The Devil's Due: An Irish Historical Thriller (28 page)

New York City

July 1924

I held my son’s hand as we climbed down the long series of stone steps to the banks of the Hudson. There, we found a lighthouse perched on the rocks and, as we stood near it, I marveled at a river that made the Shannon I had grown up with look like a stream. Our new neighborhood was named, we had learned, for the fort that had once stood high up on the bluffs above us. Long after America’s own war for independence, the fort had been abandoned. Eventually, rich families had built their summer houses where the soldiers once stood. For reasons I had never learned, those families had left and, now, the brownstones and houses of Washington Heights had become home to immigrants like us.

“Boats!” my son said, eyes wide as he pointed to the river.

I smiled and told him what they were: the steamers, the tugboats, the barges and the skiffs that seemed to fill the river. Black clouds billowed from the smokestacks, trailing for a while before disappearing in the wind. The sun glistened off the surface, a gray-brown that reminded me of the Shannon. Beyond rose the rocky cliffs of New Jersey. The papers said that one day a bridge would span all the way from New Jersey, what Americans called the Palisades, to the banks where Kathleen, my son, and I now stood. I stared out over the water, trying to imagine how such a thing was possible. But men with big dreams were determined to build it, and already there was talk of naming it, like our neighborhood, after America’s first president. Maybe one day, I thought, the Irish would build a bridge and name it Michael Collins and wouldn’t that be grand.

“Up,” my son commanded and I reached down and grabbed him in my arms. We had named him Eamon, after my father.

Kathleen watched with a smile as Eamon, head leaning against mine, pointed to the gulls that swooped and dove along the rocky shore, searching for their next meal. Two years old, my son was, an age of excitement and wonder. I watched him, pointing now to the lads who were climbing down the rocks, scattering the gulls in their way, off for a swim in the river.

He turned to me, and I smiled. His own smile faded and his eyes took on a serious look. He reached up and touched my mouth, as he had done dozens of times, and pointed to where my front teeth had been.

“Gone,” he said.

“Aye,” I said, offering a toothless smile. “Gone.”

Satisfied that we were in agreement, he turned back to the water and the wonder it held.

As I watched him, I thought back to our journey, from the fields of Ireland and the life it would have held for us had we stayed, to the shores of the Hudson River and the dreams that now lay before us.

___

Although the civil war had been averted when Brennan’s forces retreated from Limerick, the tenuous peace wasn’t meant to last. A month later, Anti-Treaty forces—what the newspapers called the
Irregulars
—had seized the Four Courts in Dublin, an ominous sign that foretold of the bloodshed to come. It didn’t take long. In June, after a general election in which Irish citizens approved the Treaty, fighting broke out when Michael Collins’s forces unleashed their eighteen-pound guns on the Four Courts. As if a force all its own, the fighting quickly spread, and soon blood was spilling in Sligo and Roscommon, in Tipperary and Wexford. By early July, the buildings in Limerick were ablaze while gun battles raged in the streets below smoke-filled skies.

We were gone by then, Kathleen and I, standing on the decks of a steamer as the fighting spread to Galway and Mayo, to Cork and Donegal. When Limerick fell, a week after the National Army—what we had called the Free State forces—turned their guns on the Artillery Barracks, the damage was done. Then when Michael Collins was killed—ambushed by men he knew—it was the beginning of the end. Waterford, Cork—one by one the counties fell and when the last bullet was fired, more blood had been spilled fighting each other than had been shed in the war with the British.

It was only luck that we got out when we did.

The inquest had been quick; the Sínn Féin courts had found Tim not guilty in Billy’s death. Billy had killed Martin, the Court had ruled, when he refused the order to kill me. Then when Tim had been given the task, had been ordered to kill his own uncle, he knew what fate awaited him if he too refused. Faced with no other choice, he had turned the gun on Billy. By the time Mick and Padraig had arrived, Billy lay dying in the dirt. It was close enough to the truth. When I was called to testify—my broken ribs and my swollen face evidence of Billy’s boot and my missing teeth evidence of his fist—and I told the story of Argyll Manor and the long chain of events that followed, any doubts had been quelled.

We were still in court when Diarmuid was found wandering the streets of Limerick. After the inquest, I visited Andrew and his mother, this time without a priest’s cassock. If they were surprised, they didn’t show it. The three of us watched as Diarmuid chased the dog with a stick, a carefree smile on his face, the dog’s playful bark echoing off the hills. Whatever wounds he had suffered at the hands of Billy had healed, but the lines on Mrs. Toomey’s face and the worry that still clouded Andrew’s eyes told me that, for them, it would take far longer than a few weeks.

In the middle of it all, Rory’s body was found, floating face down along the banks of the River Maigue, outside Adare. His death was ruled an accident, that of a man blind with drink who had stumbled into the water while poaching fish in the middle of the night.

I could only imagine what had happened to him.

“What’s done is done,” Padraig had told me, refusing to answer my questions. “It’s over now.”

Maybe
, I thought. Despite my misgivings, the new government had set about to restore order; from the ashes of war, they set out to rebuild Ireland. But the buildings and bridges that had been set afire and now lay in rubble and the train tracks that had been torn and twisted by IRA bombs would be far easier to mend than the divisions that had turned us against each other. Historically divided by counties and clans, years of servitude below the British had also left us divided by religion and class. It would take generations for the wounds to heal.

___

“He’s asleep,” Kathleen said, dragging me as she often did back from Ireland to the life we now had in New York.

“Aye,” I said with a smile. Eamon’s head was nestled by my neck, and I could feel the steady rhythm of his breathing as he slept.

After one last look at the river, we turned and began the long climb back up to the streets of Manhattan.

“Mary wants us to come in September,” my wife said.

“Aye, that’s grand.”

Kathleen hadn’t seen her sister since we left. Mary and Tim had left a week after us, settling in Philadelphia near her brother, Declan. Kathleen’s brother too, I reminded myself, but she barely knew him. He had left Ireland when she was only three.

“I’ll have to ask,” I added.

“I know,” Kathleen said. For her it would be easy. Kathleen had been able to find work as a seamstress, mending and sewing she could do at home while she minded Eamon. The sewing could wait for a week or two.

As for me, I worked in the stables on Amsterdam Avenue, a stone’s throw from Central Park. When I had first asked for a job, the head groom smirked, commenting on my size and my missing teeth, assuming I had lost them to a horse I couldn’t handle. He didn’t know that my father had kept two draft horses, large hulking animals, for pulling the heavy ploughs through Limerick’s rocky soil. I had learned how to handle them at a young age and felt quite at home in the stables. The groom shook his head, but I was persistent. After a few minutes with a horse, he realized I was far more capable than he had thought and quickly offered me a job.

I didn’t think he would begrudge me a week or two away from work.

There was a noise above us and we moved to the side as three young lads raced down the steps, their voices filled with excitement at the afternoon before them. The clatter of their feet on stone and their high pitched squeals and shouts were soon lost to the wind behind us.

When we reached the top, I turned and stared back down at the Hudson and, once again, my mind drifted along with the currents back to the Shannon. A large steamer was chugging up river, the brown water churning up behind it, thick, black smoke billowing from its stack. Sailing up to Poughkeepsie or Albany or somewhere north, the steamer continued on, undaunted by the other boats that lay before it. Far larger and more powerful, it wouldn’t alter its course. The low moan of its horn sent smaller boats scattering. Those that didn’t would be crushed below its hull or sucked into its wake.

So like Ireland, I thought. Guided by men I knew, the new country ploughed forward, the dead and wounded that had tried to alter its course left in its wake. It was a powerful force, a people who had been enslaved for centuries suddenly set free.

I heard another low moan and this time felt the vibrations in my chest. I glanced north and saw another steamer, aided by the current, charging down the river. The horns on both ships sounded—like the tips and taps of the telegraph, a language I didn’t understand—and then it happened. The ship sailing upriver yielded, the evidence in the slight curve of its wake.

Would the peace last? For a while anyway and only until a more powerful force rose up and changed the country’s course. Until we laid down our arms for good, Ireland would always be on the brink of war.

“Will you go tomorrow?” Kathleen asked me.

I turned and nodded.

Kathleen smiled and linked her arm in mine as we turned away from the river. I had begun going to church again. I wasn’t sure what drew me back. It may have been Kathleen, it may have been my son—then again, it may have been something more. Tomorrow, as I had done for the last several weeks, I would go to mass with Kathleen and Eamon. I would stand and kneel with everyone else, and the Latin would roll off my tongue as it had done countless times before. But the whole while, my mind would be elsewhere. I would think of the rain falling softly on the green hills. I would think of the rich, rocky soil soaked with the blood and holding the bones of so many before me. As the scripture was read I would see the Shannon flowing and I would think of Tom and Sean and Dan, smiling in another time. I would think of Margaret, the daughter I had never known and I would think of Liam and my father. I would think of the ones who had survived and who were still there, building anew from the ashes of those who had fallen.

I would think of Ireland.

******

When most people think of
The Irish Republican Army
, they think Northern Ireland and Ulster, terrorists and bombs, Catholics fighting Protestants. Figures like Bobby Sands, Margaret Thatcher and Gerry Adams come to mind along with images of heavily armed British troops and tanks patrolling the streets of Belfast. Many remember the nightly news stories during the
Marching Season,
of bloody clashes between the Green and the Orange. This period, during the latter half of the last century, is what the Irish refer to as
The Troubles.

But long before
The Troubles
, on the Monday after Easter in 1916, a relatively small force—a rag tag group of freedom fighters—took over the General Post Office in Dublin and declared their independence from Great Britain. The Crown was quick to restore order, arresting hundreds within weeks and swiftly executing the leaders. By most accounts, the
Easter Rising
was a failure but Britain’s harsh response spurred widespread discontent and, in the turmoil that followed, the IRA was born. In 1919, vastly outnumbered, undertrained and short on guns, the IRA set out to achieve the independence that those who gave their lives in Dublin three years earlier had envisioned.

Family legend held that my grandfather fled Ireland with a price on his head by both the British and by the IRA. That my grandfather served in the Irish Republican Army during the War for Independence is a fact. Whether he left under an assumed name and with the British and the IRA hot on his heels is unclear. But my research paints a picture of a very tenuous time where the temporary alliance cobbled together to defeat the British crumbled easily under the weight of ancient divisions; where suspicion of disloyalty often resulted in death; and where past sins were rarely forgiven.

As many authors of historical fiction do, I took some liberties with time and place and with the events that occurred to craft my story. The villages of Kilcully Cross, Drommore and Mullins Cross exist only in the pages of this book. Most of the events depicted were based loosely on real accounts of IRA raids and battles with British Forces. But the broader context of the war and the civil unrest that followed is true, to the best of my knowledge.

L.D. Beyer

June, 2016