The Year of the French (93 page)

“She will be better off here,” Browne said. “London is no place for an Irishwoman.”

“I have always been fond of London,” Moore said. “A civilised city.”

“A fine city,” Browne said. “I am there for six months of the year now.” Dennis Browne, Member of Parliament for Mayo. “It is a man’s city. You must know about her. Herself and Galmoy.”

“I don’t recall—” Moore began, evasively. Browne cut him short.

“She is well rid of him. Well rid. They are a disgrace to Ireland, puppies like Galmoy.”

“I did not know him well.”

“To meet a decent Irish girl at a Castle ball and lure her off to England with him. It is an utter disgrace that he brought upon her and upon her parents. They are a disgrace to Ireland, men like Galmoy, wasting their money in London and gambling it away. The English laugh at them and why should they not? She is well rid of that fellow.”

“I am sorry that I did not know her better,” Moore said. “She was a fine, clever girl, as I remember her.”

“Clever, is it? Sure all the Brownes are clever, save for poor Sligo, and he has no need for it, thanks be to God. She is as clever as an egg is full of meat. You would swear to look at her that she had left Ireland for a convent. Ach, sure what family is there that does not have its one misfortune? Who would know that better than yourself?”

Moore did not reply. He was embarrassed by the frankness with which Browne spoke of her. How old would she be now? Late twenties perhaps, or thirty. Not a late age in this country, but rumour would have placed a scar upon her. Clever she might be, but it had been folly to run off with Dick Galmoy.

“What are you thinking?” Browne asked sharply.

Moore smiled. “That I admire clever women.”

Browne peered at him, the sharpness now in his eyes. “Take care not to admire them too fervently, George. It would be a great pity should anything disturb our friendship.”

“Is that what we are?” Moore asked. “Friends?”

Browne left him alone for an hour, before dinner, and he explored the demesne. It was a fine, clear evening, cool, with a faint wind crossing the fields. A ghost of Atlantic salt in the air stirred his memories. A path along the meadow led through to a stream crossed by a brief, humped bridge. Beyond lay a summer house. The stream was at the full and moved noisily beneath his feet as he stood upon the bridge. Perhaps she is in the summer house, he thought. Reading, or remembering London.

She joined them in the small, dowdy dining room, frayed red Turkey carpet beneath their feet, gravy-coloured portraits on the wall, sat facing her uncle from an end of the olive-wood table. Moore had not remembered her clearly—slender, certainly, and brown-eyed, but the hair was not black at all but brown, worn unfashionably. Her throat was tall above a prim dress of blue velvet. She said little at dinner, but listened attentively to each man, turning watchful, quiet eyes towards him. She smiled often, a quick, half-smile which came and then vanished. Her teeth were very white but not straight.

With fingers and pointed knife, Browne tore the wing from a pheasant. “This is most pleasant,” he said. “A Browne back home in Mayo where she belongs, and a friend to share a meal with us. We never see enough of you, George. No one does. You should take more part in the life of the county.”

“Do you not hunt, Mr. Moore?” she asked. A coloured voice. Colours streaked with silver.

“I write,” Moore said. “And I manage the estate myself. I am kept busy.”

“His brother was the lad for the hunt,” Browne said. “George is a different fellow entirely.”

“What is it that you write?” she asked.

“History,” Moore said. “A kind of history. It has not been going well.”

Browne spoke through a mouthful of meat. “History was washed up at his door a few years ago. He didn’t welcome it.”

“I never read histories,” she said. “Poetry and novels. More novels than are good for me. But not histories. All those sorrows and dates.”

“Mine will be as dry as any of them,” Moore said. “If I ever finish it.”

She picked up her wineglass. Moore remembered where he had seen her last. At Holland House. She was different then, the voice harsh and eager. It had been a large party. But she was not a woman one would easily forget. Not now.

“You have come home at a sorry time, Miss Browne.”

“Sorry?” she repeated. “I am not certain of your meaning.”

“The county has been disturbed. There has been much suffering.”

“It is safe now,” Browne said. “And it will be prosperous soon. I was telling you that, George.” He picked up his own glass. “Pay no attention to that, Sarah.”

“Pay no attention to an historian? I am certain that he would not like that, would you, Mr. Moore?”

“Your kinsman’s knowledge of Mayo is more intimate than my own,” Moore said. “He has made a name for himself in Mayo.”

She caught the thread of his irony. “Have you, Dennis? What sort of name have you made?”

“Whatever name is given to me. I have done more than that, and George knows it. I have restored peace here.”

“
Pacem appellant
,” Moore said.

“What can that mean, Mr. Moore?” she asked. “I have no Latin. No Latin and no history, I am an ignorant Mayo woman.”

“ ‘They call it peace,’ ” Moore said.

“Give her the rest of it,” Browne said angrily. “
Solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant
. ‘They make a wilderness and they call it a peace.’ Very well so. But it is a wilderness we can live in.”

“Those of us left alive,” Moore said.

“I know nothing of this,” she said. “All this unhappiness.”

“Your pardon,” Moore said. “Your kinsmen and I have lived through difficult days. Everyone in Mayo did. We had our differences. It is all past now. As he says, peace has been restored.”

“And once at least we were in agreement,” Browne said. “Do you remember, George?”

“Yes,” Moore said.

Browne smiled at Sarah. “There is nothing suitable for a woman’s ears but talk of silk dresses and trinkets from the fair and hawthorn trees in flower.”

“You have grown poetical,” she said.

“The words are not mine,” Browne said. “They are from a song by a Killala schoolmaster. A song in Irish.”

“A schoolmaster was hanged in ’ninety-eight,” Moore said.

“All this unhappiness,” she said again. “There are always poets.”

He awoke next morning with the thought of her filling his mind, as though she had left behind a perfume, discreet but erotic. Tendrils of memory, the movement of her arm as she raised the wineglass, the small hand which held it, the wide, dark eyes which knew more than the lips spoke. It was an emotion which had caught him unaware, and he felt disloyal towards his own melancholy. The woman Dick Galmoy had taken once to Holland House, a prize to be exhibited. Dick Galmoy’s wild Irish girl.

He dressed, and then walked again along the meadow path to the small bridge. He crossed over it and went to the summer house. As he had expected, he found her there, and she was not surprised to see him. She put a slip of paper in the novel she had been reading, and placed the book on a wicker table by her chair. Then she rose to meet him.

“You remembered who I was,” she said.

“Once,” he said. “One evening. You looked different then.”

“I was different then,” she said.

They walked together along the path, the narrow, quick-moving stream beside them.

“Are you pleased to be here again?” he asked. “In Mayo?”

“Neither pleased nor displeased,” she said. “It is where I am. I was very excited on the boat, but now nothing seems familiar. I don’t like Dennis’s house, do you? I like Westport House.”

“It is very grand,” he said. “A better house for a woman. Will you live there?”

“I like the bay,” she said. “And the islands. I have a great fondness for the picturesque.”

“And for novels.”

“Yes,” she said. “I am a foolish woman. Foolish and headstrong. It will be my downfall, sooner or later.”

“You are not foolish at all,” he said. “Since last night I have been puzzled by you. You remind me of someone. You puzzle me.”

“That is a personal remark to make upon slight acquaintance.”

“But you are not offended,” he said.

“How can you know that?”

“You will stay here now?”

“Where else can I go? I would not find London pleasant this season.”

“I prefer London,” Moore said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “London or Paris. I remember Spain, as you remembered Mayo when you were in London. But I am settled here. I will not leave.”

“You do not have the look of a man who is at home. You look unhappy.”

They had come to the plantation. Beyond it, Browne’s house stood bare and stumpy.

She stopped, and turned to face him. “Do you know why I came back? Don’t ask my brother: he will invent a story for you. Galmoy ran through the money, and then threw me over. He sent me packing. If he had not, I would be with him now.”

“You are that attached, then?”

She broke a branch from the tree and studied it. “I despised him,” she said. “After the first year. He is a witless creature, all bluster and fine looks. It was a tedious life for a woman situated as I was, with no company save that of men, and other women like myself.”

“Like Lady Holland,” Moore said.

“Like Lady Holland. Are you making sport of me?”

“Not at all,” Moore said. “I will never make sport of you.”

“Never? Not when you know me better?”

“Especially then.”

“Take care, Mr. Moore. I am not at all what you may have heard of me.”

“I know only what you choose to tell me,” Moore said. “Tell me nothing, if you like.”

“I am a disappointing woman,” she said. “I have been told that often.”

“We are well suited,” Moore said. “You will see.”

Four months later, Sarah Browne became Moore’s mistress. He did not find her at all a disappointing woman, and he was delighted by her curious manner, which blended candour and reserve. She was not quite in love with him, he came to conclude, but she almost was. As for himself, he was content to be pleased by her, her nature a puzzle which teased his feelings. Her sensuality, and, as he had suspected from that first evening, she was a most sensual woman, was entangled with her wry, self-deprecating intelligence. As he had told her, they were well suited, making no large demands upon one another. They managed their affair with discretion at first, but within a few months it had become common gossip in the county. He had expected that Browne, upon hearing of the affair, would call him out, but instead Browne affected ignorance of it. “Perhaps he really doesn’t know of it,” he said to her once. “He knows,” she said; “we are an unpredictable family.”

They married three years after the affair had begun, and their son, who was born eight months later, was named George, after his father and his grandfather. He was baptised and reared as a Catholic. Moore would have insisted upon this, but in fact his wife did not care about such matters. Although they seldom appeared in society, the county believed that the marriage was a successful one, and perhaps it was.

He never completed his history of the Girondist party in the French Revolution. For several years after his marriage he continued to work upon it, but each year he felt less interest in the task, and less confidence in his ability to complete it, or in his ability to understand the mainsprings of politics and history. The first two manuscript volumes survive, the prose polished but perhaps too formal and too stiff, the handwriting an elegant copperplate, the ink brown and faded. Beyond these are draughts of chapters, revised, scratched out, partially rewritten. And notes for other chapters, clumps of names and dates, broken-backed epigrams and faltering generalizations. He had been left at last with a frozen puddle of history, muddy water frozen in the depression of a woodland path, dead leaves and broken twigs dim beneath its filthy surface.

Throughout the nineteenth century, a story persisted among the peasantry that John Moore had not died in Waterford but had escaped to Spain, and, learning that his brother was to marry a kinswoman of Dennis Browne, returned and challenged him to a duel, which was fought in the wasteland beyond Ballintubber near the ruined abbey. Neither brother drew blood, and John returned to Spain. A doggerel ballad about the duel lingered in the taverns, a wretched song which had John in a rebel uniform of emerald green, like Robert Emmet in a coloured engraving. The legend arose from popular hatred of Dennis Browne, and not of George Moore, a remote figure behind the walls of Moore Hall.

When Moore was an old man in the 1820s, although not as old as his father had lived to be, the Ribbon conspiracy erupted in Mayo, as elsewhere in the country, agrarian terrorists banded together to coerce a reduction of rents, much like the old Whiteboy conspiracy. Mickey O’Donnell, a nephew of Ferdy, was brought to trial as one of its ringleaders. Moore paid his legal expenses, entering them scrupulously if curiously in his ledger: “For the defence at Castlebar assizes of M. O’Donnell, one hundred pounds to Daniel O’Connell, barrister-at-law. John Moore,
in memoriam
.” It was money wasted. O’Donnell was transported to the prison colony in Van Diemen’s Land.

That night, after he had made the ledger entry, he took his chair onto his father’s balcony and sat there quietly for an hour. He tried to remember his father stumping about before the unfinished house, gesturing with his cane. Or John, riding down the avenue on his chestnut mare. Fading portraits, they had vanished almost completely. He could conjure up only an old man, a young man, without distinct features. He wished for tears, but his bone-dry eyes were unused to them. At last he grunted, pushed back the chair, and walked into the house, leaning upon his father’s cane.

FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA,
OCTOBER, 1798

Thursday
. I have just now returned from the gaol, where I sat for several hours with my beloved friend Owen MacCarthy, who is to be hanged in the morning early. When next I take up my pen to indite my foolishness in this ledger, he will be no more, but will be in the Presence of the Saviour. I will not be outside the gaol in the morning, and neither should any Christian man.