VICTORY!
For Henry, Lord Blessington, it was very obvious that something very disturbing was happening in Ireland. For three long days he had watched and waited, listened to what was being said by the servants and trie
d to separate rumor from fact. This was very difficult to do. From the upper windows of Trim Castle he had seen soldiers marching north. A squadron of cavalry galloped past on the second day, the same day that he had heard cannon booming in the distance. On the third day he had sent his manager riding into Drogheda to find out what he could. The man was Irish, but he was reliable. At least for the present. Now he had returned and stood before him, shaking, gripped by some strong emotion. Riley was a man of little imagination and Blessington had never seen him like this, standing here in the study and twisting his hat, unspeaking.
“Sit down man, sit down and compose yourself,” Blessington said. “And drink this.” He pushed a beaker of brandy across the table, sat down himself in the big armchair with his back to window. “Now tell me what you found out.”
Riley drank too fast and had an immense coughing fit. He dried his mouth and face with a bandana from his sleeve, then rooted in his jacket pocket for the little leather-bound book that he always carried. The coughing seemed to have broken his silence.
“I made notes, your lordship. Of what people told me. I went to the town clerk and checked with him. He had some telegrams there and he let me look at them. It seems that American soldiers have seized Dublin by force. They are everywhere.”
“Taken Dublin? How — and how did they get here?”
“Who can tell? Oh, the stories I heard, there is enough talk all right. Some said they came by sea, in an immense fleet. Someone said he had seen them with his own eyes, landing in their thousands, by boat and barge down the Royal Canal and the Liffey. But one thing is certain, and all I heard agreed on that, they are here and a great number of them indeed. Wounded too, and in the hospitals where there was talk of a great battle in the Curragh.”
“There would indeed be a conflict there.” Blessington almost said “We have” but quickly corrected himself. “There must be at least ten thousand troops stationed there. That would be a battle!”
“Indeed, sir, and I am sure that there was. And there were a lot of people who also seemed to believe that the Americans came by train, had seen them doing it.”
“Yes — of course, just what they would do. I can believe that. I have been in America and they are the great ones with their trains.” He stood and tapped the framed map on the wall. It had castles and heraldry that picked out the noble seats of Ireland, yet behind all the shields and coats of arms it was still visible as a map. “They landed here at Galway City, I’ll warrant. Beat down the local resistance, whatever there was of it, then took the trains to Dublin. What of the rest of Ireland?” he asked, turning back towards Riley. “What did you hear?”
“Saw, your lordship. A big announcement hung on the post office gate. I copied it here, just the gist if it, the best that I could, people were righting to get close to it and read it. Cork taken, it said, and all of the south of Ireland in the Liberators’ hands. That’s what they call themselves now, the Liberators.”
“They would, wouldn’t they?” he said bitterly. “But what of Belfast?”
“Fierce fighting there, that is what it said. But Belfast subdued, Ulster surrendered, Ireland one and indivisible and free. Martial law, with a dusk-to-dawn curfew, to be lifted as soon as the dissident elements are subdued. Those aren’t my words, I copied what I saw.”
“Yes, Riley, thank you. An excellent job.” Blessington dismissed the man with a flick of his hand and turned back to the map. “Trains,” he muttered to himself. It was so easy when you thought about it. There were no troops to speak of in the west of Ireland. None that he had ever seen. The invaders could land wherever they pleased there, to be greeted by rebels no doubt. Limerick to Cork. Galway to Dublin. Londonderry to Belfast — and no easy thing for them in the north, I’ll warrant. There are loyal people there. Not like the south of Ireland. A viper’s nest of Fenians. He turned away from the map as the door to the study opened.
“I saw Riley leaving,” Lady Sarah Blessington said. “Did he find out about the… troubles?”
“He did indeed. The troubles, as you see fit to call them, are a bloody invasion and a bloody war!” He knew that his wife disliked vulgarity and it gave him perverse pleasure to use it at this time. She was English by birth, very distantly related to the Queen, as she was fond of reminding him. Her eyes widened slightly, but she refused to be dragged into an argument.
“War?”
“The Americans, it seems, are the new masters of Ireland. While our troops are mucking about in Mexico, plotting some piddling invasion, the Americans have jumped the gun and are here. Now.”
“Our troops?” Sarah asked, stressing slightly the our.
Henry turned, fists clenched, to stare unseeingly out of the window. He was part of the Protestant landed gentry, one of the titled few in a sea of Catholics. Irish-born and reared, except for the few years at Cambridge, he was neither all of one nor part the other. Sarah had no problems. English-born, she carried that country locked into her bosom. But what about him? Where did he stand? What of his future?
Patrick Riley, manager of the estates of Trim Castle, had no such problem of identity. He had left the castle and walked to the row of tied cottages by the gatehouse. The door to his house opened directly into the kitchen. Peter, the Blessington butler, was waiting for him there. Seamus, the head groom, as well. Riley nodded at them and took down the stone crock and glasses for them all. Poured out good measures of whisky.
“Here’s to Ireland — free at last,” he said as he raised his glass.
“ ’Tis true, then,” Peter said.
“True as I’m sitting before you and drinking from this glass.”
“Not just rumors?” Seamus asked, always the suspicious one.
“Read it in the paper yourself,” he said, as he pulled a copy of the Irish Times from his tailcoat pocket and slammed it onto the table. The black letters of the headline leaped out at them:
THE LIBERATION OF IRELAND
“Glory be to God,” Peter said in a hushed voice, brushing the back of his hand across the newspaper, as delicately as he would a lover’s cheek.
“I gave his lordship a word or two about what was happening. But this paper is mine, for my children and their children’s children,” Riley said. “History has been made this day.”