The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  George Moore rode to Waterford upon receiving word of his brother’s dangerous condition, but he arrived too late. He stood beside the body. The skin was drawn tight over the bones of the face and was covered by a bristle of yellow beard. The eyes had been closed, but the mouth was half open, giving the face a dull, vacant appearance. George sat for a time before the body, and then walked downstairs to the taproom, where the commander of the Waterford garrison, Colonel Harrison, had been waiting for him.

  “It is a great misfortune, Mr. Moore. He was made comfortable here at the inn, and of course he was properly attended, by my own regimental surgeon. He was bled regularly. There was never a hope for him.”

  Moore nodded. “Was he sensible?”

  “Not at the end. Not when I visited him. It was a fever, you understand.”

  “Yes,” Moore said. “A long fever.”

  “It was very difficult,” Harrison said. “Poor fellow. We did not think of him as a prisoner.”

  “You have been most considerate,” Moore said. “I am indebted to you.”

  “Mayo,” Harrison said. “You will have a long journey with him. Poor roads, there, are they not?”

  “He will be buried here,” Moore said. “In Waterford.”

  Harrison cleared his throat. An awkward man to deal with, this Moore, cold and aloof. He had expected a Connaught squireen, all brogue and tears.

  “He is not the only gentleman to have been caught up in this wretched business,” he said. “There were a number of gentlemen in Wexford. Men of substance.”

  “So I have heard,” Moore said.

  “You will want to speak with the parson, then.”

  “With the priest,” Moore said. “The Moores of Mayo are Catholic.”

  “We didn’t know that,” Harrison said, in quick apology. “We could have brought a priest. He was delirious. Does that make a difference?”

  “I believe it does,” Moore said. “I will arrange for his burial. You have been most considerate. Very kind indeed.” He settled his hat and pulled on his gloves.

  Harrison walked with him into the street. “If I can be of any assistance to you. . . .”

  Moore turned towards him. Winter smiled from his long, pale face. “We have already made too many impositions on your courtesy.”

  Harrison looked away from winter, from the cold, blue eyes. Damned awkward business, a gentlemen’s brother being gaoled for treason, carted from Castlebar to Waterford like a common criminal. This fellow here had no wish to make it less awkward. London manners like a slap in the face.

  “There were no effects,” he said. “Not even a pocket watch. But there was a bank draught—”

  “I know about that,” Moore said. “I will attend to it.”

  The street ended at the quay, where a ship rode gently at its moorings.

  “British,” Harrison said. “Bound for Santander. In Spain.”

  “We were born in Spain,” Moore said. “My brother and myself. I had hoped that perhaps—” He shook his head. “Good day to you, Colonel.”

  Peculiar fellow.

  Moore spent the night in Athy, on the Barrow, and then pushed on to Mayo. It was a dreary, windless day, a landscape of pastureland, low hill. He studied it for lack of anything better to do. He had brought no books or paper with him. Near Edgeworthstown the weather changed. Drops of rain fell into the carriage. Silly man, Edgeworth, fussy little pedant with clockwork brains. Left no effects; not even a pocket watch. He sat with crossed legs, folded hands resting on his knees. Time later for bringing John home. Not now, a local curiosity, landlord’s son who mingled with rebel cowherds and sickened in prison.

  Rain thickened. Mist hid the hills. Some curse has held us here, distant from the olive warmth of Spain, the book-crowded villa on the Thames. A summer room faced the river, copper bowls choked with chrysanthemums.

  “You should meet them, George. They are splendid fellows. Tom Emmet is a musician. Would you believe that? He has a small house out in Rathfarnham, by the Dublin hills. He and Tone play duets. Spinet and flute. Tone plays the flute with great spirit.”

  “Does he indeed? A most talented gentleman.”

  “He is a most affectionate man. He has taken Russell and myself to dine with Mrs. Tone and their children, of whom he is prodigious fond.”

  “I have been told of his large affections by his friend Knox. Mrs. Tone cannot satisfy them, it would seem. He requires also Dick Martin’s wife.”

  “That is untrue,” John said. “And at all odds, you should be the last man in the world to be critical in such matters. I know your London reputation. Father knew it. Come now, George. We are men of the world, the two of us.” How old was he then, nineteen, twenty? Men of the world.

  “I cannot hope to compete with him on that score. Mr. Tone’s affections are so large as to embrace an entire nation. And Ireland at that. He shows poor taste.”

  “You are Irish yourself, George. We both are.”

  “Are we? What are we? Irish? English? Spanish? I have never been certain. More English than not, I would think. I am happiest in London. My friends are there.”

  “Burke? Sheridan? Do they think themselves English? The English know better.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It mattered to Father. He brought us home from Spain.”

  “Not to Ireland. To Mayo.”

  John laughed suddenly. Sweet bell of a hound at nightfall. “You are as mad as the rest of us, George. Sobersides, Father called you. You believed him. You are not like that at all. I know you.”

  I buried him in the nearest churchyard, alien dirt flung upon the coffin. A fat, nervous priest gabbled Latin over him. British soldiers watched from beyond the wall, a handful of country people. Not there forever. Bring him back to Mayo. I loved him. He knew.

  At Longford, he sent the coachman in to order him a meal, and stood bareheaded in the wide, rainswept street of the ugly town.

  “Will we be staying here the night, sir?” Walsh asked.

  “Not at all. I don’t like leaving the Hall without a master. See to the horses and get yourself some food.” He turned and walked into the inn.

  A queer, cold man, with a brother just buried in Waterford. At Ballintubber, Father Lavelle would have leaped upon the Mass rock to speak the panegyric. Walsh could see him: in Longford of the heavy-shouldered cattle dealers he could see Lavelle’s stumpy body balanced on the flat, broad rock, his arm outstretched, behind him the skies swept clean by the Atlantic winds. “A young man of the Moores has parted from us, and has gone from the beauty of Mayo and from the sad suffering of this sinful world. There is no man standing here who does not remember John Moore astride his horse on such a morning as this, his scarlet coat bright as the sun. . . .” Trust Lavelle for that, not a word that would not brim with praise, not a word about the shameful death in prison. Black-cloaked women fringed the crowd. And before that a proper wake, with whiskey and barrels of porter. The old man would have known what to do, for all that he was half a Spaniard.

  Flat, sweetish ale, cold ham, potatoes boiled in their skins. Moore pushed the plate aside and called for a bottle of brandy.

  “It was less quiet here a month ago,” the innkeeper said. “The rebels came at the town from all four sides. There must have been a thousand of them. Thank God this is a garrison town. The soldiers beat them off.”

  “Your news is stale,” Moore said. “Like your ham.”

  Aggrieved and obsequious, the innkeeper backed away, but stood facing him. “You would do well to pass the night here, sir. You are a gentleman from England, are you not?”

  Moore smiled without looking up from his glass. “I was just now discussing that point with my brother. My brother is Irish. He can prove it.” Unshaven and shivering in the moist-walled cell. He proved it. “My father is Spanish, my brother is Irish. What am I?”

  “Is the brandy to your liking?” the innkeeper asked nervously.

  “That depends,” Moore said. “Is it I
rish brandy?”

  “Sure, it could be, sir. It could be. There are Irish people named Lynch who ship brandy from Spain. Often enough in the bad times Irishmen went off to Spain and entered the wine trade. And they never came home again. Devil the one of them.”

  “No,” Moore said. “Devil the one.”

  He carried the brandy and the glass into the coach with him, and flung a shilling to Walsh. “Go back and buy yourself a drink. You will have a cold journey up there.”

  “Jesus, Mr. Moore. We will be travelling the roads of Christendom in the pitch black.”

  “If you call this Christendom you have much to learn.”

  Moore settled himself in the seat and opened the pistols which rested beside him. Duelling pistols. Another sport of this fool’s island. Another fine sport of this bloody-minded country. Bumpkins drawing up duelling codes that would have put Froissart to shame. No party can be allowed to bend his knee or cover his side with his left hand; but may present at any level from the hip to the eye. Starve the poor and shoot each other. Small need they have for invading armies. He primed the pistols.

  By post roads westwards and north, they crossed Ireland in darkness. A few bands of soldiers, drunkards wandering homewards from hillside shebeens, cattle strayed from broken-fence pastures interrupted the journey.

  Nothing more. Twice Walsh lost the road, and knocked at frightened cabins to ask the way. In the early night, lights from big houses gleamed from the branches of their sheltering plantations, far back from walls of cut stone.

  Moore drank quietly and steadily from the heavy bottle of brandy, sipping it like a cordial, his hand unshaken by the jolting carriage. The rain eased off, making the roads passable. At the bridge across the Shannon, sentries stopped him, and held a lantern to the window.

  English militiamen. Yorkshire accents. Moore blinked at the sudden light. He handed out his pass. Signatures of Dennis Browne, High Sheriff; Trench, General commanding. The pass was refolded and handed back. George Moore, Esquire, of Moore Hall, County Mayo.

  “You have a long journey before you, sir.”

  “I was seeing my brother aboard ship,” Moore said. “He has left for Spain. From Waterford.”

  “The roads get worse beyond the bridge,” the sentry said. “You must know that, sir.”

  Moore replaced the pass.

  “Was he an Irishman at all?” one of the privates said to the corporal. “He talked like a gentleman.”

  “He was a gentleman,” the corporal said. “It said so on Trench’s safe-conduct. But he was Irish, right enough. Did you get a whiff in there? It stank of brandy.”

  “I wish I did,” the private said, hugging himself against the night’s chill.

  West of the Shannon. Where Cromwell had herded whatever Catholic gentry he had left alive. Not the Moores: we have always been in Mayo. We were waiting for them when they drifted there in the winter, long trains of wives and children, herdsmen, droves of cattle. Provision carts loaded with furnishings from houses abandoned in Meath and Carlow. No swordsmen to guard them: no Papist will travel in arms through the kingdom. Hunting out whatever acres had been allotted to them, thin-soiled farmland fringed by bog and mountain. No worse then elsewhere, other countries. Our history. Woe to the vanquished.

  The glass slipped from his fingers. Searching, his heel crushed it. He drank from the neck of the bottle. Jews and Moors hunted down in Spain, Huguenots in France, red Indians in America. One man armed with whip and pistol more powerful than ten men naked in their shirts. Rough justice. Brandy coated parts of his mind, flared other parts to fitful thought, will-O’-the-wisps of drunken wisdom. How happy could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away. Sheridan’s song. Which was Sheridan? Irish? English? John rode down gravelled paths, beyond demesne walls of smooth grey stone, cool to the touch, joined peasants jabbering in Irish. Banner spun from French silk, dyed green to catch fools in its web. John caught. The harp without the crown. Grief. John dead. Violence. Bodies torn apart. Me. Last of the Moores. Cheap novel. Much to John’s taste. Box of pistols on the seat beside me. Fool.

  Invisible, bogland stretched away from him towards distant mountains. Bog lakes chill in the rain-soaked autumn air of Connaught. In the black cold, Moore shivered and drank again. English lady remembered. Mrs. Sophie Germain. London and Wiltshire. White skin stained pink at cheek and bosom. A week’s long afternoons in country inns. Black, disordered hair on white pillow, wide brown eyes. Afternoon sun streaming through unfastened curtains. Its memory cannot warm me. “Are there many Irish like you?” “I cannot say. I do not know many Irish.” “What is it like there?” “Like anywhere. Lakes, roads, houses, people.” “Like Spain?” “No. Not like Spain.” “It has put a streak of strangeness into you. It is most becoming.” “Spain has?” “No. Ireland,” “Do I sound Irish?” “You do. Mine now. My Irishman. Life is very gay there, I have been told.” “Fools find it so. It is splendid country for fools.” “My Irishman.” Her fingers moved across his chest. Melancholy scraped at the edges of his lust. Her Irishman.

  She vanished from the mind locked within the rattling coach. Querulous and harsh, his father paced the grounds beside the unfinished house, and Moore walked beside him. Sunday. No sounds save those of evening birds. Flights of rooks circled towards their nests. Beyond the young plantation, the waters of Lough Carra stretched cool and green, the colour of a banner whose silk would not be spun for years. “John will marry,” his father said; “he will not grow up to waste his substance and his body upon the whores of London.” “No more do I. I have never found whores to my liking.” “And books. Books and strumpets. By God, there is a pretty combination. You are as pagan as any Protestant.” “You misjudge me, Father. You have always misjudged me. I love this place. The lake. As you do.” “They stripped away our land. Sent me off penniless to a distant country.” “Now we are back. Times change.” “This man with whom you fought the duel in London. It was in the Dublin papers, spread out for every Protestant to read. What was his name?” “Germain.” “You fought over a woman, no doubt?” “Certainly not. Over cards. We had been gaming late, and drinking.” Very proper, very English. Her Irishman. In this country, the woman would have come in her coach to watch. “John will be different.” “John has always been different. You have always been at pains to point that out to me.” “I have loved you both. As the Blessed Virgin is my judge, I have loved you both.” Stretched dead in a Waterford inn, tight skin and yellow-stubbed cheeks. Different now.

  Fell into sleep. Woke up. Still night. He sang snatches of verse, song, scattered, senseless. “O, the French are on the sea, Says the Sean Bhean Bhocht.” Great wave, tumbling past Downpatrick Head, and sweeping a broken brother to Waterford. “O, the French are in the Bay, They’ll be here at break of day.” History drowns us, mutinous, formless waves. “Did you hear that one?” he shouted to the unhearing coachman. “I know that song, by God. John listened to that one.” Filthy, rain-soaked island. Cannot leave now.

  By the time they had reached Ballyhaunis he was noisy and quarrelsome. The empty bottle rolled at his feet. He insisted upon stopping at the inn, knocking up the innkeeper, and buying a second bottle. One drink from it finished him. He sat sprawled beside the long table, wild eyes and flushed cheeks, shirt and waistcoat stained. My Irishman. White hand crept towards his belly. He held the glass in both hands and lowered his head towards it, drank off half its contents, then choked and spewed it out. “All done for the best,” he said, his head lolling on his chest. “Got him out of the country. Safe now.” Walsh had never seen Moore drunk and he was terrified. It was as if a different soul had taken possession of the body, shouting wild nonsense and contorting the face. “I also loved him, Father,” he said, looking directly into Walsh’s eyes. “Loved you too. Told you once. Gone now.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the innkeeper’s wife said. “What can we do with him?”

  “Can he not hold his drink?” the innkeeper asked.

  “
Not this much,” Walsh said. “No one could.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A Mayo gentleman,” Walsh said. “Help me get him to bed.”

  “By God, he is, and a rare one at that. Will you take a look at him there?”

  “He can hear us,” Walsh said.

  But by early afternoon, when they reached Castlebar, he was himself again, fresh-shaven, fresh clothes, fresh linen. The clear Mayo sky found reflexion in the long, poised face with its alert pale eyes. No bottle rolling at his feet, the case of pistols closed. Only the wineglass, crushed to powder by his boots, remained from the long night.

  At Castlebar High Street the coach was blocked by a crowd.

  “Get away out of that now,” Walsh shouted at them and raised his whip.

  Moore leaned out the window. “No.” He opened the door and stepped down into the street.

  British soldiers, militia, farmers, townspeople. He turned to talk to a young officer, but felt a hand on his shoulder. Yeoman’s uniform, short pudgy body, round head and small, full face. Cooper. The man who had come to him about the Whiteboys. Speak a word to Dennis Browne for us. Disturbances in Killala. Before all this started.

  “By God, you came in on a good day, Moore. But Friday next will be a better one. You should be here then. The company is on duty in Killala, but I am here today and I will be here again on Friday. I wouldn’t miss a day of this. By Christ I wouldn’t.”

  “A day of what?” Moore asked. Absently, coldly, he looked at the small hand on his sleeve. Cooper withdrew the hand, and then rubbed it along the length of his buff breeches.

  “I spent a starving month as a prisoner waiting for this, and by God it is what kept me alive. By God, your Dennis Browne is a busy man when he sets his back to it. But the afternoons are no good, and by evening everyone is drunk. Get here in the morning. A good brisk morning as this one was. It has put years on me.”

  “What has?” Moore asked.