The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Spreadeagle Hogan to his doorpost back there,” Robinson said, “and give him a good lashing. Then let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “No,” Tompkins said sharply. “We will have none of that. I have no stomach for this business.” Another fire flared to the east. First them and now us. The other way around, they would say. The pot was on the boil now, and no way to pull it from the fire. Glaring flames burned away the familiar landscape of his childhood.

  Bludsoe took a flat bottle from the tail pocket of his uniform and passed it around. Tompkins took a deep swallow.

  “It was little enough we saw of your bottle when Cooper was standing the rounds,” Robinson said. “You mean hoor.”

  “Their crops burned away,” Tompkins said, “and not a wisp of thatch above their heads. By God, that’s hard.”

  “Treasonable thatch,” Bludsoe said. “ ’Tis little mercy they would show to us, Bob Tompkins, and well you know it.”

  One of the men began to sing. After the first verse, others joined in.

  “I am a true-born Protestant, And I love my God and King.”

  Tompkins put his arm around Bludsoe’s shoulder and sang with them. Where were you, when all was said and done, if you didn’t stand by your own.

  Killala, August 21–22

  MacCarthy spent a day and a night at the O’Donnells’, where he helped Maire at her work. The next night he woke up in an unfamiliar room, beside an unfamiliar girl who was in service to a Rathlackan gentleman, a cheerful, empty-headed girl who said she dragged him away from a dance where he was becoming quarrelsome. He had no recollection of the dance or of the quarrel, or indeed of the girl’s body. He put his hand upon her breast and it was new to him, soft and restful. “You are all the same,” she said carelessly. “When you are sober you are shy and when you are drunk you are useless.” “Oh, God, I feel terrible,” MacCarthy said, “my guts are rolling around inside me.” “When you are drunk you are useless,” she said again, “you are the same the lot of you.” “Thanks be to God,” MacCarthy said, “I thought I was losing my memory.” But he spent his days talking to men in the fields, or watching the screaming seabirds at Downpatrick Head, or talking with the fishermen on the coast. The fishermen had great sport with him, answering his ignorant questions with great patience, and bearing with his banter.

  He passed a long afternoon at Randall MacDonnell’s, where he arrived just as Kate Cooper, an old convent friend of Grace MacDonnell’s, was leaving after a visit.

  “Make way,” he said, as she climbed into her cart. “Make way for the daughter of Mick Mahony of the heavy whip.”

  “It is your own back would feel that whip, MacCarthy, if he could hear you making sport of me.”

  “No sport at all, Kate. None at all. By God, you are the handsomest woman in Mayo, with the full bloom of young womanhood on you.”

  “You have no call to be talking that way to a married woman. ’Tis little enough time you had for me when I was a young woman, standing with the others along a wall of my father’s kitchen, listening to you give out with your old songs.”

  “You are wrong there, Kate. I could not take my eyes from you, but I was tongue-tied from shyness and in terror of your father. You were a flame in shadows.”

  “It has been well said that a poet cannot put his eyes on a woman without trying his luck.”

  “Ach, Kate,” he said, resting his hand on the cart. “The thoughts that you put into a man’s mind are scandalous as you sit there on a fine August afternoon.”

  Half smiling, she returned his stare, holding the reins in one hand, and the other resting, a loose fist, upon her hip.

  “Shy, is it? You are bold enough for any two men, MacCarthy, to stand making flirtatious conversation with a married gentlewoman in the middle of the day.”

  “Now, Kate. I stand here drinking in every feature of you, and you call it conversation. You have been ill schooled in the use of English.”

  “Whatever it is, it has gone on long enough,” she said, and then broke suddenly into Irish. “You are a rogue, MacCarthy, and an ill-favoured one at that.”

  “There now,” he said. “There is proper speech from you. If we start out together in Irish, there is no telling where we will end. I am most eloquent in Irish.”

  “So I have heard,” she said. “You are a great success with servant girls and the sisters of small farmers.”

  “You are a fine hot-tempered woman, Kate Mahony,” he said, “with a small waist and a fine bosom. You should be very pleased with yourself.”

  “Cooper,” she said. “I am wife to Cooper.”

  He stood watching her, as the cart moved down the road. By God, but the little captain had a prize for himself there. A woman like that could not rake the ashes or pare her toenails or bring water to men labouring in the fields without provoking the passion of the beholder. For hours after talking with her, MacCarthy felt randy, and the phrases of unwritten love songs tumbled in his mind.

  He had a long conversation with a boy who had attended his school for a year and called him “master.” They sat on a tumbled-down wall and MacCarthy taught him nonsense rhymes and riddles. “What is it can walk on the water without any feet?” “Is it a ship, master?” “It is,” MacCarthy said, and looked towards the bay, hidden from them by the line of low hills. “You knew that one. You have been wasting your time at conundrums.”

  That same afternoon he met Brid McCafferty, the old woman who was credited with second sight. The powerful swordsmen of France were coming, she told him, and the deliverance of the Gael was at hand.

  “Ach, now, mother. Don’t try that old one on a poet. Sure the poets have been saying that for years, and where are the ships?” They walk on the water without any feet.

  “ ’Tis no idle story, Owen MacCarthy. I have seen it as clearly as I see you.”

  “There is much loose talk to be heard here and there that could give a person ideas,” MacCarthy said.

  She grinned at him. Toothless. A pale, wizened apple. “Ships with great white sails, and swords shining like the moon.”

  “Shining like my arse,” MacCarthy said. “Leave the moon to poets, would you?”

  She crowed with delight, and bobbed her head.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Did you ever happen to see poor Owen MacCarthy sitting at his leisure in a snug school in the midlands, with obedient scholars lined up before him, and a new set of clothes on his back?”

  “You, you rogue? Sure you were born to be hanged. Did no one ever tell you that?”

  “The grandmother did. She was always giving out with prophecies, like some others I could name.”

  “I have seen it in babbies,” she said. “There is a red line they have across their throats. The line is waiting for the rope.”

  “You are a cheerful soul,” he said. “Swords and ropes.”

  He fixed in his mind the countryside of moorland and bare mountain, the straggling villages and isolated cabins, the taverns crowded with farmers and cowherds, the shy, barefoot girls. Bird song. Stirrings in the trees and the tall grasses, the full, heavy crops beneath the blazing sun, the slow waters of the bay. Small roads curled and twisted themselves towards larger ones, lovely for idling. The air was heavy with odours. An immense sky stretched above him, a pale and flawless blue with thin traceries of cloud.

  It was late on the evening of the twenty-first, walking towards Killala, that he encountered first one, then a second of the burned cabins, roofless and with blackened walls. He walked up the boreen to the second of them and circled it, running his hand along the rough wall. When he took his hand away, it was smeared with black. He shouted, but no one answered.

  He learned what had happened when he reached Killala and went into the Wolf Dog.

  “There is your Tyrawley Yeomanry for you,” Taidgh Dempsey said, one of Duggan’s pals. “There are more than thirty families now as homeless as any of the poor people who fled from the Orangemen in the north.”

  “Who
can tell me about Judy Conlon’s cabin?” MacCarthy asked. “Or the schoolhouse?”

  “They did not go into the Acres at all,” Dempsey said. “They divided themselves up into squads and they went here and there, but they did not go into the Acres.”

  “That goddamned fool Cooper,” MacCarthy said. “That goddamned fool.”

  “You would not have thought him a fool if you had seen him standing out there at the head of his yeomanry with his uniform of red and his sword buckled on and they playing the ‘Lillibulero.’ ”

  MacCarthy ordered a whiskey and drank it off fast and then ordered a second. There would now be red war in Killala.

  “You should have seen the Protestant minister,” Dennis Clancy said, “with his breeches pulled over his nightshirt, grabbing Cooper by the arm and begging him to call back the squads. There were fires burning on the hills like beacons.”

  “Much good that would do,” MacCarthy said. “But it was decent of him all the same.”

  “Ach, they are all the same, the Protestant hoors,” Dempsey said. “And well you know it, Owen MacCarthy. Is it by chance that the yeomen are all Protestant? Who is it keeps us down but the Protestants, and they have no more business in this country than a pack of Russians.”

  “ ’Tis little enough that you know about wild Russians,” MacCarthy said. “But well you know about Mr. Falkiner, who let your rent run unpaid for two years when you had the wasting sickness.”

  “I have said a hundred times,” Michael Binchy said. “There are good Protestants and there are bad Protestants.” Wheezed out his insipid words, puffs of flatulence.

  “We know them,” Dempsey said. “Well we know them. Pay them back blow for blow.”

  Thirty taverns in as many villages. From Kerry to Mayo. Words that passed for wisdom going from one hand to the next, pennies worn smooth with use. Not like the fresh-minted coinage of poetry, gold and silver.

  He was singing when he stumbled into the cabin and smashed into the table.

  “What is that?” Judy Conlon asked, sitting up in bed. “What is it?”

  “Poor Owen is sick. Poor Owen is sick, Judy.”

  “How can you sing and be sick, you fool? Where have you been? The Protestants have been rampaging through Killala, burning all before them, and murdering and looting. I declare to God I thought you were the yeomen.”

  “The evil whiskey that is sold in this place has poisoned me. I will not get well again. I have seen men poisoned by bad whiskey.”

  “And was the poison all in the one glass or did they make you take two?”

  “Don’t be unkind, Judy. Not when you see me in this pitiable condition.” He sat down and rested his head in his arms.

  “What better could you expect when you have been gone for days and God knows where.”

  “No harmful place at all. I was rambling here and there. Respectable. Nodding to this one and nodding to that one.” He looked at the papers on the table. “Owen MacCarthy beholds his poems.”

  She rose up, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Come now, and I will help you to bed.”

  When he was on his feet, he slipped a clumsy hand over her breast, but she struck it away.

  “There will be none of that when you are this way. You will not make love to me with your mind wandering off to other women.”

  “No other,” he said, falling across the bed and forgetting about her. “No other women. Poor sick Owen.”

  But in the morning he felt cheerful and clear-headed. He drank several cups of water, and then carried one outside. There was a slight haze, which the morning sun was burning off. Far distant, beyond the hills which sheltered the town from the Atlantic winds, stretched the grey expanse of the bay. Beyond the bay, at the horizon’s edge, were three ships in full sail.

  Thomas Treacy, whose house stood upon an eminence on the Ballycastle road, was at breakfast. Beside him, addressed in a bold, florid hand, lay a letter to Ellen from John Moore of Ballintubber.

  When Ellen burst in, she was carrying his brass spyglass.

  “Father, come at once and look. Three great ships are moving into the bay.”

  Treacy carefully wiped his lips with his handkerchief. “Ellen, you are more than welcome to make use of that glass, but before you take it from the office you should ask my permission. It is a costly instrument, not a plaything.”

  “Yes, Father. Come out onto the terrace.”

  They stood together on the terrace. Wind ruffled his hair.

  “That is a sight well worth leaving breakfast for, Ellen. Those are warships. Frigates. They must be parts of Warren’s squadron.”

  “But why should they trouble themselves with Killala?”

  “Who can say? We have a bad wind here this morning. It may be a heavy one out at sea.” He handed her the glass. “On the table, Ellen, you will discover a more tempting sight. A letter from John.”

  She turned to go, but he caught her arm. “I have deliberated before passing it to you. You have found a fine, spirited lad in John, and I should be happy for you both. But I am not, and you know why, I believe.”

  “John must go his own way, Father. I have no concern with his politics.”

  “I do. This barony has the makings of a treasonable conspiracy, and John brought it here. There are Blakes and O’Dowds and MacDonnells playing at rebellion, and John stirred them up. I do not propose to see our house linked with such matters.”

  “May I go now, Father?”

  “Was there ever such a stubborn girl? There was. I had forgotten your mother. You are more MacBride than Treacy, girl.”

  “Father, I do not care tuppence either for rebels or for the King of England. I care for John, and there is an end to it. There seems no end to the nonsense men busy themselves with.”

  Treacy laughed. “You may be right. Go in to your letter.”

  The ships were well into the bay now and they had not dropped sail.

  At ten in the morning, no one had a closer view of the three frigates than Andrew Creighton, who was studying them through the telescope which the previous Lord Glenthorne had imported from London. He knew that they were warships of some sort, and he could see that they were making not for Killala but for the small bay at Kilcummin, five miles to the west. There his nautical lore ended. But he could see that they were flying British naval colours, and like Treacy he assumed that they had somehow detached themselves from Admiral Warren’s squadron. He swung round the telescope on its iron base to inspect the small bridge upon which his labourers had begun work three weeks before.

  George Moore dipped his pen into the inkwell and continued:

  “By reason of the very ideas which had given it birth, the Revolution was destined to move beyond the borders of France. At first, because the monarchies of Europe were massed against it, the war seemed purely a defensive one. It appeared so even to the revolutionaries themselves: ‘The Republic is in danger.’ But in fact they had given arms and legs and brains to a new conception of man and of human possibilities. Such conceptions are rare in history, and they never halt at boundaries drawn arbitrarily upon a map. In Poland, in Ireland, in Germany, in the Low Countries, the Revolution made enemies and friends by the simple fact that it had occurred. It is rather the rule than the exception in human affairs that the principal actors in great events lack all knowledge of the true causes by which they are propelled.”

  By one in the afternoon, the ships had dropped anchor in Kilcummin Bay and were putting out boats. Cooper mustered his yeomen in the Palace street and prepared to welcome them. Dressed in ranks, the men did not make too bad an appearance, but he knew that English officers would view them with condescension. He smoothed his white waistcoat over his small, hard paunch, and rested his hand on the pommel of his sword. With desperation, he cudgelled his brain for appropriate words of greeting, formal and yet hearty.

  At two, after he had had his lunch, Creighton returned to the telescope, and swung it towards the anchored ships. They were no longer flying
the colours. A column of men, perhaps two hundred strong, was moving along the coast road towards Killala. In their van marched three men carrying banners which he could not identify. One of them was green. On one of the ships, a different set of colours was being slowly hauled aloft.

  At just that moment, a horseman rode into Killala, and wheeled to a halt in front of Cooper.

  The ships were now hidden from MacCarthy’s view, but he could see the town, and the column moving towards it. Their uniforms were blue, and for some reason they all seemed small. Peasants were running behind them, some carrying pikes and scythes. A sudden gust of wind pulled at the banners, and one unfurled itself. A huge square of dark green, with a large device at its centre. The column moved in silence, but shouts from the mob behind it floated up to him.

  Judy Conlon put her hands on his arm. “Are they the soldiers from the ships?”

  “Yes,” MacCarthy said. “French soldiers. The French have landed.”

  A century’s imagining, armada of white billowing sail, bronze cannon, uniforms of white and gilt, prancing war-steeds chestnut and ebony. Now they were here, three or four score of men in blue coats, marching along a dusty road in late August. Creatures of poetry, tossed casually upon a road.

  The shouting, louder now, drew women from the other cabins. They stood by the doors, children pulling at them. In the fields to the left, a man stood motionless, a forearm flung across his brow. Two or three men were running towards the Acres.

  “Are those the French?” the first man to reach MacCarthy asked. “What are they going to do? By God, I am going down into the town.”

  “You might wait a bit,” MacCarthy said. “I think they will have a word to say to Cooper’s yeomen.”

  “Few enough of them, by God,” the man said.

  “That is the first batch only,” MacCarthy said. He turned away. “Go back into the cabin, Judy, and stay there like the good girl you are.”