The Year of the French (29 page)

“Perhaps,” O’Halloran said. “I have always wanted to see America, but Mayo would do.”

Before he opened the door they shook hands formally.

A light rain had begun to fall. A rattle of drums and shrill of fifes drew Elliott to Mountjoy Square. Three companies of an English regiment were on parade, standing at stolid attention as sergeants barked orders at them. Passersby, drawn like Elliott to the spectacle, lined three sides of the square. Elliott stood watching, his hat tilted to one side. A greasy sky covered them, pressing down on the handsome red brick, the scarlet uniforms. A boy, hurrying along the footpath, paused for a moment to admire the scarlet and the music, and then went away, whistling between his teeth: “Oh, the French are on the sea, says the
Sean Bhean Bhocht
; they’ll be here without delay, says the
Sean Bhean Bhocht
.” Words. Words set to an errand boy’s tune. Elliott turned away, and walked back towards the river of turf stains and twigs.

Dublin, August 18

A L
ETTER
, S
IGNED
“Jr,” A
DDRESSED TO
M
R.
E
DWARD
C
OOKE
, U
NDERSECRETARY
, D
UBLIN
C
ASTLE

The Directory moves tomorrow to an address in the Liberties which I do not yet know. I passed today in Dorset Street with O’Halloran and Waring, who despatched letters by messenger to various county delegates. They received several visitors, among them Francis Keough of Carlow and Malcolm Elliott of Mayo.

Elliott avows that Mayo holds more than a thousand sworn United Irishmen, organised and armed. He is uncertain as to his authority over them, and names John Moore of Ballintubber, the younger brother of George Moore. Of George Moore’s radical sympathies there can be no question, but doubtless he is too sly to involve himself openly, entrusting that to his brother. Elliott is gloomy and half-hearted, but a perverted sense of honour holds him to the enterprise.

I beg to repeat that a most formidable organization exists throughout the country but most particularly in the midlands. It will rise up at word of a French landing, whether or not the Directory has been arrested. Several on the Directory, O’Halloran among them, are shrewd and able men. They would not scruple at assassination. I am running a most dreadful risk in the service of my country, and my neglect of my own affairs has placed me in most embarrassing circumstances. I must have a hundred pounds in hand by the first to meet the most pressing of my creditors, and I know not where to turn. It is for love of country that I act as I do, as well you know, and I hold in scorn those base informers who for profit betray their friends and associates. I am confident that His Majesty’s ministers will not see me fall into ruin.

Killala, August 20

On the night of August 20, the Tyrawley Yeomanry conducted a raid for arms and treasonable material in the town of Killala. They nerved themselves first with several rounds of whiskey, for which they crowded into the Wolf Dog in full uniform, carrying muskets with fixed bayonets. They were not soldiers at all, by training or temperament, and they were frightened. Rumours were everywhere that the Papists were drilling by night with French muskets, and that a massacre was being planned, more hideous than that of 1641, when rebels skewered babies for sport and hurled their bodies into the flames. Dublin had at last sent a regiment to Ballina, but it was an English regiment, with no notion of what Papists were like, or what they were capable of. The tavernkeeper, a Papist, served them with wary affability, his ruddy face bland and smooth, but with deep-set blue eyes moving nervously. Cooper stood treat for the whiskeys, and then mustered them in the street outside Broome’s church.

“Now then,” he said. “There’s many a poor Papist in Killala who is as loyal as you and me. You have just seen one there in the Wolf Dog, a hard-working publican. They are decent poor buggers who ask nothing better from life than a bit of peace and quiet. I don’t want to hear that they have been mistreated. What we are looking for is rebels against the Crown. There are muskets in some of those cabins and there are pikes in some of them. I want those men brought here, and I want their cabins burned. We will do that by God if we have to turn tonight into Saint John’s Eve, with a bonfire on every hill. You know what Papists are and so do I, and we know what the Papists did in Wexford because they were let thrive. We are like a small fort in the middle of a forest, but by God we are Protestants, and that is what has always made the difference. We stood by the good old cause in Cromwell’s day and we stood by it in King Billy’s day, and God saw us safely through. And every Papist who can see a flame and read its meaning will know that we still stand by the old cause.”

The yeomanry band, a drum and two fifes, purchased at Cooper’s expense, struck up the “Lillibulero,” and the buoyant, impudent tune beat against the weathered buildings in the narrow street. Cooper rested one hand on the hilt of his dress sword, and drew the other forward and back along the line of his jaw. He was as frightened as any of his men, and yet he saw no other choice. The Papists of Killala would have to learn that the Protestants of the barony were no mere collection of agents and shopkeepers. Glenthorne and the other great landlords could spend their days in England only because men like himself, small landlords like Gibson and harness-makers like Sergeant Tompkins, were willing to stand their land and hold it. Their great-grandfathers had won the land, fighting for it and spilling blood upon it. There were two races in the island, divided by an unending quarrel, and Protestants were outnumbered four to one. But they were favoured by brains, determination, and, apparently, God. But it was a dreadful act to burn a man’s cabin, even in summer. Cooper’s anger mounted against the Papists, who had forced cruelty upon him.

Tompkins and his squad came first to the cabin of a man named Hogan, a surly, barrel-chested man with a bad reputation as a faction fighter. Tompkins pounded on the door with his fist, and then Andrew Bludsoe, lifting his boot, kicked it open. Tom Robinson lifted his lantern and they rushed in.

Hogan and his wife were lying in the low bed, and three of their children lay athwart it. Other forms, dimly perceived, lay on the straw at the far side of the room.

“This is a search in the King’s name,” Tompkins said. “For treasonable material.”

Hogan’s wife shrieked and one of the children, hearing her, began to wail. Hogan sat up, rubbing sleep from his face.

“What the hell is this? Who are you?”

“We are here lawfully, on the King’s business,” Tompkins said.

“Bob Tompkins?” Hogan said. “Is that you?” He put his feet on the floor.

“Stay where you are,” Tompkins said.

Hogan’s wife, who did not understand English, began to weep.

“Shut up, woman,” Hogan said. “And keep that child of yours quiet. Will you get out of here, the lot of you, or will I take after you with a club.”

Tompkins turned to his men. “Give the place a good search. Search the thatch. That’s where they keep their pikes.”

“Pikes, is it?” Hogan asked. “I’ll give you pikes.” He lunged to his feet, and one of the yeomen, in terror, squeezed the trigger of his musket. The ball buried itself in the thatch, and the sound echoed with frightening volume. Hogan and the yeomen were shocked into a silence which was broken by the renewed wailing of the child. Its mother grabbed it tight. “Go on,” Hogan growled, sinking back to the bed. “Search away.”

Because of an old grudge against Malachi Duggan, he had had nothing to do with the Whiteboys or the United Men, but the next day he walked up to Randall MacDonnell’s, and took the oath in the stable yard.

Tompkins and his men ransacked a dozen other cabins, but they discovered neither pikes nor muskets. The hills to the north and the east glowed with dull orange fires.

“Those aren’t all cabins,” Tompkins said. “The crops have been set afire.”

“Serves them well enough,” Bludsoe said. “Croppies lie down.”

They stood looking at each other, half ashamed that they hadn’t had better luck, half relieved that they had no cause to burn men’s cabins.

“I know a pike or a musket when I see it,” Robinson said. “But would someone be good enough to tell me what treasonable material means?”

“Hogan, perhaps,” Tompkins said.

“Hogan’s wife,” Bludsoe said.

“Evidence or not,” Robinson said, “I’ll take my oath that Hogan is a rebel. He used be a great one at the faction fights, do you remember?”

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” Tompkins said. They had found nothing in the cabins but the usual Papist filth and litter, half-naked women with squalling children hanging to their knees, red-faced men shielding their eyes against the lantern’s glare.

“Spreadeagle Hogan to his doorpost back there,” Robinson said, “and give him a good lashing. Then let’s hear what he has to say.”

“No,” Tompkins said sharply. “We will have none of that. I have no stomach for this business.” Another fire flared to the east. First them and now us. The other way around, they would say. The pot was on the boil now, and no way to pull it from the fire. Glaring flames burned away the familiar landscape of his childhood.

Bludsoe took a flat bottle from the tail pocket of his uniform and passed it around. Tompkins took a deep swallow.

“It was little enough we saw of your bottle when Cooper was standing the rounds,” Robinson said. “You mean hoor.”

“Their crops burned away,” Tompkins said, “and not a wisp of thatch above their heads. By God, that’s hard.”

“Treasonable thatch,” Bludsoe said. “ ’Tis little mercy they would show to us, Bob Tompkins, and well you know it.”

One of the men began to sing. After the first verse, others joined in.

Tompkins put his arm around Bludsoe’s shoulder and sang with them. Where were you, when all was said and done, if you didn’t stand by your own.

Killala, August 21–22

MacCarthy spent a day and a night at the O’Donnells’, where he helped Maire at her work. The next night he woke up in an unfamiliar room, beside an unfamiliar girl who was in service to a Rathlackan gentleman, a cheerful, empty-headed girl who said she dragged him away from a dance where he was becoming quarrelsome. He had no recollection of the dance or of the quarrel, or indeed of the girl’s body. He put his hand upon her breast and it was new to him, soft and restful. “You are all the same,” she said carelessly. “When you are sober you are shy and when you are drunk you are useless.” “Oh, God, I feel terrible,” MacCarthy said, “my guts are rolling around inside me.” “When you are drunk you are useless,” she said again, “you are the same the lot of you.” “Thanks be to God,” MacCarthy said, “I thought I was losing my memory.” But he spent his days talking to men in the fields, or watching the screaming seabirds at Downpatrick Head, or talking with the fishermen on the coast. The fishermen had great sport with him, answering his ignorant questions with great patience, and bearing with his banter.

He passed a long afternoon at Randall MacDonnell’s, where he arrived just as Kate Cooper, an old convent friend of Grace MacDonnell’s, was leaving after a visit.

“Make way,” he said, as she climbed into her cart. “Make way for the daughter of Mick Mahony of the heavy whip.”

“It is your own back would feel that whip, MacCarthy, if he could hear you making sport of me.”

“No sport at all, Kate. None at all. By God, you are the handsomest woman in Mayo, with the full bloom of young womanhood on you.”

“You have no call to be talking that way to a married woman. ’Tis little enough time you had for me when I was a young woman, standing with the others along a wall of my father’s kitchen, listening to you give out with your old songs.”

“You are wrong there, Kate. I could not take my eyes from you, but I was tongue-tied from shyness and in terror of your father. You were a flame in shadows.”

“It has been well said that a poet cannot put his eyes on a woman without trying his luck.”

“Ach, Kate,” he said, resting his hand on the cart. “The thoughts that you put into a man’s mind are scandalous as you sit there on a fine August afternoon.”

Half smiling, she returned his stare, holding the reins in one hand, and the other resting, a loose fist, upon her hip.

“Shy, is it? You are bold enough for any two men, MacCarthy, to stand making flirtatious conversation with a married gentlewoman in the middle of the day.”

“Now, Kate. I stand here drinking in every feature of you, and you call it conversation. You have been ill schooled in the use of English.”

“Whatever it is, it has gone on long enough,” she said, and then broke suddenly into Irish. “You are a rogue, MacCarthy, and an ill-favoured one at that.”

“There now,” he said. “There is proper speech from you. If we start out together in Irish, there is no telling where we will end. I am most eloquent in Irish.”

“So I have heard,” she said. “You are a great success with servant girls and the sisters of small farmers.”

“You are a fine hot-tempered woman, Kate Mahony,” he said, “with a small waist and a fine bosom. You should be very pleased with yourself.”

“Cooper,” she said. “I am wife to Cooper.”

He stood watching her, as the cart moved down the road. By God, but the little captain had a prize for himself there. A woman like that could not rake the ashes or pare her toenails or bring water to men labouring in the fields without provoking the passion of the beholder. For hours after talking with her, MacCarthy felt randy, and the phrases of unwritten love songs tumbled in his mind.

He had a long conversation with a boy who had attended his school for a year and called him “master.” They sat on a tumbled-down wall and MacCarthy taught him nonsense rhymes and riddles. “What is it can walk on the water without any feet?” “Is it a ship, master?” “It is,” MacCarthy said, and looked towards the bay, hidden from them by the line of low hills. “You knew that one. You have been wasting your time at conundrums.”