and clapped, as if he had given them something rather than asked them for more.
‘Then I would like to start a women’s organisation,’ Fanny said suddenly, seizing the opportunity, most unexpectedly arrived right here and now. She had always been the shyest girl and the boldest girl – her family had never quite worked it out. ‘I want us to form a Ladies Land League.’
Davitt wasn’t horrified, or shocked, or ready to laugh. Anna had said he could listen. Fanny saw he was listening now, and with great attention.
‘We would still fund-raise,’ she said to reassure him, if he needed it, ‘but not for charity anymore. It would be for real change. And we would also raise awareness, to work against all the lies in the British press. We would start here in New York, where Anna and I have many contacts,’ Fanny looked over at Anna, who was nodding vigorously. ‘But eventually women could be organised in various cities across this country, across all the Irish dominions.’
‘You might even goad the men on to greater deeds.’ Davitt laughed, his brown eyes warm and alight. ‘Although some of the others may not like it,’ he said, coming down a little, ‘the idea of women so active in the world.’
‘But you would support us.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he nodded, ‘but you see I am not from the gentleman class.’ He said this quietly, but with no shame. ‘With my people, the farming people of Mayo, and the working people of Lancashire, we don’t like to waste women’s strengths and energies. We need them too much to survive.’
‘Whereas if the Irish landlords deserve to be extinguished for any one thing,’ Anna spoke up with some energy, ‘it is for their treatment of their own women.’
Davitt heard the rage. He understood it. He knew from Anna that each of the three Parnell sons had got a fine house and lands in their father’s will – the five daughters nothing. They were living on the charity of their brothers and their mother’s American family. In a way Anna and Fanny Parnell were as poor as he was.
‘And now, with this idea of yours, Miss Parnell,’ he said, bowing in a theatrical manner to Fanny, ‘when we have united the manhood and the beauty of Ireland, surely we will be both invincible and irresistible.’ Around him people laughed and applauded some more.
It was only then that Fanny saw, underneath all the gallantry and the force of his being, that Davitt was struggling against something deep. The flickering and shimmering may not have been a character trait after all, but the presence of grief. It was perhaps that force which had threatened to overpower her at the beginning.
Fearing she was being clumsy again, she asked quietly, ‘Are you unwell Mr Davitt?’
He looked a little startled.
‘I am often unwell myself,’ she said, apologetically, to soften her observation. ‘It makes me quite sensitive to others. Your mother -’
‘Yes I am thinking of my mother,’ he admitted. ‘She would have loved your idea. A women’s political organisation. And not just national, but international! And now she cannot join you.’ His voice broke just a little.
‘Come and sit down and tell me about her,’ Fanny said, drawing him away, nodding silent instructions to the others to leave them alone. Anna took the others back to sit in the hotel foyer while Davitt, strangely unresisting, came with Fanny to her quiet corner.
He sat down beside her on a plush blue couch, pushing the cushions aside, as if oblivious to their woven finery. He stroked distractedly at his beard. She saw how it was flecked with gray.
‘Two years ago, when I was released from prison, I promised my mother I would take her back to Ireland, to see her old places again,’ he said, moving straight into his need, ‘and I did not. I put the cause of Ireland first. What sort of a son was I, when she had suffered so much already for me.’ He stopped speaking. There were tears in his darkened eyes.
Fanny felt truly honoured to be in the presence of a man’s grief, honoured and thrilled, but yet a little surprised. She had expected Michael Davitt to be tougher, somehow. But then people expected her to be more serious, or wiser. Like a ‘real’ poetess. What Anna had not said, was that the famous land agitator was human.
‘You know my mother got us out of the workhouse,’ he said.
Fanny drew in her breath but he shook his head against her sympathy. ‘We were one family amongst thousands, Miss Parnell. I tell this story not for your pity but to honour my mother with you today.’
He told how after being evicted from their destroyed home, his parents, being utterly without hope, had brought their children to the local workhouse – some miles away. It took them over four hours to walk that terrible grieving road.
Davitt told her that his father felt such shame about this destination that he never once afterwards referred to it. His father was a shanachie, a storyteller, in both the languages, and he could read and write in both of them too. Yet he never once spoke or wrote of that day, in public or in private, neither in Irish nor in English.
‘But my mother felt,’ Davitt said, ‘and I believe rightly, that there was no shame in our family having reached the zero of adversity. She loved truth, my mother, and she taught me to love it too.’ He paused for a while. Fanny sat, breathing with him. She frowned at anyone coming close. But Davitt saw nothing. He had gone back to Swinford Workhouse.
‘And so we came to that dreadful place, with its dark walls, its tiny slits of windows. You could feel its cold cruelty just from standing outside on the road. When we finally got inside, the authorities said I was too old to stay with my mother and sisters and must go to the men’s quarters. I was ready to do what was necessary. I was practically a man. I was four years old.’ He smiled, and squared his shoulders, in mimicry of his boyish self. Fanny smiled with him.
‘And they were about to take me away, when my mother grabbed hold of me. She said she would die by the roadside rather than submit to such an unnatural condition, a mother being separated from her children, and she marched us all then and there out of that workhouse.’ He grinned, and Fanny laughed, and brought her hands together in a clap.
‘And as you can see, Miss Parnell, we did not die by the roadside. My mother entreated another family to squeeze us in on their cart, and we all took the road to Dublin – with their poor old donkey trying to make a break for it every now and then.’ He was smiling now. ‘I suppose there were too many of us in that old cart. The poor beast was affronted. But we children made a joke out of it, we said that the old mule was running for Ireland.’ He laughed softly at the memory.
‘And from Dublin we sailed to England. Got off at Liverpool. Both those cities were astounding to us. My father had been to England for work, but we children had never seen so many people in one place. And then we all walked, that other family and ours, we walked for about two days to Lancashire, because that was where the work was. My parents paid that kind family back as soon as they could. Though my mother had no English, she hawked fruit in the streets of Haslingden in order to do so.’ He looked up and smiled at her. ‘Now you know, Miss Parnell, why I have no difficulties in accepting a woman’s helping hand.’
Fanny thought of her own errant mother. ‘Your mother sounds like she was a wonderful woman.’
Davitt nodded. ‘She never lost hope in God or confidence in her ability to meet misfortune. She never allowed herself to be conquered.’ He spoke with a great pride in his voice. ‘She met every reverse and
