His voice was so heartsick, his words so heavy, that I could only gaze back at him, moved to tears and silenced by his sadness.
“But when I look at you, I still see Anne,” he whispered. “Your lines are sharp and clean. The faces around you are faded and dull—they’ve been faded and dull for years now—but you . . . you are perfectly clear.”
“I am not her, Thomas,” I said, needing him to believe me and not daring to make him understand. “Right now, I almost wish I were. But I am not that Anne.”
“No. You’re right. You’ve changed. You don’t burn my eyes like you once did. Now, I don’t have to look away.”
My breath caught at his confession—the sound ricocheted between us—and he leaned in to gently free it, brushing my mouth with his. His lips were so soft and shy, they slipped away without letting me greet them. I followed, frantic to call them back, and he hesitated, forehead pressed to mine, hands on my shoulders, letting my bated breath extend an invitation before he accepted it and returned. His hands slid around to my back as his mouth lowered and stayed, letting me feel the warmth and the press of his kiss, so real, so present, so impossible.
Our mouths moved in a halo of swollen caresses, a brush and a slide, a nudge and a pause, reveling in the weight of lips against lips. Over and over, and then again. Plying and persuading, urging and unraveling, until the pounding of my heart trembled in my mouth and quivered in my belly. Need, need, need, it panted. More, more, more, it roared. The hound of Culann, baying a warning at the door. We both drew back in breathless wonder, eyes wide, hands clinging, lips parted.
For a moment we simply stared at one another, inches apart, our bodies charged and howling. And then we widened the distance, releasing each other. The clanging in my chest and the rushing of my blood was slower to ebb.
“Good night, Countess,” Thomas murmured.
“Good night, Setanta,” I said, and a smile ghosted past his lips as he turned and left my room. I was drifting off to sleep when I realized he’d never demanded an explanation about the truce.
The next few weeks, I moved in a sort of haze, straddling reality and an existence that was both illogical and absolutely undeniable. I stopped questioning what had happened to me—what would happen to me—and accepted each day as it came. When one dreams terrible dreams, part of the unconscious mind reassures that wakefulness will summon reality and banish the nightmare. But it was not a terrible dream. It had become a sweet sanctuary. And though that stubborn voice still whispered that I would wake, I stopped caring if I slept. I accepted my predicament with the imagination of my childhood, lost in a world I had created and fearful that the story would come to an end and that I would return to my previous life, where Eoin and Ireland and Thomas Smith no longer existed.
Thomas had not kissed me again, and I had not given him any indication that I wanted to be kissed. We’d established something that we were not ready to explore. Declan was gone, and Anne was gone. At least the Anne he thought I’d been. But Thomas was still caught between the memory of them and the prospect of me, and I was snagged between a future that was my past, and a past that might be my future. So we settled into an ever-narrowing circle of discovery, talking of nothing and everything, of this and that, of now and then. I asked questions, and he freely answered. He asked questions, and I tried not to lie. I was happy in a way that made no sense, content in a manner that called into question my sanity and surrounded by people who made me glad to be alive, if alive is what I was.
Thomas took me with him once or twice a week or when he thought he would need an extra set of hands, and I’d done my best to provide them. I’d been raised by a doctor; I knew basic first aid, and I wasn’t prone to freak-outs or fainting at the sight of blood, which was about all I had going for me. But Thomas seemed to think it was enough. When he could, he left me home to spend time with Eoin, who would be starting school in the fall. Eoin introduced me to all the animals at Garvagh Glebe and told me their names—the pigs, the chickens, the sheep, and the pretty brown mare who was expecting a foal. We began taking long walks along the shore and down the lane, over the green hills and across the low rock walls. I was traipsing over Leitrim’s fields with Eoin babbling at my side. Ireland was gray and green, shot with the yellow of the gorse that grew wildly on the hills and in the valleys, and I wanted to know her intimately.
Sometimes Brigid came too, first because she feared Eoin and I would disappear together and then because she seemed to enjoy the exercise. She started to soften toward me, infinitesimally, and sometimes she could be coaxed to talk of the days when she was a girl living in Kiltyclogher in northern Leitrim, giving me a glimpse into her life. It seemed to surprise her that I listened so intently, that I cared to hear her stories, that I wanted to know her at all. I discovered she had two sons and a daughter, all older than Declan, and a little girl buried in Ballinagar. I hadn’t seen a stone and wondered if the child’s marker was just a plot of grass with a heavy rock to mark her resting place.
Her oldest daughter was in America, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her name was Mary, and she’d married a man named John Bannon. They had three children, grandchildren Brigid had never seen, cousins Eoin had never told me about. Brigid’s two sons were unmarried. One, Ben, was a train conductor in Dublin, and the other, Liam, worked on the docks in Sligo. Since I’d been at Garvagh Glebe, neither had come to visit. I listened to Brigid provide updates on each one of her children, and I hung on her words, trying to absorb things I should have known, things Anne would have known, and doing my best to bluff my way through the rest.
“You are kind to her, to Brigid,” Thomas remarked one day, when we returned from our walk to find him already at home. “She has never been especially kind to you.”
Maybe the difference between the “real” Anne Gallagher and me was that Brigid was her mother-in-law and Brigid was my great-great-grandmother. Brigid’s blood ran in my veins. She was part of me—how big a part, only my DNA would tell, but she belonged to me, and I wanted to know her. The first Anne might not have felt the same sense of belonging.
Thomas went to Dublin for a few days in the middle of August. He wanted to bring me along, and Eoin too, but changed his mind in the end. He seemed reluctant to leave and anxious to go, but he made me promise, as he stuck his medical bag and a small suitcase in the back seat of his Model T, that I would still be at Garvagh Glebe when he returned.
“Don’t leave, Anne,” he said, his hat in his hands, fear in his eyes. “Promise me you’ll stay close. Promise me so I can do what I need to do in Dublin without my head running back here.”
I had nodded with only a flicker of fear. If I hadn’t gone home yet, it was doubtful I ever would again. Maybe Thomas saw the flicker in my eyes, faint as it was, for he pulled in a sigh and held it, weighing it, considering it, before he released it with a gust of submission.
“I won’t go,” he said. “I’ll wait a bit longer.”
“Thomas, go. I’ll be here when you get back. I promise.”
He looked for a moment at my mouth, as if he wanted to kiss it, to taste it for the truth, but Eoin rushed out of the house and threw himself at Thomas, demanding affection and wheedling a prize from Dublin if he was very good while Thomas was away. Thomas lifted him easily and hugged him close before extracting his own promises.
“I’ll bring you back a present if you mind your nana and look after your mother. And don’t let her go near the lough,” he said to Eoin, raising his pale-blue eyes to mine as he set the boy back on the ground.
My heart lurched, and a memory flooded back, bringing with it an odd sense of déjà vu and a line tripping through my mind.
“Don’t go near the water, love, the lough will take you far from me,” I murmured, and Thomas cocked his head.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just something I read once.”
“Why can’t Mother go near the lough?” Eoin asked, confused. “We go there all the time. We walk on the shore and skip rocks. Mother showed me how.”
Eoin had taught me how to skip rocks, once upon a time. Yet another dizzying circle of what came first.
Thomas frowned, ignoring Eoin’s question, and sighed again, as if his head and stomach were at war with one another.
“Thomas, go. All will be well while you are gone,” I said firmly.
22 August 1921
I drove to Dublin with both hands on the wheel and my heart in my throat. I’d had little contact with Mick since de Valera had returned and Lord French had been replaced as general governor. I wasn’t much help to Mick in the scheme of things. I was nothing but a sounding board. A friend. A financial backer and a secret keeper who did what I could, where I could. But still, I’d been away too long, and despite the truce, I was worried.
I met Mick and Joe O’Reilly, Mick’s personal assistant, at Devlin’s Pub. They were huddled in the back room Mick had been given for an office. The door was left ajar so he could see trouble coming. The rear exit provided a quick escape. Mick was at Devlin’s more than he was at his own apartment. He rarely stayed in one place too long, and if it weren’t for the loyalty of average citizens, who knew exactly who he was and never said a word despite the reward on his head, he would have been captured long ago. His reputation had grown to epic proportions, and I was afraid much of the rub with the president of the Dáil was due to Mick’s popularity. I became alarmed when he told me Dev (de Valera) was considering sending him to America to “get him out of the fight.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mick is the fight, and I told him as much. Without him, our Irish rebellion is all symbolism and suffering with no results—just like every other Irish rebellion over the last several hundred years has been.
Joe O’Reilly agreed with me, and I wondered for the first time how old Joe O’Reilly was. Young. He had to be younger than me. But the man was worn thin. Mick was too. His stomach had been bothering him, the pain so intense I suspected ulcers and made him promise to adjust his diet.
“Dev won’t send me away—he can’t get any support for it. But he might send me to London, Doc. He’s making noise about sending me to negotiate the terms of a treaty,” Mick said.
I told Mick I thought that was good news, until he told me de Valera wanted to stay behind, in Dublin.
Mick said, “He’s been meeting with Lloyd George for months over the truce, yet now he wants to stand back when it’s time to negotiate a treaty? Dev isn’t stupid. He’s wily. He’s playing puppet master.”
“So you’re the scapegoat.” It wasn’t a hard conclusion to arrive at.
“I am. He wants me to take the fall when it fails. We won’t get everything we want. We might not get anything we want. And we sure as hell won’t get an Irish Republic with no partition between the north and south. Dev knows this. He knows England has the power to crush us in a head-to-head conflict. We have three, maybe four thousand fighting men. That’s it. He knows nothing about the strategy we’ve engaged in.”