Fugitives!

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘Let me pass, soldier. I’m on important business for Milord Chichester.’

  ‘I’m a sergeant, I’ll thank’y, sir, and who’s that with you?’

  ‘It’s my secwetawy,’ said the voice.

  Séamus could have been struck by lightning. Bonmann! And Fenton with him. What are they doing here? He didn’t have to wait for his answer.

  ‘Seen three youngsters on ponies? Did they pass here?’

  Séamus shuffled back, ready to run, but the sergeant, clearly narked at Bonmann’s lordly manner, snapped out: ‘We’re not here to police children – sir. The bridge is closed. If you want to pass, you can report to the fort’s commander!’

  ‘I will – and I’ll weport you to the commander for insolence!’ At that they wheeled off and up the slope to the entrance of the fortress.

  Séamus wanted to thank the sergeant, but instead he continued to edge back out of the light, then turned and ran hell-for-leather down the path. The moon hadn’t risen yet, so it was pitch dark as he turned off the path towards the barn, only to collide with something huge; a horse tethered beside the door snorted with indignation. Heart hammering, he heaved at the barn door.

  He expected Fion and Sinéad to be asleep, but they were sitting up, mirror images on each side of a single candle.

  ‘They’re after us,’ he blurted out. ‘Bonmann and Fenton with three men at arms. If only Haystacks were here!’

  ‘Oh but he is!’ declared a deep voice from the shadows. Once again, Séamus nearly jumped out of his skin: Haystacks! ‘Come on, Séamus, tell us what you know!’ and Haystacks emerged from the shadows.

  Putting his own questions to one side, Séamus told them about the soldiers on the bridge, and the horsemen.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Fion asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Séamus had no doubts.

  ‘I was afraid of this,’ declared Haystacks. ‘Bonmann thinks that you, Séamus, are the only obstacle to his claiming your lands. Fenton has your parents’ murder on his conscience and won’t sleep easy until he has both you and Sinéad out of his way. You have dangerous enemies.’

  ‘I don’t think the sergeant on the bridge will link me to three missing children, and anyway he clearly disliked Bonmann,’ said Séamus.

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Haystacks, ‘but the chances are, someone saw you when you turned along the river. We can expect visitors. We must be gone by first light, but to where?’ Haystacks scratched his head. ‘Every regular crossing on the Blackwater will be guarded.’

  Séamus leapt to his feet. ‘Haystacks! I’ve got it. I didn’t pass you on your way here because I was down by the river – and there’s a boat there, submerged in the water, but the rope that holds it is new. Come, I’ll show you. My guess is that the owner sank it on purpose to keep it hidden – maybe he does a little smuggling on the side. If we bail it out, I think we can get ourselves and the gear across. Our ponies have all swum before.’

  They left immediately as none of them could even think of sleeping.

  Sinéad would remember the crossing of the Blackwater as a night of misery. The boat could only take two at a time, so she found herself dumped on a small jetty on the far side of the river pulling on a rope while the boys tried to persuade the ponies, one after the other, to take to the water and swim across. Eventually they were all over, splashed and frozen, trying to load their shivering mounts with deadened fingers.

  The smuggler’s path by-passed the village on the far side of the river so they were able to join the road well away from its dangers and settle down to cover the miles.

  Haystacks, having some mission of his own, said he would catch them up later.

  CHAPTER 17

  Crab Apples and the Search for Con

  on steered Macha down the side of the valley to where the Glenelly river sliced the Sperrin mountains in two. One time he’d found a pebble in the river here, bright with flecks of gold; he still carried it in a pouch about his neck for luck. September had arrived and these were the last days he’d have free in the mountains, his last opportunity for any sort of adventure, so he would make the most of it.

  He gave Macha a slap with his hand and was off up the hill. Half an hour later he was clear of the forest, letting his pony zigzag up the mountainside more or less as he liked. The front of Con’s shirt bulged with small crab-apples that he had picked, reaching from his saddle, a little down the slope. His cattle pole, now tucked under his knee, stuck out in front like a lance.

  Each spring his foster family, the O’Brolchains, would drive the cattle entrusted to their care by Hugh O’Neill and others up to the summer pastures on the Sperrin mountains. There they would have grass enough to thrive, and by their absence allow the cutting of hay and sowing of crops in the lowlands. Then, in autumn, the herdsmen would bring the cattle down to the warmer land below. As he climbed from the valley, the oak, the ash and the alder gave way to scattered pines, and finally to grass and heather. This was Con’s kingdom – and he decided not to think about the dreary months ahead minding the cattle in their corrals. Down there the air would be as thick as soup, and the ground a sea of liquid dung. He whistled quietly to himself.

  That summer he had had two whole months with his father, Hugh O’Neill. ‘I’m pinning my hopes on you, Con,’ his father had told him. ‘You see, I too was a rascal horse-boy once, just like you. We’re peas from the same pod, you and I. One day we will make waves and they had all better watch out!’ Now, however, something was disturbing Con’s thoughts; it was a scent on the air. He whispered to Macha to stand still, and he sniffed. There! The scent of burning wood and something else that was tantalising – he couldn’t decide what it was. Now, who was up here lighting a fire? Interesting. He tested the breeze and nudged Macha to move up-wind in that direction. There was a concealed valley here, a mere wrinkle in the hillside ahead. He slid out of his saddle, dropped the reins to tell Macha to stand, and moved towards the valley rim. Then he crouched, and finally crawled on his hands and knees to the edge. There was a rowan tree there that offered cover. It was a pretty tree, its green crown jewelled with scarlet berries, but Con was more interested in what he was seeing below.

  There were five of them, English soldiers for certain – two of them officers, at a guess. They looked very comfortable down there beside the stream. They had a small tent – for the officers, no doubt – a camp-fire and a pan and … aaah! … bliss! there it was, the smell of bacon frying.

  Con knew what he should do – slink away unseen and tell the drovers, who would pass the word on. Then, in a little while, five new horses, a couple of muskets and a fine sword or two would be passed around in their camp, and there would be five new graves somewhere in the forest. The English never seemed to learn how easy it was to wander into Irish territory, and how difficult it was to leave it. Con felt a sudden empathy with these men. They were cheeky, just like him. He would tease them a bit. He reached into his shirt, felt for an apple, then threw it with remarkable accuracy and hit one of the officers on the back.

  ‘Hey! What was that?’ The officer spun about, then spotted the apple and looked up as if expecting to see an apple tree suddenly grown above him. He turned to the soldiers. ‘Come on! Which of you threw that?’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You did!’

  ‘It must have been one of you!’

  ‘Not us, sir!’

  ‘Yes, it damn well was!’

  Con was in stitches. This was better than he could have imagined – and all with one small apple. He threw another and started them off again.

  ‘You did!’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  He threw a third apple, but didn’t wait to see where it landed when he heard shouts of: ‘Up there … that bush … where’s my pistol?’

  He was still nearly doubled with laughter when he arrived back to Macha, who was nibbling at the heather fifty yards away. But he had to think quickly now. The soldiers had horses and one or more of them might have a loaded musket.
The sensible thing was for him to run for it – they’d hardly bother to hunt down a mere boy – but when Con had the devil in him, sense was not a high priority. He tore off his shirt, scattering crab-apples like musket balls about him. Then he used its long sleeves to tie it to his cattle pole and raised it, a brilliant yellow flag above his head, and rode towards the valley rim. Taking a deep breath he stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave his loudest ever wolf-whistle. He’d been practising his piercing whistle ever since he’d been shown it by that girl from de Cashel’s castle. He stopped short of the valley rim, hoping that his flag would be visible from below, and whistled again; then he cantered along the rim just out of sight. Whenever he could, he whistled high or low as the mood took him, as if mustering a large group of men for a charge. Any doubt about them seeing him was dispelled when a musket ball hissed past his flag, followed almost instantly by a blast of the gun. Now was the time for him to clear out. They’d be upon him in a minute, but he couldn’t resist a quick look. He looked, and then he looked again, because they were gone: tent, horses, cooking pots and all. He could see the last of them disappearing down the slope. Bemused at his success, he rode cautiously down. No, it wasn’t a trap. The fire was still burning, and out of habit he dismounted in order to quench the flames and cover the ashes. Then the breeze from the fire wafted in his direction. He sniffed … and sniffed again. His stomach growled, his mouth watered – bacon! He dropped to his knees beside the fire; there in the embers were the rashers that the army scouts must have tipped out of the pan as they ran. They were still bubbling and hissing – covered in ashes, certainly, but who minded ashes? The spoils of war, Con thought, as he fell on them.

  After Haystacks had left them, Séamus took over the lead, fired with enthusiasm, and Fion rode beside Sinéad. ‘Well, we’ve got to hand it to Séamus,’ he said, ‘that river-crossing was brilliant.’

  She smiled, glad for her brother. ‘He has a new cause now, Fion. God help poor England!’ she chuckled.

  Fion nodded. ‘Just think, but for him, you might be breakfasting with your future husband, and we’d probably be in chains.’

  ‘I know. But what will happen to us here in Ireland, Fion, when Uncle Hugh has gone?’ She gazed about at the untended land. Everywhere were traces of past farming activity, but now burned and tumbled homesteads were all that was left, the land overtaken by weeds and encroaching forest.

  ‘This is Mountjoy’s work, though Chichester did most of it for him,’ said Fion. ‘This country used to be rich and peaceable – they talk of herds of cattle, a hundred thousand strong, and of farmsteads set in gold from the wheat, barley and oats around them. Apart from the occasional cattle raid, there was peace and harmony here. We didn’t need to be instructed by the English in civilisation. Haystacks could have walked from here to Donegal with only a staff against dogs; he’d have been fed in every home, welcomed by every chief and child, and if anything went amiss, he’d have been protected by our own Brehon laws.’

  ‘Do you think the English really want to civilise us, Fion?’

  ‘No, Sinéad, make no mistake, they want just one thing: they want land – your land, my land, our land. When they took Uncle Hugh and fostered him in England, they wanted to turn him into a gentleman, not out of love, but because if he became English they’d have their hands on half of Ulster. Look how they reward their generals! They give them land, not because they like their generals, but because each one will hold that bit of Ireland for King James and England.’

  ‘Ireland’s ruined now!’ she said sadly.

  ‘The land will recover, but the people won’t. When Mountjoy found he couldn’t trap Uncle Hugh, he gave Chichester licence to do what he chose. Whole villages were burned – men, women and children chopped to pieces – but it wasn’t swords and pikes that emptied the land, but hunger. When the soldiers came we could escape into the forests, but our crops and our cattle couldn’t, so the English took what they could and destroyed the rest. My old nurse – from before I was fostered with you – loved to scare me with stories of what was happening. I still have a nightmare in which I am walking down a road like this. Each side is a ditch full of human half-skeletons their mouths open, all waving claw-like hands at me. As I walk, the road gets narrower and narrower until the hands are brushing me; finally they clutch my legs and I can’t move. I stop and I look down. Their mouths are wide open like baby birds demanding to be fed, and I can see that inside they are stained with the green juice from nettles and grass they have been chewing. And the people who had created this famine threw up their hands and called us savages.’

  ‘Look, that must be Dungannon ahead,’ said Sinéad, relieved to change the subject.

  Haystacks joined them just as they emerged from the town.

  ‘You look pleased,’ commented Fion when he rode up.

  Haystacks chuckled. ‘For the moment, yes. I don’t like the role of informer, but I thought it was only fair to write a polite note to Sir Geoffrey Bonmann and inform him, firstly that the fire in the castle had been deliberate, and secondly that it had been started by one of the party he now had with him.’

  ‘Fenton!’

  ‘Precisely. But I thought we might win ourselves a little time if he had to work that out for himself. Who knows how it will help us. At best we will have brought a murderer to justice.’

  ‘And you signed this letter?’

  ‘Of course! Nobody believes an anonymous letter,’ he said indignantly, then grinned, ‘I signed it “Mr Haystacks”.’

  All day they rode north-west. Behind them the leaden waters of Lough Neagh receded into the distance. The air was sultry, the calm before the storm, perhaps. At one point exhaustion hit Sinéad like a lead weight and the temptation to roll from the saddle, lie in the grass and just sleep … slee …

  ‘Watch out, Sinéad!’ and she felt Fion’s grip on her arm as he pulled her up straight in her saddle.

  Haystacks and Fion kept asking any passersby for news of the O’Brolchains. Sometimes they were greeted cheerily, sometimes with suspicion. ‘Did you see how that fellow kept fiddling with my harness?’ asked Fion once in annoyance. ‘He was calculating what it was worth, I reckon.’

  ‘What you’re worth, more likely,’ said Haystacks. ‘Ever since O’Cahan went over to the English, and Chichester put a bounty on your uncle’s head, his hangers-on have been looking for rewards for themselves. Come on, here are the mountains.’

  Sinéad looked ahead to where the mountains were shouldering themselves above the trees; it seemed a vast area in which to find one small boy. Her heart sank when Haystacks said again: ‘I will leave you now, I must ride northwards. The country up there is less faithful to Tyrone, but Con could still be there.’

  They rode in single file, their ponies’ hooves pattering on an almost deserted road. The setting sun lit up the bases of lowering storm clouds. Rain threatened and they had no shelter and nowhere to rest their heads.

  Yet another stop, and Sinéad leaned her face into her pony’s mane and began to cry.

  ‘Hey, Sinéad,’ called Fion a short while later. ‘Wake up. Success at last!’ She struggled upright. Fion had a lanky seventeen-year-old beside him. ‘Micheál here tells me the O’Brolchain camp is just over that ridge. They’re bringing the cattle down from the high ground for the winter – he’s going there to help, and will guide us over. Wake up, girl, we’ve found Con! Micheál saw him only last week!’

  But Sinéad was looking at the mountain. ‘How are we going to get over that?’ she wailed.

  Fion laughed. ‘Micheál says there’s a pass between the mountains that we can follow; it’s tricky to find, but he’s going to show us the way.’

  As if sharing their relief, the ponies pricked their ears and followed willingly as their new friend plunged off the road to follow a zigzag path up through the trees cloaking the valley side. Micheál strode ahead on foot, waiting when the tired ponies began to dip their heads into the climb. They rose out of the oak woods just
as dusk was falling. Above them towered the mountain. Then, quite suddenly, the hillside seemed to open in front of them and there was the path, winding into the hill between steep bluffs and craggy outcrops of rock. Ferns sprang up from the wet banks in green fountains, catching the last of the light and making it their own. Now the path was plunging down and Sinéad, leaning back, had to push her feet forward in her stirrups to stop herself sliding over her pony’s head. The stream, which had started as a trickle, now chattered to them cheerily. For a moment Sinéad looked out over the forest canopy that filled the valley like a rolling sea, then they plunged down into it, and the trees closed protectively over their heads.

  A new quiet settled over the party, their ponies’ hooves suddenly hushed in leaf litter from thousand-year-old trees. Before they realised that they had arrived, they found themselves surrounded by sloping tents and thatched shelters, all in a pleasant haze of woodsmoke. This was the O’Brolchain winter camp. Women and children crowded out to see the new arrivals; the men were away on the mountain to gather the cattle. Sinéad sat in her saddle, swaying with tiredness, until she found herself looking down at a girl of about Con’s age.

  ‘I’m Aoife, but you don’t look like a Brian,’ said the girl seriously. Sinéad smiled; she’d been sussed already, but it would be a relief to be a girl again, and to be with another girl, even a small and grubby one. When Micheál came offering to take her pony to rub her down, she let him, and followed the girl into a wide, thatched hall in which there was a table long enough to seat a small army of men. She thought she was too tired to eat, but when Aoife produced a bowl of thick, steaming stew, it spoke to her rumbling stomach. Neither of them said anything until her wooden bowl was empty and she sat back with a sigh.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked the girl suspiciously.