“You ’ave some wonderful dreams,” she said hesitantly. She loved the way he spoke, not only the wild things he said but the soft lilt of his voice, foreign and full of music. But she did not begin to understand him.
“That’s the things we can have for nothing, Gracie, and if you fight hard enough, no one can take from you. But you have to fight, and you have to hand them on, to your children and your children’s children. That’s the way we survive. Never forget that. Knowing your dreams is knowing who you are.”
She said nothing, just walked beside him, happy that he was there.
They reached the greenhouse and he opened the door for her. It was surprisingly easy to behave like a lady when she was with him, to accept such courtesies.
“Thank you.” She went through and stopped in wonder at the rows of flowers all in pots on benches. The colors were vivid, like hundreds of silks. She did not know the names of them, except the chrysanthemums and the Michaelmas daisies and late asters. She let out a long sigh of pure pleasure.
“Do you want a dozen the same, or a dozen all different?” he asked, standing just behind her.
“I never seen anything like this,” she said softly. “Even flower sellers in the market in’t got this much.”
“They’ll all be over soon.”
“Yeah, but they in’t over now!”
He smiled. “Sometimes, Gracie, you’re very wise.” He put his hand lightly on her shoulder. She could feel its weight, and she imagined she could feel the warmth of it too. He had said she was wise, and yet there was a shadow in his voice.
“You thinkin’ about winter?” she asked. “Don’ forget there’ll be spring too. There ’as to be all sorts, or it don’ work.”
“For the flowers, yes, but there are winters of the heart there don’t have to be, and winters for the hungry. Not everyone lives to see the spring.”
She still kept facing the rows of flowers.
“Yer talkin’ about Ireland again?” she asked. She did not want to know, but she could not stay there with him and go around the subject as if there were nothing there. She had never avoided the real.
“If you knew the sadness of it,” he said softly. “The crying sadness of it, Gracie. Seeing all these flowers makes me think of laughter and dancing, then of graves. They follow each other so quick sometimes.”
“That ’appens in London too,” she reminded him. She did not know if it was a comfort or a contradiction. But she was going to remember who she was also, and Clerkenwell had seen its share of hunger and cold, landlords who cheated and were greedy, moneylenders, bullies, rats, overspilling drains and bouts of cholera and the typhus. Everyone knew somebody with rickets or tuberculosis. “London in’t all paved wi’ gold, yer know. I see dead babies in doorways too, all froze up, an’ men so ’ungry they’d slit your throat for a loaf o’ bread.”
“Have you?” He sounded surprised.
“Not in Bloomsbury,” she assured him. “In Clerkenwell, where I were before I came ter Mrs. Pitt.”
“I suppose there’s poverty in most places,” he conceded. “It’s the injustice that makes you weep.”
It rose to her tongue to argue. All kinds of things made her furious, sad, twisted up inside with helplessness. But she did not want to disagree with Finn Hennessey. She would like to be able to share with him everything that mattered, to look at the flowers, smell the damp earth, and talk of good things, of today and tomorrow, not yesterday.
“What sort of flowers are you getting?” he asked.
“I dunno. I in’t made up me mind yet. What der you think?” She turned around for the first time and looked at him. He was beautiful, with his black hair as soft as a night and his dark eyes that laughed one minute and drowned you the next. She found herself a little breathless, and confused with feelings.
“How about some of these big shaggy chrysanthemums?” he suggested, but without moving.
She had to concentrate on the room they were to go into. Her mind was a whirl. She could only remember florals. She had better not get lots of colors.
“I’ll take them big white ones,” she said, with no idea if they would be right, but she had to say something. “They look just about openin’ nicely. Them red ones is too far on.”
“What about the golden brown?” he asked.
“Color don’t go wi’ much. I’ll take the white ones.”
“I’ll pick them for you.” He stepped around her and started to examine the individual blooms for the best ones. “Funny we should have Padraig Doyle here, and Carson O’Day,” he said, smiling at her as he plucked the first flower.
“Is it? In’t they the right people for doin’ whatever it is?”
“Oh, probably, if there can be ‘right people.’ It’s all happened lots of times before, you know?”
“ ’As it? You mean it din’t work out?”
He picked another bloom, smelling its earthy fragrance with a sigh, then offering it to her.
She took it and held the damp petals to her face. It was like breathing heaven.
“No, it didn’t work,” he said in little more than a whisper. “It was a love story. Neassa Doyle was a young Catholic girl, about nineteen she was, same as you.”
She did not interrupt to tell him she was twenty now.
“Full of laughter and hope,” he went on, holding the flower still as if he had forgotten it. “She met Drystan O’Day by chance. It should never have happened. He was Protestant, as fierce as the north wind in January, all keen, cutting edge, his family was.” He laughed but there was no humor in it. “Saw the Pope as the devil on earth and all the church’s ways as scarlet as sin itself. They met and fell in love for all the age-old human reasons: they saw the same beauty and magic on the earth, the same tenderness in the sky, loved to sing the old songs, dance till they were too tired even to laugh at themselves.”
He was leaning against the door jamb, watching her, searching her eyes as he spoke. She knew he was sharing what mattered to him most, some part of the inner core of himself, the beliefs which drove him. “They hoped for peace, an honorable work,” he went on. “A small home and children to raise, same as you might, or me. Long evenings together when the day was done, time to talk, or just to sit and each to know the other was there.” He passed her the flower and started to look for another.
“What happened?”
“When it was too late they discovered they were on opposite sides. By then it didn’t matter to them, but of course it mattered to everyone else.”
“Their families?” she asked in awe. “But ’ow could they stop it? Nobody can stop ’oo you love. Was it her father stopped ’er?”
“No.” He looked at her very directly. “It never came to that. The English got to know of it. We were almost at agreement then, but they wanted to keep us divided. Divide and rule.” His face was pinched with pain. His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “They used them both.”
“ ’Ow?” she whispered.
“It was mainly one English soldier. His name was Alexander Chinnery. He was an officer, a lieutenant in one of the Anglo-Irish regiments. He pretended to be a friend of Drystan O’Day’s.” His young face was filled with grief and hatred till he looked so different it almost frightened her. “That’s the duplicity of it,” he said hoarsely. “He was free to carry messages to Neassa as well. No one thought anything of it. He promised to help them both to run away. He was going to get a boat for them. It was summer. Drystan was a good mariner. He could have sailed across to the Isle of Man, that’s where they were supposed to go.”