The Year of the French (46 page)

The next day some creature from Belmullet without a word of English on him came to the shop and carried off eight bolts of unbleached linen, leaving a note behind which said, “Three pounds payable ninety days after the establishment of the Irish Republic. Cornelius O’Dowd, General.” I took this remarkable document to the courthouse, and asked O’Dowd what was meant by it, and when he replied, I told him to turn it over and write on the blank side, “For bolts of linen, payable to Sean MacKenna in ninety days,” and then to sign it. “What would be the meaning of that?” he asked. “It means that you have bought yourself eight bolts of linen, and I am extending you three months’ credit. You can pay from your own pocket, and then settle your accounts with the Republic of Ireland.” He dropped the paper as though I had set fire to it. “Well then, Mr. O’Dowd,” said I, “there may be a republic or there may not, but in your judgement it is too risky a proposition for a three-pound wager. The way I would have it, your brother the bishop would settle the bill for you, as he has always done.” “I am risking my life for Ireland,” said he. “With all proper respect to your brother,” said I, “your life in not worth three pounds.” “It is men like yourself,” said he, “who have left Ireland where she is.” “With all respect to your brother,” said I, “Ireland has been left where she is by swaggering gunmen with ready tongues.” It was clear that there was nothing to be done, so I went back to the shop and folded the paper and put it away with the thought that it might someday bring in a few shillings as an historical curiosity.

I draw a pained amusement from the circumstance that this was linen which I had purchased from MacTier of Sligo, now disclosed to me by Owen as an enthusiastic United Irishman. I know him as an honest merchant, but had never suspected him of cherishing hopes for my liberation. It was MacTier, I believe, who imparted to Owen his new-found notions about the rights of man and the rest of it. The effect upon his poetry of such windy nonsense will not be a good one. A poem must be hard and particular, and bound by stout cords to its tradition.

Into the tavern with me that night, and there is Owen holding forth to a group of wild lads who looked at him with admiration, a cut or two above Malachi Duggan’s men, but not many cuts. “Owen,” said I, “would you ever tell me by which of man’s rights it is that Corny O’Dowd robbed me of eight bolts of linen?” One word led to the next, and, before I knew what was happening, one of the omadhauns had a hand at my throat and was calling me a gombeen. Owen had to send him away with a hard cuff to the side of his head. “Who was that,” I asked, “the new Attorney General?” “ ’Tis lads like that we will need,” said Owen; “he is a faction fighter from Nephin.” “Oh, by God,” said I, “Nephin Mountain, where they haven’t enough knowledge to count their toes.” “Time enough for that later,” said Owen. Such madness I have never before encountered, although I was once in my youth to Puck Fair. These were lads who a month ago would have jeered at him, and he in a drunken state, ignorant of his reputation as a poet, but now that he has a pistol and a swagger, they are all admiration. Things in this world are never placed at their proper value.

The magnificent weather continues, the land bursting with its abundance, men working in the fields and women bringing them pails of cool water against the noonday heat. A man will pause at his work, mop a forearm across his brow, and stare at a distant smudge of smoke which signals that a big house has been set afire. Little Timothy and I walked out to Turlough on Sunday, and gained a fine view of a white-tailed plover, which Timothy entered in his book, correctly spelled. As I have several times remarked, I have encouraged him to share my delight in the many-coloured wonders of nature.

How strange it is that these two worlds, a world of violence and one of harvest, can exist beneath the same bright sun, with just the first touches of slow September. A bitter September it will be for many, and I pray that it will not be so for my beloved Owen.

We are a land of ruins. Norman keeps and towers, and the queer round towers of which no man knows their antiquity, shattered manor houses of the Tudor times, the roofless abbeys and monasteries savaged by the men of Cromwell, their broken arches gaunt arms against the tumbling clouds, strongholds of O’Neills and O’Donnells, Burkes and Fitzgeralds, bashed and battered away, moss and ivy creeping over their stumps as they lie dreaming beneath the great sky of Ireland. Strangest of all, the great cairns and dolmens and fairy mounds, ruins of some race perished long before the Sons of Milesius led the people of the Gael to these shores. As though in this land all, everything, has been sentenced from the beginning to break apart, fall into pieces, powerless against our harsh divinities of rain and wind and weed and tall grasses. All in ruin, the ruin of a world, sacked and burned and smashed, by Danes and Normans and Irish and English.

While all this devastation worked its will, century after century of Coopers and Duggans hacking and slashing at each other and at all who stood in their way, did other men reap harvests in the summer sun and scatter the seeds of spring, walk hand in hand with little boys down winding roads to watch the white-tailed plover rise in flight? Who did the better work to keep for us the bit we have, the men who hacked and killed, or those who reaped and tended?

For a full week now the rebel army has hung poised in Castlebar, uncertain whether to strike eastwards or north, although Owen tells me that Ulster is silent as the tomb, or as a burned hillside cabin, whereas the midlands may be in arms from Longford to Kilbeggan.

Duggan and Cooper, Gog and Magog, striding across the island in their brutal and stupid cruelty, centuries old the two of them, tearing down abbeys, burning cabins, skewering warm bodies with sabre or pike. What business has my Owen with such men? He raises up cathedrals of sound, word linked to word as the stones of an arch are joined, a shaper, like those who built abbey and bridge. Poem and priory come to us from a world of quietness and order, and we stand mute before them. But he is less my Owen now, this swaggering fellow who has seen men butchered on Sion Hill, their deaths concealed behind his eyes. Often enough has he told me in better days of Patrick Lynch, the murderous Captain of Macroom, with the two of us marvelling from a safe distance at that man’s brutality. And now he traffics in the same wares, with song and poetry burned away from his path.

I can see him now in Castlebar High Street, plundered tailcoat tightened by belt of wide leather lifted from some slaughtered dragoon. “Owen,” I long to call out to him. “Wait! Let us walk out towards Turlough down the leafy road. Let us take two hours together away from this noise, away from pikes and boastful killers.” But he stalks past me, unseeing, up Castlebar High Street, not the friend who sat by my candle to speak his verses on winter nights, but a far smaller creature, the Whiteboy Captain of Castlebar, in the dark, heavy boots of Patrick Lynch.

A LETTER FROM GEORGE MOORE,
ESQUIRE, OF MAYO,
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
EDWARD BARRETT,
MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, WESTMINSTER

Moore Hall

2 September, 1798

My Dear Barrett:

London will by now have learned that a small French force has landed on the Mayo coast and has raised an army of native recruits. The northern portion of the county is in their hands, and they have for some days been in possession of Castlebar, the county town, which they captured after imposing an ignominious defeat upon generals Lake and Hutchinson. Were I inclined to pedantry, I would inform you that we have entered upon Year One of the provisional Republic of Connaught, of which through no desire of my own I have become a citizen.

Of events beyond Mayo, I have no knowledge beyond that offered by rumour and conjecture. It is said that Lord Cornwallis, who has himself taken the field, has crossed the Shannon and waits at Tuam for reinforcements before advancing upon Castlebar. Upon the assumption that this is true and that mail coaches are free to move between there and Dublin, I shall send this letter to Tuam by messenger.

Much that is grievous and much that is farcical have attended the establishment of our Connaught Republic, but my thoughts are taken up almost entirely by a most serious personal concern which is the occasion of my writing to you. Upon hearing of the French landing, young John, whom you will remember with affection, rode north and placed himself at the disposition of the rebel faction. He is at present in Castlebar, where he holds a position of authority with the new “government.” It speaks volumes that this youth, in his early twenties, a romantic and high-spirited boy, should be accepted by them as a weighty senator. I suspect that the French, for all their egalitarian protestations, are not free of the vanities of less advanced civilisations and have welcomed to their cause a gentleman of property and breeding. Aside from John, they have attracted only the most desperate of the peasantry, with a sprinkling of ignorant squireens, hedge schoolmasters, shopkeepers, and the like.

I have several times visited him, and although I have been unable to persuade him to return to Moore Hall, I have nevertheless discovered the following facts, upon which his future and perhaps his life may depend. He has not taken up arms, and he played no part in the battles of Ballina and Castlebar. The “government” of which he is part is a kind of civic committee, necessary to the maintenance of order in the town of Castlebar and in the countryside. He has been vigorous in protecting the lives and property of loyalists, both Protestant and Papist, as doubtless many of them will stand ready to testify at the proper time. For he will of course face grave charges and will face them very shortly. I shall do all in my power to protect him from the consequences of his folly, but this will not be an easy task. His claim to gentility will offer no shield—as witness the summary hanging of Bagenal Harvey of Bargy Castle in Wexford, who was moreover a Protestant and powerfully connected with some of the leading families. I have several thoughts upon this matter, but it will be a most worrisome and difficult business, and before we have done, I may well be calling upon you for your assistance. And thus, to be candid, the present letter.

I account it as certain that this rebellion will fail, unless it is swiftly reinforced by a second army from France, and a larger one. Wide stretches of the island remain loyal, and of those which are disaffected, all are in a state of unreadiness. It is precisely this certainty which moves me to regard our present circumstances as mysterious. Humbert, the French commander, does not have the reputation of being either a fool or an adventurer. Since his victories in the Vendée, he has been known as a shrewd and resourceful soldier, and he has threaded his way cautiously through the labyrinths of the Directory. And yet here he is with a bog to roam around in until such time as Cornwallis feels inclined to cut him down. I cannot account for the reasonings in Paris which sent him forth upon so foolhardy an enterprise, nor why he agreed to so perilous an undertaking. Certain it is, however, that Ireland is playing her accustomed role of maidservant to others.

How many dramas of modern history have chosen for setting this Godforsaken bog, and always without any recompense for my unfortunate countrymen save further misery? What were the rebellions of Desmond and Tyrone but chapters in the struggle between Elizabeth and Spain, and thus of Reformation and Counterreformation? What were the wars of Cromwell here but a sideshow to the English Civil War, in which the divine right of Kings was challenged and overthrown? When James and William, the two kings, faced each other at the Boyne, the game was Europe, and Ireland but the board upon which the wagers were placed. The history of Ireland, as written by any of our local savants, reminds me of a learned and bespectacled ant, climbing laboriously across a graven tablet and discovering there deep valleys, towering mountains, broad avenues, which to a grown man contemplating the scene are but the incised names of England, Spain, France. Now the name of France appears a second time upon the table.

In my present isolation, I am perforce an ant. London must surely have but one concern at the moment—Egypt and Buonaparte. The other day, I stood upon a rise of ground, facing the road. It was early morning, chill and with a heavy autumnal air. A small band of rebels, leaderless so far as I could judge, was trudging northwards, towards Castlebar, a few with muskets, and others with their long, cumbersome pikes carried at the slope. Frieze-clad, they might have stepped out of history. Speak to them, and they would answer in a language unknown beyond these islands, a tongue which locks them to the past as firmly as does the sea which surrounds them. Egypt, if they know the world at all, is the land where their infant Saviour was carried to avoid the wrath of Herod. For these wretches, there will be no Egypt, and General Lake will be their Herod. If I accosted them, so I thought for a moment as they moved through the mist, would they answer me with news of O’Neill, or of Cromwell, of armies gathering at Aughrim?

As ever, Geo. Moore

Killala, September 2

The men hired by Kate Cooper to guard Mount Pleasant had drifted away, intimidated by the jeers and threats of the townspeople, but for the hours before the dawn of September second she was safe and so was the house. She brushed her thick black hair with the help of a small, brass-framed mirror propped against a table in one of the bedrooms. MacCarthy watched her from the bed, a blanket of heavy, rough wool drawn about him.