Flight of the Earls (24 page)

She paused and tilted her head at him. “Well, that doesn't make her a wee bit less enticing. Will you look at those eyes?” Molly cupped her hand under her double chin, and narrowing one eye, she surveyed Clare intently. “Hmmm . . . well. We'll need to get her out of those worn threads. Much to do here, I'll say.”

Clare's uncle gave her a worried glance, as if to see if she was insulted, and then he turned back to the woman. “I'm not certain, but I believe the young lady favors the dress in the window.”

“Certainly she does.” Molly continued to analyze Clare, as a painter would stare down a canvas prior to pressing toward it with a moist brush. The woman twirled her finger in the air and, awkwardly, Clare gyrated in a full circle. This all made her uneasy, but there was also a sense of pampering that gave her a pleasant chill through her spine.

“Hmmm. Yes. Uh-huh.” Molly contorted her face as she stared down at her subject, and then after several moments she clasped her hands together with resolution. “First, we must take care of something. Follow me.”

With this Molly turned, revealing a rose colored bow, which was formed from the sash around the woman's bountiful waist.

Clare looked over to Uncle Tomas and couldn't help but spill out a girlish smile, and he raised an encouraging eyebrow in return. They followed Molly to the far corner of the store, where she was climbing a stool and then reaching up toward a row of wigs displayed on a row of hooks against the wall.

She pulled one down and started descending before pausing and reaching for another. When she climbed down, she held one in each hand and looked back and forth repeatedly until she said succinctly, “It's this one here.”

Clare questioned her uncle with her eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Try 'er on. Molly doesn't miss often.”

“Missed have I once?” Molly grimaced. She held the wig out to Clare. “Here you are, precious. You'll love this one. I'm quite certain.”

Reluctantly, Clare held her hand out and took the long, black hair from Molly. It was shorter than her hair was in Ireland, but it was nearly exact in color and style. She held it up for a few moments and then looked at Molly meekly.

“Oh, poor dear.” The woman chuckled. “It won't bite you. Let me put it on for you. Come sit in this chair before the mirror.”

Clare followed her directions and watched in the looking glass as Molly came from behind her and placed the wig over her head, adjusting it before pulling out a brush and tending to the stray hairs. “There you are dear. What do you think?”

It was as if Clare were looking at a lost friend, one she feared would never return. She had forgotten her beauty and, in fact, resolved herself to never seeing it again. But there before her was the woman who had beguiled the men in her village back in Branlow. Until now, until this very moment, she had treated her allure as a burden. It bothered her to draw the gaze of boys and men and have them babble in her presence.

Yet she was pleased with the face staring back at her. She welcomed it. Having been unnoticed, ignored for the past three months, she realized the gift she once had. Clare yearned to see the heads turn in her direction, men to pause and lift their hats. Was this wrong to feel this way?

“Are you okay, dear?”

Clare snapped out of her thoughts. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Well?”

“It's lovely. I like it quite well.”

Molly leaned in over Clare's shoulder and peered into the mirror. “Yes. That will suit you fine indeed.”

Clare smiled and turned her head from side to side, thrilled at what she was seeing. “Ma'am?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you think I might try on that dress?”

Chapter 25

The Irish Society

The wind swept up as Clare walked out of Molly's store, and had she not raised her hands to her new hat, it would have blown off her head. If the breeze had its way, it might have taken her new wig as well.

Glancing back into the glass of the storefront, pretending to be adjusting her hat, she admired her reflection, hardly remembering the frumpy woman who entered the shop less than an hour earlier. Off to her side, her uncle was grinning broadly, his arms full of boxes of other items he had purchased on her behalf. He had told her, “A lady needs more than one dress.”

For a moment, the thought came upon her,
What have I done?
But she brushed it aside as quickly as it came. Not today. She was tired and felt entitled to one day of reprieve from poverty, oppression, and sickness. Clare felt new, clean, alive, and she liked the way it felt.

“Really, this is much too much,” she said to Uncle Tomas as she turned.

“What good is hard work if it doesn't allow an old man to experience joy on occasion?”

Clare felt an impulse to hug him, but something inside held her back. They looked at each other awkwardly.

The cheer on his face faded to one of more seriousness, a touch of melancholy. “Clare, dear. I know you have questions of me. Concerns. Rightly so. Shall we talk?”

Clare peered into his eyes and saw sincerity. “I'd like that very much.”

“Then come with me.” He held his arm out to her and she received it. “I have a place I'd like to share with you. It means a great deal to me.”

She began walking with him but then stopped. “What about Seamus and Pierce?”

Her uncle laughed as he looked toward the tavern across the street. “I believe the boys will be content. Don't you?”

“I suppose,” she said, with a hint of disappointment. But then with all of the months of difficulty they endured, there shouldn't be anything wrong with Seamus and Pierce having a time of it.

They started moving again, stepping out of the way of a woman who passed them with a crying baby in each arm.

“Margaret?” Uncle Tomas watched her closely as he spoke her name.

“Yes,” Clare said, her body tightening. “Tell me about Maggie.”

He glanced up as if he was searching for the proper words. “You must first understand how much I loved your sister. Both of you girls. But if I'm speaking honestly to you, and I am, Maggie had a spirit in her as no other.” He chuckled to himself.

“What happened? We heard your ship was lost.”

“No. The ship made it here just fine. Just the usual hardships of voyage. It was when we arrived that the real troubles occurred.”

Tomas shook his head. “Ahh, your sister Margaret, she was so full of life when we arrived here. She was dancing in the streets, breathing in this new place as if she was to take it all as her own. And she would of. Maggie would of. I'm quite sure of that.”

An elderly woman wearing rags and with one eye missing from its socket came up to them as they walked. “Mister?”

Uncle Tomas dipped into his breast pocket, pulled out a few coins, and placed them in the woman's cup. He turned a corner on the road and gently tugged on Clare's arm. They stepped past a couple of pigs rummaging for food.

“But we struggled,” Uncle Tomas said. “It was a hard life, it 'twas. We found a place in the Old Brewery building. We slept with the rats and the filth and with the dregs of the city. Some of us were just off a ship with no place to go, but many were thieves, murderers, and miscreants of society. If one ate, we all ate. But most of the time, none of us ate. We didn't have any fuel for the fire, and on snowy nights the only warmth we had would be from sleeping tightly together.”

Uncle Tomas crossed the street with Clare on his arm, and they waited as a carriage passed by before dodging the mud holes in the street on the way to the other side.

“Good day, Patrick,” said a man pushing a cart full of manure.

“Lovely day,” Tomas said with a lift of his hat.

“It was Maggie's spirit that kept us all from giving up, I'm sure it was. She labored harder than all of us. While I'd try to scare up jobs at the harbor or in the streets, she did all she could. At one point she was even gathering hair from grates in the street for the wig makers.” He looked up toward Clare's wig. “Yes. Imagine that.”

The thought brought Clare shame, and she wished he wouldn't have shared that detail. “Your story is quite sad. I pray it ends happily.”

“I'm afraid not, dear.” He pointed her to a bench outside of a sundries store. When they sat, he placed the boxes down carefully and pulled out a pipe and lit it. As he exhaled, the cool air filled with smoke and mist.

A chill came over Clare and she shuddered.

“At one point, Maggie was even down to begging.” He looked to Clare and nodded. “Yes, I'm afraid it's so. It made me ill to see her lower her pride to such a level.” His voice began to waver. “I suppose I shouldn't have let her. We tried, we did. But she said it was a far better outcome than starving, and on this we could muster no argument.

“One night, when it was snowing heavy, which was good, actually, because it meant I could earn with a shovel. And earned I did. So much so I had bought us some corn meal and even a small piece of salt pork. Couldn't wait to share the news with Margaret, but when I got to where we were staying, she was not around. No one knew where she was.

“I grabbed a lantern and went into the throes of the storm. I walked every street, over and over again, until I could feel no toes in me boots. The snow grew angry and I couldn't even see me own hand even if I held it before me eyes.

“Who knows how long it was, but I finally saw Maggie.” Uncle Tomas paused and gathered himself. “She had fallen to sleep in the snow on the side of the street. I could see the tracks where people had just circled around her as if she was rubbish. Her body was froze and stiff. Margaret was gone.”

Clare put her arm around her uncle and pulled him into her.

“I'm sorry, Clare.” He looked at her as a tear traveled down his wrinkled cheek. “Breaks me heart. I failed yer ma. I failed yer pa. I know he'd never forgive me, and I don't think that he should.”

She gazed at the man who so closely resembled her father, and her emotions sparred with her sensibility. Her hopes to see Maggie again were dashed. It was as if her sister had died in her arms twice. How much cruelty could she bear? What kind of a God would allow so much hurt and pain?

“We didn't have enough to buy her a coffin,” he continued. “I didn't want her body to end in the soil of this cursed land. I couldn't get her back to Ireland, but I could get her to sea. That very evenin', in the face of the storm, I carried her for miles to the shoreline o'er me shoulder, warmed by the flames of me anger. I pinched an oar boat off of the docks and gathered rocks and rope. I took Maggie out as far as I could row in the waves and dropped her body into the sea, with stones as weights.

“I came wee close to jumping in after Maggie and finishing it all. A shamed, broken man. It would have made the stories you heard truthful. But something kept me from that fate. A force drew me, powerfully, and I fought to keep me life. Having drifted out far, it took all of me being just to make it back to shore.

“That's when it all changed. No one knew who I was or cared if I sunk to the water's bottom. I decided I had enough of being Tomas Hanley, the poor Irish farmer. What had that gotten my father, your father? In that moment, I realized there were no thieves, no villains, just survivors. Shamed of who I was. That's when I became Patrick Feagles. It would be later when I would change my name to avert a scrap with the law. But that was the day it really happened.”

Clare didn't know how to respond. She stared ahead blankly. On the street she saw two men scouring the road for fruit that had fallen from wagons. They carried it in baskets nearly as large as they were.

“What about Aunt Meara? Why didn't you ever write?”

He shifted. “Is that what she told you? I never wrote? I nearly wore these fingers to me bones writing that woman.” His voice started to grow in intensity. “It was her idea for me to go to America. She told me she would come right behind me. As soon as I had enough for passage, she'd come out with me. I must have sent her twenty letters without one coming in return. Well, there was one received. She actually said, and I remember it to this day, word by word, ‘If you don't have any earnings to include in the envelope, don't bother sending the letter.'”

“That's seems unlikely,” Clare said with a huff. “She's heartbroken to this day.”

“Believe what you will, child.” Uncle Tomas's voice became harsh and he stood. “I'm not out to convince you.”

Then, as if embarrassed by his expression of distemper, he softened his demeanor. “Come, Clare. Let us not cloud this day. These are difficult memories for me. Harder times. Forgive me and allow me.” He lifted up the boxes and positioned them in one arm, then held out the other to Clare.

She stood, straightened out her dress, tightened the fit of the hat on her head, and then accepted his arm.

His smile returned to his face. “Right around the corner there is something I need to show you. It's the main purpose of our little walk together. I believe you'll be pleased.”