not pressed me or asked me about the proceedings. It’s as if she’s simply waiting, calm and resigned. She already knows what happens next, and her knowledge is a burden she has tried to bear silently.
When I told Anne that Mick asked for her, she readily agreed to help where she could, though I had to show her his letter before she believed it. She’s still half convinced he wants her dead. She shed tears when she read his melancholy summary, just as I did, and I had no words to console her. She stepped into my arms and comforted me instead.
I love her with an intensity I didn’t think myself capable of. Yeats writes about being changed utterly. I am changed utterly. Irrevocably. And though love is indeed a terrible beauty, especially given the circumstances, I can only revel in all its gory gloriousness.
When I’m not worrying over the fate of Ireland, I’m plotting a future that revolves around her. I’m thinking of her white breasts and the high arches in her small feet, of the way her hips flare and how her skin is like silk behind her ears and on the insides of her thighs. I’m thinking of the way she abandons the Irish inflections when we’re alone, and how her flattened vowels and softened Ts create an honesty between us that wasn’t there before.
Her American accent suits her. Then I begin thinking about how motherhood suits her as well and how her belly would look swollen with our child—someone for Eoin to love and look after. He needs a sibling. I imagine the stories she’ll tell the children, the stories she’s written and the stories she’ll write, and the people all over the world who will read them.
Then I start to think about changing her name. Soon.
T. S.
18
HIS CONFIDENCE
I broke my heart in two
So hard I struck.
What matter? For I know
That out of rock,
Out of desolate source,
Love leaps upon its course.
—W. B. Yeats
The boat Michael Collins was on was hours late docking at Dún Laoghaire; they’d hit a trawler in the Irish Sea and arrived a mere forty-five minutes before the eleven o’clock cabinet meeting with the Dáil. Michael had called Garvagh Glebe from London on December second and asked Thomas and me to meet him in Dublin. We’d driven through the night only to wait on the quay in the Model T for four hours, dozing and shivering while we watched for the boat’s arrival. Dublin was crawling with Black-and-Tan patrols and Auxiliaries again. It was as if Lloyd George had given them the signal to come out in force, a final visual reminder of what Ireland would be like indefinitely if an agreement wasn’t reached. We’d been stopped and searched twice, once as we arrived in Dublin and once when we’d parked on the wharf at Dún Laoghaire, waiting patiently as they shined their flashlights in our faces and down our bodies, inside the car, and through Thomas’s medical bag. I didn’t have papers, but I was a pretty female in the company of a doctor with a government stamp on his documents. They let us go without any trouble.
Michael made the journey back to Dublin with Erskine Childers, secretary to the delegation. He was a slim man with fine features and an erudite manner. I knew from my research that he had an American wife and wouldn’t, in the end, support the Treaty. But he was only a messenger, not a delegate, and his signature would not be required to forge an agreement with England. He greeted Thomas and me with a tired handshake, but he had his own car waiting, giving us a moment with Michael before he had to be delivered to the Mansion House, where the meeting would take place.
“We’ll talk as you drive, Thomas. There might not be another opportunity,” Michael instructed, and the three of us slid into the front seat of the car, with Thomas behind the wheel and me in the middle. Michael looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He shook out his coat and combed his hair while Thomas drove.
“Tell me, Annie,” Michael demanded. “What happens next? What possible good can come of this hellish trip?”
I’d spent the night trying to remember the intricate details of the timeline and could only remember the overall back-and-forth that occurred between the commencement of the talks on October 11 and the subsequent signing of the Treaty, or the Articles of Association as they were sometimes called, in