by John Pipkin
“Corbet Hill,” the boy says. “It’s thousands gathered there.”
Finn thinks they are mistaken, that it must be cattle or sheep meandering the slopes, but as they draw closer the shadows resolve into human forms. Father O’Day claps his hands and says it can be none other than Bagenal Harvey and his army, fresh from victory at Wexford Town. The crowd on Corbet Hill is still collecting itself into a single mass, and it is like no army Finn could have imagined. Men old and young stream toward the slopes on the road from Wexford, and among them are women and children too, pulling meager households behind. The women carry pots and blankets and woven baskets and the children drag bundles tied with frayed rope and the men clutch whatever implements they think sufficient for making war: swords and sabers and pistols and muskets and here and there a blunderbuss no doubt captured in an earlier battle, and pikes as long as ten feet, enough to bring down a man from his horse.
Along with the others, Finn wades across the Barrow at a shallow point, and the soldiers in red watch from the walls and do nothing. He shoulders his way up the crowded hill, past entire families gathered at campfires and bubbling crocks of thick yellow mash, children playing games with small stones and men playing cards with tattered squares of paper, and he wonders if Owen and Moira would have brought their sons to join the fight. There is laughter and boasting, the crying of children and singing too, and they all carry on as though there is nothing unusual in it, as if this were simply what the world has become, a great mustering of families beneath the sun. Men and women too old to fight sit in the dirt with young mothers nursing infants, and younger men sharpen their pikes and they wear no uniforms on their backs to distinguish them from the rest. Most are dressed in coarse cloth, brown and black and rubbed deep with earth, and some few have tied green rags at their necks or threaded green ribbons through crumpled hats like upended flowerpots. And it’s a great wave of noise that comes rolling down the hill: the scrape of spoons in tin pans and knife-edges on stones, the sound of pipes and drums and the constant rhythmic pounding of the bodhran, and more singing and more laughter and the slap of bare feet dancing on hard-packed soil and a thousand conversations ongoing at once.
Sure it’s ten times their number we are now.
And twice that again.
Finn turns down offers of amber-hued whiskey and clear poitcheen. He feels the spark among them in the brush of a shoulder, the excitement leaping hand to hand and spreading with the ease of the blight, and it fills him with thoughts he has not had before. He wonders how it would be, to stand on this hill with Andrew and Patrick and Liam and Dermott, to fight alongside them and claim the soil as their own, not with bargains and deceptions and insatiable rents, but with the bare strength in their arms. The voices on the hill taunt him with the possibility that they might remake the world into one in which there would be no need for guilt or regret, no need for leaving.
But Caroline is waiting for him.
In this simmering mass of people drinking and singing and dancing, he could easily dissolve and disappear. He could make his way down the far side of the hill and turn back to Inistioge alone and lead Caroline somewhere safe, but the thought has hardly formed when Father O’Day is again at his side, his cough thicker than the day before.
“Our numbers are great, but we will need every man.” The priest points to a line of pikemen at the top of the hill, stepping and lunging in unison, drilling under the hot sun. “And afterward, in the new Ireland, these men will not deal lightly with traitors.”
Below, more men continue to arrive, and their numbers already seem insurmountable.
“Are there men enough?” Finn asks.
“This is but one of three armies,” the priest tells him. “There is a larger gathering at Dublin, and it is said that the rising at Arklow causes the very earth to groan. Wexford Town has fallen, and New Ross will soon be ours. The north and west are quiet, but they will join the fight soon enough.”
“And if they do not?” Finn looks back toward the walls of New Ross, sparsely dotted with soldiers in red, watching and waiting behind silent cannons.
The priest clears his throat and spits.
“They will.”
There is no sleeping for the noise and the buzzing in the air. The drumbeat and dancing continue past sundown, one man passing the bodhran to the next when he tires of striking the taut hide. Men and women and children huddle on the ground under the open sky and some of the men drink deep into the night and speak loudly of what they will do after the land is returned to them. They boast of how they will change places with the men who brought their fathers and grandfathers to ruin, and how their children will never again know hunger or despair. Some fall to arguing. Finn lies awake with his pike in his hands and nearby two men take to swinging at each other until heads more sober come between them.
Every man on this hill a good Catholic, but it’s a Protestant leading us!
Harvey and the rest are a good sort.
Aye, but when this is done there can be only one God in Ireland.
Morning’s steel light reveals clouds low and heavy, and the women boil oats over the fires and shake the men who need it and the talk begins again, works its way through the gathering. From man to man the news spreads: there will be no fight after all. There is no need for it. The soldiers on the walls of New Ross are too few. Bagenal Harvey will send a message to them. He will tell them that they face greater numbers, that they should surrender their arms and hand over the town. And all will agree that there is no cause for the spilling of blood when the outcome is already certain.
We’ll not see the Barrow run red today.
Oh, he’s a reasonable man, is Bagenal Harvey.
All heads turn to watch Harvey’s messenger ride slowly down the hill and they recognize him, for who cannot, glorious in the full uniform of the United Irishmen. Citizen Furlong they call out to him with full-throated praise. And there are whispers, too. What a wealthy man this Citizen Furlong is, to afford the green jacket with yellow trimmings and the fine tricorn and green cockade and the gleaming sword slapping the flank of his chestnut stallion. The men raise their pikes and the women reach for the hem of his coat, and Finn sees in the eyes of the cheering crowd some small glint of envy for the horse beneath the messenger, haunches splattered with mud but fat with oats and better shod than half of the men and most of the boys. And Finn wonders if the message the man carries should contain a warning as well, that not even Bagenal Harvey himself will be able to control what will come if the soldiers of New Ross do not surrender. Citizen Furlong lifts high his musket, a white kerchief tied to its barrel. His horse breaks into a gallop toward Three Bullet Gate and a riotous sound follows him, the beating of drums and bleating of pipes, as all stand ready to see the opening of the gates and the soldiers filing out in sensible surrender.
White kerchief flapping high, Harvey’s man rides confident, but when he reaches the gate his fine horse rears up and hoofs the air and Citizen Furlough is thrown from the saddle; waving his arms, he seems to take flight. It is a peculiar thing, how the noble figure of new Ireland hovers near the gate, suspended for a second, and it is only after the body of Citizen Furlong falls to pieces that they hear the roar of the guns, the rifles and muskets and a large cannon rumored to have come from the deck of a warship. Every gun upon the walls of New Ross fires at once upon the solitary man with the white flag. Finn clenches his pike as he watches Bagenal Harvey’s messenger disappear beneath balls and grapeshot sufficient to cut down fifty men.
The drums and pipes stop. The songs trail to silence. Those with a mind to listen have been instructed how to form ranks, how to wait for commands, how to breach the walls and which ramparts to avoid, but no orders come now for what they should do. A boiling growl wells up from the soil and the men lift their pikes and guns and look to one another. No one tells them how it should go but they shout and push each other forward and run at the gate, an army of ten thousand flowing downhill, screaming oaths of vengeance
and reprisal. And Finn runs with them, for he feels the rumbling underfoot and the pounding of hearts pressed close and in his hand the pike shudders and pulls him forward as if there could be no other way.
There is no order to it, only anger and intent. The first explosion sends Finn to his knees; the pike sings in his hands, but he cannot lift himself against the flow of bodies surging around him, so many men shouting and panting as if they would suck the air from the hill and they stumble over his arms and trip over his legs. Another explosion, and another, each ripping clods of earth, spewing shards of stone and metal, and Finn scrambles on hands and knees and dives between legs running and leaping. The guns on the ancient walls of New Ross chatter fire and smoke; they tear into the men running toward Three Bullet Gate and the bodies continue tumbling down the hill, obedient to earth’s indifferent pull. The first lot falls together, a great wave crashing and foaming in red spray, but for each man the falling is a singular thing, a story handed father to son—of grievous wrongs, of thefts and disenchantments and long-suffered wants—and brought to an abrupt end in a slick tangle of limb and gristle.
Soon there are others crawling with Finn amid the charge, clutching red-blooming sleeves, hugging torn stomachs, clapping their heads, screams of panic and shock. On hands and knees Finn comes across a man laid out on his back and he can find no wound, no sign of blood, but the man’s body is already losing its heat. Then he sees the purple wreath at the man’s temples, a brede across the forehead shaped in the links of the chain that struck him.
On the hill, the old men and the women are running toward the top and pulling children behind them, and everywhere are terrified dogs howling and barking and racing slantwise in circles. The ground next to Finn erupts in a spray of grass and dirt and something slices his cheek and he is on his feet again, running downhill. And now it seizes him, a cold hand of bone and ice grasping at the coils of his vitals—those parts that he once heard an Edinburgh doctor describe as a vile labyrinth, the refuge of cowardly sickness and slow-crippling distemper—and this, Finn thinks, is fear. He tries to resist what it would have him do, fights the desperate reflex to cower and fold into himself. The guns thunder on the walls and cover the hill with smoke. Below he sees a line of riflemen in red coats crouching shoulder to shoulder in a trench outside the wall, peeking above the raw-shoveled dirt, and they take steady aim at him but do not fire. They wait to see who will pass unscathed through the grapeshot and chains raining from the walls. Finn sees a man pick up a black canister that has landed at his feet and he cocks his arm as if to throw it back but it explodes in a bright flash and he stands a moment longer with the death-white splinter of his elbow protruding where his arm hung seconds before. Finn has never seen such a thing, a clockwork bomb designed to wait for its mark. More canisters fall near him and roll to a stop, ticking as their springs unwind, waiting to explode.
He runs faster down the slope, away from the dropping canisters, and he dodges other men running in every direction. The ground is slick with bodies fallen and opened to the sky. He feels the ground shudder as if the hill itself is coming unhinged and will overrun the town in a torrent of clay and turf and stones, but what he sees now in the smoke and crush of men is a charging herd of cattle, a hundred or more, black and glistening with panic, and from behind, men whip the beasts into a frenzy with sticks and screams, driving them toward the walls of New Ross. The riflemen in the trench leap from their positions and flee toward the gates and Finn throws himself behind the thundering herd, so close that he feels the mad bellowing in his chest. He runs with them toward the gate, but the charging cattle turn left and right and run in all directions and Finn continues on and stumbles into the trench. Cattle struck by grapeshot bellow and twist in the dirt and men lie upon the slope splayed and curled, crying out to mothers, to wives, to those running past with fresh oaths on their lips, and still more come down the hill and leap over the bodies of men and cattle and all of it is a grand calamity. Those with a musket or blunderbuss in hand find shelter behind unmoving bodies, their elbows flap with the effort of loading and their aim is careful and slow. The guns on the wall rent the air and tear into the hill, shattering stones and splintering trees, but the firing slows as the soldiers tire, and the number of men coming down the hill is great and they do not stop. Some come close enough to raise their pikes and jab at the guards standing before the gates, and it is a fearsome thing to see, the lunge, the thrust and twist, tumbling ropes of pink and blue, and the gurgled screams.
From high on the hill another line of men come running toward the gate and some leap into the trench and soon the powerful crack of their guns ring in his ears as they cover the assault of another wave of pikemen, elbow to elbow, an orderly column this, marching steady through the chaos. The gunfire on the wall slows and stops as the soldiers topple from the stab and thrust of the pikes. A dense smoke, blacker that what the guns alone can issue, curls over the wall and cheers rise amid the screams and cries.
New Ross is in flames!
Through Priory Gate and Market Gate they’ve come!
More men come down the hill now as if rising from the earth itself, leaping over the dead piled waist high at the gates. They dive blindly into the black smoke and it looks as though night has come early to New Ross, even while the day outside the walls continues unbroken. The men next to Finn load their weapons, tamp the powder and balls, and pull themselves from the trench. They urge Finn to follow, and they run through Three Bullet Gate toward whatever waits in the black smoke.
And Finn crouches in the trench and watches the men disappear into the darkness. He clutches his pike with the copper wire curled around its shaft and feels the spark in the wire and the cold grip in his belly and he does not think he can follow. He tells himself that he will not. And then he does.
Chapter 33
THE APPEARANCE OF FOREIGN BODIES
James Samuels tucks his nose and mouth beneath the lapel of his jacket as he watches the small procession enter the gates of Dublin Castle: at the front, on a trio of black horses, a detachment of yeomen in smart kit, indigo coats, red collars and turnbacks, silver tassels, white buttons, black leather Tarleton helmets with furred crests and cockades—how they do love their uniforms—and behind, a single slump-shouldered ass pulling a wooden cage on misaligned wheels. The yeomen stop in the upper yard and tip the cage, dump three soiled bundles trussed like felled deer from Phoenix Park, and at once the source of the foul smell is evident. Trophies for the viceroy, they say, United Irishmen killed the day before last, presented now as a gift from the landlord who outfitted these same yeomen with their horses and arms and colorful coats.
James can keep none of them straight, these lords and the patchwork demesnes they rule like fiefdoms with private armies in bright costume. There is no order to it. Most of the yeomen are dismally trained, if at all, and the trio of bodies lying in the Castle Yard gives evidence that some are as lawless as the rebels they would pacify. The dead men appear to have been dragged for miles before being bound and caged, clothes and hair clotted with dirt and blood dried black around grievous wounds. The yeomen arrange the bodies side by side in jaunty postures of repose. The day will be hot and soon there will be flies. Near one of the bodies James sees a glittering starburst, a sign that another sleeping fit might soon be upon him. He rubs his eyes and the starbursts flee and it is a relief, for he can imagine the talk if he were to suffer an episode here in the yard.
Have you heard? Mr. Samuels fell swooning at the sight of Irish blood.
Always something wanting in the man’s resolve.
A friend to the rebels, that one.
The dead men lie near the gate, so that visitors to the Castle will not miss the grisly welcome, though the sight is no different from what can be readily found elsewhere in the city. All of Dublin has become a court and gallows. Monday prior, on an errand to the Four Courts, James came upon a man slouching at his post in the courtyard, and when he greeted him, he discovered that the man
had been impaled upright upon a pike and put on display, the long shaft driven firm into the earth, and nearby stood another man similarly run through from shoulder to groin, feet barely toeing the ground, and each wore the green kerchief of rebellion. Beneath every bridge spanning the Liffey, traitors swing from ropes and chains and no man dares cut down friend or brother, for fear that he will be forced to wear the noose himself. The bodies are left to dangle until the rotting of rope or flesh drops them into the murky river.
James returns to his small office and at his desk he sets to copying out the letters that Lord Camden dictated earlier that morning. The window above his desk shows a cloudless sky, blue as a robin’s egg after endless weeks of gray drizzle, and though he cannot see the yard from here, he imagines the frenzied swirl of iridescent insects and the rising stink like a dirty finger in the mouth. The thought fills him with disgust and reignites the twinkling halos at the edge of his vision. A physician once told him that too strong a passion of any sort, unchecked, might be the cause of his episodes, and he recommended that James curb his feelings in all things, so he tries not to think of the bodies in the yard, lest he find himself similarly prone in some dreary corner of the Castle.
There is no shortage of worry for him today. The tattered list of necromancers he so carefully and discreetly compiled has dis-appeared. He has rummaged the shallow drawers of his desk and searched beneath his bed and still he cannot find it. To explain his possession of it would prove a troublesome thing. Rumors abound that the United Irishmen have spies of their own right here inside the Castle, and any behavior beyond the ordinary—a taper burning late, a brisk walk on the bulwarks at night—is cause for suspicion. His heart gallops at the thought that someone might have lifted the list from his pocket during one of his fits, and the worry has kept him from his work. He checks the clock near the door. An hour remains in which to have Lord Camden’s letters ready for the mail coach. Despite the recent attacks on the coaches, the post will brook no delay. Their constancy remains the only semblance of order in a world falling to pieces.
