A Secret Ambition

IV

"Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs." Frank Harte

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IV.

Callan McCarthy was the fifth and only surviving child of Sean and Siobhan McCarthy. His four elder siblings had all passed before he was born. From what, his mother was loathed to speak of, but childhood illness was prevalent among the Catholic poor in County Clare.

His father had instilled in him a strong work ethic, and an ambition to be greater than what Sean was. Sean McCarthy, his father before him, and every other man of the peasant Catholic rank, were all tenant farmers, working for their Protestant landlords.

Callan had grown up knowing nothing but instability and uncertainty. The Napoleonic Wars had forced the price of food to a place that was simply unattainable at times, and his blessed mother had pulled together suppers using very questionable ingredients just to put something in her husband and son's bellies.

There was constant insurrection between the Catholic working class and the Protestants who always remained in a place of power. Catholics were barred from rising to power in places like Parliament, and Mother England oversaw that very contently.

Callan had heard this around the dinner table from his father throughout his entire youth. Catholic Emancipation was the only thing that would free them from being under the thumbs of their Protestant masters. Callan could never amount to anything as an Irish Catholic boy from County Clare without it.

But he would amount to something. Sean McCarthy would not accept anything less. His son would not be another tenant farmer in a long line of McCarthys who worked themselves to death on a piece of land that was not their own. Callan would farm his own potatoes if it was the last thing his father did.

Callan had vivid memories from his childhood as he'd pushed the plough, working his hands to the point of them being bloodied with blisters, as his landlord's daughters trotted past their pastures on their white ponies.

"They're all the same," Sean McCarthy had always grumbled. "Landlords, the rich, aristocrats. Lazy eejits. If work was a bed, those lazy bollocks' would sleep on the floor. We know that firsthand. You'd do well to remember that, my boy."

"Yes, Dadaí," Callan had always dutifully replied.

Sean McCarthy would never have predicted that his son would find himself living and working in London as he'd told him over a stew that probably contained more rat than mutton that he would be a success.

Callan would have, though. Sean had drilled the work ethic into Callan's bones, and had made him a determined young man. But if anyone looked around his office, they would know that Callan was every bit a fraud.

Was the girl thinking it, too?

Callan chastised himself. It was rude to think of the young woman he'd just hired as 'the girl'. But what must she be thinking? Callan couldn't decide what he made of her, save for the fact that she had not run screaming from his chaotic excuse for an office.

Had Lily Bennett heard his accent and wondered what an Irish peasant was doing in London? Did she think it an imbalance of power that an Englishwoman was working for an Irishman?

Callan could not fail, and his determination to be a success had driven away every person he'd ever brought on to help him. Fionn, as maddeningly annoying as he could be, was bound to stand by him.

Callan had gone through five Lily Bennetts in the past year. The last only managing three weeks before Callan's impossible standards had driven her away.