The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) Page 20

Then she tried to recount the hell of the island hospital, suppressing a shudder as she recalled the death of her brother, and how close she had come to losing dear Joe.

  The more she spoke in simple unemotional language, the more she could see his attitude towards her thaw.

  At the end of her tale, he sat pensively for a moment, then nodded.

  “Very well, if you give a list of what you want done to avoid an epidemic, I shall see to it that a group of prisoners makes the rounds of each cell, and that they shall be paid in extra rations for their assistance. I haven’t had a single doctor darken the door of this place for months, so on the same terms, you can run the infirmary. I’ll give you a team of volunteers, and you can pick six of them whom you deem suitable,” the governor offered.

  Emer blinked in astonishment. “You want me to be the prison doctor?”

  “Why not? You appear far more qualified than most of the quacks who have paraded in and out of here in the past, collecting big fat fees while the men die in droves,” the governor said with a grimace.

  "Oh, but sir—"

  He dismissed her gratitude with a sardonic wave of the hand. "You'll be overworked and underfed, if only because you'll barely have time to eat. So please don't thank me. But from now until we learn of your ultimate fate, the infirmary is yours."

  “I can’t do anything about the overcrowding, but I will do my best to improve the conditions here,” Emer promised.

  “If I were you, I would worry about my own situation a great deal more than you seem to at the present, Mrs. Dillon. You do realise the charge against you is no less than treason, which could be a hanging offence?”

  “I understand that to be the case, sir, but you must understand, I was just walking past and wished to help. I had no weapon! I could barely even walk. Look, I can still barely manage with a crutch. I was carried along by the momentum of the crowd at the barricades, and meant no one any harm. But I won’t apologise for nursing the sick, indeed I won’t. I shall just have to trust to British justice to vindicate me.”

  “In that case then, if I may say so, Mrs. Dillon, I think you’re a bloody fool,” the governor said, not unkindly.

  Emer stared. “You don’t think I stand a chance, do you?”

  The portly silver-haired man shook his head and sighed. “No, I don’t. I wish I could say otherwise, but tensions are running high between the government and this country's poor starving people. I won't lie. Things look pretty bleak for you and your friends.

  "But all the same, I shall do what I can for you. I shall make a plea for you to be granted mercy if you are on your best behaviour whilst here, and are willing to help us. You can nurse the sick in exchange for clemency.”

  “I’ll help the sick to the best of my ability considering my legs still don’t work very well, regardless of whether you grant me mercy or not,” Emer said with a dignified lift of her chin.

  Rolling up the sleeves of her by now filthy shirt, she then shouldered her crutch and prepared to get started on her duties.

  Thus Emer once again found herself tending fever patients, this time in the jail infirmary, which was full to overflowing with sick prisoners, and more arriving every day.

  The spring and summer of 1848 had been particularly rainy in Ireland, and as July advanced to August, it was now a certainty that the potato crop had failed yet again.

  With little food, no clothes because all of the charitable sewing groups had stopped donating to Ireland once they had heard about O’Brien’s abortive rebellion, and the English Treasury cutting the relief works for the very same reason, all of Ireland stared another year of starvation and death straight in the face.

  Desperate people stole what they could, and invariably got caught. The women and children were thrown out of the prison onto the streets to starve in order to make room for male inmates who were willing to carry out the ridiculous outdoor relief work tasks of breaking stones and digging ditches, when they should have been occupied planting food and farming the land for the benefit of all.

  Emer did what she could for the poor souls in their cramped and wretched quarters, and was pleased that she was also allowed to do the cooking in a small scullery off to one side of the infirmary, for it gave her access to boiling water on a regular basis.

  The governor was kind enough to find her a skirt and blouse to wear as well, and so she made do with her two changes of clothing, a large towel, and the needle and thread the guards provided her with for undertaking repairs on their own clothes.

  At the end of each long day, she would immerse herself and her clothes in the boiling water, trying to keep her hair and clothes free of lice and other contagions, and hang the items on the line above the stove to dry.

  Emer was forced to share the tiny cell with Terence, since the Governor had no place else to put her, so they shared the bed in shifts. Emer worked through the night, and slept for a few hours during the day when the men were out taking their exercise.

  Every time she slept, she dreamed of all she and Dalton had shared so passionately. The dreams were so real, so vivid, she felt as though she could just stretch up and…

  Emer kissed his chest and throat. Dalton moved his head down to kiss her tenderly. As their tongues sensually intertwined, she felt him harden. Emer arched under him, taking him deep into her warm, welcoming body.

  Dalton began to move with increasingly sure strokes as she gazed up at him in rapture. He drove them both ever higher, then stilled, poising them on the brink of the ultimate fulfillment.

  "Now, love, please," she begged. "Let it go."

  "Just wait," he urged, "wait, my love."

  "Dalton, oh, ooooh," she panted. "It's getting even stronger."

  "Relax, breathe into it, that's right, just a bit more, a bit more—" He pressed deeper and felt her whole body clench and undulate around him.

  "Oh, Lord!" she gasped, as the heat flooded through her.

  She felt her nipples peak against his broad chest as her whole body rose up to greet his. Then he too was gasping out his passion into her mouth, until finally he was calm once more, and slept with his head buried between her breasts.

  Then she would awaken with a start, and pushing her heavy fall of hair from her eyes, sigh and try to put her pining for her lover from her mind for all their sakes. Sharing the confined living quartered with a man other than Dalton was not as difficult as she thought it would be, though it did have its tense moment.

  Terence was a dashingly flirtatious fellow, but any warm feelings of friendship Emer might have had for him paled into insignificance as she thought of how much she ached to see Dalton and her son again. She took refuge in her vivid erotic dreams and prayed with all her heart that the three of them would be reunited soon.

  That thought was never far from the back of her mind, and on particularly difficult days throughout the long summer, Emer was convinced that the vision of herself, Dalton and William being one happy family again was the only thing that kept her sane in the hellish prison as patient after patient died, only to be replaced by still more sick.

  She would find her son. She would get back to Canada and make Frederick pay for what he had done.

  And she would get the truth from Dalton one way or the other. She still loved him, and the man she knew from the Pegasus, as much as she had loved him, was a very different man again from the silver-haired doctor he had become. From the father to her son William that he had transformed into.

  She had never thought it possible to love Dalton more than she had aboard ship. But that had been a passionate love, and based on his fales pretences. Over time she had got to know the real man underneath his façade, and wrong-headed though he might be, he was by no means the villain she had feared.

  No, that epithet belonged to Frederick Randall. But she would again repay evil with good, just as the Bishop had advised her when they had first met at Grosse Ile.

  Out of the tissue of lies Frederick had spun, some good had come of him thinking she had
died, because Dalton had gone to Boston to become fully qualified as a doctor, and ready to help all the new arrivals from the 1848 shipping season.

  Dalton had moved heaven and earth to save her from the burning orphanage. That was not the act of a selfish man interested only in taking advantage of her for passionate encounters.

  And he had become the most model father to William, tending to all his needs as lovingly as any mother ever could.

  He had lied to her at the start of their relationship, it was true, but it had been partly for the right reasons. He had been there to determine which of his captains had been abusing their position in the Randall fleet.

  He had not discovered quite what his father had anticipated, but he had taken great pains to rectify the abuses he had seen, even by Frederick. And he had done it even when he had believed her to be dead.

  True, he had been browbeaten into an engagement to Madeleine Lyndon, but again, having met his father, she could see that Dalton had taken the line of least resistance whenever possible with his domineering parent. When the pressure had been too much to bear, he had fled.

  There was to have been no marriage between those two such as she had envisioned for herself and Dalton one day, a true meeting of hearts and minds. There had only ever been business dealings, and very little romance that she could see, for all of Madeleine's smug triumph.

  She had recoiled at the sight of the children, and no one could find Emer lacking now when they learned the truth, as they were bound to thanks to the Bishop, that Madeleine had been just a poor orphan herself. Most likely illegitimate, if she had been abandoned on the church steps as a babe as the Bishop had told her.

  Then there was the shocking information that Adrian had revealed to her about Madeleine's lack of virtue. It spoke volumes for Dalton's character that he had never availed himself of what had obviously been so freely given to so many.

  Frederick had clearly let their steamships dazzle him so much that he had not thought to look her over with the appropriate due diligence.

  So as Emer waged her war against the fever, her heart waged a war with her head, and her heart began to win. If she ever got out of this prison in one piece, she was going to find Dalton again, and together they would decide on their future, no matter what his father said.

  But first she had to get out of prison, and back to Canada, and then she would have to find her son…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  At the end of her first fortnight at Clonmel prison, Emer was just starting to serve the midday meal in the wooden bowls the prison had proved her with, when she saw a tall figure in a blue coat and light plaid trousers towering over her in the open doorway to the infirmary.

  With a sinking heart Emer’s eyes met the steel-grey ones of the new inmate, and then she knew that now there was truly no hope left for Young Ireland. William Smith O’Brien had been captured.

  “You’re the woman from the cabbage patch,” he exclaimed, as recognition finally came to him.

  “Well, Kilbracken, County Meath, actually, by way of Quebec, Canada, but yes, it’s me. I’ll tell Terence when I see him that you’re here.”

  “Yes, thank you.” O’Brien nodded gravely, and was led away to his cell on the other side of the corridor.

  She sighed, and turned back to her work. The futile rebellion had truly ended now. The only question now was, how many of them would be made to suffer for it.

  Emer’s life inside the prison was always hectically busy, but at least it kept her from brooding over what might happen to her. She hoped that her letters might eventually reach Dalton and her friends in Quebec, and that one of them might come to see her, and perhaps try to get Frederick Randall’s false conviction of her for arson overturned.

  As for being accused of treason, surely the British government couldn’t be so unreasonable as to wish to convict a woman who was only trying to help the defenceless men who had been shot?

  But she had to wait until their trial to find out the answer to that question, and their court date wasn’t until the tenth of October.

  August and September therefore seemed to plod along at an unusually slow pace, but at the same time as she stared death in the face, Emer had never felt so alive, to new ideas, possibilities, and hope for the future in Ireland despite all the suffering and despair she had witnessed within the past eighteen months of her life.

  Her intellectual stimulation while she laboured was provided by Terence and O’Brien, who talked to her and read the papers aloud as she cooked, and also lent a hand with some of her more difficult chores.

  Being all three of them political prisoners, they were accorded a relative degree of freedom compared to the ordinary felons, who remained locked in their putrid cells most of the time apart from their one hour of exercise each day.

  The men would frequently talk about politics, and where they believed they had gone wrong, and then Emer was content to listen.

  But sometimes she initiated conversations about prison and workhouse reforms, thinking about her own model orphanage in Quebec, which she longed to see up and running again one day.

  One night Terence sighed, “It was a disaster right from the start. All the help we were promised, the numbers quoted in the papers saying how much support we had, that false newspaper account in the Times saying we had burnt Thurles railway station and taken several towns, it was all one huge series of ludicrous errors.”

  “Don’t mention Thurles railway station to me, please,” O’Brien groaned, with a wry smile on his face. “It was certainly standing when last I was there, on the day they captured me and dragged me away to prison.

  "I suppose I have only myself to blame. I should have known better. But the irony is, I only came down here to the south to determine the level of support for a rising, not to cause one. I think most of the poor devils only came to the meetings in the first place because they thought I would feed them all. I may have helped a few of the miserable wretches with a couple of crusts of bread, but if there had ever been any serious fighting, it would have been like leading lambs to the slaughter.” O’Brien shook his head.

  “It may have all gone wrong in the end, but at least you were sincere," Emer said mildly. "You weren’t trying to gain power for yourselves, you were trying to show that the state of things in Ireland can’t go on like this for much longer.

  "I know that lives were lost, and it certainly looks to me as though the government is going to make you forfeit your own lives for what you did. Yet faced with the despair we see around us here, what other choice did you have? It was either be arrested anyway, and go to prison with nothing accomplished, or try to go out in a blaze of glory that would kindle the Irish spirit again out of the ashes of our country.”

  Terence grinned. “That's a generous assessment of the whole fiasco, my dear, for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “And there was that traitor Dobbyns as well, who must have told them everything. Lord Clarendon must have known about the rumours of rebellion, and waited until I was out of Dublin, to declare that the writ of Habeus corpus had been revoked,” O’Brien accused angrily.

  “Once myself and all of our other Young Ireland supporters and council members were separated, they were able to try to arrest us one at a time, with no need to state the charges against us.”

  “Believe me, gentleman, I do sympathise,” Emer declared earnestly.

  Both of the men looked at her sharply, recalling all she had told them of her suffering at the hands of Frederick Randall, which she had confided to them as they sat week after week awaiting trial.

  O’Brien had been kind enough to purchase her a pen and some paper, and she had written several relatively cheerful-sounding letters to Canada telling her friends where she was, and what had befallen her.

  She had glossed over the grimmer details, and omitted all mention of the fact that she was on trial for treason. She had simply asked desperately for news of William, and how much she missed him. Every time
she posted one of them, she wondered if Dalton would come for her, and whether or not he might be on a fool’s errand even if he did.

  She tried to remain positive that all would be well, and drew many sketches and lists of items for her utopian communities which she and Terence and O’Brien debated at length on the long, darkening nights as September turned to October, and Quebec became one distant dream for Emer when no letters were forthcoming from anyone there.

  “But why not teach the prisoners skills?" she argued one night. "Let’s face it, most of these boys only ever knew the potato, and when it disappeared, so did everything they had.

  "Why not teach them carpentry, blacksmithing, and animal husbandry, plus essential farming skills, so that when they do eventually leave prison, they can have a better life, and be much less likely to return to crime? If we could do that here in Ireland, there would be no point in going to such vast expense to transport them. Most of these boys are only in here because they would have starved otherwise. They're not hardened criminals. The governor has admitted it himself.”