The Garden of Martyrs - Softcover

White, Michael C.

3.87

182 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312322097 ISBN 13: 9780312322090

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005

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Two Irish Catholic immigrants, Dominic Daley and James Halligan, were traveling west on the Boston Post Road, headed for New York. A man named Marcus Lyon was robbed and killed along the same road. Though the two Irishmen denied any knowledge of the crime, they were arrested and accused of the murder. They spent five months in jail. Only two days before their trial they were allowed to consult with a lawyer. The trial, a mockery of justice, lasted only one day. The two were sentenced to be hanged by the neck and, as the presiding judge said, "their bodies dissected and anatomized."

Father Cheverus, an �migr� priest from France and one of only two Roman Catholic priests in all of New England at the time, is asked by Daley's wife and mother to go to the cell to comfort them, listen to their confessions, offer them communion. Father Cheverus, who escaped the Terror of the French Revolution, is a man plagued by his own past. Daley, a simple family man with a young son, and Halligan, a slick type with a checkered past and a lost love, face their deaths bravely, only to be exonerated in 1984.

Michael White has used his considerable talent to capture the political, social and cultural aspects of New England. In this heartbreaking story, he shows that the anti-Catholic and anti-foreign sentiments of that period in some ways reflect ongoing prejudice today.

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About the Author:

Michael C. White, who teaches at Fairfield University, is the author of three novels, including a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Massachusetts and Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

BOSTON, 1806
A cold, pewter-gray rain fell like a scourge upon the city. It buffeted the ships in the harbor and swept unobstructed over Long and India wharves, strafing the recently closed business establishments on State Street and wreaking havoc in the crowded Faneuil Hall market. Winter-raw and relentless, the rain turned the cobbled thoroughfares slippery and the unpaved back lanes into dangerous quagmires. Horses lost their footing and pedestrians slogged through the mud and filth and sewage runoff. At the end of a long workday, the city hummed with weary activity. Hackney coaches conveyed well-to-do businessmen to Bowdoin Square or Beacon Hill, or to the Hancock Tavern for a late supper. Having closed their stores, shopkeepers were briskly making their way homeward. Wagons drawn by oxen carried farmers out to Dorchester after a day of selling milk or eggs or livestock at market, while now-empty carts pushed by fishmongers headed down toward the docks. Workers from the sail-duck factory or one of the many ropewalks moved with tired steps toward a home they hadn't seen since before dawn. Eager to get out of the driving rain, they pushed and jostled those they passed in the street.

Among them, a smallish figure dressed in black made his way along State Street, near the old Capitol building. He was concentrating on not losing the man he was following through the crowded streets and wasn't watching where he was going. As he made to cross the street, he very nearly stepped into the oncoming path of a large roan horse pulling a cart loaded with steaming dung.

"Hell, man, watch where you're going," the driver scolded him.

The small man looked up at the driver and mumbled an embarrassed apology.

The man swore, gave the reins a smart crack, and moved on down the street.

Little did the driver know that the darkly clad figure he had just cursed was a priest. Then again, in the gathering darkness and with the bulky capote hiding both his cassock and the large silver cross that dangled from his neck, he would not have been recognized as one. With his small stature and boyish features, he could easily have passed for a student returning to his lodgings after a day's reading at the Athenaeum. Besides, though the city could now boast some twenty-five thousand souls, its inhabitants were still unaccustomed to the sight of a priest. A papist clergyman remained a rarity even in Federalist Boston, which counted among its ministers only two Roman Catholic clerics. The small man recognized the advantage of blending in, his occupation hidden from the common view, particularly in certain questionable sections of the city, and especially of late.

The man was Jean Louis Anne Madeleine Lefebvre de Cheverus, thirty-eight years old, a French �migr� who had fled the Revolution. He had come to America ten years earlier to assist Father Matignon in the founding of the Catholic mission in New England. Cheverus hardly looked like a man to found much of anything. He stood an inch under five feet tall, small-boned, as finely fashioned as a hummingbird, though in the past few years he had developed a slight paunch. He had smooth, pale skin, an unusually large head for his tiny body, and brooding, chestnut-colored eyes. His nose was long and thin, his small mouth usually pursed in an attitude of vaguely recalled regret. His once soft, delicate hands, now roughened from ceaseless physical labor, still retained the cautious poise of one used to conveying fragile things from one distant place to another.

With his short, slightly bowed legs, he had all he could do to keep pace with the larger figure he was following in the press of people and vehicles and horses. What was more, he'd recently been bedridden with an ague fever and was still feeling its effects. His body had been racked by chills and night sweats. He had lost weight, and his hands still trembled. It was only in the past day or so that he had begun to feel a slight improvement in his health and had felt well enough to sit up and take some broth. Even now, his face felt flushed and his head throbbed, and each time he took a breath of the icy evening air, the middle of his chest bloomed with bright petals of pain. Mon Dieu, he thought, believing it had been a mistake to come on this errand.

Earlier, they had passed Faneuil Market and were now making their way up Fish Street toward the city's North End, when he was forced to stop to catch his breath.

"A moment please, Tom," he called to the man.

Leaning against a hitching post, he thought perhaps he ought to turn back. Whatever it was Rose Daley wanted, it would simply have to wait until tomorrow, when Father Matignon would be able to go in his stead. He closed his eyes, took long, deep breaths, trying to regulate his breathing. Pain, and its attendant, fear, were merely the result of a lack of will, he liked to tell himself. A lazy mind given to distraction. Though he would be the first to admit he wasn't always able to conquer it, he firmly believed that it was only through an intimate knowledge of suffering that one truly knew God. Out of habit, he fingered the cross that hung beneath his cloak. He could feel the well-worn engraving, the delicate filigree of silver cool against his skin. "Je suis lˆ," his mother's voice came to him suddenly from the darkness, "mon petit chou." She had called him that: her little cabbage. He was a boy once more, and they were kneeling together in the grand cathedral in his hometown of Mayenne. They were praying to a beautiful wooden statuette of the Blessed Virgin with the baby Jesus holding a bunch of grapes: Our Lady of the Miracles, it was called. He saw his mother's head bowed, the curve of her long, swan-like neck, the shapely hands holding her cross-the same one he now wore. A woman of delicate, fragile beauty.

Maman, he whispered to her.

Oui, mon petit ch�rubin. . . .

"Should I call for a coach, Father?" The priest opened his eyes, momentarily suspended between two worlds. The coarse countenance of the Irishman replaced that of his mother. The man was leaning solicitously toward him, his face close. Cheverus could smell the fumes of the raw poteen on his breath. The odor turned his stomach, and he had to repress the urge to retch.

"No need," Cheverus replied. Don't be sick, he chided himself. He knew it would be all over the parish by morning, how the little French priest had vomited right there in the street, like some besotted wretch.

"Are ye sure, Father? I saw one just back a ways."

"No, Thomas. I can make it."

He hardly ever hired a carriage, even when he was called upon to brave a nor'easter to make a sickbed visit up in Salem, fifteen miles away. Father Matignon was always chastising him for endangering his ever-frail health. To Cheverus, though, it was a matter both of frugality and of pride. They were a poor parish, hardly able to buy votive candles or communion wine. The collection plate never provided nearly what was needed, and every penny counted. Besides, there was his pride. Most of his parishioners were, like this fellow Tom, newly arrived Irish immigrants, unlettered farmers and laborers and indentured servants, a hardy, rough-hewn, peasant stock. He himself was so unlike them, coming from such a different world, one of education and culture and refinement, a world of certain luxuries. He knew what they thought of him, what they said of him behind his back: that he was soft, weak, effeminate. And worst of all, French. Once, just after he'd arrived in America, he had overheard an Irish charwoman say to another, "Be glad I will when they send us a real priest instead of that uppity little Frenchman." So he was always trying hard to prove them wrong, that he wasn't weak, in body or in spirit, that he was capable of bearing up under all the demands, all the hardships of this wild, unforgiving land.

"I could carry you, Father," the big Irishman said to him.

Cheverus glanced at him, saw that he was serious. "Heavens, no. That won't be necessary, Tom," he told the man, embarrassed. "Lead on. I will follow."
The Irishman had come to the rectory behind Holy Cross Church an hour earlier. When the parish housekeeper, Yvette, answered the knock at the door, the man asked to speak to one of the two resident priests. Yvette was a thin, light-complected Negro from Guadeloupe, a former slave whom Father Matignon had brought north to Boston. She had a nasty, contentious disposition with everyone, except for Father Matignon. Even with Cheverus she could be brusque, impatient, sometimes rude. In her island patois, she informed the visitor that P�re Matignon was away in Quincy and not expected back until late, and that P�re Cheverus was confined to bed by illness.

"You must come back," the woman declared. "Demain matin."

"But I need to see the priest," the Irishman stated emphatically.

"Father Cheverus seek. Malade de la fievre. Tu comprends?"

"Please," the man begged. "It's important I speak to him."

"Non, non. You must come back. Now go," she commanded sternly.

They went back and forth, their voices growing heated. Cheverus could hear all this from his bedroom at the top of the stairs. He had awakened earlier from a feverish dream and had been lying in bed in the growing darkness of twilight. As a child he'd always been afraid of the dark. He would cry out in the night, and his mother would come to his room to reassure him, to sit by him and stroke his head. That's when he heard the voices below. They grew louder. When he could no longer ignore them, he got up, threw on his robe, and went downstairs.

"Go back to bed, Father," Yvette insisted in French.

"What is the matter?" he snapped at her in English. He usually spoke English with her as it tended to put her on the defensive, to give him an advantage. He was not normally a man to lose his temper, not even with Yvette, but his mind was restive, on other matters. His face was unshaven, the flesh around his eyes drawn and hagga...

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