Song of the Silent Harp (6 page)

He neither knew nor cared which particular land agent might be short a few head of cattle or a barrel of flour. He had closed the door on any personal guilt when he'd come to grips with the truth about England's handling of the famine: While Ireland starved, British ships sailed out of her harbors with enough Irish-grown oats and wheat and cattle in a year's time to feed twice the population of the entire island.

Other countries—France, Germany, Holland—had also suffered from the potato blight during the last year, but these, not being ruled by the British, stopped all exports of other food at once in order that their own people would not go hungry. Not so in Ireland. Under the pitiless hand of British rule, tons of home-grown food left the country's harbors every day on British ships, leaving the already starving Irish to survive on nothing but their failed potato crop. Even the grain stored in the farmers' barns was not available to the people; it was marked for rent, to be collected by the agents, while the very ones who had grown it died lingering deaths from the Hunger.

No, Morgan no longer allowed his conscience to keep him awake nights with recriminations. He had no illusions about the road he had taken: He was a wordsmith turned outlaw, a patriot turned rebel, and if he were caught he would die at the end of a rope.

If he were caught…

Should that be the case, he suspected that even the Young Ireland movement—which presently viewed him as an influential, if not entirely irreproachable, member—might be less than eager to claim him as well. All the essays and verses he had written for their journal,
The Nation
—not to mention the funds he and his lads had poured into their coffers—would not inspire them to come to the rescue of a common brigand. While he had done his part to convince Ireland's masses that “peaceful negotiation” with Britain would never bring about a free Ireland, his writings stopped a bit short of the militant, inflammatory tirades some members of the movement would have preferred. He was no favorite of Mitchel or Thomas Meagher, and the fanatical Lalor despised him.

In truth, the entire movement had progressed to an extremism Morgan found both ineffective and foolhardy, and
The Nation
was fueling its fire. He had held both its chief contributor, the now deceased Thomas Davis, and its founder, Charles Gavan Duffy, in high regard. But besides himself, only a few supporters, like Smith O'Brien, still shared the original concepts on which the Young Ireland movement had been founded—that of an Ireland with its own identity, a right to its independence, and a nationalism of the spirit that would embrace both Protestant and Catholic, peasantry and gentry.

No, there would be little help for him from the movement. No matter; he wrote what he wrote, not for the movement, but for himself and the few in the country who still wanted to hear the truth. As for the rest of his “labors,” he liked to think they were for those who were too weak or oppressed to save themselves. And, of course, for those few he loved: Thomas and Catherine, their little ones…and Nora and her lads.

He had reached the top of the hill behind his brother's cabin now and, stopping, he shifted the bag of provisions from one shoulder to the other. He
frowned when he saw no sign of life below—no smoke from the fire, nobody moving about. But in the remaining gray mist of evening he could just make out blurred hoofprints and tracks from a carriage.

His uneasiness grew as he stared down at the desolate-looking cabin. Finally he moved, taking the hill at a leap, sliding most of the way down in his urgency to reach the bottom.

He knew it was bad as soon as he was through the door. Thomas sat at the table with Johanna in his arms, both of them weeping. His brother's face was stricken, his eyes stunned and vacant.

Then he saw Nora Kavanagh, and knew it all. Joseph Mahon was leading her and Katie from the curtained room at the back. Nora's thin shoulders were stooped beneath the priest's supportive arm, and she was sobbing quietly. The silver-haired Mahon met Morgan's gaze with a sorrowful shake of his head.

Swallowing down his own sense of loss—for he had set a great store by Catherine, fine Christian woman that she was—Morgan dropped his bag onto a chair by the door, then crossed the room to Thomas. His brother wiped his eyes and grabbed for Morgan's hand; Morgan could feel the wet from Thomas's tears on his own skin. “She just…slipped away, Morgan. So quietly…so quickly…”

Katie now came to stand beside Johanna, and Morgan released his brother to gather both little girls into his arms, giving them a hug and some feeble words of comfort before handing them back to their da. He turned and walked uncertainly toward Nora. When she lifted her face to look up at him, her grief was a raw, painful thing.

Gently he eased her away from the priest, and she came to him with a choked sound of despair. As he held her, Morgan felt her trembling, sensed her frailty. The knife of sorrow dug even deeper into his heart, sharpened by a sudden thrust of fear for the small woman in his arms. Instinctively he tightened his embrace.

“She is gone, Morgan. Catherine is gone.” Muffled against his chest, Nora's voice was little more than a whisper.

“Shhh, Nora.” He rested his chin gently on top of her head. “Catherine rests now. Her struggle is done.”

While the priest prayed with Thomas and the girls, Nora went on crying softly in Morgan's arms. He longed to console her, but at this moment he, who had spent most of his life fashioning just the right words for his feelings, could summon none at all to assuage her grief. He could only hold her steady and let her weep.

After a time, her trembling subsided and she backed away, avoiding his eyes. “The old man is ailing now,” she said abruptly. “He took to his bed late this afternoon and has not got up since.”

“Old Dan?” Morgan frowned. He shouldn't be surprised; the elderly and small children were among those hardest hit by the Hunger and its companion diseases. But Big Dan Kavanagh had always seemed as invincible as the mountains of Mayo themselves, as enduring as the round tower on Steeple Hill.

“I must get home,” Nora said, taking another step backward to free herself from his arms. “There's no more I can do here for now, and I left Daniel John to see to Tahg and the grandfather.”

Morgan nodded, noting the sooty smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes, the ashen pallor of her thin, drawn face. “I'll see you home, then.”

“That's not necessary,” she said stiffly.

“It will soon be dark. Besides, you may need me to go for the doctor for Old Dan.”

She shook her head. “I wanted to go myself this afternoon, but he wouldn't hear of it.”

“Even so, I'll see you home.”

She looked at him, saying nothing, then turned and went to have a word with Thomas.

Outside, the last light of day had almost faded. The gloom-draped dusk was heavy with snow, and the sorrow from the cabin seemed to be carried on the wind.

They walked along without speaking until Morgan broke the silence between them. “So then, how is Tahg? Any change at all?”

Nora stumbled on a jutting ridge of ice, and he took her arm to steady her, tucking it firmly inside his own. “He's so terribly weak,” she answered worriedly. “It's as though he's coughed away all his strength and has no more left inside himself. He coughs all the time now, night and day. The medicine Dr. Browne left with us doesn't seem to help at all.”

Morgan pressed her hand. “This cold weather is hard on a cough. Sure, and he'll do better once spring comes.”

When she said nothing, he added, “You must get some rest yourself, Nora. You'll be no help to your family if you're ill.”

She gave a small, apathetic shrug but didn't answer. Morgan felt her shiver and attempted to pull her closer to his side, but she firmly resisted.

“It was all so much easier when we were young,” he said with a sigh, primarily to himself. He was remembering other walks they had taken through the snow, in happier days. “Life was kinder then.”

“For you, perhaps,” she said tersely. “I hated being a child.” He looked at her. “Because of your mother.” It was no question, merely a statement of what they both knew.

“There was that,” she said quietly. He winced at the hurt in her voice, remembering all too clearly Nora's shame.

“Nobody thought the less of you for her, Nora,” he said awkwardly, meaning it.

“Nor the better of me either, I'm sure.” A harsh, choked sound of derision escaped her.

“Many thought you were a grand girl,” Morgan said evenly after a moment. “I, for one. And Michael, another.”

He could scarcely hear her reply, so soft were her words. “Aye, I remember.”

He looked down at her, but her eyes were fixed straight ahead. “Have you heard from him of late?” she asked.

“Michael? Not since last fall.”

“And both of us playing the fools over you.” He said it quietly, not thinking. She didn't seem to hear. If Nora was remembering, she was keeping her thoughts to herself.

A ghost of a smile touched the corners of her mouth as if she, too, were remembering. “You were the lads, the two of you. You, always in trouble, with Michael guarding your back.”

Where had it gone, that time in the sun? The years of being young and brimming with life, when every wish was a promise and every dream still within reach…when Nora had been but a slip of a lass, with him and Michael standing as tall as heroes in her eyes?

Ah, where had it gone…and so quickly?

Where have the years gone?
Nora wondered, a terrible sense of loss pervading her spirit. Had it really been so long ago that the three of them roamed the village as childhood friends and adventurers?

They had been great companions, those three, young and more than a little foolish at times, but faithful one to the other for all their youthful follies…so different in so many ways, and yet somehow so close in spirit that each could finish the other's thoughts.

Nora had been in Killala first, before either Michael or Morgan. Born in the village, the only other town she had ever stepped foot in was Ballina. She was a child of shame, the oldest of four children, all born on the wrong side of the blanket to a woman who was the scandal of the village. Their father had been a womanizing British sailor who promised Nora's mother the stars
and delivered only stones. It was thought he had left a wife in England, for when Nora was eight years old he went back to the sea and never returned.

After that, her mother had taken in one man after another until she became such a slattern she could find no companion but the bottle. Nora and the younger children were left to fend for themselves as best they knew how, and over the years Nora provided what she could in the way of motherly care to the little ones.

She grew up in abject shame: the shame of her mother, their mean, dilapidated hut, her own raggedy clothing and the cast-off garments she and her siblings were forced to wear—but, most of all, the shame of rejection: that of her mother for her own offspring and that of the village for the lot of them. So heavy had been the burden of that shame throughout the years that when her mother died only weeks before Nora gave birth to Tahg, her first thought—may God forgive her—was one of relief: relief that her own children would never need to know their maternal grandmother.

Michael came to the village the year Nora turned nine, the same year a diphtheria epidemic took the lives of her two younger sisters, leaving only her and her wee brother, Rory, to defend themselves against their abusive mother. Three years her senior and already possessing the instincts of a born leader, Michael Burke had immediately taken Nora under his protection. He took his self-appointed guardianship seriously; no longer did the children of the village dare to wag about Nora and her brother, much less taunt them face-to-face. Michael was brawny and rock-solid even then, and he had a look about him that clearly said he was not to be trifled with.

To the lonely, timid Nora, the Burkes were a great wonder of a family, and she often made believe they were her own. Michael's Roman Catholic mother had been an actress in Dublin; his Protestant father the son of a clergyman. Both had defied their families and their churches to wed, eventually settling with their two sons in Killala on a small square of land that had once belonged to Michael's grandparents.

Unloved and neglected, Nora was charmed and entirely in awe of the gregarious, unconventional Burkes. Their generosity of affection, their intelligence and wit, their flair for the dramatic, and, more than anything else, their enthusiastic love for one another attracted her to them like the warm sun draws a dying blossom from the snow. The statuesque, vibrant Madeline Burke appeared to Nora as grand as the legendary warrior-queen Maeve of Connacht. She was beautiful, clever, and endowed with a heart as big as the Irish Sea. The men in Madeline's family adored her, as did the
Doyle waifs, who over the years put their feet under the Burkes' kitchen table far more than under their own.