Trinity Page 23

  Caroline approached a badly damaged wrought-iron screen that covered most of the width of the entry vestibule. "This is magnificent," she said, "it ought to be restored."

  "Never thought much about that," Roger answered.

  She touched the screen, looked up to its soaring height, then turned to him deliberately. "Perhaps I ought to do it for you," she said.

  "Oh, I see," Roger replied uncomfortably.

  "Roger, you once told me you hadn't the slightest notion on how to go about charming me. I now find myself in the same position about you. You are an enigma, an evasion. Now that you have the Weeds eating out of your hand, what do you intend to do?"

  Roger Hubble blushed, avoided her stare and edged into a dusty thronelike, high-backed carved chair. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I've given the matter a great deal of consideration."

  "And what have you decided?"

  "You are pampered beyond belief, shrewd and domineering, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a fencing match with you. I don't want to look into your eyes wondering what sort of cunning little things are whirling around in your brain. To quote the good Sir Frederick, I can jolly well live without all that female connivery. Nor will I be taunted into a jealous rage every time you look pantingly at the sweaty muscles of some half-naked workman. I shall not become a boudoir acrobat in competition out of fear of a band of unknown libertines and Lotharios."

  The old Caroline returned, arching her back mightily. "And if you must know, I don't want your bloody title and I don't want to spend the rest of my life making this stricken monstrosity fit for human habitation and there's nothing that God-awful wonderful about you!"

  "You're quite right, Caroline," Roger answered softly. "Nothing is all that attractive, that's the point."

  "And as for Londonderry!"

  "You're exactly right about that, too. You don't belong exiled in the colonies. I'm sure you noticed there are no portraits here of the Hubble women. They've been chosen for demure qualities and breeding possibilities. As for me, I think I'd also fare a lot better with someone rather simple, quiescent and bovine."

  "You bloody bastard!" she shrieked, and tugged at the gated section of the screen to free herself from the place.

  "I'm afraid we'll have to let ourselves out at the other end," he said.

  She whirled around, "Bastard!" and she stormed past him. It was a very long hall, long enough so that humility, a quality that had escaped the Weeds, found its way into her. She slowed to a stop midway and stood trembling with anxiety until he came up behind her. "I don't know what kind of woman you think I am," she said shakily, "but I'd never go into a marriage without turning all my love into my husband."

  "It's decent of you to say, Caroline, but I'm a conventional sort. I could never tolerate my wife's outside affairs. When you come right down to it, I'm a bit of an old shoe."

  "Like hell you are," she said. "Roger, I know you're the boss."

  He shrugged. "Oh, only because I'm being a bit forceful to someone who finds it novel, but I don't fancy playing Baptista to your Katherine. The Taming of the Shrew was never my favorite Shakespearean theme."

  Her hands reached out and clutched at his arms and she pressed exquisitely close. "Let's try it and see how it goes," she pleaded, "please, you're exciting the hell out of me."

  Roger's gray eyes mellowed and were at ease for the first time since she had known him. He nodded haltingly. "I think I'd like that," he said.

  The Hubble hunting lodge, Knockduff, sat handsomely in the Urns Hills on the opposite side of Inishowen between Lenan and Dunree Heads with a haunting view to Lough Swilly.

  With all his insecurities as the man to be her lover, Roger Hubble was only human. In the end he was not about to let her go . . . nor was she about to give him up. The full essence of partnership became silently but totally understood in a merger of two powerful forces completely respecting one another and willing to submit to the other's areas of superiority. To adore, magnify, absorb and drink in each other's strength instead of resenting and attacking it. The final cementing was a kind of fear. Now that they had come this far alone and found this together, fear of losing one another ended the playing of games between them for all times.

  As a wedding present to his father-in-law, Lord Roger merged his rail lines with Sir Frederick's, creating the first trans-Ulster line, and the Viscountess Caroline entered the Hubble pale to begin her reign.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  We approached the harvest walking insecure. The election had settled over us thick and threatening. Rumors came swift as strokes of summer lightning and were filled with menace. There was talk of the bottom falling out of wool, grain and cattle prices and of cutting trade benefits and imposing tariffs on Ireland, Rumors fell of rent raises and evictions. While Father Lynch and other agents of God and the Crown kept up a tirade against the pagan Fenians, Major Hamilton Walby turned into a demagogue, patterned after the Reverend O. C. Maclvor. Trouble with the squire was, the angrier he got the more he garbled his words to in comprehensibility The early low-keyed campaign had degenerated into an exercise in bigotry. Home Rule, Kevin O'Garvey and Parnell became the filthiest blasphemies in the language.

  Harvest was always a time of anxiety, for it meant a summing up of the year's labor and an end to evading how we would survive the winter. What Hamilton Walby had succeeded in doing was implanting fear of reprisal that would follow an Irish Party victory.

  The Royal Irish Constabulary, who paid impoverished farm boys next to nothing and had established the bribe and informer as a way of life, found Hamilton Walby and Roger Hubble very generous these days. An unslack noose was on our necks in the unearthing of real or imagined seditionists and other arrests of a political character.

  We were shaken. The likes of Tomas Larkin and Daddo Friel had their hands full to maintain unity. As election time drew near, a very ugly threat surfaced when "distrainment," a practice which had passed from the scene decades ago, suddenly reappeared. Distrainment was the impounding of a man's cattle and tools if he was late with rents or loan payments. The Constabulary would act solely on the word of the landlord and often without legal process. When a man's cattle and tools were taken, he was forced to take out a loan from a gombeen man at exorbitant interest rates in order to pay the ransom and continue his livelihood. Often as not cattle were moved to impoundment sites miles from the tenant's home. The cattle would not be fed for the time of impoundment. That, plus droving it back to its original village, sometimes accounted for such a loss of weight that the grain used to refatten it amounted to loss of the entire profit on the animal.

  It took Kevin O'Garvey and the Land League over two weeks of legal haggling to put a stop to distrainment but by that time the message to us was clear and the damage done.

  Next came notification that all the voting places in our district would be located in town diamonds or otherwise situated in the middle of heavily populated Protestant areas. In the old days landlords used colored ballots to monitor the vote and God help the tenant who went against him. Although colored ballots were outlawed for this election, forcing us to vote in the midst of hostile neighbors amounted to about the same thing.

  A week before the election, a final intimidation was tried. Signs were posted in every Catholic community offering several hundred temporary jobs of a week's duration in the stone quarry and as navvies on the rail lines, roads and canals. The catch was that the only men being hired were those eligible to vote, and the period of work would keep them away from their village during voting day. Our men would be shipped as far as Sligo and Meath although there were hundreds of unemployed men in those places to fill the jobs.

  When it was all added up the plan was to remove over five hundred votes from the district, enough to assure Hamilton Walby's victory. Only the village idiot could fail to see through this bald-faced bribe but our economic situation was such that few could resist it. Our people reckoned that in one way or the other Walby would steal th
e election anyhow, so they might as well pick up the extra week's work. This was a small-scale repeat of 1800, when the British bribed the Dublin Parliament to dissolve itself and agree to an Act of Union with England. At that time it had been done by creating new Irish peerages in the House of Lords and meaningless seats in the House of Commons. Today's, bribe was not nearly as grandiose, but it was the same dirty business. There was only one way to combat this. Tomas Larkin, Daddo, and all the Irish Party captains got together and ended their meeting with the decision that any man reporting for the jobs would face total ostracism. If Hamilton Walby reached back in time for his tactics, we reached further back. Ostracism was the ultimate weapon we held over our people. Punishment of turncoats by a communal boycott within our close life structure was an ordeal that few men could bear up under. It could mean a lifelong sentence of total silence from his neighbors.

  That was the atmosphere on the eve of Ballyutogue's first free election after centuries of British rule.

  Conor and I went with Tomas down to the diamond in what was the longest, loneliest walk of my life. The tension was overpowering. We knew that the squire and the Orangemen weren't going to go down gracefully and we were braced for anything. The rest of the men of the Upper Village stayed back at the crossroad waiting to see if Tomas would get through. Fear stalked everyone. Our people were confused over the entire voting process, like it was an added burden they didn't want to carry.

  Only the night before, Tomas confided he had been offered a bribe, one that would double the size of his farm with good land free and clear of debt. I think the reason he told us was to let us know that he had more to lose than anyone by casting his vote.

  When the three of us arrived, the diamond looked like an Orange rally without drums. Silence, ugly penetrating silence, greeted us from burning eyes all teared up with hatred. The voting place stood over the diamond in the magistrate's chamber, that very same courtroom that had been dispensing justice to the croppies for almost two hundred years. We stood fast until the clock tolled the hour that the voting place was to open, then started across the diamond.

  Strange to see Luke Hanna coming toward us. He had always been a reasonable man but in the end he was a senior among the Grand Masters and reverted to kind. He and Tomas stood eye to eye for an eternity. Luke was puzzled, obviously not expecting Tomas to appear. The bribe had been rejected and he couldn't believe it. He and the squire had sorely miscalculated in believing they had found his price.

  "What's on your mind, Luke?"

  "You'd better consider some of the disadvantages of what you are about to do, for the sake of your own people," Luke said hastily.

  "Stand aside," Tomas said.

  Luke Hanna panicked, knowing he had to knock off Tomas Larkin so the others would turn back like sheep. A riot was out of the question, for there was too much to keep hidden from an inquiry later on.

  "We'll not be buying flax this year," Luke said. "And don't any of your lads be looking for work as drovers and at the docks."

  Luke faded under Tomas' glare, retreated a step, then grabbed at Tomas as he walked past. "Don't be a fool, Tomas. I've seen a master plan where they're going to take over one third of your fields. If your people vote today, they mean to go through with it and it will all be on your head if you go in there."

  Around the diamond the Orangemen closed slowly like a lynch mob. Tomas looked at them almost smiling. "No blight that ever destroyed our fields can match the human blight that came to us from across the Irish Sea. Why don't you people declare war on your ignorance?"

  Those were Tomas Larkin's words as he entered the magistrate's courtroom, signed his name and asked for his ballot. Conor and I watched him drop it into the box with our very own eyes. When he was done he stood outside next to the doorway facing that seething gang with arms folded, the calmest and strongest man who ever lived.

  And then they came down from the crossroad. My daddy, Fergus, and Billy O'Kane and Grady Mulligan. They came at first in twos and threes and then in dozens, over the diamond and into the voting room.

  *

  It would be days before the results were known. It went well in Ballyutogue although there were flare-ups in other places. We buttoned up in our cottages to face the winter. Despite their threat of no work, there was the usual annual employment over the water, and those on the razor edge of survival made their weary trek.

  The storm of the particular night when the news came was average, being no better or worse than a normal November deluge. About a dozen women including my ma had gathered in the Larkin cottage to make lace on finished linen, a nightly chore that put a few more pennies in the pot. They came together in large numbers so as to save candles.

  Tomas and Fergus mended some harnesses for a while, then broke out the homemade glink board. Glink was the one game my daddy could do better than Tomas, and howled with delight every time he trapped a spoof or pulled off a double harness. There was only a single book of study for Conor and me, catechisms naturally, which we read for the millionth time.

  Just like that a commotion was heard outside so loud it was clear over the storm. I reached the door first. Sure it was Kevin O'Garvey's carriage with half the village on his tail screaming and yelling like banshees. He spilled into the best room sopping wet and panting, having ridden fiercely through the night all the way from Derry to tell us the news, laughing and crying at the same time and screaming that he had won!

  Don't you know that mass hysteria erupted on the spot and that was followed shortly thereafter by mass drinking. You never heard tell of a wake like the one we held that night for Major Hamilton Walby, the squire of Lettermacduff.

  *

  In November of the year of 1885 Kevin O'Garvey was elected to the British Parliament as one of eighty-six members of the Irish Party to gain seats. The issue of Irish freedom after centuries of British occupation would never be submerged again.

  Parnell's star had zenithed. The aloof man who spoke loudest by listening, the unemotional exterior which wept within at injustice, the shy man whose moral strength was powerfully evident, the Protestant who fought the Catholic cause, the Anglo-ascendancy landowner who led the landless, the Cambridge-educated genius who alone was able to rally and control an effective conglomeration of wild Irishmen. Charles Stewart Parnell, indeed, was the uncrowned king of Ireland.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Parnell victory set off an inflamed reaction within Ulster's Protestant community much along the lines predicted by Frederick Weed. He had made his preparations well to unify the divergent elements. With the nucleus of a Union Preservation Party already formed by himself and a few hundred gentry in gentlemen's lodges, it virtually exploded from the Orange Halls of the province.

  The Orange Society now girded to fill its predestined role. From its spawning during the peasant land wars of a century earlier it had fallen into disrepute. Rowdy behavior by rowdy men earned the snubs of gentry and government. Throughout its checkered history, however, the spirit of Orangeism which called for the debasement of the Catholic native permeated the Protestant community.

  Although outlawed at times, the Orange Society continued to thrive actively under thin disguises as benevolent societies and drinking clubs. As the decades of the 1800s rolled by and sectarian hatred became a permanent fixture in Ulster life, the Orange Society changed its tarnished image from a gang of thugs to a Reformation oriented bulwark against the papists. Secret chapters formed within the British military while legal expansion spread to England, Canada and Scotland. Respectability was gained With an influx of preachers, Anglos and aristocracy. The once haughty landlords and industrialists saw the old order slipping; they could no longer call out the military and run roughshod over natives. A new center of power was needed, power from masses of people, and the Orange Order was ready made to supply it. From them was born the political arm, the party to preserve the connection with England, the Unionist Party, bringing together all Protestant elements under a single ban
ner.

  Sir Frederick sped to London after the election to enlist support. Into the mounting storm rode Lord Randolph Churchill. He was amenable to making a tour of the province and landed with Sir Frederick in Larne at the beginning of 1886. Young Churchill, a confirmed ultraconservative imperialist in his mid-thirties, loathed Gladstone and all that liberalism. He had hatred enough to spare for Parnell, the Irish anarchist, who was now maneuvering and dealing with both British political parties for his own ends.

  The brilliant but highly unstable aristocrat reasoned that if he could bring about the defeat of an upcoming Irish Home Rule Bill the Gladstone government would fall. This would return his own Conservative Party to power and, in addition, bury Parnell's aspirations for decades.

  The heart of the Churchill motivation was ruthless, unsparing personal ambition. To that end he shrewdly calculated that the Orange card was the one to play, to travel to Ulster and harp on ancient Protestant paranoias in a community which was reeling and enraged by Parnell's sweeping victory. Protestant Ulster opened its arms.

  *

  Caroline chose the isolation of the savagely wild and mystic Bere Peninsula in southwestern Ireland for her honeymoon over the conventions of Venice, Spain and the like. It was occultly wild, beyond her own visions of it. Roger recognized that through Caroline a door had been opened which he had thought was closed to him for life. He was quick to grasp the experience, expose himself and even press for discoveries on his own. The way was open wide for long periods of talking, of lovely self examination, and this set the stage for deeper and more daring joint adventures.

  Their idyll jolted to a temporary halt with the untimely appearance of Sir Frederick. After choking on his chagrin, he pleaded that the situation was so urgent that they should return to Londonderry to pull things together in the west while he toured the east with Churchill. In repayment for his indiscretion he promised to send them off afterward to an exotic place in North Africa, a place to fulfill their most erotic fantasies, one that even Caroline was unaware of.