The Year of the French (15 page)

“Take myself as an example. ’Tis little enough that Ellen could ever hope to bring a man by way of dowry, but she is an only child and Bridge-end and the other bits of land would go in the course of nature and law to her husband. ’Tis a tidy little estate, although it is put to shame by one so handsome as your own, for example.”

“Not mine,” John said. “My brother’s.”

“ ’Tis all one,” Treacy said. “George does not seem ready or likely to marry, and if he did he is not the man to wrong a brother. But it is myself I was speaking of, of course, and not George. We are a prudent family, we have had to be prudent. ’Tis bred in our bones. I would be doing very wrong, would I not, to risk Ellen by accepting for her a rash or imprudent young man?”

“You would, of course.” Moore put down his cup. “But in troubled times it is difficult to know the prudent course. In such times the bold course may also be the prudent one.”

“On occasion, perhaps. On occasion. But in such times as these, the prudent course for the Catholic gentlemen of Mayo, for example, is to sit quiet and pray that these winds will blow themselves out. Do you not agree, Ellen?”

“I have given little thought to such matters,” she said. “They are for men to sort out. But when it comes to choosing a husband, I trust you will depend upon the common sense for which you have often praised me.”

“Well, well,” Treacy said. “Time enough to attend to such matters in the future.”

“Was it prudent of your great-grandfather,” Moore asked Treacy, “to join the Stuart army?”

“That was a hundred years ago,” Treacy said. “Times change. The Catholic gentry at the Boyne and at Aughrim were fighting for their King, for their faith.”

“And their country,” Moore added.

“Perhaps,” Treacy said. “It was a different world. They were gentlemen, John, your ancestors and mine. They would have despised these United Irishmen. We have spent too long on these matters. Is there more tea, girl?”

Ellen walked with him to his horse, and they stood to talk. He leaned towards her, but she put a hand to his shoulder. “Not here.”

“He is a stubborn man,” Moore said. “Polite and stubborn.”

“He is a sensible man,” she said. “What business is it of yours if some men in Dublin want to make trouble?”

“Make trouble!” he repeated. “They want to make a revolution, and I have taken their oath.”

“And half of them are now in gaol, did you not tell me? Sure if that is what you want, you can have it with less trouble by stealing sheep or by going off with the Whiteboys to hough cattle.”

Moore slapped the palm of his hand upon his horse’s saddle.

“What sense is there in talking of such matters with a woman?”

“No sense whatever. Women have more important things to think about. There you stand with not enough land to your name to give grazing to a calf, and my father is willing that you should have Bridge-end. Why should he wish to see me wed to a fellow who may end in gaol at the heel of the hunt? My father has common sense. It would give great pleasure to the Protestants of Mayo to see a Moore in Castlebar gaol.”

“Your father has little cause to worry. There are not more than twenty sworn United Men in Mayo. The French will land and the battles will be fought and won and Mayo will have no part in it. This is the most backward province in Christendom.”

“But you are riding off now to make a United Man out of Randall MacDonnell if you can. You would fare better by preaching to his horse.”

Moore shrugged. “I promised Malcolm Elliott that I would sound out some of the Catholic squires. There have been good men sworn, in other places, Papist and Protestant alike.”

“Protestant, is it? Sure what need have the Protestants of your revolution? Aren’t they ruling the roost as it is?”

“Some of them. It is this accursed system which rules us all, while England bleeds us white.”

“Ach,” she said. “Go preach to Randall. I despair of you.”

“You do not,” Moore said. “You are in love with me and I with you.”

“A pretty way you have to show it.”

“I know a better one.”

“In broad daylight beneath my father’s window. When you come courting it should be for that purpose and for no other. You will drive me to tears and despair. One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you. And all the time you could have myself and the promise of Bridge-end, as fine a farm as any young man in Mayo has ever been as good as offered. And myself with it in the bargain.”

“Never fear that I will not come courting,” Moore said. “It is my greatest pleasure.”

“It is not,” she said. “It is your greatest pleasure to talk with Malcolm Elliott and Randall MacDonnell. A queer sort of beau I found for myself. Far better would I have fared with Tom Bellew that I brushed aside in my infatuation.”

Swiftly, John circled her waist and kissed her. She clung to him.

“You will fare best with me,” he said. “And well you know it.”

“Perhaps,” she said. She brushed his lips lightly with her own, and then stood back from him. “That remains to be seen.”

He mounted, and sat looking down at her. “You are too tall for beauty, Miss Treacy. Now a slight and graceful girl like Grace Nugent, who does not come up to a man’s shoulder—”

“She is the pick of the MacDonnell litter,” Ellen said. “I doubt is she a MacDonnell at all. She washes herself.”

“You are too tall by a head,” Moore said, “and you have a sharp tongue in it.”

“I have,” she said. “And you had best get used to it.”

“I must learn Irish,” he said. “It is a soft and clinging speech.”

She laughed. “ ’Tis little you know it. Have a care what you say to Randall MacDonnell, John.”

“I will,” he said. “I will be as prudent as a Treacy.”

On a low hill beyond the hedge of the demesne, two cottiers were digging potatoes. Ellen stood watching them, her straight, slender back to Bridge-end House. It was a firm custom that no potatoes were dug before Garland Sunday at the end of July. These fellows had begun early. It was because of the strange weather. If the weather held, it would be the fullest harvest in memory. But Paddy Lacy and his son Owen had no cause to be digging spuds before Garland Sunday. There was a time and a method for everything that had to do with sowing and reaping and gathering. The ploughman in spring must turn his horses from left to right, with the sun, and when he unyokes them, they must be facing south. Friday is the day to begin the sowing, or any task which does not require iron, and Good Friday the best day of all. And the sower, as he sets forth, must say, “In the name of God,” and throw some turf over the rump of each horse. There were a hundred pishogues like those ones, and the harvests depended upon them.

Much did John Moore know of such matters, or his brother for that matter, but Mayo knew them, even the Protestants. They had no head for any of the practical concerns of life. You will have no luck at the fair if the first person you meet is not fair-headed, and when you buy a horse you must put a lump of earth on his back. John Moore knew that, because she had told him, but he paid no attention to it. He did not have the luck of the beast he was riding, and it would one day do him a mischance. Why had she fallen in love with a man who knew so little?

“A lovely beast,” Randall MacDonnell said, running his hand along the flank of Moore’s hunter. “A lovely beast. Who bred her?”

“Steward of Foxford,” Moore said. They were standing in the MacDonnell stable yard, amidst a clutter of farm wagons and harnesses.

“A heretic lady, but she is nonetheless sound for that. Stewart did well by you. But come over here now, John, and you will see how a Papist lady stands.” He walked with Moore to the stalls, unlatched a door, and led out a black mare. “This is Vixen. I am riding her next month at the Castlebar races. Bred on this farm.” He was the right height for a rider, but he was too broad, with wide, square shoulders and the beginning of a paunch although he had just turned thirty. “You will be there, will you not?”

“I will,” Moore said. “Unless I have more pressing business.”

“You should never let business keep you from the Castlebar races. Sure there will be no business done in Mayo that week save at the races. And if you will be guided by me, you will have a few pounds on Vixen. There are few of them can see her run, but you can yourself in the morning if you stay the night.”

“That is kind of you,” Moore said, “but I am promised at Bridge-end House and from there I am riding out to Tom Bellew.”

“Making your stations, is it, in the name of the republic?”

“Something like that,” Moore said. “I am hoping that you will give me a word to take back to Elliott.”

MacDonnell rooted in his pocket for lumps of sugar, which he divided between his horse and Moore’s.

“Elliott and I hunted together,” MacDonnell said. “A decent enough fellow.”

“He is,” Moore said. “A sound man. And he has been accredited by the Society as Secretary for Mayo.”

“Of course,” MacDonnell said, “there was a time when Sam Cooper and I were close, or as close as you can get to a Protestant. He was a wild lad for a few years after his father died. My God, the gatherings we used have at Mount Pleasant! They would go on for days. I remember riding back here to Ballycastle from Mount Pleasant with George Blake, one winter’s morning, just after Christmas it was, and the two of us out of our minds with drink. We had been at it for three days. The need came upon us, and we made a wager, which one of us could piss the farther. Not the more mind you, George would have had me there, but the farther.”

As he talked, he took Moore by the arm and walked with him to the house. When his tiresome anecdote had wound itself out, he gave a sudden whinny of laughter and clapped Moore on the shoulder.

“Seven years ago that was, if it was a day. By God, but has not Sam Cooper become a bloody fool. He was a bloody fool to turn out Squint O’Malley. He was looking for trouble and now he has it. And he was daft to put in for command of the yeomanry, a job every other Protestant was too busy or too lofty to take. What is it but a lot of bother and expense?”

“To keep the King’s peace,” Moore said, “and to guard Mayo against the French.”

“Hah!” MacDonnell cried with delight. “Have you ever seen them drill? It is the drollest sight you have ever seen. Bailiffs and shopkeepers.”

“You have a fine stand of barley there,” Moore said. “It is the same at Ballintubber. The harvest will be prodigious if the weather holds.”

“Prodigious,” MacDonnell said. “There is the word for it. One of the cottiers, an old fellow named Flaherty, says there was as fine a harvest in my father’s time, God rest his soul, but there has been nothing like it in my time or yours. Well sure ’tis not the crops you have in mind at all, is it, or how far can George Blake piss. Come into the house where we can talk like gentlemen, not standing with our ankles deep in stable muck.”

It was what Treacy had called it, a great draughty barn of a house, a two-storey farmhouse, slate-roofed and narrow-windowed, to which low, almost random rooms had been added, sprawling and graceless. MacDonnell ushered Moore in with unaffected pride, kicking a clear pathway through a litter of tackle and sacks of grain in the hall, and shouting for punch. He cleared away clutter from two chairs close to the fireplace and waved Moore towards one of them.

Ten minutes later, a dark-haired girl in red shift and bare feet brought in the punch, and placed it steaming on the hob. “There is a good girl,” MacDonnell said, and as she passed him to leave he patted her casually on the buttocks. “There is a good girl, Nora. She is, by God, John, as fine a girl as has ever served in this house.” He ladled punch into two cups and handed one to Moore, who noticed that the rim was smeared. The cup was greasy to his touch.

“Now I am going to give you a straight blunt answer, John.”

Moore recognised this as the local preface to any tortuous circumlocution. “All right, Randall. Provided you do not lecture me upon how little I understand about Mayo. I have already had that lecture at Bridge-end House.”

“From old Treacy, is it? There is a cunning old fox. You would think you were listening to a poem to hear that fellow talk about the old world that was destroyed at Aughrim, and all the while he is not doing so ill in this one, and neither did his father before him. That old fox in Ballycastle my father used call him.”

“We rub together well enough,” John said. “I am fond of him.”

MacDonnell darted a shrewd glance at him. “There is a fine estate there at Bridge-end waiting for the right young fellow, and a fine girl standing on it. A great friend of my own sister, Grace. Mind you, the hips seem a bit narrow for children, but sure where there’s a will there’s a way, as the saying goes.”

“It is a wife that I am looking for,” Moore said. “Not a brood mare.”

“Indeed? Treacy was right, you don’t know Mayo. Well now, John.” Moore’s cup was still full, but he refilled his own. “I have been talking to some men that the two of us have discussed, Corny O’Dowd and George Blake and Tom Bellew and a few others. The old stock, if you take my meaning. And I think I can tell you that we are well disposed. Yes, that is the word. Well disposed.”

“I am very glad to hear that,” Moore said, “and so will Malcolm Elliott be.”

“Ach,” MacDonnell said, rubbing a short, blunt hand across his neck. “You keep talking about Elliott, but it is yourself that I am saying this to.”

“Elliot is a member of the Connaught Directory and I am not,” Moore said. “It is the directory which is in correspondence with Dublin. You have no cause to distrust Elliott.”

“I doubt if it is much of a directory,” MacDonnell said gently. “There are some United Men in Sligo and in Galway and a scattering of them here in Mayo. All that is common knowledge. But I doubt if there are enough to make up a good hunt. You could fill the green of Castlebar perhaps with United Irishmen but it is a small green.”

“I admit that we are small in numbers now,” Moore said. “That is why I have been talking with you. Elliott has recommended me for the directory, and he is prepared to recommend O’Dowd and yourself if you will take the oath.”