But when they turned to walk back into the house, he surprised her by putting his arms around her shoulders, and held her without speaking. “John has friends,” he said at last. “You will see. We will both of us see.”
Two days later, she saddled one of the two mares that the French had left to them and rode north of Ballycastle to Grace MacDonnell. On the road she passed a group of men, eight or ten of them, three with pikes, and one with a sash tied about his waist, and a pistol stuck into his belt. When they recognised her, they touched their hands to their foreheads. The year of liberty. “You are as safe upon this road as in your own house, Miss Treacy,” the man with the pistol said. “ ’Tis all part of the Republic from Killala to the sea.” The one word of English, republic, fell loose and awkward from his mouth. “Is that what we have here?” she asked him, “a republic?” “ ’Tis what it is called,” he said; “it means that we have and hold the land.” “That is as good a word as any so,” she said. “The whole land will soon be ours,” he said, “from the centre to the sea. A great army of the Gael is rising up in the midlands, and they will join with our lads who went off from Mayo and the French with their great death-dealing cannon.” “That will be a grand day entirely,” she said, and raised her short, braided crop to the brim of her velvet cap. “It will that,” he said.
“Eight spalpeens and a farmer with a sash tied around his fat belly,” she said to Grace MacDonnell. “And a new word to add to their storehouse of English. Republic. I declare to God they will drive me mad with their words.”
“It is not a word that should come as a stranger to yourself at least,” Grace said, amiably but with a faint tartness. “There is not a proclamation has been issued without the word, and John’s name at the foot of it as President. President of the Republic of Connaught.”
“Proclamation,” Ellen said. “President. ’Tis well that the study of Latin has always been practised in this barony.”
Without its horses, the rich dungy smell of its stables, the MacDonnell farm had lost much of its character. Ellen sat with Grace in Grace’s bedroom, facing each other across a small table spread with teapot, a pot of hot water, plates of buttered bread, a jampot.
“An army of the Gael is gathering in the midlands, the fellow with the sash said. There will be a republic from the centre to the sea. Some line from a tavern ballad, but he spun it out as though he had coined it upon the instant.”
“He is not alone in saying that,” Grace said. “You hear that said upon every side, and pray God that it is true. Poor Randall is off there somewhere in the midlands, and most of the fellows from the MacDonnell lands with him. You should have the same prayer upon your own lips. If the army of the Gael is triumphant in the midlands, the doors of the Castlebar gaol will fly open, and John will come riding back to you.”
“They will be crushed in the midlands,” Ellen said. She held her cup carefully in her hands and looked down at it. “The soldiers of the English King will shatter them, and then in their good time they will march north upon Tyrawley. It requires but little thought to know what will happen in the weeks ahead. The English will not let this island fall from their hands for the sake of a thousand Frenchmen and a few thousand peasants with pikes. There is the truth of the matter and the rest is all words and proclamations and green banners. A child or a schoolgirl could tell you that, if she put her mind to the matter for an hour.”
“I have never before heard you speak such nonsense,” Grace said, “and your voice as firm as though you were reading from the catechism. I doubt not that you have learned all this from your father. ’Tis in a different world that your father lives, and ours is a new one. My own father was as bad. They are like the elks from the olden times that turf cutters turn up in the bogs, great bones that would do credit to an elephant. You did not stand at the gates here as I did when Randall rode off with a hundred men behind him, and two enormous pistols strapped to him, and the sword that a MacDonnell carried at Aughrim.”
Much else has been turned up from the bogs by the loys of the turf cutters, Ellen thought, brooches and bracelets of dark twisted gold, bones wedded to stiff, decayed cloth, fragments of rich raiment, swords of iron so rusted and brittle that the curved blades of the loys shattered them.
“There is no new world that is begun with a sword a hundred years old,” she said. “And from a battle that was lost.”
“You will see,” Grace said. “The boots of the Protestants are off our necks at last, and off they will stay. It was our country once, and it will be so again.” She rested her hands upon her knees and spoke in Irish. “The people of the Gael have risen up.” She was a small girl, unlike her brother, but she had his swagger, and although she spoke the words fiercely, her brother’s grin was behind them, reckless with easy confidence.
“They have risen up like a wave,” Ellen said quietly, “and like a wave they are falling back to the sea. The English have retaken all of Connaught from Athlone to Ballina. Castlebar lay empty before them, and they have filled its gaol with rebels. My own John is there awaiting trial. And when they have scattered our fellows in the midlands, they will march and ride into Tyrawley, and with Dennis Browne at their side. And there is your republic for you and your proclamation and your army of the Gael. It is your English that you should be practising at now, for it is English that will give out the rules and laws and regulations in Connaught as it has done since the days of Aughrim and earlier than Aughrim.”
“You have become a great little strategist of war, Ellen,” Grace said in English. “I marvel that they have not made you a captain or a colonel or a general itself, in a handsome riding habit of lobster red, you are that fond of the Protestants and the English army.”
“I am as good a Catholic as you are yourself, Grace MacDonnell,” Ellen said, her tone cross but her voice even and quiet. “And I do not care twopence for England or for the English King. I am as Irish as you are, whatever that may mean, and well do you know it.” But what did it mean? She remembered her mother reading English poetry, English novels, a wronged baronet, a noble English earl, an infant, exchanged in the cradle with a foundling, great balls in London, the great English lords and ladies at watering places, Bath and Weymouth. “They live in the great world,” her mother told her, respectful and marvelling. “London must be like Paris, but the people there are more like ourselves.” But her father, travelling southwards toward Roscommon, towards a girl he had never seen, had carried arms forbidden him by English law. Art O’Neill, last and greatest of the harpers, had flung his notes into a Roscommon farmhouse, dignified as “castle” because the once-royal O’Conors dwelled there, an old man, blind, fingernails ridged and hard as horn. “I am as Irish as you are,” she said again to Grace MacDonnell. “Whatever that may mean.”
“ ’Tis simple enough what it means to me this summer,” Grace said. “And ’tis simple enough to the O’Dowds and the Geraghtys and the Blakes of Barraclough, and to Randall off somewhere in the midlands and to your own John in Castlebar gaol, and to those fellows with pikes that you met upon the road.”
“Oh, indeed yes,” Ellen said. “The army of the Gael has risen up, as was foretold in the poetry of O’Brudair and O’Rahilly and O’Sullivan and MacCarthy, the schoolmaster in Killala.”
Suddenly Grace grinned, and her face was lightened by an irrelevant mischief. She lowered her voice, “More has risen up in recent weeks than the army of the Gael, if there is any truth to the tale that is being told everywhere between Killala and Ballycastle. A common fellow who holds a cabin on the Cooper land has been giving out in the taverns of Killala that Owen MacCarthy has spent the night at Mount Pleasant, and with Kate Mahony and himself in the same bed. There has been a rising up indeed, if you take my meaning.” For decorum’s sake, she put her fingers to her lips, but they did not hide the grin.
“Grace MacDonnell,” Ellen cried, suddenly shocked into the present. Her father had the right of it, the MacDonnells were but coarse squireens, their life a life
of stables and breeding, fox hunts and beagling, and Randall with a servant girl to attend to the needs of his body. “I am shocked and surprised that you would repeat the gossip carried by some common fellow into a Killala tavern.”
“But you took my meaning all the same,” Grace said. “Sure what is there in what I said that should cause you surprise? There is not a woman in the barony does not know that Kate Mahony brought Sam Cooper to the altar by first climbing into his bed, and women like that do not change. It is their nature.”
“That gives you no cause to repeat the story. Not even to a friend.”
“Go to God,” Grace said, laughing. “You will next be telling me that Owen MacCarthy has taken vows of chastity, and is walking the earth like a Franciscan. Sure there is no woman in the barony safe from that one, maid, wife, or mother.”
“More nights than one he has spent at Bridge-end House, and he has treated me always with the greatest respect, and with great delicacy of language.”
“And that is because of the respect he has for your father, with his cases of books and his boxes of poetry written out for him by the old ones, O’Rahilly and the others. And he has been as good as gold with me, butter would not melt in his mouth. And that is because if he so much as put a hand upon my shoulder, Randall would be after him with a whip and a cudgel. You know Owen MacCarthy’s reputation as well as I do myself, and if you do not you should make enquiries of Judy Conlon in the Acres of Killala or the hired girl at Ferdy O’Donnell’s. Sure MacCarthy is a poet, is he not, and they all have a name for the one vice. That and the drink.”
“Even so,” Ellen said uneasily. She would look a perfect fool if she denied that truth.
“And if he had Kate Mahony in Sam Cooper’s bed, then more power to his arm is my final view upon that subject,” Grace said.
“Another victory for the army of the Gael,” Ellen said. “But for all that, it is a sin either to give scandal or to repeat it.”
“It will not be the last victory,” Grace said. “We will see Randall riding back in triumph to Tyrawley, and all the other fellows with him. They will be the cocks of the walk in Tyrawley, as they should be by rights in their own country. And all that mean gang of yellow-faced Protestants who have lorded it over us will be brought low into the dust.”
Ellen stood up, and walked to the window. Empty stables, and a courtyard smeared with dried dung. “Perhaps that is why Randall rode off, but it is not at all what John had in mind. He wanted a free country, and all of us living together in peace, Catholic and Protestant and Dissenter.” The fierceness of Grace’s words echoed in her ears, and her own sounded foolish and flat, drained of John’s fervour.
“Little does John know of Mayo,” Grace said, “and his brother knows less. Either they will rule Mayo or we will, and that is the long and the short of it. Randall brought home one of John’s proclamations, and I declare to God I have never read such windy nonsense. All about the rights of man and the end of religious animosities which have so long divided us and all the rest of it. Randall started out to read it to us, but he couldn’t go on for the fit of laughter he was in, and mind you Randall has a great liking and respect for John.”
She walked with John along Bridge-end House’s leafy avenue, and they stood upon the bridge, the stream beneath them shallow and quick-moving. Pebbles and stones, smooth-polished, rested upon the stream’s sandy bed. “I would rather talk about us,” she told him. “What else have we been talking of?” he asked her; “ourselves and the kind of country in which we will be living.” “Bother the country,” she said; “what need that matter to us?” “It matters to me,” he said; “you will see. Women take no interest in such matters.” “In you,” she said; “I take a great interest in you. All those words. When they have all been spoken, the country will be the same, but you will be dead or in prison.” “If we lose,” he said. “You will lose, she said; “it drives me to despair that you cannot see that.” The words of men were polished stones upon a riverbed, opaque and lifeless. Words drown them, drag them beneath the water’s surface.
Still standing by the window, she said quietly to Grace MacDonnell, “I wish with all my heart that I had given myself to John. I wish that I had given him my body.”
“Ellen!” Grace cried. It was her turn now to be startled and shocked. “Whatever has possessed you to put such a wicked thought into your mind!”
“You have small need to ask such a question,” Ellen said. “He is in Castlebar gaol, and he is likely enough to be hanged there, or shipped off to some place where I could not be with him for years and years. And we have never known each other.”
“I should hope not!” Grace said. “A young woman who would do such a thing is lost to all honour forever. What other man would have you then if he knew of it, and if he did not you would have practised a great deception upon him and the marriage would go wrong from the start. There is great wisdom in the laws of the Church.” She added, as an afterthought, “And great virtue as well, of course.”
“Much does that matter to the way I feel,” Ellen said. Her tall, straight back turned towards Grace, she hugged her elbows tightly and stared down into the bare, sunlit courtyard.
“It is a natural enough thought,” Grace admitted. “But none the less sinful for all that.”
“My father thinks that George can somehow get him spirited away to North America or to Spain, and I could join him there, however great the distress to my father. But I have no confidence in that. When the English win, there will be a great reckoning, and ’tis small thought they will have for mercy. They will come with vengeance in their hearts, as they have always come.”
Grace stood up and crossed the small room to stand beside her at the window. “Will you not give over such notions? You have not listened to a single word I have said. It is for the English that the day of reckoning has come, the English and the Cromwellians. And long overdue it is.”
Ellen turned towards her, and smiled. “That will be a grand day entirely,” she said, as she had said to the farmer with the sash and the pistol. What good was there in talking to any of them, her father or the men on the road or even Grace MacDonnell, who had since childhood been her closest friend? What good had there been in talking to John, his words glittering and brightly painted, like the toys of children? She was alone with her grief and her love, and her certainty that the future was there for everyone to see, but no one save herself would look at it. If men lived among words and illusions and vanities, so too did Grace MacDonnell, not to mention Judith Elliott, that lovely and exquisite little ninny to whom Malcolm Elliott was wed, and who doubtless had sent him off into battle as Grace had sent Randall, with words empty and glowing.
“It will indeed,” Grace assured her. “You will see.” They all told her that she would one day see, as though she were somehow blinded, but before them lay the whole world as it did to Adam and Eve in the dreary and sonorous poem of which her mother had been so fond.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps I will see.” But she saw only her feelings, only her feelings were real to her, grief and foreboding, and her longing for John.
Later, as she sat the short, heavy-muscled mare in the courtyard, Grace rested a hand upon her arm. “Are you not a dreadful girl,” she said smiling, “that for the sake of passion you would turn yourself into a Kate Mahony and for passion’s sake let John Moore give you a tumble in the hay.”
“Not passion,” Ellen said soberly. “I cannot give a word to it, but that is how I feel. I regret bitterly that he has not known me.”
“I have often wondered what will it be like,” Grace said.
“Which of us has not,” Ellen said, returning the smile. “It is one of the few questions in life that gets itself answered, one way or the other.”
“And a small enough answer it must be,” Grace said, “or we would hear more spoken about it by the married women.”
At the gate, through which Randall had ridden with the sword from Aughrim and with the m
en from the MacDonnell lands behind him, Grace called out, “Remember now, the army of the Gael has risen up.” But Ellen rode off without turning her head to reply.
She met no one at all on the ride home to Bridge-end House. The road was as empty and quiet as though night had fallen, but it was the bright sunlight of late afternoon, which at that season holds hill, field, and meadow in suspension beneath a film of translucent varnish, as in the old Dutch painting which hung in the parlour of the O’Dowds at Enniscrone. Her observant eye was attentive to detail, an unfilled field, a pasture of small black cattle beneath low-branched trees, a lone thornbush. An empty cabin beside the road. The men perhaps were off with the rebels, but where were the women? She remembered then: a farm without women, two brothers, silent, hard-jawed men, broken into taciturnity by the thin, bitter soil. In a field beyond the cabin, a wide slab of black slate resting upon two stones: a Mass rock from the old penal days, her father had told her. On Sundays peasants had gathered there, huddled together, the women black-shawled; before their eyes a priest, half outlaw, changed bread to flesh, wine to blood. It was different now, he had explained to her, a chapel in Killala and one in Ballycastle, Mass celebrated openly by priests ordained in Ireland. History intruded upon the Dutch painting, shattered the varnish; beneath its cracked surface objects moved and changed. She hated history. History had taken John away from her.
On a rise of ground from which she could see the distant bay, she stopped and sat motionless, the reins slack in her thin, capable hands. The bay was empty, not a sail or a hull in sight, the water lifeless and grey. History had come to them upon those waters, three foreign ships riding at anchor, filled with men, muskets, cannon. History had come ashore at Kilcummin strand, watched by fishermen standing beside their huts. Poetry made actual. Not her mother’s, not Goldsmith or The Seasons by Mr. Thomson. “Now the soft hour of walking comes for him who lonely loves to seek the distant hills.” That other, older poetry inscribed on sheets of parchment in her father’s study, the black letters of an alphabet remote from English, with prophecies of ships from France, gold from Spain, the deliverance of the Gael. History, poetry, abstractions, words which had transformed and shattered her world. But for all those words, the world remained, tougher and more ferocious than language. A world of bogs upon which men died, their bellies ripped open, of black gibbets, of prison doors which words lacked the power to unlock. Erect, thin-shouldered, wiser than her years, wiser than her father or her lover, she stared at the bay as at an enemy which she lacked the power to fight or to resist.
The Year of the French Page 55
