The Year of the French (8 page)

“Not at all, woman. Are you mad? Paddy Joe’s father had his bit of land from us when my father’s father died. They are not near-strangers, as the O’Malleys were.”

“And do you think that the Whiteboys came from the moon? In Mayo it pays not to be soft.”

“Then I am a lucky man, Kate, for you must be worth millions.”

She sat on the edge of her chair, gripping its arms, her black hair falling loose about her dressing gown. He knew that he was a lucky man indeed. Small need for the excitements of gaming or the hunt when you had a woman like that at home to match tempers with, and a kind of natural genius when it came to the pleasures of the bed. It was an impressive and a frightening mixture, her hardheadedness and her lust. A solid, turbulent marriage.

Cooper opened the double doors which led off the dining room, and walked out onto the terrace, from which he could see, far off, Fogarty and the two Paddy Joes. Kate was right. She knew these people through and through—who better?—and yet, turn as he would, he could find no way to proceed. It might satisfy Kate’s feminine bloodthirstiness to imagine him raging through Killala with fire and sword, at the head of the yeomanry, but this martial fancy bore little relation to the facts. In Wexford, by all reports, General Lake had loosed his troops upon the countryside, but Wexford had been in rebellion and he acted under martial law. It would have done Cooper’s heart good to see these Whiteboys hanged in Castlebar, but he lacked Kate’s ruthlessness. In his inarticulate way, he loved Mayo deeply.

He was not heavily burdened either with imagination or with historical information, but at times he wondered how his lands had first appeared to his great-great-something-or-other-grandfather, a sergeant who had trooped with Ireton. The Papists had risen up, as they were always doing, slaughtering hundreds of settlers and driving out thousands more to perish on the winter roads of Ulster. Cromwell, hard-pressed in England, had taken badly needed time to fall upon Ireland and crush a rebellion which had spread across the island. Shares of Irish land were sold to English companies, and smaller tracts were measured out to pay the soldiers. In this manner, Sergeant Joshua Cooper, a London locksmith, had come to Mayo, had come into possession of lands earned not by the sword of worldly conquest but by Christ’s chastising sword, carried into the wilderness to avenge His slaughtered saints. Surrounded by a sullen and defeated people, sunk in savagery and hating the light, he had claimed his acres and held them.

The chain of generations bound together Sergeant Cooper of London and Captain Cooper of Mount Pleasant. But who in that chain had first come to accept the land as truly his, ratified by claims stronger than those inscribed upon legal documents? Which of them had been the first to shrug off the locksmith’s shop and think himself a gentleman, no mere owner of Mount Pleasant but its master as well? Perhaps Joshua’s son Jonathan, who in 1690 had raised his company to serve King Billy at the Boyne and Aughrim and Limerick, who rode home to Mount Pleasant and defended it for five years against the sporadic sallies of the rapparees, the swordsmen, masterless now, of the defeated James Stuart. It was Jonathan who had built the present house, and who had given it its name. Heavy shutters, with loopholes for firelocks, still testified to the dangers of the rapparee times, but the name itself, Mount Pleasant, suggested that he had discovered more in Mayo than bogland and murder. Joshua and Jonathan, the successive founders of Cooper’s line, faced each other from the walls of the dining room, grim-faced Roundhead and thick-necked Williamite with a dab of lace under the chin, gentility’s first sign, a white rash. The Biblical sound of their names pleased Cooper; it was almost, of itself, a claim to ownership, Mayo their Canaan.

By the time of Cooper’s grandfather, ivy had begun to climb the walls of what had been built as a fortified farmhouse. Within, the rooms had become cluttered with heavy sideboards and beds, purchased in Dublin and shipped around the coast to Killala. The grandfather boasted that in his boyhood, Carolan, the great blind harper, had once played in the drawing room, composing for the occasion his “Planxty Squire Cooper.” Marriages had shaped Mount Pleasant as a knot in the network of Protestant proprietorship which history had cast across Mayo. There was no longer need for the loopholed shutters, and Joshua and Jonathan had become patriarchal legends. The land was Cooper’s now. It owned him. Once, far off in the brown bog of the past, it had been owned by an O’Donnell family. A young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land, Ferdy O’Donnell, had once shown him a valueless curiosity, a parchment which recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.

Moore Hall, June 17

A wide, handsome house built with blocks of pale grey limestone, it rose four storeys high, facing gentle, tree-shaded Lough Carra. It was a new house, less than ten years old, and had been built by an earlier George Moore, father of the present owner, upon his return from a Spanish exile. In the 1750s, harassed by the penal laws against Catholics, he had emigrated to Spain, vowing to make or mar his fortune. He went to work in a counting house, and a few years later married the daughter of another Irish émigré. By the 1780s he was one of the powerful merchants of Alicante, the owner of vineyards and of a fleet of ships which traded between Spain and the coastal cities of Galway, Westport, and Killala. The same vessels also conducted a less open and more profitable trade, smuggling brandy and laces, satins, and silks to the lonely beaches of Connaught. Portraits of Moore and his wife, dressed for the court of Spain, hung in Moore Hall.

But he had been half-Spanicised, and from the first he planned to return to Mayo. He took care that his two sons, George and John, were educated in England, under the guidance of Catholic tutors. And he took equal care to visit Ireland in 1780, when, under the terms of the Act of Relief, Catholics were permitted to take the oath of allegiance to George III and to hold land under long leases. As he sat through the Mediterranean evenings on the terrace of his white, flat-roofed house, looking past almond trees and orange trees towards the Bay of Alicante, he remembered brown Mayo moorlands and rain-soaked fields. He had thought of Mayo as he stood on the weathered planks of Spanish wharves, watching his ships sail out to Connaught with wine and back from Connaught with the green and yellow brown kelp of Connemara. And when he had amassed his fortune, some £250,000 according to Mayo legend, he sold all his Spanish property save for the vineyards and the house in the palm-shaded street, and he returned home.

He had intended to build near Ashbrook, the house of his birth, but on his journey of inspection there he passed the low, solitary hill of Muckloon. He halted his carriage, climbed the hill, and saw Lough Carra spread before him. Here he built, having first acquired the hill and eight hundred acres by outright purchase, as a more recent law now permitted him to do. An architect named Aitken was summoned from London and built, to his specifications, a house severely proportioned but light of line, drawn upon its thickly timbered background with the exact delicacy of an engraver’s pen. Three flights of limestone steps marched like regiments to a massive door which swung open to reveal a hall above which arched an Adam ceiling, blue as the Mayo sky, with oval medallions of white plasterwork. Long before the house was finished, he placed his motto above the door:
FORTIS CADERE, CEDERE NON POTEST
. Mayo gave it a loose translation: “Scratch a Moore and you yourself will bleed.” Above the four-pillared portico was a balcony, upon which the summer room opened, and here he sat in the evening, looking out towards Lough Carra, as the hammers of the stonemasons echoed below him.

He had fought his own kind of war and he had won it. The Moores had returned to Mayo wealthier and more powerful than they had been before Catholic Ireland was shattered by James’s defeat at the Boyne. Lacking all sympathy for dead causes, he was a faithful if cynical subject of King George and a scrupulous though not a devout Catholic. He had built a chapel in Moore Hall, furnishing it with an altar, altar cloths which splashed crimson and gold on their surrounding whiteness, and a massive gold crucifix from Spain. He had lived to see the withering of many of the penal laws by which his youth had been oppressed, and he assumed that the others would wither. He contributed generously to the several Catholic political organizations, but took no part in their affairs. That he was forbidden by law to sit in the Dublin Parliament did not trouble him, for he had no wish to do so. It mattered far more to him that he had a voice in naming the men who did sit for Mayo, and, with the other gentlemen of Mayo, he had the satisfaction of knowing that Dennis Browne was solicitous of their interests. The Brownes and the Moores came from the same world, and if the Brownes had changed faiths to hold their property, he was not inclined to criticise a choice which he had refused to make. There were other families of the Catholic gentry scattered thinly across Mayo: Blakes and Dillons, O’Dowds and Treacys and MacDonnells. He had intended that his sons should marry into them, but there he had not reckoned with the temperament of George, the older.

One night in the summer of 1795, the elder Moore sat in his chair on the balcony of Moore Hall hours past his custom, and a servant, coming to rouse him, discovered that he had died. George Moore set to work at once to dispose of his small villa on the Thames, and then shipped his papers and his considerable library to Mayo. He could give no explanation to his English friends, not because he lacked one, but because he feared they would not understand it. What Moores had, Moores held, and what they held was a hill in Mayo, facing a lake. Alicante, London, Paris were the three points by which he boxed his compass, but the needle pointed westwards, to Mayo. London meant as much to him and as little as the orange groves of Alicante had meant to his father. Son and father had shared this almost subterranean love of place, a Virgilian piety.

The present George Moore was a slender man, above the average in height but with a scholar’s stoop, and his face was handsome, pale, and poised. His speech was grave, but often with that courtesy which is thrown carelessly across irony. He was a writer, and would be an historian. His small book on the English Whigs and the Glorious Revolution had attracted the attention of Burke, and the two had become friends. For a year now, he had been labouring upon an experiment, an attempt to treat recent history with that meditative neutrality which other writers bestowed upon the past. He was writing a history of the rise and the destruction of the Girondist party in France, and his willingness to enter into their ideals, to sympathise with their actions, their mistakes, their foolishness had darkened several of his English friendships.

In London he had been a member of the Holland House set, much to his friend Burke’s displeasure, and his scholarly bent had not prevented his being involved in several love affairs which at length became scandals. One of them had issued into a duel with the husband, much to his father’s displeasure. Few things about George Moore had pleased the father, who had hoped for a practical country gentleman, indistinguishable from his Protestant neighbours. And George, in his turn, had been saddened by the father’s clear preference for John, the child of his old age, an unsuccessful law student but a splendid rider to hounds, a lively, high-spirited young man for whom George himself had a fondness which was almost paternal. Neither had proved the kind of heir for which the old man had hoped, but he had made allowances for John. And because they never spoke of it, neither father nor elder son suspected that they shared a deep, irrational love for Mayo.

What had been his father’s summer room he converted to a library, and there, rising very early, he worked at his history, aided by innumerable small cups of coffee prepared in the French manner. He would then go downstairs for breakfast with John, and afterwards closet himself in the office with the affairs of the estate. His afternoons were spent out of doors, for the estate was still in the process of construction, and he intended, as his father had, that it should be a self-sustaining community, with blacksmith’s forge, laundry, bakery, stables. But one hour each day, in the late afternoon, he would sit on the balcony above the portico, looking outwards towards the lake. Those hours brought him closer to his father than they had been in life. In his imagination, father and son would discuss matters together, make plans for the estate, debate John’s future. The servants had learned not to disturb him then. He was sitting there when Cooper rode up the carriageway, dressed in his red uniform.

He received Cooper with quiet, distant courtesy and led him to the office, where Cooper made a brief show of admiring books which had spilled over from the library.

“You have a power of books here, Mr. Moore. I would wager that there are more books here than there are in the rest of Mayo.”

“That is likely,” Moore said. He measured two glasses of sherry and handed one to Cooper. Then he carefully placed the stopper back in the Waterford decanter.

Cooper sipped judiciously. “That is Spanish wine. I would know it anywhere. From your own vineyards, most likely?”

“No,” Moore said. “Sherry comes from a region near Cádiz. Our vineyards are in Alicante, on the Mediterranean. Our wine is oversweet to British tastes.”

“Well, this is very fine all the same. It goes down very mild.”

“I am pleased by your good opinion of it,” Moore said, and sat waiting.

“ ’Tis wonderful,” Cooper said, “to think of the wine we drink coming from such strange, far-off places.”

“In Spain, of course, Mayo is thought of as far off.”

“But not too far, eh? I remember my father used to buy casks from your father’s ships that the exciseman never saw. They would be ashore at Kilcummin on a moonless night, and half the gentlemen of Mayo would be on the strand for their casks. You take my meaning?”

“Yes,” Moore said. “I take your meaning.”

“ ’Tis a great pity we don’t see a bit more of each other. I was remarking on that this morning with my wife Kate. You must know her, she is one of yours.”