The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Carrick to Castlebar, September 17

  Dennis Browne travelled back to Mayo with General Trench’s army, and Trench, a less exacting judge than Cornwallis, found him a most likable man, every inch an Irishman of course, as good-humoured as the day is long, full of wit both droll and dry, but with flashes of shrewd common sense. His language was a delight, so like that of Sir Lucius O’Trigger in The Rivals, but of course Sheridan himself was Irish and was said to have the very devil of a brogue.

  He put the question to Browne as they rode along in the open carriage. Behind them and before, the cavalry clattered northwards along a straight coach road. Far behind them tramped the infantry, and behind them the baggage, which included five prisoners in a cart, being brought to Castlebar for trial.

  “Sheridan?” Browne said. “Not that one. Wasn’t he schooled at Whyte’s Academy in Grafton Street, where every bit of brogue is flogged out of you, the way you would take a crop to a stupid servant? Where we are going is where you will hear proper speech, with the shamrocks growing out of it.”

  “Shamrocks growing out of it,” Trench repeated. “You have a good mastery of Irish speech yourself, Mr. Browne.” The Honourable Dennis Browne, Member of the Irish Parliament, Sheriff of Mayo, Lord Altamont’s brother.

  “And why shouldn’t I have? It is my own country, Mayo. We have been there since the days of Elizabeth.”

  “More Irish than the Irish themselves now?”

  “That is it, General. There you have it.” He thrust out a short, muscular arm, pointed with short forefinger to a fortified house on the hillside, half hidden by plantation. “That fellow over there, Geoffrey Rodgers of Rodgers Hall. His people came over with William, a hundred years ago. They’re only trotting along behind the Brownes. Give us another century and we’ll have made good Irishmen of them.” Dennis Browne, Master of Arts of Oxford University, Greek scholar, author of several florid, graceful essays in support of Catholic Emancipation.

  “I freely confess, Mr. Browne, that I find you a delightful but baffling people.”

  “Why shouldn’t you, then? Sure we baffle ourselves. We are the puzzle and perplexity of the world.”

  “So much warmth and generosity, a cheerful and deferential peasantry, and then this black, murderous affair.”

  “Ah, but that is a different matter, General, a different matter entirely. There is an ugly and murderous side to us as well. You are a clever man to have spotted it.” He glanced sideways at Trench. Had he gone too far? No. You couldn’t go too far with this one. “It works its way through our bodies, like poison, and breaks out upon our skin in great ugly boils.”

  “Perhaps a surgeon should take a lancet to you.”

  “Isn’t that what you are doing yourself? Surgeon General of Ireland and the best since William.”

  “Surgeons cure very little,” Trench said. Thoughtful: the wise soldier. “A physician is required, who heals with medicines. Bloodletting is a sorry cure at best.”

  “True for you, General. True for you.” The underlying causes of Irish discontent: a general with a pamphlet in him. Why not? Burgoyne wrote a play.

  “What are your own thoughts upon the subject, Mr. Browne? Here you have been letting a stranger dogmatise to you upon your own people.”

  “Devil the stranger, General, devil the stranger. You are as welcome as the first spring flowers.” Browne reached a hand outside the carriage. Fingers strayed across dark, glossy wood. “A few weeks ago, I was beyond in Galway, shivering beneath the Atlantic winds, and Mayo naked to the rebels. Without the British army, you would have had a bloodbath in this country. Much good would yeomen and militia have done. The Parliament in Dublin can spout and orate as it pleases, but it is always the British army that sets matters to rights here. In the heel of the hunt.”

  “You are a member of that parliament, Mr. Browne?”

  “I am indeed. And my brother as well.” Different doors: House of Lords, House of Commons. Great grey building of massive and graceful curves, facing Trinity College. “Half a bow shot from the College, Half the world from wit and knowledge.” Jonathan Swift. Ambitious and poor, a shadowy connexion with Sir William Temple, pride gnawing at him like the Spartan’s fox. England offered power, influence, friends. In the end they ditched him, sent him back here to moulder in Saint Patrick’s. Fit punishment.

  “An answer, Mr. Browne,” Trench demanded cheerfully. “Unriddle your country for a poor benighted Englishman.”

  “He would be a wise man who could do that,” Browne said. “Lord Cornwallis fancies he has the solution, I suspect. A union with England.”

  “Indeed!” Trench said. “I have heard that rumoured. Has he told you that?”

  “A hint or two,” Browne said. “No more. A downy bird, Lord Cornwallis.”

  Trench nodded judiciously. “It seems the best solution, does it not? A union of our sister kingdoms. It worked once before—it was the salvation of Scotland.”

  A master of irony, perhaps. Browne stared at him, speechless.

  “Not an easy task, though,” Trench said. “Not all of your countrymen take your own large view of the subject. There are hotheads in that parliament of yours.”

  “Hotheads with empty pockets,” Browne said.

  Let him puzzle that one out. It had taken Cornwallis no time at all. Cornwallis has a good mind in that large skull of his. He plays the bluff country gentleman, Uncle Toby, but he is as wily as they come, and steel beneath the broadcloth. He knows what he wants and how to get it: the permanent pacification of Ireland. And he knows whose help he requires. This one is a child when his mind moves beyond the sound of his beating drums, the crack of his muskets.

  “Bribe them?” Trench asked. “Can a parliament be bribed?”

  “Cheap at the price,” Browne said. “They will come cheap. Pensions, profitable office, a few titles.”

  “To put an end to their own parliament! To vote the extinction of their very country!”

  “By God, a few of them will be sorry that they have but the one country to sell.” Dick Martin above at Ballinahinch, in wildest Connemara, master of thirty miles of bogland and a population of pheasants and woodcocks. Stables floored with green Connemara marble, deep as the ocean, but staggering under a dozen mortgages tucked away in Capel Street offices. He could tumble tomorrow into ruin, two bad harvests finish him off. Martin would stand hat in hand for a chance to sell his vote, and so would a hundred others. Not this year, though. Not with a harvest like this one, haystacks yellow beneath the mild sun, mellow land ripening to autumn. The finest in twenty years, and the Mayo men had left it to follow a French banner and ranting hedge priests. And rhapsodical schoolmasters, like the fellow we are carting back to Castlebar with us. By Jesus, they will pay for it.

  “Of course, if it is in the best interests of the country,” Trench said, pouring fatuity upon his conscience. “Our two countries.”

  “My very thought,” Browne said. “You reached your fist into my mouth and pulled out the words.”

  Pulled out the words: a delightful people. We will be the richer for them, all that imagination, and a wit racy as a mountain stream. Union will not solve all their problems, though. This appalling poverty, beggars by the roadside, entire families of them, barefoot, their clothes tattered beyond the point of decency. Cabins in which an English farmer would not stable his horse, stones with mud daubed over them, leaking thatch. Within the cabins, unimaginable evils, no doubt, parents and children huddled together in sleep. No, something here was abominably wrong. Putting it right was not a soldier’s task, thank God. Clear them out of Killala and the little campaign is over. Who comes out of it well? Not Lake, certainly; not after the debacle at Castlebar. Not Humbert, not really. Sly but reckless, like all Frenchmen. Cornwallis, no doubt, but what glory is there in amassing a powerful army to defeat a few thousand Frenchmen and natives?

  “Such a rich countryside,” he said. “Such a splendid harvest. Proper government and laws, security of life and p
erson—it could become the garden of Europe.”

  “It could indeed,” Browne said, “but devil the much we know about such things. We must look to England.”

  “To the future,” Trench said. “England can offer you a future.”

  “It can indeed,” Browne said.

  “But you must not look slavishly. Each nation has its peculiar genius. The world would be the poorer without Irish gaiety and wit. Music, poetry. You have given us so much—Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Macklin. Our finest model of the pathetic—‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.’ ”

  “That is well said, sir. A point well made. Are you certain you have no drop of Hibernian blood yourself, General?”

  Trench laughed, delighted. “They never told me about it. It would be an honour, I assure you.”

  An honour. Happy the land that can afford lads like this one.

  “A great pity it is that you will not be seeing the Mayo that I know. Before it was overtaken by this madness.”

  “Never fear,” Trench assured him. “I will hand Mayo back to you safe and sound.”

  “I have never doubted that,” Browne said. “Never for a moment. And if there are any awkward odds and ends left over, you may depend upon the gentlemen of Mayo to attend to them.”

  “Odds and ends?” Puzzled again.

  “It is a queer, tricksy sort of country up there,” Browne said. “The way we have been cut off from history. We are our own small world, you might say. Putting us to rights again will not be easy. Lord Cornwallis will need old Mayo foxes like myself for that. We had a long talk about it. At the Castle.”

  “Ah.” Wise, Trench nodded. The Castle. “Your poor country is going to need men like yourself.”

  “I will be there,” Browne promised him. “It is difficult to know what a country like this needs. All that an honest man can do is look into his own heart.”

  Honest men, they rode side by side towards Mayo. At their ease, leaning back against sun-warmed leather, each with an arm stretched out along the backrest, hands pointing in opposite directions.

  Carrick to Castlebar, September 17

  MacCarthy had a last good look at the Shannon. He was moved north with Trench’s army, in one of the provision wagons, himself, Geraghty, and three others, trussed up like turkeys. It flowed beneath them as they creaked over the Carrick bridge, busy upon its southwards journey.

  “ ’Tis towards home that they are taking us,” Geraghty said. “All of us but you.”

  Merchants’ houses of claret brick, spacious and trim. He had stood upon the bridge at Drumshanbo, watching a leaf drift by. How many bridges arched across the Shannon? Greatest of rivers. At Limerick so wide that you could shout and a man at the other side would not understand your words.

  “Let them hang us here and be done with it,” Patrick Tubridy said. A faction fighter from Enniscrone, ham-faced, murderous in his brutal rages. “They will make a show of us in Castlebar with tinkers and fiddlers. They will make a holiday of it, the hoors.”

  “Will you give over that?” Geraghty said. “They have finished with their hangings.”

  “You are a fool,” Tubridy said.

  “ ’Tis a queer thing,” MacCarthy said, “that a river can look one way at one place and one way at another and it will be the same river.”

  Tubridy spat on the floorboards. Ugly bullock, tethered now, his horns sawed off. “ ’Tis sorry I am that I didn’t get my pike into more of them.” Heavy eyes rolled towards the militiamen who walked beside them, scarlet jackets gay in the warm morning.

  “You did your best,” Geraghty said. “Angels could do no more.”

  Brown eyes moved back towards him, sullen anger.

  “Sure no one has any fear of you now,” Geraghty said, “with your arms pulled back and tied together with Limerick rope. A child could poke a stick at you.”

  In places meaner than Carrick I have spent the gold coins of my youth. A life like Sean MacKenna of Castlebar I could have had, the same schoolroom from one year to the next, deferential to priests with hat pulled off and ready smile, wed to the one woman and never an eye to the others, her legs and belly soft from breeding and my own piece as rambunctious as a cock. At night, punctual as the striking clock, I would set paper before me and a bottle of the best ink.

  Lovely in the morning light, across the river now, the houses of Carrick. Perhaps in one of them the little doctor fussed over his bottles and the daughter bent to her book of English letters. Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain. You will end my world, small book for children.

  “God’s curse upon that town.” one of the men said. “And God’s curse upon that black bog.”

  “He will curse it surely,” another one said. “A place where men were ripped open with their arms flung above their heads. There will nothing ever grow above the place where they are buried.”

  MacCarthy looked at them with distant interest. Ballinamuck lay distant from bridge, road, sun-sparkling river.

  The road twisted between pasturelands, hedged with hawthornes. A landscape for poets, meadows moving towards a river. A maiden, brighter than Aurora, would appear upon green meadow, blinding the eye into vision. The meadow would live within the poem, never touched by winter, never a bitter wind to batter the hawthornes.

  Beyond the pasturelands, the road climbed a steep hill. MacCarthy clambered to his feet to see the river.

  “Get down out of that,” a militiaman shouted nervously, in Irish.

  “I will,” MacCarthy said. “Just in a minute now.”

  River and town lay spread before him, quick-moving river past the neat, handsome town. Nowhere in Ireland so fair a river, a man might live out his life beside it with no thought of wandering off.

  “Sit down there in the cart, croppy, and don’t make me take the butt of my musket to you.”

  “ ’Tis a Kerryman you are,” MacCarthy said in surprise.

  “I am.”

  “That is my own country,” MacCarthy said. “I was born and reared outside Tralee.”

  “Well enough I know who you are, Owen MacCarthy, and it is a great disgrace you have brought upon yourself and upon Kerry.”

  Awkwardly, arms pinioned, MacCarthy got himself back onto the floor of the cart.

  Kerry head beneath stiff tricorne and lobsterback coat.

  “ ’Tis far we are now from Kerry, the two of us,” MacCarthy said.

  But the Kerryman, thin-lipped, looked at the road before them.

  “ ‘By Killarney’s fair lakes where I oftentimes strayed,’ “ MacCarthy said. “Do you know that one?”

  “I know that one,” the miilitiaman said, and then fell back to let the wagon rumble past him.

  What harm was there in a fellow like that, doing his landlord’s bidding, proud of his red coat? Never again would he have a coat so fine, the cloth smooth and rich.

  Beside pastures rich in the September sun, autumn a subtle presence in the air, the wagon moved north towards Mayo. Norman keeps guarded distant hills, fairy mounds kept silent sentinel. Labourers watched them, motionless as mountain hares, by nightfall a tavern tale. Provisions and sacks of grapeshot travelled with them, soldiers and militiamen thick as blackberries on the bush, wide-mouthed cannon. Edmund Spenser and Oliver Goldsmith travelled with them, and great bulging libraries of books and statutes printed in English, bills of lading and proclamations, John Milton and Richard Steele, white-wigged orators and a new alphabet. An image filled MacCarthy’s mind: General Trench’s army carried northwards into Mayo a great handsome clock, the wood of its casing shining and polished, its delicate strong springs ticking off the final hours of his world.

  19

  FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA,

  SEPTEMBER, 1798

  Thursday. On this day, General Trench brought into Castlebar from the south a great army for the war against the Killala rebels. They marched past the common, past courthouse and gaol, down Castlebar High Street, up Stoball Hill and down it, and then pi
tched their tents in the very fields where Lake’s soldiers had broken and run. I stood outside my shop with young Timothy.

  We heard them long before we saw them, for there were altogether five regimental bands with fifes and flutes and cornets and drums, and the musicians were vying the one band against the next to test which would make the most able and splendid sound as they swung into High Street. No man who lived in Castlebar but was out to watch them, whatever his religion or his political sentiment. This is a power that armies have upon the human mind and there is no use in denying it—the bright colours of the uniforms, the banners and flags and standards, the black cannon, the cavalrymen looking down at us like the watchful heroes of ancient Troy and the officers like minor deities, with a knowledge of deaths and battles masked by pale imperious faces. They looked as proud as men swinging out of a tavern with a few good pints inside them and the knowledge that a holiday was beginning. The Castlebar loyalists cheered them and so did some of our own kind from excitement at their gay sound and appearance. As one of the regiments moved past the shop, Timothy began to stamp his feet up and down in time with the music, imaging himself a handsome hero with deadly musket. I put a hand on his shoulder to quiet him, but he did not understand my signal, and looked up puzzled towards me. And so he marched along as we stood together there, our hands linked, his feet alive with the jinglejangle nonsense of the “Lillibulero.” Well it is for children that they have the sights and colours of the visible world spread out before them, unshadowed by dark knowledge. That regiment, as I have learned this evening, was Fraser’s Fencibles, from Scotland, with a terrible reputation for cruelty. And yet when one of the soldiers caught sight of Timothy, he winked at him, and Timothy waved his free hand, then looked up to see if I had noticed.

  After the soldiers and the cavalrymen with their long swords and the cannon came a chain of wagons with cannonballs and sacks of shot and musket balls and provisions, and then, at the rear, guarded by two files of soldiers, a cart with five men sitting in it. When first we saw them we did not know what we were seeing, but then we took notice that their hands were bound behind them with rope. It was Michael Geraghty, a strong-farmer from Ballina that I first recognised, and only after that did I find myself looking straight at Owen, who sat at the back of the wagon, resting against the board and with his knees drawn up. He was still wearing the gentleman’s fine coat which he had found for himself, but it was in ruins now, smeared with mud and dirt, and with one lapel ripped away to show a filthy shirt. His eyes were puffed and swollen, and one cheek carried a discoloured bruise.