Allegiance: A Dublin Novella (25 page)

“Why are you doing this?”

He looked up from the paper. “It’s the easiest way to find a flat.”

She had both hands wrapped around her teacup to warm them. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

William’s brow knit; the question made no sense. He gave her a shrug and went back to his notes, tracing his pencil down the lines, trying to find his place in the columns.

“Mum and Da are gone, William.”

The pencil froze in his fingers.

Meg set her cup down and crossed her arms on the table, her dark hair spilling down her arms. “I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said. “I haven’t been one for quite some time. I’m a Young too, you know – I don’t need a minder any more than you do. I’ve been taking care of myself since the day I whipped the Cumberland brothers for throwing mud on my new school dress.”

“That wasn’t fair,” William said. “I could’ve had them. They double-teamed me.”

They grinned together; in the light from the window he saw tiny lines around her eyes. How long had those been there?

“You’ve done your part by us well, brother. God knows you’ve been a better father to the girls then their real one ever was.” She paused. “Mum and Da would be proud of you.”

“Meg—” William’s voice quavered and he closed his mouth.

“But they’re gone now, love. And you’re here. You’ve buried yourself in their grave all your life, bound up in a service you were never meant to carry. One day you’re going to have to stop living in all of our shadows and step into your own life. You can’t go on like this forever – it’s too much for either of us to bear.” Her voice was gentle but firm. “I was proud to be your home, but I will not be your excuse.”

William swallowed over a painful lump in his throat.

“You’re better than this,” Meg said. “This isn’t the life you were meant to live.”

Quietly he said, “I don’t know anything else.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I’ve known that since you came back from Dublin. All these years, every place you went and every name you used, you were searching and running and fighting all at once. But you’ve stopped now. Whatever it was you were looking for, in Dublin you found it. And you let it go.”

The words caught him completely unprepared. Meg held his gaze, love and strength and sorrow in her eyes. She looked more like their mother than he had ever seen her.

“I had to do my duty,” he whispered.

She slipped her hands over his, stroking his fists until they softened under her touch, careful of his injured finger. Her eyes filled with tears, and her chin quivered beneath her smile, but her voice did not break.

“You’ve done them proud, William. You’ve done
me
proud. Your only duty now is to yourself. It’s not the job you wanted, I know, but it’s the only job left.”

William’s heart pounded. Things were shaking inside him that he could not identify, all his defenses abruptly dismantled without warning by the most unlikely of saboteurs. He looked at his nieces, playing in the corner – he thought of how much of their lives he had missed, and how much more there would be to miss in the future. Their faces began to blur in his vision. William’s fingers trembled in his sister’s grasp. He looked into her eyes, his one constant source for all these years.

“What do I do, Meg?”

She squeezed his hands until the shaking stopped. “You know, William. You’ve always known.”

Something sweet and sad flitted across her eyes; and then she got up from the table and walked over to the kitchen sink beneath the window. Stretching to her tiptoes to reach past the jars and bottles, she plucked a small tea tin from behind the last row. She paused to wipe the dust off with her apron, then walked back to the table and set the tin in front of William’s plate. He pried the lid off, minding his finger, and the tin fell over with a jingling sound. Three ten-pound notes tumbled onto the cloth, smudged with dust and tea; inside were more, many more, rolled into bundles and labeled with bits of paper and steady feminine script.
York, spring ‘15. Aberdeen, June ‘16. Dunbarton, Christmas ‘17. Sheffield. Paisley. Bristol. Perth. Newcastle.

William heard a giggle at his elbow; two freckled faces peeked over the edge of the tabletop. His eldest niece reached out a finger and poked at one of the coins; the youngest grinned at him with a marmalade-smeared mouth. William wound an auburn curl around his bruised finger, soft and shining in the brightening sunlight beyond the white lace curtain. He looked at his sister and smiled.

“I love you, Meg.”

She touched his face, smoothing out the lines in his brow.

“I know, William,” she said. “I’ve always known.”

30.

November 24, 1922

The wind was a serrated squall as it funneled down the trench of the busy street. The snow whipped like buckshot, swirling up from the salted sidewalks and down from the swift, roiling sky. William clutched his coat around his throat and bent his shoulders against each gust. He squinted down at the wrinkled paper in his free hand; the hand-drawn map had been smudged into obscurity by splattered drops. He looked up and tried to blink the snow from his eyes; the street signs were on poles instead of the sides of the buildings, and it was skewing his sense of direction. He’d almost been hit twice this morning by careening automobiles, surrounded by an urban miasma of blaring horns, clanging streetcar bells, and hissing steam vents, all dampened by the dull roar of a winter storm.

The address could no longer be read on the battered paper, but William had memorized the numbers long ago. The wind picked up and nearly snatched the sheet from his hand; he moved to catch it, and his gaze landed on the sign swinging from a nearby pole, glistening with ice and winter glare.
Elliot’s Dry Goods and Grocer.

William’s teeth chattered as he stood beneath the wind-whipped awning, staring at the plate glass windows. A braided mat lay in front of the door, stitched in Celtic lettering:
Welcome
. William closed his hands into fists; the map crumpled into a wet ball, and he shoved it into his coat pocket. He drew in a breath, the air stinging cold in his nostrils, and turned the brass doorknob.

A flurry of snowflakes followed him inside; the door closed behind him, and the wind dropped to a background murmur. William stood on the rug and wiped off his feet, blinking until his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. The shop was small and well-stocked, with whitewashed walls and crowded shelves and rows of bolted cloth above the cracker barrels; a cast iron stove crackled with pleasant warmth near a crate filled with rag dolls, and on the back wall hung a notice board covered with squares of colored paper.
Countrymen! Help the War Orphans of Ireland. Donate to Boston Catholic Charities Here.

Behind the counter stood a tall young man around William’s age, in a white shopkeeper’s shirt and apron, counting out a stack of receipts. He looked up when the doorbells chimed and gave a courteous smile when he saw William standing on the front rug.

“Good day, sir, can I help? Bit nippy outside, isn’t it?”

His face looked a little older than it should have; the nose crooked from an ancient break, the left eyebrow split by a thick white scar, but his blue eyes were bright and lively, and his smile curled with a very familiar lopsided amiability. Even if William had not seen the photograph, there could have been no mistaking him. The young man blinked at him in silence, still smiling politely, until William finally found his voice.

“You must be Michael.”

The blue eyes widened in surprise, but they narrowed almost immediately to mask the reaction. He was definitely an Elliot. He straightened from his receipts and looked William over at length, appraising him from head to toe; and then he crossed his arms and his smile disappeared.

“And you must be William.”

His tone was as unreadable as his expression – his face had smoothed over with a calm, careful blankness that sparked unwelcome memory.

“I am,” William said simply.

He stood as lightly as he could, his face and posture calm, but his muscles were tensed for a thousand possible reactions. He said nothing else, because there was nothing else to say. They stood there in silence, staring at each other on either side of the counter; and then Michael jerked his head toward the doorway in the far corner.

“He’s in the back.
”

The storage room had no door, curtained off instead by an Irish flag tacked above the frame. William stared at it, listening to the snow melting on his shoes and his hair dripping onto his collar. His face smarted in the warmth from the stove. His fists clenched tighter inside his coat pockets; he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked toward the back of the room.

“Mr. Young.”

Michael had picked up a stacks of receipts; he held it in both hands like a deck of cards, tapping down the edges with his thumb. He looked up at William from beneath his scarred brow.

“Thank you for what you did for my family.”

His smile returned, subtle but sincere. William returned it as best he could, and nodded.

The flag made a little swishing sound when William pushed it aside. The storeroom was long and narrow, bright with electric light illuminating shelves filled with boxes, tins, jars, and bottles. At the far end of the room, a figure stood on a rickety stepladder, organizing stock on the top row. His back was to the door, his white sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his apron strings tied low on his hips; his body was thin, far too thin, and he moved with careful grace as he rearranged glass jars of strawberry preserves.

“That you, Mikey? Who was at the door, then?”

William had lived this moment in his mind more times than he could count: on his back in his bed at Meg’s, in the swaying berth of his cabin, on the foreign maze of icy Boston streets. He had a thousand speeches ready and waiting, a catalogue of words all mapped out in his head – he stood in the doorway and watched Adam move jars around on the shelf, and he could remember now not a single one of them.

“Mikey?”

“No,” William said. “It’s not Michael.”

Adam’s hand froze on the shelf. He gripped the edge as the ladder wobbled, and the muscles in his shoulders went taut beneath his shirt. For a long moment, he did not move. Then the ladder creaked in protest as he slowly climbed down one step, then another; one hand went to his side as he flinched in brief pain, and William’s mouth pressed into a tight line. He fought his racing heart and waited, saying nothing, until Adam descended the last step and turned around to face him.

His face was thinner, the lines around his eyes a little more visible. Weight loss had seeped some of the boyish curve from his cheeks; pain and travel had left shadows beneath his eyes. His brown tweed cap sat crooked at a careless angle, but the hair beneath it was combed in the American fashion. He held himself carefully, steadying himself with one hand against the ladder – but his color was strong and his back was straight, and his gray eyes shone clear in the electric light. He was more beautiful than William had ever seen him.

“Glasgow,” he said.

William withdrew his right hand from inside his coat pocket. The object he had been clutching all this time made a clacking sound as it settled across his palm. The beads draped around his fingers, green and white still stained with brown and red; the chipped cross felt heavy in the center of William’s palm as he held it at arm’s length between them.

“You dropped this."

Adam stared at the rosary in William’s hand. He hitched a little breath and let it out, and his throat worked once as he swallowed. William refused to let his fingers tremble, giving in to neither the desire to run away nor the desire to run forward as Adam slowly crossed the distance between them. He was still looking at the rosary; he reached out his left hand until his fingertips brushed the fractured beads. His thumb slid across the rusty stain on the center knot. William's heart pounded in his chest; when Adam looked at him, he drew in a breath and delivered his only offering.

“It’s a bit worn in parts
– but it’s yours, if you want it.”