Dark Rosaleen (11 page)

Since that day she visited him every week and brought rations in her saddlebags. Salted herrings from Cork market, packets of Twankey Tea, twists of tobacco, candles and cheese and a sweet-smelling oil for his lamp. He spent his days preparing for her, fretting whenever she was a few minutes late, not wanting to lose a minute of her company. He would grumble when it was time for her to leave, complaining that he was forced to live a hermit's life, when, until the moment she entered his life, that was what he had always preferred. When she left, he would stand at his doorway listening to the sound of her horse long after he had lost sight of it. Then he would sit by his hearth and recall every morsel of their day's conversation, savouring his favourite parts of it, repeating them out loud many times.

Much time was spent preparing for her arrival. He would press his only pair of tweed trousers under the mattress the night before. His only pair of shoes, brown brogues bought in Cork for his wedding, were brought out of their wrapping and polished with spit and candlewax, caressed in his lap like the old friends he considered them to be. And although it was now many sizes too large, he wore the stiff white paper collar that had sat untouched in its box since the day of his wife's burial.

Kate loved his cottage. It smelt fresh with herbs. The stone floor was smoothed and polished by half a century and more of human tramping and shone like marble. The chimney breast was made of woven chestnut staves, plastered with mud and whitewashed with lime. His rosary hung from a peg above the hearth and by it was an enamel locket containing a band of Mary's red hair. Beside the hearth was his rocking chair and on the opposite wall his cot, its joints bound together by strips of willow bark. On a three-legged stool by its side was his Bible, worn by hands and curled by age.

It was a warm day but a square of peat smouldered in the hearth. Tom's fire was never out. He and Kate sat facing each other either side of it. Sunlight edged in through the tiny window, highlighting the freckles on his face. He had an audience and was content.

As they talked, he would hold her hand firm in his and hold it long, squeezing it as he spoke, as if special words needed emphasis.

‘Have you ever wondered, Miss Kathryn, why it is I keep a fire on a summer's day?' She sensed mischief in his voice.

‘I have, Tom, and you are going to tell me why.'

‘It's to keep the evil spirits away. They can smell a cold chimney even out there in the bogs where they hide and it takes a mighty powerful spell to get rid of them because once they're inside they can do dreadful harm.'

‘And what kind of spell is that?' she asked, not knowing whether she was expected to share his humour, nor even certain there was humour to be shared.

‘Have you never seen how mothers protect their newborns from the banshees? How they put an iron poker over the cot and sprinkle salt on the floor around it?'

‘Must I believe this?'

‘Believe it or not, it's what they believe and that's what they do. You see, sometimes a fairy child is born deformed …'

‘Tom!'

‘Deformed, I say! The fairies give it to the banshees to sneak into the newborn's cot and swap it for a human child.'

‘And what must you do with a poker and salt?' She said it with a smile.

‘Miss Kathryn! You should know that a fairy cannot lift iron and will never cross salt. Salt and poker and the child is safe. They dare not touch it.'

‘And tell me, Tom, where do the fairies come from? Or is that a secret?'

‘From the black lake of Lough Gur, east of Limerick. Least, so I'm told. Mind you, Rí na Sideog, the king of the fairies, can be found anywhere you need him. Like God himself.'

Again she protested.

‘Listen, Miss Kathryn. Listen and believe. To the people, the fairy king is just like God. It is their faith twice over, and it's only a thin line that divides the two. When one lets them down they turn to the other. I've talked to them both myself all my life. Mind you, I must have a faint voice because neither has shown the slightest interest in listening.'

He took the kettle from its hook over the fire and filled the teapot.

‘My mother was of the Church and never missed a Mass until the day she died. But when she was troubled, she would go up the hillside by the side of us here, and talk for hours with Rí na Sideog until she was peaceful again inside. She would take him flowers and little presents of herbs. We all knew and nobody said but when she passed on, we went to the top, and by the small lake up there she had built a little shrine on a rock and there were all her bits and pieces, untouched, just as she'd left them all those years. So you see, it does no good to laugh at people who believe these things for it gives them much comfort and there's precious little of it to spare nowadays.'

Tom Keegan was a keen chronicler of Irish history and Irish affairs and he would talk of Brian Boru, king of all Ireland eight hundred years ago, as if he had been on familiar terms with him. He referred to past and present-day politicians by their Christian names, giving the impression they too were old acquaintances. He was steeped in history and although he might search for hours for a lost pipe or a tray of seeds, events and names from centuries ago were imprinted indelibly in his mind. He could effortlessly repeat the names of every Irish hero and every English blackguard and made sure that every child he taught could do the same.

He had been schoolmaster for the children from the hills and valleys all his working life and in the early days it had been a dangerous profession. He knew of men who were no longer in Ireland because they too had been teachers in the time when the English had forbidden the schooling of Catholic children. He had been forced to teach his flock in secret wherever he could, sometimes even under cover of the hedgerows.

‘We called ourselves hedgers, Miss Kathryn. It was a nasty game and a dangerous one to play. If I'd been caught, I'd not be here today. The magistrates sent the police to search for us but we were always warned and we would scatter and wait for them to pass. If you were caught you were liable to five years or transportation. Only the Protestant children got proper schooling. It wasn't until the emancipation that we dared come out into the open. The day it was declared, twenty-five years ago, I opened my own school and here I've stayed.' He said nothing for a while, gazing into the past within the hearth. Then, ‘What is to become of us, Miss Kathryn? You and me? The English and the Irish? How is it to end? Will we always be at each other's throats, two islands and only a fair day's sailing between them?'

‘Perhaps it's because you are so close that we fear you.'

‘Yes!' said the old man. ‘I can understand that.'

Kate paused, not certain she should say more. Then, ‘I have always been taught to believe that Ireland is England's enemy and that good fortune for one was bad for the other. My father says that England's difficulties are Ireland's opportunities and that in every crisis you have always helped our enemies.'

‘And your father is right. But you English have since made friends of your enemies. So why not us? Why possess us all these centuries? Why all these years of vengeance?'

‘Perhaps this famine will change things.'

‘Maybe, Miss Kathryn. But for better or for worse?'

‘I have seen and heard so much since I came to Ireland, so many terrible things, but I wonder if it is all England's fault. Is it to blame for the blight?'

The old man thumped the arm of his chair and took the pipe from his mouth. In his sudden anger, colour left his cheeks, droplets of water trickled from his eyes.

‘Don't blame the English for that. They're rightly accused of many dreadful things but don't lay this on them. What has happened this year and all the years past has been the will of God and not even the English can deter God in His doing. The blight is His punishment for our waste and our indolence. I am old enough to remember those years of plenty … Yes, I can … when we had too many potatoes to eat. We would leave them in the ground to rot or if we had a handcart and the gumption to pull it, we carried them to the market. As a boy I could stand all day at the pitch and not even give them away. On the way home I'd empty the lot into a ditch, for they were not even worth the price of the sacks. Then when the next year's crop failed we knew it was God's retribution. A wilful waste makes a woeful want, that's what we would say and that's the reason for it. The blight and the hunger is His punishment and only He can right it. And in the meantime we must trust the English to keep us alive.'

The old man sank back in his chair, his temper fading. ‘Mind you,' he said, ‘if keeping us alive is the government's intention, it is being painfully slow. It sends soldiers and we need food instead of Fusiliers. But forgive me. This is not polite, nor is it fair to you, Miss Kathryn. We need not spoil our little party with Ireland's many problems. All my life I've lived with them. Mind you, when I was a young man I thought we could do something to change it.'

He poked the peat ashes with his walking stick.

‘A handful of wet straw on a fire can set up such a cloud of smoke that it obliterates the stars and that's how it was with us then. So much smoke but no fire, so much talk of doing but nothing done. We had our chance once, Miss Kathryn,' he said it quietly. ‘At Clontarf we had our chance and we lost it to good common sense. Least that was O'Connell's excuse.'

‘He is a sick man,' Kate said. ‘My father says he is finished.'

‘Oh, yes! He is dying. We all are. And when he's gone there'll be no one to take his place. When his heart stops, so will Ireland's.'

She waited for him to speak again. The only sound was the hissing of the peat. She thought he was dozing but he was not. He was lost again in his past and, like O'Connell's, it had been a lifetime of trying and losing. The past was despair. He was O'Connell's age and had once shared in the man's fury and ambition, as every Irishman had. But now the fury was spent and the great ambition withered.

The sun travelled away from the window, the room darkened, and with it, the old man's mood. He seemed smaller, fragile and when he spoke again, his voice was faint.

‘Forgive me, Miss Kathryn. I am an old man drifting backwards and O'Connell's name put me in another time and another place when we talked of defiance and rebellion. Yet here we are, all these years on and nothing has changed. The soldiers wear much the same uniforms, fire with better muskets and still we pay our rents to the same masters.'

‘Tell me of O'Connell,' said Kate.

‘We used to call him “Swaggering Dan” because of the way he walked and talked. Such a figure of a man and with a voice that could charm the Devil into Paradise. It was said that he was the yeast in a mass of Irish dough. That was often used to describe him and it was right. When he spoke at his meetings, there was a hush. It was as if he could play tunes on the spines of people, like the great fiddler he was. He promised we would get our Parliament back, the one Pitt stole from us all those years ago. The English called it a union but it was nothing of the sort. They said it was marriage but it was more like a brutal rape. We were dragged to the altar. O'Connell spent his life working for a repeal, to break from the Union and get us back our Parliament and let us govern ourselves. Whenever he called a meeting, thousands – many, many thousands – came to listen. I went to one at Tara and there was such a crowd that the English surrounded us with what we thought was their entire army. But the only disturbance that day was somebody overturning the gingerbread stand. Not a fist was lifted. There was no drink, you see. Can you imagine all those thousands of Irishmen and no whiskey? He had his chance at Clontarf and that's where his legend ended.'

‘What was Clontarf?' she asked.

‘It was the test, his biggest ever meeting, a monster. I remember it was a Sunday. I thought it wrong to hold it on the Sabbath, but I went all the same. Clontarf was near Dublin, in a special field, the very place where eight hundred years ago our own King Boru defeated the Norsemen and drove them into the sea. Men knew the significance of that and thought O'Connell had chosen it because he had made his plan and the big day had come at last. He expected tens of thousands but they say there was nearly a million men there and every last one of them ready to march on Dublin Castle and pull down the Union flag. The English were prepared for it but it didn't matter. It was our hour. We needed only a nod from Swaggering Dan. But he failed us. He was always the man of lovely words, always preaching that the power of talk did more than a charge of gunpowder. But at that moment, the very moment it mattered, he couldn't bring himself to do the dirty deed. He said there were British warships in the harbour and that their cannons would blow every man among us to smithereens. Ireland, he said, would be a field of blood. So he told us all to go home and wait until another day. And go home we did.'

‘Why?' asked Kate. ‘A million men could easily have beaten the soldiers.'

The old man shook his head, the glimmer of a flame in the hearth dancing on his face. ‘Because Swaggering Dan said he didn't want a drop of Irish blood spilt. As if a man's liberty has ever been won for less. So go home, he said, and we did, like sheep to their pens. And the English laughed.'

Tom Keegan raised himself forward in his chair and held out both hands to the fire as if in prayer. ‘And to think we flocked after him like dogs in heat. We should have kept him in the Derry bogs where he was spawned. O'Connell is dying now and soon he'll be in heaven. But the saints will mock him there, yes, they will. He lived a hero's life but Clontarf branded him a coward.'

June was as hot a month as anyone could remember. In January, people had frozen to death. Now people fainted with the heat. What mattered most was that the potato plants were healthy and strong, their stems thick and heavy with leaf. There had never been such a crop and they thanked God.