The Year of the French (32 page)

“In God’s name, Mr. Teeling,” I cried. “What have you brought down upon us?”

“Liberty,” he replied, in a neutral tone of voice.

“And is this the appearance that liberty takes?” I asked.

He did not reply. He was looking beyond the courtyard to the street, where other peasants were milling about, excited and perhaps confused, as I was.

I cannot recollect my feelings with any exactness, and cannot believe that they would be of interest to the reader. I was overwhelmed by the suddenness of the event and by its unknown proportions, by my sight of men shot down in the streets of my parish, by my fears for the safety of my parishioners and my family. I was distracted by the hubbub, and by the matter-of-fact manner in which my very house had been taken away from me. But beneath the confusion, and stronger even than my fear, lay sadness like a sodden mass in my stomach. The spirited music of the pipers, the capering peasants, the indifferent soldiers, the bloody aprons, were both the causes and the visible emblems of my grief.

Thus began the first week of the Irish Republic, as I have seen it termed in several French accounts of this adventure, or, as it has remained alive in the imagination of the countryside,
Bliadhain na bhFranncach
, the year of the French.

The Moat, Ballina, August 22

A Killala man, riding an unsaddled horse, brought the news to Malcolm Elliott, who was at work in one of his fields. Elliott listened quietly, had the man repeat several portions of his story, and then nodded.

“Go to Michael Geraghty, and tell him that this story must be taken to John Moore at Ballintubber, and then to Swinford and Foxford. John Moore will give him the names of the men who must be told at once.”

“Will the men of Ballina be coming to us at Killala?”

“No,” Elliott said. “The Frenchmen will be coming here to us. Tonight perhaps or tomorrow.” He paused, and bit his knuckle sharply. “But I myself will go to Killala now. Tell Michael Geraghty that he is in command until he sees me again. Could you make out how many Frenchmen have come?”

“By God, Mr. Elliott, there must be thousands upon thousands of them. They have not yet all landed. They destroyed the Tyrawley Yeomanry and the streets of Killala are slippery with blood. A Frenchman gave Captain Cooper a stroke with his musket that split open his skull like a bad apple.”

Elliott remembered Cooper leaning towards him across a gaming table, the cannonball head bobbing with laughter.

“Have they cannon with them?” he asked. “Did they bring cannon?”

“They brought a great green banner and hung it up from the Protestant clergyman’s house. And musicians.”

“Yes,” Elliott said.

He rode to his house, dismounted, and calling to his wife walked quickly to his office.

When Judith joined him he had a large ebony pistol case open on his desk. He looked up.

“The French have landed at Killala.”

“Our Killala? Here in Mayo?”

“Our Killala. Seven miles to the north of us.”

Her hand flew to her throat, and she sank down into a chair facing him.

“Why here? Of all the places in Ireland, why here?”

“Well may you ask. They have routed the yeomen there and hold the town.”

“Then they have come in strength?”

“Because they dealt with Sam Cooper and his bundle of Orangemen? The man who brought me the news was a peasant. He had no notion of numbers.”

“What will you do, Malcolm?”

“Do? Why, bring out the United Men. That was to be the signal, the landing of the French.”

She sat quietly, hands joined.

He took one of the matched pistols from the case. “It could become dangerous here, Judith. This is the closest garrisoned town to the French. The yeoman corps of other towns may move here and try to hold it.”

“I know nothing of such matters,” she said. “Garrisons, movements of men. I have never understood them.”

“No more have I. Do you know Michael Geraghty, who has the big farm on the other side of the river? Geraghty is a United Man. If there is trouble here, get word to him at once. If you have trouble with either side, do you understand me?”

She felt that her mind was moving too slowly to grasp his meaning.

“I must try to reach Killala now,” he said. “Very soon the fencibles will have the road closed.”

“I am sorry, Malcolm,” she said, shaking her head. “The French have landed, and the insurrection has begun. All over Ireland. Is that it?”

“I cannot speak for all of Ireland,” he said. “It has certainly begun in Mayo.” He put the pistol back in its case and closed the lid. “The hours my father spent teaching me the use of these! In his day every Mayo gentleman was a duellist. A national disease. He had a limp from a pistol ball in his thigh. Badge of honour. It was a brutish place in those days, and it is little better now.”

Judith grasped the arms of her chair. “We are merchants,” she said, “my father and his brother. I doubt if either of them has ever held a pistol in his hand.”

Elliot smiled at her. “I will be back soon,” he said. “There will be a battle for Ballina.” The word echoed in his ears:
battle
, large and melodramatic.

“We must pray for its success,” she said. Then she cried, in a different, shriller voice, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“No,” Elliott said. “Few of us will understand it, now that it is here. We all talked about it.” He put the pistol case under his arm, and walked to her. He shared her sense of unreality. Judith herself, the room in which he stood, the field in which the word had been brought to him, belonged to the order of actuality. He was setting out towards phantasy, a world of pistols, Frenchmen, and words like
battle
.

“What will happen, Malcolm?” she asked. “You must have some sense of what will happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and bent down to kiss her.

Two miles outside of Ballina, he encountered a carriage crowded with women. Beside them rode George Falkiner, an elderly man who sat his horse with a stiff, erect back. One of the women recognised him, an old friend of his parents.

“Mr. Elliott,” she called out. “You must not go near Killala. It is in the hands of the Frenchmen and the Papists. They have murdered our yeomen.”

He reined in, and touched his hand to the brim of his hat. “I must, Mrs. Saurin. I have business there.”

“There are mobs in the streets, and more Papists pouring in by the hour.”

“My business there is pressing.”

“They will murder you,” she said. “You don’t understand, Mr. Elliott. They will murder you, as the innocent Christians were butchered in Wexford.” She had a round, anxious face, and speaking had brought her to tears.

Falkiner called him away from the carriage, and they went together a short distance down the road.

“If I correctly understand the purpose of your journey, Mr. Elliott, I should pistol you as you sit there.”

“I understand my obligations, sir, as you do yours.”

“You are riding to join foreign invaders, who have come here to bring bloodshed and death. They have already slaughtered men. You intend a treason for which the only remedy is a shameful death on the gallows.”

“I am not acting thoughtlessly, Mr. Falkiner. I trust and believe that I am serving our country.”

“I observe that you are carrying your father’s pistols. Would your father have called this service to your country?”

“He would not, sir. But I am not my father. You must excuse me. Ballina is still safe for your party, and the door of The Moat is open for you, if you wish it.”

“The Moat!” Falkiner cried. “No longer, sir. No longer. I would sooner sleep in the ditch, and these poor women with me. But I have no fear of that. The houses of Ballina are loyal, all but one of them.”

In the phantasy towards which he moved off, he might at such a moment expect a pistol ball between his shoulders. But he knew that Falkiner sat motionless, the reins held loosely in his white, fragile hands. Between fields of corn and barley, golden in the sun of late afternoon, Elliott rode towards Killala.

Kilcummin, August 22

On a field sloping down from Knockmany, Michael MacMahon and his son Fergus watched the French unload supplies from their boats.

“Queer small men they are,” MacMahon said. “For all the talk about them.”

“Ferdy O’Donnell will be bringing into Killala the men who have sworn the big oath, and I will be going with them.”

“For what purpose? To make yourselves drunk in the streets of Killala?”

“Well do you know for what purpose.”

“Look around you, boy, and tell me who is to give me help in those fields. Let the Frenchmen make up their army out of spalpeens and homeless men and idle, wandering fellows.”

“It is often enough that I have seen you beating time with your heels when they sang about the great rising there would be when the French came, or Owen MacCarthy bawling out his poems. The French are here now.”

“Is Owen MacCarthy with the French?”

“How would I know where Owen MacCarthy is. He is below in Killala.”

“Owen MacCarthy is a scholar and a man of deep learning. You will not find him wasting his life to the rope or the cannon.”

“There is no waste when an entire countryside of people rises up.”

“Would you be back for the harvest?”

“Before then, sure. How long can it take? Last week the yeomen were swaggering across the countryside, burning whatever man’s house they chose. Today they are dead in the streets of Killala.”

“ ’Tis here that the year’s harvest is,” MacMahon said, “and not with the dead yeomen of Killala.” He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “It would be a wonderful thing to see the Protestant landlords driven off, and the English soldiers.”

“It would.”

MacMahon turned suddenly, flung his arms around his son, and began to weep. Fergus, taken by surprise, patted his back awkwardly.

“I don’t want you killed,” MacMahon said, sobbing. “It isn’t the harvest at all. I don’t want you to go off to the fighting and get killed.”

He is an old man now, Fergus thought with surprise, holding his father close. Over the father’s beefy, heavy-muscled shoulder, he saw Ferdy O’Donnell and forty men coming towards them along the road, pikes sloped.

Killala, August 22

A man wearing a helmet of the Tyrawley Yeomanry crashed into MacCarthy, who moved back a pace and held him upright. Randall MacDonnell was riding down the crowded street towards the Palace, followed by a long, straggling column of men. When he saw MacCarthy he waved, sketchy parody of a salute.

The man whom MacCarthy was holding said, “Tomorrow we will be given uniforms and firelocks, master.”

“Get yourself home now and go to bed,” MacCarthy said, “or tomorrow you will do yourself an injury with your firelock.” He clapped the man on the back, pushing him forward.

In the Wolf Dog he found Ferdy O’Donnell, who had his uniform already, a blue coat with yellow facings, and a sword.

“Have you become a Frenchman on me, Ferdy?”

“Indeed I have not, Owen, but a captain in the Irish army, in command of the Kilcummin men.”

“Will Randall MacDonnell be the general then of the Irish, or will Malcolm Elliott?”

“Not Malcolm Elliott,” O’Donnell said. “He is to be on the staff of the French when he arrives, and so is John Moore. It will be Randall, or Corny O’Dowd, or George Blake of Barraclough, and the others are to be colonels. You couldn’t want a better man than George Blake.”

“It is true,” MacCarthy said. “He is a good man. Gentleman, I should say. I observe that the rebellion is paying proper attention to social grades.”

“Sure who would follow after cowherds and potboys? Owen, it has been wonderful the way men have been coming in. There are men marching in from beyond Nephin who met a party of yeomen and scattered them.”

“It is wonderful indeed,” MacCarthy said. “It is as if a great sackful of people had been shaken out upon Killala. The town is crowded to bursting with them.”

“We will have a few jars, and then I will take you over to Bartholemew Teeling, the Irish Frenchman who made me a captain.”

“I will settle for the jar, Ferdy. How many of the Frenchmen are there?”

“A thousand, and they have brought firelocks for five thousand of us. And swords and sashes for officers.”

“One thousand is not many.”

“In this fleet only. More are on the way, thousands more. Teeling stood on the steps of the Protestant minister’s house and made a speech with the French general standing beside him.”

“A speech in Irish?”

O’Donnell shrugged. “Ulster Irish, but we could make out what he was saying.”

“And what is it that they intend to do?”

“I do not know for certain, except that we will first attack Ballina. In two days’ time, with the help of God, my brother Gerry will be a free man.”

“With God’s help he will,” MacCarthy said. He crossed himself and then picked up his whiskey. “I am ashamed to confess it, but my mind is all confusion. Frenchmen in their gay uniforms, Cooper’s yeomen smashed to pieces, men coming in from all directions with their pikes. What in God’s name do the likes of us know about armies?”