Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“Old! The hell I’m old! I can play you pikers into the ground.”
“He would say that,” Alfie said to James in a confidential tone, which everyone could nevertheless hear quite well. “He’ll
be wanting to save face.”
“Ah.” James cast a significant look at Rynn. “No doubt you’re right.”
Maguire’s eyes narrowed at them.
“If Owen don’t want to play, he don’t want to play,” Tim intervened. “He’s an important man now. Were we to beat him, it’d
be a blow to his dignity.”
“All right, that’s it.” Maguire looked around at his sister. “Do you have an old coat of Niall’s I can borrow?”
“I do,” Moira said, grinning, as the boys whooped in victory. Minutes later, they were out the door, with Maguire, stripped
down to his fine white shirt and well-tailored trousers beneath a shabby old coat that reached halfway to his knees with a
knit cap on his head, in their midst.
“My Niall was a broad man, but a bit shorter than Owen,” Moira confided as she and Rynn watched through a window in the back
door as the game got underway. The winter light pouring in through the glass highlighted the pale blue eyes she shared with
her brother, although they looked far more at home on her, with her bright hair and fair skin. “I lost him at Verdun, you
know.” She pulled something out of her neckline. A bronze medal, Rynn saw, attached to a red ribbon with the whole suspended
from a fine gold chain. “The government sent me his last pay, and this. Two bob and a medal is what they figured my husband
was worth.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rynn said.
Moira dropped the medal back inside her neckline. “I keep it out of sight, because it reminds the kids and makes them sad.
But I never take it off.”
“I’m sure it’s been hard on all of you.”
“Getting on without Niall has been hard, especially for the kids. If it hadn’t been for Owen, I don’t know what we would have done.”
“He seems very close to you and your children.”
“He is. With the boys, especially, he’s done his best to take their dad’s place. He’s done what he can to guide them, and
he’s provided. And not just for mine, but for our brothers’ families, too. There were six of us, you know. Me, then two sisters,
then Owen, then two brothers. Now there’s just us two, Owen and me.”
“Did your sisters leave families?”
Moira shook her head. “They passed before they could. While we were at the orphanage.”
“You were at an orphanage?” Rynn didn’t mean to pry, but the question was out before she could stop it.
“After our mother died, our father couldn’t take care of us. He liked a drink, if you want the truth of it, and wasn’t worth
a lick because of it. They put us in St. Joseph’s. When I was old enough, I left, married Niall and got my brothers out as
soon as I could. We all worked and we weren’t getting rich but we were doing all right. Then the war came, and they all joined
up, Niall and Owen and Robby and Liam. Owen’s the only one who came back, and he’s been trying to take the place of the other
three ever since. And doing a fine job of it, too. Owen didn’t tell you any of this?”
“He didn’t.” Feeling she needed to clarify her relationship with Maguire, Rynn added, “We’re not . . . seeing each other,
you know. Romantically. He and I are friends.”
Moira’s smile was wry. “Is that how it is? Well, he makes a good friend, I’ve no doubt.”
A shout from the yard diverted their attention to the action outside. Maguire was clutching a round ball close to his chest
and running like his life depended on it, which from the look of the pack of boys chasing him, it did. Another shout went
up as he apparently made it safely to wherever the goal was and started whooping with half the group as he held the ball up
in triumph over his head.
“Men. They never grow up, even the best of them,” Moira said indulgently, and turned away from the window with a little shiver
as a draft reached them through the panes. “Come into the front room where it’s warm, and we’ll have a nice visit with the
others while the house is quiet. Believe me, it won’t last long.”
An hour or so later, once again wearing his own elegant overcoat and jacket, Maguire was still flicking bits of dried mud from his trousers and shoes when he put Rynn into the passenger seat of the Vauxhall and drove away.
Tim had left earlier, in the Model T that, to his loudly expressed joy and Alfie’s hoots of envy, Owen had given him as a combined birthday and Christmas present.
Tim’s task was to take Katie Meagher home and drop off his grandmother at the train station, before returning to stay through Christmas with his mother and siblings at the farm.
The girls would return to Dublin after Christmas.
They were students at Hillcourt, a boarding school in the city, and had ridden the train down the previous day with their grandmother, who lived in Dublin.
Old Mrs. Clary considered train travel more comfortable and far safer than the roads, and given the state of the country who could blame her?
Alfie, James and Joseph attended the Bundoran Boys National School, because, as they put it, they weren’t the kind of slackers to leave their mam to run the farm alone.
To which Tim, who’d left the farm to work for Maguire and at whom the thrust had been aimed, took loud exception.
“You were right, I did have fun,” Rynn said as the car edged around a flock of sheep being herded down the road by a man and
a dog working in tandem.
“I told you you would.” Maguire was smiling a little.
“My favorite part was watching you slide face-first into the mud. And then your nephews jumping on top of you.”
“Liked that, did you? At least I managed to hold on to the ball. And they’ll pay, the cheeky buggers. We’ll see who gets the
last laugh next time I’m down.”
“And when will that be?”
He shot a glance her way. It was impossible to read anything in it, but its very opaqueness told her that the question interested
him.
“Sometime after Christmas. I have to go to London when I leave here, and I anticipate being away for several weeks. With de Valera still fundraising in America, Mick Collins is in charge of the IRA, and he’s as bloody-minded in his own way as Churchill.
There’s still a few on both sides trying to keep the violence from blowing up into all-out war, and I’ve been asked to come add my voice to theirs.
” He grimaced. “Not that I think it will do much good.”
“Really?” She gave him a troubled look.
“One can always hope, but as I told you earlier, the situation is getting worse by the day.” They were in sight of the house
now. The sun was setting, the rain had stopped and a rainbow was forming in the sky, arching above the bay and the Point and
curving down over Ballyshannon Court in a scene of almost otherworldly beauty.
“Look.” Rynn pointed. According to everything she’d ever been taught, a rainbow was a promise, a benediction. Or, alternatively,
an augury. Of good things, she thought fiercely as her heart beat a little faster at the thought. Only of good things.
“Pretty.” He was clearly unimpressed. As the Vauxhall nosed up the driveway, he added, “You want to take what I said about
moving into town seriously. At least for a while. Go visit your granny and sister, stay clear of the IRA, stay clear of the
RIC, stay clear of any involvement in anything that might bring you to the attention of either side. By the time I get back,
I’ll have a pretty clear idea about where this is headed, and then you can make whatever decisions you need to make. The key
is not to get yourself killed in the meantime.”
“I’ll be careful,” she promised as he walked her to the door. “Thank you for today. I was a little down in the dumps when
you came, I admit.”
“A little glum, were you?”
“Don’t gloat,” she warned.
He laughed. And then, as they reached the front door and Cyril, who would have been on the watch for her, could be heard on the other side fumbling with the lock, he said, “Good night, Rynn.”
“Good night.” Waiting for the door to open, she gave him a quick smile.
“Owen,” he said.
“What?”
“You probably should start calling me Owen. Since, as you told my sister, we’re such good friends and all.”
She looked at him indignantly. “Does everybody you know gossip?”
He laughed again, then stood there exchanging a few cordial words with Cyril as she went inside with a deliberately casual
“Goodnight, Owen,” thrown over her shoulder.