Chapter 7: The Fugitive
Damn it all! Money or no, he should simply stowaway aboard the next vessel bound to Liverpool or London!
Declan chafed at his thwarted mission to avenge his family. Every day at the docks, in the course of his work as a lumper, he loaded cargo onto ships bound to England...bound to the place where now resided the soulless fiend that was Blaylock...the man who had raped his mother and murdered his family.
'Twould be so easy to conceal himself in the hold of a ship behind a row of barrels or crates...and within days find himself roaming the streets of London on the trail of his prey. 'Twas only the money...the lack thereof...that kept him in Dublin. At his present wages, Declan calculated that he would need to continue in his job for another four months to have sufficient coin to sustain himself for several weeks without employment as he searched for Blaylock.
Intermittently as he worked, Declan's eyes would shoot down the River Liffey, out to the harbor to the grey horizon --- not too far beyond which lay England --- and the reminder would ever incite the dull, bitter thump of the blood pulse deep in his belly.
In the meantime, his labors carrying lumber, bales, barrels, and crates, both at the docks and at Murphy's tavern, kept his limbs strong. He performed his other exercises on the floor in his garret bedchamber, and to maintain his wind, he resumed his previous regimen of running...now in the streets as dawn broke. Aye, he would be ready for Blaylock!
But his mind could find no ease. The rage in his soul sought an outlet...and soon found it in angry contemplation of the misery of Dublin. The first reaction in his gut of simultaneous revulsion and empathy soon evolved into a more analytical consideration of the broader problem in Ireland.
In his wanderings throughout the city, Declan beheld unrelenting scenes of poverty and degradation --- juxtaposed a few blocks later to wide, well-groomed streets lined by elegant mansions and traveled by gilded carriages. He remembered right well the desperate fellow beggars with whom he had shared the streets for years of his young life --- then remembered the opulence of the Duke's carriages, raiment, and abode at Kilmaedan Castle. It shamed him to know that he had devotedly served as a guardsman to the estate --- protecting the family's lavish life.
He had been ignorantly contented in his life as a guardsman and prizefighter, and although he had been generous with his winnings among his comrades and the street urchins in Kilmaedan town, he had not dwelt long upon the disparity in conditions between the poor and the gentry. Now it seemed an anathema.
Every day at the docks he loaded cargo of foodstuffs --- the bounty of Irish soil: wheat, oats, flour, butter, bacon, ham, beef, eggs. All was shipped elsewhere, the profits lining the pockets of merchants and wealthy landowners, even as the Irish people went hungry.
He pondered the circumstances of his father's death: John Muldowney had died defending the author of an allegorical pamphlet that called for the ousting of the English oppressors from Ireland...he had died for the right to speak out against injustice. Had his father been fighting for this cause for some time? In other ways? Unable to immediately avenge his father's murder, Declan's agitated soul soon focused on his father's apparent cause, and he laid the credit of the plight of the Irish at the feet of the English occupiers.
All the wealth, land, and power in Ireland was in the hands of the English rulers and their lackeys --- a handful of Irish and English families who had been rewarded for their loyalty with elevation to the gentry and grants of lands stripped from their original Catholic owners. Now the populace lived in destitution.
'Twas true that the lackeys were Protestant, and the populace Catholic --- but to Declan this mattered less than the iniquitous circumstances authored and enforced by the English. Although he had grown up Catholic for the first nine years of his life, the subsequent struggle for self-preservation after the shock to his memory had abolished most sectarian fervor on his part. To Declan, the rights of people were paramount, no matter what their religious persuasions.
This very subject was indeed one of keen interest about him. In the tavern every night were heated exchanges between loyalists who supported the Crown, and men with republican "rebel" sentiments. Many was the night that Declan was obliged to break up fights when the arguments descended into violence. Similar tensions were appreciable on the streets, both among agitated citizens, and in newspaper headings.
At meals in the kitchen, Mr. Murphy and the lodgers engaged in debate over the topic --- Mr. Murphy making no bones about his hatred of the English. "The bastards have been beating us down for over six-hundred years!" he growled, thumping his fist on the table, rattling the teacups. "They took me leg and me sons! 'Tis time we cut them down in the streets and sent their corpses back to their own bloody country!"
Most of the lodgers were of a like mind, albeit less violently. Mr. Wainwright and Mr. McKee --- a shipyard foreman and a Custom House clerk --- offered an opposing opinion. "These United Irishmen are naught but wild Papists, determined to commit us to the tyranny of Rome."
The printer, Mr. O'Toole --- a thin, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties --- raised his hands and countered, "You are victims of perfidious proselytism if you believe that. The United Irishmen care nothing for religious creed --- hence their name. They speak for the right of Irishmen of all faiths to govern themselves on their own soil."
"They are incapable of governing themselves, let alone a country. Ireland will descend into anarchy."
"The Americans are governing themselves --- as are the French."
"The French! If you call the guillotine governing!"
Declan listened intently to these conversations, endeavoring to understand the years of tensions that had led to the current state of affairs in Ireland...the tensions to which he had for the most part been oblivious.
As he learnt more, chagrin overwhelmed him at the extent of his indoctrination by Blaylock and Bruckton. When he had first encountered them in the square in Kilmaedan town, his instinct had been to be distrustful of their English accents. Why had he not listened to his Irish heart?! Hunger and despair had crushed his soul, and he had let himself be seduced by promises of food and comfort and had become their fighting cock.
During his years at Kilmaedan Castle, Blaylock, Bruckton, the Duke --- the whole estate system had had his undivided loyalty. He had without a second thought even participated in missions to quash purported rebel activities that the guards were told threatened the castle. Indeed, 'twas "rebel activities" that had been the pretext for seizing Aoife. Whether or nay Aoife was a rebel, Declan could not say, but it had proved to be not at all the reason for Blaylock's interest in her.
But...if he had trusted his instincts and rejected their overtures that day on the square, he would never had learnt who he was...nor found his family's murderer...nor met Aoife. By God, the vagaries of Fate were indeed fodder for contemplation!
At the end of October, Mr. O'Toole brought a newspaper called
The Press
to the breakfast table and read from it an open letter to the Marquess of Camden, the Englishman serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The letter writer held the Marquess accountable for the execution of one William Orr, claiming that in
"the death of Mr. Orr, the nation has promoted one of the most sanguinary and savage acts that had disgraced the laws."
The letter then went on to accuse the Crown of a campaign of
"massacre and rape, military murders, desolation and terror."
There was much debate among the lodgers as to the identity of the cryptic "Marcus" who had signed the letter, but even Mr. O'Toole, who seemed most knowledgeable among them about the anti-Crown forces, could not confirm the author.
Declan was keen to educate himself about this infamous event that had been transpiring even as he had been embroiled in his own tumultuous situation the past weeks. When he had a chance to speak to Mr. O'Toole alone in the parlour, he asked him about William Orr and the United Irishmen. Declan was vaguely familiar with the name United Irishmen as the formal appellation of the dominant force behind the ongoing rebel sentiment.
