The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Duggan and Cooper, Gog and Magog, striding across the island in their brutal and stupid cruelty, centuries old the two of them, tearing down abbeys, burning cabins, skewering warm bodies with sabre or pike. What business has my Owen with such men? He raises up cathedrals of sound, word linked to word as the stones of an arch are joined, a shaper, like those who built abbey and bridge. Poem and priory come to us from a world of quietness and order, and we stand mute before them. But he is less my Owen now, this swaggering fellow who has seen men butchered on Sion Hill, their deaths concealed behind his eyes. Often enough has he told me in better days of Patrick Lynch, the murderous Captain of Macroom, with the two of us marvelling from a safe distance at that man’s brutality. And now he traffics in the same wares, with song and poetry burned away from his path.

  I can see him now in Castlebar High Street, plundered tailcoat tightened by belt of wide leather lifted from some slaughtered dragoon. “Owen,” I long to call out to him. “Wait! Let us walk out towards Turlough down the leafy road. Let us take two hours together away from this noise, away from pikes and boastful killers.” But he stalks past me, unseeing, up Castlebar High Street, not the friend who sat by my candle to speak his verses on winter nights, but a far smaller creature, the Whiteboy Captain of Castlebar, in the dark, heavy boots of Patrick Lynch.

  12

  A LETTER FROM GEORGE MOORE,

  ESQUIRE, OF MAYO,

  TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

  EDWARD BARRETT,

  MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, WESTMINSTER

  Moore Hall

  2 September, 1798

  My Dear Barrett:

  London will by now have learned that a small French force has landed on the Mayo coast and has raised an army of native recruits. The northern portion of the county is in their hands, and they have for some days been in possession of Castlebar, the county town, which they captured after imposing an ignominious defeat upon generals Lake and Hutchinson. Were I inclined to pedantry, I would inform you that we have entered upon Year One of the provisional Republic of Connaught, of which through no desire of my own I have become a citizen.

  Of events beyond Mayo, I have no knowledge beyond that offered by rumour and conjecture. It is said that Lord Cornwallis, who has himself taken the field, has crossed the Shannon and waits at Tuam for reinforcements before advancing upon Castlebar. Upon the assumption that this is true and that mail coaches are free to move between there and Dublin, I shall send this letter to Tuam by messenger.

  Much that is grievous and much that is farcical have attended the establishment of our Connaught Republic, but my thoughts are taken up almost entirely by a most serious personal concern which is the occasion of my writing to you. Upon hearing of the French landing, young John, whom you will remember with affection, rode north and placed himself at the disposition of the rebel faction. He is at present in Castlebar, where he holds a position of authority with the new “government.” It speaks volumes that this youth, in his early twenties, a romantic and high-spirited boy, should be accepted by them as a weighty senator. I suspect that the French, for all their egalitarian protestations, are not free of the vanities of less advanced civilisations and have welcomed to their cause a gentleman of property and breeding. Aside from John, they have attracted only the most desperate of the peasantry, with a sprinkling of ignorant squireens, hedge schoolmasters, shopkeepers, and the like.

  I have several times visited him, and although I have been unable to persuade him to return to Moore Hall, I have nevertheless discovered the following facts, upon which his future and perhaps his life may depend. He has not taken up arms, and he played no part in the battles of Ballina and Castlebar. The “government” of which he is part is a kind of civic committee, necessary to the maintenance of order in the town of Castlebar and in the countryside. He has been vigorous in protecting the lives and property of loyalists, both Protestant and Papist, as doubtless many of them will stand ready to testify at the proper time. For he will of course face grave charges and will face them very shortly. I shall do all in my power to protect him from the consequences of his folly, but this will not be an easy task. His claim to gentility will offer no shield—as witness the summary hanging of Bagenal Harvey of Bargy Castle in Wexford, who was moreover a Protestant and powerfully connected with some of the leading families. I have several thoughts upon this matter, but it will be a most worrisome and difficult business, and before we have done, I may well be calling upon you for your assistance. And thus, to be candid, the present letter.

  I account it as certain that this rebellion will fail, unless it is swiftly reinforced by a second army from France, and a larger one. Wide stretches of the island remain loyal, and of those which are disaffected, all are in a state of unreadiness. It is precisely this certainty which moves me to regard our present circumstances as mysterious. Humbert, the French commander, does not have the reputation of being either a fool or an adventurer. Since his victories in the Vendée, he has been known as a shrewd and resourceful soldier, and he has threaded his way cautiously through the labyrinths of the Directory. And yet here he is with a bog to roam around in until such time as Cornwallis feels inclined to cut him down. I cannot account for the reasonings in Paris which sent him forth upon so foolhardy an enterprise, nor why he agreed to so perilous an undertaking. Certain it is, however, that Ireland is playing her accustomed role of maidservant to others.

  How many dramas of modern history have chosen for setting this Godforsaken bog, and always without any recompense for my unfortunate countrymen save further misery? What were the rebellions of Desmond and Tyrone but chapters in the struggle between Elizabeth and Spain, and thus of Reformation and Counterreformation? What were the wars of Cromwell here but a sideshow to the English Civil War, in which the divine right of Kings was challenged and overthrown? When James and William, the two kings, faced each other at the Boyne, the game was Europe, and Ireland but the board upon which the wagers were placed. The history of Ireland, as written by any of our local savants, reminds me of a learned and bespectacled ant, climbing laboriously across a graven tablet and discovering there deep valleys, towering mountains, broad avenues, which to a grown man contemplating the scene are but the incised names of England, Spain, France. Now the name of France appears a second time upon the table.

  In my present isolation, I am perforce an ant. London must surely have but one concern at the moment—Egypt and Buonaparte. The other day, I stood upon a rise of ground, facing the road. It was early morning, chill and with a heavy autumnal air. A small band of rebels, leaderless so far as I could judge, was trudging northwards, towards Castlebar, a few with muskets, and others with their long, cumbersome pikes carried at the slope. Frieze-clad, they might have stepped out of history. Speak to them, and they would answer in a language unknown beyond these islands, a tongue which locks them to the past as firmly as does the sea which surrounds them. Egypt, if they know the world at all, is the land where their infant Saviour was carried to avoid the wrath of Herod. For these wretches, there will be no Egypt, and General Lake will be their Herod. If I accosted them, so I thought for a moment as they moved through the mist, would they answer me with news of O’Neill, or of Cromwell, of armies gathering at Aughrim?

  As ever, Geo. Moore

  Killala, September 2

  The men hired by Kate Cooper to guard Mount Pleasant had drifted away, intimidated by the jeers and threats of the townspeople, but for the hours before the dawn of September second she was safe and so was the house. She brushed her thick black hair with the help of a small, brass-framed mirror propped against a table in one of the bedrooms. MacCarthy watched her from the bed, a blanket of heavy, rough wool drawn about him.

  “They will hang you at the end of all this,” she said, pulling the brush through the unruly hair. “From a gallows in this very town.”

  “You never know,” MacCarthy said mildly.

  “And you will deserve it.”

  “Very likely. Owen MacCarthy, the
judge will say, you have taken Kate Mahony to bed and for that you must hang. There is more woman than one would give a pull to the rope.”

  “My name is not Mahony,” she said. “ ’Tis Cooper. Have you forgotten that?”

  “Well now, Kate, you did a fair job of forgetting it yourself these past two hours. Sure all Mayo knows you as Mick Mahony’s daughter, and so they would call you were you married to Cooper or to me or to anyone else.”

  “To you? I thank you, no. Married to a hedge schoolmaster with a rope waiting for him.”

  “Give over that talk about ropes, would you?”

  “You are frightened, are you not? And well you might be. You may play the rake, but the gallows frightens you.”

  “It would frighten any man. If it comes I will scream with terror but it is far distant from this room and the two of us.”

  She put down the brush and turned around to face him. “You are a terrible fool, MacCarthy. They will hang you or they will shoot you in the fighting, one or the other. There are roads open to you that you could take out of Mayo.”

  “ ‘I’m a rogue and you’re another,’ ” he said in English, “ ‘and I’ll be hanged in Ballinrobe when you are hanged in Ballintubber.’ There is a vile, vulgar rhyme for you. In English they have all these boasts about rhymes and what great things they are, and see there how it works.”

  A fine figure of a woman in her nightdress, sensuous as always, and as always a touch of the slattern, the dress hanging loose from a shoulder. Candlelight flickered on pale skin, brown-freckled. Warm beneath the blanket, MacCarthy, naked, would have rested there forever.

  “A fine figure there,” he said, speaking his thought. She smiled, wide, generous mouth.

  “You are in grave danger yourself,” he said. “Many have been hanged this year for consorting with rebels.”

  “A queer kind of consorting it is that we have been at.”

  “You would think differently if you knew Latin.”

  “All that Latin going to waste,” she said. “The Latin and the poetry and the rest of it.”

  Soft muslin masked the wide-hipped body. In sunlight, her eyes reflected summer grasses. Now shadowed, hidden. A woman will give herself to you, belly pressed to belly, legs uplifted, wrapped, tearing fingers coiled in hair, moist open lips. Then move away, the body reclothed, hand and white arm combing with familiar skill disordered hair. And it was as though no mystery had been unlocked, no bridges crossed, no door swung back. With clothes they put on mystery again, each passionate word unsaid. And for her? What had he meant to her, unlikely stranger in a darkened room, unfamiliar form hulking above her?

  “Latin and the dear knows what else,” she said, “and what good has it ever done you? It will not save you now.”

  “Consort,” he said. “To keep company with. As we now keep company.”

  “It has always been a wonder to me that the language of the Mass can be used to speak of matters that are best left unspoken.”

  “Such matters are older than the Mass,” he said. “By hundreds of years. The Mass came late.”

  “You are a great scholar,’ she said. “A great scholar and poet without ten pounds to his name.” She looked at herself in the cloudy mirror, and then turned her head away abruptly. What had she seen there?

  “My fortune is yet to be made,” MacCarthy said. “I have great hopes for it.”

  “You have neither fortune nor future,” she said. “Not now.”

  “You never know,” he said. “You would be more comfortable and warm under the blanket, ’tis grand in here.”

  “ ’T was a kind thought you had to visit Mount Pleasant and see how was I faring with no man’s hand to protect me against lawless bands. You are a kindly man. That I will grant you.”

  “Small kindness. I came here in the hope that one thing would lead to the next, and at the end of it we would spend the night in the one bed.”

  “Sure I had no such thought as that,” she said, scandalised. “No married woman should have such thoughts. I am not one of those sluttish wives who bring grief upon their heads. I have a husband and a home, and I am content with them.”

  The monumental hypocrisy of women. Sitting there before him, body still warm from his. What need would she have to brush her hair at all, had it not become entangled with their passion, damp with their passion’s sweat. A woman can remember the bed without believing what she remembers. A great convenience, and man’s perpetual defeat.

  “You say you will make me strong wine

  From the frothy pools of the Boyne,

  Gold from the furze, silver from ferns,

  I will die, without sense, from your words.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” she asked him.

  “There was a woman, the wife of Hugh O’Rourke of Brefny, and Thomas Costello the poet was always after her. Then O’Rourke went off to fight the English, and the woman speaks this poem that he is to come back because she cannot resist Costello. To be sure, the woman didn’t write it at all, but Thomas Costello.”

  “How do you know that—”

  “How do I know it! Sure, Thomas Costello was a fine poet and what would a woman be doing, writing a poem?”

  Smile, half masked by candlelight. “What, indeed. And when did all this happen, if it happened at all?”

  “Ach, hundreds of years ago. In the days of the O’Neill rebellion. Come over here under the warm blanket before you freeze to death.”

  “Hundreds of years. Who cares about all that rubbish, save schoolmasters.”

  “ ’Tis a fine poem, all the same. By God, it is.”

  “That woman didn’t know the meaning of trouble. Look at myself, would you, with poor Sam locked away by the Whiteboys, and no man here to defend Mount Pleasant. They can come here when they choose, burning and screeching.”

  “I have a belief, Kate, that Mount Pleasant and yourself will come out of this unscratched. You are your father’s daughter.”

  “You are not helpful, are you, when a woman turns to you in her distress?”

  “I will have a word tomorrow with Ferdy O’Donnell, if you like, but ’tis little enough that Ferdy can do for one who lives this far from the town. If you are fearful, you had best go to the Palace, to Mr. Broome and his wife.”

  “And leave Mount Pleasant naked against the likes of Malachi Duggan? Before one of them can set a bare, dirty foot into Mount Pleasant, I will scratch the eyes out of Malachi Duggan’s head.”

  His father could tell one bit of turf from the next, as MacCarthy could sample whiskeys, crumbling the turf in his fingers, touching his tongue to it. Landless Brian MacCarthy, son of an evicted peasant, carrying his spade from one Kerry hiring fair to the next, his own son scuffling, dirty-skinned, behind him. Mick Mahony gouging and scrambling, toe of boot to a peasant’s arse, obsequious smile for landlord and magistrate. Kate Mahony, loose mouth and wild body wasted on drink-sodden Cooper, mistress of Mount Pleasant. It was land that they hungered for and not the passionate bed, but the poets spoke only of love, laments for the Stuarts, grief for the banished chieftains. He was as bad as the rest. The subjects suitable for poetry had been prescribed centuries ago.

  “Gold from the furze, silver from ferns.”

  “Your life is wasted,” she said. “You have thrown it away in your foolishness.”

  “I had little to throw.”

  “You had a school, that girl in the village, the poetry. You will have nothing now.”

  “By God, Kate, I am much of your opinion. What the hell am I doing at my time of life, swaggering around like some half-mounted squireen at a fair?”

  “It is your question. Let you answer it.”

  He moved to prop himself on one elbow, and held out his other hand towards her. She shook her head.

  “No more of that. It will be light soon. It was a very foolish thing I did with you tonight, Owen MacCarthy. God knows that it is my own husband should be with me now, and it is no fault of mine that he had to s
tuff himself into a red uniform and be captured by savages from France. It was to me that he owed his first duty, the selfish beast.”

  “It may have been the woman after all who wrote the poem, and not Costello at all.”

  “What does that matter?” she said impatiently. “A wild rover like yourself, taking the virtue from maidens and the honour from married women, you think you have the best of every bargain but you have nothing at all. No house that you can call your own, no woman’s love that you can claim a year from now. A month ago, from the window of this house, I heard a man in the field singing one of your songs. The songs may be remembered, but not the man who wrote them.”

  “What could be better than that, for your songs to be anonymous and remembered?”

  She rose suddenly and stood looking at him, loose fists pressed against hipbones. “You are a child, Owen, for all the size and the age of you and your dreadful life. God forgive me, I have gone to bed with a child.” She crossed the room and sat beside him on the bed. “Owen, have you never wanted anything?”

  “You,” he said. He ran the back of his hand down her hair.

  “Oh, to be sure. Or any other woman. That is not wanting something.” But she did not draw back from him.

  “I was born with nothing and I have nothing. That cannot be changed.”

  “That must be a terrible way to live.”

  “It requires practice.” He touched her cheek lightly.

  “Ah well,” she said, “it must be wonderful all the same to live without worrying and scheming.”

  “Wonderful indeed,” he said, drawing her head to his shoulder.

  Beyond them, the candle flickered upon the empty mirror.

  Ballycastle, September 2

  On September second, Cornwallis moved northwards from Tuam to Hollymount. A messenger from Longford brought word to Humbert from Hans Dennistoun that the midlands would rise in two days’ time. And John Moore again rode past Killala to visit the Treacys on the Ballycastle road.