The Year of the French (13 page)

Moat House, Ballina, June 26

Late that night, Malcolm Elliott, of Moat House near Ballina, south of Killala on the Castlebar road, sat in the small writing room which he had fitted up next to the bedroom, and read again the letter which he kept hidden away in a French translation of
Gulliver’s Travels
. The name of his small estate was a mystery to himself and everyone else, for although the house had been built where a Norman keep once stood, there was no evidence that there had ever been an encircling moat. The estate was bordered on one side by the River Moy, which a half-mile farther north passed through the town of Ballina, a broad, sluggish river crossed, in the town, by two wide, humpbacked bridges.

When he began reading, he sat to his desk, with lamplight falling comfortably upon what had once been his most cherished books, volumes of Helvétius, Diderot, and Holbach. When he finished however, he was pacing the floor. The lamp was weak, but he knew the letter almost by heart.

Elliott folded the letter and replaced it. It had been brought to him the week before by a man claiming to be a pedlar, a scarecrow with a soiled and ill-fitting wig, riding a sorry-looking pony and leading a scrawny donkey loaded down with wares. “Are you from Dublin?” Elliott asked him. “Athlone. I am travelling to Sligo.” “You were given these letters in Athlone?” “What letters?” We are well aware of the backwardness of that province. Much they knew of Connaught, those Dublin lawyers and merchants. The Provisional Directory should be marched through the streets of Ballina to judge for themselves the state of things.

He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers and walked the room again. He had the look of a Mayo squireen, a man with a jockey’s slender, nervous frame, and a face like a hatchet, narrow and triangular. Thick, sandy eyebrows sheltered darting eyes. He had been called to the bar, but his radical politics had incurred the hostility of the other gentlemen of the county. He was a hard-riding hunter, reckless and skilful in the Mayo fashion, and in Dublin he had been restless and dissatisfied, longing for the fields and broken fences of home. Those years, he now knew, had been the happiest of his life. His politics, he then had prided himself, were practical and unsentimental. A wave had arisen in France and was destined to sweep across Europe, destroying monarchs and ancient aristocratic privileges; it would batter down Ireland’s oligarchy, sweep away hereditary corruption, cleanse government and Parliament, open up careers to honest and energetic men. There had been many such men in Dublin in the early nineties. They had formed a Society. Now they were a conspiracy, their leaders imprisoned or in French exile, and their insurrection had become a peasant uprising, with Protestants put to the sword at Wexford Bridge and on Vinegar Hill. Faint echoes reached Mayo: a note carried by a pedlar; “Citizen Elliott . . .”

Taking up the lamp, he went to the bedroom, and stood looking down at his sleeping wife, Judith. A wisp of fair hair had fallen across her brow; her face was calm, oval. She was an English girl; they had met and married in London. But she was a far more ardent Irish patriot than he was himself, as though sympathy for her adopted country demanded proof. In Dublin she had become the friend of Pamela Fitzgerald, Lord Edward’s earnest and vivacious French wife. At Moira House, under the benign eye of a radical peer, they had enthused together over the coming Republic of Ireland, and over their husbands, who would bring it into being. Now poor Edward was dead, of wounds suffered when resisting the soldiers who ran him to earth in a Dublin slum, sold out by an informer. And Elliott, a blunt, bitterly honest man, was back in Mayo, a man with no taste for conspiracies and useless cyphers. He was bound to the Society only by his oath and by a pedlar’s letter. But to Elliott, an oath was a very serious matter. He was bound in honour to the dead Fitzgerald, to men in Irish and in English prisons, to the exiled plotters in Paris. And in Mayo he was useless to them.

On their first journey to Mayo, Ireland had been an unrolling wonder to Judith, as they left behind them the Anglified counties of the pale and crossed the Shannon into what Dublin spoke of as “the wild west.” She picked up Irish turns of phrase, and used them with an impressive inaccuracy but with an eagerness to please which won the hearts of all who spoke with her. “Sure and what time of day can it be at all?” she would ask him, and he would gravely answer her, “It can be ten O’clock.” A true child of her age, she travelled with her Ossian, a poet capable, in Elliott’s view, of the most appalling drivel, endless bathetic windiness. She would quiz him about the mountains they passed: what heroes lay buried atop them, what ancient Fenian battles had been fought upon their slopes? Elliott knew little about Ireland’s grotesque legendry. Who knows or cares, he had been tempted to reply, but clear eyes and an eager face always checked his reply.

She stirred, and in sleep turned her face towards him. Love ravished him, holding him tight by emotions which he could not name. She dwelt in a different world from his, shaped by her reading and her imagination. Once they had spent an evening at Tom Emmet’s villa in Rathfarnham at the foot of the Dublin hills, in the small oval study painted in what Tom’s wife believed to be the Grecian fashion, white and pale blue. Russell had been there as well, and MacNevin and Bagenal Harvey. And one other had been present there in their conversation, as they recalled Tone’s quicksilver wit, his fondness for claret and the violin and flute. It had seemed to Judith, and to Elliott himself, a conspiracy of the intellect, the best and clearest minds in the kingdom, banded together against brutishness and corruption. Emmet was in prison now, and Bagenal Harvey’s head was on a spike outside Wexford gaol. Prisoner rather than leader of the Wexford peasants, they called him their general, and then carried him from battle to battle. After Vinegar Hill, he hid for a week on an island off the coast, shivering and spray-stained. Where MacCracken was at that moment, Elliott did not know, perhaps waiting in some deep-walled Antrim glen for the soldiers to hunt him down. And Tone? Somewhere in France with an army that might or might not come. Elliott had not told Judith of Bagenal Harvey’s fate. He could see the darkening head, lolling tongue, protruding eyes. Judith remembered wit, music, curved walls painted white and blue.

Elliott blew out the lamp, and walked downstairs in the darkness, his hand sliding along the smooth, familiar olive wood of the banister. He crossed the hall, and walked outside. It was a cool, clear night of this extraordinary summer. The air was both sweet and pungent, blending the odours of cattle and crops. To his left, the Moy moved quietly towards Ballina, where a few lighted windows still glowed.

What did it matter, here in Mayo? There was himself in Ballina and John Moore in Ballintubber, Peters the provision merchant in Castlebar, Forrest on Glenthorne’s land, Burke who was steward to Lord Altamont in Westport. These were sworn United Irishmen. And John Moore had been speaking with some of the young Catholic squireens, O’Dowd and Blake and MacDonnell. With enough time, they might be persuaded to act, and perhaps could bring some of their tenants with them. Elliott knew their type, fierce, impetuous men ready to point their huge hunters towards the most daunting wall, flying over with shouts and laughter. They were capricious young bucks, ready for violence but easily bored. Put all these together and a fair showing of the tenantry and you had perhaps seventy men. Mayo was locked away from Tom Emmet’s study, from Dublin-bred conspiracies. Moorland and mountain mocked all eloquence.

Across the bay, in Sligo, things were a bit better. There was a fair organization in the town, and MacTier, the Presbyterian linen merchant, was an able man, prudent and hardheaded. If MacTier had a chance to act, he would, and if no chance came to him, he would abide by that, as quiet and as calm as a man counting bolts of cloth. Papist and Presbyterian alike had been sworn into the Society by MacTier, cautious, reserved, testing each man in searching conversation. And he had managed all this from a warehouse set squarely into one of the most implacably loyalist towns in the west of Ireland, a bitter garrison town. Not here, not in Mayo. But how many could even MacTier count on? A hundred, perhaps, not more. And that had been before the collapse of the Antrim rising. Sligo looked towards the north, towards Ulster, and now the only news was from the bloody glens of Antrim. What purpose was served by a letter from Dublin ringing false with its hysterical optimism?

He walked beside the river, and heard the small night animals stirring at the sounds of his booted feet. In Dublin a few years before, he had heard a story about Danton, whether true or false he did not know. When his arrest was decided upon, Danton was at his farm in the suburbs with his new young wife. A messenger came to him with a warning from a friend. He dressed hurriedly, stuffed his pocket with a shirt and a pistol, and set off through a forest. An hour later he halted. The forest had become the landscape of a dream. He had been quietly asleep in his own house, beside a woman’s warm, naked body. Now he was cold and breathless in a dark wood. He went back to his farm, and was in bed, awake and quiet, when they came for him. Elliott, walking beside the quiet Moy, understood that story. Wexford and Antrim were a thousand miles away, and the Provisional Directory was farther yet. Tone and the French fleet were across the world, phantoms. Next week perhaps, or next month, word might come that the French had landed in the south, or that Munster had risen. And perhaps, like Danton, he might dress, weigh down his own pocket with a pistol, and ride southwards. But he had not ridden to Wexford, nor taken the shorter journey to Antrim. Mayo held him, stronger than dreams nurtured in a Rathfarnham villa.

Mayo was the slow, invisible river at his feet, flowing past farmland and pastureland and bog towards the distant bay. He had begun to save the hay, and soon the first crops would be ready for reaping. Each day now, he would be in the fields with his labourers, stripped to his shirt, sweat darkening its armpits. At noon, girls would bring them buttered bread and pails of cool milk. In the clear light, beneath a sky of pale blue, he could see the Ox Mountains, which sheltered Mayo from the troubling winds of Ulster. Now night pressed upon him, dark silences weightier than speech.

Ballina, July 1/Ballycastle, July 2

Very early on the first morning of July, John Moore mounted his hunter and rode northwards towards the barony of Tyrawley. He made a leisurely journey of it, and did not take the shortest roads. At eleven he was in Castlebar, where he paused for two tankards of ale with Brian Peters, a provision merchant in the town. At three he was in Foxford, and engaged in a long conversation with Michael O’Hara, a strong-farmer. At sundown he reached Ballina, where he stayed the night with Malcolm and Judith Elliott, at Moat House.