“What part of the west?”
“County Galway it is,” he said, “and the little town of Ballyglunnin that’s me birthplace, and doesn’t me sainted mother live there to this day. And doesn’t she every day wrap her shawleen about her and go to the ould bog to cut turf for the fire, for to take the damp from her poor ould bones.”
He went on, and she thought that his brogue had not been nearly so strong before, or perhaps she hadn’t noticed it, but now it was hard to understand him, and some of the words he spoke were not ones that she knew. And then, as the taxi turned on Amiens Street just a block from her hotel, she looked at him and caught the light in his eyes and the way his lip was struggling to keep from curling in a grin.
“You,” she said carefully, “are putting me on.”
“Sure, and ye’ve found me out.”
“You’re not from County Galway at all.”
“Sure, and where’s the harm to a body if a lad has a bit of innocent sport with a pretty—”
“You’re not even Irish.”
He grinned at her. “Well, that’s not entirely true,” he said, speaking all at once in an accent straight from the Eastern Seaboard. “My father’s Philadelphia Irish. Blood will tell, you know.”
“You fooled me.”
“I can put on a fair brogue. I’ve been here long enough.”
“If I were entirely sober,” she said, “you wouldn’t have fooled me.”
The taxi drew up in front of The White House. “This,” David Clare said, “is where you get off. And this is where I pick you up tomorrow morning. How’s ten o’clock?”
“But ...I don’t—”
“And hurry inside and get to bed. It’s raining, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“But who are you? I don’t understand. I—”
“Ten o’clock,” he said. “Wear comfortable shoes. I will come prepared to Tell All. Good night, Ellen Cameron.”
He spoke to the driver, and the taxi moved away from the curb. She stood for a moment watching it until it turned a corner and disappeared from view.
Five
He was as good as his word. At ten o’clock, as she sat in her room studying her map of the city, basking in the afterglow of a deep sleep and a lavish breakfast, there was a knock on her door.
“A gentleman to see you, Miss Cameron. He’s waiting in the parlor for you.”
She had not truly expected him to come. She went downstairs, and he got to his feet and crossed the room to meet her. He held a cloth cap in both hands and stood before her with his head lowered like a servant.
“Your personal guide ready to show you all of Dublin, mum,” he said. “But sad to say me limousine’s broke down, and it’s on foot that we’ll be after walkin’.”
They walked all over the city, and by noon she was certain she would need to buy a new pair of shoes before she left Dublin. He took her to some of the places she had seen the day before, but he showed them to her in a new light. They walked through Trinity College together, where he was pursuing a master’s degree in history.
“Pursuing it at a leisurely pace,” he added. “I’ve been here two years already, and it’ll be another year before I finish my thesis.”
“Does it usually take that long?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I’m in no hurry to get the degree itself. It’s just a piece of paper, when you come right down to it, and I’m more interested in learning the things I want to learn than in getting my studies finished. I’m on a teaching fellowship, and living’s cheap over here, so money’s not a problem.”
He took her once again through the Long Room of the library. Before, the old manuscripts had been breathtaking; now, with his knowledge and enthusiasm bringing them to life for her, they took on far greater fascination. Together they bent over a gleaming glass case to examine a page of The Book of Armagh, written by the monk Ferdomnach in the early ninth century. “The man spent a lifetime copying this manuscript,” he told her. “It’s hard to imagine such an investment of time in an age when we run off a million copies of a book in a matter of days. But how many of us manage to spend our lives creating anything as important as this?”
Later, as they left the college and walked past the building that had housed Ireland’s first parliament, he talked more about himself. He had just finished his summer courses, he explained, and would not be attending classes again until January. His advisor had approved a leave of absence until then, and he planned to spend the time learning the Irish language.
“Do you have to know it for your research?”
“Well, it certainly won’t hurt,” he said, “but I’m sure I could get along well enough without it. If my particular area of study were the old Celtic times, then a knowledge of Irish might be necessary. But most of the records of the Rebellion of Ninety-eight are in English, or else available in English translation.”
“Is that your subject?”
He nodded. “It’s a funny thing about Irish history. It’s nothing but a record of unsuccessful rebellions from the Norman invasion clear up to the present century. The British kept planting the country with fresh settlers, and within a generation the new arrivals became Irish and rose up against England. The Rebellion of 1798 was the rising that struck the most responsive chord with me, and so I decided to go into it in more detail. You probably know some of the songs that came out of it.”
“A few. Not as many as I’d like to know.”
“I could teach you some, if only I could sing decently.”
“Oh, will you?”
“You know what my voice is like.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Don’t you be silly. I can’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
They walked on, and he talked about his plans to learn the language. “They have classes in Irish. They’ve been trying to encourage study of the old language since the turn of the century, but not too many of the young people have much enthusiasm for it. But I won’t be going to classes.”
Instead, he explained, he would be spending the next few months far in the west of Ireland, in the Connemara region of County Galway. This was one of the areas that comprised the Gaeltacht, the general name for regions where the original Gaelic tongue was still spoken by the inhabitants as the language of everyday life. By living among the people, by meeting with them in the markets and at the pubs, he hoped to learn Irish as a spoken, living language, not as one would learn Latin or classical Greek.
“But will you be able to retain the language when you go back to America?”
“I’m not sure that I will go back.”
“You mean you’d stay here?”
“Why not?” He spread his arms wide, a gesture that took in the whole of Dublin and the surrounding country as well. “Why would anyone want to leave this place? Yesterday you saw it in the rain, and now you’re seeing it in the sunshine. Either way it’s the sweetest spot in the world. The people know how to live here. No one’s in a hurry, no one bustles about in a mad rush to join the Coronary Club by his fortieth birthday. Life is lived at its own pace.”
“But could you really feel at home here?”
“I already do,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure...”
“Look,” he said. “I’m an historian. In America an historian is someone who spends his life on a college campus teaching dull little freshmen what happened in eighteen fifteen. And publishing deadly articles in professional journals that nobody reads. And making a rotten living in the bargain. If I stay here I can spend my time doing nothing but research and writing. The cost of living is so much lower here that a man can make a comfortable living by writing an occasional book for the American market. And I’d be close to my sources here. Remember, Ellen, Irish history is my field. It’s one thing to study Michael Dwyer in the domed library of the University of Eastern Idaho or some such place. It’s another thing entirely to pack a knapsack and take a walk in the Wicklow hills where Dwyer and his men made their camp. It makes the whole thing come to life.”