No Peace for Amelia Read Online Free Page A

wrong. The Volunteers were desperate to find safe places to keep ‘ hardware ’, as Patrick put it. What could be safer than under Mary Ann’s floorboards? Who would ever think of such a commodity being hidden in such a household?
    Mary Ann thought she agreed with Patrick that the rebellion the Volunteers were planning against British rule in Ireland was right and just, but she was unhappy about her brother’s request all the same. Although she was in favour of the idea of armed rebellion, it was a bitdifferent when it came to actual guns that might be used to shoot actual real live people being kept in your own bedroom, where you had to sleep at night. And Mary Ann was quite well aware of the attitude of her employers to guns and fighting. Would it be fair to them to bring such things into their house? She thought of Mrs Pim’s kindness to her mother in her last days, and she thought about the trust and esteem in which she herself was held in this family, and she shook her head. But then she thought about the sheer cleverness of Patrick’s plan. The authorities would never dream of raiding a Quaker house. Everyone knew where these people stood. The precious metal would be as safe as houses here. It was a lovely plan, lovely and clever and daring and brave and treacherous.
    If she were to co-operate, Mary Ann would be part of the great bid for freedom of the Irish people. Future generations might call her a heroine. She would be in the tradition of the great heroes of Ireland’s past. She’d be a modern warrior-woman, like Queen Maeve or Granuaile. She’d be part of the ancient struggle against the English oppressor and vital to the uprising that would finally rid Ireland of English rule and allow Robert Emmet’s epitaph to be written, when his country took her place among the nations of the earth. Ah! Mary Ann looked out of the open window at the starlit night and wondered if the moon would shine one day soon on a truly free and Gaelic Ireland.
    Then she looked down again at the grey-buff page of squiggles and scorings-out in her lap, and she feared for her brother. She feared for her brother, she had to admit, more than she feared for her country. Patrick Maloney was a fiery, impetuous lad, with more courage than sense, and God knows what was to become of him in the company of such men as he now consorted with. She was nearly sorry they had let him out of prison last year. At least he had been safe in there. It was a mad, uncertain time for Europe, for Ireland – and for the Maloney family. What was she to do? Mary Ann tucked the letter back into its incongruously clean envelope and put it with the rest under the floorboards.
    Then she shut the window and climbed into bed, where she spent a long and disturbed night, lying awake for hours, and dreaming horrid, lurid dreams when she did finally drop off to sleep. And between dreams, she tossed on her pillow and tried to reach a decision, to choose between her brother and his convictions, which she largely shared, on the one hand, and her employers and their convictions, which she respected, on the other. All night she dreamt and tossed about and thought and thought and dreamt and tossed, and by the time the sun came up over the grey, pointed spire of the church of the Holy Trinity and glinted on the coloured windows of Mount Argus, she knew what she must do. 

Lucinda’s News
    A melia was still getting used to being allowed to sit up for dinner in the evenings with the grown-ups, and she tried hard to behave terribly well, for it would never do to show herself unworthy of her elevation to the dining room. So she was careful to wipe her mouth daintily with her napkin before taking a sip of water, to make a minimum of chomping and slurping noises as she ate, and to pass the butter and the salt and the redcurrant jelly or the horseradish sauce or the gravy or whatever there was to go with the meat, to Grandmama, who sat gravely