Redemption - Leon Uris [80]
Another two dozen witnesses—municipal inspectors, architects, factory owners—testified to the safety of the building.
No mention was made of toilets that did not work for years or windows stuck shut with grime or sand buckets whose bottoms had rotted out or fire hoses that had not worked in a decade or that no fire drill had taken place in ten years because the stairs and landings were too crammed with bolts of linen to move past…a building whose very design all but guaranteed a disaster….
So, the Earl of Foyle went his jolly way and grieving families had a few quid tossed to them.
That’s it! Myles McCracken was admitted to the insane asylum and killed himself. That might have driven a Conor Larkin from Ireland.
Or was it that night after Conor had finished his rounds trying to tend the broken men of Bogside?
Conor climbed up to his flat, a wave of deep sighs holding back some of the pain. Four months had passed, but still there came the rain of ashes after every wind, and it seemed that the smell of rotten corpses found a way out of the rubble. He sensed the presence of someone.
“Who’s here?” he rasped.
“Caroline.”
He lit the lamp and saw her huddled on the settee, cloaked in a monk’s cloth hooded cape so as not to attract notice. On sight of Conor she saw the toll that had been taken on him. He slumped into his reading chair.
“I’ve written you a dozen letters,” she said.
“I’ve not received them,” he answered.
“I never sent them. I tore them up. They were all inadequate to set my feelings down. I don’t feel very good about myself,” she said voice trembling. “I have an overwhelming need to face you.”
“Why?”
“I am torn by a terrible notion about us.”
“Caroline, there is so much confusion and guilt about what happened. That factory did not burn down because you and I fell in love.”
“Part of the reason it burned down was that I am the Countess of Foyle and part of the establishment that allowed it to happen.”
“Good God, Caroline, if there was ever an aristocrat out here who made some efforts to better things, it was you. You couldn’t have known.”
“I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know…. I didn’t know because I never went above the first floor of that wretched place. There was conspiracy on the wind and I made it a point not to find out.”
It was all too far gone to play at games. “Nor did I,” Conor said. He said what he had held in till this moment. “All right. I smelled something wrong the first time Kevin O’Garvey postponed the investigation. His whole life was pointed to bringing the Earl up before his committee and exposing that factory. When he called it off, I did not challenge him because…I didn’t want to know, either! I didn’t want to have to face my hero and have him confess to me that he had made a deal. Not hard to figure out what the deal was, is it? I had my forge, I was on the way. I didn’t say a word when the second postponement came. And then,” he croaked, “nothing was going to take me away from the great screen, and no one except you could understand that. So, we didn’t want to know and we joined the conspiracy by our silence.”
“Conor, hear me. I cannot rationalize this, but there is a reason for our behavior. No man has ever taken on a great work of art without paying a terrible price and creating terrible pain for those he loves the most. But nothing…nothing…nothing could have kept that building from collapsing after my husband and Kevin went into some kind of deal.”
“I keep trying to tell myself that…”
“Hang on to that belief,” she said. “We were both trapped by the system. I came here to plead forgiveness for my part and beg you not to hate me.”
“I believe you. I never went above the first story, myself. God, woman, I could never hate you.”
She arose and came to him and mussed his hair and kissed his forehead. “Take care,” she whispered.
“Aye.”
And she was gone, into a snowfall of ashes.
What was it that drove Conor Larkin out of Ireland?