The Year of the French (61 page)

“Peace is not taught with weapons,” I said, but might as well not have spoken, for all the attention he paid to my words. Squatting there in half-darkness, his uniform soiled, his beard a coarse mat, and his head round and hard, he might have been that first ancestor of his, a Cromwellian ferocious in his piety, his sword a Scripture.

“By God, you are wrong there, Mr. Broome,” he said. “ ‘I bring not peace but a sword.’ That is in the Scriptures, is it not? The Protestant Scriptures?”

“In the Christian Scriptures,” I said. “A perplexing text. So much else in the New Testament speaks with a different voice.”

“Not to me it doesn’t,” Cooper muttered, with a quick jerk of the compact head.

“ ’They that live by the sword shall perish by the sword.’ Those are also the words of Our Saviour.”

“And He never spoke a truer word,” Cooper said. “Have you not seen those fellows swaggering around with great cutlasses strapped to their waists? By God, there will be a reckoning made one of these days. If you drink the porter you must pay the tapster. This was a peaceful land a year ago, and it will be one again, please God.”

“Please God,” I said, overjoyed to encounter a sentiment which I could applaud without reservation. “If I am not here tomorrow, I shall be upon the day following. Mrs. Broome and I are most heartily sorry for your present circumstances. I am certain that your courageous stand in the streets of this town will be remembered by the government.”

“The government!” Cooper said. “Cornwallis and his gang of clerks and parade-ground English soldiers. Don’t talk to me about the government!”

It was an injunction which I was most ready to obey, and after a few meaningless civilities, I escaped from the foetid room, for as he had truly said, the air was vile-smelling and oppressive.

And yet a twenty-minute walk would take me away entirely from the grey, stony town and into the green and abundant countryside. Even in early autumn, it is a most astonishing green, unmatched in either England or France, a deep and seductive hue, and rich beyond the point of healthiness, being nurtured by the heavy rainfalls. Black cattle grazed in upland pastures, tended by women, or else by men too sensible to wander down into that disastrous village. I fell into the habit of riding the narrow roads between the fields, under the protection of my suit of black and low, broad-brimmed hat. In early morning, bird song filled the sea-washed air, and the heavy scent of wheat, corn, and barley. A most abundant crop, and its neglect may truly be called sinful. How merciful is the Creator in the simplicity of His instructions, bidding us to those tasks which lie closest to hand: the harvester’s scythe, the fisherman’s net, the carpenter’s hammer commend us to our duties. I hold that the sin rests most heavily upon those who incited such simple men to rapine and rebellion—vainglorious squireens, tavern bards, briefless barristers drunk upon Rousseau and Tom Paine. The simple of this world are ever the prey of the clever and the unscrupulous. Most willingly and despite my cloth would I have placed the hempen noose around the neck of Mr. Theobald Wolfe Tone!

“Sure what have they to lose?” O’Donnell asked me, “those cowherds, as you call them?” It was long after midnight, with a sea wind wet against the windowpanes, and two bottles of my madeira before us. “Cowherds, spalpeens, cottiers, labouring men. A bad crop one year and they are on the winter roads, huddling in ditches with rags and bits of blanket, more naked to the rains than cows or sheep or potatoes, and of less value. You’ll not frighten them with talk of hanging.”

“But not you,” I said. “You have fields and pastures, and you have a family. And all this you have foolishly thrown away.” I would not have spoken so bleakly, almost in taunt, had I not conceived a desire somehow to extricate him from his desperate situation, for as I have said he was a young man of several estimable virtues, though mingled with vices and a foolish temper.

“I watched them take poor Gerry away to the goal,” he said. “And I knew then that I have nothing at all. Slaves we are, upon our own land and in our own country. The poor niggers in North America fare better.”

But at other times he would speak of the round of peasant pleasures and pastimes with a zest and an affection which I found most moving—their feast days and patterns, even their wakes. Joy was interwoven with the harshness of their lives. Cabins bursting with music came alive for me as he spoke, the feet of the young dancers, the plaintive violins, voices thick with whiskey and song. Their lives have ever been a mystery to me, but a door will at times be briefly opened, and peering through it I can perceive essences, vivid but imprecise. Some slight distance, thin and sharp as a knife’s edge, set O’Donnell too apart from those of whom he spoke, as though he spoke of a world well and richly remembered from which he had stepped aside. I thought then that this was a consequence of his years abroad, at the seminary in France. But I now believe that he realised that all had been changed for him by his fatal act of rebellion.

And all this while, as we lived with our uncertainties, the wretched affair was drawing to its predestined close. Upon that very night of sea wind and madeira, Humbert, many miles to our east, swerved from his northward path, and began his march to the south, along Lough Allen, to the midlands. Colonel Crauford, it has been said, was beside himself with rage when he entered Manor Hamilton to find the trap sprung but the quarry vanished. But to the south lay a larger trap. Lord Cornwallis had secured one side of it to the Shannon, at Carrick, and was marching eastwards, to deal with the risings in Longford and Granard. Humbert’s only hope now lay with the size and the success of those risings, for if the main road to Dublin lay open, he could then move upon the undefended capital. In Killala, day drifted into day, but for the two armies, time was shrinking to hours.

It has been stated that as Lord Cornwallis made ready to move he received a despatch from Dublin which afforded him welcome amusement. The second French fleet of invasion had at last set sail, but Admiral Warren stood ready to receive them as they approached the Irish coast. And this, as my readers will surely recall, was accomplished, at which time it was discovered that aboard one of the French ships was the celebrated Theobald Wolfe Tone, who was not shielded by his French rank and uniform from the fate which he deserved. And thus all the knots of the wretched enterprise were pulled neatly together. I have not seen so much as a cheap engraving of Mr. Tone, but in my mind have formed a picture of him, an agile little fellow, sharp of nose and thin of mouth, all ambition and egotism, his head crammed with humanitarian cant, and his heart bursting with mischief. But perhaps I wrong him. It may be that he had little understanding of the bloody engines whose springs he touched. I know only what I have myself experienced, the men I have seen slain, the thatch in flames, the homeless upon the roads. May the Almighty show to him more mercy than I can summon up!

When I seek to recall those days and nights in which we were all locked together in Killala, prisons within prisons, it seems strange that I remember most vividly evenings spent in talk with O’Donnell. Imagine us if you will, a clergyman past middle years, balding but with a ludicrous aureole of greying hair falling to the collar’s edge, plump and soft after a half-century of sedentary life, with no height to give me dignity, but round, full legs swinging back and forth as I sat facing him, the tips of black boots barely touching the polished wood. And a large-boned young peasant, a face firm yet puzzled, skin coarse and reddish of hue, great murderous pistol thrust into his belt. As we leaned towards each other across the table, we leaned from two worlds which had no knowledge the one of the other. Perhaps my face, like his, bore the marks of puzzlement, as I strained to understand him.

I can stand now, any day I choose, on the broad green at Castlebar, that green where I was one day to look upon the gibbeted bodies of the rebels, and if it is a fair day can listen to fiddler and piper, their notes jostling the lowing of cattle and the shouts of pedlar and card-trickster, and all will seem but an ugly jangle, raw, brutish sound. But on another day, as I am riding, it may be, to some ailing or infirm parishioner, a voice will float to me across half a valley, or even a voice drifting from pothouse window in the grey, sea-streaked village, and I can almost read its meaning, a voice across mountain grasses or slippery cobblestone.

Drumkeerin, September 6

Sunlight fell in spangles through the high hedges on either side of the road, the soft sunlight of early morning, and to the south lay the warm, harvested fields. Tawny. The small hillocks of the gathered hay crouched, small submissive creatures. From cabins upon low southward hills rose plumes of smoke. He could almost smell them, warm smoke from turf fires. No wind. The plumes rose straight, unwavering. Low fences crisscrossed the fields. Well tended, they rode across the soft rolls of the countryside. The lands of peace. He twisted round, and looked behind him. Quiet fields as far north as the eye could see. A magpie in flight. Flash of black and white.

A half hour later he was in the village. At a crossroads, four houses, a huckster’s shop, a tavern, a forge. Hens pecked in the dunghills. Metallic clatter from the forge. He was watched from the windows of shop, cabins. He walked to the tavern door and knocked.

An old man came at last out of the inner room. Toothless, cheeks sunken, hair grew from a brown mole on his chin.

“Could the woman boil me a few eggs and butter some bread?” MacCarthy asked. “And while I am waiting, I will have a glass.”

“For God’s sake, man. It is early in the morning.”

“A proper time for eggs, so.” He sat down on a bench facing the fire, and rested his hands on his knees.

“You are on the roads early.”

“I must be, to have every face in the village peering out at me. What name has the village?”

“ ’Tis Drumkeerin. You must have come a fair distance not to know the name of Drumkeerin.”

He measured whiskey into a glass, carefully, and handed it to MacCarthy. “That will be twopence.”

“I will pay for it with the eggs and the bread, when your woman has them ready for me.”

“There is no woman. It will be twopence more for the eggs and bread. Fourpence in all.”

“You are very quick at sums. You must have had good schooling.”

The long, thin lips spread to a smile. “Quick at sums, slow at courting is the saying.”

“Is it? I have never heard that. It must be a Drumkeerin saying.”

The gold of sunlight and full harvests was in the glass. It caught the morning sun. Whiskey lay upon his tongue, familiar and comforting. Whiskey my only village. How long?

Holding the glass in his hand, he walked to the door, and resting his shoulder against the post looked out into the street. The forge had fallen silent, and the smith, a hand upon the bellows, stood facing the tavern. Two younger men were beside him. MacCarthy touched his hand to his forehead, and they returned the gesture,

He drained the glass and walked back towards the fire.

An hour later, the eggs and bread settling heavily into his stomach with four glasses on top of them, he was still sitting there, his long legs stretched towards the fire. Across from him sat the smith, whose name was Hugh Falvey, and the other men from the forge, who were Falvey’s sons. The four of them had glasses in their hands, and they were moving rapidly towards friendship. Falvey had one call upon his services, but he attended to it quickly and then returned.

“You could do worse than think of Drumkeerin,” he said. “ ’Tis two years since there has been a schoolmaster here, and they are growing up as wild and ignorant as hares.”

“Small wonder,” MacCarthy said. “A priest is badly needed in a village, but it is with the schoolmaster that civilisation comes. A good master to beat the love of learning into them with a stout stick.”

“Oh, by Jesus,” Michael Falvey said, “the master that was in it had a stout enough stick, but it was not upon the boys that he practised with it.” His brother snickered.

“There is enough of that,” his father said. “You will find good masters and bad masters, as you will in any trade.”

“ ’Tis not a trade,” MacCarthy said. “What would we be at all without the schoolmasters but a pack of bare-arsed heathens?”

“ ’Twas good money the schoolmaster Scanlon got from us,” Falvey said, “together with chickens for his pot and turf for his fire. Drumkeerin is not an ignorant village. Would you know him at all, Mr. MacCarthy, or know his reputation? Michael Scanlon, a short, heavyset man with bandy legs. Michael Scanlon.”

“That is a Limerick name, Scanlon,” MacCarthy said, “and half of them are called Michael. Michael goes with Scanlon like salt with potatoes.”

“There is now a wee Scanlon in Drumkeerin as well,” Michael Falvey said, “but his poor bitch of a mother has no claim upon the name.”

“Are you a Limerick man yourself, then, Mr. MacCarthy?”

“I am not,” MacCarthy said, shuddering.

“But you are from Munster,” Hugh Falvey said. “That is clear from your speech.”