The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Oh, Jesus,” the local man said, looking at the others.

  “It wouldn’t fire at all. It made a tiny click that you could hardly hear. And I turned it around in my hand and beat him about the head with the butt of it until he was dead.”

  “I knew O’Neill,” MacCarthy said.

  “The age on him, Owen! And as blind as I am myself. He was ninety, I swear to God. Did you know that he was once taken to Scotland to play before the gentlemen in the Highlands?”

  “I marvel you didn’t hear about the time he played before Brian Boru. You could learn the history of the world by talking to Art O’Neill and with himself in the centre of it.”

  “Well, so. I can only tell you what he told me. He told me that he had played for Murtogh Oge O’Sullivan. I don’t know was that true or not.”

  “That was true,” MacCarthy said. “I have heard that often. Murtogh’s purse was always open. He was a generous man.” Bonniest of the wild geese, quick-turning gull hovering over the coasts of France and Munster. When the English took him at last, he died hard, his body dragged at rope’s end from Beare to Cork City.

  “They were the great lads, were they not, himself and Art O’Leary. The last of our own gentry. After them, we had nothing left but our own muck. And they were killed, how long ago, twenty years, thirty?”

  HANDSOME, GENEROUS, AND BRAVE the tombstone in Kilcreagh calls O’Leary, shot down outside Macroom because an English shoneen coveted his horse. No sword could best O’Leary’s, no man could face his rages, no woman’s bed was barred to him. But it was his wife who wrote his great lament.

  “You have the right of it there,” MacCarthy said. But perhaps they had been but squireens, like Randall MacDonnell, dunghill swaggerers, glorified by legend.

  “That would be a story to tell,” Laverty said. “To have known Murtogh O’Sullivan.”

  “O’Neill was the man to tell it,” MacCarthy said.

  “Sure I never thought you had such a dislike of poor Art O’Neill.”

  “Dislike, is it? He was the best musician in Ireland, and he ended his days playing jigs in the kitchens of the big houses.”

  “ ’Tis said that he was never in Granard that he did not stop at Councillor Edgeworth’s, and well received he was.”

  “In the kitchen,” MacCarthy said. He drank off half his whiskey. “Well do I know the kitchens of the big houses. Boxty and a cup of ale.”

  “ ’Tis true for Dunphy,” Laverty said. “We are at the latter end of things.”

  Sudden laughter from the other end of the tavern. Greedy, they shared the boasts of the Granard captain. MacCarthy watched him spread wide his arms. Southwards, at Granard and Longford, peasants had swarmed upon the bands of yeoman cavalry, pikes ripping at reins, riders pulled to the ground. At tavern ease, an Odysseus at rest, the Granard captain rehearsed his triumphs. Crowding near him, their faces were twisted with excitement.

  “I went up into the house of Mr. Shaw of Castlehaven,” he said, “with eight or more fellows at my back. ‘Mr. Shaw,’ I said, ‘I am sorry to disturb your quiet evening, but we need arms for the Irish Republic, and to drive the stranger into the sea.’ They were all sitting there in the drawing room, the grandest room you have ever seen, himself and his wife and their daughter Anne, a quiet and a comely maiden. She was working at her embroidery. That room was furnished as though for twenty—tables and pictures on all the walls, a great case with hundreds of books in it. ‘You are making a great mistake,’ he said to me. ‘I don’t think so, Mr. Shaw,’ I said; ‘I don’t think so at all.’ And we took away with us three fowling pieces and a musket and this pistol with which I killed the yeoman.”

  “There are weapons enough for an army here in Drumshanbo,” a local man said. “At Mr. Forrester’s house. The Rise, it is called.”

  “They could be put to better use,” the captain said. Cowherd, belted and armed for battle. MacCarthy had seen him before, in old woodcuts from the Elizabethan wars, mouldering in Munster libraries. Rude wood-kerne.

  MacCarthy drained off his glass, and then put his hand on Laverty’s shoulder. “I am off now, Martin. One of these fellows will see you safely home.”

  “Wait!” Laverty said, startled. He reached up, and put his hand on MacCarthy’s. “You cannot set out now, Owen. ’Tis dark night.”

  “It will be light soon enough,” MacCarthy said. “Mind what I told you. Stay safe in your school. In the morning the Mayo men and the Frenchmen will be here, and after them the English horsemen. They are fierce cruel men, those horsemen.”

  “There is no one walks the roads in the darkness,” Laverty said. “I would not walk them myself and I am blind.”

  “I would like to reach my own country,” MacCarthy said. “I would like to cross back over the Shannon, and make my way down into Kerry. And instead I will walk to Granard. ’Tis a great fool I am.”

  “To Granard!” Laverty said, in a sharp whisper. “You are mad indeed! That fellow there has come from Granard and you have heard his talk. There is nothing in Granard but red murder.”

  “There are more roads than one into Kerry,” MacCarthy said. “And my luck is holding strong.”

  “Fools have no luck,” Laverty said fiercely. “ ’Tis a long road indeed that would take you to Kerry through Longford.”

  “ ’Tis a long road I travelled here from Mayo,” MacCarthy said. “I saw the first, and I may as well see the last.”

  “Your luck is that you have your sight and your life,” Laverty said. “And you would be a fool indeed to imperil them.”

  “Never fear,” MacCarthy said. “I will hide myself from harm, and I will one day send a note to you from Tralee.”

  “I will not be waiting for it,” Laverty said. “And if it came I could not read it.”

  “You have prize scholars to do your reading for you,” MacCarthy said. He lifted Laverty’s hand from his and stood up.

  Laverty made a lunge to hold him, but he stood back.

  “He is a blackhearted hoor,” a local man said to the Granard captain. “Mr. Forrester of The Rise. And well have I cause to know it. He is my own landlord. Every quarter day he has us pay the rents to him in his kitchen, and he bids us all come on the same afternoon, and stand in a long row that stretches from the door down the length of the yard. One by one he summons us into the kitchen, and he sits there behind the table, and we stand, with our hats in our hands. If there is a new thatch to the cabin he knows of it, and the rent is raised accordingly.”

  “He is not in his kitchen tonight,” the captain said. “He is sitting shivering in his drawing room. ‘I am sorry to disturb you in your drawing room’ is what you should say to that fellow.”

  “Ach, sure old Forrester,” another man said. “He is not the worst. When his son came of age wasn’t there a great feast day, and people came from miles around. There were barrels upon barrels of porter in the barn, and by nightfall we were all drunk. There is a folly in the park to commemorate the occasion. ‘Nicholas Forrester upon the attainment of his majority,’ it says. ‘The pride of both parents and an object of veneration to their tenants.”

  “Object of veneration me arse,” the first man said. “There are two girls or three in Drumshanbo could tell a different story.”

  “Stonemasons were brought over from Boyle to build the folly. Elegant craftsmen they were.”

  The Granard captain laughed, and put his arms around their shoulders.

  “All my life I heard about Art O’Neill,” MacCarthy said to Laverty. “And then one night I saw him in the Macroom tavern, putting on the airs of a lord, and so drunk that he spilled more than he swallowed.” But when he took the harp from its case, he showered the room with coins of silver and gold.

  “ ’Twas not of Art O’Neill we were talking.”

  “ ’Tis but a small world that has been left us to live in,” MacCarthy said. “And I think it is ending.”

  “We have had a good night of it,” Laverty said. “But I am frightened no
w. I can see nothing.”

  MacCarthy bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then walked away from him. As he made his way through the crowded room, the Granard captain caught sight of him.

  “Master!” he shouted. “ ’Tis over into Granard you should go. There are prodigious spectacles there. The army of the Gael has swept over Longford like a mighty wave.”

  “ ’Tis little that the men of the midlands know about waves,” MacCarthy said.

  A black night. He could barely make out the cabins opposite him, bridge, river, road. A light rain was falling. He walked to the bridge, and stood upon its hump. He heard water beneath him, the Shannon escaping to the sea. There were so many roads in Ireland that a man’s fate was certain to be awaiting him upon one of them. What man had twisted away from his fate more cleverly than Paddy Lynch the Whiteboy, at the end of things hiding like a wolf in the caves of the Boggeraghs, raging down at night upon the outlying big houses? And all that time, fate was waiting for him in his own Macroom, feared and hated twin, a platform built upon the square beside the market house, a gallows and a bit of rope.

  In that town, MacCarthy had heard Art O’Neill play, a man old as history, blind, thin white hair falling to his shoulders, bent to his harp, fingernails long and hard as talons. Prodigal with his music, he filled the silent tavern with its notes. They spilled into the streets of Macroom, sheltered town beneath hard hills, moved dark upon dark night past Lynch’s gibbeted corpse, tar-coated, heavy in irons. Crafty taloned fingers swept past lamentation to jig, swift and playful as feet on earthen floor. Here, in this town, the hills of Munster rose beneath the blazing blue of MacCarthy’s memory. Soft as the breasts of women, they arched towards invisible oceans. Hands pressed hard against hard stone, his fingers sensed the bridge’s curve. Remembered music struck upon the ear of his imagination, mingled with the sound of water flowing beneath his feet. The sounds joined themselves within a single feeling, transient and powerful.

  He pushed himself away from the low parapet, as though shoving back a powerful weight. Farewell to you, River Shannon, he said aloud, and the sound of his voice drove the notes of remembered music back into nothingness. A world vanished with them, his memories of O’Neill’s gnarled fingers, the legends of O’Leary and O’Sullivan, lost princes of an impossible past, the voices of poets in a winter tavern, summer blossoming from the hard roots of language. Minute by minute, gilt hands upon the white dial of an alien, invisible church swept away his past, rich world of memory and feeling. He turned away from the bridge, and walked past the tavern. The flames of candles flickered behind its single window, uncertain and pale. Then, with his back to the south-flowing river, he set off upon the road to Granard.

  16

  Moore Hall, Early September

  In these final days of golden summer, Moore discovered in work his only solace. His “History of the Girondists” stretched from the fourth to the fifth of the tall, cloth-bound manuscript books in which it was contained, and then into the sixth. Their rise to power, their precarious hold upon it, the utter ruin of their fall already lay sealed in the past, stuff for scholarship and speculation, and yet they had helped to usher in this new, incomprehensible world. The ideals to which they had held were ones shared by most liberal Englishmen; their fate had been actual and devastating. One by one they mounted the steps to the guillotine, actors upon the stage of events no longer. Overturners of a world, they had been destroyed by its convulsions. The glitter of their rhetoric had not saved them, nor their brief alliances with the mobs of Paris. A pageant of events—the King’s flight to Varennes, the September massacres, the resplendent oratory of the Convention, the trials and executions—lay ready for the hand of the historian. But Moore was in search of meanings and coherences beneath this surface. Understand one part of the pattern and you would understand it all. The Terror, the fall, first of the Gironde, then of Danton, then Robespierre, the corrupt and fear-coarsened Directory, Buonaparte gaunt and hungry for glory, even Humbert and his army of Mayo peasants.

  As though obsessed, but in truth deadening his mind against his own grief and worry, he plunged into the schemes and quarrels of the dead. Wanderer in thought beside the quays of Paris, seeker of its political clubs hidden in ill-lighted streets, he fled from Mayo. He opened his mind to the weight and gravity of Paris, a narcotic strong and subtle. The affairs of his estate, which he had always taken pride in conducting without the assistance of an agent, were at the moment a bewildering compound of the ordinary and the abnormal. With a wrench, furious at the necessity, he would give his occasional attention to them. There was a heavy harvest to be sent to market, along roads swollen with military traffic. Peasant women would appear at his office to explain that harvesters, their husbands and sons, were “away,” and perhaps would add, “ ’Tis well you know that yourself, sir.” He knew it well indeed, for he had already taken the first steps, in letters to Dublin and London, which might, with great luck, save John’s life.

  Twice a week he visited his brother, jogging along the narrow road into Castlebar, a slender man impeccably dressed, buff trousers and dark brown tailcoat, linen white as parchment at wrists and throat. Acquaintances would meet him on the road and rein in to speak, but Moore, his pale face impassive, would nod politely and touch the brim of his hat with his whip. It was a long whip of braided black leather which he carried coiled, his only concession to the troubled times. He would not speak with them, for he courted neither their sympathy nor their malice. The Moores, save for John, were a stiff and undemonstrative family. The old merchant of Alicante had governed them in silence, silence had cloaked his love for Lough Carra and his pride in the house which stood facing it. Catholic gentry of the penal days, they had made silence both shield and weapon, shaping it for their own purposes. Bred into the bone, tougher and more tenacious than London manners and Whiggish politics, the silence of the century which followed the defeat at Aughrim. But in Moore it was joined to his contempt for fools, his innate disdain.

  Riding into Castlebar was a painful duty. The evidences of the battle had vanished, together with all signs of its occupation by the rebels and the French. British troops and companies of yeomen patrolled the streets, flushed with the prospect of victory and smarting under their earlier defeat. In the grey town of gaunt, ugly shops and warehouses, Protestants could once again be distinguished by their bearing and their stride. It was a garrison town. Somewhere to the south, a final battle with the rebels was shaping, but what mattered to Castlebar was that Killala and the lands around it still lay in rebel hands. Small bands of suspected rebels were each day herded into the town—five or six unshaven peasants, black hair or red hair matted above rough, harsh-boned faces. Wide eyes which had stared upon mountains and brown, empty bogland, the eyes of Belmullet, moved in sullen terror across shopfronts, courthouse, gaol. Moore, sitting impassively upon his chestnut gelding, saw one batch of them being shoved into the crowded gaol. Troopers marched before them and behind, sweating into their heavy red uniforms, obscene, cheerful men.

  Seven bodies swung from the rough-timbered gibbet outside the gaol, their bodies dragging. Two soldiers stood on guard beneath them, shoulders resting against the posts. The windows of the gaol looked past the gibbet to the commons, a wide triangle of grass crisscrossed by paths. Castlebar had learned to avoid sight of the seven dark faces. Merchants and soldiers walked the paths with eyes averted. But Moore, on each of his visits to town, forced himself to stare at them. They faced the common, grotesque and hideous, masks of a shameful death.

  John was imprisoned alone, in a cell whose high, barred windows looked upon the green. Prison had not changed his fair skin, the brightness of eye, but it had stilled his nervous eloquence, his impulsive gestures. He seemed feverish to his brother, but insisted that he was well in body. But he was ill in spirit, George knew.

  They would spend a quarter-hour without talking, George perched upon the low, three-legged stool, John facing him upon the narrow straw bed.

&nbs
p; “It is horrible,” John said. “I cannot bear to look out upon the grass or people passing by. The bodies are always there, hanging from that monstrous gibbet.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Who can tell?” John shrugged. “The gaolers will not tell me. I cannot see their faces. What sort of trial had they? Who are they?”

  “If you wish me to, I will find out their names.”

  John buried his face in his hands, then raised it again. “They may have done nothing at all. Poor country lads seized up by the yeomanry. Or perhaps they were lads to whom I spoke and gave encouragement.”

  “Yes,” Moore said, “perhaps they were.”

  “There are scores of them in the cells below, penned in together like animals, quarrelling over scraps of food.”

  “You are entitled to special consideration,” Moore said. “You were President of the Republic of Connaught.”

  “Some nights I fall asleep,” John said, “and when I wake I think for a moment that I am at my room in Moore Hall. I open my eyes to look at the shelves of books, the bright flowers of the wallpaper. Instead I see this.”

  “There is reason for us to hope,” Moore said. “I have written to certain friends.”

  “They had no friends,” John said, nodding towards the high, barred window.

  “No,” Moore agreed. “They did not.”

  “Is it just that they should hang and I should go free?”

  “I was not speaking of freedom,” Moore said. “The charges which will be brought against you will be very grave indeed. Hanging charges. Our one hope is that we can manage a sentence of banishment. But then perhaps, a few years later, when this escapade has been forgotten. . . .” He shrugged and recrossed his long legs. The waning sunlight fell upon his polished boot.