Alexandra Ripley - Scarlett

The sound of the second shot was an explosion that echoed deafeningly from the vaulted stone ceilings for a time that seemed forever. Scarlett threw herself to the floor, screaming.

“I’ll ask you to be quiet, Scarlett darling,” said Colum. She knew his voice, and yet it was not his voice. There was steel in this voice, and ice.

Scarlett looked up. She saw Colum’s right arm around the neck of the man, Colum’s left hand around the man’s wrist, the pistol pointing at the ceiling. She got slowly to her feet.

“What is going on here?” she enunciated carefully.

“Close the door if you please,” said Colum. “There’s light enough from the windows.

“What . . . is . . . going . . . on . . . here?”

Colum gave her no answer. “Drop it, Davey boy,” he said to the man. The pistol fell with a metallic crash onto the stone floor. Slowly Colum lowered the man’s arm. Quickly he moved his own arm from its stranglehold around the man’s neck, made two fists with his hands and clubbed the man with them. The unconscious form fell at Colum’s feet.

“He’ll do,” Colum said. He walked briskly past Scarlett and quietly closed the door, slid the bolt across. “Now, Scarlett darling, we have to talk.”

Colum’s hand closed around her upper arm from behind her. Scarlett jerked away, whirled to face him. “Not ‘we,’ Colum. You. You tell me what is going on here.”

The warmth and lilt was back in his voice. “It’s an unfortunate happening to be sure, Scarlett darling . . .”

“Don’t you ’Scarlett darling’ me. I’m not buying any charm, Colum. That man tried to kill me. Who is he? Why are you sneaking around to meet him? What is going on here?”

Colum’s face was only a pale blur in the shadows. His collar was startlingly white. “Come where we can see,” he said quietly, and he walked to a place where thin slats of sunlight slanted down from the boarded-over windows.

Scarlett couldn’t believe her eyes. Colum was smiling at her. “Ach, the pity of it is, if we’d had the inn this would never have happened. I wanted to keep you out of it, Scarlett darling, it’s a worrisome thing once you know.”

How could he smile? How did he dare? She started, too horrified to speak.

Colum told her about the Fenian Brotherhood.

When he finished, she found her voice. “Judas! You filthy, lying traitor. I trusted you. I thought you my friend.”

“I said it was a worrisome thing.”

She felt too heartsick to be angry at his smiling, rueful response. Everything was a betrayal, all of it. He’d been using her, deceiving her from the moment they met. They all had—Jamie and Maureen, all her cousins in Savannah and Ireland, all the farmers on Ballyhara, all the people in Ballyhara town. Even Mrs. Fitz. Her happiness was a delusion. Everything was a delusion.

“Will you listen now, Scarlett?” She hated Colum’s voice, the music of it, the charm. I won’t listen. Scarlett tried to close her ears, but his words crept between her fingers. “Remember your South, with the boots of the conqueror upon her, and think of Ireland, her beauty and her life’s blood in the murdering hands of the enemy. They stole our language from us. Teaching a child to speak Irish is a crime in this land. Can you not see it, Scarlett, if your Yankees were speaking in words you did not know, words you learned at the point of a sword because ‘stop’ must be a word you knew to the very pit of your knowing, else you would be killed for not stopping. And then your child being taught her tongue by those same Yankees, and your child’s tongue not your own so that she knew not what words of love you said to her, you knew not what need she told you in the Yankee tongue and could not give her her desire. The English robbed us of our language and with that robbing they took our children from us.

“They took our land, which is our mother. They left us nothing when our children and our mother were lost. We knew defeat in our souls.

“Do you but think of it now, Scarlett, when your Tara was being taken from you. You battled for it, you’ve told me how. With all your will, all your heart, all your wit, all your might. Were lies needed, you could lie, deceptions, you could deceive, murder, you could kill. So it is with us who battle for Ireland.

“And yet we are more fortunate than you. Because we have yet time for the sweetnesses of life. For music and dance and love. You know what it is to love, Scarlett. I watched the growth and the blossoming with your babe. Do you not see that love feeds without gluttony on itself, that love is an always brimming cup, from which drinking fills again and still more.

“So it is with our love for Ireland and her people. You are loved by me, Scarlett, by us all. You are not unloved because Ireland is our love of loves. Must you not care for your friends because you care for your child? One does not deny the other. You thought I was your friend, you say, your brother. And so I am, Scarlett, and will be until time ends. Your happiness gladdens me, your sorrow is my grief. And yet Ireland is my soul; I can hold nothing traitorous if it be done to free her from her bondage. But she does not take away the love I have for you; she makes it more.”

Scarlett’s hands had slid on their own volition from her ears down to where they now hung limply by her sides. Colum had enthralled her as he always did when he spoke that way, though she understood no more than half of what he was saying. She felt as if she were somehow wrapped ’round in gossamer which warmed and bound at the same time.

The unconscious man on the floor groaned. Scarlett looked at Colum with fear. “Is that man a Fenian?”

“Yes. He’s on the run. A man he thought his friend denounced him to the English.”

“You gave him that gun.” It was not a question.

“Yes, Scarlett. You see, I keep no more secrets from you. I have concealed weapons throughout this English church. I am the armorer for the Brotherhood. When the day arrives, as soon it will, many thousands of Irishmen will be armed for the uprising, and those arms will come from this English place.”

“When?” Scarlett dreaded his reply.

“There’s no date set. We need five more shipments, six if it can be done.”

“That’s what you do in America.”

“It is. I raise the money, with help from many, then others find a way to buy weapons with it, and I bring them into Ireland.”

“On the Brian Boru.”

“And others.”

“You’re going to shoot the English.”

“Yes. We will be more merciful, though. They have killed our women and children as well as our men. We will kill soldiers. A soldier is paid to die.”

“But you’re a priest,” she said, “you can’t kill.”

Colum was still for several minutes. Dust motes turned lazily in the stripes of light from the window to his bowed head. When he lifted it, Scarlett saw that his eyes were dark with sorrow.

“When I was a boy of eight,” he said, “I watched the wagons of wheat and the droves of cattle on the road from Adamstown toward Dublin and the English banquet tables there. I also watched my sister die of hunger because she was but two years old and had no strength to carry her without food. Three, my brother was, and he, too, had too little strength. The smallest always were the first to die. They cried because they were hungry and were too young to understand when they were told there was no food. I understood, for I was eight and wiser. And I did not cry because I knew that crying uses strength needed to survive without food. Another brother died, he was seven, and then the six-year-old and the one who was five, and to my eternal shame I have forgot which was the girl and which the boy. My mother went then, but I have always thought she died more from the pain of her broken heart than from the pain of her empty belly.

“It takes many months to starve to death, Scarlett. It is not a merciful death. For all those months the wagons of food rolled past us.” Colum’s voice sounded lifeless. Then it livened.

“I was a likely lad. Once ten, and the Famine years past and with food to fill me, I was quick at my studies, good at my books. Our priest thought me full of promise and he told my father that perhaps, with diligence, I might in time be accepted in the seminary. My father gave me everything he could give. My older brothers did more than their share of work on the farm so that I need do none and could be diligent at my books. No one grudged me for ’tis a great honor to a family to have a son who is a priest. And I took from them without thought for I had pure, encompassing faith in the goodness of God and the wisdom of Holy Mother Church, which I believed to be a vocation, a call to the priesthood.” His voice rose.

 “Now I will learn the answer, I believed. The seminary contains many holy books and holy men and all the wisdom of the Church. I studied and I prayed and I searched. I found ecstasy in prayer, knowledge in studies. But not the knowledge I was seeking. ‘Why?’ I asked my teachers, ‘why must little children die from hunger?’ But the only answer given me was, ‘Trust in God’s wisdom and have faith in His love.’ ”

Colum raised his arms above his tortured face, raised his voice to a shout. “God, my Father, I feel Your presence and Your almighty power. But I cannot see Your face. Why have You turned away from Your people the Irish??” His arms dropped.

“There is no answer, Scarlett,” he said brokenly, “there has never been an answer. But I saw a vision, and I have followed it. In my vision the starving children came together and their weakness was less weak in their numbers. They rose up in their thousands, their fleshless small arms reaching out, and they overturned the carts heaped with food, and they did not die. It is my vocation now to turn over those carts, to drive out the English from their banqueting tables, to give Ireland the love and mercy that God has denied her.”

Scarlett gasped at his blasphemy. “You’ll go to Hell.”

“I am in Hell! When I see soldiers mocking a mother who must beg to buy food for her children, it is a vision from Hell. When I see old men pushed into the muck of the street so that soldiers will have the sidewalks, I see Hell. When I see evictions, floggings, the groaning carts of grain passing the family with a square meter of potatoes to keep them from death, I say that all Ireland is Hell, and I will gladly suffer death and then torment for all eternity to spare the Irish one hour of Hell on earth.”

Scarlett was shaken by his vehemence. She groped for understanding. Suppose she hadn’t been there when the English came with the battering ram to Daniel’s house? Suppose all her money was gone, and Cat was hungry? Suppose the English soldiers really were like Yankees and stole her animals and burned the fields she’d watched greening?

She knew what it was to be helpless before an army. She knew the feeling of hunger. They were memories no amount of gold could ever quite erase.

“How can I help you?” she asked Colum. He was fighting for Ireland, and Ireland was the home of her people and her child.

The ship captain’s wife was a stout, red-faced woman who took one look at Cat and held out her arms. “Will she come to me?” Cat reached out in reply. Scarlett was sure Cat was interested in the eyeglasses hanging on a chain around the woman’s neck, but she didn’t say so. She loved to hear Cat admired, and the captain’s wife was doing just that. “What a little beauty she is—no, sweetheart, they go on your nose, not in your mouth—with such lovely olive skin. Was her father Spanish?”

Scarlett thought quickly. “Her grandmother,” she said.

“How nice.” She extracted the glasses from Cat’s fingers and substituted a ship’s biscuit.

“I’m a grandmother four times over, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. I started sailing with the captain when the children were grown because I couldn’t stand the empty house. But now there’s the added pleasure of the grandchildren. We’ll go to Philadelphia for cargo after Savannah, and I’ll have two days there with my daughter and her two.”

She’s going to talk me to death before we’re out of the bay, Scarlett thought. I’ll never be able to stand two weeks of this.

She discovered very soon that she needn’t have worried. The captain’s wife repeated the same things so often that Scarlett had only to nod and say “My goodness” at intervals without listening at all. And the older woman was wonderful with Cat. Scarlett could take her exercise on deck without worry about the baby.