The Year of the French (72 page)

Then, as carefully as before, she took up her nightdress from the chair and put it on again, blew out each of the candles. Odour of candle lingered briefly in the air and then was gone. In darkness, she crossed the familiar room to her bed. Beyond the window, field and pasture lay in darkness, the moonlight too faint for vision.

She lay motionless in bed, her hands by her sides, staring upwards into darkness. Presently, silently, she began to cry. Tears filled her eyes, and then moved down her cheeks. She did not raise her hand to brush them away. She cried for John, in his dark, unimaginable gaol, who had never known the stranger’s body which was her own; for her mother, sitting half asleep as sunlight streamed upon the foolish book which lay in her lap; for Randall MacDonnell, riding boisterous and confident between the gateposts; for the Tyrawley men stumbling somewhere in the darkness of the midlands armed with pikes and scythes; for her father standing beside her on the terrace, comforting and puzzled, the wind ruffling his hair. She cried for her own grief, for the anguish and knowledge which were locked within her, incommunicable. Then, much later, her hands still resting by her sides, the tears drying upon her cheeks, she fell asleep.

The Granard Road, September 7

A fairy fort. Tall grasses stirred upon its earthen mound in the faint wind. Cattle grazed near it. Lucky the man who owned them, sleek glossy flanks and haunches. Powers of the air rode out from it, if you believed old men, a powerful host thronging the air like storm clouds. Fairy forts and fairy mounds, dolmens and cromlechs, their habitations hugged the land, a network of the
sidhe
. Thorn trees were sacred to them: never cut the lone thorn. Devil the help or harm they had ever been to him, but you never knew.

His father had believed in them. “It is a fool would put his blade against the lone thorn. Sure everyone knows that.” Hoarse voice heavy with phlegm. In the mud cabin they sat together, rotten thatch over their heads. Weariness hung like chains from his father, pulling down the heavy shoulders. The father sat upon strewn straw, the boy beside him, solemn face and matted red hair. “Oh, by Jesus, no. Fear would stay my hand. If you cut the lone thorn, harm will surely befall you.” The father nursed the jug of whiskey as you would a baby. Whiskey would battle against the weariness. “There is more work to be had now than there are lads to do it. Tomorrow we will rise up early and walk to Squire Coghill’s. No beggary for us, boy. Leave that to the scruff.” But one winter they had begged, across Kerry and into Limerick, standing in yards pleading with farmwives, or at crosses, running up to men on horseback. “Please, your honour, a couple of coppers for the little man here. Take a look at him would you, sir?” Remembering, shame crawled in his belly. In the cold nights, his father would wrap his arms around him. In the stolen shelter of a barn, he would talk the boy to sleep: loose, rambling stories, parts forgotten or told twice. A boy like himself, poor and ragged, but a great lady would love him, take him to her palace. Everything would be laid out there for his pleasure, ham and boiled chicken. In sleep his father’s heavy muscles heaved and tightened.

Owen MacCarthy, poet and schoolmaster, remembered his childhood, an improbable misery. He was two miles outside Drumlish: the sea of his life lay between himself and his father. Affection pulled him like the strong tides. Winds of Kerry battered the lone thorn, sacred to his father’s memory. He recited a poem to the empty air, driving away his childhood. A foreign countryside, bogland and wet pastures.

Drumlish had been burned. The air stank with the smell of charred thatch. Empty. Cabins with smashed doors glared at him. Cyclopes. Spirits had swarmed from the fairy mound and carried off the people. The chill of winter seized him and he shivered. Fourteen, twenty cabins, two shops, a tavern. Loneliness lay all around him, stretching towards the bogs. Empty. Village of the dead. Swiftly, mechanically he made the sign of the cross. He was terrified and did not know where to run.

He walked to one of the shops and pushed open the door. The stench became part of his mind. He thought in dirty smoke. On the floor by the low counter a man lay stretched out at his ease. He grinned at MacCarthy, his mild blue eyes fixed upon the door. His throat was a mop of blood, torn flesh, bone. Dead. MacCarthy stepped backward, grabbed the door with both hands. “O Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. O save me, Holy Mary Mother of God.” He heard himself speak, like the voice of a man standing beside him. He backed out of the shop.

He stood again in the street and shouted. “Where are you?” In the flat light, the cabins mocked him. He walked down the road to the tavern, a large cabin, windows set on either side of the broken door. He hesitated and then stepped inside.

Behind the counter stood a short, bald-headed man, a pistol in his hand. He raised the pistol and pointed it at MacCarthy, black, heavy, the mouth wide as the door to hell.

“Who are you?”

“In the name of God, point that engine somewhere else. You could blow a hole into me.”

“Who are you? Where have you come from?”

“My name is MacCarthy. I am on my way to Granard.”

“To Granard, is it?” He placed the pistol on the counter, beside a bottle. Dark, cool, the corners of the room lay in silence. “You can spare yourself that trip.”

MacCarthy took a step forward, and the man put his hand in warning on the butt of the pistol.

“You can sell me some whiskey,” MacCarthy said.

Long lips parted in a grin. Dark, uneven teeth. “You can take all you want. That is what I have been doing.” He reached below the counter for a second glass. Carefully, his eye on the pistol, MacCarthy filled his glass and raised it to his lips. Familiar taste, it brought him comfort.

“I heard you clattering about out there, shouting to rouse the dead.”

“There is a dead man in the shop.”

“I saw him. By Jesus, they did for him. He owns the town now. He owns Drumlish.”

MacCarthy took another sip. “ ’Tis a curious sort of tavernkeeper you are.”

The grin widened. “I am not a tavernkeeper. I came here an hour before you did yourself. We have the tavern to ourselves.”

“What in the name of God has happened here?”

“The army happened. They must have moved through here after the fighting at Granard. Or before it. They killed the shopkeeper and fired the cabins. The people are off there somewhere. They will be coming back. Devil the copper will I pay for this whiskey.”

MacCarthy shook his head. “The army could not have been here. I was at Drumshanbo last night, and I have been keeping ahead of them.”

“Drumshanbo has nothing to do with it. The British army has moved out of Carrick, and they are stretched across the country from there to Granard and beyond. This morning they smashed the rebels at Granard and now they are moving north to fight the Frenchman. They are everywhere. I don’t understand how you can fit so many soldiers into one county.”

MacCarthy took his glass to a bench and sat down.

“The rebels at Granard have been beaten? Do you know that for certain?”

“By God, no man has better reason to. I was there with them. Are you a United Man yourself?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“I was a captain with the United Men.”

“I can believe that,” MacCarthy said. “I have yet to meet a United Man who wasn’t at least a captain. I met one last night in Drumshanbo.”

“I am a famous United Man. Captain Francis Reagan.” He put the pistol in his waistband and, taking the bottle and his glass, went over to sit by MacCarthy. “I am famous in Granard and Ballinalee. ’Tis all one now. They gave us a thorough drubbing and destroyed us utterly.”

MacCarthy shook his head. “But there were thousands of you. That is what I have heard everywhere.”

“We were. There must have been eight thousand of us. But they bested us. At Mullingar and then at Longford and then Granard. But we put up a fight for it at Granard. There are bodies strewn across the meadows of Granard.”

“ ’Tis over then,” MacCarthy said. “There is no hope left.” Saying it, he felt an unexpected relief. “Were there many of the English?”

“English and yeomen,” Reagan said. “They were as thick as blackberries in the hedges. A thousand of them, fifteen hundred perhaps. With cavalry and sergeants and artillery. They went after us piecemeal. First Longford and then Granard.”

MacCarthy drank off his whiskey. Nausea lay like a stone in his belly. “You were bested by a thousand men.” Clowns and cowherds.

“Sure there could be no standing against those fellows. We stood for a half hour at Granard and then we turned and ran. The cavalry rode down upon us, slashing with their sabres.”

They ran in terror, arms above their heads. Heavy legs indentured to plough and spade, they ran across pasturelands. Familiar hills looked down upon their deaths. Ripe harvests behind them, the sweet, heavy air of late summer.

“It was a slaughter,” Reagan said. “Outside Granard I hid behind a hedge with my hands over my ears but I could hear them screaming. For a long time there was no quarter given. There would be a man running along screaming and a trooper would ride up and cut him down. One of them was so close to me that I could hear the swipe of his sabre cutting down upon the fellow. But after a time they gave quarter, and the ones that were left were taken off. And all of that time I hugged myself in the hedge, and not a man saw me.”

“And that is the end of it,” MacCarthy said.

“Oh, by God, you never know. I met twenty or more of the fellows on my way here. They were going north, by the boreens, to see can they meet the Frenchmen. There are thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen marching here, with cannon and cavalry. There will be a great battle between the Frenchmen and the English army.”

“The Frenchmen are running themselves,” MacCarthy said. “With another English army behind them.”

Reagan shot him a sudden, startled glance. It changed his face, marking lines of shrewdness around his eyes.

“Is that the truth?”

“It is. By now they will have crossed the Shannon. They were counting upon you fellows. And there are not as many of them as you might think. About a thousand Frenchmen and the like number of our own fellows.”

Regan shook his head. “By Jesus, we are done for, then. Every road to the south is choked with English soldiers. I stood upon the rise of a hill, and I could see them in the distance. ’Twas only a regiment or two that they sent to Granard to deal with us. The English have caught us up into a sack.”

“I will take your word for that,” MacCarthy said. “You are a captain, after all.”

“Ach.” Reagan cleared his throat and spat on the dirt floor. “I am a soldier. A real one. I was twenty years in the French army, in Dillon’s regiment. After the regiment was broken up I made my way back home to Longford, to my sister’s house. That is why the United Men made so much of me. I taught them their drilling, months ago. The English will have my name by now and there will be a rope waiting for me.”

“They will have my own name as well,” MacCarthy said. “I was the schoolmaster at Killala, and I joined up there with the Frenchmen.”

Reagan nodded, and almost absently refilled their glasses. He held the bottle towards the sunlight from the doorway. “Do you know these roads?”

“I do not,” MacCarthy said. “But only the one road here from Drumshanbo.”

“They could move down this road, or by the road through Cloone. But the English will have the two roads covered, and they will be moving up their artillery. I don’t know which way to turn and that is the truth of it. We are as safe here as we would be on the roads. The hills might be safest if we crossed over the bogs to them. Afterwards they will be beating the hills looking for fellows like ourselves, but that will take time.”

MacCarthy walked behind the counter, and found a loaf of bread and a round of cheese. The cheese was dry and tough. He tore it into two pieces, and handed one to Reagan, who thanked him and filled his mouth.

When he could speak again he said, “Twenty fucking years with Dillon’s regiment and I never rose above the rank of private. I never had any wish to. They told me to go there and I went there, and to do that and I did that. But I can tell when there is to be a slaughter. You can feel it in the air, the way you can feel rain before it comes.”

“Neither hills nor roads will be safe,” MacCarthy said. “Here we stand with a man lying murdered in his shop. Holy Mother of God, what have they done to this village, the bloody-handed butchers.”

“What a French army would have done,” Reagan said. “Or any other army. I have seen worse than this. They will be thick upon every road now, and they will kill any creature with two legs inside a pair of breeches.”

“ ’Tis a band of butchers they are,” MacCarthy said. “Burning and killing for the sport of it, the way you would chase a badger.”

“I have seen worse,” Reagan. “God send we don’t see worse ourselves before the day is out.”

The cheese was wretched stuff. MacCarthy chewed it without pleasure.

“What was it that possessed you,” he said, “to go off with the Brigades?”

Reagan washed down the last of his cheese. “ ’Tis so long ago that I can scarcely remember. I was a young lad then. A fellow came along recruiting. A major he was, Major Nugent, the Nugents are one of the old families here. He had a sergeant with him. He took a room in his brother’s house in Castlepollard, and passed out the word that he was looking for likely lads to take service with the Irish Brigades in France. There was little recruiting in these counties before him, or after him either for all that I know. They got most of the fellows for the Brigades from Cork and Kerry.”

“Yes,” MacCarthy said. “I know that.”

He had watched one night, from a hill above Carhen. A dozen lads crowding into the two boats, jingle of francs in their ears, a rough voyage facing them and an unknown land. Recruiting officers in taverns, spry, confident men, hats cocked to one side, shrewd as graziers. Stuff of poetry: the wild geese. Ireland’s glory, names blown backward on the wind. Dillon, Lally, O’Brien, periwigged commanders, their chargers carried them above the battle, faces stern and exultant. At Fontenoy they turned the tide, defeat certain for the French, and then Clare’s dragoons swept down the field of war. We wrote their praises, hugging their triumphs, hiding their defeats. They would return someday, terrible their vengeance, overturning Aughrim and the Boyne. Here they were. Frightened veteran of France and Granard, drinking his fill in a dead town.