A Secret Ambition

XVI

Lily squeezed his hand, and Callan found himself curling his fingers around hers, and gripping her little hand to keep himself focussed. He enjoyed the sensation far too much.

"There are landlords in Ireland," Callan managed to say. "It's not the same there. The differences between the wealthy and the peasant class are criminal. Poverty is ... rife. The landlords, they flout their wealth. They're arrogant, or ignorant, or both. But the way they treat us is, again, not the same as here. We're Catholics, you see."

"Forgive my ignorance, but I don't understand why being a Catholic is a bad thing."

What did they teach in schools in England? Then, Callan supposed, Lily's teacher had probably been a protestant.

"To be a Catholic is to be a second class, a fifteenth-class citizen," Callan explained. "Catholics can't sit in Parliament. We have no power or voice in the decision making of our own country. Our overlords are protestants who look down upon us while making laws that benefit their own kind. We starve in famines while they profit off of our brawn. They charge extraordinary rents that the poor people can't possibly afford and then evict whole families when they fail to pay.

"My grandfather is one of them. My grandfather was the richest man in Country Clare according to my father. He still is to this day. My mother is his daughter, and she defied him to marry my father."

Lily said nothing save to squeeze Callan's hand once more. She simply listened.

"My father worked himself to death to keep up with his demands. He would have done anything to prevent us from suffering because of him, especially considering my mother had chosen our life over the life she lived with her father. But he always wanted more for me."

Sitting here now, as he was, Callan wished that he had had the ability to refuse his father. He would have farmed potatoes for the rest of his life if it meant not having to return to Ireland in this way. The shame he felt was all-consuming.

"He ... he sounds like he was a very honourable man, your father," Lily uttered gently.

"He was," Callan confirmed. "I thought he would go to his grave hating them, hating what they all stood for. Aristocrats lauding their riches over us while we starved. And he did, in a way. But he never had too much pride when it came to me and my future.

"He went to the landlord's house. He was half dead, and he somehow made it to the landlord's house and asked to speak with my grandfather. My grandfather took the meeting. I imagine it was to laugh at my father, or to shame him, or some other evil deed. But my father asked him two things, and it was to acknowledge me as his grandson, and to provide for my future in his will."

Once Callan had started, he simply couldn't stop. Letting this pour out of his heart was cathartic, and he needed that relief at a time like this.

"What did he say? Did he say 'yes'?" Lily wondered.

"He did." Callan nodded. "On the condition that I renounce Catholicism."

"And did you?"

Callan scoffed. "No." Shaking his head, he continued, "I could never be one of them. I could never belong to a class that hated me despite the fact that we believed in the same God.

"But my father, bless his soul, would have done anything to provide for me. On his death bed, he would have watched me become one of them just so long as I didn't have to suffer under Seamus O'Connell as he did. Better me join my grandfather than be under him.

"So, I made a deal instead. I took a loan from him. I took a bloody loan from the man." Callan wished that he hadn't. Had his father not been on his deathbed begging Callan to, he wouldn't have. "I would use that money to start a business make something of myself, and I would pay the man back with interest. Fail to do so, and I ..." Callan's words stuck in his throat as he was about to voice the consequences of his failure out loud. "I have to return to Ireland and renounce Catholicism.