Chapter 21
Clare and Griffin walked along with a tour group down the stone corridors of the Kilmainham Gaol. It was one of the symbols of Ireland’s bloody and gruesome past, one borne from being invaded and oppressed. During the Irish potato famine, hungry people were dumped inovercrowded conditions for the crime of stealing bread. Irish revolutionary leaders were imprisoned and executed on the prison grounds.
Clare ran her hand over the bleak limestone walls, wondering how the prisoners felt, knowing they might never be free again. Even with the natural light slanting through the narrow, overhead windows, it was like entering the bowels of a dark and dismaldungeon.
“Do you have any memories of being here?” Clare asked Griffin when he peered through the spy hole of a cell door.
He shrugged and pointed to graffiti carved above the door. “Maybe I did that.”
“No surrender,” she read. “That sounds like you. Did you have any hope of getting out?”
He leaned close to her ear and whispered. “Other than death? No, but you knowI always live again after I die.”
“You told me that the first time we met.” She smiled at him. When they decided to have fun, they’d also agreed to go back to pretending. It was more fun than thinking about brain surgery and doctor appointments.
“This place still gives me the creeps,” he said as the group walked by a warren of cells where people starving in the potato famine wereimprisoned.
Clare shivered and leaned closer to Griffin. “I can’t imagine being crammed in here with no heat and no light.”
“No hope,” Griffin said. “These two cells were the final ones before two brothers were executed. Neither knew his brother was only a few feet away in the cell next door before they were separately brought out to be shot.”
“Why did we Irish have to sufferso much?” Clare asked.
“We were invaded by people who didn’t assimilate into our culture. They didn’t appreciate our fair island, the nature, the dreams, the stories we lived,” he explained. “The British had no interest in being Irish, but only in exploiting us. Our forests were cut down to build British ships, and our people were starved while the British took our grain.”
“Is thatwhy you want to go back to the twelfth century and have a do-over?” She hardly dared to bring up the plan in the Green Notebook, but since he was going to have surgery, it would no longer be in his realm of reality. She should destroy the notebook and everything in it to allow Griffin to start out fresh with a new, innocent life.
“It’s my destiny,” he declared with all the forthrightnessof a hero. “If I can bring Brigid back, Ireland would not have to suffer centuries of oppression.”
Members of the tour group next to them looked amused at his outburst, and others darted surreptitious glances his direction.
“Éirinn go Brách.” Clare gave him a curt salute, and that gesture seemed to mollify the onlookers.
Griffin seemed oblivious to anyone gawking at him. Instead,he pointed out details of the prison that Clare would not have noticed. When they stepped into the prison yard, he said, “See where that black cross stands? I was shot back there after the Easter Uprising.”
History had the names of the men shot, and Griffin Gallagher was not one of them, but an agreement was an agreement, and one last day of fantasy wouldn’t hurt.
“How did it feel?Did you say your prayers?”
He held his finger over his lips, shushing her as the tour guide pointed to the opposite end of the stonebreaker’s yard where an injured James Connolly was placed in a chair and shot.
After wiping a tear from his eye, he whispered to Clare, “I now know I was reliving someone else’s life after watching a film on the uprising. The men who were the real revolutionarieswere the true heroes. I, unfortunately, was only a boy who wished to be great.”
“You are great in your own way,” Clare said. “I’m sure there is a big meaning in your life. We have to discover it, that’s all.”
He turned and saluted the tricolor Irish flag that was flown between the two crosses, and Clare said a prayer under her breath that Griffin would look back on this day as theturning point of his life.
Going for surgery would be the bravest thing he ever did. Facing his truth, even greater.
But what did it mean when she felt like her life was on the edge of a knife? With her heart clenching, and her mouth dry, her throat tight, and her pulse swishing, she blinked back the wetness in her eyes.
Was Griffin about to be freed from the jail of his memoryloss, or would reality imprison him into a bleak and difficult future? What if he was better off believing he was the lover of a fairy queen, a man with the ability to save Ireland?
She clasped her hands in front of her beating heart and watched him with another shocking realization.
What did it say about her that she cared?
He was a stranger she met on the airplane, and oneshe’d thought was pulling her leg. She’d been interested, of course, but she’d never thought he was dangerous until she read his notebook. Except he wasn’t the same man who’d written in the notebook; he was a new man who’d forgotten what he’d planned on doing.
