The Year of the French (9 page)

“One of mine?” Moore asked, puzzled.

“A Papist. Her father was Mick Mahony the grazier. Sure you must have known him.”

“No,” Moore said. “At least, I cannot remember him.”

“Then you didn’t know him,” Cooper said flatly. “If you had known that fellow you would have remembered him.” He sipped at the sherry. “A great pity we don’t know each other better.”

“Perhaps we are about to,” Moore said.

“Yes,” Cooper said. “Perhaps so. It is on official business that I am here, in a way. Yeomanry business.”

“Are you certain then that your business is with me? I have understood that the Tyrawley Yeomanry is entirely Protestant.”

“Well, there is little doubt of that,” Cooper said. In embarrassment his thumb polished a brass button. “Largely Protestant in its composition.”

“But not entirely so?”

“Well now, that is more a matter of local custom than anything. ’Tis best when the two creeds keep to themselves.”

“Do not misunderstand me, Captain Cooper. I have no ambitions in that direction, no aptitude for military life.”

“What I am really here about is the serious disturbance that we have had in Kilcummin. You will have heard of it, surely?”

“No,” Moore said. “What disturbance is that?”

“There has been an outbreak of Whiteboyism. The Whiteboys of Killala, they call themselves. They have maimed a number of cattle. My own, in fact. And they threaten the like to any landlord who turns to grazing.”

“That could be serious, of course,” Moore agreed. “How did all this come about?”

He refilled their glasses.

“I started things off myself, I suppose. I had a tenant named Squint O’Malley. And a damned bad tenant he was, I can tell you. He wasn’t one of ours at all. He drifted here from Achill a few years ago. He was far behind with the rent. Two weeks ago, I had my steward drive him off.”

“You had no choice?”

“I had none. Do you think I like driving a man and his family onto the road? The way it is, I am fair crippled under the mortgages and the debts. In March I went down to see the worst of them in Dublin and he gave it to me straight. I am to offer proof that Mount Pleasant can be made to pay, and it is cattle that will make it pay. He is dead right about that. I have no choice.”

“It may not be Whiteboys,” Moore said. “It may only be O’Malley out for revenge.”

“Not at all,” Cooper said. “O’Malley is out of it. I hear he is out in Erris, on a bit of land his wife’s brother has. No, it is Whiteboys, and they are out to stop all of us.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out the letter, unfolded it, and handed it to Moore. Moore made room on his desk, and smoothed the letter flat with a long, pale hand. Then he took his reading glasses from their case. “ ‘To the Landlords and the Middlemen of this Barony. A warning take by Cooper.’ ” He read through the letter, glanced once towards Cooper, and then read it again more attentively. He smiled several times, but otherwise maintained his quiet seriousness of manner.

“This is a most curious document,” he said. “I have never seen anything quite like it.”

“Of course you have not, not in London nor any other civilised place. But they have been common enough here in the past.”

“You misunderstand me,” Moore said. “This is written with considerable eloquence. Listen. ‘Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.’ ”

“That is me,” Cooper said. “Am I to admire insults as eloquence?”

“‘Let all churls take warning from Cooper. The people of Tyrawley have stained with their sweat the acres they till. When the sun rises up they are before it at their labours, and the white moon keeps its watch upon their poverty.’ That was not written by a ploughboy.”

“Of course it was not,” Cooper said in exasperation. “Any of twenty hedge schoolmasters in the barony could have written it. Proper bastards those schoolmasters are.”

“Yes,” Moore said, pleased. “That could be it. It has the stiffness of a translation.”

“There used to be laws against schoolmasters, and good laws they were. What business have Papist peasants learning to read and write?”

Anger, like chips of ice, flecked Moore’s mild blue eyes, then vanished.

“This could indeed be a serious matter,” he said. “Am I to take it that you have ridden all the way to Ballintubber for my advice?”

“Not exactly. Or rather, yes, we would be most happy for your advice, but it is your assistance we need.”

“And by ‘we’ I take it that you mean Gibson and Saunders and the others in your neighbourhood?”

“That is it. The small landlords of Kilcummin and Killala. We have had Whiteboy trouble before, years ago, and we know how to deal with it. It is the goodwill of Dennis Browne that we need now.”

Moore passed the tips of his fingers across his forehead. “I don’t understand this at all, Captain Cooper. If it is Dennis Browne you need, you should be talking to him and not to me. But why do you need Browne? If there are popular disturbances in Tyrawley you should report this to General Hutchinson in Galway City.”

“This is not a task for Hutchinson’s soldiers. We can deal with these lads, if we are given a free hand.”

“Surely that is a matter for the magistrates. You are a magistrate yourself, are you not? And Gibson?”

“We are, to be sure.” Cooper was beginning to doubt the wisdom of Kate’s advice. Moore was apparently a very slow-witted man, his brain bogged down in his books. “And we have no wish to act beyond what the law would allow.”

“A most commendable attitude on the part of the magistrates, if I may be allowed, as a Papist, to comment on such matters.”

Or that was it, perhaps. Scratch a Papist deep enough and you came upon some gnawing ambition or other. A seat in Parliament or on the bench of magistrates. Anything and everything that was forbidden to them by law.

“It isn’t a sectarian matter at all,” he assured Moore in what he believed to be a conciliatory manner. “This is Whiteboy trouble, and we both know what that means. Once we have a few of these rogues tied to the cart’s tail, and a few ribbons cut out of their backsides, we will be close to the bottom of things. And the matter will be over before it has properly begun. That’s the way.”

Moore stared at him incredulously. “And that is what you mean by a free hand. Do I understand you correctly? You have come for help so that you can turn your yeomen loose upon the peasants of the barony?”

“Not your help exactly, Mr. Moore. But you stand in very well with Dennis Browne. Everyone knows that the Brownes and the Moores have been friends time out of mind.”

“You foolish man,” Moore said.

“Perhaps you are the foolish one, Moore,” Cooper said. He was stung less by the sudden, unexpected words than by the casual manner of their utterance. “You don’t know Mayo yet.”

“I know enough to be appalled,” Moore said. “And so would Dennis Browne be, unless I greatly misjudge him. So would be any man of prudence and discretion. Have you discussed your ideas with George Falkiner? He seems a sensible fellow.”

“You don’t know Mayo,” Cooper repeated stubbornly. And he had spent an entire afternoon riding here, to be insulted by a Papist ignorant of the county. Prudence and discretion in a county governed by the hounds and pistols of the gentry, the loaded whips of the middlemen, the clubs of the peasantry.

“You are a magistrate, Captain Cooper, and so are your friends, and the magistrates of this country have more power than I would once have thought possible. Use it, and keep your Tyrawley Yeomanry out of the matter. The last thing needed at this moment is the dragooning of the county by red-coated Protestants.”

“Protestants, is it?” Cooper asked, seizing happily upon the word. “Now we have it out in the open at last.”

Moore sighed. “I will not lecture you upon morality or law. It would be a waste of breath. You said that you would welcome my advice and you shall have it. Parts of this island have been in rebellion, and the danger is not yet past. The French may make another effort. We have been most fortunate in Mayo, and we should protect our good fortune. You must deal with these Whiteboys, of course, but it would be most unwise to inflame the countryside. I am quite certain that this is the advice which Dennis Browne will give you.”

“What advice?” Cooper said, the irritation squeezing him like the choker of his uniform. “To sit quietly until I go into ruin, and am swept away off my own land?”

“I am certain that your affairs are not quite so desperate,” Moore said. “You have time enough to act quietly and within the law. Must this county be turned upside down in troubled times because one landlord is heavily mortgaged?”

“By God,” Cooper said, stung again by Moore’s insufferably cool manner, “and to think that I came here out of the goodness of my heart, to draw you in a bit into the affairs of the county.”

“That was kind of you,” Moore said. “I take such part in county affairs as your laws permit to me.”

“Those laws,” Cooper said, his anger at last bursting its dam, “are here for the very proper purpose of keeping Papists in their place.”

“Just so,” Moore agreed. “I am in my proper place. Moore Hall. And I wish the countryside around me to be as tranquil as possible.”

Cooper puffed out his cheeks, and then expelled the air in a gesture of baffled defeat. What did this man know, with his blue ceilings decorated with naked white goddesses, of the problems a poor man faced, squeezed between the cabins and the mortgage brokers, and no place for him to turn?

“Come now,” Moore said. “It is foolish of us to lose our tempers. Let us discuss this a bit more, while you sample another glass of sherry.” He slipped his watch from his pocket, snapped it open, and studied the time.

“ ’Tis little enough the two of us have ever had to discuss,” Cooper said with dignity. “And we have less now than ever before.” He rose up, and smoothed his scarlet coat. The action soothed him; authority leaked from the wool into his fingertips. “I had best be going now. It is a long ride.”

Moore lifted his glass, and Spain burst upon his tongue. About one thing Cooper was right: Spain was far distant from here. He looked through the window towards the lake, and tried to picture the blazing sun upon winding streets of white walls and ochre walls. “Do nothing rash, Captain,” he said, without turning his head. “Be careful.”

“I shall take care,” Cooper said. “You may depend on that. We have been taking care of this county for a good many years now, and we know what must be done.”

Moore leaned towards him suddenly, his lips thin and the blue eyes glittering. “Do you? Has this land no other resource of governing but the whip and the cudgel, no other form of justice than a peasant’s bloody back and a greasy sovereign in the hand of an informer?”

Amazed, Cooper stared at Moore.

“The whipping post and the lash and the gallows, those are your laws,” Moore said, spitting out the words, “whatever may be the statutes which they enact up in Dublin. It is small wonder that your brutes of peasants murder your agents and tumble their bodies into the bog. And you have the insolence to seek my assistance in your filthy plans.”

“Are you mad?” Cooper asked. He meant the question. The abrupt change from Moore’s manner of icy indifference was bewildering. He had been a fool to take Kate’s advice, which had provided Moore with an opportunity first to taunt him with cool ironies and then to rant at him like a Presbyterian minister.

“Perhaps I am,” Moore said, regaining control of himself with an effort. “To have sat here listening to your foolishness.”

“And I was foolish to have come here,” Cooper said.

“You mustn’t forget this,” Moore said, handing him the Whiteboy letter. Clownish churl. Whoever had written that letter had a gift for phrase. A most curious document indeed. He walked Cooper to the door, as though they had exchanged only pleasantries, and bade him a polite farewell. Cooper was speechless with indignation.

Mounted on his chestnut gelding, Cooper rode glumly down the avenue. Leafy rowan trees flung dappled shadows in his path. They were all alike, Fogarty, Moore, twisting, clever men who could always get the best in words over a blunt, plain-spoken Protestant. He rehearsed speeches that he might have made, withering Moore into silence, but gave up the effort. What kind of Papist was he at all, with his elaborate manners and his English speech? What kind of a gentleman could he be, the son of a huckster who smuggled wine ashore at Kilcummin strand in the old days? It would do him good to have such words flung in his face, a man who could never sit on the bench of magistrates or hold the King’s commission. Ach, much would it bother him, with his fine house and his vast acres and his quarter-million pounds. Old Joshua Cooper would have put him in his place. Cooper’s spirits lifted slightly at the thought of old Joshua, and he remembered the face in the portrait, a hard, capable soldier who had beaten all the Moores to their knees, all the Papists.

Moore, standing on his balcony, watched the small, dumpy figure in its uniform of resplendent red. Exactly the kind of small man who could create large trouble, a very specimen of the type. A sceptic in spiritual matters, Moore had prided himself in London upon his indifference to sectarian divisions. It was different here. Beneath his contempt for Cooper’s foolish swaggering had glowed a hot coal of anger. How dare this improvident farmer set himself above me, he had found himself thinking at one point. And now, as he watched Cooper’s receding back, the coal was still warm. Ill-bred vulgarian, spawn of some Cromwellian trooper, history had given him licence to crow over this dunghill of a country. Clownish churl: admirable phrase. He turned his back on Cooper and left the balcony.

But not even at dinner that night was he allowed to forget Cooper’s visit. John came late to table, and still in his riding clothes, the neckband loose, and with his loose yellow hair falling about his forehead.

“In Father’s day,” he said as he picked up his napkin, “a man like Cooper would never have been a guest in this house.”

Moore glanced up from his soup. “You are mistaken there. Father was a politic man, far more so than either of us. And when he was a young man, before Spain, he had to be very wary of such fellows. They ruled the roost. Things are a bit better now.”