peering at her, stopping, peering at her again. Peggy held her breath. Beside her, she knew Irene was doing the same.
“Hi, hi,” he said at last. He moved closer. “Hi!”
Bridie took it in stride. “Well, hi to you, too, boyo.” She went back to her scones, unaware of the small miracle that had just taken place right in front of her.
“Kieran was fascinated by Bridie,” Peggy said that evening, as she and Irene sat studying a smoldering fire. “I think it’s her hair. It’s so bright, and light fascinates him.”
“She’s a beautiful girl.” Irene leaned back in her comfortable armchair and rested her feet on a small padded stool. “Sheila was lovely, as well. Bridie resembles her, but her bones are finer. Sheila’s beauty wouldn’t have lasted past forty, but Bridie’s will.”
“She must miss her mother so much. A girl that age needs one.” Peggy had lost her own mother at a much earlier age, but she’d had sisters and her aunt Deirdre to make up for it. Still, there was a yearning for Kathleen Donaghue that never quite went away.
“I suspect she’ll be finding her way out to Tierney Cottage more often now that you’re here. She’s taken to you.”
“And to Banjax,” Peggy said. The dog had settled into the shed as if he’d lived there forever. Irene had made her way outside to supervise the placement of his bedding, even deigning to pat his bony head.
“A girl needs her father, too,” Irene said.
“Bridie says Finn was working in Louisburgh today?”
“Construction. He wants nothing to do with medicine. He won’t even work in a laboratory. He works so hard building houses, he sees little of his own daughter.”
Bridie’s plight was too familiar. Peggy had grown up without a father, too.
Irene pulled a knitted afghan over her lap, as if settling in for a very long time. “I needed my father and missed him every day I was growing up.”
Since Peggy’s arrival, they had hardly talked about Liam Tierney or his death in Cleveland. That had been the purpose of Irene’s first contact with the Donaghue sisters, and Peggy had offered so little information.
“I wish I’d had time to dig deeper into city records,” Peggy said. “Sometimes the amount of information that’s out there is a curse in itself.”
“I grew up wishing I knew more about him. The urge doesn’t seem to go away. And I worry I’ll die without that mystery being solved. It nags at me, although why it should, I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you do know,” Peggy said. “Megan and Casey have promised to continue to search. You and I have the whole evening, if you’re not too tired. Start from the beginning, and tell me everything. Maybe you’ll remember something that will make their job simpler.”
“I was very young.”
“Then tell me what your mother told you.”
Irene sighed contentedly. “A cup of tea would be nice, don’t you think? If I’m going to tell the story.”
Peggy rose. “I’ll make it. You gather your thoughts.”
“I’ll do that.” Irene closed her eyes. “It’s a happy story, at least at first. The telling of it won’t be so hard.”
1923
Castlebar, County Mayo
My dearest Patrick,
As always, I think of you, my only brother, so far removed from Ireland, and I mourn your leaving for Ohio as if it only happened yesterday instead of nearly a lifetime ago. Cleveland is more your home now than Ireland ever was, and St. Brigid’s still the center of your heart, even though you have now retired and serve as its priest only occasionally. But how sharp your mind has remained, and how astute your observations. We are lucky, you and I, that we still have our wits left, and that only an ocean separates us and not yet death.
How different our views on the plight of our people. Yours garnered at one end of our national tragedy and mine at the other. Yours when the immigrant steps off the ship or train and into a world of belching factories and hastily constructed shanty houses. Mine when the emigrant leaves his poor barren farm, prayers in his heart and hope glimmering in his eyes.
They say we live in a new Ireland. So far I’ve yet to see it. Last year assassins killed the Big Fellow at Beal na mBlath, a terrible loss to all men and women who believe our best fate lies in compromise. We Irish still fight among ourselves, as surely and naturally as we fought the British invaders. Men who survived the horror of Gallipoli fall in Dublin’s streets, and sabotage, execution and other atrocities have become as symbolic of our ancient and honorable culture as rainbows and church spires.
You tell stories in your letters of new Irish blood for Cleveland, of men with surnames such as Durkan and Doyle, Heneghan and Lavelle, names as familiar to me as my own. I mourn for these men, although I never knew them, for their need to depart the country of their birth, and for unwelcome surprises on arrival. I remember too well your letters about the place called Whiskey Island, dear Patrick, and the horrors of life there for men who had only known Ireland’s green splendors. Perhaps things are better now, but Cleveland will never be Ireland, will it?
There are still few enough opportunities here, particularly for those who allied themselves with the Republicans. Some wounds never heal. Perhaps it is better they leave for America’s far-off shores, but perhaps it is not. For what will our beloved Ireland do without its strong, courageous sons?
Your grieving sister,
Maura McSweeney
chapter 9
At his father’s knee, Liam Tierney had learned not to expect anything from life. At his mother’s, he had learned he was not deserving of love. Fortunately for Liam, he met Brenna Duffy when he was still young enough to be skeptical.
Lorcan Tierney, Liam’s father, was a hard man, and having a son late in life hadn’t softened him. He provided the bare essentials without a smile and demanded nothing more of himself.
Walton Gaol, Liverpool’s prison, had made Lorcan the man he was. As nothing more than a feckless boy, he had left the family home in Shanmullin to seek his fortune in England, but only a month later, overriding hunger, a slab of hastily stolen beef and an unlucky eyewitness to his robbery cured him of hope. Deeply ashamed, he told no one what he had done or where he was.
Upon his release years later, he returned to Ireland to find his family gone, likely all dead, and nothing left for him except the rocky soil and tumbling cottage he had abandoned with such expectations in his youth.
Liam’s mother had been a spinster, sickly and morose, who accepted Lorcan’s curt offer of marriage when a brother made it clear that she would have no place to live if she said no. She gave birth to Liam, her only child, with a maximum of pain and a minimum of joy. Had Lorcan not intervened, she would have left their infant son on the doorstep of the rectory that night.
Twelve years later, upon Lorcan’s death, she made good on her threat and abandoned the adolescent Liam at the rectory doorstep, disappearing that same night, never to be seen or heard from again. Castlebar’s conscientious parish priest sent Liam south to finish growing up under the strict tutelage of the Christian Brothers. Very little of what he learned in the orphanage served him well.
Lonely, angry boys find others like themselves as friends. Lonely, angry boys seek solace in action, in violence, in causes that fill the empty places inside them. Upon leaving the orphanage at sixteen, Liam Tierney found just such friends and just such a cause in the political upheaval of his time. Only the miraculous appearance of Brenna, an auburn-haired, blue-eyed angel and orphan from another institution, had saved him.
Now Liam and Brenna had come to Cleveland for a new life, a new start, a new home for their darling baby girl. Brenna had