The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Owen,” I shouted. But he did not look towards the sound of my voice, although several did. It was then that Timothy saw him and shouted out in puzzlement, “It is Owen. Look at Owen.” But Owen did not look towards him either. And before I knew what he was doing, Timothy had pulled his hand free from mine and was running towards the cart. He and Owen were great friends, and there would always be some trifling gift for him when Owen came back from one of his rambles, were it only a peach pit carved into the shape of a basket. Before he could reach the cart, one of the soldiers scooped him up and thrust him back towards me, but not in an unkind or brutal manner. “Owen,” I called to him again. “Can you not hear me? It is Sean MacKenna.” Timothy began to cry then, bewildered sobs which racked his body as he arched against my embracing arm. Owen’s eyes moved towards me but they were the eyes of a stranger and held no glint of recognition. At last the cart moved past us, and turning Timothy around so that he faced me, I kissed his two wet cheeks. The town grew quiet, men looking at each other, many of them not speaking at all. The alehouses began to fill. Timothy and I went back into the shop.

  Westport, Late September

  When he learned that Dennis Browne had returned to Westport, his brother’s great house at Cahenamart, Moore rode there, setting out in the very early morning and arriving at clear, warm noon.

  The road rose up to crest a steep hill, and Moore, reining in, sat facing farmlands and pasturelands which declined, hill by soft low hill, to Clew Bay with its numberless small islands. On the horizon the glittering Atlantic was an enamelled ocean on which rested, distant, two mother-of-pearl sails. To his left lay the town, set out by Wyatt twenty years before. Beyond the town, demesne walls of cut stone encircled ornamental gardens, a river arched by charming, florid bridges. And Westport House, finest of the houses created in Ireland by Cassel, heavy German master of Palladian facades and massive black marble. Compared with it, Moore Hall was a crude, unfinished sketch and Glenthorne Castle an exotic phantasy. Seventy years old now, it had weathered well, a seal of power set between hills and bay. Back set to the mountains of Mayo, the windows of its nine-bay façade glinting towards water, stone eagles with outstretched wings soaring from its cornices, in the pediment, richly carved, baroque, the arms of the Altamont earldom, guarded by wolf dog and stallion. Altamont, Sligo, Westport, Mount Eagle—peel away the titles, one by one, and you came at last to the Brownes of Mayo.

  At this distance, in the windless, pellucid noon, house, town, river, pastures, bay, formed a painted panorama, each with its emblematic value. Distant, on the pediment, invisible from hill crest, stone scroll beneath stone shield, SUIVEZ RAISON. Mixed blood in the Brownes, O’Malley, Bourke, Bermingham—Gaelic pirate, Norman knight, Tudor adventurer. In the early years of the penal century, John Browne, outlawed Papist and Jacobite, soldier under Sarsfield, survivor of Aughrim’s great disaster, bankrupt, had turned smuggler, sheltered by this ring of hills. Black-hulled ships from France and Spain dropped anchor here with wines, lace, brandy, bolts of silk. Profits, but never enough. A hundred thousand acres sold off at six shillings the acre. In 1705 he had himself declared dead, but lived another seven years, in hiding, a wraith, to watch his son restore the fortunes of the Brownes. Peter it was, adroit and determined, who made the fateful trip to Dublin, swore his allegiance to King George and renounced all claims upon his loyalty by Pope and Pretender, abjured the errors of Rome and was received into the Protestant Church as by law established. SUIVEZ RAISON.

  Who had trusted him? Like the marrano grandees of Spain, those Jacobite colonels who turned Protestant in the decades after Aughrim. Aughrim had been a watershed, a black line drawn across history, separating old and new. Ratified at Limerick by treaty and surrender, signed by “Patrick Sarsfield Earl of Lucan, Pierce Viscount Galmoy, Colonel Nicholas Purcell, Colonel Nicholas Cusack, Sir Toby Butler, Colonel Garrett Dillon, Colonel John Browne of Mayo.” Sarsfield and Dillon sailed off for France to serve an alien, Catholic king. John Browne had returned to Mayo, smuggler in hiding, dead man who watched his son change kings and church, moving from old world to new. Shamefaced, sullen beneath the reproachful eye of pious wife, the son sends away the chaplain, nails shut the chapel door. Dust slowly smears chalice and pyx. Fish aswim in strange waters, he attends Sunday service with his Protestant neighbours. Bored but uncomplaining, he moves his eye across the plain, whitewashed walls unmarred by effigy or idol. No Mass: no mumbo jumbo changing wine to blood, bread to flesh. Safe at last from the “discoverers,” the property safe, the right to bequeath and to inherit it safe. And the son’s son in due course, ear unsullied by Papist ritual, knowing only whitewashed walls, the Book of Common Prayer, marries a Protestant, is anointed as lawyer, magistrate, gentleman. Thus, as the old chroniclers might have put it, perished the old nobility. But the chroniclers had perished as well, and the poets and the harpers.

  But not the Brownes of Mayo. Stepping nimbly from old world to new: Jacobite into Hanoverian, Tory into Whig, Papist into Protestant. Study their faces on the walls of Westport House: crafty old colonel clad in the sober brown of peace; politic son in silk and periwig, small fleshy jowl above the lace; grandson, full figure against panorama, architect’s plans in one hand, the other gesturing towards a mansion rising up beside the ocean; great-grandson, father of Dennis Browne, martial figure in King George’s lobster red, behind him, past drawing-room windows, a glimpse of terraces and formal walks. SUIVEZ RAISON. “Mr. Browne’s house is very pleasantly situated on the south side of the rivulet over which he has built two handsome bridges, and has form’d Cascades in the river which are seen from the front of the house; which is built of Hewen Stone, a coarse marble they have here. It is an exceeding fine house and well-finished, the design and execution of Mr. Castels. Mr. Browne designs to remove the village and make it a Park improvement all round; there are fine low hills everywhere which are planted and improved, and the trees grow exceedingly well. The tide comes just up to the house; the Cascades are fine salmon leaps. In the house are handsome chimney pieces of the Castle Bar marble, which are a good black without any white in them like the Touchstone, which the Italians call Paragone and value very much.” Thus Bishop Pococke in 1752, indefatigable traveller, garrulous graceless author, Anglican bishop upon visit to Anglican magnate. Only Mayo remembered what the Brownes had been—managers, go-betweens, adroit negotiators. If you have an affair that needs managing, take it to Dennis Browne. Now Moore had come.

  Motionless astride his glossy-flanked chestnut, Moore studied the scene as he might study an historical document. The great house an assertion of power, the new prosperous town its illustration, the farms and distant wharf its corroborative footnotes. Like those medieval paintings which required explanations from scholars, their beasts not legendary but emblematic. Pococke could not have read the painting, eccentric cleric jouncing in closed carriage along narrow deep-rutted roads. Nor poor Mr. Broome of Killala, his head stuffed with ignorant benevolence from black shovel hat to white collarbands.

  No portraits faced them in the dining room. Walls of white and blue, the ornate plasterwork of Ducart, the Sardinian master, summoned to Mayo by Lord Glenthorne and lingering for three years to adorn the walls of lesser lords. Intricate, stiff-bodied, allegory stretched across the ceiling: Time rescuing Truth from the assaults of Discord and Envy. Dennis Browne could read allegory, more ably than Altamont, his absent brother, master of the house.

  He placed a walnut between the jaws of a cracker. A small brown world shattered and he picked meat from it.

  “It is no good, Moore. A messy jacquerie. Peasants swarming across the entire countryside burning and killing. By God, if Altamont had been here he would have been skewered in his bed. I have had ample time in Galway City to reflect upon our Mayo peasants, with my butt frozen blue by Atlantic winds.”

  “We were not speaking of peasants,” Moore said. “We were speaking of John.”

  “Far worse.” He brushed walnut shell away from him, across sti
ff linen. “Far worse. I can understand the little half sirs, the O’Dowds and MacDonnells. What are they but peasants with airs? Horse pistols, and a scrap of Jacobite parchment in the west room. But your brother and Malcolm Elliott are men of education. They knew what they were about.”

  “I doubt that. Elliott certainly, but not John. He is a boy. He is also a Moore, and the Moores have claims upon the friendship of the Brownes.”

  “Would I ever deny that? Though, mind you, your father never sought out mine in friendship,”

  “They are claims older than our fathers. They go back a century or more.”

  “What was it that your father called mine? The turncoat’s son?”

  “He was an old-fashioned man,” Moore said.

  “Yours was,” Browne said. “Not mine. After Aughrim we all had to find our way in a new world. Your father went to Spain. The Brownes turned their coats inside out. What matter? They were men of pluck, the two lots of them. I drink to them.”

  The coat hung in the hall, encased in glass and black walnut, scarlet coat with gilt epaulets and facings.

  “What else were we to do?” Browne asked. “Sink down into the peasantry, like the Treacys and the MacDonnells? Not bloody likely. The Protestants had won, and they had us by the balls. They would have bled us white, stripped us of every acre. We are the old Mayo stock, George, strong trees that hold firm against the winds.”

  “John is the old Mayo stock,” Moore said, “and he is in Castlebar gaol with a gallows for a view.”

  “He may have a closer view of that gallows before his race is run.”

  Bareheaded, John took his mount over the high stone fence, then waved his hat towards Moore Hall. Their father, standing by his chair above the portico, returned the salute.

  “He will if he is tried here,” Moore said. “By the gentry of Mayo. Cooper would fasten the knot with his own hands.”

  “What does it matter where he is tried?” Browne asked. “My God, George, he was the President of their bloody republic.”

  “Just so. And took no part in the fighting. Tuck him away in some gaol in the south and wait for quieter times.”

  Browne turned shrewd eyes towards Moore. “Wait until your friends in London have pulled a few strings.”

  “If I can persuade them. And with your help. I must have your help, Dennis, you are Sheriff of Mayo. There is no need for us to fence. I propose to save John’s life if I can. Hanging John will not restore tranquillity to Mayo. The Crown can afford it.”

  “O’Dowd will hang, you know, and Elliott and the rest of them. For doing no more than John has done. Less perhaps.”

  “I accept that,” Moore said. “I am not here to argue the justice of the matter. John is my brother, and I want him saved.”

  Browne laughed and drew the stopper from the decanter of brandy. “By God, you are a cool one, George. I have never seen this side of you before. Elliott swings and John goes off to Hamburg or America.”

  “Or Spain. He was born a Spanish subject. I do not pretend to be arguing upon principle.”

  “This brandy was born in Spain,” Browne said, “but it is Mayo brandy now.” He filled their glasses.

  “By reason of broken laws,” Moore said. “The coast guard never saw the ship that brought it into Clew Bay, and the excise man never saw the cask. You have hit upon an excellent instance.”

  “A bottle of brandy is one thing,” Browne said, “and a rebel in arms against his sovereign is another.”

  They sat quietly, sipping the brandy. The warmth of Spain was a faint, plaintive echo in Moore’s glass.

  “What did they expect,” Browne asked, “himself and Elliott? Stirring up a rabble and bringing in Frenchmen.”

  “They were United Irishmen. You know as well as I do what they wanted. A republic, a written constitution, total separation from England.”

  “A constitution,” Browne said. “Randall MacDonnell would not have known a constitution if it came up and bit him. He was killed, you know. In Longford.”

  “John is alive.”

  “There has been no better friend in Parliament to Catholic Emancipation than myself. I have written for it and argued for it. Turncoat or not, I am half a Papist myself.”

  “They wanted a bit more than that.”

  “Did they not! A gang of jumped-up merchants. Whatever they wanted, it has no place in Mayo.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “It will not be enough to bring this rebellion to a close,” Browne said. “The fear of God and the fear of the Crown must be beaten into these people. They are fools to be frightened of the British army. Let them fear Dennis Browne.”

  “You have a policy?”

  “I do. I intend to whip loyalty into them. A hundred years from now the cabins of Mayo will still be using Dennis Browne as a curse.”

  “Well now,” Moore said, “of all the ambitions that have ever been unveiled to me, that is the most curious.”

  From wall and ceiling, antiquity counselled them. Discord and Envy drew back. Time raised from the ground the languid form of Truth. Figures in white plaster, delicately moulded against blue medallions.

  “End it,” Moore said. “Dragoons hacking away at frightened men, crops burned, husbandless women turned out upon the roads with winter setting in. End it. I shall never believe that you want that.”

  “Everything is ending, George. Cornwallis and Pitt intend to press through a union with England. Cornwallis sat in the Castle and explained it all to me. It will be public knowledge soon. He is going to take each Member of Parliament by the shoulder and bully or cajole or bribe him into voting the extinction of the kingdom. How does that strike you?”

  Moore shrugged. “He can for all I care. I am no patriot. It isn’t England that has humiliated me and kept me deprived of civil rights and liberties. Why should I care a damn about a parliament in which I am forbidden to sit? Until a decade ago, I didn’t have a vote. This nation is governed by a gang of Protestant bullies, and corrupt bullies at that. I have no tears to shed for them.”

  “There you have it, George. And it matters as little to me. Mayo matters.”

  “Yes,” Moore said. “Mayo matters. I take it, then, that Castlereagh and Lord Cornwallis will have your vote without going to the trouble of a threat or the expense of a bribe.”

  “To be sure, they can. And I will have more than my vote to deliver to them. I will give them Mayo wrapped in cloth, and tied with red ribbon and a dab of sealing wax. I look forward to serving in the London Parliament, George. A larger stage for my talents.”

  “I doubt that you will find it there,” Moore said. “Irishmen in London will find that they are country cousins, like the bonnet lairds of Scotland. England will feast at the table and toss the scraps to Ireland.”

  “Perhaps,” Browne said. “And perhaps you underestimate my resourcefulness. But I will need backing, all the help I can get. I would welcome your own support, George.”

  “Mine!” Moore exclaimed, as though in surprise, although he had been expecting it. “What use could you make of a poor Papist farmer?”

  “Come now, George. You are a well-connected man indeed. You are thick with that London crowd.”

  “With Fox, Sheridan, Lord Holland. My friends are Whigs. They are out of office now, and out of favour with the King. They are out of favour these days. They oppose the war with France.”

  Browne shrugged. “And there is a matter nearer at hand. Your word has more weight than mine does with the Catholic gentry. If you were to argue the case for a union, they would listen to you.”

  “Persuade them that they have no need for a country,” Moore said with distaste.

  “What country have they now? You have said that yourself. I ask you only to make public your views on the matter. They are a stubborn lot, the Catholic gentry. They are likely to cling to a nation which has abused them for a century.”

  “They are likely, that is, to believe that a poor nation is better than no nation at
all.”

  Browne nodded. “I think that they will put it in exactly those terms. But you could argue the case for a union most effectively to them, and without doing violence to your own feelings. They would fare better under the union, George. Catholic Emancipation is far more likely to come from London than from those fellows in Dublin. It is a matter which you should discuss with Cornwallis. He is a most enlightened fellow in that regard.”

  “I think,” Moore said after a pause, “that I would welcome another drop of your brandy.”

  “I am sorry!” Browne cried. “I am an inattentive host.” When he had poured, he held the decanter of sharp-cut glass and studied its contents. “God be with the days when this brandy was a bond between your family and mine. Before our time. Your father shipping it up from Alicante, and my grandfather on the beach at Clew Bay to receive the casks. And the excise man bribed and drunk. We were hand-in-glove in those days, ‘Spanish’ Moore and the turncoat. The Moores and the Brownes. The old Mayo stock.”

  “They were good bargainers,” Moore said. “I have never mastered the art.”

  “You never had the need,” Browne said. “Your father left you a rich man. But we all come to it, sooner or later. We all must bargain, it is the way of the world. Not always for money.”

  Moore drank off the brandy at a single pull. His throat burned. Body of boneless plaster, Truth rested in the arms of Time.