Conor's Way (25 page)

He heard her mumble something, and he pulled
back enough to look into her round, frightened eyes. "It's just a
lot of rain, love," he said gently, brushing back the hair from her
face. "It likes to put on a big show, that's all, shouting and
carrying on. Any time you hear that thunder shout at you, you shout
right back."

Some of the fear left her eyes, and she
nodded. That's what you do when you have bad dreams, isn't it?"

Conor's lips twisted wryly. "Something like
that," he admitted.

"And then you're not scared?"

"Mr. Conor's not scared of anything!" Carrie
told her sister stoutly. She looked up at him, worship clearly
shining in her eyes. "Are you?"

He wanted to laugh at the irony. He wondered
what Carrie would have said had he told her the truth—that he was
very scared of a great many things.

"No, moppet. I'm not scared of anything." He
reached down and wrapped an arm around Carrie with a growl, then
lifted her like a sack of potatoes. She laughed, grabbing his shirt
in her fists to hang on.

He glanced over at Becky and gave her a grin.
"If I'm not mistaken, love, there's still a whole plate of pecan
butter cookies from yesterday just waiting to be eaten."

She grinned back at him. "Let's go."

Becky led the way downstairs with the lamp,
and Conor followed her, carrying his two young charges. Chester
walked beside him, and Conor got the feeling he was finally going
to be tolerated by the grouchy old mutt.

In the kitchen, he set Carrie on her feet,
and she immediately went into the pantry and brought out the plate
of cookies.

"Why don't we go into the library?" Becky
suggested as she poured apple cider for all of them. "It's much
more comfortable in there."

Conor glanced at the straight-backed kitchen
chairs, shifted Miranda's weight to one hip, and thought that was
probably a good idea. "Come on, then. We might as well be
comfortable. Carrie, bring the cookies. Becky, love, bring the
lamp."

They settled into the comfortable cushions of
the sofa in the library. Miranda curled up on his lap. Carrie
snuggled against his side. On his other side, Becky leaned against
him with her head on his shoulder. Chester flopped down to the
floor at his feet.

"Tell us a story, Mr. Conor," Miranda
murmured, snuggling against him to rest her cheek on his chest.

A story. Oh, Christ. He
tried to think back to the stories the
seanachaie
had told when he was a
lad, before the famine, before music and laughter and stories
around the peat fire had vanished from his life.

"Once upon a time," he began, "there was a
young lad by the name of Cuchulain, who lived in the grand court of
the king. One night, he heard the baying of a hound, and he knew it
was the Hound of Ulster, the great, savage beast that wandered the
plains and terrorized all the wee children. All the other children
shivered with fright when they heard that sound, but Cuchulain was
a brave lad, and he wasn't afraid. The next morning, he went out
to have a game of hurling with his friends—"

"What's hurling?" Carrie interrupted.

"It's an Irish game played with sticks and a
leather ball."

"How do you play it?"

Conor started to explain, but Miranda nudged
him impatiently with her elbow. "Forget that. What happened next,
Mr. Conor?"

"While the children were playing," Conor went
on, "the beast came upon them. It was a massive animal with wild
green eyes and jaws like the devil. All the other children screamed
with fright and started to run, but Cuchulain told them to stop and
get behind him,

which they did. The beast came straight
toward them, running across the field with teeth bared, ready to
tear all of them to pieces."

"Wasn't Cuchulain scared at all?" Miranda
asked.

"No, lass. He was very brave, and he faced
the hound squarely. He took his hurling stick and hit the ball. His
aim was true, and the hurling ball struck the beast with such force
that it fell, slain upon the field. And that was how Cuchulain
killed the Hound of Ulster and saved the children. Cuchulain was so
courageous and fair that he went on to become the high king of all
Ireland."

"That was a good story, Mr. Conor," Becky
said, reaching for a cookie from the plate on the table before
them. "Tell us another one."

"'Tis very late. The three of you ought to be
in bed, I'm thinking."

A flood of protest was his reply.

"I don't want to go back to bed," Miranda
told him.

"Me neither." Carrie added, reaching for
another cookie.

"Can't we wait up for Mama?" Becky asked, and
her sisters nodded agreement.

Conor glanced from one hopeful face to
another. "You girls realize your mother's not going to be happy to
come home and find that none of you are in bed?"

All of them nodded again, smiling.

Conor sighed. "Right."

He settled Miranda more comfortably on his
lap and started to tell them of "Cuchulain and the Courtship of
Emer," but halfway through the tale, he realized that he wasn't
getting any questions this time. He glanced down at the girls
around him and found that all three of them had fallen asleep.

Conor realized that the story itself didn't
matter. It was the closeness they wanted, the sound of a voice to
lull them into sleep.

But Conor did not sleep. He listened to the
thunder, trying not to remember all the times his sisters had
curled up beside him in dark alleys and roadside ditches in the
rain. After Michael's death, it had been his responsibility to take
care of them, to find food, to find shelter. They had trusted him,
they had counted on him. He had failed them.

Tá ocrás
orm
, Conor. He could hear the plaintive
voices of his sisters on the wind; he could see their tears in the
rainfall. He struggled to blot them out, he tried to prop up the
barriers that kept the disjointed fragments of his past at a
tolerable distance. He didn't want to hear the voices now, not when
he was awake, not when the girls were so near.

Tá ocrás orm, Conor...I
think I'm dying
...
tell us
.

A loud crack of thunder rattled the
windowpanes. Miranda snuggled against him with a tiny sigh, and his
arm tightened around her. She felt so small in the crook of his
arm, vulnerable and fragile. He glanced at Carrie curled up beside
him like a kitten by the fire. He could feel Becky's hair tickle
his neck. He tried to focus on those things, not the voices that
echoed through his brain.

There were times when he wanted so badly to
silence the voices and demolish the dark dreams permanently; but
somehow, he had never been able to take the final necessary step.
He'd thought about it plenty of times, savored it like an upcoming
holiday, contemplated the countless ways he could do it. Yet, when
the moment came, something always stopped him. Suicide was the
final sin, the one he could not bring himself to commit.

Survival was his greatest talent. Famine,
typhus, dysentery, bullets, knives, beatings—he had survived them
all because dying would be giving in; suicide would be the ultimate
capitulation.

Hate and anger were what had kept him alive.
He had fed on them for so long, they were the only emotions he
recognized, the only ones he still knew how to feel.

And yet, right now, surrounded by the warmth
of the three precious girls who were using him as a pillow, hate
seemed very far away, crowded out by things unknown and yet
familiar, impossible things. Love. A feeling of belonging. A sense
of peace.

He closed his eyes. It was all an illusion.
He didn't belong anywhere. He didn't know what love was anymore.
And peace ... Christ, what was that?

So Conor sat listening to the rain and
stealing a few moments of trust and affection he did not deserve
from three wee girls who were not his. And he reminded himself at
least twice that night that he was not a family man.

Belfast, Ireland, 1865

When Conor met Sean Gallagher for the first
time, he wasn't sure if the man was the full-blown revolutionary
genius others thought him to be, or just an old man full of piss
and wind.

Conor had heard of him, of
course. Gallagher was something of a legend, a follower of
O'Connell, and later one of the leaders during the rebellion of
'48. He had seen the inside of many prisons as a guest of the
Crown, and had suffered any number of indignities at their hands.
He was now a member of the Brotherhood's hallowed inner circle.
But after two hours in this small, cramped room above McGrath's,
listening to the man drone on like a
seanachaie
about hundreds of years
of subjugation and injustice, and tell the same stories he'd heard
all of his life, Conor began to wonder if the man ever stopped
talking long enough to have a revolution.

Talk, talk,
talk
, he thought.
We Irish are so good at it
.

Nonetheless, Conor leaned back in his chair
and listened, keeping his impatience hidden, remembering the words
of O'Bourne just the night before. "Gallagher is the kind that
keeps the spirit alive. Many a man can talk brave enough in the pub
after a few pints, but Gallagher'll keep their anger high after the
porter's gone, lad. And he knows what he's doing. Remember
that."

O'Bourne was a captain in the Brotherhood,
leader of Belfast's small republican circle. His goal was to
organize the Brotherhood in Belfast, to find recruits, safe houses,
and escape routes, and to establish Belfast as a cornerstone of the
Fenian movement. Conor and the half-dozen other men in this room
had been carefully chosen, their backgrounds exhaustively checked,
and their Fenian sympathies closely examined. Most of them were
like Conor, without home or family, with a fire in their bellies
and no one to grieve if they died for the cause.

Gallagher was up from Dublin to inspect
O'Bourne's recruits, and select a handful of them for some kind of
mission. Out of the seven men in this room O'Bourne had
recommended, Gallagher would choose two. Conor wished he'd stop
giving a dissertation on Irish history and get on with it.

"Some of you may be asking yourselves why
we're wasting our time sitting here talking about fighting for
freedom when all those who have come before us have failed."
Gallagher leaned forward, palms flat on the table before him.
"Those of you who are waiting to see Ireland rise and throw off the
British yoke in our lifetime will wait in vain. Don't expect our
people to come pouring out into the streets to follow us down the
freedom road. They won't. They've been subjugated too long."

He paused to let the words sink in, then he
went on, "We are trying to fight a war with limited support,
limited funds, and centuries of fucking bad luck. So, why bother?
What do we have that gives us any hope of being free?"

Gallagher straightened, and his hands
clenched into fists at his sides. "We have one thing the British
can never conquer with their armies and their governments, one
thing they can never capture with their laws and their prisons. We
have the will to fight. As long as there is one man to sound the
battle cry for freedom, one man to spit in the eye of tyranny, one
man who refuses to be subjugated, the British will never truly
conquer us. And that is why they not only hate us, they also fear
us. No matter what happens, remember that, because that is what
will save our land and our people in the end. Our refusal to be
broken."

His gaze slowly circled the room, and Conor
knew they were being assessed. Gallagher was deciding who had
barroom courage and who had the real thing, who would break and who
would not, who could give his life for Irish freedom and who could
only boast about it.

"The Brotherhood is your family now, lads.
You have no other. Take a good look at the other faces in this
room. Outside this circle, trust no one. And remember, I've nothing
against a bit of skirt from time to time, but for Christ's sake, if
you take off your pants, that doesn't mean open your mouth."

Conor didn't have to worry
about that. He was celibate as the Pope himself these days. He
thought of Mary, and his heart twisted with pain. She'd married
Colm a week after their conversation outside McGrath's. Seven
months later, she was dead, and the child she'd been carrying had
died with her. His child. Over two years in her grave now, and he
still felt the pain.
Let it
alone
, he thought, and forced away
memories of her, forced himself to concentrate on Gallagher and
the cause. That was all that mattered now.