Mr.Churchill's Secretary(94)
“It saved you back there, so don’t be snippy about it.”
But Maggie wasn’t through. “And now—if we live—since you cooperated with Frain, you and your boyfriend will probably just get extradited to Ireland, where they’ll no doubt celebrate you as heroes.”
“No. They won’t,” Claire said in a low voice. “Most Irish don’t condone the actions of the IRA.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Think of the Irish flag—green, white, and orange stripes, yes? The green is for Gaelic tradition. The orange represents the supporters of William of Orange—in other words, the Protestants. The white in the center is supposed to signify peace between the two.”
“Sounds promising—peace, that is.”
“There can be no truce,” Claire spit out, “not while they want to wipe out the Catholics.”
“Still,” Maggie said, “you’ll have it better there than you would here.”
Claire was very still.
Maggie tried to hold back, but she couldn’t. It had been a very long, very bad day. “Were you laughing at us the whole time? I mean, when you pretended to be Paige … Were you just thinking what idiots we all are and how easy we were to fool with your charming-blonde act?”
Claire was silent for a moment. “I don’t expect you to understand, Maggie.”
“Well, do enlighten me. We’re not going anywhere soon. And you owe me that much.”
She sighed. “Paige isn’t a lie—at least, not in the way you think. Paige is who I’d be if I grew up in Virginia, an all-American girl, blissfully ignorant of what’s really happening in the world.”
Maggie wasn’t expecting this.
“But that’s not what happened. I spent my summers in Ireland. And there I saw the most horrible forms of injustice. There was the Home Rule Act. Have you ever even heard of it?”
She hadn’t. “No.”
“The Irish wanted to rule themselves. The Brits didn’t agree. It’s—say, the Irish are the American colonists in the 1700s and the British are, well, the British. Imposing heavy taxes and arbitrary rules.”
“I’m still not seeing why you’d get involved.”
“The British executed the leaders of the IRA after the Great War. One person described it as ‘watching blood seep from behind a closed door.’ It was guerrilla warfare from then on. We were fighting to preserve our language, our culture, and our freedom.”
Claire drew in a ragged breath. “In Belfast, where we lived in the summers, there was horrifying violence. The Protestants were vicious. They’d pull people out of their homes and execute them on their front steps, and then they’d burn the houses down. Then the British sent their Great War vets—Black and Tans we called them, because of their uniforms—and they were even worse. I can’t—I can’t tell you how bad it was,” she said. “But I can tell you that it continued—continues—to this day. I—saw my mother raped. By a British officer. And my father, who wasn’t doing anything except trying to keep the Celtic language from falling into oblivion, was shot.”
Well. That certainly explained a lot. “But even so,” Maggie said, not wanting to give too much, “why bomb London? Why try to assassinate Winston Churchill? There’s a much bigger war going on right now.”
“Depends on how you look at it.”
“And you really believe that? I mean, the Blitz? Sarah and John and David … Are they really the enemy? Am I?”
“You’re not the enemy, but you support the enemy. With your taxes, with your ignorance, your passivity …” There was a pause. “You can’t help but be who you are. But neither can I. I don’t expect you to understand.”
What was there to say? “I still don’t understand, I admit,” Maggie said slowly. “And I can’t—ever—forgive you.” But. “But I can see that you’ve gone through a lot. Unspeakable things.”
And so they stood, back to back, in the darkness, until Claire started singing, her soprano voice thick and trembling but then gaining strength:
“In Mountjoy jail one Monday morning
High upon the gallows tree,
Kevin Barry gave his young life
For the cause of liberty.
But a lad of eighteen summers,
Still there’s no one can deny,
As he walked to death that morning,
He proudly held his head on high.
Just before he faced the hangman
In his dreary prison cell
The Black and Tans tortured Barry
Just because he wouldn’t tell
The names of his brave comrades,
And other things they wished to know.