The Year of the French (78 page)

“If my eyes were keener I could see them,” Maria said. “But I can see only the bog.”

“I can see them,” Sinclair said.

“All these ancient hatreds,” Edgeworth said. “And the people have never learned proper habits. Drinking themselves into a stupor. Grovelling before their priests.”

“I know little about them,” Sinclair said. “We came here six weeks ago. They are rather like Highlanders, I think.”

“If the bogs could be reclaimed there would be land enough for all of them,” Edgeworth said. He gestured loosely with his spectacles. Sudden sunlight glinted from the lenses. “My pamphlets upon the matter earned the praise of Arthur Young.”

“You should look in Longford for your bailiff,” Sinclair said. “First Longford and then Mullingar.”

Maria put her hand upon her father’s arm.

“I tried to raise a company of yeomen,” Edgeworth said, “but I admitted Papists to their ranks and the government would not supply me with arms. Neighbours wrote to Dublin, warning them against me.”

“There are many Papists in the militia,” Sinclair said. “The North Cork.”

“I know these people,” Edgeworth said. “They are not governed by reason. All the laws and pamphlets ever written mean less to them than a poem. I have written against the dangers of poetry in this country. It is their only academy, wild words sung in taverns. Hatred breeding hatred. I have tried. No one listened to me.”

Maria sat down and took the reins from him. “I wish you a safe return to Scotland,” she said to Sinclair.

“Not yet,” Sinclair said. “The rebels still hold part of Mayo.”

“Hatred and intolerance,” Edgeworth said.

“Elsewhere they have been banished.”

“Not here,” Sinclair said.

Maria looked again towards the bogs. The soldiers were returning from the thickets, swinging from the straps their helmets filled with berries. She flicked the reins against the horse’s rump, and the Edgeworths turned away from the bog, and rode back through the village of Ballinamuck towards the Longford road.

FROM 
AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE
OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA
IN THE SUMMER OF 1798,
BY ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME

If memory serves, there is an essay by Oliver Goldsmith or some similar writer which in a spirit of capricious paradox argues that the freest existence is that enjoyed by the prisoner. It has ever been the practice of impecunious scribblers to devise derangements of common sense and thereby to gain the admiration of thoughtless readers, who imagine themselves in the presence of some novel profundity. If I recall Goldsmith as the perpetrator of this folly, it is only, perhaps, in contrast to his massive and sagacious friend Doctor Johnson, whose writings shine the more brightly for their soundness of judgement. But then Goldsmith, I cannot forebear to mention, was an Irishman and the product of a hedge school, wherein fancy was doubtless commended to him as equal in worth to reason and deliberation. And yet, without that touch of fancy could he ever have offered us so affecting or so memorable a poem as his
Deserted Village?
Who that has read that poem does not cherish it, and who has not read it?

Had the gentle and sentimental spirit of Goldsmith visited Killala in September of 1798, it would, we may be certain, have fled aghast. It had been for many days now the capital and centre of our topsy-turvy world, given a fragile semblance of order by the humane conduct of Ferdy O’Donnell and yet managed by lawless bands who chafed beneath the weight of his discipline. My own house and others in the town were crammed to overflowing with loyalists whose residences had been assaulted and who had now the doubtful pleasure of peeping through curtained windows upon those who had worked their ruin. In the market house still languished our Yeomanry, hostages to fortune, as indeed we all were. For bearing down upon me with a special heaviness was a melancholy paradox. I never doubted that British arms would triumph, yet saw in this our greatest danger. For the defeat of French and rebels arms to the south would expose us to the fury of desperate and vengeful insurrectionaries.

Do not seek to sketch for yourself our circumstances from what you may have read of the Terror in Paris. That was the work of city mobs, inflamed by ruthless pedants in the service of an ideal social order. The Killala rebels were peasants, moved by deep and long-nurtured passions which imparted to their actions a primordial brutality. That our throats might be sliced by rural rather than city ruffians may seem an overly nice distinction, and yet as I looked upon them, I felt that I was staring into a deep and deforming past, as the spade may turn up from the bog the artifacts of a lost world, pickled in the briny past. Several accounts of the rebellion have recently been published by loyalist pamphleteers, with the work of such skilled artists as Mr. Rowlandson furnishing the imaginary portraits of its leaders—long, simian lips, low brutish foreheads, bits of clay pipe and the rest of it. I do not recognise in these the features of Ferdy O’Donnell or the despicable Malachi Duggan, or even that coarse and malignant ruffian who styled himself “Captain” O’Kane. The veritable Irish bear little resemblance to such caricatures.

Imagine if you will a pleasant evening at the very end of summer, the sky still bright, a faint wind drifting from the Atlantic through the small town, an evening suited to tea and conversation, or perhaps the reading of a novel in a quiet garden, soft sunlight scattered upon the grass. Before you lies the prospect of dinner with the faces of friends about the table, news and innocent gossip, the affairs of the parish and of the great world which lies beyond it. Such, to my way of thinking, is an image not merely of a decently ordered society but of civilisation itself. For a time, in my first weeks in Killala, I thought that Ireland, as much as England, offered the prospects of such a life. Most assuredly my dear Eliza and I did all in our power to bring it into being, and in this we were cheerfully assisted by such new friends as Mr. Falkiner. But almost from the first, as I have hinted in earlier portions of my narrative, there lurked my suspicion that something ancient in Ireland resists such attempts at moral cultivation.

Shall I call “Captain” O’Kane an emissary from that dark world? What shall I say of such a creature but that he emerged from the mists, driven by a mysterious energy? He was no native of Mayo, although he had for some years held land in Belmullet, close by the surly, leaden ocean. A persistent rumour held that he had once been a priest, deprived of his office for riotous and sinful behaviour. This rumour he would not deny, but rather allowed to accumulate about his name the awe which the Irish peasantry accord to even the most unworthy of their clergy. Clearly he possessed education of a sort, for he had a storehouse of mouth-filling phrases, which he rolled out easily to the delight of his followers and the fearful disgust of the loyalists, trumpery references to “the army of the Gael,” and to the pleasures of wading knee-deep in “Saxon gore.” He was in person a short, plump man, bandy-legged, with a beet-red face and a vulgar mouth.

He came one day swaggering into my residence, knowing full well that O’Donnell was away in Crossmolina, and assured me that all our lives were subject to the whim of the rebel army.

“ ’Tis a great flock of cuckoo birds you all are,” he told me, leaning against one of my cabinets of books. “All over Ireland you have settled yourselves into the nests of others. ’Tis time now for the people of the Gael to be rid of the lot of you. Do for you as you did for us over the long centuries.” He may have been drinking, for he swayed as he stood before me, with Jeremy Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes forming a kind of halo behind his bald head. “ ’Tis sweep you into the sea is what we should do with the pack of you.” And how may cuckoo birds be swept into the sea, I thought.

“That would be an ill-service to your cause,” I said in as even a tone as I could muster. “Your army will hold you responsible for the safety of the civilian population.”

He made a hawking noise, as though he were about to spit upon my Turkey carpet. “You would long ago have killed us all, man, wife, and child, but that you needed us to till your fields and tend your cattle.”

“I hold it a grievous sin to mistreat the helpless,” I said, “and so must every Christian.”

“Helpless,” he mocked me. “Well do you think of that now, when ’tis yourself that is helpless. The boot is on the other foot.”

I did not answer him, finding it prudent not to add fresh coals to the fires of his wrath. Often in these past weeks I had had occasion to reflect upon the stories which had come to us out of Wexford, of men and women piked upon Wexford bridge and flung into the river for no better reason than that they were Protestants.

“I declare to God,” he said, “when I look at your little dunce-cap steeples and when I hear your language spoken, the gorge half strangles me.”

“You are no stranger to that language,” I said. “You express your feelings most vividly.”

His pale blue eyes seemed to bulge out of his head, and his red face darkened. “ ’Tis not by my own wish that I learned your language. ’Tis in your language that money is counted out and fields measured. A man would be a fool not to learn English.” He turned suddenly around, and, grasping books in his two hands, flung them to the floor. They spilled over his boots, solid, stored with the world’s knowledge, the fate of empires, mysteries of the human soul.

“They were written for you,” I said. “As much for you as for me or anyone else.”

“They were not,” he said. “You would keep us as ignorant as the beasts in the fields.”

He wore one of the blue coats which the French had distributed, but his breeches were of coarse homespun. Two pistols were jammed into his wide belt, cannon and artillery of whatever war he fought. I let the books lie where they had fallen, although the sight of them distressed me, for the spine of at least one had been smashed.

He stood before me, at once furious and irresolute, as though contemplating a violence which prudence held in check. Nor could I find words that I was willing to risk. I caught a glimpse of myself in the gilt-framed mirror above the cherrywood table. We were both of us short, corpulent men.

“Have a care then,” he said at last, in an anticlimax which made him appear almost sheepish. “ ’Tis heretics you all are, and tyrants.”

But how different was his appearance when he harangued his followers. The harsh grey street was his pulpit. The cords of his neck strained like taut ropes, and his voice was a bull’s bellow; his Irish swept over them in a torrent at whose meaning I could but make conjecture. They drank in his words like thirsty men and were intoxicated.

I described this menacing visit to O’Donnell upon his return from Crossmolina, and showing no surprise he nodded and sank down into a chair.

“That fellow is half mad,” he said, “and the whiskey always rolling around in his head.”

“You should tell that to the wretches who listen to him.”

“That lousy crowd of tavern sweepings? They need not concern us for a bit longer. ’Tis my own men who are beginning to get nervous. We are sealed off here, and no word from beyond.”

“I have told you before, Captain O’Donnell,” I said. “You should ride down into Ballina and make terms with the commander there.”

“Would he so? That would be most obliging of him. The redcoats in Ballina are commanded by Ellison, a right Orange bastard. A fine conversation the two of us would have.” He shook his head. “I pledged my word that I would hold Killala for the United Men, and hold it I will.”

“What use is that now?” I asked. “The French are off somewhere to the south, and the soldiers are in possession of Mayo from Westport to Ballinrobe. All but this Godforsaken waste.”

He shook his head again but did not reply.

“It is not only the safety of the loyalists that you must consider, but your own people as well.”

“I would serve them ill if I turned Ellison upon them. He is but a tinpot version of Dennis Browne, beyond in Westport.”

“Mr. Hussey, your own clergyman, is in agreement with me.”

“Mr. Hussey is the son of a big grazier in Westmeath and he is back there every year to eat red meat and drink wine from Spain. ’Tis easy for him to preach submission to drifting men and to men with farms hanging from the sides of Mayo hills. If the lot of us were hanged, Mr. Hussey would call it the working of God’s will and preach a sermon against lawlessness. When poor Gerry was carted off to Ballina gaol there wasn’t a peep from Mr. Hussey.”