Song of the Silent Harp Read online

  He moved a step closer to Conal, intent now on making his grandfather understand. “I saw him. Cromwell. I saw that pious hypocrite on his knees. He was praying, Grandfather. Only moments before he himself stood in the blood-soaked breach of the wall and urged his soldiers to break through and slaughter our people—he…was…praying. I saw his rage—he was wild with it, in a white-hot passion for our blood! ‘No quarter,’ he said. ‘Kill them all!’ Our soldiers said he intends to bring all Ireland to its knees. They said he believes himself to be the divine instrument of God’s judgment upon the Irish!”

  Even now the memory of the Puritan general’s gaunt, sour face, the sound of his vile name, made Eoin’s head roar. “Would you have the ugly truth about that monster go untold? Would you have his name remain free of the guilt it ought to bear?”

  At last Eoin stopped. His heartbeat slowed, and the ringing in his ears subsided. He was drained, his anger cooled, his passion depleted.

  After a long, tense silence, Conal nodded sadly. “What you say is true. The Puritan and his army purport to carry out the will of our merciful Lord, while in truth they have no mercy at all—none at all. But, then, Drogheda is not the first, nor will it likely be the last field of battle where the Hatchet of Hell proclaims itself the Sword of Heaven.”

  Their eyes met, and Eoin drew a deep breath. “Grandfather, two nights past, before the massacre, I had a dream. In the dream, God”—he faltered—”God spoke to me.”

  Conal’s chin lifted, his eyes flashing first with incredulity, then something akin to dread as he listened.

  “Our Lord has given me a clear vision of—of His will for my life.” Eoin spoke haltingly, yet he felt his conviction grow as he went on. “That’s how I know I am to take the harp into exile, wherever we go. And not as a silent harp, but as a voice. A voice for our people. The Harp of Caomhanach will be our emblem of freedom, an unchanging reminder of God’s presence with us and His promise for us: a promise that one day we will be truly free. A free Ireland, Grandfather.”

  Silence hung between them. When Conal finally spoke, his voice trembled as violently as his hands, causing Eoin’s heart to wrench at the pain he knew he had inflicted. Gone was the challenge in the old man’s eyes; instead, there was only sorrow.

  “Do what you must do, then, Eoin. I will only caution you this one last time, for soon I will no longer be with you to dampen that fiery spirit you possess.”

  Eoin stared at him. “What do you mean, Grandfather? Of course, you will be with me.”

  Conal shook his head. “No, lad. I’m old, and I’m ill, and I’ll lay my head down for the last time on my own sod. As Drogheda has been my home, so will it be my tomb.”

  Stunned, Eoin moved toward him, but Conal stopped him with an upraised hand. “I do not fear those stone-faced zealots, lad. With what can they threaten me? Death?” He made a small sound of laughter. “They cannot threaten a sick old man with heaven, now can they?

  No,” he said, again shaking his head slowly, “I do not fear death, so long as I can die in Drogheda.”

  When Eoin opened his mouth to protest, Conal ignored him. “But as for you, if indeed God has spoken to you, then of course you must obey.”

  Tears scalded Eoin’s eyes, and he quickly lowered his head to hide them.

  “Come here, lad,” Conal beckoned him kindly. “Come here to me now.”

  Eoin went to him. Standing with one hand behind his back, the other steadying the harp on his shoulder, he suddenly felt very much the child Conal had accused him of being.

  “If indeed you are leaving, Eoin, you must leave now. Go by the river. Use the opening in the cellar, behind the stone. Go up the river, not down, where the ships are. Swim until you find a boat. Go tonight,” he said, his voice urgent, “before the moon rises.”

  “But I can’t—”

  “You must!” The old man clutched at Eoin’s arm. “There’s a sack of coins beneath the cellar floor—take it with you. Hide it somehow; you may need the gold later, to buy your safety.”

  Conal paused, then tugged at Eoin’s arm to draw him still closer. “If you believe with all your heart the words you have spoken to me, Eoin, that the harp is free to sing, then let it sing for me this one last time. Sing a lament for Conal Caomhanach, whose spirit has already departed the land and waits for his flesh to follow.”

  Eoin stared at his grandfather for a moment. At last he eased away from Conal and turned, knowing the old man would not wish to see the tears that now spilled from his eyes. Steadying the harp, which some long-dead ancestor had hollowed from a single block of willow, he slowly began to pluck the strings.

  He sang in a voice still boyishly high. He sang for his grandfather, and he sang for himself.

  “My harp will sing across the land across the past and years to be.…”

  Eoin’s voice caught, and he had to stop and swallow hard before going on.

  “No loss or grief nor death itself

  will still its faithful melody…

  To sing the presence of a God

  who conquers even exile’s pain—

  Who heals the wandering pilgrim’s wound

  and leads him home, in joy again…”

  PART ONE

  SONG OF SORROW

  The Hunger

  They who are slain with the sword are more fortunate

  than they who are the victims of hunger.

  LAMENTATIONS 4:9 (AMP)

  1

  Daniel

  Write his merits on your mind;

  Morals pure and manners kind;

  In his head, as on a hill,

  Virtue placed her citadel.

  WILLIAM DRENNAN (1754-1820)

  Killala, County Mayo (Western Ireland)

  January, 1847

  Ellie Kavanagh died at the lonesome hour of two o’clock in the morning—a time, according to the Old Ones, when many souls left their bodies with the turning of the tide. A small, gaunt specter with sunken eyes and a vacant stare, she died a silent death. The Hunger had claimed even her voice at the end. She was six years old, and the third child in the village of Killala to die that Friday.

  Daniel kept the death watch with his mother throughout the evening. Tahg, his older brother, was too ill to sit upright, and with their da gone—killed in a faction fight late last October—it was for Daniel to watch over his little sister’s corpse and see to his mother.

  The small body in the corner of the cold, dimly lit kitchen seemed less than human to Daniel; certainly it bore little resemblance to wee Ellie. Candles flickering about its head mottled the ghastly pallor of the skulllike face, and the small, parchment-thin hands clasping the Testament on top of the white sheet made Daniel think uneasily of claws. Even the colored ribbons adorning the sheet mocked his sister’s gray and lifeless body.

  The room was thick with shadows and filled with weeping women. Ordinarily it would have been heavy with smoke as well, but the men in the village could no longer afford tobacco. The only food smells were faint: a bit of sour cheese, some onion, stale bread, a precious small basket of shellfish. There was none of the illegal poteen—even if potatoes had been available from which to distill the stuff, Grandfar Dan allowed no spirits inside the cottage; he and Daniel’s da had both taken the pledge some years before.

  All the villagers who came and went said Ellie was laid out nicely. Daniel knew their words were meant to be a comfort, but he found them an offense. Catherine Fitzgerald had done her best in tidying the body—Catherine had no equal in the village when it came to attending at births or deaths—but still Daniel could see nothing at all nice about Ellie’s appearance.

  He hated having to sit and stare at her throughout the evening, struggling to keep the sight of her small, wasted corpse from permanently imbedding itself in his mind. He was determined to remember his black-haired little sister as she had been before the Hunger, traipsing along behind him and chattering at his back to the point of exasperation.

  Old Mary Larkin
had come to keen, and her terrible shrieking wail now pierced the cottage. Squatting on the floor beside the low fire, Mary was by far the loudest of the women clustered around her. Her tattered skirt was drawn up almost over her head, revealing a torn and grimy red petticoat that swayed as her body twisted and writhed in the ancient death mime.

  The woman’s screeching made Daniel’s skin crawl. He felt a sudden fierce desire to gag her and send her home. He didn’t think his feelings were disrespectful of his sister—Ellie had liked things quiet; besides, she had been half-afraid of Old Mary’s odd ways.

  Ordinarily when Mary Larkin keened the dead, the entire cottage would end up in a frenzy. Everyone knew she was the greatest keener from Killala to Castlebar. At this moment, however, as Daniel watched the hysterical, withered crone clutch the linen sheet and howl with a force that would turn the thunder away, he realized how weak were the combined cries of the mourners. The gathering was pitifully small for a wake—six months ago it would have been twice the size, but death had become too commonplace to attract much attention. And it was evident from the subdued behavior in the room that the Hunger had sapped the strength of even the stoutest of them.

  Daniel’s head snapped up with surprise when he saw Grandfar Dan haul himself off the stool and go trudging over to the howling women grouped around Ellie’s body. He stood there a few moments until at last Mary Larkin glanced up and saw him glaring at her. Behind the stringy wisps of white hair falling over her face, her black eyes looked wild and fierce with challenge. Daniel held his breath, half-expecting her to lash out physically at his grandfather when he put a hand to her shoulder and began speaking to her in the Irish. But after a moment she struggled up from the floor and, with a display of dignity that Daniel would have found laughable under different circumstances, smoothed her skirts and made a gesture to her followers. The lot of them got up and huddled quietly around the dying fire, leaving the cottage quiet again, except for the soft refrain of muffled weeping.

  Daniel’s mother had sat silent and unmoving throughout the entire scene; now she stirred. “Old Dan should not have done that,” Nora said softly. “He should not have stopped them from the keening.”

  Daniel turned to look at her, biting his lip at her appearance. His mother was held in high esteem for her good looks. “Nora Kavanagh’s a grand-looking woman,” he’d heard people in the village say, and she was that. Daniel thought his small, raven-haired mother was, in fact, the prettiest woman in Killala. But in the days after his da was killed and the fever had come on Ellie, his mother had seemed to fade, not only in her appearance but in her spirit as well. She seemed to have retreated to a place somewhere deep inside herself, a distant place where Daniel could not follow. Her hair had lost its luster and her large gray eyes their quiet smile; she spoke only when necessary, and then with apparent effort. Hollow-eyed and deathly quiet, she continued to maintain her waxen, lifeless composure even in the face of her grief, but Daniel sometimes caught a glimpse of something shattering within her.

  At times he found himself almost wishing his mother would give way to a fit of weeping or womanly hysteria. Then at least he could put an arm about her narrow shoulders and try to console her. This silent stranger beside him seemed beyond comfort; in truth, he suspected she was often entirely unaware of his presence.

  In the face of his mother’s wooden stillness, Daniel himself turned inward, to the worrisome question that these days seldom gave him any peace.

  What was to become of them?

  The potato crop had failed for two years straight, and they were now more than half the year’s rent in arrears. Grandfar was beginning to fail. And Tahg—his heart squeezed with fear at the thought of his older brother—Tahg was no longer able to leave his bed. His mother continued to insist that Tahg would recover, that the lung ailment which had plagued him since childhood was responsible for his present weakness. Perhaps she was right, but Daniel was unable to convince himself. Tahg had a different kind of misery on him now—something dark and ugly and evil.

  A tight, hard lump rose to his throat. It was going to be the same as with Ellie. First she’d grown weak from the hunger; later the fever had come on her until she grew increasingly ill. And then she died.

  As for his mother, Daniel thought she still seemed healthy enough, but too much hard work and too little food were fast wearing her down. She was always tired lately, tired and distracted and somber. Even so, she continued to mend and sew for two of the local magistrates. Her earnings were less than enough to keep them, now that they lacked his da’s wages from Reilly the weaver, yet she had tried in vain to find more work.

  The entire village was in drastic straits. The Hunger was on them all; fever was spreading with a vengeance. Almost every household was without work, and the extreme winter showed no sign of abating. Most were hungry; many were starving; all lived in fear of eviction.

  Still, poor as they were as tenant farmers, Daniel knew they were better off than many of their friends and neighbors. Thomas Fitzgerald, for example, had lost his tenancy a few years back when he got behind in his rent. Unable thereafter to get hold of a patch of land to lease, he barely managed to eke out an existence for his family by means of conacre, wherein he rented a small piece of land season by season, with no legal rights to it whatever. The land they occupied was a mere scrap. Their cabin, far too small for such a large family, was scarcely more than a buffer against the winter winds, which this year had been fierce indeed.

  Daniel worried as much about the Fitzgeralds as he did about his own family. His best friend, Katie, was cramped into that crude, drafty hut with several others. She was slight, Katie was, so thin and frail that Daniel’s blood chilled at the thought of what the fever might do to her. His sister had been far sturdier than Katie, and it had destroyed Ellie in such a short time.

  Katie was more than his friend—she was his sweetheart as well. She was only eleven, and he thirteen, but they would one day marry—of that he was certain. Together they had already charted their future.

  When he was old enough, Daniel would make his way to Dublin for his physician’s training, then come back to set up his own practice in Castlebar. Eventually he’d be able to build a fine house for himself and Katie—and for his entire family.

  There was the difference of their religions to be considered, of course. Katie was a Roman and he a Protestant. But they would face that hurdle later, when they were older. In the meantime, Katie was his lass, and that was that. At times he grew almost desperate for the years to pass so they could get on with their plans.

  A stirring in the room yanked Daniel out of his thoughts. He glanced up and caught a sharp breath. Without thinking, he popped off his stool, about to cry out a welcome until he remembered his surroundings.

  The man ducking his head to pass through the cottage door was a great tower of a fellow, with shoulders so broad he had to ease himself sideways through the opening. Yet he was as lean and as wiry as a whip. He had a mane of curly copper hair and a lustrous, thick beard the color of a fox’s pelt. He carried himself with the grace of a cat-a-mountain, yet he seemed to fill the room with the restrained power of a lion.

  As Daniel stood watching impatiently, the big man straightened, allowing his restless green eyes to sweep the room. His gaze gentled for an instant when it came to rest on Ellie’s corpse, softening even more at the sight of Daniel’s mother, to whom he offered a short, awkward nod of greeting. Only when he locked eyes with Daniel did his sun-weathered face at last break into a wide, pleased smile.

  He started toward them, and it seemed to Daniel that even clad humbly as he was in dark frieze and worn boots, Morgan Fitzgerald might just as well have been decked with the steel and colors of a warrior chief, so imposing and awe-inspiring was his presence. He stopped directly in front of them, and both he and Daniel stood unmoving for a moment, studying each other’s faces. Then, putting hands the size of dinner plates to Daniel’s shoulders, Morgan pulled him into a hard, manly embrace
. Daniel breathed a quiet sigh of satisfaction as he buried his cheek against Morgan’s granite chest, knowing the bond between him and the bronze giant to be renewed.

  After another moment, Morgan tousled Daniel’s hair affectionately, released him, and turned to Nora. The deep, rumbling voice that could shake the walls of a cabin was infinitely soft when he spoke. “I heard about Owen and the lass, Nora. ’Tis a powerful loss.”

  As Daniel watched, his mother lifted her shadowed eyes to Morgan. She seemed to grow paler still, and her small hands began to wring her handkerchief into a twisted rope. Her voice sounded odd when she acknowledged his greeting, as if she might choke on her words. “’Tis good of you to come, Morgan.”

  “Nora, how are you keeping?” he asked, leaning toward her still more as he scrutinized her face.

  Her only reply was a small, stiff nod of her head before she looked away.

  Daniel wondered at the wounded look in Morgan’s eyes, even more at his mother’s strained expression. The room was still, and he noticed that the lank-haired Judy Hennessey was perched forward on her chair as far as she could get in an obvious attempt to hear their conversation. He shot a fierce glare in her direction, but she ignored him, craning her neck even farther.

  Just then Grandfar Dan moved from his place by the fire and began to lumber toward them, his craggy, gray-bearded face set in a sullen scowl. Daniel braced himself. For as long as he could remember, there had been bad blood between his grandfather and Morgan Fitzgerald. Grandfar had carried some sort of a grudge against Morgan for years, most often referring to him as “that worthless rebel poet.”

  “Sure, and that long-legged rover thinks himself a treasure,” Grandfar would say. “Well, a scoundrel is what he is! A fresh-mouthed scoundrel with a sweet-as-honey tongue and a string of wanton ways as long as the road from here to Sligo, that’s your Fitzgerald! What he’s learned from all his books and his roaming is that it’s far easier to sing for your supper than to work for it.”