The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  In fact, he lent me that evening two books which had appeared in that fateful year, of which one was a volume of verses, some of which were pretty enough in their way, although strained and artificial in their very effort to appear natural; but there was also a long and ludicrous ballad or “rime,” in which a sailor slays a large bird with an arrow, for which apparently heinous offence he is pursued around the world by all the powers of hell and his shipboard companions perish miserably. All this set forth in a wearisome style of false innocence and simplicity.

  The chief work which he lent to me was not this flight of fancy, but an Essay on the Principle of Population, by an acquaintance of his, a newly ordained clergyman named Malthus. Mr. Malthus began simply enough, by demonstrating that populations will always grow at a rate swifter than that of the food which they require, unless checks be placed upon their growth. These checks he divided between the positive and the negative, of which the former included famines, plagues, and pestilences. What an awful vista his words opened up! I could not force myself to accept the inevitability of his argument, yet try as I would I could not escape from it. It was as though, like some darker Newton, he had hit upon a formula which had for centuries lain hidden just beyond the edges of men’s minds. Clear and cold as iced water, it clarified and chilled the brain. And all set forth with an air of unimpassioned calm which contrasted most vividly with his abominable conclusions.

  I would have thought that Ireland, with its centuries of recurring famines, was well suited to his thesis, but I sought for it in vain. His first volume ranged over the entire world, and brought before our consideration the naked wretches of Tierra del Fuego and Van Diemen’s Land, the yet more wretched savages of the Andaman Islands, the paint-bedaubed warriors of North America, the furry Laplanders, the horsemen of the Asian steppes. But of Ireland, which lay at Mr. Malthus’s doorstep, there was not a word, until I came to the very last page, where tersely he informs the reader that the natives are too barbarous to admit of counting up their numbers. And then he adds: “The checks upon the population are of course of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing, by the filth of their persons, and occasional want. To these positive checks have of late years been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of civil war, and of martial law.” He says not a word more, and his disdain was painful to contemplate. All that I had witnessed, all that tumult and passion, that confusion and blood, were but checks upon population. The dead in the streets of Killala, the obscene weights upon the Castlebar gibbet, the peasants hunted down in the Belmullet wastes, had contributed their lives to an equation. The Irish, it would appear, were doomed to an endless sequence of spawning and starving, spawning and starving.

  “It is a most salutary and Christian work,” young Mr. Clifford assured me. “Mr. Malthus reminds us that man is not a perfectible creature. He strives blindly to propagate his kind, but the very laws of nature press down upon him. There is no salvation within nature or within society. I need not remind you of that.”

  “As it is now,” I said, “even without famine, the poor are reduced each winter to beggary. Oh, Mr. Clifford, if you could but see them! And we sit snug in our warm houses.”

  He then described to me a tract society, newly founded in London, which proposed to distribute Bibles in the west of Ireland, for which purpose sums of money had been collected and agents hired. I did not know whether to cry or laugh.

  “But they cannot read,” I said. “They do not speak English. What folly is this, what new folly? It would serve as well to cram pages of the Testament into bottles and cast them on the waters to drift to Africa and the Sandwich Islands. Better still, let them translate Mr. Malthus into Gaelic, and thus instruct the poor that they starve by theorem and die to conclude a syllogism.”

  He was abashed by this, for as I have said he was a good-hearted young man. But he could only rub his hands together, as though washing them.

  “What would you have?” he asked at last. “I know nothing of these matters. Perhaps they are indeed inevitable, as Malthus suggests. We must seek to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry. We must be charitable.”

  “With great caution,” I said satirically. “Malthus warns us that unbridled philanthropy can be perverse or even wicked, interfering with the operations of a system nicely calculated to maintain a population upon the edge of grinding misery.”

  “You are too hard upon him,” he said. “Too hard upon yourself.”

  Dark musings in a season of Christmas joy: I did not long dwell upon them. And yet nagging memories remained with me of the land which I had left, to which I would again return. Clifford’s evasive delicacies, my brother’s gruff indifference reminded me that the world did not share my concern. Derbyshire was my warm winter blanket, thicker than the snow, woven of childhood memories, certitudes, good cheer. Here I was not an alien, but moved once again among my own, their accents mine, their habits mine. What need had a Derbyshire squire to know the population of Ireland, or a Derbyshire parson to take upon himself the burdens of a foreign island? Thus, and most comfortably did I reason with myself.

  Lord Glenthorne, however, was a different matter, and I still remember, with something akin to horror, my conversation with him. In that hour with him, seated side by side in a quiet London room, lies the meaning of what I experienced, and yet I cannot puzzle it out, an oblique meaning, set at a grotesque angle. I may be mistaken. Truth baffles us. We seek it out in vain, and then it leaps upon us and we are unprepared.

  I had resolved that I should visit him on my way back to Ireland, for, as I have said, he had the benefice of my parish. I knew that he would welcome an account of events which so closely touched his interests. He had already received from Dennis Browne an account of the murder of Creighton, his agent, and of the damage wrought upon Glenthorne Castle by the insurgents. But letters are cold instruments, they convey little. Accordingly, I wrote to him of my wish and in due course received a civil reply: “My compliments. I am at home every afternoon. Glenthorne.”

  On the afternoon of the eighth, therefore, I presented myself at his door. The house was by no means prepossessing, built of pink bricks with bow windows overlooking the park. A servant girl opened the door, simply attired, and with her hair caught beneath a mobcap. She showed me into a small sitting room, sparsely furnished, and dominated by two works of art, an ill-executed oil painting of a Highland stag standing in lonely eminence upon a crag and a large cheap engraving of Abraham and Isaac. I seated myself upon a small upholstered chair, which sent up a puff of dust.

  This, then, was the dwelling place of the legendary ruler of Tyrawley, an absolute monarch, the “Big Lord.” A simple London house, not footmen but a servant girl in a mobcap, walls decorated in a manner which a Dublin grocer would find coarse. I was not surprised. Friends in London had informed me that he was known there not for his wealth or his power but for his benevolence, being a prime mover in the Society for the Amelioration of the Condition of Chimney Sweeps, and a generous contributor to that most worthy of causes, the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

  He did not keep me waiting longer than five minutes, and then entered to greet me with simplicity and cordiality, taking my hands in his two. He was a small, bent man, dressed in a suit the colour of snuff, with a long, thin nose and full lips.

  “You are most welcome, Mr. Broome,” he said. “Most welcome. It is seldom enough that I have a visitor from Ireland. That unhappy land has been much upon my mind these past months, much upon my mind. As you can readily believe.”

  “Most readily,” I assured him.

  “Come into my library, Mr. Broome. Into my library. It will be a pleasant place to talk, and we have much to tell each other. Much to tell.” His habit of repeating phrases needlessly was a settled one. It was as though he spoke once for my ear, and once for his own, telling himself what he had said. A harmless mannerism.

 
But at the door he hesitated and turned. “Do you see that fireplace there?” It was small, with a trim white mantel above it. “Do you know that fireplace for what it is, a place and instrument of oppression?”

  “Of oppression, Lord Glenthorne?”

  “Oppression as foul as any in our time. The chimney sweeps of London would break your heart. Little lads of nine, eight, seven. Angels some of them, for all their filthy clothes and filthy faces, faces streaked black as the pit. Little chaps led from place to place by their masters like trained monkeys, taught to clamber up chimneys so narrow that their poor shoulders and hips are scraped raw. Fires lit below them if they don’t make haste, or if their cries are too loud. And then cast out into the world in a few years’ time. But some of them never grow too big. They die. The soot gets into their lungs. In time it chokes them to death. Their poor lungs coated with soot. A surgeon of Guy’s Hospital has explained the process.”

  “That is indeed horrible,” I said. And so it is, but I could not think what more to say.

  “Horrible,” he agreed. “It will cease, Mr. Broome. We shall make it cease. Their infamous masters will be brought low. The little boys are raised without God, their speech is abominable. Little girls as well. Little girls have been set to the task. The souls and bodies of children destroyed so that we may sit in comfort at our fires. It is monstrous.”

  “Monstrous,” I said.

  “And in Ireland? Is it the same there?”

  “In Dublin, perhaps. I cannot say. A man comes round to my palace once a year with his son and his brushes, but the boy does not seem ill used. The small farmers have a simpler method, they use birds. Birds are their chimney sweeps.”

  He peered at me with large, pale eyes. “That is not a jest? They use birds? Birds for chimney sweeps?” He laughed, a dry cackle. “I would believe anything about Ireland.”

  “I wish you well in your efforts,” I said. “The sweeps are badly used. It is time that thought was given to them.”

  “It is, Mr. Broome. High time. And we shall succeed. Men of consequence are joining us. Godly men.”

  He led me to a small, crowded room overlooking a garden. Trees and bushes were leafless and stark. Two walls were lined with books, and a long table, running almost the length of the room, was strewn with papers. Papers were stacked beside the two armchairs which faced each other in front of a cold fireplace. He waved me into one, and then himself sat down and rested his hands on his thin knees. “Your palace, you said, Mr. Broome. Surely you do not live in a palace?”

  “Only in a manner of speaking. You may recall that Killala was once an episcopal diocese. My house was then the palace, and it is still called so. But in fact it is a modest residence, though most comfortable.” Which I myself was not, for the room was cold and it was with difficulty that I suppressed a shiver.

  “I am glad to hear that. That it is comfortable, to be sure, but more especially that it is modest.”

  “It is more than sufficient for our needs,” I said. “Mrs. Broome has made it most pleasant. We have no family.”

  “That is good,” he said. “It is good that you are married. A celibate clergy is one of the curses under which the Papists of Ireland suffer. The Papists of all countries. The priests of the early Christian centuries were married. You know that, of course.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that. But the Irish priests are strict in the observance of their vows. There are few of the scandals so common in Mediterranean countries.”

  “My wife died in childbirth,” he said, as if I had not spoken, “and my child with her. It was a boy. I never remarried. We are not a fruitful line. I was an only child.”

  I could find nothing to say to that.

  “Had they lived, my own life might have been different. I might have moved more in the world. I am more effective now by far. The chimney sweeps, the slaves. Human slavery, Mr. Broome. Here, in Africa, in America. Entire African villages herded upon their death ships, crossing the ocean to a life worse than death. Their owners deny them the Scriptures. They live and die as pagans. But they have souls. He died for all men. There are many kinds of slavery. The little London sweep, the black man in the fields of Virginia. Do you smoke?”

  “No,” I said. “It makes me ill.”

  “I am pleased. It is the leaf of slavery. Bales of tobacco leaf stacked up on our docks, rank with the sweat of black slavery. God waits for us to act. We have the power to sweep the slaver from the seas.”

  “It is a monstrous evil,” I said. “No Christian should support it.”

  “They do,” he said. “By their silence. By their inactivity. I intend to accomplish good, Mr. Broome. Great good. My father did not. He was a sinful man and a pleasure-loving man. Marbles, paintings, rich foods, women, and sins worse than those with women. Do you follow me? Far worse than those with women. I am not spreading scandal. He was notorious. You have heard of him.”

  “I have visited Glenthorne Castle,” I said. “I was a friend of poor Mr. Creighton. It is lovely, a fairybook palace, like a child’s dream of the Arabian Nights.”

  “It was shaped by vanity and voluptuousness. Like his villa in Italy. It was worse in Italy. Bricks the colour of sunset, a balcony looking beyond oceans of roses to the distant sea. A village could have been fed upon his clothes alone, silks and broadcloths. He used scent. When he bent down to kiss me, it would smother me in its sweetness. All the filth of the world was carried to me upon my father’s kiss.”

  I could not become accustomed to the room’s chill. It could not have been much colder in the bare-branched garden.

  “I was greatly disturbed by the news of Mr. Creighton’s death,” I said. “He was a fair man, a just man.”

  “Just?” Lord Glenthorne asked, “Which of us is just? He was a practical man, and middling honest. The agents before him were hopeless, thieves and drunkards. You speak of his death. You mean his murder, of course. I have a letter here from Browne.”

  He leaped to his feet, agile and monkeylike, and rummaged among the papers on the table with one hand, while with the other he fitted a pair of spectacles. “It is here. An atrocious crime. He was run through with pikes. Over and over again. After he had been killed. Bestial.”

  “We have endured much in Mayo these past months,” I said. “All of us have. Rich and poor alike.”

  But Glenthorne did not hear me. He was reading the letter, his forefinger moving swiftly over the lines. His lips moved silently.

  “You were held prisoner in your own house,” he said. “Your palace. A wonder you were not murdered, like Creighton.”

  “I might easily have been,” I said. “I owed my safety to one of the rebel leaders, one of your own tenants. He was killed in the fighting.”

  “I can form no picture of Mayo in my mind,” he said. “I see bogland, mountains, a straggling coastline, mean villages. I do not even know the number of people on my lands. Is that not absurd? Years ago, Creighton made the attempt, but he gave it up. He sent me maps, pretty things.”

  He led me to the map, hung behind the table, in an oak frame. At first I could recognise nothing, then I made out Killala and Ballina, mountains, bogs, the Moy moving past Ballina towards the sea, pasturelands, plantations, the outline of the Glenthorne demesne, the castle.

  “Each of those dots is a cabin,” Glenthorne said. “Many of them on two acres or three. But he abandoned the task. There are people squatting upon the barren wastes of the mountains. They can pay no rent. How do they live?”

  “In great misery,” I said. “For part of each year they go hungry and are driven by want onto the roads. Now. In midwinter.”

  “Horrible,” he said. “Horrible.”

  “He made a kind of model of the estate,” I said, “on a table as large as this one. Papier-mâché mountains and bits of glass for lakes. It was quite lovely, like a toy village built for children.” A toy world. I did not add that by common report he had been slain upon that table, forced backward upon it by Duggan’s mob
, his blood streaming down paper mountains.

  “It is a great responsibility,” he said. “I have been remiss. I have governed them through agents. I cannot bear to go there. That sinful monument to vanity and lust rising up amidst such misery, feeding upon it. My rents are all Irish rents now, you know. We had several estates here, small ones, but I have sold them off. There is so much that must be done, so much good that must be accomplished. I live simply. You can see that I do.”

  “They know nothing of you there. Where you live, what you want of them. They never speak of you by name. Only as the Big Lord.”

  He turned away from the map and peered at me sharply. “Do they? The Big Lord?”

  “That would be the English of it. It is a Gaelic word.”

  “They do not speak English,” he said. “He told me that. Gaelic-speaking peasants. Papists, sunk in superstition and idolatry. Something went wrong, centuries ago. I know little about Irish history. They have no written records, no history.”

  “They have needs,” I said. “Needs of soul and of body.”

  He reached out his hand as though to touch my shoulder, then withdrew it. “I chose well,” he said. “It is well that they have in their midst a proper emissary of Christ. God send that I can find a proper agent. It is an exacting responsibility. All this.” He swung his hand around towards the map. “I will be remiss no longer. I promise you. Poor Creighton had his plans at first, in the early years. I have them somewhere among my papers. Model villages, schools for the children that they may learn sobriety and English. As you say, they have needs of both body and soul. They must learn proper methods of agriculture and husbandry. He had schemes for the reclamation of the bogs, but I told him that they would be too costly. I have been remiss.”