Dr. O’Brien was firm. “D’Arcy, the ulcer in your leg is worsening. Under no circumstance are you to leave your house for at least a week.” Mary McGee stood by the doctor like a co-conspirator. She would make sure his instructions were followed. If D’Arcy lost the election, so be it.
“But I have to go to Ontario. I’m needed,” McGee protested.
“Just a week, dear,” Mary insisted. His adventure in Ontario was nothing but foolishness as far as she was concerned. Imagine, while running for his life in the federal election in Montreal, he was also running for the provincial legislature in Ontario, a province he’d never lived in. Didn’t he have enough on his plate?
“There’s work to be done. You’ll not put me in prison.”
“In a week, you can go back to your meetings and be insulted,” Mary said. “For now, fight your battles in bed. I’m your enemy.”
Conor snickered. He thought of offering up some lumber camp remedies. Perhaps a pinch of gunpowder with that potion, sir, or beaver kidney extract. No one seemed in the mood for a joke, so he kept it to himself. It would be his job to keep his employer off his feet for seven long days. McGee the wild animal corralled, and he the hired hand trying to keep him penned. But Conor had his own designs on this week. The instant Mary McGee and the doctor left, he pulled a chair over to the side of the bed. “Are you tired, sir?” he asked. “May we talk a bit?”
“Of course I’m not tired,” McGee lied. “It was a simple fall.”
“I want to speak to you about my father.”
D’Arcy McGee’s face grew serious. “Yes, Thomas O’Dea. He’s a good man, but very bitter, far too bitter.”
“He thinks you’re a …” He tried not to use the word in the chant from Jolicoeur’s, but he could think of no other. “He thinks that you’re a traitor.”
“I daresay he’s not alone.”
“And I guess he thinks I’m something far worse.”
McGee ran his hand through his messy hair and sighed.
“He told me about Ireland and the famine,” Conor said. “He described the ship over here.”
McGee sadly nodded. “Fever ships. Coffin ships. I know them well.”
“He told me about my mother,” Conor continued. “Her name was Margaret. She died in the crossing.”
McGee bit his tongue as the pain rushed through his leg. “Conor, it’s hard for you to understand what your father has been through.”
“He says you don’t understand.”
McGee considered the accusation. “An immigrant—no, a refugee—will always be an outsider, and that’s what your father is. No one can live inside your father’s skin and really know what he feels, but I think I have some sense of his anger. I was a refugee, too. In fact, I think I understand the people who shouted me down last night, even that man at the back of the room.”
“What?” Conor exclaimed. “How?”
“Listen, tomorrow a reporter from Cincinnati is coming here to interview me.” Conor knew about the interview, but he had assumed it would be cancelled now that McGee was in a sickbed. McGee anticipated his reaction and continued. “Mary can’t object. We can do it from my room here. I want you to listen in. He wants to hear about the old days—the days of Young Ireland. Rebellion. Insurrection.” His tired voice seemed to fill the room. “You see, I once stood with them. We didn’t use the word then, but it’s fair to say that I was …” He paused, as if daring himself to use the word “Fenian,” and chose instead to say, “I was just like them.”
MARY McGee marched into the room without knocking and dismissed Conor. He was not—“I repeat, not”—to return until the next day at noon. “D’Arcy needs his sleep.”
McGee smiled. “You’re right, Mary. Tomorrow at noon. Because at two o’clock I have an interview with some American reporter. It can’t be moved.” He held up his arm as if deflecting an attack. “Conor will be here to keep it short. No problem.”
She cast an angry look at Conor, as if he was part of some plot with her husband.
“It’s not his fault. The interview was set up last week and we don’t know where the reporter is staying. I can rest in the morning, and surely I’ll have the strength to talk a bit in the afternoon.”
“I don’t have the strength to stop you,” she said softly. And he knew he had won.
“Now, Conor, go and find out more about that mysterious troublemaker last night. Then, Mary, we’ll burn him in a pot of boiling Guinness and be done with him.”
She didn’t smile.
CONOR went to Irish bars throughout the parish and simply hung around, drinking a few pints and asking a lot of questions. He heard great stories of conspiracies hatching throughout Griffintown, of Fenians on the border, of a free Ireland on the horizon, but nothing specific—nothing clear about whoever had started the trouble at Jolicoeur’s. Nobody, it seemed, had seen his face. Those who had, or thought they might have, could not remember any distinguishing features.
“Was he tall?”
“No, medium height.”
“Did he have a beard?”
“No. I don’t think so.
“What was the colour of his hair?”
“Hard to say. He wore a hat, and I never got a good look at his face.”
“Would you recognize him again?”
“No, I doubt it.”
Conor felt like the world’s worst detective. But then, there was probably nothing to worry about. He was just another of Barney Devlin’s boys.
CONOR wrote to Meg daily. He struggled timidly over each word. He could write complicated political treatises and solidly argue a point of privilege, but he’d never written a love letter. So he hid behind reportage: reports on his day, reports on the election, reports on the latest book he was reading.
He had been slowly composing a real love letter for days, and stumbling over every sentence. He discovered he had to write about someone else first. Another woman. Even if she was from his own imagination. Encouraged by his talk earlier in the day with D’Arcy McGee, and fuelled by a few pints, he took out his pen and began writing.
SOMETIMES he told people to call him Patrick, but usually he avoided trading names. He had stored a box of clothes at the St. Lawrence Hotel when he first came up from New York State. Picking it up was easy. A few dollars and a Southern accent, and the boy behind the counter paid him little attention. His bag of tricks stored a make-up kit, hair dye, wigs and false facial hair.
He had taken a room above Barney’s Tavern in the guise of a workman: overalls, open-necked shirt and tweed jacket. From his dirty window, he watched McGee’s assistant arrive and then leave an hour later. Meddling son of a bitch. He’d be dead if he weren’t potentially useful. He would have to go down to the bar later to find out what he had been up to.
He considered his options for tomorrow. He should wear a suit, but not too expensive. He’d sport a rather garish tie. He was American, after all, not a boring British subject. A touch of grey on the temples, a thick moustache, maybe a distinguishing scar on his right cheek. He looked in the mirror. Not bad. Maybe add to the moustache and make it a salt-and-pepper beard. That was better. He was a new man: Jasper Green from Cincinnati.