Dark Rosaleen (40 page)

They stopped many times. A fit horseman might canter fifty miles cross-country in six hours with a stop or two. But Coburn was half drugged on laudanum, without stirrups and with only sacking as his saddle. He could not trot his mare, every step jarred his bones, every stumble threatened to break open his wound. They stopped at streams for water and rest the horses but Coburn would not have them stop long, and urged Declan to go on. The wind cut his face and his wound burnt as if the bandages were on fire. But he thought only of her, knowing that every hour of pain brought her nearer.

It was almost dark when they came to the shores of Ballylongford. A sharp wind carried a cold drizzle from the sea and, behind it, the threat of fog. A line of oil lamps lit up a long, narrow wooden jetty where half a dozen small boats were tied up. Men sat smoking pipes, huddled beneath a shelter of an old discarded sail.

Declan shouted to them.

‘Which one of you is meeting the ship
Pegasus
tonight?'

‘Who is it who wants to know?'

Declan went closer to the man who had answered.

‘Is it you?'

‘It is. What is it of yours?'

‘Because we're coming with you.'

‘You are not. You have no authority.'

‘See here, friend. Is my pistol authority enough? Tell me, which is it to be?'

Within the half hour they had lifted Coburn into the boat and tucked him under the small fo'c'sle wrapped in a blanket and sheltered him from the spray with a tarpaulin cover. His wound was seeping blood. Declan took molten candlewax from the lanterns and, rolling it in his palms until it was warm and supple, smeared it, layer upon layer, across the bandage until the dressing was tight. Soon the bleeding stopped.

‘You have much pain, Mr Daniel?'

‘I feel nothing, Declan.'

‘Be brave with it, sir. We are at last on our way.'

It began to rain hard and the wind smacked at the sails as the helmsman tacked slowly out towards mid-channel.

Declan shouted to him above the wind.

‘When will we sight her mast light?'

‘You'll not see it yet,' he answered. ‘Not for a while.'

‘How will you know it's her?'

‘I've been ferrying pilots on this river for over forty years and I can tell a ship by the smell of her. I'll give you warning when I sight her. And you'll not need the pistol now. I know who it is you are carrying and I've much respect for him and I can see he's very sick. The waters are rough, it's wind against tide and it's rising but I'll do my best to keep it easy. Tuck that tarpaulin tighter. Keep him warm and keep the water off him.'

Declan held the lantern higher to the man's face.

‘What's your name?'

‘Brennan.'

‘When this is all over, Brennan, people will remember you.'

‘It's a small part I'm playing but I'll have a hell of story to tell.'

‘How will we get him aboard the ship?'

‘The master will turn into wind and we'll heave to on the lee side. The water will be steadier there for the pilot to get clear. It will not be easy but there'll be plenty of muscle to haul him up. You must trust me.'

‘I trust you,' said Declan.

The helmsman tacked his boat deeper into the blackness that was the Shannon, without compass, without stars or river lights to guide him, sometimes running with the wind, sometimes fighting it, but all the time getting closer to his rendezvous with the great sailing ship. The rigging shrieked in the wind, the short mast bent under the blow and they stood ankle-deep in bilge water. The boat twisted with the force of the waves, rising on a crest and then plunging down into the trough in great dizzying sweeps with the white huge back breakers rising behind it. Declan spread his large body over the tarpaulin covering Coburn to protect him from the storm.

Then he heard the helmsman shouting. He was pointing out beyond the bow and as the boat rose again, there, cutting through the rain and spray, Declan glimpsed the glistening black hull and white sails of
Pegasus
.

She stood on the deck, shivering in the cold heavy sea fog. It hid the coast from her, teasing her, tormenting her, vague outlines of a land she would never to see again. The salt from the spray mixed with the salt of her tears and she turned away from the wind and wiped her eyes.

Along the shining deck she saw the prow climbing and dipping, ploughing through the waves, torrents of water gushing through the scuppers. She knew she was looking west, towards the vast Atlantic Ocean, west to Canada and America, places that promised her safety, a new life for herself and the child she would bear in the New World. And in return, there would be emptiness, the dread of a lifetime of loneliness, praying for the tides and the winds and another ship to bring him to her.

She heard the moan of a fog horn ahead and men shouting. Were they familiar voices she was so desperate to hear? She heard the thud as the rope ladder hit the hull's side. The river pilot was leaving. She saw the glow of a lantern held on a pole high above the gunwales. As the bow parted the fog, she saw a small boat with a single sail and the shapes of men beneath tarpaulins.

‘Another's coming aboard.' She heard the shout above the roar of the wind. She strained to see. She might even have believed it was him. She sighed and wept at her fantasy and recited out loud yet again the words of the poem she had heard for the first time from a little boy in a land near dying.

I could scale the blue air,

I could plough the high hills,

I could kneel all night in prayer

To heal your many ills,

My Dark Rosaleen.

She closed her eyes and turned her head once more into the wind. When she opened them again, Ireland was already a shadow.

Sebec Lake

Maine County

So ends their story as told to me. It was Ireland that first called them together, Ireland that forged them into one and delivered them to the New World, where they lived long and happily, as I can vouch. Daniel and Kate Coburn are buried here in Maine, side by side in the foothills of the Appalachians. Forever in America and I thank God for it.

– THE END –

Daniel Coburn
is based on John Mitchel, an attorney and journalist, founder of the nationalist newspaper
Young Ireland
.

He was an early follower of Daniel O'Connell, and the leader of the Repealers. Coburn rejected O'Connell's policy of non-violence and founded the Young Irelanders, campaigning for direct action against the landlords and insurrection against English rule. ‘Irish soil for the Irish.'

After the failed uprising in 1848, he was charged with sedition and treason, convicted and sent to the penal colony in Bermuda. He was later transferred to a prison on Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).

Coburn escaped to America and founded the Irish-American newspaper
The Citizen
.

He supported the South in the American Civil War, based in Richmond Virginia. Three of his sons fought for the Confederates.

He returned to Ireland in 1875, and was elected Member of Parliament, but this was invalidated because he was a convicted felon.

Mitchel County, Iowa, is named in his honour.

He died in 1875, aged 60.

William Smith O'Brien
was born of an aristocratic family in Dromoland in 1803, a descendant of Brian Boru, an eleventh-century king of Ireland. He was a Protestant and an MP, and also an ardent Irish nationalist, co-founder, with Mitchel, of the Young Irelanders.

Convicted of treason after the failed uprising of 1848, he was sentenced to be hanged but this was later commuted to life imprisonment and he was sent to Van Diemen's Land, where he met Mitchel again.

He was released in 1856 on condition that he would never returned to Ireland.

After a stay in Brussels, he was allowed to return to Ireland.

O'Brien never involved himself in politics again and died in 1864, aged 61.

Thomas Meagher
was born in 1823, the son of the mayor of Waterford.

A member of the Younger Irelanders, he was convicted of sedition following the failed 1848 uprising. He was sentenced to be hanged but this was commuted to transportation for life to the penal colony in Van Diemen's Land.

In 1852, he escaped to America, and lived and worked in New York as a journalist.

During the American Civil War he supported the Union, and recruited and led the Irish Brigade, where he was promoted to brigadier general.

After the war he was appointed acting governor of Montana Territory.

Meagher drowned in 1867, after falling from a steamboat in the Missouri at Fort Benton, aged 44. His body was never recovered.

Gavan Duffy
, son of a grocer, was born in Monaghan in 1816.

Journalist and later attorney, he founded
The Nation
, an Irish nationalist newspaper. He was a follower of Daniel O'Connell and the Repeal Association, but he left along with Mitchel, O'Brien and Meagher to form the Young Irelanders.

Charged with sedition, he was convicted and sentenced, but won on appeal to the House of Lords. Despairing of the continuing famine and negative prospects for Irish independence, he emigrated to Australia and became Premier of Victoria in 1871.

He was knighted in 1873, retired from politics and lived in France. He died in Nice in 1903, aged 86.

Sir William Macaulay
, is based on Sir Randolph Routh, born in Poole, Dorset, in 1782.

He did military service in Jamaica, the Netherlands in the Welcheren Campaign, the Peninsular War, the Battle of Waterloo. He was promoted to Commissariat General of the British Army in 1826. He spent seventeen years as Colonial Administrator in Canada and was knighted in 1843. In 1845 Prime Minster Peel appointed him Chairman of the Irish Relief Commission. He was frequently at odds with Sir Charles Trevelyan.

Routh died in 1858, aged 76.

Michael Nicholson is one of the world's most travelled and decorated foreign correspondents. In a forty-year career in television he has reported from eighteen war zones and was three times Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year. He was twice ‘Emmy' finalist at the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for documentaries and received a BAFTA award for his reports from the Falklands War. He was also awarded the Falklands and Gulf Campaign Medals and an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 for services to television.

In 1992 he smuggled Natasha, an orphan child, out of Bosnia.
Natasha's Story
(Macmillan, 1993) was made into the Hollywood film
Welcome to Sarajevo
. Also by Michael Nicholson:

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The Partridge Kite

Red Joker

December Ultimatum

Pilgrim's Rest

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A Measure of Danger

Across the Limpopo

A State of War Exists

First published in 2015

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