not welcome at Garvagh Glebe any longer.
“You are in this fight up to your eyebrows, Dr. Smith. You have been for years. You are not innocent. You are no better than my boys. I hold my tongue. I keep your secrets, what little I know. And it’s precious little! Nobody tells me anything.” Her chin began to tremble, and she looked at me, her eyes filled with questions and accusations. Thomas regarded her soberly, his face devoid of emotion.
“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will hurt Anne,” Thomas said, his voice low, his eyes holding hers. “Do I have reason to be afraid?”
She began to shake her head, to babble something incoherent.
“Brigid?” he interrupted, and she fell silent immediately, her back stiffening, her expression growing stony.
“They don’t trust her,” Brigid bit out.
“I don’t care,” he snarled, and for a moment, I saw the Thomas Smith who had carried Declan on his back through the streets of Dublin, who had infiltrated the Castle and the prisons for Michael Collins, who faced death daily with flat eyes and steady hands. He was a little frightening.
Brigid saw him too. She blanched and looked away, her hands clasped in her lap.
“I’m afraid Liam and Ben will harm Anne,” he repeated. “I can’t allow that.”
Brigid’s chin fell to her chest.
“I will tell them to stay away,” she whispered.
Thomas held my hand tightly in his as we maneuvered through the crowd and into the packed chamber of the Mansion House. Michael had assured us there would be seats reserved for us, and we slid between nervous congregants, who were smoking and shifting and making the room smell like ashtrays and armpits. I pressed my face into Thomas’s shoulder, into his clean solidity, and prayed for Ireland, though I already knew how she would fare.
Thomas was greeted and hailed, and even Countess Markievicz, her beauty faded by the ravages of imprisonment and revolution, extended her hand to him with a slight smile.
“Countess Markievicz, may I introduce my wife, Anne Smith. She shares your passion for trousers,” Thomas murmured, tipping his hat. She laughed, her hand covering her mouth and her broken and missing teeth. Vanity was not easily relinquished, even among those who eschewed it.
“But does she share my passion for Ireland?” she asked, her brows quirked beneath her black hat.
“I doubt one passion is identical to another. After all, she married me,” Thomas whispered, conspiratorial.
She laughed again, charmed, and turned away to greet someone else, releasing me from her thrall.
“Breathe, Anne,” Thomas murmured, and I did my best to comply as we found our seats and the session was called to order. Before it was all said and done, Constance Markievicz would call Michael Collins a coward and an oath-breaker, and my loyalty was firmly with him. But I couldn’t help but be a little awestruck by her presence.
I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.
But sitting in the crowded session, seeing men and women who had lived only in pictures and in print, hearing their voices raised in argument, in protest, in passion, I was the furthest thing from objective and detached; I was overcome. Eamon de Valera, the president of Dáil, towered over everyone else. Hook-nosed, thin-faced, and dark, he clothed his height and his spare frame with unrelenting black. Born in America, he was the son of an Irish mother and a Spanish father and had been sadly neglected and abandoned by both. Above all else, Eamon de Valera was a survivor. His American citizenship had saved him from execution after the Rising, and when Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and a dozen others fell under the swath of civil war, Eamon de Valera would still be standing. There was greatness in him, and