Free A Passionate Girl by Thomas Fleming Page A

find fault with him when I compared my soft safe life with his perils and sufferings? I put my arms around him and vowed to love him more wholeheartedly.
    â€œâ€™Tis time surely for your luck to turn,” I said. “And with it, Ireland’s. You may be a good luck charm, without knowing it.”
    â€œYou’re the first piece of good luck I’ve had in a long time, Bess,” he said. “In fact, you’re too good to be true.”
    â€œI’m true as the oak of this deck,” I said, stamping my foot on the solid wood. “Will you be?”
    I said the words lightly, but my mind flashed to the broken promise to the woman at Priest’s Leap. For a moment a darkness fell on his face, as if he sensed what I was thinking. But he only laughed and kissed me and said, “What do you think?”
    Later that day, I climbed into the rigging to contemplate the sea from the crow’s nest. For this kind of exercise, I wore my sailor’s costume. High above the water, I gazed at the world’s immensity and felt very small. I thought of Dan’s story and brooded on how little we controlled our lives.
    I was so absorbed, I scarcely noticed the arrival of my brother. He had a similar fondness for this perch. Dan, on the other hand, seldom joined me here. He disliked heights. They gave him “the creeps,” he said, an American word that needed no translation.
    â€œAre you going to marry him?” Michael said.
    â€œIf he asks me,” I said.
    â€œWhat if I ask him?”
    â€œI’ll have your head,” I warned him. “I haven’t gone through the grief of defying Father, for all my love of him, to discover another father in you. Contrary to your assumption, the mere fact that I’m female and you’re male gives you no authority over me.”
    â€œHe’s not worthy of you, Bess. He has no education, no spirit but that of a mercenary.”
    â€œIf you knew his life, you wouldn’t be so quick to find fault,” I said, and told him the story of Dan’s past. It shamed him into temporary silence, but he refused to change his mind.
    â€œRemember how the song ends, Bess,” Michael said.
    â€œWhat song?” I said, trying to pretend I had no idea what he was talking about.
    â€œâ€˜Donal Ogue,’” he said, and recited the final verse.
    â€œFor you took what’s before me and what’s behind me
    You took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me.
    Sun and moon from my sky you’ve taken
    And God as well or I’m much mistaken.”
    â€œIt won’t end that way,” I said. “God won’t let it.”
    How strange it was, that while I was sinning my soul and defying my father and the precepts of the Catholic Church, I remained convinced that I was doing a holy thing to risk my salvation to free Ireland. Revolutionaries are strange creatures, and Irish revolutionaries perhaps the strangest of all.
    That night, Dan bought a bottle of John Jameson’s from Captain O’Hickey and got drunk. It was the kind of drinking I had never seen before, a dark plunge into whiskey as a kind of oblivion, without laughter or pleasure. But it loosed his tongue to speak to me for the first time with his feelings. Even when he took me in his arms, he said little by way of endearment. He never used the word “love.” “You’re a beauty, Bess,” he would murmur. He let me do all the talking about love.
    Now, as he reached the bottom of the bottle, he looked at me and shook his head. “Go ’way, Bess. When we get to New York, go ’way from me. I specialize in lost causes. Always on the losin’ side. This thing—Ireland—losin’. There’s nothin’ there, Bess. No spirit. No hope.”
    â€œâ€™Tis my cause more than yours,” I said. “You can’t tell me to go away from it. Any more than you can tell me to stop loving