No Peace for Amelia Read online

  Her family looked up from their Sunday afternoon pursuits – Papa and Edmund from their chess game, which Papa was letting Edmund win again, with no regard to the boy’s moral education but to his great delight, Mama from her latest large volume from the circulating library, and Grandmama from her thoughts – and they all wished Amelia a good afternoon.

  ‘Don’t fall in!’ shouted Edmund. ‘Or Frederick will have to leap in after you gallantly and then you’ll both drown. Or worse still, he’ll rescue you and have to give you the kiss of life. I don’t think Papa would approve of that.’

  ‘Humph,’ said Papa, and then added unkindly and uncharacteristically, ‘Check!’

  ‘Goodbye Edmund, dear!’ said Amelia with sarcastic emphasis, as she closed the door. ‘And watch out for your queen.’

  It was Frederick on the doorstep, as she knew it would be. She could see his tall shape through the stained glass and the outline of his face in profile as he stood looking at the garden. He looked like a distorted coloured jigsaw of himself. But she would know that shape anywhere – the tall figure, the lean jaw, the blur of curls. She smiled with happiness and opened the door. He turned to face her, and immediately a little of her happiness started to drain away. His face was pale, drawn, shadowy, and his eyelids were heavy, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. As soon as his eyes met hers, he made a visible effort to cheer up.

  ‘Hello, Amelia!’ he cried, with too much enthusiasm.

  ‘Hello, Frederick,’ Amelia replied, with exaggerated quietness, as if she were trying to compensate for his false cheeriness.

  The others – almost a dozen all told, including somebody’s older married sister who had been dragooned into chaperoning them and wore a stiff, bored expression – were clustered at the gate, bobbing and swaying with chatter like flowering elder at the mercy of the breeze. The day was bright and blustery cool, the sky silken blue, shot with the merest streaks of cloud, and the sun was high, high in the sky, and warm if you were in its direct Cyclops gaze. The lightness of the day buoyed up all their spirits, and they hailed Amelia with loud cries and extravagant gestures. She smiled at them all, promptly forgot Frederick’s dark mood and put her hand to her hat as soon as she felt the first lively gust beating around her ears, but the hat was quite secure.

  The chattering group moved off as soon as Amelia and Frederick joined them, and all the way to the station they vied with each other to tell the best jokes and make the wittiest remarks. The boys cuffed each other playfully about the shoulders and made mock boxing motions in each other’s faces when one of them said something the others thought vain or naughty or challenging, and the girls pulled at their jackets when the boxing motions looked at all threatening and clicked with their tongues as if they were calming small children.

  Frederick didn’t join in the general good-natured hubbub, but he was always at Amelia’s side, his hand under her elbow whenever they came to a road they had to cross. When they clambered onto the train, Frederick tugged quickly at Amelia’s sleeve and nodded his head towards an empty seat a little back from where the others had piled themselves in a giggling heap. Amelia turned towards the seat he indicated, but just then one of the girls called out: ‘No, no, there’s room for you two here. Look, this gentleman is just leaving.’ And she pointed out a seat opposite herself and another girl just being vacated by a large man with a small dog yapping at his feet. Amelia immediately sat down opposite her friend and patted the seat beside her invitingly. Frederick hesitated for a moment, and then joined her.

  ‘Or maybe you two love-birds wanted to sit apart and do a bit of billing and cooing!’ said the girl who had pointed out the seat, slyly.

  Amelia blushed and curled her lower lip under her front teeth. Frederick said nothing but looked out of the window. He must be embarrassed too, thought Amelia. Bother! She should have sat apart with him after all. He must have something he wanted to discuss with her.

  There was a lot of silly pointing and laughing at the large, wobbling man and his ridiculously small dog as they waddled (the man) and bounded (the dog) along the platform towards the exit. Amelia couldn’t help joining in the laughter. The pair did look funny, though sweet too, in a way.

  An army recruitment poster on the station wall caught someone’s eye. ‘Look, everyone!’ she cried. ‘Do you have any womenfolk worth defending?’ she read out in a challenging tone. ‘Golly! Do you think we’re worth defending, girls?’

  Frederick shifted beside Amelia on the seat.

  Amelia looked through the dusty window of the train at the poster. It showed a peasant woman in a shawl. The tone of the question made her feel uneasy. It suggested that women were somehow pathetic and defenceless, and in a curious way it seemed subtly to make women responsible for the war. And yet, it had an odd appeal. She felt guiltily thrilled by the idea of armies of soldiers marching off to war to secure the safety of their women. The guilt was because she knew war was always wrong.

  ‘Definitely!’ called one girl.

  ‘I’ll say!’ said another.

  ‘My dears,’ said one of the boys, flinging out his arms in mock gallantry, ‘every single one of you is infinitely precious, but I’d rather stay in nice, safe Rathgar, if it’s all the same to you.’

  Everyone laughed, and the ones nearest to the boy who had spoken smacked him about the shoulders.

  ‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ said Frederick suddenly, shuffling his feet and staring straight ahead, at nobody in particular. ‘War is too serious. People get killed. It’s beastly and horrible and dangerous, and I think you lot are beastly to joke about it like that.’

  Amelia was amazed at the vigour of Frederick’s reaction and looked at him curiously. She expected him to take an anti-war view, of course, but he spoke with real passion, as if he were personally touched by this war. He didn’t meet her eye.

  ‘Gosh! What a speech, everybody!’ said the boy who had made the mock outburst, appealing to the others for support.

  ‘Quakers!’ whispered somebody else. ‘Pacifists.’

  A quick mutter went around the group, accompanied by a few embarrassed giggles, quickly squashed, and followed by a moment’s silence.

  Nobody challenged Frederick – some of the others were Quakers too, including Amelia of course, and would probably have shared his views anyway – but there was an uneasy atmosphere for a while. People stopped joking about the war, which was raging in Europe even as they sat on their train on their way to their Sunday afternoon walk. The conversation turned to people they knew who had enlisted. Several people mentioned cousins, neighbours, acquaintances, who hadn’t come back from the war. Nobody had lost an immediate relative, but everyone’s life had been touched in some way by the war. It had been going on for almost two years now.

  After his little outburst Frederick continued to look straight ahead. Amelia put her hand quickly over the back of his, where it lay on the seat beside her, and gave it an encouraging pat, but when Frederick turned to acknowledge her gesture, his look was troubled. Amelia tipped the brim of her bothersome hat up a little so that she could see into his eyes and read his mood, but hat brim or no hat brim she could not mistake the darting shadows in his gold-flecked eyes and the little lines of worry around the bridge of his nose.

  They tumbled higgledy-piggledy out of the train and onto the platform at Kingstown. The sun was like a bright button now, radiant and splendid, but distant and without heat, or not enough to penetrate the salty breezes. The group marched briskly along to keep warm, breaking into a run at times, and wrapping their coats and shawls as tightly to their bodies as they could to defeat the cold gusts that whipped around them and assaulted their clothing at every opening, trying to trickle up their cuffs, lashing and flapping about their hems and insinuating themselves through their buttonholes even.

  All afternoon, Frederick was silent, thoughtful, pressing into the wind with Amelia gathered close. Several times he looked as if he was just about to draw her aside from the group and have a
quiet word with her. She wished he would – she wanted to hear what it was that was bothering him – but every time, something happened to distract them. On one occasion, it was an incident with a hat – not Amelia’s, though. A particularly determined gust lifted the thing off its owner’s head and it went whizzing along as if it were motorised and landed several yards ahead of the party. Those in the vanguard made a dash after it, but just as they were about to nab it, it lifted itself off the pier, sailed merrily over the edge and landed in the harbour, where it floated and drifted quite unabashed. One of the boys lay down full length on the pier and tried to fish it out with the handle of an umbrella, but it was away out of reach, bobbing atop the blue-green waves.

  ‘Jump in and rescue it!’ shouted some of the girls. ‘Go on, be a man!’ They didn’t really mean it. They were only teasing. But even so, the young fellow looked a bit sheepish as he stood up and wiped the grit off his knees.

  ‘Aww!’ called the girls.

  The boy made a face at them, and they chased him for several yards along the pier and beat him with their umbrellas when they caught him.

  Amelia laughed at their antics and turned to Frederick to point out their silliness to him, but he was looking in quite the opposite direction. Still worried, Amelia tucked her hand further into the crook of his elbow and gave it a little squeeze.

  ‘Amelia!’ said Frederick, turning to look at her. ‘Amelia, I …’

  There came a gust of laughter from the group further down the pier as the would-be rescuer of his lady’s hat knelt down and threw his hands up in the air, begging for mercy. Amelia was distracted and looked towards the source of the laughter, and smiled. Frederick said no more. He too smiled at the others and their silly game and made an effort to put aside whatever was on his mind, for this day.

  When he said goodbye to Amelia that evening at her garden gate, under a still sky washed with mauve light, he took off his hat and made her a funny little bow, like a grown-up. Well, of course, Frederick was eighteen now, which very nearly was grown up. Amelia longed to be as grown up as that.

  ‘Amelia,’ he said, in a solemn sort of voice.

  ‘Yes, Frederick?’ said Amelia, thinking he was about to confess, finally, whatever it was that had been bothering him all afternoon.

  ‘Oh, nothing, just goodbye, Amelia.’

  ‘Is something the matter, Frederick?’

  ‘No, no. I say, your hat is ever so smart.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Amelia, putting a tentative hand to her head. The hat was still there. She had managed to forget it after all.

  ‘Well, goodbye again,’ said Frederick stiffly.

  ‘Goodbye, Frederick,’ said Amelia, ‘I’ll see you next Sunday?’

  Frederick didn’t reply.

  Amelia broke away from him, disappointed, and opened the gate. On the doorstep, she turned and gave him a little wave. He was still standing there, holding his hat. He raised it in response to her wave. He remained standing there until the door had opened, and Amelia disappeared inside.

  Mary Ann’s Dilemma

  Mary Ann fished out her packet of letters. She’d always kept them under the floorboards in the last house she’d worked in, because she was afraid the authorities might want to burn them for fear of infection. Now that she’d moved to Casimir Road, she continued the habit, even though it was almost two years since her mother’s death, and the danger of infection had long passed. On her first night in this house she’d used a nail-file to prise up a floorboard and made a dusty little nest under it for her precious documents. She didn’t often disturb the letters in their hiding place. She liked to keep them, for sentimental reasons, but she didn’t often reread them, because they only made her sad. Her mother had died a lonely death of consumption in a home for incurables, cut off from the children she loved and visited only by charitable strangers. The small children were kept away for fear of contamination, Mary Ann didn’t have the free time to go and see her, her eldest child, Patrick, was in prison, and her husband, Mary Ann’s father, couldn’t afford the tram-fare.

  This evening, as she bent to loosen the floorboard, Mary Ann was not planning to read over her mother’s last letters, but rather to add a new letter to the bundle. With a shaking hand she pulled out the crumpled and beloved bundle and undid the old bootlace that held the letters together. As she did so, the letters fell into her lap with a soft sigh. Just then, a mating cat mewled and screamed somewhere beyond Mary Ann’s window, which was open to the spring night, and the sound made the girl jump. The sudden movement caused a tidal wave in the folds of her apron, and the precious letters went skittering and slithering to the floor.

  ‘Christmas in the workhouse!’ Mary Ann swore her mother’s favourite curse and bent down to pick up the letters. Now she’d be forced to open them all to check the dates, as she liked to keep them in order. There were about a dozen, and as she opened each envelope, stray words and phrases from the body of the letters caught Mary Ann’s eye, try as she would not to read the content: ‘Tell your Da to put Jimmy in the middle of the bed, so the others keep him warm …’ (for Mary Anne’s father was illiterate, and her mother could only keep in touch with him through messages to Mary Ann), ‘the nuns are very good …’, ‘porridge for breakfast …’, ‘Remind the small ones to say a prayer for their poor Ma …’, ‘bad pain in my chest …’, ‘Don’t let your Da get into debt …’, ‘You’re a great girl …’, ‘I’m feeling a bit better today, thank God.’

  Mary Ann gulped when she read that bit. It was from the very last letter, written two days before her mother died. She folded the letter quickly and stuffed it back into its envelope, and laid it on top of the bundle. Then she put her latest letter on top of that again, and did the whole lot up with the mangy bootlace.

  On second thoughts, she undid the bundle again, removed the new letter, and re-tied the bootlace. She’d just read it once again and then she’d put it with the others, but not inside the bundle. She’d prefer after all to keep her mother’s letters in their own special bundle. There was something that made her a bit uneasy about Patrick’s letter, and she thought her mother, much as she had loved her eldest boy, mightn’t like her letters to be so closely linked with this one of his.

  The letter was written on a page out of a school jotter – the very cheap kind that had visible pieces of wood pulp in it, which you couldn’t write on in pen and ink, because it would blot all over the place. He’d written with a pencil that needed sharpening, so between the poor quality of the paper, Patrick’s inelegant handwriting and the blunt pencil, it was a bit of a chore to read it at all. But Mary Ann could decipher it well enough, and she could read between the lines too, and every time she read it, she got a sour surge of acid in her stomach, caused by a mixture of panic, excitement, fear, horror and elation.

  As well as being physically poorly written, the letter was confused in its construction and tone, as if Patrick too was in the grip of a mixture of panicky and elated feelings. It was full of sentences repeated from things that Mr Pearse, the leader of the rebels, had said, and bits of a poem by somebody else all about blood and roses, which was half like a prayer and half not. And at the very end there came an awful request for Mary Ann’s help.

  The request was awful, because it required Mary Ann to do something both simple and shocking. Quite what the something was was not entirely clear – it wasn’t the sort of request you could make openly in a letter going through the public postal system. But even though it was stated in shrouded terms, Mary Ann knew perfectly well that she was being asked to do something illegal, and something that might also be morally wrong. The Volunteers were desperate to find safe places to keep ‘hardware’, as Patrick put it. What could be safer than under Mary Ann’s floorboards? Who would ever think of such a commodity being hidden in such a household?

  Mary Ann thought she agreed with Patrick that the rebellion the Volunteers were planning against British rule in Ireland was right and just, but she was unhappy about her brothe
r’s request all the same. Although she was in favour of the idea of armed rebellion, it was a bit different when it came to actual guns that might be used to shoot actual real live people being kept in your own bedroom, where you had to sleep at night. And Mary Ann was quite well aware of the attitude of her employers to guns and fighting. Would it be fair to them to bring such things into their house? She thought of Mrs Pim’s kindness to her mother in her last days, and she thought about the trust and esteem in which she herself was held in this family, and she shook her head. But then she thought about the sheer cleverness of Patrick’s plan. The authorities would never dream of raiding a Quaker house. Everyone knew where these people stood. The precious metal would be as safe as houses here. It was a lovely plan, lovely and clever and daring and brave and treacherous.

  If she were to co-operate, Mary Ann would be part of the great bid for freedom of the Irish people. Future generations might call her a heroine. She would be in the tradition of the great heroes of Ireland’s past. She’d be a modern warrior-woman, like Queen Maeve or Granuaile. She’d be part of the ancient struggle against the English oppressor and vital to the uprising that would finally rid Ireland of English rule and allow Robert Emmet’s epitaph to be written, when his country took her place among the nations of the earth. Ah! Mary Ann looked out of the open window at the starlit night and wondered if the moon would shine one day soon on a truly free and Gaelic Ireland.

  Then she looked down again at the grey-buff page of squiggles and scorings-out in her lap, and she feared for her brother. She feared for her brother, she had to admit, more than she feared for her country. Patrick Maloney was a fiery, impetuous lad, with more courage than sense, and God knows what was to become of him in the company of such men as he now consorted with. She was nearly sorry they had let him out of prison last year. At least he had been safe in there. It was a mad, uncertain time for Europe, for Ireland – and for the Maloney family. What was she to do? Mary Ann tucked the letter back into its incongruously clean envelope and put it with the rest under the floorboards.