lough,” he said to Eoin, raising his pale-blue eyes to mine as he set the boy back on the ground.
My heart lurched, and a memory flooded back, bringing with it an odd sense of déjà vu and a line tripping through my mind.
“Don’t go near the water, love, the lough will take you far from me,” I murmured, and Thomas cocked his head.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just something I read once.”
“Why can’t Mother go near the lough?” Eoin asked, confused. “We go there all the time. We walk on the shore and skip rocks. Mother showed me how.”
Eoin had taught me how to skip rocks, once upon a time. Yet another dizzying circle of what came first.
Thomas frowned, ignoring Eoin’s question, and sighed again, as if his head and stomach were at war with one another.
“Thomas, go. All will be well while you are gone,” I said firmly.
22 August 1921
I drove to Dublin with both hands on the wheel and my heart in my throat. I’d had little contact with Mick since de Valera had returned and Lord French had been replaced as general governor. I wasn’t much help to Mick in the scheme of things. I was nothing but a sounding board. A friend. A financial backer and a secret keeper who did what I could, where I could. But still, I’d been away too long, and despite the truce, I was worried.
I met Mick and Joe O’Reilly, Mick’s personal assistant, at Devlin’s Pub. They were huddled in the back room Mick had been given for an office. The door was left ajar so he could see trouble coming. The rear exit provided a quick escape. Mick was at Devlin’s more than he was at his own apartment. He rarely stayed in one place too long, and if it weren’t for the loyalty of average citizens, who knew exactly who he was and never said a word despite the reward on his head, he would have been captured long ago. His reputation had grown to epic proportions, and I was afraid much of the rub with the president of the Dáil was due to Mick’s popularity. I became alarmed when he told me Dev (de Valera) was considering sending him to America to “get him out of the fight.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mick is the fight, and I told him as much. Without him, our Irish rebellion is all symbolism and suffering with no results—just like every other Irish rebellion over the last several hundred years has been.
Joe O’Reilly agreed with me, and I wondered for the first time how old Joe O’Reilly was. Young. He had to be younger than me. But the man was worn thin. Mick was too. His stomach had been bothering him, the pain so intense I suspected ulcers and made him promise to adjust his diet.
“Dev won’t send me away—he can’t get any support for it. But he might send me to London, Doc. He’s making noise about sending me to negotiate the terms of a treaty,” Mick said.
I told Mick I thought that was good news, until he told me de Valera wanted to stay behind, in Dublin.
Mick said, “He’s been meeting with Lloyd George for months over the truce, yet now he wants to stand back when it’s time to negotiate a treaty? Dev isn’t stupid. He’s wily. He’s playing puppet master.”
“So you’re the scapegoat.” It wasn’t a hard conclusion to arrive at.
“I am. He wants me to take the fall when it fails. We won’t get everything we want. We might not get anything we want. And we sure as hell won’t get an Irish Republic with no partition between the north and south. Dev knows this. He knows England has the power to crush us in a head-to-head conflict. We have three, maybe four thousand fighting men. That’s it. He knows nothing about the strategy we’ve engaged in.”
Mick’s heels dug into the floor with agitation, and I could only listen as he paced and talked through his fears. “We’ve fought dirty and we’ve fought lean. We’ve relied on the Irish people to hide us, to shelter us, to feed us, and to keep their mouths shut. And they have. Goddammit, they have! Even when farms were burned in Cork last year, and businesses were torched in every county. When reprisals were being carried out in Sligo and priests were being shot in the head by Auxies for refusing to point fingers at their parishioners. When young men