The Year of the French (70 page)

“None of that matters in North America, John says. Could George manage North America for him? How could that be managed?”

But he did not hear her. His mind had slipped away again into the past, more real to him than the present, the terrace upon which they stood, bright sunlight upon ungathered crops, dull waters of the distant bay, a gaol in Castlebar. Dear God, she thought, give me patience with him. The past was his life, a box of mouldering parchments, cupboards of tarnished plate, his memories of her mother.

As though the thought had travelled from her mind to his, he turned suddenly towards her and smiled. Faint wind ruffled thin locks of long hair. “You should have heard your mother on the day she learned that the O’Driscolls were leaving for America. ‘Mother of God,’ she said, ‘they will be eaten by the red Indians. Roasted alive over red hot coals and then eaten.’ Your poor mother knew little of the world. She was remembering some pious book with woodcuts of the Jesuit martyrs. The O’Driscolls are thriving in America.”

“John and I could thrive in America,” she said. “If George could manage it. George and his friends in London.”

“They have a farm somewhere on the Hudson River, north of the city. The red Indians were all driven from there centuries ago. They roam the plains of the west now. What your mother knew of the world she knew from woodcuts and engravings—the Alhambra in Spain, and Venice with its canals and bridges. She would sit pouring over them for hours. Novels and books of English verse.
The Seasons
by Thomson was a great favourite of hers. And Goldsmith, of course.
The Deserted Village
. She set you the task of memorising it, when you were far too young for such work. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” Ellen said gently. “I remember.” Sunlight streamed into the parlour, fell upon frayed carpet and faded damask. She sat upon the carpet, long legs folded beneath her. Her fingers remembered the carpet’s feel, blue and red beneath her outspread hands. “I remember bits and pieces,” she said to her father; “I didn’t understand it.” “ ’There the black gibbet glooms beside the way,’ “she said to her mother; “I don’t know what gibbet means.” “That part doesn’t matter,” her mother said; “the second part is very sad, but the beginning is lovely. ‘These were thy charms—but all these charms are fled.’ That is where it changes and becomes sad.” “I don’t like sadness,” she said to her mother. “No one does,” her mother said; “but sadness is not the same when it is in a poem. It is not really sadness then.” Her mother knew the difference between words and feelings, words and things. Perhaps this was the secret, useless wisdom of women.

“It was a good marriage,” her father said. “Our families arranged it, but we were very happy together. You saw our happiness. We were very fortunate. Many marriages are not fortunate, but people somehow manage. Where would we all be if they did not?”

“Where indeed?” she said, dryly. Families mattered, children mattered, families and land, tight networks of kinship and alliances. Sure why should not arranged marriages work out as well as the other kind, if not better? But she and John had both . . . his remembered hand, his lips upon hers. And what of her parents? You never knew. They were very fortunate, her father said. She remembered his grief, remembered her own. She had her own grief now, John’s fate unimaginable, North America, or black gibbet.
Liberty
was a word, like
sadness
in books of poetry, or the language of romance in the novels which her mother had read in late afternoons, with half-smiles, sighing gently. Remembering her mother, she quickly bit her lip, turned away from her father. Perhaps the novels had told her of unexperienced feelings, half-believed, inaccessible.

“Never fear,” her father said, misunderstanding. A hand placed awkwardly upon her thin, small-boned shoulder. “George will manage something.”

Manage
. For him as well, it was only a word, she knew suddenly. What did he know of such matters, a farmer haunted by stories of the penal days, hugging the shadows of a lost gentility. Somewhere off in London were great men, George’s friends—Fox, Sheridan, Lord Holland. Somehow, if they wished, they could turn the lock of a gaol cell in Castlebar, in the wilds of Mayo. How? Powerless for a century, the Treacys and the MacDonnells and the O’Driscolls. As powerless as women. Her father placed his hand upon her cheek, turned her head until she faced him.

“He has been very foolish,” her father said softly. “You understand that, child, do you not? George warned him, and so did I. His life is at forfeit. You must learn to accept that. It is difficult, I know. I know that you loved him.”

Her father knew nothing of their bodies pressed together, straining against each other, their lips touching, awareness of his flesh beneath wool. Her father knew
love
, a word. People somehow manage.

“How did you first meet?” she asked him. “Mother and yourself?”

“Why, it was at a ball,” he said, surprised and pleased by the question. “At O’Conor’s house, Clonalis, down in Roscommon. It took us two days of travel, your grandfather and your grandmother and your uncle and myself. We went armed, your uncle and myself, although it was against the Protestant laws for Papists to bear arms. But the roads were dangerous in those days, footpads and highwaymen and rapparees. It was at the time when the first Catholic Committee was being formed, and Charles O’Conor and Lord French were the chief men for Connaught. The ball was a most convenient excuse for the Papist gentry to meet together and discuss the petition for rights. But it was a true ball for all that, and the women were lovely, I remember their gowns and the softness of their faces by candlelight. Art O’Neill played for us that night, the greatest of all the harpers. Your mother was standing with other young women, and she was a full head taller than the ones she was with. She was the tallest young woman I have ever seen. Who is she?, I asked your grandmother, and she told me that she was one of the MacBrides. I danced twice with her that night, and would have danced a third time, but she said that this would cause comment, and she was right, of course. Your mother was a most sensible woman, as of course you know.”

“But without the Catholic Committee there would have been no ball,” Ellen said. Words. Abstractions. Committees and petitions.

“Why of course there would,” he said, puzzled. “There were always balls in those days, and very lovely they were. And the music we had then you do not have in these latter days. All the harpers are dead. Like the poets.” He shook his head. “We were a great people, and music and poetry were held in honour among us, as they had been by our grandparents. And all that while, we were outlaws upon our own land.”

“There are outlaws today,” she said, turning away from him again, so that he would not see the tears of anger brimming in her eyes. “The gaols of Ballina and Castlebar are filled with outlaws awaiting sentence.”

“That is very different,” he said. “Rebels who had taken up arms against their lawful King. The Catholic Committee was a committee of gentlemen. We commenced our petition with a declaration of loyalty to the King. That wretched little German is our lawful King. Women cannot understand such matters. It is not their sphere.”

Sphere. In her father’s study stood a great sphere, a globe of the world, two feet wide and perfectly round, mounted upon a stand of wood, great oceans of blue, and continents in browns and whites and reds. Perfectly round and perfectly seamless. If you put your hand upon it and gave it a twist, it would spin upon its brass axis, within its frame of arched olive wood. Oceans and continents blurring together. But when it slowed, rested motionless again, if you looked closely, you could see that it was not seamless at all, a thin line, almost invisible, running from pole to pole, through oceans, bits of continent. Two halves, joined together by a craftsman’s cunning.

“The harvest is lost,” she said, when she could trust herself to speak, looking out over the yellowing fields.

“The best harvest in ten years it was,” Treacy said. “And all of the spalpeens off fighting for liberty in the taverns of Killala.”

“Some of them,” she said. “Some are in Castlebar.”

But when they turned to walk back into the house, he surprised her by putting his arms around her shoulders, and held her without speaking. “John has friends,” he said at last. “You will see. We will both of us see.”

Two days later, she saddled one of the two mares that the French had left to them and rode north of Ballycastle to Grace MacDonnell. On the road she passed a group of men, eight or ten of them, three with pikes, and one with a sash tied about his waist, and a pistol stuck into his belt. When they recognised her, they touched their hands to their foreheads. The year of liberty. “You are as safe upon this road as in your own house, Miss Treacy,” the man with the pistol said. “ ’Tis all part of the Republic from Killala to the sea.” The one word of English,
republic
, fell loose and awkward from his mouth. “Is that what we have here?” she asked him, “a republic?” “ ’Tis what it is called,” he said; “it means that we have and hold the land.” “That is as good a word as any so,” she said. “The whole land will soon be ours,” he said, “from the centre to the sea. A great army of the Gael is rising up in the midlands, and they will join with our lads who went off from Mayo and the French with their great death-dealing cannon.” “That will be a grand day entirely,” she said, and raised her short, braided crop to the brim of her velvet cap. “It will that,” he said.

“Eight spalpeens and a farmer with a sash tied around his fat belly,” she said to Grace MacDonnell. “And a new word to add to their storehouse of English.
Republic
. I declare to God they will drive me mad with their words.”

“It is not a word that should come as a stranger to yourself at least,” Grace said, amiably but with a faint tartness. “There is not a proclamation has been issued without the word, and John’s name at the foot of it as President. President of the Republic of Connaught.”

“Proclamation,” Ellen said. “President. ’Tis well that the study of Latin has always been practised in this barony.”

Without its horses, the rich dungy smell of its stables, the MacDonnell farm had lost much of its character. Ellen sat with Grace in Grace’s bedroom, facing each other across a small table spread with teapot, a pot of hot water, plates of buttered bread, a jampot.

“An army of the Gael is gathering in the midlands, the fellow with the sash said. There will be a republic from the centre to the sea. Some line from a tavern ballad, but he spun it out as though he had coined it upon the instant.”

“He is not alone in saying that,” Grace said. “You hear that said upon every side, and pray God that it is true. Poor Randall is off there somewhere in the midlands, and most of the fellows from the MacDonnell lands with him. You should have the same prayer upon your own lips. If the army of the Gael is triumphant in the midlands, the doors of the Castlebar gaol will fly open, and John will come riding back to you.”

“They will be crushed in the midlands,” Ellen said. She held her cup carefully in her hands and looked down at it. “The soldiers of the English King will shatter them, and then in their good time they will march north upon Tyrawley. It requires but little thought to know what will happen in the weeks ahead. The English will not let this island fall from their hands for the sake of a thousand Frenchmen and a few thousand peasants with pikes. There is the truth of the matter and the rest is all words and proclamations and green banners. A child or a schoolgirl could tell you that, if she put her mind to the matter for an hour.”

“I have never before heard you speak such nonsense,” Grace said, “and your voice as firm as though you were reading from the catechism. I doubt not that you have learned all this from your father. ’Tis in a different world that your father lives, and ours is a new one. My own father was as bad. They are like the elks from the olden times that turf cutters turn up in the bogs, great bones that would do credit to an elephant. You did not stand at the gates here as I did when Randall rode off with a hundred men behind him, and two enormous pistols strapped to him, and the sword that a MacDonnell carried at Aughrim.”

Much else has been turned up from the bogs by the loys of the turf cutters, Ellen thought, brooches and bracelets of dark twisted gold, bones wedded to stiff, decayed cloth, fragments of rich raiment, swords of iron so rusted and brittle that the curved blades of the loys shattered them.

“There is no new world that is begun with a sword a hundred years old,” she said. “And from a battle that was lost.”

“You will see,” Grace said. “The boots of the Protestants are off our necks at last, and off they will stay. It was our country once, and it will be so again.” She rested her hands upon her knees and spoke in Irish. “The people of the Gael have risen up.” She was a small girl, unlike her brother, but she had his swagger, and although she spoke the words fiercely, her brother’s grin was behind them, reckless with easy confidence.

“They have risen up like a wave,” Ellen said quietly, “and like a wave they are falling back to the sea. The English have retaken all of Connaught from Athlone to Ballina. Castlebar lay empty before them, and they have filled its gaol with rebels. My own John is there awaiting trial. And when they have scattered our fellows in the midlands, they will march and ride into Tyrawley, and with Dennis Browne at their side. And there is your republic for you and your proclamation and your army of the Gael. It is your English that you should be practising at now, for it is English that will give out the rules and laws and regulations in Connaught as it has done since the days of Aughrim and earlier than Aughrim.”

“You have become a great little strategist of war, Ellen,” Grace said in English. “I marvel that they have not made you a captain or a colonel or a general itself, in a handsome riding habit of lobster red, you are that fond of the Protestants and the English army.”

“I am as good a Catholic as you are yourself, Grace MacDonnell,” Ellen said, her tone cross but her voice even and quiet. “And I do not care twopence for England or for the English King. I am as Irish as you are, whatever that may mean, and well do you know it.” But what did it mean? She remembered her mother reading English poetry, English novels, a wronged baronet, a noble English earl, an infant, exchanged in the cradle with a foundling, great balls in London, the great English lords and ladies at watering places, Bath and Weymouth. “They live in the great world,” her mother told her, respectful and marvelling. “London must be like Paris, but the people there are more like ourselves.” But her father, travelling southwards toward Roscommon, towards a girl he had never seen, had carried arms forbidden him by English law. Art O’Neill, last and greatest of the harpers, had flung his notes into a Roscommon farmhouse, dignified as “castle” because the once-royal O’Conors dwelled there, an old man, blind, fingernails ridged and hard as horn. “I am as Irish as you are,” she said again to Grace MacDonnell. “Whatever that may mean.”