Bridget Rising 001

This is my first venture into publishing on Literotica – please be kind!

The story is my own, though the characters are not. Well, one of them isn't. If you haven't already, you must read Patricia51's novellasBridget's Nights andBridget's Days. This story is based around the character Bridget O'Brien, and while it is effectively a stand-alone, it would help to get the background. Patricia has graciously allowed me to take her beguiling heroine into the most tumultuous period of recent Irish history.

A disclaimer: Though there will be (of course) sex and sensuality, for large portions of the coming venture there will be none. I prize characterization and plot over all else; indeed, in a kind of twisted voyeuristic way, characters you know and care about making love is far more sensuous and sexy than just some random sex-tale. In my humble opinion, anyway.

Thanks very much to Patricia51 for giving my pretty much free rein, and thank you to Morgan Llewellyn for the inspiration for the setting. If anything in this story parallels either of yours, it is out of subconscious admiration, and not outright plagiarism.

And thank you, most of all, to my Muse, my Calliope, my Kate.

Now, on with the show!

--Benn Morland

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Prologue

The wizened old man shambled up the attic stairs, his failing senses unable to tell the difference between the creaking of the wood below his feet and that of his weary bones.

He was going to die before the sun rose again. He knew this, though he could not tell you how he knew.

His gnarled fingers, twisted by time and by activity, lifted the lid of an oaken chest clad in faded leather from a cow slaughtered long before the old man was born. He sneezed from the dust, which in its turn brought on a cough from his tired lungs that took several minutes to run its course.

The old man did not bother to fight the cough anymore.

At the top of the chest's neatly packed contents were letters written in a woman's graceful hand. The old man set them aside for later.

Gramophone platters were next. They couldn't be listened to anymore. The ancient gramophone had broken down some years before, and the old man had been unable to obtain a replacement. With a wheezed sigh, he set the black discs down beyond the letters.

The old man's back began to wail then, like the banshees of myth, so he peered around for something upon which to sit. His brown eyes lit upon an overturned Guinness crate. It had to be nearing the thirtieth anniversary of its unremarkable birth, but the old man with the sore body saw no other option.

With that thought, a memory flashed vividly before the old man's still vibrant eyes. He could see Philippe de la Croix's face as clear as day; the blue eyes, the short-sheared light brown hair, the aquiline features. His sardonic voice as he repeated an old Yiddish proverb: "No option is still an option."

The Jew in the FrenchRésistance, who had Aryan eyes and a name that translated to "of the Cross", had disappeared not long after the old man had met him. Possibly deeper into the underground, probably to some Nazi camp.

Forcing himself back to the present for now, the old man dragged the beer crate up to the chest and sat his fundament uncomfortably on the frail wood, held together only by cheap brazen staples.

Resuming rifling through the chest's contents, the old man gathered various mementos and keepsakes and laid them on the dust-coated attic floorboards according to how important they were to him.

At the very bottom of the heavy box, rheumatic fingers scooped up a paper portfolio. Setting it on his knobby knees, the old man began to remember.

From the beginning.

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Bridget O'Brien was sitting in a bar in Arlington, Virginia. The calendar on the wall said 1989 – no one had bothered to change it for five years, then.

There was a man singing on the small stage, his voice wizened beyond his years by whiskey and cigarettes. He was singing the cheesier of the Irish ballads; Americans would rather hear of Molly Malone and her cockles and mussels than Pádraic Pearse and his butchered schoolboys. They would rather think of Ireland as a place of happy leprechauns, drunken and merry, rather than the true tragedy of Bridget's homeland.

Bridget sighed, despairing for her adopted countrymen.

Before her was a half-full bottle of Jameson, a chipped ashtray brimming with butts and ash, and a damply empty glass.

The red-haired lass fixed the glass's fault, and stared down balefully with her green eyes at the letter set down before her on the warped wood of the wobbly table.

It was then that a cantankerous old fool with a tobacco-stained beard slurred a come-on at her. Bridget flashed a sharp-toothed grimace at the man, who blinked and flubbed before walking away. Let him wonder what kind of demon she may be, Bridget thought. She had no patience for lecherous old fools this evening.

She had a letter to read.

A letter from the grave.

To the eldest female descendant of Brigid Ó Brían,

My name is Marcas Liam Ó Eidirsceoil, or Mark William Driscoll. I prefer the former. It was my honor to be an acquaintance of your forebear during the turbulent years of Ireland's fight for independence. I would hope, indeed, that she would have considered me a friend.

I have given instructions to my solicitor that, on the event of my departure from the world, this letter be given personally into your hand.

I know not your name. I do not even know if you exist; though I prayed for many years that Brigid was able to find a husband and happiness.

I ask you to come to Ireland and receive what little I have to bequeath. I have no sons, nor daughters. My wife passed away during the Second World War, and I have been alone for close to half a century.

The only person who meant so much to me that I would give my life in return for hers, was Brigid Ó Brían. She is surely dead by now – I may only hope that this letter reaches you in enough time that you may come to Ireland and carry out my final wish.

I leave you everything of mine. I have no idea who you are, but I give you all that is mine.

Yours sincerely,

Marcas Liam Ó Eidirsceoil