A Passionate Girl (32 page)

“There's nothing in Buffalo or even New York to match it,” gasped Mr. Balch, and his friend Havemeyer solemnly agreed.

“We have the better class, who had the strength to emigrate,” Havemeyer said.

I was stunned speechless, which was just as well. Limerick was a city I had visited a hundred times, but my aunts lived on a comfortable street in the new town, and my convent school was on the outskirts of this same section. I had never ventured into old Limerick. All I knew of it was some vague words of disapproval spoken by my parents or my aunts.

The English town was not much of an improvement on the Irish town. It, too, swarmed with poor Irish. The major difference was the presence of hundreds of prostitutes in the streets around the English barracks. They stood in the doorways of their houses or leaned from the windows, combing their hair. Many of them were young, and some were as beautiful as any Broadway demimondaine. Mr. Balch and Mr. Havemeyer were embarrassed by the sight of them and spluttered about the “inevitable depravity” of army life.

Returning to our hotel, I began to wonder if I might die of shame, or of undischarged hatred. What should I see lounging on the hotel steps but the most welcome sight I could imagine: Red Mike Hanrahan. He was wearing rough countryman's clothes, chatting away with the hackmen. He tugged on his right ear and began talking loudly about the weather in Dublin. Nothing but rain, he said. It was good to see some sunshine here in Limerick.

It was the agreed-on signal that all was well. Mike had bought a large touring coach and four good horses and was supposedly en route to Cork to meet an American millionaire who was the real buyer. That night after supper, Dan and I announced we needed some fresh air before bed. We strolled into the Irish town, and Mike followed us. We paused on the corner of St. Giles Street, and he tipped his hat and pretended to strike up a conversation with us.

“His lordship is waiting for us,” he said. “He's busy evicting tenants in a five-mile swath. Seventy-two families, five hundred and twenty-two souls, in the past month. His fellow landlords have pitched in to bring the total to seventeen hundred. Never was there a better moment to strike a blow.”

“Where's the coach?” I asked.

“At the livery stable owned by your hotel,” Mike said.

“What have you found out about his lordship's daily routine?”

“Not much. Except that he spends almost all his time upon his estate and seldom comes to Limerick.”

“That's good enough. Tomorrow we'll begin our trips into the country. You can do the same, exercising your horses. We'll meet you here tomorrow night.”

Limerick was not a tourist center. It was primarily a commercial city, so there was no system of guides. Therefore no one made the slightest objection when we rented a chaise the next day and asked for suggestions of sights to see in the countryside. Lake Fergus and the ruined castle of Lord Desmond, Gort House, and the cairn of the old kings nearby were among those suggested—as I knew they would be. We now had every reason to be in the vicinity of the man we wanted to kill.

Red Mike Hanrahan was meanwhile telling his friends at the livery stable that he had received a telegram from his American employer, informing him that he'd decided to stay in London an extra week, so there was no need to hurry to Cork.

The dutiful groom had decided to remain in Limerick for a few more days, because the roads were infinitely better than those in the hills around Cork. Each day he hitched his team of fine dappled grays and rode out for an hour or two. The livery stable manager was of course delighted to keep a customer who paid hard cash and tipped liberally.

Dan was my chief worry. Each day his doubts multiplied and his questions grew more numerous. He saw a hundred ways for the plan to miscarry. I was finally reduced to crooning to him as if he were a baby, “All will be well, all will be well.” Meanwhile, deep within me, other voices whispered the opposite. I was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of rallying people so far gone in degradation. I had already lost faith in the power of my act of hatred, but my will to perform it was still intact. The hatred itself was still alive within me and would swell there like a tumor, I thought, unless it was vented.

The next day, the tenth of March, 1866, we arose from our sleepless beds and descended to breakfast, took our picnic lunch from the head porter, and trilled our enthusiasm for another day in the country. It was perfect weather, a soft spring breeze and a warm sun in a blue sky. In an hour Lake Fergus was in sight, shining like a blessing below its guardian mountains. We avoided the west side, where Ballinaclash and the Fitzmaurice farm lay, partly because I could not bear the agony of seeing them close, and partly because we feared a familiar eye might, by some quirk, recognize me. Our single horse, a sturdy brown gelding, trotted by the gate of Gort House and along a narrow road to the north where thick stands of trees masked the shores of the lake. A woodman's track ran into this little forest. We followed it into the silent shadows.

We sat there for an hour, saying little. We nibbled a bit of our lunch. Dan took his pistol from the carpetbag at his feet and loaded it. I did the same with the pistol in my purse. Across the lake I could see our old house and the cottages of the laborers. They were the size of toys at this distance. It was all unreal. Was I the same Bess Fitzmaurice who had sat outside Malloy's cottage in the sunshine, listening to her prediction that I would marry a rich man? The same headstrong girl who had refused Patrick Dolan's offer of marriage while knowing, dreading, that eventually she would accept it? It was hard to believe anything was real, once you mounted history's whirlwind.

A clatter of hoofs on the road. We both stiffened. Red Mike was here. The coach came creaking down the woodman's path to where we sat. Mike did not have to assure us that he had paid his livery bill and told his friend the manager that he was off to Cork. Dan glanced at his watch as Mike and the horses became visible in the trees. Eleven o'clock. Time to get busy.

With scarcely more than a nod to Mike, we hauled the trunk from the back of the coach. Within it were bottles of cleansing fluid, which quickly enabled Mike to daub the traces of age from our faces. A black wig was fitted over my gray head, and a red wig replaced Dan's gray one. Off came our sedate middle-class clothes. I stepped into a gorgeous dark green traveling dress and donned a velvet hat of the same color, with a dark veil. Dan shrugged into an English tweed suit. A shoulder holster held his gun. A walking stick was another weapon. Mike buttoned me up the back, cursing his thick fingers. “Jesus God,” he muttered. “Who'd think that a sergeant of the Fighting 69th would end up a ladies' maid?”

By eleven-thirty we were ready. In my purse were my gun and my calling cards, which read
MRS. PIERRE LORILLARD RONALDS
. I was impersonating Annie's old benefactor. Dan's card read
GEORGE DANGERFIELD
. He would have no trouble playing one of Mrs. Ronalds's many male friends. We had a firm grasp on these identities, lest his lordship be out and we had to sit and converse with some other member of the family.

By noon we were turning in the gate of Gort House. Mike Hanrahan, wearing the red and yellow livery of a well-tailored coachman, boldly announced our arrival with a call on his bugle. It had taken him the better part of a week to learn it. We should have had another man on the box, but rather than worry about a fourth confederate, we decided it would be easier to explain his absence by a story about an illness that left him sick in bed in Limerick.

We clattered to a stop in front of the house. A scrawny gray-haired doorkeeper ran out. I handed him my card and Dan's. “Is his lordship at home?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, ma'am,” he said.

Our first hope was that Lord Gort would come out to greet us personally. We had no great desire to enter the house, which could easily become a trap.

Within sixty seconds a husky, fair-haired English butler appeared on the steps. “His lordship has just returned from the fields. He begs you and Mr. Dangerfield to wait for him in the library and hopes you can stay for dinner at the very least.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible, at least today,” I said.

I allowed the butler to hand me down from the carriage. Dan followed. We were led down a long center hall covered with swords and armor and frowning portraits of earlier Gorts. The library was a large, pleasant room with a fire in the massive fieldstone fireplace. We walked over to it, moving deep into the room, and stood with our backs to the door, gazing up at an oil painting of the mansion by an artist who must have been aboard a boat in the lake. We had plotted every move, studied every alternative, and decided nonchalance was the key to success. It was better by far to lure him into the room rather than lurk by a door, something no lady would do.

Five minutes stretched into ten. I could see Dan's jaw tightening with impatience and the fear drifting like fog into his eyes. “All will be well,” I whispered.

Footsteps in the hall. Then a cheerful voice crying, “My dear, why didn't you warn me of this American invasion? What is this about not staying for din—”

I was turning as he spoke. Lord Gort stood about six feet away, incomprehension befuddling him as he saw my face. From the rear in my rich black wig I could easily pass for Mrs. Ronalds. Face-to-face he saw a different woman.

“But you're not—”

“No,” I said. “The name is Fitzmaurice. John Fitzmaurice's daughter. The Fenian girl.”

I was drawing my gun as I said these deadly words. Terror banished puzzlement from Gort's face. He threw up his hands as I fired, aiming point-blank at his chest. My little gun sounded like an artillery piece in the closed room.

“Oh, my God, I'm shot,” Lord Gort screamed in a shrill woman's voice.

He whirled, clutching his chest, and staggered toward the door. I fired two more shots that I know struck home, but still he stayed on his feet. From the beginning Dan had argued that he should use his heavier gun with its far more destructive bullets, but I had insisted on my right to vengeance. Now beside me I heard Dan curse, and an instant later his gun boomed. The impact of the single shot sent Lord Gort hurtling out the door into the hall on his face.

We raced for that same door. As we rushed toward it, a terrified face, then the body of a young girl, no more than ten or eleven, appeared in it. She was wearing a white organdy dress with a blue sash, not unlike ones I had worn at that age. She flung herself on Lord Gort, screaming, “Father, Father!”

Incredibly, Gort was still alive. Blood gushed from his back onto the girl's dress. He flailed at her. He was trying to crawl away. We burst into the hall and confronted Lord Gort's wife and two other daughters, both younger than the girl on her knees, and the butler. The wife and the two other girls were shrinking back, screaming hysterically.

We stood there for a pandemonium-filled second. I was numb with the horror and shock of it. Nothing had happened as I imagined it. I had envisioned Gort toppling, dismay and fear on his face, from a single shot, then swift escape while servants cowered beneath our guns. Somehow I had even avoided noticing that Lord Gort was married and had children, daughters. The Sassenach was human!

If I had been alone, I might have died there. I might have handed my gun to that young girl and whispered, “We are even, now you may kill me.” My hatred, which I had imagined was as imperishable and impenetrable as tempered steel, had vanished. I see now that it had been shriveling, withering, from the day I landed in Ireland and began to doubt the cause. This scene of horror and death had been a final ruinating blow.

But Dan McCaffrey had been ordered to kill Lord Gort and paid a thousand dollars to do it. He had seen ten thousand men die in four years of war. No doubt some of them had cried out and tried to run and may even have had a friend if not a daughter plead for them when they fell. But war—which was what we claimed to be fighting here—allowed no place for soft hearts or guilty nerves. Brutal years of experience were Dan's armor against the weakness that was disabling me. With a snarl he shoved the daughter aside and aimed a final shot into the back of the dying man's head. The gun crashed amid the echoing screams.

And crashed again. The butler had seized a sword from the wall and rushed heroically at us, like a man from another century. His reward was death.

“Come on,” Dan roared, and seized my arm with a wrench that almost amputated it. The pain was what I needed to restore some semblance of reality. We raced for the front door. Behind us the screams continued, with one voice, a daughter's voice, louder than the rest: “
You've killed my father! Killed my father!
”

Outside, Red Mike was on the coachman's box and the horses were turned to the gate. We sprang in and were instantly on our way. Out the gate we rumbled and down the road to the north. As we expected, there was no pursuit. In ten minutes of furious driving, we were at the turn to our forest track. Into it we crept. There stood our chaise and faithful gelding, still munching a bag of oats we had provided for him. We leaped from the coach and struggled back into our middle-class clothes. Fiercely to work went Hanrahan, our makeup artist. In ten minutes we had recaptured the wrinkles and gray hair of old age. Dan's mustache was in place, and the handsome young couple who had called on Lord Gort had vanished as if they never existed. Red Mike put on countryman's clothes and discarded the black-haired wig he had worn as our coachman. He lay down beneath our feet in our chaise, and we covered him with a blanket. In ten minutes we emerged from the woods and trotted sedately up the north road around that end of Lake Fergus and headed back to Limerick.

About a mile from the city, on a deserted stretch of road, Mike slipped from beneath the blanket and headed for the railway station on foot. By nightfall, if all went well, he would be in Cork. Within another day or two he would be aboard an immigrant ship for America. Mr. and Mrs. Stowecroft would take a train to Dublin and resume their sightseeing.