Redemption - Leon Uris [77]
That was not Des and Atty. He worked into exhaustion, filled to the brim with whiskey, and dropped into bed with a thud. Atty reached for him, but he was already turned away from her, and, in a moment, was dead asleep.
27
When Conor Larkin first came down to Deny from his village of Ballyutogue, he took a fancy to Maud Tully. Maudie was a Bogside lass of generations’ standing, determined to escape the “life sentence” at the shirt factory that had consumed her family and friends.
She became an early daughter of the Gaelic revival, learning the ancient language and spending hours she could scarcely spare in the uplifting environs of Celtic Hall.
The hall was long the office of Kevin O’Garvey as head of the Land League, people’s solicitor, Member of Parliament, and political healer to an endless line of impoverished petitioners. With all his titles, Kevin O’Garvey never knew the surplus of a pound sterling. If he had tuppence in his jacket, he always found someone who needed it more than himself.
After factory hours and a quick meal, Maudie worked for Kevin as an unpaid assistant, secretary, or whatever help she could render to him.
Maudie, like the rest of Bogside, was enamored with Conor Larkin’s arrival, as he became a saint without wings. A great lad on the football pitch, he lectured to turnaway crowds and lifted the hopes of the wanes of Bogside.
Conor and Maudie became truly fond of each other, but he was just putting his toe in the water and she was well launched on the mission to escape Bogside. Setting romantic fervor aside, they remained as “brother and sister.”
It was an entirely different circumstance when Maudie laid eyes on the handsome Myles McCracken, who had the voice of a songbird, and gentle and honorable ways. Myles had followed Conor from the village of Ballyutogue and gone to work in Conor’s forge as an apprentice. Maudie figured that with Myles she could follow her dreams out of Deny. Love, marriage, and pregnancy, not necessarily in that order, befell the devoted couple.
To pinch every penny so they might buy a forge in a few years, she contined to work at the shirt factory, and to save rent they moved into an already overcrowded wee house and slept on bedrolls in an alcove in the kitchen.
Brigid Larkin arrived to claim Myles too late.
Myles was a good lunker, but it was Maud, with her smarts born of Bogside, and her compassion that drove her to work for Kevin. She was there for Conor when he needed it most.
Maudie helped Conor work his way through the death of Tomas Larkin. She was there for him when the sudden departure of his boyhood hero, Andrew Ingram, left him puzzled and pained.
She was there when, in a fury of defiance, Conor’s wee forge entered a bid against Caw & Train Graving for an array of ironwork around the country. Caw & Train belonged to the Earl of Foyle, and Conor Larkin was burned out.
Aye, the burnout. That was the moment of challenge and decision. Now, a strange thing happened. Conor’s forge was rebuilt instantly with “secret funds from America” and, stranger still, subcontract work began to fall his way from Caw & Train.
Maudie counted the minutes until Conor would demand to know some of the smoky things happening behind him…but Conor never made the demand.
Instead, he was swept up with the restoration of the great screen in Hubble Manor, and a changed Conor Larkin began to emerge.
Although he still showed up on the football field and drank at Nick Blaney’s with the lads and had a viscount as a water boy for the team, there was a definite drifting away from the hot spot of history, ideals, and ideas that emanated from Celtic Hall.
He complained from time to time that he was so consumed with the great screen that his mind was limp to everything else. Yet he wooed and won a number of ladies, all without the power or ability