Union Army, Virginia, 1862
Lavelle knew that by going South his life would be at risk. It didn’t matter. He had grown so tired of war. The endless tramping, the skin-and-bone rations; the hollow talk of glory; and the faint promise of a quick victory over the Rebels receding more and more into the never-never land of political wishfulness.
And he was tired of killing … sick of lying in the long grass, flat on his belly like some venomous serpent, spitting out death to some mother’s son … like Patrick.
How now could he face Ellen if he ever found her?
Wherever she had gone, whatever imagined wrong she thought she had done them, nothing could compare with this. Her son … the light of her eyes … the reincarnation of her first husband, Michael. And he, Lavelle, now her husband, had taken that son away from her. Lain in a hollow, singled him out, and shot him down from a tree like some wild animal.
He took out the blood-edged book he had found on Patrick. Lavelle was convinced it was Ellen’s, and that she had given it as a present to Patrick on account of this Emmeline. Lavelle wondered how Patrick had so successfully tracked down his mother after all this time when he himself had failed to do so?
He had assumed Patrick would have long abandoned all notion of continuing to search for Ellen. The boy had not been as forgiving of her disappearance as he had.
Patrick must have changed his mind after he had gone South. But what had Ellen been doing in the Deep South?
He himself, at one stage, had declared he would join with the South.
Ellen had chided him for this. She had argued that ‘freedom’ was a principle which over-rode Lavelle’s arguments about the blacks who, when freed, would swarm northwards like locusts to take Irish jobs, in the process, making the Irish the ‘new blacks’.
She had been having none of it.
In time he’d had to admit that, as in many things, she was right. Ultimately he had declared for ‘freedom’ and the North.
Now, remorsefully, Lavelle thought, if he had not listened to her, and instead gone South, Patrick would be still alive.
But he had chosen to stay North for another, more pressing, reason. To find her, thinking she would stay in the burgeoning East Coast cities.
Yet again he had been thwarted. She had gone South. Now it was where he must go to reach her. Break her heart with the news of Patrick.