Page 132

And when his hands begin again, the same sure hunger returning, I know I ought to protest, but I refuse to. I only pull him closer and think, with startling ferocity, that I could spend the rest of my life in this bed if it meant he never had to leave me. Let the rest of the day go to hell.

Pleasure, ache, exhaustion—I would take it all if it meant keeping him here. Keeping him mine.

I’m done letting fear, circumstance, and the cruelty of life itself keep me from taking all that I want.

PART VI

ENTRY FOUR

THE JOURNAL OF A YOUNG DREAMER

Keiss, Scotland, 14 September 1798

This day, I have learned that Thomas has been removed from Kilmainham and sent to Fort George in Scotland. I have turned the news over in my mind so many times that I no longer know whether I ought to receive it as comfort or as a fresh injury. He is said to be among the fortunate, if such fortune can be named.

One of the lucky few.

What sort of luck is this?

If he is lucky, it is in the bleakest sense that can be given to the word.

Nevertheless, when I think of what these past months have cost us, the losses are far too many to name. Brave men. Ardent men. Men whose names ought to have been carried forward by the grateful voice of a nation, but now pass from mouth to mouth in grief, in fear, or in whispers.

The non-combatants caught in the crossfire are the ones I try hardest not to think about. The whole of it keeps me awake at night, but they are the faces I cannot bear to imagine.

Most believed, as we believed, that Ireland might yet be made worthy of her people. Now they are fallen, and those of us who remain are left with memory, which is a poor inheritance beside the company of the dead.

This is what is most painful to think about when I imagine Thomas in his confinement. Not only is he shut away, but he endured loss, and was powerless to help. How must it feel to carry such grief and have no relief, no brother near, no friend to speak to, no liberty even to mourn as a man should? The dead are denied to him almost as cruelly as the living.

It is not enough that he is imprisoned. We were made strangers by force. Those who have confined him have robbed us even of grief shared openly.

Is there something shameful in continuing the motions of common life as if the world has not been rent in two? Tyranny would have the living grow accustom to loss. It would like to beat us into carrying on tamely while the best of us are cut down or caged.

Yet I cannot think of Thomas as wholly lost, and I will not allow myself to write of him so. He would not allow me to, so I must keep that in the forefront. Exile is not death. He remains in the world. He remains himself, whatever indignities they heap upon him. If there is any blessing to be found in this miserable news, it is only that he yet breathes, yet suffers, yet endures, and shall prevail. While he lives, the enemy has not had all.

I will hold on to that.

Much as I wish to be mistaken, and cling onto small slivers of hope in this world, I cannot persuade myself that this news has come alone.

—Endure, and prevail.

R.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ROBERT

Saturday, 15 September 1798

The Sinclair Family Home, Castle Connemara

I’m in the yard, hauling split timber nearer the kitchen wall before the evening damp settles in, when I hear a wagon before I see it, and at once I know something is wrong.

Not the easy rattle of someone expected coming up the road, but a hard, reckless clamour. Wood and iron overworking, as though the driver means to break both horse and cart before he stops. I feel the wrongness of it settle low in my gut.

Then the wagon breaks into view.

Behind the reins sits Ewan MacGregor with murder in his face.