, O'Mahoney, and several other leaders would go into the surrounding country to raise men while O'Brien stayed with the men in Ballingarry.

The next day there were reports of police units converging on O'Brien's group. O'Brien's men threw up a barricade on the road and fought a skirmish with sixty-four green-uniformed peelers who took refuge in the widow McCormack's house. McManus favored setting fire to the house, but it was discovered that Mrs. McCormack's five children were inside. After a brief exchange of gunfire from the peelers and rocks from the rebels, during which McManus was shot in the knee, O'Brien advised his men to disperse. A week later O'Brien was arrested on a railway platform. Meagher, after spending several nights sleeping in the open, was taken near Cashel. McManus had made it on board a ship for America in Cork Harbor, only to be discovered by the harbor police.

In October a jury returned the verdict of guilty against Meagher. He was urged to plead for mercy because of his youth, but his docket speech was in another tone:

. . . To lift this island up—to make her a benefactor to humanity instead of being the meanest beggar in the world—to restore to her native powers and her constitution, this has been my ambition, and this ambition has been my crime. Judged by the law of England I know this crime entails the penalty of death, but the history of Ireland explains this crime and justifies it . . . I hope to be able with a pure heart and perfect composure to appear before a higher tribunal—a tribunal where a Judge of infinite goodness, as well as of justice, will preside, and where, my Lords, many—many of the judgments of this court will be reversed.

All three were tried that autumn and sentenced to death by hanging, their bodies to be beheaded and quartered with the quarters to be hidden in the far corners of the kingdom. Thus ended the Irish rebellion of 1848.

The idea of hiding the body parts was to make it impossible for an evidently not-all-knowing God to find all the parts on judgment day and reassemble them so that they could be reunited with their souls.

After three days in the woods near Carrick with almost nothing to eat, Sean, Rory, and Mike left their weapons with the men there and, in a morning's walking, made their way to the quay in Waterford. Cavanagh quickly found a Confederation head and asked about the situation. The men had been awaiting orders but none had come. They were disappointed; where was Meagher? Cavanagh had found a Dublin friend of his father, Art O'Byrne, a club member who transported woolens. A round-faced man whose smooth features looked more like a priest's than a sailor's, he offered the three a meal on board his lighter and also a trip back to Dublin. It was an excellent dinner of ham and boiled cabbage and biscuits with buttermilk to drink. They had finished in the small cabin just as the light of evening was gone, eleven o'clock by Rory's watch. He still carried the one Mrs. P. had given him. There was a commotion on the pier and O'Byrne put his head out the hatch and listened to a long narrative from someone out there. Sean was too tired and too comfortably full with the much-needed dinner to pay attention. O'Byrne returned to the table, and his expression told the story.

"It's over," said Cavanagh.

"It is," O'Byrne answered. "For now."

They sat in silence for a time. "I'm thinking that was a long way our anger brought us for nothing," Sean said.

Cavanagh rose and went out on deck and the three sat at table in the cabin and listened to the sound of him vomiting his supper into Waterford Harbor.

In Dublin, Sean went to the office of _The Nation_ and sought out John O'Leary, the young man who had impressed him in the pub when they first came to Dublin. The office was in chaos. No one knew where O'Leary was. Perhaps he would be in later. They would not tell where he lived. For several hours Sean walked the street before the office and finally spied him coming, the broad forehead surrounded by unruly brown hair. Sean introduced himself. The two talked while walking.

"In truth, they did about the right thing," O'Leary said. "It's called the cabbage patch coup, for Mrs. McCormack's garden, and we are the subject of much merriment, but a real rising would have resulted in thousands more of corpses and done no good. Yet, we can't lie down quietly. We must be as obstreperous as possible without getting us all killed, that's my view of the practical approach to getting our country back some day. Be a constant aggravation that they will someday tire of. You should go to America," he said.

"What would I do there?"

"There are a number of Irish business leaders there. I don't know much about them, but here's one sent me a letter just last week." He handed Sean a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket.

Dear Mr. O'Leary:

I seek young, energetic, intelligent men for my business. I have read your articles in the Nation newspaper. You seem to be intelligent and a man whose judgment I can trust. If you know of such, send them to the Tammany organization and have them ask for me. If you will pay their passage I will reimburse you.

Yours in respect for the old country,

The signature, in great swirls and curlicues, occupied the lower half of the page: Jimmy O'Dea, New York.

### II

Sea-Drift

1

Van Diemen's Land

On Monday morning, July 9th, 1849, Cornelius Cooper, deputy governor of Richmond Prison, Dublin, was admitted by the warder to Meagher's cell, where he introduced himself but, being a confirmed unionist, did not offer to shake Meagher's hand. A tall, hawk-nosed man with bushy side-whiskers, a retired captain in Her Majesty's service, he stood at military attention and delivered his message. "It is my duty to inform you that your sentence has been commuted to immediate transportation to Van Diemen's Land for the remainder of your life. You will embark this day."

At half past ten a police van, escorted by one hundred and fifty cavalry, carbines at the ready, charged through the street of Dublin at a rapid trot, emergency bell clanging. In the van with Meagher, O'Brien, and McManus were two armed guards who forbade any sort of gesture to the public. The government was determined that no crowd would gather. Cab horses shied from the clatter—one jumped its traces and fell, upsetting the cab. At the crosswalks pedestrians scattered and turned to watch. As the procession approached the military barracks on the south side of Dublin Bay, known as the Pigeon House, it passed through a battery of artillery manned and ready to fire in case a mob followed the van. None did, and the men were taken to longboats, one boat and six guards per man. The longboats were rowed to a ship lying off Kingstown Pier, the _Swift_ , a ten-gun brig, black as a collier and obviously well past its prime, which would take them to an island a hundred miles south of Melbourne, to which they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives.

Aboard the _Swift_ the captain and ship's surgeon met them on deck. The captain, a fragile-looking man who appeared to be well past the usual navy retirement age, read the rules of conduct for the passage in a dry voice. "Two prisoners only are permitted on deck at one time, no conversing with any crew member, captain and surgeon excepted, no smoking, save on deck between one and two p.m. and five and six p.m., meals supplied by Her Majesty, same food as ship's officers, lights extinguished every night at nine o'clock. Are there any questions?"

There were none. The captain gave orders to get underway. The three men were the only passengers. More would increase the chance of mutiny.

"I'll stay below, then," McManus volunteered. He spoke in a quiet, rumbling voice. "I'm most of my life in Liverpool. The two of you will want a look at the old place. I was near saying a last look, but let's hope it's not that."

Meagher and O'Brien remained on deck as the ship sailed down the Wicklow coast within a few hundred yards of land.

"I don't swim," Meagher said after a long silence. "Do you?"

O'Brien did not answer. The coastline was flat land, nearly treeless. They could see a deserted farmhouse. There were mountains just visible in the distance.

"I'm an idiot, and you're another, friend," O'Brien said at last. "What in hell have we been about? The silliest country gentleman out murdering snipe with his blunderbuss is a paragon of accomplishment compared to us."

"A confusion it was." Meagher looked straight down at the water. There was still light enough to give him in the smooth wave troughs a vague reflection of himself, shifting, blurring, disappearing. He watched it a minute, but felt a touch of motion sickness and closed his eyes. "I wish I had a drop of the uisegebaugh."

The wind was light and intermittent, coming from the west. The sails luffed several times, and the ship made slow progress. Bray head was still just visible off to the right as the coastline darkened, the bare tops of the mountains cutting a sharp line against the evening sky.

"Well, they didn't hang us. Could it be that our masters grow humane? In '98 it was the gallows for everyone," Meagher said, aware that his tone was irritating to O'Brien.

"Our masters . . ." O'Brien's voice faded. "Our masters have no wish to create new martyrs. They may be getting a little cleverer. Merely that. And this was nothing compared to '98. In '98 the Irish, or the French, I should say, won a battle or two before Cornwallis destroyed them. We did nothing. Exactly nothing." He walked away toward the bow, leaving Meagher to study the coastline. A crew member announced that their supper was ready. They went below for their meal of beefsteak, hard biscuits, and water, served by a sailor with cross-belts and a bayonet at his side.

"I see you limping. Did they get the ball from your knee?" Meagher asked of McManus, who sat next to him at the small table.

"No, I have it yet. A souvenir of Ballingarry."

A sound like a dry chuckle came from O'Brien. Meagher looked across the table at O'Brien, the brother of Sir Lucius O'Brien of Dromoland Castle, thirteenth Lord Inchiquin, son of Sir Edward O'Brien, baronet, leaning back from the table, his face in shadow, his expression impassive. He had not touched his dinner.

"You had a business in Liverpool, did you?" O'Brien asked.

"I was a shipping agent there. I had an office in the quay."

"And was it profitable?"

"I made nearly a thousand pounds in a good year."

"And you've gone off on a goose hunt and now you have nothing."

"No regrets," the little man said, but his expression said otherwise.

"The police in Liverpool are frightened of the Irish, and with reason," McManus went on. "There's several of them in the graveyard because the boyos went out from the pub of a Saturday night looking for a bit of fun."

A silence ensued. The ship creaked in a steady, slow rhythm. The small pewter lamp on the table gave a yellow light that cast black shadows on the bunk curtains.

"Good man," Meagher said in a near whisper.

"D'Arcy McGee and I tried to recruit as many Irish ship captains as we could find. There were none of them ship owners, unfortunately. So, they'd have been cashiered for joining us."

Meagher held up a hand to stop him. "No need to explain. We were not in position to use them. It's a good thing you didn't come."

Meagher went alone on deck after their meal and watched the coastline in the lingering sunset. The sky went violet and the coastline was a silhouette but for the lights of towns. What little wind there had been had died.

In the morning the coast was still visible; by afternoon a light westerly came up and by supper Ireland was gone from view. Of the three, only O'Brien would see it again.

The voyage of one hundred and twelve days was uneventful, the few storms brief and unthreatening. During a twenty-four hour-stop at Simon's Bay, Cape of Good Hope, the prisoners were denied a promised half-day ashore. The townsmen had risen in protest over a government plan to begin a penal colony near the city and had threatened the safety of any prisoner brought shore. The _Neptune_ , sailing from Bermuda with John Mitchel and other prisoners aboard—the first prisoners of the planned colony—was two weeks overdue and feared lost. After taking on supplies, the _Swift_ began its voyage across the Indian Ocean. A three-day northerly pushed them off course, and for a week the southern horizon showed ice, stark white by day, but in the moonlit nights came faint gleams and slow flashes, blue and green, as from facets of crystal, a cold message of no meaning. Meagher remained on deck and watched the spectacle every evening. He saw it in the dark and it made him curl in his bunk for warmth as he tried to sleep.

Meagher and O'Brien had each brought the few books that they had been allowed in their Richmond Prison cells, and had occupied a good part of their days reading, sometimes aloud to each other from Cicero or Ovid, books they had not read since school. But one night when the crystal shone with exceptional clarity the captain found the three of them on deck at the same time, a violation of the rules, and had the books stowed as a punishment. McManus turned up from a chest in their cabin a well-thumbed fragment of _Robinson Crusoe_ , the first twenty and an indeterminate number of the latter pages missing. Meagher and O'Brien each read this half an hour a day, and even rationed in this way it ran out in a couple of weeks.

Near the end of October they arrived at the wide estuary of the River Derwent, below Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, and cast anchor in a calm and beautiful harbor. Two functionaries of the penal colony came aboard and offered the prisoners tickets of leave—parole status. They were free to come and go as they pleased on the condition that they remain each in his own assigned district of the island and that they not attempt to escape. Of course they would pay their own living expenses, and this detail was perhaps the reason that the government permitted such freedom in its penal colonies—a cost-free means of confining rebels. O'Brien refused the ticket of leave, saying he would not promise compliance with any rule or law of the English government or any of its agencies. McManus refused also, but, after learning that the decision meant solitary confinement, changed his mind. Meagher also accepted the ticket of leave. The guards to escort them to their districts would be ready in the morning; the men would spend one more night aboard the _Swift_.

The warm air had a smell of living things—grass, ripe fruit, a hint of wood smoke. A high cliff loomed on their left, white gulls arcing in its shadow, and straight ahead a mountain, its snow covered peak still in full sun above the darkening river. On a piney lowlands stood a signal tower with a red flag, alongside it a farmhouse with white walls and a green verandah.

The ship stood anchored in the harbor and a small boat rowed by a young man came alongside. Forward sat a matronly woman and in the stern a girl a little younger than the oarsman—a mother and her children, by the look of it. Between shouts from a seaman for them to be off, the women in the boat greeted the men. "Oh, you're welcome, you're welcome, Mr. O'Brien, you're welcome to us, though it's a quare home you're coming to," the older child shouted in a Mayo accent, while the younger waved a kerchief. Van Diemen's Land, they would discover, was an Irish colony.

O'Brien left the ship at sunrise, under escort, to Maria Island to the east. An hour later McManus and Meagher were taken by carriage along a winding road through the mountains. Meagher got down and said goodbye to McManus in mid-afternoon at Campbell Town, near the western coast. McManus continued on to his assigned district, Norfolk, to the north.

Campbell Town, Meagher learned, standing in its dusty main street, was a small clearing in a pine woods and surveyable at a glance. It consisted of about forty small clapboard cottages and small bungalows facing in random directions, and a two-story wooden structure with white paint peeling from its clapboards that advertised itself as a hotel. Down the street stood a half-built, roofless school upon which construction seemed to have ceased a good while before. Still, he saw that classes were in progress—a version of a hedge school. At the eastern end of the clearing was a long, low structure with Warren Woolen Mill painted in block letters at the top of its windowless side. Two of the guards carried his trunks into the entryway of the hotel and Meagher followed. A plump woman with a front tooth missing looked at him open-mouthed with surprise.

"Is it a room ye'll be wanting, sir?"

"It is, woman of the house," said Meagher, smiling at her. "Ye've grasped the very essence of me desires. Have ye got one?"

"That I do, but it may not be quite as grand as a gentleman such as yourself would require. That's the trouble of it, you see."

"Well, why not let me be the judge of that." He followed her up a creaking stair and to the end of a short hallway where she, puffing, held the swinging door and let him into a room that justified her modesty on its behalf. Washstand with pitcher, narrow, sagging bed, four clothing hooks on the unpainted board wall, window with torn shade.

"Ah, it's the most beautiful room I've seen in me life. Modeled after the royal suite at Versailles, is it not?"

She laughed aloud, covering her mouth.

"And how much is the rent of it, Molly acushla darlin'?"

"It's a shillin' the night. Six for a week."

"Well, if you have a place for my small trunk you may sign me on as your tenant, but I'll not be a week. It's only while I'm looking for something a little more commodious. My name is Tom Meagher."

"My name is Brenda. Sure, I knew who you were. Haven't we been talking of naught else but your coming here now a month since the news came out. Ye fought for Ireland's freedom, more's the honor to ye."

"Ah, yes, well, more or less, perhaps. And how did you come to be here?"

"We came out just three years ago when the hunger got so bad and the old one died of it, my boy was caught stealing the mangel wurzel just for a bit of something to stay alive, even if we did have to eat it—cattle fodder is all it is, but ye'll stay alive on it better than the nettles. He took it from the master's field, cut off the roots and put the tops back in the ground, he did, so it wouldn't be missed, but the tops died and fell down, ye know, and there was the footprints of his bare feet still there in the ground. He has a toe missing from the cutting spade falling off the wall on it when he was a little one. And so his little borrying was found out and didn't the judge send him here. Well, we got a letter back sayin' the food was plentiful. He was in the labor gangs at Port Arthur a year he was and then he got free of that and got work cutting wood and sent us the letter sayin' there was food—and he sent us the money, he did. And I've been workin' at this place it's going on two years now, taking care of it for Mr. Warren in Hobart Town, him that owns the woolen mill here. It's where everybody works here, them that works at all. It's a queer, half made place, this island, but ye won't starve on it. That's one thing. It's another part of Ireland, now, it is, and with the hunger and all, maybe the best part at that. A prison colony, but then so is the old country for all that. I'll have my boy then put your trunk in the shed."

"Is there a privy?"

"Out back, too. There's a pot under the bed, but no one to empty it but yourself. That's the way of it here. I'm all the maid there is, sorry to say, and that is something I don't do. Gentleman or not, the pot smells the same, that's what I say. So. Well, I hope you're comfortable enough. The only place for regular meals is Mrs. Tuohy's boarding house two blocks up. But you're welcome to have a bit of stew with us this night. I can't say for tomorrow. The food at Mrs. Tuohy's is very bad, they say. I've not tried it, meself."

Death by bare dirt. This was the way he formulated it, walking the bare dirt roads of Campbell Town on the early afternoon of his arrival. The bare dirt cure for romantics. There were piles and outwashings of it in the weedy half-finished yards of the bungalows, and red dust blowing and swirling in the streets. He had walked a scant half-mile and his boots and trouser cuffs were red with it. Young children at play behind a house were also dusted in red. And the bungalows, not old in years but derelict, windowpanes patched with wood, a front door with an old box for a step. No walks, no lights. As for women—a thought much on his mind during the journey—he expected there would be a bit of something. It was a prison colony. But that hotel was useless for the purpose. He had imagined a nice steamy bar in a city something like Waterford, a quick walk through narrow streets, an apartment over a shop.

He returned to the hotel and found a young fellow of about fifteen building a new shed in the back. He wore an old jacket with the lining coming out of it and some very dirty breeks that hung from him in tatters. "Are there any other towns in the Campbell Town district?"

The young fellow looked at him without answering, but opened his mouth and gave an alarmed cry. His teeth were badly broken and blackened.

"What is it? What is it?" Brenda shouted, running out from the hotel. "Don't talk with him, now, it upsets him. What is it you need?"

"I just asked him if there are any other towns in this district."

"Ahh, ahh, oss! Oss!" the boy shouted.

"That's right, Marcus. Ross is about seven miles up the road. Come inside, sir, and I'll tell you how it is."

Meagher followed Brenda into the back hallway of the hotel.

"There's another town, and the hotel there may be more to your liking. Just up there. Ye'd be there in two hours walking. We have no coach or anything here. But don't be bothering my Marcus about anything, sir, if you please. He's good with the hammer and saw. They had him on a building crew in the prison, and he took to it. He built the whole of the addition here on the back of the building. But he's desperate afraid of the gentlemen. He had a year at the Port Arthur and they beat him. Ye see how his teeth is broken with the shock of wood they put in his mouth to stop him screaming. When they're lashing him on his back, you know. That and I don't know what all they did to him. He's better right along, but he's afraid of any man dressed such as yourself, sir, in gentlemen's boots and all. So if ye'd just stay away from him, like, I'd be grateful, I would, sir."

"Say no more. Which way to Ross?"

"Just that way. Ye'd be there in two hours or less."

He felt tired and decided not to walk any more that day. He read a bit in the front room of the hotel. A month-old Melbourne newspaper reported that Queen Victoria and her beloved Prince Albert had been welcomed to Ireland by vast crowds cheering her all along her way in Cork and in Dublin. The town of Cobh in Cork Harbor had been renamed Queenstown in honor of the visit. The queen was moved to contribute two thousand pounds toward famine relief and promised a return visit. The famine itself had abated somewhat. The potato crop of 1849 had been healthy, but the cholera continued and observers reported that dead bodies were still a common sight along the roads. There was a headline with his name in it, the story of the transportation. The widespread sympathy for the young Meagher in America and even in England was misplaced, it said. "In the tragedy that is unfolding in Ireland there are surely many more deserving of sympathy than this young ruffian who has repaid Her Majesty's generous relief efforts with treason."

Meagher took a bowl of Brenda's stew for supper and retired early. When he awoke it was broad day. His body ached from the bed and he felt lethargic. When he finally rose and dressed it was past noon. He did not make the walk to Ross that day either, but returned to his room with a book from the shelf and lay on the bed all afternoon, thinking he would read, but the open book remained face down on the bed beside him. Sentenced to life in Van Diemen 's Land. The phrase repeated in his mind. As punishment for a half-rebellion, you are sentenced to live a half-life. The first circle of hell is for the tepid of heart.

He awoke the next day with a new thought: brooding in this room is very like feeling sorry for oneself. Up you get.

The walk out of Campbell Town began with a long climb on a road through pine woods to the top of a low mountain. There were washes in the red clay road, but fresh wheel ruts right through them and hoof marks indicated some traffic, so he concluded that it might be possible to move his trunks if Ross should prove more livable. He had to stop several times to catch his breath. The long sea voyage with little exercise had weakened him. He reached the top and saw the town a good five miles ahead, and he saw a carriage of some kind on the a mile or so distant. The carriage was not moving. As he walked he saw that it was a continental style barouche with its four elegant corner posts. Several people sat on the bank of the ditch and at least three of these were wearing bonnets.

As he approached one of the bonneted ones, a girl of perhaps ten years ran toward him holding her headgear in place with a white-gloved hand. "Do you know how to fix a wheel, sir?"

"Well, I don't know. I'll have a look."

"William Hall," said a short, middle-aged man, well dressed in a black waistcoat and silk cravat, extending his hand. "Doctor Hall of Ross."

"Tom Meagher."

"Tom Meagher! So, you're here at last, are you? Well, this is a pleasure. Girls, come round and meet the hero of forty-eight."

From the other side of the carriage there came four more young women, the eldest perhaps twenty. She had the Celtic Irish look, freckled and red-haired, and she had a striking figure. He looked away from her and smiled at the others as the doctor introduced them. The young ones curtsied perfunctorily, a little put out at their mishap and distinctly not impressed with the hero of forty-eight.

"And this is Catherine Bennett, governess to my girls." William Hall had noticed Meagher's interest.

She extended her hand and Meagher took it. "Pleased, madam."

"And what are you doing out on the road?" the doctor asked.

"Well, my guards put me down in Campbell Town, but I find it lacking in intellectual and cultural opportunities. I thought I'd go exploring for new worlds."

The doctor laughed heartily. He threw his head back when he spoke and even more when he laughed. Miss Bennett was amused, too. She had no shyness about her but returned his glance, looking him straight in the eye. "You must come to Ross," she said. "It is London itself compared to Campbell Town."

"Aha, London. London he doesn't want, my dear. New worlds. New York. Or say Paris. Ha, ha, Paris. I can see by his look that's what he wants. Our museums fall a little short of Paris, as do the restaurants, but we have pretty girls. Pretty girls we do have."

Meagher felt that his smile was perhaps a bit weak, having been found out so thoroughly. Miss Bennett looked embarrassed, and gave her employer an impatient look. Still, she did not blush.

"Well, I'll have a look at this," Meagher offered, getting down on his knees to examine the wheel, which leaned away from the carriage at a precarious angle. "You've broken the axle," he said, dusting himself off. "Nothing for it but a new one. These ruts are terrible. Not safe for a carriage out here."

"Damn," said the doctor.

"Well, I'm walking to Ross. I'll send someone to fetch you and the carriage if you'll tell me who. Can the horse be ridden?"

"Yes, he's ridden all the time."

"Let's unharness him and the young ones can ride home. I'll lead him."

This was soon accomplished and Catherine, without comment, joined him in the five-mile walk to Ross. She was a sturdy country woman with a long stride, and he developed an ache in his side keeping up with her.

"Is there a decent hotel in Ross?" he asked.

"There's a hotel. It's better than that thing in Campbell Town. Beyond that I won't say. You're not looking well. Are you ill?"

"I'm afraid I'm in poor condition for walking these hills. I've been three months on the ship and the better part of a year in prison before that. Maybe we could slow down a bit."

"Ach, I'm sorry. Why don't you ride? The two older ones can walk and you can ride with Sarah." She stopped and held the horse by the rope bridle they had devised. "Caroline, Emma, get down."

This order was greeted by cries of dismay from the girls and another from Meagher.

"Is it to be me and the youngest girl led by three women?"

At this she did redden a little, but it was with suppressed laughter.

"You may stay where you are, girls," he said. "I'm right as a fiddle. Let's go." The girls cheered. He strode out ahead of her.

"And what about your condition?" she asked, catching up.

"Humiliation, it seems, is a great specific for a stitch in the side. I'm fine. Try to keep up now. I'm a man in a hurry. I have engagements."

He looked sideways at her. His malarkey had done the trick, he thought. He had not spoken with a woman in this way in a very long time. She had an encouraging smile, and she was almost pretty—a country girl, big-boned, muscular, nothing ladylike about her, and not at all self-conscious. "Tell me how you came to be in this place, Catherine Bennett," he said, puffing. "It will use up some of that extra wind you seem to have."

"I was born here. I've never been anyplace else, not even Melbourne. My father was sent here many years ago. He took some of the master's grain, or some such thing as that. 'This is where the Lord should have put Ireland in the first place,' he used to say, 'and as soon as the English have sent us all here, this is where it will be. 'Tis a better climate,' he would say, ' _and_ superior for neighbors.'"

They reached the top of a long hill and saw the town of Ross again. It was indeed an improvement over Campbell Town. A main street with several businesses, even a few carriages and pedestrians on the cobbled streets and walks. Several of the buildings were of brick, including, as it turned out, the doctor's fine two-story house.

"I'll call on you again if I may," Meagher said as they walked the horse around to the stable. He heard laughter from the girls, who had gone into the house and were spying on them from a window. "I'm in need of a guide to the metropolis. Would you like a walk on Sunday afternoon?"

He heard one of the girls mimicking, "I'll call on you again if I may," and the lot of them laughing.

"Yes, I would."

"Ah, I don't even know what day it is now, come to think of it."

"It's Sunday afternoon. We've had a bit of a walk already, but we'd better be getting to the smith's and send him out to help Dr. Hall. You'd never find it by yourself. So, we're off on our promenade. I have no parasol, worse luck. Come along."

Their errand accomplished, an uncommunicative blacksmith dispatched in the direction of Doctor Hall, replacement axle tied to the back of his saddle, Catherine showed him to the hotel and said goodbye for the afternoon. As he entered the hotel he heard a low buzz of conversation and the unmistakable clink of glasses. His eyes adjusted in the dark lobby and he looked toward the source of the sound, an open door at the far end, next to which was a familiar placard in gold and black: _Guinness is Good for You_. He checked into his room, arranged to have his trunk brought from Campbell Town, and repaired to the dark end of the bar, where in the course of the evening Irish soldiers in Her Majesty's service came over to the rebel force in the thousands, the clubs of the Confederation captured arms from police barracks and received great shipments of ordnance from America, including a gun he had read of that fired rapidly by the use of a crank, ranks of redcoats fell while others ran in panic, English ships were sunk in the Irish sea by canons commandeered from the Pigeon House, and the Irish Republic was proclaimed by General Meagher, the silk tricolor waving above him. At closing time one of the patrons was kind enough to help him to his room.

He lived at the hotel for several months and developed a routine of letter writing, reading, walking, and dining frequently at Dr. Hall's. His father sent him a monthly check which more than covered his expenses, along with a monthly letter which was mercifully sparing of advice. At times he seemed to come around to his son's view of the cause:

The idea that we are a part of England is, of course, a fraud. There is no doubt that had the famine struck in England itself, in Cornwall or in the midlands, the government would have done whatever was needed to relieve it. We are a vanquished country and are treated as such. But it is my view that we must learn to live with it. Risings and the like only make our masters more difficult to live with. You, of course, are of the opinion that there are some things a man must not tolerate, even if it means his death. There is some validity in that, too. I honor what you have done.

He had dreamt, indeed planned, a good romp with a woman of low morals for the better part of two years, but it came to nothing. There were such women about, strolling the main street at night, inviting him with looks and words, but it was a very small town. The news of his having taken a drop too much on his first night had reached William Hall by the time of his next visit. And it warned him off the other form of consolation; taking a woman to his room, or taking her anywhere, was impossible without the whole town knowing. And they were no doubt poxy in any event. Catherine, Meagher concluded, was the right idea.

He went walking with Catherine on the roads in the hills above the town and found that when the bantering stopped he had little to say to her.

"Did you fight a real battle, then?" she asked on their second walk together, after he had been in Ross ten days.

"A real battle? No. They shot at us; we threw rocks at them. Two of our men were killed. We had no weapons. As a rising it didn't rise much, a cabbage patch coup. What is that peculiar thing?" A small strangely shaped animal stood in the road ahead, baring its teeth and hissing at them.

"A devil. They're everywhere around here, but they're no harm to us. They kill the lambs and eat them. She'll run when we get near. She has a baby in her pouch. You can see its head."

The animal gave one last hiss and scampered into the woods. Catherine looked up at him. "Was that an Irish rebel?" she asked.

"You read my mind, Catherine." He turned and faced her and she smiled at him. The role of warrior in exile had its uses. He put his arms around her, but she put them away and walked on. This was a kind of courtship he was not accustomed to.

"I'm sorry I said that. No one should belittle you and what you did, you know. It was necessary that someone let them know that there are men among us."

"Do you consider yourself Irish then?"

"Of course. What else could I be?"

"Van Diemenian? Is there such a word?"

"No, there isn't. And don't be starting it."

"Right you are. Irish it is. I can see that and no doubt about it. Give us a kiss to seal the agreement." She let him kiss her and let his arms remain around her for a while.

"Would you be at all interested in getting married?" he asked.

"Getting married? I've only known you a week."

"Ten days, it is. Nearly eleven."

"And don't put on the Irish accent with me. It's not your way of speaking. I can't agree to marry somebody after ten days' acquaintance."

"Ah. But I'm a very simple fellow. You've already seen all there is."

He was fond of Catherine. She was quick of mind but not educated, had none of the accomplishments, musical, literary, or conversational that a governess to a wealthy family of Ireland would have. She was not exactly a peasant either, simply a kind of person that this place made possible, one who knew enough of the world to perform her job and was not particularly curious about the rest.

A week later she walked in among the pine trees with him, where they embraced on a bed of brown, sun-warmed needles. He undid the top button of her blouse and she took his hand and held it. "Are we to be married, then?" she asked.

"We are. Yes, we are," he answered.

"When?"

"My schedule is quite unencumbered. You may choose the date, and I will be there in my best suit of clothes."

She took her hand away and permitted him to continue. "You've done this with a great number of women, I'm sure."

"Ah, once or twice, perhaps in the dark and backward abysm of time. Not at all in the past year and more, Terence McManus being less interesting in that way than yourself. Your breasts are a wonder of the world, Catherine Bennett. I'm as nervous as can be. I believe that my virginity has been reinstated for lack of recent experience."

"Why not wait, then, until we're married?"

"Ah, Catherine, Catherine, please, let's not."

The reawakening of his senses was for a time a source of great happiness. He noticed the detail of the land, the peculiar quickening scent of pine and sea. Limiting himself to two pints of Guinness before dinner and nothing but coffee after, he awoke mornings with great energy and set to his regular reading and, writing the story of the abortive rising, and a long hike in the afternoon. He let his beard grow and took to wearing a wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, and galluses. He discovered Lake Sorell, fifteen miles to the west, and bought a small sailboat.

Arriving at the lake one afternoon, he slid his boat into the water, pulled it to the end of the small pier and tied it to one of the end posts, rolled up his trousers, lowered himself into the water, and removed from a newly purchased parcel a can of paint and a brush. On the stern he lettered as neatly as he could the word SPERANZA. She was a bad poet and no doubt about that, but he liked the word; something about it suggested wind for his sail. He affixed another new purchase to the transom mast: the flag of the United States, thirteen stripes, thirty-one stars. He was twenty-six years old and somewhat famous in the world, thanks to the American newspapers. And it was in the United States that the exiled Irish were forging a power that would someday put an end to British rule in Ireland.

He and Catherine were married in February of 1850 in the house of Dr. Hall with T. B. McManus illegally in attendance. Meagher's hotel room was inadequate for two. At the land agency, he found that the cost of land at Lake Sorell was surprisingly low. For twenty pounds he purchased a parcel on the shore. At Ross he purchased a cartload of lumber, had it brought to the shore, and began building a cottage for himself and his bride. The work went slowly. He had no experience at building and had to redo much of it. Finally, on an especially frustrating day, he put away his tools at mid-morning and rode in to Ross and visited the general store, then rode on to Campbell Town, to the hotel. Brenda was hanging wash on a clothesline in back.

"Good morning."

"Ah, you're back for another night in a fancy room, are ye?"

"No, I will have to forgo that pleasure. The fact is, I need the assistance of your son. Marcus, was it? I'm doing a little building and I find that I have no idea how to do it. That's the long and the short of it."

She looked at him uncertainly. "Marcus it was, and is. But he don't work out from home."

"I thought maybe we could try. If I was easy with him, maybe he could. He'll have to someday, won't he?" He felt awkward. "Here, I brought this for him, anyway. Maybe if you took it in to him and he'd put them on."

Brenda took the parcel and opened it. Jacket, shirt, trousers, underclothes. Feeling each with her stubby, muscular hands, she was quiet, considering.

"I hope they fit. I had to guess at his size."

She took them inside and after a few minutes Marcus emerged in his usual clothes and walked to the far side of the shed. Meagher walked to where he could just see him, the face with its broken mouth.

"Well, I'm in terrible trouble and I thought maybe you could help me. I saw you building the shed there and I'm trying to build a little cabin, but I have no idea how to do it. I need someone who knows what he's doing. And I'll pay you. I don't know what the rate is here."

"It's three pound a week," Brenda volunteered from the back door. "That's the wage at the factory now."

"Four pound a week it is then. A skilled carpenter must have more than a factory man."

Marcus came out from behind the shed. Meagher took this for assent.

"Well, if you have a horse, let's be going. We can do a few hours yet today."

At the cabin site, Marcus began by undoing all that Meagher had done. Meagher pitched in, pounding studs apart, clawing nails. Marcus worked at a pace that Meagher found exhausting. After a couple of hours he called a break and fetched the water jug. By dusk they had the footing stones in place and a solid floor frame laid on them. They worked until they could no longer see what they were doing, and then rode together to Ross, Marcus continuing the additional hour to Campbell Town. "See you here in the morning, then. You can come here and we'll ride out together." Marcus nodded. All day he had not spoken a word, but they had become easy together.

In the morning, the Meaghers were still in bed when Marcus knocked. Meagher fumbled for his watch. Five thirty. Just after sunrise. This fellow is still on the prison work schedule. Meagher opened the door a little. "You can wait downstairs. I'll be along." When he came down Marcus was standing, waiting. "I can't even get my breakfast at this hour. You're too early. Come at seven from here out, all right?"

They finished the cabin in three weeks, and Meagher arranged for Marcus to come out three days a week for odd jobs and errands. In April word came that John Mitchel had arrived at last, the penal colony at the Cape of Good Hope having been closed due to the objections of the citizenry. Mitchel was in ill health and the governor permitted him to live in Bothwell with John Martin, his former associate at _The Nation_. Studying the map, Meagher discovered that all of their districts—his, McManus's, Mitchel's, and Martin's—nearly met at Lake Sorell. They would be nearly within the law if the met there. He wrote them suggesting a meeting. Martin answered that Mitchel was much improved and eager for the trip.

In mid-April—early winter in this part of the world—the four men met at the cabin. "I never thought I'd see this day," Mitchel said. Thin and hollow-chested, he seemed to have aged twenty years in his two years on the prison ship. Nothing of the feisty rooster about him now.

The men talked for several hours. According to McManus, O'Brien was being kept in a house formerly belonging to the prison warden with a full company of militia guarding him. Plans were underway for his escape. It seemed that O'Brien was allowed a daily walk along the shore to keep his health up. The plan involved a fishing boat in some deep water near the path, where O'Brien would make a sudden plunge into the water, and before his guards knew it he would be aboard the boat on his way to a ship a mile off shore. Marcus passed around small whiskeys on a tray. Meagher had hired him as a house boy and Catherine had been training him in these little servant tasks. This was his first effort before company, and he did pretty well. The men toasted O'Brien's success.

Martin turned to Mitchel, who had been quiet, slumped in a rocking chair by the fire. "Tell us about your time aboard the ship. We had word that you were under the lash."

"No. No. Nothing to that." For a minute it seemed that was all he would say. Then he went on in a barely audible voice, which faded out from time to time. "It is a clever thing, solitary. The days flow. Mesmerizing. You sleep twelve, fourteen hours. All day sometimes. Forget. Why you were angry. Who you were. Excellent treatment for rebellion. No more thought of battles or barricades. A bowl of stirabout can be. A wonder. You tremble for it."

"We'll soon have you restored," Martin said. "We had a letter from O'Brien, smuggled out past the censor by a servant, I suppose. He's calculated from the census figures that the hunger killed more than a million. When his nibs here read that the other day, it brought the color back to his cheeks, I can tell you."

After a time the conversation turned to whether their word of honor not to escape was really binding. "If we are imprisoned by a government we do not acknowledge, how can a promise coerced by that government be binding?" Meagher asked.

John Mitchel had reclined on a bed in the corner, but he replied readily. "You made the promise. You must keep it. As O'Brien did."

"At the cost of solitary confinement?"

"Yes."

A silence ensued. "I suppose there is a logic to what you say," Meagher answered at last. "But this honorable conduct logic always comes out in a win for them. Why is it that none of these ethical conundrums ever trap an Englishman? For them it's always a clear shot at an open goal."

"Some advantage in owning the playing field," McManus replied.

"The trap is perhaps not a perfect one," John Martin said. "You can give up your ticket of leave and then it's a different game. Run fox and all after."

"Run fox and all after," McManus called in a child's singsong. "That will be the legend on our national seal. How would you put that in Irish?"

"A few matters to put in order before designing the national seal," came Mitchel's rasping voice from the dark corner.

"Do you think there will ever be such?" Meagher asked. "O'Brien does not."

"I have thought of it every day for two years now," Mitchel answered in a voice at the end of its strength. His words came slowly. "The Englishman is a pragmatist. When he is persuaded he is better rid of us, we'll have our country. O'Brien is chagrined at what he considers his failure. I do not consider it a failure. There was no chance of a success no matter what we had done. Nor will there ever be. We gave John Bull a tweak that made him jump a little. We must give him a dozen more, a hundred more, until he's tired of being tweaked."

It was agreed that they would meet weekly at the cabin. Mitchel's health improved steadily and by the end of the summer he had regained something of his old feistiness. The Melbourne paper reported that O'Brien's escape plan had gone awry when the man guarding him during his walk along the shore pointed a gun at the rescuers on the fishing boat and threatened to shoot if they helped O'Brien aboard. O'Brien, who had jumped into the water and swum to the boat, was forced to swim back to shore. The Melbourne newspaper quoted the governor of Van Diemen's Land: "This scheme, like all the others in which he has meddled, has been a failure."

The paper also reported that one thousand people had gathered at Tammany Hall in New York to protest the treatment of O'Brien. One confederation leader was quoted as saying, "If you wish to send comfort to Smith O'Brien, tell him there are a hundred thousand Irishmen in America ready to fight the battle of freedom." Anti-English excitement in America was at a fever pitch.

To the next Lake Sorrel meeting in May Terence McManus sent word that he had given up his ticket of leave so that he would no longer be honor bound not to escape. But the Melbourne newspaper reported that McManus had fallen ill and had taken to his bed, unable to report for confinement as ordered by the Governor General. "Poor McManus is not feeling himself these days," said Martin with an expression of something like mirth awkwardly playing on his usually unexpressive features.

"Are they letting him stay at home?" Meagher asked.

"They have a full company of soldiers guarding his house. Only it's a

slight problem they have that they'll find out soon. The fellow in the bed is not feeling himself because he's not himself at all, you see, but John Galvin a townsman who looks a dead ringer for him. McManus is off on a ship to California these two days past and Galvin clear of prosecution, too, because he never said he was McManus."

At this, Marcus, who had been sitting unnoticed in the corner, burst into the only laugh Meagher would ever hear from him, a squawking cry like the exulting of a bird of prey, so shrill that it silenced the laughter of the others.

Boating, hiking, reading, a bit of writing, regular meetings with his friends, the unmitigated blessing of a sex life, tanned, trim, in robust health—for a summer Meagher was content.

Marcus did well taking care of the yard and keeping a small vegetable garden. The little cabin began to feel like home. Life with Catherine, however, was diminishingly wonderful. By the end of summer she was pregnant, and they were quarreling frequently. His hero status with her had proved fleeting. She soon had the whole story from him of the meandering, feckless rebellion, and had, one evening, picked up a copy of a newspaper published in Hobart Town by a drunken exile desperate for whiskey money. From a paean to the heroes of forty-eight she read several of the more extravagant phrases aloud, laughing in a caustic way that surprised him.

"I never pretended, you know, to be a great military hero."

"But you come out so charming modest-like, just as if you had really done something. If you really did nothing you ought not scuff your toe as you do."

Stung, he walked out of the cabin and stood outside under a brilliantly starry sky. A peasant woman was what she was, after all, and she even looked it now, the red and raw, big-featured look of the country woman. She was angry most of the time. His father had cautioned him against marrying an uneducated woman. There would be "no community of purpose," were his words, and Meagher understood them now.

He sat a long time in the little verandah chair that he had made from saplings and thought about what she had said. It seemed to him that in her small experience of the larger world she could not understand that this kind of pretense was in fact the coin of the realm. The humility of saints might be practiced in cloisters or in heaven. But here, if you want to get on, you must claim what you can. A _cul de sac_ it was. No way to explain it to her. He sat blankly staring into the dark, hearing the sound of small waves on the shore until it came to him that she was right. He had done nothing at all, nothing but talk and posture. Meagher of the words. This was a truth that had been always in his mind. He saw now that he had been holding it in with great effort, like holding back a flood. It burst on him now and came over him like filthy water, revulsion so strong it brought the bile to his mouth. Mouthing the phantasmal hopes of the miserable, because they will cheer: a pathetic confidence game. There is only one thing for it, he thought at last. The Smith O'Brien solution: off to America and start a career. Enough of being Irish. He would escape, like McManus. He would read the law in New York. He would have a career like his father's, be a person of consequence.

Catherine had gone to bed. He undressed in the dark and got into bed beside her. Her breathing quieted; she was awake. "I have decided to leave this place," he said.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"I think you did. In any event, you were right, but I cannot correct my mistakes here. New York, a career in the law, possibly politics, is what I intend. I will make arrangements for you to come when I can. Tomorrow you must leave the cabin."

The next day he paid a visit to William Hall and arranged for her to stay with him for a time. His two Irish sailor friends of the O'Brien episode were still in Hobart Town. The two men were to hire passage on a ship that would be sailing through the northern islands. The main sea lanes passed just a mile off the coast of an uninhabited dot of land, a place where ships took on fresh water called Waterhouse Island. He would head for the north coast where he would wait at its northern tip. The ship would send its longboat for him.

"A ship for any land of liberty, one not under British control. Do you know what that means? It means not Australia, not India, not Shanghai or Hong Kong, or Singapore; nowhere in Asia. Find one headed for America, north if you can, or south. Do you understand?"

"Perfect. In fact there's Cap'n Betts in port now, of the _Elizabeth Thompson_ , be sailin' this fortnight for London."

Meagher dropped his head into his hands.

"Now, not to get us wrong, sir. I know ye doesn't want to be goin' to London," Courtney said as Casey wheezed with mirth, his pink tongue appearing too large for his toothless mouth. "But she'll put in at Pernambuco to take on sugar for the New York and Boston leg. Takes teak to Pernambuco, sugar to New York and Boston, tobacco to London and back to Melbourne and Hobart Town with manufactures. _Elizabeth Thompson_ , she's a right ship, ain't she, Casey?"

"A right enough ship, yessir. Cap'n Bett. Bett be a fair man. Pare da lash, not as dat would ply to you, sir. And he's good wit the Irish, he is. Modder was Irish. Put Tom True in iron for calling me a shotten Mick."

"A what?"

"A shotten Mick, sir," Courtney answered.

"You rec'lect Tom True? Spent the night in iron, he did, calling 'em a shotten Mick. Cap'n Bett. It's a good berth. It is. Right enough."

"Where the devil is Pernambuco?" Meagher asked, cutting off Marky's gummy ramblings.

"Pernambuco?" Casey asked, obviously surprised at his ignorance.

"Right on the hump of Brazil," Courtney answered.

"The nipple on her tit," Casey offered, his face crinkling again to a toothless grin.

At the district office he handed in his ticket of leave in person, with a note: "After 12 o'clock tomorrow noon, I shall no longer consider myself bound by the obligation which _parole_ imposes. In the meantime, however, should you conceive it your duty to take me into custody, I shall, as a matter of course, regard myself as wholly absolved from the restraint which my word of honor to your Government at present inflicts."

Having deposited Catherine at Dr. Hall's house and Marcus back at his mother's hotel, with a purse of money for each, Meagher returned to the cottage and waited. It took most of the day for the police to respond, and Meagher knew why. The chief was one Tim Clancy, a good friend of his, who would no doubt be as dilatory as possible, giving him every chance to escape. He smiled to think of the shenanigans old Tim would be up to, but he waited. He felt honor bound to escape under the conditions he had posited: a man not under ticket-of-leave, escaping the British police. He mounted his gray mare and rode into the wood behind the cottage. When the police had come into the yard and their leader, who was not Tim Clancy, had dismounted and gone to the door, he rode out of the wood in full view of them and shouted, "I am Tom Meagher. Arrest me if you can," and galloped off down the road. He heard laughter and whoops of celebration from the police. They did not pursue.

Rain. Casey and Courtney had taken him out to Waterhouse Island on a borrowed skiff and stayed with him for two rainy nights, camped in the close quarters of a leaking well house. They had taken turns watching for the _Elizabeth Thompson_ but had seen no ship at all. They were running low on food, so Meagher dismissed them on the third day.

"We'll look in on you in a week. Make sure you've got off proper." Courtney offered.

"No. Thank you. Check in a year. If you find my skeleton give it a proper burial."The men had laughed reluctantly.

"I know Bett," said Casey. He'd right enough. If he said he'd coming, he's coming right enough. It's the loading. The cargo don't always come right on time."

Meagher watched through the rain for two days, during which only one ship passed within view, a great four-masted clipper bearing no resemblance to the _Elizabeth Thompson_ , a two-masted freighter. He sat under the mackintosh his father had given him for the voyage out. The rain pelted down so heavily on the second day that he could barely see to water's edge. It let up toward evening, giving way to a churning and opaque fog. Trying to see through it hour upon hour gave him a feeling of lightheaded unreality. He ached in every joint from sleeping on the well house floor with two damp blankets, but he finally gave way to fatigue and curled up in the corner for a third night of fitful sleep. Betts would never find the island in this. Would he stand out in the channel and wait for it to lift? Or would he find the fate of one lone passenger not worth delaying a shipload of precious teak and head for open seas and clear weather? Meagher's supply of broth and cheese would last only another day. Bugger it all, he thought. If I die here, so be it.

He awoke at some indeterminate hour of the morning and lay awake for hours waiting for light. He imagined Catherine's body, and the erotic glow it gave him diminished the cold a little. She had a good body, especially the great breasts. Pernambuco. The tits of Brazil. She was always slapping his hands away. Too damned Catholic for any leisurely pleasure. Still, she received a good fucking willingly enough, those little gasping sounds in his ear; she put her mouth to his ear so he could hear them. She knows a lot she doesn't say. Gives the warmth in the blood that makes life worth something. He tried adjusting his blankets, but they were too wet to give warmth. Thank God for tits, without which I'd freeze to death. Thoughts of Catherine gradually gave way to colder thoughts of his failures. Twenty-eight now. Lots of time. He would turn away from the romance of Ireland. One foot ahead of the other, one step, then another. It was possible with all his academic success. To hell with all things Irish. Even Dan O'Connell had died in failure, his pleas for famine relief laughed at in Parliament. Ill, defeated, he died traveling to Rome. And that passes for an Irish success story. Bugger it. And double that for all things English. By the end of this year I'll be dead or American, he thought, a little comforted, and dozed off again.

His food ran out, and on his fifth day on Waterhouse Island he picked mussels from the rocks and clams from under the rocks. The rain had finally stopped and the fog thinned a little so he could see a quarter-mile or so out to sea. The wood was too wet to light, however, except for the rotten wooden cover to the well, which he broke apart to make a fire. He wrapped the mussels and clams in seaweed as he had done many times as a boy in Waterford, and placed them at the edge of the fire until the familiar odor told him they were ready to eat.

Upon this fire he threw pieces of sodden driftwood which hissed for a half hour and then burned. This fire he kept going for the balance of his ten days on the Island, until he awoke one morning at sunrise to find the apparition he had almost ceased hoping for: the prow of the _Elizabeth Thompson_ looming up, a boat with an oarsman being lowered down her side.
2

Coffin Ship

March 1849

The small hotel room was cold and filthy, so Sean Gillespie took his duffel to the lobby where there was a smoldering turf fire and spent a fitful night nodding on a wooden chair that creaked with his every move. He was elated, having waited a year for this berth, a year of selling papers and doing odd jobs, and finally about to sail. Americky bound. At first light he rose, stretched the kinks out of his back, and went round the side of the building to piss. About to undo his trouser buttons, he noticed that there were people sitting against the side of the building, two of them wrapped in blankets with only their eyes showing and a man in an overcoat and cap. They could have been watching him, but in the dim light he could not tell whether their eyes were open or shut. They could hardly have slept much in that cold. He walked farther down the close to a respectful distance.

He got a drink from the pump in the town square and ate a bit of biscuit he had in his pocket. He walked a steep cobbled street down to the pier. Two brindled cats prowled about the pilings looking for fish scraps. The ship had arrived. He walked out on the pier and looked down at its deck. The lettering on its longboat read Sir Henry Pottinger. Some English toff making his fortune on four-pound voyages, one more benefit to Brittania from this poor starving country.

"That's a fine ship, there," said an old man puffing a clay pipe.

"Seems to float, anyway," answered Sean.

A coffin ship. He had heard about them. They were named for the coffin-sized wooden bunks in the steerage, shelves three feet wide, stacked five and six high, that you were supposed to sleep on. Also named for the corpses that went over the side each trip. Sickly, starving Irish, they died everywhere, the one thing they were good at. An old people, as Meagher had said. And Meagher off to Van Diemen's Land. Sentenced to live on someone else's land for life, but that was the same as at home.

A rope hung across the entrance to the gangplank. He leaned his bag against a pile end and sat on the old splintered planks of the wharf and looked out to the greasy, calm water of Queenstown Harbor, as it was called now, its dull green shading to pewter out among the low hills toward the sea. The ship, the sails of its two masts furled, its two smokestacks cold, stood as still as the pier. There were a dozen or so other passengers on the wharf, small black mounds against the railing, sleeping. A few gulls wheeled overhead and one landed, but apparently sensed life in these still forms and flew off at once. He was near the gangplank and would have nearly first pick of coffins. "Take a top berth," O'Leary had told him. "There'll be seasickness and diarrhea. There is an advantage in being above it all. Stay alive. You've done well at it so far. Maybe you're under a charm. Born with the caul, perhaps."

And it was O'Leary who had done him the great favor of getting him on a ship that left for America from an Irish port. Most who were leaving for America had to go first to Liverpool as deck passengers on a steam packet. "They go on the open deck, in the rain as often as not, and arrive twenty or thirty hours later as wet as if they had swum, their teeth chattering with the chill. And in Liverpool there are runners, gangs of toughs who steal the baggage. Right out of their grip they take it and it's gone, the food for the whole trip and whatever else they had packed. All the treasures of their lives gone. For some the voyage ends right there. They're stuck in Liverpool working whatever kind of navvy work they can get to survive. The ones who continue must wait days or weeks sometimes till their ship leaves. And, days out of Liverpool, after all that, off to starboard there's Ireland again. Nearly dead with traveling, some of them literally dead with it, buried in the Irish sea farther from America than they begun, and now the survivors back where they started. The ship you're taking will be bad enough, but when you're at the worst of it remember the poor devils who had to go on the Liverpool packet. And you're to go directly to the Tammany bus when you arrive. It's at the pier every day to take the new men to their new homes."

It was cold, but, resting against the piling with his duffel under his legs to guard against its being stolen, Sean nodded in and out of sleep. He thought of the good horsehide blanket in his duffel along with five pounds of oatmeal, a little good lean ham to be eaten cold. He was too sleepy to take the blanket out of the duffel. In his dream Millicent was speaking to him calmly in a sad, wilting voice. _And did the horses ever harm you? What sense does that make? Think of them dying like that in fire._ And O'Leary's voice: _Burn out their nests if you would be rid of them. Ireland cannot free herself except by inflicting pain. Pain so great that they will flee as from angry bees. If you shrink from that you will be a slave forever._ He had repeated those words to himself many times but still did not feel sure about what he had done.

People began to come onto the pier. He rose and stood at the barrier. There was activity on deck now. It appeared they would be boarding soon.

Sean watched three crew members on the deck heft one provision barrel after another and put it back in the same place. They had lifted several when they came upon one that seemed heavier than the others. This one they tipped on its side and then up on its other end. They stood back and watched for a minute. The barrel began to move of itself, rocking to and fro and finally tipping on its side. A violent pounding came from within until the head of the barrel shattered and amid an explosion of white flour a pair of broganed feet shot out. This was followed by the emergence of a very floury fellow spluttering and gasping for air. Two of the crew members took the stowaway by collar and britches and frog-marched him onto the pier. The crew members slapped their jackets to get rid of the flour.

"Shake out your coat when you're home. Ye can make a loaf of bread," a man shouted from the deck.

After they had inverted the remaining barrels and looked in the various hiding places on and below decks, they lowered the barrier and, checking tickets carefully, permitted the paying passengers to board.

One great red-faced fellow, above six feet tall and obviously drunk, was arguing with the ticket man. "I've lost me ticket," the man bawled. "It was in me throwsers and now it's gone. I've been robbed."

It took two sailors to keep him from forcing his way onto the ship. A stout gray-haired woman, who looked out of place among these half-starved emigrants, shouted at the man in anger. "Shame on ye, Des Murphy, for a bald face liar. And him after selling his ticket and drinking it up all the night. I'll not be a party of silence to your connivin'" She was comical in her forcefulness for such a short person.

On deck a sailor waved his arms, trying to get a family of five barefoot peasants who had headed forward to go below. The youngest child screamed in terror while the others stood uncomprehending. The woman who had scolded Des Murphy came up to the sailor. "Sure they have no English so stop your palaverin' and let me say a thing to them." She spoke to them in Irish and after a minute persuaded them to join the crowd slowly going down the hatchway. "How they're ever going to survive in America and not a word among them." She shook her head at their prospects.

The steerage was illuminated only by the open hatch and a few skylights, pieces of thick glass inserted into the decking above. Children squalled in the dark and frightened adult voices shouted. The narrow aisles between bunks formed a dark maze. Sean, being among the first to board, slung his duffel up into a bunk near the ladder, climbed up and stretched out. He could not see out through the hatchway, but his spot got a little of the light from it. The bunk was a little too short for him, but they were probably all of a length. A man asked him if he would exchange for another bunk so his family could be together, but it was not a top bunk and Sean refused.

The pushing crowds of people getting themselves and their things situated got worse, and for a long time an especially bedraggled and dirty fellow with sunken eyes and a large hooked nose stood with his face a few inches from Sean's, clutching a carpet bag to his chest. His teeth were rotted, and even through the strong odor of the compartment, Sean could smell his stinking breath. People shoved by him, but he remained motionless.

"Hadn't you better find a bunk?" Sean asked him.

He looked straight into Sean's face, but it was clear that he was not really looking at anything. Sean put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. "You had better find a bunk. They'll be all gone." The man looked each way and then slowly pushed off. Other faces passed. Blank apprehension. One more thing coming. No knowing what. "Sure, I've never been on the water before in me life," a woman said, and when there was no reply to this, she repeated it twice. A family nearby was noisily settling in, the woman shouting instructions to her son, "Declan, bring the other sack here. Come here, Declan. Bring the other sack here. Declan, do you have the other sack? Then bring it here. Come, Declan."

After a long while the ship's steam engine gave a chuff that sounded below decks like an explosion, and then another. In mid-harbor the engine stopped. All passengers were mustered on deck and their tickets inspected again. The process went on for a long while as crewmen went from passenger to passenger, carefully examining each ticket. Four stowaways, three men and a woman were discovered and put on a small boat with two uniformed policemen. The engines began again and they were underway.

Sean stayed on deck to watch the ship navigate the long, winding waterway with green hills on either side. Others also remained on deck, taking a last look at the country, and some were visibly moved. An older woman near him was crying, dabbing her eyes with a tightly wadded handkerchief, but Sean felt nothing of the sort.

Two sailors, one obviously drunk, worked at coiling the ship's lines on the deck. The drunken sailor repeatedly picked up the heavy rope and fumbling, dropped it again. On a sudden impulse, Sean walked up to the sober one and asked, "Could you use another deck hand on the voyage?"

The sailor, a short man with a pot belly and a bald pate, kept working. "I can give a good day's work." He straightened up after another minute, but looked angry at being interrupted. "Has th' ought of ship's work bifore?"

Sean recognized the Liverpool accent. "I have not, but if you will tell me what to do I can learn it quickly."

"And what would th' want in tally for this service?"

"Somewhere to sleep out of that." He indicated the square hatch to the steerage deck, its ladder leading down into the dark.

The man finished coiling his rope. When he had finished he indicated the large coil on the deck. "Put that'n in the locker, then," he said.

Sean removed the peg from the hasp and opened the locker. There was a pile of curiously knotted rope and two cans of lamp oil in the bottom, which he took out and placed on the deck. He hooped his arms around the coil of rope. It was heavy, but, trying to conceal the effort it cost him, with a great heave he just managed to get it in the locker. He reached in and straightened it as best he could and placed the two cans of lamp oil in the center and the knotted rope on top. He closed the lid and replaced the peg in the hasp.

"Not bad, but don't be leavin' the peg on the deck as ye did. Sea's up you'll lose it. Put it in th' pocket," the man said, patting his jacket pocket. The drunken sailor had sat down on the deck and then tipped over sideways and lay curled up. His comrade tried to get him to stand but without success. Sean bent down to help, but the fellow would not budge. "Let 'im be, then," said the other, and he walked away to the rear deck where steerage passengers were not allowed.

Well, it was worth a try, thought Sean. He walked forward to the bow where two privies had been hastily constructed of scrap lumber. A few women waited to use them. Not far from these was a fireplace of sorts, a rectangular arrangement of bricks with a low wall on three sides in which sat an iron grate about four feet wide.

As the ship left the harbor it began to roll and there was a sound from the steerage hatch, a collective moan of apprehension. Sean felt it, too. The sensation of the floor below you going all liquid was alarming. Within an hour the rails were crowded with people being sick. "Don't go down there," said a young woman with lots of loose blond hair blowing in her face, indicating the hatch. Sean was sure he had seen her somewhere. "The stink will soon have you in the same way as those." She indicated the unfortunates at the rail.

"I've no intention of going down there, not even to sleep. I've a good stout jacket and a good blanket. I'll stay above in the air."

They and other passengers on the crowded deck watched as the crew hoisted the sails. One fellow had climbed to the top of the mainmast to untie the sail and hung on with one hand as he leaned out and worked with the other, the ship rolling all the while. "Ayy," she cried, watching the man. "That's a remarkable thing, now."

He remembered. "Weren't you from Mularkey's?"

She laughed and nodded assent. "I am that. Kate is what they call me. Were you a customer, then? I don't remember you."

"I was once or twice. I came in with John O'Leary and his friends. Terence McManus, Tom Meagher."

"You knew them?"

"Not well. I was off to join them at Ballingarry, but it was over before I got there."

"Ah, the great rising. Sure, we've had greater battles in the pub." She appeared about to laugh but held back out of sympathy.

"Right. It wasn't much of a revolution. The French are much better at these things. The police hid in a widow's house where there were five children, and dared us to attack." Alibis just make it worse. Let it go. "And so, we're off to Americky. What set you off on this?"

"Just tired of Mularkey's. Cleaning up vomit from the stocious."

"So, you came here to get away from the vomit." They both laughed. She was an attractive woman, not slender, and she had a little chip in one of her front teeth, but surely natural enough. Clear green eyes. She looked for a moment the way she had a year ago, flirting with Meagher in the pub on Sean's first night in Dublin. It would indeed make the voyage go faster, he told himself, if he could strike up a friendship with her.

"I saw you hauling that hawser like a deck hand. Are you a sailor?"

"Ah, no." In fact, he was feeling a bit queasy from the motion. Concentrate on those green eyes, it will pass, he told himself. "He was just after asking for a bit of help. Hawser. Is that what that rope is?"

"It's what they tie the ship up with. Lots of sailors come in to Mularkey's. It's my first voyage, but I've heard all about sailing for years. You're beginning to look a bit pale. Are you all right?"

"Not exactly. It's my first voyage as well."

"Look off at the horizon. I'll rub the back of your neck. Did you know, even sailors get this."

"No. I thought they'd be . . . " He left off.

"Does this feel good?"

"Yes."

"Are you better now?" she asked after a minute.

He vomited suddenly on the deck.

After a time at the railing, getting rid of the meager breakfast he had eaten, Sean sat in an inconspicuous place on the foredeck between some low boxes used for storage of equipment and cradled his head on his knees. Kate sat on one of the boxes. After a time he looked up, and they watched the coast of Ireland pass.

"It's a lovely country if you don't have to live in it," she said.

"Are you sad at all to be leaving?" he asked.

"I've been counting the days till I could get out. Are you?"

"No. I wish I'd been able to do it sooner. I don't know what other countries are, but I'm thinking they can be no worse than that." He nodded toward the misty hills across the water. "Did you not have family, then?"

"I have family aplenty. Four brothers and a father, useless jackeens the lot of them. Trying to live by cadging off of my poor wages. I'm well out of that."

"And your mother?"

"Ah, my mother. She'll have the lot of them to look after now. Maybe there's a reward in heaven. It's a poor, blighted place where the men can't stand on their two feet and look after themselves."

"Ah. You've got me when I'm down."

"Ach, faix, I didn't mean you." She laughed, enjoying herself. The motion apparently had no effect on her. "And what did you do when you were standing, then?"

"I was a stable boy when I was younger and I've worked a little in a newspaper and I've been a soldier, of sorts."

"And how old are you?"

"Eighteen," he said. He had just turned sixteen, but his beard had begun these past six months and was coming in black and straight like that of an older man.

"That's my age."

He looked up at her, sitting cross-legged, swinging her foot. Apparently she believed him.

By mid-afternoon the land was out of sight. The gulls that had followed in the ship's wake had gone and there was nothing in view now but the swells and whitecaps of the sea, gray and cold-looking as gun metal. The day did not warm, but sailing downwind, the air on deck was fairly still. Toward evening a bell sounded and the first ration of ship's biscuit was distributed by sailors carrying gunny bags. Sean could not eat his. Kate took it below to put in his bag for him and then went up to the privies. "The privy is already dirty as a pig sty," she told him. "If you aren't sick when you go in there you will be when you come out."

Did you get sick, then?"

"A little. It was only the smell of that foul thing. I'll have to find another way. I'll not go in there again."

"Just wait till it's dark and hang yourself over the side."

"You could do that if you could get to the stern, but that's the captain's quarters. That's why the privy is in the bow."

Sean felt no better as the day went along. It was necessary for him to stay still. He sat in the same place through the long evening, talking a little with Kate, letting her talk mostly. She had a position with a wealthy New York family, but the rules were that for her first three months she would not be allowed to leave the house. After that, if she proved satisfactory in her work, she would have Sunday afternoons off from one o'clock until an hour before dark. Sean told her of his situation with the Tammany organization. He did not know what kind of work he would be doing, only that the interests and businesses of Tammany were widespread.

As it was growing dark, a crew member came along shouting, "All below decks. Return to your berths." It was the same fellow that Sean had hauled the hawser for.

Sean forced himself to stand and approach the fellow. "Look, I've got a half crown for a special berth."

"There aiden't any special berths. Get below. Go on. Can't sleep on decks. Cap'n makes a reg'lar tour. Decks must be clear of passengers at night. That is the rules."

"There's a special berth up there." Sean pointed to a lifeboat hanging overhead.

The sailor laughed. "How are th' to get up there?"

"I'll get up there. And I'll come down before dawn so the captain doesn't know." Sean held the half-crown before the man's face.

Taking the coin, the sailor said, "Wait till it's good and dark, then. Tie the tarpaulin down arter ye get in. Ye get caught, that's the end on't. I know naught about it. Ye'll probably fall off the bloody boom and break your bloody neck. If ye do, kindly throw yourself over the side and save us the trouble."

Sean and Kate walked forward together and watched a sailor douse the cooking fire with a large bucket of seawater. There were loud protests from some who had not had a turn to cook their evening meal.

Negotiating with the sailor had been good for him. He felt better than he had since morning. "Well, there's room for two in that," he said, leaning an elbow on the rail.

She laughed. "Ah, so that's your game, is it? Well, you get the credit for ingenuity, at any rate." She began to walk aft and he followed.

"Kate McGowan, me intentions are honorable, for the moment at least. And as for that, you'll be a lot closer to the nearest strange male down there than you'll ever need to be up above. You in the one end and me in the other. Perfectly decent."

"And you'll negotiate from there."

"And me nearly dead from the seasickness. Ye've little to fear, I'm thinkin,' from the likes of me, Katie."

"Katie, is it? And I thinking all the time what a quiet and modest fellow you were. Well, I'll come up if I can, but it'll be as you say, me fore and you aft, and there we'll stay. Agreed?"

"Agreed. Certainly."

"And how are we to get up?"

"In that chest with the hawser there's a bit of rope we might use. We'll wait first for it to get a bit darker. Let's go below and get our belongings."

"We'll not give up our berths below," she said. "Tell the people around you that they may use your berth for storage until you come back, but that they're to preserve it for you against your coming back."

Kate's berth was only fifteen paces from the hatch but it took her a long while to get her bag. Below decks it was nearly impossible to move with people getting themselves into their little boxes. The air was close and foul smelling with vomit. When they returned to the deck it was dark. Sean found the hawser locker, took the knotted rope and coiled it about his waist.

"Can you tie a good knot?" he asked her.

"I can. A good bowline. The sailors taught me."

"Good. You'll be needing that skill in a minute."

A couple of lanterns near the rails failed to illuminate the boom. The lifeboat was secured by ropes which were wound around two cleats at the side of the vertical. Sean managed to pull himself up and get a leg over the lowest one, after which getting up to the horizontal boom was easy. As he began to crawl out toward the boat, straddling the boom, the ship rolled so that he had to hug the boom with arms and legs. During the time his head was below his feet all he could do was hang on. In three rolls of the ship he managed to reach the boat. He dropped down onto the tarpaulin. It took him a long time of fumbling with cold fingers to untie three of the lashings which tied the tarpaulin to the gunwale and get enough of an opening to get into the boat. He pulled the canvas back and squeezed in feet first, tumbling in onto a stack of loose lumber. He lay still a minute, then began pushing the boards about to make a level surface. It was difficult in the dark and he made little progress. In moving the boards about he had heard the clanking of metal pots. The longboat was a storage bin for lumber and other odds and ends.

The boat was fairly deep. In the middle there was space for him to sit upright. He unwound the rope from his waist and tied one end around a large plank.

He got his head through the opening and looked down to the deck. "Are you still there?" he called.

"I am."

"Here's the rope coming down. Tie your bag to it."

She did this and he raised it and squeezed it in through the opening. After raising his own in the same fashion he lowered the rope again. "Can you climb this, using the knots?"

"No," she said up to him. "I could never do that."

"Tie it around your middle then with a good bowline knot."

She tied the rope.

"Is it a good knot?"

"It is."

He pulled as hard as he could till he was able to get a knot over the gunwale. The lifeboat tilted and swayed with the weight. Things began to look a little dubious. Still, using the knot's purchase to renew his grip, he pulled again and got another knot over the gunwale. He did it a third time, which coincided with a downward roll of the ship. She screamed in terror. "Ahh, put me down, put me down again, for God's sake."

As the ship righted, he looked over the side. "What is it?"

"Ah, it swung me clear over the side and me with nothing but ocean below. It scared the life of me. I'm shaking all over with it. You'll have me drownded. Put me down again. I'll go below."

"I thought you said it was a good knot."

"It _is_ a good knot."

Well, then, you've nothing to fear. Hang on."

He got in three more heaves before it rolled again, so the next roll she did not go so far out. Still, she cried out a little. He waited till the ship righted, gave two more heaves and she was able to grab the gunwale. She came in through the opening head first, the boat swung and they both tumbled to the far side. She scrambled to a sitting position and pummeled him with both fists.

"Ya blatherin' eejit. Stupid . . ." She punched him again. "I'll have the livers out of ya. Ow. Oh." With the swinging of the boat she had missed, struck wood with her fist. Then she lay exhausted for a minute.

"I've some candles in my bag. I'll just make us a bit of light." He busied himself fumbling in his bag for the candles and the matches. He lit the candle, dripped wax on a board and stuck the candle in it. "Ah, isn't that splendid now, how it lights up the whole boat. We have our own private stateroom."

After a silence, she said, "When I said put me down you had no right to go on pulling me up."

He made no answer but began arranging the lumber, trying to make a flat surface.

"Pulling me into your boat like a bleeding mackerel." She was arranging her clothing on herself as best she could. "What's that? Laughing is it?"

He laughed a bit aloud and then more. "With nothing but water below you, you wanted me to put you down? Think about that a minute."

"I'll knock you for a goal." She kicked his backside, but she began to laugh, too, and he leaned back finally and laughed till tears came. She was wiping tears, too, he saw. His sickness was completely gone now.

"We'll have to find a better way tomorrow," she said finally.

"The boat can be lowered," he said, "but I'd never be able to raise it again. Maybe you can learn to climb up like I did."

It was an uncomfortable place to sleep. The various sizes of the boards made it impossible to make a flat surface. The edges were sharp and they ended sitting with their backs against the side. In the night the wind died and at first light there was the sound of the engine chuffing.

Sean untied a couple of the lashings on the seaward side of the boat and they poked their heads out together. There was a rim of sunrise off behind the ship and ahead still a few stars visible in the sky. The emptiness of the great expanse made them quiet.

"I suppose we'd better be getting out of this before it gets any lighter," Sean said.

"I'm thinking maybe I'll just stay in it."

"Stay in it? All day?"

"Yes. I'll lower one of these and you help me get some water in it." She indicated one of the rusty pots, left behind, no doubt, by previous travelers.

"Do you have any food?"

"I've a ham and a good number of pickled eggs in a jar and a good loaf of bread and a jar of water. I'll be right for weeks."

"What about, ah, the privy?"

"One of those pots will do for a chamber pot. We can pull a bit of this back." She indicated the seaward side of the tarpaulin. "That will give me a bit of air and light."

"On the ship side it must stay down. After I'm out, pull the lashes through so they'll look tied. And you'll have to stay still or move easy like, so that boat doesn't swing too much on its ropes. If the captain finds we're here, we'll be evicted like the poor tenants of Connaught and sent back to hell."

"Bring another jar of water this night when you come back."

He took the army canteen O'Leary had given him and slung it round his neck. Looking up and down the deck he saw only a couple of other early rising passengers far forward. He eased himself over the side of the boat and dropped five feet to the deck.

"And did th' pass the night well?" asked a Liverpool voice.

Sean, startled, turned. "Tolerably well, yes."

"And the lady?"

"The lady?"

The sailor laughed, a quiet wheezing sound. "The lady I saw go in petticoats a-flying last evening."

Sean made no answer.

"I must remind th' that the fare for special berth in the larboard longboat is half crown per the passage."

Sean dug in his pocket, found another half crown and gave it to the sailor.

The sailor bit the half crown, slid it into his jacket pocket with a wink. "And, of course, the odd detail of work as I may assign."

"Of course. I'd like a bit of work. It would make the time go faster."

To this the sailor gave a sideways twist to his head which seemed to indicate reservations on the subject. "And is the lady good company, then?" he asked with a wink.

"The lady is not a subject for discussion, sir. And I would trouble you for a bit of one of those rope ladders as I see all about on the masts."

This request made the sailor laugh. "There be no extra ladders be lyin' about for the use of the steerage passengers, not even for those with the deluxe accommodations."

"Would there be for another half-crown?"

"Ah, well, in that case I could ask about. Investigate, so to say. Mought be a bit of an old one not in use somewheres about." He held out his hand.

"Payment on delivery," Sean said, and walked slowly up to the bow. He wondered if Kate would be "good company" in the sailor's sense. A bar girl from Dublin, she couldn't be entirely innocent, could she? She had looked to be on very friendly terms with Meagher. And she had been easy enough about sharing the boat with him. She would wait for him to make the first move. And she would think him a gooney if he didn't, and soon. Not that he didn't want to, but there was a quaking whenever he thought about it. He remembered Meagher's easy laughter about his exploits. "She flipped about like a salmon on a spear," he had said one night, to general laughter from the boys. To be that easy about it. Meagher of the sword, the English writer Thackeray had called him. That had taken the meaning of a private joke among his friends. All of his thrusts at the one target, Duffy had said. And O'Leary's rejoinder: he has the "s" misplaced. Never held a sword in his life. He only talks about swords. He's Meagher of the words, more like. And now he's in Van Diemen's Land on the far side of the planet and there to stay, it seems. _For the remainder of your earthly life_ , the sentence had read. O'Leary had not said whether the rising had changed his opinion. If it could be called a rising. They had done what they could. And that turned out to be not much.

People were coming on deck from steerage. The stout woman who had helped the family with no English was bathing a half-dozen children in a great tub of seawater. A couple of sailors looked on, enjoying the fun the children were having. Presently, when the children had bathed, the two used the tub of water to mop the deck. Sean watched the line at the cooking fire. The sailor in charge of it was collecting pennies from the passengers and jotting names on a card which he held in his palm. When a pot of potatoes had come to the boil he ordered it off the fire and called the name of the next in line. There was much grumbling among the passengers at this system.

A length of ladder was indeed forthcoming. About midday, the bald sailor tucked it under Sean's arm and held out his palm for payment. "Pull one o' the loose ends at the top through the oar lock and knot it to the other one. Understand?" He put his thumb on Sean's forehead and pressed. "Yes. I understand. Tie them together." For the rest of the day Sean carried it about with him or sat on it, leaning against a locker. He would wait until night, when the decks were cleared, to try it. If the other passengers discovered their special berth some would want to join them. He meant, for the duration of this trip, to be a sort of low-order aristocracy. The real aristocracy were the cabin passengers whom he saw from time to time strolling the after deck in their fine clothes. They had paid twenty pounds and more for their cabins. His steerage berth had cost three pounds ten. With a few half-crowns extra he would make it as comfortable as he could.

When it was dark he walked back to where the boat hung. He could see a bit of light coming from under the tarpaulin. He gave a low halloo, and another. The light was extinguished and Kate raised the canvas and looked out.

"Here, catch this. Ready?" He tried to hurl an end of the ladder up to her, but made a bad throw. "Here it comes again." On the third toss she got it. He told her how to tie it to the oarlock. "One of your good knots, now." The bottom of the ladder came well short of the deck but he was able to pull himself up. He was in the boat in no time and pulled the ladder up. The bottom of the boat was now a perfectly flat floor.

"Well, this is quite a thing," he said, feeling the surface. How did you ever do that?"

"I spent most of the day on it. It's all a matter of arrangement. Putting the thin ones over the fat ones."

"You have done a wondrous thing indeed. We have a house. And with a better floor than the one I came from in County Sligo. Shall we get married, then?"

"Hold your horses, me boyo. Is that water you've got there?"

He handed her the canteen, which she used to refill her water jar. "And what's the news from the outer world, then, man of the house?"

"The biscuit is already hard as stones. It must be left over from the last trip. It couldn't have gotten so hard and us just a day out. And the decks are crowded all day because it is so bad below with the stink and the tiny berths. The ship is carrying hides in its hold and they have a stink and then the two privies at the bow are all there are for four hundred passengers and more. So the children and some others have found a way down into the hold and have been using that." He lay down full length on the new, flat floor and took a breath. "Altogether, you're better off in here."

"And how many days are they saying now for the voyage?"

"Thirty-five if all goes well."

"Thirty-four remaining. Look at this." She held the candle near the side and showed him where someone had marked the days. "Someone before us has crossed in this boat. Seventeen days marked. You know they didn't get across in that time. Something happened after seventeen days."

"A storm, maybe, or the fever."

She cut them some ham and bread and they ate without speaking, passing the water jug.

"So," she said when he had finished, "you came from a place that had only dirt for a floor."

"Yes. It was all any of them had on our road."

"And the pigs and the chickens all inside of it with you."

"When we had pigs and chickens. With so many hungry they would be stolen if they were left out."

"And where are your people now?"

"All dead of the hunger. Three years ago, nearly." This was not the conversation he had imagined all day. It would not lead to the sort of night he had been hoping for—and fearing.

"Ah, that's a desperate thing. And so you joined the Fenians for revenge."

He thought a minute. "Not just that."

"What, then?"

"It seems to me we need to get the landlords out and own our land. There was no need for the hunger if we had been allowed to keep the crops we raised in the country."

"And so you thought to drive them out by force of arms."

"Ah, I hear the mockery. No, there's no way we can think of beating the English in battle. O'Leary's idea is to make them so miserable with defending themselves that they will eventually see the wisdom of leaving. We're to be as great a bother as we can to them."

"Ah, I see. Like bedbugs."

He made no answer.

"Ach, I'm a terrible person, entirely. I've wounded your feelings. You may be right for all I know. Here, have this."

The food was fresh and wonderful. Afterward she came and sat by him. "Put your arm around us, would you? It's freezing."

He took the horse blanket from his duffel. "Let's get under this. It's a very warm thing." He wrapped the heavy blanket around them and put his arm around her. "How's that, now, Katie MacGowan?"

"That's just fine, Sean Gillespie. It is a warm blanket. But let me tell you now, in case you have any ideas, that there'll be none of your malarkey. Warmth and a secure place to sleep is all we're up to here."

"My malarkey? And where did you get such an idea of me and my malarkey?"

"You are a male of the species. That's ground sufficient. And a friend of Thomas Meagher and he notorious for it."

"I am a wee shy lad from the hills of Connaught. Not notorious on any count. Give us a kiss and we'll lie down and go to sleep."

"You'll get no kiss. Here, I'll fold up my little blanket for a pillow for the two of us." She did so as she spoke, and she lay down with her back to him. "Come on, then."

He lay down behind her on the smooth planking, blew out the candle and nestled close. He put an arm around her and felt for her breast, but she gave his hand a slap. "None of that, now. Sleep, all right?"

All that woman's hair right before his face, and a woman's body touching his. A woman's warmth and magnetism amazing all the atoms of his body. It was all right. Better than that. And there was infinite hope in that little question, "all right?"

The crowd at the cooking fire was such that Sean and Kate lived on bread and slices of cold ham and pickled eggs for several days. The sea continued moderate for more than a week. Sean saw the bald sailor every day but got no work instructions. Bored from inactivity, he even asked one day whether there was not something for him to do. "Not today. Keep patient. You'll have your fill before we arrive." And night after night he curled up with Kate and slept, or sometimes failed to sleep.

"Tell that little friend of yours it's time to rest now."

"I would, but he never listens to advice."

And, a couple of hours later, "I've never seen the like. Is he really going to stay like that all night?"

"I don't know. You could do something to help him rest, you know."

"I'll do nothing of the kind. Go to sleep."

On a cold early morning twelve days out, the little sailor told him to go below and bring up Colm Smith.

"I don't know who that is," he replied.

"Just go to the forward steerage and ask. They'll tell you. Wrap him in this." The sailor handed Sean a folded piece of old sail canvas.

He took a lantern and made his way forward through the maze and asked a woman huddled on her berth. She pointed without saying anything. There on the bottom berth was a

hook-nose face that looked familiar. It was the man who had stopped, confused, by his berth on the day of embarkation. He was without a doubt dead.

"Are you going to take him up, sir?" the woman asked.

"I am if I can get a good man to help. Is there one about?"

"He was awful quiet this whole time. I was only able to talk with him the once, days ago. His whole family is gone with the hunger and he trying to get away to America, but he didn't have the strength for it. He made sounds, like, in his sleep. I think he was confused in his mind. Patrick Fagin!" she shouted at the top of her lungs.

"It's me, ma, I'm right here," answered a voice from a nearby berth.

"Give a hand here and help this man carry Colm Smith that was up on the deck. And is there anyone to say a word over him? There's no priest on board that I have seen."

Sean spread the canvas on the floor and he and Patrick, a boy of thirteen, perhaps, lifted the man onto it. He was easy to lift, nothing but bones. Like many of the passengers, the man had no shoes. His bare feet were dirty and bruised. "I've seen no priest." Sean wrapped the canvas over the man and the two of them carried him through the steerage and up to the deck, the woman following.

"Take him up by the deck tub then and I'll give him a wash," the woman said. The stout little gray-haired woman who bathed the children every morning was there and together, while the children shouted and splashed in the tub, they undressed the man and carefully sponged him from head to foot. They washed his clothes, too, in the tub and put them on him wet.

"You, then," the woman said peremptorily to Sean, "say an Our Father over him at the least of it before they throw him to the fishes."

"Sit quiet, now," she said to the children. "The man is going to pray. Cory," she admonished one especially noisy young fellow. And the children sat quietly in the tub as Sean stood among the small group that had gathered and in the wind and the wash of the sea said the Paternoster. "Amen," answered a few voices.

"Over he goes, then," said the little sailor. Sean wrapped him again and he and Patrick Fagin carried the body to the rail and dropped it into the sea.

A few days later, in the afternoon, the light turned greenish and ahead lay great piled clouds with black bottoms and gray veils of rain under them. The ship began to buck and toss and the wind came up suddenly. The decks were wet with the spray from waves breaking over the bow. Sailors clambered aloft to take in sail as the rain began. The bald sailor shouted to him over the din of the storm," Get th' missus out of that and go below." He hallooed her and she promptly threw the ladder down. The boat was swinging, but he found that if he pulled hard on the ladder it steadied the whole sufficiently for her to climb down. She was frightened and he shouted, "Come on, now. One foot down. That's it. Again. Right. Keep on. You're all right."

"It looks as if we'll have to stay below for this," he said to her when she was down at last. She would not look up at him. A few big drops splatted on the deck. He climbed up the ladder and tied the tarpaulin down as best he could. Then he climbed up on top and stuffed the ladder back inside. Hanging from the gunwale, he swung down and dropped to the deck.

A sailor stood ready to close the steerage hatch as a few stragglers climbed down into the dark. She hesitated, looking down the hatch. "This will be terrible," she said. The rain was pelting now. They were both soaked. The sailor gestured impatiently. Quickly she went to the hatch and climbed down into the dark. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, but she pulled away and went toward her berth. He stood a while, holding a support post, then tried to climb into his own berth, but it was full of duffel bags. He shouted twice, "Whose bags are these?" but got no answer, so he put them on the floor. He lay a long while with his head on his arm as the storm got worse. He shivered with cold but there was nothing to be done. The blanket was in the longboat.

His sickness returned and he retched over the edge of his berth. The wind and crash of water on the ship and the creaking were loud so that he could not hear much from the passengers. The little spirit lamps were all out now and almost no light came from the bullseyes. The children near him had cried for hours, their choked, terrified voices barely audible in the din, but now they had gone silent. Most of the passengers were silent, but someone near was moaning in a kind of cadence to the ship's tossing. A long groan on the long rise of a swell when everything tilted more and more and the timbers creaked and Sean had to hold on to the little wooden framing piece at the head of the berth to keep from falling. Sometimes a wave broke over the ship and hit the deck with a pounding and it seemed that everything would break up. There was no telling how much time passed. Each ascent, roll, and descent seemed minutes long. It had been hours, certainly. Had it been a day? He heard the sound of someone falling from a berth and then a whimper from the floor. Whoever it was tried several times to get up but always fell again. There must be many on the floor by now. Maybe even someone below him.

He could see nothing. His own hands were aching with the fatigue of hanging on, but the thought of the floor made him grab the edge each time the ship tilted that way. It had to end. It did not end. Let it break, he thought sometimes. Wash me out there into the crashing black with the broken timbers, let my little thoughts loose to swim with the fishes, I am sick of them. There was Kate maybe and America maybe but there was too much of cold sweat. His grip was weakening, he was tired of it. He felt himself slide and grabbed for all he was worth. He had dozed a little. A tremendous crash made the ship shudder with a new intensity. He banged against the back of his berth with an impact that knocked the wind out of him. There was a scream from voices that had thought themselves incapable of another. This is it, he thought. It can't possibly withstand a blow like that. And another. What had been the back of his berth was now nearly under him. He felt the ship, still tipped on its side, rise on a swell. It rose for several seconds. Then it suddenly tossed the other way. He flew from his berth and slammed into the berths opposite, then fell onto bodies in the passageway. The ship righted and he scrambled for the top bunk.

He tasted sticky warm blood in his mouth. A tooth was broken and he had a terrific ache in his thigh where it had hit. The ship rolled and he fell from the bunk again, landing on bodies. He stood, finally, and found a post that he could lock his arms around. The ship continued to rise, roll, descend. Once more it nearly went over, he lying astraddle the post. After a long time it righted and he sank to his knees, still holding the post. He slept and woke. For a long time there were no voices, no one crying or moaning. He slept again. When he awoke the storm seemed to have let up a little. It was back to long creaking rises, pauses, descents. Someone near was talking. He could hear the voice but not what she was saying. He could probably get back in his berth and manage to stay there, but he felt too weak. He needed a drink of water but had no idea where his canteen might be. He rose finally. The pain in his knees made him catch his breath a minute. He found his way to his berth, but the canteen was gone.

"Is my canteen here?" he asked weakly.

"Here it is," a man's voice answered. "For all the good it'll do you."

He shook it. Empty. He climbed into his berth and stretched out. It was no longer necessary to hold on. He slept and woke to light. The hatch was open, the storm over.

He went on deck and found the water barrel. As he was filling the canteen the little sailor with the strange cap approached. "A bad tossing we got, but I see you're up and about."

"I am, but just," Sean replied.

"It's all any of us are, truth be told," the little man answered. "Get a bite of biscuit and a drop of water and when you've got your strength a little there'll be work for th'."

"And what might that be?"

"You're to get an able-bodied man or two to help th', and get them that's dead up."

Sean screwed the top on his canteen and stared at the man.

"The corpses," the man said. "Ye've done one already. There'll be more now. They can't stay below. Get them up and wrap them and over they go. After a blow like that there'll be a dozen, at the least of it."

There were fourteen. Sean and Patrick were most of the day finding them and getting them carried up.

As the days wore on, there were fewer on deck. People lay in their berths all day and night with illness or inanition from hunger and boredom and disgust. Sean watched a man sitting on deck take a bite of the ship's stale biscuit and then stare at the biscuit with loathing, as if hating it for keeping him alive. There were dead to bring up and wrap most days. He and Kate did not go back to the longboat.

Then, one gray day as he came on deck, it was there, near and green and shining: land. There was great commotion as people came onto the deck, many of them hardly able to stand but making some effort at a wave of celebration.

The ship sat several hours in mid-harbor, preparing for the health inspector. The passengers were ordered to throw all bedding and blankets overboard. There was much grumbling at this. What were they to do for bedding in the new land? "Are we to be paid for the value of it?" a woman shouted. "Bother the value of your fleas and rags. Over they go or you'll not get ashore," a ship's officer answered. "The health inspector must pass us for disembarkation. Fortunately for you, he does his job only for the money and is willing to overlook a great deal. But the bedding that has been in steerage these forty-two days has a stink that would send the people of this city running for the countryside if you brought it ashore. Over it goes!" he shouted, walking among the passengers and waving his arms. "Right now! Hurry, hurry, hurry."

Sean quickly stuffed his horse blanket in his duffel, but most complied, and soon the harbor was strewn with a mess of blankets and straw tick mattresses moving off on the swell, a sodden flotilla sinking and diminishing like their hopes but still visible after an hour, floating off toward shore. The steerage was scrubbed by passengers and crew for the only time of the voyage to make it ready for the inspector. When the inspector and his assistant, both in black frock coats and tall hats, finally came alongside in a longboat and boarded, he informed the passengers on deck by means of a megaphone that they were each to pay one dollar and fifty cents, or seven shillings silver, to cover the cost of any possible hospitalization. There were shouts and panic among the passengers. "And what if we haven't got it?" a passenger asked. "You'll not be eligible for hospital. And if you get sick, you'll be left to your own devices. You'll have one week after getting ashore to raise the sum. You must bring it to the city offices in Broad Street, otherwise there'll be no medical care available to you. Now, step up this way one at a time, pay your fee to my assistant who will record your names, and present yourselves to me for physical inspection."

In mid-afternoon, after the masked health inspector had made his inspection, having each passenger stick out his tongue to be looked in the mouth like an auction horse, hold out his hands, answer questions, the ones who passed were allowed to walk across the gangplank to a steamer which would take them ashore. Those who showed signs of the ship's fever or the black fever were sent to a roped-off area on the foredeck. These would be sent to the Staten Island quarantine hospital across the harbor.

The deck of the steamer was loud with runners selling inland steamship tickets. A plump man in a swallow-tail coat and shiny top hat, standing on a storage chest, proclaimed with theatrical gestures, "A ticket to the prosperous city of Schenectady," which he pronounced one syllable at a time, lingering on the last: Ska _neck_ ta dee. "Where gainful employment is plentiful, only two dollars or ten shillings sterling, via first class accommodations on river steamer. Only ten shillings. And to show my good will, ladies and gentlemen of the Emerald Isle, I, Dan Foley of Donegal, will pay, entirely from my own pocket for a deserving family to travel to the thriving and prosperous city of Ska _neck_ ta dee. You, sir." He held his hand out to a lanky fellow with a caved-in mouth who stood holding a child of about two. "And these be your lovely little childers all around you, I presume?" The man gave a slight nod and looked around him. "And your wife, rest her soul in God's bosom, died in passage, I'm told?" The man said nothing. "It's true, ladies and gentlemen. The captain has informed me, this poor man's wife passed away in the dreadful storm these two weeks ago, may the blessed Virgin Mary look over her in heaven. He has five children. Here, sir, is your ticket and five children's tickets for the city of Schenectady by river packet of the Albany line, and here sir, on this sheet of paper is the name and address of an employer who will offer you a position at seven dollars the week, more than enough to support your fine family in luxury. And may God's blessing and the blessed Saint Patrick and Saint Brigit of the travelers go with you and watch over you. Amen. And who among you will buy a ticket now and go along with this worthy man and his lovely childers to make your fortune in the great city of Ska _neck_ ta dee?"

### III

### Americky

1

One of Jimmy O's Boys

May, 1849

America was imminent. Its horses clopped, its carts and drays clattered on the cobbles, its draymen shouted. Its coal fires and its horses made an agreeable stink. The day was cool and cloudy, something like Irish weather, in fact, but for something lighter, less substantial, about the air. It was early May, and leaves were coming out on the small trees along the quay. The horses of the waiting omnibuses and carts turned their heads away from the wind gusting off the water.

In the crowd waiting at the gangway, Sean held Kate's hand. "There you are," Sean said, indicating a horse cart next to which a liveried man held a sign with "Katherine McGowan" lettered in green. She gave his hand a last squeeze and moved away from him in the crowd. No one in the household must know that she had a man friend. In three months, if her work and conduct were satisfactory, she had told him, she would be allowed to go out Sunday afternoons. He would send a note to her referring to himself as her cousin and give his address. She would write to him. They would meet in three months.

Agents for boarding houses hustled the passengers. "You and the missis, sir, only twenty cents for the night. That's only a sixpence of your money, sir. First class establishment." "Change your money, sir. United States banknotes. Pounds and shillings no good here." Unlike most of the passengers, who seemed to have no idea what to do next, Sean had clear instructions: go to the Tammany bus and tell them he was to call on Mr. O'Dea. "Be sure to say it that way. Any other words and you'll be thrown off be the scruff a your neck."

There was, indeed, Sean found after carrying his bag on his shoulder in the traffic of the wide cobbled road, an omnibus labeled in faded yellow letters, "Tammany." At its rear was a closed door with gate keepers, two brawny men in white shirts and galluses leaning on it, who had a squinting look and spoke little. They waited patiently, letting the men gather, answering their eager questions with stolid nods of the head. The plump cheeks and bulging stomachs of these two bespoke steaks and onions, oysters and beer, and all the other wonders these skinny tatterdemalions had come to the latter end of the world for. After a half hour or so of letting them gather and wait, the largest of the two said in a whiskey baritone, "Arright, listen to me now." Two of the men kept talking with each other. The big man stared at them. After a moment the two were quiet. "I wanchez to folla me. Come wit me." He led them across the cobbles of the quayside road, nearly back to the ship, then said, after waiting for them to gather again, "yez'll stay here, tagedder"—he hooped them with his arms—"until yer called fer. You," he grabbed Sean by the arm, "come wit me."

Sean followed the big man across the cobbles, to where the shorter one stood. He looked Sean in the eye.

"Yes?" was all he said.

"I am to call on Mr. O'Dea."

"County?"

"Dublin."

"Your leader?"

"What?"

"Your leader, lad. Who sent you here?"

"John O'Leary."

"You're one of Jimmy O's new boys. He always gets giants."

The tall one opened the door in the rear of the omnibus and Sean climbed up and took a seat on the wooden bench. He sat for an hour while the others answered questions and boarded the passengers one at a time.

"Arright," shouted the whiskey-voiced man as the bus began to bounce along the cobbles. "You're all gonna be American citizens in a hour." A cheer went up. "Now listen to me. You'll be ast tree questions. One, how long have you been in the country. The answer is 'About six years.' True"—the man held up his hand for silence—"true, ye've only been here an hour on the 'bus when we get there, but I ask ya to remember ye're saying _about_ six years. That means it could be more and it could be less. The law says five years for white people. Understand? Now, the next question you'll be ast so you can register to vote is 'Where is the house you own?' You have to own a house before you can vote. The answer is—listen now, you dumb Paddys, or you'll be trown back in the ocean—the answer is 'In the Five Points.' Now you, Michael me boy. Is your name Michael?"

"No, sir," answered a very pale young man with a large mustache.

"What is it, then?" the big man asked with sarcastic patience.

"Kevin McArdle."

"Ah, Kevin McArdle is it? Well, then, Kevin McArdle, how long have you been in Americky?"

"About six years, sir."

"Ah, good, Kevin. Half the time I ask that the answer I'm getting is 'oh, I'm just afther arrivin now, sorr.'" The man laughed at his own soprano mimicry. "If you're going to survive at all here ye've got to muster all your wits. And the third question you'll be ast is your party affiliation. That means which party you belong to. We have Whigs and we have Native American Party—them's the ones that hates the Irish—and we have Democrats. You don't have to tink it over. Yez are all Democrats. Democrats," he said again, for emphasis. "Loco-Focos, that's a kind of Democrat. You're all Democrats, Loco-Focos, till the day you die, and do you know the reason for that? You don't, but I'll tell ya. Because if you ever vote for anybody else in Five Points that will be the day you die." He laughed heartily at his joke. "It is a lesson from the great Liberator, Dan O'Connell himself. You take care of the party and the party does what, Kevin McArdle?"

"The party takes care of you," answered Kevin.

"You're an unusually bright young fellow, Kevin McArdle. I'm goin' to give you a sandwich. Are any of yez hungry?"

A shout of affirmation from all the passengers.

"Ah, they're hungry, Grogan, can you imagine that? And I was tinkin' they served a poached salmon and Champaign dinner on that boat every night. And where is the house you all own? Let's hear it all together now."

A jumble of voices answered as Grogan handed the shorter man a wicker box of sandwiches, which he passed out to the men.

"Courtesy of Tammany Hall. Don't mention it. Ye'll get a chance to repay the favor. I'll exchange yer money for yez if you want. But your gold and silver pounds and crowns and shillins is good here, and don't let no one on the street change your money. They'll give you paper bank notes not big enough to wipe your ass on and not good for anything else, either. This is straight gold, silver, and copper coins of the realm, gentlemen. And I'll give yez the same exchange as a bank. We deals straight with our men as long as they do the same. I hope none of yez took any of that stuff on the pier. Lotta money sharks out there. Lotta worthless paper. First thing that happens to a lot a the people that come to America, some shylock takes all their money, someone grabs their luggage, leaves 'em cryin' in the street. But they knew you was Tammany, so." He laughed by way of completing the thought.

They bumped down a wide avenue lined with shops advertising Smith's Segar Store Havana Segars, Kinkead Inc., Tailoring and Second Hand Clothing, Dunigan's Cheap Cash Bookstore, Casey's Hatters, and one whitewashed building, taller than the others, Barnum's Museum, announcing "Exhibition of the Balloon Panorama every Afternoon and Evening." Empty drays clattered past them heading toward the harbor, their drivers standing on the flat beds holding the reins. One of these greeted the driver of the omnibus with a wave of his long switch. A large sow with two piglets following her trotted along the gutter, rooting here and there in the garbage. Sean changed his money and found that he had seven dollars and twenty-five cents.

The sandwiches were a whitish cheese with mustard on hard buns and were a little stale, but under the circumstances excellent. Piling out of the omnibus they found themselves before a somewhat dilapidated walled fortress at the edge of the sea. They entered its gate on a white marble slab walkway leading up to a small portico, also white marble with four columns. "Castle Garden" read the words over the entrance of the building in which they would become voting Americans. Its appearance had not much of the castle, its ivy-covered wall being a bit too low, and the four columns being of very modest size. And it had nothing of the garden; what probably had been the yard on either side of the walk being entirely occupied now by two low and plain wooden buildings. They came into an enormous room with high ceilings and a partial second floor in the shape of a great horseshoe and the place all filled with seats facing an elevated platform in the center. Like Conciliation Hall only three times the size. Playbills on the wall advertised upcoming concerts. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. Would the job he had been promised pay enough for him to attend a concert? There would be wonders in this place.

The interview was perfunctory. Whatever irony these officials felt about their sham question-and-answer routine had long vanished in the repetition of it. Sean gave the correct answers and returned to the omnibus an American citizen and registered voter, to be taken to Five Points, the neighborhood of Jimmy O'Dea.

Five Points was not one of the incipient wonders: a tangle of muddy streets and lanes with wood frame buildings of various sizes, some smaller than the cottages in Ireland, some conspicuously out of plumb, old leaning derelicts, all of them in need of whitewash. How did they have the time to get so old in this new country? And the air as close and fetid as the steerage of the ship had been. Hogs roamed and rooted with the confidence of proprietors, and rats scurried along the edges of the buildings. The humans also had a scavenging and rooting aspect, but one a little less hopeful than that of their four-legged competitors. The 'bus came to a crowded square formed by the intersection of three streets. The sun was low in the sky now, its pale light firing window panes on the buildings opposite and faintly coloring the haze orange.

"Here's home," shouted their guide, who had just clambered aboard—a little fellow with a purple bulb nose. He intoned a bored litany. "You are in Cross Street. Dis here place is called da old brewery. It is called at because at is what it is. It useta be a brewery. It is da old brewery on Cross Street. Remember dat. It will come in handy when you are tryin' to find your way home in dis here big city. Youse are in da Bowery districk. Youse are Bowery b'hoys. Do not say 'Bowery boys.' Da woid is b'hoys. I do not know why, so do not ast me why. You go out walkin', go wit somebody and do not go across Chatham Street or you will be in Dead Rabbit territory. Dead Rabbit b'hoys is not friends of Bowery b'hoys. Above Houston is Gashouse b'hoys. Da same goes for dem. If you get in Gashouse or Dead Rabbit territory, you will probly become dead, so I would advise you not to do it. Do not go dere."

The old brewery was a brick building with a stone front, three stories high in front with windows strangely placed, several groups of two or three squinting together, and large expanses of wall with none. The street was crowded with people, many of them holding mugs of beer, evidently patrons of the saloon which occupied a corner of the building.

On the sidewalk where the 'bus stopped, laid out with hands folded on her chest, was the body of a woman of about forty years. As he got off the bus, Sean asked the guide why the body was there.

"Probly got shot," he shouted over the din into Sean's ear. "Or maybe a whore wit one a dem diseases dey get. Happens all a time here. Keep your eyes open and do not make no enemies, and do not have nuttin' to do wit whores or you will be crippled up wit da pox, beggin' pennies on da street. The coroner's cart will be around for her, probly tamorrah."

Sean toted his bag up a narrow stairway and down a dirty hallway to the second to last door. The room was no more than eight feet wide. There was one small window with a broken pane and no furniture and no fireplace or stove. An old chamber pot stood in a basin in the corner. Sean flung his duffel in a corner and looked out the window, which gave upon the back of a wooden building no more than ten feet away. Presently Kevin McArdle appeared at the door.

"I'm Kevin McArdle," he announced.

Sean extended his hand.

"We're to share this, I'm told," Kevin explained.

"Well, come in. Make yourself comfortable. We aren't rich yet, are we, Kevin McArdle?"

McArdle made a noise of disgust in his throat. "That was a funny fellow took us here. Do not, do not, do not. Mr. Purplenose Do Not seems to have sought his fortune at the bottom of a whiskey bottle."

They stood a minute. When the sound of loud footsteps in the hallway abated for a moment there was another sound like distant voices murmuring.

"I'm going to go out and see if I can find me a bit of straw. Sure, we can't sleep on the bare floor," McArdle said.

"You've been sleeping on bare wood for five weeks and more. Still, I'll come with you. I wouldn't mind a bit of straw myself."

They walked, looking for a horse barn. After a couple of blocks they came to Chatham Street and turned back. Kevin asked a bearded man where they might find straw, but the man stared at them with the shiny-eyed stare of a drunk and muttered incomprehensibly. A group of young girls came around a corner laughing and stood their ground in the middle of the sidewalk as if daring them to pass. Sean could see they were in for a bit of a ragging, as they would be back home.

"Hey, mister, I bet you've got a big cock," shouted one who appeared to be about ten years old. "Two-bits, I'll suck it for you." She licked her lips and held her face up to his. Plain, flat face. "Let me put my lips on it, mister, only twenty-five cents."

He kept walking. They pulled at his coat. One with front teeth missing, no more than seven years old, grabbed his testicles. "You want a boy? We'll get you a boy," one of them shouted. He had to pull the hand of another out of his pocket. Kevin also had two or three hanging on him. They pulled free at last. "Jaysus Mulcahy," said Kevin.

"What's the matter, Paddy? No money or no balls?" a girl with red sores on her face shouted angrily. "Just off the boat, Mickey asshole?" "Hey, go bugger a pig, shit-face mick." They followed for a time, shouting, then turned back toward their corner.

"Holy Mother of God," said Kevin. "That was a thing I never thought I'd see. Did you hear what they were saying?"

"I did that."

They walked without speaking. It was nearly dusk, so they returned to the old brewery. Sean bought them two mugs of beer for ten cents at the street bar in the old brewery, a small bar that offered no indoor space nor any chairs or tables on the sidewalk. They stood on the street with the others and drank their beer, which tasted sour. They had found no straw. Sleeping on bare wood would have to do for another night.

"Are you just off the _Henry Pottinger_ , then?" asked a slender fellow with a prominent adam's apple.

"Just this afternoon, yes," Sean answered.

"We were just accosted by a gang of young girls. They nearly pulled the trousers off of us," said Kevin.

"Sure, they're everywhere. Thousands of them. At first you want to feel sorry for them, but you can't. They're worse than the rats down here. Don't let them touch you. Poxy, the lot of 'em. Kick the first one comes after you hard. That'll keep them off. It's a sad thing. Bad as it got in the old country you never saw that." The slender man took a pull of his beer and licked his mustache. "How's your room, then?"

"It's small and there's not a stick of furniture," Kevin answered.

"At least it's a room," the man answered. "There's five hundred living in the basement of that," indicating the old brewery. "Down there with the rats and the filth. And the women and children don't come out, half of them, for a month at a time for fear of coming to harm. They're taking a dead body out of there every day. Some days more than one. It's the land of milk and honey right enough."

They sipped their beer and watched the crowd mill about. "I've been here going on two months," said the man after a minute. "Came on the _Queenstown_. Landed at Grosse Ile because of the fever. More than a hundred were buried at sea." He took a swig of his beer. "And most of the rest died at Grosse Ile, I've heard. I got on a bit of a raft I made with two others. We tore some boards off an old building, and we made it across to the States swimming and hanging on. And was there fever on your ship?"

"Yes, to be sure," Kevin answered. "We sent twenty at least over the side."

"We sent fifty-three," Sean corrected him. "Didn't I wrap them myself?"

"This beer tastes like bog water," said Kevin.

"It does," said the slender man. "There is no good beer in this country and I have yet to find a decent public house. They're all of this kind or worse. Not a chair to sit on, nor a roof over your head. Drink standing on the pavement."

"And what have you seen of New York?" Sean asked.

"Ah, I've seen a bit. It's as big as Dublin, I believe, maybe bigger. I was only in Dublin the one time and not for long. Would you like to see a telegraph office? There's one just up that way."

They finished their pints and were off down the street. The telegraph office was a very small one, notable for possessing the only clean glass window he had seen in the neighborhood. Inside were a clerk and an operator, the one taking down messages from a steady stream of customers and the other sending them with his key. Sean watched the operator over the shoulder of another sidewalk observer. He held the messages under the white shade of an oil lamp with his left hand and sent them with his right, tapping the shining brass key with the light touch of two fingers and puffing a pipe all the while.

"That's going to Philadelphia," their guide said. "See that on the top of the sheet, PDA? Philadelphia. It's clicking there just now and they're reading the message. It goes from here by the one line up to Bowker's Island and there it's sent into the Philadelphia line and shoots right down there in a snap. It does the whole thing faster than you can blink your eye."

The operator drew Sean's attention, the steady way he worked, his steady hand and his look of conscious mastery.

"Well, if you want to see a bit more of the world," the man announced after they had watched a while, "we're going up into the Lafayette for a bit of Shakespeare this night."

"What's the Lafayette?"

"It's a street where you can see lots of toffs in shiny hats and ladies with half their bosoms sticking out of their dresses. And they have an opera house all in marble, the Astor Place Opera House, a marvelous thing entirely. John Jacob Astor the millionaire built it with his own money and he lives right there in the Lafayette. And Mr. Macready, the English actor that hissed the American actor, Forrest, is playing there this night, and the toffs in the Lafayette have invited him here to play his play, and we're to give him a reception he'll remember." The slender man pointed over Sean's shoulder and sure enough a large group of men had begun to move up the street.

Sean and Kevin fell in with the crowd. "Are you all that interested in the theater that you defend your favorite actor?"

"Theater is it? I've never been in a theater in me life. It's an Englishman has insulted an American."

"But you've only been an American for two months."

"That's right. I have. And a great two months it is. I am these two months somebody an Englishman has to worry about. We can put the wind up them properly now." They walked a few blocks without speaking. "Sure, I've a ticket to go in," the slender man continued. "They were given out by Rynders' men. But I don't think I'll be doing it. Outside is where the action will be."

"Could I have it? I'll go in." Sean watched the slender man for a response. After a minute he produced the ticket from his trousers pocket and held it up between two fingers. "Take it if you like. I don't think you'll be enjoying the performance."

The men moved along the sidewalks on both sides of the street. A scant quarter hour later they walked from night into day. Oil lamps every forty feet on both sides of the street lit the broad sidewalks and the dignified fronts of houses from which echoed the whispering of their brogans. The houses bristled with spiked iron fences and pillared porticos. Beveled plate glass windows threw sharp rays of color, magical emanations of splendid lives. They walked without talking now. A couple dressed for the evening came out of a door, paused and watched them pass. The woman went back into the house. The man stood as if mesmerized, thumb and forefinger resting absentmindedly in his waistcoat pocket. He looked up the street and Sean turned to see what the man saw, but behind him he saw only grim faces intent upon following the man ahead.

Suddenly the group stopped. Someone was speaking, but Sean could not hear. "If you've got a ticket, you're to go ahead," someone ahead of him said. He made his way forward and followed a small group two blocks to the theater, where they had to walk a narrow path between piles of cobblestones. A large trench had been dug down the middle of the street. A billboard at the top of the marble steps announced that the play for the evening was _Macbeth_ , performed by the "World-Famous Actor, William Macready."

Sean's ticket, like those of his fellows, entitled him to a standing space in the second balcony. The performance began with an orchestra playing. The curtain went up to reveal three witches up to some sort of witchy business, followed by an injured soldier telling of a battle. Sean had begun to get interested in this strange event when the hero of the piece came on stage in his armor and was greeted from the balcony by a raucous jeering and catcalling. The actors continued bravely and Sean tried to follow the story. The noise increased and several eggs splattered on the stage and a bottle of some medicinal looking stuff which soon filled the place with a rancid odor.

The play went on. Macbeth appeared with bloody daggers in his hands. A man had been murdered. Lady Macbeth took the daggers. Patrons nearer the stage turned to shush the hecklers. One young man in the stalls stood and tried to stare them down. Macready himself turned once and stared at the noisy balcony as imperiously as he could, and for a few minutes the audience was quiet, but then there was a new ruckus of breaking glass in the hallways. The windows of the theater were being smashed by the crowd outside, throwing cobblestones. Still the actors continued. The performance had gone on perhaps an hour when a chair came flying out of the balcony into the orchestra pit. The music stopped, but the actors went on. Another chair flew onto the stage, and another splintered two feet from Macbeth, interrupting him in mid-speech. From the topmost hallway came a great shout and the sound of water as police doused the crowd that had broken into the building with a fire hose. Macready began again, but a barrage of cabbages and potatoes finally brought the curtain down.

The hallways and lobby were packed with shoving men. The women seemed to have disappeared. A window shattered overhead and broken glass showered on the heads of the crowd. Sean allowed himself to be carried by the bodies into the square outside, where he saw a cordon of several hundred police across LaFayette Avenue trying to contain the mob. In the front, young men were throwing cobblestones at the police and the police were busy dodging them. From the right, up Lafayette, came mounted cavalry six abreast directly into a hail of cobblestones. The horses shied and the cavalry was soon routed back down the street in confusion. The police fired their rifles, but this seemed to have no effect. "They're using blanks, boys!" someone shouted and the volley of cobblestones continued. The police fired again and this time the crowd moved back. Men were pushing their way into Lafayette and running into the side streets. Two men came carrying a third who had been shot in the chest. The man carrying the legs was having trouble holding on, so Sean grabbed one of the injured man's legs. They took him up to one of the big houses. A third volley of shots sounded as they opened the door, only to be pushed back by several men from within the house. They took the injured man back down the steps and into a side street, where after walking a couple of blocks they found a billiard parlor crowded with young men.

The crowd parted and then watched as they laid the man on a table. "He don't look no better'n those," a boy with a newspaper bag said, indicating two other men laid on tables who were apparently dead. Sean saw that the man they had carried had died also. A black-haired fellow of about his age in a red flannel shirt. "Goodbye," he said aloud, "whoever you were." He walked out of the billiard hall and down the dark street away from the Lafayette. After a minute he began to run.

Through dark side streets he ran, not knowing where he was going. Had he crossed Chatham Street? He knew no landmarks. He stopped amid dark buildings. A spattering cold rain had begun. Something moved along the gutter, shuffling, breathing massively. A hog, probably. He walked as quietly as he could to an intersection. There was a street sign, but no light to read it by. There was a glow against the clouds off to his right. He walked toward that for several minutes and found himself back in the Lafayette. Mounted soldiers patrolled the otherwise deserted street. He dared not show himself. He walked back and paralleled the lighted street to the place he recognized. It was where the girls had accosted him. Finally, walking in a steady rain now, he found the old brewery and his room. Kevin had not returned. He took off his wet jacket, boots, and trousers, used the chamber pot and emptied it out the window, then took out his blanket and rolled up in it on the floor and fell asleep. At some hour of the middle of the night he woke and stared at the faint outline of the window. There was a sound of snoring from the next room and a loud fart, and still some voices from below. Five hundred down there in the dark, women and children. As bad as the ship. He studied the non-pattern of cracks around the hole in the window. A tangle of random paths. He ached and shivered with the non-pattern of who and where he was and maybe a little with cold, too. He would write to Kate tomorrow.

In the morning he woke to wheels and hooves on cobblestones, lumber rattling on wagon beds, chuff of steam engines starting and behind it all a great whirring roar in the air. In the street he got a bun for a penny from a cart vendor and a glass of buttermilk from another. It was a sunny, brisk day and he felt clear-headed and wide awake as he stood on the assigned corner and ate this quite satisfactory breakfast. Presently the little man with the purple nose came walking along to take him to his job. Mr. Purplenose Donot.

"Where's da odda one?" he said, looking about.

Sean couldn't understand this fellow. "Dodda wan?"

"De odda fella. Da one in ya room wit ya. I'm suppose to take da boat a yez over."

"Kevin. Kevin McArdle. He never came back last night. We were up at the Astor Place. There was a big fight."

"Jesus Christ, whada ya wanna do somethin' like at for? Twenny one corpses dey took outa dere last night. And a coupla hunnerd hurt. McArdle one a dem I s'pose. We might as well start walkin'."

They headed alongside the old brewery through crowded, narrow streets. The little man walked with his head down and spoke from the side of his mouth, a little out of breath, waving one hand in front of Sean. "Ya see," he cupped his hand under Sean's face as if he were holding something for him to see. "The Irish, 'ey'll take any chance 'ey can get to trow a rock at a limey. And who could blame 'em? But the only ting is, 'ey never hit da limey. Macready, he gets away clean, see. Not a scratch on him. His pants is still pressed. And so the Irish is'ere trowin' rocks at cops. But the cops is Irish too, most of 'em, just tryin' to make a livin' like anybody else. At's a trouble, see." White spittle gathered at the corners of his small mouth. "How many went up from Five Points?"

"Must have been a hundred of us or so. I was mostly just curious, got carried along."

"Jimmy won't like 'at when he hears it. Jimmy don't like 'at stuff. Gives us a black eye. Hurts business. Dat's probly Ned Buntline got dat stirred up. Native American Party. America for Americans. Puts on he's a cowboy. Runs wild west shows, showin' everybody what a real American is, see. And you can be sure dat if you're an Irishman you ain't no real American in da book a Ned Buntline. Which is not his real name, either, Ned Buntline. And he ain't no cowboy. Grew up in Brooklyn or some goddam place. And the fact is he don't give a shit about America neither. He found out he can make money bein' a phony real American. He's wit Isiah Rynders. Gashouse gang. Don't like Paddys. Pays a couple of 'em, see, to do some damn t'ing like 'at. Give Jimmy a black eye. He's a good Wigwam man, in good wit da sachems downtown, but him and O'Dea ain't close, you know what I mean. Don't tell no one you was up 'ere last night. Yer a O'Dea man, one a the braves a the Bowery districk. Do not ferget dat. When Jimmy wants you to get into somethin' like 'at, you will get da woid. Oddawise do not do it."

Sean listened to this lecture in silence. During the walk he had seen several blacks, a thing he had never encountered before. "Do not stare at da niggers," the little man said, leaning close. He looked behind him and leaned even closer. "'Ey all got knives. Cut your t'roat as soon as 'ey would look at you. Animals. Do not have nuttin' to do wit 'em. Some a da b'hoys likes to kill one real slow sometime, just to hear 'em holla. Poisonally, I do not do dat. Even a nigger can live, as far as Paddy Donoghue is concerned. I would not kill a dog or a cat. A nigger ain't much, I'll grant you dat, but he's better'n a dog or a cat. Sometime you see one real gentleman like. And you see the pickaninnies—at's da little niggers—all dressed on a Sunday just as nice as can be. White shoits, ties, dresses. Real pretty."

They walked a few blocks without speaking. Paddy Donoghue was not five feet tall, but he walked with surprising speed. Sean found himself nearly running to keep up. "At da Nightingale, dat's where you're gonna woik, da Nightingale, named after some kinda boid, I t'ink, your boss will be Dick Croker. Dick Croker. You're gonna get tree dollars a week."

"I should go tonight to see about Kevin, what happened to him."

"Do not go," said Paddy Donoghue. They turned a corner into a narrow street with two-story brick buildings on either side. Baxter Street, the sign read. "If he's dead and you let on you knew him, they'll make you take da body, and you will have to pay to bury him and 'at is ten bucks. Ten bucks at da least of it. Either dat or ditch him somewheres on a sidewalk, which is not such a good idea. And if he ain't dead, he'll be back, see? Don't go. Woist t'ing you could do. Da Nightingale."

The sign above the door advertised that the dingy wooden shed before them was indeed The Nightingale. Before they could enter, the posterior of a fat man emerged, blocking the entrance. The man backed out, gripping an inebriate under the arms. He dragged the man to the small empty lot adjoining the club and dropped him there among several others who appeared to be in the same condition. The little man ushered Sean into a smoky and smelly room with a dirt floor that even at this hour of the morning was crowded with drinkers. "Dis, where you will work, is a barrel house," he explained. "It is also my home. I live up." He pointed to the second floor with his thumb. "You got any troubles, come and see me. Dat's what I do, see. Help da boys a little when I can."

As Paddy went to get the boss, Sean heard a great deal of coughing and wheezing but surprisingly little conversation for such a gathering, and, as his eyes adjusted, he was able to see the strange proceedings. During his first hour he learned the routine. Men paid two pennies for a drink from a tube. The tubes were attached to barrels racked high along the wall. The drinker paid his pennies to a man with a coin device at his waist, and stepped up to the tube where a second man put the tube in his mouth and then, by means of a clamp operated with handles, allowed the liquor to flow until the man's mouth was full, no swallowing allowed while the tube is in the mouth. When the drinkers' mouth was full the clamp was reapplied, the flow stopped, the drinker retired to the side of the room, his cheeks bulging. He took the liquor down in one, two, three gulps and then let out a gasping wheeze. There was no bar or furniture of any kind. The men stood or leaned against the walls. When a man fell or sat Sean was to drag him out to the side yard, unless he had a nickel to go to the velvet room. There his nickel bought a jug which he drank from until he passed out. He was permitted to sleep there until he awoke and either started the process again or departed.

After a day of dragging drunks, Sean started back toward the old brewery, but it occurred to him that there was, in fact, no point in going there. The room was for sleeping only. He found a stationers' shop, bought paper and an envelope, and, sitting on a bench in a little square, wrote a letter to Kate. He decided to omit any details which might disturb her employer, and, as he thought about his circumstances, he realized that that was nearly everything.

Dearest Cousin,

My new position is a little less than satisfactory. I won't bother you with the details. My new quarters are also a little rough. Still, I think there is a chance of improvement soon. I am well. Hope you are the same. Look forward to seeing you as soon as possible. Send reply to Patrick Donohue at number 147 Baxter Street.

Your fond cousin,

Sean.

He walked until he found a post office, bought a penny stamp, and posted the letter. There is no point in going anywhere, he thought. He bought a newspaper from a boy and, leaning against a railing, read the account of the riot, a description so filled with clichés from novels—"swift and terrible was the charge of the cavalry that bore down mercilessly upon the Hibernian mass"—that he did not recognize it as the event he had seen. He turned to the back of the paper and came upon a page of advertisements for employment. Stevedores, cab drivers. And near the bottom of the page: "Intelligent, industrious, and literate young men wanted to learn the new international telegraphic code with prospect of becoming operators of the soon-to-be-completed transatlantic telegraph. Apply in person between six and nine p.m. Thursday to Professor S. F. B. Morse, School of Art, New York University." And the words that nearly all the situation ads ended with: "No Irish need apply."

He looked at the date of the paper. It was Thursday. He walked until he found a clock in a store window. Five-thirty. He asked several passersby, young men dressed like himself, where New York University was. None of them knew. He walked up past the old brewery toward the Lafayette. He spied a gentleman in a gray suit and hat and began to ask him but the man held up a hand and walked past him. A gardener trimming a hedge in front of one of the grand houses seemed more accessible.

"Excuse me, sir, New York University, could you direct me?"

"Are you going in for higher education, Paddy?" The man had a mustache and goatee, the popular style in New York, and wore a round black felt hat. He kept clipping as he spoke. "Or are they advertising for a sweeper?"

"As a matter of fact, I have an appointment there."

The gardener smiled under his mustache and clipped for a while without answering. "Well," he said at last, "if you will walk directly that way about six blocks you'll come to Washington Square. Then look to your left—do you know what your left is?"

"I do."

"Then you're already well educated for a mickey, I'd say. And if you don't just look one way and then the other and you'll see a large building of white stone. That will be New York University, at the south end of the park."

So it was that obvious that he was Irish. Then he would not be accepted. Still, he had nothing else to do. He would penetrate as far as he could into this, if only to find out how far that was. He came to the large, weedy square where peddlers had set up their stands to sell trinkets and cheap clothing. There was indeed a white building like a cathedral to his left. The door attendant asked him his business. "Two floors up, down the hallway," he said in reply.

The floor was wooden and creaky and there was a strong smell of linseed oil. He found the door, its glass lettered

S. F. B. Morse

Professor of Art

He knocked.

"Enter!" a raspy voice called.

The room was a large studio with a high ceiling. Long windows looked across the square. On the wall opposite hung a portrait of a woman archer with auburn hair, one breast revealed by her white robe, drawing her bow.

"Yes?" Sean had to look for the source of the voice in the large room. There, at the far end, peering over a pile of books on his desk, a pair of insanely staring eyes under black lowering eyebrows.

"You advertised for telegraph operators?"

"Not for Irish telegraph operators. Be gone."

Sean approached. The professor was clean shaven, handsome. A wide mouth good at expressing contempt, graying hair which stuck out wildly above the ears. "I am not papist. I am of English descent," he lied.

"You would have to pass a test for literacy and intelligence. An Irishman, papist or not, would have no more chance of passing my test than a nigger. And you would have to show up for work at times when persons of your race are customarily drunk. Goodbye."

"I drink very little, in fact. As for intelligence, let us test your hypothesis. Let me try the test."

The professor looked surprised. "Hypothesis," he repeated.

"Surely, in the scientific spirit, you would wish to test a theory so strongly held. Let me take it. If I fail, I will go away and your theory will be proven."

At this the professor began a raw ferocious barking that rang from the high ceiling. It was his laugh. "Marjorie!" he called. From an adjacent room came a woman, a plumper and older version of the woman in the painting, a Diana of the beer garden. "Get a copy of the telegrapher test for my Irish friend here. We will test an Irishman and a hypothesis simultaneously. Do you know that word, 'simultaneously'? You will need a good vocabulary for this job."

"I expect to master telegraphy so well that I will operate two keys simultaneously."

"No one can do that. One will do nicely." The professor was not susceptible to malarkey.

"You are not an abolitionist, are you?"

"No, sir."

"Good. Such sentimentality has no place in my enterprise. The hairless baboon, not being human, has no place in human society and I will not contribute to error by employing abolitionists. Very well, here is the test. Good luck to you."

The test was not difficult. Sean gave synonyms for words: ingenuous, intricate, commodious; he answered simple geography questions: Was Spain south or north of France? In what country was the city of Bombay? A bit of elementary arithmetic, a passage to paraphrase. He finished it in less than an hour.

Morse was mostly right, he knew. The Irish coming to America were peasants suddenly broken from their hillsides into a world much bigger than they wanted to know. They certainly had no wish to hear about Bombay or Spain or France, not to mention books with words and ideas beyond what they got from the priest. The landlords in Ireland were of the big world, with their parliament and laws and queen and empire, all of which had nearly put an end to the Irish. The big world could kill you.

Morse looked at the test a long while. The time it takes for a cherished hypothesis to crumble, thought Sean.

"Well, that's good," he said finally and gave Sean a questioning look. "What part of England are your ancestors from?"

"Sussex, I think," Sean answered.

"Is that in the north?"

"I believe it is, yes. I've never been to England."

"Wrong. It's in the south. Take this pencil and hold it as if to write."

Sean took the pencil and rested his hand upon the professor's desk.

"Now, tap out the code for an S, dit-dit-dit, like that." He demonstrated with his finger, three rapid taps upon the desk.

Sean tapped the desk three times rapidly.

"Try to get them evenly spaced." Morse demonstrated again.

Sean tapped again.

"Good. Good. You have a hand. You must come every night to the class. No absences." He handed Sean a scrap of paper with the room number and time on it. "Six p.m. until ten, Monday through Saturday, for six weeks beginning the week after next."

After work the following day, Paddy Donoghue was waiting for him on the street.

"Jimmy wants to see yez. Come along dis way."

"What does he want. Do you know?"

"I do not."

Had he found out about his going outside the territory to see Morse? He had heard there were men who just walked the streets, keeping track of where Jimmy's men were and whether any outsiders had encroached. In half an hour they came to a large house with a grass yard and several large trees. Paddy showed Sean to a room in the front of the house, furnished as an office. Behind the large polished desk sat a portly, full-bearded man of about fifty years. He held a piece of paper under a lamp, reading.

"They tell me you're a scholar." He held up a letter. "O'Leary has a high opinion of your abilities."

"I read a bit now and again."

"Good. Good." He tossed the letter to the pile of papers on his desk. "I've never had much time for that, but I am sending my sons to the university. I wanted to meet you. Get acquainted. Let me show you something."

He rose slowly from his chair. His speech and movements were ponderous, the manner of a man used to having people wait upon his words and actions. Slowly he reached up for a black box and took it down from a shelf.

"Hand carved ebony from Ceylon. It came here from England, from some wealthy household, no doubt. Quite old, according to the auctioneer. I paid eleven hundred dollars for it. Had the inscription lacquered myself."

He held the box so Sean could read the gilt and red boldface letters across its top.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

"You should understand some things about the business that you are now a part of. It is a good business. Many a decent family depends on it for its livelihood. But . . . " He sat again, placing the box on the desk. "We must, now and then, do some things that a gentleman should not do. Break a skull, for example. It is unfortunate. I do admire scholars, though. The English are great for scholars. They too break a skull now and then, as I am sure you know. You need your place in this world and you need some wealth if you wish to have scholars and artists. And to get your place you have to tap a head or two. Do you know what's in it?" He indicated the box with a nod of his head. "I'll tell you, just between us. It's a part of the skull of Adolf Joost, former police chief of this very precinct. It was his goal in life to clean up the Irish gangs. He arrested some people who were very important to me. We got him one day around noon in Mulvaney Street with only four bodyguards, about thirty of us. I myself tapped the back of his head lightly with a bit of an iron bar and a piece of his skull flew all the way across the street. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. We were departing in that direction anyway. I won't show it to you. It still has the hair on it. A refined person such as yourself should not have to look directly upon such things. I keep it in that very expensive box by way of reminding me of the pattern of the way things are. This office, this suit—I have fifty of them, made in London, same tailor as the prime minister—the dinner I am about to enjoy at Delmonico's, all of it comes from the lesson I have learned from our good friends the English. You won't find them dragging the skinny corpses of their dead children on the road to the graveyard and you won't find me doing that, either. Use the force that is necessary, but keep your balance and your style. Don't become an animal. And fight when you must. And if you lose a fight and you die, you die honorably on the field. Not starving in some stinking hut on a hillside. I have heard that you have had some experience in that."

"Yes," Sean answered, astonished that Jimmy knew.

"You no doubt noticed back home that they did not scruple to take food away from the starving people because they had won it by force of arms. They had the guns, so it was theirs. I would not do that—take food from the starving. I try to hold myself a little above their standards, and it has cost me money. I do what is necessary to maintain my position. But I wanted to see you for a purpose more specific than a discussion of political philosophy and tactics. I know that the duties I have assigned you are not making full use of your talent. What sort of work do you want? What can I do for you?"

"Well, I think I'd like to be a telegraph operator. There's a school for it starting at New York University."

"Do we have telegraph operators?"

"I don't think so, but I'm thinking it would be useful if you did. There's a lot of information that could be useful that I could get if I was in the right telegraph office."

"That's true. And also you could eventually get out of this kind of life and become respectable. Am I right?"

Sean hesitated. This was a sharp old buzzard. He didn't dare lie.

Jimmy laughed, but his dark eyes did not. He waved his hand dismissively. "I'm right." He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands below his paunch. "You know something? I don't blame you. My sons will be gentlemen. They try to get into this, I'll break _their_ skulls." He popped forward in his chair and clenched his fist as if to pound the desk, but changed his mind, opened his hand in a gesture of reasoning. "This ain't . . . this is not respectable. I know that. But it is how they all started. Astor? You think that bunch made their money in the fur trade? That's the story they tell, you know. The fur trade. That is garbage. They made a few dollars in the fur trade but they got rich in the tenements. Until they bought some of these slum buildings and took to squeezing the pennies out of hungry immigrants with their dago goons beating the bejasus out of anyone who don't pay, they were nothing. This is how this system works, my friend. You break some heads until you got what you want and then you, or your children, put on a good suit, buy a nice house on the park or up on the Hudson, make up a nice history of the family business, how your grandfather sold apples and saved his pennies. Don't get me wrong. I am not criticizing. This is exactly what I plan to do myself. Just that in my case it is a little too soon for the apple story. I am in the early stages of establishing respectability. You know something about me? I don't smoke. I don't drink. I have never cheated on my wife, even though there are beautiful women available to me. I go to church every Sunday. I even go to confession. Takes a long time, some weeks."

He smiled, but a look in his eyes let Sean know that he was not to smile back. "But I go. And I contribute to Catholic charities. I wonder how many of the gentlemen in the mayor's office can say those things. Never mind." He rose to replace the black box, his British Empire, on its shelf.

Sean was grateful for the "never mind." Jimmy would sniff out an ingenuous "not many, I'm sure" in an instant.

"So, you want me to pay for this school."

"I have the money. I just need the time. I can still work at the Nightingale but not in the evenings on weekdays. That's when the class is."

"And then you'll want to quit when you get a telegrapher job?"

"Yes."

"That's what you agreed not to do."

"All right then," Sean said finally. "I appreciate what you've done for me. I just thought I'd ask."

"You know anything about numbers?"

"Yes, I guess so. Sure."

"I need another bookkeeper. Business is growing. The bookkeeper I have is not up to it. I am moving him to another position. Come here tomorrow morning, seven o'clock."

Sean worked in the little office in the lower front of Jimmy's house, keeping the books. He had an aptitude for it, which the previous bookkeeper had not. It took six weeks to set up a system that worked and to arrive at figures that meant something. He showed the whole thing to Jimmy one afternoon. He told him which houses were making money, which were not. It was clear from his records of expenses that several of his managers were skimming. Jimmy got rid of them and, in the months following, his profits grew. He was impressed with Sean. The job also left his evenings free. Every night, unknown to Jimmy, he attended his telegraph class in the professor's studio.

"The problem with the code as it stands is the pauses. Di-dit dit. Or dit-it . . . dit." Professor Morse paced the front of his room and spoke with his right hand sending code, tapping out the letters on an imaginary key, while his left gestured. In the strange room of the vacant-eyed goddess, Sean sat with twenty-one other young men listening to a man whose eyes shone with something akin to madness. "A slightly longer pause on the second one tells you that it's an i and an e and not a c. But it's confusing. Many errors. For the international cable I am creating a new code, the international code, one which will have no pauses within characters. And for a new code I need new operators. No one who has thoroughly learned the present code will be capable of learning the new. Code is learned beyond memorization to the point of reflex, as ingrained as speaking. W: di-daw-daw. M: daw-daw. A: di-daw. For an operator who has used it for years, it is permanent. Hence, for the transatlantic cable we will have all new operators. That, gentlemen, is you. Some of you. If I detect anything less than perfect diligence I will dismiss you from this class and there will be no appeal. In addition to diligence you will need the physical ability known in the profession as a good hand. To send a perfect code requires a physical ability that most people do not have. It's here." He held his hand up. "In the wrist and forearm. I do not have a particularly good hand. I am primarily an artist, a painter, and I have developed the kind of dexterity required for that, a steady hand that follows the line of visual imagination. Here we deal in sound, sound and rhythm. I will begin the instruction. Repeat after me: di-di-daw-dit F."

The class responded, "Di-di-daw-dit F."

"Di-di-daw-dit F," Morse repeated.

"Di-di-daw-dit F," twenty-two male voices answered.

"This is what you are saying." He drew with chalk on the slate two dots, a dash and another dot. "Dot, dot, dash, dot. Di-di-daw-dit, in telegrapher language. We will have four hours of code drill each evening for the first three weeks of the course, after which you will know the new International Morse Code or you will no longer be among us. This will be followed by three weeks of practice sending and receiving messages. Your skill will be evaluated and those of you who pass will be fortunate indeed. You will be the advance guard, the pioneers of the universe electric." Darting his glassy gaze first upon one student, then another. "Fast as thought," he said, and paused for dramatic effect. "All the individuals of the world, and all the other worlds, their minds connected in electrical intimacy. Breaking the severest limitation that holds the human race in check, the bounds of distance, the bounds of the individual mind. Di-di-daw-dit!" he shouted.

"F," a few voices answered.

"DI-DI-DAW-DIT!" he screamed.

"F!" the class shouted back.

The universe electric seemed a little crazy, but spending the rest of his life in a gang was not what he wanted. This could be a way out.
2

America

On May 27, 1852, after a four-month journey from Van Diemen's Land, the ship Meagher had boarded at Pernumbuco, the _Acorn,_ rounded the lower end of Manhattan and docked at Castle Garden Pier. He was greeted by no one. The news of his escape was the last word of his whereabouts that New York had received.

This gave the bearded, well-tanned stranger with the wide-brimmed Australian bush hat an opportunity to stroll the streets of lower Manhattan. He had the Houston Street address of John Blake Dillon, an old friend, but when he found the house at last, he was told that Dillon had moved to Brooklyn. He spent the night at a nearby hotel and set off in the morning for the law office of Dillon and O'Gorman in William Street, where he was greeted with great excitement and hilarity. Word spread rapidly, and, as he dined that evening at O'Gorman's house, not far from the law office, a crowd including several companies of the 69th New York militia, a couple of brass bands, and several thousand others gathered in the streets around O'Gorman's house.

Meagher came out onto the porch and waved. The cheering went on for a very long time. Just when it seemed about to die down, someone would shout, "Freedom for Ireland!" or "Up the green flag!" and off they would go again. He saw Mike Cavanagh, a curly-haired devotee of his who had worked in the Confederation office in Dublin, eyes always a twinkle, as if he knew you

for a clever rascal and expected your next remark to be immensely amusing, and several others from the Dublin Confederacy clubs. Every handshake, every wave to the crowd set off a new round of cheering. Once or twice he was able to shout a word or two, but whatever he said simply set them off again. Finally in a break in the roaring, he said, "I have had a long journey to this place. I have been in a land of freedom only once before in my life, in France in '48. My feet have touched American soil only a few hours ago, but already it feels like home. Thank you friends, countrymen. I only wish that John Mitchel and Smith O'Brien were here to share in this welcome. I must confess that I do not know what this celebration is in honor of. Certainly that minor disturbance that I helped create four years ago—" He was interrupted by cheering—"is insufficient cause. Nothing that we did then was worthy of the name rebellion. Ireland is still in chains." Roars from the crowd. "We have done nothing yet." At this the crowd erupted, chanting "forty-eight, forty-eight, forty-eight."

Meagher was tired. He regarded this noisy, surging mass with something approaching indifference. He waved to the cheering men for a minute and then sat on a kitchen chair at the back of Cavanagh's porch. A commotion in the yard across the street caught his attention. A neighbor had opened his parlor window and began to play "God Save the Queen" on his piano, until a man from the crowd climbed on another's back and pulled the window shut. The man inside opened it again and resumed his fortissimo playing. Finally three men from outside climbed into the house. The window came down and "God Save the Queen" was heard no more.

Other speakers, several "veterans" of Ballingarry and editors of Irish American newspapers, took turns at the porch railing, speaking of the power of a million Irish Americans to at last secure justice for Ireland.

It was nearly midnight, when, Cavanagh handed Meagher a letter from Catherine which had arrived two weeks earlier. It contained the news that she had given birth to a boy in February, but that it had died a week later. He showed the letter to Cavanagh, who read it slowly, leaning to get the light from the small oil lamp. Cavanagh said he was sorry. In the small bed in the upstairs room, tired to the bone, the noise of the day ringing in his brain, Meagher tried to think what this news meant, but fell into a dreamless sleep from which he awoke to sunlight, singing birds, and a headache.

There followed several days of receptions, a banquet at the Astor House at which he was presented with a resolution of commendation by the City Council. He was puzzled to find that he had been invited to a public reception of welcome by the mayor and the governor of New York. He declined the invitation on the grounds that his effort on behalf of Ireland had failed. Cavanagh had advised him against appearing with politicos. They lavished praise on Irish heroes as an easy way to get Irish votes. "Appearing with them looks like an endorsement even when it isn't," Cavanagh had said, "and then the other fellow gets elected and we're in the shit pile."

At week's end the _New York Herald_ reported that the twenty-eight year old Thomas Francis Meagher had received the most lavish New York reception since the arrival of LaFayette for his memorial tour in 1823.

He wrote to Catherine, enclosing a copy of the article. "I had thought to drop the heroic stance, as you suggested, but, as you see, it is not so easy. They are hungry for Irish heroes here and, lacking the genuine article, they have pressed me into service. I am still of your mind on this point and will try to escape from this jail also. Book passage as soon as you can. I do miss you. I am very sad about the baby." To his father he wrote that the welcome had been beyond anything. He invited him to come visit.

That summer, in addition to reviewing the New York Militia's Fourth of July parade from the mayor's balcony in City Hall, taking command of a unit of New York militia called the Irish Rifles, editing his speeches and articles for publication, he began his law studies. The study of law in mid-nineteenth century America required only two years of university, which his Stonyhurst degree easily fulfilled, and an apprenticeship, the satisfaction of which was at the discretion of the lawyer to whom apprenticed. If that lawyer was the descendant of a famous Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, say, author of the most famous docket speech in Irish history—"When Ireland has taken its place among the nations of the world, then, and only then, let my epitaph be written,"—then that apprenticeship could be a very mild indeed. Meagher was apprenticed to Attorney Robert Emmet III. So, he toured the country, lecturing on Australia. The lecture contained references to Smith O'Brien and John Mitchel, but consisted mostly of geographical description and analysis of the Australian economy which he had learned from books, his Van Diemen's Land experience being useless as lecture material. Several reviewers found the lecture boring, but overflow audiences packed the halls to see the hero of 'forty-eight. In March, he concluded his first speaking tour in Washington, DC, and attended the inauguration of Franklin Pierce.

Replies to his letters arrived in the fall. Catherine was traveling to Ireland, and would come with his father to New York the following summer. It was bad timing. For one thing, he had just heard of the lecture fees to be had in California. He had been planning a tour, hoping to raise enough to buy a house in Brooklyn, and now he had to abandon it. And, as summer approached, it was clear that the city would be uninhabitable. The streets were fairly quiet, but cholera had broken out, and it was everywhere, even in the good neighborhoods. In the poor neighborhoods they died by the hundreds. New burial pits had been opened north of the city, the original Potter's Field, having long since been filled with more than thirty thousand bodies, covered over with earth, and renamed Washington Square.

The summer was a bad one for cholera and yellow fever and Meagher, with his lecture fee money, was able to do what other prosperous city dwellers did during the contagion season: he and his small family travelled to an upstate vacation spot, in their case, Saratoga Springs. He drew gawkers and admirers as they sat on deck. "Well, Catherine, how do you like all the attention?" Thomas senior asked, smiling.

"Ah, it's grand," she replied. "We're a royal family."

A photographer asked permission and they agreed. It took several minutes for him to set up and the crowd grew so large that the steward came and asked some to go to the other side of the boat. "All right then, hold very still, please. This will be a sunlight photograph, no exploding powders, so you will need to be still for a count of five. Very still. One, two, three, four, five. Very good. Very good."

A black man sang and played the guitar. "Goin' downtown, goin' stay down dar til dawn. Got a girl in the country, got two dat stays in town." Meagher's father leaned close to be heard. "Merry as a wake in the old days. A long path you have taken, but you seem to have found a place for yourself." They had a good dinner with wine. Catherine tried to be cheerful, but her mood was fragile. The baby. The old man, too, had changed in the four years since Meagher had last seen him. He had less fire, slumped a little, as if he had seen the final size and scope of his life and was a little disappointed. Late in the evening the boat quieted and the three talked in their stateroom. Business was not good, his father said. Never would be good again. "Not in my lifetime." It showed in a twitch of the mouth, a protracted blink of the eyes, and angle of the head. The potato blight had ended and the famine seemed to be over, he said, but the country had changed. Death and emigration had emptied the countryside. Whole townlands had been demolished and turned to grazing. The middle class of merchants and professional people, who were his customers, were poorer. He was not ruined, but maintaining his household was now about all he could do.

The resort at Saratoga was not much to Meagher's liking, He wanted to get on with the business of being an American success, and this lolling in the woods seemed not at all to the point. Catherine was quiet and reserved. She could not get the baby out of her mind, she said, although she had tried. We'll have another, he told her. They made love nearly every night. He too was sorry about the baby, but infant deaths were common enough. Most people got over them and went on with their lives. But here it was only compounded by the new situation: the confusion of America, but also the surprise of his stature, the telegrams and visitors that kept coming, even in this remote place. The incessant call for his presence at dinners, meetings, people seeking appointments with him. When she learned of his command of a militia unit, she was dumbfounded and even more so when delegates from Meagher clubs in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia arrived. It was usual among Irish country people for a wife to treat her husband with a certain rough dismissal, as a serviceable household utensil to be kept in its corner until needed, a good husband as important as the family cow—perhaps—a bad one less so. And so she had regarded him when she had him more or less alone in Van Diemen's Land. He was at times now secretly amused at the wide-eyed look she gave him, and her new tone. Maybe this will turn out well, he thought.

"You're quite plump these days," she said to him one night as she lay in bed watching him at the wash basin. "Do you dine at Del whatever it is every night?"

"Delmonico's. No, not every night."

"That's where you meet the people with influence?" She pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable.

"That's it. I survive on _influence._ Thin air. Like a Frenchman in his balloon basket. And soon I'll come down with a bump."

"Is it just air, then? It's a real grievance is it not? Thousands of our people dead."

"A million. More. The Irish want to express their disapproval. They express it by cheering for me. The fact that I did little really doesn't matter. How else can they express it? Our little band of rebels is all they've got." He tossed the towel aside, lowered the wick in the lamp and blew across the chimney, found his way to bed in the faint light of the window.

"You frighten me." Her voice shivered.

"How so?"

"You've been too much around death, I'm thinking. Something in you . . . cold. You say nothing to your father."

"We've never talked much. I like seeing him. He likes seeing me. We don't have much to discuss."

"He is discouraged about his business. We talked a great deal on the ship. He's a fine man. And when he told you about it, you asked if he wanted more coffee. You should . . . make an effort."

"I will. And, Catherine of the wondrous bosom, I'm ready to make an effort at this moment."

She put his hand away. "No."

He did not press her. He tried to think of some significant thing he could say to his father, but it seemed impossible. He had asked once about his mother, but the old man had reacted with red-faced anger, seemed to regard his question as prying. He had not mentioned it again. With Mrs. Anderson he had sometimes confided, and Aunt Callie, but his father, never. Infirm now. He will die soon, in a few years, because he does not care for his life any more. The politeness of old people often covers a profound indifference to the whole show. Cold. Yes. Cold. Sentiment of the kind she wanted seemed to him an illusion. The iron hard street children in New York, they are the clear-eyed. Cold. Catherine did not know the half of it.

Back in the city for the winter, Meagher thought it prudent to accept a few lecture offers. And when his audiences began to diminish because of his disinclination to wave the green flag, he began to put in a bit more of the _Erin go bragh_. Newspaper reviewers expressed surprise at the new tone. Still, his audiences declined. He was no longer the new sensation. Timothy Shay Arthur was holding forth on the evils of drink, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was drawing great crowds for her lectures on women's suffrage. Irish independence was last year's topic.

Walking on Fifth Avenue with a new friend, a rising Tammany man named Dan Sickles, he watched a throng of cheering people coming down the street, some of them pulling the carriage of a smiling, portly man. He asked Sickles who the man was. Sickles, in his usual authoritative tone, answered, "Captain of the _William H. Macy_ , a clipper ship that won a race to San Francisco. Those are the lucky bettors who won money on him. They're off to the Astor House for an afternoon of revelry."

The new hero, a yachtsman. It was time for the California tour.

The elder Meagher, anxious to get back to his ailing business, and disgruntled by this unfinished, half-civilized America, took Catherine, who was expecting again, back to Waterford. She was disappointed. At the piershe cried, a thing she rarely did, but Meagher cajoled her with promises of a house when she returned. Meagher's own departure was postponed by the news that John Mitchel had escaped from Van Diemen's Land and would soon arrive in New York. He arrived on a drizzly day in late November, and Meagher, with Mike Cavanagh, Devin Reilly, and a few thousand others came to the Fourth Street Pier to greet him. It would have been another greatest reception since LaFayette but for the fact that Mitchel refused to mount the platform at the pier or to appear before the crowd that gathered at his mother's house in Brooklyn. "Spare me these howling idiots," he pleaded to his hosts. And they did, explaining to the crowd that Mr. Mitchel wished them well but that he was too ill and tired to greet them at present.

Mitchel's mother had preceded him to America. At her house in Brooklyn there was a tearful reunion with the old woman, who did her best to remain dignified before all the strange guests. Mitchel's father, a Protestant minister in Londonderry, had died of cholera during the famine. His mother had been through some hard times until the Emmet Monument Association had paid her way to America and bought her this small house.

"There is nothing as loathsome to me as a drunken admirer," Mitchel said of the howling mob that had followed the carriage through the streets and now milled about in the street outside. "'Begob, Jhohnny, yer the greates' man . . . I ever shaw an' thass the gozz tru . . . hic . . . the gozz truth,'" he mimicked. "They stand around and shout and slap each other on the back and believe they have done something." He stretched his legs halfway across the small parlor and took a sip of whiskey, furnished by the ever attentive Mike Cavanagh. "There's no saving them, Thomas. Priest-ridden half-wits, the lot of them." He looked in a bored way at Reilly. "Excuse me, Devin. I'm a poor heathen wretch. Sorry to abuse your religion."

"We all know you're a prod, Johnny. It's good to have you blaspheming where we can hear it again," Cavanagh answered.

Mrs. Mitchel called them to the dining room, where a feast of many courses lasted until after midnight.

"Missus Mitchel, you are the wonder of the Western world. This supper is marvelous."

"I'm glad I had a little warning and was able to lay in a few things," she replied.

"Well, Johnny, you have obviously recovered your strength and attained to something like your former disagreeable self," Meagher said.

"Thank you. It's true, the sap is again in me branches. I'm thinking, Thomas, while bobbing on the sea, that we—the two of us—should establish an Irish newspaper. A fixed enterprise that will give us a place and a purpose and put an end to all this floating about and maybe animate this heap of ordure that is Irish nationalism with a grain or two of intelligence. What do you say to that?"

"There are eight or ten Irish newspapers in the city already. And six more in Boston."

"What I've seen are bleary-eyed Mother Machree rags. Is there an intelligent one?"

"Not that I've seen."

The two agreed over another glass of Cavanagh's whiskey that they would publish a weekly to be called _The Citizen_ , after the French revolutionaries of sixty years earlier. Meagher would contribute the dollars to rent the office of a defunct paper in publishers' row and promised also to contribute articles, which he would send from the various stops on his western journey.

In February Meagher went on a speaking tour to the south: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. Back in New York, he again fell afoul of the church in a speech to the New York volunteer militia in which he blamed the Catholic clergy's opposition to the rising for its failure. With Catholic newspapers in full cry at his perfidy, he once again left the city for the long-dreamt-of California journey, where there were nuggets to be earned by public speakers, especially Irish ones. He took the fastest route by way of Nicaragua, and all went smoothly. He wrote his first article for the new paper on board the _Star of the West_ , a month out of New York, off Kingston, Jamaica, in which he discussed an idea he had from his father: that the only people who had really helped Ireland had been the great political orators, especially Dan O'Connell. It was an uninspired article. Indeed, during the four years of its publication, his monetary contributions to _The Citizen_ would be significant, but his written ones sporadic and humdrum.

He arrived in San Francisco after a journey of two months, to a fine reception by the mayor and city council. At one of the receptions he met a dejected Terence McManus. McManus's welcome two years earlier had also been a hearty one—a banquet with speeches by local politicians, with more than three hundred in attendance. His new business—he had tried to re-establish himself as a shipping agent—had thrived on the fame. But then a rival had published an account of his escape from Van Diemen's Land alleging that McManus had dishonorably violated the terms of his ticket of leave. McManus had sued the man for libel and won, proving the account false. Soon after, the rival had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leading to the rumor that local Fenians had murdered him. It was possibly true, McManus thought. The fellow had an English name, Bradford, and some of the boyos here would kill an Englishman on no other provocation whatever. McManus had nothing to do with it. Nonetheless, the notoriety had destroyed his business. He was living in a miner's shack now, in Yerba Buena, making a few dollars panning gold. He refused Meagher's offer of money.

Meagher spoke in the little squatter towns where miners lived in lean-tos and sheds and some of them outdoors. No better than at home, really, except for a scrap or two to eat and the promise of a rich strike. There were Irish aplenty and they packed the saloons where most of the talks were given, quaffed amber liquids before, during, and after, and displayed their patriotism by treating him generously to the same. Many an evening ended in muzzy comradeship at a table of besotted Murphys, Dalys, Mac thises, and O'thats.

When he thought about it, it seemed to him that his drinking was partly to cover the embarrassment of having to get a living in this way—the posing, the forced cheering of the audience eager for a night of drinking, whatever the excuse. There had been several attacks on him in newspapers back east. One said, "An easy way to riches: shout patriotic slogans to bewhiskied Irishmen. 'Erin go bragh! Presto! there's fifty dollars; 'Down with the Queen!' Eureka! a hundred!"

Spurred by the criticism, he dropped the clichés and the pandering to audiences and lambasted the church for its perfidy in the rising. News of his heresy resulted in breaks with some of his supporters in the East, notably McMasters of _The Freeman's Journal_. But the California tour did produce the required funds. It would now be possible to buy a house and complete his law studies without further recourse to his Irish hero stage act. He returned to New York most of the way by sea, but the ship went only to Charleston. He completed the trip by train.

The steady sound of the locomotive that had punctuated his half-sleep slowed at last, becoming a little erratic, and the change of rhythm woke him. He watched from the window as the train approached the city. Brush-covered hills, rock outcroppings, trash strewn everywhere, squatters' shacks of scrap lumber, the square red brick Croton Reservoir atop a hill, and through the windows on the opposite side of the train a row of elegant new mansions. Finally the train wheels squealing and the engine letting off its steam, metallic sounds of uncoupling. The baggage master came through and Meagher instructed him to deliver his bags to the Astor Hotel. After twenty minutes the train cars began to move again, down Broad Way Avenue, pulled by four horses, among the carts of greengrocers, fishmongers, a square white cart, FRESH MILK ICE COLD, dripping a trail of water onto the cobbles, its skinny white horse chewing in its nose bag. On the sidewalk, the familiar itinerants who slept in the park, their lives unchanged during his year's travel. A blind man huddled against a building lifted his face, feeling the sun with an expression of disgust. People getting a living, or not getting one. The train came to a second stop at City Hall Park and Meagher walked across the green toward the hotel.

On a bench in the park, wrapped in a dirty army blanket, was a woman he recognized. Sadie the goat. A wiry little woman, Sadie, in her better days, would walk up to a well-dressed man on the street and suddenly butt him in the solar plexus with her head. She could do it with such well-aimed force that the man would double over in pain, enabling her accomplices, a couple of Dead Rabbit boyos, to relieve the man of wallet and watch before he could recover sufficiently to shout for help. But Sadie had fallen on hard times. Her business partners had been killed in a war with Jimmy O'Dea's boys the summer before, and she was reduced to sleeping in the park. "I'll not turn to hooring," she had told Meagher one day as he sat next to her on the 'bus. "My boys is gone. My days is over. I'll be an honest tramp before I turn to hooring."

The chambermaid who brought him a pitcher of hot water was a lovely plump country girl from Wicklow. He talked with her for a few minutes and, when she had left, stripped and bathed himself from the basin. He felt a bit randy this morning, as he often did after a night of drinking. In California he had taken advantage of the city's easy attitude toward sex and the easily available prostitutes. But New York was not San Francisco; the Astor Hotel would put him and his baggage out in the street if he tried to bring a prostitute to his room. As for the Wicklow chambermaid—impossible. The Irish country people were puritanical in the extreme. Even during the hunger he had never seen a country girl selling herself.

He was awakened from a dead, dreamless sleep, by a knock on the door. "Hallo, Thomas," came a familiar voice.

"Mike, my boy."

Cavanagh shook his hand without responding. "Hello," he said finally, and handed him a letter. "From your father, sir."

"Come in, Mike."

Meagher, in his nightshirt, stood by the window and read:

"I am sorry to inform you that Catherine died of a fever this May sixth. The baby, a boy, was stillborn. It gives me great pain to be the writer of this news. I know what it is like to lose a wife in this way. A longer letter follows. I am very sorry."

He sat down on the bed in the small room, holding the letter.

"It's a sad thing," Cavanagh said, looking out the bay window onto the park. "He sent it to me with another letter explaining."

Meagher sat without speaking for a time.

"She went back to Ireland to avoid the fever," he said.

The two sat a long while in silence, Meagher on the bed, Cavanagh in a large red plush chair, erect in his well-pressed suit and high starched collar. He still had the look of a youth, an imitator of adults and their ways.

"There has been a great deal of fever here, too. Even if she had stayed . . . You shouldn't blame yourself. You should know that the _Times_ has reported it. I don't know how they found out. It wasn't me."

Meagher sighed. Cavanagh was a good hearted fellow, a slavish admirer of his.

"Raymond has a column."

"Raymond always has a column. He blames me for sending her back?"

"He does."

He waved his hand, asking him to desist on that subject, and held his head in his hands.

"And the others are on about your loss of faith, so they call it."

"Who?"

"McMasters. _Freeman's Journal_. I know you don't want to think about it, but I thought you should know."

"Thanks. Yes, I had heard that." A clatter rose up from the street, and Cavanagh closed the window and sat again in the plush chair. "You want me to stay?" he asked.

"The fact is that we did not get on together. I was the wrong husband for her. She'd have been fine if I had left her alone, tending the doctor's children in Ross. She had a good life until me."

"Now you're blaming yourself. You're upset. I think perhaps a drop of the golden ambrosia of the Halloran may be the thing. O'Leary's come. They'll all be there."

Although it was mid-afternoon, he was hailed at Halloran's by a large table of friends. John O'Leary had come from Ireland with James Stephens, newly escaped from Clerkenwell Prison in England. John O'Mahoney, who had stood by Meagher in that dreadful meeting at Carrick, had come from his exile in Paris. And a dozen others were there, the Fenian boyos.

O'Leary, in spite of his famous "Meagher of the words," seemed genuinely happy to see him. He had heard about Catherine, expressed sympathies, his slender, ascetic face inclined toward him.

"Your man gave a fine speech this day," O'Mahoney said.

"A fine speech," O'Leary said, spitting the words. "Just what the old woman needs, another fine speech. If you could make a country of fine speeches we'd have had one long ago. I'm supposed to be here on a secret mission and Tommy Corcoran sends his brass band of the 69th militia to greet me at the pier, and they have me giving a speech to a couple of thousand from the balcony of the hotel. Tomorrow it will be in all the papers. 'O'Leary here on secret mission.' Another Irish shenanigan this whole enterprise will turn out. Invading Canada. A fine lot I have fallen in with."

"Invading Canada?" Meagher asked.

"That's the plan. We're going to conquer Canada and trade it for Ireland. They're raising troops in every state. Fifty thousand signed on already, and they're coming in every day. We're trying for a hundred thousand."

O'Leary was laughing. "A grand scheme, is it not? Here, have a whiskey." He poured him a shot from the bottle. "A couple of these and the grandeur of the thing will be more apparent to you."

"In fact," O'Mahoney explained, "invading Canada will be much easier than a rising in the old country. It is lightly armed, their militia is inexperienced, there is much empty space where an army can muster far from the nearest police barracks. And no one is thinking we will take all of Canada. A good piece would be adequate to our purpose."

"Uncle Sam might have a word or two to say on the subject of a freebooting army invading another country from his," Meagher said.

"Uncle Sam is a bunch of elected officials and the Irish vote is now decisive in almost any election in this country." O'Mahoney had given this speech often. Meagher remembered him now from the priest's house in Waterford in 'forty-eight. He was the fellow who thought they could win then. "This is much less improbable," O'Mahoney continued, "than defeating the English in their own neighborhood. If this is amusing, then our little effort in 'forty-eight was more so."

"No argument there," Meagher said. "On to Canada." He drank the whiskey, and another. He sat at the end of the table and listened to the rambling and random conversation. An Irishman is president now. Old Buck will be all for the cause. Wasn't it his secretary when he was British ambassador, Dan Sickles, who refused to stand for _God Save the Queen?_ Dan Sickles, running for Congress now, all for two minutes of sitting. It's a wonderful country. He was sad for Catherine. They had not been suited for each other, but she was . . . Don't romanticize her, he told himself . . . she had loved him in a practical, peasant kind of way. Straight, honest, and intelligent, truly, though not imaginative. No Irish dreaming in her. She would have had no patience with this blather. And she would be right, too. O'Mahoney was a bit chuckle-headed, truth to tell. Another whiskey had appeared before him.

When he awoke he could not remember who it was who had helped him back to his hotel, but it had evidently been early in the evening. It was now God knew what small hour of the morning and he lay wide awake. He rose and went to the window. A few dark figures moved on the never quiet street. There was a distant sound, barely audible, of some urchin crying with hunger and cold, such a common sound you normally did not hear it. In the back streets their bodies lay by the curb in the morning, usually covered in rags, awaiting the van. Pointless lives. People without places. Catherine. Me, for that matter. If I had gone into the old man's business, married some Waterford merchant's daughter, I maybe could have succeeded Father as mayor. In the dark he groped through his trunk until he found the smooth, familiar shape. He took a good swallow and then another and returned to bed.
3

1850s New York

"She was born into this world in a peasant cottage in Skibbereen, but by God she'll leave it . . ." Jimmy O'Dea removed a collar stud from the corner of his mouth where he had been holding it and looked to Sean for the words.

"She'll leave it like a queen," Sean said. Jimmy often asked him to find the right expression, and he favored those that associated himself or his family with an image of royalty. Sean had been dressed in his new green livery for hours, but Jimmy dawdled. It was just two hours before the funeral service for Jimmy's mother, it would take half an hour at least to get to the church, still he maundered and fussed. His brow was shining with nervous perspiration.

"Like a queen," Jimmy repeated, weighing the expression, not satisfied.

Sean offered: "With all the pomp and ceremony of the greatest European monarch, which is no less than she deserves."

Jimmy gripped Sean's forearm with his stubby, powerful fingers. "That's right," he said. "No less than she deserves." With a grimace, he got the stud into place beneath his tie and fastened it. Sean held his jacket and smoothed it across the shoulders as Jimmy studied the effect in the mirror. Then Jimmy with his large, gusseted wife, Rose, Sean, and two other liveried attendants came out of the house at last and got into two carriages for the ride to St. Patrick's Cathedral in Mulberry Street.

The word on the street was that Jimmy would spend more than ten thousand on the ceremony. The other two in the carriage were Brian Boru, a bouncer from one of the dives in the Paradise, and Skinner Meehan, Jimmy's boss in the docks, a hulking, three-hundred-pound former stevedore, whose suit bulged and stretched over his chest and was near to bursting over his thighs. The two tried to get Sean to open up. Sean had no idea. He was not privy to Jimmy's personal finances, only those pertaining to business: liquor, whorehouses, the docks. He answered that he did not know, but smiled a little so they would think that maybe he did.

"He don't know," Skinner said, and laughed. "He's Jimmy's main man and he don't know. Shite and biscuits. He's got more than a hunnerd musicians coming. They must be gonna take turns. They can't all play at once, a hunnerd and some, can they?"

"Yeah, they can," Sean answered. "It's an orchestra and a chorus."

"A hunnerd?"

"Yeah. More than that."

"Christ. And it ain't a wake. It's at the church. Music at the church? What is that? They gonna dance?"

"A requiem, it's called. Like a musical mass. They sing."

"Jesus. That takes the biscuit."

A thin sunlight filtered through the haze, gusts of cold wind whipped up street dust with the ammoniac smell of horse piss, and scraps of newspaper soared to the tops of buildings along Mulberry Street. Sean opened the doors of carriages and held the elbows of ladies in black bombazine and gentlemen in top hats as they stepped down to the curb. Mayor and Mrs. Fernando Wood, all of the sachems from the Tammany Wigwam, Senator William H. Seward, even Captain Isaiah Rynders of the Dead Rabbits, normally an enemy of O'Dea, and his spectacularly attired lady, had come to the last rites of Mary O'Dea. Many of them held handkerchiefs covering nose and mouth to protect themselves from the contagion of the dust. They made their way through the wrought iron gate to the arched door and shook the hand of Jimmy O'Dea, who gave the same solemn nod to each.

The full orchestra and chorus of the New York Philharmonic Society would perform the Requiem Mass of Hector Berlioz, the _Herald_ had reported. Sean had had no idea what this entailed, but, as the priest's voice sounded, he left Brian and Skinner on a bench in the entryway where they slept off hangovers, and went in and stood behind the last row near the holy-water font. The priest, in a gold-embroidered soutane spoke, but his words, lost in their own reverberation among the pillars and the high vault of the ceiling, came to Sean's ears as a tone only, rising, pausing. A plainsong of supplication, but an unconvincing one, something a little theatrical and hollow in it. Words often spoken. A cleric-politician endorsing the departed for higher office. Sean made up the words. Vote, all you seraphim and cherubim, vote for Mary O'Dea. Get up early and vote several times each. A dollar a vote, but only if she wins.

After a time the orchestra undertook a delicate harmony of violins and cellos, a soprano joined, then the whole choir, as harmonies gave way to the thunder of sixteen kettle drums and the triple fortissimo of chorus and orchestra booming, reverberating, the priest in procession with four attendants at one point swinging the thurible, leaving slow arcs of incense moving in shafts of sunlight. Sean found himself moved. The music went on for over an hour. Sean was stunned by its opulence. Jimmie sat with the rest of the family in a small elevated pew at the side, and Sean watched his face, the powerfully scowling mouth and forehead, cheeks puffed a little, barely holding in the pressure, all of him glowering in furious satisfaction, as Sean imagined he must have looked on that Five Points street twenty years earlier, iron bar in hand, having just smashed in the skull of Police Chief Adolf Joost.

Sometimes after work Jimmy invited Sean to dine with the family, and he had gotten to know the old lady a little. The widow Mary O'Dea of Skibbereen had been brought from her peasant house to a smallish mansion near New York's Battery Park by her son twenty years earlier. Jimmy had thought that a big house with servants would delight her, but in fact it only made her cranky. The house was too hot. She did not like her bed. American buttermilk had a strange flavor. The russet potatoes she did like better than the "lumpers" she had eaten in Ireland, but she insisted upon boiling them herself. The cook never got them right—too salty, not done enough. Buttermilk and praties had remained the staple of her diet. Meat, she said, did not agree with her. She had not learned to read, but she did like to be read to. She had learned several poems by Wordsworth and Byron and recited them to Jimmy's great enjoyment. A recitation about daffodils, skylarks, rainbows, and the like often followed the meal. And today Jimmy's fellow pallbearers carrying this Irish peasant woman were Mayor Fernando Wood, William Marcy Tweed, Devin Reilly and John O'Mahoney, and Isaiah Rynders, who was mending fences with Jimmy in preparation for an expected war with the gangs to the north. This, thought Sean as he followed the pallbearers and the family up the aisle, is what a firm stroke with an iron bar can do for you in the land of opportunity.

Sean had found a two-room flat in an agreeably leafy neighborhood of Brooklyn, half a mile from the ferry landing. It was much less expensive than anything in Jimmy's neighborhood, and it was away from gang territory. He liked the fact that he never saw the likes of Bowery B'hoys and Dead Rabbits on the streets there.

Walking on Myrtle Street in Brooklyn on a July evening, a few blocks from his flat, Sean came upon a three-story house with a bookstore on one side of its main floor and a printing shop on the other. The shingle on its signpost read

Walter Whitman

Carpenter and Builder

Sean went in to browse and found the proprietor, a slender man of above average height, behind the counter. Short black beard, one streak of gray at the chin. He raised his head from his book and gave Sean a quick look of appraisal.

"You're an Irishman."

"I am that. Sean Gillespie, by name."

"Only an Irishman wears his hat back on his head like a halo. I am Walter Whitman," he said without extending his hand.

"Builder and carpenter. And bookseller," added Sean as he browsed the four tall book cases of the small shop.

The bearded man gave a quick, combative smile. "And that takes you only as far as the b's and c's on the list," he said. "I go through the alphabet a to z, alpha to omega, author to zoologist, and several other alphabets that no Irishman has ever heard of. I am a cosmos, Paddy," he shouted at Sean, who had gone out of his view around the shelves. He laughed loudly and a little forcedly, Sean thought. "You are a cosmos too," he said appearing around a book shelf, "but a little Irish cosmos." He held his thumb and finger half an inch apart and laughed. "The priest has pinched off your weasand, put blinders on your eyes, consigned your brain as cargo to the Barbadoes. Do you read? Can you parse that?" He held a book spine toward Sean.

Sean came forward and read, " _Practical Phrenology_ , by Orson Fowler."

"Do you know what that is?"

"Phrenology: determining mental qualities by examining the shape of the skull. Such as amativeness, the mental quality of . . . interest in the opposite sex."

"It does not specify the _opposite_ sex. But good. Well. An Irishman who knows something. I am prepared for all manner of surprises in this world. I expect them. And they come to me daily, hourly. You are a miracle, sir. Perhaps I have been hasty. Permit me."

He placed a strong, calloused hand on top of Sean's head and felt gently with his fingers. "You have a very high amativeness. I am dazzled by it. A seven perhaps. But low self-esteem, no more than a four. Adhesiveness fairly good, a five, I'd say. Philoprogenitiveness, hmmm, a five also. High concentrativeness and combativeness, sixes—same as mine. You have no tune, though. None. You should go to Fowler's Cabinet on Broadway and have this done properly. An assessment of your organs of temperament and faculties. I am a mere dabbler. And your occupation, pray? Are you a Hibernian of the hod? A Sean of the shovel?"

"I am a bookkeeper but am training to be a telegrapher."

Walter held his hands aloft in praise. "A great leap heavenward you are making, from a niggler of pennies to the electricity of the word. If you could but connect your wire here," he said, pointing to his own head, "for five seconds it would arc a thousand volts into your clicker. The thunder would shake your ground. You would see a new continent in its flash. Do you believe that?" The proprietor was laughing, enjoying himself.

Sean laughed, too. "Wires can work two ways. I could maybe teach you a thing or two," he said, "if you are attending to your receiving device." He selected a book, _American Notes,_ by Charles Dickens.

"Dickens!" the bookseller thundered. "That's an Englisher. Don't it make you want to rip his gizzard out?"

Sean took the change from his pocket and put two half-dimes on the counter. "I liked the _Pickwick Papers_."

"I set most of this book in type," he said. "Another of my professions. This edition, New World Press. One of my great honors. Did the whole thing in three days' long work. They never paid Dickens a cent, of course. Nor me much, either. The ocean is a lovely thing for publishers. Cossetters of dimes." He rubbed a thumb and forefinger stingily. "Garnerers. Do not imagine that because they deal in meteors and lightning that book makers have been near Olympus. Telescope renters, ten cents a look. Mostly never looked themselves. John Jacob _Astors_ "—he roared the name—"the lot of them, than which there is not a fouler epithet. Better a shithouse roach than an Astor. Well. What was your name?"

"Sean."

"Sean. I thank you for your custom. You are a paragon of your race. Hibernia has hope, after all. They nearly did something useful in 'forty-eight, you know. Did you know about that?"

"I was nearly in it."

Whitman cocked his head.

"Some friends and myself went to join the rebels. It was a confused thing. We never found them."

Whitman was quiet for a time. He scratched the back of his head and stared at the bootmarked pinewood floor. "Confused things are the best things," he said. "Failure is better than the other thing. Which is not success. The thing you have if you are not a failure is not-failure. It is Astorhood. Astority. A shiny hat, a round belly, a head full of sleepy sentiments. Failure has a texture, it savors of old wine. Do not be discouraged by it. I am a failure myself. I have it always on the back of my tongue. I would not change it. It is the whole point of this. In the end the whole shebang fails. All the parts, eyes, ears, brains—even John Jacob's grip on his coin purse—kaput. I preach, as you see. Another of my many . . ." This idea ended in a quiet laugh. "Come and see me again."

Sean began reading the book on the ferry and continued on the bus ride up Broadway. Dickens, it seemed, was not fond of America. The filth in the streets, the wandering hogs, the men spitting tobacco juice. It was true enough. In fact, Dickens had not seen the worst of it: the cock fights, the blood-spattered contests in tenement basements where terriers competed in a cock pit to see which could kill the most rats; the gang wars; the drunken torturing of a black man just for sport.

Niggers take Irish jobs, they said. In Ireland the English took; now they were in a place where they could take. They had learned a lesson from the grain convoys, the wagons guarded by regiments of redcoats as they went down the roads past the hungry houses to the ports: stay with your own because in numbers there is power, and if you have the power to take—take. It was a revel, this America, a jubilation of blood. About American barbarity Dickens was even more right than he knew—for Dickens. For Sean, he was wrong. America was a healthier place than Ireland by far. You could get killed in the street, true, but if you had any wits you would not starve. If Dickens thought America was in a bad way, thought Sean, it was clear that he had not the slightest idea of his neighbor island.

In Central Park Sean sat on a rock outcropping, their usual place, and waited. It was Saturday afternoon, not usually a time when Kate could get away, but her family, The A. T. Stewarts of department store fame, was away for the summer, gone to their place in Rhode Island because of the contagion. It was seven o'clock when she came along, still broad daylight. A quick embrace. She was trembling, as was he now. He knew that they would not be able to wait until dark.

Just off the pathway in a wooded area, and mostly clothed, they made love, Sean as always pulling out to ejaculate. They had both cried out and now they had to hurry. Voices. Someone was coming along the path. Men's voices, possibly police. Buttoning and tucking, they emerged from the other side and walked, innocently and leisurely, a couple enjoying the beginning sunset.

"God, I'm wet all over underneath," she said, laughing.

"I'm glad I could do that for you. Let's sit a minute. This once-a-week routine leaves me legs in a much weakened state."

"Gar, you talk funny." She gave his nose a playful tweak with her knuckles. "In a much weakened state. It's the books does that. What's that one, now?"

He handed it to her and sat on the grass. "I bought it from a very peculiar bird near me in Brooklyn."

She sat beside him and browsed through it. He looked across the way at the row of new mansions, grander than those in the Lafayette. "And what is the news in the Stewart household?"

"Mister's new store is taking in ten thousand dollars a day. Stewart's Marble Palace, they're calling it. He has two hundred clerks now."

"Ten thousand a day. Jaysus." He lay back and covered his face with his cap. "My own fortune is growing. I have more than a thousand dollars in cash coins now. No bank notes."

"A thousand! How much is he paying you?"

"Fifty a week, these days. Another raise starting Monday. I've got all the books straight, so he can see where his money is going and where it's coming from. He says I've helped him more than anyone ever has."

"And you about to give it all up to click a telegraph."

"When they get the cable done. Fourteen miles a week, now, going under the sea. Yes, I will. Do you want to raise our children on money from whorehouses? Eighty thousand a year he makes, sixty of it from the girls. I am bookkeeper to a ponce. That makes me a sort of assistant ponce myself, you know."

"Will he let you go?"

"No, he won't. You work for Jimmy, you belong to Jimmy, arms, legs, and arse button. I'll have to move and change my name. How does John Glaspie sound to you? I think I'll be John Glaspie."

Sean had written a couple of letters to Rory in care of John O'Leary, but three years and more had passed now, and there had been no reply. Lost in the mails—the usual fate of letters to Ireland, he had thought. So, in mid-August he was surprised to get a note from the desk clerk at Sweeny's Hotel in Rory's recognizable scrawl:

On me way to Americky. I'll get there in August if the boat don't sink. In the unlikely event you wish me to find you, leave your address at the desk of Sweeny's Hotel. Or check for the arrival of the Benjamin Gaines—upon which I have booked a stateroom—and be at the pier with six American virgins, a bottle of New York's finest brown ale, and yourself in muscular condition to carry me trunk, if you please.

The note was dated six weeks earlier, sent, apparently, just as its author was embarking. Sean left a note with his address at Sweeny's, and, on the Sunday following, there sure enough on his front step, in the thin disguise of a shaggy red beard, leaning on his elbow against the pillar, smiling and tanned from a sunny voyage, was Rory Lynch himself.

"Jaysus, he's become a giant," Lynch roared. "And how tall are ye now?" he asked as they shook hands.

"About six feet four inches, give or take. And you look in the spit of health. The voyage must have been an easy one."

"It was. Calm and sunny nearly every day. A lovely run across the pond. And you've filled out. You look strong as an ox."

"I can take care of myself."

They sat in wooden chairs on the lawn.

"Do you have a place yet?" Sean asked.

"I do. Got in yesterday and found a place. In Canal Street it is."

"You will do well to get away from there as soon as you can. The cholera has not been bad this summer, but the typhus is taking off quite a few. You're close to Centre Street and they have fifty dead there every summer from one disease or another, more some years. Come out here. It's only a penny ride on the ferry, it doesn't stink as much, and it's much safer from the contagions."

"Ah, surely the contagion's no worse than Dublin and I've survived there these many a year. As for the stink, it's nothing but rotting manure, same as home. I lived a year and more in a stable. As you may remember. It's a fine stink."

Sitting on lawn chairs, they chatted for several hours. Ireland had changed a great deal. "The famine is ended for now. The potato crop has been good these three years. Dublin goes on as ever, but the country is different. All the little townlands such as yours are gone. The landlords, the ones we didn't shoot, are more prosperous than ever, and they can go about at will now. There is not a peep of trouble. The Mollies are gone to America, Australia, England, the moon. _The Nation_ is started again by Lady Wilde and Duffy, but it's tame as porridge, all about if a tenant improves his place can the landlord raise the rent. And the answer to that is yes, so they can save themselves the ink and paper, as far as I'm concerned. The landlord can do what he bloody wants. Always could, always will. And so, I am out of it. We must fight from neutral territory, and that is this." He kicked the ground. "I am at the Fenian office. I went round to see it yesterday in Union Square, or just off it, the Moffatt mansion. Impressive. Have you seen it?"

"Yes, the great green flag, harp and sunburst flying out front. Everyone has. And what do they have you doing?"

"Emmet Monument Association. I'll be working for John O'Mahoney. Membership secretary. Remember? Cards, I suppose. And mailing fund letters. It will be boring but worthwhile, maybe. And you? You work for . . . who was it?"

"Jimmy O'Dea. He's a big man in the east side. Just between us, if you can keep a secret, I'm planning to leave him and become a telegrapher as soon as they get the cable done."

They talked all afternoon and made plans to meet the following afternoon, late, and go for a plate of oysters at Sweeny's.

Since he had graduated from the code class Sean had many free evenings. He gradually discovered that, for a young man with a few dollars in his pocket, New York was a feast. Jimmy introduced him at Delmonico's, but he soon found that other places away from the politicos and the sachems were better. The taverns in the side streets near the East River—Abraham Marthing's in William Street, the Pineapple and Griffin down on the quay—both served a good plate of food for fifty cents. He went regularly to the Park Theater in Nassau Street for the Italian opera, which he loved. And Wallack's Theatre at Thirteenth and Broad Way often presented Shakespeare plays. He told Kate about these, but his powers of description failed. She was not allowed to go out in the evenings, in any event. Her initiation into the fantastic would have to wait.

Alone in Jimmy's office on a gray day in early July, a drizzle wetting the leaves of the maple tree outside the front window, Sean could not concentrate on the numbers. It had been obvious for a month and more that Nosey O'Bannon, his erstwhile boss at the Nightingale, was skimming. Sean had not told Jimmy, but he had tried to tell Nosey that if he stopped now, he could cover it. In his short stint of bouncing for Nosey, he had got to know him a little. A cheerful but dim-witted fellow. It was a mistake to put him in a job like that, handling money. None of Jimmy's managers were honest, but the good ones were clever and moderate in their thievery. Nosey was getting dummy invoices from his supplier, a ruse that might have worked before Sean had organized the books, but now it was obvious: more barrels going in, the same money coming out. And it was clear this morning that he hadn't stopped. If he told Jimmy, the consequences did not bear thinking about. He longed for the day he could say goodbye to this.

But now it seemed the day was farther off than ever. The transatlantic cable had been completed. The telegraph offices had been decorated with flags of the world. A parade featuring a model of the cable-laying ship had marched down Broadway. The _Herald_ had proclaimed the transatlantic cable to be the angel of the Book of Revelation "with one foot in the sea and one foot on land, proclaiming that Time shall be no longer." Sean had gone to the International Telegraph Offices on Long Island and worked several training shifts, sent messages to and received messages from Valencia in the southwest of Ireland. He had been scheduled to begin full time in two weeks. He had rented a new room in the Bronx. His disappearance from the Bowery B'hoys was imminent. Then, disaster. The cable went dead. A break somewhere in its three thousand miles. It was not reparable. Millions of dollars lost. They devised a stronger insulating material and a thicker and denser gutta-percha for tensile strength, and began to lay a new one, but this one began in Newfoundland. It would be staffed by Canadians, no doubt. All his training was, for now at least, useless. There was no way out. He would have to report Nosey or face the punishment for protecting him.

A gust blew the leaves silver and the rain came down hard, streaming down the windows of his office. He slumped in his chair. Along the front walk came an elderly but strong-walking woman in a plain brown coat and an out of season straw hat, managing her umbrella against the wind with difficulty. She turned in at the gate and came up the front walk to the door. Did he know her from somewhere? He listened to the conversation at the door.

"Is John Gillespie a resident here?"

"Sean Gillespie, madam. He is not a resident, but he is here at present." Mike Halloran putting on his butler performance. "May I present him with your card?"

"I have no card. Tell him, if you would, that Mrs. Parrin is calling."

"Mrs. P.!" Sean shouted as he came from the office room. "Mrs. P.! Wonder of wonders!" He felt a momentary impulse to embrace her, but the way she held her umbrella before her did not invite it. "What brings you here? Come in. Sit down. Michael, bring us a drop of tea, old chap. Poor thing, you're drowned. Let's hang this by the fire," he said, helping her with her coat.

She sat in the leather chair against the wall and he turned his swivel chair to face her. She looked about the same, a sturdy, no-nonsense woman with red cheeks and strong shoulders. But she seemed reluctant to speak. "You were from Ohio, if I remember. What brings you to New York?"

"I am with the mission here now in the Five Points. I've been here a month and more. I have been looking up the children from the Ireland hospital to see how they have fared. It was one of them told me about you."

"Rory Lynch, I suppose," Sean answered. "I see him from time to time."

"No. I have not seen Mr. Lynch. Where would I find him?"

"He has an apartment near here. Number 99 Canal Street, third apartment."

She took a small pad of paper from her purse and recorded the information. "No, I heard about you from one you have not seen since Ireland. Megan Tierney."

"Megan. Is she in the city, then?"

"She is with us now. Poor woman, she has had a difficult time of it. She lost her sight of the ship's fever."

"Lost her sight . . ."

"She is blind, but well enough now after spending most of two years in the quarantine hospital in Staten Island. It's a lucky thing she survived that. She is learning housekeeping with us now. We do find work for the blind girls if they are trained. They can polish silver and assist in cooking. A blind man is impossible to place. And there are so many coming blind off the ships. The ship's fever destroys their sight, if it doesn't take them off. Tim Fagin died of the fever on the same ship. John O'Rourke took his own life just two months ago. He was living on the street, poor man. Do you remember him?"

"A little. He was the one thought the Indian corn would turn his skin dark. How do you find them? Thank you, Mike."

Mike placed the tea service on the table before Mrs. P. and poured her a cup. "Would you like sugar, madam?"

"No, thank you. The ships' registers are available in the customs office. I go when I can and read them. I came because I want you to come and see Megan. She speaks of you."

"I could come now, for a bit."

"That would be good of you. It is a half-hour's walk."

"I'll see if Mike can get us a cab. You don't use 'thou' and 'thee' anymore."

She sipped her tea without answering. He could see that his remark had put her out a bit. "I have found," she said in a sharper tone, "that many people of this city will ridicule anything that is out of their usual experience."

"They do, indeed. It is a—"

"I do not mind ridicule, as a rule," she said. "It is the empty wagon rattles most. But I found that it was interfering with my ability to carry out my work. Often I must ask people for help, and a commonality of speech makes that easier. Do you understand?"

He remembered her habit of thorough explanation and following query. "Yes. Perfectly." He found himself in a confusion of emotions, and close to tears. He rose quickly, went to the door and asked Mike to get a cab.

In the cab she asked about his job and the nature of Jimmy O'Dea's business. He answered in general and evasive terms—restaurants, retail businesses. The Five Points had not changed in the time that he had steered clear of it—derelict buildings, dark windows. Men curled in doorways showing their boot soles, evidence of long wandering to this destination. The Old Brewery still moldered on its corner. The Friends' Mission House was a newly painted white frame building, plain, unexpressive, unequal to the task of cheering the scene.

Megan was nervous and chattered like a magpie. How surprised she had been when Mrs. P. had found her. "I recognized her voice instantly. And yours, too. You speak cor-rectly," she mocked him, "like a school master. You always have, you know, but I did not notice voices so much before. You learn to hear everything when your sight is gone. Do you recognize me? Have I changed?"

She looked pale and a little soft, but she was as quick and animated as ever. "Not a bit. Those freckles still go marching across your nose in the same formation. How are you, Megan? I wish I had known you were out there."

"I am well now. They feed us like royalty here."

"And how did you hear of me?"

"Ah, all the fellows that eat here in the soup kitchen know about Jimmy O'Dea and his number one man. You're famous among them. Did you know that?"

"Ah, well. Famous. I hope to become less famous someday soon. I told Mrs. P. that we are in the restaurant business, but it's not as nice as that, truth to tell. I don't want to sail under false colors with you, Megan. What I do deserves no praise from anybody. Its only value is that it gives me a chance to get somewhere better. I am trained to be an international telegrapher, if they ever get a cable that works. Don't tell that to your fellows, if you please. If Jimmy knew about it, it would be an end of my plans."

"Is he a difficult master, then?"

They talked for an hour, and she became more calm, but she could not let go of the sharp note of fear in her voice, and she had formed the habit of a quick, apprehensive turn of the head at odd moments. He could tell from these, more than from what she said, something of what she had been through. She told of several girls from the Quaker hospital in Ireland who had found places in wealthy households. He did not know any of the ones she named.

"And what did you do out there on Staten Island for all that time?" he asked.

"I had some work to do. I can wash dishes with the best of them. In the evening people read to us. There were a dozen blind girls there and more at times. After the first, I wasn't with the very sick. For the most part, it wasn't as bad as all that."

"And does anyone read to you here?"

"Once in a long while. They are very busy here all hours of the day and night with the poor starving people. I swear, it's as bad as the old country in the time of hunger, only here it's forever."

"I could come and read to you in the evenings, if you'd like."

"Oh, I would. But it would have to be something suitable. There is a rule against novels and frivolous books."

"I hope we're not back to Bible stories again."

"Bring something you like. I'm sure it will be all right."

They sat for a minute without speaking.

"What are you going to do, Megan?"

"I'm to go into service as soon as they can find a situation for me. It will not be long, they say."

"Is that what you want?"

She drew a breath and held it a moment. "Yes."

It was late afternoon when he started back to Jimmy's. In the prosperous neighborhoods the approach of evening, the sky going violet, was a comfortable time of day, but here the shadows loomed: another night coming. He remembered the nights in the Old Brewery, the empty ache, the hours till dawn, the groan of agony from the depths of the building where a thousand wretched women and children tried to survive in the damp. He held his hand to his chest where her foot had been—what?—ten years ago, a little more. The cab was an old one and nearly deafened him with its grate of steel tires and rattle of loose boards.

Jimmy returned at six o'clock as usual from his rounds. Mike greeted him, but there was no reply—a sign that something was wrong, as was often the case. He would explode in a few seconds. Sean sat still. Had he found out about Nosey? There was an unintelligible shout from another room. Doors banged. Rose was not home and he required an audience for his exploding.

"I'll kill him!" That roar was near. Jimmy burst into the room, stopped and stared at Sean. "The son of a bitch has lived long enough. This was the reason, you see? That he came to the funeral. He thought I would be so touched that I would let him destroy me."

So it was about Rynders' new saloon on Eleventh Street, The Gardens of Spain. It had been installed in an old shop quickly and had been open for a couple of weeks. The old man was slowing down. Normally he would have seen it before it was done. Sean listened while Jimmy paced and poured out his grievance. He had honored his agreement and not built any business within two blocks of the Eleventh Street boundary. And now Rynders had shown his lack of respect, had thrown down a challenge which he knew must be answered. "It makes me sad, Johnny. I am a man of peace. But there is no other possibility. Please go around and tell Brian that he must get the boys together tonight. We will take it down tonight. I'd like you to supervise. There are several crystal chandeliers and other glass fixtures. Be sure that all of them are completely destroyed. Letting a chandelier like that fall to the floor will not break all of the crystal. Someone must take a hammer and be sure every piece is broken. Will you see to that?"

"Yes, sir."

"We will go in just at closing time, at one. I do not wish to inconvenience any patrons. Many of them are our patrons, too. And the boys may have the proceeds from the till, the food, and the liquor. Have Brian divide it. Tell them I have done that for them."

At one o'clock more than a hundred O'Dea men from the docks came down Hester and Walker streets. Some carried pistols, others heavy shocks of wood. Most of them formed into two groups to block access to the restaurant. About fifty went to the restaurant, filed in and walked down the aisle between the empty tables in silence. Brian went to the bar and gave the three customers there five dollars each, explaining that he was sorry to have to ask them to leave. The bartender needed no asking; he had skedaddled the minute he saw the column of stevedores come in. The men stood quietly. A clink of dishes came from the kitchen. Brian walked to the swinging doors, and presently the white-clad staff came out and walked hastily to the door.

The demolition took about two hours. It was a fine mahogany bar and credenza; several men worked on them with axes for the whole time, chopping both to kindling. Sean spent nearly the whole time smashing beads of crystal from the chandeliers. He had three men cut them from the wires with butcher knives, then he placed them on the terrazzo floor, covered them with a napkin to prevent the glass flying, and smashed them with a hammer.

"So, are we going to have a war about this?" Skinner Meehan asked, putting down a handful of crystals.

"Likely so, I suppose," Sean answered.

"You got any complaints?" Brian asked in a heavy voice. Skinner had not seen him, standing in the shadow behind the bar.

"No."

"Jimmy take care of you. You take care of Jimmy," said Brian Boru. "This here _is_

war. Rynders knows that. Jimmy don't answer this, he's done. And if Jimmy's done that means we are done." Brian walked to the end of the bar and poured himself a shot of whiskey.

"Jimmeh take cah of you," Skinner mimicked, bringing another load.

"It's a livin', man," Sean said, covering an especially large teardrop of crystal and giving it a hard whack.

Skinner squatted his great bulk beside him, watching, rubbing his stubbled chin, an idea coming. He spoke quietly so Brian would not hear. "It just seems like such a, you know, so god damn dumb, is all."

War began the following afternoon. Rynders' Dead Rabbits reinforced by the Roach Guards from the Paradise came up Broome Street into the Bowery and attacked the Bowery boys' favorite hangout, the Green Dragon at number 40. With iron bars and paving blocks they smashed the interior of the restaurant and tore up the dance floor board by board, passing the liquor bottles around. Several Bowery boys were beaten, two of them beaten to death. Jimmy sent Sean and Mike for the stevedore bosses, whom he met at Brodie's Saloon. The two gangs, about one thousand in all, confronted each other in Bayard Street and fought with pistols, knives, shocks of wood, and stones. Stretcher bearers hustled down the streets carrying gang casualties to nearby hospitals, which soon became overfilled. Gun battles also flared on the rooftops as gangs vied to control them.

By late afternoon barricades had been erected in several neighboring streets, muskets and rifles had been procured, and a steady fusillade continued until after dark. Toward evening a detachment of one hundred police arrived, but they were quickly defeated and forced to withdraw, carrying six wounded and one killed. The low clouds glowed through the night as several buildings burned. The fire stations were empty, the firemen being gang members all. A general conflagration of the kind that had repeatedly wiped out large sections of the city in the thirties and forties seemed likely as the fusillade began again the next morning.

Finally the police commissioner called for Rynders and O'Dea to meet in his office. The two men and their entourages gathered around a table in a City Hall conference room, Sean at the side of Jimmy O'Dea. All of them had been up all night and the atmosphere was raw with hatred. Irish hoods had been disrupting the Buntline show, intimidating the patrons. They had killed Terence Galen, one of Rynders' best men, in the street of his own block, with no provocation. Rynders' face was purple with rage as he shouted his grievances.

O'Dea appeared calm and reasonable by contrast. It was an act. Sean knew that the old man would gladly rip Rynders' guts out. "Sean, you have looked into that matter for me. Tell this man what happened."

The commissioner would not understand a reference to the Rynders saloon in Jimmy's territory, so Sean mentioned an incident of a month earlier. "Galen and his boys came into Kit Burns's terrier pit at four a.m. as it was closing. They beat up the manager and stole the night's proceeds."

O'Dea turned an innocent face to the commissioner. "I would have to kill anybody who would do a thing like that," O'Dea said, holding his hands up in supplication. He turned to Rynders. "You can understand that, captain. You are also a businessman."

After four hours Rynders and O'Dea agreed: the Garden of Spain would not re-open; the Buntline All-American show would go unmolested. Sean walked from City Hall to the barricade in Bayard Street with one of Rynders' men and together they persuaded the men to disperse. In late afternoon, singly or in twos they straggled down the dingy street, indistinguishable in their heavy-legged shuffle from the derelicts who came out of their crannies and holes as the firing subsided.

Mrs. P. directed him to the kitchen, where he found Megan drying dishes.

"Can I put them away for you?"

"Wash your hands, then." She answered as if his sudden appearance were no surprise. "It's a rule here."

He took the kettle from the stove and poured warm water into the wash basin.

"With soap," she added.

"Soap it is. Soap it is." He took the bar of strong soap and lathered his hands. Several fresh cuts stung. "And how are you keeping?"

"Well enough for a blind mole. Snouting along in my tunnels. Were you in the fight?"

"I was. As little as possible. I kept myself down. I haven't slept, though, in two days. As soon as I relax I'll be asleep."

"It must be difficult for you, keeping down. I'm told you've grown a great fellow."

He looked at her sideways as he dried his hands. Teasing smile. The pallor of her illness still on her. "Would you let me put my hand on your head? To see how big you are?"

"I've grown since I got here. The American food, it must be. All right."

She placed a hand on his shoulder and moved it up along the side of his head to the top. In her damp soapy aura he felt something from eons ago. Warm, humid kitchen, pot boiling. "Gar, you're a giant."

"I'm standing on a chair."

"You're not. You're seven feet."

"Six and a half, nearly."

"'Tis a wonder you weren't shot, a target the size of you."

"If you saw where I kept myself, you wouldn't say that. I'm cautious when the bullets are flying."

Her hand remained, sensing. "You're trembling."

He took her hand and held it. "A bit of drying dishes and I'll be fine. And being a giant is handy for putting things on shelves."

He stacked the plates, then said, "I brought something to read to you. I thought a bit of reading would calm me down, but it didn't pass muster. Mrs. P. has it. She'll give it back when I leave."

"And what was it?"

"The new Dickens book, _David Copperfield._ "

"I told you, not a novel. A Quaker history or the Bible. Other books are frivolous, they say."

"They are simpletons, soft be it spoken."

"They saved your life. And mine."

"True. Maybe we should return the favor by trying to save their minds."

"You won't find them in the streets battling each other to pieces," she replied, handing him a pot. "Above the stove," she said.

He hung the pot on the peg above the stove. "I'm waving the white flag. You've destroyed me. It is a hard world for a penniless bog trotter to find a place in. If they ever get an Atlantic cable in the States, and it holds together, I'll become civilized directly."

The dishes done, they went to the sitting room where Mrs. P. sat in a corner sewing. "I could make a run for it, I suppose. Illinois," he said. Mrs. P. looked up, considering, then resumed her sewing. "I have some money saved. The only thing is, the telegrapher job, if it will be anywhere in this country it will be here, I think. The international code is what I know. They are converting the domestic telegraph to the international code. In a year they are doing that. They will be needing new operators. I could make a dash for the west then. Dakota, maybe. Change my name. It's a big country. Jimmy would never find me." He talked on of his plans. Megan murmured assent. He was very sleepy. It seemed to him that Mrs. P. said there was no need to be trapped. He awoke in the dark and realized he had fallen asleep while she was speaking and had slept for some time. But he had heard what she said and listened now to her voice in his mind. "This is a tiny corner of the world and it is a sad thing that there are so many who imagine that there is no way out. There are roads and ways aplenty and your own two good legs, and if you have a few dollars the railroad will have you in farming country in a few days. Any man can learn to farm and it is the best of occupations. There is no need to stay in this, no need whatever." He was on the sofa of the sitting room. Someone had covered him with a blanket. A very tiny corner of the world, this little room, he thought. Maybe I can hide in it forever. He pulled the blanket up and went back to sleep.

The next morning Jimmy came into the office as Sean was going through the receipts. "I want to express my appreciation for your loyal work," he said in his usual stilted way. "It has been commendable. Very commendable. I am giving you a raise in your wages. Seventy-five dollars a week you may draw. You write your own paychecks," he chuckled at his own generosity. "I trust you, Johnny. And if you need anything more, be sure to ask. I consider you a friend, Johnny."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome." He picked up one of the bills from its basket, looked idly at it, put it back. "You were good with the commissioner. You have a better knack for that kind of talk than I do." He sat in the chair alongside Sean's desk. "I could not do without you, Johnny. You know that. And that is why it grieves me when I hear that you are still entertaining ideas of becoming a telegraph man. Tele-grapher, whatever they call it. Why would you want to do that? What can it pay? Twenty dollars a week? Twenty-five?" He held up his hand preventing a reply. "I know what you want. It is what I want. To get out of the whorehouses and the barrel houses so you can get into the good people's houses. Am I right?" He held his hand up again. "I am right. Listen. Get married. Raise children. Nothing would please me more than to send your sons to a university. And they can get as many miles from this as they please and have a life that is nothing like this. But we cannot do that. We cannot give up our kingdom. Without a kingdom we are without defenses. We learned that in the old country, did we not? We must never find ourselves in that way again. We must hold what we have. And that requires full use of every resource. I cannot let you go, Johnny. I am a strong man, but I would cry if I had to hurt you. I would cry like a baby." He was crying now. Plump tears ran down his cheeks. He rose and left the room.
4

McMasters, Mitchel, and Sickles

Mitchel and Meagher sipped their morning tea at The Sparrow, a tea shop near _The Citizen_ office. Meagher browsed a newspaper from the rack. He spoke without looking from his reading. "Should I call him out?"

"Old McMasters? No. Concentrate on the good news. Your friend Sickles will throw a jolly party at the hall tonight. Congressman Sickles. Jesus, that doesn't sound right even yet."

A year earlier, Sickles had returned from London after a stint as secretary the American ambassador to England, James Buchanan, and run for congress. His departure from England had been precipitated by the scandal of his refusing to stand for "God Save the Queen" at a public function. Two minutes of sitting in a chair had got him the Democratic nomination for Congress. It was now two days after the election. The ballot count had been completed, and Daniel Edgar Sickles, by reputation the greatest cocksman in New York, the man who had traveled to Albany as a legislator openly in the company of a prostitute, would soon be a congressman.

"Dan's all right. It's New York," Meagher said, still reading the McMasters broadside against him.

"And O'Brien is out of Van Diemen's Land—or Tasmania as they say now—and on his way to Ireland. I thought you would be filled with supreme joy."

"Palmerston was afraid he'd die in prison. Trying to avoid trouble with Irish MPs. O'Brien's so sick he can hardly walk on his own. He'll die in transit, I suppose. Why do they continue after me? I have not made an anti-Catholic remark in public in a year."

The Catholic newspapers had lost no time in condemning Meagher's anti-clerical position. The _Boston Pilot_ dragged up the old issue of his ticket of leave, in spite of his having published the whole story in the _Herald_ more than a year earlier. Now McMasters' column in _The Freeman's Journal_ repeated the accusation of the _Times_ , that, in his lust for lucre, he had abandoned Catherine and contributed to her death.

"Well, you _have_ , you know, strictly speaking," Mitchel replied. "You did make a rather pointed remark to old McMasters at the Saint Pat's festival, as I recall."

Meagher continued to read without answering.

"'What would a Catholic be doing reading a free man's journal? A slave of Alabama has a freer mind than a papist.' It went something like that, did it not?"

"You have lost the poetry."

"Don't challenge him. He's too old. You'd only end up in jail for the remainder of your days. Find him on the street and punch his nose in the fine old tradition of American journalism. He won't challenge you. That stern look on him is all bluff. He'll melt like chicken fat."

Directly upon leaving the coffee shop Meagher strode toward the _Journal_ office, only a few blocks away. He decided not to go in. No need to place himself in a nest of enemies. This would be man to man. He walked up and down the block several times. Tired of pacing, he stood with a couple of idlers before a blacksmith shop. In the comfortable ammoniac heat of its open door he watched a cart horse being shod. The Irish smith kept up a running patter, whether for himself or his audience was hard to tell. "He's left it on too long, ye see, on a horse that's growin'. The nails is pulled and done a hurt." He indicated a crack in the hoof with a stubby thumb.

"For want of a nail the horse was lost," said one of the observers.

"That's right," said the other.

"Isn't that what they say?"

"That's right," the man repeated.

"Isn't that what they say?" he asked Meagher. "Eh?"

"It is," said Meagher.

"That's what they say, isn't it?"

"That's it," Meagher agreed.

"For want of a nail the horse was lost," the man repeated. It struck him funny. Toothless mouth open wide, he broke into a high-pitched laugh, his adam's apple bouncing.

The smith spit a gob of tobacco juice and put a few nails in his mouth, turning them with his darkened tongue and lips to hold them, then, tapping the horse's leg and taking it between his own legs, quickly nailed the new shoe.

McMasters emerged at lunch time. Meagher walked up to him, and, without a word, took a swing at his face. McMasters had recognized him and was able to duck away. Meagher, off balance, landed a glancing blow and nearly went to his knees from a great thump on his back. With a sharp pain that seemed to go to his heart, he turned to face the smiling McMasters, who brandished a walking stick. The tip was obviously loaded with lead. McMasters took from inside his coat a revolver. Before he could bring it to position, Meagher lunged and grabbed his arm, preventing an accurate shot, but the weapon did go off and Meagher, grazed above the ear, fell to the ground. McMasters departed hurriedly and someone offered a handkerchief, which Meagher held to the side of his head as he went off in a cab to the hospital. By late afternoon, the powder stain mostly removed from his face, he was back in the office enduring the gibes of Mitchel.

"Another foray into the world of arms, another lesson learned." Luckily, Mitchel was in the final hour of getting the issue out, going through the proofs as quickly as he could, and did not have the time for a full treatment. "You neglected to bring your military training to bear. Next time do make a few discreet inquiries into the nature of your man's arsenal before you mount your attack."

"You advised the attack in the first place, you will remember."

"There is some justice in your accusation. I did. I did at that. I left out a detail. Well, such are the fortunes of war. Cheer up, old fellow. New advice," he said, holding up his editor's pen. "Better advice. Pink him with this. If Meagher of the sword does not prevail, bring on Meagher of the mightier weapon. Next issue. Headline: The Lackeys of the Catholic Press. The whole story of the church baking its own biscuits over the fire of Irish nationalism, the Catholic press by turns fanning the fire and cooling it, a baker's assistant in the garb of a revolutionist. There you have it, a brilliant metaphor produced on the spot. You can have it for your article. No charge. We'll get a lovely sketch to go with it. Bishop Cullen at the oven. Have you read my editorial in this number? No? Chin up, man. Have a look at it. The English are off to fight the Rooshians in the Crimea. I advocate an Irish-Russian alliance."

"I have become a clown."

Mitchel turned from his work and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. "Each man in his life plays many—"

"Enough of that. Damn you. And damn your Irish-Russian alliance. It's nonsense, John!" He rose and looked about the one-room office, its single platen press being run by an old Swede, hard of hearing, a stutterer who rarely spoke a word, and Jimmy Roche the clerk who had worked himself into a state of precarious health taking care of all of the business including mailings to the seven thousand subscribers. A skinny fellow with large red eyes whose jaw hung continually open, stunned at life's continuing outrages, Roche looked up over the piles of paper on his desk at Meagher's outburst. "What good is Ireland as an ally? No army, no wealth, no influence. Russia might as well form an alliance with the Far Tortugas." Meagher picked up the paper from Mitchel's desk. "This is self-manipulation, John. We've found a way to make ourselves feel good and we're out in the jakes having a fine time. In the meanwhile the world goes by. I've done with it."

Meagher walked out of the office for good. The paper was moribund in any event. Initially, propelled by the reputations of its editors, it had sold well, but lately circulation had declined, and even the serialization of Mitchel's _Jail Journal_ had not revived it. In fact, it had hurt. Mitchel was a pro-slavery white supremacist and he made no bones about it. In describing Ireland before the famine he wrote:

. . . in ordinary years many thousands of poor people lived mainly on seaweed some months of every year. But this was trespass and robbery; for the seaweed belonged to the lord of the manor, who frequently made examples of the depredators. Can you picture in your mind a race of white men reduced to this condition? White men! Yes, of the highest and purest blood and breed of men. The very region I have described to you was once—before British civilization overtook us—the abode of the strongest and richest clans in Ireland.

This was popular with the lower-class Irish, who fought with blacks over cartman and stevedore jobs and taunted and fought with them in the streets, but stevedores and cartmen did not buy newspapers. Educated readers had dropped the paper like poison.

The irony of Mitchel's stance was noted. An abolitionist paper replied:

The strongest and richest clans, indeed! If strength and wealth are evidence of high and pure blood, then it is clear that the English have the 'highest and the purest' in their part of the world, and we need concern ourselves no more with the Irish than Mr. Mitchel is concerned with the Negro. Mr. Mitchel needs to examine his philosophical underpinnings. These pinnings have come undone and left his backside pinkly exposed to the general view.

_The Citizen_ folded within a year of Meagher's departure. Mitchel moved to Tennessee, where his views were regarded as mere common sense, and bought a farm. Two of his four sons would die fighting for the Confederacy.

"Well, Meagher, you son of a bitch," Dan Sickles shouted halfway across Delmonico's dining room. It was a celebration of Dan Sickles' election to Congress. "Your badge of courage looks damned fine on you, gives you a dashing sort of musketeer, what do they call it? Panache. The Englishman looks a damn sight worse, I'll wager. You'll have to fight the ladies off now."

Although he spoke like a roughneck, Dan Sickles, three years older than Meagher, was a man of several New York cultures. Tammany Hall, of course, and a fixture in Delmonico's,

but he also knew professors at Columbia College, and especially valued his friendship with one Lorenzo Da Ponte, his former tutor, who had in his youth been a librettist for Mozart and, at age eighty-nine still taught Italian at the college. It was through his acquaintance with Da Ponte that he had met his future bride Teresa, the very young daughter of Italian opera singers. It was rumored that their affair had begun when she was thirteen. He had married her when she was sixteen and he thirty-four. Pretty and flirtatious, she had been much in demand at London social gatherings.

Meagher held a hand to his bandage in mock agony, congratulated the new congressman, and took the hand of Teresa. "And congratulations to you, madam. It is your wedding anniversary, I believe?"

"You darling. Trust Tommy to remember." As he bent to kiss her hand, Teresa pulled it very near her daringly cut gown so that his forehead nearly touched her breasts. Sickles laughed delightedly.

"A death-defying adventure that was," Meagher said, holding a hand to his brow. "I feel I must sit down."

"Have a restorative, old fellow." Sickles handed him a whiskey from a passing tray. "And you must kiss her again. It was her birthday just last week. She has attained the ripe old age of eighteen years."

"Kiss her again, I dare not. My knees are near to buckling now, but I will drink to ripeness," Meagher toasted, and downed it at a gulp.

The orchestra began a waltz, and Sickles escorted Teresa to the dance floor. Meagher watched. After a minute the plump and sleek figure of President-elect James Buchanan appeared from the crowd. He and Sickles bowed to each other and Old Buck guided Teresa elegantly around the dance floor.

"They don't call him Old Buck for nothing," said a voice near his right ear. It was the Wigwam lawyer Jim Brady, a little red-faced man in an ill-fitting tuxedo.

"They are an item, I take it."

"They are. Dan's is not the first political career built on the back of his wife. And, of course, he has his own little amusements. Still sees that doxy he used to take up to Albany with him. And a few others. He goes all the way to Philadelphia for one of his favorites."

"A man with an appetite."

"Not unlike yourself, I believe. You are well entertained these days, at Mrs. Dennis's, I hear."

Meagher helped himself to another whiskey. "This is a very small city, Jim," he said. He did visit the brothel once or twice a week, as he had in Dublin, and Mrs. Dennis's was popular with the Tammany men, including Mayor Wood, who always gave Mrs. Dennis a pass in his biennial election-year brothel-closing ritual. Mrs. Dennis had a comfortable parlor where the men took a glass of beer and chatted, and she had a stable of young and lively girls who brought the patrons back for more. There was always piano music and sometimes a singer. It was a man's secret, never alluded to in print or mentioned in the presence of women.

Tammany whiskey flowed and the party for Sickles went on into the small hours, but Meagher, unlike most of the guests, remained fairly sober. He was able to walk the twelve blocks to his hotel.

Meagher's law apprenticeship had a year to go. The end of the lecture circuit seemed finally in sight. Meanwhile he continued on the stages of New York and Boston with occasional tours to the Midwest and the South. In early November, after a poorly attended lecture on a rainy evening at the new Niblo's in Grand Street, a few people came to the front of the room and asked the usual questions, made the usual remarks, the ones he had been hearing for a year and more now. Roberts and an invasion of Canada, O'Mahoney and Stephens and a rising in Ireland. Which side did he favor? He favored neither side—real military plans were not bruited about at fundraising events. He favored raising enough money to pay his hotel bill, due in three days, and this paltry gate would barely cover costs. He favored a law career, a comfortable house like his father's. "I see little prospect of a victory of arms against the English," he said. "If the master does not relent and give us back our small island, they'll have it forever. We cannot take it from them by force." The discussion went on. He had been through it a hundred times.

A lady with an ornate hat stood and asked in an educated English accent, "I have a question in reference to the famine. Why did they not raise other crops? Why was it just potatoes?"

He looked at her. She fixed him in a tight-lipped stare that seemed to accuse him and his countrymen of not being up to the mark, agriculturally speaking. Cavanagh and the boyos in the back laughed derisively. Such questions must be answered. She had paid her dollar. "It was just potatoes, madam, because some of your countrymen conquered Ireland many years ago and took all the good farmland for themselves. People who had been farm owners became tenants of English landlords, obliged to live and feed their families on the produce of a small parcel, often less than an acre. Potatoes are the only crop that an acre of land can produce in sufficient quantity to feed a family. Let me say one thing further, madam, because I think I understand the sense of your question. The Irish, many of them, are peasants. Uneducated. Backward. I believe your question suggests that. But they are peasants because the policy of your government over centuries has deliberately made them so. They were barred by English law from educational institutions, from professions, from government office, and from the land, even from owning a horse worth more than five pounds. These laws were finally abolished only twenty-six years ago, but the social order they have wrought is still very much with us. And I must say that to deliberately and forcibly reduce a people to peasantry and then to suggest that they are peasants because of some inherent racial deficiency is a double outrage. It is to rob a man of his money and then berate him for his penury. It is to break a man's back and scold him for his bad posture." The room had gone dead quiet. "We appear the beggar on the road and the lady averts her gaze. There is a story the old man could tell, but it is musty and long. I am sorry to trouble you with it, and I thank you for attending this evening."

His eye wandered off to the side of the room to a striking young woman sitting alone, waiting, he supposed, for one of the men. He had glanced that way several times during the evening..

As he was about to depart, after half an hour of predictable discussion, she approached and touched his arm. Gray-blue transparent eyes, an amazingly slender waist, and an expensive dress, corsetted in the newest fashion, a wisp of dark hair—auburn? black? hard to tell in the gaslight—showing from under a large hat "Excuse me, Mr. Meagher. I'm Elizabeth Townsend. I'd like to talk with you sometime. I wonder if we could set a time to meet."

"What about now?"

"Your friends—"

"Friends," he said to the men, "go ahead. I'll be coming along in a bit."

"Oh, ho," said Mike Cavanagh. The others laughed as they went out.

"I am sorry about them," he said.

"You make a compelling case for Irish home rule." She flushed bright red, barely able to control her breath as she spoke, fairly bursting with idealism. He had encountered such women

at other meetings, pent up all day with their books and their pamphlets on worthy causes in the house of some practical businessman, these lectures their only outlet for the poetry of their souls. Needy as beggars, they frightened him, and he usually escaped as fast as he could.

"An easy enough thing to do," he answered. "Compelling the English to permit it is the place where it sticks."

"I'm wondering . . . I have a little money put by and I would like to assist. Can you suggest . . . " Her voice caught.

The hall was empty now, except for the two of them and the attendant, who had locked the main entrance and stood now at the side exit, rattling his keys.

"Are you out all alone this fearful night?" he asked.

"I have a carriage waiting. I'm just over on Fifth Avenue. Could I take you somewhere?" She looked him squarely in the eyes. This was a daringly unconventional offer and her look forbade him to smile at it.

He accepted a ride to the Astor House. The rain had turned to sleet, which chattered on the roof of her quiet and smooth-rolling carriage and stippled its glass windows. "As to helping the cause, I would be careful. Subscribe to their papers if you like. Unfortunately, you see, there is no hope for any scheme that we might spend your money on. Stephens' idea of organizing an ad hoc force that could defeat the British is plainly impossible. I think he must know it himself.""But you, yourself—"

"Yes. In the midst of the famine it was necessary if we were ever to hold our heads up again to try the impossible. There are outrages that must be answered. But continuing to bang against impossibility is not intelligent. For now, all we can do is talk. And we are . . ." He paused. "We are."

"Yet you say the famine was the greatest outrage ever perpetrated by one people of Europe upon another. Surely, a price must be paid."

He watched the changing light from the iced windows play across her face, white and gold and reddish gold, as she spoke so earnestly. It was a very pretty face, and the kaleidoscopic show it unwittingly made was doing its work in his veins. What to tell her?

"And we may eventually extract that price. Everywhere in the world, except England, one or two neighborhoods in Boston, and the editorial department of the _Times_ , opinion is strong for us."

"Henry Raymond."

"Henry J. Raymond, indeed. Lieutenant governor and editorialist of the _Times_ and no friend of mine."

"Your description is most forbearing, considering what he has written about you."

"Most of it is so far from the mark that it touches me not. And I admit that I have used other descriptive terms for him on other occasions." He was about to say "out of the hearing of ladies," but judged that this would be an error. Miss Townsend was obviously a modern woman. She had no doubt read Shelley and Byron and heard Amelia Bloomer. Fortunately, she was not wearing the ridiculous costume that Miss Bloomer had made infamous.

"He suggested that my neglect killed my wife. The sheer pomposity of such a remark from one who knows nothing of the situation is breathtaking. But I would like to change the subject."

"He is an acquaintance of my father's," she said. "I have heard the word pomposity used in connection with him."

The carriage had stopped before a white blaze which lit up the interior of the carriage as if it were noon. The driver opened the door, his heavy coat and top hat shining with the wet, and revealed the ostentatious display of gaslight of the Astor House.

"May I call on you?" he asked.

"Yes, I'd like that."

He soon learned from friends that he had made a considerable conquest. Elizabeth Townsend was the daughter of Peter Townsend, prosperous merchant, and granddaughter of the Peter Townsend whose Sterling Iron Works had provided the first steel rail in America. He sent her a note requesting to call and received a prompt acceptance. The three-story attached brick residence a few blocks up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square was substantial, but well short of magnificent. The parlor in which they met was warmed by a smoky coal-burning fireplace which had deposited grime on everything in the room. Conversation was awkward at first. Her mother had died when she was eight, so she lived here with her father. She had graduated from the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary just this past spring. She had enjoyed many of the courses and the professors, but the religious regimen had not been to her liking. She asked about his education and he told her about Clongowes Wood and Stonyhurst, feeling awkward and overly formal. To break the nervousness between them he told of a play he had seen at the Hibernia Theater, mimicking the characters.

"Would you take me to see a play?" she asked.

She was a shocking woman. "You would no doubt be a little conspicuous. Perhaps we could pop into the back of the balcony as the lights go down, if your father approves."

"My father need not approve. I am twenty-two years of age," she replied.

She invited him to dine with her father and herself. At dinner, three days later, it was not difficult to discern that Peter Townsend was less than enthusiastic about his daughter keeping such company. He got to the subject of finances early on, and it was clear from his look of bewilderment that public speaking and an anticipated career in the law, which would begin in a few months, was not up to the mark. Fortunately for his chances, she was a woman with an independent mind. A few days later they went to the Bowery Theater. The weather had warmed and it was raining lightly as the carriage let them off. He had tried to time his entrance just at curtain time to keep the uproar to a minimum, but he was five minutes early, so they had to endure the shouts and cheers of his admirers and some direct stares from the mostly male audience in the direction of the elegant lady. He stood and waved once and sat down, but the cheers continued for several minutes. At last the house lights dimmed and they were able to witness the entire performance of, as the program announced,

The Fenian Spy, or John Bull in America

A Comedy Featuring the Christy Minstrels

Characters:

Mr. Greenhorn, an Englishman

Felix O'Flannigan, a broth of a boy

Fanny Phoenix, a dashing young Irish girl

Various New Yorkers played by the Christy Minstrels

A cape-flourishing villain took center stage and announced that he was an Englishman determined to capture the notorious Fenian spy Felix O'Flannigan. He flourished his cape again, and allowed the audience to boo and hiss its fill. Scenes of the melodrama alternated with songs of bold Fenian men, Mother Machree, dear little Ireland. Finally, the shillelagh-wielding O'Flannigan drubbed the mustachioed Englishman to such great cheers from the audience that the scene was repeated twice, the actors bowing to accolades after each performance.

They left the theater into a mild late autumn evening and walked half a block to the carriage. With the warmer weather the summer stench was back and she held a handkerchief to her face. "Well?" he asked.

"It was interesting."

"How so?"

"Well, maybe it wasn't. The audience, though, was so wonderfully . . . their energy. What do you think?"

"It comes a little short of Sophocles in depth of meaning. Every few months they change the title and the names of the characters and put in a new Moore melody or two." He motioned the coachman to remain on his perch and opened the door for her. "That there is a living to be made in this trade, it is certain." He latched her door and, leaping a four-foot-wide slough of wet horse manure at the curb, trotted around the carriage and got in beside her. "But I grow skeptical."

"Surely, you don't compare this low stuff with your own lectures?"

"Well, all right, I won't, then. I thank you for putting me at ease on that point. All the same, I do hope to be practicing law soon and to let Felix O'Flannigan cudgel the Sassenach sans Meagher."

Elizabeth Townsend and Thomas Francis Meagher announced their nuptials a month later and were married at the home of Archbishop Hughes in November of 1855. Peter Townsend, mollified by the charm of his new son-in-law and the revelation that his circle of friends included some people who would be very worthwhile in a business sense, welcomed Meagher into his home and turned the master suite over to the newlyweds. Near year's end a special act was introduced in the New York State Assembly to admit Thomas Francis Meagher to the New York Bar despite his being a year shy of the required residency for citizenship. The Irish vote being what it was, members scrambled over each other to co-sponsor the bill. It passed unanimously.

Meagher was in his mid-thirties now, steaming full ahead, as he thought in his happy moments, toward success in America. But what success, exactly, was still a puzzle. The imagination sketches the future in the high romantic style, he reflected, but the world, when it presents, does so in gritty daguerreotype. America, marriage, admission to the bar—he kept getting what he wanted—but his life kept somehow the same. He had imagined that admission to the bar would present the opportunity, but, initially, at least, it disappointed. In his first case he successfully defended an Irish housemaid accused of theft, but, since the mere accusation was sufficient to prevent her getting another situation, he had not the heart to take her money. "Don't take too many charity cases or you'll become known as a two-dollar lawyer," Dan Sickles had advised him as they sipped a whiskey at Sweeny's. "Deep pockets, old boy, deep pockets are where successful lawyers live. Become a judge as soon as you can. Some possibility of self-respect in that work, but in the meantime seek the deep pockets."

Sickles' advice was good, in theory, but the possessors of such pockets, he was finding, are much sought and take care not to be easily found. This was America, and America was pockets. Newly married, living in a fashionable house on Fifth Avenue, the one thing he must not do now was to run short of funds in full view of his new father-in-law. A pocket strategy was required. Peter Townsend was a man of pockets, but he had a longstanding arrangement with an old law firm and made no move toward changing. And it was important not to ask. Leaving for a lecture tour of the Midwest, Meagher apologized to Elizabeth within the old man's hearing and said that he would soon build the law practice to a point where he could give up lecturing. The old man said nothing. Townsend did not explicitly disapprove of his son-in-law's lecturing, but the sad, quizzical look still occurred at its mention. Townsend frequently spoke of the men he admired: men of substance, men with a product to sell. Cornelius Vanderbilt and his shipping and railroad lines, A. T. Stewart and his marble dry goods palace, Astor and his real estate. Nationalism was appropriate for luncheon speeches to one's business associates—optimism about the country's future encouraged investment and helped everyone—but as the basis for a life? His advice to his son-in-law was general and difficult to put into practice. "Look to Central America. That's where the future is."

He thought about it. He talked to Cavanagh about it. He came to a conclusion. There was one trade whose minutia were familiar enough to him and which might work well in connection with a law practice. A newspaper editor, if he championed certain causes, Central American causes, possibly, might recommend his services to those causes and thereby to persons of pocket profundity. "It's pocket billiards, Cavanagh, a bank shot."

"Shameless. A shameless pun, Tom. You'll buy a whiskey for that one."

"Shameless is one of the requisites. The truly shameless can go to the clouds in this wonderful land."

In April he founded _The Irish News_ by the usual expedient of buying the shop of a failing paper and offering to pay for it over a period of years. After a day of inquiring he found Jim Roche in an east side boarding house and offered him his old job. Roche, who had no job at all and was down to his last coppers, accepted with a minimal sound and a look of more dread than usual. "You want Peterson? The printer? Upstairs. Needs work, too." Meagher hired Peterson the printer, too.

The summer of 1857 was a difficult one for New Yorkers. Just as Meagher was opening _The Irish News_ office, the state legislature, controlled by Republicans, abolished Mayor Wood's city police force and appointed its own Metropolitan Police. The upstate Republicans pointed out that many of Wood's police were gang members, collecting protection money from citizens, and failing to close the grog shops on Sunday. It was all true enough, but what the upstaters did not understand was that it was traditional. The fire houses, too, were run by gangs—every one of them—collecting protection money and burning the buildings of deadbeats. After a few fires, everyone paid. And why shouldn't the grog shops be open on the only day a working man had to drink his lager and chat with his friends? The Bible-thumping farmers from upstate had passed that foolish law, too.

Supporters of the mayor called a rally and urged the crowd to resist by force of arms. All summer long in every district of the city, even in the wealthy neighborhoods, the former policemen fought pitched battles with the municipals. Compounding the problem, the usual gang warfare reached a new intensity as turf battles raged in several wards. In the Eleventh Ward, the Blues and the Forty Thieves fought in the docks of the East River, pier by pier, to see who would control stevedore hiring. Fifteen blocks to the north, in the Seventeenth Ward, the Dead Rabbits and the Gashouse Gang fought the Bowery Boys from barricades that rendered that section of the city impassable for the entire summer. Casualties were not counted since the gangs buried their own, but after one attack, a victory for the Bowery Boys in which the Dead Rabbits broke and ran, police came into the abandoned battlements and gathered twenty-seven corpses from the street. The 27th regiment of New York militia was called in repeatedly, but to no lasting effect. The restaurants were deserted, businesses closed. Beggars and whores swarmed the streets thicker than ever, and in the fall the stock market crashed, but Meagher, with the former work force of _The Citizen_ , was an editor again.

The news from Central America was of William Walker's filibuster in Nicaragua. Walker, a native of Tennessee who resembled Napoleon Bonaparte in size and set of jaw, after invading Mexico in a failed attempt to set up a sovereign nation in Lower California, had taken his armed band to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua and assisted a local rebel in conquering the country. Soon after, he had murdered his cohort and named himself president. Now he was busily drumming up immigration from the States. In addition to the original California land office, a self-styled Office of Colonization for the Republic of Nicaragua, directed by one Colonel Joseph W. Fabens, former U.S. counsel in Nicaragua, was now shipping off several hundred Walkerites from New York every week to begin work on the tropical paradise.

"'With its natural resources and ideal ocean ports, Nicaragua needs only the addition of Yankee hard work and ingenuity to become a paradise on earth,'" Mike Cavanagh read aloud in mock oratorical style. Meagher had brought copies of his first issue to Sweeny's, but, it being not quite four o'clock in the afternoon, had found only Cavanagh in attendance.

"It stands to reason they must be in need of legal services, if you see what I mean," Meagher said, raising his pint.

"It stands to reason," Cavanagh agreed. "And I see you bid fair to put yourself in the way of that trade."

"Read the rest of it. I'd like to hear it."

"In your own immortal words, then," Cavanagh said, holding the paper to catch the light from the window. He cleared his throat. "'The question seems to us to have simply come to this—who will have the supreme right of way between the Atlantic and the Pacific? If it is not to be the United States, it will be England. And in the latter event will America consent to pay the toll struck by the Parliament whose Stamp Act she cut to pieces and flung in the foolish face of old King George, and pass from one part of her domain to another through a double file of sneering Red coats?'"

"Nicely put, wouldn't you say?"

"You do have a gift of the bullshit." Cavanagh had been in the bar all afternoon. Five years in the new land had disheveled him, and the saloons had plumped him. His elegant jackets remained unbuttoned now, but he had a new toughness bred of disillusion, and his mind seemed sharper. "'Sneering Red coats.' You've got it in two words. Looks like you've got coats doing the sneering. The thing of it is, though, I suppose you know, the rat in the oats here is the commodore. Do not forget Mister Vanderbilt." He quaffed two inches of his pint, gave an appreciative gasp and wiped the foam from his mustache. "Owns Central America, you might say. The Vanderbilt fast line. New York to California in seven weeks they're going it now if you get a fast ship. How long did it take you?"

"A little over nine weeks going out."

"But that was, what? three years ago? Seven weeks now. Vanderbilt's Transit . . . what is it?"

"The Accessory Transit Company. One million dollars last year. Net."

"Like blasting pigeons with a forty-barrel shotgun. The dollars are raining on them. And now Walker takes it away from him. Confiscates the whole shebang. Gives it to his pal whatshisname. And the story is that Pierce had a piece of it. Pierce has a piece. That means the gunboats. This Walker has walked a little too far, I'm thinking, and he's standing on the commodore's toe, not to mention that of Mister President Pierce. That is not going to last. He will be walking the other way soon. Even if he gives the railroad back, he is done. You think Cornelius wants ragamuffin immigrants all over his country looking for a place to raise chickens? He's got the Indians under control. A barrel of whiskey will rule any tribe of Indians. But what he don't want is Europeans, anybody who knows the game or might find out about it. This Walker is going to be walking out, I'm thinking, with Cornelius a-grip of his collar and pants."

In January Walker's colonization agents, Joseph Fabens and Henry Bolton, were arrested in New York for violation of the Neutrality Act of 1818. Meagher offered his legal services and was hired as their lawyer. He successfully defended his clients by threatening to reveal President Pierce's financial interest in Vanderbilt's company. It was a painful episode. He had considered Pierce a personal friend, but a lawyer must put such considerations aside. In March of 1857, during the last days of the Pierce administration, the government quietly dropped the charges. It was Meagher's second courtroom victory and his first fee. In May, Walker was deposed by a band of Nicaraguans funded by Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had lost in court, the popular theory went, so he funded a guerilla army and took his country back. Walker made a tour of the States, preaching manifest destiny and collecting considerable sums. A year after his expulsion he tried a second invasion only to be thwarted by the U.S. Navy. Meagher's hope of becoming the American attorney of the Republic of Nicaragua had come to nothing. Walker would make a third try to capture Nicaragua three years later, lose the battle, and give his last command—to his own firing squad. By that time Meagher was otherwise engaged as a company commander at the first battle of Bull Run.

Meanwhile, the law practice languished; the lectures continued. He spoke to the still-thriving T. F. Meagher Club at a picnic in the summer of 1858. His words were recorded by the secretary:

_Six years have elapsed since I first met this club. I was then a dazzling novelty._ (cheers, laughter, hear! hear!) _With its myriad eyes, this inquisitive country was staring and starring me off my legs, out of my wits, into the wildest bewilderment. My autograph flew to an extravagant premium. It was the highest scrip then upon the 'Change._ (laughter). _A lock of my hair would have fetched more than what people give now for a foot or two of the Transatlantic Submarine Cable._ (laughter, cheers) _But the most favorite novelties must fade and come down in the market. The day of their transcendent demand grows dim on the record. So it was and so it is with me._ (shouts of no! no!)

Months earlier, at the inception of his Central America strategy, Meagher had written to an old Stonyhurst chum, Ramon Paez, the son of a Venezuelan general who, Meagher learned from the reply, was employed at the palace of President Montealegre of Costa Rica. Paez invited Meagher for a visit, and, in spite of a scarcity of funds bordering on the desperate, Meagher canceled six weeks of lectures and, with Elizabeth, made the trip. They were treated like royalty by the president, who was obviously smitten with Elizabeth. A plump and gregarious man, he kept them up until dawn on their first night, drinking wine and extolling his "dem-oakracy." The president inveighed against the devil Walker who had tried to invade his sacred country. As the hours passed, Meagher found himself desperately trying to look alert and interested. Slapping the flat of his hand on the table, the president berated Vanderbilt, who fought any trans-isthmian railroad other than his own. "This business must be open to all countries. Is that not the meaning of your free enterprise? All countries." Montealegre had a large and hairy wart on his chin. Meagher watched it move, feeling himself go cross-eyed. Elizabeth continued to sparkle, responding, smiling. The tyrant Morazan had been shot and justly so. "There was no other possible recourse." He held his hands open before Meagher, pleading. "No other possible recourse." Meagher realized that he had no idea who Morazan was but that he had let his host go on too long to ask now. Elizabeth smiled. "And Morazan is a previous president?" she asked. Amazing woman. "Press-ident, no. No press-ident. He call himself press-ident. DictatOR, tyrANT. Like that devil Walker." Their host noticed, finally, that his guests were very sleepy and called for a servant to escort them to their room.

"And a good thing he hasn't read your articles on the great General Walker," Elizabeth said into his ear as they lay in bed. They laughed as quietly as they could.

In the following days Montealegre took them on a tour of the country. They stayed each night at the hacienda of a wealthy landowner. Montealegre was especially keen on showing him the valley he had selected as the site of a trans-isthmian railway. The Meaghers enjoyed their visit. They did not meet a single Irishman. Not a single hurroo or hurrah.

His lecture at Niblo's on Costa Rica was well received by reviewers. School children from various parts of the city came for several repetitions, but the gate was small. The newspaper made a little money. He scraped by.

Smith O'Brien, still showing the effects of his prison illness, arrived in New York in late February of 1858. With the colder weather and a peace treaty between Albany and Mayor Wood, the streets had quieted to their normal level of turmoil. Meagher, with several thousand others, greeted him at the pier. The strenuous journey had taken its toll. He was hardly able to walk. Meagher took him straight to the Townsend mansion where he remained bedridden for nearly a week, sleeping much of the time.

Three days after O'Brien's arrival, before Meagher had been able to have any extended conversation with his guest, he heard newsboys on the street before his office crying an "extra" and something about Dan Sickles. Since his paper was a weekly, he did not pick up his telegraphic dispatches every day, so he bought an _Evening Post_ from a boy and read that Dan Sickles had murdered Philip Barton Key, the grandson of Francis Scott Key. He returned to his desk and read the lead article. "In broad daylight, at approximately two o'clock of this Friday afternoon, the New York congressman, after shouting something that bystanders did not understand, fired point-blank at his victim, the ball striking Key in the heart. Key died in a few hours, attempts to stem his bleeding being unsuccessful." On the editorial page, a blistering broadside: "The wretched man, Dan Sickles . . . a person of notorious profligacy . . . It is certain that the man who makes no scruple to invade and destroy the domestic peace of others—he who, in his own practice, regards adultery as a joke and the matrimonial bond as no barrier against the utmost caprice of licentiousness—has little right to complain when the mischief which he carries without scruple into other families enters his own."

Within an hour the telegraph boy appeared with a dispatch from Washington. Sickles wanted Meagher to be his attorney. "Please come. Had reason for action. Will explain."

Meagher hurriedly turned the forthcoming edition over to Roche, had his cab wait at the curb at the Hudson River Railroad Depot as he bought a ticket for Washington, and headed home to pack. Every daily in the city published an extra edition, and Sickles' name was shouted in the streets.

As his valise was being packed he went to O'Brien's room. A bank of coals glowed in the fireplace. The room was hot. "The poor man can't seem to get warm enough," Gladys had said that morning when Meagher asked how he was. O'Brien was dressed, sitting in an armchair. "Hello. I've been hearing the news from the wonderful Gladys." The oldest chambermaid had been assigned to him and O'Brien, in his old way, was pretending that she was a wonder of the world. "An exciting country you live in."

"Yes, I'm sorry. I must be off to Washington by the overnight."

"Ah, I may not see you again before I leave, then."

"You're traveling the country?"

"Yes. I'd like to get out west. Maybe as far as Chicago."

"In search of a callipygian Norwegian lady."

"Do you think I'd find one? A withered old wraith such as myself? I'm afraid I've come too late for that." He adjusted himself in the chair and pulled the blanket down a little. He turned his head away, toward the fire. A dry sound of rapid breath came from O'Brien. He was laughing, Meagher thought.

"Whiskey?" Meagher wanted to get away from the scorching fire.

"No, no. It would floor me. So, you're making a good life here, I see."

Meagher went to the corner table and poured himself a small glass. "What you see is an illusion. If I don't get the law practice going soon, I don't know what I'll do. And now I'm to be Dan Sickles' lawyer, another unremunerative enterprise.

"As soon as we were on the boat for Tasmania, our countrymen ran out the red carpet for the queen," O'Brien said. "There they were, priests and all, shouting their huzzahs as she passed by."

"Named a city after her. To Queenstown." Meagher stood behind O'Brien's chair, his elbows on its back.

"And a huzzah for Queenstown," said O'Brien. After a minute he said in a quiet voice, "and my own eldest, Edward, would have been off to Oxford, with Lucy's approval, if I had not forbade it."

"It's not an accident the Irish invented this potion." Meagher indicated his glass.

In his usual penchant for excess, and in spite of—as Meagher well knew—his inability to pay any of them, Dan Sickles had retained a sizable squad of attorneys, five in all. Old Buck—President Old Buck now—made it a half-dozen by sending his best attorney, Edwin Stanton, to keep his own name out of it. "Why, if your family honor is to be untarnished, did you not shoot President Buchanan for his well-known affair with your wife" would be a logical question to ask. It was, presumably, Stanton's job to see to it that the question was not asked. Teresa's occasional bounce with Old Buck was one thing, but Sickles had been genuinely offended that a nobody like Key, a mere undersecretary of something or other, should presume. In court, Sickles confessed to the killing; his lawyers pled the sanctity of marriage. "The prescribed damages," said Meagher, "for adultery in the state of Maryland is one hundred pounds of tobacco. If congressman Sickles had taken the prescribed recourse he would have got a chew of tobacco for the defilement of his honor." Meagher recruited a few character witnesses, congressmen eager to support the cause of a man defending his hearth. The trial lasted a month. The jury voted to acquit on the ground of justifiable homicide. Meagher returned to New York in time to see an exhausted and ill O'Brien off to Ireland. The hoped-for trip to Chicago had proved impossible, sea travel in a first class berth being much easier than the strenuous trip by railway.

Before summer's end Sickles, to the dismay of his friends and the delight of editorialists, forgave Teresa and took her back. "It will interest, though it will scarcely surprise our readers to learn, that Daniel E. Sickles and his wife had harmonized their little difficulty and are again enjoying each other's refined and elevating society." The reason, as he explained to his much reduced circle of cronies at Sweeny's—he had been banished from Delmonico's—was simply that he could not live without her. And she was an affectionate young person. Key was tall and handsome. Sickles, being neither, had to make allowances. And that son of a bitch deserved what he got.

Meagher, meanwhile, had another client. The telegraphic dispatch had been terse to the point of mystery, but, coming from one of the country's most successful railroad entrepreneurs, it did seem to be the one he had been waiting for.

MEET 10AM THURS SEPT 10 READING LINE OFFICE BLDG 487 DISCUSS NEGOTIATION OF INTER-OCEAN RAILWAY CHIRIQUI COSTA RICA WIRE CONFIRM AMBROSE W THOMPSON CHIRIQUI IMPROVEMENT COMPANY PHILADELPHIA AWT END

On the train to Philadelphia Meagher stayed resolutely out of the saloon car. There had been a frost in the night. Low on the hills sumac reddened, and a faint yellow showed in some of the higher trees. A strangely shaped mongrel dog ran alongside the train for a long while, its tongue lolling, until someone tossed out a piece of bread. He thought of the Sickles trial and his offhand joke to the jailer as Sickles was released. "My condolences, sir, on the loss of your tenant." It had brought a great laugh from Stanton as they shook hands in farewell. And it had been in the papers, a full account with illustrations. "Congratulations, sir! Meagher and Stanton have reason to smile," read the caption. A success, surely. It had polished his reputation but had not filled his coffers; he had not bothered to submit a bill. And Dan's political career was, for the time, sunk, no chance of a favor there, either. As the train jolted through northern Pennsylvania he felt a hollow ache. Head of the class at Clongowes, same at Stonyhurst, world fame at twenty-five, and now in this tumbling, scratching, catch-as-catch-can heap of America it was improve Chiriqui or die. 'Tis the last rose of summer, old friend. Well, he thought, this is Americky and, as Dan would say, I will rassle this son of a bitch to the ground.

Ambrose W. Thompson had a demeanor suggesting both bull and bulldog. His eyes pinned their target; his shoulders hunched a little and his powerful head dropped in warning. He had tasted the bitterness of human folly and it had curled his lip. From Meagher he wanted short answers. "Vanderbilt got three million from the government with his Mosquito Grant for his Nicaragua line. All we need is one million, three hundred down, and the balance when we start the project. It will be a contract with the United States Navy, to carry their men and supplies between the oceans, and we will be free also to carry civilians as long as the navy gets priority. Across the isthmus in a day. Shorter than Nicaragua, better than Panama, where they have built their line in a malaria swamp. They are losing men and the track is falling apart. They will be no threat. We worry only about Vanderbilt. First, Monty has got to agree. Can you deal with Mexicans?"

"Costa Ricans?"

"Costa Ricans!" He gave an abrupt, grating mirthless laugh. "Shit."

"I can negotiate with President Montealegre. He is a personal friend. Ramon Paez, his right hand man, was a friend of mine in school. I have stayed at the palace."

"I know that. That is why you are here. No horseshit, now. Will he deal?"

"He will. He has asked me personally to help him get a line built."

"What is your part of this?"

"Pardon?"

"Your fee, Mister lawyer."

"Fifty dollars a day."

"No. Two hundred a day if we get the line. Otherwise, nothing. I have talked to that little greaser, too. He gives you a nice dinner and a big smile, but he's a typical spic asshole. Wants to let all the construction contracts himself so he can pocket the graft. I have dealt with these sombreros before. Let them take charge and you're the piñata. They hire their whole worthless family. They put on their ruffles and their sparkles and dance and drink for a week. The priest blesses every god damned nail. And ten years later you got a pile of rusted rails in the bush and a bunch of Mexicans lazier and fatter than ever on your money. 'Mucho sorry, señor. It jost deen't work out.' You tell the sonofabitch we'll give him a hundred thousand, a piece of it every month while the construction is going on. He can soak his liver in all the cactus juice he wants on that. But he gets his slimy self and all his compadres out of the way and lets us build the god damn railroad. No government inspectors with their hands out. He keeps the banditos away from us. We will have our own guards, of course. Pinkertons. Any little mustachios come out of the hills to rob us, they are corpses. And his penny-ante government will have nothing to say about it. No trials. No payoffs. Nothing. That is the deal. We're going in with Americans who will actually get the sonofabitch built. If he doesn't take it, I'll shoot the bastard and get someone who will. You don't have to tell him that. He already knows."

"I think he will sign. As for my fee, two hundred a day is generous indeed, but I will require to have my expenses paid in advance."

"Bullshit. Expenses paid in advance. Get out of here."

"I think it only fair, if I am on your business—"

"Get out of my office. That is the attitude of someone who plans to fail. We have substantial law firms here who will work on my terms. You were a mistake. Go away."

"Very well. You are a tough negotiator. Two hundred a day plus expenses upon the success of the venture."

"Second," Ambrose continued, "we need the president and his congress. The million we get from the treasury includes two hundred to buy these assholes. Normally, you could buy them for a fourth of that, but the commodore will be in the bidding to kill it. Fortunately, he is spending his own money. I would be surprised if he'd go above fifty. We'll go two hundred. That should do it. I got my senator, Harper, introducing the bill now. It's your job to get with the right people up there, make sure the two hundred gets spread around where it needs to so it does the job. Go to Harper's office. He will get you started there."

For the next eighteen months Elizabeth stayed at the palace in San Jose while Meagher shuttled and negotiated. Montealegre settled for a hundred thousand but wanted it all in advance. The Panama Railroad Company sent its lawyers to Washington with much more cash than Thompson thought they had. They said that Chiriqui was disputed territory; Panama also laid claim to it. It dawned on Meagher gradually that Montealegre wanted a Chiriqui railroad built by an American under contract with Costa Rica so that America would defend his claim. Vanderbilt weighed in as predicted. Still, after a month of largess with Thompson's funds, Meagher had nearly enough senators to pass the grant.

In August of 1860, passing through new York on his way to Washington, he dropped off an article he had written on the ship, "The New Route Through Chiriqui," at _Harper's_ and picked up several New York newspapers to read on the train. Colonel Michael Corcoran, the little banty rooster of a man who commanded the Irish regiment of New York militia, had declined to march them in the upcoming parade for the visiting Prince of Wales and, in spite of a threatened court-martial, was adamant. "When English regiments march in honor of the President of the Republic of Ireland, I will return the favor. Not before, threaten what you will."

The _Irish News_ looked good. Roche was handling it well. Of Meagher's Costa Rican enterprise Roche enthused:

He had managed his diplomatic and other negotiations in the matter of the railway grant from Costa Rica, as happily as if he was all his life at that kind of business. And really, considering the fate of blundering and bad luck attending every plan and arrangement of our politicians in that very difficult and entangled part of the world, his success has something extraordinary in it . . . He has shown that Irishmen can succeed as well as other people.

Other papers, too, wrote well of his work. Even the _Times_ mentioned it without sarcasm.

He was not elated by the praise. He had had yards of it, and it amounted to nothing. It was how they sold the damned rags: create a popular hero for the readers to follow. And no one easier to gull than the hero-starved Irish. He was an accessory to a racket. Peter Townsend was right to be unimpressed. He would force the Chiriqui railroad to succeed. It must succeed. He would not relent. Ambrose W. Thompson was a thug, Montealegre a weasel, but it was life and death for Meagher. Chiriqui must have a railroad.

On the strength of his work in the Sickles case, Meagher got in to see Buchanan, now nearing the end of his disastrous term in the White House. It seemed to Old Buck that he had no right to interfere with any state that wished to secede from the union. They had joined voluntarily; surely they could depart if they wished. The country was crumbling under him and he ached for his term in the thankless job to end. Meagher was authorized to offer him a salaried position on the board of directors of the Chiriqui Improvement Company. Old Buck promptly declared for Chiriqui improvement. "See Dimitri," he advised. Meagher went back to San Jose and talked to Dimitri, the American ambassador, who told of the wonders of the rain forest, the percha trees: "More wealth there than in all of the railroads of the isthmus." Meagher brought back to Washington a signed contract—exclusive rights to inter-oceanic railroads in Costa Rica. The Chiriqui Improvement bill was introduced and passed House of Representatives in a close vote.

But the question of hegemony remained. The senators had a complex decision to make. True, Thompson's contributions had been generous, more so than those of Vanderbilt or the Panama company. But a pro-Thompson vote would turn off the steady contributions of Vanderbilt and the Panama interests, and, if Panama succeeded in claiming the territory, the Thompson funds would dry up, too. A senator who supported Vanderbilt and the Panama Railroad was assured of continuing bribes; a supporter of the Chiriqui grant could end up with nothing. Against all odds Meagher labored mightily, arguing with nearly every member of the Senate for the superior terrain of Chiriqui, for the historical Costa Rican claim on the territory, for the lower cost to the navy under the terms of the Costa Rican agreement. The appropriation failed in the Senate by only three votes. Meagher consoled himself with a few drinks at Willard's and went to bed. In the morning a telegram awaited him at the hotel desk:

PRIORITY A YOUR SERVICES ARE TERMINATED EFFECTIVE NOW STOP DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH ME FURTHER STOP DAMN YOU AND ALL OF YOUR INCOMPETENT TRIBE ATW END

Meagher was nearly two thousand dollars in debt to his father-in-law. He returned to San Jose to bring Elizabeth home and found her staying in a hotel. After hearing of the defeat, the president had drunkenly attempted to seduce her. Ramon Paez, risking his future in the administration, had managed to humor the old man and lead him away.

In the hotel room—San Jose's finest, but shabby nonetheless, water-stained pink wallpaper, scuffed pinewood floors—Meagher lay in bed into the afternoon. Elizabeth sat in the platform rocker by the window, reading, its steady creak the only sound. A few times she read aloud to him. She left him alone for several hours, then came in and looked out at the street for a long while.

"Would you like something to eat?" she asked at last.

He had no strength for an answer.

Evening light, mauve, heliotrope, violet, filled the room, the southern sky malarkey he had known in Van Diemen's Land, too sweet by half for the brown world it illuminated.

""I suppose I must bestir myself," he said at last as the room grew dark. After a long pause he added, "But, on the other hand, all this bestirring, what is the good of it?" Elizabeth laughed. A lovely, musical laugh. She alone knew how hard he had tried.

He turned onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. "You have married into the somewhat dubious enterprise of my life and career. I suppose it looks a little different to you now you see its minutia. You discover that the enterprise was not fully described in the prospectus."

"It looks well enough. A heroic failure is better than a mundane success."

"Is that me? A heroic failure?"

"I refer to this enterprise only. You are a thumping success."

So, she forgave his failure, was relieved that he would be all right. She was wonderful. He loved her. He dozed a little longer. He awoke thinking of Dimitri and what he had said about the wonders of the rain forest, the percha trees. It was dark when he finally arose and dressed. Elizabeth brought him some of the heavily herbed chicken soup that he liked. He ate most of it with some corn bread. "I have been thinking about the rubber business," he said, finally.

The following day he arose at dawn and worked at the writing table.

"What are you up to?" Elizabeth asked when she came out of the bedroom.

He wrote a while without answering. His pen scratched. The thought completed, he turned. "A proposal."

"What are you proposing?"

"Dimitri, our ambassador, tells me there are millions of percha trees in the Chiriqui. I propose to harvest the sap, the gutta percha, and export it to the American vulcanized rubber companies, Goodyear, Roxbury. Start a stock company."

He took his proposal to Paez that afternoon. Surprised to see him, Paez read it for a few minutes, then put it down. "Would you like something, friend? Coffee? Whiskey?"

"No. No thank you. What do you think?"

"I must tell you in all friendship, this proposal will not be granted. You come with no offer to give anything to the leaders who must make this decision. Why should they give away this valuable thing? They will say you are loco. I know that you will take it in the spirit of an old friend when I tell you I think it is time for you to go home."

Toward the end of January 1861, the Meaghers arrived again at the Townsend home on Fifth Avenue, nothing accomplished. For a time Meagher let his assistant continue to run the paper while he stayed at home, but he could not simply give up. Not under the gaze of his father-in-law. By early February he was going to the office every morning, but once there he did little. Roche was doing well, the paper was making a little profit. It was barely pocket change, not enough to even begin paying his debt to Townsend, but the old man had said nothing and would not. Meagher sat at his desk mesmerized by the rattle of the press, and after six or eight hours went home, where he was greeted just as if he had done a day's work. He had not gone back to Sweeny's to see Cavanagh and the boys. He had nothing to say to them. Their static lives would have put the final tap to his hopes.

One morning in early February Roche put a news dispatch on his desk. "I think you had better look at that," he said in an unusually soft voice. The usual green sheet covered with telegrapher's scrawl. He left it a minute, gradually coming out of his reverie. When he focused, the words jolted him awake.

PRIORITY C 15 JAN / TERENCE BELLOW MCMANUS DEAD / IRISH REBEL OF '48 / SAN FRANCISCO HIS FINAL RESTING PLACE / DIED IN POVERTY AFTER BUSINESS FAILURE / SUBSCRIPTION FOR BURIAL CONTACT FENIAN BROTHERHOOD SF / END

He read it again, then tossed it on his desk.

"I'm sorry," Roche said. "I know he was an old friend of yours."

"He was. Yes."

"Maybe a life and times?"

"Yes. Yes. Sure. They spelled his name wrong."

The dispatch said nothing of the circumstances, but Meagher knew the essentials. Not ready for rough America, McManus had failed and died in despair. It was the most usual of all American stories.

"Two column?"

"Yes. Two column. I'll do it now."

He worked on it all day, sent a note excusing himself from dinner, and continued into the evening. Remembering remarks about the Fermanagh childhood, the shipping agency in Liverpool, the attempted rising, the sentence of death, the years in Van Diemen's Land, escape, their last meeting in San Francisco. It was a good piece of work. In the cool of the foggy night the walk through the park quickened him. He remembered McManus's quiet, growling voice on the ship as they were leaving for Van Diemen's Land, his Irish accent that had not disappeared in all those years in England. "The two of yez will want a look. I was after saying a last look . . ."

and he had given up a comfortable life to try this thing. Tears welled, blurring the kerosene lamps and their halos in the fog of the City Hall park. Surprised, he stood in the dark and let them come. After a few minutes he wiped his face with a handkerchief and began again toward home. "You're still in it, man. You're above the ground a while yet," he said to himself, and half believed it.

In February and March Meagher spoke on McManus several times and raised a large sum for the burial subscription. Indeed, the funds rolled in so copiously that the Emmet Monument Association, despite the objections of Irish Archbishop Cullen, resolved to return McManus's remains to Ireland for burial. It would no doubt fan the fires in the home country, one last contribution to the cause from TB.

On April 4, Meagher was speaking in Springfield, Massachusetts, and heard the news from the audience that Fort Sumter had been fired upon. In Washington, the new president had called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to preserve the Union. At Sweeny's Meagher learned that the court-martial charges against Michael Corcoran had been dropped and that he had been commissioned to outfit his regiment for duty against the rebellion. Upon his return to New York, Meagher called on Corcoran and was offered command of a company.

"You'll have to go up to Albany. The governor likes to do the ceremony."

On the last day of April, he returned to the city as Captain Thomas Francis Meagher of the Phoenix Zouaves, Company K, 69th New York Regiment, Army of the Potomac.
5

Remembering Fontenoy

Rory slapped the paper he had just placed on the table at Sweeny's. "That's what you 'list for, three months. We're all joining, everyone in the brotherhood under forty—three hundred dollars cash bonus."

Sean pulled the paper from under Rory's hand and studied it.

Call for Recruits, April 22, 1861

Company K, to be attached to the 69th Regiment, N.Y.S.M

YOUNG IRISHMEN TO ARMS!

TO ARMS YOUNG IRISHMEN!

PHOENIX ZOUAVES

Application to be made at 36 Beckman St.

"What are the zouaves?"

"That's just extra fancy uniforms. Turkish, like. Sashes and trimmings. The uniform costs forty dollars, but you'll be getting three hundred from old Abe."

" _Turkish?_ "

"It makes a show. No more Paddy Stink and Micky Mud. Meagher is the captain of it. Like in '48."

"I hope not."

"It's the Phoenix that really means something. Sounds like Fenian, does it not? When this little fuss is over we'll have an Irish army trained by Father Abraham, ready for anything. Ready for Canada. Why are you being so Sean-like? Here's your chance to ditch the old man." Even Jimmy O won't be able to bully the 69th New York State Militia. It will be the abolition of your slavery, old boy."

In his recruiting speeches Meagher had to choose his words carefully. It was a fight to preserve the Union, their most powerful ally in the holy cause of nationhood for Ireland. England loved the Confederacy, the speculation went, loved it for its cotton and would gladly welcome it back as a colony, and many Confederates had expressed interest in rejoining the British Empire. The Irish were warriors, and the military training would make them great warriors for the cause. Remember Fontenoy! he shouted in every speech. At the village of Fontenoy in Flanders in 1745 an Irish brigade of the army of Louis XV carried the day against the British and Dutch in the War of the Austrian Succession. His audience knew nothing of Louis XV, Flanders, or the long-ago war between a few German princes and the Hapsburg monarchy, but they did know that Fontenoy was an Irish victory over the English. They cheered. They enlisted. He had a hundred sturdy-looking fellows for his company within a week.

"Squab right," Rory shouted as the two of them approached the corner of Sweeny's.

"Squab right it is, cap'n." They felt the eyes upon them and their new uniforms. Everyone they passed, people across the street even, regarded them with curiosity. Other zouave companies north and south wore turbans and widely bloused trousers in the manner of the Algerian zouava units of the French army, but Company K's uniform was standard New York State Militia with a few modifications: slightly bloused trousers, green sash at the waist, red piping on the jacket. The state-issued cap was unadorned.

Company K had no parade field available to it, so they drilled for three weeks in a pool hall at 10th and Broadway owned by Captain Harvey Phelan. The pool tables had been pushed against the wall and the place echoed with rifle butts hitting the wooden floor, sergeants shouting commands, and the tramp of squads marching. The rest of the regiment, under Colonel Corcoran, had departed for Washington in April. Corcoran had left orders that he did not wish to be embarrassed by the presence of raw recruits in his regiment; Company K could join the regiment when they knew squad right from squad left, could march in step, and execute the manual of arms.

At Sweeny's Sean took a quick look around the room. None of O'Dea's boyos in attendance. Good. Sweeny's was a Fenian haunt; the b'hoys rarely ventured into such places, had no truck with ideologues. But still he was nervous. They would be looking for him by now. He had given Jimmy no note or notice and was ducking around corners, spending as little time on the street as possible. Two more weeks it would be. A mere war will be safer. It would be a lovely war. He would disappear into it, come out a new man, head west. He had left his Brooklyn room and was bunking with Rory in Canal Street until they deployed. It was surprising how many hulking fellows that looked like Skinner Meehan there were on the street. He had ducked into doorways several times for false Meehans. In his eleven years of working for Jimmy, he had kept his escape route as open as he could, had never told him about Kate, or about Megan. There were no people Jimmy could hold hostage to force him back.

The first pint at Sweeny's was free, courtesy of the establishment, for all members of the 69th. The second pint was free, too, to all men of Company K, courtesy of their captain, who entered shortly after they did to huzzahs from the twenty or so who had come directly from drill. From the bar Meagher raised his glass. "To the day we lift our glasses together in Dublin Castle."

All stood. The roar was deafening. Someone started the chant CA-NA-DA, and it went on, loud and fierce for a long while.

"What are you thinking?" Kate asked in a whisper.

"I'm thinking that will have to last me for a while."

"It had better. Don't be bringing home any diseases from the Washington whores."

"Any chance you could sneak out Tuesday night for a fond farewell?"

"No. They're home." After a pause she added, "As for that, you know, there's an hour till Rory comes back."

"There is, is there?"

"Yis," she said in an uncharacteristically small voice.

"Yis?"

"Yis. There is. Ample time if you're up to it. If you're the stout fellow you claim to be, this would be a time to—" She tweaked his nose between her knuckles in her usual way, then grabbed his cock—"prove it. And it's a good time of month. No chance of babies, so let yourself go a bit. No need to jump out of the boat before we're in port, if you know what I mean."

It was the first time they had had a room and a bed for their lovemaking, the first time they had been naked together. She had never been to his flat. The landlady had warned him against women in the flat. Unlike nearly all the men he knew, he had never gone to a prostitute. The warm sun streaming in through Rory's cobwebbed windows and dusty curtains, the sound of the passing Sunday afternoon traffic, and the utter surprise of Kate—he felt it everywhere in his body, stunned by happiness. They made love again and then again and still they did not leave the bed. Rory was late coming back. Good man. Probably visiting his favorite at Rose's.

"Do you think this will be dangerous?" she asked, waking him from a light doze.

"The fighting? I don't know. Maybe. No more than what I've been doing, I'd guess. And it gets me out of here. You keep that money safe and we'll go west when I'm done with this. My enlistment expires August fourth. We'll be westerners by September."

"Don't get killed."

"I'll do me best."

"I didn't see you in the front ranks of the volunteers, Michael."

"Ah, right you are cap'n. It's a pain in me foot I've got, and a therrible fear of gettin' out of reach of a good pint." Mike Cavanagh hoisted his pint and drank. "And besides that," he continued, dropping the stage Irish, "I don't know why you don't send off the black Republicans to fight. They're the ones got us into it, and it's the poor Irish who'll get killed in it and then lose their jobs to the niggers. Seems to be something wrong in the scheme of things."

Meagher was looking through a packet of his mail and not listening much to this familiar copperhead patter. "Well, if we get killed we won't be needing jobs, if it comes to that. Where's your old fighting spirit, Mike? Days of '48."

"Ah, well, if it was the English . . . But it isn't the English. That's the thing of it. The boys are so ferocious about the English they'll kill anybody and pretend he's English. But these ain't the English. It's somebody else entirely. Some of them will even be Irish. People I have no grievance with at all. And you didn't either, if I remember aright. Only a few years ago you were praising the gentlemen of the south and cursing the abolitionists. Seems you've changed, too."

In a public meeting Meagher had responded to such questions with a speech about the traitors who dishonored the flag at Fort Sumter, but that was not a thing you said to a friend in private conversation. "That was Mitchel, mostly, defending the slave owners. I never did that. The thing is, if you want to know what the thing is, I might get killed. And it won't be such a bad thing if it happens."

"Eh, cap'n, don't be talkin' like that. I thought the rebels were going to evaporate at the first cannon's roar."

"I have no idea about them. The fact is, we have no experience, they have no experience. It's hard work just getting troops from one place to another. How in hell we're going to fight is beyond me. And the word from Virginia where we'll be going is that it's all mud. The roads are impassable. It's not a sure thing there will be a war, I'd say. But if there is I intend to make a hero. Dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me."

"Ah, Tommy. Things ain't that bad. Don't be getting killed just for the fun of it. What's the letter?"

"From the governor."

"Your father?"

"The same." Meagher read, and Cavanagh went back to his newspaper.

"Ah, Mrs. Callie—Aunt Callie, we called her—has died. Poor man. She was his mistress, really. I always pretended I didn't know. He asks if I could get a pardon and come to visit him. Smith O'Brien was pardoned, he says."

"O'Brien didn't run away from the jail as your nibs did."

"And O'Brien has a brother Sir Lucius, thirteenth Baron Inchiquin. Helps a little, no doubt. I am a little busy just now. He didn't have my letter when he wrote this. 'The McManus funeral is already making a stir in the old country, and the body not yet arrived in New York. Old Cullen has forbade all ceremony in any church in his diocese. The west is in famine again, an artificial one, as usual, the landlords squeezing the tenants out to make more grazing land. A thousand and more have died on the roads over the winter.'"

"'Twould be worth a trip back just to shoot another of those bastards," said Cavanagh.

Sean said goodbye to Kate and took the 'bus back downtown. Dressed in civilian clothes, he sat on the bench at the front, facing away from the street, his head down, elbows on knees. He suspected that his precautions had been inadequate; he had been too much on the street in daylight. So, it was more resignation to the inevitable than surprise that he felt when the enormous boots, brown toecaps on black, and the moleskin trousers came into his sight. He did not look up.

Skinner took the seat next to him, eased forward, spoke into his ear. "We been missing you."

Sean nodded slightly.

"You got a lady friend, I see. She work there?"

Sean said nothing.

"You don't want to talk to me? I thought we was friends."

"I'll talk to you. I have joined the militia. I will be leaving the city soon. They know where I am and they know who to look for if I don't show up. The 69th is about fourteen hundred men and if anything happens to me or to the lady you refer to, you will pay for it."

Skinner laughed, a dry sound deep in his throat. "You still talking funny. The 69th went away t'ree weeks ago. All you got is your company. Recruits. And they got a war to fight. They ain't coming down to the Bowery to settle none of your business. Now I got to tell you, Jimmy wants you back. Just come back. He understands. You had a good time wit your lady. The lady I refer to." He laughed again at the language. "Everybody needs to get away like that sometime. Just come back. Everyting is OK."

"You are my friend, Skin-o. We've been through a lot together. You said it was dumb yourself. Busting chandeliers with a hammer. All I want is to get the hell out of here. Just tell the old man you didn't see me. I'm not going to make anyone any trouble. Just let me go."

"No chance. The b'hoys know I've got you. If you look in the back"—he indicated the back of the 'bus—"you'll see some of your friends. We got word you was headed uptown. We been waiting for you. You got to go back, man."

Sean stared at the floor. After a minute he looked to the back. Brian Boru and Big Eddy Knives—Ed Scanlon, a raw-boned, lanky fellow, as stupid and mean as they come, famous for the knife blades stitched into his boot soles and heels. He killed with a swift kick to the stomach or chest. Sean had seen him walking home after the Bayard Street fight, blood to the thighs. He had acknowledged Sean's gaze, showed his tobacco stained horse-like teeth in a smile of pride. He had killed eight in that fight by his own account. Sean had seen one of them, and he thought of it now, a kick to a kneeling man's throat that left him spouting blood.

"I got three hundred bucks in gold coins in my pocket, Skin-o. That's one hundred apiece. All you've got to do is go back and say I got away."

Meehan held his forehead, massaged it, spoke with sadness. "That's no good, Johnny. You know that. First time them guys gets drunk the word is out. You can't trust Eddy, and Brian ain't much better. He goes back to the old man, tells 'im I took a skander. What's that gonna do? If it was just me it would be different."

Sean sat in silence until his stop, rose with his escorts and got off the bus. At Jimmy's the b'hoys stopped respectfully in the foyer and let Sean walk into the office, where Jimmy rose from behind the desk. His mouth tightened at Sean's approach. The blow was so sudden Sean did not see it, a hard, open-hand slap to the side of his head, and another from the other side, weaker, but hitting his nose.

"Is this the way you pay me back?" His voice was thick and sour. "I took you out of the shit."

He slapped again, hard, hitting the left eye this time. The shorter man swinging upward, biting his lower lip, quivering anger, eyes watering with regret. Sean knew better than to defend himself. Jimmy had killed for less than this. Let him have a few slaps.

" _I took you out of the shit!"_

Sean's nose was bleeding freely. He tried to stop the blood with his handkerchief, but there was too much.

"I ought to put you in the river. If you was anybody else, you'd be in the river. Do you understand that? . . . Answer me!"

"Yes," Sean said into the soaked handkerchief.

"Why do you do this to me? Eh? Why do you do this? Pinch your nose for Christ sake. Like this." Jimmy pinched the bridge of his own nose, demonstrating. "Hold your head back. What's the matter with you?"

Bloody nose, for one, thought Sean.

"Why do you do this to me? Now I got to put a guard on you. Meehan! Brian!"

The two appeared in the doorway.

"You will stay with our friend here night and day. He does not go out of your sight. You understand that? Even when he takes a crap one of you will watch him. You will stay in his bedroom with him, one of you awake at all times. And until his company leaves this city he will stay in this house, the back bedroom upstairs."

This is desertion from the army, Sean thought of saying, but did not. It would get him another slap. You were in my army first, Jimmy would say. Who the hell do they think they are? He could easily supply both halves of any conversation with Jimmy O'Dea.

"You, you got work to do" said Jimmy, indicating the pile of bills on the desk, and he left the room.

"Well," said Skinner, "at least he didn't put Knives on you. I'll get you a rag to wash with."

Sean began slowly to sort the bills. Skinner came back and meekly offered the cloth.

After he had worked for a while, Skinner asked, "What do you want to get out of this for anyways? You got the best job of anybody."

"You are right," Sean answered. "How could I have been so foolish?"

"Very grand, very grand," said Peter Townsend as they went in to dinner. Elizabeth and Gladys had been raving about his dashing new uniform with its green sash and belt. "So, you're going for a soldier now."

"I am."

"Well, good luck to you." He raised his wine glass in salute.

"I detect a note of, what? Skepticism?"

"I do have some little scruple as to whether union with those screaming religionists is really worth the risk of anyone's life."

"Surely, to preserve the Union . . ."

"Union with whom, is the question. Not all unions are worth preserving. It seems to me that you were at some pains to undo a union not long ago. The Irish Confederation, was that not the name of it? You were a Confederate. It was different, of course. They were starving you. You wanted your land back. Here we are merely trying to advance our civilization and we have a section of it that won't advance. The South is another lazy Central American malaria swamp, a shoddy aristocracy and a mess of slaves. Let them make another Mexico, I say. They will never be any threat to us. If we force them back into the union we will continue to face the forlorn prospect of trying to civilize them. They will sap our energies fighting their backwardness, suffering the morons and savages they send to Congress. Beating our senators with canes on the floor of the Senate! What an outrage! Instead of letting them secede we should throw them out. We have the industry and the universities. They have disease and slaves and shouting Baptists and a little cotton. Cut them loose and let them sink to their natural level. That's what I say." He finished his oration by handing his plate to the servant for another helping of beef.

"Even if they become an English colony? You have fought the English twice already to keep them out of your continent."

"I doubt England would take them for a colony. Too embarrassing. England no longer permits slavery in its possessions. Albion is getting a little selective in whom she admits to membership these days. Her agonies in connection with your native land have begun to teach her a lesson, I believe. Having to take some responsibility for the famines and plagues of one's possessions—new idea, this. Imposes a burden. If she could be rid of Ireland without complications now, she would. But she can't. The Protestants she planted there have got her stuck and there is no way to undo it. Ireland will drain her forever now. If she could find a way out of it you'd have your country back."

"Transplant them again. That's a way out. Give the Prods free land in Australia. Away they go."

"Very clever. Except that no English politician can be seen accommodating Catholics by getting rid of Protestants. He'd be out of office in a minute. And, getting back to the present difficulty, even if the Confederacy does become an English colony, it makes no difference. We have English colonies to the north. Pretty well-behaved. So let us have them to the south, too, if necessary. Well, we are boring dear Elizabeth to death with this rubbish." He raised his glass to his daughter and drank. "You have a need to score a personal success, I know . . ."

"Father!" Elizabeth interrupted.

"I only meant to . . . well, all right," he concluded. "Changing your mind at this point, pretty much out of the question anyway, am I right? The captain of the company can't very well change his mind about the whole thing, can he? I'm going home, fellows, sorry, good luck in the fight." Peter Townsend laughed at his own joke. He raised his glass again. "I give you the 69th New York Militia, Company—what is it?"

"K."

"Company K. May you hoop the secessionists to us with bands of steel."

Early afternoon. Sean entered numbers in the ledger. His hand shaped them strangely. He made errors and left them. Rory and the rest of Company K would not simply forget him; they must come looking. When night came, he tried to sleep, but, with the incredible snores of Skinner Meehan and Brian Boru rattling amid the rage in his head, he could not.

The following afternoon, with the house closed against the ninety-degree heat, he had nearly given up, when Mike Halloran admitted a caller and he heard the familiar voice in the foyer. "I'm just deliverin' the bills, yer honor, from the laundry and I'd like a word, just to explain a thing, ye know, wit' the fella that does them, if it's aright."

"And what kind of thing would that be?" Mike Halloran asked him.

"It is just a thing about why it's more this time because the sheets now is more dear to buy them then . . . then they was before, is all."

"Who are you?" Halloran asked.

"Only Seamus Daly from the laundry askin' to speak with the man of the books, is all."

"I'll give him the message."

"Stop where you are," Rory said calmly, dropping the ruse. "Just take me in to him or I will use these."

Rory came in brandishing two pistols, took a quick look at the swollen face of Sean and turned to Skinner and Brian. "Stay sitting where you are. Don't move. Smash that window out," he said to Sean.

Sean opened the window and Rory, keeping his eye on the three, sat on the sill, reached out and signaled. It appeared to be the entire company, in their new uniforms, rifles at the ready, that came down the street and formed before the house.

"Now, you have a choice, gentlemen," Rory said. "We can part as friends, Sean with us. Or we can demolish this house and maybe you three, too, and then depart with Sean. So, what's it to be?"

No one spoke.

"Well, I take that for a sensible decision. Let us get out of here, Gillespie Rua, and a farewell to your former associates." He made a slight bow in their direction.

The company cheered as Sean came out the door. He raised his arms in victory. "Company K has carried the day," he shouted, unheard.

The company marched back to Sweeny's, where it celebrated its first victory and its impending departure.

At the Townsend home, as the day of departure neared there were telegrams daily from Albany and Washington. Mayor Wood came for a visit. Elizabeth beamed. Even her father had gradually taken a new tone, asking Meagher what he thought of Lincoln, whether Winfield Scott wasn't too old to command. And he listened to the answers with the sort of inclining of the head and compression of the lips which he accorded to people he respected, men of business. Meagher's stock had risen in the 'Change.

Elizabeth had gotten wind of some grumbling among the men that Meagher had married a Protestant, and she had taken the extraordinary step of converting to Catholicism. Meagher did not know of it until the day he was invited to her confirmation at the residence of Archbishop Hughes.

"I wanted to do that for you. There can be no division between us at this time." She told him this in the bedroom. He had come home late, but she had lain awake. It would be followed by one of her high romance lovemakings which he found too theatrical, and too much dominated by her and her sighing and swooning. She was a good woman. He loved her. But her attitude of utter belief in him had come about only after she realized that he was in trouble. It was a pose and a stratagem, a kind of charity, and it put him off a little.

"You didn't have to do that for me. There might not even be a war. This could all turn out to be nothing, like all of my other ventures," he said. "In any event, medievalism is not really of any help to anyone."

She was quiet. He had hurt her feelings, he knew. He sat on the edge of the bed.

"I liked your old independent self, you know. You are too sharp-eyed to be happy under old smother church."

"Think of it as a gesture, then."

He tried to kiss her. She was reluctant to turn her head. "All right. And a lovely gesture, too. Come on. Just be Lizzy for me. I have idolaters enough. I need a friend."

He lay in bed for an hour after their lovemaking. At two o'clock he arose, put on his dress uniform, and said goodbye. She would come to see them off at the pier. She cried, clung to him. He comforted her, told her all would be well. He left the house with the scent of her about him. He had thought to go to Mrs. Dennis's, where they expected him for goodbyes, but decided against it and had the carriage take him to Sweeny's. The riot inside was thunderous. He closed the door and walked away before anyone had seen him and kept walking until he came to the newspaper office. He went across into the park and sat for an hour on a bench along the path.

A young girl, twelve or so, barefoot, came into the light of the lamp and approached him. "You up for it tonight, guvnor? Two dimes. Do what you like."

"No," he said. She scratched her shin with a bare dirty foot and continued to stand before him. He could smell her. Another girl, younger, stood off at the edge of the lamplight. "Is that your sister?"

"No. You don't want her, guvnor. She's sick."

"Here." He gave her the change from his pocket.

"God bless you, sir. Over there, in them trees."

"No. No. Go away."

Finally he did go around to Mrs. Dennis's.

"Tommy's here," Dotty Dennis bellowed in her robust baritone. "We was afeard you wasn't coming to say goodbye, Tommyboy. Hannah'll be along here in a minute."

It was late. The parlor was empty. "How many times has she been upstairs tonight?"

"Now don't be asking our trade secrets. It's been busy. Some of your Company K has been here. Good boys. All good clean boys. Don't worry about that." Dotty was a fat woman with dyed red hair who still took a man upstairs now and then.

"Spending their enlistment money."

"And why not? What better way to go off to war? You expect the boys to spend their last night here playing whist?"

"You like another port of entry, anyways," said a voice from the stairs.

"Here she is," said Dotty, going back into the parlor.

"Tommy Tittlemouse himself," said Hannah. "I'm glad you came for a farewell fucking." She was pretty,—heart-shaped mouth, clear, sparkling eyes, good figure—and she really enjoyed sex. With Elizabeth he would sometimes lie back after they had made love, smiling. She, misunderstanding, would return the smile. In fact he was thinking of steam engines—the way she got her boiler up and hissed in his ear.

He followed Hannah up the stairs. She tossed her shift on the chair and bounced onto the bed, took her usual position on knees and elbows, arse up. He took his time getting undressed.

"You hold your point well. What sort of bird have you sighted?"

"A red-haired cock pheasant, master. Wuf, Wuf."

"No barking in point. I must have a word with that kennel."

He took his sheath from her drawer. She had washed it as always and placed it between linen cloths. He slapped her backside with it and tossed it on the bed before her. She sat up and put it on him expertly, giving his cock a kiss for luck.

"Don't be gentle, mine old bugger wugger."

"Why do you like it that way?" she asked when he had finished.

"I don't know."

"Most men wouldn't do that if I paid _them_. Was it the boys' school? Is that what you did there?"

"Are you writing my biography?"

"No."

"Well, I like the little seal barking you do. A performer wants some response from his audience."

"Uh, uh, uh," she imitated herself and laughed. "Well, are we having another for the Grand Army of the Republic, or whatever it is?"

At dawn, noisily, unsteadily, they came out of the tavern and formed up in Great James Street, three hundred strong as it turned out. Two hundred raw recruits were coming to be distributed among the other companies of the regiment. Captain Meagher, who had joined them for a few whiskies in the small hours, shouted the command, "Company, ten-shun! Left face! Forward march!" Their band, formerly Robertson's Band of Harry Hill's Dance Hall, all but two of whose members had joined Company K, played them on their way, and, in spite of the hour, well-wishers crowded the sidewalk and onto the street so that it was difficult to keep ranks as they marched the scant mile down Broadway to Pier number four.

Company K arrived in Washington on the evening of May 23, 1861. They paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue, their band in fine form. They again drew a crowd of followers as they passed Willard's, the Treasury building, the White House, on up to Georgetown, where they were quartered in the dormitory of the college. They remained there two nights only. The rest of the 69th had left, crossed the Potomac to establish a fort in the newly seceded state of Virginia.

On their second evening in Washington a women's group gave a reception for the company. Lemonade and cakes. No one wanted to be there; it was a transparent stratagem to keep them sober on the night before the move to Virginia. Sean found himself munching a little sandwich in the company of a tall pock-marked man named Cyrus Green, a year off the boat from Cork, and an attractive young black-haired woman whose name he had not caught.

"And why are the Irish so eager to be soldiers?" she asked. "I mean, after all, it's not even your country, or if it is, only recently. You can't be all that involved in its politics, can you?"

"The uniforms are nice," Sean answered. "Where else would I get to wear all these colors, see? Green sash, red piping on jacket, and the little cap. Don't you find it altogether grand?"

"But it's serious. You could get killed. Or lose your limbs."

Sean knew the answer: because it's better than being what they, all of them, had been in all their lives till now: flunkeys, errand boys—nothing. He had been a well-paid errand boy, but it was still nothing. Wearing a splendid uniform, being cheered in parades and feted at little soirees like this was a great relief after being _that_ , a surplus body knocking about, hanging on to this or that little perch. Even if you got killed for it. Being a soldier, even a dead one, was a definite something. You needn't apologize for the space you were taking. But that was not an answer you gave to a pretty lady.

She was looking at Cyrus Green, who answered in his slow way. "The Irish are lucky. The cannon balls can't find us. Saint Patrick, you know, steers them toward the Protestants."

She laughed and gave him a look that let him know she would let him off with that bit of malarkey.

The stratagem, if that is what it was, was unsuccessful. Company K was present in its entirety at Willard's from soon after the lemonade social until well after dawn.

At Arlington Heights in Virginia the regiment constructed a fort and named it for their colonel. Fort Corcoran. Pounding the logs of the perimeter fence into the ground was an easy matter; the ground was more liquid than solid. Getting them to stay upright was another matter. Planks had to be laid for footpaths and corduroy roads constructed to move animals and equipment. Gradually, as June passed, the ground dried. Meagher organized a field day in which the officers competed in a steeple chase. Captain Nugent was hospitalized with a broken shoulder blade—the result of a fall—and two horses had to be destroyed. Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, their brigade commander, was furious. Meagher replied that he thought it useful to keep the men's spirits up and averred privately that Sherman was a pinch-faced martinet.

At retreat on an especially steamy evening in July, over the loud drone of cicadas, Colonel Corcoran read the order to the ranks of soldiers. "Tomorrow, reveille will be sounded at three a.m. All units will prepare to march in battle formation. Departure will be at sunrise."

### IV

Marye's Children
1

Bull Run

When Sean was able to sit up without much pain he read the newspaper accounts, one after the other, but they had only muddled stories of the defeat and no details about the left flank of the action where the 69th had been overrun by a cavalry regiment. Colonel Sherman had ordered them to guard nine cannon. They had formed up in good order. He remembered the sight of the horsemen approaching at a trot across the field. Their commander seemed to be hailing them, his arm waving. Sean could see the full-bearded man's teeth. He was smiling. Colonel Corcoran, on horseback, had given the command to fire. Most of the regiment had been able to get only one round off before the rout. Horses crashed in among them. Thud of bodies, gasps of men knocked breathless. A jolt in his chest, as if hit with a club. Waking with sun on his face. Mouth parched. Paralyzed by pain. A long time on the quiet field. On a stretcher in the evening. A long night of straggling retreat back into Washington, lying in a crowded cart without being able to move his arms, the pain shooting through him with each jolt, mosquitoes on his face.

The newspapers agreed that eighty-eight of the 69th New York had been wounded, forty-one killed. Colonel Corcoran and sixty-five men had been taken prisoner and transported somewhere near Richmond. Newspaper accounts of Meagher's actions varied. Meagher had either been knocked unconscious when his horse was shot from under him and rescued from the field by the 13th New York, or had fought on despite having been knocked unconscious when his horse went down. The regiment had "fought bravely," said the _Herald_. In fact, they had been annihilated very quickly as a fighting unit, as would any infantry attacked by cavalry. All nine cannon had been lost. During the retreat Meagher had been riding on an ammunition wagon. The horse pulling the wagon had been shot in mid-stream at Centreville, capsizing the wagon and pitching Meagher into the stream. He had waded ashore and walked the rest of the way to Fort Corcoran. For some papers, this proved that he had taken a ride back when he could have given the space to one who really needed.it. For others, the dousing revived him and enabled him to struggle on.

Rory, unhurt, had returned to New York with the rest of the 69thNew York. The crowd of welcomers, upon seeing the downcast aspect of the regiment, had stopped cheering and watched the men pass in silence. Several from 69th were in Sean's ward of this Washington public building turned hospital. Cyrus Green, who had been through hell with a gut wound, retching and gasping day and night, was now apparently recovering, or at least quiet, in the next bed. Saint Patrick had not done his job. Sean read to him from the papers. He seemed to hear, opened his eyes and turned them in Sean's direction sometimes.

"J. E. B. Stuart," Sean said. "That was the commander of the cavalry that we met. Jeb, they call him, says he was surprised at our nerve, standing up to cavalry. My recollection is we didn't stand up long."

Sean's wound, from a ball in the chest, repeatedly swelled and drained pus for a month. When it finally settled to a jagged scar and the jutting point of a broken rib where the ball had been removed, he left the hospital and took a cheap room. Forced to lie on his back, he slept fitfully in the hot nights, mosquitoes whining in his ears.

Kate wrote that she would give up her situation only for marriage. Positions such as hers were particularly difficult to find now. She dared not be without one. Sean should find a permanent situation if he wanted her—and "not in the army."

The international code was now being used domestically on several lines. Sean had made inquiries, but Washington had not converted. There were no positions for international operators. The new transatlantic cable would originate in Newfoundland. "Out west. The territories," was the advice of the manager of the Pennsylvania Avenue telegraph station.

Megan had had a situation for a month, working in the kitchen of a house near Kate's, but the mistress had been a tyrant. "I could not abide it," she wrote, "and so am back at the Friends' for the time. I must find something else soon, for they are short of space and funds here."

Sean's funds were ample, the room being an inexpensive one in the home of an old woman and her grown son. He went to visit Cyrus nearly every day and read him the news.

"Here's something," he announced one morning. "Meagher is getting up an Irish brigade, a three-year enlistment."

"No, thank you," Cyrus replied. He was much improved, sitting up for visitors and talking, but his diet was mush in the morning and soup noon and evening. "He can go to hell with his brigade."

A few days later he had a letter from Rory, who had joined the new brigade. Sean read the letter to Cyrus. A group of supporters, including Elizabeth Meagher, had presented them with a brigade flag.

It's a gaudy green and gold thing, with harp, Fenian sun bursting through clouds, scrolls top and bottom with mottoes: "Free Irish Brigade" and "Riam Nar Druid O Sbairn Lann" — "Who never retreated from the clash of lances." And a few shamrocks sprinkled around. The _Times_ says there is something "gaudy and not quite tasteful" (I think the words were) about the whole idea of an Irish brigade. "Boastfulness of inadequacy," they said. It could be they're right. The Doichers from Milwaukee have a brigade and that's it for other nationalities. Everyone else is just Americans. But we've got dozens. Companies, regiments, now a brigade. It's a good recruiting game. All you have to do is advertise an Irish company and every Paddy ditch digger in miles throws down his shovel. I don't know what the Protestant Yankees are doing at all when they need a hole dug. But it's good for the Fenians. Gets them all thinking about the cause so they don't just all melt into America.

Well, we're off to Washington. Arrive at about three p.m. Thursday. Come down and meet us, buy us a toddy. And when we have dispatched this little matter of the graybacks we'll be off to Canadee. Join up with us, Johnny. The Free Irish—it has a nice ring, no? We'll have our day yet."

"Melting into America sounds good to me,"said Cyrus Green.. "I'm going to melt as fast as I can,"

He heard Peter Townsend laughing and hesitated in the upstairs hallway. His laugh boomed from the morning room, having a jolly time over his coffee this morning. No telling what he is laughing about, thought Meagher. He decided not to go down for breakfast just yet. The old boy will be leaving for the office in a few minutes. He went back into the bedroom and sat in the soft chair in the corner. He was to go to Jones' Wood in the afternoon to speak at a fundraiser for the families of the dead and wounded. The _Times_ had made a joke of it, too. They dubbed the battle of Bull Run "The Great Skedaddle." The illustration was a cartoon of bug-eyed union soldiers running for their lives. It was maybe a fair jibe at some of the army. They were raw and frightened, and Colonel Sherman had not done well, shouting what anyone could see, that the cavalry was coming. He was a martinet and an incompetent, and he had no excuse, being an old military man.

In fact, the battle was nothing like Meagher had imagined it would be. At first contact, his horse had shied and fallen and then all was confusion. He rose but had no weapon, was buffeted between flanks of horses, and a hard blow to the head knocked him down again. To say that the regiment had stood its ground and fought bravely was as false as to say it "skedaddled." In the heat of the moment there were no choices to be made. You struck what blow you could and went down. He remembered sitting up when it was over and seeing the human debris across the field of scrub trees along the river. Trying to rise, falling, his head throbbing. He rose at last. Someone found him wandering and got him onto a wagon. The wagon tipped in the stream. He waded across and found he was able to continue for the long night on foot.

The laughter downstairs had ceased. Peter would be gone to his office now. Meagher got up from the bed and went down for breakfast.

Mike Cavanagh was blind drunk. They had returned to Sweeny's after the Jones' Wood gathering. The event had been a success; twenty thousand had contributed nearly sixty thousand dollars. The families would be provided for, for a time at least. Cavanagh leaned across the table, fixed Meagher as well as he could with his red eyes. "Well, another episode and another fine speech, eh? Another chapter in the bloody biography I'm afther tryin' to write." His elbow slipped from the edge of the table and he banged his chin. "Jaysus." He felt a tooth. "Is it true you did a bunko? That's what it's sayin' in the _Times_. He used the horse fallin' for an excuse and ran back among his men, and then hitched a ride on an ammunition wagon when he could have walked, takin' the place of some poor fellow deserted on the field who could have used the place. What do you say to that? Eh?"

"Is this fellow bothering you, Tom?" Jack Gosson asked. "Go sleep it off, buster."

"I'm sorry, Tom. Ye are a bloody walkin' Irish rebellion, y'know. A great deal of heroic syllabub followed by a comical splat on your pants and then a lot more blather about how glorious it was. And now you're gettin' up a bloody brigade? Jaysus."

"Wasn't our fault, Mike. We were fourteen hundred in an army of thirty thousand. Leave off, Mike, if we're to remain friends."

The body of Terence Bellew McManus arrived in New York on September 13, 1861, and was given mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Mulberry Street. Archbishop Hughes addressed the mourners, who did not include Meagher—he was in Albany receiving his promotion from Governor Morgan. He returned the next day and accompanied the casket to the pier in his new uniform, the single star of a brigadier general on its epaulets.

Dan Sickles, too, had gotten up a brigade, and now had been told to un-get it. Sickles came to see Meagher at Irish Brigade headquarters on Broadway. He was in a lather. Governor Morgan had authorized him to enlist three thousand men but the upstate Republican sons of bitches had got to him and now he was taking it back—refusing to enlist them as state militia. At the Delmonico's oyster bar Sickles, forgiven by the management now that he was wearing a brigadier's star, held the dispatch in a trembling hand. "'Authorized for regiment only. Two hundred soldiers. Please disband all additional troops,'" he read. "Disband all additional troops! Does he know what he's asking? Send them home after three weeks' drill, without pay? What an idiot. What an incompetent booby. I'm going to the big man. Straight to Washington. See Lincoln. Get me an appointment, Tommy. You have met Abe. Telegraph him, Tom."

"I don't know that that would work, Danny. I saw him at camp last June, but there were dozens of us and he only stayed a couple of hours. I don't know that he would have any idea who I am."

Sickles slammed his hand on the bar. He was in a frenzy. Meagher sat calmly and watched him. Sickles was often in a frenzy. "Come on, Tom," he roared. "These men have given up jobs, left their families on the strength of my word. I can't tell them to go home. It will be the end of me, Tom."

"It would be the end of your brigadiership, at any rate," Meagher answered.

Sickles was shocked. Open-mouthed. "It's not me, Tom. You know that. Tom! I'd go as a private. My men aren't eating. I've got Wiley, you know, from the Wigwam. I'm stuck with him. That was the deal. Take Willie Wiley or no brigade. So I got Willie Wiley, the useless bugger. What does he do? Sets up his mess hall here. At Delmonico's. Sets up at Delmonico's," Sickles repeated over Meagher's laughter, amused a little himself now, "and hires two of the chefs to cook for the men, but there is no money. I can't feed three thousand morning, noon, and night at Delmonico's. I've got them into quarters at the state barracks by the post office, but those are day barracks. There is no water there, so now they've all got the cooties and the crotch pheasants, and everything covered in piss and shit. The city health department is on me. I've got Nielsen on Crosby Street, the Turkish baths. Nielsen says he'll barber and bathe them for ten cents apiece, but that's three hundred dollars, Tom. Three hundred for baths and haircuts. And he wants it in advance."

"Can't help you there, Dan'l. A bit impecunious myself these days. I will send your message to the president, though. Its efficacy strictly not guaranteed, you understand."

A week later Meagher had a note from Sickles.

I've seen Lincoln and the Excelsior Brigade has been approved as federal volunteers. Three thousand men. But the damned Governor is raging now—I went over his head. I'm thrown out of the state barracks. Got them camped for now at Long Island Race Track on the infield. No races scheduled for three weeks, so I'm OK now. I've got an old circus tent from Barnum. I've got to get a permanent billet before the end of August, Tommy. That's the next horse race here. If you have any ideas, I would like to hear them.

"Try Fort Wadsworth—Staten Island. My brigade drills there. Plenty of space. Federal land so Morgan won't be able to throw you out," was Meagher's reply.

His own brigade was to have consisted of regiments from Philadelphia and Boston in addition to the three from New York, but the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had forbade any of its militia from joining a New York brigade. So, for now, the Irish Brigade was three regiments only.

One day about two weeks after their meeting, Dan Sickles and the first of the Excelsior Brigade arrived at Fort Wadsworth, newly washed and barbered—on credit, thanks to Sickles' persuasive appeal to the patriotism of Nielsen. And they were soon to be paid. "We've got the use of the land just next to you here," he reported. "Abe's got a mustering officer on the way 'to take us in out of the cold.' That was the way he put it. Take us in out of the cold. By God, Tommy, it's coming together. We'll have our big top up by tomorrow. When we're ready, I'd be honored if you would come out and review my troops."

Meagher accepted the invitation, and two days later, on a sunny late afternoon, he rode out to Camp Excelsior with Captain Jack Gosson. They paused where the road began its descent into camp.

"Jesus," said Gosson. "Two bits to see the fat lady."

The big top was red and white stripes, trimmed with yellow and blue swallow-tail pennants flying from the peaks. Rows of troop tents stood before it. In the distance, a beach of the river served as a parade field where companies and regiments were forming up for inspection. Meagher and Gosson continued down into camp, and Sickles came out of his big top followed by a little man in a bright blue uniform crowned with a plumed helmet of polished steel. The two saluted the Irish Brigade officers and Sickles introduced the little man as Prince Salm-Salm of Vienna. Prince Salm-Salm had a great eagle's beak of a nose above his highly waxed mustache and saluted and clicked his heels with military punctilio.

"The prince has honored us by joining the Excelsior Brigade as an adjutant," Sickles explained as he and Prince Salm-Salm mounted their horses.

Gosson leaned close and spoke under his breath. "How can anybody be named Salm-Salm? That little piss ant must have come with the tent."

"This way, gentlemen," Sickles called. As they rode alongside the tent, the sound of women's laughter drew Meagher's attention. The wall had been raised in several places for ventilation and he could see in the murky interior Japanese lanterns and ladies in dresses.

"I hope you can stay, Tom. Wiley has got Pete Delmonico himself out to give us a little supper after this business. Teresa would love to see you again. She is beginning to get over that unfortunate business and go out a little now. This way, general. The Excelsior Brigade awaits."

"Where did you get that name for it?"

"It's on the state flag. Comes from a Longfellow poem, I think. About a fellow who toils onward and upward in the night."

"Yes. I've read that poem. He also abjures the company of women, if I remember right."

"He does? Foolish man. What would he do that for?" As they walked out onto the sand, Meagher, Gosson, Sickles and a couple of his officers and Prince Salm-Salm, cries of _ten-shun!_ repeated down the ranks and the twelve hundred men of the Excelsior Brigade snapped to attention.

The inspecting officers walked the length of the formation slowly, stopping to chat with the colonel standing before each regiment and with the captains of the companies.

"Colonel Miles!" Sickles shouted, approaching a gray-haired man.

The colonel saluted. "Yes, sir!"

"It looks as if you have a company missing."

"Yes, sir. Company B, sir. They've gone off."

"Gone off?"

"Left, sir. They voted last night. They're off to join the Thirteenth New York, sir. Left for the ferry an hour ago. Said they couldn't afford to do without their pay any longer, sir."

"God damned deserters!" Sickles roared. "Colonel, have the balance of your regiment draw ten rounds of ammunition each and form up in marching formation within fifteen minutes. We will go and bring those deserters home if we have to shoot every god damned one of them. General, I apologize. Perhaps you and your officers will adjourn to the tent. The ladies will entertain you until I am able to return."

"Be glad to help you, Dan."

"No, Tom, this is Excelsior Brigade business. I am embarrassed that this has happened

on this day. I will see you in an hour. Please, I am sure the prince will take you back. Please avail yourselves of the little bit to eat that we have for you."

"Right, Dan." Meagher snapped a salute and Sickles returned it.

"Brigade dismissed!" Sickles shouted.

While Sickles pursued his vagrant company, Meager and Gosson mingled with the guests in the tent. There were the usual sachems from the wigwam and their ladies, Mayor Wood, Dotty Dennis and several of her girls, including Hannah, all of whom knew better than to acknowledge acquaintance with any of the visitors, and Teresa Sickles, dressed more modestly than before the scandal. The prince introduced Meagher and Gosson to Princess Salm-Salm. Meagher had seen her before, possibly, it occurred to him, in this very tent. In her pre-princess career as a bareback rider in Barnum's circus, Agnes Leclerque, in her red, white and blue, star-spangled tights and striking blond hair, had packed the big top with the young men of the city. Today's costume also had a patriotic theme. A tight low-cut red dress with white and blue trim drew attention on this late afternoon amid the glow of the Chinese lanterns in the dusk, the clink of glasses, the animated conversation. The prince gazed in admiration as she, bantering with a circle of male admirers, tilted a nearly empty champagne glass in an attitude of practiced indifference.

"What are we to call you? Your highness, is it?"

"That will do nicely."

"Your highness, how does princess work differ from your former job?

"The clothes are more expensive. And the risk is somewhat greater, I would say."

She spoke in an attempt at a vaguely European accent. "Where is she from?" Meagher asked one of Sickles' officers.

"Vermont," came the reply.

"That is a lovely set of tits, all right," Jack Gosson said a little too loudly into Meagher's ear. "This friend of yours knows how to go to war. Trouble is, the men out there, eating their beans, can see all this. It's no wonder they run away. I'd run myself. I'm damned if I'll stay here for this. I'm going back."

"Stay, Jack. This kind of connection is good for the brigade. Just till Dan gets back and we can take our leave properly."

"Shit," said Jack Gosson. He walked to the table where Delmonico's waiters were dispensing whiskey punch, took a whiskey bottle in each hand, and walked out of the big top. Through the opening Meagher watched him circulating among the troop tents, pouring whiskey into their canteens.

Later, he found Teresa sitting in a corner, nearly in tears at having been left alone, and jollied her by making fun of the princess's accent.

Finally Dan returned. "Got the sons of bitches just as their boat was pulling away from shore," he told Meagher in a voice loud enough for all to hear. "Traitors! I have placed their captain under sentence of death. Waiter! A large whiskey."

The battle at Bull Run had been in late July. It was November now, an unusually dark and drizzling November in Washington. Sean still visited Cyrus Green every day to try to keep his spirits up. The Irish papers were full of the McManus funeral. A seven-mile procession in Dublin on a rainy November day had given new life to the Fenian movement in Ireland. "We're good at showing up," Cyrus said. "Don't do a god damned thing but show up and shout, but we are good at that." Cyrus had not healed much. The nights were still very bad for him.

Sean's letter to Kate asking if she could find any situation for Megan brought an angrily scrawled reply. "Who is this woman? Why are you so interested in helping her? I know you better than to believe you're living without women there in Washington. Why else would you be putting me off all these months? Now I see you had other companions in New York as well."

His answer—repeating that Megan was blind, that he knew her from home, that there was no romance between them—brought no answer at all. He wrote again, asking her to go see Megan and talk. He was trying to get a job, but they were not available now. The misunderstanding was pointless. Again, no reply. To hell with her, he thought one moment, and the next moment began walking to the steamer dock to buy a ticket for New York. But he thought as he walked. What would he do when he got there? Maybe she has someone else. Why else would she be so unreasonable? He would send her a note, meet her Sunday afternoon. If she wasn't answering his letters, would she come? Probably not. He had better wait until she calmed. He wrote every day, but got no answer. She had a temper. He knew that. Tearing up his letters unopened, no doubt.

Rory and the new 69th regiment, the vanguard of the Irish Brigade, which now also contained the 88th Connaught Rangers and the 63rd New York Volunteers, came to Washington in mid-September. Sean met them at the pier. They had brought whiskey on the steamer and disembarked in a mood for more. The new bunch was even wilder than the last. Their enlistment bonuses in their pockets, they careened into saloons, downed straight whiskeys, fell out into the street again, shouted, sang. "The minstrel boy to the war has gone, in the ranks of death you shall find him" rang in the streets and saloons. At one point Captain Jack Gosson commandeered a policeman's horse and raced it up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Joining the carouse, Sean became beatifically drunk. All the fussy troubles that had him down lately, where were they? To hell with Kate. She still had about five hundred dollars of his money. Well, she wasn't like that. He had had a good time with her, as had other men. She had been very friendly with the brigade commander, for that matter. He remembered that from Dublin. She had never permitted questions of that kind, but Sean was pretty sure that she had been fucked by none other than Thomas Francis Meagher. And I, on the other hand, have never fucked anyone other than Kate. This is inequitable, he reasoned, flopped in the corner of an especially dark and smelly tavern.

"Do you think it is reasonable," he asked Rory, "that a man who has made love with only one woman in his life should marry a woman who has, shall we say . . ." The room was spinning a little. He did not know what to say.

"Fucked a regiment," Rory suggested.

"That's enough. You are a crude person. I can see that now."

Rory put his arm around Sean's shoulders. "I don't think it is reasonable. That is my opinion. I don't think it is reasonable for a healthy man with a healthy prick to have fucked only one lady in his life. Where's your sense of adventure? Let us put it to a vote." Rory stood on his chair, waving his arms for attention. "Gentlemen, this man has—"

Sean grabbed him by his belt and pulled him off the chair. Both of them crashed onto the floor, laughing. On the floor, Rory put his arm around Sean's neck and spoke into his ear. "I'll tell you what. Let's find a kip and get this little problem of yours behind you."

"It's only a little problem, isn't it?"

"It is the littlest problem in the world. There is no problem any littler than this. If you have a dollar it may be solved at any hour of the day or night."

The two struggled to their feet. "'Scuse us. We are going to solve a little problem. Landlord!" Rory shouted as they walked past the bar. "Is there a whorehouse in the neighborhood?"

The white-headed bartender laughed approval. "Ay, just to the end of the block. The big stucco place, Knight's Arms."

"Is it poxy?"

"It's a clean one. Mrs. Armstrong. Tell her I sent you and it'll be a glass on me."

A small group followed them down the block, where Sean, with a pretty and tiny mulatto girl, solved his little problem.

Late in the afternoon Sean accompanied the troops back to the barracks and, to shouts of encouragement from the men, put his signature on the enlistment document. He awoke in the barracks of the regiment and lay awake as the sun came up. He felt the after-effects of the day before, but no regret. All that hilarity had been a purgation. He felt like laughing.

"Reveille, reveille!" shouted a sergeant, and the men began so stir.

"Talty, don't touch anyone till you've bathed. That pig you ended up with last night was poxy."

"Christ, you should have seen her. Scab face Lucy from Louseville. I hope to Christ I never get drunk enough to fuck something like that."

"Sean Gillespie!" the Sergeant called.

"Here," Sean replied.

"Come with me to the quartermaster to draw your uniform and bedding."

"Whoo! Whee!" the men shouted. "You're a soldier again, Johnny!"
2

Soldier Again

In the near dark new supplies of cartridges and primers were brought to them and they were ordered to sleep on their weapons and resume firing at dawn. There was no new supply of food.

Men moved in from the ends of the line and filled the gaps. Sean recognized the silhouette of the large man who settled next to him. "You wouldn't have an extra hard cracker, McGuire, old boy?" Sean asked him.

"I got exactly one, and it ain't extra. You can get some water over at the near edge of the woods—right back there at that big birch is the water cart. Better wait till it darkens more. There's a sharpshooter or two up there."

The smoke had become an eye-stinging haze almost obscuring the last trace of sunset, the violet sky with its high, ribbed pink clouds. Rory came along the line.

"Gillespie?"

"Here."

"Right. That's Coogan you hear back there. Let's go take him to hospital. We might get something to eat back there, too."

"Who's Coogan?"

"The Rynders man who made his escape. Like you."

"The recruit?"

"Right. We were talking to him at camp back at Yorktown. Come on. It's dark now. Let's get him before the moon rises. I've got permission from Sergeant Welsh."

"Leave him, for Christ's sake." It was the bass voice of Hugh Talty coming from a little distance. "He's hit square in the gut. Not a thing the hospital can do. He'll scream like the banshee if you lift him."

There were several crying. No telling if one of the voices was Coogan. He and Rory left their rifles and went back down the hill. It was dark with only a few stars visible. With no wind the stinking haze would still be there in the morning. It took some time to find him. They called to him several times and he answered "Here, over here."

Sean slung Coogan's musket rifle over his shoulder and Rory took his haversack. They lifted him and carried him slowly to the rear. He caught his breath with the pain but did not scream.

"God, out fightin' for Abe's niggers and look what it gets me. Shot to free a black nigger. God damn stupid. I should have stayed in Skibbereen and starved." He was crying like a child. "I could be in the damn graveyard be now."

"All right, shut up now," Sean said. "It's trouble enough hauling you without listening to all that shit coming out of you. Tell us about the finer qualities of Skibbereen. How tall was your _carnán aoileach_? That's manure pile to you, Mr. Lynch."

Having talked too much, he was quiet, gasping with the pain. After a minute he said, "You're a funny man, Lynch, is it?"

"I'm Gillespie. That's Lynch has your legs."

" _Gaeilge agat_?" Coogan asked.

"A few words only."

On the road there were others carrying wounded men. A ragged procession made its way along the road back into the town. On the streets there were a few fires burning with figures sitting and lying near them. Several buildings had been set up as hospitals, but they were crowded. The men around the fires were all wounded. They carried Coogan to one of the fires. "Scootch a little, we've got one more who needs to be near the fire."

"Where is it he's hit?"

"In the gut."

"Jesus. Take him somewhere else," came another voice from the dark.

"He'll be quiet, won't you, Coogan?"

They laid him on the ground. Rory took the blanket from his sack and spread it near the fire. They moved him onto it and wrapped him.

"He'll be bellowing like a goddam birthing cow before morning. Take him out of here," said the same voice.

"Do you want this under your head?" Rory asked, showing him the sack.

"All right."

They spied a litter leaning against the rail fence as they went back to the road. Sean rolled the canvas around one of its poles and slung it over his shoulder. It would explain to passing officers what they were doing on the road. They walked back along the road they had come that morning and then turned on the road to the ridge where the main fight had been. The moon shone nearly full over the ridge and they could see where they were walking now. Still there was the occasional snap of rifle fire and pop of musket.

"He could be all right," said Sean. "Usually there's more pain. Maybe it missed the gut."

They walked a while on the faintly glowing strip of dust. It had been mud in the morning but was dry now. A group of mounted officers rode past, heading away from the ridge toward the headquarters for tomorrow's orders, no doubt. None of them spoke.

"I suppose," said Rory, "he could be up dancing like a Dutchman in half an hour, but I'm guessing he won't. I think we better try over there just over the top. Let's get off the road here. There will be pickets." They climbed the bank up into the woods. Walking was not difficult. The brush was well trampled and the moon silhouetted the trees. Soon they could hear the night singing of the main battlefield, a deep moan, voices of the wounded, that seemed to come out of the earth. As they neared the top they paused and listened. There was a company, or the remains of one, manning the highest ground. They went to the left, around the top, and soon found what they wanted. Sean nearly tripped over the first one. He knelt and rolled him onto his back, felt the outside pocket, found nothing, and unbuttoned the tunic. In the inside pocket the familiar paper jacket. Just one. He put it in his pocket and moved along.

"Here," Rory whispered.

Sean descended the hill to where Rory had found several of them. Union and Rebs, mixed. They searched the Union men. Not much chance of finding food on a Reb. In a few minutes they had a dozen or so of the paper-wrapped crackers. As they made their way back down the hill there was a flurry of musket fire to the right. There were still an exchange of fire between the Rebs on the hill and the Yanks on top.

"For the love of God," a loud, rasping voice came from directly before them. "I don't care who yez are, do yez have a drop of water?"

"Where you from?" asked Rory.

"Lisdoonvarna," came the answer. "Do ye know that?"

"I know that," said Sean. "In County Galway." They moved down the hill toward the voice and found its owner under a fallen tree.

"And it looks as if you've got a bit of a gray uniform on yez," said Rory, leaning over the tree trunk and examining him closely. "You took Jeff Davis's dollar, me boy. And now look where you are. Cannonball hits tree which falls on hapless mick. I hope they didn't pay you in Confederate scrip."

"Do you have any water? I've been here all day."

"See if you can find him a canteen, there, Sean, old boy. There's some hereabouts who won't be needing any more water."

A musket popped nearby, and then another.

"Let off, lack-brains!" Sean shouted. "It's one of your own we're bringing to hospital. I'm just getting him a drop of water."

The firing stopped. "What regiment?" someone shouted.

"Jesus, it's a bloody Irish company of Rebs we've found," said Sean. He uncorked the canteen and helped the man from Lisdoonvarna drink.

"It's a whole Irish regiment," said the man after drinking a long swallow. "Twenty-ninth Georgia and damn this god damned peninsula."

"I wonder, can you move yourself if the two of us can lift this tree? Do you think you can scootch yourself out of there?"

Straining, they were able to lift the tree a few inches and the man began to pull himself out but yelled in pain.

"I've got it. Pull him" said Rory.

Sean let go of the tree and dragged him, but Rory could not hold the tree by himself. It came down again on his leg and the man from Lisdoonvarna screamed and kept screaming. Sean shouted toward the Georgia company. "Come here, a couple of you, and help us lift this off of him."

In a minute he heard footsteps in the brush. "Let's to it, then," said a deep, husky voice. "Here?"

"Right, let me help you."

"I got it," came the answer and the tree lifted a couple of feet. The deep-voiced man was a giant. Sean and Rory lifted the man out. Sean found the litter and the three of them placed him on it.

"We'd have got him sooner, only we thought the place was covered by the company above." The fellow who had lifted the tree sounded apologetic. "It was covered until just now."

"Faix, he's barefooted. How did you get your boots off, then?" Rory asked.

"I got them off two months ago, or three, maybe it is. Along the Richmond road. They were falling off anyway. Half our men have no boots."

"And how much of a bonus did they give you?" asked Rory, as they carried the litter back up the hill.

"Four hundred dollars, it was."

"U.S. or Confederate?" asked Rory.

U.S. to be sure. I'm not a bloody idiot. Haven't I already a farm in Minnesota with it, a hundred and sixty acres, and my brother farming it? A nice crop of wheat he's growing."

"Well, it's a hundred dollars more than Father Abraham paid us," said Sean.

"How many bounties have you collected?" asked Rory.

"Sure, 'twas just the one. I'm not a jumper."

They carried him onto the road. As they walked toward town they saw covered ambulance wagons and supply carts filled with wounded, but the ambulance ahead of them was over-filled, so they continued to carry him.

"Did you think I was a bounty jumper?" he asked finally.

"You don't get mail from Minnesota if you're in the 29thGeorgia," Rory answered. "You must have heard the news about the crops before you jumped. You're a jumper, but don't worry. I'll carry you anyway as a favor to Lisdoonvarna."

"Prisoners, it was. I was guarding prisoners the last two months. Two I had were from the 6thWisconsin. The Iron Brigade. It was from them I learned it. Don't be calling me a jumper now."

The line of traffic bearing the wounded was stopped, so they carried him alongside the road until they came to another covered ambulance. "Any room up there?" Rory asked.

"Can he sit?"

"Sure he can. It's just his leg is broken."

"I don't know if I can sit. My leg's terrible painful."

"You can sit and holler then," said Rory. "We can't carry you to the Reb line. That would not have a happy ending for us."

The man from Lisdoonvarna stiffened with pain when they lifted him up, but he held it back pretty well.

Don't be talking about your farm in Minnesota," Sean said in his ear as they hoisted him. They left him sitting on the back ledge of the ambulance, one arm hooked around the support of the canvas. His right foot was turned around in the wrong direction.

They munched hard crackers and drank from their canteens as they walked back to the regiment. Sean held a cracker up, trying to see it in the moonlight. "Are these weevils or worms?"

"Can't tell. No big worms. Must be weevils, mostly."

"Good. You think he was a jumper?"

"Sure he was. You don't buy a farm with four hundred dollars. It'd take a thousand or twelve hundred anyway, two or three jumps to get that much together. All you have to do is report under a different name. Chap from Syracuse I was talking to back at Y Town said his sergeant couldn't call the roll at first, nobody could remember what his name was supposed to be. Had to pass the company roster around and each of them take a name and write it down. They do shoot one now and then, or brand a D on their forehead, but mostly it's pretty safe until you have to fight. Now they'll take his leg off and he'll be done jumping. He'll be a hopper."

"Hopping along behind his plow in Minnesota," said Sean.

They passed the field where the wounded from their own skirmish waited. There were fewer fires and not much sound. Someone in the distance was calling out what sounded like a name, something like Myra. Martha? Sean could not tell which it was. Now that his hunger was gone he felt how tired he was. The brigade had not slept a whole night in a week or more.

Sean and Rory rounded the turn and came into the field where the brigade was and found that the brigade was coming toward them in marching formation. They hurried along the ranks. Sean was so tired he found himself stumbling, unable to pick his feet up. They found the sixty-ninth in the lead, as usual, stood and waited for Company K. Sean spotted Talty. "Who's got our rifles and sacks?"

"I've got your bloody sack. There."

Others handed them the rest of their gear and they joined at the end of the company.

"Where are we headed, then?" Rory asked.

"Yonder." McGuire nodded his head to indicate the ridge. "Up where they made all the noise today. The rebs we were fighting left in the dark. Probably going up there too. Maybe we'll see them again. You get any crackers up there?"

"A couple. Ate 'em, though."

McGuire patted Sean's breast pocket to see if he was telling the truth.

It was late. The moon had passed its zenith. The tired brigade moved without speaking much, as it had all the previous night. A mild scuff of boots, clank of gear. When the column stopped and stood for ten minutes, there was cursing. This was time they could be sleeping. Sean watched the haversack of the man ahead, kept his interval, stopped when it stopped. They parted for a battery of horse artillery which passed through them. Six twenty-four-pounders with limbers. They too moved without talking, except for a brief exchange between officers.

They stopped again at a wide place in the road where the ammunition cart had pulled off. After they had loaded their cap pouches and their cartridge pockets they began again, uphill now. They went into the woods, cutting across between switchbacks of the road. It was steep in places; he had to put a hand down on the ground. He slipped and lay a minute. A hand shook his shoulder. He got up and climbed to the next stretch of road, climbed the gravel road to the top, then along the ridge single file, jumping black crevasses to rocks that glowed like moons, down the bank a few feet, single file again along a path of stone chips below a cliff. Then came the command to fall out. He found a spot of fairly flat ground cradled above a tree, leaned his rifle on a rock, found his blanket in his sack, felt for its stitched edge, spread it on the dewy ground, lay down, wrapped himself, arranged the sack under his head, wriggled himself so that the rocks were not cutting too badly into his ribs and hip, held his hand to his chest in his old habit, and fell into a black sleep.

He awoke to a stabbing pain in his right leg. From the mowed field below a Confederate battery of howitzer was firing solid shot into the cliff just above them, spraying them with rock chips. In barest gray dawn a thin rim of red showed over the woods at the horizon. Rock fragments ripped through leaves with each explosion and ricocheted off boulders. From the suppressed cries it was clear that a number of men had been struck.

Sean scooted around the tree to get it between him and the cliff. The back of his thigh was stung but not bleeding; the blanket had spared him that. He took a buck and ball cartridge from his pocket and emptied it down the barrel of his .69 caliber smoothbore musket, letting the buckshot and ball fall last. He took the ramrod from beneath the barrel and tamped the load, leaned the ramrod against the tree. He eased back the hammer, took a firing cap from the bag on his belt and placed it on the cone. He took aim at the nearest howitzer, but it was well out of range. He put the musket down without firing. As he watched the tree line a thousand yards away he saw it emit bits of its darkness, particles of black moving slowly onto the field, swimming in space, crepuscular insects or eye-motes, wandering and random but eventually forming a line. Sergeants would be barking orders, but from this distance they were inaudible. It looked to be maybe a thousand—a couple of brigades reduced in earlier fighting. They formed up in close order attack and began to move across the field.

Sean watched little Hugh Talty below him nestled behind a limestone boulder and John McGuire farther along as they watched the dark line approach. Talty's arm sprawled on the rock, his head resting sideways on it. McGuire leaned back against a tree and slowly picked a _míol_ from his scalp and crushed it between fingernails. Two almost simultaneous explosions sent the rocks flying.

"Where's our damned artillery?" Talty asked no one in particular.

After a minute one of the twenty-four-pounders fired from the ridge and a shell exploded well short of the Confederate line, then another fifty yards behind the line, then, finally, a third that did some damage in the center. "You got 'em boys. Fire for effect," Talty shouted. He had been in the artillery, briefly, until he had got drunk and failed to get back to base camp for reveille, and he liked to show off his little knowledge. A cannonade followed from the six Union guns. "Down two degrees elevation, fire when ready."

"Shut up, Talty," McGuire said. McGuire had undone two buttons of his shirt and had his hand inside, holding his rosary beads.

The Confederate howitzers continued to fire into the cliff. Sean scurried down the hill alongside an outcropping of limestone to a place where he had some cover from both the attacking infantry and the flying rock. He came up behind one of the new men, who was in position at the end of the outcrop.

"Got room for one more?"

The man climbed up to a ledge and gave the spot on the ground to Sean.

The Confederates were about three hundred yards away now.

The order came relayed down the line, "Fire on command."

Sean passed the order along: "Fire on command."

The Union cannons fired again, this time the flat ugly bark of canister shot. More cannon had been brought into position at the top of the ridge. The Union barrage was devastating. Dozens fell, maybe a hundred, but they kept coming. They began their yell now, a high ullulation, and broke into a run. Volley after volley of canister reduced them to less than half their original number by the time they got to the foot of the hill, when the command came for Company K to fire. Another round of canister ripped through the leaves just above their heads. The Union guns—howitzers now had come up to join the twenty-four-pounders, maybe forty guns in all—were firing point-blank down the hill.

"They sure want to keep their niggers," the recruit said as he fired his piece. Crouching to reload, he said, "They call us nigger lovers. They must love 'em more than we do."

Sean fired at a Reb coming up the hill and saw him fall. From a kneeling position beside the rock outcrop he reloaded and fired. The Confederates were only thirty yards away, dodging among the trees, scrambling up the hill without stopping to reload, still yelling. Sean got off another shot at ten foot range squarely into the chest of a bearded, dark-complected man and then they were too close for him to reload. He crouched by his rock and soon found himself standing among gray-clad troops. Firing ceased. There seemed to be about as many Confederates as there were Union. It was impossible to fire with everyone intermingled. Sergeant Welsh came along behind their position, looking bewildered. "Just hold everything right where you are," he shouted. A lieutenant shouted from the top of the ridge, "The Confederate troops will lay down their arms and go to the rear!"

There seemed to be no Confederate officer or sergeant among these troops. After a minute of silence and what felt strangely like embarrassment, the Confederates began to obey the order. A very thin soldier no more than fifteen years old, stunned, open-mouthed, handed his musket to Sean and, grasping a sapling, pulled himself up the hill toward the lieutenant. As he passed, Sean heard a choked whimper, a sound of relief.

On the ledge the recruit was slumped, face down. Sean tossed the worthless Confederate musket down the hill. He reached up and turned him. He was dead, shot in the face. Why had he gone up there on that ledge, anyway? The two of them could have alternated from below, one firing while the other reloaded.

The order came down the line to form at the top of the ridge. Sean's hands were shaking. He felt nothing. He had felt nothing in any battle for the past six months or more, save a numbed tension, an ache that ran the length of his spine and into his legs and shoulders and the cold sweat. And when the battles were over there was a shaking when he could not draw his breath without a series of catches and sometimes nausea. It was body-fear. The body feared to die long after the mind had gotten over it. It will be an end to this agony, his mind said, but his body didn't believe it. After the shaking he would want to sleep, but now there would be no chance. It was somewhere around mid-morning. There was too much time left in the day. He hoped his company would be given prisoner detail, to guard the prisoners on their march to the prison camp, but no such order came. Some other company had got the soft duty. He took the recruit's smooth bore, slung it on his shoulder along with his own, and climbed up to join his company, feeling with each step the ache of trembling in his thighs. The brigade moved down the ridge path, winding down into the field, where they sat for a long time.

Sean slept for a while that afternoon and came up out of sleep still confused between that world and this. It was late afternoon when they formed up to move. The sun had warmed him and dried his clothes. Pissing into a clump of bushes he felt the sting on his backside and crotch where the rock shards had hit him. Under his clothes he had hardly an inch of skin that was not blotched and swollen. Some of it was louse bites. A cannonade was in full thunder on the left flank and the woods were on fire there. "Poor beggars," said McGuire, standing next to him. He walked back to where the brigade had gathered. Father Corby stood upon a rock and gave them absolution. _Dominus noster Jesus Christus vos absolvat, et ego, auctoritate ipsius_ . . . . Most of the men around him knelt, but Sean stood and absently watched the fire in the wood. It was most of a mile away, but he could hear it now, its crepitate roar as loud as the cannonade. . . . _absolvo vos, a pecatis vestris, in nomini Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen._

As they formed up he asked McGuire, You seen Lynch or Talty?"

"Talty's gone back for a head wound. Knocked him cold, but I'd say he'll be all right. 'Tisn't as if he'd have a brain to be injured. Rory Lynch I didn't see. Was he on the right?"

"I don't know."

Another order came, relayed down the line: "Load at will. Forward, ha!"

"There was a lot of them killed on the right where all that rock came down."

He had done this enough times now that he knew what to expect from his nerves: a hollowing in the stomach of an anticipated blow gave their walk a toe-first concavity. The two lines approached each other. At fifty yards, both lines stopped and fired. At that range the loss would be bad. They would have to charge or withdraw. Meagher came along behind them on his stallion and shouted, "Fix bayonets. Charge, boys! Fontenoy!" They ran headlong at the Rebs and the enemy collapsed and ran, taking up a position in a railroad cut, but most had not time to reload. Sean charged into the cut, his rifle also not loaded. A rebel soldier shouted, "I surrender!" and put his rifle down. As Sean turned toward another man, the man who had surrendered picked up his rifle again. Nearly hurling his rifle by the butt, Sean ran his bayonet through the man's neck. A Rebel officer handed Sean his sword. McGuire and Sean ordered the surrendered Rebs to sit in the railroad cut with their hands on their heads. Sean threw the sword at a Reb climbing the far side of the cut. Just as he let it go something struck his left shoulder. It felt like a rifle butt someone had swung. There was no pain, but when he tried to lift his rifle again he found he had no strength in the arm. McGuire came towards him. "Damn, they got you, Sean, a ball" he said.

Sean climbed out of the cut and went to where the prisoners were being formed up. He thought to help guard them, but felt faint. The side of his shirt and trousers were soaked in blood and he felt it in his boot. He stopped and drank from his canteen and felt a little better. Captain Gosson came riding along the ranks of the prisoners—there were perhaps two hundred of them—observing with a proprietary and satisfied air. He looked toward Sean. "You're injured, soldier." Gosson called for a stretcher.

Sean awoke in a field hospital and reached to brush flies from his face. He felt nothing in his left arm. He held his hand over his eyes to keep from looking. Well, if it is gone at least I am out of this, he thought. After a minute he looked down. There was his left hand protruding from a sling, resting on his stomach, numb and dead as if it was not his.

The light rain had let up around sunrise, and the morning's march was muddy. It had been two months since they had come out of the peninsula and back to Washington. Now they were moving north. The rain had been a relief. For six days of marching in dust, the men had worn handkerchiefs or whatever bit of cloth they could find over their mouths and noses. Here the road was puddled and narrow, bordered by wooden fences. The bump of artillery had been increasing all morning. It was not another skirmish, of which they had had several. This would be a major battle. In the early afternoon they stopped for hard crackers and coffee. This had been their most of their diet for nearly a month. Once there had been a little milk, a few times the infamous goobers—unroasted peanuts. Sean unloaded his sack and rifle and worked his arm. The left, the one he aimed with. It hurt and he could not raise it much. A festering wound, at night it throbbed. They lined up to draw ammunition, sixty rounds each buck and ball cartridges from the ammo wagon. They had not slept, having come thirty-four miles since the previous evening. There was a delay in reforming. Some of the men curled up on the ground, damp as it was, and went to sleep.

The day was steamy and hot. Sean and Rory lay against the bank of the road in a bit of shade, heads resting on haversacks. Rory too had been injured in the peninsula campaign, a broken rib and a large bruise on his back where the rock had hit him. It had healed well. He could move his arms nearly as well as ever. After four months of mud and heat and mosquitoes and confusion of Maclellan's ill-fated peninsula campaign, now back through northern Virginia and into Maryland they had marched five hundred miles this way and that, slept in swamps, gone without rations, been attacked by their own troops, and fought one poorly generaled battle after another. They did not complain of the delay. Delays are to be enjoyed, relished even, as long as the shot is flying elsewhere. Every minute was one minute closer to the end.

"So, tell me, Corporal Gillespie, whether you think you'll live till the end of this."

"This what? Day? Month?"

"War."

"War. I'm sure I don't have the slightest idea. Or not much interest either, for that matter. I never think that far ahead. I was thinking just now of a piece of that apple pie with cheese baked for us by the good ladies of Arlington back in the Fort Corcoran days. Remember that?"

"Jesus, you're a bit beside the point there, boyo. If I'm thinking of the good ladies of Arlington it's not for their apple pie. How long since you've had a good fucking?"

"It has been a day or two. The monastic ideal, that's what's required here. Think of the cause. All for the Union."

"All for the Union, hell. This is all for Canada, and don't you forget it."

"Probably never get there."

"We'll get there. You ever hear from your lady in New York?"

"Kate? No. Nothing."

"The two dozed off for an hour or so. They awoke to the boom of artillery fairly near.

"Ain't it a bit peculiar," Rory said, "that we're against the Union back home and for the Union here. In Ireland we're a bunch of bloody secesh and here we're all for the Union. Now why is that?"

"It's a different Union, maybe. Buggerer and buggeree kind of thing. Looks as if we're forming up. Are we bringing our sacks?"

"Looks like it."

All along the road men were coming down the little berm of the ditch slinging up their sacks and rifles. A few were still lined up at the water wagon, and the sergeant grabbed each canteen in rapid succession and held it under the spigot to hurry things along. Company K fell in near the end of the column behind Captain Courtney, who sat his bay horse and raised his hand to give the location.

"Jesus Christ, Talty, you're rotten."

"Holy Mary, how did you work up a fart on hard crackers?"

"It's a blessed miracle." Hugh Talty crossed himself. He still wore a bandage on his head wound of four months ago, in spite of regular chiding that he was playing hero. "We thank thee Lord for these thy benedictions," he intoned. He had a comically deep voice for such a small man.

"You're a blaspheming little dwarf, Talty. You'd've been felled with a lightning bolt years ago but you're too small to hit."

"Load," shouted the captain. The order was superfluous. Most of the men had already loaded.

"And don't you wish you had that problem?" Talty shouted as McGuire went forward to take his place in the ranks. "I'm going into this one right behind your wide arse, McGuire."

They marched along a wooded hill and as the lead company approached the turn the captain came riding back. "Quick march, quick march." All down the column, which stretched a half mile along the road, the companies picked up the pace to a quickstep. "Listen to me, boys," he said, ranging alongside. "As we come onto the field it'll be by company into line, on the right company. Think now how you'll do that. Sergeants, listen. We'll come all the way around until we're lined up on Company A. Get the colors up as fast as you can. We've done this enough times now we should be able to do it at a full run without losing the formation. All out. Let's do ourselves proud. Our regimental commander is now Colonel Cunningham. Colonel Flaherty was killed just now."

The colonel killed. So the head of the regiment was around the turn already. Flaherty had prided himself on going into battle at the head of his men. Such colonels do not last. Rifle and musket fire popped. From this distance it sounded like a crew of carpenters pounding nails. The order came for double quick march and, nearing the turn in the road, they broke into a slow run. Sean rounded the turn into the field just as an artillery round exploded. The percussion knocked him off his feet. Gravel had cut his face but he was not seriously hurt. The rebs were shelling this constricted entrance to the field and there were a hundred or more dead and wounded on the ground. Sean got up and ran forward in a field with hay stacks. As in all battles, wounded horses screamed. Two riderless horses galloped toward their line, but another exploding shell sent them off toward the Confederate line.

Most of the company managed to reassemble. The whole brigade, more than half a mile wide, formed across the field. Several of the new recruits ran ahead of the line and were soon down. Anderson, running beside Sean, pitched forward, hit the ground on his face. The veterans ran slowly in a slight crouch, no one getting ahead, and after coming into position and firing the pre-loaded round at the fence line ahead, knelt to reload.

The 69th came up alongside the 29th Massachusetts, who were exchanging fire with a Confederate brigade across a creek. The two regiments took a position in a shallow drainage ditch. The rest of the brigade had no ditch. They lay in the tall wheat of the field. Sean knew that they would not be there long. Meagher would not willingly leave them here long in the middle of this field with this inadequate cover.

But the order to move did not come. Indeed, the word came down the line that they were to hold this position until sunset. As far as Sean could see there were only two artillery pieces supporting them, and their firing was only intermittent.

"I suppose they're all up that way where the big fight is," said Rory, standing to fire. He fired his round and dropped to the ground. "God listen to that. One continuous roar. I'm glad we're here."

The battle was on the far side of the rise to the northwest, maybe a mile away. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia—in all, more than a hundred thousand men. The sound came to them through the valley and echoing from the ridge to the north of a giant furnace when its fire roars in the flue.

The smell of smoke early in a battle had something eager in it, a sharpness that made you want more. Later, when it was thicker and the newness was gone, it would be a little sickening. With sixty rounds, as much as they could carry in cartridge belt and pockets, each man could fire only once in every five minutes or the ammunition would run out before dark. It really was not sufficient to keep the Rebels pinned. Maybe the commander over there, hearing the roar, did not really want to proceed. This skirmish would be a good enough Morgan. Good enough for me too, thought Sean. Stay pinned, Johnnie.

Sean lay on his stomach on the dry grass of the ditch and studied the ground. The past year had brought him to this study almost daily: the endless and tentative probing of the _feithid_ amid the towering grass and bur weed, the under pattern, the droning burthen to the pointless tune of this pointless planet.

As the day wore on, the four pieces of enemy artillery adjusted on their line and the brigade took several direct hits, one on the right side of the 69th. Company A—Halloran and O'Bannon. As usual the Rebs were low on ammunition and their artillery fire was also intermittent. After the first three rounds it looked as if, having found the range, they planned to rake the line by adjusting deflection—the lateral angle of the guns. It became possible to guess where the next one would hit, and the troops moved back and forth in the ditch to avoid them. The sound of laughter and whooping came from the Confederate lines with each hit. They were taunting them, but Sean could not hear what it was they were saying.

Meagher took a long pull at the bottle and, jockeying his skittish horse sideways, passed the bottle to Jack Gosson. "Come on, Jack-o, time to teach them a lesson."

Jack took a good swig and tossed the bottle. Followed by the two brigade chaplains, they rode straight out across the field, through their own lines. Meagher turned his horse about and shouted, "Boys, raise the colors and follow me."

A few men rose, then a few more. In a minute the whole brigade was moving forward. Confederate artillery had their range and fired repeatedly with deadly accuracy. Large gaps blown in the line were quickly filled. The priests had stopped to administer last rites. Meagher and Gosson, fully exposed on their mounts, led the brigade straight up to the Confederate line, a breastwork of stacked fence rails along a sunken road. In this field he would erase all the embarrassments. Ballingary. Chiriqui. Bull Run. The Peninsula. His horse calm now, Meagher rode straight, aware of the significance of the whirring sounds about his ears. Jack Gosson's horse, shot through the nose, sprayed blood with each breath, but Meagher and his adjutant remained unhit. The brigade, fully exposed, came within thirty yards of the Rebel line crouched in the sunken road. Meagher waved his sword as a signal and the brigade fired a volley, reloaded, fired again. The cries of the wounded soon became audible amid the fusillade. Meagher called for bayonets and led a charge, but the men who followed him were quickly cut down. He felt a sudden jolt and pitched forward, landing hard within a few yards of the Rebel line.

After another half-hour of blasting away toe to toe, Sean heard the command to move to the rear. Two fresh brigades, marching in columns, were coming up. They withdrew through the field of hay stacks. Some of the stacks were on fire. A man leapt out of one, his clothes burning, trying to run from his own flames. He fell and lay in his flames, not moving. A shirker, no doubt, trying to hide until it was over.

Meagher awoke in a room lit dimly only by a lantern at the far end. He lay before the wooden altar of a country church. "Must be my funeral," he said aloud.

After a minute there was a mild laugh. The brigade surgeon, Williams, came over to him. "Not yet, old fellow. You took a hard thump when your horse went down. Lots of people asking about you." The doctor moved off among the other wounded. Meagher lay and listened to the mechanical repetitions of whippoorwills. The hospital was quiet. It must be a long time since the battle, he thought.

The captains of each company reported their numbers. A few minutes passed in the mild dusk of the mid-September day. Finally Colonel Anderson said, "Gentlemen, we are one hundred and thirty-four now in the 69th New York Regiment. This morning we were three hundred and thirty."

They stood in formation waiting for Jack Gosson, acting brigade commander, to report the numbers for the whole brigade. Instead, after consulting with his captains, he merely dismissed the men, wishing them a good night.

Meagher had rejoined them after a few days in hospital. He had not been shot. "He fell off drunk," was Hugh Talty's analysis. "Too drunk to stay in the saddle at a gallop. If you've ever fallen downstairs at the pub, it's the same thing. The ill effects of the whiskey is worse if you bang your head."

Maguire was furious. "Drunk or sober, that was the bravest thing you will ever see, you misbegotten dwarf. Meagher and Gosson both. They stood their ground calm as can be."

"You'd be calm too with a quart of whiskey in you. Sure, he drinks all the time. When did you ever see him sober?"

"There is more than one general in this army that drinks. Look at old Gin Barrel French, and he wearing three stars."

The rebels had retreated after the battle, leaving Maryland and northern Virginia to the federals. For more than a month after the Maryland battle, what was left of the brigade camped at Harper's Ferry in pleasant country amid beautiful autumn weather. Casualties on both sides had been horrendous, nearly thirty thousand killed and wounded. Replacements arrived, including a whole Pennsylvania regiment, the 116th. Sean and Rory were promoted to sergeant and each were assigned a dozen new recruits to train. Sean stood his squad at attention on the tenting ground and looked them over. Sturdy looking fellows of middle height, five to five and a half feet, except for one lanky, tow-haired man who seemed reluctant to look back at him. Sean stood before the man till he looked up, a sheepish expression on the familiar pocked face.

"Well, Cyrus Green, you're back to give them another shot at you."

By way of answer his face reddened, crinkled into tears. "OK, men," Sean said quickly, "let's get the tents up, three on the end of each of these two rows, lined up two paces apart. Select your wives, gentlemen, and button your half shelters together, never do us part. Poles are in the stack yonder."

Green and another man buttoned their half shelters together while Sean watched.

"A little hard to find a living out there, I guess," Sean said.

Cyrus, busy fitting a cross pole into the Y of the upright, nodded.

"How's the stomach?"

"Better. Not too bad."

Sean had a letter from Megan, who was still at the mission. "Your friend Miss McGowan came for a visit. She seems a good person, although she was not especially friendly with me, I must say. She left me wondering why she had come. Do you have any idea?"

He kept writing to Kate about once a week, on the chance that she might finally relent. Finally, just as they had got their orders to march, a letter came:

I continue well and work here goes on the same. The family are building a new place at Newport Island and I am to go there with them next summer when it is done. I have seen Megan and must admit maybe I was too hasty. Are you truly staying away from women there? Why ever did you enlist again? I don't understand you. Everyone here is saying that the war will end with the South separate anyway and Lincoln is a crazy man getting everybody killed for nothing. Is it true many thousands were killed at the battle in Antietam? The papers are full of it, but your letters barely mention it. I am frightened sometimes thinking about you and all your books and your piculear ways. Still I do think about you often. I have no other man in case you wonder about that. You never ask in your letters. I wonder if you even care. You are a very strange fellow. Still, you are in my thoughts constantly. New York is still a hell. The gangs have closed the streets below Canal again this week and more with their fighting and the collera was bad this year. If you ever live through this and get a living at something better I would go west with you as your wife.

I will try to find a position for Megan but it will be hard. The fighting down there has damaged the Quaker mission. It is not safe there for anybody now. I will get her out if I can.

Yours affectionately,

Katherine McGowan

He re-read the letter until he knew every word. It was nearly time for the mail to go out. He dashed off an answer.

Your letter was a godsend. Please, Kate, don't give up on me. I seem to be in a somewhat hopeless condition now, but I am trying to be as cautious as I can. My arm is better. I will survive and get out of this as soon as I legally can and become a new fellow. You will be amazed. Thank you for helping Megan. I am sure you understand the situation better now. Stay in the lifeboat with me.

Meagher lay on his cot, playing a slow air on his penny whistle. He played a wrong note and tried unsuccessfully to correct it. He wiped the instrument on his sleeve and tucked it into his pocket. "It's an infinite meander, Jack." It was late afternoon. The next morning they would march southward. "Falmouth, Virginia, Jack. You have any idea where that is?"

They had taken their cots outside the tent to get some rest in the warm sun. Jack answered in his quiet rasp. "No idea, general. Just follow the horse tail ahead. Seven days' march."

Meagher took a pull at his bottle. He had learned how to ride the bottle, get through the day on whiskey and still be functional when he had to. Most of the officers he knew did the same. A good shot upon rising, about three more during the morning, a little nap after lunch, if possible, then four or five or ten during the evening, the day's end unrememberable the next morning. This war was not a thing you would do sober. The ones who tried mostly went off howling, like the sonofabitch Sherman. Got so down after the Maryland battle that he went home crazy. The men had laughed when they heard. "That asshole has always been crazy. Must be someone finally told him about it," Meagher had heard a funny little fellow in the 69th say. He had scolded the man and had him assigned to extra guard duty.

"We're going to fight a battle there, Jack. March the herd to the shambles. It's a god damned . . ." His voice trailed off for lack of energy. The heavy fly-buzzing silence took over. What had he been about to say? He had no idea. It did not matter. A god damned infinite wander. A long tune with variations. "Christ, we lost too many men, Jack. Was that my fault?"

"It's all your fault." Jack rose from his hammock and sat on a stool near the tent flap. He spat into the dust. "You're no damn good, Tommy. Everybody knows that. God damn drunken mick."

The two laughed.

"And so you told her not to come?"

"She came to Washington. I saw her in Washington. When was it? I can't talk to her much anymore. She still believes . . . all that." After a minute he added, "Battle of Falmouth. Well, it has a sort of . . ." From the drill field, the sound of a sergeant's barking orders, a cheer of men. "It will sound good in the history books, won't it? Battle of Falmouth. Falmouth, Fontenoy. Meagher and Gosson were finally shot in the ass at the battle of Falmouth. They were sorely missed by several dozen fleas."

They marched twelve days to Falmouth and made camp for the winter. Timber was plentiful and the men built a log mess hall and a chapel with split-log benches. December came and the fighting season appeared to be over. Sean had another letter from Kate.

I must tell you now what I had not wanted to. I have had a child, a little boy. It is yours, no doubt of that and you won't either when you see him. Fortunately, I have a good matron here who has kept me out of sight of the family and I have been able to keep my situation until now. But it is found out and now I am discharged. I am with the boy now at a boarding house. It is not a very nice place. I have used all my money and now find it necessary to draw upon the money you left me. It would be a good thing if you could leave the army and we could go west as you suggested. I await your answer.

Yours always,

Katherine McGowan

Sitting on his bed roll before his dog tent just after sunrise, he could see his breath. He wrote a short letter saying he would try for a leave. It was winter now and the fighting was most likely done until spring. Yes, he wanted to marry her. Had she named the boy yet? If not, Aidan, he thought, for his grandfather who had died in the hunger. Spend the money I left you. Get a good place to stay.

Father Dillon of the 69th was a severe man, full of his own importance, always after the men to sign no-drinking pledges. He would no doubt come down on the apparent fornication with his full weight and be of no use in getting a leave. Father Corby of the 88th was better, a small fellow with a pipsqueak voice, but he took a shot of whiskey now and again when Dillon was not around. Sean made the hike to the 88th and asked him to help.

"I'm going to marry her, Father. I can't stand the thought that our child was born in sin, and I mean to rectify that as soon as I can," he said, taking the expected simpering tone.

"Ah, yes. Quite right you are." The little man with the shaved face framed by a leprechaun beard paced in the clearing before his teepee-like Sibley tent. "But what am I to tell the other men? That you have been rewarded with a leave in return for having committed a grievous sin, while they, because they have committed no sin, are required to remain in camp?"

"Father, I will undertake whatever extra duty that the commander may prescribe."

"What is wrong with your arm that you hold it that way?"

"Caught a ball on the peninsula. It never healed, really."

Corby had him remove his shirt and examined the two sides, the tidy healed scar at the front where the ball had gone in and the jagged cut at the back where it was still swollen and discolored.

"You have an infection here. Have you told the surgeon?"

"Yes. There is nothing he can do for it."

"And they expect you to fight when you can hardly move your arm. I think a leave to New York to get proper treatment would be in order. And if you should happen to get married while you are there I am sure no one would complain. Do you attend mass regularly, my son?"

"Yes, Father, I do." It was a lie, but, Sean reasoned, he probably won't get around to asking Dillon.

"And have you been to confession and done your religious penance?"

"Ah, no, Father. I was hoping to do that while I was here."

The two retired to the chapel and Sean did his Our Fathers and his Hail Marys. The chaplain wrote to General Meagher. Sean was thanking him, about to head back to his own regiment, when a lieutenant stuck his head into the log structure.

"Have you heard, Father. It's an attack."

"We're being attacked?"

"No, we're attacking. The whole division. We're to cross the river in the morning. Up that hill we will go," he said and disappeared.

"They're not sending us up into those guns we've seen them positioning for the last three weeks and more?" Sean asked.

"I'm sure they're not," Corby replied. "Your commanders have more sense than that."

Meagher arose on that cold morning and found himself unable to walk. There was a light cover of snow on the ground. A painful boil had formed on the back of his right knee. He had gone two days ago to the surgeon and had it lanced, but now it was badly infected. The knee was swollen to twice its size and he had to slit his trouser leg to accommodate it. He had thought to lead the men on horseback again, but the order for attack read to the brigadiers by General Sumner stated that all officers would be on foot. In the afternoon, after two divisions had already been cut to pieces on the hill, a captain rode up to Meagher in the main street of Fredericksburg where his men had been resting for several hours. Jack Gosson had found a keg of whiskey and things had gotten noisy. "Might be the only chance of your life to get drunk with never a morning after," someone said.

The captain saluted. "General, your brigade is required."

Meagher managed to limp at the head of the column onto the field between the hill and the river, but as he started forward, Gosson shouted for him to get to the rear. "We've got to get up there fast, Tom, or there won't be any of us left. You're slowing us up. Get back. Command from the rear like the other generals."

Meagher stood as his brigade passed and watched as they approached the hill. Finally, he hobbled back into Fredericksburg and got his horse. He rode back to the field below Marye's Heights and with the other brigadiers of Sumner's division, watched the hopeless attack.

At Fredericksburg, in the assault on the hill known as Marye's Heights, the Irish Brigade earned its paragraph in the history books. They left their corpses nearer the stone wall of the Confederate breastworks than did any of the two divisions and more—nearly fifteen thousand men in all—who went up the hill. Confederate artillery entrenched at the top of the hill fired into their ranks, while Confederates four deep behind the wall rotated firing and loading, keeping up a heavy fusillade.

As they came within the thirty-yard effective range of their muskets, the order came to lie down and fire. Sean tossed his haversack onto a small hillock before him and rested his rifle on it. As he curled behind it reloading, it jumped twice with bullets hitting it. He remained curled, head flat on the ground and fired blind, using his right arm only to raise the rifle, prop it on the sack, aim as well as he could, and fire. His left arm was useless anyway. He could not hold it still long enough to get a good aim.

Jack Gosson came running along behind the line shouting "Up, boys, bayonets!" Sean fixed his bayonet, rose with the others, and advanced at a slow run, left shoulder forward as if into a storm. He came within fifty feet of the wall, knelt, forced his left arm to prop on his knee. The pain was sharp, he trembled with it, but he would get one shot. He sighted the top of the wall and waited for the next head to pop up. A brown bearded face appeared and he fired, scoring a perfect hit. The man disappeared in a splash of blood. The next instant a jolt knocked him to the ground.

Not all that again, he thought. I hope I'm killed. He knew after a minute that he had not been hit. The ball had struck his rifle stock, which had splintered and cracked lengthwise. He had been holding it pressed to his cheek, and the impact had been a punch to the jaw. The men came back running and he joined them, dropping his broken rifle and pulling one from the hands of a fallen man, he lay once again behind his haversack. It was hopeless. There were hours left until dark. Gosson was dead. Another officer ordered a charge, and they were up again. From behind the stone wall came a strange sound, hard to identify at first. Finally, after the third futile attempt, Sean knew what it was. The Rebs were cheering their brigade. Again they fell back and another captain came running along the line, ordering yet another attack. A ball felled him just in front of Sean. His extended arm held a Colt revolver. Sean took it and put it in his sack. During a brief lull he crept forward and dragged another body into position atop the captain. Another charge was ordered, and yet another, until the corpses outnumbered the living, but Sean did not charge. Burnside was evidently an idiot and this was another hopeless mess. He decided to survive it if he could. He added two more bodies to his defenses and lay behind them, eyes shut, trying to think of Kate, of Megan, of New York, but he could think of nothing at all but the pain in his arm. All right, the pain then. Let the pain have its way. He saw to either side that other survivors had also dragged a few corpses together for a shield. Another captain came screaming for a sixth attack, but again Sean remained behind his haversack and the bodies, trying to not hear the sound of the balls hitting them, waiting for dark.

Dark came slowly, coldly. He heard Maguire cursing. A sergeant came along, crawling behind him and said, "Sleep in your position. Resume firing at dawn."

Marye's Heights was thick with wounded and dead, too many to carry. Sean and Maguire made three trips in the dark, carrying men who seemed to have a chance. Then they found a stable and climbed a board ladder to its loft.

"We're supposed to be up on the hill," Maguire said in the pitch-dark loft. His slow words reverberated.

There was only the bare floor to sleep on, and not much of that. The loft was crowded with silent men. Sean found a space near the wall, curled in his blanket, placed his sack under his head and tried to sleep, but lay awake in a shivering sweat, a roaring in his ears, staring into the swirling dark. The arm had gone numb, and the pain in his back made it hard to breathe.

"Lie on your weapons and resume firing at dawn." It was Talty's voice, deep and sharp, splitting the silence. "Just stay up there till every last one of yez is dead, ye stupid micks. Jaysus, we are fools."

No one spoke after Talty's remark, but there was no sound of the heavy breathing of sleep, no snoring. The others were awake, too.

In the morning the attack resumed. All day they lay in the loft, hearing the firing. They talked little. Most fell asleep as the day warmed. There was nothing to eat.

"Do you suppose we're deserters?" Maguire asked in the afternoon.

"I suppose," Sean answered.

The night singing was different in the cold. A low, collective groan, close-mouthed.

The following morning there was no attack. As Sean emerged from the barn he saw stretcher bearers and wagons going into the field under a flag of truce. He and Maguire joined the detail and worked all morning bringing bodies off the hill, many of whom appeared to have died more of cold than injuries. Two lieutenants kept a body count as the stretchers filed past them. Sean asked one of them what the count was, but the lieutenants were under orders not to give out the number. It was thousands, surely. Near the stone wall several hundred corpses had been stripped naked. Rebs sat on the wall and watched the removal. "Thanks for the boots, boys," one shouted.

In the late afternoon Sean and Maguire found Rory in a hospital tent near Fredericksburg. His neck was bandaged and his head wrapped under the chin and over the top. He was conscious; he raised a hand weakly in greeting, but his mouth was discolored and seemingly full, his cheeks puffed out as if he were trying to disgorge something too large. He could not speak. His breath rasped in his throat. He pointed to Maguire's canteen and to his mouth. Maguire poured a little water into Rory's mouth, but there was no passage, and the water ran down his cheek.

Sean went to the surgeon's tent and waited for the surgeon to come out. The usual detritus around the tent did not bear looking at—a pile of arms, legs, feet, hands—and he saw the bodies to the side and behind the surgery tent, too. The dead and the moribund, not worth the surgeon's time. From the side of the tent two men carried a corpse out and laid it with the others. Sean walked along the row of bodies and stopped halfway at the sight of a tall, slender corpse. Cyrus Green.

The surgeon came out finally carrying a black jack. He took a drink, set the black jack carefully on the ground and washed his bloody arms in a horse trough. Drying them on a dirty towel, he arched his back, stretching. A major, slender with a neatly trimmed vandyke. He bent over slowly and picked up his drink again, raised it in a greeting to Sean. "Salut," he said, and took several swallows.

"What's the condition of the last man in the corner, neck and face bandaged?" Sean asked.

"Damned if I know. Show me."

The surgeon followed Sean to the remote corner of the tent.

"Mm. Yes. In the cheek, out below the ear." He indicated his right cheek, left ear with cup and finger. "Mouth swollen shut. Tongue. Ball tore up the back of his tongue. Mouth full of sausage. Dead day after tomorrow, more than likely. Thirst. Can't get anything down. Tough fellow. Walked up here on his own power last night. I could cut his tongue out, but he won't have it. Rather be dead, I guess." The surgeon reflected a moment, finished off his whiskey and went back into the tent.

Back at Rory's cot, Sean took Maguire aside. "We've got to get some water down him. Give us your penny whistle once."

"I wouldn't do that," the man in the next cot said. "He been throwing up all night. Out his nose. Blood it's all over the ground there. Just stopped around sunrise. Damn near killed him, I'd say, from the sound of it.

"Shit." Sean stood a moment, then gave Rory's knee a light slap. "Well, old man, what shall we do? We need a language here. One fist is yes." Sean held up a clenched hand. Two is no. OK?"

Rory closed one hand.

"All right. You have to tell us what you want here. Do you want us to put this whistle down your gullet and try to drop a little water down there?"

Rory closed one hand, then reached again for the canteen, letting his arm fall for lack of strength.

Slowly Sean eased the wooden whistle over the swollen tongue. Farther in it was bloody meat; a mess. It seemed stuck and he had to force it a little. Rory gagged, heaved, his face darkening. After a minute he was quiet and lay back and Sean dropped the water slowly down the penny whistle. Rory's breath caught. Sean paused. "We'll take this slow. There. We'll wait a couple of minutes. See how that does."

Rory gasped and groaned through his nose, then heaved onto his side and vomited, spouting blood through his nose. The whistle shot out onto the ground.

"No," said Maguire, "that ain't it. You just start the bleeding again with that. We'll just drip it on his tongue and maybe some will sort of, you know, get down."

Maguire took the first shift, tipping the canteen, waiting, tipping again. Sean walked down the row of cots but saw no one he knew. "Anyone need anything?" he asked.

"Get me a ticket for Wisconsin," someone said. There was no laughter.

He walked out of the tent. For as many men as there were about, there was little conversation. Men walked along the road singly and in groups, without speaking.

He sat with his back against a tree for an hour and then went back to Rory's cot to take his turn.

"How's it working?" he asked.

"A lot of it is running out, but he says he's getting some. You're getting some, right?"

Rory made a fist.

"That's three canteens I've poured on him. I don't think that's more than two on the cot and the ground. So maybe I got one in him. Maybe one. What do you think?"

Rory made two fists and pointed downward with a finger.

"Less than one, but some."

They took turns all day and night, dripping the water. It seemed to be working. Rory worked his mouth a little and some of it was certainly getting down. After midnight a fever began, his forehead was damp, but it was not the full fever that so often killed the amputees, and by late the next afternoon he was all right. The swelling was down a little and he was taking quite a bit of water.

"That enough for a while?" Sean asked as the light was beginning to go toward dusk. Rory made one fist. He closed his eyes and slept for a while. Sean sat on a camp stool, knees on elbows, looking out the open flap of the hospital tent to the leafless scrub woods on the flood plain of the Rappahannock.

A medic came around with a lantern and stood looking at Rory. "How's he doing?"

"He'll be all right, I guess."

Rory's eyes opened. Sean said nothing for a long while.

After it was pitch dark outside, Sean spoke quietly. "Well, it's just a three-month 'listment. And we get three hundred dollars and fancy uniforms. And when we're done, we'll be professional soldiers, and we'll go conquer Canada. Good idea, eh?"

Rory closed a fist and trembling with the effort held it in Sean's face.

Maguire came to sit with Rory for the night. "We're camped just where we were," he said, as Sean was leaving. "You can sleep in my tent, far row from the road, third one down." Sean walked a half-mile to the camp and met Hugh Talty on the road. He had been waiting with a message for him from mail call. He struck a match while Sean read.

Regret to inform you that all leaves for enlisted men have been denied by order of the commanding general.

Lt. S. Campbell, Brigade Headquarters

"No leave for the peasant classes," Talty said. "They're afraid if they let go the tail of your coat you won't be back. And in my case they would be right about that." He offered Sean a drink from his canteen. White lightning it was. Talty was chattering with the elation of it. "Bought a gallon off a Reb picket for a half dollar. Even they feel sorry for us now. 'What the hail was ol' Sodburns thinkin of, sending yew up that heel?' he says. 'Han't he ever heard of flankin manoovers, or cuttin off supplah lons?' Shit," said Talty, "their privates are better generals than our generals." He leaned close. "Lots of the boys took off last night," he said quietly. "Went into the houses, took civilian clothes. That loft we slept in? Blue uniforms four feet deep in it. Marye's wee _céili_ was the end of it for most of 'em. Should have gone it myself. Too late now. They seen me. If you can get off down the road, ditch the blue coat, they'll just figure they buried you. This is the time if you're going. No one in the regiment seen you yet."

"Do me a favor?"

"Sure. I'll go fill your canteen. You got your sack."

"And Lynch needs help up there at the hospital tent. Will you relieve Maguire at reveille and tell them to keep quiet about me?"

"Glad to, old boy."

"And water for the canteen."

"Water?"

"Water."

"Right. Be right back. And give me that message. I'll write 'dead in action' on it and send it back to them. We've got to have one or two Irishmen alive still when this is done."

3

Westward Again

Beneath a sliver of moon he strode westward. The perimeter guards were no trouble; he had been nipping out of camp around them for a year. Twice after he had cleared the authorized army area he had to dodge into the trees to avoid pickets, but no attack was expected, so they were not especially alert. Like everyone else in this army, its guards were careless and incompetent and often drunk. The early stages of deserting were easy, but he had no idea what lay to the west, his only guide the double path of faintly glowing wheel tracks along the river. He did know that Quaker country lay to the north in Pennsylvania and northwest in Ohio. But he probably would not be able to get there. The west was huge; there had to be a place far enough. But northward no doubt there were guards on the roads. In Baltimore and Washington they rounded up deserters by the hundreds, branded them with a D on their foreheads, and took them back to their units. Straight west it would be—as straight as this river road would take him. He paused and traced the line of the two stars at the back of the chariot to the north star. As he faced down the road, the north star was behind his right shoulder, so the road was bending south now. _Swing low, sweet chariot_ , he sang under his breath. A runaway slave myself, the chariot will carry me home, too. Not its line to the north star but its left hand perpendicular. West.

At dawn he found a patch of scrub oak in tall dead grass, curled up with his blanket, arranged his left arm in the way he had learned that let him sleep, held his right hand against the spot on his chest where Megan's foot had warmed it, and slept soundly until late in the afternoon. The sky had grayed over and the day had not warmed. He lay awake, cold, and listened for sounds on the road, but there were none for an hour. Crows on the far shore kept up an agitated palaver. Then a distant rumble, a thin and insubstantial thunder, the clatter of slow and heavy wagons. Through the grass he saw the wagon train, suttlers bringing food to the troops. It took a quarter of an hour to pass. His own stomach was empty, but it would have to stay that way a while yet. Keeping his head low, he sipped from his canteen and lay back again.

To cheer himself, he thought about the good side of things. His boots were good. That was something. He had forty dollars specie in his pocket. He could buy what he needed if he could find a seller. At twenty miles a night, he could cover a hundred miles in five days. And, it seems I am a father. I've got to stay alive to see the heir. He tried to cheer himself, to bring some spark to his hopes, and at times he felt it. Other times he felt, lying in the grass, that if he lay there until he froze, it did not matter. He could do it deliberately and without emotion. At his center he was already as cold as anything in this barren brushland. He would go on, but only out of a pure calculation that he might not always be thus.

During the second night's walking he decided that since he was pretend-dead for the second time he would change his name again—back to John; he was tired of Sean. _Sean_ led to unnecessary trouble. And the other name would be the one he had told Kate: Glaspie. A good name; they would hardly know he was Irish.

He came to a small town with no signpost. He supposed there would be guards, probably hanging around the saloon, and that it would be a good idea to skirt the main street. The first turning led only to a stable. He tried the second and found a side road leading into an area under trees and so dark he could see nothing. It didn't feel like a road. He found his way back out and tried a third, which led among a haphazard collection of frame houses. This seemed to be something like the side street he wanted. He peered into yards where there was light from windows, wondering if there might be a pair of trousers and maybe a shirt hanging on a line. No luck. The wise wives of Virginia did not leave clothing out at night. Former soldiers looking for a change of costume had no doubt passed this way before.

A staggering drunk came from the direction of the main street, but he was short and fat, and if he got that drunk he probably also pissed his pants. The clothes line idea was better, although he might have to risk a daylight raid.

At the edge of town a road forked off a little more in the westerly direction, although he could not tell with certainty. The sky now was dull, glowing clouds in all directions. Hoping he had not got turned around in the maze of streets, he crossed a bridge and continued on a road that left the river and rose gradually, getting rougher and weedier. In the first daylight he saw that the road ahead ascended into the clouds. He had come out of the scrub woods into a land with a few poor farms, derelict houses with black windows, the one just ahead with only a faded blanket hanging in place of a door. A little smoke came from its chimney, ascending nearly straight in the still air. A few tiny snowflakes floated. It would be another cold day.

He settled down in the ditch across the road from the house behind a patch of dried mullein. He took the captain's revolver from his sack and checked the chambers. Fully loaded. He put it into his belt, adjusted his jacket to cover it, and leaned back on the bank to watch the doorway. If his death was coming soon it would be on the path of his own determining, not in Burnside's meat grinder. Marye's Heights.

A small boy wearing only a shirt came into the doorway and pissed into the dirt. Another, smaller boy came out and stood beside him and did the same.

"Hey, fellows," John Glaspie called out, standing.

The two stared back. The older one pulled the blanket aside and said something back into the house. A small woman in a faded rag of dress or shift, came out carrying a fowling gun. She shouted something, a gummy toothless jabber in an incomprehensible accent, raised the gun to her shoulder and sighted him. John dove sideways into the ditch and a blast of buckshot sent a powder of mullein flying where he had been standing. She shouted again. He understood not a word. It was a single barrel gun, was it not? John asked himself. He was pretty sure that it was. He took a breath to get the pain under control—he had landed on his bad arm—raised his head above the ditch and leveled the revolver at her. She was busily inserting another load into the gun.

"Hold it there. Drop the gun. I am serious," he heard himself say. She went right on loading and then began to raise the gun again. He pulled his head down. He heard the scuff of her feet approaching.

"Now, just a minute here!" he shouted. "I just want to buy some things from you. I'll pay you money, silver coin." He regretted his words. Now she will shoot me for the money. "I mean you no harm," he added. "I have a gun but I am not shooting." He raised the revolver for her to see, pointing it straight upward. "Look, I don't want to shoot you." She stopped and he pulled his hand down just in time to avoid the blast. Tucking the revolver into his belt, he jumped up and rushed her. She doubled over, protecting the gun as he tried to pull it away. She was wiry-strong and would not let go. He pulled the little ball of a woman this way and that with his good arm and finally settled for just holding the barrel of the gun.

"All right," he said. "Let me just ask you something. If you answer no, I'll just keep walking down the road. I'll give you a silver dollar for a set of clothes I can wear, trousers and shirt. And I'll give you another for a good meal. Anything you've got. Can you understand what I am saying?"

She puffed with exertion. Her tongue came out at the corner of her mouth. She was maybe thirty years old and toothless as a turtle. Her lips worked. Her mouth went down, readying for more struggle. She said nothing. I could pull her all the way to Illinois by this gun barrel, he thought.

"Well, I guess that's no, eh? I will require the rest of your cartridges, though." He reached for the pocket of her dress, bulging with cartridges. She dodged sideways, preventing him. "All right. This is not dignified, but I am not stupid enough to walk away without them or the gun." He put his leg behind hers and threw her to the ground, pulling as hard as he could at the gun as she fell. It came away.

"Look," he said, showing her the Colt. "I could shoot a hole in you the birds could fly through, but I am not going to." He looked up toward the house. A half dozen skinny children stood in and around the front door, watching. Red-rimmed eyes, runny noses smudged the dirty faces. "I do not want to hurt you. I don't even want your damn gun. I will leave it down there by that biggest tree. Don't come for it until I am out of sight or I'll go back for it and you'll be out a gun. I would think you could use a couple of dollars, family like that, no man around. All I want is clothes and food."

"Your gun got no bullet. You jus' one sorry runnin' yankee. Your gun hain't loaded or you woulda used it 'fore now."

He drew the pistol and fired into the dirt of the road. A small clod of dirt and pebbles jumped. He pointed it at her head. "And there's five left where that came from." He put it in his belt. "You thought I was fooling. Now, you want to sell me something?"

"Hain't got no clo for you. My man off to war. Hid clo half you side. Hain't no yankee giant."

"Is there a store?"

"Tore in Taunt. Four mile." She sat on the bare dirt of her yard, regarding him curiously now.

"Well, you give me a meal. I'll give you a dollar." He felt in his pocket. "Here, see that? That's for a plate of food. Then your biggest boy there goes with me to Taunt and he can go in and get me some clothes and I'll pay for the clothes and give him another dollar and a federal uniform into the bargain. See? Red piping. Zouave. You should be friends with me. I'm done fighting for the Yankees. Our generals don't care if we're alive or dead, so I figure they don't care if we're here or there. So I'm heading west. Don't want to shoot anybody any more."

After another minute of looking at him, she rose and gestured with a quick move of her head for him to follow into the house.

Meagher's leave was granted. One month to return to New York for medical treatment to his knee. His request to bring the entire brigade for purposes of recruiting it up was denied without explanation. No doubt they feared that other brigades would want the same, and, considering the number of desertions after Fredericksburg, there was a good chance that they would lose men rather than gain them.

His orderly, Lieutenant Daly—tall and slender in a spotless uniform, a model soldier—was helping him to his feet. "You're riding the chestnut mare a little hard this morning, general. If you're going home you'll have to ease up on her." He held the empty bottle before Meagher's eyes. "Eleven o'clock and this was full when you rose, sir."

"They shot Jack Gosson," he said.

"Now don't be starting again. They shot damn near all of us, but it does no good now. You're a general, so just stand up and act like one. Here, take your crutches."

"I'm a general, aren't I?" Meagher put his crutches in place and hopped a step to look in the tiny mirror hanging on the tent wall.

"That you are." Daly brushed the dirt from Meagher's uniform. "And if you have to sleep, use your cot. This clay ground makes a mess of your uniform."

"That's right. Use the cot."

He slept for a while and recovered well enough to ride in the wagon fifteen miles to the rail head for his train to Baltimore. He arrived there the following evening. Going to another land of enemies, he knew that. Daly had told him before he left that Raymond of the _Times_ had written a scathing account of his shirking the battle of Fredericksburg. "His men were slaughtered while his nibs watched from a safe distance." It was a full day and night in Baltimore before the New York train, so he had the station porter wheel his trunk while he crutched it to a cab and asked the driver to take him to a good hotel. The cab stopped before a small red brick building in a narrow street.

"Is this a good hotel?"

"Shape you're in, they won't take you at the Maryland. You might get in here."

It was none too clean inside, he could see that. Still, the desk clerk, a fussy person with a little cap and a graying mustache, was of two minds about admitting him. He had thought he was all right, but he knew he had asked was there a room twice. The general's uniform did the job, finally. Just want to get some rest, need a little rest, he said. There is a chamber pot, the man said, don't forget to use it. A black man carried his bag up the stairs and he gave the man a dime. "Thank you sah, thank you, thank you," the man said, bowing his way out. Meagher took one more pull and lay on the bed.

In the dark he came out in the hall. The man on the stairs below the railing was Henry Raymond, he could see Raymond's face clearly, looking straight up at him, pointing, laughing silently. Meagher went back to his room for his revolver. Outrage. Must be avenged. He aimed carefully, firing straight down on the top of his head. The place was full of people running. Someone grabbed him from behind.

"Scoundrel Raymond. Got him," he announced proudly.

The black man took him down to the tiny lobby and sat him on its one ladderback chair against the entry wall. The clerk went out the door and came back with a policeman.

"He's fired a shot into my stairs. No one there, he just fired into my stairs. And he's pissed his pants. The bed is soaked. I knew that was going to happen. Get him out of here. I want him arrested until he pays."

"Where's Raymond?" Meagher asked.

"He's raving. I want eight bucks for a new mattress and four to put a new tread in my stairs."

Meagher dug in his pocket and produced a handful of specie. The man took a twenty dollar piece, bit it, and put it in his pocket. "Get him to the jail," he said, mollified a little. "If he's going to piss his pants he better do it on a board than on my mattress. Isn't that a shame?" he said. "A gentleman. Star on his shoulder."

Meagher spent the night in the Baltimore jail. In the morning the policeman who had arrested him was off duty. No one could tell him which hotel he had been taken from. He arrived in New York without his trunk, hopped on his crutches to a cab and told the driver Sweeny's Hotel.

_John Glaspie_ , he said to himself as he walked. He had stumbled in ground fog, aglow in the moonlight like phosphor, opaque and dazzling, but now he had climbed above it and could see the road again. The fog covered everything behind him, as bright to his eyes as any daylight cloud. He took it as an emblem of his journey, fog behind, clear road ahead. John Glaspie, John Glaspie. Johnny again. No, John. Just John.

The clothes he bought at the general store in Staunton were not much help. The shirt was right enough, a stout woolen garment of no particular color. Over his army BVDs it was warm. But the closest fit of breeks they had were four inches short on him. The boots were of such poor quality, and pinched his toes so badly, that, after walking about in them, he decided to keep the government issue. Wrapped in the blanket, warm for the first time in days, with a plate of beans inside him—the meal that he paid a dollar for—he had slept well. Now he was hungry again, but he had strength. He strode the uphill road easily.

"A sore knee! A sore knee was it?" Cavanagh, leaning against the bar at Sweeny's, was in his usual state. "You got your whole brigade," he waved his arm wildly, "murdered—"

"That's enough," someone shouted, and Cavanagh was given the bum's rush out the door, shouting as he went. "And you couldn't be there for a pain in your leg."

The hilarity at Sweeny's was greater than ever; his celebrity, except in Cavanagh's eyes, as great as ever. And he once a Meagher idolater. The fact that he had shown up with his uniform in such a state was the source of additional hilarity. Getting falling-down, piss-pants drunk did not damage a man's reputation in this place.

In the small hours of the morning a fire company clattered by, its bell clanging. Afterward he lay awake in the sweats from the liquor, whispering to himself. "Safe distance? Safe distance. New York is a safe distance, Cavanagh. Balls were flying where I was."

"It's the pain of having lost so many men that you recruited and trained. You numb the pain with drink," Elizabeth said softly.

He would say nothing to her. There was nothing to say.

"Aren't you speaking to me?"

He took a deep breath. "That's one explanation."

"Is it not the right one?"

"For you it will do. It is right for you."

"And for you?"

"For me . . ." A double Jameson's.

"I don't understand. Help me now. I am trying to understand."

"Don't do that. Worst thing you could do. All the money your father spent on the ladies' seminary down the hole."

"You accuse me of naïveté, yet you won't tell me." She was near tears now. "That is not like you. You are not yourself."

"I have lost all my mirth, Lady Elizabeth. There is nothing to tell. I am nobody. I understand less than you do. I am sorry."

"There must be a terrible bitterness in that much death, but you must not let it embitter you."

After a minute he heard her crying. He put his hand on her shoulder and held it there until she was asleep.

John had thought to make the top before sunup, but the road switched back and forth, a mile of walking for every thousand feet up, and the horizon was an angry red stream now, the fog of the plain below a dark red vapor, an ocean of all the blood of that ugly little Fredericksburg and its broken-name hill with that stone wall at the top—Marye's Heights. He kept up the fastest pace he could, fleeing it. He thought he was maybe halfway up, could not see the top for the trees. His legs were heavy as he turned and looked back, the first long stopping he had permitted himself.

He had not done what he had hoped, but—something. Something. He took a drink from his canteen. No sign of patrolling federals, but the Home Guard of the Confederates would also be trouble, and early in the night he had heard what he judged to be them, a half dozen or so on the road below. They were mounted and so no threat, easy to hear coming. They wouldn't bother with the mountains anyway. He had seen them in northern Virginia, carousing from inn to inn, enjoying their power over a countryside that had no young men who might call them to account.

An uprooted pine tree lay just off the road, its roots taller than he was. He hoisted himself up, hooked an arm around a bottom branch and dozed until it was broad day. Too hungry to sleep any more, he was about to jump down and continue but there was a person with a humpback regarding him from the road, a person wearing black trousers and heavy boots, but also a woman's bandana.

"Hello," John said.

The person—male or female, he could not tell which—smiled but said nothing. He lowered himself, picked up the haversack and approached. "Good morning. You want to sell me something to eat? I'll pay." Woman, he guessed. No whiskers, small hands, a glint in the smile, which now became a chuckle.

"Lots of 'em coming out of bushes all over here, lahk to turkeys in a brush fire. Turkeys in a fire." An old woman's voice. "Got nothin' ter sell. You want ter see where your friends is, I can show you them."

"My friends?"

"Bluebellies, that's you, ain't it? Whole mess of 'em, still in they blue coats mostly, up ter Parson Ridge, up yon. Hidin'. Nother bunch of 'em over t'other side, Bamber. Skeered ter death. Jump when a skeerel go by. Some of 'em hurt, too, like you. They shot your arm."

"No, I don't want to see them. You boil me two potatoes, I'll pay you a dollar."

She made a little sound, shook her head no. "You got a gun?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You shoot a rabbit, I roast it for you. For us. We share. Taters too. You come up with your rabbit. Up yon." She indicated the next bend in the road.

Rabbits abounded. He had seen several during his rest. She went back up the road, and he waited for a good-sized one to present itself. The Colt made a mess of it, blew it nearly in half. He took it to the hut of scrap lumber where she apparently lived alone and watched as she skinned and gutted it, cut it into pieces, and, in an iron pot over a low outdoor fire, cooked a stew with turnips and carrots and herbs.

She was talkative. While the stew simmered, she kept up a narrative. The bump bump coming on the air, deep, she felt it as much as heard it, showing him with her hands on her stomach. It had been some days ago now and she knew there was a fight. All day it was. Never stopped. After a while she didn't know she was hearing it, but at night when it finally went quiet she thought of it again and wondered at it. She had never been scared living here. Nothing to be scared of. But that night, lying in the silence, she had been a little scared. Next day she could smell the smoke of it. She thought it was someone down below burning rubbish, but the minister of the Baptist church in these parts came by and he said no, it was the war. And then the next night the bluebellies started to come along the road. Maybe a few hundred. She had lived here all her life, had heard of Fredericksburg but never been there. She never went anywhere. "Got all I need here." She had grown up down yon on a tiny farm. She had her hump from birth, had to fend for herself as a girl when her father went off and her mother died of the second child. She came up the mountain and made this. The parish brought food for a time, but she got able to take care of herself as a year or two went by and was glad to tell them she no longer needed help. He asked her had she heard of President Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. She gave a quick shake of her head no and rose to pick up the bowls. She was clearly not interested in such things and something he had asked had offended her.

They ate the stew with cornbread and potatoes, and afterwards he slept in a stack of rotted hay near her shack. He woke with goose bumps. He had dreamt of the hill. It had been the same after the Maryland battle, several nights without dreams and then all of it, the sweats. He lay still in the afternoon sunshine until it passed. It would come for several nights now, the sweats. There were insects crawling on him. The hay had been full of small black bugs. He took off his shirt and BVD top to shake them out.

"You was shot long time past," she said.

He had not seen her watching. "Yes. Six months now and more. Any bugs back there?"

She brushed his back with a dry, calloused hand and held his shoulder to have a close look. "Poultice no good now. That could take you off yet. Too deep inside for a poultice. Let me try it anyways." She had him sit while she heated a pot of water. She put compresses, one after another, scalding hot, on the wound and then some yellow paste from a crusted pot. She wrapped the wound in flannel which she tied in place with strips of flour sack. "Keep that on. Give it a chance to rest. Give it all the heat you can. Ever chance you get, get it as hot as you can stand it."

Just over the top, as he started down toward the violet remains of sunset, he saw the fires of the deserters' camp. Can't go home, can't go back. Just sit there until you're caught. Stupid. He took a footpath so steep in places that he skidded as much as walked, coming out on the switchback road half a dozen times, and by morning was nearly to the bottom. A hand-lettered sign indicated the new state of West Virginia, below which someone had scrawled "NIGERLAND." Below him lay a small town with dirt streets, a freshly painted white church spire, a main street with a hotel, and, at its far end, what looked like a railroad station.

After six days on the train, some of it on a siding in the middle of nowhere, John left his seat near the coal stove in a car of the Chicago, St. Paul, Fond du Lac Railroad to emerge into the coldest air he had ever breathed. Puffs of steam arose from every building and emerged from every mouth, human and horse. Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He had feared encounters with guards in the Chicago terminal and had taken the first westbound train he could get. It had been as much north as west, but it was perfect: placid, unsuspicious people and a thousand miles from the war. He checked into the hotel and immediately wrote to Kate:

I hope to tell you soon the whole story of my adventures and how I landed here. Why don't you and Aidan come out here on the train? Get a ticket for Chicago and then one for here. Be sure to get the "day express." It gets here in ten hours from Chicago. The local takes eighteen hours. Don't worry about spending the money. The western territories are all getting telegraph now, and I am sure to find good work. This hotel is just across the street from the railroad station. I'll watch for your arrival every day. We will be married here and then move on to wherever I can get work. Get some good warm clothes for the two of you. If you thought New York was cold, you have a surprise coming. It is cold enough to kill you here, and quickly. I am not exaggerating.

At the general store he found himself a reasonably well-fitting pair of trousers, a bulky sheepskin coat, a fur hat with ear flaps and a pair of sturdy mittens. It was a small town and he was soon known by everyone he saw as Johnny the Irishman. He put hot packs on his wound every day and in a week his arm was better, the swelling down, the pain of moving it nearly gone.

The Chicago express trains arrived at nine o'clock in the morning and eight-thirty in the evening, the local anywhere from noon till five. So, after a week, when it became possible that she would arrive, he spent much of the day at the station. "Prayer du Chien" was the way the local people pronounced the name of the town, and _chien_ meant dog—prairie of the dogs it meant, but prayer of a dog struck him as better. There was a tan dog with a pink nose that hung about the station in search of discarded remnants of travelers' lunches. "He'll tell you when the train is coming," the stationmaster said. "Watch his ears. Up they go with the train ten minutes out. Hears it way before you and I can." His own beseeching as each train approached struck him as similar, his dog's prayer, ears up, sniffing the air: be on this one.

It was a full week of going to the station before she arrived in the pitch dark late afternoon of a day with the temperature at twenty-five below zero. She carried the boy wrapped in blankets. He took the little bundle from her, and tried to peer in to see him, but it was too dark. "There's a step here now. Hold my arm," she said to someone behind her. He held her arm to help her down and looked over her shoulder into the dim light of the car but could not make out the person she was talking to. "Another step," she said. Someone she had met on the train? "It is frightful cold, isn't it?" A woman's voice. Familiar. Megan. It was Megan. She had brought Megan.

Aidan was on the verge of walking. He stood holding onto furniture in the hotel room, tried a few steps, and fell. Kate narrated to Megan. "He's holding on the dresser knob now. Off he goes. Whoops. Down. Come on, baby. Up you go. Look how he looks like you. The eyes. Especially when he gets that serious, determined look." There was a resemblance, no doubt of it. She needn't have been so insistent. He believed her.

He saw her studying him as she spoke. "So, I look different?" he said.

"You do," Kate answered. "He's skinny and brown. He looks like an old fence post," she said to Megan.

At night in bed, Megan in her next door room, and the baby asleep, he turned to her. "Come on. It's still me, you know."

"Is it? You look tough. I'm a little scared of you."

He rubbed her back. "Me."

They made love as quietly as they could in the sagging, squeaking bed.

"You're an amazing thing entirely," he said after a long silence.

"An amazing thing, am I?"

"Entirely so."

"Well," she said in a long exhalation. "Mrs. Parrin was at wit's end what to do with her. The fighting is so bad there they have to leave the place for a time. I told her where I was going and Megan asked if there was any way. And the worst of it is, she's in love with you. It will be a test of your gentlemanly qualities." After a silence, she said, "Say something."

"Ah, right. My qualities are in good order, I think."

"Yes, and so is this." She grabbed him between the legs. "But it's mine alone. Agreed?"

"Yes. Yes, it is. Yours alone."

In the morning they discussed the next move. Idaho Territory was about to be divided in two and a new capital established. A new road and new telegraph lines were under construction. He had inquired at the telegraph office at the station about a job there, or anywhere. So far he had no answer. There was no railroad to Montana, but they could go by river. Down the Mississippi to St. Louis, then up the Missouri all the way to western Montana, Fort Benton. River steamers would start again as soon as the ice went, maybe March, probably April. They stayed on at the hotel and John went to the telegraph office and spoke to the lone operator each day. No reply. One day, after a week or so, the man looked at him over his spectacles "How's your hand?" he asked.

"It is fine. I know international."

"So do I. The old stuff is gone now, except for a few railroad lines in the east."

"I was taught by Morse himself. For the Atlantic cable."

"You ever send across the Atlantic?"

"Once. On the first cable before it broke."

"Well, that _is_ an exclusive club. Here's a message for St. Paul. Let's hear it on the old key."

John came into the office and sat in the chair, practiced a minute, tapping his thigh, then sent the message.

TO BENSONS WHLSLE GROC SIXTEEN BOXES YELLOW FEET DUCKS AVAILABLE 20 CENTS THE PAIR ALL CLEANED AND READY TO COOK BANK CHEQUES ACCEPTED ORDERS SHIPPED BY STAGE COACH TO ARRIVE IN ST PAUL IN TWO DAYS PLEASE POST PDC

"Very nice. Steady. Clean." The operator considered. "Well, they're in need of an operator in St. Paul. Let me see what they think."

He took the chair and tapped out

LAST MESSAGE SENT BY APPLICANT FOR YOUR AVAILABLE OPERATOR JOB. DO YOU WANT HIM?

The operator pulled out an old copy of the St. Paul Daily Press and pointed to a paragraph about the closing of a bawdy house. John sent it. The key went silent and they waited several minutes.

"Must be they're thinking you over. Are you discharged from the army, or do they want you back again?"

"No, I'm discharged. My left arm is damaged. Can't aim a rifle. Never will be able to use the left arm much again. So—"

The key began again.

SEND HIM UP. It finished with the code for G and H.

"What's the GH?"

"Telegrapher's chat code. It means 'good hand.'"

"Don't they want to know anything else about me?"

"Nope. Only two requirements. Good hand and show up on time, sober. They'll find out the other when you get there. If you show up drunk they'll throw you down the stairs. Only trouble you're going to have is getting up there. You'll have to take the coach and that's a week on snowy roads. Summer you'd be there in a day on the river if they don't get hung up on a sand bar. They don't build a railroad because no one would take it in summer."

The coach was cold and jounced as if it would break to pieces on the icy ruts of the road. Bundled in all the clothes they could put on, they could not keep warm. After two hours, toes went numb. Icicles dangled from the scarves that covered their faces. On the slippery inclines where the horses could not pull the full weight, they had to get out and walk. This warmed them a little, but the footing was treacherous. They followed the example of the only other passenger, a Lutheran minister from St. Anthony, who climbed up the snowy edge of the road where it was less slippery. The two horses wore special spiked shoes that dug into the ice, but still they stopped on the worst hills and had to be whipped. John carried Aidan on the hills, but he cried with the cold. In the coach Kate bundled him on her lap with a horse blanket and he slept. At night they stayed at the worst inns imaginable, ate unidentifiable re-heated meat for which they paid exorbitant prices, and slept with their coats on in cold and dirty beds.

In St. Paul, after three nights in the shabby Merchant's Hotel, they found a two-room house, a shanty with an attic bedroom, near the Mississippi, with bare stud walls and a board floor, rent four dollars a month. From a second-hand furniture store they got two beds, three wooden chairs, and a sturdy painted wood table. A potbelly coal stove kept the middle of the room warm, the periphery less so. The back yard well, not having been used for a month, was frozen. John piled burning coals around the pipe, but it was no use. They brought in tubs of the cleanest snow they could find and melted it for water, boiling the water they meant to drink. "People really do live here," Kate said when they had finished hauling in their tubs for the day. "The thing I am wondering is why."

The job was wonderful. An eight-wire cable all the way to Chicago had been completed the previous summer, and the Western Union office in a brick building near the steamer levee had eight keys, all of them manned during the day, two at night, one on Sundays. His boss was Joe Higgins, who had also come out of Ireland in the hunger. John's twelve-hour shift began at six in the evening and he went home in the crackling frost of the early morning on his dapple gray, for all the world like a squire riding out to his country house. Ice crystals sparked in the air and on the bare branches of the trees. This world at last was clean and cold and crisp; it had a logic and a feel that he liked. Kate and Megan made the little house as pleasant as they could with curtains and braided rugs. But the floors remained cold. It took two pairs of woolen socks and a certain amount of stamping of the feet to keep any feeling in the toes. He still had nearly five hundred dollars of savings, and he made twenty-four dollars a week, a good wage. So, he could afford a better house. In the afternoons after he awoke he had two or three hours of free time. He looked about for a better house, one he could buy, but most of them were as ramshackle as the one he was in. St. Paul had a few city streets at its center, but only a few of them were cobbled, the rest were rutted dirt. There were a few brick buildings, but beyond that, along the river, was an encampment, a helter-skelter of shacks and hovels that did not even square up with each other and face the wagon paths, less organized and no more permanent-seeming than a winter camp in the army. Some of the old-timers still called the town by its former name, "Pig's Eye."

In March the snow melted and the roads turned to mud nearly as bad as that of Arlington Heights. Boards were laid along the road to the high ground where horses and carts and carriages of various descriptions were kept. It was a treacherous walk; careless walkers were pitched into the mire. Megan and Aidan were trapped in the house. Everyone was irritable. Then, one night while John was at work, the gentle snowfall that had gone on all day turned to a wind-whipped blinding storm. John struggled through hip-deep snow that had drifted behind the office to the stable a hundred feet away to feed and water his horse, the strong winds filling in his footprints as he went. Going back he feared for a time that he was lost, but found a corner of the building next door and orienting himself by that, made his way to the drifted doorway of the office. The storm left several feet of snow. Great drifts blocked the roads. There was no way to go home. He and the other night operator managed to get bread and cheese from the grocer who lived over his shop across the street. Together they manned the office day and night, but no one came to pick up messages. The green slips piled up in boxes along the wall. At home he knew they had a sack of potatoes and one of oatmeal. The three of them could survive on that. Their ancestors had for generations.

After four nights away, he rode home through trenches cut in the snow and then half drifted in again. The hillside where his house stood had been swept almost clear by the wind. Inside the house something had changed. Kate and Megan said hello in subdued voices. Aidan ran to him and hugged his legs. He picked the boy up. "Well, sir, I see you've defended the house while I was gone."

"House," the boy repeated, and carried on in baby chatter, pointing with a moist finger just removed from his mouth.

"That's right," John said. "Exactly right. Couldn't have said it better myself."

"We've had visitors," Kate said.

"Oh," Megan said, near tears.

"The good ladies of the church object to our living arrangements. They were here this morning, four of them. The priest here has had a letter from our friend on the coach, the Lutheran minister from St. Anthony. He has grave doubts. He asked the ladies to pay a friendly visit."

"Well, to hell with them. What can they do?"

Megan answered in a small, bewildered voice. "There is a city law against it, they said. Cohabitation. They can have us all in prison."

John sat in the creaking rocker near the window with Aidan on his lap. Megan and Kate were getting supper. The lid of a boiling pot rattled. Megan worked at peeling potatoes.

"Well. Ain't that a fine kettle of fish?"

Kate had turned to face him, arms folded.

"What do you suggest?" he asked Aidan, who pointed a finger.

John took his hand and pointed it in a different direction.

"He's pointing across the river. I think he's got an idea there. We'll have to go a little farther west, I guess."

With Elizabeth's encouragement Meagher managed to get himself reasonably dried out, spending his days at home following the family doctor's prescribed treatment of allowing leeches to draw the infection from his knee. He telegraphed another request to the War Department that he be permitted to bring the remnant of his brigade to New York to help recruit it back to strength, but the request was ignored. He tried a halfhearted recruiting speech, with no results. Newspaper reports and letters home about the suicidal December battle and the incompetence of Ambrose Burnside had taken their toll. And Michael Corcoran, released in a prisoner exchange, had, with difficulty, recruited up an Irish Legion. The supply of young Irishmen willing to go off to this war was apparently at an end. Meagher returned to camp late—ten days beyond his authorized furlough—off the wagon again, his knee still painfully swollen, and with no new recruits.

On St. Patrick's Day, to relieve the boredom of camp, Meagher organized a second annual festival, featuring steeple chases and other games, a feast of roast oxen, and seven barrels of whiskey punch. It was well attended by other generals, including the new general of the army, Joe Hooker, a good friend who got sociably drunk and had to be helped back to his headquarters at day's end. The summer fighting began at Chancellorsville in May, and Meagher's remnant of a brigade lost another two dozen men. Numbering less than three hundred now, it was a brigade in name only. Other units, too, had been badly reduced in the fighting and Hooker consolidated and reorganized many. Meagher saw that Hooker was reluctant to refigure the Irish Brigade into the regiment that it now was, as it would mean demoting Meagher to colonel. In May, to resolve this awkward situation, Meagher resigned his commission and returned to private life in New York. The _Irish News_ , in the tradition of hundreds of newspapers published in the city, had ceased to exist. Jimmy Roche, his former editor, had sold the press and left a small check at the house. Meagher needed a job. Something out west would be just the thing. Another new beginning. His friends, including Dan Sickles, now a corps commander with two stars on his shoulder, lobbied the president.

He read in the New York papers of the great three-day battle in Pennsylvania, the biggest to date. For a change, the Union had won. Lee had sent Pickett up the hill into the entrenched Union army; Fredericksburg in reverse. Surprising. He had thought Lee too intelligent for such a move. Dan Sickles, as usual, was the center of a controversy. On the second day of the battle he had disobeyed orders and moved his corps forward into a peach orchard, ground he considered easier to defend, but in so doing had left his flank exposed. His men had withstood a ferocious attack by Longstreet's corps and were finally forced to retreat to the position he had been assigned in the first place. The move had resulted in heavy casualties; on the other hand, they had held and protected the Union flank until the fighting ceased in darkness. General Meade, who had replaced Hooker a few days before (army politics, Joe had resigned his command but remained in the army) wanted him court-martialed. Sickles maintained that his move had won the battle. At the end of the day, Longstreet did, in fact, withdraw. Sickles had taken a ball in his thigh and left the field on a stretcher, his thigh bone badly shattered, smoking a cigar.

The week after the Pennsylvania battle Meagher found himself confined to the house as the worst riots in city history raged through the streets. Congress had passed a conscription law in March, and Lincoln had ordered a draft of 300,000 men, but it was not until late spring that the trouble began. It was then that provost marshals set up offices in New York and began canvassing the city, recording names of eligible men. One provision of the law in particular enraged them: Any man who paid three hundred dollars was exempted. There would be no draftees in the Lafayette. In July, just after the Pennsylvania fight, amid noisy street protests, lottery wheels were set up in the provost offices. Slips of paper inserted into slots on the wheel bore the names of the eligible. The wheel was spun again and again, names shouted to the crowd, until the quota was filled.

When the name of the leader of Fire Company Thirty-Three of the Gashouse district was drawn in the Broadway office, the Gashouse Boys stormed the office and destroyed the wheel. This touched off a riot which destroyed a hundred buildings and left more than two thousand dead. Stores were looted, telegraph lines cut. Railroad track was torn up in an effort to prevent army reinforcements. Dozens of black men, women, and children were murdered in the streets and their bodies hung from lamp posts. At Thirtieth Street and Seventh Avenue a black church was burned. On Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street a black orphanage was burned, and one small girl, who had been left behind in the hurried evacuation, was murdered. Gunboats off the Battery stopped an attempt by the rioters to occupy Governor's Island. Pitched battles were fought in several parts of the city. On First Avenue and Eighteenth Street a regiment of two hundred state militia was annihilated when sharpshooters on rooftops started them running and rioters ran out of the buildings on either side with knives and pistols. Five battle-weary regiments from Pennsylvania, assisted by several hurriedly formed companies of invalids, set up artillery batteries in the streets and fired canister shot into the midst of the rioters. Warships cruised into position off the Battery and fired salvos into Wall Street and other streets of lower Manhattan. At week's end Mayor Opdyke announced that peace had been restored. It was safe for the residents of New York to go out of their houses.

As the summer wore on, regiments of sullen conscripts departed for the front. It was clear from his non-stop campaigning that the cashiered General McClellan would challenge Lincoln for the presidency. Knowing that Lincoln would be eager to mend fences with the New York Irish, Meagher encouraged his friends, including Opdyke and Sickles, to get him back into the army. He visited Mike Corcoran's Irish Legion and stayed for a week. The visit proved a good strategy; while he was in camp he received a telegraphic dispatch asking him to report to Washington. On his last night, after a drunken party, Corcoran rode with him to the railroad station. When Meagher arrived in Washington he learned that Corcoran had been killed in a fall from his horse on the way back to camp.

The next morning Meagher reported to General Halleck at the War Department, where he was restored to active duty at his former rank of brigadier. Halleck took no pains to conceal his dislike of political generals. "Dan Sickles is a friend of yours, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"Shot his wife's lover?"

"I believe he did. Yes, sir."

"And now charging off like a goddamned cowboy at Gettysburg. Drunk, I suppose. And I've just heard of Corcoran. We lose as many to the bottle as to the battle in this army. Here you are."

"Thank you, sir." Meagher took his order of reinstatement and saluted.

Lacking orders on where to report, he stayed at home on Fifth Avenue most of the summer on full brigadier's salary, sending an occasional telegram to the War Department but receiving no replies. He decided to repeat his stratagem of the previous winter to remind the field commanders of his existence. In November he visited the remnant of the Irish Brigade on the Rapidan. It was now two regiments of a consolidated brigade. General Hancock accompanied him and afterward put in a word to the new commander, Ulysses Grant, who got him an assignment under Sherman in Nashville. Meagher was given command of two convalescent brigades who had been assigned the soft duty of guarding railroad tracks around Chattanooga.

A plump young major with bloodshot eyes and a great mustache met him at the railroad station. He had brought Meagher a horse, The major made an effort to mount, but his foot slipped from the stirrup and he landed flat on the ground. He tried again and struggled to his seat.

"This way." They set off down a rutted road. "The division of the damn near dead, is what we affectionately call ourselves. The corps of the incompletely killed. Not a damn one of 'em wouldn't run off home given half a chance. They keep us in Tennessee because it's as far as they can get us from home. Not so many get away."

"I take it there is a morale problem."

The major laughed. "Shit. Everybody here been shot once. Now they're supposed to hobble out and get shot again. And the food is so bad that everybody's teeth is falling out."

At the camp on the bank of the river, Meagher walked through the hospital tents that housed about half of his command. The stench was fierce. The men needed bathing. He stopped at the bed of an emaciated man with a long black beard.

"What's your injury, soldier?"

"Ball in the hip."

"Can you stand up?"

"Kind of. Not very good, though. I do get up oncet a day and hobble long as I can. We're supposed to be ready for action in sixty days."

"Think you'll make it?"

The man expelled a short breath of contempt and turned his head away. Meagher talked to several more. Injured at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, most of them. It was the usual assortment of men on crutches, men with head bandages, men sick with infected wounds, pale, perspiring, the ordinary agony of an army hospital. A field of dog tents housed the ambulatory. A captain came to greet him—shabby looking fellow, as ragged as the men. Meagher told him to organize a bathing detail for the next day and to get the men's clothes washed with lye soap. And to get some poisoned grain for the rats. He and the captain walked the rows of tents. It was late afternoon and some of those who would have guard duty that night were just waking, coming out into the weak sun, stretching. Meagher spied a man in a 69th NYSM cap. The man snapped a salute as Meagher approached. His face and one side of his neck were badly scarred.

Meagher returned the salute. "What's your name, soldier?"

"Lynch" the man answered in a hoarse whisper. "Rory Lynch." He had a shaggy red beard and a quick familiar smile.

"Company K?"

"Yes sir. First Bull Run."

"You're the fellow organized the raid on Jimmy O'Dea's house to get your friend back."

"That's me."

Meagher shook his hand. "Got one in the neck, did you?"

Rory pointed his right forefinger to his right cheek and his left to the side of his neck.

"Jesus. You ready to go back at 'em? Get even?"

"Hell, no. I'm ready to go home," Rory whispered.

"Where is that?"

"New York. About three-fourths of us are from New York."

Meagher walked the rows of tents, chatting a bit here and there.

A voice from inside a tent rasped, "They tell us we have only two months to recover and then we'll be sent again to battle. Is that right?"

He was about to say something about no man being sent before he was ready, but the words did not come. "I will look into that," he said.

"They already got their shot at me. I don't aim to give 'em another," said the voice, hoarse with rage.

Meagher walked back to his tent. For these, the romance of war had dried to dust. They had gone clear-eyed and wanted out. Burnside's incompetence at Fredericksburg had done it. You can't shove men into a meat grinder and still expect them to believe the gallant soldier-boy line. Abe would need new draftees with a new supply of military romance to finish this.

He had heard Sherman on the subject of morale back in the Arlington Heights days. "All they got to do is run toward the enemy and shoot. All they need for that is legs and a finger. They don't run and shoot, we shoot them. How they feel or what they're thinking about it don't make a piss pot's difference." But since then Sherman had gone crazy, spent a year at home to get his own head straight. Maybe he had learned something. But then, Meagher reasoned, he's also a dumb sonofabitch, so maybe he hasn't.

The major and Meagher lay in hammocks at right angles to each other, alongside the headquarters tent.

"Major, where are you keeping that bottle?"

It was a pint of clear whiskey which burned all the way down. They passed it back and forth without speaking until it was gone.

"Pebscot," the major said.

"Pebsot, indeed," Meagher replied. After a long pause, "Why did you say Pebsot?"

"Pebscot. My name. I thought maybe you'd want to know my name."

"What would I want to know that for?"

"Right, sir."

"Any more of that?"

"Not on hand. Buy it from the johnnie pickets. O. B. Joyful. Dollar a bottle."

Meagher rummaged in his pocket and tossed him a twenty dollar piece.

Major Pebscot held up the gold piece, contemplating it. "This is a sorry god damn outfit, ain't it?"

Meagher did not answer.

"Sorriest thing I was ever involved in. You walk through out there at night, you hear them crying. Worst of it will be when we have to move. Got to join Sherman in North Carolina in February."

In early January, a month ahead of schedule, Meagher was ordered to take his brigades to New Bern, North Carolina, to join Sherman's main force with the object of a campaign down through Georgia. "Penrod," he said as they finished the second bottle of O. B. Joyful that evening, "We'll take them through New York. Let the ones with any brains run away home."

"Good man," Pebscot answered.

"They'll probably fry my nuts for it, but at this point I do not give a roasted fart."

"Good man," Pebscot repeated. "One ball through the god damn gizzard is sufficient. Let some of the god damn three hundred dollar wonders come and bleed."

In mid-January four of the river transports—steam packets—arrived, enough for about a fourth of the men. Meagher wanted to wait until the other eight arrived, so they all could travel together, but he got orders from Halleck in Washington to send them piecemeal as transport was available. Two days after the four had departed for Pittsburgh another two showed up and Meagher departed with sixteen hundred troops, leaving a captain in charge of the remainder. Beyond Pittsburg the river was frozen; they would have to continue by rail. The captains of the first three steamers, eager for new fares, had ordered the men off, leaving them without shelter. Confusion reigned. Meagher sent an officer into the city to arrange rail transport to New York. A major from the War Department arrived and reported to Meagher that, on authority of General Halleck, he had countermanded the order to travel via New York. They would proceed to Washington, then by rail to North Carolina. "You seem to be inebriated," the fussy little man added. "Can you repeat the order?"

"Repeat the order," Meagher answered. "I'll repeat a punch on that peculiar proboscis of yours. Where did they ever get a little weasel like you? We are going to New York, you little brass asshole."

The major saluted and departed without a word.

"That may not have been a good idea," Pebscot offered.

An hour later the major was back with a telegraphed order:

TO GENERAL THOMAS MEAGHER YOU ARE RELIEVED OF COMMAND FORTHWITH MAJOR ROBERT N. SCOTT WILL ASSUME YOUR COMMAND FOR PURPOSE OF TRANSPORTING YOUR BRIGADES HALLECK.

In February, upon his arrival at New Bern, Meagher was relieved of further duty and advised to return home.

At his usual table at Sweeny's he bought a beer for Mike Cavanagh and watched as Mike looked at the mug long and hard, then turned on his customary stool at the end of the bar, reached for the mug, and raised it. He walked slowly over to Meagher's table.

"Mud in your eye, guvnor."

"Hello, Mike."

They talked for an hour. Meagher's dismissal from the army was indeed a harsh punishment for one episode of drunkenness, Cavanagh thought, and especially so coming from Uwhiskey S. Grant. "Why don't you join us for the Canada fight?" Cavanagh was now John O'Mahoney's secretary at Fenian headquarters. The Canada attack was on. They would seize Campobello Island, New Brunswick. They expected to have an army of fifty thousand, and they needed officers.

_I have lost enough fights,_ he carefully refrained from saying. "I'll be westering, I'm thinking. Need a new start."
4

One Over the Usual Allotment

They found Megan a room in the house of a lumber man on Summit Avenue, where she earned her keep doing household chores. John and Kate came and took her for walks on Sundays. It was not a satisfactory arrangement. Megan had found another disagreeable employer. Like many wealthy women of her time, the lady of the house used the opium elixir laudanum and had the usual apoplectic temper of the addict, exploding when the slightest sound, a clink of silver or a footstep, disturbed her "reverie." But Megan would not continue to be the object of opprobrium of the respectable ladies of St. Paul. John and Kate asked around for other positions, but there were none. In the winter, after a tirade from her mistress that lasted most of a morning, Megan finally gave up the job. She tried living at a boarding house, but, finding it impossible to manage by herself, had been persuaded by Kate to come back to their house. She slept in her trundle bed in the main room downstairs. On her first night back they heard her crying.

"Maybe you should go down there and talk to her," John said.

Kate did not answer.

"Are you awake?"

"Yes." She sounded impatient.

"Do you think you should talk to her?"

Another silence, Kate not even breathing. "It isn't me she's pining for. Leave her alone." She was cross.

He turned over to go back to sleep.

"Maybe we'll find her a gentleman," she said. "How about one of the operators? Is there someone we could invite for supper?"

"Do you think she could manage . . . as someone's wife?"

"If she had the right man who'd help her a bit she could be a perfectly fine wife. You're out in the world. Scout around a little. Find somebody."

News of the war's end came over the wire on John's key. He copied it, slid his chair back beyond the half wall and looked down the row of operators, each in his stall. He waited a few minutes until all keys were quiet. "It's over. Lee surrendered," he announced. The news had been expected. Keys began again. "Well, that's good, eh?" the operator next to him said.

A week later the assassination of Lincoln came across the wire at night. John saw it posted on the news board in the morning. A reporter from _The St. Paul Pioneer_ , a banty little man of middle age who came in every day for the wire news, stood next to him copying the story into his notebook.

"Something, eh?" John asked.

"I guess," the reporter responded without interrupting his writing. "Never cared for him. Lots of people shot in his war." He finished his writing and closed his book. "No reason for it. None. Don't suppose you'd know anything about it. Just off the boat. Lots of people from around here killed in it. Damn shame."

Rory wrote often. He had come through the Georgia campaign unscathed and was now back in New York, still mending. "My voice still a hoarse whisper, some trouble swallowing," he wrote. But nonetheless eager for the "northern expedition," as he called it. He thought John should join. "We could use your expertise with the old buck and ball to perforate some red jackets. Think about it. Think about your mother and father and brothers and sisters in a famine grave in County Leitrim. Some price must be paid for that. Think hard, Johnny. We need you."

Browsing the news board on a July evening, John found a surprising message: General Thomas F. Meagher (Ret.) was on his way to St. Paul. Captain James Liberty Fisk, the western explorer, was promoting his third gold prospecting expedition to Yellowstone. It would leave from St. Paul in early August. Meagher had petitioned the government for troops to escort it. John told Kate and Megan that evening as they were cooking the dinner.

"Gold prospecting, is it?" Megan replied.

"Or guarding prospectors. They're heading straight through Dakota. Right through the Sioux Nation. He wants to be a general again."

"He must be desperate, leaving Fifth Avenue for this place," Kate said.

"It's the adventure appeals to him. Fighting Indians. Gold prospecting in the Yellowstone," Megan said.

"It's another Californy-a." John picked Aidan up and sat him on his knee. "Alder Gulch. They've taken forty million out of it in two years."

"Well, more's the power to them if they find any." Kate poured the steaming water off a pan of potatoes into a brass kettle to save it for making bread. "Whatever he's tried so far has turned to disaster. He's too intent on doing the grand thing to ever settle on something practical as you have, something he could make a success of."

"So, you think I'm a greater success than Meagher?"

"Well." Kate raised her hand and held up her thumb. "The great rising of '48. It didn't rise." She raised her forefinger. "The Chiriqui railroad. No railroad." She raised her middle finger. "The Irish Brigade. Murdered. And now he's off with a pick axe on his shoulder to dig up lumps of gold." The three of them laughed and Aidan joined in, and they laughed again about that.

"I hope he finds at least one lump," said Megan, placing the plates.

"It will be his first, if he does," Kate added.

"I thought maybe you were his first," John said.

"The supper is ready."

"The supper is ready, she says." He spoke to Aidan. "She doesn't answer the question about her scandalous past, you notice."

"As for my past, you knew I was no angel when you took me on. No more of that, now."

"Come, gentlemen," Megan announced. "Dinner is served."

"Allus gets stuck in mud in summer. There ain't enough water after spring," the deck hand explained, herding the passengers aft. "Usually don't get stuck this bad goin' upstream. Current just pushes her back off. But the old man was runnin' 'er a bit hard. Now, while you stands here and lends the weight of your personages to the cause, we all go up foredecks, jump in the river and push. You definitely got the better job of the two, I'm sure you will agree. So, if you will all cooperate by putting your full your weight down, I'm sure we'll be underway in a hanged man's holler."

Meagher stood aft with the forty or so other passengers of the _Time and Tide_. The engine raced, paddles churned at full speed. The little man next to him began talking about the unbounded prospects of the upper Mississippi. An hour passed, engine churning, idling, churning. The morning drizzle became a steady rain. The grain exporting business alone would be sufficient to create a metropolis equal to London or New York, the man said. "This will all be a vast metropolis."

"You're going to lose a button there," Meagher said. The man's coat button was hanging by a thread. Collar frayed, too. The western move was a last gasp for most. His clothes soaked through, Meagher looked off across the steaming spatter of rain on the river to the limestone bluffs below Fort Snelling. It was there he would request a contingent of troops to guard the Fisk expedition.

The deck hand returned. "Well, I'm wetter'n you are. And we're all going to be here a while. We'll use the nigger engine, warp 'er over if we can. So you may return to the lounge or to your cabins. Warpin' takes a piece of time. All day, could be. Maybe this rain will float 'er off."

Meagher arrived in St. Paul two days later. The commander at Fort Snelling took his request under advisement. He would pass it to his commander in Washington for a decision. Fisk hoped to be underway by mid-August. The expedition would be well armed, military escort or no, and if the escort was not approved, he would depart anyway, straight through the Dakotas, the heart of Sioux country. Meanwhile, Archbishop Ireland invited Meagher to give a speech on the great advantages the Irish could find in the West compared to the misery and moral depredation they suffered in the East. John attended and found the speech convincing on the economic advantages of westering, less so on the moral issues. When it was over he went forward and joined the line to shake Meagher's hand.

He decided to risk it. "John Glaspie, formerly of the 69th New York."

"Johnny Glaspie," Meagher repeated.

"Yes. I'm the chap the boys rescued from Jimmy O'Dea. Sean. Sean Gillespie."

"Yes, yes. I met the fellow who organized it. What's his name?"

"Rory Lynch. Jimmy's bloodhounds could be sniffing still. That's why my name is changed a little. Keep it under your hat, if you would, sir."

"I don't think you have to worry about Jimmie any longer. Well, you survived the war. Did you go right through?"

"No. No, got a ball at Fredericksburg." He raised the left arm. "Invalided out." Should have kept my mouth shut, he thought. Change the subject. "I hear you spent a couple of extra days on the river. How was that?"

"Just like the rest of it. A few of us are going over to the hotel to wet our whistles. Care to join us?"

"All right."

The group was large and a few glasses made them boisterous. Had he heard right? _Just like the rest of it?_ Maybe he had said he just liked the rest. Meagher, basking in a circle of admirers, answered questions about the war: Jeb Stuart at First Bull Run was the best Reb general he had fought. The rising of '48: Smith O'Brien was a great political leader, a man who gave up the privileged life for the cause, and it didn't matter that he was not a great battlefield commander because there was never a chance of winning on the field in any event. "If he'd been Napoleon himself, we would have lost, and lost at much greater cost." New York politics: Dan Sickles was getting around on his one leg, had the one he lost in a glass case to show to all his visitors. He had a State Department appointment now, about to get back into the diplomacy business. Some kind of appointment in Spain. John finished his beer and went home.

Meagher had been in St. Paul less than a month when he received a telegram from the president. He had, without much hope of success, applied from New York to be appointed governor of the new Montana Territory. Over the years he had applied for several appointments, including an ambassadorship to Central America and an undersecretary's position in the War Department. A place-beggar, they would call me in the old country, but this was different, really, he reasoned. In the old country they got their appointments by selling out the country. Here, I am asking only to be rewarded for service rendered. To his surprise, this time it worked, more or less. President Johnson had appointed him secretary to Governor Sidney Edgerton of the new Montana Territory. This would get Johnson some headlines in the Irish papers; Meagher knew that was the reason. Johnson was a member of a nearly extinct species: a southern abolitionist Democrat. The impeachment hounds were at his heels. He needed friends, and the Irish were available as friends.

Well, Montana then. A collection of brigands of one description and another, no doubt. But it was something, and he was in need of something. He walked the few blocks along the board sidewalk to the _Pioneer_ office and informed them that he would be leaving to assume his post in a few days. He sent a telegram to Fisk, resigning from the expedition.

John got the news from the telegrapher who took the message. After it appeared in the paper, and it was safe to admit that he knew it, he went to the Merchant's Hotel after work.

The desk clerk answered his query with prim distaste. "In the saloon, no doubt."

Meagher was at the corner table with Nimsy, a garrulous idler who had to be shooed from the telegraph office several times a week.

"Hallo," Meagher called across the room. "Sean. Johnny. Excuse me."

A couple of sheets to the wind. "Afternoon, general."

"And what brings you to our minds? Midst."

"I hear you're headed for the new territory."

"And you are looking for a job."

"Well, a recommendation for one. Yes. I am a telegrapher."

"He is. I'll vouch for that," Nimsy volunteered. "A god damn dot and dasher."

"And a recommendation . . ."

"Dot dot dot dash dash dash," Nimsy growled, tapping an imaginary key. "God damned if I know how they do that. How do you know one dot from another?"

"Well, are you any good at it?" Meagher asked through Nimsy's maundering.

"Damned if I can figure it out. Click click click. Jesus."

"Yes, I am. The office manager here will testify to that, but if you could say a word about an old battlefield comrade, how deserving he is and all."

"And how deserving are you?" Meagher asked.

"How them little clicks get through that wire, that's what I want to know."

"Bull Run twice. Fair Oaks, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg,. Pretty damned deserving, if I do say so."

"You went about as far as I did. All right, then."

"'Cause you look at the god damn wire, it ain't nothin' but a solid god damn piece of iron in there, or whatever it is."

John took a telegraph message sheet from his pocket and placed it before Meagher. "There you are. I'll send it myself."

"And what's wrong with dear old St. Paul that you want to leave it?" Meagher looked around the fly-specked barroom and laughed. "Well, yes. I see your point. But it will be even less civilized where we're going."

"St. Paul is a damn fine city," Nimsy said. "Beats Minneapolis into a cocked hat any day. And St. Anthony. St. Anthony don't amount to a sparrow drumstick. What is that in them wires, anyways?"

"Copper. Truth to tell, I'd like to get beyond the reach of the crook of the crozier."

"Aha. It's been around your neck too, has it?"

"Strangled me half to death."

"Somebody stranglin' you?"

"Yes, they are. I'm turning purple with it."

John watched Meagher write the letter. Meagher had evidently picked up the camp habit of pointless idling between adventures. Waiting around to get killed, the soldiers had called it. He thought of saying _looks like you're on another sand bar_ , but didn't. Nimsy was going on about someone who had been strangled in a jail he had been in. Meagher wrote at some length. John bought three pints at the bar and returned to the table with them. Nimsy left for the back. "Got to shed a tear for Ireland," he said, adding, "Oh, Christ, din't mean that. Jesus. Din't mean that. Shit."

"Would you like a home cooked dinner?"

"Thank you, friend." Meagher raised the mug. "As a matter of fact, yes. I'm fairly dying for one. I've been to the bishop's twice for some very nice eating but other than that I've been living on the fare of this . . ." Giving up the search for a word, he indicated with a sweep of his hand.

"And listening to the adventures of our raconteur."

"Nimsy? Nimsy's all right. I understand Nimsy."

"Tomorrow night, then, if that's all right. I'll bring you a horse. The hotel's stable is also bad. Their horses are hopping with fleas."

"So was the room. I made them scrub the room and boil the linen."

"I'll be around about this time. We'll ride out."

"We're riding out? Where we ridin'?" Nimsy took his seat. "That shithouse . . . Jesus. There got to be somethin' died in there." He took a swig of beer, closed his eyes. "Took my pizzle out, god damn mosquitoes ate it right down to a stump. Pray for winter. I'm ready to ride. Where we headed?"

Kate squealed when she saw Meagher, reddened as he kissed her hand. John thought that the greeting, for both Kate and Meagher, seemed warmer than mere renewed acquaintance. So, it was true, most likely. He would not ask her about it again. Megan and Kate had dressed up for the occasion. Meagher kissed Megan's hand, too. "I seem to be your escort this evening, Madame. Will you take my arm?"

It was a warm evening. John had brought the chairs and a deal table into the side yard where a bit of grass remained. Meagher had evidently spent the afternoon with Nimsy. He took Megan's arm, but it was Megan who steadied him as they walked across the rutted bare dirt to the chairs.

John went into the house and brought three whiskeys and two lemonades. "And do you remember this person from Mularkey's in Dublin?" he asked, distributing the drinks. "As I remember, general, you promised to introduce me to her but never did."

"I do remember, yes. My apologies. Fortunately you seem to have overcome my deficiency. And I am guessing that this little fellow is in some way connected to the story."

John watched as Meagher looked her over.

"This is Aidan. Aidan, General Meagher."

"Tom. Tom will do nicely for old friends. And new ones." He held out a finger for Aidan to grasp. "And your name is still Johnny, I trust. Or are you on the run again?"

"John."

"Well, I started to tell you the other night, I believe you have little to fear from Jimmy O. He has run afoul of the Tammany sachems. Rynders is now all for the Irish. Gives out with the most godawful Mother Machree claptrap every chance he gets. You'd laugh till you burst, but it works. No one simpler than an Irishman. Just drop some overripe plums of Irish sentiment before them and they'll go all a-swoon on the fumes. Some of Jimmy's old boys have gone over, Brian Boru and . . . who was that great moose?"

"Skinner Meehan?"

"Skinner Meehan. Right. And Billy Tweed is in the saddle now at the Wigwam, Rynders his right hand man, and Jimmy O. on the ropes, going down for the count, I think. Last I heard he'd lost a couple of his houses in the Bowery to Rynders and he without soldiers enough for a fight. Isaiah will take hold of the whole Five Points now and Billy Tweed will help him. The word is, it was his number one man, business manager, left him and that was the beginning." Meagher toasted John with a wink and took a swallow of the whiskey.

"That's me." John raised his glass, simultaneously swatting a mosquito on his neck. "Freed in the proclamation. Hallelujah. I am sorry, a little, about Jimmy. He wasn't the worst crook ever lived."

"A right old skin, I thought. It's a rough country. He did what he had to."

Aidan wanted to get on John's lap, so he took him up. Aidan immediately grabbed a handful of his beard and pulled. "No, Aidan, don't pull." John pried the boy's fingers loose.

"And you're off to Montana," Megan said.

"Yes. Yes, indeed. Montana it is. I'm to be the secretary of sage brush."

"You're a grand fellow, entirely," Kate said. "And you're about to lead the Irish into the promised land, I'm told."

"Hell of a thing. Beg your pardon, ma'am."

"Isn't that what you said in your speech?"

"Yes. Well, Moses. I don't think so. Johnny Ireland, you know, the bishop, wants 'em out of the way of sin and temptation. He told me to say that. You think anybody will follow?"

"I think it's a winding path you'd lead them on in your present condition." Kate laughed a little to take the edge off of her joke.

"Ah. True. Not much to do here expect . . . except sit at the bar. Sorry, ma'am."

"I think we had better tend to the roast," Kate said.

"We have bored them nearly to death, Johnny old boy. We shall have to make amends. Stay, ladies. Let us speak of the arts."

"Speak of what you like, gentlemen, arts or arses," Kate said.

Megan made a sound of disgust.

Hoisting Aidan onto her hip Kate said, "I'll give you a call when the dinner is on."

"Bit of a sharp tongue on that one. Always has been."

"So, you remember her from Dublin, then?"

"Ah, yes. A grand woman. A bit of a tongue on her, but that's to the good, really. Piquancy to the sauce, you know. Better than a sighing willow. You're a lucky fellow." Meagher massaged his eyes. John looked into his face. Pale, puffy, red-rimmed eyes. Meagher spoke quickly, under his breath. "Are you fucking both of them?"

This had not been a good idea. The general set his empty glass conspicuously before him. John got up and brought out the whisky bottle and poured two short ones.

"Will Elizabeth make the trip to join you?"

"I suppose she will. No doubt she will."

"You don't sound especially cheerful about it."

Meagher laughed. He thought a minute and laughed again, long and loud. "Elizabeth, my dear Elizabeth, is a wonderful woman. She is a woman with great uplifting qualities. Did you know that?" Meagher reached across the table for the bottle and filled his glass. "She's been to a ladies' seminary. That is what they learn there, you know. Uplifting. She could uplift that horse over there to the roof of your house without the aid of ropes and pulleys. And she is my wife. God bless her." He lifted his glass.

"Yes. Well, she is young. And she's not Irish. She didn't grow up with all the air squashed out of her. Such people are apt to believe in possibilities."

"Yes. Foolish people. There are no possibilities."

The two sat in silence for a moment. A steamboat whistle sounded; the packet from Prairie du Chien. This one, too, had been stranded. The rain had not raised the river much.

"O'Brien is dead," Meagher said suddenly in a low, flat voice. "A year ago and more. And McManus four years now. This whole mess just dried them up like leaves. Took the sap out of them. We're all failures," Meagher announced. "Can you name a famously successful living Irishman?"

"Hm. Difficult stricture you've put on it. What we're famous for is dying. It's what we do best. I could name the new secretary of the Montana Territory."

John had hoped that Meagher would smile at that, but he looked even more grim. "I must bring my Mount Holyoke, Fifth Avenue New York wife to live in the dust. No, friend, I have not been successful."

"Dinner is served, gentlemen," Kate called from the back door.

Rising, John took the rest of his whiskey at a gulp.

"I am secretary of sand," Meagher said, not rising. "You think of yourself as a success?"

"I don't know. I'm making a little progress now, I think. Coming in?"

"I have not succeeded."

"What are you trying to do?"

"King of coyotes."

"Well, let's have supper at least. Maybe we'll succeed tomorrow."

"What am I trying to do? That's a damn good question, isn't it? To succeed you must know what it is that you are trying to do. Chasing the bubble reputation even in the canon's mouth. Who said that?"

"Shakespeare, I think. Shall I help you up?"

John helped him to his feet. "It's the trouble with bubbles. Pop, they're gone." John helped him walk. Along the way Meagher stopped to lean against a tree and piss. Kate had disappeared from the door, fortunately. She would give him a piece of her tongue for pissing in the yard if she saw it. Inside, Meagher made straight for Megan's trundle bed in the corner, and, while John, Kate, Megan and Aidan enjoyed a meal of roast beef and potatoes and freshly made biscuits, the retired general of the Irish Brigade snored.

They had finished cleaning up and were wondering what to do about a bed for Megan when the general sat up.

"Would you like a bite to eat?" Kate asked.

Meagher looked at her, uncomprehending.

"No, it doesn't look as if you do," Kate said with an edge to her voice.

After a minute Meagher rose and went out back.

"I had a whole family like that in the old country. That's why I left it," Kate said.

When he did not return, John decided to leave him to his own devices. The four of them ate in silence. When he had finished his dinner, he sighed, rose, and walked out to see what had become of him. It was nearly dark, and the voice surprised him.

"Click click? That's what you do?" He was sitting on the steps. John had nearly tripped over him.

"That's it." John leaned against the railing behind him.

"Isn't that a little rattly? Repetitious? Click, clickety click. Make you want to run out of it screaming?"

"Sometimes. Until I think of the other ways I have tried to get a living. Then it's music."

"Shit." John heard him take a pull at the bottle. He had left it out on the table and Meagher had found it in the faint light. "Where's the satisfaction in it?"

"I'm good at it. It takes a certain touch. Morse himself praised my hand. The steadiest he'd heard, he said. Not terrifically fast, but steady. That's better, really. Send fast, you have to repeat too much. Not every operator can copy fast. But steady, clear."

A rasping sound came from deep in Meagher's throat, a dry cackle. "Shit. Not your only talent, either. Two rather attractive household companions, both looking well satisfied." He continued to cackle.

John eased past him on the steps, went around the house and led the horses to the small stable. He forked some hay into the stalls and gave them some water from the well. He came back around the house to the steps.

"And weren't you in the Fenians?" Meagher asked.

"No. A friend of mine is telling me I should join for the Canada . . . whatever it is."

"And?"

"I'm thinking about it."

"Would be amusing. Give the limeys all the trouble you can."

"I tried for Ballingarry. Hobbled a good part of southern Ireland in forty-eight with a musket strapped on my leg, trying to shoot a Peeler."

"And were you with us there . . ." a pause, the idea getting away from him. "There at Ballin." He tried again. "Ballin garry?"

"No, no I wasn't. Never found you. Someone gave us a good breakfast at Waterford and told us the battle was lost and we went back to Dublin. And I came to New York. Worked with Jimmy O'Dea for a few years, keeping books, mostly. Helped him run his whorehouses. Then ran off to the war."

"Now there you had a profession. Assistant to a ponce. A deputy pimp." He laughed again. "That's my line, too." He passed the bottle to John. "Do you know what we did at Ballingarry? Bugger-all. Nothing. That's what we did."

John took a pull. "It's been a wander. Like playing a jig. One verse pretty much like the other. This is the end of it, I hope for me. Montana. That's where you're headed?"

"Where's the damn bottle?"

"I finished it," John lied.

A little wind came up, whistled in the brush along the river bank. The moon had risen, showing a few clouds. Not enough for rain. John nearly dozed off from the whiskey, but awoke to a sudden sound.

"Shit," came the voice from the dark below the porch. His guest had fallen off the stairs.

"Are you all right?"

"I have no idea. It don't make any difference. I'm inconsequensickal."

John helped him back up onto the stairs. It was growing chilly. What were they going to do with this fellow? They had no place for him to sleep. John got a lap robe from the house and covered his back.

"You ran a hell of a long way, Sean me boy, but you got out of it."

"John. That's right. Don't tell anyone I'm here."

"Christ, Irish-ossitude, it's a jail, ain't it? The Hibernian hoosegow. You're a soap lock."

"I'm small. I slipped between the bars."

"My problem. I was enormous. I was hurrahed. It's hard to go where you want if you are hurrahed. Thing is, what you have to do is take what you can get . . . because . . . that's all you can get. You can't get everything you want. But I want everything I want. That's the trouble of it. If I didn't want everything I want I'd be all right. I am waxing phosolifical or syphilitical or some damned thing. That's a good idea you had here. Get a nice little situation and settle. Wonder if I could do that. I should invite myself to dinner and get to know myself a little better. I've decided that I hate Irishmen. Do you hate Irishmen?"

John merely laughed for an answer. Meagher joined him.

"They put my Saint Patrick's Day speech in the paper here last March. Did you read it?"

John's laughter increased.

Meagher mocked his oratorical tone. "The mountains of America become the . . ." What was it?

"The dear little hills of Connemara, I believe."

"Jesus. It's enough to . . . I've tried talking to them like adults. They won't have it. That was the purpose of the penal laws, you know. Make them into peasants. Worked. They are stupid papist peasants, kneeling down for their wafer of bread. And the worst of it is the boyos from University College and Trinity making heroes of them. The noble peasantry. What shit. Crawling to the priest, half of them buggered by the priests, wallowing in their sins, all twisted inside. Worthlessness. That's what the priest teaches you. There's no way a creature like that could ever stand up for himself. All they can do is hurrah. So, they find someone who _can_ stand up and they hurrah the bejasus out of him. Hurrah until he doesn't know which way he's going. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah. Until he's giving Saint Patrick's Day speeches like that one."

"There's an old infantry saying, "Keep your arse in the weeds."

"That's a damn good old saying. And so that's how you ended up so well, arse in the weeds?"

"Arse in the weeds."

"I've been trying to get my arse in the history books. Didn't work. Bad idea."

"You'll be in them. The brigade. Lee says you were the best brigadier in the Union Army."

"Maybe. One sentence in his book. I thought I'd get killed. That would have been a good ending, you see. Irish patriot dies for his adopted country. But there were too many Irishmen fighting for the Rebs. They'd pass the word down the line not to shoot the general."

"I had heard that. I wondered if you had."

"They shot everyone around me, and they shot my horse, and they shot Jack Gosson, and there I stood. Or lay, rather. Pretty obvious what was happening, wouldn't you say?"

"Strange god damn war."

"Strange it was. And people wonder why I drink. Do they think this whole buggered mess is worth staying sober for? Come on, Johnny, give a sup of your beautiful bottle for an old veteran of the war."

John passed him the bottle.

The general drank and then seemed to fall asleep again, but after a time there was one soft, trembling cry. They drank the whiskey and talked on the steps until the sky glowed opaque gray and the birds began.

"Guess I'll mosey back to the hotel," Meagher said. "Get a wink or two. Boat leaves this afternoon."

John went to the stable and brought him the mare. "Don't put her in the hotel stable with those flea bags. Just tie her up out front where she can reach the water. I'll come down after I've had a sleep."

"Good. OK. Well, to Canada, then. May you conquer." Meagher raised the bottle and drained all but the last gulp. He passed it to John.

"Montana," John answered and finished it.

"Good man." Meagher's head was clear now. The whiskey had brought him wide awake. He turned the mare toward the tip of the sun straight ahead of him on the rutted empty road. He felt calm now and powerfully in control as he had not for ages. Montana. He spurred the mare and clicked his tongue. The mare galloped a half mile before slowing again. It's a trick of the dawn light and the whiskey, of course. The clarity trick. But such tricks are not to be despised. Such tricks are to be savored while they last. Such tricks are the whole of it.

In the sweltering late afternoon, with lightning flashing in the west, Meagher departed for Atchison, Kansas by river boat. That night a thunderstorm broke and the captain took the boat in under a bluff and moored it fast to a couple of elms. Lightning crashed like an artillery barrage, some of it so close that flash and bang were simultaneous. Meagher and two dozen other passengers watched the storm through the saloon windows. Across the river a bolt struck and sizzled on a pine, flaming it all at once amid the downpour, lighting the mile wide-basin of slanting, steaming rain. The storm was over in an hour. In a half hour steam was up in the boiler, a couple of great chuffs and the chug of the engine and splash of the paddle wheel resumed. By midnight the sky cleared and a full moon shone on the water.

He was on the river ten days and kept mostly to himself. He had brought no liquor, and, after the first day out, did not drink in the saloon. This would be a drying ride. He changed boats in St. Louis. With the low water level of September the Missouri steamer could go only as far as Atchison. There he purchased, for the outrageous price of six hundred dollars in bank currency, a stage coach ticket for Bannack, the capital of Montana Territory. It was robbery, but there was only one company. He had no choice. It would raise an eyebrow when they got his expense account in Washington.

As the coach was about to depart, the driver came with an armload of rifles, clattered them onto the floor of the coach and handed one each to the three male passengers, leaving two more on the floor between them.

"Is there much Indian trouble?" Meagher asked.

"Some," the driver replied.

The three other passengers on the first leg, a three-week coach to Denver, were a dismal looking elderly couple and a sallow-faced man who seemed to lack all energy. They did not respond when he introduced himself. The first day there were a few squatters' shacks along the trail, most of them abandoned, and after that a near desert, sparse and dry prairie grass, sand. The stage stops were shacks, the meals overpriced and nearly inedible—a piece of dry meat, a stale biscuit, and a glass of water. The silent family did not partake. They sat in the shade alongside the building and ate food they had brought. At one station the building had been burnt and the horses taken by Indians. They slept the night in a haystack and continued in the morning with the same team.

Word of his approach had reached Denver and he was called upon to speak to a crowd at the hotel. "This country is overrun with you, do you know that?" he shouted to a laughing audience. "I've been north and south, California and New York and Massachusetts and South Carolina, and now nearly all the points in between, and in every squatter's shack and river barge, in the little towns and great cities, behind every bush and tree there are persons who look and talk just like you. I've come two thousand miles thinking there must be an end of you somewhere, but, begorrah! here you are. You cannot all have come out of that tiny island and covered this large continent from one end to the other, while simultaneously blanketing Australia and Van Diemen's Land. It is a plain physical impossibility. I cannot but conclude that most of you are impostors, Esquimaux, perhaps, seeking acceptance in a warmer world, or Englishmen hiding a sordid past, studying for heaven." The booing and laughter were about equal. "Give it up, my friends. If you are an Esquimaux I will accept you as brothers. I too have known the dark and the cold, the whistling wind in the empty land." He paused, looked for a moment at the faces of his audience. Nearly all men. Laborers. Miners, they would be. He smiled a little. "If you are an Englishman . . ." Laughter interrupted him. "If you are an Englishman . . . if you are an Englishman . . . admit it. Confess. We understand your distress, your profound embarrassment, but facing a difficult truth is the first step in overcoming it. Shame leads to repentance, repentance to redemption . . ." The laughter and cheers drowned him out. He thanked them for their expression of friendship. In taking on his new job it would be helpful to know that people wished him well.

His fellow passengers on the Salt Lake stage were four young missionaries of the Church of Latter-day Saints, clean-shaven fellows in identical black trousers, bowler hats, and white shirts. The youngest-looking one introduced himself as Malachy Horan and said he had heard Meagher's speech at the hotel. "You have a good wit. I thought it was very good."

"Thank you, sir. I did not care for it, myself."

"You didn't?" The young fellow chuckled. "You have a secret affinity for the English?"

"None whatever. But I've heard, and spoken, a bit too much of that. Like butter on bread, an excess is cloying."

After they were well underway, the coachman cracking his whip repeatedly over his team of four as it slowly climbed the long trail into the mountains, the oldest of the missionaries asked him if he had heard the story of the Angel Moroni and the golden tablets. Meagher had heard the whole rigamarole from an officer in Virginia but, tired of traveling in silence, said that he had not. The missionary told the absurd story, how the angel Moroni brought the golden tablets to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York. Joseph Smith translated them from the reformed Egyptian language with the aid of his magic stones, the urim and thummim. The magically translated words were inscribed by elder Ephraim Hoskins. The result was the _Book of Mormon_ , the sacred history of the ten lost tribes of the Hebrews, who in three migrations came to the new world and whose descendants, their skins darkened as punishment for their apostasy, are the American Indians. The other three young missionaries listened with expressions of proprietary pride as their leader went on about Jesus's visit to the new world for a second delivery of the MountOlivet speech.

Meagher had read the newspaper exposé, how the golden plates had been revealed as fireplace tiles, but he let the fellow rattle on. It was this or silence. He had known it for a while now: large parts of this country were occupied by lunatics.

"Brigham Young is the lawful successor to the prophet and founder and as such he is God's prophet, seer, and revelator for all earthly men."

Memorized missionary patter. Encouraging this idiot was probably a bad idea. He longed for the silent, morose family of the Denver stage. He thought about Sean/John in St. Paul and his little Mormon harem. The droning drivel continued. " . . and it is our mission on earth to build the new Zion on the borders of the Lamanites, The Lamanites are the Pah Ute Indians and that is why God has led us to the Great Salt Lake. Christ's second coming will be to the new Zion. From there he will rule the world for a thousand years."

"Strange he'd want it next to these Lamanite heathen just after scorching them for their apostasy. Why wouldn't he go to a Christian neighborhood?"

"The Lamanites will be converted by his appearance and are to lead the procession into heaven on the last day. The last shall be first, the scripture tells us."

"Ah. Yes. I should have thought of that."

After an hour or so the missionary, apparently sensing that Meagher was not listening, fell silent. The coach rattled on for a time. Bored, Meagher prodded him again. "And why did your fellows murder all those people in the wagon train?" Meagher asked. "Where was that again?"

"You are no doubt referring to the Mountain Meadows episode. It's in the south of Utah. I see you have been influenced by the heathen press of the East. That's all right," he said, raising a hand in forgiveness. "That unfortunate episode was the doing of the Pah-Ute Indians. The Saints tried to prevent it."

"The Lamanites. Hm. Seems to me I read that Young ordered the attack, and it was led by Mormon officers. Had something to do with Buchanan and Sydney Johnston's trying to stop all your men having harems. Something like that. How many wives have you got?"

The missionary reacted with anger. "The church of your countrymen is the mother of harlots, as we read in 1 Nephi, chapter 13. 'The gentiles do stumble exceedingly, because of the most previous parts of the gospel of the lamb which have been kept back by the abominable church, which is the mother of harlots.'"

"Most previous?"

"What?"

No point in trying to explain fine grammatical points to this fellow. A little fun now. Pour it on, see if you can rattle him. "Your Joe Smith was a bad writer. He stumbled exceedingly with his clauses. I have read some of that book. It is a mess, as that bit you just quoted illustrates."

"You naturally want to defend the Catholic Church."

"No. No, I don't. It has had some advantages that yours has not, polishing by a few first-rate minds. But at bottom it is no better than your nonsense. The truth of the matter is right there." He indicated the passing country—red soil, scrub brush, mountain range in the distance. "It comes without an explanation, so we are invited to make our own. But make a better one than that. The English have a good one. 'God put us here to tell everyone else how to live,' it goes. That gives them a reason to get up in the morning."

"And the Irish? What is their story?" Horan asked.

"They don't have one, and so they don't get up in the morning."

The missionaries tried, unconvincingly, to laugh. They had been taught how to behave in the presence of mockers.

"What was your speech, then?" the young Irishman asked. "Weren't you saying that you were better than the English?"

"Well, yes. But nobody believes it on less than five whiskeys. Whiskey religion is the best. The truth is revealed sometime around midnight, and in the morning it's gone and we've got to find it again. Your stuff has you befogged all day."

"Are you an atheist, then?" the young Irishman asked.

"I am a priest and revelator of the whiskey religion."

At night they slept in the coach or on the ground, and even as he tried to doze off the Mormons kept at him until he told them bluntly to be quiet. Still, it was better than the jangle of his own thoughts. He did wish for a sip of the _uisgebaugh_ often and mightily. Arguing with clodpolls gave him a thirst. But it was novel waking up so bland and blank to sunny days in the mountains, one after another. Bare blue sky. Snowy peaks. Simple sun. Clear, thin air. It was no doubt the feeling these fellows had every day of their lives.

As they neared their destination, the argument died for a time. He observed the two faces across and the one beside him and tried to emulate their thoughtless expression, the plump apple shine. Something like the pose one struck in a military parade or in being photographed in uniform, except that you hold it all of your waking hours. He found that it could not be done by simply arranging one's features. It seemed to come from something like internal pressure. That was it. The hydraulics of certainty. Meagher held the expression, turning his head in various attitudes. No wondering. No chewing one's past for the bitter juices. These didn't notice that they were being imitated. They didn't notice anything. That was the secret. If all questions are settled, one needn't notice. They could be wealthy Englishmen, or bishops. Or governors. I could be one myself soon, with any luck.

In Salt Lake City, a brass band greeted the stage, much to the surprise of his fellow passengers. "Are you as famous as that?" the oldest one asked. "I am a second Barnum," Meagher answered. "The four-headed cow will be here directly."

The next day he boarded the Virginia City stage and headed north through the desert, sans Mormons, along the western edge of the mountains, through regions of sand dunes and salt flats, three water barrels strapped atop the coach, two for horses, one for passengers. In Bannack a gaunt man with a scant yellow beard and spectacles approached. "General Meagher?" His voice was dry, exhausted.

"Yes."

"Governor Edgerton." Instead of proffering his hand, he handed Meagher a large brown envelope. "These are the official documents of the territory. I am appointing you acting governor. I will be departing in an hour."

"Departing for . . .?"

"Mandan, St. Louis, Philadelphia ultimately. This is the hotel." He indicated a two-story wooden building just across from the coach house. "We can take our noon meal here. The territorial capital is upstairs, room four. Let us talk a while until I have to leave. I'll fill you in."

Edgerton advised Meagher not to convene the legislature as they were unrepentant Confederate rebels, the lot of them. "Last year they tried to secede from the Union, even though they're only a territory. General Sterling Price is a special problem."

"Sterling Price. Old Pap. The fat Reb general who didn't surrender. I thought he was in Mexico."

"The very one. He _is_ in Mexico, but a thousand or so of his men are here. They plan to form a Confederate army and launch an invasion of America. Liberate the Confederacy. Price's left wing, they call themselves, and they've elected a whole passel of themselves to the legislature. The other problem you have is the absence of troops. There is not one soldier or policeman at your disposal. You have no real power, except to call for Sherman's cavalry, and it would take them two weeks to get here, at a minimum, if he decided to come. It's a thankless god damned job. If you have any other way to get a living . . ." The governor's voice trailed off into a minute of silence. "I'd look to it, if I were you," he added finally. "My family is in the dry goods business in Philadelphia. I am giving up the governorship of Montana Territory to become a dry goods clerk, and I regard it as a promotion."

"Is it as bad as that?"

The governor shrugged. "It is an open-air bedlam. If the Sioux were to massacre them all, you maybe could get new citizens. That's your best hope for civic improvement, as I see it. Have you ever worked with Sherman?"

Meagher laughed. "Not exactly _with_ him. Under him, unwillingly."

"Well, I see the coach is ready to leave and I would not miss it. Goodbye."

Meagher walked to the coach and shook hands with the departing governor. As it pulled away he found himself face to face with a portly man whose smile of barely suppressed hilarity beneath a familiar-looking handlebar moustache showed several teeth missing. "General!" the man shouted.

"Penrod?"

"Major Henry Pebscot, at your service." He approached, holding forth a half-full whiskey bottle. "Here, take a good one. You'll need it."

Sitting by the stove after dinner, John took out a dispatch and read it again.

PRIORITY A CANADA HOLIDAY SOON STOP MAKE RED JACKETS REDDER STOP RESERVE YOUR TICKET NOW STOP REPLY RORY LYNCH CLEVELAND OHIO

"What's that you've got," Kate asked.

"An invitation to get the hell out of here."

"I must go away . . ." Megan began, but both Kate and John interrupted her.

"You must not," Kate said.

"Let's all go west before the summer's over," John said. It was late spring now, 1867. "To Montana. Meagher will get me on at the telegraph office. But first, I will go do this little thing." He handed the telegram to Kate, who read it aloud.

They sat in silence. "It will be an enormous army," John said. "Eighty thousand and more have signed up. It will be as big as the Army of the Potomac, and all veterans."

"To take something from them. It would be a wonderful thing. Do you suppose it is possible?" Megan asked.

"To take a piece of Canada? Of course it's possible. Their army has no veterans at all. We have brigades of them. We have weapons. We have generals. We have old Tom Sweeny, a great brigadier, for a commander. This is not a pipe dream. This is an army that could beat the English if we could get there."

"You're going off to war again?" Kate came and stood before him, holding the telegram. "Is that what this is about?"

"Ah, well, thinking about it. You disapprove, I take it."

"Didn't you learn anything from the last one? Do you remember at all how much trouble it was to get away? Do you remember . . .?"

"Now . . ." Megan interrupted her, a thing she had never done. Surprised, they both waited for her to speak. "We haven't come here to forget everything. You were in Dublin. You don't know." Her voice went to a near whisper. "What they did. Our brothers and sisters. And they are still at it. There is hunger yet in the west. He must go," she said.

"Ach." Kate picked up Aidan, who was upset by the tone of argument, and held him on her hip. "What good is it? Even if you get a piece of Canada, do you think they will let you keep it? They'll come with an army bigger than yours, and it will be another . . . ballocks. You'll lose. Again."

"I don't think so. If we can get across with even three divisions, they'll not defeat us. They will be green as we were at First Bull Run. There is a world of difference between veterans and green troops. Listen, it's a volunteer army with no enlistment period. I can leave when I like. I'll go for a month only. For the invasion. When it's done and they're established, I'll come home."

"The last time, if I remember, was for ninety days only, your first enlistment." Aidan began to cry again "It's all right, it's all right," she said to him.

"I promise, solemnly, I will be back before August. I have talked to Higgins. He's all for it. He'll hold the job for me."

Kate sat down at the table and covered her eyes for a time. "Is there no end of it?"

"There will be, for us. And it will be soon. It will be this summer."

"And what of the government? Will they let you just get your own army together and invade another country?"

"Johnson has given his consent, more or less. He won't oppose us. He's in trouble with everyone except the Irish now, so he doesn't dare stop us. He'll accept a _fait accompli_ , he said. That means go ahead. Do it if you can."
5

Canada, Home

In early April of 1866, Colonel B. Doran Killian, an officer of the International Order of Fenians, in command of a company of infantry and a schooner loaded with arms, invaded Campobello Island, New Brunswick. Seeing that Campobello had no defensible terrain, and knowing that American or Canadian troops, would be along soon, Killian quickly retreated to Indian Island, a tiny dot on the map near Campobello, and camped there for a few days until a small force under General Meade, the Union commander at Gettysburg, arrived, seized their arms and removed them. They left without a fight. To the dismay of Canadian officials, the Americans took no action against the invaders.

Now, in June, more than three thousand Fenians under Roberts had come to Cleveland to cross Lake Erie into Ontario, where they planned to occupy the shore town of Paris and then move on Hamilton and Guelph. And several thousand from Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, had gathered in Buffalo for a simultaneous move on Fort Erie. Sweeny had promised an Irish free state on the lower part of the peninsula between Lake Erie and Lake Huron by summer's end. But already the plan was going awry. Sweeny had received word that the western wing of the invasion, the fifty thousand who were to gather in Detroit for an invasion of Windsor, was having trouble: the Michigan railroads had refused to carry them. He had issued orders to proceed without the western wing for now. Worse, it seemed that the man responsible for securing boats to cross Lake Erie had failed to do so and then disappeared. Sweeny ordered the Cleveland units to proceed immediately to the railroad station.

"Son of a Ballinamucko, we're off to conquer Canadee." Rory grabbed John around the neck and wrestled him this way and that as they walked along the street in downtown Cleveland, Ohio after the meeting. His prankishness was not gone after all, merely dormant until he had a drop taken, which he had on this occasion, from the flask of a large raw-faced man named Rourke who had carried the barrel of a four pounder on his back during field exercises one day.

"And we're rebs, my friend," John answered. "New York Rifles attached to the Thirteenth Tennessee Volunteers. That's a disgraceful thing, you know. We probably shot at more than one of those bastards just a while ago."

"They are now our loyal southern countrymen, a little worse for wear." Rory's voice was raspy. John could not get over the change in him in the three years since that hill at Fredericksburg. The scar on his cheek was an indentation, not that noticeable except that it changed the shape of his mouth, turning the left corner downward when he spoke or smiled. But the change was more than that. He had gone rail thin on army rations; his eye sockets were darker, and there was something uncertain now in the movement of his eyes, the angle of his head, as if he had got an answer to a question that had not pleased him. But a drop of the _uisgebaugh_ could still take it off him.

"Hey, Rourke," Rory shouted to the big man walking a little ahead of them. "How did we ever miss a target the size of you?"

"Didn't. I got a couple pieces of lead in me."

"Where'd you get them?"

"In me arse."

"Runnin' away, were you? No, I mean where in the country?"

"Runnin' away! You're brave for such a skinny shit. I got one in me neck, that's Pennsylvania on the round top, and one down here in me gizzard, that's Maryland in the sunken road. Any other questions?"

"Couple of wins for us, those two."

"You lookin' for a little private rematch? Just me and you?" Rourke retorted. Several of his comrades gave a southern holler.

They wore their blue or gray jackets and black caps, battered and faded, which drew admiring looks on the street. Workpants of varying grays and browns and heavy farm boots made up the rest of the motley uniform. They walked, along with a few hundred of their comrades, to the railroad station to be taken to a destination not announced, but obvious as soon as they saw what train they were boarding—Buffalo, Syracuse, New York. The train sat for a time after they boarded and Rourke, his flask empty now, face flaming, asked if anyone had any whiskey. A few did, and the train became noisy with hilarity.

"The general of the boats is disappeared," said a little fellow with a comically high voice in the seat behind John and Rory. "'I'd like to book passage for a wee invasion of Canady,' says the general to the ticket man. 'Ah, hmm, I am terrible sorry,' says the ticket man, 'but the thing of it is we don't sell no tickets for no invasion forces is the thing of it. 'Tis an old company policy, is the trouble of it, you see. 'Twould give the line a bad name, ye know, if the passengers would get off with rifles blazin'. They could revoke our dockin' permit if we got in a habit of doin' it on a regular basis, ye know. I'm sure you understand, general. Now, if yez were goin' over to visit your old aunt in Hamilton town, that we could do.' 'Ah, that's it,' says the general. 'We're going over to visit our old aunt in Hamilton town. Three thousand tickets, please.' But they never believed him, so he runs away in disgrace to the western wilderness to live in a wigwam. And we're off to Buffalo, tryin' to think up a better story on our way."

As the day grew hot, most of the men fell asleep. The train began to move so slowly that most did not awaken. Rourke's loud snoring could be heard above the rattle of the cars. In early afternoon amid a field of grain, the train coasted to a gradual stop. They jumped from the exits onto the bank of a shallow ditch, falling over each other, formed up on a country lane and marched, each company to a different farm, where campgrounds had been arranged. In the evening they formed up again and marched the mile into Buffalo where they convened at Townshend Hall in the city's center and received their orders. They then returned to their campgrounds and slept for several hours. And then, at two in the morning, back to Buffalo again, and three miles along the Black River Road to Pratt's iron furnace dock, where they boarded canal boats and were towed by tugs across the mile-wide Niagara River. The boats had to make several trips to ferry the whole brigade of nine hundred and fifty, but by seven o'clock on the cool and cloudy morning of the first of June they had all been landed at the ferry dock near Frenchman's Corner, about a mile north of Fort Erie, Ontario.

A woman came out of an old clapboard farmhouse and watched them pass, nineteen companies of fifty, moving in route step along the river road, each with its captain and sergeants before it. She turned as if to go back into the house and then changed her mind and watched, a look of disbelief on her face. She held a dusting cloth in her hand, a big woman with the look of one who had worked hard and lived poor.

"You think the Canooks have any kind of army?" Rory asked.

"Nah. Canooks haven't fought a battle in about fifty years. They'll be green redcoats."

"Yee-hah!" shouted Rourke, reb fashion, "this is going to be fun. Right around sundown I'm going to pop one in the belly so we can listen to him yell all night. Oh, mommy, where are you mommy?" He followed this with a roaring laugh. "That will be the sweetest music I have heard since me dear old mother sang 'The Rose of Tralee.'"

"Peggin' redcoats!" shouted Rory. "And you don't have to carry a rifle strapped to your leg this time."

"Shut your gobs!" came a roar from the rear. "You sound like green recruits yourselves. We've done nothing yet."

They camped for the night on high ground near the river, and before dawn the next day they headed inland on a dirt road which followed a wooded creek bank. The officers had commandeered horses from the local farms and Colonel John O'Neill with his staff stood mounted in a clearing, chatting with the men as they passed. A young man in his thirties, he looked fit and ready to do battle himself. He asked John Glaspie where he was from. "County Leitrim first, Minnesota now," John answered. "Good man," the colonel said. We'll fight them today, men. The Queen's Own Rifles from Toronto has just arrived by train at Port Colborne."

"The Queen's Own Rifles!" shouted Rory. Shouts of enthusiasm brought a smile to the colonel's face. "This is it at last. What we been getting ready for all these battles and years."

At about eight o'clock they got the order to form up—Tennessee Volunteers on the right, New York Rifles on the left—and to move in battle formation across field of green wheat toward a grove of trees. What appeared to be only a few redcoats soon became a full regiment as they emerged from the wood and formed a line. The Fenian force closed to within a hundred yards, knelt and fired. Several Canadians fell, and there were shouts, small thin sounds across the open field. The Canadian commander, apparently mistaking the mounted officers of the Fenians for cavalry, began to form his men in a square. As they moved to the new formation they ceased firing. Distracted by the danger, fumbling their ramrods, slow at reloading, they allowed the Fenians to move in at will. They screamed in terror and fell by the dozens. Irishmen cheered as they moved to within fifty yards. After a few minutes of close range firing, The Queen's Own Rifles broke ranks and ran for the woods. O'Neill decided not to follow them, but to re-form in the wheat field and see if they would return. After half an hour of waiting it was clear that they would not. The Battle of Limestone Ridge was over. For the first time since 1798, an Irish force had defeated an English one.

A long wait ensued. The officers held council, and the men rested. John walked through the young wheat to the redcoat he believed he had shot. There were two corpses, a few feet apart. John knew by the way the arms and shoulders had gone forward that his was the chest shot body. The other fellow was gut shot and lay on his side. He had had time to undo his tunic and trouser buttons for a look. John rolled the man over onto his back. A young fellow, eighteen maybe, clear green eyes, a few freckles, bucktoothed. The sort who would lisp. "Any money on him?" a nearby voice asked. John rose and shrugged. "Good boots," he said. "Too small for me." He looked around. No sign of a white flag ambulance detail. There were a dozen dead and maybe fifty wounded, some of them sitting, one of them bawling, and a hundred or so Fenians had come forward to inspect. "God, they really can die," came a voice from another direction. "I wouldn't have believed it," answered Rory. "We did not come the long road for nothing this time, Johnny." John went to the chest-shot soldier, squatted down for a closer look. He appeared to be even younger than the first. Blond haired, boyish face. He had curled up to be alone with his death.

Ahead, Rourke stood before the bawling redcoat, taunting him. "Where does it hurt? Show mommy."

"My leg," the fellow bawled.

"Jesus," John said and turned quickly to walk back. Rory joined him.

Rourke's husky voice bellowed, "Here's another for ye, a thank you from the people of Ireland for all ye've done for us." The bawling turned to a scream. A sharp rifle pop. The scream went high, seemed to express disbelief and outrange more than pain, ran out of breath, did not resume. A little laughter, almost lost in the open air.

"Here, a souvenir," Rory said, and handed John a small button. "A good day's work and not even noon yet."

John looked at it, a small dull pewter thing with a crude pattern. A lion? Hard to tell. No glint of treasure. He was about to toss it into the trampled wheat, but changed his mind and put it in his pocket.

The brigade formed up on the road and marched back to the old fort, a relic of the War of 1812, a mile upriver of the city of Fort Erie. About two hundred Canadian defenders put up a token resistance for a little more than an hour before retreating with three wounded, none killed. The grounds surrounding the fort had been made into a park and the men lolled on the grass, some sleeping, while the leaders held another council. Colonel O'Neill walked among the men, congratulating them. "Can we go inside?" someone asked.

"Good idea," he replied. "Sergeant, post a company of volunteers at the battlements. Get some people up on that tower to observe."

Inside the fort, John, along with Rourke and a couple of other Tennessee boys, explored the barracks, the mess, the brig. "An Irish fort!" Rourke shouted, raising his arms to the heavens. "We can defend this until hell freezes. And they'll bring new regiments—we'll expand this. This is our stronghold, see? This plan is genius. Pure genius. I proclaim New Ireland! Get the flag up that pole!"

But the Irish tricolor never flew over Fort Erie. At the council of war, scouts had reported that the U.S. Navy had put the revenue cutter _Michigan_ in the river to prevent reinforcements and that the main Canadian force of twenty thousand was two days march away. Food was short. O'Neill favored holding the fort, but the other officers favored a return to New York. The two Irish-American regiments occupied the fort for less than a day before re-crossing the Niagara.

Upon their return, O'Neill's force was placed under arrest. The men spent the afternoon in the former parole barracks outside of town. Toward evening someone opened the gate. A police sergeant shouted something that John did not hear. But it was clear that they were free to leave.

Twenty-five of the invaders were captured by the Canadian force, which arrived before the slow-moving ferry could take them back. They stood trial and were sentenced to death. Under strong political pressure, Secretary of State William H. Seward got the sentences reduced. All the men except one, who died in prison, were home before 1870.

"Of course it was worth doing. Any punch on the snout of those bastards is worth doing." Rory was outraged that John had raised the question. They were having a valedictory pint at a tavern in Buffalo. John's train for Chicago was due at midnight.

"They looked a little young to me. For soldiers."

"Our brothers and sisters didn't look young? Do you suppose any of them worried about that?"

"Right. We've been over that. Why did they let us go?"

"Politics."

"So, what next?"

Rory was studying him closely. "You're a very peculiar fellow. You come all the way out here, fight like the banshee, and then you go all philosophical mush."

John moved his beer mug in the puddle of condensation it had made on the bar, widening the circle. "Just wondering. Wondering is not so peculiar, I'm thinking. I wonder about it a great deal. Can't figure out an answer. On the one hand, the bastards who starved us deserve it. But these were not the same bastards. I doubt the real villains of the piece in London care any more about them than they did about us."

Rory, hunched over, stared into the bottles behind the bar. After a minute he said, "The Rossa is in New York now. He says what you say. No point in shooting their soldiers. They can always find more soldiers, and half the time they find them in Ireland. Just go where they live, he says, and blow them to smithers. He's getting up a dynamite fund. Plans to go to London with a carload of the stuff. Blow up the London Bridge, Saint Paul's, Whitehall, whatever he can."

John finished his beer, pushed the mug toward the bartender. "Another?"

"Sure," Rory answered.

"Again," he said to the bartender. "What I am thinking is that I am out of this. For good. Going out to Montana."

"And forget about Ireland?"

"No. I suppose not. But . . . but no more of this," he said, finally.

The train arrived nearly on time. As the passengers boarded, it took on coal, which roared in the chute. They shook hands goodbye without speaking. Ten days later, approaching St. Paul in the steamer, John saw them on the levee, tall Kate holding Aidan's hand, Megan, a foot shorter, putting the hair from her face. It was a cool day for late July, cloudy and windy, a few drops of rain. They had not seen him yet. Kate bent to do something with Aidan's clothing, tidying him. No more, he thought again. Enough. When she looked up he took his hand from his pocket to wave and something metallic fell to the deck. He saw it was the button Rory had given him. He kicked it into the water and raised his hand again.

"Denver, Salt Lake. With the stage you'll be there in two months, two and a half at the most. That's good time. Very good time." The agent was a round little fellow with a wattly frog face which shook when he made his strong points. "But you're going to be minus two thousand dollars approved bank currency. Got to be currency from a bank on our list here. Or one thousand specie or gold dust. That's for the four of you. Child travels half fare. And that way there is Indians. Now, the other way is you can boat all the way: down to St. Louis and out on a Missouri River boat, six hundred dollars, give or take, but that's going to take three months. Four months, maybe. Comfortable. More comfortable than the stage. You'll have a stateroom. Travel while you sleep. Nothing like it."

John looked out the dirty window at the levee. One boat moored, nose in. A small boat in need of paint, _Jeanette Roberts_. Six hundred dollars, about half of his worldly fortune. He looked out to the river and across to the frame buildings in the hills along the far shore.

"Going prospecting?" the agent asked.

"No. Telegraph job."

"Telegraph job," the man repeated. He shook his head.

"Sounds like you don't think it's a good idea."

"You know anything about Montana?"

"No, not much."

"Hell of a place to take women and children," he said. "You're going out there yourself, prospecting, that's one thing. Taking women and children, that's another. Nothing there but dust with a little gold in it. Here, I got a little garden, I raise a few vegetables. You couldn't raise a burr weed out there. Not a school in the territory. Prospectors digging up the nuggets, highwaymen stealing the nuggets, a few whores screwing for nuggets, Indians ready to scalp the whole shebang, that's Montana. When they swept out America that's where they emptied the dust pan. I'm talking against my own trade here—I'll sell you the tickets in a minute if you want, but I'm guessing I'll see you back here in a year or so with a long face and holes in your pants. What's wrong with here? Or, you don't like the cold weather, St. Louis? Great town, St. Louis. Four tickets for St. Louis on the _Hawkeye State_ , a hundred bucks. Less. Let's see ... Ninety-one dollars. And you'll be there in two or three weeks. Lovely trip. Meals by the best chef in the Midwest included in the price. Six-piece orchestra. Big stateroom. I'll put you in the Ohio room, four beds, Persian carpet on the floor, crystal chandelier. Best boat on the upper river since the Grey Eagle. You won't want to get off."

"Well, thanks. I'll think about it."

The talkative fellow had cheered him, somehow. And convinced him, not by his words but his manner. There were others like him at the telegraph office, comfortable people who talked about their children and their gardens—maybe a little boring, but agreeable. It was mid-afternoon, three hours until his shift. He rode up the hill and along the road to the bridge above the falls. He crossed the long wooden bridge and rode downriver along the high western bank. Minneapolis. Strange combination of Indian and Greek words, a pretentious name for this mess of ramshackle wooden buildings and rutted dirt roads, as bad as St. Paul. South of it was a rolling plain high above the river, patches of woods, an occasional farm house. He came to a road and headed west for a mile or so to a crossroads with a blacksmith shop. Pleasant country. Empty, nearly. Only two farm houses and the blacksmith shop visible. As he rode back, he timed himself with his pocket watch. Forty minutes to the levee telegraph office.

The four of them rode out with a land agent in his cart the next day. A half-mile south of the blacksmith shop on the cart lane was ten acres they could buy for two hundred dollars, cheaper than going west.

Kate and John, with Aidan on his shoulders, walked the boundaries of it with the agent, a wizened old fellow, blind in one eye, Tim Halloran, an Irishman. It stood above a cattail marsh and the mosquitoes were ferocious, but it had a pleasant look to it, some large elms and an oak or two. The western end went downhill to the water, but three-fourths of it was high level ground. John pulled a fistful of the waist-high grass, brown now in late summer, and felt the clod of dirt. Dark soil, rich. It would be good for a garden. And the rest of it would pasture two or three cows.

"Well, our estate in America. What do you think of it?"

"Grand, except for these creatures. They have me bitten to pieces."

"Near the swamp. Why it's cheaper than the others, no doubt," John said. "If we get the grass cut there will be not so many of them."

"You won't get away from those anywhere in Minnesota," Halloran said. "You'll do well here. Nice spot. I even thought about it for myself, but the missus won't move again, she says. Trouble with being a land agent, I keep finding places I like better than the one I'm in."

"Give over the sales malarkey," said Kate. "We might buy it in spite of you."

"We can put a Cincinnati house on it for a hundred and fifty complete with a good stove. They'll haul it out here and have it up in a week. That will do us well enough until next summer and I'll build a house and we can sell the Cincinnati for a hundred. The whole thing is less than the fare to Montana."

Halloran stood a little way off, letting them talk.

"Well, madam?" John took her hand as they walked a little farther.

Aidan pointed to the distance over the swamp and chattered in a more or less approving tone, John thought.

"That's a vote in favor, I think."

"All right, then. A few midges can't stop us after the way we've come."

John turned back to the agent. "I've got a hundred and fifty. That's all the money I have just now."

Halloran cocked his head and gave John a look. "Find another twenty-five and we'll do business," he said. "Specie. I don't take paper."

"Sorry. One-fifty. Far as I go." John waited for a response, and seeing none he gestured to the women to get back on the cart.

Halloran waited until the cart began to move. "One-sixty, then."

"Bye. Good to meet you." John snapped the reins and the cart started down the road.

Halloran came running after them. "One-fifty. One fifty," he called out.

John stopped the cart horse.

"You'll need a well, too," Halloran puffed. Gustafson at the blacksmith shop will dig you one. He's as good as any, Gus. Dollar a foot, last I heard. Forty foot will do it here. Another fifteen dollars for the pump and you're in business."

Meagher assumed the office of acting governor of Montana Territory. The most immediate and troublesome issue had to do with supply trains being robbed by Indians and bandits. He hired a few officers to ride with the wagons and found it necessary to ride along himself to keep the lieutenants, as he called them, honest. The first train of the year, when the snow had melted and the muddy roads became fit for travel, was usually the largest of the year. In April of 1867 he led a supply party from Virginia City to Fort Benton, pulled by twenty oxen. On the third night out a guard woke him. Just across the gully a band of Sioux seemed to be waiting for sunup, their usual time for attack. Chief Red Cloud had announced that he would expel the "visitors" before the next snowfall. Not coincidentally, Meagher suspected, a half-dozen lieutenants had reported that they were otherwise occupied and could not make the trip. Only two recently recruited officers accompanied this train and, not yet paid, they were complaining and threatening to quit. He woke Pebscot and the two officers and they went from wagon to wagon arguing and cajoling men to defend the camp. Most had gold dust in their wagons and were reluctant to leave it. By dawn he had set up a line of fifty. In the bare light from across the gully, well within rifle range, the Sioux, motionless, eyed them for half an hour. Twenty-five of them by Meagher's count. "Hold your fire, gentlemen," Meagher said to his troops. Then, with no audible command, the Sioux turned all at once and rode off to the east.

The rest of the journey to Fort Benton was a din of complaining men. Four had had their gold stolen while defending the train. They insisted that the territorial government pay their losses. Meagher knew it was hopeless, told them there was no point in submitting claims as there was no tally of how much gold each miner had. One of them, a whiny and nearly toothless old fellow, followed close behind him all morning. "Them Indians wouldn't of attacked us. You was just gettin' us outa our wagons, so's your friends could rob our dust. I'm gonna come for you, Tommy Meagher, when you ain't got all your friends around, see?"

Meagher rode on, ignoring him.

"How would your nice New York wife like to hear me tell the tale of Pennsylvania Polly and her visits to your office before she got here? How would she like to know that the territorial office was full of whores day and night?"

Pebscot drew his revolver. "Why don't I just put a hole in him?"

Meagher turned in the saddle. "I've told you enough times that I didn't have anything to do with taking your god damned dust. If you want to see Fort Benton tomorrow, get yourself somewhere where I can't see or hear you or I will permit my friend here to improve the average intelligence in this territory."

On a hot afternoon on the first of July, 1867, Meagher and the two militia officers rode into Fort Benton at the head of the ox team. The officers were slender, bearded men, one blond, a lieutenant, the other brown-haired, a captain, all three dusty and tired. Pebscot, having ridden ahead, came out of the hotel into the baking street to greet them. He snapped a half-serious salute.

"Gov'nor! Good to see you." His usual hoarse roar was subdued in the heat.

Meagher slid slowly from the saddle without answering.

"He's done in some with the heat," the blond-haired man said.

"Lucky he's alive," Pebscot answered. "Come on, Gov', I'll get you inside."

Pebscot put an arm around him and helped him into the hotel, where it was no cooler. "God damn shame the governor of the territory has to come himself for an errand like this." He eased Meagher into the only soft chair.

"Acting," Meagher said after a minute. "Same as when I was a general. It's all acting, Penrod. 'A little hour upon the stage,' is that how it goes?"

"Damned if I know. How what goes? It's hot as blazes, and you're looking a little peakéd there. Let me get you a restorative. They got some good blackberry wine here."

"Water first, please," Meagher said.

"You got any word on the shipment?" the captain asked.

Pebscot answered. "It passed Fort Union a week ago." He handed Meagher a glass of water. "It's Johnny Doran's boat bringing it. You know Johnny from Chattanooga."

Meagher sipped the water, which was unpleasantly warm. "I know twenty Johnny Dorans. Everybody named Johnny Doran is a skinny fellow all bent over from sniffing priests' arses. All Johnny Dorans should be lined up and shot." He took a long drink of the water and coughed.

"Hey. Steady, gov'nor. He's bringing your rifles. Here, try a little of the blackberry."

"God damn sweet rubbish. Give me a whiskey. Lined up lengthwise, I mean. Shoot ten of them with one bullet."

"No, gov'nor. Take this. It's good for what ails you."

"Didn't say what kind of rifles, did he?" Meagher asked.

"No, just twenty-five hundred. And eighty boxes of ammunition. We can plunk a few redskins with that."

"Buck and ball. That's what we had in the war. Give me smooth bore every time. God damn Sherman, probably sent whatever he wanted to get rid of. Do you know that bastard has plagued my whole military career, started by complaining about my field day at Camp Corcoran, and now here he is again. He hangs over me like a dark cloud." That wasn't so bad. Again, sir."

"And some specie for to pay us. Did old Tecumseh happen to say anything about that?" the captain asked.

Pebscot laughed.

Meagher drank another small glass of the dark, sweet wine. "Thank you kindly, good sir. That is some better, as they say in these parts."

They heard the steamer just after dark. Meagher and his men came out of the hotel and went across the street and stood on the levee. A late blizzard in the mountains was melting rapidly now. The normally placid river was loud, churning, slapping the pier timbers.

"So, you're not impressed with General Sherman's generosity?" Pebscot asked.

"Generosity," Meagher said in a scornful whisper. "Forty cents a day for a man and a horse. You couldn't feed a cat on that. But I am learning American ways. There are expense accounts. My cats will sup."

The men laughed.

"How much you bill them for that horse you rode up on?" the captain asked.

"That is a five-hundred-dollar horse."

"Hit must of swallered some gold nuggets," the blond lieutenant said.

"Enough of your cynicism. That horse has spiritual qualities."

"That's a right decent house you built for the missus back in Alder Gulch," the lieutenant said.

"Virginia City, if you please."

"That's enough of that, now," Pebscot said. "And the house is just a big log cabin. She's used to much grander than that."

"It's all right, Pebby. They have risked themselves these months without pay. They have a right to their skepticism."

"I hear 'Lizabeth ain't too pleased you're out after the Sioux."

"Hey. I said enough!" Pebscot roared.

"That's right," Meagher answered. "She thinks we're just like the English going after the Irish. Says I've switched sides. Become a redcoat."

"Jesus," the lieutenant said. "I've heard some bad things said about the Irish, but comparin' 'em to Indians . . . that takes the biscuit, don't it?"

"Could be. Could be she's right."

Meagher's words were inaudible as the boat, a sidewheeler, coming bow-in to the levee, let its steam from the boiler. The splash of paddles ceased. Hissing, it eased into its slip. Meagher saw the name across the texas: _G. A. Thompson_.

"That you, Tommy?" Doran leaned over the pilot deck rail.

Pebscot returned the greeting for him. "It is, Johnny. Hello, old man."

Two crewmen made the boat fast to the levee and slid the plank into place. A few passengers got off.

"Come up, there," Doran shouted. "All of yez."

The men walked up the plank and climbed the short stairs to the upper deck. Meagher bent as he came through the doorway.

"Have a chair. Jesus, you don't look so good, governor. Take the good one there."

"Long ride up. How are you, Johnny?"

"He's all bent over with kissing priests' arses," Pebscot said. "Did the rifles get here?"

"They did. You may rely on Johnny Doran. And devil the priests' arses. Your army diet is what bent me over. The scurvy, thanks be to our great Uncle Samuel and his ration of hard crackers. That's what I was in Chattanooga for. Good trip this time. Enough water for once."

"And the pay for the officers?" the captain asked.

"Safe as biscuits. You may have it when you want it, Tommy."

Doran got out a bottle and poured five small ones. Meagher slid down in the captain's easy chair, took the whiskey at a gulp, stretched his legs and closed his eyes. The men talked for an hour. Nearly asleep, he listened to the buzz of voices. The face of that old man who had lost his bag of dust kept coming back to him. That voice. It was all the voices. The other Thompson, Ambrose, of the Chiriqui Improvement Company, and McMasters, who had accused him of dishonor in violating his ticket of leave, and Henry Raymond of the _Times_ , who had ridiculed his every move. And now even Elizabeth. _Seeking your own advancement. It's just what the English generals did in Ireland._ He fought through the dream, fought to make a sound with his own voice. He awoke to the sound of his own shouting.

"Hey, you're all right, gov'nor, just relax." Pebscot's soothing rasp.

"You look like you could use a sleep, there general." It was Doran. "I've got a nice stateroom all made up down below. Why don't you go down? We're going across the way for a bite of supper. Bring you back something if you like."

"No. No. I couldn't eat."

Doran and Pebscot helped him to his bed. Doran pulled his boots off.

"You should have something to eat. I'll bring you some soup."

"Stay with me, Johnny."

"What?"

"There's someone followed us here. Thinks I robbed him. I'm not sure I'm safe here."

"You're safe, Tommy. I got crew on board. Two on guard now. No one's coming on without I say so."

Meagher lay in the bed a few minutes, heard the voices of the men recede. He lay thinking vague thoughts, not wanting to sleep. The voices. The boat moved a bit in its ropes with the current and bumped the levee, moved out, bumped again. He rose and sat on the edge of the bed. Call of nature. He felt his way out of the room, followed the rail to the rear deck and walked out in the dark, moon not up yet, hands out for the aft rail, and fell. Cold startled him. Stark awake, he tumbled in the current. It must have been a section of rail missing. A good joke. He managed to get his head above water and shouted once into the clear sky. Futile against the water's wash. Something struck the back of his legs and the stars disappeared. He was under again. Enough. He relaxed his limbs, letting the dark element turn him gently into its colder depths. He raged for a breath, but it was an old trick, this rage. It had gulled him before. This time he would win. His head scraped sand, then nothing, the turning dance nearly over now.

John pinned the message to the news board. The little man from the Pioneer stood alongside him.

"Ha. Drunk, I suppose." Copying the details into his book, he clicked his tongue. "Gets through all them battles and dies falling off a boat. Jesus."

John returned to his key.

Arriving home in the evening, he found that the news had preceded him. Gustafson, who had dug their well, and was now building the new house, had it from the fellow who delivered the lumber.

"It's too bad about him," Kate said. She was letting Megan get the supper this evening. "Take them off the heat," she instructed from her chair. "Then dip them out with the strainer. You can let the water cool before you pour it out. It's too bad. God knows there's enough hopeless cases of Irishmen like him. You're all a little that way, you going off to that useless thing in Canada, whatever it was."

John had taken Aidan on his lap. "She reminds me of my errors from time to time. It's a very useful thing, to be kept in mind of them, and I'm grateful to her for it, and she having told me beforehand and all."

Megan laughed, a sound John always enjoyed. "And what would you say of a man who did nothing at all against them?" Megan asked.

"Right for you, Megan Tierny. Isn't she right?" he asked Aidan. "And you're going to have a birthday."

"I'm going to be four," Aidan said, holding up fingers.

"Is that four?"

He counted them off. "It is."

"And you're to have a little brother or sister soon, too, aren't you?"

"Yes. I don't' want a brother or sister."

"Hm. Well, you may change your mind. Sometimes they're nicer than you expect."

"And have you sent your answer to Mister Rory Lynch?" Kate asked.

"I have. I have declined the honor, as you suggested. Wisely suggested."

Rory was on tour with the Fenians, a series of fundraising picnics at which the Battle of Limestone Ridge, as the Canadian raid had come to be called, was reenacted by men who had participated. "You should hear them cheer when the redcoats start falling. And the money rolls in," Rory had written. The money was for a third invasion.

"I'll go see him when he's here, though. Hoist a pint for the old days. And, I suppose I'll send a few dollars for the Meagher memorial. It will be in Montana, no doubt."

"Well, I think it's ready," Megan answered. She placed the plates and the bowls of stew and potatoes on the table, a job usually done by Kate.

"It is lovely indeed," John said, taking his seat. "You are a wonder. You've become very good at this."

"She's getting practice. The big performance will be tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" John asked. "What's tomorrow?"

"Company coming. She's blushing."

"Ah, company. Mr. Erik Gustafson, I'm guessing."

Gustafson had stayed for supper a few times. An amusing, lively fellow, he played the guitar and sang and was always up on the news from the cities.

"That's quite a guess," Kate said.

"Well, good. He seems a right enough chap."

"And you are to be very nice to him. Bring home a little beer tomorrow," Kate said.

"A little beer. How advanced is this whole thing? Has he officially asked?"

"No. He wants to speak to you. Ask your permission, like," Megan answered.

"Marrying a Swede. What do you think of having a Swedish uncle, Aidan me boy?"

"Good," Aidan answered with his mouth full, referring to Gustafson or the buttered potatoes or some combination of the two.

Well, I think that settles it, then. I'll say ya to Mr. Gustafson."

"And don't be mocking his accent," Kate said. "'Tisn't as if we speak the queen's English ourselves, you know. He's a hard worker. Did you see he did the whole of the roof frame today? And he says he'll have the whole roof done this week yet if the rain holds off."

"I did see that. We'll be moving in before the leaves fall."

"A little more of the stew?" Megan asked.

"I will have another dollop. What is that flavor?"

"A bit of the garlic you brought, I've put in. And the new onions and carrots from the garden. They're ready now. And we'll have the new potatoes soon."

"It's very good."

"I'm thinking we should go into town on Saturday," Kate said. "You're not working, are you?"

"No. Sunday evening I'm on. Six to six in the morning."

"Saturday afternoon then. They've reduced prices on clothing material at the Parker's Store. We could all use a few things. And we have some time to sew now, before I lose my help. Aidan has grown out of all his trousers and his shoes are too small."

"He has his father's height," Megan said. "And he's a good worker too. He helped Erik for hours out there today. You're a good sawdust sweeper, aren't you?"

"I sweep it all clean, and I pick up the wood when he saws them and I put them in the pile."

"And that's why you need some new trousers and shoes. For all that working," Kate said. "And he'll be off to school in the fall. Every day down to the St. Anthony day school."

"Your father was a good student, so you will be, too, I'm sure," Megan said.

Aidan pointed at his father. "Pa's crying."

A thing that hadn't happened to him in years. Something in him had relaxed. He didn't know where it came from.

"Is it Meagher you're thinking of?" Kate asked.

John made no answer.

"No," Megan said. "I think it's only that this is it. We have got here at last. Is that it?"

He nodded. It was.

Sources

_Memoirs of Thomas Francis Meagher,_ edited by Michael Cavanagh

Hall's Ireland: Mr.& Mrs. Hall's Tour of 1840

_This Great Calamity,_ Christine Keneally

_Annals of the Famine in Ireland,_ Asenath Nicholson, edited by Maureen Murphy

_The Great Irish Famine,_ : Words and Images from the Famine Museum,

Strokestown Park, County Roscommon, Stephen J. Campbell

_Famine Diary: Journey to a New World,_ Gerald Keegan

_The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,_ edited by Seamus Deane

Passage to the New World: Packet Ships and Irish Famine Emigrants, 1845-1851, David Hollet

_Fenians and Fenianism,_ John O'Leary

_The Gangs of New York,_ Herbert Asbury

_The Hone and Strong Diaries of Old Manhattan_ edited by Louis Auchincloss

_American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles,_ Thomas Keneally

_The Great Shame,_ Thomas Keneally

_The Civil War: A Narrative,_ Shelby Foote

_The Irish Brigade,_ Capt. D. P. Conyngham

_Remember Fontenoy! The 69_ th _New York and the Irish Brigade in the Civil War,_ Joseph G. Bilby

_The Year of the Fenians: An Illustrated History of the Fenian Invasion of the Niagara Peninsula,_ David Owen

_The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866-1870,_ Hereward Senior
Note

The lives of the historical characters in this novel, such as Smith O'Brien, T. B. McManus, John Mitchel, Dan Sickles (including his leaving the Gettysburg battle with shattered femur smoking a cigar) are from the books listed above. Verbatim speeches of Meagher in the novel are in italics. Speeches not in italics are ones that he should have given but of which there is no trace in the historical record.

Acknowledgements

Patricia Zontelli, Warren Lang, Willard Bailey, and Rene Karel have read the book and made valuable suggestions, as has my wife, Jeanette O'Neill. Ted Gilles of CreateSpace thoroughly proofread and edited the book. Susan Roethke did a great amount of typing. I thank them all.

About the Author

William O'Neill received a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Minnesota. He worked as an English professor. His previous publications are nearly all on Irish literature. He is retired now, living in the woods of northern Wisconsin with his wife, Jeanette.

http://williamfoneill.com

