Irish Lady by Jeanette Baker Page A

pride when he told how his sister, impervious to tear gas, had led the Bogsiders’ resistance in the Rossville Street area of the main war zone. Pictures taken of her breaking bricks to throw at the police earned her a six-month jail sentence.
    Now those remarkable blue eyes, so like her brother’s, were staring at Meghann, insisting on a commitment the younger woman was not sure she could even begin to make.
    Meghann wet her lips. “I’ll do everything that I can for Michael. You know I will.”
    Once again, Bernadette linked her arm through Meghann’s, turning them back in the direction from which they had come. “I wonder if y’ have any idea how much it will cost, Meggie.”
    ***
    In the weeks to come, as Meghann waded through paperwork at her London office, commuted to Ireland on the weekends and endured the ghastly bus rides to the Maze and the even more ghastly interviews with an increasingly uncommunicative Michael, she was to think often of Bernadette’s words and wonder where the woman had acquired her omniscience.
    At the end of Michael’s seventy-two-hour internment, the Crown appointed a lawyer to defend him. Miles French was a capable, soft-spoken Irish Protestant who, to his credit, believed in fair representation for Catholics. Meghann chafed at his inexperience and at the limitations the Devlins had placed upon her. But memories were long in the Six Counties, and until Michael gave the word, she would not divulge her role in his defense.
    When Bernadette introduced her as a family friend, the young barrister had looked at her curiously but kept his thoughts to himself. If he wondered at her grasp of the facts or the pointed questions she asked, he never hinted that anything was other than it should be. Meghann didn’t like deceiving him, but her loyalty was already determined.
    She knew that, eventually, her services would be needed. Miles French was a fine lawyer, but he would never command the media attention needed to save Michael’s life. Only Meghann could do that, and until she had something to go on, something other than an instinctive belief in Michael’s innocence, she was like a swimmer floundering in a merciless current.
    It turned out that maintaining Meghann’s anonymity had been a wise decision after all. While ten-year-old Susan Killingsworth continued on life support, London buzzed with speculation about her father’s murder. Meghann had no doubt that she would have heard none of it had she come out publicly as lead counsel for Michael’s defense.
    Meanwhile, inside the confines of the H-Blocks, Michael refused to compromise his prisoner-of-war status, thereby losing his monthly visitation privilege. Annie was terrified, Bernadette jubilant, and Meghann, when she found out in the receiving line at the St. Johns’ ball, furious.
    Theodore Thorndike had just introduced her to Lillian St. John’s eldest daughter when the news broke, electrifying the crowd like a lightning bolt. The hunger strike of the eighties that had immortalized Bobby Sands and increased membership in the IRA a thousandfold was resurrected as the primary topic of conversation.
    Meghann excused herself, found the study and, in the middle of a dozen cigar-smoking aristocrats, listened as the anchor reported the latest news from the Maze.
    â€œThe clever bastard,” she heard someone say.
    â€œIt won’t help,” said another. “He’s a marked man. He won’t be set free, even if he didn’t do it.”
    Meghann turned, a slim regal vision in green satin. She recognized every man in the room except one. “On the contrary, gentlemen,” she said coldly. “This isn’t 1974. The eyes of the world are upon us. We’ve a great deal to answer for after the Guildford debacle. If Michael Devlin is innocent, he will go free.”
    â€œCome now, Lady Sutton,” Robert Gillette protested. “He’s a