clothes the best they could, begging from the wealthier citizens on behalf of the poor. The women had warmed themselves that winter with their long walks through the countryside, and a slow burning rage. Their own home was insecure, with a landlord hostile to their family involvement in the League. Even if you paid your rent, your tenancy was not secure. The women shared the League’s determination that things must change in Ireland.
Yet at times Bee had felt full, not of rage, but of light, warmed and raised above the ordinary, on the dreams of Michael Davitt. Who looked everything at her but said nothing. The only thing she had really feared that winter was that the English would come and take him back to prison.
Everyone knew that Dartmoor Prison had been a cruel experience. Seven years of it. No quarter given, especially not to one of the hated Fenians. As a twenty one year old Davitt had joined the Lancashire branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Three years later, he had attempted to buy arms in England for an Irish uprising, one that never happened. Unsuccessful though it had all been, an informant still told the police.
At the beginning of his fifteen-year prison sentence he had been strip searched daily, sometimes up to four times a day. They had put him to stone breaking, and when his one hand was too blistered to continue, he was moved to the prison gang hauling carts around the prison, yoked as animals. When the cart harness injured the stump of his right shoulder, they simply moved him back to stone breaking. Cockroaches were served up in the food, the men kept so hungry that some of them ate their cell candles.
Davitt preferred light. After all, hunger had stalked him and his kind since his earliest years. He had used his precious candlelight to write to the international press about conditions in the jail. He had written for all of them, political and criminal prisoners. A warder who had no sympathy for the Irish cause, but some for Davitt himself, smuggled the letters out. Liberal newspapers in Ireland and England published them. There was a stir, a controversy, and the slow ripples of his freedom had begun. Although it had taken the Irish Parliamentary Party five more years to get him and other Irish political prisoners out of English jails.
By the time he was released on parole on December 19, 1877, into the welcoming arms of first London Irish then Dublin crowds, Davitt’s father Martin had died, and his mother and sisters, on his urgings, had left Lancashire for the safety of America.
When he came out of Dartmoor, Michael Davitt was thirty-one years old, penniless, jobless, without the comforts of family or wife and children. When you have taken everything from a man - his country, his family, his language, his freedom - you have done either one of two things. You have broken him and made him your slave, or you have forged a mighty and bright-shining weapon, to be raised up against you.
Chapter 9 - That bastard left me behind
‘They’ve always had this fucking thing about Xavier.’ Siena twisted and wriggled in her seat, as if it were a bed of nails, instead of the soft leather padding of Zellini's. She and Hilary had scored their coveted spot, near the little grinning Buddha. His arms were raised up to embrace the world, his joyful hands aloft, grasping small orbs.
‘Yeah. One brother hunts him down and the other guards his hiding place. And I’m stuck in the middle here.’
‘Only because you want to be.’
‘No way,’ Hilary protested. ‘I do not want to be!’
Siena snorted in disbelief. ‘Come on Hils, it’s the only way you’ll get to have a part in their play.’ She softened at Hilary’s rising colour. ‘Look, I’m not accusing you, I’m sharing it with you! I’m standing out here too, jumping up and down, hello, it’s me. It’s me. Little sister!’
‘And I was so excited to have found Xavier’s email,’ Hilary ignored the jumping little sister, ‘and to have found some of his work in progress! That’s what distracted me. I’m sure I would have eventually noticed the email was a year old. Only Claudia pointed it out to me first. Turns out she’d already tried the email of the mysterious Hannah Reynolds. Whoever she is.’
‘That name’s familiar,’ Siena frowned.
‘Another suffering girlfriend?’ Hilary wasn’t too interested. ‘But I quite enjoyed Xavier’s little excerpt about your Michael Davitt.’
‘Actually I’ve got some chapters Xavier sent me ages ago about Davitt’s relationship with the Parnell sisters, if you want to read it. I sent him info on the Ladies Land League. You know the League, well the Land War itself, was a creative hotbed for women writers.’
Hilary noted the immediate possession, the claim to ownership. I’ve got some chapters Xavier sent to me. ‘So is Michael Davitt going to have an affair with Anna Parnell?’
‘Oh Hilary,’ Siena sighed. ‘There are other narratives in life you know.’ It was a Ryan family joke how Hilary wouldn’t go to any movie that didn’t have a romance in it. Vianney said she had therefore missed seeing ten of the greatest movies of all time. Wouldn’t say what they were.
‘Why do you guys treat love like it was a trace element or something?’ Hilary felt strangely defiant, ‘when it’s the main story.’
‘Look, the Parnells were Anglo-Irish elites.’ Siena tried to explain. ‘And Davitt’s the son of Irish-speaking peasants. The class gap would have been huge. Davitt had a good education in England as it turned out, but the Parnells were Protestant landowners. Really posh. They were another world. Although their mother was American, some people say that was a democratizing influence. But really,’ Siena frowned as she thought, ‘I don’t think the Parnell sisters would have been at all interested in Davitt as a man.’
‘Why not?’ Hilary dipped her chips into the tomato sauce, ‘he seemed pretty sexy to me.’
‘I’m delighted to hear you say that.’ Siena was approving. ‘Xavier must be doing good work then. It’s usually Parnell who is seen as sexy. Clark Gable got to play him. Poor old Davitt got played by Donald Crisp.’
‘Who?’
‘My point exactly! Handsome fancy boy Charles Stewart Parnell has always got the spotlight. Then and now.’ Siena moved the tomato sauce away. They were her chips after all. ‘You see Parnell crossed his own class line to lead the have-nots. The two men, Parnell and Davitt, made the link between them.’ Siena brought her hands together, clasped them in a bridge. ‘The Prince and the Pauper. Constitutional and radical politics. The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Fenian-backed Irish Land League.‘
This was one of the reasons Hilary didn’t like discussing anything with the Ryans. They just loved to tell you everything they knew. She picked at her stir-fried vegetables. She’d only ordered them to be good. But there was no fun in being good.
‘And the poor Irish farmers absolutely adored Parnell for it.’ Siena was continuing her lecture. ‘He would have got up there on his fine horse and spoken like Prince bloody Charles, “I say, old chaps, you must keep hold of your homesteads.” As if they actually had homesteads, instead of hovels and huts and mud cabins! But they would have loved every word of it. Because he was on their side. And he shouldn’t have been.’
‘Well if you can have cross-class politics, you can have cross-class romances,’ Hilary persisted.
‘Rapes, you mean.’
‘Oh come on Siena!’ Hilary protested. ‘Can’t we ever have a happy ending?’
