The Year of the French (84 page)

“I doubt that. Elliott certainly, but not John. He is a boy. He is also a Moore, and the Moores have claims upon the friendship of the Brownes.”

“Would I ever deny that? Though, mind you, your father never sought out mine in friendship,”

“They are claims older than our fathers. They go back a century or more.”

“What was it that your father called mine? The turncoat’s son?”

“He was an old-fashioned man,” Moore said.

“Yours was,” Browne said. “Not mine. After Aughrim we all had to find our way in a new world. Your father went to Spain. The Brownes turned their coats inside out. What matter? They were men of pluck, the two lots of them. I drink to them.”

The coat hung in the hall, encased in glass and black walnut, scarlet coat with gilt epaulets and facings.

“What else were we to do?” Browne asked. “Sink down into the peasantry, like the Treacys and the MacDonnells? Not bloody likely. The Protestants had won, and they had us by the balls. They would have bled us white, stripped us of every acre. We are the old Mayo stock, George, strong trees that hold firm against the winds.”

“John is the old Mayo stock,” Moore said, “and he is in Castlebar gaol with a gallows for a view.”

“He may have a closer view of that gallows before his race is run.”

Bareheaded, John took his mount over the high stone fence, then waved his hat towards Moore Hall. Their father, standing by his chair above the portico, returned the salute.

“He will if he is tried here,” Moore said. “By the gentry of Mayo. Cooper would fasten the knot with his own hands.”

“What does it matter where he is tried?” Browne asked. “My God, George, he was the President of their bloody republic.”

“Just so. And took no part in the fighting. Tuck him away in some gaol in the south and wait for quieter times.”

Browne turned shrewd eyes towards Moore. “Wait until your friends in London have pulled a few strings.”

“If I can persuade them. And with your help. I must have your help, Dennis, you are Sheriff of Mayo. There is no need for us to fence. I propose to save John’s life if I can. Hanging John will not restore tranquillity to Mayo. The Crown can afford it.”

“O’Dowd will hang, you know, and Elliott and the rest of them. For doing no more than John has done. Less perhaps.”

“I accept that,” Moore said. “I am not here to argue the justice of the matter. John is my brother, and I want him saved.”

Browne laughed and drew the stopper from the decanter of brandy. “By God, you are a cool one, George. I have never seen this side of you before. Elliott swings and John goes off to Hamburg or America.”

“Or Spain. He was born a Spanish subject. I do not pretend to be arguing upon principle.”

“This brandy was born in Spain,” Browne said, “but it is Mayo brandy now.” He filled their glasses.

“By reason of broken laws,” Moore said. “The coast guard never saw the ship that brought it into Clew Bay, and the excise man never saw the cask. You have hit upon an excellent instance.”

“A bottle of brandy is one thing,” Browne said, “and a rebel in arms against his sovereign is another.”

They sat quietly, sipping the brandy. The warmth of Spain was a faint, plaintive echo in Moore’s glass.

“What did they expect,” Browne asked, “himself and Elliott? Stirring up a rabble and bringing in Frenchmen.”

“They were United Irishmen. You know as well as I do what they wanted. A republic, a written constitution, total separation from England.”

“A constitution,” Browne said. “Randall MacDonnell would not have known a constitution if it came up and bit him. He was killed, you know. In Longford.”

“John is alive.”

“There has been no better friend in Parliament to Catholic Emancipation than myself. I have written for it and argued for it. Turncoat or not, I am half a Papist myself.”

“They wanted a bit more than that.”

“Did they not! A gang of jumped-up merchants. Whatever they wanted, it has no place in Mayo.”

“So it would seem.”

“It will not be enough to bring this rebellion to a close,” Browne said. “The fear of God and the fear of the Crown must be beaten into these people. They are fools to be frightened of the British army. Let them fear Dennis Browne.”

“You have a policy?”

“I do. I intend to whip loyalty into them. A hundred years from now the cabins of Mayo will still be using Dennis Browne as a curse.”

“Well now,” Moore said, “of all the ambitions that have ever been unveiled to me, that is the most curious.”

From wall and ceiling, antiquity counselled them. Discord and Envy drew back. Time raised from the ground the languid form of Truth. Figures in white plaster, delicately moulded against blue medallions.

“End it,” Moore said. “Dragoons hacking away at frightened men, crops burned, husbandless women turned out upon the roads with winter setting in. End it. I shall never believe that you want that.”

“Everything is ending, George. Cornwallis and Pitt intend to press through a union with England. Cornwallis sat in the Castle and explained it all to me. It will be public knowledge soon. He is going to take each Member of Parliament by the shoulder and bully or cajole or bribe him into voting the extinction of the kingdom. How does that strike you?”

Moore shrugged. “He can for all I care. I am no patriot. It isn’t England that has humiliated me and kept me deprived of civil rights and liberties. Why should I care a damn about a parliament in which I am forbidden to sit? Until a decade ago, I didn’t have a vote. This nation is governed by a gang of Protestant bullies, and corrupt bullies at that. I have no tears to shed for them.”

“There you have it, George. And it matters as little to me. Mayo matters.”

“Yes,” Moore said. “Mayo matters. I take it, then, that Castlereagh and Lord Cornwallis will have your vote without going to the trouble of a threat or the expense of a bribe.”

“To be sure, they can. And I will have more than my vote to deliver to them. I will give them Mayo wrapped in cloth, and tied with red ribbon and a dab of sealing wax. I look forward to serving in the London Parliament, George. A larger stage for my talents.”

“I doubt that you will find it there,” Moore said. “Irishmen in London will find that they are country cousins, like the bonnet lairds of Scotland. England will feast at the table and toss the scraps to Ireland.”

“Perhaps,” Browne said. “And perhaps you underestimate my resourcefulness. But I will need backing, all the help I can get. I would welcome your own support, George.”

“Mine!” Moore exclaimed, as though in surprise, although he had been expecting it. “What use could you make of a poor Papist farmer?”

“Come now, George. You are a well-connected man indeed. You are thick with that London crowd.”

“With Fox, Sheridan, Lord Holland. My friends are Whigs. They are out of office now, and out of favour with the King. They are out of favour these days. They oppose the war with France.”

Browne shrugged. “And there is a matter nearer at hand. Your word has more weight than mine does with the Catholic gentry. If you were to argue the case for a union, they would listen to you.”

“Persuade them that they have no need for a country,” Moore said with distaste.

“What country have they now? You have said that yourself. I ask you only to make public your views on the matter. They are a stubborn lot, the Catholic gentry. They are likely to cling to a nation which has abused them for a century.”

“They are likely, that is, to believe that a poor nation is better than no nation at all.”

Browne nodded. “I think that they will put it in exactly those terms. But you could argue the case for a union most effectively to them, and without doing violence to your own feelings. They would fare better under the union, George. Catholic Emancipation is far more likely to come from London than from those fellows in Dublin. It is a matter which you should discuss with Cornwallis. He is a most enlightened fellow in that regard.”

“I think,” Moore said after a pause, “that I would welcome another drop of your brandy.”

“I am sorry!” Browne cried. “I am an inattentive host.” When he had poured, he held the decanter of sharp-cut glass and studied its contents. “God be with the days when this brandy was a bond between your family and mine. Before our time. Your father shipping it up from Alicante, and my grandfather on the beach at Clew Bay to receive the casks. And the excise man bribed and drunk. We were hand-in-glove in those days, ‘Spanish’ Moore and the turncoat. The Moores and the Brownes. The old Mayo stock.”

“They were good bargainers,” Moore said. “I have never mastered the art.”

“You never had the need,” Browne said. “Your father left you a rich man. But we all come to it, sooner or later. We all must bargain, it is the way of the world. Not always for money.”

Moore drank off the brandy at a single pull. His throat burned. Body of boneless plaster, Truth rested in the arms of Time.

“We have drifted off the subject,” he said.

“We have,” Browne said. “But not far. The Brownes and the Moores. We go back together a long way. They thought they had us whipped after Aughrim, but we rose again, one in one way, one in another. John’s business is a tricky matter, but we can manage it, I think. There is a gaol in Clonmel that he might find more to his liking than the one in Castlebar. And after a while, a month or so, a gaol in Waterford that he might like even better.” He filled their glasses again. “Waterford is on the coast. A great town for shipping—Hamburg, Barcelona. You have a good head for politics, George. You should discuss your ideas with Cornwallis. He is very open in his dealings with Irishmen. Of the right sort.”

“Then we have made a bargain, I take it.”

“What bargain?” Browne asked, puzzlement in his voice. “I don’t understand you. John is a harum-scarum sort, but he is a good lad. I will help him any way I can. What else are friends for?”

The following evening, Moore stood where once his father had spent his evenings, on the balcony above the portico. His hands rested upon the smooth, cool stone of the parapet. Motionless after rain, the waters of Lough Carra were green beneath the sky. A flight of rooks circled above it, flocks of black. From elsewhere upon the estate, populous as a village, noises floated towards him, the shouts of herdsmen, from the forge the beat of hammer upon iron. In other months, at this time of day, he had heard song lingering in the distance, cadences wedded to soft, moist air. He heard none now. The flames of August had burned away song. Shout and dull hammer-blow merged into the silence.

He had paid a cheap price for a brother’s life. His father would have thought it a fine bargain. Not a shilling to pay out, but only his pledge to serve the interests of England and of Dennis Browne. Never again would he survey the world from his balcony of cool and superior amusement, judging, appraising, condemning. His irony, in which he had taken pride as a function of his intelligence, would become a shell, each year more brittle and more thin, a mannerism, a gesture. John’s reckless folly had bound him hand and foot, delivering him into a world which he had learned to despise. What a simpleton he had been, to believe that he could escape history, whose sources were as close to hand as a brother’s passion, a neighbour’s ambition. History was Dennis Browne at ease in a dining room, glass in hand, and feet stretched out full length, or John unshaven in the stink of Castlebar gaol.

Where had the chain begun, of which his bargain with Dennis Browne was the final link? In some mountainside shebeen, Whiteboys nursing their grievous burden of evictions, their grotesque, invented history. Or in Dublin, solicitors and merchants’ sons, their heads crammed with Tom Paine; city-bred, they thought in pamphlets. Or in Paris, Wolfe Tone, fertile-witted mountebank, doubtless making sweeping, empty gestures, promising an island in turmoil to the Directory, that gang of swindlers and opportunists. Or as a dangerous notion in Humbert’s head, quick island glory with Buonaparte half the world away. Moore’s mind drifted towards possibilities, world stacked upon world, motives, probabilities, pantomime actors gesticulating in the theatre of his imagination. Abstractions beside a green lake. He was at home. Harsh-throated, the rooks settled noisily in the beech trees.

FROM 
AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE
OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA
IN THE SUMMER OF 1798,
BY ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME

September 23, the final day of the “Republic of Connaught,” as it styled itself, was one of those days which have earned for our barony its cheerless and unenviable reputation, with ocean, coast, and town alike lying grey and dour beneath a blanket of dirty cloud. From dawn and through the early hours of the morning, a rain fell, soft as mist, a rain so soft that it seemed a portion of the air itself. The ancient watchtower atop Steeple Hill served the rebels as sentinel, for men had clambered up its bowels and leaned from its shattered top looking towards the south, perched there like gargoyles. We could see them through the streaky, pallid light, their clothing as colourless as stone and rain. The town dogs, a band of scrawny curs, had been awake with the dawn, snapping and yelping at the bands of men who passed beneath my bedroom window. From what I could make out of the waters of the bay, there was not a sail upon it, as there had not been for several weeks. It was a great bowl of vile water.