Dark Rosaleen (30 page)

‘Kate, will you come to me?'

‘Must we leave, Daniel?'

He shook his head.

‘No! But read my mind, Kate. Read it and tell me what you see. Tell me what I feel.'

‘Daniel, I cannot.'

‘Try, Kate. Let me hold your hands. Put them in mine. What do you feel?'

‘I feel your pulse, your heart beating. It's very strong.'

‘Kate, have you never really loved?'

‘No, never.'

‘And no one has ever loved you?'

‘No.'

He held her hands tight and brought them to his chest.

‘I think I love you, Kate. I have never known it but what I feel for you must be love. It is stronger than anything I have ever felt. You must know it too. You felt my heart pounding.'

‘Is it stronger than your love of Ireland?'

‘I do believe it is.'

He smiled and kissed the palms of her hands. She leant up to him and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she kissed him again. He picked her up in his arms and walked back slowly towards the tower. He put her down in the soft ferns that ringed its walls and lay beside her. The air was still warm. The first wisps of sea mist circled above them. The only sounds were the soft rattle of waves along the sands below and the call of a distant curlew.

‘Let me woo you with your own poem, Kate. The one they've named you after.'

She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his warm breath on her face. She closed her eyes as he spoke.

I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills.

I could kneel all night in prayer to heal your ills.

One smile from you would float like light

Between my toils and me,

My own, my true, my Dark Rosaleen.

‘A little boy from Kinsale taught me that,' she said. ‘A million years ago.'

‘What was his name?'

‘I knew him only as Eugene.'

‘Where is he now?'

‘Buried only a short walk from where he was born. That was as much as he knew of this world and he had such a yearning to learn more. I was so proud of him, he might have been my own child. He lost his family in the first year of the famine.'

‘I was that same little boy,' Daniel said. ‘One of thousands of children left to survive as best as they could on their own.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I was eleven years old, but so small and thin that people thought I was six. It was just another year of many hungers but the worst of it was in my own Mayo. It takes three months to starve to death. Did you know that? That's a long time for a little boy to watch that much suffering. And to think that only a month before we had flowering potatoes with stems as thick as that little boy's wrists.

‘One morning, we woke and knew we had lost them just by the smell. Father had seen it all before. He knew there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the bailiffs and the tumbling gangs. So he went off to the whiskey dens and never came back. I looked for him and my sisters and brothers searched too. But mother knew he was gone.

‘I tried to feed them. I stole turnip tops and at night I milked the udder of a rich man's cow. Sometimes I would cut a vein in its neck and draw out the blood and mix it with the milk. But everyone was doing it and men sold their cows before they were bled to death. I searched the beaches for dead crabs and rotten fish and when a storm fetched up seaweed we ate that too. Once I found a cockle but I never found another. Do you know that there wasn't a bird flying, not a frog or a snail to be found anywhere? The land had been scoured clean of life.

‘So we sat by the peat fire and ate blind herring. Do you know what that is, Kate? It's a fish that isn't there except in your mind. We sat eating fish that wasn't there and we wasted away. They died, slowly, one after the other. It must have been the fever.

‘So the little boy sat, not knowing what to do, not having the strength to bury them on his own. So he set fire to the hovel he had called home. I buried them in fire, Kate. My flesh. My blood. All of them. Remember that day in Connemara? You asked me where they were buried and I didn't answer? They were under the stones, Kate. That little square of stones I walked around. That was their grave. All my family, together.'

She wrapped her arms around him and began a story of her own. Of another boy she had seen one night in the fire of her Lincolnshire home. A child encircled by flames, his small face cursed by innocence, wondering who was to blame for the pain of dying so young and forgotten. His image had scorched her with a scar as vivid as any wound from a firebrand.

She told of how often that boy had entered her dreams, of the night when she was in the final throes of her fever and how he had held out his hands and saved her.

‘Am I that little boy, Kate?'

She did not answer. She pulled him tight towards her and kissed him again many times and, cloaked within the soft warm mist, they were joined.

Daniel Coburn was a man of many colours, a revolutionary mired in contradictions. Like all Irishmen, the '98 rebellion was scorched into him like a branding iron. Wolfe Tone, O'Neill, Emmett, Monro, Fitzgerald and Father Murphy were among his many martyrs and the slaughter at Vinegar Hill and the barbarity of the Gibbet Massacre were the founding of his deep hatred for the English. When he was eighteen he had walked thirty miles from Connemara to Daniel O'Connell's monster meeting in Clifden. Like the many thousands there that day he was inspired by this man of fine words and grand vision. It was the young boy's baptism.

Coburn the child had survived one famine. Coburn the man was now living through another far more tragic one. It swept aside all past values. The whole pyramid of Irish life had been precariously balanced on the potato crop. That base had collapsed and a whole new way of life had to be devised.

He had a vision of the peasantry rising as one, raising the green flag in armed rebellion, an agrarian revolution that would herald the birth of a new social order. Up and down the country he had preached it again and again. The future of Ireland lay in the absolute possession of the land, the Irish sole owners of Ireland's soil. He took to it with a passion, as fervently as a man adopts a new religion. It was his shibboleth and he never wavered.

He was encouraged by events beyond both Ireland and England. The dawn of universal liberty was now being trumpeted throughout Europe and Continental governments were falling like dominoes. The French ruling elite had been overthrown yet again. In a bloodless revolution, another republic had been proclaimed, and King Louis Philippe had fled across the Channel to Dover in disguise. Insurrection in Sicily had forced the monarchy to concede a new and democratic constitution. There was mass rioting and barricades in Vienna and Prince Metternich was obliged to become another exile in London. The people of Milan drove their Austrian rulers out of the city and raised improvised banners declaring its autonomy. Further south, the Venetians had fought their own military, seized their garrison and arsenal and demanded self-rule.

The republican victories throughout Europe were seen as Ireland's own and the Irish cheered them all and none cheered louder than the Young Irelanders. Bonfires were lit on the highest hilltops from Donegal to Munster, from Wicklow to Killrush. Crowds in the streets of the towns and cities carried banners celebrating the triumph of Europe's dispossessed.

Coburn was convinced it would set off an Irish explosion, certain that the fuse that had been burning imperceptibly for centuries must now detonate. He decided that his tour of the counties, his meetings and his speech-making were over. The message had been spread far and wide and there was not a man or woman in Ireland now that did not know of the Young Irelanders and not one among them who said they would not rally to the cause. Now was the time for deeds. The providential hour should not pass if the people were to be liberated.

The landlords would be targeted. They would be made to live in fear. If some had already fled to the safety of England, then their bailiffs would suffer on their behalf. Their lordships' mansions would be torched, their livestock slaughtered and taken as food. No estate would be safe and there would be no exceptions.

Coburn made ready his campaign. English newspapers would no longer ridicule the Young Irelanders and their aspirations with cartoons and make-believe stories. They would now have something real and harsh to report.

The ship was a clear sharp silhouette against the moon's light on the water. She was out from Wexford, bound for the French port of Cherbourg, carrying a cargo of corn and flour. At the mouth of the river Slaney the wind failed, and her sails dropped. So her master decided to bottom her on the South Slob mudflats and wait for the tide to rise.

Word of it came quickly to Coburn from men who had loaded her the previous day. Three hundred and eighty sacks of grain were in her hold.

‘We take. We give,' said Father Kenyon. ‘We are the men in the middle. A few sacks will keep more than a few alive. It's a gift from God.'

‘We'll need carts,' said Duffy.

‘I'll get the carts,' said Meagher.

‘And curraghs,' Coburn said.

‘I'll have them, too.'

‘Daniel. Will we kill?' asked O'Brien.

‘Only if I kill first,' Coburn replied. ‘You will wait for me to strike. It may not come to that.'

‘We will take a gun each then?'

‘No! I will take only mine. If I have to use it, then we are lost. They'll hear it on shore and we'll have no time to escape them.'

‘Haven't you forgotten something?' the priest asked.

‘Tell me,' said Coburn.

‘I shall,' said the priest. ‘What will you do if you can take all you want? Where will you hide sacks of grain hereabouts? The Redcoats will take every cottage apart, even the tumbled wrecks. They'll turn every sod of turf and every stone too. Have you thought of that, Daniel?'

‘Then don't hide them on land,' said Meagher. ‘We can drift the curraghs to Gerry Cove on Beggerin Island. Only our own people know of it. Let's keep the sacks there until the searches are over. Then we can give the grain out to the people, little by little.'

‘And we will hold off the day,' said the priest. ‘Well done, Meagher.'

‘You will not come on this one, Kate,' said Coburn.

‘I will,' she replied.

‘You will not come.'

‘I will too!'

The tide was flowing out to sea. Soon it would be slack water and an hour later the water would begin to rise again and soon the ship would be on her way. There was no time to haggle. What they had to do they had to do quickly.

The current turned on itself under the lee of the mudflats and carried the three curraghs out without effort. Only light pulls on the oars were needed to bring them close to the ship. Its black tarred hull towered above them. Its sails were tied and there was no movement on deck, only the soft rattle of the rigging and the slap of water against the planking. At the stern, her name was painted in large white letters:
Jackdaw
.

Coburn, Meagher and O'Brien pulled themselves up on the aft anchor line. Duffy and Kate followed them.

‘Who's there?' They saw a lantern swinging and the shadow of a man standing by the hatchway. He shouted, ‘Have you come to take my ship?'

‘No, sir,' Coburn replied. ‘We have come for a little of your grain. Our people are starving. I'll ask you not to resist. We will not cause you harm. Just a few sacks is all we need. You'll not miss them.'

The captain came towards them, a short, broad man with a beard flecked with grey. He was wearing no topcoat or cap. He held a mug of tea in one hand, the lantern in the other.

‘Is your gun loaded?' he asked.

‘Why else would I carry it?' Coburn replied.

‘You will get ten years transportation for that.'

‘And death for you if you try to take it from me.'

‘I have men asleep below. I have only to shout.'

‘Then I will shoot you,' said Coburn.

The captain hung his lantern on a hook at the mast. ‘Must I die for a few sacks of grain?' he asked. ‘Must you hang for it?'

‘We can both live,' Coburn answered. ‘You are taking food from our land, food from our people.'

‘What use is raw corn to you?'

‘One ear of corn, one handful of flour will save a life. What I've come to take will save a hundred families. It belongs to them. Think of them, Captain. Think of them'.

He needed no reminding. He had been sailing to ports along the Irish coast all his working life and had never been far from the wretchedness of the poor. He was no stranger to their miserable lives. In this past year of famine he had been forced to witness what no decent man should be asked to bear. The images would never leave him. The howling of the hungry in Tralee as they watched barrels of herring and sacks of barley being loaded, bound for a foreign port. How bodies were left rotting in the snow in Westport because the ground was too hard to bury them. How he had shot the dogs eating them until he had no cartridges left.