6

On Sackville Street a crowd had gathered around a stalled tram and Curry pushed closer to see. But the tram was draped with large-lettered posters and bunting, not the usual advertisements for Pears Soap or the Guinness Brewery. A large banner ringing the top, like a crown, read, irishmen enlist today! The tram wasn’t stalled, in fact, but was positioned on a stretch of lesser-used track. Across the front of the car, below the headlight, were huge red letters reading, recruiting office. And on the side below the windows another banner read, for the small nations and for ireland, how can you say no?

Dark-suited men were lined up, waiting their turn, and others, like Curry, had pushed in close to watch them file onto the tram to stand before the British soldiers for their interview. The observers were passive, almost sullen, but they looked on without jeering. What shocked Curry wasn’t the recruiting—for weeks posters had been appearing all over Dublin saying, kitchener wants you—bad teeth no bar—or even the willingness of Irishmen to enlist. Many befuddled boyos had done so and many more would. What surprised Curry and, in a way, offended him more, was the British appropriation of an ordinary Dublin streetcar. Was nothing immune from their impressment? It was a simple reminder, of course, that trollies, belonging to the city, belonging to the county, belonging to the nation, belonged like everything on that damn island first and foremost to bloody England. His resentment bubbled, and Curry suddenly thought, To hell with working on Naisi’s lines; and he turned, pushed back through the crowd to the sidewalk, and went into Mc-Mahon’s, a Sackville Street pub.

At first the darkness blinded him. The pub was jammed with the last of the lunch crowd, and it took Curry a few moments to make his way to the bar. “P.P.,” he called, a Dublin joke, not about urine but about parish priests, and the bartender served him a pint of porter. He raised his glass to the man next to him. “To the bloody fools outside,” he said and drank thirstily.

His neighbor lifted his own glass, removing a blackthorn pipe from his mouth to drink. Then he looked quizzically at Curry. “Where’s your patriotism, man?”

The man’s sarcasm registered. He had a familiar face, with its heavy nose, sensitive mouth, skin even paler than most Irishmen, thinning hair carefully combed, but Curry couldn’t place him. He guessed he was thirty-five, ten years older than he was himself. The man chomped down on his pipestem again.

Curry concentrated on his pint, trying to shut out the feelings stirred up by the permanent British insult, but also by the noise of the boisterous drinkers around him. Naturally the tram—recruiting office outside was the subject of the heated talk. Everyone in the pub had his opinion about it and everyone seemed determined to state it at one and the same time. Curry closed his eyes. This wasn’t what he needed, not at all. He hadn’t had five minutes to collect himself since leaving the Abbey. He hadn’t been affected like this by a girl in a long time and he wanted to think about her, to hold her image in his mind, turning it this way and that, like a precious stone, eyeing facets, appraising, deciding, as it were, whether to cut or polish.

But wasn’t that a pompous, self-aggrandizing metaphor? Curry’s rejection of it cost him his ability to remember Jane Tyrrell with any precision. He’d loved the way the wisps of her otherwise tightly pinned hair framed her face, but now he couldn’t quite conjure the face itself. But if he fancied himself a jeweler, that was as it should be. The thought of holding her up to the light embarrassed him. Was that lithe, lovely girl only an object to be examined? And anyway, was he even remotely a connoisseur? On the contrary, like most of his kind when it came to women, he was a man without much to admit to. Furtive encounters with Tyrone Street prostitutes—they were naked under their coats so no time was lost fumbling with clothes—only compounded a fellow’s insecurities with what one soon came to think of as the other women, as the normal women, or, in good Irish fashion, as the good women, the ones with clothes. But Jane, he sensed, fitted neither category, and that, perhaps, was why she fascinated him.

But wasn’t he an actor and a rakish one at that? In his year at the Abbey and, before that, as a member of the drama club at the university, where he’d gone after quitting the Catholic seminary in Maynooth, Curry’s reserve had evaporated in every aspect except one. His ill-chosen and unhappy stint in training for the priesthood had brought him to the threshold of manhood even more confused about the female than other Irish boys. Where the others threw sullenness or impassivity over their confusion, he threw the cloak of his great personality. With women, particularly the lovelies who were actresses, he played the role of the Gaelic extrovert and it never failed to charm them, but only to a point—the point at which, as if by prior agreement, they always withdrew from one another. Nora Guinan, for example, the actress playing Deirdre. His passionate flirtation with her for a few months early in the year had been wonderfully circumscribed by the fact of her marriage. The truth was that big Dan Curry, though he could not admit it—hell, he could hardly believe it!—was afraid of women. He thought it was because he’d been stunted in the seminary, but he was just like most other men of his class and background. If chastity didn’t stunt them, poverty or obedience did. Ireland itself was their seminary.

Curry knew all of this, of course. And that was why it horrified and humiliated him that, despite the public and personal triumph of his success at the Abbey—he was a professional actor, by God!—and despite his own steadfast refusal to accept it as a spoiled priest’s inevitable lot, he had not overcome this one unreferred-to but monumental inhibition. When he’d quit the seminary he’d adopted the pose of the gregarious but also mysterious, even ascetic loner. At twenty that had had its charm. But at twenty-five he was just another Irish bachelor waiting for Ma to die before taking up with someone else.

He looked around the pub: a roomful of them! Even the married ones were bachelors! Curry had to stifle a sudden repugnance for the coarse, argumentative, brew-swilling men. Men like him.

Someone yelled in the heat of an exchange, “They’ll give us our nation six feet at a time!”

Curry turned to the fellow next to him. “But they’ll still want their rent.”

A bantam Irishman leapt up onto a chair and sang, “Full steam ahead John Redmond said / that everything was well, chum; / Home Rule will come when we are dead / and buried out in Belgium.”

The drinkers cheered, and so the little man sang it again.

The man with the blackthorn pipe looked around at them, saying quietly to Curry, “We either stand in line to join their army or we stand on chairs to sing drunken songs against them. How King George must shiver at the thought of us.”

The man’s eyes met Curry’s, and their weighty sobriety, in that context, prompted Curry to ask, almost despite himself—why should he take Ireland’s bondage seriously when the others didn’t?—“What else are we to do?”

The man answered with a long stare. When at last he spoke, his words were like a footnote to what his expression had conveyed. “Stop playacting.”

“What?” Curry felt defensive at once. He hadn’t expected to have his profession attacked.

“We must stop playacting. It’s become our national pastime. Redmond with his Irish regiments in the King’s army plays the role of an English lackey so they’ll give him Home Rule as his reward. Carson with his Orange bullyboys plays the role of the snarling villain who keeps the maid of Ulster tied to the tracks. James Connolly has his Irish Citizen’s Army and a home-grown honest-to-God militant class struggle, but what the lads really want are those fancy Australian bush hats, Sam Browne belts, and trousers with stripes down the leg. Eoin MacNeill is the C-in-C of the Irish Volunteers and what is their duty? Why, begorra, to defend the shores of Ireland from foreign invasion!” He laughed bitterly but didn’t stop. “And then there’s Arthur Griffith and the Sinn Fein, who claim the name Ourselves Alone but want a dual monarchy like they have in Hungary. And there’s Pádraic Pearse, who’s he, then? Why, he’s the unrepentant poet of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, bloody phantom revolutionaries, heard but never seen. And lo, Doug Hyde of the venerable Gaelic League still parading about in the native Irish kilt, blathering jibberish, and the GAA still handing out hurley sticks behind the nation’s hedges. Oh, how they must quake at Dublin Castle! And never forget the Irish National Literary Society, which gives us the sacraments of our new religion, and its cathedral, the Abbey Theatre, where at least they have the grace to admit that all they do is pretend that the freedom of Ireland means a damn.” The man stopped now, his eyes burning at Curry.

Curry’s impulse was to slink away from him. Instead he said, “I’m with the Abbey.”

The man nodded. “You’re Daniel Curry.”

Ordinarily such recognition would have flattered the actor, but in that context it made him realize that the man had a purpose in speaking to him like this. “Who are you?”

“Pearse.”

Hadn’t he just mentioned Pearse? Pádraic Pearse of the IRB? But Curry recognized him then. The high forehead and pale skin of a schoolteacher. Yes, Pearse. In true Irish fashion his scathing contempt for the competing movements of Irish nationalism, as impotent as they were flamboyant, was self-contempt. Pearse’s writing appeared regularly in Irish Freedom.

Curry deflected the awkwardness he felt with an easy but pointed comment. “I must say, Mr. Pearse, you do spread the blame around fairly, including yourself, I mean.”

Pearse was staring out of the pub window toward the tram-recruiting office, toward the line of men waiting to sign up. He shook his head. “I don’t blame them. Their children are ill-fed. Black tea and dry bread are what they feed their families. They’ll sign the paper in the streetcar there, and at once their kippers are on the royal payroll and they’ll go home tonight with milk and butter. With luck, they’ll die in France and their families will get the pension and have milk and butter for as long as Ireland is part of England.” Pearse laughed and raised his drink, gesturing around the pub. “A damn long time, if these blokes have anything to say about it. These are the ones I blame.” He let his eyes drift back to Curry while he drank. Then he wiped his mouth with his hand. “But you’re right. What’s the point of blame? Aren’t the priests always telling us it’s hopeless? And if it’s hopeless, then we sin if we do something real about it. It’s a perfect system when Dublin Castle joins hands with the Pro-Cathedral.”

“The priests have never gotten over Wolfe Tone’s thinking well of the French Revolution.”

Pearse raised an eyebrow at Curry. “They taught you that at Maynooth?”

Curry channeled his surprise that this stranger should know such a thing about him into a show of looking around for an invisible prompter. “Mr. Pearse, do I take it you’ve been talking to my mother?”

Pearse smiled thinly. “I’m sorry if you think me overpersonal. It’s true that I’ve made an inquiry or two about you. But not of your mother.”

“My mother would tell you what a disgrace I am to her, for having quit Maynooth. She never forgave me.”

Pearse shrugged. “We’re all in that boat, boyo. We were all born to be priests. But that’s all right. Our mothers were born to be disappointed.”

Curry laughed and felt consoled.

Pearse said, “The difference between you and most of the rest of us is that you had a moment of selflessness. You were capable of handing yourself over to an ideal. I understand why eventually you didn’t want the priesthood, but whatever happened to that original selfless impulse?” He waited for an answer. When there was none, he said, “You’re a large-hearted man, Mr. Curry. You’d have made a good priest. You’ve a way of kindling fervor in your audience. Fervor not for God, but for the cause of Ireland. You were magnificent in The Deliverer.”

Curry searched his face for a sign of sarcasm, but saw none. The play was Lady Gregory’s great work about Parnell. “Thank you. That’s an example of what playacting, as you call it, can do for the cause.”

“But only sensitive souls ever see it, five hundred at a time. Who attends the Abbey but the likes of me?” He gestured toward the recruiting tram. “Not those fellows out there. That’s the fervor that needs kindling, and I don’t mean for wee Belgium. What’s the point of a priest preaching only to the choir?”

Curry lowered his eyes. “I’m not a priest.”

Pearse stared at him, reading the depths of his feelings. Then he said quietly, “But you do care for Ireland.”

“Indeed I do.” He raised his face to meet Pearse’s eyes.

Pearse lifted a finger to the bartender. When he’d brought two more glasses, Pearse clicked his own against Curry’s. “When I watch you on stage you make me lay aside my awful inbred cynicism. I’m so weary of thinking ill of my fellows. Yet I never think ill of you. I saw you in John Bull and Riders to the Sea as well. And I confess that each time I began by thinking, Here is more talk, talk, nothing but talk. Sometimes I think Ireland will float away on talk, like one of those French balloons. Listen to them.”

He stopped long enough to let the pub noise swell. The drinkers and smokers were going to do this and that to the bloody English. They were going to bring a halt, by God, to the obscene blasphemy of British recruitment outside these very doors. But first they’d have another nip.

“But your talk, Mr. Curry, won me. What was your fellow’s name in John Bull?”

“Keegan.”

“Ah, Keegan. Right. As he put it, our Ireland is the dream of a madness. But it’s the only dream there is for the likes of us. You helped me to take it up again. You kindled my fervor. So I’m wrong, aren’t I, about the choir? I said, watching you, This man believes it! This man lives it! You convinced me, Mr. Curry. Or was it only that you fooled me?” Pearse faced Curry aggressively. “Is it more than talk to you? I have to remind myself that by profession you’re a man who seems to be what he’s not. What kind of profession is that, sir? Forgive my asking such a question. But you see, I think the Lord sent you in here today, to sit by me, so that I might put it to you. That question and this: can’t you do more for the cause you claim to worship than make the Anglo-Irish gentry squirm with guilt while their ladies bathe in an ocean of warm feelings for you?”

“I think what I do is more than that.”

Pearse shrugged.

“What are you saying, Mr. Pearse? I should join the IRB? The phantom revolution?”

“The IRB isn’t run by Protestants.”

“What has that to do with it?”

Pearse shook his head, as if it was too fundamental to explain. But he said, “You are their servant. You’re a tenant on their estate. Don’t you see that?”

“You said yourself that—”

“I said you kindle fervor, aye. In the plays of all those Prods. But Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory are like their cousin John Redmond. They think they are the heirs to England, not us. They want the King out, of course. They want the Irish Parliament, true. But whose parliament do you think it will be?”

“Ireland’s, Mr. Pearse. Ireland’s.”

“But Ireland is Catholic. You’re a Maynooth man. You know that.”

“Yes, I do. But I’m an Abbey man now, and I’ve seen that Protestants can love Ireland as dearly as we do.”

“Which is why we make alliances with them. But we mustn’t forget what our purpose is. To the Protestants Ireland is a vast estate, rolling hills, lush with grass for grazing their horses in. But to us Ireland is the hovel and the slum in which our people starve. Is it more than talk to you? Begob and begee and the divil for Inglind. Erin go brah and Ireland forever. But for whom? Forgive me, Mr. Curry. It’s my obligation to put the question as directly as I can.”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“What can you do for us?”

“Besides wear a stripe down my trousers?” He shrugged. “I’m in costume all the time as it is.”

Pearse shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand me. We let the boyos playact militia because there’ll come a time when they leave the theater for the streets.”

Curry looked around. “I think your problem is getting them out of the pub, Mr. Pearse. Not the theater.”

But just then, as it happened, a shabby small man, clearly drunk, began shouting while making his way to the door, “To hell with Belgium! To hell with John Redmond! To hell with bloody King George!” The others opened an aisle before him and began to cheer him on. He banged against the door, and the glass rattled as it bounced open. He stumbled out into the street, staggered while his eyes adjusted to the blinding glare of the afternoon, then righted himself. When he straightened to his full height and puffed his chest out, the evident contrast between the fierce image he had of himself at that moment and the pathetic figure he actually cut was heartbreaking. He strode forward, only to stumble at the curb. Even on the street, men made way for him, and he kept up his shouting—“To hell with small nations!”—as he approached the recruiting tram.

Pearse and Curry moved to the window with the others, and the crowded pub grew silent. Everyone craned to see what would happen.

As the drunk drew closer to the tram, three large, helmeted policemen appeared—two from beside the streetcar, one from inside it—to block his way. They held their heavy batons menacingly. But the drunk ceased neither his provocative ranting nor his unsteady march toward the makeshift recruiting office.

Curry said, “Christ, they’ll murder him.” He turned to Pearse. “We can’t let him do this.”

But Pearse, a man to whom any manifestation of England’s oppression was welcome, did not take his eyes from the scene.

Curry pushed away from the window, through the men by the door, and out into the street. The crowd had filled in behind the drunken outrager and Curry had to shove mightily to get through them. They had become relatively quiet too. “To hell with the fucking King and Queen and all the fucking princes too!”

Curry was only feet behind him when the drunk arrived at the tram. The police had not come to meet him, and they didn’t strike at once. The man surprised them by veering at the last minute toward the banner beside the door. He seized it—how can you say no?—and ripped it from the streetcar.

Then the police, joined by two others, fell upon him. All five bluecoats clubbed the drunk, who went down like a scythed sapling. The police continued to strike him.

The sounds of their clubs against the man’s head and body carried loudly. The crowd had shrunk back in stunned silence.

Curry pushed into the open circle. “Stop! Stop! He meant no harm!” But a policeman swung around at him and lunged with his baton, catching him as he came forward full in the stomach. As Curry fell, another policeman clipped him on the side of the head, above his ear, not squarely. He hit the pavement hard and covered his head with his arms against more blows.

The bloodied drunk had sobered fast, and the distraction provided by Curry gave him the seconds he needed to roll under the stationary streetcar, across the tracks, and out the other side, where he disappeared into the throng.

The police let up on Curry when they saw the first culprit escaping, and he too rolled away. The bystanders had not come to his assistance, but now they closed around him as they retreated. “Good man yourself!” a voice cried. “Shame on them!” another yelled, and then a third one, brave after the fact, cried, “Fuck England!” Curry got unsteadily to his feet, then stumbled and fell.

But now someone caught him.

Blood was streaming from the cut above his ear, matting his beard. In his red hair the blood seemed black. The man who’d caught him applied his handkerchief to the wound. Curry looked up at him. It was Pádraic Pearse.

“Are you all right?”

Curry touched his head and winced. He took Pearse’s handkerchief and began to do his own nursing. “You’re like all the others, Pearse. A race of spectators. You know what an Irish hero is? The fellow that stands by with bandages.”

“It’s not heroics we need, Dan. That’s not what I was asking for. Come along . . .” Pearse led Curry away from the crowd. Half a block away, in front of a horse’s watering trough, was a wrought-iron bench. “Sit here,” Pearse said. “I’ll get something for that.” He disappeared into an adjacent chemist’s shop.

A few moments later he came out with iodine, sterile cotton, and tape. “Bandages, you say?” He smiled. The moroseness that had made him so bleak in the pub had evaporated, replaced by a cheerful agitation. He daubed Curry’s wound, then closed it with the cotton and the tape. “This will sting when you take it off, but the thing now is to close it up and keep it clean.”

Curry let him finish. “Thank you,” he said. He felt better.

“You’re a good man, Dan. And you’ve got the stuff. But you shouldn’t waste your time running at them when they have the clubs.”

“That’s the definition of it, though, n’est-ce pas?”

“Not for long. Things are changing fast now. A few of us have decided across the lines of our separate movements that when the moment comes we’ll act as one. There hasn’t been an opportunity like this in seven hundred years and that is what unites us. You know as well as I do that if we Irish ever stopped fighting with one another, the fight with England would be over in the twinkling of an eye.” Pearse winked. “It’s a short time only, isn’t that what Synge said?”

“In which to be triumphant and brave. Yes. John Millington Synge, the Anglo-Irish Protestant.”

“A case in point, my friend. Because the opportunity I’m speaking of is given us by the war in Europe. England’s misery is our bliss, but do you think your Anglo-Irish friends feel that? They’re the ones leading the poor buggers down Sackville Street here into the British army. And if the poor ignorant bastards have a religious qualm at the last minute about swearing allegiance to a king who claims to be head of the Anglican Church, then the slick recruiting officer says it’s a war for Belgium and France, a war for Catholic nations. Sign here in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

“I’ve heard that said.”

“And if your friend Synge was alive, he’d bemoan the war like all civilized people do, but we rejoice in it. The war makes all the difference. Don’t you see? London is desperate. That’s what recruiting offices in the trams of Dublin mean. London is up against it for the first time since William the Conqueror came across the Channel. Her boys are falling like wheat falls in autumn. And we say, the more the merrier. Am I ghoulish? On this point, yes. As the going gets worse for England, it gets better for us.”

Curry said nothing. He felt bent by the weight of the man’s hatred. For once the rhetoric of nationalism seemed ugly, and that was how Curry knew that this talk, talk, talk was true.

“When the time comes, Dan, you could make a big difference. Men would follow you if you spoke to them from off that stage.”

Curry couldn’t look at him because it was true. He was a modest man, but he knew he had a gift. He’d watched squirming audiences freeze at his entrance and he’d heard the rhythm of their breathing alter because of the way he used his voice. When the passion of his own conviction joined, the way meaning joins with words, the passion of the great Irish speeches, his power to move and to convert and to inspire was greater even than the power of priests.

“I’m telling you, Dan. You should be one of us.”

Curry heard Pearse’s statement as pure command. There was recruitment, but this was conscription. The church he was called to serve was Ireland herself.

Most nights of his working life—“I cannot leave my brothers when it is I who have defied the King!”—he enacted the ritual rebellion. He knew how this was done. In Pádraic Pearse his own dear nation had touched his shoulder, and now it was his to say Adsum. He faced Pearse and nodded, deliberately and slowly, showing with his eyes that he understood what he was doing. “All right,” he said—a modest bit of antirhetoric, just what the moment wanted.

Curry knew that she would have to cross the Liffey on the Carlisle Bridge, so he loitered there. As wide as it was long, this was the main span over the river, a graceful arched bridge with columned marble railings the perfect height for leaning on. The streetcar tracks neatly bisected it between lanes of carriage, cart, and automobile traffic, and the eye naturally followed the tracks down Sackville Street. The confiscated tram was just a block and a half away. Curry stared at it. From that vantage the crowd around the recruiting office seemed less mammoth. All up and down the boulevard, one of the grandest in Europe and in fact the widest, people were pointedly going about their business. The wheels of carriages and the hooves of horses clattered on the cobblestones. It seemed Dublin was determined to ignore the affront of the British recruitment. Well, for a few moments so could he.

He turned to face the river, and, like a corner boy, spit into it automatically. The muddy water failed to reflect the sharp blue of the sky. It was a rare afternoon for Dublin, warm and sunny. Such weather always filled him with a poignant nostalgia. By a trick of his memory the days of his childhood had always been sunny like this. A form of selective repression, no doubt, for he’d lived in squalor on the bleak, dead-end Henrietta Street just a few blocks north of this very river. His eleven brothers and sisters, his parents, and a wet-brained uncle had shared two rooms in a dilapidated tenement that had been built a hundred and fifty years before as the Church of Ireland’s Archbishop’s mansion. In Curry’s day the former drawing rooms, parlors, dining hall, corridors, and even the former chapel housed three hundred souls who’d have thought themselves sinners had they known their home had been asperged by a Protestant divine. Good weather alone had rescued them from the stench and darkness of the place, and that was why Curry remembered his childhood days—a favorite game was chasing rats from lane to lane—as sunny.

Where was she?

He watched the figures of the people crossing the bridge, hoping to see a brown skirt, a white blouse, a dark shawl, a woman with graceful posture, long neck, confident walk, and no hat—Jane Tyrrell. He’d taken refuge from his anxiety in thoughts of her. He’d left it with Pearse that he would come to a meeting the next day. Before they’d parted, Pearse had made him solemnly swear an oath of secrecy, and that was when Curry had become afraid.

But there was no sign of her. He looked downriver again. From Carlisle Bridge, because the Liffey gently curved just there, he could see the Custom House. In that distance the waters of the river seemed tranquil and blue, and he could just make out the shimmering reflection of the stately Palladian building. Curry was not unmindful of the irony that Dublin’s distinction as a city was the result of Anglo-Irish genius and enterprise, not Gaelic. Its magnificent public buildings, of which the Custom House was the masterpiece, were embodiments of Ascendancy virtues—restraint, symmetry, mannerist detail, devotion to classical themes, intellectual rigor. Only a primitive could be unmoved by their beauty, but an Irishman could still experience those places as alien, indeed had to, and in that case the perfection of such buildings as the one he was looking at—how the color of the dome, a robin’s-egg blue, matched the sky today—only compounded the feeling that foreigners were choking him. Everywhere in Dublin the message was the same. The two great cathedrals, Christ Church and Saint Patrick’s, were monuments of the Gothic genius that brilliant Irish monks had inspired throughout medieval Europe. The two soaring cathedrals, so exuberant in their worship of God, so enthused with what they wanted men to think of themselves, epitomized the high point of Catholicism, but the Protestants had made them their own, leaving the Catholics to squeeze into the drab, undistinguished Saint Mary’s Pro-Cathedral—false Cathedral—in North Dublin. The Four Courts, designed by the same Englishman who built the Custom House, and the huge Phoenix Park obelisk named for Wellington, and Nelson’s Column commemorating Trafalgar, the Bank of Ireland, the former Parliament, and Dublin Castle, the military headquarters, and the somber arches of exclusive Trinity College all cast cold shadows on the filthy streets and collapsing hovels that alone belonged to the vast population. The people cowered, never daring to consider the great buildings of Georgian Dublin as their own, much less to enter them. On those buildings was engraved a coat of arms, English lions joined with Irish harps, and inscribed, Quis separabit?, Who shall separate them? Curry thought of that seal, staring downriver at the Custom House, and he said to himself, We shall.

“Hello.”

He turned quickly, surprised that his thoughts had left her and disappointed that he hadn’t seen her coming.

“What is it with you and bridges?” Her smile was dazzling.

He started to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. He was so pleased to take in her beauty again. His fantasy had done her an injustice. He shook his head. “What?” He adjusted his cap, to hide his bandage.

“In Stephen’s Green this morning, that bridge.”

“Was that only this morning?”

She joined him at the marble bridge railing, leaning on it with her elbows as he’d been doing, letting her happy eyes take in the sights along the river.

He studied her quite openly. The sleeves of her tight-wristed blouse fluttered in the breeze, and she pulled her shawl about her primly. Wisps of hair feathered her face, but she ignored them. He sensed she was aware of his staring. How could he make her understand all that was happening? And how could he explain that since he’d first seen her that morning it seemed that doors had opened inside of him, loosing a cavalcade of feelings the way sunny days had turned loose tenement children on the north side of Dublin.

Due north, that’s what she had seized in him, so that the needle of his concentration, even after spinning wildly between Deirdre and Pádraic Pearse—the old fate of Ireland and the new—kept returning to her. That was why he’d stopped here to wait. What he had for bridges was her. Irrationally, he had been convinced that this woman had come in the morning to teach him what Naisi felt, and now he was convinced she had come to prepare him for his encounter with Pearse.

But she and Pearse were opposites. No, more than opposites. Curry suddenly shuddered with the recognition that Jane Tyrrell and Pádraic Pearse were enemies.