The Year of the French (14 page)

They had a long, quiet meal, talking of Dublin and of distant friends. After dinner, Judith sat beside her harp in the drawing room, and sang to the two men in her clear, silvery soprano. Elliott listened with his jockey’s body perched on the edge of a delicate chair, his hands pressed against his knees, but John was settled deep into a sofa, his long legs stretched out before him. Judith had a small selection of French and Italian songs which, so far as John could tell, she sang most creditably, but she preferred the group of
Hibernian Airs
which had recently been published in Dublin by Miss Owenson. They sounded French to John; Elliott had no ear for music. Then Elliott and John closeted themselves in the office, where they talked late into the night, a bottle of brandy on the desk beside them.

The next morning he was again on the road. Labourers, standing in fields to his left, lifted their arms in lazy salutation to a stranger, and Moore touched his crop to the brim of his low-crowned hat. To his right, stretching towards the bay, were the high walls of the Glenthorne estate. Moore, a tall young man on a tall mount, could catch glimpses, between thick clumps of plantation, of Glenthorne Castle, white and indistinct in the morning haze.

A mile from Killala, he swung into a byroad which brought him to the Ballycastle road. Four miles farther on, he crossed over a stream, and rode through entrance gates towards Bridge-end House. It was a simple, two-storey farmhouse, more modest than its ornamental gates, built with its back away from its avenue, upon the crest of a hill facing northwards. As he rode towards it he could see a distant flash of bay.

He dismounted, looped his reins to a post, and walked along a curving path of loose stone to the front of the house. A servant showed him into the parlour, where he was joined almost at once by Thomas Treacy, a tall, bent man in his fifties, with white hair falling full and loose about his neck. He seized Moore’s hand in both of his.

“You are most welcome, John. Most welcome indeed.”

“And I am most happy to see you, sir. I have business in Killala with Randall MacDonnell, but nothing would stop my horse turning aside to the Ballycastle road, that I might pay my respects to you.”

“You will spend the night here,” Treacy said. “I can offer you a far cleaner room than you can find at the MacDonnells’. ’Tis not a house they have there at all, but only stables. They are a disgrace to us all.”

“I will not quarrel with that,” Moore said. “And it is pleasant to look forward to a clean bed.”

“They are more horse than man,” Treacy said. “Like the pagan centaurs.”

“They know horses,” Moore said. “Better than any family in Mayo.”

“Well they might,” Treacy said. “But they come by it honourably. A MacDonnell commanded a squadron of King James’s cavalry. He did not distinguish himself. Sit down, John. Sit down. We will have tea directly, if that lazy slut of a girl pays any attention to my orders. Is George well?”

“He is indeed. He keeps himself busy with his scribbling.”

“It is an honour to the country, to have a scholar like your brother resident here. Perhaps one day he will finish his dealings with the French regicides and turn to the history of his own county.”

“I doubt if George will ever be done with his Frenchmen. He is very clever about them, and cleverness delights him. He would find little to be clever about in Mayo.”

“Now there you are mistaken, John. Perhaps you have been too long away, George and yourself. Your father thought so, God rest his soul. Our deepest roots are in the soil of childhood.”

“But I knew Mayo from childhood on,” John said. “Father spoke of it to me. He was homesick all of those years in Spain. He spoke often of your own father.”

“Ah,” Treacy said, smiling. “There was always a great friendship between our two families. A hard time we had of it in the black days, the old families of Mayo. There is the proper subject for George’s pen, and not the base king-killers of Paris. A black century stretching forward from the disaster at Aughrim. They did their best to savage and scatter us. But we are tenacious, a tenacious people, John. Your father is a case in point.”

Treacy smiled grimly, a bit complacently, proud of survival. Well might he be, John thought. But how many other families had gone under, vanished, names lingering only as meaningless tags for townlands and hills. The Brownes had survived by turning Protestant, and the Moores by exile; O’Dowds and MacDonnells had half fallen into the peasantry, uneasy hobbledehoys. And among the peasantry, families which had forgotten an early gentility, save perhaps for a battered silver teapot, a gown of frayed and shiny satin passed down from mother to daughter. Fit subject for an artist of the pathetic and the picturesque, uncongenial to his brother’s pen.

“An ancient chivalry,” Treacy said, warming to a familiar subject. “Destroyed by Cromwell’s rabble, and by Dutch William. Mayo once was famous for its piety and learning.” His hand gestured, vaguely, groping towards centuries. “Our early history. You have seen the ruins of our abbeys, our monasteries. One of the finest stands roofless upon your own land. Ballintubber.”

“My brother’s land,” John said.

Treacy did not hear him. “We were outlaws upon our own land. Our priests were hunted down. Our sons were encouraged towards apostasy. Sergeants and corporals, the sweepings of the English cities, were set over us as magistrates. It is the stuff of epic, boy, fit subject for a Virgil. But we survived. We were not forced down into the bog.”

“It has been a bad time for us,” Moore said. “A sorry time. Perhaps it is changing. In Wexford—”

“Wexford! Peasants, brutal peasants hacking and killing with pikes and scythes. Drunken Whiteboys burning and butchering.”

He was hopeless, Moore had known that. Celebrant of a consoling myth, counting like prayer beads the links of his bondage.

“Times may change,” he said. “If the French fleet had landed two years ago—”

“With ten thousand of those ruffians and arms for fifty thousand Whiteboys? No, no, there was a time, my grandfather’s time, when ships from France would have meant the Irish brigades, the return of the Wild Geese. Not now. Those bloodthirsty ruffians are as bad as the Cromwellians were. It has begun in Mayo. We have our own Whiteboys now. Six estates have been attacked.”

“Six?” Moore asked, startled. “Two only, surely.”

“Six,” Treacy said. “And the last was the worst of all. Saunders’s barns were destroyed last night, the thatch fired and the walls levelled.”

“That is a serious undertaking,” Moore said thoughtfully. “Six estates in two weeks. That is a small insurrection.”

“Ach, sure they are Whiteboys. Cooper will hunt them down with his yeomen. It is time those little Protestant bastards did more than rattle their foolish drums.”

“And all this because Cooper turned a bit of his land to grazing. This is a mysterious business.”

“They don’t know what they want,” Treacy said. “There has been Whiteboy trouble in Killala before, thirty years ago, when I was a young man. It was tithes and high rents then, and it is grazing now. But there was a black, sullen hatred behind it; they did not know what they wanted but they knew what they hated. Pothouse poets had them stirred up, and prophecy men. There was a prophecy clear across Galway and Mayo that when the millrace in Oranmore ran red blood Ireland would be freed. And they put the prophecy in their letters.”

“Their letter now is like that,” Moore said. “Cooper brought it out to Ballintubber and showed it to George.”

“To be sure it is,” Treacy said. “They are always like that. There is always some rogue of a schoolmaster with a head stuffed wih nonsense. It was a bad time for my father. We held the land on lease only in those days, and we had parts of it sublet at rents as high as any in the barony, but we were never disturbed at all, and neither were the Blakes, who are little better than rack-renters. It was the Protestants they went after, and many of the Protestants thought there was a conspiracy among all the Catholics, ourselves included. My father said one night he was thinking of burning down one of our barns as a gesture of goodwill.” Remembering, Treacy laughed. “But it never came to that. There were four lads hanged in the heel of that hunt. One of them was a MacMahon, Padraic MacMahon, I knew him well, a great horse of a young fellow and the best hurler in the barony. There were no yeomen here in those days. Sam Cooper’s father hunted him clear to Nephin, and rode back leading Padraic by a bit of rope. God rest the soul of poor Padraic MacMahon. There was something wrong with one of his eyes, but he was the best hurler in the barony.”

Imagining a past which had come and gone before his birth, John saw two figures entering Killala, a yeoman captain’s father, squireen back from the hunt, red-faced and self-satisfied, behind him, led like a stray cow, a tall young fellow in frieze, twisting his head this way and that.

“There is a song about him now,” Treacy said. “A wretched bit of pothouse doggerel. That is the way of it, they are a leaderless people. Their heroes are Whiteboys and faction fighters and hurlers.”

“Our people,” Moore said. “Yours and mine.”

Ach no,” Treacy said. “We are a scattered people. History put its heel on our neck. ’Tis a great pity you never knew my father, and a greater one that George did not. He was a great scholar. Mind you, he taught himself, but he was a great scholar in the two languages. He corresponded with Charles O’Conor of Belnagare, the historian and vindicator of the Catholics of Ireland. I have a packet of Charles O’Conor’s letters in this house. They would be of great interest to George. Read Charles O’Conor’s history, John, and you will understand the fate of the Catholic gentry of Ireland. We have been calumniated by perjurers and slanderers. King George now has no subjects more loyal, and we ask only the rights of full citizenship.”

“Padraic MacMahon the hurler wanted something different, I expect,” John said.

“I don’t know what he wanted,” Treacy said. “I know what he got.”

“The end of a rope,” John said.

“Yes. The end of a rope and a bad song which he never lived to hear.”

The door opened, and a girl of about eighteen carried in the tea service. She was slender and for a girl extraordinarily tall, almost as tall as Moore himself.

He rose to his feet and said, “Your father told me that some lazy slut of a girl might bring tea. I hadn’t known that he meant you, Ellen.”

“Neither had I,” Treacy said. “Neither had I. Have you no tasks to keep you busy, girl?”

She placed the tray on the long oak table and sat down before it. “I have the task of making a guest welcome, which I have been instructed takes precedence over other tasks.”

“I was riding by your gates.” Moore said, “and I was parched for a cup. I would otherwise have ridden on to the MacDonnells.”

“The MacDonnells, is it?” she asked. “At this time of day you would be lucky at the MacDonnells to get anything but buttermilk in a bowl or whiskey in an eggshell.” Quietly, deftly, she poured the tea, sugared two of the cups heavily and handed the third one to Moore. “You will be a foreigner, John, until you have a sweet tooth like the rest of us.”

“I begin to suspect that I will always be a foreigner,” Moore said. “Sugar or not.”

“John will be stopping the night with us,” Treacy said. “If you can find time to make a bed for him.”

For a moment her eye caught Moore’s. “I might find time,” she said. “Someday. Are you not staying with the MacDonnells then, John? With all the hospitality they can offer? Firing off pistols into the ceilings is a part of their hospitality, I understand, when they entertain young gentlemen from Ballintubber.”

“They are a wild crew,” Treacy said. “It comes to them in their blood. Have I told you of the reputed conduct of their Major MacDonnell on the night before the battle of Aughrim?”

“You have, Father,” Ellen said. “Twice.”

“I was addressing our guest.”

“Sure it was John you told it to twice. I can’t count the times I have heard it. Every time poor Grace MacDonnell comes to visit me, I hear it, as though she were herself some wild rapparee riding in from Aughrim.”

Treacy nodded. “You would never guess that the poor mother is a Dillon, adrift as she is in that bare, draughty barn of a house. A wild crew.”

“She is a very pretty young woman,” John said.

“She is indeed,” Ellen said. “We are most fond of one another. Grace MacDonnell has the finest forehead in Mayo and lovely green eyes.”

“They are blue, I believe,” John said. “Dark blue like your own.”

“Are they so? Perhaps they change in the light.”

“Shall we expect you for dinner?” Treacy asked.

“That would be most welcome,” John said. “I will have a bit of a talk with Randall and then ride back to Bridge-end.”

“Randall is a great man for the talk,” Treacy said. “Especially when he has a few jars in him.”

“He is,” John said. “A plainspoken man.”

“I met him at the market last month,” Treacy said, stirring his tea. “He tells me that the two of you have talked political matters until late at night.”

Moore was silent for a space, and then said, “We have. I have never kept my sentiments a secret from you, sir.”

“And I have no wish to press you on the matter, if it remains a matter of sentiment and no more. I am most fond of you, John, most fond indeed, and I would grieve to see you compromised.”

“Sure what can Randall MacDonnell know about politics,” Ellen said quickly. “As little as myself. There is but the one thing that Randall MacDonnell knows, and that is horses.”

“He is a wild rascal ready for any mischief,” Treacy said, “like his father before him. They have half sunk into the peasantry.”

“Not Grace,” Ellen said. “I am sorry to see so fine a girl in such a disordered house.”

“Her mother is a Dillon,” Treacy said. “Randall and the others are children by the first wife. She was a Lally of Tuam, a very cross-tempered woman. I don’t know what Aeneas Dillon was thinking of when he let a daughter of his marry into the MacDonnells of Ballycastle. A father has a heavy responsibility in such matters, does he not?”

“He does indeed,” John said.