The Year of the French (83 page)

“Well enough I know who you are, Owen MacCarthy, and it is a great disgrace you have brought upon yourself and upon Kerry.”

Awkwardly, arms pinioned, MacCarthy got himself back onto the floor of the cart.

Kerry head beneath stiff tricorne and lobsterback coat.

“ ’Tis far we are now from Kerry, the two of us,” MacCarthy said.

But the Kerryman, thin-lipped, looked at the road before them.

“ ‘By Killarney’s fair lakes where I oftentimes strayed,’ “ MacCarthy said. “Do you know that one?”

“I know that one,” the miilitiaman said, and then fell back to let the wagon rumble past him.

What harm was there in a fellow like that, doing his landlord’s bidding, proud of his red coat? Never again would he have a coat so fine, the cloth smooth and rich.

Beside pastures rich in the September sun, autumn a subtle presence in the air, the wagon moved north towards Mayo. Norman keeps guarded distant hills, fairy mounds kept silent sentinel. Labourers watched them, motionless as mountain hares, by nightfall a tavern tale. Provisions and sacks of grapeshot travelled with them, soldiers and militiamen thick as blackberries on the bush, wide-mouthed cannon. Edmund Spenser and Oliver Goldsmith travelled with them, and great bulging libraries of books and statutes printed in English, bills of lading and proclamations, John Milton and Richard Steele, white-wigged orators and a new alphabet. An image filled MacCarthy’s mind: General Trench’s army carried northwards into Mayo a great handsome clock, the wood of its casing shining and polished, its delicate strong springs ticking off the final hours of his world.

FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA,
SEPTEMBER, 1798

Thursday
. On this day, General Trench brought into Castlebar from the south a great army for the war against the Killala rebels. They marched past the common, past courthouse and gaol, down Castlebar High Street, up Stoball Hill and down it, and then pitched their tents in the very fields where Lake’s soldiers had broken and run. I stood outside my shop with young Timothy.

We heard them long before we saw them, for there were altogether five regimental bands with fifes and flutes and cornets and drums, and the musicians were vying the one band against the next to test which would make the most able and splendid sound as they swung into High Street. No man who lived in Castlebar but was out to watch them, whatever his religion or his political sentiment. This is a power that armies have upon the human mind and there is no use in denying it—the bright colours of the uniforms, the banners and flags and standards, the black cannon, the cavalrymen looking down at us like the watchful heroes of ancient Troy and the officers like minor deities, with a knowledge of deaths and battles masked by pale imperious faces. They looked as proud as men swinging out of a tavern with a few good pints inside them and the knowledge that a holiday was beginning. The Castlebar loyalists cheered them and so did some of our own kind from excitement at their gay sound and appearance. As one of the regiments moved past the shop, Timothy began to stamp his feet up and down in time with the music, imaging himself a handsome hero with deadly musket. I put a hand on his shoulder to quiet him, but he did not understand my signal, and looked up puzzled towards me. And so he marched along as we stood together there, our hands linked, his feet alive with the jinglejangle nonsense of the “Lillibulero.” Well it is for children that they have the sights and colours of the visible world spread out before them, unshadowed by dark knowledge. That regiment, as I have learned this evening, was Fraser’s Fencibles, from Scotland, with a terrible reputation for cruelty. And yet when one of the soldiers caught sight of Timothy, he winked at him, and Timothy waved his free hand, then looked up to see if I had noticed.

After the soldiers and the cavalrymen with their long swords and the cannon came a chain of wagons with cannonballs and sacks of shot and musket balls and provisions, and then, at the rear, guarded by two files of soldiers, a cart with five men sitting in it. When first we saw them we did not know what we were seeing, but then we took notice that their hands were bound behind them with rope. It was Michael Geraghty, a strong-farmer from Ballina that I first recognised, and only after that did I find myself looking straight at Owen, who sat at the back of the wagon, resting against the board and with his knees drawn up. He was still wearing the gentleman’s fine coat which he had found for himself, but it was in ruins now, smeared with mud and dirt, and with one lapel ripped away to show a filthy shirt. His eyes were puffed and swollen, and one cheek carried a discoloured bruise.

“Owen,” I shouted. But he did not look towards the sound of my voice, although several did. It was then that Timothy saw him and shouted out in puzzlement, “It is Owen. Look at Owen.” But Owen did not look towards him either. And before I knew what he was doing, Timothy had pulled his hand free from mine and was running towards the cart. He and Owen were great friends, and there would always be some trifling gift for him when Owen came back from one of his rambles, were it only a peach pit carved into the shape of a basket. Before he could reach the cart, one of the soldiers scooped him up and thrust him back towards me, but not in an unkind or brutal manner. “Owen,” I called to him again. “Can you not hear me? It is Sean MacKenna.” Timothy began to cry then, bewildered sobs which racked his body as he arched against my embracing arm. Owen’s eyes moved towards me but they were the eyes of a stranger and held no glint of recognition. At last the cart moved past us, and turning Timothy around so that he faced me, I kissed his two wet cheeks. The town grew quiet, men looking at each other, many of them not speaking at all. The alehouses began to fill. Timothy and I went back into the shop.

Westport, Late September

When he learned that Dennis Browne had returned to Westport, his brother’s great house at Cahenamart, Moore rode there, setting out in the very early morning and arriving at clear, warm noon.

The road rose up to crest a steep hill, and Moore, reining in, sat facing farmlands and pasturelands which declined, hill by soft low hill, to Clew Bay with its numberless small islands. On the horizon the glittering Atlantic was an enamelled ocean on which rested, distant, two mother-of-pearl sails. To his left lay the town, set out by Wyatt twenty years before. Beyond the town, demesne walls of cut stone encircled ornamental gardens, a river arched by charming, florid bridges. And Westport House, finest of the houses created in Ireland by Cassel, heavy German master of Palladian facades and massive black marble. Compared with it, Moore Hall was a crude, unfinished sketch and Glenthorne Castle an exotic phantasy. Seventy years old now, it had weathered well, a seal of power set between hills and bay. Back set to the mountains of Mayo, the windows of its nine-bay façade glinting towards water, stone eagles with outstretched wings soaring from its cornices, in the pediment, richly carved, baroque, the arms of the Altamont earldom, guarded by wolf dog and stallion. Altamont, Sligo, Westport, Mount Eagle—peel away the titles, one by one, and you came at last to the Brownes of Mayo.

At this distance, in the windless, pellucid noon, house, town, river, pastures, bay, formed a painted panorama, each with its emblematic value. Distant, on the pediment, invisible from hill crest, stone scroll beneath stone shield,
SUIVEZ RAISON
. Mixed blood in the Brownes, O’Malley, Bourke, Bermingham—Gaelic pirate, Norman knight, Tudor adventurer. In the early years of the penal century, John Browne, outlawed Papist and Jacobite, soldier under Sarsfield, survivor of Aughrim’s great disaster, bankrupt, had turned smuggler, sheltered by this ring of hills. Black-hulled ships from France and Spain dropped anchor here with wines, lace, brandy, bolts of silk. Profits, but never enough. A hundred thousand acres sold off at six shillings the acre. In 1705 he had himself declared dead, but lived another seven years, in hiding, a wraith, to watch his son restore the fortunes of the Brownes. Peter it was, adroit and determined, who made the fateful trip to Dublin, swore his allegiance to King George and renounced all claims upon his loyalty by Pope and Pretender, abjured the errors of Rome and was received into the Protestant Church as by law established.
SUIVEZ RAISON
.

Who had trusted him? Like the
marrano
grandees of Spain, those Jacobite colonels who turned Protestant in the decades after Aughrim. Aughrim had been a watershed, a black line drawn across history, separating old and new. Ratified at Limerick by treaty and surrender, signed by “Patrick Sarsfield Earl of Lucan, Pierce Viscount Galmoy, Colonel Nicholas Purcell, Colonel Nicholas Cusack, Sir Toby Butler, Colonel Garrett Dillon, Colonel John Browne of Mayo.” Sarsfield and Dillon sailed off for France to serve an alien, Catholic king. John Browne had returned to Mayo, smuggler in hiding, dead man who watched his son change kings and church, moving from old world to new. Shamefaced, sullen beneath the reproachful eye of pious wife, the son sends away the chaplain, nails shut the chapel door. Dust slowly smears chalice and pyx. Fish aswim in strange waters, he attends Sunday service with his Protestant neighbours. Bored but uncomplaining, he moves his eye across the plain, whitewashed walls unmarred by effigy or idol. No Mass: no mumbo jumbo changing wine to blood, bread to flesh. Safe at last from the “discoverers,” the property safe, the right to bequeath and to inherit it safe. And the son’s son in due course, ear unsullied by Papist ritual, knowing only whitewashed walls, the Book of Common Prayer, marries a Protestant, is anointed as lawyer, magistrate, gentleman. Thus, as the old chroniclers might have put it, perished the old nobility. But the chroniclers had perished as well, and the poets and the harpers.

But not the Brownes of Mayo. Stepping nimbly from old world to new: Jacobite into Hanoverian, Tory into Whig, Papist into Protestant. Study their faces on the walls of Westport House: crafty old colonel clad in the sober brown of peace; politic son in silk and periwig, small fleshy jowl above the lace; grandson, full figure against panorama, architect’s plans in one hand, the other gesturing towards a mansion rising up beside the ocean; great-grandson, father of Dennis Browne, martial figure in King George’s lobster red, behind him, past drawing-room windows, a glimpse of terraces and formal walks.
SUIVEZ RAISON
. “Mr. Browne’s house is very pleasantly situated on the south side of the rivulet over which he has built two handsome bridges, and has form’d Cascades in the river which are seen from the front of the house; which is built of Hewen Stone, a coarse marble they have here. It is an exceeding fine house and well-finished, the design and execution of Mr. Castels. Mr. Browne designs to remove the village and make it a Park improvement all round; there are fine low hills everywhere which are planted and improved, and the trees grow exceedingly well. The tide comes just up to the house; the Cascades are fine salmon leaps. In the house are handsome chimney pieces of the Castle Bar marble, which are a good black without any white in them like the Touchstone, which the Italians call Paragone and value very much.” Thus Bishop Pococke in 1752, indefatigable traveller, garrulous graceless author, Anglican bishop upon visit to Anglican magnate. Only Mayo remembered what the Brownes had been—managers, go-betweens, adroit negotiators. If you have an affair that needs managing, take it to Dennis Browne. Now Moore had come.

Motionless astride his glossy-flanked chestnut, Moore studied the scene as he might study an historical document. The great house an assertion of power, the new prosperous town its illustration, the farms and distant wharf its corroborative footnotes. Like those medieval paintings which required explanations from scholars, their beasts not legendary but emblematic. Pococke could not have read the painting, eccentric cleric jouncing in closed carriage along narrow deep-rutted roads. Nor poor Mr. Broome of Killala, his head stuffed with ignorant benevolence from black shovel hat to white collarbands.

No portraits faced them in the dining room. Walls of white and blue, the ornate plasterwork of Ducart, the Sardinian master, summoned to Mayo by Lord Glenthorne and lingering for three years to adorn the walls of lesser lords. Intricate, stiff-bodied, allegory stretched across the ceiling: Time rescuing Truth from the assaults of Discord and Envy. Dennis Browne could read allegory, more ably than Altamont, his absent brother, master of the house.

He placed a walnut between the jaws of a cracker. A small brown world shattered and he picked meat from it.

“It is no good, Moore. A messy
jacquerie
. Peasants swarming across the entire countryside burning and killing. By God, if Altamont had been here he would have been skewered in his bed. I have had ample time in Galway City to reflect upon our Mayo peasants, with my butt frozen blue by Atlantic winds.”

“We were not speaking of peasants,” Moore said. “We were speaking of John.”

“Far worse.” He brushed walnut shell away from him, across stiff linen. “Far worse. I can understand the little half sirs, the O’Dowds and MacDonnells. What are they but peasants with airs? Horse pistols, and a scrap of Jacobite parchment in the west room. But your brother and Malcolm Elliott are men of education. They knew what they were about.”