The Year of the French (60 page)

A forcing-house of superstitions and dark conceits. Upon a small eminence within easy view of my window, Steeple Hill as it is termed, stands one of the cylindrical and grotesquely tall towers of this island, built in some unimaginable antiquity, of whose origins numerous theories exist, both learned and fantastic. That they precede the Christian dispensation is most certain, as has been demonstrated by the researches, at once erudite and ingenious, of General Vallencey and other dilettantes. The peasants, of course, have their own notions, but to rehearse these would strain the credulity of my readers. I have seen them standing in small groups beside this tower, peering outwards, beyond the bay, towards the open sea. For almost to the end, they maintained their hope for the second fleet which Humbert had so confidently promised them. Poised thus between their ancient and their present delusions, they offered a tableau pregnant with meaning. Children of the mist, they live by fancies rather than ideas. Songs, prophecies, long-winded ranting poetry supply the furniture of their minds.

“There can be no denying what is written down in books,” O’Donnell said. “Were there not great victories won by the people of the Gael in the days of our princes and earls, and ships coming in on every tide with treasure and cannon from Spain and Italy and from the Pope himself.”

“Centuries ago, my friend. All that ended at the Boyne.” And I could not but be moved by the thought of the brightly coloured pictures with which his mind was stocked, for these princes and earls were but ruddy-bearded barbarians prowling dark forests, glorified cattle thieves, swept easily away by history’s inexorable march, which is the march also of civilisation and true Christianity.

“We took Ballina and Castlebar,” he said stubbornly, “and Foxford and Westport.”

“Took them and lost them. My poor fellow, consider your position, I beg of you. There are more soldiers of the Crown on this island today than there were at the battle of the Boyne.”

“Oh, by God, that would take some doing, Your Reverence. There were two crowns in Ireland for that battle. And the two kings, William and James.” He grinned at me mischievously, in the manner of this people, with their primitive habit of unseasonable japery.

“A century ago,” I said again. “The plain fact of the present is that a wily and unscrupulous French general has seduced the people of this barony from their proper allegiance. And the day is fast coming when they will pay dearly for their folly and in blood.”

“Were I you, Mr. Broome,” he said, sober upon the instant, “I could not take so calm a view of the matter. Desperate men take desperate measures. If the British army moves upon Killala, there are terrible things could happen in the town before they reach it. There are dreadful fellows who come in and out of Killala at their pleasure and answer no man’s bidding. There is Malachi Duggan and his follyers. Damn all does he care about this,” O’Donnell said, flicking with a thumb his sash of office.

“Barbarians!”

“Barbarians, do you say? And what are the lobsterback soldiers, with their gibbets at every crossroads from Castlebar to Ballina? I wonder at you, the way you make every man with a pike a barbarian, and every man with a bloody English bayonet an angel of justice. There is a fierce satire that Owen MacCarthy wrote once on the soldiers, long before the trouble started. ’Tis a scrappy thing, but it has good lines in it. I asked him for a copy of it, but he said it wasn’t worth the trouble of writing it out. Let me see can I remember any of it.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” I said in a bleak manner.

Here was this MacCarthy, a man with little to recommend him save his facility at the composition of verses in the archaic Irish language, a tardy schoolmaster, a drunkard and libertine, a brawler and a lounger in alehouses. And yet he was quoted as a sage, much as red Indians and furry Siberians are said to give reverence to fools and madmen. The spoken word, adorned with whatever ridiculous furbelows of rhetoric and artifice, has great power among primitive peoples. I have considered the possibility that poetry and song express the childhood of a race, as philosophy and history express its calm maturity.

“He knows more than many a man, Your Reverence. He is an exquisite scholar alike in Latin, English, and Irish.”

“Is he indeed? And yet he spared time from his studies to ruin the name of that poor girl in the Acres.”

“By God, she wasn’t the first one, poor creature. He is the very devil with women, and would you not know it to look at him? Red hair and a ready tongue will always win the day.”

And yet O’Donnell was a man who would defend the sanctity of his own home with utmost ardour, and several times suppressed with zeal and fury the offending conduct of his men. A primitive yet a complex people, they tease my curiosity without rewarding it. For they maintain a strict decency in sexual matters, despite the opportunities for sin which are provided by their cramped domestic arrangements, yet a man such as MacCarthy is accorded a kind of licence, and his transgressions form the staple of crossroads jests. But this tolerance had most strict limits, and did not extend to the unfortunate girl. She lived in the melancholy section known as the Acres, upon land sufficient for the pasturage of a few cows, managing by herself her poor resources, for MacCarthy, into whose other vices laziness was compounded, had never lifted a hand to give her help. And if his sin was winked at hers was not, a most unjust and un-Christian apportionment of blame. Poor child—for though a widow she was little more—she would slip into the village upon her errands and then return, cowled and barefoot like the other women, small, triangular face shadowed by the folds of the shawl. Nor could I accept the argument of O’Donnell that she was content with her lot, and fretted only that MacCarthy was far off and in danger for his life.

This, at least, gave her common ground with other women, for of course many hundreds of men, from this and from other baronies, were away with the French, and might as well have been upon the moon or in High Tartary. Few Irish peasants ever wander far from their country, which is for them a sufficient, even an ample world. Now they were swallowed up by the blue, hazy mountains to the east, within landscapes which those who remained could scarcely imagine, an infinity of space. Dublin, Belfast, Cork, words scattered across the map of a small island, were cities more distant than Rome or Bethlehem. It must have seemed to them that the men had been spirited away, and would not return for years, or would never return.

For our other half-world, the world of my Protestant parishioners, life presented a different but an equally frightening aspect. Although our churches in Wexford had been savagely and vilely used during the rising there, the churches of Mayo were accorded respect or at least neglect, and no hindrance was placed upon my services. On the Sunday, I conducted both morning and evening services for a congregation larger and more zealous than any before or since. For the most of us, I am certain, the very walls, whitewashed and severe, carried welcome messages from that world of civility and industry from which we had been so suddenly and so violently cut off. I remember in particular allowing my eyes to dwell upon a brass plaque erected to the memory of Mr. Falkiner’s grandfather, which bespoke the earnest wish of his descendants that he had now entered into “the citizenship of heaven”—a noble phrase, in its pious belief that hereafter we may enjoy a blessed state akin to the best which we have known upon this earth. Mr. Falkiner and his family, Mr. Saunders and his, took on these occasions their accustomed pews, the men past middle age but both still tall and unbent, the women becomingly dressed and tranquil, hands folded in laps about their books of prayer. I will not, I trust, be thought a ranting patriot if I declare that in such hours I grew inwardly firm and resolute in the knowledge that the people of our race, male and female alike, are fortified by adversity, and summon forth that which is hardiest and most enduring in our characters. Alas, we were not a full congregation, for Captain Cooper’s yeomen still languished in the market house, and their wives, by their presence, reminded us that the parish had suffered and still was suffering. Nor did we lack, even in such sacred hours, reminders of our present peril, for once I looked up from the Book towards the window, to discover there malicious faces peering in, with broad, grinning faces and suspicious eyes.

It seemed a time suited to prudence in discourse, and in my sermons, accordingly, I limited myself to assuring my auditors that God’s will would be done, a sentiment not merely true but irreproachable. I could contrive nothing of more immediate comfort, and yet I fear that my words fell tamely upon ears familiar with the Protestant martyrology. For to these English-in-Ireland, if I may term them so, the calamity which had befallen us had the familiarity of lessons and legends learned from infancy. For several centuries now, they and their forebears had told and retold their stories of the fearful Papist uprising of 1641, when the luckless Protestants of Ulster were slaughtered or driven naked upon the winter roads, alike women and infants, of the brutal rapparees who roved the hills after Aughrim, cutthroats and brigands, of Whiteboys banded together against lonely and defenceless Protestant farms. A melancholy litany, decade after decade of hatred and brutality. It was as though our backs now smarted from the cuts of an ancient whip, a scourge devised to test the British spirit. The Old Testament abounded in episodes and language suited to this fierce perception of history, but I felt little inclined to roll out denunciations of Philistines and Canaanites. Far better to remind my unhappy flock of the merciful God of the New Testament, the God who forgives sinners and comforts the helpless and the afflicted. Mr. Saunders, in especial, received my news of this benignant deity almost as though I had introduced a novel heresy. And yet perhaps, I now conjecture, the God of Abraham and Isaac was better suited to their present difficulties, the God who had sustained his Elect People against all tribulations and wickedness.

And yet Mr. Saunders had at least the safety and the comparative ease of the church on Sabbath, and at other times his cot beneath my roof, where he dwelled with other loyalists whose houses had been destroyed by the banditti. Far different were the circumstances of Captain Cooper and his yeomen, crowded together in the stenches of the market. Whenever in these present days I encounter Captain Cooper, I have occasion to reflect upon the resiliency of the human spirit. For there he stands before me, buoyant and confident, busy upon the world’s and his own affairs, as though the time of his imprisonment and humiliation had never been, an old scar healed over and leaving but the thinnest of lines. But I can remember, if he does not, the ravaged face with its red-rimmed eyes and rug of black beard. He and his men were fed, it is true, but fed most grudgingly, and upon occasion went for entire days without food, owing to the forgetfulness of their captors.

He had recovered most admirably from the black and wrathful despair into which he had at first been plunged, and was able now to rally the spirits of the poor fellows who shared captivity with him. Upon my visits to the market house, bearing with me such modest provisions as Eliza was able to supply from her depleted larder, he would greet me as of old, with a genial and complacent vulgarity, by which I was always deceived, thinking that he had returned entirely to his senses. He would enquire as to the health and well-being of Eliza and of the other ladies beneath my roof, and upon hearing my reply, would nod briskly, saying, “Good, good, good! Excellent!” Then he would distribute to the company my little treats, reserving for himself perhaps a single oaten cake, nibbling at it slowly so as to make it last. Only after some minutes of my visit had passed would I realise, with a sick and sudden sorrow, that all was not well with his spirit.

“And our friend Mr. Duggan,” he might say, licking the crumbs from his fingers. “Has he been keeping himself busy? Slaughtering the cattle of honest men? Burning the crops in their fields?”

“No, no,” I would assure him. “We have heard little of Duggan these past few days. And Ferdy O’Donnell keeps order in the town.”

“Ferdy O’Donnell! It is my own Mount Pleasant that that lad has his eye on. It was O’Donnell land a century or more ago, black Papist land. Do you know how those fellows worked the land? By a plough tied to the horse’s tail by a rope of straw. Connaught was dirt before we took the sword to it. Red Indians were kinder to the soil than the Papist tribes.”

“A long time ago,” I said, bland and foolish. For it is true that proper methods of farming and husbandry came in with the English. We brought with us from England the secrets of seed and plough, of tillage and harvest.

“Long ago, is it?” he asked sharply. “Tell that one to Duggan and to O’Donnell. By God, they are all alike. If they pass you on the road, they will take off their hats and give you a bow, but what they are thinking all the time is that we have no right to be here. No right, is it? By God, before we are done with this, they will learn lessons about rights.”

When he was on this tack, there was no turning him aside, yet I always endeavoured to do so.

“Ballina has been retaken,” I might tell him, “and the rebels themselves admit that to the south of us a mighty army of the Crown is advancing. Your imprisonment is galling, but deliverance is certain.”

“It is worse than galling,” Cooper said. “I marvel that you can endure our stench. The bloody English have left us here to stew in our own shit, while they march along at their leisure, with banners flying and fifes tootling. I declare to Christ that the Protestants of this island are the most put-upon of God’s creatures, with the bare-arsed Papists on one side of us, and English thicks on the other.”

“Certain it is that God has placed severe tests upon us,” I said. “I pray that we may give them a proper answer.”

“We know the proper answers well enough,” Cooper said. “The rebels of this county are going to be given a drubbing they will not forget. The gallows and the pitch cap. Croppies lie down. There is but one weapon that can teach peace to these people, and it is a length of hempen rope.”