The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) (28 page)

 

Terence gazed at
her in stunned
surprise, and Emer sat down in the tiny space left for her on
the floor that
wasn’t taken up by the wooden bed or privy, and recounted her
travels and
experiences since she had last left Ireland as the darkness
set in over Clonmel
prison, her new home for God only knew how long.

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

 

 

After a few days of
confused reprisals
that marked the aftermath of the rebellion, the authorities in
Tipperary tried
to track down the remains of the armed group, and sought the
rest of the
leaders of the attack on the police at Ballingarry.

 

 

Emer and Terence
were kept together
in the tiny cell at night in order to separate them from the
common prisoners,
so as to ensure that they didn’t spread their treasonous
practices throughout
the jail.

 

 

The prison
authorities assumed her
to be a man, but when the Governor of the prison summoned her
to answer her
request about performing nursing duties, he revealed, “We know
who you are now,
Mrs. Dillon.  The
captain of
the
Britannia
informed
the authorities in Cork that you had been lost at sea. Quite
frankly, I’m
astonished that you made it this far without either drowning,
given your
crippled state, or being picked up by the constables due to
that flaming
burgundy hair of yours. 
It's
an amazing achievement, and I'm only sorry you've managed to
get into trouble
again so quickly.”

 

 

“Sir, all I wanted
to do was help
the injured in Ballingarry. I am no rebel, sir. I never even threw
one stone, so help
me. So if you
persist in keeping me locked
up for crimes I never committed, then the least you can do is
let me not waste
my time here.

 

 

“As I've said, I'm
willing to nurse
the sick in the prison infirmary, and would ask you to address
the sanitary
conditions in
the cells. The
buckets are never emptied, and the
floors are running with filth.
If
you don’t do something soon, this place will have an epidemic
of yellow and
even black fever and cholera on its hands in no time,” Emer
said, trying to
keep her tone as even as possible so as to not be accused of
disrespect and
summarily dismissed.

 

 

“How do you know so
much about the
fevers?” the governor asked in surprise.

 

 

He stared at her
with something akin
to pity as she told her tale of her crossing from Ireland to
Canada and all the
fever cases she had seen.

 

 

Then she tried to
recount the hell
of the island hospital, suppressing a shudder as she recalled
the death of her
brother, and how close she had come to losing dear Joe.

 

 

The more she spoke
in simple
unemotional language, the more she could see his attitude
towards her thaw.

 

 

At the end of her
tale, he sat
pensively for a moment, then nodded.

 

 

“Very well, if you
give a list of
what you want done to avoid an epidemic, I shall see to it
that a group of
prisoners makes the rounds of each cell, and that they shall
be paid in extra
rations for their assistance.
I haven’t
had a single doctor darken the door of this place for months,
so on the same
terms, you can run the infirmary. I’ll give you a team of
volunteers, and you can pick
six of them whom
you deem suitable,” the governor offered.

 

 

Emer blinked in
astonishment. “You
want
me
to be
the prison doctor?”

 

 

“Why not? You appear far more qualified than most
of the quacks who
have paraded in and out of here in the past, collecting big
fat fees while the
men die in droves,” the governor said with a grimace.

 

 

"Oh,
but sir—"

 

 

He dismissed her
gratitude with a
sardonic wave of the hand. "You'll be overworked and underfed,
if only
because you'll barely have time to eat. So please don't thank
me. But from now
until we learn of your ultimate fate, the infirmary is yours."

 

 

“I can’t do
anything about the
overcrowding, but I will do my best to improve the conditions
here,” Emer
promised.

 

 

“If I were you, I
would worry about
my own situation a great deal more than you seem to at the
present, Mrs.
Dillon. You do
realise the charge
against you is no less than treason, which could be a hanging
offence?”

 

 

“I understand that
to be the case,
sir, but you must understand, I was just walking past and
wished to help. I
had no weapon! I
could barely even walk. Look, I can still
barely manage with a crutch. I was carried along by the
momentum of the crowd
at the barricades, and meant no one any harm. But I won’t apologise
for nursing the
sick, indeed I
won’t. I shall
just have to trust
to British justice to vindicate me.”

 

 

“In that case then,
if I may say so,
Mrs. Dillon, I think you’re a bloody fool,” the governor said,
not unkindly.

 

 

Emer stared. “You
don’t think I
stand a chance, do you?”

 

 

The portly silver-haired man shook
his head and
sighed. “No, I don’t. I
wish I
could say otherwise, but tensions are running high between the
government and
this country's poor starving people. I won't lie. Things look
pretty bleak for
you and your friends.

 

 

"But all the same,
I shall do
what I can for you. I shall make a plea for you to be granted mercy
if you are on
your best behaviour
whilst here, and are willing to help us. You can nurse the sick in
exchange for clemency.”

 

 

“I’ll help the sick
to the best of
my ability considering my legs still don’t work very well,
regardless of
whether you grant me mercy or not,” Emer said with a dignified lift
of her chin.

 

 

Rolling up the
sleeves of her by now
filthy shirt, she then shouldered her crutch and prepared to
get started on her
duties.

 

 

Thus Emer once
again found herself
tending fever patients, this time in the jail infirmary, which
was full to overflowing
with sick prisoners, and more arriving every day.

 

 

The spring and
summer of 1848 had
been particularly rainy in Ireland, and as July advanced to
August, it was now
a certainty that the potato crop had failed yet again.

 

 

With little food,
no clothes because
all of the charitable sewing groups had stopped donating to
Ireland once they
had heard about O’Brien’s abortive rebellion, and the English
Treasury cutting
the relief works for the very same reason, all of Ireland
stared another year
of starvation and death straight in the face.

 

 

Desperate people
stole what they
could, and invariably got caught. The women and children were thrown
out of the prison
onto the streets to
starve in order to make room for male inmates who were willing
to carry out the
ridiculous outdoor relief work tasks of breaking stones and
digging ditches,
when they should have been occupied planting food and farming
the land for the
benefit of all.

 

 

Emer did what she
could for the poor
souls in their cramped and wretched quarters, and was pleased
that she was also
allowed to do the cooking in a small scullery off to one side
of the infirmary,
for it gave her access to boiling water on a regular basis.

 

 

The governor was
kind enough to find
her a skirt and blouse to wear as well, and so she made do
with her two changes
of clothing, a large towel, and the needle and thread the
guards provided her
with for undertaking repairs on their own clothes.

 

 

At the end of each
long day, she
would immerse herself and her clothes in the boiling water,
trying to keep her
hair and clothes
free of lice and
other contagions, and hang the items on the line above the
stove to dry.

 

 

Emer was forced to share the tiny
cell with Terence,
since the Governor had no place else to put her, so they shared
the bed in
shifts.  Emer
worked through
the night, and slept for a few hours during the day when the men
were out
taking their exercise.

 

 

Every time she
slept, she dreamed of
all she and Dalton had shared so passionately. The dreams were
so real, so
vivid, she felt as though she could just stretch up and…

 

 

Emer kissed his
chest and throat.
Dalton moved his head down to kiss her tenderly. As their tongues
sensually
intertwined, she felt him harden.
Emer arched under him, taking him deep into her warm,
welcoming body.

 

 

Dalton began to
move with
increasingly sure strokes as she gazed up at him in rapture.
He drove them both
ever higher, then stilled, poising them on the brink of the
ultimate
fulfillment.

 

 

"Now, love,
please,"
she begged. "Let it go."

 

 

"Just wait," he
urged,
"wait, my love."

 

 

"Dalton, oh,
ooooh,"
she panted. "It's getting even stronger."

 

 

"Relax, breathe
into it,
that's right, just a bit more, a bit more—" He pressed
deeper and felt her
whole body clench and undulate around him.

 

 

"Oh, Lord!" she
gasped,
as the heat flooded through her.

 

 

She felt her
nipples peak against
his broad chest as her whole body rose up to greet his. Then
he too was gasping
out his passion into her mouth, until finally he was calm
once more, and slept
with his head buried between her breasts.

 

 

Then she would awaken with a start,
and pushing her
heavy fall of hair from her eyes, sigh and try to put her pining
for her lover
from her mind for all their sakes.
Sharing the
confined living quartered
with a man other than Dalton was not as difficult as she
thought it would be,
though it did have its tense moment.

 

 

Terence was a
dashingly flirtatious
fellow, but any warm feelings of friendship Emer might have
had for him paled
into insignificance as she thought of how much she ached to
see Dalton and her
son again. She
took refuge in her
vivid erotic dreams and prayed with all her heart that the
three of them would
be reunited soon.

 

 

That thought was
never far from the
back of her mind, and on particularly difficult days
throughout the long summer,
Emer was convinced that the vision of herself, Dalton and
William being
one happy family again was the
only thing that kept her sane in the hellish prison as patient
after patient
died, only to be replaced by still more sick.

 

 

She
would
find her son. She
would
get back to Canada
and make
Frederick pay for what he had done.

 

 

And she would get
the truth from
Dalton one way or the other. She still loved him, and the man
she knew from the
Pegasus
, as much
as she had loved him, was a very different man again from the
silver-haired
doctor he had become. From the father to her son William that
he had
transformed into.

 

 

She had never
thought it possible to
love Dalton more than she had aboard ship. But that had been a
passionate love, and
based on his fales
pretences. Over time she had got to know the real man
underneath his façade,
and wrong-headed though he might be, he was by no means the
villain she had
feared.

 

 

No, that epithet belonged to
Frederick Randall. But
she would again repay evil with good, just as the Bishop had
advised her when
they had first met at Grosse Ile.

 

 

Out of the tissue
of lies Frederick
had spun, some good had come of him thinking she had died,
because Dalton had
gone to Boston to become fully qualified as a doctor, and
ready to help all the
new arrivals from the 1848 shipping season.

 

 

Dalton had moved
heaven and earth to
save her from the burning orphanage. That was not the act of a
selfish man
interested only in taking advantage of her for passionate
encounters.

 

 

And he had become
the most model
father to William, tending to all his needs as lovingly as any
mother ever
could.

 

 

He had lied to her
at the start of
their relationship, it was true, but it had been partly for
the right reasons.
He had been there to determine which of his captains had been
abusing their
position in the Randall fleet.

 

 

He had not
discovered quite what his
father had anticipated, but he had taken great pains to
rectify the abuses he
had seen, even by Frederick. And he had done it even when he
had believed her
to be dead.

 

 

True, he had been
browbeaten into an
engagement to Madeleine Lyndon, but again, having met his
father, she could see
that Dalton had taken the line of least resistance whenever
possible with his
domineering parent. When the pressure had been too much to
bear, he had fled.

 

 

There was to have
been no marriage
between those two such as she had envisioned for herself and
Dalton one day, a
true meeting of hearts and minds. There had only ever been
business dealings,
and very little romance that she could see, for all of
Madeleine's smug
triumph.