The Year of the French (62 page)

“I am from Kerry.”

“Kerry, is it? They say that the best masters of all are bred in Kerry.”

“ ’Tis true,” MacCarthy said. “The birds in the trees speak in geometrical theorems.”

“Schoolmasters and poets,” the tavernkeeper said. “Schoolmasters and poets. Was it not in Kerry that Owen O’Sullivan lived and wrote?”

Ignorant huckster. Say Kerry to them and they say O’Sullivan back at you, as if no other man had ever put words together. Small wonder poor Scanlon had fled their company.

“It is back to Kerry that I am travelling,” he said, “and with enough experience at my back to match any master in Munster.”

“By God, you have picked a poor season for it,” Falvey said. “With warfare above you and warfare below, and the redcoat soldiers upon all the roads.”

“Not on this road, surely? It is quiet enough here.”

“And God send it remain so. Sure if you came from the north it must have been all around you.”

“I came from Manor Hamilton, and it is as quiet there as it is here.”

“And is it true that all of Mayo is in the hands of the people of Ireland, and the redcoat soldiers and the Englishmen driven out of it?”

“And the great landlords with them?” Michael Falvey asked.

“That is what is said in Manor Hamilton. And if that is true, the people of Ireland will not rest in Mayo. They will march down towards the south. What would Drumkeerin say to that?”

“By God, I know what I might do,” Michael Falvey said. “I might go along with them, and so might Dominick here.” At Tobercurry, two boys climbing over the high wall of the demesne to run after the drums and guns. One we left in the ditch at Collooney. A world’s distance from Collooney.

“You would my arse,” his father said. “What call has a smith’s son in Drumkeerin to go off with a pack of Mayo men?”

“Mayo men and Sligo men,” MacCarthy said. “And men from the midlands, if what I hear is true.”

“You seem to hear a lot in Manor Hamilton,” Falvey said.

“A rebellion cannot be kept a secret.” It was a rebellion: the word touched MacCarthy like a finger of ice. Small wonder the soldiers were building gallows.

“It is remarkable,” the tavernkeeper said. “Fighting there and fighting the other place, and here it is as quiet as a winter morning.”

Wait. One day, two at the most, and it will be on top of you. Mayo men, Frenchmen, horses, artillery, and the redcoats hard on their heels. Drumkeerin will be twisted the way plantations are twisted by big winds. MacCarthy felt like an angel of doom out of the Bible, carrying destruction from town to town. But this was no city of the plain, this poor crossroads village with a tavern and a forge. The whitewashed walls hugged him; fire warmed his bones. How could trouble come to this room? He drank quickly, scarcely touching the whiskey.

“Was it in Manor Hamilton you had your school, Mr. MacCarthy?”

He shook his head. “Above,” he said vaguely. “In Donegal.” He would never see Donegal now. Small loss. Small loss that he would not see the ugly province of Ulster. How far to Kerry, hundreds of miles, and what welcome would he find there? A better one than the soldiers would give to Drumkeerin, by Jesus. Let him but reach Killarney and he would be safe. In the town itself there were four houses in which he would be welcome, and beyond Killarney stretched all of Kerry. Lakes. The eyes of heaven. Wide and softly moving, their banks edged with ferns delicate as lace. Straight, slender reeds rose from the water, softly they caught the winds. At Killorglin, Patrick O’Reardon’s tavern: no bare cabin like this, but a noble and spacious room where poets and musicians drank; voices sent images, crystalline, perfect, above the smoke, contests of song, companionship. Hundreds of miles! Half the roads of Ireland between Kerry and his face.

“Sure we have a right to our own,” Michael Falvey was saying. “And if the men of Mayo and Sligo are taking it back for us, more power to their arm.”

His brother Dominick spoke at last. Taciturn, thin of body and face, he stood leaning against the wall. “There would be more power to their arm if the men of the other counties joined with them.”

“They will have no call upon Drumkeerin men, in any event,” his father said. “There will be neither rebels nor King’s soldiers upon this road. Would you not agree, Mr. MacCarthy?”

He shifted uncomfortably on the bench, and then shrugged. “Ach, who can tell?” A tavern, men talking before a fire. What more was needed? A crowing cock?

“That is the way of it,” Dominick said. “The men of the other counties rise up, and we bide at home hammering shoes onto horses. Like a field under water, Drumkeerin is. Dead.”

“ ’Tis easy talking here,” the tavernkeeper said. “Let you take a scythe and run up against a company of the King’s soldiers on fat horses, with lances to skewer you like a pig.”

“You mind his words,” Falvey said to his sons. “ ’Tis a giant that the English army is in this country, and it can walk with giant boots over those who stand up against it. It was so in Cromwell’s time and it is so now.”

The tavernkeeper nodded, and silently carried the bottle from one man to the next, filling their glasses. Hugh Falvey held out his glass, but avoided Dominick’s eye.

They know. Blacksmiths and tavernkeepers and small farmers know. Wisdom comes to them, a slippery dust upon their shillings. Forge and tavern stand firm upon the earth, battered by futile winds and the noises of rebellion. It is the sons who slip away to join spalpeens and wandering men, and the king they rebel against may be at no greater distance than the crossroads forge.

He drank half the whiskey and then looked across at Falvey. “ ’Tis well for you, Mr. Falvey, to have your forge so near the tavern. I am not so fortunate myself. I will buy a round for this pleasant company and then be off on my travels.”

“Indeed you will not. If you can find enough to keep you busy through the day, you will be more than welcome to a meal in my house and a bed.”

“I thank you, Mr. Falvey, but I am on my way now. Sure it is shocking the time it takes a man to eat a bowl of eggs in Drumkeerin.”

“Would you not think of Drumkeerin for your school, and talk with the priest about it?”

To the north, men moved down the main road, a clumsy ship traversing dust, bristling with pikes and muskets. Here they would have me bide, in this quiet place, sheltered from history and verse. Ravagers of quiet.

He shook his head. “Fill up the parting glass, Mr. Regan, for I must go and you must bide.”

“By Jesus, ’tis a lucky man you are, Owen MacCarthy,” Michael Falvey said. “That you can carry the tools of your trade inside your head, and can be off on any road that pleases you.”

“Oh, I was born into good fortune,” MacCarthy said.

But outside the tavern, in the dusty street, the smith stood beside him. “Do you know these roads, Mr. MacCarthy?” “I do not, but I can find my way south.”

Falvey put a hand on his arm. Broad, mottled. “Keep to the shore of Lough Allen for all of the afternoon, until you come to the end of the lough. The neck, you might call it. At the village of Ballintra there are two roads. There is the one road that will take you to the south. And there is the other road that will take you over a bridge across the Shannon to Drumshanbo, and beyond Drumshanbo into the midlands, to Longford and Granard, past the village of Ballinamuck.”

“I will know which road of those two to take,” MacCarthy said. “Thank you.”

He looked southwards, towards blue-hazed hills. Better to leave the roads at Ballintra, and travel by boreens, or across fields. Phoebus at one shoulder, beloved of poets and loving them in return.

Falvey tightened his hold upon the arm. “Which of them is it you are running from, the rebels or the soldiers?”

MacCarthy looked into his eyes, as clear and bulging as Duggan’s.

“ ’Tis a clever fox you are, Mr. Falvey. I should bide here in Drumkeerin and take lessons from you.”

“From the rebels?”

“From all of them. I was with the rebels until last night. I slipped away. I will put the length of Ireland between themselves and me.”

“And where are they?”

“They were at Manor Hamilton last night. They are closer now.”

Strong fingers, shaped upon iron, bit into his arm.

“What the hell do you mean, they are closer now?”

“They were to move southwards this morning, to the midlands.”

“Through Drumkeerin, so?”

“By this road, perhaps.”

“Then why the hell could you not have told us, man? They will be trampling through here in hours. You know that, do you not? What are they like at all?”

“Ach, sure they are men like yourself and like me. Poor landless gobshites from Mayo. ’Tis little interest they will have in Drumkeerin.”

“And the lobsterbacks will be here in pursuit after them, who are not at all men like you and me. They would not think twice about burning down a man’s three walls and then hanging him from the fourth. In the name of Christ, what have you brought down upon us, you Kerry hoor?”

“Me, is it? Sure there is nothing I want better from life than to be free of them. Bad cess to Mayo and Sligo, and to Drumkeerin as well. Wasn’t it the happy man I was before I knew the name of your stinking village.”

“Then leave so, you low cunt. Are you a schoolmaster at all? Can you read and write? I have a son within there can write the best copperplate, and tomorrow he may be off with those vagabones.” He raised his voice to a sudden shout. “Why here, in the name of Jesus? Why here?”

MacCarthy pulled his arm free. “Why anywhere? Why Killala? Why Castlebar? Does bloody Drumkeerin have a safe-conduct through history?”

Farmers tilled fields at Aughrim, by Limerick, beside the Boyne. Armies swallow us, spitting out bone and gristle, savouring the flesh and the blood. Plough blades at Aughrim turn over musket balls, bits of bone.

“Ach,” Falvey said, and turned his head towards the blue-hazed mountains. “Are you a schoolmaster at all?”

“Good luck to you, Mr. Falvey. And to your sons there. Sure no harm may come to Drumkeerin at all. They may rush through here like skitter through a goat.”

“They may,” Falvey said. “We can hope for the best.”

“I was kindly received here, and I am sorry to leave with your anger upon me.”

Falvey, still looking away from him, shook his head, his mood shifting. “It is the strange son always that is a grief and torment to a man, and yet he is the son that is loved best. Did you see the look on him in there? A few shouts and the glint of a pike would take him from me. God’s curse upon them, you are well shut of them.”

Eyes watering below broad, dark forehead, the mouth a thin, downward curve. What value had speech here? Will I become a leper, bringing calamity with me from village to village? Not after Ballintra. Not if I keep to this side of the Shannon and find my way south.

“What chance have they at all?”

“I don’t know. I can make neither head nor tail out of the ways of armies. ’Tis said that the midlands have risen up, and the fellows above are coming down to join with them. But the English are everywhere.”

“That is the way it has always been.”

“ ’Tis sick of it all that I am. I would like to take a draught and puke up the last month. Cabins burned, and men hanged and men with their throats cut like pigs.”

“Sure what else is there we can do? ’Tis a terrible way we have to live, and our fathers lived that way before us and our sons will after. What justice will come but what we can take at the end of a pike?”

“By God, Mr. Falvey, your mind is as confused as my own. I no longer know what I want, save to reach Kerry with a whole skin. It was bad before but we were safe from murder. I was safe enough above in Mayo, in a snug house and a warm bed.”

Falvey did not stay to see him leave; he turned and walked back into the tavern.

It was full morning. The sun hung above the cornfields. To his left, a girl carrying water crossed the field. Seeing him, she paused. The heavy pails pulled at her arms. He shaded his eyes to watch her. Vivid, delicate, her features in profile cut the sky. Beyond her, pigs rooted in a cabin yard. Ballinamuck, the place of the pig. An ugly sound. Bogwater, lifeless and brown. He waited for her to turn her head, but she avoided his glance. Deceptive early autumn covered them, the silence of morning.

FROM “YOUTHFUL SERVICE:
WITH CORNWALLIS IN IRELAND,”
BY MAJOR GENERAL
SIR HAROLD WYNDHAM

By no means the least of Lord Cornwallis’s virtues as a commander was his solid and sturdy sense of proportion. For a governor general of India and master general of the ordinance, the task of subduing a thousand Frenchmen and their native allies must have seemed a trumpery enterprise, but he addressed the task with a calm and settled seriousness which certain of his subordinates, and General Lake among them, might have studied to their profit. He was to display the merits of this attitude in the final days of the campaign, when disconcerting information came to him from several quarters.

That the second French fleet of invasion was under sail did not disturb him unduly, for he reasoned that even should it elude Admiral Warren, which was unlikely, the present affair would be well settled before it had an opportunity to disembark. The outbreak of a second insurrection in the midlands was a more alarming matter, however, and the more so because he could not easily spare men to douse out those flames. And most grave that report from Mullingar indeed was, for several thousands of rebels were involved, having in their minds the capture of Granard and Longford. The rebellion had come to resemble that most dangerous of fires which, when the flames are put down in one wing of the building, springs to life in a second. He was in the very act of draughting orders to the Argyll Fencibles, sending them to the defence of Granard, when a rider came to us from Lake, bearing word that Humbert was moving to the south, towards the midlands.

A week or so later, I was to hear from Colonel Crauford’s own lips of the anger which he experienced when, upon entering the town of Manor Hamilton, he discovered that Humbert had slipped away. He at once surmised what had happened: that Humbert, wheeling suddenly, was now marching south along the shore of Lough Allen, whence he would be able to cross the Shannon and seek a way to the midlands. He sent back a rider to Lake, and then moved south himself. Now, as throughout the campaign, he was like a wolf upon the hunt, agile and fierce, and would as surely have been a bear if on the defence—a magnificent fighting animal, resourceful and bold.