The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Tuesday. Last evening, I walked along the path which runs beside the lake. A most mild evening, and the sky a delicate even blue, with immense billowing clouds. They were reflected in the still waters of the reed-fringed lake. Above my head, birds circled towards their nests. A feeling of almost transcendent quietude, with, inexplicably, a faint, erotic fretting at the edges. It is almost four months since I have been with a woman, and that but little Sophie M. in Dublin—taffeta, silk, and broken fingernails. Water moved gently at my feet. London, Paris, poor provincial Dublin itself are a universe distant from this lovely lake, from the hill where we settled after our wanderings. A bittern boomed, a most lonely cry, and then the lake was silent again. As I walked back towards the house, a faint breeze arose, scarce stirring the heavy-leafed boughs. We possess ideas, but we are possessed by feelings. They lie too deep for understanding, astir with their own secret life and carrying us with them.

  Moat House, Ballina, June 26

  Late that night, Malcolm Elliott, of Moat House near Ballina, south of Killala on the Castlebar road, sat in the small writing room which he had fitted up next to the bedroom, and read again the letter which he kept hidden away in a French translation of Gulliver’s Travels. The name of his small estate was a mystery to himself and everyone else, for although the house had been built where a Norman keep once stood, there was no evidence that there had ever been an encircling moat. The estate was bordered on one side by the River Moy, which a half-mile farther north passed through the town of Ballina, a broad, sluggish river crossed, in the town, by two wide, humpbacked bridges.

  When he began reading, he sat to his desk, with lamplight falling comfortably upon what had once been his most cherished books, volumes of Helvétius, Diderot, and Holbach. When he finished however, he was pacing the floor. The lamp was weak, but he knew the letter almost by heart.

  Citizen Elliott:

  A provisional directory has now been established in Dublin, and has assumed the task of holding the Society in readiness.

  The arrests of the Chief Directory in March, the capture and fatal wounding of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the subsequent arrests of numerous local leaders have beyond question impaired the organization, but we believe that an excellent beginning has been made upon the tasks of restoration.

  Far more serious has been the suppression of the risings in Antrim and Wexford, with great loss of life. The final battle in the north has been fought and lost at the town of Ballinahinch, where the army of the United Irish withstood for hours the greatly outnumbering forces commanded by General Nugent. General Monroe, the United Commander, disputed every inch of soil, and it is claimed by the enemy that five hundred of the United Irishmen were slain. The town of Ballinahinch is now a ruin, and it is said that the forces of the Crown exacted a horrible vengeance from the defenceless townspeople. Henry Joy MacCracken, commanding the main Antrim force, had been defeated several days earlier, but not before he had captured several towns with a United army numbering six thousand.

  In the south, the rising was more formidable, numbering perhaps twenty thousand, and for a time it controlled much of Wexford, winning a number of battles and occupying towns of consequence. It was impeded, alas, by the lack of proper leadership, and at last was overborne by superior numbers. One stain indeed befouled the Wexford banners. The rumours of savagery meted out in Wexford to our Protestant fellow countrymen are beyond any dispute. It was the splendour of Antrim that there Presbyterian and Papist marched, fought, and died side by side. Let Antrim be our example, and the heroes of its deep glens. The very name of the Society of United Irishmen proclaims our guiding principle: a union of Catholic and Protestant, submerging those sectarian differences which have been carefully fostered by the oppressor that we may be held in subjugation. But our army in Wexford, although holding many who at least nominally were United Irishmen, attracted great numbers who must only be termed Defenders, if indeed not outright Whiteboys, and these were fiercely and ignorantly sectarian. They fought less as United Irishmen than as a mob, shepherded by bellicose priests. Not the Republic was their ambition, but rather what they termed “the triumph of the Gael.” And yet they fought most bravely, and died heroically. The peasantry of Ireland can accomplish much, nay, all, provided they have proper leadership, and provided they receive that disciplined army of French allies which we now await. The Rights of Man may be likened to a powerful sun, beneath which ancient bigotry will melt like stale wax.

  When our French allies land, the United Irishmen will render to them all possible assistance. Our agents in France, Theobald Wolfe Tone and his companions, have promised them that the island shall rise up, and our task it is to fulfill that promise. In Leinster, resistance has ended with the surrender at Vinegar Hill, but in Munster our organization remains substantially intact, despite the burnings and tortures inflicted upon the counties of Waterford and Tipperary.

  This letter is being sent to each of our members in Connaught, the one province which has thus far been spared the brutality of the Crown forces. We are well aware of the backwardness of that province, in whose soil our Society has never taken firm root. It is essential, however, to till that soil, so that there, as elsewhere in Ireland, the Tree of Liberty can be planted. Our cause is just, the unfettering of our native land that she may take her place among the nations of Europe. Let our energies be as firm as our hopes.

  Elliott folded the letter and replaced it. It had been brought to him the week before by a man claiming to be a pedlar, a scarecrow with a soiled and ill-fitting wig, riding a sorry-looking pony and leading a scrawny donkey loaded down with wares. “Are you from Dublin?” Elliott asked him. “Athlone. I am travelling to Sligo.” “You were given these letters in Athlone?” “What letters?” We are well aware of the backwardness of that province. Much they knew of Connaught, those Dublin lawyers and merchants. The Provisional Directory should be marched through the streets of Ballina to judge for themselves the state of things.

  He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers and walked the room again. He had the look of a Mayo squireen, a man with a jockey’s slender, nervous frame, and a face like a hatchet, narrow and triangular. Thick, sandy eyebrows sheltered darting eyes. He had been called to the bar, but his radical politics had incurred the hostility of the other gentlemen of the county. He was a hard-riding hunter, reckless and skilful in the Mayo fashion, and in Dublin he had been restless and dissatisfied, longing for the fields and broken fences of home. Those years, he now knew, had been the happiest of his life. His politics, he then had prided himself, were practical and unsentimental. A wave had arisen in France and was destined to sweep across Europe, destroying monarchs and ancient aristocratic privileges; it would batter down Ireland’s oligarchy, sweep away hereditary corruption, cleanse government and Parliament, open up careers to honest and energetic men. There had been many such men in Dublin in the early nineties. They had formed a Society. Now they were a conspiracy, their leaders imprisoned or in French exile, and their insurrection had become a peasant uprising, with Protestants put to the sword at Wexford Bridge and on Vinegar Hill. Faint echoes reached Mayo: a note carried by a pedlar; “Citizen Elliott . . .”

  Taking up the lamp, he went to the bedroom, and stood looking down at his sleeping wife, Judith. A wisp of fair hair had fallen across her brow; her face was calm, oval. She was an English girl; they had met and married in London. But she was a far more ardent Irish patriot than he was himself, as though sympathy for her adopted country demanded proof. In Dublin she had become the friend of Pamela Fitzgerald, Lord Edward’s earnest and vivacious French wife. At Moira House, under the benign eye of a radical peer, they had enthused together over the coming Republic of Ireland, and over their husbands, who would bring it into being. Now poor Edward was dead, of wounds suffered when resisting the soldiers who ran him to earth in a Dublin slum, sold out by an informer. And Elliott, a blunt, bitterly honest man, was back in Mayo, a man with no taste for conspiracies and useless cyphers. He
was bound to the Society only by his oath and by a pedlar’s letter. But to Elliott, an oath was a very serious matter. He was bound in honour to the dead Fitzgerald, to men in Irish and in English prisons, to the exiled plotters in Paris. And in Mayo he was useless to them.

  On their first journey to Mayo, Ireland had been an unrolling wonder to Judith, as they left behind them the Anglified counties of the pale and crossed the Shannon into what Dublin spoke of as “the wild west.” She picked up Irish turns of phrase, and used them with an impressive inaccuracy but with an eagerness to please which won the hearts of all who spoke with her. “Sure and what time of day can it be at all?” she would ask him, and he would gravely answer her, “It can be ten O’clock.” A true child of her age, she travelled with her Ossian, a poet capable, in Elliott’s view, of the most appalling drivel, endless bathetic windiness. She would quiz him about the mountains they passed: what heroes lay buried atop them, what ancient Fenian battles had been fought upon their slopes? Elliott knew little about Ireland’s grotesque legendry. Who knows or cares, he had been tempted to reply, but clear eyes and an eager face always checked his reply.

  She stirred, and in sleep turned her face towards him. Love ravished him, holding him tight by emotions which he could not name. She dwelt in a different world from his, shaped by her reading and her imagination. Once they had spent an evening at Tom Emmet’s villa in Rathfarnham at the foot of the Dublin hills, in the small oval study painted in what Tom’s wife believed to be the Grecian fashion, white and pale blue. Russell had been there as well, and MacNevin and Bagenal Harvey. And one other had been present there in their conversation, as they recalled Tone’s quicksilver wit, his fondness for claret and the violin and flute. It had seemed to Judith, and to Elliott himself, a conspiracy of the intellect, the best and clearest minds in the kingdom, banded together against brutishness and corruption. Emmet was in prison now, and Bagenal Harvey’s head was on a spike outside Wexford gaol. Prisoner rather than leader of the Wexford peasants, they called him their general, and then carried him from battle to battle. After Vinegar Hill, he hid for a week on an island off the coast, shivering and spray-stained. Where MacCracken was at that moment, Elliott did not know, perhaps waiting in some deep-walled Antrim glen for the soldiers to hunt him down. And Tone? Somewhere in France with an army that might or might not come. Elliott had not told Judith of Bagenal Harvey’s fate. He could see the darkening head, lolling tongue, protruding eyes. Judith remembered wit, music, curved walls painted white and blue.

  Elliott blew out the lamp, and walked downstairs in the darkness, his hand sliding along the smooth, familiar olive wood of the banister. He crossed the hall, and walked outside. It was a cool, clear night of this extraordinary summer. The air was both sweet and pungent, blending the odours of cattle and crops. To his left, the Moy moved quietly towards Ballina, where a few lighted windows still glowed.

  What did it matter, here in Mayo? There was himself in Ballina and John Moore in Ballintubber, Peters the provision merchant in Castlebar, Forrest on Glenthorne’s land, Burke who was steward to Lord Altamont in Westport. These were sworn United Irishmen. And John Moore had been speaking with some of the young Catholic squireens, O’Dowd and Blake and MacDonnell. With enough time, they might be persuaded to act, and perhaps could bring some of their tenants with them. Elliott knew their type, fierce, impetuous men ready to point their huge hunters towards the most daunting wall, flying over with shouts and laughter. They were capricious young bucks, ready for violence but easily bored. Put all these together and a fair showing of the tenantry and you had perhaps seventy men. Mayo was locked away from Tom Emmet’s study, from Dublin-bred conspiracies. Moorland and mountain mocked all eloquence.

  Across the bay, in Sligo, things were a bit better. There was a fair organization in the town, and MacTier, the Presbyterian linen merchant, was an able man, prudent and hardheaded. If MacTier had a chance to act, he would, and if no chance came to him, he would abide by that, as quiet and as calm as a man counting bolts of cloth. Papist and Presbyterian alike had been sworn into the Society by MacTier, cautious, reserved, testing each man in searching conversation. And he had managed all this from a warehouse set squarely into one of the most implacably loyalist towns in the west of Ireland, a bitter garrison town. Not here, not in Mayo. But how many could even MacTier count on? A hundred, perhaps, not more. And that had been before the collapse of the Antrim rising. Sligo looked towards the north, towards Ulster, and now the only news was from the bloody glens of Antrim. What purpose was served by a letter from Dublin ringing false with its hysterical optimism?

  He walked beside the river, and heard the small night animals stirring at the sounds of his booted feet. In Dublin a few years before, he had heard a story about Danton, whether true or false he did not know. When his arrest was decided upon, Danton was at his farm in the suburbs with his new young wife. A messenger came to him with a warning from a friend. He dressed hurriedly, stuffed his pocket with a shirt and a pistol, and set off through a forest. An hour later he halted. The forest had become the landscape of a dream. He had been quietly asleep in his own house, beside a woman’s warm, naked body. Now he was cold and breathless in a dark wood. He went back to his farm, and was in bed, awake and quiet, when they came for him. Elliott, walking beside the quiet Moy, understood that story. Wexford and Antrim were a thousand miles away, and the Provisional Directory was farther yet. Tone and the French fleet were across the world, phantoms. Next week perhaps, or next month, word might come that the French had landed in the south, or that Munster had risen. And perhaps, like Danton, he might dress, weigh down his own pocket with a pistol, and ride southwards. But he had not ridden to Wexford, nor taken the shorter journey to Antrim. Mayo held him, stronger than dreams nurtured in a Rathfarnham villa.

  Mayo was the slow, invisible river at his feet, flowing past farmland and pastureland and bog towards the distant bay. He had begun to save the hay, and soon the first crops would be ready for reaping. Each day now, he would be in the fields with his labourers, stripped to his shirt, sweat darkening its armpits. At noon, girls would bring them buttered bread and pails of cool milk. In the clear light, beneath a sky of pale blue, he could see the Ox Mountains, which sheltered Mayo from the troubling winds of Ulster. Now night pressed upon him, dark silences weightier than speech.

  Ballina, July 1/Ballycastle, July 2

  Very early on the first morning of July, John Moore mounted his hunter and rode northwards towards the barony of Tyrawley. He made a leisurely journey of it, and did not take the shortest roads. At eleven he was in Castlebar, where he paused for two tankards of ale with Brian Peters, a provision merchant in the town. At three he was in Foxford, and engaged in a long conversation with Michael O’Hara, a strong-farmer. At sundown he reached Ballina, where he stayed the night with Malcolm and Judith Elliott, at Moat House.

  They had a long, quiet meal, talking of Dublin and of distant friends. After dinner, Judith sat beside her harp in the drawing room, and sang to the two men in her clear, silvery soprano. Elliott listened with his jockey’s body perched on the edge of a delicate chair, his hands pressed against his knees, but John was settled deep into a sofa, his long legs stretched out before him. Judith had a small selection of French and Italian songs which, so far as John could tell, she sang most creditably, but she preferred the group of Hibernian Airs which had recently been published in Dublin by Miss Owenson. They sounded French to John; Elliott had no ear for music. Then Elliott and John closeted themselves in the office, where they talked late into the night, a bottle of brandy on the desk beside them.

  The next morning he was again on the road. Labourers, standing in fields to his left, lifted their arms in lazy salutation to a stranger, and Moore touched his crop to the brim of his low-crowned hat. To his right, stretching towards the bay, were the high walls of the Glenthorne estate. Moore, a tall young man on a tall mount, could catch glimpses, between thick clumps of plantation, of Glenthorne Castle, white and indis
tinct in the morning haze.

  A mile from Killala, he swung into a byroad which brought him to the Ballycastle road. Four miles farther on, he crossed over a stream, and rode through entrance gates towards Bridge-end House. It was a simple, two-storey farmhouse, more modest than its ornamental gates, built with its back away from its avenue, upon the crest of a hill facing northwards. As he rode towards it he could see a distant flash of bay.

  He dismounted, looped his reins to a post, and walked along a curving path of loose stone to the front of the house. A servant showed him into the parlour, where he was joined almost at once by Thomas Treacy, a tall, bent man in his fifties, with white hair falling full and loose about his neck. He seized Moore’s hand in both of his.

  “You are most welcome, John. Most welcome indeed.”

  “And I am most happy to see you, sir. I have business in Killala with Randall MacDonnell, but nothing would stop my horse turning aside to the Ballycastle road, that I might pay my respects to you.”

  “You will spend the night here,” Treacy said. “I can offer you a far cleaner room than you can find at the MacDonnells’. ’Tis not a house they have there at all, but only stables. They are a disgrace to us all.”

  “I will not quarrel with that,” Moore said. “And it is pleasant to look forward to a clean bed.”

  “They are more horse than man,” Treacy said. “Like the pagan centaurs.”

  “They know horses,” Moore said. “Better than any family in Mayo.”

  “Well they might,” Treacy said. “But they come by it honourably. A MacDonnell commanded a squadron of King James’s cavalry. He did not distinguish himself. Sit down, John. Sit down. We will have tea directly, if that lazy slut of a girl pays any attention to my orders. Is George well?”