Redemption - Leon Uris [43]
Liam became a sad boy, with only Conor’s love keeping him from tearing apart.
Brigid was manipulated away from Myles McCracken, a boy she loved, because he would be landless.
Eamonn O’Neill, Seamus’s and Conor’s early conduit for forbidden books, died in a fire and left a small insurance policy with the proviso that it be used to further Seamus’s education. Seamus moved down to Deny, where Enid and Andrew Ingram tutored him so he could take the entrance exams for Queens College in Belfast. Thus Seamus O’Neill became the first Catholic to attend college in Ballyutogue’s long and anguished history.
Conor’s happiness for Seamus was stifled by his own terrible loneliness. The intensity of the silent war under the Larkin roof became short-fused when Conor won his ironmaster’s certificate. Conor’s hunger for the world beyond was close to consuming him.
The hour, the moment, the second came. Through Kevin O’Garvey, now a member of Parliament, Liam arranged passage to New Zealand. When Conor learned of it, he was thrown into a frenzy of fear that Liam’s departure would chain him to Ballyutogue.
Conor begged his father to let Liam inherit the land. Tomas refused. Both of the sons left Ballyutogue that night, Liam forever to New Zealand and Conor down to Derry’s Bogside.
16
Dublin, 1895
Dublin was a he-man’s world, new pubs lined three deep at the bar, the sporting scene, and the new volatile Gaelic politics of Griffith’s Sinn Fein Party. Ladies of the Anglo-ascendancy—English-born but rising in Irish society—had their saloons, flower shows, and the theatre. Most Catholic girls learned their catechisms, bore the babies, and remained docile about all the worldly matters exploding around them.
Nonetheless, the Gaelic revival was giving birth to a number of extraordinary women cut from different cloth. Among the leaders were a group of Anglo-Protestants whose families had been in Ireland for generations and who finally came to a turn of conscience over British misrule.
None among them was more stunning or daring than Atty Moore, who, barely out of her teens, was fast turning into an Irish Joan of Arc.
On her twenty-first birthday Atty inherited the Barony of Lough Clara. No sooner had the ink dried on the documents than she renounced her title and canceled the debts of the tenant farmers. She sold the manor house and a few hundred acres that surrounded it to a retired British general.
Atty kept the cottage of Darby Murphy and the grounds of the horse-breeding operation, which had always been profitable.
The balance of the barony was given to the peasants along with an office of agricultural experts to help modernize operations and increase yields.
She spent the bulk of her estate to set up scholarships to Trinity College for worthy scholars among the peasants and villagers, and she established a unique girls’ school in Galway to teach job skills from which females had formerly been barred.
The last major grant was made for research into the scourge of tuberculosis in western Ireland.
Atty was ever on the run. If a rent-and-rate strike had been declared in Waterford, she was there. If an epidemic struck Cork, she was there. If unjustified evictions surfaced, she was there. She was there in the scummy cobblestones of Dublin’s Liberties to help abate hunger.
More and more she defied the Crown, speaking at rallies where patience was short and anger was great. At last she was jailed and it caused such an uproar she was released immediately…only to lead another illegal march and be jailed again.
Each time she came through the bridewell gate, she did so defiantly, as though it were her intention to be a guest of the Crown in every prison in Ireland.
After months of nonstop skirmishes or a stretch in prison, Atty would fall out of the scene, retreating to her cottage at Lough Clara. She could lose the Gaelic revival for a time, riding far up into the hills and bens, but the movement soon came after her.
In the cottage, often alone, she would allow herself memories of Jack Murphy and a rereading of their correspondence.