Free Song of the Silent Harp by BJ Hoff

order that their own people would not go hungry. Not so in Ireland. Under the pitiless hand of British rule, tons of home-grown food left the country’s harbors every day on British ships, leaving the already starving Irish to survive on nothing but their failed potato crop. Even the grain stored in the farmers’ barns was not available to the people; it was marked for rent, to be collected by the agents, while the very ones who had grown it died lingering deaths from the Hunger.
    No, Morgan no longer allowed his conscience to keep him awake nights with recriminations. He had no illusions about the road he had taken: He was a wordsmith turned outlaw, a patriot turned rebel, and if he were caught he would die at the end of a rope.
    If he were caught…
    Should that be the case, he suspected that even the Young Ireland movement—which presently viewed him as an influential, if not entirely irreproachable, member—might be less than eager to claim him as well. All the essays and verses he had written for their journal, The Nation —not to mention the funds he and his lads had poured into their coffers—would not inspire them to come to the rescue of a common brigand. While he had done his part to convince Ireland’s masses that “peaceful negotiation” with Britain would never bring about a free Ireland, his writings stopped a bit short of the militant, inflammatory tirades some members of the movement would have preferred. He was no favorite of Mitchel or Thomas Meagher, and the fanatical Lalor despised him.
    In truth, the entire movement had progressed to an extremism Morgan found both ineffective and foolhardy, and The Nation was fueling its fire. He had held both its chief contributor, the now deceased Thomas Davis, and its founder, Charles Gavan Duffy, in high regard. But besides himself, only a few supporters, like Smith O’Brien, still shared the original concepts on which the Young Ireland movement had been founded—that of an Ireland with its own identity, a right to its independence, and a nationalism of the spirit that would embrace both Protestant and Catholic, peasantry and gentry.
    No, there would be little help for him from the movement. No matter; he wrote what he wrote, not for the movement, but for himself and the few in the country who still wanted to hear the truth. As for the rest of his “labors,” he liked to think they were for those who were too weak or oppressed to save themselves. And, of course, for those few he loved: Thomas and Catherine, their little ones…and Nora and her lads.
    He had reached the top of the hill behind his brother’s cabin now and, stopping, he shifted the bag of provisions from one shoulder to the other. Hefrowned when he saw no sign of life below—no smoke from the fire, nobody moving about. But in the remaining gray mist of evening he could just make out blurred hoofprints and tracks from a carriage.
    His uneasiness grew as he stared down at the desolate-looking cabin. Finally he moved, taking the hill at a leap, sliding most of the way down in his urgency to reach the bottom.
    He knew it was bad as soon as he was through the door. Thomas sat at the table with Johanna in his arms, both of them weeping. His brother’s face was stricken, his eyes stunned and vacant.
    Then he saw Nora Kavanagh, and knew it all. Joseph Mahon was leading her and Katie from the curtained room at the back. Nora’s thin shoulders were stooped beneath the priest’s supportive arm, and she was sobbing quietly. The silver-haired Mahon met Morgan’s gaze with a sorrowful shake of his head.
    Swallowing down his own sense of loss—for he had set a great store by Catherine, fine Christian woman that she was—Morgan dropped his bag onto a chair by the door, then crossed the room to Thomas. His brother wiped his eyes and grabbed for Morgan’s hand; Morgan could feel the wet from Thomas’s tears on his own skin.