Redemption - Leon Uris [44]
Dublin was a provincial place. The inner circle of the revival was counted in a few dozen who were constantly rubbing elbows with one another at meetings and saloons.
Atty had met Desmond Fitzpatrick, a formidable barrister who worked a great deal in London. It wasn’t until he moved permanently to Dublin to take on a series of court cases and she took the lead in a long-running new play that they had a chance to extend their time together.
Desmond Fitzpatrick, an early follower of Parnell, was in his late twenties, the scion of an old Norman Catholic family from the genre who had conquered Ireland for the English in the twelfth century. After a time the Normans integrated to become “more Irish than the Irish.” The Fitzgeralds, Barrys, Roches, Burkes, Joyces, and Plunketts became the mighty Earls of Ireland before they, too, were ground down under the Cromwellian heel. They had fared better than their poor Gaelic coreligionists, the croppies.
As the Catholics emerged from generations of darkness in the nineteenth century, those of Norman ancestry made up a large part of the Catholic middle and upper classes.
Desmond was a long fellow, some six foot four, and joked that he and Atty should be together more often because they were the only two who could see each other over the heads of a roomful of Irishmen.
He was deeply moved by her performance in the new play Elvira the Hackler. The drama decried the horrors of the linen mills of Belfast. Atty ranged from a gallant and spirited rebel to a wasted drunk with tuberculosis, made worse by the linen dust and slimy wet floors of the mills where the hacklers-worked barefoot.
Atty owned this play and her audience. Nothing onstage could take the focus from her, she was that dominating. On that special night Desmond Fitzpatrick leapt to his feet leading the chorus of bravos as Atty, bowing low, arid the curtain fell to the stage floor simultaneously. Desmond fancied himself a bit of an actor, as did most barristers. They balanced one another marvelously as players offstage. Atty had the raw rage and power of a warrior while Desmond Fitzpatrick had the wit and cunning of a Shakespearean conspirator.
His early career was as a Land League lawyer, defending the tenant farmer with notable success. Even when Desmond lost a case, he shook things up.
Then came a stint in Parliament as a member of Parnell’s “Pope’s Brass Band.” When he returned to Dublin and the revival, he worked for years as the political liaison for the Irish Party until it became stagnant.
Dublin was it, now. Desmond reckoned he could take nips and bites out of the steel web of legal entanglement by which the British controlled the Irish.
He pressed a theory called “Victor’s Validation,” which claimed that one nation could not own another nation either under God’s Law or, more appropriately, under British Common Law. Using British precedents and landmark cases of Common Law against the British proved a nightmare for the judges. Each time Desmond won a point, he weakened the British legal position just a mite but meanwhile laid monumental groundwork, not only for the Irish, but for all colonized peoples.
To repay Desmond’s visit to Elvira the Hackler and pacify her own curiosity, Atty went to the Four Courts to watch his performance in a small but far-reaching case.
Using his robes like a toreador, his wig askew, Desmond played fox and hounds