The Year of the French (7 page)

“My own tenants is who they are, and I haven’t so many of them that their ways are mystery. And if the law can’t give me satisfaction, I will take out after them with a pack of the MacCaffertys.”

“Oh, to be sure, Captain.”

“This isn’t Dublin, you know. This is Mayo, and we settle matters in our own way here. We’re Irishmen here, and Irishmen by God who stand on their own two feet.”

“If you are over that now,” Kate said, “maybe you will tell us what you intend to do.” She was a handsome, coarse-featured woman, with a broad, humourous mouth and eyes like green agates.

He looked towards her and then away. “Fogarty, there is no need for you to sit there with an empty belly. Kate, ring the bell for Brid, and while the man is waiting pour him some tea.”

“Tea would be grand,” Fogarty said. “I have had my breakfast in me for two hours. I put Paddy Joe and his son to work on the fence that was knocked down.”

“Well, aren’t you the thoughtful hoor,” Cooper said, but then said quickly, “Ach, Tim, I’m sorry. I am fair beside myself.” He rubbed the palm of his hand across his eyes. “I was counting on those cattle for the market. I don’t know what I will do now at all.”

“No offence taken, Sam. ’Tis a sore business.” He sipped at the scalding tea, and added sugar.

“And now, Sam,” Kate said. “What do you intend to do?”

“I have about a fifth of the land marked out for pasturage, and ’tis the only way. The both of you know that. And I won’t be the last landlord to do it here, only I had the bad luck to be the first.”

“You might better have waited, then,” Kate said. “Until you had some company.”

“Wait wasn’t in it, Kate, the sore way we are in. This bitch of a barony wasn’t built for farming. It is land for cattle.”

The room was too small for the furniture which had been crowded in, a broad expanse of mahogany table, heavy chairs with wide arms and high, tapestried backs, a sideboard of olive wood. Two smoke-darkened portraits faced each other across the table.

“You can’t leave it this way,” she said. “With a Whiteboy threat hanging over you if you move.”

“And those Dublin leeches fastened onto my arse. Do you not think I know that?”

Across the hall, in the small office, paper bulged from his desk, lay scattered across the table. How could a man have this much land, and yet be so poor? True enough, the land was heavily mortgaged when his father died, and there was no turning back from the road of heavy mortgages. But the road had seemed pleasant once, seven or eight years ago. Those had been good years, after his father’s death and before he married. Liberty Hall, you might as well have called Mount Pleasant, but without extravagance, all considered. Not a rakehelly young man of the barony but had his welcome, and not all of them Protestants by any means, he was no bigot. The two Routledges had their welcome and Tom Bellew and Corny O’Dowd, the old Catholic stock, good mounts for the chase. There were still marks on the hall floor from the time Corny O’Dowd had ridden up and through the door. All that was over now, with black hatred building up again between the creeds.

“You must stop them now,” Kate said.

He spilled his tea. “You are as bad as the rest of them. Didn’t my own father tell me that marrying a Papist was like building your house upon mud?” He shifted in his seat. “What in hell was the need to marry you at all, is the question I ask myself every night I can’t sleep.” When they had children, she would be teaching them their beads when he wasn’t watching; it always went that way in this kind of marriage.

“Then you cannot have often to ask the question.”

“Well, ma’am,” Fogarty said, “with my best thanks for the tea.”

“You will sit where you have been bid to sit,” Kate said, “and you will leave when you have been excused.” She leaned towards her husband. “You married this particular Papist because you were besotted by the pleasures of the bed, and you knew a bargain when you saw one.”

Cooper drew in his breath to answer, but then expelled it. “By God, you are right, Kate. A damned good bargain it was. But I can’t let your bloody Papists—”

“
My
bloody Papists, are they? Do you think that Thomas Treacy would be safe, or George Moore? If Whiteboys are left unpunished, not a landlord will be safe against them.” She rested her hand on the table. “Haven’t you enough sense to puzzle things out? You have a handful of men frightened they will be turned out and maybe some ramblers with no business but mischief. And barring you find yourself an informer you will never find out who they are, not until half the men in the barony have taken the oath, and for you that will be too late. You heard no whispers of this, did you, Tim?”

“I did not, ma’am. When we turned out Squint O’Malley and flattened the cabin, there was a crowd of them standing in the road to make their moans, but that is always the way. You have the right of it there, ma’am. This is but a handful of men now, but it will grow fast.”

“Do you hear that, Sam? There is no way out of this but to make them all more afraid of you than they are of the Whiteboys. And there will be no way to frighten them until you flatten cabins and send a few off to Castlebar in a cart.”

“Jesus but you are a hard woman, Kate.”

“Ireland is hard. I learned how to live in it by watching my father. There was a man to take lessons from. On one side of him was the Protestants and on the other side was the Whiteboys, and all he had in this world when he commenced his progress was a lease on a few hundred acres of bad land that he let to those who could get no better. And what had he to protect it but a whip with a load of lead in the handle.”

“This is no morning to hear about your father,” Cooper said. Shaggy, mountainous form, hairy ears and nostrils, the loaded whip around which legends had clustered.

“You remember my father, don’t you, Tim?”

“I do, ma’am,” Fogarty said reverently. “I do.”

Two of a kind, her father and Fogarty. Tucked somewhere in the thatch of Fogarty’s cabin was a leather sack of silver shillings and gold sovereigns, a bit added to it each year, his eye on some nice bit of land, perhaps part of Cooper’s own land. They hungered for land, as other men for women or whiskey. One of these years, Fogarty would be around, stroking the greasy band of his hat, ready to talk about a long-term lease, bag plump on the desk. Then he could start in business as a middleman. That is how old Mahony, Kate’s father, had started forty years before, when Papists were forbidden by law to own land by outright purchase. They complain about the heretic landlords, but it is their own that sweat them worst. The worst rack-renters are the Papist middlemen. Servants make bad masters.

“There is not even need for Castlebar,” Kate said. “Let the magistrates seize up a few of the likeliest rogues and throw them into Ballina gaol. And if they are too finicky about the selecting, they themselves will be the losers. It works wonders to toss a lad in gaol and hold a whip under his nose.”

“It isn’t forty years ago, Kate. There must be charges now.”

“Are you not yourself the law in Killala now? Is not the Tyrawley Yeomanry the law? Why else did you throw away our sore needed money on red uniforms?”

“That is a different matter altogether,” Cooper said, suddenly stiff. He seemed to rise taller in his chair. “The Tyrawley Yeomanry was founded to hold this barony for our lord the King.”

“Whatever that means,” Kate said acidly.

“Well you know what it means. It is our task to guard these shores against the French, and to protect this barony against rebels.”

Kate suddenly broke into laughter. “Listen to him, Tim. Listen to him.” She seized Fogarty by the arm, as though they were allied in judgement against her husband. “I declare to God that all men are children.”

All save her father.

“You great fool,” she said to Cooper. “What is a Whiteboy if he isn’t a rebel?”

“Not against the Crown,” Cooper said, making an effort at patience. “Have you no ears in your head? Have you not heard about the south of this island and the north of it? The peasants rose up in rebellion against the Crown. They destroyed Wexford. The English had to send over an army to put them down. Thanks be to God there are no United Irishmen in Mayo, there are no rebels. These are only Whiteboys.”

“Only Whiteboys,” Kate echoed contemptuously. “It is Whiteboys and not rebels of Wexford who can send you naked and starving on the roads. It is against you that the Whiteboys are in rebellion, and you have a hundred men who owe you the red coats on their backs.”

Cooper shook his head. “A Whiteboy war in the middle of a rebellion. My God, what a country!”

“Small difference,” Kate said. “Whiteboys this year and rebels the next. If there was ever a rebellion in Mayo, wouldn’t your Whiteboys be in the thick of it?”

“They would, by God,” Cooper said.

“There you are then,” Kate said. “Take your yeomen and ransack the barony. Bring the wrath of God down on them. That is what your own father would have done. He was a mean, yellow-skinned Protestant, but he knew how to deal with Whiteboys.”

“Will you not listen to me when I tell you that it is not my father’s time now, and much less is it the time of your own father. I hold my commission from Dublin, and I am answerable to Dublin.”

“You are fearful to make use of the yeomen, is that it? Then why must I tell you what you must do? You must have a word with Dennis Browne. He is the High Sheriff for Mayo and he is the Member of Parliament for Mayo and he is brother to Lord Altamont. If there is one man who has the management of Mayo in his own two hands it is Dennis Browne.”

“Dennis Browne, is it?” He laughed and turned to Fogarty, who responded with a smile. “It is little you know about the affairs of your own husband. Sure didn’t Dennis Browne and I stand on the field five years ago and bang away at each other with pistols.”

“Indeed I did not know that. What possessed the pair of you?”

“It was a matter closely touching a young lady’s honour. Now that is enough said on that subject.”

“Touching a lady’s honour,” Kate said. “That is the only part of a woman that Dennis Browne would not touch. He is as bad as MacCarthy below in Killala.”

“There were circumstances,” Cooper said. “Very delicate circumstances. It was all over and done with before ever I met you, love.”

“You may depend on that,” Kate said.

“Over and done with,” Cooper said. “But there is little affection between us. Ach, what use has he ever had for fellows like myself or Gibson or Saunders or any of the other small landlords? He cares only for the men of great property, his brother and the Big Lord and those. And his brother and himself are safe, out there in Westport.”

“No one will be safe,” Kate said. She bit her lip in thought. “Is there no one in these parts who has his ear?”

“One man,” Cooper said. “George Moore of Moore Hall.”

“A fine-looking man,” Kate said. “He keeps to himself, but he is a fine-looking man. And he is a Roman Catholic.”

“Sure the Brownes are half Papist themselves. They are neither fish nor fowl. And George Moore is mad. A man who sits in the middle of Mayo and writes books is mad.”

“Unlike yourself,” she said, “he never tried to kill Dennis Browne, and unlike yourself, he is gentry.”

“Gentry, is it? By God, there is fine talk from Mick Mahony’s daughter.”

“I am glad you like it. I have more.”

“Fogarty, why the hell are you sitting there, gawking at your betters while the affairs of the barony are being discussed? The tea is stone cold, and Paddy Joe and his son are down by the pasture fence wondering how do you put one stone on two others without it falling off.”

“My own thought, Captain. My own thought. I’ll be on top of them in two shakes,” He stood up, and then pointed to the letter. “Mrs. Cooper is right, though, Captain. It has to be stopped now. You saw who that was written to. Not to yourself alone. ‘To the Landlords and the Middlemen of this Barony,’ it begins. That is the proper Whiteboy stuff, and it has to be stamped out, the way your father used do in the old days.”

Cooper watched the door until it closed. Easy enough to say. Thirty, even twenty years ago, his father would have taken some brisk Protestant lads—or better, his pet Papists the MacCaffertys—and turned Tyrawley inside out. Now nothing was clear. Perhaps Cooper wasn’t gentry. Perhaps he was only a farmer trying to hold his land in a hard county. Pity for himself spread, a soft sponge, in his chest. He squeezed it dry.

“Maybe I am not gentry, Kate, but I am accounted so. I have a great-grandfather’s phiz to hang on the wall. It isn’t your great lords who have held Mayo for the Crown from the days of Cromwell. It is men like myself and Gibson, and small thanks we ever got for it. When your great lords were off in England, it was men like my great-grandfather fought off the rapparees. It is men like ourselves took Mayo and held it.”

“Let you keep your hold on it, then.”

“How! What in hell is it you want me to do?”

“Go down to Ballintubber and have a word with George Moore, that he will have a word with Dennis Browne. And then turn your yeomen loose on these rogues.”

“My God, what a creature you are for a woman. It is a man you should have been born.”

“A strange creature that would make of me in your bed. It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it. Sure what do I care, Sam, are you gentry or not. If you had grown up as I did, a Papist among Papists, you would have a full belly of such prating, with every O and Mac giving out about how grand they were in the days before Cromwell and how much land they had taken away from them. If you put all that land together, Mayo would stick out into the sea so far that you could stand on Croagh Patrick and see New York. That is all over and done with. What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it. I mean us to keep Mount Pleasant if we have to turn every perch of land into pasture.”

“We shall see, Kate. We shall see. But for the moment I had best get below. It is little Fogarty knows about stonework, much less Paddy Joe.”

“And Paddy Joe will have his ‘Fine day, Captain’ for you, and you will have your ‘It is indeed’ for him, and all the time Paddy Joe could be one of the lads we should be scouring out.”