“Get out you crazy son of a bitch, get out,” Jack told him. “Come in again, you’ll get worse.”
Matty Lookup, whimpering out of his ruined flesh, stood up and shuffled his crumpled form out the door.
“How’s your ear?” Edward asked Maginn, who, with a handkerchief, was blotting the blood that oozed from his lightly chewed ear. “Did he eat much of it?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Maginn said. “I’ve got his nose in my pocket.”
“You hurt any place?” Jack asked him. “I thought you were all done.”
“I would’ve been, except for our nimble novelist here. Quick thinking, old man. I myself might’ve reached for a bottle to club him with, but I’d’ve never gone for the soup. A genteel weapon. Your prospective in-laws would doubtless approve the choice.”
Don’t say anything, Maginn.
Jack tapped Edward’s arm with his club.
“Good, Eddie,” he said. “You did good.” Then he went behind the bar to get the mop.
The whistle blew in the Lumber District. Six o’clock. The men would be pouring in, any minute. Edward now hated this saloon, hated Matty Lookup, Matty Beansoup, Matty Noface, hated his own savage response to the oaf. What was served by your attack and your sacrifice, Matty? What rubric of resistance did I serve with the soup? He held the empty pot in his hand. He looked at it: foot and a half deep, blue enamel, chipped rim, charred bottom, implement of retribution. He looked up and saw Maginn staring at him and smiling, blotting soup from his coat. Jack came with the pail and mop and went to work on the beans.
Edward could not now ask Jack to be his best man. A great fellow, Jack. A generous man if ever there was one, and now he’s got Ruthie all to himself. But he doesn’t approve of Katrina. Everybody’s generosity ends somewhere.
Maginn was still smiling.
“Shut up, Maginn,” Edward said.
Edward Delivers a Manifesto, September 27, 1885
EDWARD MOUNTED THE stoop of Katrina’s home on Elk Street, a quiet shaded thoroughfare on Capitol Hill that because of its monied residents was known as Quality Row. This was his first visit to this house since his proposal to Katrina. He’d seen her often, exchanged letters with her daily, but was persona non grata until her insistence wore down her parents. She had written Edward this morning that her determination had triumphed, that they would talk to him about the future; and so now, at afternoon, when he rang the pullbell of the Taylors’ Gothic Revival town house, Fletcher, the family butler these ten years, opened the door to him. As Edward entered the foyer, Fletcher took his hat, put it on the hall hat rack.
“Miss Katrina will meet you in the library, Mr. Daugherty.”
“Thank you, Fletcher. How goes the horseshoe season?”
Fletcher, a precise and florid man of some wit, and with a day laborer’s constitution, was horseshoe champion of Elk Street servants. A summer-long competition ran in the court alongside the Taylor stables, and Edward, being of neither master nor servant class, occasionally joined the games.
“Somewhat predictably, sir,” Fletcher said.
“You mean you’re ahead.”
“Yes, sir, I do mean that.”
“I almost beat you last time,” Edward said.
“You did, indeed. But, alas, you did not.”
“My turn will come, Fletcher.”
“It’s always good to believe that, Mr. Daugherty.”
Fletcher led him to the empty library and lighted the gas in the six globes of the chandelier. The library was part sitting room with tea table and cane-bottomed straight-backed chairs, walnut bookcases with glass doors and perhaps two hundred books, blue velvet drapes on the windows, and Jacob Taylor’s orderly walnut desk, with two leather armchairs facing it. Edward sat in one of these chairs, staring at the books. He waited, listened to the silence of the vast house, stood and searched for two particular books he’d read when he came here with Lyman years ago. He scanned the English and Dutch history books, such a burden when he first opened them, and now they weighed on him again: all that confirmation of ancestry. But where are the books of my lineage, my ancient history? My history has not yet been written.
He found books on Albany’s Dutch origins, volumes in the Dutch language, studies of the first Dutch and Episcopal churches of seventeenth-century Albany, lives of the Van Rensselaers, Albany’s founding family and its dynasty of patroons, lives of the Staatses, Jacob’s family, and shelves of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray (which Katrina read avidly before she was allowed to have them), Washington’s memoirs, The Federalist Papers, and books on the English in Ireland, yes: what Edward was seeking.
He took two volumes from the shelf and sat and skimmed them: “The Irish are abominable, false, cunning and perfidious people. . The worst means of governing them is to give them their own way. In concession they see only fear, and those that fear them they hate and despise. Coercion succeeds better. . they respect a master hand, though it be a hard and cruel one. . Cromwell alone understood this. .”
The same Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing of his 1649 attack on Drogheda: “. . the enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town. . I believe we put to the sword the whole number. . I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the Town. . about 200 of them possessed St. Peter’s Church-steeple. . I ordered the steeple. . to be fired, when one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.’. . I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone. .”
And then to Wexford to slaughter 2,000 more: “I thought it not right or good to restrain off the soldiers from their right of pillage, or from doing execution on the enemy.”
And Sir William Petty’s estimates: that the war reduced Ireland’s population from one million, four hundred and sixty-six thousand in 1641 to six hundred and sixteen thousand in 1652, much more than half exterminated; and three-fourths of Irish land and five-sixths of Irish houses taken over by British settlers; and, twenty years after Cromwell, three-fourths of the Irish population existing on milk and potatoes, living in cabins without chimney, door, stairs, or window.
Wrote Gookin: “They were strong, they are weak; they were numerous, they are consumed by sword, pestilence and famine; they were hearty, they are out of courage; they were rich, they are poor and beggarly; they had soldiers, they are left naked; they had cities, they have but cottages.”
“So,” Petty concluded on Cromwell’s achievement, “they will never rebel again.”
Cromwelclass="underline" Lyman’s presumed ancestor. Geraldine’s. Katrina’s. And here you are, Edward, seeking the hand of a woman bred of Cromwellian dust, you, whose father, by memory passed on, traces your lineage back to Connacht then and now.
Katrina entered the library and came to him, reached out her hand and stared into his eyes.
“I’m pleased you’re here at last,” she said. “Mother and Father will meet you alone, and I’ll come back when your conversation is over. I love how strong your face looks today.”