Fic: "Last Rose of Summer" (Pete/Patrick, historical AU)
Author:shadow_shimmer
Title:“Last Rose of Summer”
Rating:PG-13
Disclaimer:The people are real; this isn’t.
For: normalhumanbein who requested 1) the 1990s; 2) the non-stereotypical future; or, the 1800s. I went with the 1800s and then proceeded to angst about exactly WHAT in the 1800s I was going to write about. There was much prodding from the peanut gallery for industrial revolution!fic, while I was leaning more towards The Crimean War. Of course, I settled on neither, and I hope normalhumanbein is okay with the subject matter. Thanks to grammar_glamour for the last minute beta. We don’t need no stinkin’ tense agreement. ;)
Summary: Pete is a sailor; Patrick is an Irish revolutionary on a boat to Canada during the Famine. The American Civil War makes a cameo appearance.
Warning: This is NOT a happy story. It was the Potato Famine--people died.
a/n to follow the story.
Last Rose of Summer
Rough-hewn stone scrapes along the palm of Pete’s hand, raising the memory of calluses and rope burns.
Pete leans against the big cross and looks across the field of smaller, listing wooden ones. He could take his time and walk the rows, but it’s raining now--filling faded etchings with mud and water--and Pete doesn’t remember there being rows or markers in ’47 anyway, just holes in the ground.
He shrugs his shoulders against the rain looks out over the river, squinting at the ships. His knee--the one with the little reminders of Antietam still in it--is going to start to complain if he doesn’t get off of his feet and in out of the wet pretty soon. But before he was a soldier he was a sailor, and he’s never really minded the rain.
Lovely companions, faded and gone
Perched half-way up the rigging, held fast by one legged looped through the ropes, Pete watches the storm roll in. The water’s choppy already and dark, wind whipping up white-caps and blowing salt in his eyes. He picks for a second at the skin peeling off of his nose and then tugs a hand through filthy, salt-stiffened hair. The strands torn loose by his attempt at grooming flutter down and then off to starboard where a little group of passengers are huddled by the rails.
There’s a big bundle shrouded in white between two men who are trying to shove it up and over the side. One of them--small and red-haired--is saying something Pete can’t make out. It’s not in English--not even the kind of English the Irish claim to speak.
Losing interest after the body gets tossed, Pete focuses again on the storm and on the fact that Captain Hurley is insane trying to cross the Atlantic this late in the season, no matter how many Irish are still waiting at the port in Sligo.
The Harmony creaks and shudders her agreement, and Pete chances a look back down at the funeral party as he begins his climb down the rigging, bare toes gripping the rope, fingers sliding and burning over knots and frays. Several people--including the little makeshift pall-bearer--are bent over the side, heaving. Pete isn’t surprised: rough seas and bad food make for weak stomachs.
By the time he’s back on deck, though, ready to bypass the funeral and go about his business, he can hear music over the wind.
His first thought--as a respectable sailor--is, sirens? Which he dismisses because sirens are female and the voice he’s hearing is male. It’s the sea-sick pall-bearer, bundled up now against the wind, and singing something sad enough that is cuts Pete a little, right through the sun burned, calloused skin and down to the muscle and the sinew--it makes him weak.
He shakes, loses his footing on the slick deck, and turns away.
*
With the weather getting worse, most of the passengers are confined below-decks, sleeping in straw beds on the floor and avoiding the narrow bunks nailed to the walls.
Pete has a hammock in the crew deck and so ignores the plight of the passengers until he finds the little singer curled up under a tarp outside, straw stuck to his hat and coat, shivering.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” Pete asks, kneeling beside the sleeping kid and shaking him.
“The smell,” he answers. He turns his head away from Pete and Pete catches a glimpse of white skin, an inch or two, between his chin and his scarf. “Don’t--I can’t go back down there now.”
Pete shrugs; it’s not his job to make sure the passengers don’t freeze to death. They’ve already paid their fare.
The kid blinks at Pete through little, round spectacles and then smiles. “I know you. You--” and he walks his fingers up Pete‘s arm, “climb around on the ropes.”
“And you sing,” Pete says without thinking.
A nod. “My name’s Patrick,” he says.
Of course, Pete thinks. “Pete,” he says.
*
Beyond his affinity for high places, Pete has other things in common with magpies. For instance, he likes pretty things. He collects buttons, bits of green glass, jewelry (if passengers are careless enough with it), girls on board--in better times--with shiny eyes and hair (if their fathers or brothers were careless with them).
Patrick is pretty, in his way, Pete decides, watching him stand at the rail and sing into the wind. Slight and pale with mist in his eyes; red and fierce around the edges.
“Why risk it?” Pete asks him, standing behind him, a head taller and broader all around. “You toss another of your people overboard everyday.” Pete wishes, maybe, he hadn’t said that. Patrick’s lost a father and a cousin to typhus since they left Sligo three weeks ago.
Patrick turns into Pete, song interrupted, eyes bright with cold (fever?) and cheeks red. “And if I’d stayed?” he hisses, teeth closed against the words, against the pain of leaving. “And if I’d starved? What good is that?”
“What do you mean, ‘what good’,” Pete asks, not backing down. He understands selfishness, which is all he has. He understands self-preservation. Patrick isn’t talking about that.
“For Ireland,” Patrick says, as if Pete’s stupid.
This means nothing to Pete. He belongs to the Harmony and the Crown, and as long as he can stay on the water, he’s satisfied.
Patrick is not satisfied with Pete’s views. In moments--snatches of conversation, breaks in Patrick’s singing and writing (Pete can’t read, or he would spy), after Pete’s mended a sail or scrubbed up after another Irishman’s lost his dinner on the deck--Patrick tells Pete about the Penal Laws, the Act of Union, and, with a tremor in his voice, Daniel O’Connell and how he failed. Patrick tells Pete about Young Ireland and about revolution.
“He didn’t see, O’Connell didn’t,” Patrick says. “He didn’t see that there’s just no sense in reasoning with you, with England. Things have to be done.”
Pete agrees just because he likes to hear Patrick talk and because he likes to get close enough to feel the way Patrick’s heart beats harder when he talks about politics. Pete hears rhythms and cadences and never the arguments.
“What’ll you do in Canada?” he asks, once, pressed against Patrick’s side, face in Patrick’s hair, daring himself to kiss the skin under his lips.
“Write. Teach. They--you,” Patrick breathes out heavily, “want us to work cutting wood. The men below?” Pete nods, dragging the tip of his tongue under Patrick’s jaw. “The English paid their way so they’ll cut wood for them in Canada.”
“I,” Pete whispers in Patrick’s ear, “don’t want you to do anything.”
Patrick laughs a little and shivers, his anger gone now, chilled again. “Oh?” he asks. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”
*
Four weeks into the crossing, Patrick starts to teach Pete how to read. Pete doesn’t catch on right away.
“What good is it?” he asks.
“It makes me happy,” Patrick answers, and kisses Pete back for the first time.
No kindred to reflect, or give sigh for sigh
“A nation once again,” Pete says, reading his first sentence out loud to Patrick sometime around dawn on a clear day.
The wood of the deck is warm where they’re laying, concealed by a life boat and their tarp, and Pete feels a little strange about what he’s just done--like maybe once he’s let the words into his head they aren’t going to ever get back out.
“You did it,” Patrick says, smiling, pulling Pete close. “Now I just have to find one of the wee people and wish you Irish. Then,” he tugs Pete’s matted hair out of his eyes, “my life will be complete.”
“I could be Irish,” Pete says, sliding a hand over Patrick’s back, pushing his shirts and coat up and feeling skin.
Patrick just pulls on Pete’s hair again and laughs.
When his lips meet Pete‘s, Pete’s surprised at the urgency of it, like Patrick’s suddenly in a hurry, needs something, has been missing something or is afraid he will.
Pete’s willing to go with it, to push it farther. He slips a hand down Patrick’s trousers; it’s easy because they’re so loose now, and Patrick breathes hard and coughs, muttering to himself. Pete thinks he hears something about sin before Patrick palms him over his trousers and he focuses on Patrick’s voice--raspy and hard and low--in his ear.
“Come to Quebec with me,” Patrick’s saying, shifting first toward and then away from Pete.
“I’m going to Quebec,” Pete says, following Patrick’s movements, chasing him and then pinning him. “That’s where we dock.”
“No, no, no,” Patrick chants. “Come ashore with me; I don’t want--there’s no one waiting.”
“You don’t need me,” Pete says. “It’s not my fight,” and he bites at Patrick’s lower lip, shutting him up.
When Patrick comes, it’s like he falls apart. Pete can feel the shudders and the shakes working their way through Patrick’s body from where their knees knock together to where Patrick’s hands lock on Pete’s shoulders.
Pete holds Patrick’s body to him, ignoring his wide eyed confusion and his hurt, suffocating Patrick’s gasps and sighs and sniffles in the crook of his neck while he finishes himself, his hand still sticky and warm with Patrick‘s come.
*
Since Patrick refuses to stand up, even though it’s morning now and the rest of the crew is moving around on deck, Pete just kisses Patrick’s forehead and leaves him.
There’s a moment when his heart stops and he almost stumbles, but he doesn’t say anything. Patrick seems to be asleep, breathing shallow and quick. Pete prays (and wishes that he knew Latin because maybe that’s all Patrick’s God can hear) that the heat against his lips is only excitement, or shame, and not fever.
*
There’s a thump and Patrick falls on top of Pete having rolled out of the bunk nailed to the wall.
“Patrick--” Pete starts, hauling on Patrick’s arm.
“Stop,” Patrick says between hard breaths. “I won’t lay in that bed. It looks like a coffin.”
They’re three days out of Quebec.
*
Pete’s reading improves by the time they dock simply because Patrick wants to be read to and Pete obliges as best he can. He reads stories from the Bible, Wolfe Tone, and political pamphlets from the Young Irelanders.
Patrick notices, even with the fever, that the ship has stopped moving.
“Canada?” he asks.
“Quebec,” Pete answers.
“Are you coming with me?” Patrick asks, and Pete reads to him from the book of Exodus.
*
By the time the passengers are allowed to disembark, Patrick is unconscious.
“I’m coming with you,” Pete tells him.
*
There’s a quarantine on Grosse-Ile, and that’s where Pete takes Patrick. There are only three doctors for all the hundreds of Irish coming off of the ships infected with typhus.
It’s a pretty place. Green and misty. Like, Pete imagines, Ireland. If you look at it sideways. He means to ask Patrick if this is so when he wakes up, since Pete hasn’t ever seen Ireland beyond the docks in Sligo. He will someday, though. He promises Patrick that.
I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one
But Pete, as he likes to tell his kids, fell into a bottle in Canada and crawled out in New York, and, no, he never made it back across the Atlantic. He grins then, showing off a gold incisor. “Joined the army instead,” he says, patting his knee where denim covers criss-crossing silver scars where battlefield surgeons filleted his leg looking for bits of floating metal.
“I was way too old,” he says, “to be in a fight that wasn’t mine.” But he was still homeless and shiftless and making his money the hard way. And since he’d missed the rebellion of ‘48 (which he knows Patrick would have dismissed as another failure of his beloved revolutionaries), Pete figured he might as well spill blood for something Patrick might’ve approved of.
Go, sleep thou with them
It’s almost thirty years after the war and over forty since Pete first came to Canada on the Harmony, that he decides it’s time to go back. There’s something Patrick ought to know and no one but Pete to tell him.
It’s late fall, and this is the only time Pete’s ever seen Canada; it doesn’t endear itself to him any more this time around than it did the first.
There’s a big Celtic cross standing sentry over Grosse-Ile now, and Pete sits at the base of it, toughing out the rain, numbed a little at the endless rows of graves. He coughs into his sleeve and waits to catch his breath, counting the beats of his heart and wondering how long he has now that he’s ignored the doctors who told him to go West where it was higher and drier for the good of his lungs.
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells Patrick. “I’m betting that I was meant to die at sea and you--you little Irish bastard--wished some kind of luck on me, and I’ve been bullshitting around ever since.”
He stretches out his leg and pulls his hat down lower. “Anyway, I just thought you should know that Parnell died a couple of months ago. And he’s this guy--this politician, I guess-- and they called him ‘The Uncrowned King of Ireland‘,”
Pete sniffs and wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “You all had your chance in ‘48 and again in ‘67, maybe? But this Parnell? He almost had your Home Rule. Without revolution. Without fighting.”
He rests his head on his arms and lets his eyes close. “I thought you should know,” he says again. He hums one of Patrick’s old songs to himself as he falls asleep.
Soon, I may follow.
END
*A/N: Appx. 5,400 people died at Grosse-Ile and maybe another 5,000 at sea in the “Coffin Ships” carrying the Irish immigrants from Ireland to Canada and the United States during the famine years of 1846-1848. Liverpool was the initial port for many Irish leaving the UK; later, Irish ports like Sligo became were more commonly used. The Harmony was a coffin ship; to the best of my knowledge, she did set sail from Sligo.
Patrick teaches Pete to read using the nationalist song “A Nation Once Again,” written by Thomas Davis, a founding member of the Young Irelanders.
Charles Stuart Parnell (who died in 1891) was the known as “The Uncrowned King of Ireland,” but so was Daniel O’Connell, occasionally (the man Patrick was so angry at.) The two men of different generations are buried next to each other in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
The title and the sub-headings in the fic are taken (and slightly altered, in some cases) from the Irish folk-song “The Last Rose of Summer,” written by Thomas Moore in 1805.
Title:“Last Rose of Summer”
Rating:PG-13
Disclaimer:The people are real; this isn’t.
For: normalhumanbein who requested 1) the 1990s; 2) the non-stereotypical future; or, the 1800s. I went with the 1800s and then proceeded to angst about exactly WHAT in the 1800s I was going to write about. There was much prodding from the peanut gallery for industrial revolution!fic, while I was leaning more towards The Crimean War. Of course, I settled on neither, and I hope normalhumanbein is okay with the subject matter. Thanks to grammar_glamour for the last minute beta. We don’t need no stinkin’ tense agreement. ;)
Summary: Pete is a sailor; Patrick is an Irish revolutionary on a boat to Canada during the Famine. The American Civil War makes a cameo appearance.
Warning: This is NOT a happy story. It was the Potato Famine--people died.
a/n to follow the story.
Last Rose of Summer
Rough-hewn stone scrapes along the palm of Pete’s hand, raising the memory of calluses and rope burns.
Pete leans against the big cross and looks across the field of smaller, listing wooden ones. He could take his time and walk the rows, but it’s raining now--filling faded etchings with mud and water--and Pete doesn’t remember there being rows or markers in ’47 anyway, just holes in the ground.
He shrugs his shoulders against the rain looks out over the river, squinting at the ships. His knee--the one with the little reminders of Antietam still in it--is going to start to complain if he doesn’t get off of his feet and in out of the wet pretty soon. But before he was a soldier he was a sailor, and he’s never really minded the rain.
Lovely companions, faded and gone
Perched half-way up the rigging, held fast by one legged looped through the ropes, Pete watches the storm roll in. The water’s choppy already and dark, wind whipping up white-caps and blowing salt in his eyes. He picks for a second at the skin peeling off of his nose and then tugs a hand through filthy, salt-stiffened hair. The strands torn loose by his attempt at grooming flutter down and then off to starboard where a little group of passengers are huddled by the rails.
There’s a big bundle shrouded in white between two men who are trying to shove it up and over the side. One of them--small and red-haired--is saying something Pete can’t make out. It’s not in English--not even the kind of English the Irish claim to speak.
Losing interest after the body gets tossed, Pete focuses again on the storm and on the fact that Captain Hurley is insane trying to cross the Atlantic this late in the season, no matter how many Irish are still waiting at the port in Sligo.
The Harmony creaks and shudders her agreement, and Pete chances a look back down at the funeral party as he begins his climb down the rigging, bare toes gripping the rope, fingers sliding and burning over knots and frays. Several people--including the little makeshift pall-bearer--are bent over the side, heaving. Pete isn’t surprised: rough seas and bad food make for weak stomachs.
By the time he’s back on deck, though, ready to bypass the funeral and go about his business, he can hear music over the wind.
His first thought--as a respectable sailor--is, sirens? Which he dismisses because sirens are female and the voice he’s hearing is male. It’s the sea-sick pall-bearer, bundled up now against the wind, and singing something sad enough that is cuts Pete a little, right through the sun burned, calloused skin and down to the muscle and the sinew--it makes him weak.
He shakes, loses his footing on the slick deck, and turns away.
*
With the weather getting worse, most of the passengers are confined below-decks, sleeping in straw beds on the floor and avoiding the narrow bunks nailed to the walls.
Pete has a hammock in the crew deck and so ignores the plight of the passengers until he finds the little singer curled up under a tarp outside, straw stuck to his hat and coat, shivering.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” Pete asks, kneeling beside the sleeping kid and shaking him.
“The smell,” he answers. He turns his head away from Pete and Pete catches a glimpse of white skin, an inch or two, between his chin and his scarf. “Don’t--I can’t go back down there now.”
Pete shrugs; it’s not his job to make sure the passengers don’t freeze to death. They’ve already paid their fare.
The kid blinks at Pete through little, round spectacles and then smiles. “I know you. You--” and he walks his fingers up Pete‘s arm, “climb around on the ropes.”
“And you sing,” Pete says without thinking.
A nod. “My name’s Patrick,” he says.
Of course, Pete thinks. “Pete,” he says.
*
Beyond his affinity for high places, Pete has other things in common with magpies. For instance, he likes pretty things. He collects buttons, bits of green glass, jewelry (if passengers are careless enough with it), girls on board--in better times--with shiny eyes and hair (if their fathers or brothers were careless with them).
Patrick is pretty, in his way, Pete decides, watching him stand at the rail and sing into the wind. Slight and pale with mist in his eyes; red and fierce around the edges.
“Why risk it?” Pete asks him, standing behind him, a head taller and broader all around. “You toss another of your people overboard everyday.” Pete wishes, maybe, he hadn’t said that. Patrick’s lost a father and a cousin to typhus since they left Sligo three weeks ago.
Patrick turns into Pete, song interrupted, eyes bright with cold (fever?) and cheeks red. “And if I’d stayed?” he hisses, teeth closed against the words, against the pain of leaving. “And if I’d starved? What good is that?”
“What do you mean, ‘what good’,” Pete asks, not backing down. He understands selfishness, which is all he has. He understands self-preservation. Patrick isn’t talking about that.
“For Ireland,” Patrick says, as if Pete’s stupid.
This means nothing to Pete. He belongs to the Harmony and the Crown, and as long as he can stay on the water, he’s satisfied.
Patrick is not satisfied with Pete’s views. In moments--snatches of conversation, breaks in Patrick’s singing and writing (Pete can’t read, or he would spy), after Pete’s mended a sail or scrubbed up after another Irishman’s lost his dinner on the deck--Patrick tells Pete about the Penal Laws, the Act of Union, and, with a tremor in his voice, Daniel O’Connell and how he failed. Patrick tells Pete about Young Ireland and about revolution.
“He didn’t see, O’Connell didn’t,” Patrick says. “He didn’t see that there’s just no sense in reasoning with you, with England. Things have to be done.”
Pete agrees just because he likes to hear Patrick talk and because he likes to get close enough to feel the way Patrick’s heart beats harder when he talks about politics. Pete hears rhythms and cadences and never the arguments.
“What’ll you do in Canada?” he asks, once, pressed against Patrick’s side, face in Patrick’s hair, daring himself to kiss the skin under his lips.
“Write. Teach. They--you,” Patrick breathes out heavily, “want us to work cutting wood. The men below?” Pete nods, dragging the tip of his tongue under Patrick’s jaw. “The English paid their way so they’ll cut wood for them in Canada.”
“I,” Pete whispers in Patrick’s ear, “don’t want you to do anything.”
Patrick laughs a little and shivers, his anger gone now, chilled again. “Oh?” he asks. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”
*
Four weeks into the crossing, Patrick starts to teach Pete how to read. Pete doesn’t catch on right away.
“What good is it?” he asks.
“It makes me happy,” Patrick answers, and kisses Pete back for the first time.
No kindred to reflect, or give sigh for sigh
“A nation once again,” Pete says, reading his first sentence out loud to Patrick sometime around dawn on a clear day.
The wood of the deck is warm where they’re laying, concealed by a life boat and their tarp, and Pete feels a little strange about what he’s just done--like maybe once he’s let the words into his head they aren’t going to ever get back out.
“You did it,” Patrick says, smiling, pulling Pete close. “Now I just have to find one of the wee people and wish you Irish. Then,” he tugs Pete’s matted hair out of his eyes, “my life will be complete.”
“I could be Irish,” Pete says, sliding a hand over Patrick’s back, pushing his shirts and coat up and feeling skin.
Patrick just pulls on Pete’s hair again and laughs.
When his lips meet Pete‘s, Pete’s surprised at the urgency of it, like Patrick’s suddenly in a hurry, needs something, has been missing something or is afraid he will.
Pete’s willing to go with it, to push it farther. He slips a hand down Patrick’s trousers; it’s easy because they’re so loose now, and Patrick breathes hard and coughs, muttering to himself. Pete thinks he hears something about sin before Patrick palms him over his trousers and he focuses on Patrick’s voice--raspy and hard and low--in his ear.
“Come to Quebec with me,” Patrick’s saying, shifting first toward and then away from Pete.
“I’m going to Quebec,” Pete says, following Patrick’s movements, chasing him and then pinning him. “That’s where we dock.”
“No, no, no,” Patrick chants. “Come ashore with me; I don’t want--there’s no one waiting.”
“You don’t need me,” Pete says. “It’s not my fight,” and he bites at Patrick’s lower lip, shutting him up.
When Patrick comes, it’s like he falls apart. Pete can feel the shudders and the shakes working their way through Patrick’s body from where their knees knock together to where Patrick’s hands lock on Pete’s shoulders.
Pete holds Patrick’s body to him, ignoring his wide eyed confusion and his hurt, suffocating Patrick’s gasps and sighs and sniffles in the crook of his neck while he finishes himself, his hand still sticky and warm with Patrick‘s come.
*
Since Patrick refuses to stand up, even though it’s morning now and the rest of the crew is moving around on deck, Pete just kisses Patrick’s forehead and leaves him.
There’s a moment when his heart stops and he almost stumbles, but he doesn’t say anything. Patrick seems to be asleep, breathing shallow and quick. Pete prays (and wishes that he knew Latin because maybe that’s all Patrick’s God can hear) that the heat against his lips is only excitement, or shame, and not fever.
*
There’s a thump and Patrick falls on top of Pete having rolled out of the bunk nailed to the wall.
“Patrick--” Pete starts, hauling on Patrick’s arm.
“Stop,” Patrick says between hard breaths. “I won’t lay in that bed. It looks like a coffin.”
They’re three days out of Quebec.
*
Pete’s reading improves by the time they dock simply because Patrick wants to be read to and Pete obliges as best he can. He reads stories from the Bible, Wolfe Tone, and political pamphlets from the Young Irelanders.
Patrick notices, even with the fever, that the ship has stopped moving.
“Canada?” he asks.
“Quebec,” Pete answers.
“Are you coming with me?” Patrick asks, and Pete reads to him from the book of Exodus.
*
By the time the passengers are allowed to disembark, Patrick is unconscious.
“I’m coming with you,” Pete tells him.
*
There’s a quarantine on Grosse-Ile, and that’s where Pete takes Patrick. There are only three doctors for all the hundreds of Irish coming off of the ships infected with typhus.
It’s a pretty place. Green and misty. Like, Pete imagines, Ireland. If you look at it sideways. He means to ask Patrick if this is so when he wakes up, since Pete hasn’t ever seen Ireland beyond the docks in Sligo. He will someday, though. He promises Patrick that.
I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one
But Pete, as he likes to tell his kids, fell into a bottle in Canada and crawled out in New York, and, no, he never made it back across the Atlantic. He grins then, showing off a gold incisor. “Joined the army instead,” he says, patting his knee where denim covers criss-crossing silver scars where battlefield surgeons filleted his leg looking for bits of floating metal.
“I was way too old,” he says, “to be in a fight that wasn’t mine.” But he was still homeless and shiftless and making his money the hard way. And since he’d missed the rebellion of ‘48 (which he knows Patrick would have dismissed as another failure of his beloved revolutionaries), Pete figured he might as well spill blood for something Patrick might’ve approved of.
Go, sleep thou with them
It’s almost thirty years after the war and over forty since Pete first came to Canada on the Harmony, that he decides it’s time to go back. There’s something Patrick ought to know and no one but Pete to tell him.
It’s late fall, and this is the only time Pete’s ever seen Canada; it doesn’t endear itself to him any more this time around than it did the first.
There’s a big Celtic cross standing sentry over Grosse-Ile now, and Pete sits at the base of it, toughing out the rain, numbed a little at the endless rows of graves. He coughs into his sleeve and waits to catch his breath, counting the beats of his heart and wondering how long he has now that he’s ignored the doctors who told him to go West where it was higher and drier for the good of his lungs.
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells Patrick. “I’m betting that I was meant to die at sea and you--you little Irish bastard--wished some kind of luck on me, and I’ve been bullshitting around ever since.”
He stretches out his leg and pulls his hat down lower. “Anyway, I just thought you should know that Parnell died a couple of months ago. And he’s this guy--this politician, I guess-- and they called him ‘The Uncrowned King of Ireland‘,”
Pete sniffs and wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “You all had your chance in ‘48 and again in ‘67, maybe? But this Parnell? He almost had your Home Rule. Without revolution. Without fighting.”
He rests his head on his arms and lets his eyes close. “I thought you should know,” he says again. He hums one of Patrick’s old songs to himself as he falls asleep.
Soon, I may follow.
END
*A/N: Appx. 5,400 people died at Grosse-Ile and maybe another 5,000 at sea in the “Coffin Ships” carrying the Irish immigrants from Ireland to Canada and the United States during the famine years of 1846-1848. Liverpool was the initial port for many Irish leaving the UK; later, Irish ports like Sligo became were more commonly used. The Harmony was a coffin ship; to the best of my knowledge, she did set sail from Sligo.
Patrick teaches Pete to read using the nationalist song “A Nation Once Again,” written by Thomas Davis, a founding member of the Young Irelanders.
Charles Stuart Parnell (who died in 1891) was the known as “The Uncrowned King of Ireland,” but so was Daniel O’Connell, occasionally (the man Patrick was so angry at.) The two men of different generations are buried next to each other in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
The title and the sub-headings in the fic are taken (and slightly altered, in some cases) from the Irish folk-song “The Last Rose of Summer,” written by Thomas Moore in 1805.