Redemption - Leon Uris [33]
Tender kisses from Atty had been hard to come by. He treasured this one.
“And now, willful, wonderful, wise, angry Atty, allow me to offer you one piece of advice.”
“Of course, Father.”
“Forget about Jack Murphy.”
“I can’t and I won’t.”
“You’re far too strong for him. Forgive me for saying this, Atty, but you’re far too strong for any man I’ve met. But Jack Murphy will not be ground under and unless you can reach an accommodation with him, as you just have with me, then you will grind him under.”
“And if he doesn’t come back? No one else will have me?”
“No one else can hold you, Atty. Unless…and I find this highly unlikely…you fall in love so desperately that you completely lose yourself.”
“What do you believe?”
“I told you. Find an accommodation with Jack or someone, a way you can live together without great passion or great desire to destroy each other. You see, my girl, the man who can make my Atty lose herself does not exist. Be British in this instance. Make an accommodation.”
13
1890
Lord Randolph Churchill had come. The Long Hall of Hubble Manor was packed. Every member of the landed gentry and aristocracy west of Westport and north of Athlone had come. All men of the cloth who were the inheritors of the Reformation had come. Every loyalmost of the loyalmost, the Orange Grandmasters, had come. Beribboned veterans of the Queen’s loyal Ulster regiments had come. And their women.
Shivering from Charles Stewart Parnell’s smashing victory and fearing for their continuation in isolated Londonderry, they heard the archconservative of England play his Orange card. His voice, couched in words to reach beyond the wall and over the sea to Parliament, took dead aim at intimidation of the Liberal Party.
His young son Winston sopped it up for future reference. His father had splayed the unsuspecting foe, broken their ranks, left them reeling.
It was also the first successful adventure of the partnership of Western Ulster, defended by Roger Hubble and the Belfast establishment controlled by Sir Frederick Weed. Between them now, they had a lock on the province’s political direction. Their relationship was consummated by the marriage of Caroline Weed to Roger Hubble. Churchill at Long Hall became one of the most consequential events in the history of Ulster. The moment was a culmination of two different men with two different careers suddenly and daringly merged.
Weed was the bully Scotsman, an entrepreneur in an age of British entrepreneurship. The self-made magnate whose mighty industrial plant was now laying the hulls for steel ships of up to ten thousand tons. The rail king with his Red Hand Express engine and personal train, the envy of every South American dictator and Indian maharajah. Steel from his mills spun the rails that eighty percent of Ireland’s trains ran on. He had accomplished it all, by God, with his great derring-do.
His bastion of Belfast, unfortunately, was the only place where the British had made substantial investments. It stood unique on an Irish landscape bereft of manufacturing. Manned with loyal Protestant workers, Belfast was the solitary enclave of enterprise.
Out on the land, the days of the great estates were ending. Since the potato famine, the gentry had been reduced to tattered curtains and mumbled their pledges to the Crown by rote.
Viscount Roger Hubble, the pending Earl of Foyle, proved an exception. He snatched the earldom from his bumbling father, pensioned him off with his mistress, and not only survived but created a new chapter to add to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution.
Roger Hubble was an ultimate master of creating a cradle-to-grave labor force, which was always in his debt. On the land, his tenant farmers cultivated the raw product he needed and he allowed them just enough acreage to farm food for