Grandmother and the Priests Read online

  Table of Contents

  Grandmother and the Priests

  Publishing Information

  Author Page

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Monsignor Harrington-Smith and the Dread Encounter

  Chapter Three

  Father MacBurne and the Doughty Chieftain

  Chapter Four

  Father Hughes and the Golden Door

  Chapter Five

  Father Ifor Lewis and the Men of Gwenwynnlynn

  Chapter Six

  Father Donahue and the Shadow of Doubt

  Chapter Seven

  Father Padraic Brant and the Pale

  Chapter Eight

  Father Alfred Ludwin and the Demon Lady

  Chapter Nine

  Father Thomas Weir and the Problem of Virtue

  Chapter Ten

  Father Shayne and the Problem of Evil

  Chapter Eleven

  Father Daniel O’Connor and the Minstrel Boy

  Bishop Quinn and Lucifer

  Chapter Twelve

  Preview

  Grandmother and the Priests

  by

  Taylor Caldwell

  Publishing Information

  Grandmother and the Priests

  by

  Taylor Caldwell

  Copyright © 1963 by Reback and Reback

  Copyright renewed;

  mobi digital edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by eNet Press Inc.

  16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034

  Digitized in the United States of America in 2012

  Revised 201208

  www.enetpress.com

  Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com

  ISBN 978-1-61886-431-4

  Author Page

  Taylor Caldwell, christened Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell, was born in Manchester, England on September 7, 1900, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve! (although it remained unpublished until 1975). She continued to write prolifically, however, despite ill health.

  Taylor Caldwell was also known by the pen names of Marcus Holland and Max Reiner as well as her married name of J. Miriam Reback. Her works include Dear and Glorious Physician, a novel detailing the exploits of Saint Luke, The Listener, written about a mysterious altruistic individual who lends an ear where it is needed, and Dynasty of Death, a saga about a family of munitions makers.

  In 1918-1919, she served in the United States Navy Reserve. In 1919 she married William F. Combs. In 1920, they had a daughter, Mary (known as ‘Peggy’). From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York. In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo. In 1931 she graduated from the University of Buffalo, and also was divorced from William Combs.

  Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, a fellow Justice employee. She had a second child with Reback, a daughter Judith, in 1932. They were married for 40 years, until his death in 1971.

  In 1934, she began to work on the novel Dynasty of Death, which she and Reback completed in collaboration. It was published in 1938 and became a best-seller. ‘Taylor Caldwell’ was presumed to be a man, and there was some public stir when the author was revealed to be a woman. Over the next 43 years, she published 42 more novels, many of them best-sellers. For instance, This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Her works sold an estimated 30 million copies. She became wealthy, traveling to Europe and elsewhere, though she still lived near Buffalo.

  Her books were big sellers right up to the end of her career. In 1979, she signed a two-novel deal for $3.9 million. During her career as a writer, she received several awards: The National League of American Pen Women gold medal (1948); The Buffalo Evening News Award (1949); The Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).

  She was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society’s monthly journal American Opinion. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion.

  Around 1970, she became interested in reincarnation. She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives. Supposedly, she agreed to be hypnotized and undergo ‘past-life regression’ to disprove reincarnation. According to Stearn’s book, The Search of a Soul - Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives (1973), Caldwell instead began to recall her own past lives - eleven in all, including one on the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria.

  In 1972, she married William Everett Stancell, a retired real estate developer, but divorced him in 1973. In 1978, she married William Robert Prestie, an eccentric Canadian 17 years her junior. This led to difficulties with her children. She had a long dispute with her daughter Judith over the estate of Judith’s father Marcus; in 1979, Judith committed suicide. Also in 1979, Caldwell suffered a stroke, which left her unable to speak, though she could still write. (She had been deaf since about 1965.) Her daughter Peggy accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell, and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.

  She died of heart failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985.

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  1938 Dynasty of Death

  1940 The Eagles Gather

  1941 The Earth is the Lord’s: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan

  1941 Time No Longer

  1942 The Strong City

  1943 The Arm and the Darkness

  1943 The Turnbulls

  1944 The Final Hour

  1945 The Wide House

  1946 This Side of Innocence

  1947 There Was a Time

  1948 Melissa

  1949 Let Love Come Last

  1951 The Balance Wheel

  1952 The Devil’s Advocate

  1953 Maggie - Her Marriage

  1954 Never Victorious, Never Defeated

  1955 Your Sins and Mine

  1956 Tender Victory

  1957 The Sound of Thunder

  1959 Dear and Glorious Physician

  1960 The Listener

  1961 A Prologue to Love

  1963 Grandmother and the Priests

  1963 The Late Clara Beame

  1965 A Pillar of Iron

  1965 Wicked Angel

  1966 No One Hears But Him

  1967 Dialogues With the Devil

  1968 Testimony of Two Men

  1970 Great Lion of God

  1971 On Growing Up Tough

  1972 Captains and the Kings

  1973 To Look and Pass

  1974 Glory and the Lightning

  1975 Romance of Atlantis (with Jess Stearn)

  1976 Ceremony of the Innocent

  1977 I, Judas (with Jess Stearn)

  1978 Bright Flows the River

  1980 Answer as a Man

  Foreword

  This book is dedicated to the heroic memory of God’s Servants, encountered in Grandmother’s drawing-room so long ago, in the early years of this century, and to the equally heroic memory of all other of God’s Servants, whose devotion we do not deserve, whose prayers we do not merit, of wh
ose love we are not worthy, and whose endless labors are known only to God.

  For those who are not fully familiar with the terms used in this book, all Bishops of all Faiths arc called ‘my lord’ in the British Isles, and are referred to as ‘his lordship’. ‘The edge of purple’ was commonly used half a century or more ago in referring to the Monsignori, no matter their Orders or whether or not ‘the edge of purple’ was actually used on their clothing.

  I have used Scottish, Welsh and Irish dialect only enough to give an authentic flavor to these various sagas, so they will readily be understood by anyone who is not of these racial backgrounds.

  To the Welsh and the Scots, an Englishman was a ‘Sassenach’, and to the Irish he was a ‘Sassenagh’, both terms deplorably not complimentary.

  Some say that the late years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth were ‘hard years’. But all years are ‘hard’, in different measure. I am sure our modern missionaries and clergymen find these days very hard indeed, too, and their heroism as little appreciated as they labor in their particular and stony vineyards. No, indeed, we are not worthy of our clergy, anywhere in the world.

  This is a story of heroes, then, whose lives were indeed hard and perilous, and who often, like their Lord, had no place to lay their heads, and only random shelter. They lived in an atmosphere of faith and fantasy and wonder and joy in life, and told marvelous stories about themselves and others. Moreover, though often oppressed, they were truly free men, often lacking in deadly ‘caution’, and never afraid. They, more than anyone else, understood Emerson when he wrote, “For what avail, the plow and sail, the land or life, if freedom fail?”

  Taylor Caldwell

  Chapter One

  Rose McConnell said to her husband, William, turning a ring around on her ringer, “I never look at this emerald without thinking how its color resembles Grandmother’s eyes. Look. There is a hint of blue in it, too. And it sparkles, just as Grandmother’s eyes sparkled when she was up to mischief or some kind of deviltry. But, I never meet anyone like Grandmother any more. She was a product of the nineteenth century, though she lived far into the twentieth. In fact, Grandmother was ageless. Look how the emerald shines, William! It seems to wink at me, as Grandmother used to wink. I used to admire it on her own finger. I’m glad she left it to me. Emerald as her eyes; emerald as her Irish homeland.”

  William McConnell, who had met Grandmother only a few times, said, “Yes, she was ageless. She seems as much alive today as when I first saw her. Her name was yours, too, wasn’t it? Rose Mary. A beautiful name.”

  Grandmother Rose Mary O’Driscoll was Irish, and the last child of a family of seventeen children, all of whom lived into their nineties and some into their hundreds. But she had been born in Scotland, not Ireland, for her family had moved to Scotland before she was born. They were shipbuilders on the Clyde, and Grandmother’s brothers, some of them, later engaged in whiskey or in railroads. But that was later. In the meantime, Rose Mary O’Driscoll was brought up in luxury in Scotland. She was her parents’ favorite child, the child of their old age. She was denied nothing whatsoever, and when she was a married woman (having married a Bruce Cullen, a Scots Irishman), she still denied nothing to herself. Discipline was a word Grandmother had never heard. All her brothers and sisters had had strenuous blue eyes, white skins, and the black thick hair of the true Irish, who have Spanish blood. They were also tall and morose. They were silent, but sometimes silently violent. Grandmother was unlike her older brothers and sisters. She was short, lively and gay. Her eyes were blue-green and glittering. Her hair was red, her nose large and Roman, her skin eternally freckled.

  She also had tremendous style and flair and liveliness and wit, from the very earliest childhood. No one ever called her beautiful, not even her numerous lovers, which she took after her four sons were born. But she made up for her lack of beauty in liveliness, loud raucous laughter, jokes and utter devilment. She had a voice like a foghorn, hoarse and loud, which must have made her brothers and sisters wince, with their soft Irish voices. They adored her. They called her ‘our Rose’. They forgave her everything and they had a lot to forgive.

  Rose Mary would tell her granddaughter, Rose Cullen, that when she was a child she had her home ‘under me thumb’ from her cradle. This continued throughout her life, until her last few years at the mercy of her grim sons, with their Covenanter consciences and their morality and their stiff repugnance at the slightest sign of frivolity and joy. Because they could never understand her, and because of their father, Bruce Cullen, whom they respected and feared, they came to consider their mother as evil. But Rose Mary was merely her usual shouting, laughing, hilarious and devilish self, as she had been all her life, and which, paradoxically, had first drawn her husband to her — he so dour and restrained and joyless, himself. (Her witchery over him was short-lived, unfortunately.) She was never a hypocrite. “Be yeself,” she would tell her granddaughter, Rose, her only granddaughter. “And the divil take the sober.” Sadly, her husband and her sons were all ‘sober’, something which she never forgave them.

  All Rose Mary’s handsome sisters, with their deep blue eyes, snow-colored skins and black hair, were well married before their seventeenth birthdays. The brothers married well-dowered girls. But Rose Mary, having a hell of a good time among her legion of beaus in Barhead, declined marriage. She was seventeen, and unmarried; she was eighteen and her mother went to Mass every morning and made Novenas and wept. Then she was nineteen and her father went to see the Bishop, himself. What was wrong with his darlin’ colleen? The lads were mad for her, but Rose Mary was not mad for any particular lad; she simply loved them all. Besides, she was enjoying herself mightily. Dances. Walks. Teas. Receptions. The Bishop graciously accepted an invitation to dinner, remembering Mr. O’Driscoll’s fine dinners with pleasure, he who rarely had more than a few days’ supplies in his own larder. He talked with Rose Mary, in his grave and musical voice, and Rose Mary friskily said her heart was on no particular man as yet. Yes, my lord, she had passed her nineteenth birthday. But, she was patient. The Bishop looked into the dancing green eyes and thought of elves, and then reminded himself hastily that there were no elves.

  Rose Mary loved music of any kind, though she did not care for female singers, not even Jenny Lind. “A screecher,” she once told her granddaughter. “It’s the ears she would tear from your head.” Rose Mary, herself, sang like a parrot, a bird to which she was devoted all her life, huge birds like vultures, colored wildly and always giving the impression, to little Rose, of awaiting the exact moment when they could snatch out a small girl’s eyes. But Rose Mary loved the singer, and not the song, which soon became distressingly evident shortly after the Bishop’s visit.

  Rose Mary was delighted by pantomimes, public dances, theatres, concerts, and other crowded gatherings, no matter who made up the crowds. There she would glitter in her Paris gowns, her sequinned gloves, her plumes (fastened to her bright red hair with brilliantes), her velvet or furred cloaks, her jewels. There she would soon begin to be her natural self, and eyes would be directed to the box which she occupied with her parents, and ears would be listening to her ribald remarks, her hoarse and hooting laughter, the rattle of her bracelets. She seemed always to be in movement, restless, exciting, shining. Her audacious grin would glow upon the young men in the stalls below, and they would be dazzled by the tiny and vivacious girl above them and her winks and her wicked fannings. Her long and fiery curls lay on her small and freckled bare shoulders. If she had a very childish bosom still, it was lighted up with the gems inherited from female ancestors. She had a seventeen-inch waist, garlanded with a belt of turquoises and topazes, set in flexible gold. Her bustles were gathered up with diamond pins. She may have had no beauty, but she had style and fascination in spite of a small and freckled face, a large grinning mouth full of flashing white teeth, a pointed chin with a deep cleft, and a very big nose with coarse nostrils. She had no need of beauty; she scint
illated.

  She met her fate, as it was called then, while she attended a certain concert with her parents when she was within hailing distance of twenty. The featured singer was a lad all of eighteen, tall, handsome, brooding, with pale and chiseled features, quiet blue eyes, an incipient mustache the color of pure gold, broad and impressive shoulders, and a stern mouth full of Scots melancholy. His voice was beautiful and strong. He sang the ballads of both Scotland and Ireland, and the audience wept, including Rose Mary, the cynic. She had never cared a fig for such ballads before, but she was now suddenly lost in the eyes of a Scots lad and heard nothing but his voice. Rose Mary was deeply and instantly in love for the first, if not the last, time in her life.