‘I think I would have liked Séamus,’ Grace mused as she looked out of the window at the passing countryside. ‘He sounds like such a lovely man. I’d like to have met him.’
Maggie smiled to herself as she watched a rabbit darting back into its burrow, startled by the noise of the car. ‘Well dear, as it happens, you did. You did meet him.’
‘What?!’ Grace and Jimmy both reacted together.
‘What do you mean?’ Grace continued, as Jimmy slowed the car and pulled into a nearby gateway. ‘I never met him! How could I have met him when he lived in Ireland all his life?!’
Maggie turned in her seat to face Grace. ‘He was your great-grandfather Grace. The man who used to tease you with his mixed up words and smoke his pipe and tell you all those tall tales. That was Séamus Doyle – James Doyle, as you knew him, the English version of his name.’
Grace’s mind was reeling. ‘Séamus was James? Great-granddad James? But……’ she burst into laughter. ‘I can’t believe it. So, you married Séamus? The Séamus. The Séamus who you loved and who wrote those letters. After everything you’d both been through, you married him?!’
Now Maggie was laughing. ‘Yes love. I married him! There was a big mix up after my telegram was delivered incomplete and the poor lamb thought I didn’t want to see him ever again, but luckily, after he’d learnt of my survival, he got hold of my aunt’s address in Chicago and wrote to me. I’ll never forget the day that letter arrived. It was the first contact I’d had from home since the terrible disaster and he said such kind things about hoping I would live a long and happy life and that with his Da dead, he was selling his land and going to work in the English cotton mills. Of course then that confused me, as my message had said for him to come to America as soon as he could. Oh, it was a dreadful time – of course, you kids would be able to sort it all out now with a quick phone call or one of them fancy fax machines or computers, but we didn’t have anything like that back then and had to wait for letters to cross the ocean on steam ships and chug down train tracks and trundle across dusty tracks in a horse and cart. Well, eventually we sorted it all out and after he’d sold his father’s bit of land he had enough money for a passage to America and he arrived in Chicago one day at union station and as soon as he saw me he sank to his knees and wept and asked me to marry him and I wept and said yes! He never mentioned that he’d already proposed to me in his lost letters. To his dying day, he wouldn’t tell me what he’d written in those letters. He said it didn’t matter now.’
‘Wow! So, Séamus Doyle was my great-grandfather! But why did he change his name to James?’
‘Well, he got so fed up of having to spell his name out for everyone. You see, these silly Americans didn’t know how to pronounce Séamus properly – ‘Sea-mus’ they used to say! Oh, how I used to giggle at him. So one day he announced that he was going to change his name to James, the English version of Séamus and that’s how he was known for the rest of his life: James Doyle.’
‘That’s amazing! Oh, I’m so thrilled Maggie. I’m so happy it was him - that I knew him. And you loved each other so much and, oh, it’s just wonderful Maggie. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection.’
‘Well, why would you I suppose - I always got so upset thinking about him since he died, I didn’t really like to talk of him too much. And then all this started happening and that kind man found his letters and I guess I was so wrapped up in all the memories that I forgot you never knew. I kind of assumed you knew it was the same man – it’s so long since I’ve spoken about our life before Titanic – when I was Maggie Murphy and he was Séamus Doyle. We were different people for so many years afterwards, it’s almost like those two teenage kids were lost somewhere along the way.’
They chatted for a while about the man who Grace had known and how fate had conspired to keep Maggie and Séamus apart but that they had found a way back to each other after all.
‘Yes. He was a truly lovely man and I was the luckiest woman in all of Chicago to marry him. I loved him very much. And Grace, ‘she added, ‘he loved you, you know. He loved you very, very much. You were named after his own mother. He insisted on it.’
CHAPTER 38 - Chicago, Fall, 1982
The leaves were already taking on all the wonderful hues of autumn when Grace left for college; the russet, gold and copper shades glistening in the early morning sun and casting a warm glow over the lanes and fields which surrounded her home.