The Star of the Sea (44 page)

Three hundred miles north-west of the point where he was standing, a woman was passing a milestone for Chapelizod. She was hungry, this idle tramp: this fodder for the workhouse. Her feet were bleeding badly and her legs were very weak. Not so long beforehand, she had given birth in a field; but the ratepayer would not be burdened by having to keep the child alive. She walked easterly, quite slowly, in the direction of Dublin, and beside her flowed the Liffey on its way to the sea. On the sea must be a ship that could take her to Liverpool. Glasgow or Liverpool. It did not really matter. All that mattered now was to stay on her mangled feet: to somehow keep walking through the town of Chapelizod. Her name would not be mentioned in the House that sunny evening; nor in
The Times
for the following day.

As she came to a brow and saw the sea in the distance, those
debating her across that sea were remarking on something curious. The extraordinary passion with which the new peer was speaking; how odd was his ardour, his clear sense of outrage, when the gallery was almost as empty as the chamber itself.
Hansard
records the making of a genteel intervention.

MISTER SPEAKER: Might I respectfully counsel His Noble Lordship that although some Noble Lords may be a trifle hard of hearing, and although his Hibernian tones are pleasant in the extreme, there is really no need to raise them to quite such an operatic degree. (Laughter from the House. Cries of ‘hear hear’.)
^*

It was as though he was not making a speech at all, many said. As though he was shouting at someone in the room, some enemy he had long been waiting to attack. All the more strange when you looked up the records and saw that the man who had seconded the original bill was Thomas David Kingscourt of Carna, the Viscount of Roundstone: the maiden Earl’s father.

The Chief Director of the company agreed to a compromise. Forty thousand guineas would have to be paid immediately, the remaining three hundred thousand at the end of the year. Those were the very best terms that could be offered. They had only been possible because of Lord Kingscourt’s position. Nobody wished to bankrupt a peer of the realm; to auction the lands of his birthright would be utterly unthinkable. We Old Wykehamists had to stick together now.

The literary evenings stopped. The sculptures were sold, then the paintings and finally the entire library. The Renaissance fresco was purchased by a Yorkshire grain merchant who was building a Gothic mansion on the outskirts of Sheffield. The total raised was a little short of nineteen thousand. It wasn’t enough, the company said.

Laura sold the jewellery she had inherited from her mother,
having first ordered paste copies to be made of every piece. She dreaded letting her father know what course she was taking or the circumstances that had caused her to take it. If he ever discovered either, he would be enraged to a fit. Six thousand guineas were raised at the auction at Sotheby’s, a disappointing sum given their actual value. It was still not enough, said the company’s banker. The instalment required was forty, or the lands would be sold.

The rent on the house at Tite Street was eight thousand a year. If they gave it up and took the children out of school, they could scrape together the forty thousand. The plan was sold to the boys as a great adventure; similarly sold to Laura’s father. The family would be removing to Galway for a while. Clean air. Open fields. The ancestral lands.

They arrived at Kingscourt in August ’46 to find a forest of tepees in the Lower Lock meadow, where Blake’s evicted tenants had come to camp. The smoke from their fires could be seen five miles away. There was talk of an outbreak of Typhoid fever. When Merridith went among the people of Kingscourt, many refused to speak to him, or even to look at him; though some of the women raged at him that his family was a disgrace.

At night he could see the men talking angrily in the shadows. Crowds of fifty or a hundred would congregate beneath the trees. He let it be known through the police that he would tolerate no trouble. He would put nobody off the land in such difficult times but there were certain rules that must be obeyed. Anyone seen with a firearm would be arrested and evicted. He had Johnnyjoe Burke put bars on the windows.

The house was leaking badly; rotting with damp. Their advertisements for servants remained unanswered. They moved into the servants’ quarters at the back of the manor where the cries of the people at night could not be heard. They would see the ravaged faces peering in through the windows. The hungry faces of weeping children. His sons became terrified to leave their quarters. Laura would not leave the house without an armed bodyguard or a pistol. Merridith came to dread opening the curtains in the morning; a dozen more tents would have appeared in the night. By September the entire meadow was filled with the landless, and their colony was spreading into the distant fields.

The police came to see him and insisted the lands must be cleared. The encampment was the size of a small town by now and presented great risks both to health and security. Three thousand people were camping on the demesne, every last one of them a Liable sympathiser. He told the constables to leave and not to return. He could not put starving families on the roadside.

He wrote letters to London and insisted there must be more aid. This talk of ‘government relief works’ would have to stop. The people needed food; they were too weak to be asked to work for it. It was true that this year’s crop had not failed in its entirety; but it was far too small, too lacking in nutrients; grown from the rotten seed of last year’s blight. And many had nowhere to grow even that. Tens of thousands were being evicted.

In October the first of the tent-people died. Four the first day; nine the next. By November, eighty were dying every week. He had Burke paint over the windows of the boys’ rooms with black varnish.

They spent Christmas at the Wingfields’ Dublin townhouse. The boys had begged not to be taken back to Galway on New Year’s Eve. The Wingfields were going to Switzerland for a few months’ holiday; when they offered to take the boys, their parents agreed. Laura was also invited, but bravely declined. She would have to remain with her husband now.

On New Year’s Night they returned to Kingscourt to find a cordon of armed constables surrounding the house. An informer had told them to expect a Liable attack. Nearly two hundred tenants had died in Christmas week. The Sergeant could only allow the Merridiths entry to the manor if they agreed to station fifty troopers inside the building itself.

On the sixth of January, 1847, Merridith returned to Dublin alone. Laura was ill with suspected pneumonia and was in no condition to face the journey. She had pleaded with him not to go; the journey was dangerous. By now there was talk of landlords and their agents being attacked on the road to Dublin. But he had little choice. He had no choice at all. A document had arrived during their absence over Christmas. It was a notice of eviction from the Kingscourt Estate.

The attitude of the man from the company shocked him. He
had expected to be meeting with the Chief Director, Lord Fairbrook of Perthsire, ninth Duke of Argyle. But apologies had been conveyed by the Dublin Office manager. His Lordship had been detained by a late sitting of the House. In his place he had sent Mr Williams of the Liability Collection Office: a small, bald, furiously sweating Londoner who looked as if he would kick a dog to death if it barked.

‘Have you brought what is required?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Do you have what is required to redeem your debt, sir?’

‘Not at the moment. I rather thought we might agree to a compromise. Lord Fairbrook and I have discussed the matter previously.’

Williams nodded desultorily and wrote in his ledger.

‘I thought three years would be the appropriate period,’ Merridith said.

Williams made no reply. He mopped his mouth with a handkerchief.

‘Preferably five: but I think three may show results. My plans are laid out in the document I have given you. You will find costings and so on. I assure you it is all in order. Matter of riding out the storm for a while.’

Williams nodded again without looking up from his record book. Fingered his greasy moustache as he wrote. Finally he stamped a seal on the completed page and closed the ledger so abruptly that it gave a dusty thud.

‘You have failed to repay the mortgage. The property will be sold as soon as possible. The lands still having tenants will all have to be cleared.’

‘There is absolutely no question of that, I’m afraid.’

‘It will be done, My Lord, whether you do it or no. Land with unpaying tenants produces no income. Moreover their continued squatting will keep driving down the value.’

‘Squatting?’

‘What would you call it yourself, My Lord?’

‘Some have lived on those lands for five hundred years. Since long before my family ever came to Connemara.’

‘That is not a matter of any interest to the company.’

‘I know the company very well, thank you. The Chief Director is a long-time friend of my family.’

‘Lord Fairbrook is quite aware of the situation, Lord Kingscourt. I can assure you I am acting on his direct authority. The lands will be cleared and that is an end to it.’

‘How do you expect me to clear the lands? Am I to turn starving people onto the highway?’

‘We understand there are professionals who do that kind of work.’

‘Hired thugs, do you mean? Driver-out men?’

‘Call them what you will. They enforce the law.’

‘No bailiff has ever set foot on Merridith land. Not in two hundred years of my family’s presence in Galway.’

‘It is
not
“Merridith land”, sir. It belongs to the company. You gave undertakings that payments would be made and they have not been made. You have failed in your obligations, sir. Utterly failed. One would have thought it might be a matter of honour for you to meet them, but obviously your word is not your bond.’

‘How bloody dare you address me in that manner, sir. I’ll take no such talk from a glorified usurer.’

‘You seem happy to take when it suits you, My Lord. You are living as a guest on a property not your own.’

‘I am a squatter too, then, am I?’

‘
You
have been a squatter for a very long time, sir. At least they paid something to live in the place.’

‘I shall never hand over the deeds of my land.’

‘The tides are already in our possession, I assure you. Any other documentation can be obtained by order of the courts. The company’s lawyers have the matter well in hand.’

‘Surely – some compensation for the families can be arranged.’

Williams laughed bleakly. ‘Are you making a joke, sir?’

‘I do not understand. How do you mean?’

‘It is not the company which has profited from your tenants’ labours for two hundred years. So why should the company now offer compensation?’

‘They have absolutely nothing. Surely you can see that.’

‘You can evict them and compensate them in whatever way you wish. Or we shall evict them with no compensation. The choice is
your own. You have until June the first. The evictions will begin on that date. The lands will be sold as soon as possible thereafter.’

‘A brief respite is all I ask. Two years; no more.’

‘The time has elapsed. Good-day, Lord Kingscourt.’

‘One year, then. Please. You can manage a year.’

Williams pointed towards the door with his dripping pen. ‘Good-day to you, My Lord. I have other appointments. My sailing returns to London at seven tonight.’

Dusk had descended by the time he left the office. Sleet was surging noisily into the rubbish-strewn streets. A girl who looked like a housemaid was kissing a soldier in the doorway of a shop. A trio of schoolboys was watching and laughing. He walked for a while through the crowds and the beggars, beneath the gracious colonnades of the Parliament on College Green. Down towards the river and Sackville Street next. The Liffey had a black and scabrous look. A tall ship was tied up at the south-side wharf, its three bared masts a spider web of rigging. Barrels were being unloaded by the squads of stevedores and stacked on the grey, wet flagstones.

Lightning crackled violently over the Customs House dome. He began to walk again, through the stinging blur of the hailstones. A page of a newspaper slapped against his chest. He told himself he didn’t know where he was going; but that was one thing he did know. The only thing, perhaps.

Pushing now, into the slab of wind, as he crossed the slippery bridge in a flutter of coat-tails. The stern figure of Nelson glared down from his pillar: an Easter Island idol in regimentals of granite. Traders around the pedestal were packing up their stalls. A colony of gulls flapped low and scavenged their leavings, ascending in squabbles of twos and threes. Soon he was in Faithful Place; then Little Martin’s Lane. The terraces became darker, their inhabitants shabbier. Skull-like the stare of the windowless tenements. The reek of wet coal and unlaundered clothes. A circlet of grime-faced urchins cringed around a brazier as he crept through the alleyways leading up to the Diamond; and the tolling of the Angelus from a score of chapels.