Toward the Sea of Freedom Read Online Free Page B

could. Sometimes Kathleen brought bread or fruit. Michael liked when she filched treats from the manor, but he wouldn’t take anything that might have come from Trevallion’s hand. Michael let her know that he would choke on that man’s gifts.
    These days she was always hungry—for food as well as affection. She knew she was sinning with Michael, and was ashamed of it—only afterward though, once the rush had died away. When Michael was making love to her, as when she thought about him at work or at night on her sleeping mat, she felt blessed, not guilty. Something so wonderful, so uplifting, could not be a sin. Besides, God did allow it, so long as a couple went into church and pledged themselves to each other first. Which Kathleen and Michael would have been prepared to do at any moment.
    Once, she even pilfered a candle from the manor house, and the two of them solemnly recited wedding vows. Naturally, they knew this did not count. They were just children, playing at marriage. To make it real, they would need permission from their parents and the landlord, and Father O’Brien’s blessing. They couldn’t imagine how they would get all that.
    “We’ll marry in America!” Michael comforted Kathleen when, once again, these thoughts aggrieved her. “Or in Kingstown or Galway before we sail.”
    Kathleen no longer protested when he raved about their wonderful life together on the other side of the ocean. She had chosen him; she wanted to live with him, wherever that would be. And America was better than the convent—the only way to flee a marriage in Ireland.

    The cold and rainy days of late autumn had arrived. Even under the thickest of the blankets Michael had scavenged, it was wet and uncomfortable in their love nest on the river. But the walks after church also grew shorter. Everyone took refuge in houses and cottages. Many people simply lacked the strength to do anything else.
    There had been less and less to eat for weeks. Hunger held Lord Wetherby’s tenants in its iron grip, although the lord himself did not notice. He and his wife had long since returned to their country house in England, where they sat drinking tea in front of the fireplace, cheered by the rich harvest of his Irish holdings. It was possible he was not even aware that no such blessings were bestowed upon his tenants and day laborers. His grain was sound. Why should Wetherby give a second thought to potatoes?
    The few potatoes not blighted had long since been eaten. There had been so few, no one had been able to store any—not even seed potatoes for the following year. They would have to buy them, and God alone knew with what money. To survive the winter, the children gathered acorns in the forest, which their parents ground. The lucky ones, like Kathleen’s family, added rye or wheat flour; others baked their bread from the coarse, unsubstantial acorn meal. The poorest—those who could hardly summon the strength to go into the woods to gather acorns or dig up roots—cooked soup from the meager grass that grew along the road. People fought over the last dry nettles.
    Now and again, Father O’Brien would dispense donations in church. Collections were taken up in England for the Irish, and some of the charity even came from America. Nevertheless, it was never enough to last very long. Stomachs were filled once, but it only made the hunger hurt all the more.
    Michael Drury’s family found ways to make ends meet. Michael fiddled in Wicklow’s tavern, but even the towns lacked money for diversions. Prices for groceries climbed in equal measure to people’s hunger, and even the moonshine whiskey distillers in the mountains wanted for raw materials.
    Through it all, Mary Kathleen was the only one on whom the strains of the famine could hardly be seen. While everyone around her became thin, she seemed to blossom and even to put on weight. The reason for that did not, however, lie in Trevallion’s generous gifts. Old Gráinne cooked for the