The Year of the French (10 page)

“They may seem better,” John said.

“Whiteboys have been busy in Kilcummin. As a landlord I was gratful for the information.”

“Whiteboys?” John asked, startled. “Is he certain of that?”

“Quite certain,” Moore said. “He brought me their letter; it was the usual bombast, better written than most. They are not—” He broke off, and waited until Haggerty had served John’s soup and had left the room. “They most certainly are not rebels, if that was the point of your question.”

John said nothing. He picked up his spoon and stirred his soup. “I have been at Malcolm Elliott’s,” he said. “That great chestnut mare of his has foaled. It will be a lovely creature.”

“Elliott is well, I trust, and Mrs. Elliott? She is also lovely, in her way. I am very fond of Mrs. Elliott.”

“She is well,” John said shortly.

“And Elliott and yourself found time for a long talk about political matters, no doubt?”

John put down his spoon and faced his brother. “Yes,” he said, “we did. Elliott and I often discuss political matters.”

“These must be depressing times for Elliott,” Moore said. “The leaders of his organization imprisoned in Dublin, and the rebellion shattered.”

“Have a care,” John said, glancing towards the closed door.

“Oh, you are safe enough here,” Moore said. “And safe enough with Malcolm Elliott in Moat House. But everywhere else, you do well to guard your tongue. This is a poor season for sedition. This wine is a bit off. Had you noticed?”

“No,” John said. “If you do think it sedition, you are devilish cool about it, George.”

“What I may think it is not to the point,” Moore said. “It is a hanging offence.”

They said nothing further until Haggerty, assisted by an untidy maid, had served the meal.

“I have no wish to meddle with another man’s politics,” Moore said. “You spent a year in Dublin. Perhaps you joined the Society there, and perhaps Malcolm Elliott did. But as a brother I am thankful that you are safe in Mayo, and many miles away from the Society of United Irishmen.”

“That is fair enough,” John said. “You have never affected any sympathy for the ideals of the Society.”

“For their ideals?” Moore asked. “A very large sympathy.” He put down his knife. “Why can they not cook meat properly in this country? The best beef in Europe, and they burn it to cinders. One might suppose that with their long tradition of arson—”

“Not enough sympathy to take them seriously.”

“I have met several of the United Irish leaders. I know Tom Emmet, and MacNevin. And I have known many men like them, in France, in the first year or two of the Revolution. Liberty, equality. They want all the proper things, all the admirable things. And it ends in butchery.”

“It need not,” John said.

“History is what happens,” Moore said.

“Freeing one’s country from oppression has usually been accounted a virtue,” John said. “For the first time in the history of this country, Protestant and Catholic have united in a common purpose.”

“A union of some Dublin solicitors and a handful of briefless barristers, a few Catholic physicians and merchants. But when the rising broke out in Wexford, the United Irishmen had no control over it. Do you believe that the peasants of Wexford had read Tom Paine? It was a rising up of the peasantry against the men of property, the Papists against the Protestants. ‘The army of the Gael,’ they called themselves.”

“Surely a wish to be free does not require the reading of Tom Paine,” John said.

“An excellent point,” George said. “But you should make it to your friends, and not to me. Their minds are fixed upon a republic, but the peasants who do their fighting for them have their minds fixed elsewhere. When peasants respond to oppression, the response is brutal, violent. Those barristers in Dublin know nothing of the Irish peasantry. I doubt if Wolfe Tone has ever spoken with one. I doubt if he would know how.”

“But you agree as to the fact of the oppression.”

“Oh, I do indeed.” Moore pushed his plate aside impatiently. “The landlords of this island, taken in the generality, are both savage and silly. A dangerous combination. Men like Cooper are intolerable. Even Dennis Browne—”

“Then what hope is there for the country, short of—”

“Alas, John. You cannot call this a country, this battered old hulk adrift on the Atlantic. You have seen France and England and Spain. You know what nations are. France is just now emerging from a convulsion, but it has remained a nation. Ireland has never been a nation. It cannot be. We have savaged each other too long, and we have cut too deep.”

John laughed. “By God, if you find Ireland so complicated, how can you hope to write a history of the Revolution in France?”

“No trouble at all,” George said. “The French Revolution is merely a momentous cataclysm which has changed the direction of human events. I could never write a history of Ireland.”

“They are in gaol now, most of them,” John said. “If I had stayed in Dublin, I might be there now myself.”

“Not Tone,” George said. “Tone is still in France making mischief. I wish him joy of the Directory. Not all the world’s rogues are in Ireland.”

“I wish him well,” John said quietly.

George looked at him sharply, and with a slight smile. “You don’t believe a word I’ve said, do you?”

“All of them,” John said. “They don’t matter. I know what this country needs.”

“So does Cooper,” Moore said. “I envy such knowledge.”

By the time the fruit was served, they had managed to change the subject. John watched his brother’s long, deft fingers separate an apple from its skin, the sharp silver knife twisting an even curl of red peel.

“Later this week,” he said, “I may ride out to Ballycastle to visit the Treacys.”

“An excellent idea,” Moore said. “She is a splendid, sharp, saucy girl. She is exactly what you need.”

“Thomas Treacy is not a wealthy man,” John said. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“That is no concern of mine. I am pleased that it doesn’t bother you. But I recommend you venture no political views to Thomas Treacy. There is the old Catholic stock for you with a vengeance. He is still waiting for the Stuarts, poor fellow.”

“Ellen is not,” John said. “She shares my sympathies.”

“Then she is in love with you,” Moore said. “Women have no politics, thank God. You should have more sense than to discuss politics with a woman. I did so once in London, and we had the devil of a row. Making up was most pleasant, though. I believe that she knew it would be, and thus caused the quarrel. They are very clever.”

“And Judith Elliott,” John said. “She is most patriotic.”

“That is different,” Moore said. “Mrs. Elliott is English, and they often become Irish patriots if they settle here. It has something to do with the weather. Mrs. Elliott is a romantic; it is part of her charm. She and Ellen Treacy are not at all alike, and of the two I think I prefer Ellen. Such is my own patriotism.”

“But you do think Mrs. Elliott lovely. You have said so.”

“Lovely indeed, and of a most loving disposition, I have no doubt. But a steady diet of high sentiments would not be to my taste. Still, Elliott thrives. I may be mistaken.”

As they talked, John was remembering being a very small boy in Alicante, the air heavy with odours, the roofs below them turning purple in the evening light, their father elaborate in his Spanish clothes. He was talking of home, an unimaginable place called Mayo, thick green, warm with the memories of family. Now they were here, two brothers, restless in different ways.

Killala, June 20

MacCarthy watched the dancers.

He was standing beside the fiddler, his long, ungainly body propped against the wall of Donal Hennessey’s farmhouse, one of the largest in Killala, two wide, deep rooms with a true fireplace in one of them. Nothing in the world was more tormenting to him than an image which had not yet become an image. He was like a woman giving birth to a cauled child. The moon and the surface which held its light were clotted together in his imagination, rain-shrouded.

The fiddle fought against the room’s other noises, the feet upon the floor, the voices and laughter of the men and women standing against the wall, too old for dancing or too tired. The fiddle spoke to the thudding bare feet of dancers upon the mud floor, and was answered by them. There is a fine girl, he thought, watching one of the dancers. What girl is that, Maire Spellacy? A great, strapping girl, beef to the heels, as they said in Mayo, their minds always upon cattle. He watched her, prodded to a faint sensuality, but the image nagged at him. For an hour it had given him no rest. He drank half of his glass of whiskey, and raised it in salute to the fiddler, who smiled with his lips, but his eyes were turned inwards towards his music. Terrible people, musicians, wedded to their wood and their catgut, caressing them like lovers. Someone filled his glass. Drinking was expected of him.

Soon it would be Saint John’s Eve. Wood for the bonfire had already been piled high upon Steeple Hill, and when the night came there would be bonfires on every hill from there to Downpatrick Head. There would be dancing and games in the open air, and young men would try their bravery leaping through the flames. There would even be young girls leaping through, for it was helpful in the search for a husband to leap through a Saint John’s Eve fire, the fires of midsummer. The sun was at its highest then, and the fires spoke to it, calling it down upon the crops. It was the turning point of the year, and the air was vibrant with spirits. When the fires had died down, the cattle would be driven through the embers, and hazel wands lighted from the embers would singe their backs. Ashes from the fire would be set aside to mix with next year’s seed corn.

Good reason had Hussey to stand in his pulpit and give out against the bonfires, for they had little enough to do with Saint John. They were older than Christ, older than the Druids who had been driven out by Patrick. In MacCarthy’s Kerry, on Saint John’s Eve, the oldest woman in the townland would crawl three times around the fire, praying for the crops. And to bring home a burning stick was to have good luck all year. Saint John’s Eve frightened MacCarthy by suggesting the antiquity of human life, the remote past casting its shadow outwards from the fires, darkening the flame-reddened faces. Still, it did no harm, and this could be one of the biggest harvests in the memory of Mayo, the weather fine with soft rains and bright sunlight, the corn growing plump. It did no harm at all to keep the sun with you. O’Sullivan had a poem about Saint John’s Eve, a poem too soft and easy in its construction, but not a bad poem at all. He was no man to try a contest with; at his laziest, he was better than most.

When the dance had ended, Ferdy O’Donnell, who was one of the dancers, joined MacCarthy against the wall, a jug in one hand.

“Well, Owen, it is about time we gave another try to Virgil, one of these nights. Come early, and we will have something to eat and then set to work.” He had been briefly a seminarian, and had now this plan to work through six books of the
Aeneid
with MacCarthy’s help.

“We will, Ferdy. I was in Kilcummin a few nights ago, and thought that soon I must call in on yourself and Maire.”

“You had other business in Kilcummin, I am told,” O’Donnell said, dropping his voice. He nodded towards the other room.

“I had a fool’s business. Acting as secretary to a quartet of blackguards.”

“It is no quartet now. There are more than forty Whiteboys now in the barony, sworn Whiteboys. They are acting under Duggan in Kilcummin, and Hennessey here in Killala.”

“But not you?”

“Ach, ’tis not my style either, Owen. What have beings like the two of us to do with Whiteboys? Sure I wouldn’t walk down the road to see even a faction fight. Mind you, I’m not saying they are wrong. There may be less talk now about evictions.”

“If you will not be sworn, Duggan will not weep,” MacCarthy said. “You are a well-respected man in Kilcummin, and you did not earn that respect with a cudgel.” It was not flattery. A quiet, clear-headed young man and a good farmer. They respected his learning, and they remembered that he was one of the old O’Donnells.

But their talk moved then to the
Aeneid
. O’Donnell had a decent seminarian’s knowledge of Latin, but not the faintest notion of what the
Aeneid
was like as a poem. Translate thirty lines a day, and stop at the thirtieth, wherever you might find yourself. What was it that men like O’Donnell found to love in the Latin? Perhaps the sentences built like good fences, every word solidly in place, and each one giving strength to all the others. A marvellous language. Language of mystery and miracle, it brought Christ to earth, placed His body upon man’s tongue.

When Hennessey came to summon him to the west room he was loath to go. What had bleeding cattle to do with the far moon, or the notes of a violin, or Aeneas cast up on Dido’s shore, a kingdom burned behind him and a kingdom yet to be built, but now a queen amorous and pious. Troy flaming like the bonfires of Saint John’s Eve.

“You are one of us now, Owen boy,” Hennessey said, clapping him on the shoulder. “That letter had a blade to it like a knife.”

“I am like hell,” MacCarthy said. “I told you that I was not.”

“Sure Duggan only wants you to have a drink with us. You would be wise to keep in with Malachi. He will rule the barony.”

“The magistrates rule the barony,” MacCarthy said. “The magistrates and the yeomen.”

“Cooper has spent the last two days riding up and riding down to the other landlords,” Hennessey said. “He will have them frightened out of their wits. He even went to the Papist landlords.”

“Landlords have their own religion,” MacCarthy said.

In the west room they were gathered around Duggan, all of them standing, Quigley and O’Carroll and nine or ten men, a few in their thirties, but most of them far younger. Some were farmers, and some were labourers. What business had spalpeens in a quarrel between farmers and landlords? The room was heavy with their smell. O’Carroll handed him a large tumbler of whiskey, and Duggan greeted him, unsmiling.

“You are a man of your word,” MacCarthy said. “You have begun a Whiteboy war in this quiet corner of Mayo.”