The Year of the French (16 page)

“Would that not be the great honour. There are members of the Leinster Directory, down in Wexford, who are waiting trial at the moment, and some are already swinging from gibbets. That is altogether too high an honour for a poor Mayo squireen.”

Moore shook his head. “No one is proposing action until the French have landed, and Munster has risen. All that is needed now is preparation. Men like Corny O’Dowd and yourself have a good name among the tenantry. They would listen to you and they would take the oath from you.”

“They might,” MacDonnell said. “They might. But would they fight is a different matter. Sure what would they fight with? Would you have me set them to work making pikes?”

“That is what Wexford did,” Moore did.

“Ach, sure don’t tell me about Wexford. It greatly weakens your case.”

“The French will come,” Moore said. “We may depend upon that. There will be a fight worth making.” He sipped the punch. As he had feared, it was sweet, but he drank again, more deeply.

“By God, I like the sound of that. This country needs a fight. Drink up, John. Drink up.”

“It will have one,” Moore said. “And when the fight is over, it will
be
a country, and not England’s granary. Will the people of Mayo fight for that?”

MacDonnell laughed, and emptied the remainder of the small bowl into their cups. “Nora,” he shouted. “More punch.” He waited a moment, and then shouted again. “Nora!” He nodded to Moore. “She has it ready. The secret with punch is to keep it hot. The hottest day of summer, I will take punch over cold whiskey. It clears the head.”

“Will they?” Moore repeated.

“There are wilder young fellows in this county than you could find in the whole of the two kingdoms,” MacDonnell said. “Jesus, in the last faction fight of the men of Ballycastle and the men of Killala, they were breaking skulls the way yourself or myself would crack open an egg. They had blackthorn cudgels, some of them, the size of a stout man’s wrist. There were two men killed outright, and mind you those fellows were fighting for nothing at all but only the honour of their towns. Jesus, the honour of Killala!”

“I know about faction fights,” Moore said. “They are a silly brutal business. George has forbidden them in Ballintubber.”

“No sillier than a republic would seem to a faction fighter. Or a Whiteboy. They have no notion of such things. But they are fine haters. They will fight what they hate.”

The girl brought in a fresh bowl of punch and placed it beside the empty one. Before she could straighten, MacDonnell encircled her waist and pulled her to the arm of his chair. “Do you have the likes of this in Ballintubber, John?” He put his hand on her rib cage, and then shoved it upwards, pressing one of her breasts towards the opening of her shift. “Study a creature like this and it will put every other thought out of your mind.” She leaned against his shoulder and smiled shyly at Moore.

MacDonnell slid his hand over the breast and stroked it softly. “Get along now,” he said. “We have business.”

When she had left, MacDonnell looked towards the closed door. “But she is a damned lazy serving wench for all that. Her name is Nora Duggan, and she is the niece of a strong-farmer named Malachi. He is one of Gibson’s tenants. It is to Duggan that the men in Kilcummin look. Duggan and a fellow named Ferdy O’Donnell. A decent enough fellow Ferdy is. We are somehow related, far back. You may depend upon it that those two lads are somehow thick in this Whiteboy trouble. By God, if that trouble spreads to Ballycastle they will oblige me by sticking to Protestants.”

“I have wondered,” Moore said quietly, “whether it is not to these Whiteboys that we should be looking for our recruits.”

MacDonnell nodded. “I thought we would come to that matter.” He bent down and put his hand on the bowl, then drew it quickly away. “O Jesus, I’m burned. How the hell did the girl carry it? She must have hands of leather.” He took a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the hand. “Do you know, those fellows down in Wexford, there must have been thousands of them by all we hear, I cannot believe they were all United Men. They may have taken that oath you have, but at heart they were Whiteboys. A country lad in Wexford is much like one in Mayo, and I cannot believe he was fighting for something called a republic. He took his pike and he went out after what he hated—yeomen, militiamen, Protestant magistrates.”

Moore shook his head. “I would be sorry indeed to see that here or anywhere in Ireland. The first intention of the Society has been to break down those wretched barriers of religion.”

MacDonnell laughed as he ladled out the punch. “By God, it took us centuries to build them up. You have your work cut out for you. ’Tis little enough that I know about rebellions, but I know that you must work with what you have. It isn’t a hundred years ago, when a lad like Corny O’Dowd could go riding out and haul his peasants after him. If there is a rebellion this time, the peasants will make it and it will be a Whiteboy war.”

Moore shook his head again, his full lips compressed. “It will not. It must be controlled by the Society. The French are not sailing here to support a country rabble.”

“The French! Much the French have ever cared about us. If the French come it will be to shove a thorn into England’s flank. There is a bit of the Whiteboy in me, John, and if I were to ride out with you, it would be because of that bit. For a hundred years or more those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish, hogging all the power and all the land. There are men still living who can remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant. The priests were hunted like wild wolves with five pounds’ bounty on their heads, and the people had to hear Mass in wild caves with a guard posted. Why do you think the Tyrawley Yeomanry is all Protestant? It is to keep us in our place, and to keep muskets out of our hands. I can meet Sam Cooper at the Castlebar races, and we will have a drink and a bet together, but if it comes to a fight, I will gut him or he will gut me.”

He spoke with what Moore found an impressive and unsettling calm, as though expressing facts so clear as to require no emphasis. Moore turned his eyes away from him, towards the bare, graceless room. On the walls hung only a few awkward portraits, the work of journeyman artists riding from county to county with canvas and paints. There were strong family resemblances, long, protuberant jaws, high, harsh cheekbones. The resentments which MacDonnell nursed had been passed on, a family inheritance, from father to son. In this room 1641 and 1691 were as young as yesterday, shaping conduct and governing passions. It was a history without triumphal arches or squares named after victories. It clung to the dour, treeless bogs and the low, abrupt hills, a history of defeats and dispossessions, of smoke rising from gutted houses.

“Let the French make their landing down in Munster,” MacDonnell said, “and let the people there rise up. If there is no one to guard Mayo then but the Tyrawley Yeomanry, by Jesus but we will give them a whipping. You must rest content with that, John.”

“Blake, Bellew, O’Dowd,” Moore said. “Are you speaking for them as well as for yourself?”

“I am,” MacDonnell said. “We have talked about this, you know, one way and another. We have no objection to taking the oath of your Society, and I don’t greatly care what it says. I am certain it must be a very fine oath. But your Society had damned well better understand that there is little that can be done here in Mayo.”

“We know that,” Moore said. “As well as you do.” He smiled, a young man venturing upon deep waters. “Then my ride was not wasted. You might have begun by telling me that.”

“Ach,” MacDonnell said. “Here, let us finish up the punch. You don’t have much—four squires and perhaps a few others that Corny and myself can find for you.”

“Those two men you mentioned—Duggan and that other fellow.”

“Ferdy O’Donnell. Let that rest for a bit. We are all Papists, right enough, but those fellows are peasants and we are landlords. It may be that Cooper will prove a good recruiting sergeant for us, if he turns the yeomen loose upon the barony.”

Moore managed to down his third cup of punch with a show of pleasure. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “he just might manage that, if he is as foolish as he would seem to be. George despises him.”

“George despises all of us,” MacDonnell said, and held up a hand when Moore began to speak. “All of us,” he repeated, “and who can blame him? Look at me, a man my age, and I have been a dozen times to Dublin and there is the extent of my travels. I have read one book in the last six months, a trifling romance that I found in Tom Bellew’s house. It was all about some English lord who was in love with the daughter of a Spanish duke and you have never read such sorry stuff. Some woman wrote it. There is no other man in Connaught with my knowledge of horses, but what is that, when all is said and done?”

As Moore walked back with MacDonnell to the stables, he felt oppressively the truth of the remark. MacDonnell was clearly an able man, for all his reckless talk, but like the hillside thorn trees he had been shaped by the winds of Mayo, and like the thorn trees, he was rooted to the land.

MacDonnell, as though to confirm this, said, “Mind now, the Castlebar races. The finest week in the year, and it will give us a good shove forward into the harvest. By God, there is nothing like a fine race.”

Moore drew riding gloves from the tail pocket of his jacket. “You have agreed to join a seditious society, and all you can think of are the Castlebar races.”

“Well now,” MacDonnell said, leading Moore’s horse from the stable, “the French won’t come until after the races, surely? If they do, they will lose a few friends.”

Paris, July 7

He walked with jaunty haste down the Rue Saint-Jacques, a slight, knife-faced man with a prominent nose, dressed in the uniform of a
chef de brigade
in the army of the French Republic. He was singing a snatch of opera in a harsh, high-pitched voice which attracted attention, and when a head turned towards him he saluted it with a wave of his hand. He wanted to embrace every passerby, to take all of them off to the café for toasts in French and in English. In the mirror of his pleasure he saw a young and handsomely dressed officer walking the streets of the capital of revolution on a fine summer night. He was Citizen Wolfe Tone, formerly of Ireland and shortly to return there. He was the founder of the Society of United Irishmen, its accredited representative in France, and that afternoon he had received the final decision of the Directory.

He had been in Paris almost three years, bouncing from hope to despair to hope, draughting memorials, sitting long hours in the anterooms of ministers, flattering politicians and wishing that he had the money to bribe them. Penniless and voluble in his wretched French, when they gave him his army commission he had had to beg an advance in salary so that he could buy his uniform. His proposal had been simplicity itself: he had come to Paris to secure a French invasion of Ireland. For six months he had sat at a small table in his lodging house, writing his endless memorials, accounts of the Irish political parties, how the island was governed, descriptions of the religious factions, a layman’s account of the island’s defences, the aims of the Society. All written in a neat barrister’s hand, the facts marshalled like regiments, logic hard and direct as curricle guns moving across an open field. The afternoons he had spent walking Paris, gawking at the sights, practising his French on waiters and tavernkeepers. In the evening, three bottles of
vin ordinaire
and then the opera or the theatre. Then the weeks of attending upon Carnot or some other minister, sitting on a hard bench beside other supplicants, cheap leather portfolio balanced on bony knees. A half-dozen nations were competing for the services of the Revolution, but Tone won the competition. He offered to the Directory a sullen and discontented island sailing on England’s flank, a peasantry armed with pikes and aching for insurrection, a wide-flung revolutionary network controlled by radicals.

In December of 1796 the expedition set sail from Brest, forty-three sail carrying an army of fifteen thousand under the command of the great Hoche, the brilliant young general who had conquered the Vendée. Christmas Day saw Tone aboard the
Indomptable
in Bantry Bay, the ship buffeted by great winds. Wrapped in his greatcoat he stood frantic on deck, staring through swirling winds towards the bare Munster coast. After a week in the bay, the winds still hurling themselves down upon the ships, a British fleet prowling somewhere off the coast, the French determined to lift anchor and sail home.

Tone argued himself hoarse at their council of war in a rocking cabin, the charts and maps held down on the table with lengths of chain. Give him command of the Légion de France, a company of the
artillerie legère
, a supply of firelocks, such officers as wished to volunteer. Sail him around the coast to Sligo, clear of the buffeting winds. Or place a French officer in command, and he would serve under him as private. Anything which could get a supply of arms and a body of seasoned soldiers into Ireland, now, while the United Irishmen were strong and prepared.

The French officers were all young, sons of a revolution which had lifted them from obscurity. They listened calmly, with a cool admiration for this excitable young Irishman, so ardent, so patriotic. But only one of them volunteered to take command, a very young brigadier named Jean-Joseph Humbert, who had served with Hoche in the Vendée and understood the use of irregular troops. He joined his arguments to Tone’s. With two thousand men and arms for twenty thousand rebels, he could reach the midlands in a week; the rebels could rally to him there. Hoche hesitated. It was an attractive plan, and one almost without risk to France. If it succeeded, she would have created a new ally. If it failed, she would be rid of the Légion, a choice collection of rogues and gaolbirds. If you are captured, Hoche reminded Tone, you will be hanged and disembowelled. The hanging is not a pleasant prospect, Tone said; as for the disembowelling,
je m’en fiche
. An attractive man, this Colonel Irishman, witty, brave, and no doubt, like Humbert, his new ally, a bit unscrupulous. Hoche had the two of them leave the cabin while he made his decision.