Page 7 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
I’m lost in the smell of paper and tea when the knock comes. I answer the door in my oldest hoodie, the one withSaveur Finalistscrawled on the sleeve in permanent marker. On the other side, a courier holds a small, square package and a clipboard.
“Delivery for Kelly?” he says, scanning my face for confirmation. I nod and sign, and he hands me the box, no questions asked.
It’s heavier than it looks. I bring it inside, set it on the table, and study the label. No sender, but the handwriting is unmistakable, the same careful script that annotated the shipping label on the mushrooms.
I slice the tape with my thumbnail. Inside is a book, old and battered, bound in leather so cracked it looks like the crust of a good rye. The title, embossed but nearly rubbed away, reads,
THE O’CONNELL FAMILY RECIPES
Anno Domini 1802
I open to the first page. The paper is thick, edges ragged, and every margin is crowded with notes, corrections, cross-outs, and exclamations in at least three different inks. Some recipes are written in a looping, florid hand. Others are blunt, in all-caps, as if someone were shouting the secrets down to posterity. There are clippings, stains, even a pressed sprig of thyme, brown but still fragrant.
I read the first recipe—some kind of bread pudding, but with caraway and lamb fat instead of custard. I read it twice, then a third time, and it occurs to me that no one writes down this much detail unless they’re desperate to be remembered.
The next page has a letter, folded and tucked between the leaves.
Aoife,
For when the Old Country is not enough.
You deserve more than peace. You deserve a kingdom.
—D
3
DECLAN
Two days later
The hour before dawn has always been mine alone, when even the ocean that hems in this city on three sides breathes slower and the gulls have not yet found their arguments. Boston is still asleep, the streets not yet stirring with the clatter of delivery trucks or the shouts of dockworkers. The sea air is damp and briny enough to slip through the smallest cracks in the windows and leave its fingerprint on the metal latches.
I wake before the first gray light touches the horizon and reach for the matchbox on my bedside table, the wood smooth where the corner knocks have been worn down by decades of hands. The brass candleholder beside the door is old enough to have been steadied by my great-grandfather, the lip worn thin where countless fingers have braced it at the turn. I strike the match and watch the flame catch and spread over the wick until it steadies into a small unwavering glow. It speaks to the kind of human imperfection that survives every renovation because no one dares to correct the dead.
The prayer comes next, in Irish as it has been since long before any of us had proper English. I murmur with a rhythm passed down from father to son long before Boston knew our name. I speak for the dead first, the men and women who carved our place into this city with their labor and their cunning and their blood. Then I whisper gratitude for the living, those who guard the line against erosion from without and rot from within. There is no sentiment in it, no softness. It’s a ritual of maintenance, the same as sharpening a blade or oiling a lock, the small act that keeps everything from rusting.
Once I finish, I leave the candle behind in the alcove and leave the room to walk the length of the corridor to the study.
Portraits watch me pass. Men in black coats—some with the plain collars of priests, others with the gleam of gold watch chains, each one painted with the same hard eyes that mark our blood. Women wear high lace collars, their hair braided into crowns.
The main staircase curves down to the east corridor, where the cold from the stone floor seeps faintly through the thin leather soles of my slippers. I prefer the semi-dark at this hour, the sconces unlit, the windows showing only the faintest hint of the sea’s pale shimmer beyond the grounds. I want the day to unfold at my pace and not be startled into it.
The study is where the real work begins. Just inside is a long mahogany desk with drawers that still smell faintly of pipe tobacco from an age when every O’Connell man smoked as if he were ensuring the house knew he was alive. The top is polished smooth. The lock on the center drawer is original, the key kept on a chain I wear under my shirt.
Inside are the ledgers, some modern and bound in black leather and embossed in gold. Others are older, their pages brittle with age, the ink faded but legible. They are here for instruction, every success and every error recorded, a lineage ofdecisions stretching back to the first shipment that came into the docks under our control, with notes in the margins where a grandfather corrected a rate or a father underlined a name that should not be trusted. This is how you keep a family alive in a place that does not grant you immortality.
I run a finger down a column from the nineteen thirties and pause at an entry about a crate of Irish whiskey. It arrived labeled as lamp oil. Three barrels were cracked. One was lost to the harbor. A priest was compensated with two. The note was clipped to the page with a rusted pin that had stained the edge a permanent red. I remember the story of that priest, Daly’s predecessor, who blessed the lot and took his share in glass jars with no labels. I close the book and open another. Sentiment is a luxury, and morning is for movement.
The docks remain the lifeblood of this family. Their rhythms are older than our paperwork and more honest than any oath sworn in a boardroom. During Prohibition they carried crates of whiskey under false manifests, barrels hidden behind stacks of imported textiles. Later, when Boston’s underworld shifted from bootlegging to guns, the crates became heavier, the men on the piers rougher, and the night watch better paid. Now, in a century that cloaks crime in corporate gloss, the containers bear legitimate seals and clean paperwork. Imported marble from Carrara. High-end electronics from Taiwan. Rare teas from Darjeeling. Beneath the decoy layers lies the cargo that never appears on any ledger. Weapons bound for ports that do not ask questions. Uncut stones destined for cash-only sales. Components for technology assembled far from any government’s reach.
Our reach is layered. First, the dock bosses—men who owe their positions to my father and now to me, whose families eat from our hand and would sooner drown in the harbor than turn against us. Then the union men, loyal through steady envelopesand careful handling of their disputes, because a strike is a sermon that can be preached for months if mishandled. Third, the port authority clerks, whose mortgages and debts we own as surely as the deeds to the warehouses. Every manifest is checked twice. Once for the paperwork, and once for what it conceals. The rhythm of it is like a tide that never stops, in and out, a choreography of cranes, forklifts, and men with thermoses who know the color of the tape that means trouble.
Laundering runs alongside the shipments, the way a shadow keeps pace with a man at noon. The city’s oldest churches, shipping companies, and boutique investment houses form the web. A charitable donation to a parish school becomes a short-term investment in a construction project. That turns into a loan for a shell company that will never finish its development. On paper, everything’s proper. In truth, the Archdiocese has been moving unclean money for decades because the city asked it to forgive sins it could not wash away. We send our own funds into the same stream. The trick isn’t hiding in plain sight. It’s hiding in the shadow of someone else’s sin, becoming less interesting than the institution that needs your quiet help.
By seven in the morning, the first calls begin.
Kieran’s on the line, my cousin and overseer of the night crews. In the background I hear gulls, the crash of waves, and the clank of chains on steel. “All shipments moved without incident,” he says. “Italian container came in hot. Thinking of shifting it to the south warehouse. Wind favors us today.”
