The Year of the French (71 page)

“ ’Tis simple enough what it means to me this summer,” Grace said. “And ’tis simple enough to the O’Dowds and the Geraghtys and the Blakes of Barraclough, and to Randall off somewhere in the midlands and to your own John in Castlebar gaol, and to those fellows with pikes that you met upon the road.”

“Oh, indeed yes,” Ellen said. “The army of the Gael has risen up, as was foretold in the poetry of O’Brudair and O’Rahilly and O’Sullivan and MacCarthy, the schoolmaster in Killala.”

Suddenly Grace grinned, and her face was lightened by an irrelevant mischief. She lowered her voice, “More has risen up in recent weeks than the army of the Gael, if there is any truth to the tale that is being told everywhere between Killala and Ballycastle. A common fellow who holds a cabin on the Cooper land has been giving out in the taverns of Killala that Owen MacCarthy has spent the night at Mount Pleasant, and with Kate Mahony and himself in the same bed. There has been a rising up indeed, if you take my meaning.” For decorum’s sake, she put her fingers to her lips, but they did not hide the grin.

“Grace MacDonnell,” Ellen cried, suddenly shocked into the present. Her father had the right of it, the MacDonnells were but coarse squireens, their life a life of stables and breeding, fox hunts and beagling, and Randall with a servant girl to attend to the needs of his body. “I am shocked and surprised that you would repeat the gossip carried by some common fellow into a Killala tavern.”

“But you took my meaning all the same,” Grace said. “Sure what is there in what I said that should cause you surprise? There is not a woman in the barony does not know that Kate Mahony brought Sam Cooper to the altar by first climbing into his bed, and women like that do not change. It is their nature.”

“That gives you no cause to repeat the story. Not even to a friend.”

“Go to God,” Grace said, laughing. “You will next be telling me that Owen MacCarthy has taken vows of chastity, and is walking the earth like a Franciscan. Sure there is no woman in the barony safe from that one, maid, wife, or mother.”

“More nights than one he has spent at Bridge-end House, and he has treated me always with the greatest respect, and with great delicacy of language.”

“And that is because of the respect he has for your father, with his cases of books and his boxes of poetry written out for him by the old ones, O’Rahilly and the others. And he has been as good as gold with me, butter would not melt in his mouth. And that is because if he so much as put a hand upon my shoulder, Randall would be after him with a whip and a cudgel. You know Owen MacCarthy’s reputation as well as I do myself, and if you do not you should make enquiries of Judy Conlon in the Acres of Killala or the hired girl at Ferdy O’Donnell’s. Sure MacCarthy is a poet, is he not, and they all have a name for the one vice. That and the drink.”

“Even so,” Ellen said uneasily. She would look a perfect fool if she denied that truth.

“And if he had Kate Mahony in Sam Cooper’s bed, then more power to his arm is my final view upon that subject,” Grace said.

“Another victory for the army of the Gael,” Ellen said. “But for all that, it is a sin either to give scandal or to repeat it.”

“It will not be the last victory,” Grace said. “We will see Randall riding back in triumph to Tyrawley, and all the other fellows with him. They will be the cocks of the walk in Tyrawley, as they should be by rights in their own country. And all that mean gang of yellow-faced Protestants who have lorded it over us will be brought low into the dust.”

Ellen stood up, and walked to the window. Empty stables, and a courtyard smeared with dried dung. “Perhaps that is why Randall rode off, but it is not at all what John had in mind. He wanted a free country, and all of us living together in peace, Catholic and Protestant and Dissenter.” The fierceness of Grace’s words echoed in her ears, and her own sounded foolish and flat, drained of John’s fervour.

“Little does John know of Mayo,” Grace said, “and his brother knows less. Either they will rule Mayo or we will, and that is the long and the short of it. Randall brought home one of John’s proclamations, and I declare to God I have never read such windy nonsense. All about the rights of man and the end of religious animosities which have so long divided us and all the rest of it. Randall started out to read it to us, but he couldn’t go on for the fit of laughter he was in, and mind you Randall has a great liking and respect for John.”

She walked with John along Bridge-end House’s leafy avenue, and they stood upon the bridge, the stream beneath them shallow and quick-moving. Pebbles and stones, smooth-polished, rested upon the stream’s sandy bed. “I would rather talk about us,” she told him. “What else have we been talking of?” he asked her; “ourselves and the kind of country in which we will be living.” “Bother the country,” she said; “what need that matter to us?” “It matters to me,” he said; “you will see. Women take no interest in such matters.” “In you,” she said; “I take a great interest in you. All those words. When they have all been spoken, the country will be the same, but you will be dead or in prison.” “If we lose,” he said. “You will lose, she said; “it drives me to despair that you cannot see that.” The words of men were polished stones upon a riverbed, opaque and lifeless. Words drown them, drag them beneath the water’s surface.

Still standing by the window, she said quietly to Grace MacDonnell, “I wish with all my heart that I had given myself to John. I wish that I had given him my body.”

“Ellen!” Grace cried. It was her turn now to be startled and shocked. “Whatever has possessed you to put such a wicked thought into your mind!”

“You have small need to ask such a question,” Ellen said. “He is in Castlebar gaol, and he is likely enough to be hanged there, or shipped off to some place where I could not be with him for years and years. And we have never known each other.”

“I should hope not!” Grace said. “A young woman who would do such a thing is lost to all honour forever. What other man would have you then if he knew of it, and if he did not you would have practised a great deception upon him and the marriage would go wrong from the start. There is great wisdom in the laws of the Church.” She added, as an afterthought, “And great virtue as well, of course.”

“Much does that matter to the way I feel,” Ellen said. Her tall, straight back turned towards Grace, she hugged her elbows tightly and stared down into the bare, sunlit courtyard.

“It is a natural enough thought,” Grace admitted. “But none the less sinful for all that.”

“My father thinks that George can somehow get him spirited away to North America or to Spain, and I could join him there, however great the distress to my father. But I have no confidence in that. When the English win, there will be a great reckoning, and ’tis small thought they will have for mercy. They will come with vengeance in their hearts, as they have always come.”

Grace stood up and crossed the small room to stand beside her at the window. “Will you not give over such notions? You have not listened to a single word I have said. It is for the English that the day of reckoning has come, the English and the Cromwellians. And long overdue it is.”

Ellen turned towards her, and smiled. “That will be a grand day entirely,” she said, as she had said to the farmer with the sash and the pistol. What good was there in talking to any of them, her father or the men on the road or even Grace MacDonnell, who had since childhood been her closest friend? What good had there been in talking to John, his words glittering and brightly painted, like the toys of children? She was alone with her grief and her love, and her certainty that the future was there for everyone to see, but no one save herself would look at it. If men lived among words and illusions and vanities, so too did Grace MacDonnell, not to mention Judith Elliott, that lovely and exquisite little ninny to whom Malcolm Elliott was wed, and who doubtless had sent him off into battle as Grace had sent Randall, with words empty and glowing.

“It will indeed,” Grace assured her. “You will see.” They all told her that she would one day see, as though she were somehow blinded, but before them lay the whole world as it did to Adam and Eve in the dreary and sonorous poem of which her mother had been so fond.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps I will see.” But she saw only her feelings, only her feelings were real to her, grief and foreboding, and her longing for John.

Later, as she sat the short, heavy-muscled mare in the courtyard, Grace rested a hand upon her arm. “Are you not a dreadful girl,” she said smiling, “that for the sake of passion you would turn yourself into a Kate Mahony and for passion’s sake let John Moore give you a tumble in the hay.”

“Not passion,” Ellen said soberly. “I cannot give a word to it, but that is how I feel. I regret bitterly that he has not known me.”

“I have often wondered what will it be like,” Grace said.

“Which of us has not,” Ellen said, returning the smile. “It is one of the few questions in life that gets itself answered, one way or the other.”

“And a small enough answer it must be,” Grace said, “or we would hear more spoken about it by the married women.”

At the gate, through which Randall had ridden with the sword from Aughrim and with the men from the MacDonnell lands behind him, Grace called out, “Remember now, the army of the Gael has risen up.” But Ellen rode off without turning her head to reply.

She met no one at all on the ride home to Bridge-end House. The road was as empty and quiet as though night had fallen, but it was the bright sunlight of late afternoon, which at that season holds hill, field, and meadow in suspension beneath a film of translucent varnish, as in the old Dutch painting which hung in the parlour of the O’Dowds at Enniscrone. Her observant eye was attentive to detail, an unfilled field, a pasture of small black cattle beneath low-branched trees, a lone thornbush. An empty cabin beside the road. The men perhaps were off with the rebels, but where were the women? She remembered then: a farm without women, two brothers, silent, hard-jawed men, broken into taciturnity by the thin, bitter soil. In a field beyond the cabin, a wide slab of black slate resting upon two stones: a Mass rock from the old penal days, her father had told her. On Sundays peasants had gathered there, huddled together, the women black-shawled; before their eyes a priest, half outlaw, changed bread to flesh, wine to blood. It was different now, he had explained to her, a chapel in Killala and one in Ballycastle, Mass celebrated openly by priests ordained in Ireland. History intruded upon the Dutch painting, shattered the varnish; beneath its cracked surface objects moved and changed. She hated history. History had taken John away from her.

On a rise of ground from which she could see the distant bay, she stopped and sat motionless, the reins slack in her thin, capable hands. The bay was empty, not a sail or a hull in sight, the water lifeless and grey. History had come to them upon those waters, three foreign ships riding at anchor, filled with men, muskets, cannon. History had come ashore at Kilcummin strand, watched by fishermen standing beside their huts. Poetry made actual. Not her mother’s, not Goldsmith or
The Seasons
by Mr. Thomson. “Now the soft hour of walking comes for him who lonely loves to seek the distant hills.” That other, older poetry inscribed on sheets of parchment in her father’s study, the black letters of an alphabet remote from English, with prophecies of ships from France, gold from Spain, the deliverance of the Gael. History, poetry, abstractions, words which had transformed and shattered her world. But for all those words, the world remained, tougher and more ferocious than language. A world of bogs upon which men died, their bellies ripped open, of black gibbets, of prison doors which words lacked the power to unlock. Erect, thin-shouldered, wiser than her years, wiser than her father or her lover, she stared at the bay as at an enemy which she lacked the power to fight or to resist.

But of that wisdom, she had no notion. Every voice in her society assured her that she knew nothing of the affairs of men, of nations, of armies moving across landscapes more vast than the boundaries of her proper world. Her sphere. In that other, larger world, matters were “managed” by men, farms sold and bought, committees formed, men left cabin and big house to follow words written upon proclamations, a banner of green silk. Her small world was bounded by a sewing room, scraps of bright brocade and calico, her mother lost in the sounds of murmurous verse, improbable romances. Wisdom rested within her father’s rheumy voice, his prudence fortified by knowledge of the past, or John’s eager voice, his new, bright-coined words, his talk of the future. Wisdom was farmers bargaining on market days, a grazier, pen in hand, bent over his ledgers. She took no pride in her quick, alert intelligence, the shrewdness of her judgements, her firm grasp upon the practical. These were virtues which she did not know that she possessed. She knew only that she was puzzled, and angry, but at what she did not know, and in anguish at the loss of John.

She rode on to Bridge-end House, to her father, who could assure her once again that George would manage something, that John would have a fate more fortunate than the black gibbet in Goldsmith’s poem.

Late that night, alone in her room, she did something which surprised and shocked her even as she did it. Carefully, she lit the two candles which stood on either side of the pier glass which had once been her mother’s. Then, facing herself in the mirror, she took off her modest nightdress of white muslin, and stood motionless, staring at her naked body. She had so rarely studied herself that it was almost the body of a stranger, a young, wild woman, an intruder upon her privacy. When the shock had quieted itself and she was able to accept the stranger as herself, she looked at her face, indistinct within the tarnished mirror, the wan light from the candles, a thoughtful face which had learned to conceal feeling. It was a handsome face, she had been told that often enough. But it was too hard-boned for beauty: her mother had told her that, softly and almost in apology. The cheekbones were too high for beauty, and the small chin too determined, the mouth thin-lipped and too wide. There were fashions in beauty, of course, as in everything else, and she had been born out of fashion. But her eyes were lovely, her mother had told her; they were her best feature, and she should make the most of them. Blue eyes, ill served by candlelight, studied the stranger’s body which was her own: too tall for a girl, as everyone told her. I am myself, her mother had told her, all the MacBride women are, and there is nothing to be done but to stand up straight and make the best of it. The stranger’s breasts were small, pointed. She raised her hand to touch one of them, and then, guilty and ashamed, dropped it to her side. The body was shadowed, slim flanks and long legs. She turned, and the stranger’s body that was her own turned with her. Sudden light caught her flank in the mirror’s dark, depthless surface. She raised both arms, and put her hands upon her cheeks, but continued to look, motionless now.