The Year of the French (28 page)

“What is it about?” someone called.

“About a boy who was hanged,” MacCarthy said. Worst of all deaths, the body writhing, breeches stained with shameful death, the face blackening.

The songs never told you that. Macroom: Paddy Lynch dancing on air. And the song they sang was of Ireland free. “A croppy boy. For God’s sake, is there no one in this cabin has a song with some life in it?”

Before he left, O’Donnell asked him to recite his lament for O’Sullivan Beare, but he refused. It was an intricate poem and it depended upon allusions, hints, the small gestures of remembered names. These poor cowherds, matted hair, breeches streaked with the dung of cattle, would be puzzled and embarrassed. As though a velvet-coated gentleman had flung himself into the room to call for punch.

The rain had begun again and then had ended during his hour in the cabin, but the air was still heavy, and the tall grasses were drenched.

Dublin, August 18

Malcolm Elliott arrived in Dublin on the morning mail coach, took a room in a Dawson Street hotel, and breakfasted there in the company of squires, middlemen, and a few English officers.

He had spent the night in Granard, to visit with Hans Dennistoun, a member of the provincial executive, and was encouraged by what he had heard. The United Irishmen were strong in the midlands; their organization had survived harassment and the arrest of several leaders. The county executives for Longford, Westmeath, and Cavan worked closely together. More remarkable than that, the strategy of the United Irishmen, an alliance of Protestant and Catholic, had been achieved. Dennistoun, the Longford commander, was a Protestant, an affable, large-bodied farmer with a quick, decisive intelligence. Michael Tuomy, his seconder, was a Catholic apothecary in Granard. At dinner, listening to their talk, Elliott could imagine himself back in Tom Emmet’s Rathfarnham villa. Why had such urban notions taken root here, in this rich pastureland? The bulky farmer and the spare, bespectacled apothecary sat perched on the edge of their chairs, amicably arguing tactics, politics, principles, as though there had never been a rebellion crushed in Wexford, as though Catholics had not been dragooned and hanged, or Protestants butchered at Wexford bridge and burned alive at Scullabogue. They lacked Elliott’s bitter, unspoken belief that they were committed to a cause hopeless and tainted. Perhaps they were right.

But the road southwards to Dublin offered evidence at every mile that the island had witnessed one insurrection and was preparing for a second. Mullingar, the great cattle market of the midlands, was also a garrison: The troops now stationed there had spilled from the barracks. Their neat encampments were spread beyond the edge of the town, in rolling meadows. Troops were on the move south of Kinnegad, slogging past the coach in double files, followed by bored young officers. Their accents, as they shouted cheerful obscenities at the coachman, were English. Perhaps they belonged to the supplementary regiments which Cornwallis had obtained from London. There was an empty gallows and a whipping post at Kilcock cross and a row of burned cabins in the village street. But Maynooth was quiet, its single street dominated by the massive estate walls of Carton, seat of the Duke of Leinster, Edward Fitzgerald’s brother. Sentries were posted along the Royal Canal, at the outskirts of Dublin.

At breakfast, Elliott shared a table with an estate agent from Mallow, a witty, choleric man, who discoursed upon cattle, fox hunting, and politics between mouthfuls of mutton chops and slabs of thickly buttered bread. Cornwallis was being too bloody lenient towards the surrendered rebels of Antrim and Wexford, he said. What the country needed was a good stiff dose of Cromwell’s ghost.

“No trouble with the people on my land,” he said. “Treat them fair and they’ll live as quiet as a parson. A pair of these United Irish vagabones arrived to stir them up, and one of my tenants tipped me the wink. I had my bailiff hang them up by the heels from a gable end. No need to hang them properly. Arrested, tried, convicted, and sentence executed in twenty minutes. My tenants pelted them off the land with rocks and clods.”

A rough-and-ready view of matters: the national grain. Elliott found him, on the whole, a pleasant companion and they spent an agreeable hour together.

After breakfast he strolled north, across the Liffey, to Dorset Street. It was a clear, brilliant morning, and the city of cool Portland stone and warm brick seduced his senses. At College Green he paused, where the curved masses of the Parliament House faced the austere, Palladian façade of Trinity College. What was that jingle about Parliament by Swift? Wolfe Tone was forever quoting it: “Half a bow shot from the College; all the world from wit and knowledge.” Tone’s mind was peppered and riddled by tags of poetry and song. “A soldier’s a man, and life’s but a span, Why then let a soldier drink.” Somewhere in Shakespeare.

Dublin was the creation of Elliott’s people and Tone’s, Protestant and Anglo-Irish, descendants of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian and Williamite settlers. The river was flanked by the public buildings of that nation of Protestants, the Custom House with its intricacies of design, the heavy, grandiloquent dome of the Four Courts. On the streets running off the river stood the town residences of the Protestant nobility and the houses of the Protestant merchants and solicitors and barristers. Elliott was pledged to the overthrow of their oligarchy, and yet he could not walk through the streets of Dublin unreminded of the extraordinary triumphs of his caste. They had inherited a maze of mean streets huddled about the Castle. By its side they had raised up this lovely and powerful assertion of their pride. “Why then let a soldier drink.” Iago: Iago’s song in
Othello
. Trust Tone to quote Iago.

He paused again at the wide bridge leading to Sackville Street, and leaned over the parapet. Below him, boats and barges creaked against their moorings. The wide brown Liffey seemed to be flowing towards him, although he knew it did not, from the distant centre of Ireland, bearing lake water, twigs of distant trees, the stains of black turf. A skein of arteries, roads, rivers, canals, carried the wealth of Ireland to Dublin. There it stuck, a bit of it. The rest was shipped off to England.

The door in Dorset Street was opened by Oliver Waring, a young Protestant solicitor whom Elliott knew and trusted. In a small room upstairs Patrick O’Halloran, a pamphleteer and physician, and Jack Russell, a farmer from Kildare, were seated at a round table of dark olive wood.

Elliott looked around the room and smiled. “Is this the Directory?”

“Part of it,” Waring said. “And you were lucky to find us here. We are moving to the Liberties.”

Elliott sat down. “Well, you have my letter, I take it. You asked for an organization of some kind in Mayo and now you have it. There are several hundred men under local leaders who say they will come out if the French land. I cannot answer for their zeal, and I am uncertain as to my authority over them.”

“There is no question but that the French will land,” Waring said. “But there is no way of knowing when it will be, or where, or how many men.”

“Or why,” Elliott said. “If they had put five thousand men into Wexford or into the north, two months ago, they would have tipped the scale.”

“But they did not,” O’Halloran said. “Our task now is to wait for them to come, and then to bring out as many men as we can. This has gone too far. We have no choice.”

“No,” Elliott said. “We have no choice.”

“Look here,” Waring said. “We have returns from more than twelve counties, and some of them are well organised. In Longford alone—”

“I know about Longford,” Elliott said. “I spent the night with Hans Dennistoun.”

“Then he must have told you about Westmeath and Cavan. And we can tell you about Waterford.”

“Let me instead tell you about East Mayo. There are three or four hundred Whiteboys there who think they are spoiling for a fight. The men who will bring them out are squireens and faction fighters. A few estate agents and stewards. They have some guns they picked up by raiding gentlemen’s houses.”

“By your orders?” Jack Russell asked.

“No,” Elliott said. “After the raids, I gave my approval to them. That should give you a sense of how matters stand. A man who served with the Austrians is drilling them at night, but I don’t think he will have them trained in less than a century. The only man who has any authority over the Papist squireens is John Moore of Ballintubber, and Moore is exactly twenty-two. I doubt if anyone can control the Whiteboys.”

“But they have been sworn,” Russell said.

“Oh, yes. Every mother’s son of them is now a member of the Society of United Irishmen. What they think that means, God knows.”

O’Halloran laughed. “You are not the most cheerful of delegates, Mr. Elliott.”

“I am not. We had a good chance in ‘ninety-six, and a fair one this spring. We have none at all now, unless the French put in a very large force and do most of the fighting.”

“Are you making a suggestion, Mr. Elliott?” O’Halloran asked.

“The north is smashed,” Elliott said, “and Wexford is smashed. You are going to get local risings which the British can put down at their leisure. Hundreds, probably thousands of poor bewildered peasants and artisans are going to be blown apart by cannon and strung up from gable ends.”

O’Halloran rubbed a palm across his eyes. “I have spent nights saying that to myself, Mr. Elliott. I declare to God I have. And I have also told myself that if there is no rising now, there will be none for fifty years. This vile system under which all of us live will be fastened upon us forever and the key cast away into the sea.”

Elliott turned to Waring. “And you?”

“I have a more sanguine nature, perhaps. Those local risings could be formidable indeed. If the French make a landing and we do not take advantage of it, we will be worse than fools. And most of the delegates are agreed upon that.”

“They are at the moment,” Elliott said. “When it comes to the sticking point, will they take up pikes and lead peasants against regular troops?”

“We know that you will,” O’Halloran said gently. “And we must hope that they will. The Directory here cannot control events. We are ten or so men of no great ability, and no claim to leadership save that we have avoided arrest. We can urge the counties to act. Order them to, if you like, but it comes to the same thing. If there is a rising, it will be a peasant insurrection, and Dublin lawyers and physicians have little power to affect such matters. By the time the French land, we will most likely be in gaol with the other Dublin men.”

“In gaol or in the Liberties,” Russell said.

“It is much the same,” O’Halloran said. “They lifted Fitzgerald in the Liberties.”

“He was stagged,” Waring said. “Stagged and then lifted. Someone sold him to Higgins and Higgins sold him to Cooke at the Castle.”

“Selling each other like heifers at a fair,” Elliott said in disgust. “How do you know that I won’t sell you? I could turn Mayo over to Dennis Browne and my fortune would be made.”

“Hardly,” O’Halloran said. “Not at Castle prices. I think Fitzgerald went cheap.”

“Was there ever a country that deserved liberty less,” Elliott said. “Four men sitting around a table in Dublin. We should be on the stage of a theatre.”

“An unimpressive spectacle,” O’Halloran said mildly. “But the boulder has been given a shove down the hill and nothing will stop it now. If I could stop it I would not.”

A short man with deep-set eyes behind spectacles and a wide expressive mouth, he had entered politics as a moderate, a member of the Catholic Committee and author of pamphlets on the penal laws. Now he was implacable.

“I am no different from yourselves,” Elliott said. “A Dublin solicitor stranded in the wilds of Mayo. A careless landlord and a solicitor without clients.”

“You lack patrons,” O’Halloran said. “Perhaps Dennis Browne is your man.” He smiled to take the offence from his words.

“No,” Elliott said. “For whatever good I am, you may depend upon me.”

“We know that,” O’Halloran said.

Elliott stood up. “This is the most misfortunate land on the face of the globe. We are like gamblers, and this is the final throw of the dice. Perhaps what’s needed are swaggering playactors like Tone.”

O’Halloran saw him to the door.

“I regret, Mr. Elliott, that we did not become better acquainted in your Dublin years.”

“Do you see any hope in this?” Elliott asked with vehemence. “Any at all?”

“Oh, yes,” O’Halloran said. “Otherwise I would not be in it. We both know that—a man like myself comes to the Directory by default, so to speak. Fitzgerald is dead. Emmet and MacNevin and Bond are in prison. Some have turned tail. Some have become government informers. But events have a momentum of their own. The French will land. Parts of the countryside will rise up. And tomorrow night I will be in a hole in the Liberties, listening to some braggart tell me how he can hold the Wicklow hills and waiting for Major Sirr to break down the door.”

Elliott gave him his harsh, barking laugh, a fox in thicket. “Like a figure in Plutarch,” he said.

“A clumsy Hibernian counterfeit. I am a fair physician, you know; I have a knack for it. But in my middle years I have discovered my true talent. Do you know what my talent is? Political rhetoric. I discovered it when I was writing those pamphlets. Justice, equality, the rights of man—the words fairly flowed from my pen. ’Tis little I thought then of burning cabins or unarmed men cut down by cannon fire.”

“It is a common failing these days,” Elliott said. “Words have a splendour for us, and so we send them off into the world to do mischief. It began for me with words. Books, pamphlets, debates.”

“The words are abroad now,” O’Halloran said. “And battered beyond recognition.”

“Have you ever been to Mayo?” Elliott asked suddenly.

“Nor anywhere near it. I am a Limerick man.”

“It is not a land hospitable to ideas,” Elliott said. “Strong feelings perhaps, but not ideas. The soil isn’t right for them. Perhaps someday I can show it to you.” Unspoken bonds of sympathy drew him to the small, stoical man. Flies, stuck in the amber of ruined hopes.