The Year of the French (24 page)

“You fucking Papist whore,” the man from Derbyshire said. “You are looking for trouble.”

“I had not far to look. I didn’t ask for your company. Your friend gave me a civil shout and I joined him. I bought you a drink and you put your big ham of a fist around it without thinking twice. You come into a tavern of quiet men and then call them out of their names. Fucking whore yourself, you great stupid turnip.”

The Derbyshire man put down his porter, but the Londoner stepped quickly between them.

“You should have more sense, Joe. They’re like children, laughing with you one minute, and shouting at you the next.” He twisted his head to look at MacCarthy. “You’d better get back to digging your spuds, Paddy, before I lose my own temper.”

MacCarthy felt Sean MacKenna’s hand on his shoulder. He shook it off. “I have no quarrel with you,” he said to the Londoner, “and I would drink with you any night most willingly. You are a most generous man to have come all this way to help us. Did you know that, Sean? This man came all the way from London to take care of us. First he took care of us in Wexford, and now he has come to Mayo.”

The Londoner grinned again, at MacKenna now. “They have had a bit too much, the two of them.”

“ ’Tis well known to be the cause of most quarrels,” MacKenna said.

The Derbyshire man was humming. “I can’t remember any of the words,” he said. “It’s called ‘Croppies Lie Down.’ ”

“A people gifted in music,” MacCarthy said.

“Put a stopper in it, Paddy,” the Londoner said.

Outside the tavern, MacKenna again put his hand on MacCarthy. “I will tell you something about yourself, Owen. You think a poet leads a charmed life. You can lie in bed when you should be in your school, and drink yourself into a stupor, and ruin a woman’s name, and pick quarrels wherever you choose. You can be an ugly reckless man at times, and a danger to your friends.”

MacCarthy nodded absently. “I was frightened then, Sean. The red uniforms frightened me.”

“They served their purpose then,” MacKenna said.

MacCarthy walked shivering from tavern to tavern, looking for the farmer who had promised him a ride back to Killala. Lobsterback soldiers wandered up to the barracks in threes and fours, arms wound around the necks of comrades. Boiled lobsters, red dragons of the sea, walking upright, high helmets like briny plates of shell. At the top of Castlebar High Street, in the yard formed by the joining of barracks and gaol, three bodies hung from the gibbet, tar-coated and weighted down with chains. Worst of all deaths. A lure for the flies of summer. MacCarthy crossed himself and hurried past them.

Killala, August 15

Massive and intricate, Glenthorne Castle soared upwards from the plain of Mayo. The central block was intransigent, declaring a solidity which would outlast bogland and pasture. Long arcs of Ionic colonnades swept outwards to join wings which balanced each other with a delicate and subtle harmony. In its lightness and strength, it reproved the barbarism by which it was surrounded, the raw landscape of brown mountain and rank green fields. In sunlight, the cut stone mellowed from white to the palest of honeys.

Their vast estates in Mayo, together with the earldom of Tyrawley, had come to the Glenthornes in recognition of great though clandestine services accomplished by the third Lord Glenthorne in 1688 for the then Prince of Orange. He accompanied William to Ireland, commanding a regiment of foot. Several paintings of the battle of the Boyne display him beside his Prince, a furled map in one hand, the other outflung towards the river, saturnine face unsmiling beneath full wig, a statesman and courtier performing with competence a military task. He did not visit Mayo on that occasion; like William, he found Ireland damp and disagreeable. His son and his grandson never visited Ireland at all. They were content to enjoy their Tyrawley title and the revenues of the Tyrawley estate.

The estate was formed by the expropriation of the lands of the largest of the Mayo Jacobites, Catholic and Protestant, and a number of lesser gentry who had practised the delusory prudence of neutrality. Its affairs were managed by agents, who had for their dwelling the fortified farmhouse of one of the expropriated Jacobites. The first two were part men of business and part centurions, for in the decades which followed the Williamite settlement, Mayo was a lawless wilderness. The Jacobite captains and colonels, returning to their confiscated acres, mustered their former tenants into gangs of reivers and highwaymen. For a time they persuaded themselves that they were maintaining the battle which in fact had ended at Limerick, but they degenerated at last into common brigands. One by one they were hunted down by packs of horsemen and hounds, and their heads fixed to the palings of the gaol in Castlebar, then a new, raw town. Those who survived turned peasant, accepting with gratitude a few acres of tillage upon their former lands.

Lacking the civilising influence of a great resident landlord, Tyrawley became a barony dominated by squireens as wild as faction fighters, hellfire duellists, coarse, valorous, and brutal. Some farmed no land at all, but rather rented it, up to the very doors of their houses, to the drifting peasant multitudes. Others entrusted their land for renting to middlemen and submiddlemen, thus spawning a class whose attachment to the land was more casual even than their own. Isolated even from the influences of decadence, they gave over their days to gambling and cockfighting, the abduction of heiresses and the despoilment of peasant girls.

The Glenthorne agents, managers of estates so wide and so populous as to make difficult an accurate account of either cattle or peasants, remitted quarterly revenues to a Dublin bank for transmission to England, played their parts in the social and political life of the county, and spent several months of each year in England. The handful of travellers and wandering writers who visited North Mayo over the decades invariably fell upon the Glenthorne estates as a superb instance of the evils of absenteeism. Were the Lords Glenthorne to reside in Mayo, it was argued, the lands would be better managed, the methods of agriculture and husbandry would improve steadily, a benign influence would be exerted upon the lawless and turbulent peasantry, the neighbouring squires would be given a centre towards which they might look for instruction in decorum and sobriety. But the impossibility of this ideal was admitted. Glenthorne was both an English and an Irish peer, and his first duty was to his estate in Cheshire. The deplorable effects of absenteeism, therefore, were deemed part and parcel of those implacable circumstances which had set upon Ireland the seal of a hopeless existence.

In 1759, however, the Lord Glenthorne who was father to the present earl determined to move to Mayo. The eccentricity which had secretly been nurturing itself among the Glenthornes had burst into flower in this pear-shaped original, a lover of boys and sopranos and a patron of the arts. His decision was regarded by his Cheshire neighbours as but a further instance of his frivolousness, and for once a welcome one. He had spent years flitting about the courts of Italy, trailed by portraitists, blackamoor pages in turbans, and a pathetic, hard-visaged wife. Now, so Cheshire reasoned, he had snapped the final cords and was adrift towards space. But in his mind’s eye he had seen a mansion, immense, exquisite, and chaste, and placed within a natural setting of wild and picturesque grandeur.

Eight years were devoted to the creation of Glenthorne Castle. Niebuhr, the great German architect, took up residence with the agent and spent six months pacing the ground upon which he proposed to build. He held to his eye a glass of his own design, which composed into an optical symmetry the hills and bogland and estuary at which he peered. Then stonemasons were imported from England and ornamental plasterers from Italy. Lord Glenthorne in London, with Niebuhr’s detailed drawings in hand, commissioned from Parisian craftsmen the furnishings and hangings for each of the many rooms. Some thirty families were cleared from the land upon which were laid down the gardens and walks, the artificial lake and waterfall, and the two mazes.

And yet it was not the triumph for which he had hoped. It did not eclipse, in magnificence or folly, the other great mansions of the day, Santry Court near Dublin, Castletown and Carton in Kildare, Russborough in Wicklow, and a score of others. Its unique advantage was its remote location, for most of its rivals lay within the civilised pale. Travellers through the wastes of Mayo responded to it with awe and stupefaction. That it existed for the sole pleasure of one person added to its air of the uncanny, the ensorcelled. For the Countess, after enduring Mayo for eight months, returned to England, taking with her their son, the present lord. Her husband was left alone, to take his solitary walks through his ordered labyrinths, tripping, near-sighted, over his peacocks. For Glenthorne, too, the pleasures of his palace faded after a few years, and he departed for Italy to rejoin a former lover, now a youthful bishop.

The effect of Glenthorne Castle upon his hundreds of peasants was complex and profound. Song and legend had told them of their own majestic, vanquished princes and chieftains. Beyond those, more ancient still, were the kings and heroes of the sagas, and, beyond even those, rose up gigantic wraiths, the gods of the old religion, dwelling within the wealth and splendour of light itself. But Glenthorne Castle suggested to them an absolute power of existence such as no O’Neill or O’Connor had ever possessed. It was an image by which their imaginations grasped historical and political actuality. Alien and enigmatic, the absent Big Lord had at last revealed his limitless and capricious will. Of the Big Lord himself, nothing at first was known save his high walls and colonnades, his lakes and waterfall, but these sufficed. The brief years of his residence in Mayo had endowed him with the characteristics of a legendary being, exotic and remote. What in Cheshire had been judged the eccentricities of an effeminate aristocrat seemed to Mayo eyes the manners of a splendid, grotesque sovereign. Few enough saw him, but the servants carried tales.

The Big Lord now was his son, and he too remained invisible. A quiet man, evangelical in his religion and Whiggish in his politics, he divided his year between Cheshire and London. He entertained but two deep passions, a detestation of the African slave trade and a hatred of his father’s memory. That Glenthorne Castle was a wonder to behold he did not doubt, but he chose not to look upon it. It had been the crowning folly of his father’s life, a sybaritic life wasted upon fripperies and base sins. In nightmares he beheld it with horrid clarity, like a scene from
Vathek
, blanched towers soaring upwards, naked serfs crouching by the iron gates. The very word
Irish
was repellent to him. When he heard himself described as “an Irish landlord” he was torn between embarrassment and incredulity. He chastised himself as a nabob, drawing his wealth not from brown Hindoo or black African, but from the white slaves of a neighbouring island. The thought was unbearable.

The Glenthorne estates, he determined, should at least have the benefit of a wise and prudent stewardship. Towards that end, and after careful reflexion and enquiry, he selected as his agent Andrew Creighton, Glasgow born but Cambridge educated. One wing of Glenthorne Castle was made into a residence for Creighton and his family, and he was given a salary suitable to his attainments. He also received two percent of the annual revenues of the estate. Lord Glenthorne’s only instruction to him was that he should take as his model the good steward in the New Testament. It was his task to manage the lands and goods which had been entrusted to him, to look to the well-being of the peasants and the livestock, and to deal with all men in a candid and forthright manner. Glenthorne had chosen well, for Creighton found in the sprawling, chaotic lands a challenge both to his skill and to his conscience.

His first task was to determine the exact extent and condition of the estates, the terms upon which small portions of it had been leased away, the complex network of document, claim, and custom by which the lands had been stitched across the county. As he had anticipated, this carried him into a series of lawsuits with the smaller landlords, but all of them were settled to his satisfaction. He had next to take a census of the human and animal population, and this was no simple task, for his predecessor had fallen into the slovenly ways of the countryside. For some forty years, the remote boglands and mountain wastes had harboured squatters. His predecessor, following local custom, had exacted no rent from these wretches. Creighton was uncertain as to how they should be dealt with, but he wished at least to know their numbers and their names. He spent weeks on this task, a pale, blunt-featured man dressed in sober brown, riding broken mountain paths. Behind him rode an Irish-speaking bailiff. The squatters fled at the sound of hoofbeats, entire families scrambling up the sides of high hills.

When the task was completed, he transferred the information to a large and intricately coded map which he hung in his office. This had once been the smaller of the castle’s two music rooms, and the map faced a painting of the Judgement of Paris, executed in eighteenth-century court dress, after the manner of Watteau, by one of Lord Glenthorne’s protégés. For the first year of his stewardship, Creighton spent most of his time in this office, acquiring a mastery over the details of the estate as they presently existed. This task, however, was but the preliminary to a far larger one, that of bringing order out of chaos.