Molly Read online

  Molly

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part II

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Part IV

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Copyright

  To Tony – With love and thanks

  Prologue

  It was finished almost before it was begun: the wet air sang with silence after the brutal blast of gunfire; blood ran in the gutter with the rain.

  Molly O’Dowd crouched in her doorway staring in stunned disbelief at the two bloody, shattered bundles that had been such a short time before her youngest brother and the boy she was to marry. In the mud of the road Cormac, the brother closest to her in age, moaned and writhed, his leg shattered; not far from him another wounded man struggled to a sitting position nursing a blood-soaked shoulder. Apart from these – the debris of violence – the street was empty. Not a door nor a window opened; the whole village might have been dead.

  “Not Sean,” Molly whispered through furious, streaming tears. “Dear God, not Sean—”

  From the direction of the police station came a shouted order.

  Molly stepped into the street and Cormac’s head came up sharply. “Get away, Moll.”

  She ignored the words as she ignored the tears and the advancing red coats. She knelt beside him in the mud. If there were nothing she could do for the two she loved most in the world, it was at least some comfort to try to help Cormac. But as she calmly ripped the hem of her skirt to staunch the awful flow of her brother’s blood she could not stop the question that burned on her tongue like acid.

  “How did Sean come to be with you? How?”

  Cormac shifted his gaze, glassy with pain, away from her face.

  “Father,” she said with bitter certainty, “wasn’t it?”

  Cormac closed his eyes, the gesture an admission.

  “And how did he do it?” the girl asked quietly, her reddened hands busy about his leg, her eyes, silvered in the growing morning light, upon Sean’s and Danny’s obscenely sprawled bodies. “What did he say to bring my Sean here to die for nothing? Isn’t it enough that his sons are as crazy as he?”

  “Leave it,” Cormac said tonelessly, wincing. “Leave it, Moll—”

  But the girl’s tongue ran on. “Did he sing a fine patriotic song? Did he talk of O’Dowds who have perished for Ireland? Sean doesn’t—” she swallowed “—didn’t hate the English any more than I do. What is he doing here?” The soldiers, weapons levelled, were almost upon them. She sat back on her heels and wiped the tears from her face with a bloodied hand. “And where,” she asked the drifting, dove-grey clouds in a voice that made Cormac flinch, “was our brave father when the shooting started? Where was he? It should be him dead, not them. It should be him.”

  Her wounded brother did not answer, but steeled himself for the ungentle touch of the soldiers.

  * * *

  Seamus O’Dowd watched his only daughter gather her few belongings into a meagre pile on the kitchen table. The silence between them had lasted since the deaths of Sean and Danny six weeks before. He had argued, cajoled, threatened. At one time he had even unbuckled the wide leather belt that had so often been used to bring the girl to heel, but she had stood silently before him, frail and childlike, her great blue-grey eyes – the image of her dead brother’s – fixed upon his face with an expression of mixed contempt and hatred, her lifted head and straight, uncompromising mouth defying him. What could he possibly do to her worse than had already been done? Later he had tried to talk to her; always his tongue had been a weapon as effective as any he possessed: persuasive, eloquent, provocative, a tongue to talk the dead to life and to cut the living to the heart. And Molly, as the words flowed unheeded about her, had wondered when her Sean had begun to listen to this voice? And why hadn’t she noticed, hadn’t she guessed, the fatal influence her wild, attractive family, their tongues as quick as their tempers and their laughter as ready, were having on the man whom she loved for his gentle nature, for his very contrast to the passionate, exhausting men with whom she lived? She had watched her father’s vivid, handsome face as he talked. “Coward,” said her eyes. “Coward! Where were you when they died?” She had turned and left him then without a word. After that he seemed to accept her silence, to ignore her as she ignored him – believing, Molly was certain, that she would eventually come round. It was not in Seamus O’Dowd to believe that a woman could truly hate him.

  Without her brothers the house had been like a morgue! Danny dead; Cormac in the hospital of an English gaol; Patrick her eldest brother, who had escaped in the confusion of that bloody morning in Kilcarrigen, God only knew where. Those shocked and empty weeks had been a nightmare, the only relief coming with the news that Patrick had left the country and was safely on his way to America. But long before the first grief eased or the passionate rage at the terrible and irredeemable waste died, Molly had known she would leave. She had made her plans quietly, spoken to no one, gathered her small resources.

  Now she laid her little stock of much-darned but clean and neatly pressed clothes upon a shawl spread over the table, drew together the corners and tied them firmly. Then she straightened to meet her father’s eyes. He was leaning in the doorway, the light firing his crop of curly hair to ruddy gold, leaving his face in shadow.

  “You’re leavin’ then?” He did not sound surprised.

  She nodded and broke her silence at last. “I am.”

  She lifted her bundle and stood waiting for him to move. She could not leave until the doorway was clear. With her wild hair, gypsy black and curly as her father’s, and that deceptively fragile look that comes from years of not-quite-adequate nourishment, she looked, from a distance, little more than a child still. But in the thin, pearl-skinned face the blue-grey eyes were very far from childhood, the stubborn set of the straight mouth and the wilful line of the jaw telling more of truth than the narrow shoulders and thin, childish hands. At eighteen Molly O’Dowd was a woman grown.

  “You’ll be goin’ to Patrick?”

  She did not answer.

  “I’d thought of it meself.”

  She had guessed it and, for this reason – and others –
had made different plans. As things stood she had little more time for her brother than she had for her father. His hand, after all, had been as firmly in that wild and ill-conceived fiasco that had cost them all so dear. She waited in silence for Seamus to step aside and let her pass.

  “Don’t go like this, girl,” he said softly in the warm, winning tone he knew so well how to employ. “It would have broken your mother’s heart to see you leave so, with no word of kindness…”

  That was too much. “I doubt,” she said clearly, “that ’twould be me that broke her heart. I thank God she didn’t live to see Danny blasted to kingdom come in Kilcarrigen village street—” Her breath choked in her throat at the picture the words brought to mind and she stopped abruptly. Handsome, heedless, laughing Danny had always been their mother’s favourite. “Let me go, Father,” she said after a moment. “We’ve nothing to say to one another.”

  Still silhouetted against the light he shook his head.

  “How can you say that, Moll? You’re me daughter, me only daughter. At least tell me where you’re going.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not to Patrick, then?” There was a hard edge now to the mellow voice.

  “Let me go,” she said again. Something in her voice alerted him. He pushed himself from the doorpost and straightened.

  “England,” he said. The word was an imprecation.

  She said nothing.

  “I’ll see you dead first.”

  “You’ll have to,” she said, simply. “For you’ll stop me no other way. I’ve made up my mind. Sean and I decided long ago, to go to London—” She looked at her father, studying him, her dark, arched brows drawn together, asking a question to which she could find no answer. “What did you say to him, Father?” she asked at last, very quietly. “What in heaven’s name did you say to persuade my Sean to carry a gun to Kilcarrigen? He isn’t – wasn’t – one of you. He never was. I couldn’t have loved him else. We were to have a different life, a new start. Peace. Something to work for, something to build.” She looked slowly and with clear, seeing eyes around the squalid, sparsely furnished room that had been her only home. “A decent place to bring up our children, an education for them—” She could not go on, her struggle for calm lasting for several seconds before she asked, “Why did he go with them? He’d never held a gun in his life.”

  “He went because he wanted to.” Her father was no longer looking at her.

  “No.”

  “And I tell you that he did.”

  She shook her head, stepped closer to him, tilting her head to study his face before voicing the suspicion that had kept her all these weeks from speech lest she scream it at him. “You wouldn’t have told him,” she asked, deceptively calmly, “that you wouldn’t give your permission for your darlin’ daughter to marry a man who didn’t measure up to her brothers?”

  Silence. Beyond the door a bird sang.

  She stepped back from him. Her face, always pale, was bone-white. “How could you? How could you? Why didn’t you just kill him where he stood, and me too?” She was clutching her bundle as if it were life itself; tears she would not allow herself to shed roughened her voice. “Why, oh why can’t you understand? Hatred is no answer, Father. It never has been. Killing begets more killing. What is the use of it all – what has ever been the use? How can you ask a woman to bear children simply to perpetuate that hatred and die in their turn? I am not my mother. I’ll not see it happen to my children. There has to be an end. But the end is not here for me; neither is it with Patrick and you in America. Leave me to find my own way, Father. Go to Patrick. Nurse your wrongs together. Just be certain that you never look too hard for the real reason why Sean and Danny lie rotting in the churchyard. For if you find it you’ll surely kill yourself.” She had shouted herself hoarse and short of breath. She dumped her bundle back on the table for a moment, clutching at it to stop the trembling of her hands, breathing in deep and jerky gasps.

  Her father had stepped at last from the doorway, his face of a hue to match his hair, his powerful hand lifted to strike her.

  She stood her ground and watched him come. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, her voice edged hard with contempt. But the blow died in mid-air. The colour receded from the handsome face and an expression close to bewilderment took the place of fury.

  “The soldiers killed them,” he said, “the English soldiers.” The echoes of his voice hung in a questioning silence.

  She stared at him, her own anger draining in face of the dreadful uncertainty in his eyes. “I know that,” she said more gently, “I know it. I was there, wasn’t I? But it wasn’t only them, Father. You did it together, you and the soldiers. Don’t you see that? You can take pride in the fact that they died for a cause – comfort, even. I cannot. I see only the waste: their lives, and mine; children unborn. And for what? Nothing has been gained. What I cannot forgive you for is that Sean knew it. You goaded him to Kilcarrigen and he died for nothing.”

  There was a moment’s pause as she awaited her father’s comment but he said nothing.

  “I have to go,” she said, lifting her bundle and swinging it up into her arms. As she did so something fell out and slapped onto the floor at her father’s feet. A book, battered and dog-eared from much reading. Before she could move he stooped to pick it up, riffled through the pages. Finally he turned to the frontispiece with its hand-written inscription.

  Molly watched him in silence. The book was her treasure, a memento of a friendship she would never forget; the only true friendship of her short life. It had begun when an English girl named Mary Livingstone surprised a small, fierce trespasser on her father’s lands. From such an unlikely beginning had come a friendship that would have a profound effect upon Molly. Gentle Mary opened to her a world that until then she had not known existed. For two long summers the girls had spent hours together, stolen hours in the cave-like, sun-dappled shade beneath the old willow that had become their hiding place. From Mary, Molly learned of a way of life for which her own soul yearned: a life of peace and comfort, of books and music, a life where each day was not a brutal struggle to survive, a hand-to-mouth affair with ragged arrogance and bitter pride its only support. But more valuable by far, she learned practical skills as well. Mary had been delighted to discover in the wild, uneducated Irish girl a burning will to learn and a sharp intelligence that made teaching her a pleasure. And so, under the curtaining willow Molly learned to write and figure and read. The book her father now held was Mary’s parting gift on the day she had left Ireland with her family to sail to a new life in India. Molly knew large chunks of it by heart, had lived through it many times. Alice and the White Rabbit and all those other characters created for a much-loved child from one man’s joyous and witty imagination had figured in her dreams, had peopled a world she could not now conceive of being without.

  Her father traced the written signature with his finger and lifted his head. “This is her doing,” he said. “She it is who caused the rift between us. She had no right—”

  “No, Father. Though ’tis certain that she taught me to think for myself, and I can only thank her for that. Don’t blame Mary, Father. Blame me, blame yourself, blame us all. Things are as they are and cannot be changed. I’m going to England and I will not be stopped. I want a decent place to live, places to go, books to read. I never again want to be hungry. And I never again want to hear the sound of gunfire, nor to shake with fear at the sight of a soldier or a policeman.”

  In the silence that followed, each of them came finally to recognize that the gulf between them was unbridgeable. At last, as if in defeat, her father asked quietly, “How will you live? Have you money?”

  “Some. Enough, I think, at least to get me there. Sean and I had saved a little—” She paused awkwardly. “—I’ll be all right. I’ll find work.” She held out her hand for the book, avoiding his eyes. “Goodbye.”

  He closed the small volume and laid his large hand palm-down upon the
leather cover. “I’d like to keep it.”

  She lifted startled eyes to his, flinched at the look on his face.

  “I’ve nothing of you,” he said. “Nothing at all. I’ve seen you with this often – it would comfort me to keep it.”

  She had come too far to be defeated now. “Keep it.” She smiled crookedly. “Ill buy a better one when I’m rich,” she said and left him with no further farewell, standing solitary in the middle of the beggarly room staring blindly at a book he could not read.

  Part I

  Autumn 1898

  Chapter One

  Euston Station in the early afternoon was Bedlam on a Sunday. Carried along unresisting by those in a greater hurry than herself, Molly was swept by the stream of humanity and its luggage past the ticket barrier and on into the great station hall. She staggered as a case carried by a burly man caught her painfully behind her knees. The man tutted impatiently and glared at her as if she were at fault. She hesitated then, a small and uncertain figure, her bundle clasped to her chest, her eyes wide upon the noisiest confusion of human activity she had ever seen.

  As the crowd around Molly’s still figure thinned a little, she became more aware of her own unkempt appearance. The overnight trip as a four-shilling deck passenger on the steamer Kerry and the subsequent long, tiring train journey from Liverpool had done little for her looks. Her hair was tangled and salty from the windy rough crossing, her face and hands were dirty, her already shabby skirt and shawl were sea-spotted and smeared with grime from the train. Dressed so, she knew she appeared drab and incongruous amongst the fashionable, and even the not-so-fashionable people who swarmed through the station hall. Nearby stood two girls about Molly’s own age. They were dressed almost identically in smart, wasp-waisted suits with sweeping skirts and puffed leg o’ mutton sleeves that narrowed elegantly to the wrist; the ruffles at their throats and cuffs were snowy white, contrasting with the sober colours of their travelling clothes; their upswept hair was set off with saucily-tilted boaters trimmed with flowers, and their small hands were genteelly gloved. Indeed, if there were one thing that Molly had noted from the moment she had stepped onto the dockside at Liverpool it was that no woman but she was without a hat or gloves. She tucked her bare hands beneath her shawl, aware that one of the girls she had been studying had noticed her and said something, giggling, to the other, who stared most rudely. Molly turned away, a flush creeping into her cheeks. She was tired, she was hungry and rather more than a little scared, though this last she would not have admitted, even to herself. She squared her shoulders and looked around. Some distance off a notice proclaimed the Ladies’ Room; putting her faith in the saints that the term ‘Ladies’ might not be too strictly applied she headed determinedly in that direction.