Brendan Graham - The Element of Fire

Lavelle did the heavy work – painted and decorated and put a snas on the backyard. Then Patrick wanted to ‘get at’ the gone-to-seed cabbages, but at her request left it. She decked the front and back borders of the cabbage patch with small yellow flowers – a Latin name, ending in ‘ ium ’ – she couldn’t remember when Mary had asked her. Peabody had told her when he’d given her the seeds, but she’d forgotten. The other two sides she left open, so she could ‘pluck the new cabbages, when they grew’, she hoped.

Eventually, the house was the way she wanted it; for the moment, at least. She had one other idea for the good room, but that could wait a while.

Lavelle, who had always maintained close links with those Boston Irish interested in the ‘Irish Cause’, had recently begun to attend meetings for the repeal of the Union of Ireland with England. She would have preferred he didn’t, that he’d leave ‘the past to the past’. Lavelle’s view was that ‘the past never goes away – the past is a road – always coming from somewhere and leading somewhere else’. She couldn’t win with him, so she gave up trying. She did once remark that with his increasingly frequent absences on ‘matters of Ireland’, ‘Now that the house is settled here, I have a mind to move back to Washington Street – and you could pay court to me every evening, as before!’

He knew she wasn’t serious, grabbed her and kissed her, laughing as he exited the door.

She read, instead, sitting at the rosewood bureau he had restored, her book on the baize-covered writing surface, vanishing her away from the world.

Her visits to the Old Corner Bookstore had been less frequent since they moved here, yet more precious. So that when she did go there she lingered over its store of treasures, lovingly fingering the gold-lettered spines, imprinting into memory the works and the lives within. The English poets: Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads , Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – the two contrary states of the human soul – Byron and Donne. These were her favourites, opening her eyes to an England, pastoral, passionate, spiritually provocative, different from the ‘perfidious Albion’, she had known, an England of Cromwell and Queen Victoria, ‘The Famine Queen’.

At Christmas, Lavelle had presented her with Legends of New England, in Verse and Prose , by the Massachusetts-born John Greenleaf Whittier – ‘to wean you away from old England’. And she was much interested in New England writing. Emerson with his spiritual vision, his belief that all souls shared in the higher, Over-Soul, that nature is spirit, rang with a resonance close to her own, one which the organized pulpitry of the Catholic Church could never achieve for her. The women writers of New England, she also sought out, as much for their ‘Bloomerist’ agenda as for anything. However, the Old Corner Bookstore, Lavelle’s ‘Repeal’ meetings, and even the aggrandizement of No. 29 were only the trimmings of life in Boston. The education of her children, the steady growth of the business, and the unerring stability of life in general was what mattered, what she had always craved. What now was within her keeping.

The children all were flourishing. Patrick at the Eliot School, Mary, and even Louisa, with a little additional schooling from Mary, at Notre Dame de Namur. Peabody had now opened yet a further store, his third, in the affluent suburb of West Roxbury. And she had settled more easily than she had expected into the marriage life, seldom a cross word between them, Lavelle, unlike many, remaining sober in manner. Mrs Brophy’s ‘pool of contentment’ continued to surround them, if not indeed deepen.

She thought that maybe the time was now right to try again some of Boston’s better establishments which had once refused her, given that they themselves were better consolidated now. But upsetting the arrangement with Peabody worried her.

‘We are too much in his hands already,’ was Lavelle’s view. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Peabody to go directly to Frontignac himself. What’s stopping him – except you?’ he added, teasingly.

She swiped at him with her apron. ‘You might be right, Lavelle,’ she teased back, ‘but underneath everything, Jacob is all business,’ adding more seriously, ‘he is at no risk financially. That is what’s stopping him. He doesn’t pay until he sells. Nobody else affords him that arrangement.’ She paused. ‘But if we are to give the same terms to enter business with others, then what little reserves we have will be strained. We will need to approach the banks – or R.G. Dun, the credit agents!’

‘Well we didn’t give it to Higgins …’ Lavelle started, referring to the customer he had secured while she was in Ireland; a steady, but not startling account. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t …’ he corrected himself, so as not to appear critical of her arrangement with Peabody. ‘The city is bursting at the seams. It cannot develop quickly enough. There is such wealth here that we can scarce go wrong by expansion, and without having to extend excessive credit,’ was Lavelle’s final word.

She told Peabody of their plan, reassuring him that they would not supply anybody within a certain radius of his own stores.

‘I wondered how long it would take you. Of course, you must expand – God forbid anything should happen to me!’ was all he said. ‘Come, sit now a while and we will discuss life, instead of business – all only business with you Irish,’ he mocked.

She was relieved at his generous response. There were times when Jacob seemed more interested in philosophy than profit, and she did love these discussions with him. He seemed to know so much, quoted freely from poem and psalm alike and had such seeming wisdom. How like her father he was in that respect. Yet, unlike the Máistir , Jacob never revealed much about himself; his defence to veer off into being flirtatious with her, if she probed too deeply. Not that he needed much excuse for that either.

Jacob, how did you come to know so much … of everything?’ She had decided to try some probing of her own. ‘Was it from your father or through schooling?’

‘Neither,’ he quipped, ‘but from gazing into the eyes of beauty. Much wisdom is to be found there.’ Then he turned it around, asking questions of her. ‘That song at your wedding – I was reminded of it again recently,’ he began. ‘The “Úna” in your song intrigues me. Love beyond death? Death in love? Which is it?’

She laughed; he always did this. ‘It is both … it depends,’ she answered vaguely.

‘On what?’

‘On the love, the lovers – you know that, Jacob!’

‘And is this love a common thing, do you think, or only in songs?’ he pressed.

‘It is uncommon. If it were common, it would not be written about.’ She tried to bring the discussion back within the framework of the song but Peabody was having none of it.

‘So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for the many and the other – great, tragic love – for the few. Is that it?’

She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody, the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.

‘Yes … I suppose so, Jacob,’ she parried.

‘What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?’

It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken of it to him on her return to Boston – about how she had shortened her name, dropped the ‘Rua’.

‘I don’t know, Jacob, and don’t call me by that name.’ She stamped out the words at him.

‘Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen … Rua?’ he repeated provocatively.

‘Of course I do!’ she said, angry that he still persisted with her old name. ‘Earth, wind, water, fire,’ she reeled them off.