The Year of the French (97 page)

“Of oppression, Lord Glenthorne?”

“Oppression as foul as any in our time. The chimney sweeps of London would break your heart. Little lads of nine, eight, seven. Angels some of them, for all their filthy clothes and filthy faces, faces streaked black as the pit. Little chaps led from place to place by their masters like trained monkeys, taught to clamber up chimneys so narrow that their poor shoulders and hips are scraped raw. Fires lit below them if they don’t make haste, or if their cries are too loud. And then cast out into the world in a few years’ time. But some of them never grow too big. They die. The soot gets into their lungs. In time it chokes them to death. Their poor lungs coated with soot. A surgeon of Guy’s Hospital has explained the process.”

“That is indeed horrible,” I said. And so it is, but I could not think what more to say.

“Horrible,” he agreed. “It will cease, Mr. Broome. We shall make it cease. Their infamous masters will be brought low. The little boys are raised without God, their speech is abominable. Little girls as well. Little girls have been set to the task. The souls and bodies of children destroyed so that we may sit in comfort at our fires. It is monstrous.”

“Monstrous,” I said.

“And in Ireland? Is it the same there?”

“In Dublin, perhaps. I cannot say. A man comes round to my palace once a year with his son and his brushes, but the boy does not seem ill used. The small farmers have a simpler method, they use birds. Birds are their chimney sweeps.”

He peered at me with large, pale eyes. “That is not a jest? They use birds? Birds for chimney sweeps?” He laughed, a dry cackle. “I would believe anything about Ireland.”

“I wish you well in your efforts,” I said. “The sweeps are badly used. It is time that thought was given to them.”

“It is, Mr. Broome. High time. And we shall succeed. Men of consequence are joining us. Godly men.”

He led me to a small, crowded room overlooking a garden. Trees and bushes were leafless and stark. Two walls were lined with books, and a long table, running almost the length of the room, was strewn with papers. Papers were stacked beside the two armchairs which faced each other in front of a cold fireplace. He waved me into one, and then himself sat down and rested his hands on his thin knees. “Your palace, you said, Mr. Broome. Surely you do not live in a palace?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. You may recall that Killala was once an episcopal diocese. My house was then the palace, and it is still called so. But in fact it is a modest residence, though most comfortable.” Which I myself was not, for the room was cold and it was with difficulty that I suppressed a shiver.

“I am glad to hear that. That it is comfortable, to be sure, but more especially that it is modest.”

“It is more than sufficient for our needs,” I said. “Mrs. Broome has made it most pleasant. We have no family.”

“That is good,” he said. “It is good that you are married. A celibate clergy is one of the curses under which the Papists of Ireland suffer. The Papists of all countries. The priests of the early Christian centuries were married. You know that, of course.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. But the Irish priests are strict in the observance of their vows. There are few of the scandals so common in Mediterranean countries.”

“My wife died in childbirth,” he said, as if I had not spoken, “and my child with her. It was a boy. I never remarried. We are not a fruitful line. I was an only child.”

I could find nothing to say to that.

“Had they lived, my own life might have been different. I might have moved more in the world. I am more effective now by far. The chimney sweeps, the slaves. Human slavery, Mr. Broome. Here, in Africa, in America. Entire African villages herded upon their death ships, crossing the ocean to a life worse than death. Their owners deny them the Scriptures. They live and die as pagans. But they have souls. He died for all men. There are many kinds of slavery. The little London sweep, the black man in the fields of Virginia. Do you smoke?”

“No,” I said. “It makes me ill.”

“I am pleased. It is the leaf of slavery. Bales of tobacco leaf stacked up on our docks, rank with the sweat of black slavery. God waits for us to act. We have the power to sweep the slaver from the seas.”

“It is a monstrous evil,” I said. “No Christian should support it.”

“They do,” he said. “By their silence. By their inactivity. I intend to accomplish good, Mr. Broome. Great good. My father did not. He was a sinful man and a pleasure-loving man. Marbles, paintings, rich foods, women, and sins worse than those with women. Do you follow me? Far worse than those with women. I am not spreading scandal. He was notorious. You have heard of him.”

“I have visited Glenthorne Castle,” I said. “I was a friend of poor Mr. Creighton. It is lovely, a fairybook palace, like a child’s dream of the
Arabian Nights
.”

“It was shaped by vanity and voluptuousness. Like his villa in Italy. It was worse in Italy. Bricks the colour of sunset, a balcony looking beyond oceans of roses to the distant sea. A village could have been fed upon his clothes alone, silks and broadcloths. He used scent. When he bent down to kiss me, it would smother me in its sweetness. All the filth of the world was carried to me upon my father’s kiss.”

I could not become accustomed to the room’s chill. It could not have been much colder in the bare-branched garden.

“I was greatly disturbed by the news of Mr. Creighton’s death,” I said. “He was a fair man, a just man.”

“Just?” Lord Glenthorne asked, “Which of us is just? He was a practical man, and middling honest. The agents before him were hopeless, thieves and drunkards. You speak of his death. You mean his murder, of course. I have a letter here from Browne.”

He leaped to his feet, agile and monkeylike, and rummaged among the papers on the table with one hand, while with the other he fitted a pair of spectacles. “It is here. An atrocious crime. He was run through with pikes. Over and over again. After he had been killed. Bestial.”

“We have endured much in Mayo these past months,” I said. “All of us have. Rich and poor alike.”

But Glenthorne did not hear me. He was reading the letter, his forefinger moving swiftly over the lines. His lips moved silently.

“You were held prisoner in your own house,” he said. “Your palace. A wonder you were not murdered, like Creighton.”

“I might easily have been,” I said. “I owed my safety to one of the rebel leaders, one of your own tenants. He was killed in the fighting.”

“I can form no picture of Mayo in my mind,” he said. “I see bogland, mountains, a straggling coastline, mean villages. I do not even know the number of people on my lands. Is that not absurd? Years ago, Creighton made the attempt, but he gave it up. He sent me maps, pretty things.”

He led me to the map, hung behind the table, in an oak frame. At first I could recognise nothing, then I made out Killala and Ballina, mountains, bogs, the Moy moving past Ballina towards the sea, pasturelands, plantations, the outline of the Glenthorne demesne, the castle.

“Each of those dots is a cabin,” Glenthorne said. “Many of them on two acres or three. But he abandoned the task. There are people squatting upon the barren wastes of the mountains. They can pay no rent. How do they live?”

“In great misery,” I said. “For part of each year they go hungry and are driven by want onto the roads. Now. In midwinter.”

“Horrible,” he said. “Horrible.”

“He made a kind of model of the estate,” I said, “on a table as large as this one. Papier-mâché mountains and bits of glass for lakes. It was quite lovely, like a toy village built for children.” A toy world. I did not add that by common report he had been slain upon that table, forced backward upon it by Duggan’s mob, his blood streaming down paper mountains.

“It is a great responsibility,” he said. “I have been remiss. I have governed them through agents. I cannot bear to go there. That sinful monument to vanity and lust rising up amidst such misery, feeding upon it. My rents are all Irish rents now, you know. We had several estates here, small ones, but I have sold them off. There is so much that must be done, so much good that must be accomplished. I live simply. You can see that I do.”

“They know nothing of you there. Where you live, what you want of them. They never speak of you by name. Only as the Big Lord.”

He turned away from the map and peered at me sharply. “Do they? The Big Lord?”

“That would be the English of it. It is a Gaelic word.”

“They do not speak English,” he said. “He told me that. Gaelic-speaking peasants. Papists, sunk in superstition and idolatry. Something went wrong, centuries ago. I know little about Irish history. They have no written records, no history.”

“They have needs,” I said. “Needs of soul and of body.”

He reached out his hand as though to touch my shoulder, then withdrew it. “I chose well,” he said. “It is well that they have in their midst a proper emissary of Christ. God send that I can find a proper agent. It is an exacting responsibility. All this.” He swung his hand around towards the map. “I will be remiss no longer. I promise you. Poor Creighton had his plans at first, in the early years. I have them somewhere among my papers. Model villages, schools for the children that they may learn sobriety and English. As you say, they have needs of both body and soul. They must learn proper methods of agriculture and husbandry. He had schemes for the reclamation of the bogs, but I told him that they would be too costly. I have been remiss.”

Behind his gold-encircled spectacles, his eyes were large and flat, a blue light as the heavens. I was taken aback by his enthusiasm. He held out his hand again, and this time placed it upon my arm, lightly. I felt it there, soft, like a branch from the garden, bare of leaf.

“There is much that could be done,” I said. “Life there must surely be as hard as it is anywhere in the world.” His words should have exhilarated me, filled me with a wild hope, but they did not. I felt confused and apprehensive. His mild, shielded eyes stirred a faint fear.

“I will find the proper man,” he said. “I would not know how to go about the task.” His grip tightened upon me. “Savages clinging to mountain wastes, uncounted, unnumbered, nameless. They must go. The estate must be reduced to its proper population. There must be fewer farms and larger ones. There must be a maximum yield. There are ways of providing for this. If the rents are raised, there will be an incentive for the industrious ones. They are not hopeless, they are the children of God, as you and I are.”

“They must go?” I asked. My words fell flat upon my ears. “They must go? What do you mean?”

“Grain and cattle,” he said, as if he had not heard me. “Sheep-walks. It has been said that Ireland can become England’s granary. There have been books and pamphlets upon the subject. Arthur Young. A man named Edgeworth.”

“There is nowhere for them to go,” I said. I pulled my arm free. “Why else would they live in hovels? You must surely learn more about the country. It is urgent that you do so. You could place them under a sentence of death.”

“There are other mountains,” he said. “Other bogs. Let them find them.” He rubbed his hand, as though I had bruised it. “They are my lands, you know. I intend to improve them. I bear them no ill will. They rose up in rebellion and they murdered but I bear them no ill will. They are children. Disobedient.”

I had a sudden, sharp recollection of the Glenthorne demesne, the endless walls of dressed stone, a vista stretching as far as the eye could see, the Italianate castle, mysterious in its loneliness and its exotic beauty. I saw Creighton bending over his model of the estate, a near-sighted, fussy man. He was shaking his head.

He walked away from me towards the window, and then turned.

“I am certain that you will not misunderstand me, Mr. Broome. You see how I live. My wants are simple. The wealth is drawn off from that unfortunate country by those who live in wanton riotousness, in sinfulness. Misery yields up marbles and brocades. I am not an orthodox Christian, but my will to do good is very powerful. I have spoken to you of the blackened children of London, the slaves chained like animals in ships. There are others. Girls are compelled to sell their bodies upon the streets, in vile cribs. Girls of twelve and thirteen. By their mothers. Little boys, to satisfy unnatural lusts. It is all one, a seamless garment of greed and cruel pleasures. I will use my wealth for good, to free souls from slavery that they may seek salvation.”

He stood with his back to the thin sun of a winter afternoon. His pale hair seemed translucent, an aureole.

“Surely, then,” I said, “you would not want to bring more misery upon those who depend upon you for their very existence. You do not know them, but they depend upon you utterly.” They spoke of him as the Big Lord.

“There are laws,” he said. “Laws of supply and demand, of property, of the market-place, laws of commodities. I did not make them. I must have wealth if I am to do good, much wealth if I am to do much good. There will be schoolhouses there, model villages. We shall reclaim the bogs. You will be there to see it. I envy you.”

“I pray that I will not see it,” I said. “Most earnestly do I pray.” And I then said, though more to myself than to him, “They will never know why. They will be swept from their hovels and they will never know why. I could not describe this room to them, they would not understand your words.”

“A foolish title,” he said. “The Big Lord. Beware vanity.”

I took my leave of him, but he did not reply, though he was staring at me. I looked again at the map. From that distance, it seemed a cluster of random lines, straight and curving, clumps of brown ink. I could not see the dots, encoded habitations. He spoke to me as my hand touched the door.

“If you see a sweep, you should give a shilling to him. I keep them in my pocket for the purpose. But you must be sly. If the master sees you, he will take it from him later.”

In the hall, the maidservant stopped me, a hand again upon my arm. “Is he excited, sir?” she asked.

“Excited? He is animated. Is that what you mean?”