Read Online Leon Uris by Redemption - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Redemption
Tags: Fiction, Historical fiction, General, Romance, Historical, Sagas, History, Europe, Ireland, Literary Collections, New Zealand, New Zealand fiction, Australian & Oceanian
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other’s hair and exploded into a new furious kind of lovemaking that told each they both had held back words, thoughts, commitments. The raw rush of man and woman answered it all.
9
County Galway, Ireland, 1881
The door on the tenant’s cottage had been posted with a cholera notice. Atty held Jack Murphy’s hand so hard it hurt as he gingerly shoved open the forbidden door. Atty was seven. Jack Murphy, the foreman’s son, was fourteen.
Their eyes played over a misery. Four wanes, all under ten years of age, lay moaning or beyond the strength to moan in a fogged, then comatose, crawl toward death. A thin voice of desperate prayer from their mother was the only pointless tad of hope.
The entire village was stricken, as was much of the region. The mother’s prayer was interrupted by her sharp hack from the tuberculosis. Atty knelt before the children laid out on a mattress of bog peat before the fire.
“God has abandoned us,” the farmer’s wife said. “You shouldn’t be bringing her up here in the heather.”
Atty turned loose from Jack and felt the children’s faces, then smiled at the smallest wane, who managed a smile back. Atty held the child’s hand until he passed on to death. She stood and went outside, her mouth in a vise grip as the sounds of sobs and wails mixed with prayers and preparations for yet another wake and burial.
Jack was about to say that they had better leave but was stunned speechless by the incredibly ferociousexpression in Atty’s eyes. He had not seen the likes of it, ever. The fires lit in Atty would burst in fury all her life, like sunspots flaring into space.
It became apparent in a few years that she would be the sole inheritor of the Barony of Lough Clara, a landowning family institution of County Galway dating back nearly three centuries.
It was also apparent that she loved Jack Murphy and would love no one else, forever. As the foreman’s son, Jack had a privileged social position among the Catholics on the enormous estate. He had fetched the doctor for Atty’s birth and watched over her ever since.
Lord Charles Royce-Moore was not disconsolate at being unable to produce a proper male heir. Atty was as capable as any man and her willpower was of the stuff that made empires. She would do all right by Lough Clara.
His feelings for Atty ran deeper than any frantic efforts for continuity. In fact, somewhat the opposite. The summation of his family’s generations in Ireland disturbed him: After three centuries, they were still strangers in a strange land.
The defining event of his own life had been the potato famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s. For the first few years of the crop failure he bore witness to the sweeping scythe of death littering the fields with starved corpses, their mouths green from eating grass…then came the typhoid and TB and the mass flights from Ireland, many on infamous death ships.
All of this was too harsh for a young lad of the gentry, so he and most of the family sat out the great hunger in the more hospitable atmosphere of England. In order to save the barony, Lord Charles’s father shipped off every head of cattle to England rather than go on a plan to share food with the peasants.
Charles returned to Lough Clara eventually, but his innards were too soft to further invoke the harsh rule when he ascended to baron and lord of the manor.
Baron Royce-Moore did what most of the Anglo landed gentry did, let his estate drift into an unkempt and undirected holding. While many of his class went under, he was skillful enough to keep the lifestyle grand and the manor house stocked with vintage cognac, mainly through his horse-breeding operation. At the same time he socked away enough in London to be able to have that city as his eventual retreat, living out his days in the comfort of a plush leather chair in some fine club.
Shrewd consolidation of the barony would afford Atty and a husband of her choice a handsome way of life and the
9
County Galway, Ireland, 1881
The door on the tenant’s cottage had been posted with a cholera notice. Atty held Jack Murphy’s hand so hard it hurt as he gingerly shoved open the forbidden door. Atty was seven. Jack Murphy, the foreman’s son, was fourteen.
Their eyes played over a misery. Four wanes, all under ten years of age, lay moaning or beyond the strength to moan in a fogged, then comatose, crawl toward death. A thin voice of desperate prayer from their mother was the only pointless tad of hope.
The entire village was stricken, as was much of the region. The mother’s prayer was interrupted by her sharp hack from the tuberculosis. Atty knelt before the children laid out on a mattress of bog peat before the fire.
“God has abandoned us,” the farmer’s wife said. “You shouldn’t be bringing her up here in the heather.”
Atty turned loose from Jack and felt the children’s faces, then smiled at the smallest wane, who managed a smile back. Atty held the child’s hand until he passed on to death. She stood and went outside, her mouth in a vise grip as the sounds of sobs and wails mixed with prayers and preparations for yet another wake and burial.
Jack was about to say that they had better leave but was stunned speechless by the incredibly ferociousexpression in Atty’s eyes. He had not seen the likes of it, ever. The fires lit in Atty would burst in fury all her life, like sunspots flaring into space.
It became apparent in a few years that she would be the sole inheritor of the Barony of Lough Clara, a landowning family institution of County Galway dating back nearly three centuries.
It was also apparent that she loved Jack Murphy and would love no one else, forever. As the foreman’s son, Jack had a privileged social position among the Catholics on the enormous estate. He had fetched the doctor for Atty’s birth and watched over her ever since.
Lord Charles Royce-Moore was not disconsolate at being unable to produce a proper male heir. Atty was as capable as any man and her willpower was of the stuff that made empires. She would do all right by Lough Clara.
His feelings for Atty ran deeper than any frantic efforts for continuity. In fact, somewhat the opposite. The summation of his family’s generations in Ireland disturbed him: After three centuries, they were still strangers in a strange land.
The defining event of his own life had been the potato famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s. For the first few years of the crop failure he bore witness to the sweeping scythe of death littering the fields with starved corpses, their mouths green from eating grass…then came the typhoid and TB and the mass flights from Ireland, many on infamous death ships.
All of this was too harsh for a young lad of the gentry, so he and most of the family sat out the great hunger in the more hospitable atmosphere of England. In order to save the barony, Lord Charles’s father shipped off every head of cattle to England rather than go on a plan to share food with the peasants.
Charles returned to Lough Clara eventually, but his innards were too soft to further invoke the harsh rule when he ascended to baron and lord of the manor.
Baron Royce-Moore did what most of the Anglo landed gentry did, let his estate drift into an unkempt and undirected holding. While many of his class went under, he was skillful enough to keep the lifestyle grand and the manor house stocked with vintage cognac, mainly through his horse-breeding operation. At the same time he socked away enough in London to be able to have that city as his eventual retreat, living out his days in the comfort of a plush leather chair in some fine club.
Shrewd consolidation of the barony would afford Atty and a husband of her choice a handsome way of life and the
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