What the Wind Knows Read online

  PRAISE FOR WHAT THE WIND KNOWS

  “I don’t often find a book I can’t put down, but I devoured What the Wind Knows. It’s magical, atmospheric, and compelling, a book that will haunt you for a long time.”

  —Rhys Bowen, New York Times and #1 Kindle bestselling author of The Tuscan Child, In Farleigh Field, and the Royal Spyness novels

  “Amy Harmon brings a tragic and fascinating period of history to life with a poignant love story that plays out across time and oceans. Skillfully woven around vividly depicted historical events and figures, this is a page-turner, hard to put down until the end.”

  —Helen Bryan, international bestselling author of War Brides,

  The Sisterhood, and The Valley

  ALSO BY AMY HARMON

  Young Adult and Paranormal Romance

  Slow Dance in Purgatory

  Prom Night in Purgatory

  Inspirational Romance

  A Different Blue

  Running Barefoot

  Making Faces

  Infinity + One

  The Law of Moses

  The Song of David

  The Smallest Part

  Historical Fiction

  From Sand and Ash

  Romantic Fantasy

  The Bird and the Sword

  The Queen and the Cure

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Amy Harmon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542040075 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542040078 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503904590 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503904598 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin

  First edition

  To my great-great-grandmother,

  Anne Gallagher Smith

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  1 EPHEMERA

  2 THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

  3 THE STOLEN CHILD

  4 THE MEETING

  5 A CRAZED GIRL

  6 A DREAM OF DEATH

  7 HOUND VOICE

  8 THE MASK

  9 HIS BARGAIN

  10 THE THREE BEGGARS

  11 BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE

  12 A FIRST CONFESSION

  13 HER TRIUMPH

  14 I AM OF IRELAND

  15 ERE TIME TRANSFIGURED ME

  16 TOM THE LUNATIC

  17 A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN

  18 HIS CONFIDENCE

  19 A NEEDLE’S EYE

  20 THE WHITE BIRDS

  21 PARTING

  22 CONSOLATION

  23 TILL TIME CATCH

  24 WHAT WAS LOST

  25 LOVE’S LONELINESS

  26 A MAN OLD AND YOUNG

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Let us go forth, the tellers of tales,

  and seize whatever pey the heart long for,

  and have no fear.

  Everything exists, everything is true,

  and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

  —W. B. Yeats

  PROLOGUE

  November 1976

  “Grandfather, tell me about your mother.”

  He was silent as he smoothed my hair, and for a long moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me.

  “She was beautiful. Her hair was dark, her eyes green, just like yours are.”

  “Do you miss her?” Tears leaked out the sides of my eyes and made his shoulder wet beneath my cheek. I missed my mother desperately.

  “Not anymore,” my grandfather soothed.

  “Why?” I was suddenly angry with him. How could he betray her that way? It was his duty to miss her.

  “Because she is still with me.”

  This made me cry harder.

  “Hush now, Annie. Be still. Be still. If you are crying, you won’t be able to hear.”

  “Hear what?” I gulped, slightly distracted from my anguish.

  “The wind. It’s singing.”

  I perked up, lifting my head slightly, listening for what my grandfather could hear. “I don’t hear a song,” I contended.

  “Listen closer. Maybe it’s singing for you.” It howled and hurried, pressing against my bedroom window.

  “I hear the wind,” I confessed, allowing the sound to lull me. “But it isn’t singing a very pretty song. It sounds more like it’s shouting.”

  “Maybe the wind is trying to get your attention. Maybe it has something very important to say,” he murmured.

  “It doesn’t want me to be sad?” I proposed.

  “Yes. Exactly. When I was little, about your age, I was very sad too, and someone told me everything would be okay because the wind already knew.”

  “Already knew what?” I asked, confused.

  He sang a line from a song I’d never heard in a voice both warm and rolling. “The wind and waves remember him still.” He stopped singing abruptly, as if he didn’t know what came next.

  “Remember who still?” I pressed.

  “Everyone who has ever lived. The wind and the water already know,” he said softly.

  “Know what?”

  “Everything. The wind you hear is the same wind that has always blown. The rain that falls is the same rain. Over and over, round and round, like a giant circle. The wind and the waves have been present since time began. The rocks and stars too. But the rocks don’t speak, and the stars are too far away to tell us what they know.”

  “They can’t see us.”

  “No. Probably not. But the wind and water know all the earth’s secrets. They’ve seen and heard all that has ever been said or done. And if you listen, they will tell you all the stories and sing every song. The stories of everyone who has ever lived. Millions and millions of lives. Millions and millions of stories.”

  “Do they know my story?” I asked, stunned.

  “Yes,” he whispered on a sigh and smiled down into my upturned face.

  “And yours too?”

  “Oh yes. Our stories belong together, Annie lass. Your story is a special one. It might take your whole life to tell it. Both of our lives.”

  1

  EPHEMERA

  “Ah, do not mourn,” he said,

  “That we are tired, for other loves await us;

  Hate on and love through unrepining hours.

  Before us lies eternity; our souls

  Are love, and a continual farewell.”

  —W. B. Yeats

  June 2001

  They say that Ireland is built on her stories. Fairies and folklore inhabited Ireland much longer than the English or even Patrick and the priests. My grandfather, Eoin Gallagher (pronounced galla–HER not galla–GUR), valued the story above all else, and he taught me to do the same, for it is in the legends and tales that we keep our ancestors, our culture, and our history alive. We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too.

  Even as a child, I found myself entranced by the past, wishing I knew the stories of the people who had come before me. Maybe it was due to an early acquaintance with death and loss, but I knew someday I would be gone too, and no one would remember that I had ever
lived. The world would forget. It would go on, shaking itself free of those who had been, sloughing off the old for the new. The tragedy of it all was more than I could bear, the tragedy of lives beginning and ending with no one remembering.

  Eoin was born in County Leitrim in 1915, nine months before the famed Easter Rising that changed Ireland forever. His parents—my great-grandparents—died in that rebellion, and Eoin was orphaned without knowing either of them. We were alike in that way, my grandfather and I—both orphaned young—his loss cycling into mine, my loss becoming his. I was only six years old when I lost my parents. I was a little girl with a tied tongue and an overly active imagination, and Eoin stepped in, rescued me, and raised me.

  When I struggled to get the words out, my grandfather would hand me a pen and paper. “If you can’t say them, write them. They last longer that way. Write all your words, Annie. Write them and give them somewhere to go.”

  And so I have.

  But this story is like no other tale I have ever told, no story I have ever written. It is the history of my family, woven into the fabric of my past, etched in my DNA, and seared into my memory. It all began—if there is a beginning—when my grandfather was dying.

  “There is a locked drawer in my desk,” my grandfather said.

  “Yes, I know,” I teased, as if the locked drawer had been something I’d been trying to break into. I’d actually had no idea. I hadn’t lived in Eoin’s Brooklyn brownstone for a long time and hadn’t called him “Grandfather” for even longer. He was just “Eoin” now, and his locked drawers were of no concern to me.

  “Don’t sass, lass,” Eoin chided, repeating a line I’d heard a thousand times in my life. “The key is on my fob. The smallest one. Will you get it?”

  I did as he asked, following his instructions and pulling the contents from the drawer. A large manila envelope sat atop a box filled with letters, hundreds of them, neatly ordered and bundled. I paused over the letters for a moment, noting that none of them appeared to have ever been opened. A small date was written in the corner of each one, and that was all.

  “Bring the manila envelope to me,” Eoin instructed, not raising his head from the pillow. He’d grown so weak in the last month, he rarely left his bed. I set the box of letters aside, picked up the envelope, and returned to him.

  I opened the clasp on the envelope and carefully upended it. A handful of loose pictures and a small leather-bound book slid out onto the bed. A brass button, the top rounded and dull with time, rolled out of it last, and I picked it up, fingering the innocuous item.

  “What’s this, Eoin?”

  “That button belonged to Seán Mac Diarmada,” he rasped, a glint in his eye.

  “The Seán Mac Diarmada?”

  “The one and only.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “It was given to me. Turn it over. His initials are scratched into it—see?”

  I held the button to the light, turning it this way and that. Sure enough, a tiny S followed by a McD marred the surface.

  “The button was from his coat,” Eoin began, but I knew the story. I’d been steeped in research for months, trying to get a feel for Irish history for a novel I was working on.

  “He carved his initials into his coat buttons and a few coins and gave them to his girlfriend, Min Ryan, the night before he was executed by a firing squad for his involvement in the Rising,” I said, awed by the tiny piece of history I held in my hand.

  “That’s right,” Eoin said, a small smile flitting over his lips. “He was from County Leitrim, where I was born and raised. He traveled the country, setting up branches of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He was the reason my parents became involved.”

  “Unbelievable,” I breathed. “You should have the button authenticated, and put it somewhere safe, Eoin. This has got to be worth a small fortune.”

  “It’s yours now, Annie lass. You can decide what happens to it. Just promise me that you won’t give it to someone who won’t understand its significance.”

  My eyes met his, and my excitement over the button fizzled and fell. He looked so tired. He looked so old. And I wasn’t ready for him to rest—not yet.

  “But . . . I don’t know if I understand it, Eoin,” I whispered.

  “Understand what?”

  “Its significance.” I wanted to keep him talking, to keep him awake, and I rushed to fill the void his weariness left in me. “I’ve been reading about Ireland—biographies and documentaries and collections and diaries. I’ve been doing research for six months. I have so much information in my head, and I don’t know what to do with it. The history after the 1916 Easter Rising is just a garbled mess of opinions and blame. There’s no consensus.”

  Eoin laughed, but the sound was brittle and mirthless. “That, my love, is Ireland.”

  “It is?” That was so sad. So disheartening.

  “So many opinions and so few solutions. And all the opinion in the world doesn’t change the past.” Eoin sighed.

  “I don’t know what story I’m going to tell. I’ll arrive at one opinion only to be swayed by another. I feel hopeless.”

  “That is how the people of Ireland felt too. That’s one of the reasons I left.” Eoin’s hand had found the book with the worn leather cover, and he caressed it the way he’d stroked my head when I was a child. For a moment we were silent, lost in our own thoughts.

  “Do you miss it? Do you miss Ireland?” I asked. It wasn’t something we’d talked about. My life—our life together—was in America, in a city as alive and vibrant as Eoin’s blue eyes. I knew very little about my grandfather’s life before me, and he’d never been eager to enlighten me.

  “I miss her people. I miss her smell and her green fields. I miss the sea and the timelessness. She is . . . timeless. She hasn’t changed much. Don’t write a book about Ireland’s history, Annie. There are plenty of those. Write a love story.”

  “I still have to have context, Eoin,” I argued, smiling.

  “Yes. You do. But don’t let the history distract you from the people who lived it.” Eoin picked up one of the pictures, his fingers trembling as he brought it close to his face to better study it. “There are some paths that inevitably lead to heartache, some acts that steal men’s souls, leaving them wandering forever after without them, trying to find what they lost,” he murmured, as if quoting something he’d once heard, something that had resonated with him. He gave me the picture in his hand.

  “Who is this?” I asked, staring down at the woman who gazed fiercely back at me.

  “That is your great-grandmother, Anne Finnegan Gallagher.”

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he breathed.

  “I look like her,” I said, delighted. The clothes she wore and the style of her hair made her an exotic, foreign creature, but the face looking up at me from decades past could have been my own.

  “Yes. You do. Very much,” Eoin said.

  “She’s a little intense,” I observed.

  “Smiling wasn’t the thing to do in those days.”

  “Ever?”

  “No,” he chortled, “not ever. Just not in pictures. We tried very hard to look more dignified than we were. Everyone wanted to be a revolutionary.”

  “And is that my great-grandfather?” I pointed at the man standing next to Anne in the next picture.

  “Yes. My father, Declan Gallagher.”

  Declan Gallagher’s youth and vitality were preserved in the yellowed print. I liked him immediately and felt a surprising pang in my chest. Declan Gallagher was gone, and I would never know him.

  Eoin handed me another picture, a photo of his mother, his father, and a man I didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s he?” The stranger was dressed like Declan, formally, in a three-piece suit, a fitted vest peeking out from behind his lapels. His hands were in his pockets, and his hair was slicked back in careful waves and was short on the sides and longer on top. Brown or black, I couldn’t tell. H
is brow was furrowed slightly, as if he wasn’t comfortable having his picture taken.

  “That is Dr. Thomas Smith, my father’s best friend. I loved him almost as much as I love you. He was like a father to me.” Eoin’s voice was soft, and his eyes fluttered closed again.

  “He was?” My voice rose in surprise. Eoin had never talked about this man. “Why haven’t you shown me these pictures, Eoin? I’ve never seen any of them before.”

  “There are more,” Eoin murmured, ignoring my question, as if it required too much energy to explain.

  I moved on to the next picture in the pile.

  It was a picture of Eoin as a young boy, his eyes wide, his face freckled, and his hair slicked down. He wore short pants and long socks, a vest, and a little suit coat. He had a cap in his hands. A woman stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders, her mouth grim. She might have been handsome, but she looked too suspicious to smile.

  “Who’s she?”

  “My grandmother, Brigid Gallagher. My father’s mother. I called her Nana.”

  “How old were you here?”

  “Six. Nana was very unhappy with me that day. I didn’t want to take a picture without the rest of my family. But she insisted on a picture with just the two of us.”

  “And this one?” I picked up the next photo. “Tell me about this one. That’s your mother—her hair is longer here—and the doctor, right?” My heart fluttered in my chest as I stared at it. Thomas Smith was looking down at the woman beside him, as if at the last moment he’d been unable to resist. Her gaze was cast down as well, a secret smile on her lips. They weren’t touching, but they were very aware of each other. And there was no one else in the picture with them. The picture was oddly candid for the time period.

  “Was Thomas Smith . . . in love with Anne?” I stammered, strangely breathless.

  “Yes . . . and no,” Eoin said softly, and I looked up at him with a scowl.

  “What kind of answer is that?” I asked.

  “A truthful one.”

  “But she was married to your father. And didn’t you say he was Declan’s best friend?”

  “Yes.” Eoin sighed.

  “Oh wow. There’s a story there,” I crowed.