Dark Rosaleen (8 page)

‘What now?' asked Shelley. ‘Will you take me and let these men go?'

‘Oh! No. It's not like that at all. There is no deal, Mr Shelley. I have my orders and I think you know what they might be.'

‘I expect a trial. I am a former English officer.'

‘You are a traitor, Mr Shelley. Once you wore this uniform and when you threw it off you must have known the penalty.'

‘I demand you arrest me and me alone. What I have done I have done for my reasons. Let me face the tribunal and I'll accept the punishment.'

‘Not so, Mr Shelley. Not so.'

‘I demand to be heard.'

‘Too late, Mr Shelley. Too, too late. You have already been judged and condemned.'

He turned to his squad, their rifles still at their shoulders.

‘Sergeant, close the doors. We have business to finish here.'

Kate was out that day to meet Edward Ogilvie at Kinsale, some twenty miles south of Cork. The rendezvous was not of her choosing. The more she met him the more repulsive she found him. It was election time and this was polling day. Ogilvie, confident he was about to become a Member in the Parliament of Westminster, was cantering about his constituency to ensure his tenants put their crosses to his name. Few dared to disappoint him.

The town was like a fair on market day, massed with people drawn out by the sun and the prospect of a spectacle. Even the pauper mothers and their ragged children seemed blushed with excitement. Kate had never been so enveloped by a swarm of so many people. The scent of burning peat from the tinkers' fires, the sweat of the horses, the pungent smell of their oiled harnesses, the sweet wisps of tobacco smoke, was both suffocating and comforting. A man on a stool was blowing a tin whistle and men came and danced around him, then staggered their way drunken back to the shebeens for another mug of whiskey. Another man, wearing a scarlet jacket and a jester's cap with bells on its tips, held up a sack, shouting, ‘A ha'penny a guess. A ha'penny to guess how many chickens I have inside my sack. And if you guess right you can have the pair of them.'

In the corner of the square a man stood alone with a pig in a cart. He beckoned to her. ‘Look at the lovely lard on him,' he said. ‘Look at his grand skull.'

He stuck his broad finger into the belly of the little pale-eyed pig, took hold of its tail and pulled it out of its bed of straw. ‘Aye! There's nine weeks of fattening in him.'

At the bend of the square was a cow, old and thin; its udders had not given milk for years. Two men were arguing and Kate stepped closer to listen. They spat on their hands and whacked them together. ‘I'll give you three pounds,' said the buyer.

‘I'll not take it,' replied the seller.

Then a third man introduced himself, for it always takes more than two to make a bargain in an Irish fair. ‘Divide the pound,' he said, to begin the haggle.

‘Will ye split the pound?' demanded the buyer.

‘I will not.'

‘Will ye give him to me then?'

‘I told you three pounds.'

The buyer walked off.

‘You'll be back,' the seller shouted as men around him berated him for his obstinacy. The third man then ran after the buyer, seized his hand, pulled him back and smacked the buyer's hand against the seller's. They split the pound, the sale was made. The buyer took out his scissors and clipped his mark on the cow's rump and the three men went off to celebrate the sale at one of the steaming, crowded pubs.

Kate heard the sound of a hunting horn and at the far end of the market she saw Ogilvie. He was elegantly dressed with a black top hat, a pink hunting jacket and riding breeches of white broadcloth above his polished black knee boots. Blue ribbons were tied to his mare's tail and neck. He rode at the head of a long line of men who walked hesitantly, awkward and morose as if they were being led to a funeral. Behind them she saw his own bully-boys, broad and heavy men, with a blunderbuss over their shoulders and a shillelagh in their belts.

He was pleased to see her. He clapped his hands above the top hat and shouted above the din. ‘Kathryn, my dearest girl. What an exceptional honour. Your father promised me you would come but I didn't dare expect to see you.'

‘I've never been to an election before,' she shouted back. ‘Like your tumbling gangs, I suppose it's something I ought not to miss.'

He was grinning. ‘Kathryn, don't be sour with me, not on a day like this. You might regret it. Tomorrow I will be a parliamentarian and I could have you transported to the other side of the world for insolence.'

‘Tell me what is happening, Edward. Who are these men behind you?'

‘My tenants. Freeholders who've come to vote for me. Not that they are very free, nor do they have much of a holding. But they are beholden and that's what matters. Remember the hanging gale? They do and I don't let them forget it.'

He turned and stood in his saddle. He looked down and laughed at them. They did not look up.

He said, ‘They're not over fond of me but they'll give me their cross or they'll be out on their backsides. No vote, no tenancy. It's a simple electoral choice.'

‘It's blackmail.'

He stood in his stirrups and spoke loudly, as if he wanted to hear himself speak, to listen to his own words, knowing that they could sound one way in the mind and yet sound quite different spoken aloud.

‘It's nothing of the sort, Kathryn. Remember you're in Ireland. Who do you think they would vote for if they weren't obliged to vote for me? They'd go for one of their own and then what would we have? A Parliament of papists. Don't call it blackmail. If the English want to keep this country, you must accept that what is happening here today is democratic and nothing less.'

Kate said, ‘This is their country, Edward. It's their future.'

He laughed and raised his hat as he passed the paupers' tents, mocking them. ‘The poor do not worry about the future. They worry only about today. Tomorrow is far too far away. And it is not their country. How often have I told you that land belongs to those who own it and my father owns this?'

As the procession of tenants passed through the market square, the crowd jeered and threw mud at them, ridiculing them for their subservience, shouting that they were following their Protestant master like sheep to the slaughter. Some of the mud hit their targets and a tenant voter broke line and began fighting. Ogilvie turned his horse. There was a crack of his whip over their heads. The crowds fell back, cowed, and the line of tenants shuffled on.

Kate was too ashamed to look at them. She felt their eyes on her. Honest, hardworking men, forced to march and vote for a man who held them captive. Ogilvie was talking to her again.

‘Don't fret, Kathryn. The land is bright again. Given a good summer, we shall have wheat and some good profit. Prices are high and, given another blight, they will go higher.'

‘You want another blight?

‘Yes, of course. It will do a lot of good, believe me. The famine will be a great help, a calamity to some but with a purpose for others. It puts these people out. Gets rid of them off good land. It allows us to bring it together and make some really profitable farms. There's talk of bringing Scottish shepherds over and putting the land to sheep. You just see. Once this is all over, this country will be peaceful and profitable and who denies the common sense in that? If it wasn't all for the good then why did God make it happen?'

She did not answer. There was no answer to give. She vowed never to see him again. She had known him to be a braggart. She had seen his ways with her father and knew he was a self-seeking sycophant. She had seen such young men in England yet none had been as callously cruel as Edward Ogilvie.

Ahead of them she saw a crowd gathered around a man dressed like a scarecrow. He had a pole down the back of his tattered coat and another that went through both arms. He had stuffed straw into the front of his vest and more came out from his sleeves. His face was smeared with chalk so that his eyes were bright and his lips protruded fleshy red. He moved with the jerky action of a clockwork doll, stiff, his limbs unbending, imitating a scarecrow buffeted by the wind. Then he stopped as still as a stone and the crowd marvelled at his cleverness. Somebody dropped a penny into his hand. He bowed and they clapped.

She saw a small boy standing in her way, quite still, captivated by the scarecrow. He was no higher than her stirrups. She did not hear Ogilvie shout to the boy to move aside. He did not shout a second time. He brought the bullwhip high above his head and lashed the boy, the tiny bags of grapeshot cutting his shirt apart and tearing open the skin on his back. The whip cracked again like the snapping of a dead branch and blood spurted from the boy's legs. He cried out and fell. He did not move.

Kate jumped from her horse and ran to him. She held him in her arms, his blood staining her skirt. She looked for help. No one moved.

‘Someone help me,' she shouted. ‘Help me carry him to my horse … Help me!' No one came forward.

‘Curse you for your cowardice,' she screamed at them. ‘All of you. Curse you for this!'

She turned. The end of Olgilvie's whip with its leather pouches lay only a foot away from her. She grabbed and pulled it quick and hard. The whip handle was attached to a loop on his wrist and he was jerked off his saddle and hit the ground hard. He was a heavy man and the breath was knocked out of him. She ran towards him, took hold of the whip end again and hit him across the face. Blood ran down his neck as his men pulled her away.

She turned back. The boy was unconscious in the arms of a man.

‘Bring him here,' she shouted to him. ‘Put him on the saddle and I will take him to a doctor.'

The man said. ‘There is no doctor here, miss. If there was, the gentleman would have him first.'

Ogilvie was helped away, limp and barely conscious. Bloodied rags covered his face.

‘Where can we take this boy?' she asked the man. ‘Who will look after him? Where is his family?'

‘He has none,' he replied. ‘But I know him. I will care for him.'

‘Then take my horse.'

‘It is not far, miss. I can manage.'

‘Please.' She held the boy's hand. The man nodded.

‘I am a schoolmaster. My name is Keegan and my schoolhouse is only a little way beyond the market. If you should come, I will ask the women to rinse your clothes. You cannot go to your home like that.'

The crowd was sullen and silent as they left. She had called them cowards and they knew that well enough themselves. But she had injured their landlord, made him look ridiculous in front of them and that was worse. Whatever he intended for her would be nothing to what he was certain to do to them. They knew his bullwhip would return to Kinsale and God help man, women or child that had its attention.

It was not a long walk to Keegan's schoolhouse. It was squat and thatched and the stone had been freshly whitewashed. By the side of it was a semicircle of small cottages bordering a patch of grass. Beyond that, a grand view of the sea.

Keegan said, ‘I'll put the kettle on. You would like tea?'

Kate nodded. Together they undressed the boy, washed his wounds in warm soapy water and laid him in a mattress of straw. The whip had cut deep but the wounds were clean and Keegan said the warm air would dry them and heal them.

‘He'll have awful scars,' he said. ‘They will last him all his life. He will not forget Mr Ogilvie.'

Keegan was a neat man in himself and all things around him. He had dark-brown hair, long sideburns and grey eyes that were never still, set deep in his ruddy face. He was small but with powerful shoulders and strong arms and might have been a stonemason or a woodcutter. He looked at odds with his schoolroom. There was a small square window on its southern wall. Nailed above the door was a piece of wood engraved with the words, ‘
Céad míle fáilte
'.

‘It means a hundred thousand welcomes,' he said. ‘And never in my life have I been happier to offer one of them to someone than I am now to you. You have honoured me by your visit here.'

‘May I come back tomorrow?' she asked him. ‘I could bring some balm and new dressings. Maybe a little fruit.'

‘Would that be wise, miss?'

‘My name is Kathryn, Mr Keegan. I prefer to be called Kate.'

They shook hands.

‘Why should it matter whether it's wise or not?' she asked. ‘I would like to help.'

‘I'm not sure that coming back will help him more,' he answered.

‘I don't understand.'

‘Ogilvie is a vicious man, Miss Kate. We know his cruelty here.'

She sipped her tea. ‘I'm not afraid of him. He cannot hurt me.'

‘Forgive me,' he said. ‘I am not afraid for you. You are of his people. But he can harm us and he will. He will be back and I fear some of us might not see the end of summer.'

‘Then I must come back here again. Don't you see? As long as I keep coming, he cannot hurt you. He can do nothing to me. I am your protection.'