The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  No French ships had been sighted along the coast from Sligo to Bundoran, or from the shores of Donegal Bay. But the steep coastline of Donegal stretched northwards from Killybegs, a mountainous coast indented by innumerable small bays, curving across the edge of the island, and dropping down by Lough Swilly to Londonderry. A fleet might well be riding at storm anchor off Donegal, unable to put its men ashore, as had happened when Hoche and Tone came to Bantry Bay in 1796.

  “More Protestant wind and rain,” MacCarthy said, giving MacTier a thin, taunting smile.

  But MacTier ignored him. The Ulster rising was dead, he was certain of this. It died when Monroe’s pikemen were cut to pieces in the town of Ballinahinch. There were still rebels in the glens of Antrim, but they were being hunted out and destroyed. Many of the towns up and down the Ards peninsula had been burned by the British, and scores of farms and cabins.

  “Teeling’s home is in the Ards,” I said.

  “It was.”

  “What if Humbert can bring our Mayo army into Ulster?”

  “Into Ulster? Are you daft, man? Past Sligo and Ballyshannon, with General Taylor waiting for you in Enniskillen?”

  “Lake was waiting for us in Castlebar,” MacCarthy said. “But he left.”

  “Aye,” MacTier said. “I know.” He took out a pair of square-framed spectacles and settled them on his stump of a nose.

  “But what if we do get through?” I asked him. “What help could we get from your fellows in the glens?”

  “Ach. If you could make your way into Ulster, you would do best to bide in the Donegal hills, deep in the Derryveaghs. It would take weeks to find you, and you could wait there for the French ships.”

  “Too long have we waited for the ships from Spain,” MacCarthy said suddenly.

  “From Spain?” MacTier asked, puzzled.

  “A line of poetry,” MacCarthy said, with the same taunting smile.

  MacTier studied him moodily, and then turned back to me. “That is my suggestion. But my other thought would be to make for the midlands. There has been talk about a rising there, and a certain man we both know has been to Belfast.”

  “I have visited him,” I said, and told him of my talk in Longford with Hans Dennistoun.

  “You people are great for knowing each other,” MacCarthy said, “from one end of the island to the other.”

  MacTier ran a finger along the rim of his spectacles. “What people would that be, Mr. MacCarthy? The United Irishmen?”

  “Perhaps,” MacCarthy said. “Perhaps it was the United Irishmen.”

  “Perhaps,” MacTier said. “And perhaps you mean Protestants, but lack the manliness to say so.”

  It is most curious, the effect of those words, Protestant and Papist, when used without warning and in what is termed “mixed company.” Like a pistol fired into silence. MacCarthy had the stunned look of a man who finds himself murderously attacked by a small terrier.

  “Because if that is your meaning,” MacTier said, “I must tell you that I will not have it. I will not abide the abominable bigotries of this country, and least of all will I ride for miles through rain and muck to hear them insinuated into tavern conversation.”

  “Ach, that might be the rub right there,” MacCarthy said. “In a Sligo tavern is one thing, and back in your Belfast home may be another.”

  “You may think so if you wish, sir, and be damned to you. This is a strange United Man you have brought to us, Mr. Elliott. Has he even taken the oath?”

  “He has,” I said. “Whether or not he accepts it is another matter.”

  “I have only just met this gentleman from Ulster,” MacCarthy said. “And without a rudeness, ’tis little about him that I know.”

  “Neither is there any need for me to offer you an autobiography,” MacTier said, his manner unruffled. “I know nothing at all about you, save that Mr. Elliott vouches for you and that by your accent you should be many miles to the south of Sligo.”

  “I should indeed,” MacCarthy said. “We are of one mind in that matter, at least.”

  “And in others as well,” I said. “I have vouched for you, MacCarthy, and I can vouch as well for Sam MacTier, who has been a United Man these four years. We have the same hopes and wishes.”

  “What the hell does he know about my wishes?” MacCarthy said.

  “I don’t have a mind to turn the country over to the Papists, if that is what you mean,” MacTier said to him.

  “Not when you can turn it over to the Orangemen.”

  “You are talking nonsense,” MacTier said. “The husband of my own first cousin marched on Toome bridge with the Papists. He was hanged at Toome with a Papist, side by side on the same gallows. The last words they spoke on this earth were to each other.”

  “I can well believe that,” MacCarthy said dryly, but then more slowly, and shaking his large head, “A Papist and a Presbyterian dying side by side.”

  “On the one gallows,” MacTier repeated. “They were United Men, and they took the same oath that I took and that you took. Mind you, there were many of our fellows who left the cause when they heard how the Protestants were being slaughtered in Wexford, and who can blame them? But there were still enough United Men to stand together and fight together, and those are the best Irishmen of all.”

  “Sure they may be Irish by the relaxed standards of Sligo, but you would all of you seem outlandish people in the county of Kerry. And what were the United Men doing when the poor Papists were driven out of Ulster in their thousands?”

  “That is a bitter truth,” MacTier said. “That did happen.”

  “You are damned right it happened,” MacCarthy said, “because I have seen the poor creatures in the hillside hovels of Mayo.”

  “But no United Man had art or part in that. You would believe me if you could but talk for an hour with Henry Joy.”

  MacCarthy shook his head. “I have heard of him from your friend Teeling, who came into Mayo with a French uniform and a gift for shouting out commands at people. Your Henry Joy was one man, and your Monroe makes two, and yourself may make a third. But there is little kindliness has ever been given to my people by the black Presbyterians of the north.”

  “Now you hold there. I am as good a Presbyterian as any man, and I will not hear them miscalled.”

  “You may be fighting the English, but it is yourselves you are fighting for and the devil take the hindmost, and the hindmost of all God’s creatures are the Papists of Ulster.”

  “Talk sense, man. We have been trying to fight a rebellion, and you cannot have a rebellion in one corner of a small island. How can you have one part of Ireland free and not the other part? Look, man. I wasn’t always a merchant. When I was a lad, my father was a crofter, and he was being squeezed dry by the Big Lord—”

  “The Big Lord,” MacCarthy said, catching up the phrase and repeating it.

  “It was but a name we all had for him. He was Lord Antrim, rightly speaking. But up and down the glen he was the Big Lord.”

  MacCarthy looked at me.

  “There is a Big Lord in Mayo,” I explained to MacTier.

  “And in Kerry as well,” MacCarthy said. “Lord Blennerhasset and Lord Kenmare and the rest of them. And there are scores of them in County Cork. There are Big Lords in every part of Ireland that I have seen, save the western islands, which are too poor to have need of one.”

  He picked up a jug and refilled our tumblers.

  “It was then that my brother Davey and I joined the Hearts of Oak, to force down the rents and stop the evictions, and that was years before there was any Society of United Irishmen. It was my introduction to public life, as you might say, and I was scarce nineteen then.”

  “Be damned if we did not do the very same thing in Munster with the Whiteboys,” MacCarthy said. “The very same thing.”

  “And if the middleman was a Presbyterian clergyman, do you think that stopped us? It did not.” MacTier held his tumbler briefly towards us, and drank off half its content
s.

  MacCarthy slapped the big bone of his knee and leaned forward. “There was a priest or two around Macroom who learned his manners from the Whiteboys.”

  MacTier removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “There is bad blood between your people and mine, and too much of that blood has been spilled upon cobblestones. Peep O’Day Boys and Orangemen and Defenders butchering each other. There is scant profit to be gained by sorting out the rights and the wrongs of it. I grew up hating Papists, I’ll not deny it, and do you know why? When my father was at last driven from his wee farm it was given to a Papist who could pay the high rent, and that happened in place after place. Do you mind a mountain in South Down called Slieve Gullion?”

  “I have heard of it. A mountain with the graves of the ancient race on its slope, and a lake at its summit, like a blue eye staring to heaven.”

  “I wouldn’t know of that,” MacTier said. “But I know this.” Now it was MacTier who refilled our tumblers. “The farms of Slieve Gullion’s braes are the bonniest in Ireland, south or north. And in the seventies, when Papists were allowed to take land upon the long leases, they went after the farms and drove up the rents.”

  “There had been a time when Papists held all those lands,” MacCarthy said, “before they were driven off by your people and sentenced to land little better than bog.”

  “Aye,” MacTier said. “A time hundreds of years ago. But when your bit of land is taken from you, you hate those who get it. So that we hate the Papists and the Papists hate us, and the Big Lords get the best rents they can wring from the lot of us.”

  “It was Lord Blennerhasset who did for us,” MacCarthy said. “By God, I have never seen that man but I hate him. He may be dead by now for all I know. It was a long time ago.”

  “There is a son,” MacTier said. “They all have sons.” He cleared his throat, and then, astonishingly, began to sing in a voice at once dry and moving. I remember only the last words of that song: “O the rents are getting higher and we can no longer stay, so farewell unto you bonny, bonny Slieve Gullion braes.”

  In the quiet that followed, MacCarthy put a large, freckled hand on his shoulder. “What savage, heretic name is it you have? Sam? Who would think to look at you that you could sing a song? All jinglejangle English words, mind you, but a proper song for all that.”

  There followed one of the wettest nights of my experience, and I do not write as a stranger to drink. When the jugs were empty, they were replaced by others. Presently O’Hart joined us, and he matched verses with MacCarthy for the better part of an hour. I could follow the Irish, although the references were obscure, but I have no head for poetry. It seemed to me that O’Hart greatly deferred to MacCarthy, addressing him with respect, and bringing forward his own verses with a show of diffidence. But MacCarthy was soon too befuddled to take notice of this. Tavernkeeper, schoolmaster, linen merchant, they were locked in the transient, treacherous companionship of whiskey and song.

  But although I matched them drink for drink, I sat a bit apart from them, locked in a puzzle of my own making.

  “It is all over in the north, is it not,” I said suddenly to MacTier.

  “It is,” he said presently, an owl peering through whiskey. “It has been over since Ballinahinch.”

  “And without the French, it would not have begun in Connaught. Without the French, we would have had mobs of Whiteboys. Ask this fellow,” I said, and nodded to MacCarthy.

  “But you have the French now,” MacTier said. “A thousand of them, and more promised. You have Castlebar.”

  MacCarthy sang, in English, “Oh, the French are on the sea, Says the sean bhan vocht.”

  “Because it suits them,” I said. “And we have a shattered Directory in Dublin. Half of it in prison.”

  “Oh, the French are in the bay,” MacCarthy sang. “They’ll be here at break of day, and the Orange will decay, says the Sean Bhean Bhocht.”

  “It is a puzzle to me, Mr. Elliott,” MacTier said, “how you have got yourself involved in such dangerous matters, a Mayo gentleman with a comfortable farm.”

  “I have taken the oath,” I said. “And I am bound by it.”

  “You need never have taken it,” MacTier said. “There are few enough of the gentry who did.”

  “A rotten parliament,” I said, my tongue thick with whiskey. “The good of the country drained off to England.”

  “You would risk your life for an improved parliament?” he asked sceptically. “You set a slender value upon it.”

  “If you don’t like my answers, you can go to hell,” I said. “I am descended from John Elliott, who helped strike the head off Charles, and I have no love for kings.” It was a braggart’s swaggering answer, and in fact I have always doubted that family legend.

  I had not given him a proper answer, but only a drunken boast from one tavern drinker to another. What had taken me to Castlebar and to the Sligo Coast? Was my concern for a piddling parliament indeed so great that I would sacrifice to it a good farm and a beautiful wife? The formulations of the Society, although I gave and give to them my full assent, are but abstract things less real than a blade of grass or a drop of blood. In that odd clarity which drink can give, a pale light at the centre of roiling mud, I perceived that I did not know myself or my motives. Worse, that I feared to seek them out.

  MacCarthy had turned to O’Hart, and was speaking or rather reciting to him, in a loud, impressive voice, heavy with incoherencies, jabbing at him with a long forefinger. I did not recognise the words; they might have been his own, or those of another poet. They filled the room, sodden with drink. MacTier sat with folded arms, looking first at me and then at MacCarthy, parts of a puzzle which no doubt he had solved.

  The rain had stopped by morning, and the ocean wind had swept the air. We stepped into a sparkling world, still wet with its scrubbing. The long grasses beneath our feet were a deep green, with drops of dew upon them, and the bay an expanse of blue stretching towards the empty sea. There was not a ship or boat in sight, save for two small fishing boats hauled up on the strand, sunlight glistening upon their skins of tarred hide. In the field beside us, separated by a low fence, cows were at pasture, brown, and red and white, and the small black cattle of the west. MacCarthy stared at the pasture with what I imagined was a poet’s eye, receptive and tranquil, and then walked over to the fence, where he leaned down and vomited, a graceless, coarsely built peasant, absurdly dressed. He cleaned his teeth with a tuft of grass.

  MacTier, mounted upon a serviceable, short-legged mare, shook hands with us formally. He appeared none the worse for his night’s excesses, a trim, self-sufficient sort of man, his eyes mild and even behind their spectacles. “We leave by different roads,” he said.

  “We have long been on different roads,” MacCarthy said, but he spoke now without malice. “You have a chest full of good songs, Mr. MacTier.”

  MacTier smiled. “If the world could be tied together by songs, it would have happened long ago. You have my good wishes, Mr. Elliott.”

  “We may see you in Sligo,” I said.

  “I doubt that,” he said.

  “It was doubted in Castlebar,” MacCarthy said.

  “Don’t count too much upon Castlebar,” MacTier said. “I have seen Ulster smashed.”

  “You were there?” I asked, surprised.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I paid a wee visit there last month. I had a great fondness for Henry Joy. It is all over in the north. All smashed.”

  “Farewell unto you bonny Slieve Gullion brae,” MacCarthy said.

  We watched MacTier ride back towards Sligo, a sedentary man jouncing along in discomfort.

  “That lad will be selling linen when the rest of us are dead and gone,” MacCarthy said. “There are some fellows have a great talent for that, like a talent for dancing, or thatching.” He looked around him. “A bit of cold water on our faces would do no harm at all. Do you see that strange shape of a mountain over there? It was on the side of Ben Bulben that t
he hero Diarmuid fought the enchanted boar, as is told to us by your wife’s friend Ossian. The tumbled one over there, in the other direction, is Knocknarea. They say that Queen Maeve is buried there, where you see that knob on the top.”

  “A long time ago,” I said.

  He nodded. “Stories made up a long time ago by fellows like myself, you couldn’t believe a word they said. The country people say that she can be seen at winter riding a great horse, a woman that no man could satisfy. Like Kate Cooper, unless I misjudge her greatly.”

  He walked to the water’s edge, and dashed water over his head. “God Almighty,” he said, shaking himself. “That stuff is as cold as a witch’s cunt.”

  “We can depend upon what Sam MacTier says,” I said. “He is an honest man.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis little call I have to buy linen. He has a good voice.”

  He was looking out to sea. All was empty and still in the cheerful light of morning. I would even have welcomed the sight of a fishing smack.

  Galway City, August 30

  The mansion of the Browne family stood facing Eyre Square, a tall, assertive town house of dark limestone, its windows intricately ornamented. Nicholas Browne, who built it in 1627, wanted a city mansion which would surpass those of the Blakes and the Martins, and the builders gave it to him. But Galway was then at the late climax of its long career as a coastal city trading with Spain and France. It was still the historical capital of Connaught, but what now was Connaught? The once-thriving city was lovely, fading, wild, and stricken. Although the mansions of the great Galway families still stood, they were only seldom used. Some had been shuttered for years, their owners gone, sunk down into the peasantry or vanished away, generations before, into the armies of France and Spain, Austria or Russia. And the mansions of others, the clever ones, the Martins and Brownes, were rarely opened. Their owners were off in their remote big houses, or else in London. The Atlantic winds were wilder here than in Mayo or Sligo, cutting over unused quays, in winter shrieking down the narrow streets.