Men of No Property

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

• Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781480460584
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Narrativa storica

Dorothy Salisbury Davis brings to life the joys, hardships, and challenges of the Irish in New York City, following the lives of five people from their voyage to America in 1848 through fifteen turbulent years
When the  Valiant weighs anchor, the Irish that are crammed into her hold break into song, and with the hymn, say good-bye to the island of their birth. Famine, nationalism, and sectarian strife have crippled the Emerald Isle, and those who can afford it crowd aboard leaky ships, risking death for the possibility of a better life.
Among the  Valiant's passengers are Peg and Norah Hickey, a pair of lovely young runaways; powerful and charming Dennis Lavery, who sets his sights on Tammany Hall; tough urchin Vinnie Dunne; and Stephen Farrell, a lawyer and journalist who waded into troubled political waters in Ireland. While they begin their journey with optimism in their hearts, as their fortunes prosper in the new world, their lives will be touched in ways they would never expect—by disillusionment, corruption, and the violence of America's Civil War.
A tribute to her mother's homeland, this historical novel was the first work of fiction published by Dorothy Salisbury Davis that did not deal with crime and criminals. Nonetheless, she brings to it the same insightful characterization, lively pacing, and engrossing drama that mark her as one of the finest mystery authors of all time.

PART I

1

THERE WAS A MUTE companionability amongst the people who waited on the dock, an unspoken sympathy for each other lest the pity of it be turned, by each upon himself, a voyager halted and his journey scarcely begun. Fear nibbled at their quiet, almost itself a sound. For all of them there was time, and for some of them the means yet to turn back to Ireland. Margaret Hickey would not so much as cast her eyes upon her sister, fearing to start the word from Norah’s lips. She prayed for a quick distraction. Could none of them sing? Was here to be a packetload of Irishmen and not a story-teller amongst them? Not a fiddler? Ah, but there was a priest, fair comfort that to some. Gone aboard but an hour before, he’d not shown himself since, but neither had he taken his leave, and Peg wondered in her bitter way if he wasn’t coaxed on to lull the Irish until sailing, or sure maybe no priest at all, for there was something queer in the fit of the cassock and the way he wore it—like an Irish recruit in a redcoat. There was never a priest she knew at home didn’t wear it like his skin.

She watched then as a man came striding along toward the dock, his boots clacking on the cobbles in the noontime quiet. No emigrant he, the girl thought, though he took the emigrants’ measure as if he expected their company. He put down his dinner box at the side of a capstan and was there intercepted by a lad whose like Peg had often seen on the streets at home. He was plying his trade a last time this side of the Atlantic. She strolled the distance by which she might watch him at work, for the beggars of Dublin were artists!

“Give us a ha’penny, yer honor.”

The man pulled the tail of his coat from the clutches of the small beggar, the boy no taller than his waist but with the big round eyes of an owl and the same look of age about him, and the same mute show of cunning. He was puffed up like the bird, too, stuffed with the nothing of hunger.

“What do you want with a ha’penny?” the man said. “Aren’t you off today to America?”

“The oul’ lady won’t give us from the packet t’eat. Give us the ha’penny.”

The man hunched down to be nearer the boy’s level. “And why won’t she give you from the packet?”

“She’s savin’ it for the crossin’. Give us the penny, yer honor.”

“So now it’s a penny, is it? You’re getting in practice for the swells of New York. Christ, what a parcel of creepers we’re exporting from Ireland this year of our Lord! Put your chin in the air, lad, and look a man in the face. How old are you? Eight? Ten?”

“Thirteen and yous can kiss my arse.”

The man started back as he might from the snarl of a dog. He gave a great laugh and fetched a purse from the tail of his coat. “That earns you tuppence, my lad. Give them that in New York and you’ll prosper.” He moved down then, the man with the generous purse, upon the emigrants where they lolled amongst their belongings. He looked from them to their ship. The workers were at it again with their hammers and tar. “The Valiant,” he said derisively, “well named for exporting the Irish.” A spate of blasphemy came from the emigrant men, a dribble of prayer from the women. Lying in a Liverpool dock The Valiant had sprung a leak. On the wild Atlantic she might as soon split asunder.

“God save Ireland!” the man cried.

Ah, that was it, Peg thought, a Young Irelander. And sure enough, he began coaxing and abusing the men, trying to push them back to Ireland.

“No man who is a man has the right to leave Ireland,” he cried.

In this year of our Lord, Peg thought, in this year of our Lord, 1848, no man who is a man has the right to leave Ireland. But who had the choice of staying? Didn’t he know Young Ireland itself was scattered? Its revolution no more than a whisper in the wind? Oh, the rights of Irishmen were many, the right to starve and the right to beg, the right to toil in the fields from the skriek of dawn till the drag of night and to own not so much of the soil they tilled as the scrapings of it from the soles of their feet; the right to load ships near to sinking with the harvest their sweat nurtured, and to unload the last harvest before it coming home again with the sweet stamp of charity on it…a few months too late for a hundred thousand or so dead who plainly did have the right to leave Ireland. Let him bag his own bones and take them back to Ireland, Peg thought, for the women were setting up a lamentation that would curdle the marrow in your spine. A rising, he was talking now, a rising that was, and another to follow.

A great handsome lad grown out of his clothes stood up then amongst the emigrants. “How the hell could you have a risin’ and not a ha’porth of yeast in any of yous?”

Go it, Peg thought, go it! and added her voice to the men’s approval until her sister hushed her. The English seamen laid off their deck work, and even the priest came to the rail. The emigrant shrugged his shoulders as though to cast off timidity.

“Young Ireland, is it?” he said.

“It is, and proud I am of it,” the agitator answered.

“And is it that walk into Tipperary you’re callin’ a risin’? Were you there, man?”

“Would God I had been and died there,” the agitator cried.

“Amen to that, I’m thinkin’,” said the emigrant, and Peg realized he was more a man than the fit of his coat described him. “Oh, what an army of yous died there. The marvel of it was how all them dead bodies could get up and run.”

“Look up to your ship now and see why it failed!” The agitator shook his finger at the priest who had turned from the rail and bowed his head, clouding his eyes with his hand. “’Tis not the first time the clergy has turned their backs on us. You spoke of Tipperary, young one. Let me tell you true what happened there. The people came out with pikes to join us, pikes, pitchforks and gentlemen even with their fowling pieces. They swore with us an everlasting fealty to Ireland, a fight from ditch to cave. And then came on your holy men. Midwives you’d think they’d be to Irish freedom. But nay, my friend. They turned the people from us. Dry nurses they are, I tell you, with empty paps! They’re suckling Ireland to her death!”

The women wailed out in horror and the men groped through their possessions while the emigrant spokesman let fly a great spit in the face of the agitator. All of them then gave something to his banishment: if they had but two shoes, one of them was aimed at his head, pipes, pots burned black with stirabout, jugs, pitchers which were to hold their first milk in America. And through it, Young Ireland stood, his eyes streaming, until one iron pan felled him. The constabulary came for him then, and the sailors leapt from the deck on the mate’s whistle, and with ropes and billysticks herded the emigrants up the plank and down into the ship’s hold, each one blessing his reverence as they hurtled by him. Peg hung back as long as she could as did the boy who got tuppence, having but half eaten his loaf.

On the dock the agitator found his own legs and shook off the support of the constabulary. “Oh, mother England,” he wailed out, “you could never hurt me like this!” He limped off while the police gave him a cheer. At a safe distance, he picked up his lunch box, turned, and thumbed his nose at them. He did not see the one salute given him in honor, Peg thought, the priest, whoever he was, touching his fingers ever so gently to his forehead.

Farewell, Young Ireland.

2

AS SOON AS THE tug-steamers sounded their approach, the hatch was closed and fastened upon the emigrants. It was not that the captain was a cruel man. He was merely honest. He had been paid by the head for his human cargo—his other cargo was pig-iron and pottery—twelve pounds for each adult and six for an infant, and in his long experience with the Irish emigrant, he had seen more than one of them pitch himself into the sea after a few uneasy hours in The Valiant’s groaning belly. Starting with two hundred and sixty head, he would bring that number into the Atlantic at least, and with fair winds and a generous sky he would bring two hundred into the New York harbor. The rest would have died on land or sea. He, at least, could give them a clean burial and a deep grave.

Below, a shout and a curse exploded with the clap of the hatch. The silence then amongst the emigrants was leaden. A solitary lantern, smoke-grimed and flaring fitfully, hung from a stanchion. The bunks were scarcely visible, and the wide furtive eyes of the occupants gleamed as from the depth of a pit. The slough of water and the creak of the ship as she buoyed up with the tide was like the sigh and the crackle of bones in an old woman’s rising to a dreary chore. A child whined. His mother muffled the cry, his mouth against her breast.

“Let him cry. It’s the sound of life in him, and it’s a good thing hearin’ it.”

All eyes followed the dark shape of the speaker. He strode down the center passageway, swung around each stanchion until he stood, his face level with the lantern. It was he who had spoken up to Young Ireland on the dock. Now his face was softer and there was the promise of an easy smile about his mouth.

“I’ve heard tell they batten us down till we’re on the high seas,” he called out and lowered his voice when it came pounding back at him from the low ceiling. “There’s no malice in it, yous understand. It’s only they don’t want us pollutin’ English waters.”

There was no response to his words except in the steady blinking eyes on him.

“Well,” he tried again, “’Twas a poor joke but the best I had on no notice. I’m Dennis Lavery, and I come from Henry Street, Dublin city.”

Again he waited.

“Have none of yous tongues?” he shouted.

A boy’s head poked over an upper bunk near him. “Eee! Vincent Dunne here, Mulberry Square.”

This brought a shiver of welcome laughter. Mulberry Square was amongst the most elegant of Dublin’s residential sections.

Lavery leaned away from the light to see the boy’s face. “Ah, that accounts for the tuppenny loaf I seen you with,” he bantered. “Did you save us a crumb itself?”

“Och,” a woman said from the bunk below, “if he’d only a potato he’d give you the skin. Come down and stand on your feet when the man’s talkin’ to you, Vinnie.”

“Aye,” said Lavery. “Come down and be introduced proper. We’re all to be gentlemen in America.”

The boy shinnied down the post, his bare toes groping for the floor. Standing beside Lavery, he cocked his head up at him and grinned. The eyes had mischief as well as cunning and the nose was saucy as a cork on water.

Lavery smiled and extended his hand. “Here I thought it was a giant in the loft and you’re no more nor a mite of a boy.”

The lad put his full grip into the handclasp. “Gi’ me any gam under five stone an’ I’ll miff wi’ him.”

“Oh an’ flatten him,” Lavery said, flexing his fingers. “I give yous Vinnie Dunne, the mighty Irish mite. Which is your ma, Vinnie?”

“Me ma’s dead. Her there’s Granny, takin’ us over.”

“It’s him takin’ me an’ the little one,” the woman said, easing herself off the bunk. She was a big, puffy woman who would take on weight if from nothing but water. She jerked a self-conscious bow out of herself. “I’m Mary Dunne, an’ the little one’s name is Emma. Vinnie was only spoofin’. We lives on Townsend Street.”

Lavery moved toward the bunk, his arm about the boy’s shoulder. He stooped and squinted in at the child, who after the look at him, slipped behind her grandmother and sucked on a piece of sugared rag.

“A broth of a girl,” Lavery said.

“Good as gold, she is. No trouble at all. The father’s waitin’ the first sight of her, him goin’ off to America after dottin’ his ‘i’. But that one. He’s no notion what he’s gettin’ with him at this age.”

Lavery agreed, but winked at Vinnie when he spoke. “’Tis a troublesome age.”

Together the man and the boy moved down the aisle. They paused at every bunk and took the hands of its occupants. Those in their wake clustered with them that were greeted before, and those ahead moved to the front of their bunks, the quicker to meet Lavery and the boy.

At one halt Lavery stayed beyond his introduction of himself. “By a foul light here’s a fair sight,” he said.

Two girls drew deeper into the shadows, but one of them laughed aloud, her teeth gleaming in the near darkness.

“Don’t be bold, Peg,” the other whispered fiercely.

“Ah, but do be bold, Peg,” Lavery said, and gave the boy a nudge to carry on by himself. “It’s a bold country you’re goin’ to. And if you be Peg,” he moved closer to her companion, “who would this be?”

“Norah, my sister,” Peg said. “We’re Margaret and Norah Hickey.”

“Margaret and Norah Hickey,” he repeated. “Poor, poor Ireland, her fairest blooms blowin’ out to sea.”

“Are you a poet, Mr. Lavery?” Peg asked.

“The name is Dennis and I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for the Writing of Dorothy Salisbury Davis
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V
• PART VI
• PART VII
• PART VIII
• PART IX
• About the Author
• Copyright