“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will hurt Anne,” Thomas said, his voice low, his eyes holding hers. “Do I have reason to be afraid?”
She began to shake her head, to babble something incoherent.
“Brigid?” he interrupted, and she fell silent immediately, her back stiffening, her expression growing stony.
“They don’t trust her,” Brigid bit out.
“I don’t care,” he snarled, and for a moment, I saw the Thomas Smith who had carried Declan on his back through the streets of Dublin, who had infiltrated the Castle and the prisons for Michael Collins, who faced death daily with flat eyes and steady hands. He was a little frightening.
Brigid saw him too. She blanched and looked away, her hands clasped in her lap.
“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will harm Anne,” he repeated. “I can’t allow that.”
Brigid’s chin fell to her chest.
“I will tell them to stay away,” she whispered.
Thomas held my hand tightly in his as we maneuvered through the crowd and into the packed chamber of the Mansion House. Michael had assured us there would be seats reserved for us, and we slid between nervous congregants, who were smoking and shifting and making the room smell like ashtrays and armpits. I pressed my face into Thomas’s shoulder, into his clean solidity, and prayed for Ireland, though I already knew how she would fare.
Thomas was greeted and hailed, and even Countess Markievicz, her beauty faded by the ravages of imprisonment and revolution, extended her hand to him with a slight smile.
“Countess Markievicz, may I introduce my wife, Anne Smith. She shares your passion for trousers,” Thomas murmured, tipping his hat. She laughed, her hand covering her mouth and her broken and missing teeth. Vanity was not easily relinquished, even among those who eschewed it.
“But does she share my passion for Ireland?” she asked, her brows quirked beneath her black hat.
“I doubt one passion is identical to another. After all, she married me,” Thomas whispered, conspiratorial.
She laughed again, charmed, and turned away to greet someone else, releasing me from her thrall.
“Breathe, Anne,” Thomas murmured, and I did my best to comply as we found our seats and the session was called to order. Before it was all said and done, Constance Markievicz would call Michael Collins a coward and an oath-breaker, and my loyalty was firmly with him. But I couldn’t help but be a little awestruck by her presence.
I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.
But sitting in the crowded session, seeing men and women who had lived only in pictures and in print, hearing their voices raised in argument, in protest, in passion, I was the furthest thing from objective and detached; I was overcome. Eamon de Valera, the president of Dáil, towered over everyone else. Hook-nosed, thin-faced, and dark, he clothed his height and his spare frame with unrelenting black. Born in America, he was the son of an Irish mother and a Spanish father and had been sadly neglected and abandoned by both. Above all else, Eamon de Valera was a survivor. His American citizenship had saved him from execution after the Rising, and when Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and a dozen others fell under the swath of civil war, Eamon de Valera would still be standing. There was greatness in him, and I was not immune. His political longevity and personal tenacity would be his legacy in Ireland.
He spoke more than everyone else combined, interrupting and interjecting, shifting and sidestepping every idea but his own. He’d introduced a new document he’d drafted during the break, an amendment that wasn’t much different from the Treaty, and insisted on its adoption. When it was rejected on the grounds that it was not the document that had been debated in private session, he threatened to resign as president, further muddying the question at hand. I knew my feelings about him were colored by my research, but I had to remind myself that he had not known how it would all play out. I had the advantage of hindsight, where history had already unfolded and pointed the finger of blame. The committee clearly held him in high regard; their respect was evident in their deference and in their attempts to appease him. But where de Valera was venerated, Michael Collins was loved.
Whenever Michael spoke, the people strained to hear, barely breathing so they wouldn’t miss it. It was as though our heartbeats synchronized, an inaudible drumbeat reverberating through the assembly, and it was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I’d read about some of Michael’s speeches, and I’d even seen a picture a photographer had snagged from a window above the crowd assembled to hear him speak in College Green in the spring of 1922. The picture had shown a small stage surrounded by a sea of hats, giving the appearance of pale, bobbing balls, every head covered, nothing else visible. The numbers were fewer in the chamber, but the effect was the same; his energy and conviction commanded attention.
The public debates droned on. Arthur Griffith, gray-faced and ailing—he reminded me of a slimmer Theodore Roosevelt with his handlebar mustache and circular glasses—was the most adept at holding de Valera accountable, and when he came to Michael’s defense after a particularly nasty attack by Cathal Brugha, the minister for defense, the entire room erupted in applause that didn’t end for several minutes.
I’d been wrong about one thing. These were not average men and women. Time had not given them a gloss they had not earned. Even those I wanted to loathe, based on my own research and conclusions, conducted themselves with fervor and honest conviction. These weren’t posing politicians. They were patriots whose blood and sacrifice deserved history’s pardon and Ireland’s compassion.
“History really doesn’t do them justice. It doesn’t do any of you justice,” I murmured to Thomas, who regarded me with ancient eyes.
“Will we make Ireland better? In the end, will we have accomplished that?” he asked quietly.
I didn’t think Ireland would ever improve upon the likes of Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and Thomas Smith. She would never know better men, but she would know better days. “You will make her freer.”
“That’s enough for me,” he whispered.
In the last hour of the final day of debates, Michael Collins closed the proceedings and asked the Dáil for a vote to accept the Treaty or to reject it.
De Valera, though he’d already had his time on the floor, sought the last word, warning the Dáil that the Treaty would “rise up in judgment against them.” His attempt at a final oratorical flourish was cut off.
“Let the Irish nation judge us now and in future years,” Michael said, silencing him, and I felt the pangs of doubt and the weight of a nation pressing on every person in attendance. One by one, the elected representatives from every constituency cast their votes. The result was sixty-four in favor of the Treaty, fifty-seven against.
Like distant thunder, a cheer rose up in the streets when the result was announced, but within the chamber there was no gloating or gleeful celebration. The collective heartbeat stuttered and slowed, and one by one, became a cacophony of disparate rhythms.
“I wish to resign immediately,” de Valera intoned amid the emotional chaos.
Michael rose and, with his hands planted on the table in front of him, begged the room for calm. “In every transition from war to peace or peace to war, there is chaos and confusion. Please, let us make a plan, form a committee here and now to preserve order in the government and in the country. We must hold ourselves together. We must be unified,” he urged, and for a moment there was a hopeful pause, an indrawn breath, a possibility to defy destiny.
“This is a betrayal,” a voice cried out from the gallery, and all heads swiveled to the slight female in the front row who stood, hands clenched and mouth quivering, before the assembly. She was a suffering specter of Ireland’s not-so-distant past.
“Mary MacSwiney,” I whispered, close to tears. Terence MacSwiney, Mary’s brother, was the Cork mayor who had gone on a hunger strike and died in a British prison. Mary’s words would smash all hope of a united front.
“My brother died for Ireland. He starved himself to death to call attention to the oppression of his countrymen. There can be no union between those who have sold their souls for the fleshpots of the Empire and those of us who won’t rest until Ireland is a republic.”
Collins tried again amid the calls of support and cries for revolt. “Please don’t do this,” he begged.
De Valera interrupted him, raising his voice like a southern preacher. “My last words as your president are these. We have had a glorious run. I call on all of you who support Mary in her sentiments to meet with me tomorrow to discuss how we will go forward. We cannot turn away from the fight now. The world is watching.” His voice broke, and he could not continue. The room dissolved into weeping. Men. Women. Former friends and new foes. And war returned to Ireland.
I awoke to voices and shadows and lay listening, drowsy and drifting, alone in Thomas’s Dublin bed. We’d left the Mansion House in the swell of reveling crowds; the mood in the chamber was not reflected on the streets, and the people were ebullient, rejoicing in the birth of the Free State. A few of Mick’s men had embraced Thomas as we exited the chamber, visibly relieved that the vote had gone in favor of the Treaty, but the tension in their faces and the strain in their smiles indicated an acute awareness of the trouble to come.
We hadn’t seen Michael after the session adjourned. He was swallowed up in another round of meetings, this time to cobble together a plan to proceed without half the Dáil. But obviously, Michael had found Thomas. I recognized the burr of his brogue rising up through the vents even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Thomas, his voice soft and low when he spoke at all, was clearly soothing his friend. I waited to see if I would be summoned to look into my crystal ball but heard the front door close and a hush descend on the house once more. I slid out of bed, pulled my robe around my naked body, and padded down the stairs to the warm kitchen and my brooding husband. He would be brooding, I had no doubt.
He sat at the kitchen table, knees splayed, head bowed, coffee cradled in his hands. I poured myself a cup, doused it with milk and sugar until it was the color of caramel, and drank deeply before I parked myself on the table in front of him. He reached out and wrapped one of my long curls around his finger before letting his hand fall back in his lap.