The Year of the French (86 page)

“Quarter,” the subaltern said. “There would be no quarter for rebels.”

“That is it,” Barrett agreed. “When we knew that, even O’Kane turned pale. Then he pulled out his sword and shouted, ’By God, we will do those bastards now.’ ”

“By which he meant the yeomen prisoners?”

“Yes. The yeomen.” Barrett lowered his hands to his knees, and then held them up to the candle, wet and gleaming. “My poor legs are destroyed,” he said. Once again I urged that we join our hands and humbly seek from the Redeemer forgiveness for our transgressions.

Embarrassed, the subaltern lowered his pen again and looked away from us. Barrett drew a deep, sighing breath.

“Ferdy told me to get my men in good order and to take them a mile down the road and there wait for the others. And that did not take me long, because they were angry, although many were frightened. I was frightened myself. We left the town so, and I don’t know anything more about the prisoners. I saw nothing of that.”

“But O’Donnell and O’Kane went back into the village, did they not? They went to the market house and ordered out the prisoners.”

“Have I not told you that I do not know where they went or what they did?” In the flickering light, his eyes were dark and evasive.

“He went first to my house,” I said. “I talked with him there.”

“You did?” the subaltern asked, surprised. “Can you remember what he said?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I remember.”

He stood before me, swaying. There was a bottle of my brandy on the table, and he had a tumbler of it in his hand.

“Avoid needless killing, did you say?” he asked me. “Sure it was to kill us that they came here, and they will do so.”

I could find nothing to say to him.

“The way you would go after badgers or foxes,” he said. “They have destroyed the most of us in Longford or wherever, and now they have come back to finish matters.”

I could not understand why he stood there talking to me while his men were preparing to do battle.

“It is a mad business,” he said, “and it has been from the start. Owen MacCarthy said so, and he was as mad as any of us. I cannot remember when it started, but it was long before the French came. The French lit the fuse, but the powder was there waiting for it.”

“There is nothing I can tell you,” I said. “You should have been given your chance to surrender. The unfortunate Maguire—an accident—I would most readily go forward myself with a flag. . . .”

He shook his head. “The fighting will not last long,” he said, “and then the town will be yours again.”

It had never been mine. Neither its people nor the fields and hills which stretched away from it. It is not mine now.

He raised the tumbler and drained it off, choking on it.

“I doubt will I be back again,” he said. “Unless they bring me back to hang me. There is a mad thing to say.”

“Mr. O’Donnell,” I said, “I am—all of us in this house are most thankful to you for your humanity, of which we have all been witnesses. And you may depend upon us to make this known to the army.”

He smiled without humour. “That would be most kind of you.” He turned to leave, but then paused and took one of the pistols from his belt. “I will leave this here for you. You may be safer so.” He put the deadly looking engine on the table and then left the room.

For a moment I stood looking at the door and then moved my eyes downwards to the table. I had never held a pistol, and had no idea of its operation, beyond pointing it and pulling the trigger. I picked it up and held it in my open hand, surprised by its weight. Then I carefully replaced it, and walked to the window.

It was then I discovered that a group of prisoners had been dragged from the market house, some fifteen or twenty of them, wearing the scarlet coats and white breeches of the yeomanry, although much befouled. A mass of men and women swarmed around them, and they stood huddled together, not knowing where to look. It was raining more heavily now. Then, as I watched, a man rushed forward from the crowd, his pike held like a spear at the level of his waist, and thrust it with a quick, upward motion into the belly of a yeoman. For a shocked moment the crowd fell silent: the one sound was the yeoman’s agonised screech. His weight hung upon the pike, dragging it downwards, and the rebel holding it took a step forward. They stood thus, joined together by the pikeshaft, men of similar build, corpulent and tall. Then the yeoman crashed to the ground, in his fall ripping the pike from his assailant’s hands.

From my height I could see the fallen figure more plainly than those who stood on the fringes of the crowd. I pressed my head against the window and closed my eyes, as if in the childishness of my panic I hoped that the scene might be obliterated, lost forever, somewhere within the blackness of my skull. With my eyes squeezed shut, I heard the shouts begin anew, which, being in Irish and therefore unknown to me, were the more frightening. Then there was a second scream, more protracted than the first, but like it high and inhuman, as when an animal is slaughtered. With a great effort of will, I opened my eyes. There was a commotion in the room next to mine, and I knew that there, too, appalled faces pressed to the window. How can I describe the feelings which now overwhelmed me? Least of all did I think myself at that moment a servant of the Almighty. Human life had been taken, and two of God’s creatures wantonly destroyed. Most strange of all, the rain washed across my thoughts. They would be slaughtered in this mean rain, a drizzle of nothingness, and their blood would flow past dung and over wet cobbles. My window sheltered me, glass upon which the rain pattered. I saw O’Donnell now, moving through the crowd, grabbing men by the shoulders and thrusting them roughly aside. But at the crowd’s centre, two men had seized yet another yeoman, forcing him to his knees in a travesty of prayer.

His life hung by but a thread, and the knowledge was too terrible for me to endure it. I turned away from the window and ran out of the room. On the landing I collided with Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Sammons, who endeavoured most strenuously to restrain me, but I struggled free of them and rushed down the stairs. Then I seized up the pistol from the dining-room table and ran out into the street, waving the heavy, foolish weapon above my head. “Stop, stop,” I shouted. “Blood! Murder!” Then I ran down the street, past a straggle of men.

I never reached the yeomen or their tormentors. Halfway down the street, a man took me by the shoulders and flung me against a shuttered shop, where he wrested the pistol from my grasp. We looked for a moment into each other’s eyes, and I remember his face as a fragment of nightmare floating in blackness, a fleshy face, the eyes protruding. He held the pistol as one holds a club, by its barrel, and swung it high. Then, as I came to know later, he smashed it against my head, above the ear. I fell to the ground, against the door, and lay there as one dead, for how long I cannot say, for I next remember Mr. Gardiner bending over me, and with him a woman who was then a stranger to me, a Methodist. By that time the rebels had moved outside the town to make their stand against the oncoming army, and the street was now, for a brief time, in the possession of the helpless.

My head reeled with pain and giddiness, and leaning over I retched upon the cobbles, although I also befouled my coat. The street was a jumble of sensations, noises, faces, moving figures. Rain fell upon my senses. I put a hand against the pain, but Mr. Gardiner drew it away; my fingers were sticky with blood. “We cannot leave him here,” I heard Mr. Gardiner say, but the woman argued with him, saying that worse would befall should I be moved. Presently Gardiner knocked on the shop door, and then, when there was no response, tried it and found it unlocked. How they carried me inside I cannot recall. Mr. Gardiner was a dry stick of a man, all elbows and knees, and the woman, though sturdy, was but a woman. They rested me on the floor, where I again lost consciousness.

Two hours later, Ferdy O’Donnell died in the streets of Killala, not ten yards from the shop where I lay injured. The “battle” of Killala was a rout, in which the rebels briefly held their ground, with the doggedness of men who know themselves doomed, as General Trench’s men pummelled them with grapeshot and canister, and then swept forward with sabre and bayonet. When at last they broke, they fell back upon the town, there being no other line of retreat. That road down which they rushed, closely followed by Trench’s cavalry, is known now among the country people as
casan an air
, which is to say, the road, or way, of slaughter. How many were slain upon it I cannot say, but it is the appalling fact that six hundred were killed in the narrow streets of Killala.

I was awake to hear them perish. Beyond the door of the shop all was Bedlam, shouts, screams, the sounds of hooves and booted feet. It was a shabby death which our troops dealt out, a kind of butchery. I remind myself that this is the way of war, which does not greatly resemble our romantic notions, and yet this reminder does not persuade me. I bear witness that the streets ran red with blood, and this as no figure of speech but as simple fact. A sizable number of rebels, perhaps seventy or eighty, scrambled up Steeple Hill and there stood massed to await the deaths which soon fell upon them. Later, their bodies lay at the foot of the watchtower. Most had been bayonetted. A hundred or more made their way past the town itself to the Acres, and there perished, together with a score of cabin dwellers. Others fled towards Rathfran, on the very coast, where some drowned, the tide being then at the full, and others fell beneath the musket fire which was brought to play upon them. But all these made up the lesser part. Most were killed in the streets, and all this I heard, although mercifully I did not see it. When today I walk those streets, I am at times surprised that the cries of the dying have not lingered in the air.

By the afternoon, Mr. Gardiner and I felt sufficiently emboldened to leave the shop and venture back up the street to my house. I dared not look to left or right lest horror overwhelm me, but we were forced to slip past the soldiers as unobtrusively as possible, relying upon my cloth for safe conduct, and to pick our way through the scene of slaughter. So many lay upon the cobbles that death had lost all dignity. Once I foolishly glanced up towards Steeple Hill, and saw the bodies scattered there, and several Highland soldiers standing idly, their weights resting upon their muskets. And I found also, nay almost stumbled upon, the unfortunate Ferdy O’Donnell.

He was not quite dead. His sabre lay beside him, that blade hammered in France which had brought this violent madness upon us. I knelt beside him, fighting back nausea. His chest had been shattered and upon it lay a mat of darkening blood. Mr. Gardiner tugged urgently at my arm, but I knelt down, speaking my name and then his own in the hope that he might recognise me. Every romance must have its ogre, and O’Donnell has been pressed into this service by government pens and in the accounts of such loyalist historians as Sir Richard Musgrave. In the houses of some Mayo Protestants, children are cautioned towards their best behaviour “lest Ferdy O’Donnell get them.” It would be more to the point were they to be frightened by the brutish Duggan or the half-mad O’Kane, who also perished, but time has given these names no resonance. I do not recognise O’Donnell in these accounts, nor in the wretched pothouse ballad which praises him as “the darling of Erin.” He was speaking, in a voice which croaked like a raven’s, and I bent my head to listen to his words. But he spoke in Irish, and I could not understand him. Presently I rose to my feet and left him to die. I remember his body sprawled in the street, his last words spoken to the rain.

Thence we made our way home, like London gentlemen picking their way along a filthy thoroughfare, and I was welcomed with rejoicing by my dear Eliza and by the loyalist families who had sheltered with us. About an hour later, a Colonel Timmins called upon us, doubtless in time snatched from more sinister tasks, to assure us that we had indeed been rescued, and I thanked him with such courtesy and presence of mind as I could muster. A most ludicrous figure I must have appeared, sitting in a high-backed chair with linen wrapped around my head in the fashion of an India turban. He advised us not to venture out into the streets, where an occasional musket shot reminded us that the process of “scouring” was not yet completed.

Nor did I move from that chair until evening, for I continued giddy and nauseous, and there was a maddening pressure within my skull and considerable pain. Eliza brought me a bowl of porridge, but I could do no more than look upon it and then wave it away. Presently, however, I felt sufficiently recovered to rise and walk to the window, but at once regretted that I had done so. The rain had stopped and the air was clear. The sky had a faint greenish cast, with a few ragged strips of cloud. I looked down the street to the market house. An iron rod, hooked at the end, projects from its wall, about two feet above a tall man’s head. This rod had been pressed into service as a gallows, and a man’s body was hanging from it by a short length of rope. I turned away from the window, and went out into the street, despite Eliza’s alarmed protests. She seized me by the arm but I pulled myself free.

The bodies still lay in the street, but had been shoved to both sides, against the walls of the shops and cabins. At the street’s end, the hanged man was a dark mass pressed against the green sky. I walked towards it, with hesitant steps, but before I could reach it I encountered Stanner, one of our Killala yeomen, a man of middle years who keeps a provision shop. He carried a month’s growth of beard, and his uniform was filthy beyond description.

“We are a free people, Mr. Broome,” he shouted. “We are a free people again. Praised be the name of the Lord.”

“Death,” I said. “Bloodshed and death. It is all around us.”

“Have you seen my shop, Mr. Broome? Have you seen how my shop has been used this past month? We have been held in the jaws of iniquity but we have been delivered by God’s mercy.”

“End,” I said. “It must be ended or we will be forever soaked in blood.” I must in truth have been enduring a fever, for I felt that the very walls of the town oozed blood. It lay in pools upon the street, and ran between the cobbles.