Page 59 of Reforming Lord Ragsdale
It was so clear to him what had happened then that his own mind recoiled from speech.How could they?he thought.If the sins of nations must be atoned for at some distant judgment bar, England will pay for this one.
“And they arrested your family for complicity,” he whispered, when he could speak. “Oh, Emma.”
She spoke then in a monotone voice, so low and chilling that he was reminded of tales of zombies his Caribbean nursemaid told in the nursery years and years ago. “They yanked Tim out of his sickbed and ordered me to carry him. Da, Eamon, and Sam were bound together. Mama and I carried Tim ten miles that day toward Dublin.” She pausedthen, and her voice became wistful. “I remember that it was raining, and I lost a shoe in the mud.”
“You walked all the way to Dublin?”
“Aye. Tim died on the way.” She made another odd gesture with her hand, as though to wipe away the memory. “At least, I am sure he did. He was burning with fever, and the captain of the guard forced us to leave him in Diggtown with a family named Holladay.” She burrowed closer to him. “His eyes were sinking back in his head, and there was a fearsome gurgle in his throat.”
He chewed that over, letting her sit in silence until the coals settled in the fireplace, and she sat up, startled. He pulled her back against his chest again.
“The rest of you made it to Dublin?”
“Aye. Mama and I were taken to the Marlborough Street Riding School, where they were holding women involved in Castle Hill. The others went to Prevot Prison.” She shuddered, and he understood why. He had been to Prevot himself in 1798, when he had escorted prisoners there from Cork before his own injury.
“Were they tortured?” he asked as gently as he could.
She nodded. “But they wouldn’t say anything.” She looked at him, her eyes huge. “What could they say? They knew nothing!” She pounded on his chest in her rage, then threw her arms around him and wept.
He held her close, murmuring softly to her, devastated at the depth of her sorrow and understanding her deep shame.And you think you brought it on them all, my dear. This is too big a burden to bear alone.“This is tragic, my dear, but hardly your fault.”
“I am not through,” she interrupted, her voice cold. “When they would not speak, the English took me from Marlborough to Prevot and tortured me in front of them.”
“Oh, please no!” he exclaimed, feeling such a measure of horror and revulsion that his stomach writhed. “No, Emma!” he declared, as though his words could take it away.
She held up her left hand to him, holding it with her right to steady it. “You’ve noticed my fingers, my lord?” she asked, her eyes glittering with a fierce anger that burned into his body almost.
“Yes,” he whispered. “They pulled out your fingernails, didn’t they?”
“Aye.” She looked at her hand, the fingernails grown back, but with bumpy ridges. “I tried not to scream, but I couldn’t help myself. I even bit through my lip.”
“Emma, don’t,” he pleaded.
“You wanted to know,” she said calmly. “Well, now you will know. They told my father they were going to rape me right there. That was when Eamon confessed.”
“But . . .”
“Confessed to crimes he never committed, to spare me.” She stood up, and there was a dignity and majesty about her. “Now you begin to understand something of what drives me, my lord. It is not pretty, is it?”
Chapter 17
No, it is notpretty, he agreed after a night of twisting and turning in his bed until he was a prisoner of his sheets and weary with no sleep. As dawn was beginning to tinge the sky, he dragged himself to his arm-chair by the window and propped his bare feet on the ledge.I wonder that she can endure. May the Lord smite me if I ever whine again.
The rest of her story was told in fits and starts. How Eamon had been ripped from them and thrown into a cell for the condemned. They heard gallows under construction for some and learned from their triumphant jailers of Robert Emmet’s death by beheading. They begged, they pleaded, but the authorities did not bother to tell them who else had died, as though Irish grief was as dismissible as a gnat before the face.
On his lap again, Emma spoke of her escape, her voice still wondering at the mystery of it all. They had kept her in Prevot for another week, and then suddenly all the prisoners were removed to Marlborough Street Riding School, hurried along through the streets of Dublin as night was falling.
“It was typhus, and they moved everyone,” she explained into his soaked waistcoat. “Da and I were not chained together, and I know it must have been an oversight. When we passed a crowd and the guard wasn’t looking, he pushedme into the mob and said, ‘Indenture,’ to the man who caught me.”
Her voice lost some of its tightness as she told of being hustled that very night to the Dublin docks and put aboard a ship bound for America and the West Indies. “And so I came to the Claridges,” she concluded. “I never thought I would have a chance to look for my family again, but when Mr. Claridge said he was sending Sally and Robert to England, I knew I had to come.”
“And you have been treated shabbily,” he concluded. “That will change tomorrow, Emma. We are returning to the Office of Criminal Business, and I assure you that Mr. Capper will see you.”
“You would do that for me?” she asked in surprise, not realizing how her spontaneous question deepened his own shame.
“I will do that for you, Emma.”
“I will do that for you,” he repeated at dawn to the window.And then what? Will there be tidy lists of prisoners bound for Australia, or am I only letting Emma in for more frustration and heartache? Put baldly, is this a kindness?
