The Year of the French (3 page)

His voice was flat, but his lips glistened with spittle. He wants this. The thick, square fingers could fasten on bailiff’s throat, tear punishing thornbush from the earth.

“Ach, there is no choice, Owen,” O’Carroll said. “If the landlords turn to grazing we are done for. It is happening in other places. There is no argument we have but the Whiteboys’ letter.”

MacCarthy turned towards Quigley. “A tavernkeeper has no land. What is all this to you?”

“Well now, Owen. I have no land it is true, no more than a schoolmaster has. That is true for you.” He took MacCarthy’s glass and filled it again with the calm, colourless whiskey. “But a man should stand in well with his neighbours. That never hurts him, whatever his trade.”

MacCarthy turned the glass around in his hand. The room was darkening. Beyond the window, the evening light had turned to the linnet-wing softness which stands at the edge of night.

“This is a foolish business you have in mind,” he said to Duggan. “Great risings have now been stamped out in Ulster and in Wexford. There was a travelling man last week in Killala who said that gallows stretch from one end of the County Wexford to the other, and burned cabins. And no count will ever be made of all who were killed with musket and sword. He said that there are more English soldiers in the country now than have been here since the Boyne. They are in Tuam in their thousands, and they are in their thousands in the city of Galway.”

“I heard that travelling man,” O’Carroll said. “He had more to say than that. He said that for a month the army of the Gael was victorious in the County Wexford.”

“Great comfort that was to them when they stood on the gallows,” MacCarthy said.

“There are not thousands of British soldiers in Tyrawley,” Duggan said. “There is only Captain Cooper and his tinpot yeomen. Protestant shopkeepers and tithe proctors. What was happening away off in Wexford or in Ulster is no matter here.”

“There were thousands of them risen up in rebellion,” said MacCarthy. “All of the County Wexford, and all of Carlow and all of Wicklow and parts of Kilkenny. They tried to fight their way out of Wexford. They were going to bring their rebellion to all of Ireland. They went this way and that way, but there were English soldiers on all the roads. And when they could think of nowhere else to go, they climbed a hill and waited for the English cannon to blow them to pieces.”

Beyond the power of his imagination. The roads of Wexford clotted with people, their pikes a winter forest against the horizon. Priests rode in their van. Faction fighters drove them against yeomen and militia. They prodded cattle before them into battle. He heard again the words of the travelling man: “There were great encampments of the people on the plains and along the rivers. They captured town after town, Camolin and Wexford and Enniscorthy. They burned Enniscorthy.” Only two months ago. All over now.

“The people of Wexford were fools,” Duggan said. “Captain Cooper will satisfy me. And after him, Gibson.”

“Gibson is your own landlord, is he not?” MacCarthy said. “I thought that you would find time for Gibson.”

“Then Gibson,” Hennessey agreed. “But after him the agent for the Big Lord. By God, I hate that Creighton. He is the worst tyrant in Tyrawley.”

“He does as he is bid,” MacCarthy said. “The Big Lord off in London sends him a letter of instructions. That is how it is done.”

“I will send him a letter, by God,” Duggan said. “The Whiteboys of Killala will send him a letter.”

“So that is to be the way of it,” MacCarthy said, “and then a fourth and then a fifth. You have a great budget of work for me there.”

“You will be safe enough, Owen,” Hennessey said. “We will all be safe enough. There will be five hundred Whiteboys in Tyrawley.”

“It will not stop at the bounds of this barony,” Duggan said. “There are men I know in Erris, and across the Moy in Sligo.”

“We are not fools,” Quigley said. “We have met with this fellow and that fellow. And we have made out an oath.”

“To be sure you have,” MacCarthy said. “An oath is a Whiteboy’s first order of business. The more mouth-filling the better.” Seventeen seventy-nine, a barn close to Tralee in Kerry, and MacCarthy just turned eighteen. Frightened, boastful faces gathered around a candle. He would burn away parts of his past if he could, all the nights of the Whiteboys’ moon. Fellows with blackened faces, white smocks pulled over their coarse frieze, baggy stockings peeping underneath, creeping across wet fields towards cattle. The night air a sudden jangle of bellows and shouts.

“We are not fools,” Duggan said. “We know how to do this.”

“You do, to be sure,” MacCarthy said, draining his glass again. “You are grand fellows. It was well worth my long ramble northwards from Kerry to meet such grand fellows.”

“Corn and oats will bring good money to the landlords,” Hennessey said, “but cattle will bring better. The landlords will give farm after farm to the cattle, as Cooper gave them the farm of the O’Malleys.”

The landlords had no choice and the people had no choice and the magistrates would have no choice but to hunt them down and hang them. It was like a proposition in Euclid, straight lines driving towards a point. That is what happened twenty years before, in Kerry and in West Cork. He had seen Whiteboys drink their victories in chapel yards, and he had seen them swing at the rope’s end. What of me, he thought; have I a choice?

“We did not bring you here so that you could argue with us, MacCarthy,” Duggan said. A question answered.

“No more do I want arguments,” MacCarthy said. He took Quigley’s jug of ill-tasting whiskey, and filled his glass to the brim. The parting glass.

“That is not true,” Duggan said. “You would be happy to sit arguing here while there was any of that stuff left in the jug. You are a slave to it, and every man here knows it.”

“We are all slaves,” MacCarthy said. It tasted better now, soft and cool. “Slaves to this or slaves to that. I will write your letter for you, and I will write it with my left hand. But I will take no other action with you or for you, and I will take no oath. You will bring blood into the streets of Killala and Kilcummin, and it will not be the blood of landlords.”

“Some of it will, by God,” Quigley said. “If our blood is spilled, so will theirs be. We will bring the bright edge of the knife to them.”

MacCarthy looked at him, despising the round, complacent face. The room was dark now. The face floated in dying afterglow, a fatuous moon. MacCarthy suddenly hurled his glass into a corner of the room; whiskey splashed across his hand.

“Listen to him,” he said to Duggan. “Listen to that man. That is the kind of man you will have with you, who has never seen blood save for the blood of cows and pigs. He will be drinking his own bad whiskey and making his boasts and he will drink and boast you up the steps of the gallows.”

“But you have seen blood,” Duggan said, with his humourless irony.

“I was schoolmaster in Macroom when Paddy Lynch was hanged with five of his followers. I saw his feet reaching for the air and I saw his face. That brought me close enough to blood.”

“By God that would take away a man’s appetite,” O’Carroll said to Duggan, but he smiled nervously to take the edge off his words.

Duggan shifted to face him. “If we are careful and quiet there will be no hangings in Tyrawley.”

“In Castlebar,” MacCarthy said. “They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there. If you have a hundred men, you will have ten informers and if you have five hundred men, you will have fifty.”

“Will you listen to this man?” Duggan said to O’Carroll, his voice rough with contempt. “A man who owns nothing in this world but a sack of books and half of Judy Conlon’s bed. Let you listen to him, and in two years’ time there will be nothing left in Tyrawley but graziers and cowherds. And Judy Conlon.”

“Be careful how you talk, Duggan,” MacCarthy said, standing up. What use would I be against him, with his hands like great hams, smoked and seasoned by the blackthorn and holly of the faction fights. “By God,” he said to the others, “it is once in a while a great comfort not to have land.”

“It is,” Matthew Quigley said. “A great comfort. If we do not forget loyalty to our neighbours.”

“Owen is not the man to forget that,” Hennessey said. “Sure, what life would a schoolmaster have if he did not stand in well with his neighbours?”

“None at all,” Duggan said. “No life at all.”

MacCarthy remained standing. “My thanks to you for the whiskey, Matthew. To which of you am I to give the letter when I have it written?”

“As well to me as to another,” Quigley said. “I will walk down to the Acres for it tomorrow evening.”

“Not the Acres,” MacCarthy said. “Nor my schoolhouse either. I will meet you at Tobin’s tavern.”

“Sure don’t be in such a hurry, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Have you no song for us?”

“A song, is it? A pity I haven’t Paddy Lynch here to teach you to dance upon air. Poor Paddy, he was a true artist. He learned the mystery of that craft, but he told it to no one.”

Only Quigley laughed. “You are a witty man, Owen. A witty man when you have drink taken.”

“That is often enough,” MacCarthy said.

“Safe home, Owen,” Hennessey said.

He took a last look at them, indistinct now in the dark room. What harm will they do, four men in a tavern by Kilcummin strand? No, three men and a bullock with brains. A bullock with eyes as round as moons.

Outside the tavern, the moon mocked him. Full, perfect. It fell upon rock and strand and black bay. The night air was chill. Far to the west, Downpatrick Head, fierce-snouted peninsula, and the lonely, savage barony of Erris. To the south, the Nephin Mountains, stretching towards Achill Island. To the east, the Ox Mountains, in the softer county of Sligo. A hard land indeed, after the sweet kingdom of Kerry, and the cheerful bustle of Cork. The wildest and poorest county in Ireland, the people of Galway said of Mayo. Well were they qualified to judge such matters, poor creatures.

His path followed the line of the bay, narrow, uneven. Ahead of him, Killala, cupped by low hills. At their centre, on Steeple Hill, the ancient, upthrust arm of a round tower, black against the darkened sky. What man could know the age of such towers? Far older than the Dane, some said; older than the Sons of Milesius and the coming of the Gaels. Perhaps so. It was a land where history was measured by ruins, Gaelic fort and Norman keep. Not even the round towers marked the farthest line of wrack, for were there not the dolmens, and the queer underground burial chambers, immense, as though for giants?

He entered Killala at its western end, past cabins with fishing nets hung out to dry upon their walls, and walked along narrow, winding streets. He paused by the open door of Tobin’s tavern, whose sign he could make out with the moon’s help: the Sign of the Wolf Dog. Even the names they gave to places of cheer were faintly ominous: stiff-bristled mastiff, lips curled back from fangs. He was Ovid, banished to wild Tomi. From the tavern, a tide of murmurs spilled out into the street. Perhaps the travelling man had more to tell them about the broken rising in Wexford. Thousands of men upon the roads of Wexford. Towns had fallen before their onslaughts; militia and yeomanry had been beaten, scattered bodies, red-uniformed, upon thick-grassed fields. Pedlars and travelling men were now their Homers and their Virgils, tales carried to distant taverns.

MacCarthy almost entered, but then walked on, past Hussey’s Catholic chapel, newly built and awkward with embarrassment beside the trim shops of the Protestant merchants, Bassett, Beecher, Reeves, Stanner. Once they had been wealthy; once Killala had been a thriving town. Now the trade was all in Ballina, southwards at the base of the bay, on the road to Castlebar. Poor Protestant merchants of Killala: poor Reeves, poor Stanner. Right-angled to the street, facing the market house, the Protestant church, and the residence of Broome, its clergyman. In its old, flourishing days, Killala had been an episcopal see; Broome’s house was still called “the Palace,” a large, wind-battered building of cut grey stone with tall, handsome windows. Walking beside church and bishop’s palace, MacCarthy left the town, past scattered cabins, past the large, low hut where, from late autumn to spring, he held his school. All instruction offered in grammar and navigation, Euclid’s
Elements
, Ovid and Virgil, bookkeeping and metaphysics. Offered but not accepted, save by a few of the brighter lads, an eye on the priesthood. The others wanted only sums and catechism, a smattering of English. But they loved the sonorities of Latin, the changelings in Ovid, the stories MacCarthy had picked up on his years of wandering across Munster. Tricked into knowledge with the honey of anecdote. He climbed a low hill to the Acres, two rows of cabins, walls of rough stone washed white, discoloured thatch.

He pushed open a door. Against one wall, mattress of straw on low frame, Judy Conlon lay asleep. He lit a candle of tallow set in a clay dish, and then stood beside her. Kneeling briefly, he ran a finger gently along the line of her cheekbone. She stirred, and a small hand moved to the tangle of black hair. He put the candle on a table set against the opposite wall. Ranged across its far side, his two dozen books: the
Aeneid
, Keating’s
History of Ireland
, the
Eclogues
and the
Georgics
, some volumes of Shakespeare,
Paradise Lost
, a box which held his copies of the poems of O’Rahilly and O’Sullivan.

He opened the two boxes which contained his craft. In the larger one, his own manuscripts, poems completed, poems to be remade, his translation of the first two books of the
Metamorphoses
into Irish, his sheets of blank paper. In the other box, a small brass bottle of ink, a sharp knife, his assortment of pens, grey goose for poetry, black crow for business. He placed paper and ink before him, sharpened his quills, and dipped a black feather into the ink.

In the early morning, when he felt Judy standing beside him, he was still sitting at the table, moving a grey goose feather across the page, scratching out a word, adding one, scratching that one out. Absently, with his hand, he moved along the line of her leg, cupped her haunch. A small girl, the hand had not far to travel.