The Catalpa Rescue by Peter FitzSimons

Author:Peter FitzSimons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

13 September 1875, farewell to San Francisco

Sadly, squaring away finances has proven to be a matter of months, not weeks.

But at last it is all done and John J. Breslin, travelling under the pseudonym of ‘Mr James Collins’, engages passage to Sydney, Australia, for himself and the enthusiastic patriot, Thomas Desmond, who is just five years his junior at 37 years old, and whose fervour for the freedom of his native-born country reminds Breslin of his die-hard brothers. Desmond is a strapping man, his fair Irish skin turned bronze under the Californian sun. Breslin is impressed from the first, and he immediately sends a telegram to Devoy saying that he approves of the choice. Desmond is not much of a talker – which is exactly the way things should be, for such an exercise as this – and perpetually has the air about him of one who wants to get on with the business at hand.

Now the two are travelling together on the good ship Cyphrene – Mr Breslin in First Class, if you please; Mr Desmond in Second Class – across the Pacific Ocean, bound first for Sydney, where another Fenian awaits.

Though Breslin and Desmond are able to talk over their plans, they are careful to do it behind closed doors – and even then they keep to their chosen accents and personas. Breslin . . . ahem, Mr Collins . . . is a wealthy land-holder and mining magnate living in America, the type of man who sports a gold pocket watch on a fob chain, while Desmond chooses to be from Vermont, and is accustomed to measuring time by the sun rising and falling on his long work day.

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