The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

back within the framework of the song but Peabody was having none of it.

      ‘So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for the many and the other – great, tragic love – for the few. Is that it?’

      She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody, the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.

      ‘Yes … I suppose so, Jacob,’ she parried.

      ‘What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?’

      It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken of it to him on her return to Boston – about how she had shortened her name, dropped the ‘Rua’.

      ‘I don’t know, Jacob, and don’t call me by that name.’ She stamped out the words at him.

      ‘Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen … Rua?’ he repeated provocatively.

      ‘Of course I do!’ she said, angry that he still persisted with her old name. ‘Earth, wind, water, fire,’ she reeled them off.

      He held up his hand. ‘Fire – that is it, the Element of Fire. That is what begets the difference, Ellen Rua.’

      Sometimes he was hard to follow, the way his mind twisted and darted.

      ‘The Element of Fire? What on earth are you talking about, Jacob?’ she asked. ‘And I told you – it’s Ellen!’

      He ignored her reprimand. ‘That is the difference between love for the many and love for the few – the Element of Fire,’ he answered, as if it were all self-evident. Then, seeing the look on her face, he continued, ‘Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and purifies, it engenders great passion … and it destroys.’ He paused, took her hand as if passing some irredeemable sentence on her.

      ‘You were named for fire, Ellen … Rua.’

      The talk with Peabody had unsettled her. What was he at with such a statement? That she was named for fire, the element that destroys! Jacob was trying to bait her, to stir something in her. Maybe some tilt at Lavelle and herself? But why? While Peabody was dismissive about Lavelle, he was hardly suggesting that she didn’t love him, that it was merely a marriage of convenience? You never knew with Jacob. Sometimes she felt that if she were to encourage him, he would be quite willing to draw down the shutters, pull her into the storeroom, and fling her on to the nearest flour sack, or chest of tea from the Assam Valley.

      He was capable too. More than once when he embraced her, he had pushed in close to her, so that even through her underskirt she could feel his ‘scythe-stone’. Whatever about Jacob’s ‘scythe-stone’, his mind was sharp and dangerous, always trying to cut through her thoughts, to lay them bare.

      She didn’t speak to Lavelle about her discussion with Peabody except to say, ‘My fears were unfounded, Jacob was most generous at the news.’

      ‘I don’t trust him, Ellen; and neither should you,’ was Lavelle’s response.

      ‘He has always been upright in his dealings, give him some credit,’ she defended Jacob with.

      ‘It’s not in their nature, the Jews.’ Lavelle would give no ground to her argument. ‘While there’s money to be made, they’re trustworthy. When more is to be made elsewhere, then see how far their trustworthiness stretches,’ he challenged.

      ‘Lavelle, you can’t say that. They’re not all the same, no more than all the Irish are fighters and drunkards,’ she retorted.

      But Lavelle was not for turning. ‘History teaches us – didn’t they betray the Saviour for thirty pieces of silver?’

      ‘That was just one, Judas,’ she responded.

      ‘Yes … His friend,’ Lavelle retorted. ‘Kissed Him and betrayed Him, and the rest – all Jews – stood by while it happened. How well the like of Peabody got started here. The wandering Jew will get in anywhere.’

      ‘Jacob was our saviour when –’ she started to protest, but he cut her short.

      ‘I know you and Peabody have talks, and I know, too, that at the start, he was our saviour, but he is too familiar in his talk with you, and,’ he added, ‘how he looks at you!’

      So that was it. How could Lavelle possibly think that Jacob was a rival for his affections? Nevertheless, this side to him pleased her somewhat, and brought a small flush to her neck. She went to him, embraced him.

      ‘Oh! Lavelle, please stop it!’ she chided. ‘You know he looks at every woman under fifty years of age like that, it’s just his way. Jacob has never made any indecent approaches to me – yet,’ she teased.

      He laughed with her, kissing her fiercely. ‘All I say is, beware the Judas kiss,’ was his final word.

      Later, on her own, she raked over what had passed between them. She hated it when Lavelle got like this about Jacob and the Jews, as if he never saw the parallels with the wandering Irish, or the Irish who betrayed their own for the Queen’s shilling. She did remember her father telling her about the Jews, condemned to wander the world for ever because they had crucified the Son of God. How they were buried standing up, not like other people, laid out flat. Whatever was the reason for that? She had never doubted the Máistir’s teachings before. All those years growing up, all those years after his death, his voice had come to her, guided her like a beacon in times of trouble. Strange how here, under the shadow of Beacon Hill, he hardly ever spoke to her now. Had he deserted her?

      Or, she wondered, had she deserted him?

      She encountered the same problem as before with the Pendletons, Endecotts and the others – ‘the wine Whigs of Boston, old world Sassenachs’, as she described the merchants to Lavelle. Polite but definite ‘no thank yous’. They still wouldn’t deal with her because she was Irish; by definition, a Catholic. It must change, she thought. Some day, surely it must change. But it didn’t help her now in their hunt for new customers. She continued to search, now looking among their own – the coming Irish. Those who had ‘upped themselves’ out of the North End and into the South End, in the process forcing the second-generation Yankees to move onwards.

      The palates of these burgeoning Irish middle-class now sought a little more refinement than Boston’s one thousand groggeries once supplied them with and still did to their less elevated countrymen. So, on a train journey to Dorchester, she found ‘Cornelius Ryan’s Emporium’, boasting ‘wines, whiskies and refined liquors’.

      Ryan, a sly but affable Tipperary man – or ‘Tipp’rary’, as he pronounced it, had come to America before the exodus caused by the Great Famine. Like many he had started his first enterprise in the corner of a tenement basement. Things had obviously gone well for him.

      He rolled his ‘r’s like the Scots and gave her an order for ‘half a crate of the “Bordelaux”’, putting back into that region the syllable previously denied to Tipp’rary. She thought it a peculiar twist of his speaking but didn’t correct him. ‘Till I see how it goes … and half of the white too – you can put them all in the one box,’ he added.

      Riding back to the city to the sound of steel on steel, she wondered why she wasn’t more excited about finding this new outlet. When she and Lavelle had first started she would have been beside herself to have found a new customer, any customer. Now it didn’t seem to matter an awful lot to her. But it should have. She let her thoughts wander far from Tipp’rary and Cornelius Ryan.

      What she loved on such journeys was the way you could lose yourself in the sway of the train. Fix your gaze on everything, your mind on nothing; let the world swirl by. It was a wondrous thing, the way the trains were going everywhere, pushing out further and further, finding out America. Far from trains she grew up – many’s the day barefooted, going over the bent mountainy roads and back again – twice or three times the length of these train journeys in and out of Boston – it not even bothering her.

      Everything was so easy here, once you got