A Passionate Girl (29 page)

“Mother and Mary,” Annie said, demonstrating that a nonrevolutionary had more practical common sense than Michael and me together. “What's become of them?”

“They went to Limerick, to her sister's house,” Patrick Dolan said, “but they didn't get along. So the last I heard, just before I left, they removed to a cottage in Killarney, where they're in hopes Mary can find work in the hotels.”

“Killarney,” I said. “They don't know a soul down there.”

“That was Mary's idea, I think,” Patrick said. “She wanted to go someplace where she wasn't known. There wasn't a hope of her gettin' married in the old district. There's such a terror of losin' Lord Gort's favor.”

“I'll lay that man in his grave if it's the last thing I do on this earth,” I said.

“How—how can you hope to do it, Bess?” Annie sobbed. She was still weeping terribly. I had a sudden premonition that she might find it harder to live with this news than either Michael or I would, but I brushed it aside. Hatred was already beginning to obliterate sympathy and every other human feeling from my mind.

“I know the man who will do it for me,” I said.

I meant Dan McCaffrey. I know I could depend on my Donal Ogue when it came to murder.

Riding downtown in a hackney cab, I discovered that Patrick Dolan was staying at Sweeney's Hotel. Michael debarked at Union Square and headed for Moffat House. Patrick continued down Broadway with me. I managed to avoid personal conversation by pointing out City Hall, Stewart's department store, and every other sight worth mentioning. Patrick was stunned by New York's size and bustle. He was amazed by the pace of the crowd rushing along Broadway and shrewd enough to observe the contradiction between the rushers on the sidewalk and the clogged traffic in the street.

“If everyone's in such a hurry, why does it take so long to get someplace by horse, no less?”

“New York doesn't claim to make sense. It just exists,” I said. “You have to take it or leave it.”

“I think I'll leave it,” he said.

He asked me to join him for a bite to eat. Instead I invited him up to our suite, where I brewed some tea for him on a little gas stove we had installed in a corner of the room. “You're looking worn out,” I said. “Was it a hard voyage?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I came on the Bristol steamship. It scarcely took ten days. It's for you that I'm worn down, Bess. I'm afraid I took your leaving harder than anyone, even your poor mother. I couldn't sleep and barely ate for a good month, thinkin' of you. I knew you were runnin' away from me as much as anything.”

“No, you're wrong,” I lied. If I had heard him say this the previous day, without the terrible news about my father on his lips, I would have felt sorry for him. Now I merely observed him as a phenomenon who might teach me something that would help me consummate my hatred. There was some pleasure and possible profit in being reminded that Bess Fitzmaurice had this much power over a man. The hold I had on Dan, which I had demonstrated perilously but undeniably on the night I had spent with Robert Johnson, was a tenuous thing compared to the thrall in which I held Patrick Dolan. Not even my flight of three thousand miles had shaken it.

“My first intent was simply to guide Michael and the American—Dan McCaffrey—to the coast,” I said. “By the time we reached it, I was partner to a half dozen serious crimes and had no choice but to flee.”

Patrick seized my hand like a desperate man, up to his waist in a sucking bog. “I was hopin' and prayin' you'd say that, Bess. Hopin' against hope that you'd give fresh thought to my suit.”

For a moment I was shaken to my depths by that perfectly ordinary Irish expression, “suit.” It sounded so old-fashioned, it was a cruel reminder of how far I had traveled, mentally and spiritually, in the last six months. It reminded me that for all my publicity and notoriety, no man had so much as hinted at asking me to be his wife. That reflection led to an even sadder one—the difference between the woman who sat here letting Patrick Dolan hold her hand and the girl who had sat beside him on Knockadoon Island near the ruins of Lord Desmond's castle on May Eve. Was she the one who was worn and woebegone beneath her bright makeup? The innocence of that May Eve girl, even some of the pride, was lost beyond recall.

I had not yet learned to hold tight to my hatred, to grasp it to my heart until by a slow deadly process it turned that organ to icy metal. It slipped away from me, and I heard my sad voice saying, “Patrick, I'm not the wife for you now if I ever was. I'm a revolutionary. I've done things that would make me ashamed, if I didn't have a cause to justify them. You want a good honest girl like my sister Mary. I can't be that now.”

“Bess, what the devil are you talkin' about?” he said. “I'm sittin' here face-to-face with you seein' with my own two eyes that you're twice as beautiful as when I last saw you. Anything you've done is between you and the priest in confession and can be cleared up in five minutes. There's no ring on your finger. That's all that I feared to see.”

The word “priest” restored my hatred to me with magical violence. “How can you talk of love with the news you brought?” I said. “If you were a true man, you'd offer me your good right hand and say, ‘It is at your service, Bess, to pull the trigger or wield the knife that puts Lord Rodney Gort in the ground.'”

Patrick Dolan thought for a minute in that calm, steady way I found so infuriating. “What would we gain from that, Bess? I'd probably die on the gallows for it. Even if I got away, I'd have a murder on my soul. Lord Gort's done me an injury, to be sure, and done you a worse one. But is anything to be gained from doin' the worst of all to him?”

“
Revenge
is what's to be gained, the dearest thing in the world to me,” I said. I had my hatred now, gripped to my heart like a mother clutches a diseased babe, careless of the infection's menace. “I have a man who'll do it for me, and that man will have my love, as long as there's breath in my body.”

“I hear no love in your voice, Bess,” Patrick said with that calm unflinching stare.

“He'll think it's love,” I said. “'Tis the same thing, in this world.”

“Not to those that truly love Bess Fitzmaurice, who watched her grow from a wild skinny thing to a proud comely woman. I'll wait for that woman to come back to me. This Fenian girl is a stranger.”

“You'll have a long wait,” I said. “That Bess Fitzmaurice is as dead as Red Hugh O'Donnell.”

“I don't believe that,” he said, standing up.

“What will you do?” I said in my icy voice, refusing even to look at him. In a strange way I feared this man, I felt he had some power over me that I did not understand. I thought of Archbishop McCloskey, entering this same room to confront me with those sad eyes. I told myself it was the power of the past, on which I had turned my back. They wanted to chain me as they had chained Ireland to the humiliations of piety and obedience. America proved the futility of those ideas. Violence, blood, was the only test of power, and power was the only gateway to pride and pleasure.

“Do?” Patrick said sadly. “I've brought my little capital with me, what I could get my hands on quickly. About five thousand pounds. Mayhap I can go into business with it somewhere. Not in New York, but in some neighboring city, some smaller place, where a man can get a footing without fear of being washed away in the torrent.”

“Good luck to you,” I said, and let him go without another word. Even while he spoke of his sober hopes, my hatred was forming my plan of revenge. I lay awake most of the night elaborating it to the utmost detail. The next morning I rose with the dawn and was on my way to Moffat House by eight o'clock. I paid no attention to Michael. His door was closed, and I supposed him to be in his room.

Because I wrote a good hand, I had been working in Moffat House as the secretary of the cabinet, handling the correspondence with the bond-selling committee in the various cities. Occasionally I made a brief tour to New England or Baltimore or some other place that had not yet heard the Fenian girl, but Mike Hanrahan, who had the instincts of an impresario, had warned me against wearing out my welcome with the public and had persuaded Colonel Roberts to let me retire to the wings for a time.

It was as secretary that I stumbled into the scene that tore the Fenian movement to shreds. I journeyed up Broadway, feeling more like a corpse than a girl of twenty. Because I often worked late, I had a key with which I let myself in the big oak door, with its brass knocker in the shape of a harp. In the office where I usually worked, I discovered Michael, John O'Mahoney, and two others poring over books and ledgers, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. There were papers strewn over the tables and on the floor.

“What in God's name is happening here?” I said.

“We've launched a final call—for the truth,” Michael said. “I've at last convinced the president that we're surrounded by the greatest bunch of thieves since Judas betrayed Jesus, and we're gathering the evidence to convict them.”

“Why do this now, when all is going so well?” I said.

“The news from Ireland—Michael told me about your father—should be the best answer to that,” O'Mahoney said.

“You know what you are?” I said to him. “A damned old fool. And you're another,” I said to Michael. I stalked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Michael said, following me.

“To tell the men you're trying to ruin. Good God, Michael, does it matter if they stole a few thousand? It wouldn't surprise me in the least. Others are stealing ten times that much every day down at City Hall, and no one is putting them on the block. In Washington, I saw generals and politicians gambling and whoring, and no one says a word against the virtue of the United States of America. Expose us to this disgrace and you'll ruin us.”

“On the contrary,” Michael said. “We'll rescue two million dollars in the treasury, to be spent in Ireland, on Ireland, for Ireland.”

“If you were more of a hero and less of a politician, you'd only want to spend one thing in Ireland—a bullet in the black heart of Lord Gort.”

“We'll see what you think of heroes before we're through with this investigation,” Michael said. “Your Donal Ogue is one of the biggest thieves, from what we've found so far. There may be a few even bigger, like Roberts and Hanrahan.”

I started for the front door, Michael pushed me away and threw an inside bolt. “We need a few more hours,” he said. “You'll stay here by order of the president.”

I tried to wrestle past him to the door. He dragged me down the hall and locked me in a sitting room. He was so hurried that he did not notice the windows faced the street. Soon there was a great commotion, as other members of the staff tried to get in. They banged the knocker and pounded on the door. I flung up a window and shouted the news to them. Two of them went scampering downtown to tell William Roberts. Red Mike Hanrahan appeared next, and I gave him a summary. His face went white. I knew then that there was something to hide, which made things all the worse.

Within the hour, Roberts, Red Mike, and a dozen Fenian senators arrived, with a small army of police. They battered the lock off the front door and marched into the mansion. I was released from my prison room in time to see Roberts serve papers on O'Mahoney informing him that a meeting of the Fenian senate had found him guilty of dereliction of duty and had deposed him as president. A Tammany judge had issued an injunction forbidding the old man access to the mansion. He and his cohorts were barred under pain of imprisonment from taking any documents with them from the files.

Michael acted like a madman. Shouting denunciations, he tried to stuff papers in his pockets and under his shirt. The policemen seized him and solemnly extracted every document. They marched him and O'Mahoney and their helpers to the door of Moffat House and warned them not to return. Michael went straight to the
New York Times
, a paper that was slavish in its admiration of England and inveterate in its hostility to the Irish.

The next morning, we were treated to a juicy story on the front page, describing the Fenians as swindlers who had cajoled millions from the Irish poor. Our accuser was, of all people, John O'Mahoney himself. He claimed to have only just recently discovered the extravagance, misappropriation of funds, and misdirection of the movement that had supposedly been raging for years. The
Times
pointed out with nice sarcasm that this did not speak well for O'Mahoney's perspicacity, but it praised his “sensitive conscience” and agreed with his condemnation of the Canada invasion not only as a land-grabbing scheme but also as a plot to embroil America in a war with England.

John O'Neil, who was heading our operations in the Midwest, reported consternation when this story was reprinted in newspapers there. Dan McCaffrey, who was spending much of his time in that part of the country, sent similar alarms. We shuddered to think of what our lukewarm supporters in Washington, D.C., were saying.

A meeting of the cabinet and senate leaders was convened. Connolly and Peter Barr Sweeny attended, to offer Tammany's support and testify to their solidarity with our side of the quarrel. These two veteran politicians were less troubled by the imbroglio than the Fenians. Tammany Hall had a long history of splits and feuds. There was only one way to settle them—by beating hell out of the other side. They offered their battery of orators to talk the spoilers down in New York and urged us to recruit similar support elsewhere.

The Celtic temperament is naturally pugnacious, and this advice was accepted as wisdom. We launched a furious counterattack on O'Mahoney and Michael. We called them would-be dictators, hungry for power, guilty of the very extravagance and peculation of which they were accusing us. We vowed we had nothing to hide; our books and our plans were open to the whole world. They wanted to return the Fenians to the narrow path of the secret society. We had opened our ranks to the onward march of a whole people. The American government was endorsing our plan to conquer Canada and letting us buy guns from its arsenals. Our regiments were drilling openly in the streets of Chicago and Nashville and New York.

O'Mahoney and Michael and their circle replied in kind. They draped themselves in the mantle of O'Mahoney's purity and declared they alone were the true Fenians. They began raising their own funds and recruiting their own army. To counter Michael, who was making most of the speeches, I was often dispatched to address the same audience and call him a madman—which was not far from wrong. I was made the subject of a cartoon in
Harper's Weekly
for my efforts. I was pictured as the Fenian Joan of Arc, with a whiskey bottle on my head for a crown and a shattered broom in my hand. My face was that of a monkey, a favorite trick of the anti-Irish cartoonists in England and America. They regularly drew on Darwin's theory of evolution to portray the Irish as closer to simians than humans. Another issue of that same English worshipping magazine portrayed the two factions as a pair of drunken Irish apes, fighting over a battered harp.