The Year of the French (91 page)

By the time they had reached Ballyhaunis he was noisy and quarrelsome. The empty bottle rolled at his feet. He insisted upon stopping at the inn, knocking up the innkeeper, and buying a second bottle. One drink from it finished him. He sat sprawled beside the long table, wild eyes and flushed cheeks, shirt and waistcoat stained. My Irishman. White hand crept towards his belly. He held the glass in both hands and lowered his head towards it, drank off half its contents, then choked and spewed it out. “All done for the best,” he said, his head lolling on his chest. “Got him out of the country. Safe now.” Walsh had never seen Moore drunk and he was terrified. It was as if a different soul had taken possession of the body, shouting wild nonsense and contorting the face. “I also loved him, Father,” he said, looking directly into Walsh’s eyes. “Loved you too. Told you once. Gone now.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the innkeeper’s wife said. “What can we do with him?”

“Can he not hold his drink?” the innkeeper asked.

“Not this much,” Walsh said. “No one could.”

“Who is he?”

“A Mayo gentleman,” Walsh said. “Help me get him to bed.”

“By God, he is, and a rare one at that. Will you take a look at him there?”

“He can hear us,” Walsh said.

But by early afternoon, when they reached Castlebar, he was himself again, fresh-shaven, fresh clothes, fresh linen. The clear Mayo sky found reflexion in the long, poised face with its alert pale eyes. No bottle rolling at his feet, the case of pistols closed. Only the wineglass, crushed to powder by his boots, remained from the long night.

At Castlebar High Street the coach was blocked by a crowd.

“Get away out of that now,” Walsh shouted at them and raised his whip.

Moore leaned out the window. “No.” He opened the door and stepped down into the street.

British soldiers, militia, farmers, townspeople. He turned to talk to a young officer, but felt a hand on his shoulder. Yeoman’s uniform, short pudgy body, round head and small, full face. Cooper. The man who had come to him about the Whiteboys. Speak a word to Dennis Browne for us. Disturbances in Killala. Before all this started.

“By God, you came in on a good day, Moore. But Friday next will be a better one. You should be here then. The company is on duty in Killala, but I am here today and I will be here again on Friday. I wouldn’t miss a day of this. By Christ I wouldn’t.”

“A day of what?” Moore asked. Absently, coldly, he looked at the small hand on his sleeve. Cooper withdrew the hand, and then rubbed it along the length of his buff breeches.

“I spent a starving month as a prisoner waiting for this, and by God it is what kept me alive. By God, your Dennis Browne is a busy man when he sets his back to it. But the afternoons are no good, and by evening everyone is drunk. Get here in the morning. A good brisk morning as this one was. It has put years on me.”

“What has?” Moore asked.

“Why, the court-martials, of course. The hangings. What else have we been talking about, man?”

“I am not your man.” Master of Moore Hall to Killala farmer. What difference does it make?

“We have been topping them in batches. Three or four a week.”

Mean garrison town—courthouse, prison, shops, taverns. The capital of Mayo. Moore looked down the street to where it straggled away in cabins, and upwards, where it rose to the courtyard, beyond the crowd.

“I have never been able to draw much pleasure from hangings,” he said.

“Well now,” Cooper conceded. “I am not a bloody-minded man myself. But this is a different matter. They are beaten now and we will put the fear of God into them. Take a look around the county. See what they have done.”

“You call freely upon God,” Moore said, and then said, in the same flat, casual tones. “You would have hanged my brother, you know. John, my younger brother.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Cooper said, startled and abashed. “I had forgotten John, I had forgotten your brother. I ask your pardon. You did well to get him away out of this. Where is the poor fellow now? In Clonmel is it not, or Waterford?”

“Waterford,” Moore said. “His difficulties are being sorted out. I expect that shortly he will be permitted to leave for Spain. We have commercial interests there, as you know.”

Cooper knew. Moores, Brownes, Martins, Glenthornes. Nothing could touch them. Gentry. Everything arranged over a glass of sherry— marriages, bonds, the hunt, even a case of high treason. But John was a decent fellow, high-spirited. Cooper did not begrudge him Spain. Not like this glass of cold water.

“That is welcome news,” he said.

“These fellows whom you are topping in batches,” Moore said. “They should have had commercial interests in Spain. They were short-sighted.”

Cooper looked sharply at the impassive face, pale eyes. Cold, sardonic bastard. Eyes like arctic ice.

“I have my own cause for joy,” he said.

“I am certain of that,” Moore said. “A length of hemp and a trapdoor.”

Puzzled, Cooper drew his hand across his round chin. A vulgar man.

“You must have mistaken my meaning. The fact is, Moore, that all the while I was wearing my heart out in that prison, near mad with rage, my wife Kate was carrying our child. She had the news waiting for me when I got back to Mount Pleasant.”

“My congratulations to you, sir. And to Mrs. Cooper. We have never met, I believe.”

“You would have known her father, Mick Mahony the grazier. He held lands near Ballycastle and near Crossmolina.”

“I have heard the name,” Moore said. “You have a worthier cause for happiness than a hanging, and I do indeed wish you joy.”

“A great beauty she was in the county. And still is. A black-haired woman.”

“Black-haired women are often beautiful,” Moore said.

“But a most dutiful wife,” Cooper said hastily. Moore lived quietly in Mayo, but his reputation had followed him from London. “A most dutiful woman. She is one of yours.”

“One of mine?”

“A Papist. I have never tried to change her. She says her confessions and goes to Mass, the same as you do.”

“More frequently, I trust. You mentioned Friday. Why is Friday a special day?”

“Friday?” Cooper blinked. “Oh, to be sure. Friday. They will be hanging Owen MacCarthy on Friday.”

“Who is he?”

“Well may you ask.” Cooper spat, and ground the gob into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “He was the schoolmaster at Killala, and he was one of the ringleaders of the Whiteboys. He wrote that bloody proclamation that started the whole business. The one I brought to you at Moore Hall.” Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.

“I remember it,” Moore said. “A most peculiar paper. It had a touch of the poet, I thought.”

“He is a poet,” Cooper said, “and a damned good one, Kate tells me. They often are, those schoolmasters. And they are often the greatest ruffians left unhanged.”

“And you will remedy that omission on Friday.”

“He has admitted it all,” Cooper said. “The proclamation and the rest of it. A few brisk lads of the Killala Yeomanry visited him in Castlebar gaol one evening. He took little persuasion, though. He is a beaten cur. Ballinamuck took the fight out of him, and the poetry as well.”

A dusty street, the houses grey and drab in the even sun of afternoon. In a side street, invisible, a dog yelped in pain.

“God damn you,” Moore said mildly. “God damn us all. God damn this country.”

Cooper, legs spread wide apart, fists planted on hips, watched the coach roll away, towards Ballintubber. Moore had placed a touch of winter upon his pleasure, English accent strained through his long, arrogant nose, his Papist creed flaunted like a decoration. Mayo was settling back into place, thanks to the tough fibre of its loyal Protestants, a touch of the whip, a touch of the rope. But nothing could touch Moore, not even a brother’s disgrace. The great families were all alike—Browne or Moore, Protestant or Papist. They lived within a conspiracy of kinships and secret alliances, spoke a secret language which was a rebuff to ordinary men like himself who were the backbone and sinew of Ireland. I declare to Jesus, Cooper thought, I had more that I could share with Mick Mahony than I have with these bastards.

But by nightfall he was himself again, sitting in the Wolf’s Head with two officers of the Kerry Militia, and describing to them the arrival of the French and his defence of Killala.

“It could as easily have happened to us,” Captain Stack said. “In ’ninety-six when Hoche’s fleet was beaten into Bantry Bay at Christmas, with Wolfe Tone aboard the flagship. It was only that miracle of a storm that prevented them from landing in Kerry. They would have burned Tralee, the bastards.”

“What the people there call that storm,” Lieutenant Hassett said, “is the Protestant wind.”

“We have been lucky with our winds,” Cooper said, “and we have been since the days of the Armada.”

“It is more than luck,” Stack said. “I believe that. I believe that it is Providence. We are a people placed under God’s protection. How else could we have survived, a small garrison surrounded by that great mass of ignorance and idolatry?”

But Cooper was less certain. Winds came and went. There were terrible winds off the Mayo coast and Kerry was even worse. But it was comforting to think of the Protestants of Ireland as a people protected by Providence, a spare, taciturn people, the heirs of Cromwell, resolute in adversity, forthright in their dealings with themselves and others, God-fearing, shunning idolatry and superstition. The people of an unbroken tradition of courage and respectability. On the strength of that feeling, he ordered another round of porter.

“Mind you,” Stack said, half smiling, half taunting, “I can only speak for the Protestants of Kerry. The Mayo Protestants may be another lot entirely. Sure, the Mayo Protestants may be half Papist for all I know. ‘Turned rotten’ is the word we have in Kerry for a Protestant when that happens to him. First he will find himself a Papist wife, and after that the rot sets in. When the children begin to arrive.”

Over his tankard, Cooper peered at him. Was this an unlucky hit, or had Stack been talking to people?

“There is nothing wrong with their women,” Cooper said. “Some of them. Bed them down with good Protestant farmers and you have the best stock in Europe. In such matters, it is the man that rules. And Protestant men are bred up from birth to rule. It is our special skill.”

“Best to stay with your own,” Hassett said.

“Best indeed,” Stack said.

“It is said in other parts of the kingdom that Kerry is a nursery for treason,” Cooper said. “The lad who is going to swing on Friday is a Kerry man.”

“Driven out from there,” Hassett said. “With his tail between his legs. Sure, I know all about that lad. He was born in Tralee and his father worked as a labourer for my own grandfather. It was the people of Mayo who took up that lad and let him have his own school. Kerry knows how to deal with wild lads.”

“ ‘Wild’ is the word,” Stack said. “Sure how many years is it since he left Kerry, and they haven’t done talking about him? Didn’t the priests themselves denounce him from their altars?”

“One of them did,” Hassett said. His mouth softened to a reminiscent smile. “Away to the east, at Castleisland. There were two lassies big with child at the same time, and each of them claiming MacCarthy as the lucky man, so to speak. The Papists still say that he couldn’t be left alone with any woman be she maid, wife, or mother.”

But Stack’s mouth remained firm. “The Papists can have little enough to boast of, if they keep a thing like that in memory.”

“Ach, now fair is fair,” Hassett said. “He could write a lovely song. It is the songs that will keep him in memory, and not the other thing.”

“Much good that will do him on Friday,” Cooper said.

“I know the sort,” Stack said. “Kerry spawns them. You have the right of it there. Get drunk and take a man’s daughter to bed with you, and the next day off to confession and write a hymn to the Blessed Virgin.”

“Or a Whiteboy proclamation,” Cooper said. Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.

“Their religion suits them,” Stack said. “Spend your shilling on drink and never a thought about tomorrow. Confession works the same way.”

“He was the same here,” Cooper said. “He lived in a cabin with a wild young widow. Be a very pretty little piece if you gave her a good wash. And God knows what other women.”

“When he was pitched out of Kerry,” Hassett said, “he landed in Macroom, and there is a story about him there that I have from a Macroom grazier of my acquaintance. It seems that MacCarthy and a priest were interested in the same lassie, a servant girl at one of the big houses.”

“Their priests are the worst,” Stack said. “Whitened sepulchres.”

“Get on with your story,” Cooper said, leaning forward.

This was more like it, a pleasant tavern with lads like these two, scarlet-clothed elbows leaning on table, jests and stories given salt and savour by shared loyalties. Up the dogleg road to the gaolhouse, where the man sat waiting to be hanged, was distant by a thousand miles, a remote arctic far removed from the warmth of the tavern.

When Moore’s carriage drove back between the gates of Moore Hall, one half of his life ended. The other half, a slow movement towards an acceptance of his character and fate, did not reveal itself to him for several years.

The first months of 1799 were given over to a fulfillment of the promise which he had made to Dennis Browne in exchange for John’s removal from Castlebar gaol. In a series of pamphlets, five in all, he argued the case for the abolition of the Irish Parliament and the union of the two kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the great issue of the moment, overshadowing even Buonaparte’s failure to capture Acre—“that miserable hole which came between me and my destiny.” The first two pamphlets, which set forth the general considerations, were couched in terms too lofty to be of consequence, but the other three set forth with great persuasiveness the grounds upon which the Catholic nobility and middle classes should support union as best calculated to secure the restoration of their civil and political rights. These pamphlets were an immediate success, and they led to an extensive correspondence with Archbishop Troy and with Lord Kenmare. He travelled several times to Dublin to present his views to the Catholic Association, and it has been accepted by historians that his was one of the chief voices by which the Catholic community was led to endorse the policy of Pitt and Cornwallis. He received a cordial letter from Pitt, in which the Prime Minister hinted that Catholic Emancipation would indeed receive the early consideration of a united parliament.