Dark Rosaleen (9 page)

Keegan studied her face as she helped herself to more tea from the pot. He asked himself why she was doing this. Why should she whip one of her own? It made no sense. Who was she, dressed in such finery? An English girl riding a horse that was worth more than most could earn in a lifetime. The saddle alone would keep his school in books for the rest of his teaching life and another teacher's beyond that. Such a fine young lady sitting here on a stool, drinking his tea.

She looked to him. ‘Perhaps, one day, I will tell you why this is so important to me.'

This startled him. ‘You must read my mind,' he said.

‘I surprise myself. It is all happening very suddenly. But you must not think it sinister. I simply want to help and this is the first chance I've had. Let me come back.'

He said nothing for a while. He looked at the boy asleep in the cot. A draught whistled softly through a crack in the window frame. It was late afternoon, the sun had left the room. Soon it would be dusk.

He held out his hands to her. ‘Miss Kate, this is a strange day. Some might say it was a day meant to happen. But whatever comes out of it can only be good for us all. That I know. Of that I'm certain.'

She took his hands and held them tight in hers. She looked at the boy. ‘What is his name?'

‘Eugene. A fine boy. He had a yearning to learn. But it's dead in him now that he has lost his family.'

‘They are dead?'

‘Dead or gone.'

‘I will bring him a picture book. And the fruit.'

She ducked beneath the low door into the early orange evening. Keegan's neighbours had watered her mare and let her graze on the slopes. As she mounted, a woman came with a knitted shawl. She spoke in Irish.

‘She wants you to have it,' Keegan said. ‘To cover the blood.'

Kate wrapped it across her knees. ‘I will bring it back tomorrow. Tell her I am very grateful.'

‘And we are too, Miss Kate. If we seem shy, forgive us. We are strangers to kindness of this sort.'

She waved them goodbye and cantered away to join the road to Cork. When she was above Kinsale she stopped and looked down. She could see the schoolhouse shining in the last of the sun. Around it, like a litter of suckling piglets, the semicircle of cottages. How wonderfully safe it all looked, as if nothing that had happened this past year had touched it, as if all the suffering and dying had bypassed it, leaving it clean and tidy. Then she thought of the little boy Eugene in her arms, his blood trickling through her fingers, a child who had lost all and she knew that Keegan and his hamlet had not escaped that winter's sorrow.

It was almost dark. On the rise she could see the lights of Cork. She had left the road and cut cross-country, following a route she knew well. At the Owenboy River at Fivemilebridge she quickly reined in her mare. Three horsemen were waiting on the far side. She was about to turn when one of them came trotting towards her.

‘Mistress Kathryn.'

She knew the voice.

‘Moran. Is that you?'

He stopped beside her and took hold of her bridle. ‘Thank God we found you first, Miss Kathryn.'

‘Moran. Why are you here? I am almost home. Did father send you?'

‘No! But he has many men out searching. He knows what happened in Kinsale. He is not pleased but Mr Ogilvie says there will be no charges against you.'

‘It was a terrible thing I did, Moran.'

‘No man deserved it more. But that is not why I'm here. I must tell you …'

He hesitated. Kate tugged at his sleeve.

‘Go on, Moran. Tell me what?'

‘Captain Shelley is dead.'

It was as if she already knew, as if this was simply confirmation. She had not heard from him for over a month and his smuggled letters had been so constant, so regular. This was expected. She did not feel shock.

‘How did he die?' she asked.

‘He and the others broke into a depot in Kinvara. It was full of food, over five tons of it, enough to feed all Galway. But it was a trap. They were waiting for them, waiting inside. There was nothing they could do.'

‘Who was waiting? Tell me, Moran, who were they?'

‘The military. Fusiliers. They shot them, every single one of them, a boy and all. They didn't have to. None of them was armed. But they shot them as they stood and dragged the bodies into the sea. It was planned. They were meant to die.'

She said nothing. Moran touched her arm.

‘He is dead, Miss Kathryn. And we did it. We killed them just as sure as if we had pulled the triggers ourselves.'

There was a splash of fish downstream and the call of a coot.

‘I don't understand,' she said.

‘I sent them news of that food convoy. At first Shelley said they could do nothing, it would be too well guarded. But then you told me that the military would leave once the food was in place, that Martineau had not wanted soldiers there. I sent your note to him, telling him that, just as you asked.'

‘Yes! Just as I asked. Oh! Moran, how could we have known?'

‘It was Martineau, Miss Kate. It was his doing. He planned it. He let us know deliberately. The English could never arrest the captain. They could never have let him stand trial. He had too much to say, too much to tell.'

‘He had to be silenced.'

‘Yes, Miss Kate. They have silenced him. And all who were with him.'

From the far side of the river a man called out, ‘Come, Moran. We must go. We have a long night ahead.'

Kate looked towards the horsemen. They were bareheaded. The collars of their coats were pulled high, covering their faces.

‘Who are these men?' she asked. ‘Where are you going?'

‘They are friends. And I am going with them. I will be hung if the Redcoats take me. Your father knows my part in this. Martineau will have told him. I am a wanted man, Miss Kathryn. I am a criminal.'

‘Moran, I must help you. I must do something.'

The two horsemen crossed the bridge and one edged closer. ‘You can do nothing, Miss Macaulay, but go to your father and stay out of this business of ours. The road is safe for you from here to the city. I'll vouch for that. Say your goodbye to Moran for you'll not see him again.'

Moran held out his hand and dropped something into hers. It was a pendant. ‘It is silver, Miss Kathryn. It belonged to my sister. Have it to remember me by. Others know me by it. Show it and you will not be hurt. We have been friends, you and I, and I do not believe that will ever change, whatever is ahead of us. Goodbye and may God always be with you.'

Kate watched the three canter away and soon they were lost in the half light. She listened until she could hear the pounding hooves no more. Then she too followed their path and left the river behind.

That night she cried herself to sleep. In her dreams he came to her once again, the ragged orphan in the flames, the boy with the despairing eyes. But this time she did not burn her hands trying to save him. He was reaching out for her instead.

Sir William was shaken by Moran's sudden departure and Martineau's evidence that the quiet and respectful butler had been an agent of the Queen's enemies. More shocking still was the sudden capture and killing of Captain Shelley. Sir William had not expected it to end that way. It had not been his wish. He knew the man to be a traitor and he would most certainly have been executed for his treachery, but whatever a man's crime, he was deserving of a fair trial. That was British justice.

He had asked Martineau to find out why the outlaws had not been taken prisoner and who it was who had given the order to fire on the unarmed gang. Martineau assured him he would enquire and report his findings, but as time passed, he made no mention of it again and if Sir William had his own suspicions he did not pursue them. It was eventually agreed that, as Shelley's desertion and the killings had only a muted response from Whitehall, it was in everyone's interests to let the matter rest.

It had been a bright and perky April. A warm, still May followed. With their seed potatoes in the ground, women guarded them as jealously as a miser guards his pennies. In the daylight hours they stood like sentinels on their plots to scare away the crows that dared to snatch at a juicy leaf. Their children patrolled the ridges, pulling up the weeds, throwing away the stones and crumbling the soft earth between their fingers so that not a single clod might delay a shoot's rise. Along the coastline, boys scoured the beaches and brought back baskets of seaweed and worked its goodness into the ground. Their sisters carried handfuls of soot, scraped from the hearths and chimneys of their razed cottages and spread it around the plants to ward off the beetles and worms. There was much labour earnestly given.

In better times it was the tradition to give the priest a fat chicken or a basket of duck eggs that he might bless the fields and sprinkle them with holy water. At planting time they were overly respectful towards him and never failed to attend Mass, crossing themselves a dozen times as they stumbled through the Act of Contrition. Special homage was paid to St Bridget so that she too might bless the little seeds snug in their holes.

April heralded the beginning of the season of mean and hungry months. Now Ireland would again swarm with armies of roaming men searching for food or work, begging, stealing, resting wherever there was a space, crowding into towns and cities, dirty, ragged and hungry, each looking out for himself. And they would all share the same longing for the day when their tubers were big and round in the earth and they could go home again.

In their mind's eye they could see them ripening, the stout green stems pushing their way up towards the sunlight, the fields glorious in the first blossoming, the dimpled ridges covered in delicate, shallow forests of yellow and white flowers. As they tightened their belts yet another notch, they would tell each other how, come early autumn, they would rip open the ground and gorge themselves.

It was their belief, sacrosanct and taught by their fathers and their fathers before them, that plenty always followed scarcity, that God first punished and then blessed. They had somehow survived a terrible blight and a fearful winter but surely there would now follow a glorious summer and a bumper crop.

In those wandering, hungry months of spring and summer, men were certain of only one thing. This time they must harvest well. They and their families had come through one famished winter. They could not expect to survive a second.

Kate no longer pined for England, not even when she was most depressed. In those first months after arriving in Ireland, her father's promise that she would go home within a year had been her one salvation, an ever-present consolation and comfort. But now Lincolnshire seemed far away and as foreign as any distant land could be. She was becoming part of the life around her and the more she became engrossed in it, the more she demanded of it. She was content and yet there lingered in her mind a dread of the future, a contradiction that frightened her. She could not explain it, not to herself, not to Keegan.

She visited him now as often as she could. She had promised him that Edward Ogilvie would not take revenge on the village for what she had done. She had said that her visits would keep him and his bullwhip away and this had proved true. The bare little schoolroom had now become more a home for her than her father's house in Cork and the boys and girls who came every day so quietly and shyly to sit on the stone floor were her new friends.