“I expect he’ll be all right, Mabel,” Miss Gavan Duffy suggested. “There’s not much time for you before Curfew.”
“Are you expecting anything to happen to him?” I asked.
Mrs. Fitzgerald turned in my direction. “It will be all right if I let the papers know he has been taken. The Castle people can’t deny things then. It’s on the way to the Castle and during interrogation that our people sometimes come in for a bad time. Once they are properly lodged they are all right. Desmond will probably be interrogated to-night. There is a captain”—I forget now what name she said—“who was wounded in the war and seems to be a degenerate. He takes a delight in torturing our people. Desmond may come before him to-night. It makes a difference whom our boys go before when they are up for interrogation.”
Before the night was much older, I believe Mrs. Fitzgerald, true to her word, was on her way down town to hand in her news at the newspaper offices.
We saw very little of her at first after that evening. She lived underneath us with a nurse and the infant son, Fergus. There were two other boys at school.
There was no more tireless worker in the Republican cause. She worked all day, and for a while after her husband went she worked all night—keeping his propaganda work up to date, I suppose. Mrs. O’Grady, kneeling on a piece of newspaper before our sitting-room fire of a morning, would sniff and say, “That woman’s light is never out. That woman’s writing there all night. She’ll kill herself if she doesn’t mind. She’s that pale each morning she looks like a ghost. And what now, if the Black-and-Tans come back again and find what she’s got there?”
“Och, Mrs. O’Grady, indade and these do be terrible times,” I would answer.
When Mrs. Fitzgerald was not at work below she was in the streets, hurrying, no doubt on the business of the Republic, from house to house. She never walked, she went always at a trot. She seemed always behind time, always at the end of her tether; always ready for any new work that might have to be done. If all she did in a day were well done, she would have been one of the most useful members of the Cumann na mBan.
Yet, as was the case with numerous other prominent women, the British Government never took steps to put an end to her activities, though it was common knowledge that as the men were taken, the work fell more and more upon the shoulders of women.
For days after her husband’s arrest, Mrs. Fitzgerald kept very much to herself, partly, no doubt, because of her press of work, partly because her work was confidential; but also, I think, because she was sensitive and loth to intrude.