Redemption - Leon Uris [117]
“I told my folks I had a singing engagement at the girls’ school in Dun Laoghaire and that I’ll be staying over with a friend.”
He was out of his chair in a blink and seized her. “No profanity till after dinner,” she managed between kisses and his fumbling with her buttons. “Or we’ll starve…once we start up…and everything like that…you know…”
“Oh Molly, Molly, Molly.”
They stood huffing in each other’s faces, eyes drifting off to dream stuff… .
“…you hungry?”
“…not really.”
“…me, either.”
“…the translations?”
“…tomorrow… .”
Thump, thump, thump, thump. Outside, a bloody drum! A blurred message from marchers whooping it up, “Free Conor Larkin! Free Conor Larkin!”
Jeremy went into a quiver of clenched fists and clenched teeth, nearly shutting off his own breath. “I love Conor so!” he blurted without meaning to do so. “Molly, we must have done something terrible to make a man like Conor turn on us. It was that bloody factory fire!”
Molly turned away in frustration. Everyone had warned that her affair with the Viscount Coleraine was doomed from the start. Every year gentrified college lads fell desperately in love with nice sorts like her, away from their parents’ eyes. And one day their college was done and they were gone.
But did not she and Jeremy have something grander? Somewhere, somehow, someday the diverse peoples of Ireland would have to start getting along with one another. The cases in point would have to be strong, like her and Jeremy. If two people could love each other so and not make it, then the country could never make it.
Jeremy now roiled against Conor and the Brotherhood. Molly closed her eyes and moved from his view. She wanted to shout at him, “You’d better learn about the potato famine, Jeremy, and before that the penal laws, and before that, death by Oliver Cromwell!”
Why must two decent people find out that their love always has to be a defiance of history? It was not that Jeremy wasn’t one of the lads. He’d done the Irishtowns of the Midlands. His hero was a Catholic rebel. Yet, when one is raised in Hubble Manor, no matter how liberal the countess was, privilege was divined into him so that below a certain line of compassion, Jeremy was unable to understand suffering, humiliation, and slavery.
Jeremy was like the “decent” slave owners of Alabama and the Caribbean. He could only delve so deeply into black men and women before his “natural” order of superiority took over. His love of Conor was the exception. His love of Molly, yet to be resolved.
Jeremy merrily rolled along thinking everyone a fine fellow. This worried his father and grandfather enormously as they worked him into a ceremonial role in life. For the Weed and Hubble Ulster scheme to work, the Catholics and Protestants needed to be pitted against one another.
Molly O’Rafferty awakened frightened many mornings, knowing that Ireland’s tragic past had breezed by Jeremy. If he deeply felt the injustice, he’d have to do something about it, and he didn’t have the mustard to buck his father.
His mother never went over the first floor of the factory because she didn’t want to know the misery above. Jeremy’s dilemma about Conor was of the same cloth. He didn’t really want to know why Conor was Brotherhood.
Molly, sweet Molly, what had she gotten herself into? She loved this boy as only a bedrock virgin could love after giving him her treasure.
“You’ll have to make your way to Conor Larkin. You know the people to let you into his prison. You’re going to have to make peace with him, and perhaps Conor will enlighten you about the treacherous waters you and I are in.”
“Mother will stand up for us.”
“There’s more to it than that, Jeremy.”
“I’ll not let anything happen between us.”
“We’re in Ireland, Jeremy, and you’re an Ulsterman with a golden set of credentials which excludes me. If we are to come through this together, you’re going to have to start making some strong decisions.”
As she embraced her lad, Molly knew that this was not the time to bring up the possibility of her pregnancy.
44
The house