The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

  The road suddenly dipped between trees into darkness as thick as silt. I had, almost without being aware of it, and far sooner than I had allowed for, arrived at the crest of the road running down to Shaw’s Bridge. The Ring lay another quarter of a mile to the right, through woodland so dense that even a full moon would not have penetrated it. I turned circles on the road, circles in my mind. Then – ha! – It came to me. Of course! The day I passed this way with Millar, we had left the road to inspect the bridge’s undersides. With a confidence bordering on the reckless I plunged ahead, swinging myself over the parapet and down the slope, going for the moment from black into blacker, holding on to the grass until I felt the ground level out again beneath my feet: towpath. Crouching then, I groped my way under the arch. I wedged my back into its curve – it might have been made for me – and drew my knees up to my chin.

  Someone had been cooking meat of some description.

  I could smell it quite distinctly above the smells of the river and its bank, concentrated though they were by the stone surrounding me. The earth, I discovered with a little more groping, had been disturbed, two or three feet to the left of where I sat, was warmer, too, then hot. Here, some two hands deep, was the pit or oven. I knelt and blew into it and got for my pains a faceful of sour ashes. I wiped my mouth and nose and blew again, more gently, and was rewarded this time with a faint glow, which grew from half an inch to an inch, from one inch, almost, to two. I scraped together whatever I could find in the way of dried grass and twigs and after a great deal more blowing was able to coax the embers back to life. With my hands cupped over them, I let the warmth spread along my arms, my shoulders, and finally into the cavity where I had used to think my heart resided.

  At some point, perhaps half an hour after my arrival there, two men passed along the road. I heard their voices from a long way off, heard the clump of their boots, the creak, the nearer they drew to the bridge, of their lamp, and managed to fill in the pit with earth before the smoke gave me away. At the last moment it occurred to me that the meal whose remains I had smelt had been theirs – ogres walking off the last tasty morsel to have wandered all unwarily into their lair – but there was no discernible break in their stride, or in their chatter, which, as to its accent, although we were yet so close to the town, was as different from what I heard every day as chalk from cheese.

  They had been drinking – were passing a bottle, or a jug, between them as they walked: slurps and sloshes added to the clumps and creaks – which might have accounted for some of my difficulty. And one of them, if I understood it correctly (I was getting about one word in three)‚ was reporting an argument with a third man, whose wheedling voice he assumed from time to time, which might have accounted for some more.

  As they crossed above my head – the Lord alone knows what actual ogres would have sounded like – the teller of the tale broke off to hawk up and spit over the far side of the parapet. The phlegm seemed to bend rather than break the surface of the water, because a few moments later I saw it quite clearly, passing in front of me, turning this way and that, at the start of its long, slow journey out to sea. The men carried on – their voices, and the voice of the absent acquaintance, growing fainter – until when I expected it least one of them let go a laugh of such force and brightness that I was sure it must have lit up the sky, like a firework. And when I uncoiled myself from the ball into which I had retreated, the darkness did indeed appear to have lost a little of its grip. I waited a quarter of an hour more, then brushed down my clothes and took to the road again, another trial endured.

  I met no one on that last leg of the journey and before the first cock crew, sounding like the first cock ever to crow, I had already arrived at my destination, or my destination had announced itself to me. For as before, the rampart rose up in the end unexpectedly, as though just that moment conjured from the earth. On this occasion, though, I fought down the sense of awe; this was a place of wile this morning, not of wonder. I skirted around the base, choosing one of the less convenient breaches to enter by and coming at the cromlech from the rear, so as not to leave too clear a track in the dew for Lord Donegall to see. He must be kept at a disadvantage until the moment I stepped out in front of him, the answer to all the questions crowding his mind.

  Even in that twilight, I had a clear view through the stones of the way he must come, although, just as in the painting I had imagined hanging in the gallery, mist was trapped still in the lower branches of the trees. One by one I removed the items from the bag and laid them, like a surgeon would his instruments, on the nearest thing to a flat surface that I could find: the stone that I had thought, last time I was here, would do Millar as a pillow. I went through then the procedures I had rehearsed and rehearsed in my room, until I felt I could do them with both eyes closed, although I scarcely dared now even to blink. I pulled the firing pin back to half-cock and poured a measure of powder into each barrel in turn before placing a square patch of wadding over the upper one only to take the ball. I pressed it in to the depth of my thumb’s first joint then repeated the process with the lower barrel. Then I picked up the ramrod – this was its moment: one, two, three into the upper barrel, keep pressing, and pressing . . . There. One, two, three into the lower. The only way now to clear them was by firing, in preparation for which, finally, I tapped more powder into the frizzen pan, taking care as I closed it not to let the powder spill, and, when everything else had been returned to the bag, placed the gun on full-cock.

  I kept tight hold of the butt to begin with, but when my palm began to sweat I transferred the gun to my coat pocket then almost at once removed it again – what if it were to become entangled at the vital moment? What if it were prematurely to go off?

  I set it back on the ledge. Then I waited.

  For a time the sun seemed to be in two minds about rising, hardly doing more than peek over the horizon: leaking light instead of shining. Slowly, though, it became more definite, presenting itself at last as an irrevocable fact to all who laboured and suffered under it: “The day is here and must be got through.”

  I was too far removed from the habit of prayer to believe that anything I might say now would be heeded, or even heard, but I recited some words anyway. Clemency, not outright forgiveness, was all that I asked. I was doing what had to be done. I felt the weight of the centuries, as though this, not the ancient pagan ceremonies, still less the latter-day horse races, was the reason that these massive stones had been hewn out and transported here – however they had been transported, wherever they had been transported from; the reason for all this impenetrable geometry.

  I had been trying by my routines and repetitions to keep my emotions in check, but I think unquestionably by that stage I was a little delirious.

  I am almost sure I nodded. St Peter appeared to me above the trees, reading aloud from a scroll that stretched out behind him, miles and miles and miles across the sky, which was at the same time the garden behind the house on the Flags: the names of those to whom no clemency was to be shown. At the sound of my own name I opened my eyes.

  Hoof beats, coming towards me at speed from out of the mist. He had caught me out. I fumbled the gun off the ledge as the horse whinnied and the rider dismounted heavily. He would be armed, I was certain of it. I almost fell out from behind the stones, left arm holding up the right, which would otherwise have failed me. “Not one step further!” I yelled at the same moment as the voice of St Peter called again from my grandfather’s mouth, “Gilbert!”, and my finger, almost convulsively, squeezed the trigger.

  I tried to let go or redirect my aim, but it was as though the pistol was moulded to my hand, my arms locked in position. The powder flared in the pan and the expression on my grandfather’s face passed in a fraction of a second from horror to resignation. He was already halfway to God and Spencer Perceval. But there was no shot. No breath from either of us, only the fluting of a blackbird somewhere on the edge of that vast arena. Even the horse seemed frozen, its nostrils
flaring, its eyes swollen to bursting as it watched with us the powder burn itself out and the smoke drift away.

  I managed at last to shake the dreadful thing from my hand. My grandfather bounded forward (memory perhaps exaggerates the distance, but still: he bounded) and wrapped his arms around me, more seizure than embrace.

  “What have I done?” I cried.

  “You are fortunate you have done nothing that cannot be undone,” he said, and eased me back against the stones. I slid to the ground, my chest heaving. Tears followed, great gales of them, and all the snot and slabber of a boy utterly broken. My grandfather beside me pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, but had not the energy to reach it to me. Only now that the danger was past did he look what he was, an old man and frail. I collected myself, scrambled to my feet.

  “We must leave at once,” I said. “Lord Donegall . . .”

  “God grant, will not be coming,” said my grandfather, handkerchief now to his brow, which was not, as I had expected to see it, red from exertion, but blae: pure, pure blae. “Nisbet rode out to Ormeau before first light to tell him there had been a great mistake.”

  Of course, if he had known to find me here he must have known too the reason for my coming. Still I could not account for it.

  “Who told you?” I asked him.

  “Mrs Barclay sent a man,” he said, “knocked the entire household up. A young woman who lodges, or works, with her at the inn came to her last evening in great distress over a letter she had received.” He was not looking at me, but I blushed nonetheless, face, neck, shoulders, back. “She feared that something dreadful was about to occur, she could not say for certain what, or even where, the letter was too cryptic, but she believed from certain references that it might concern the Ring here.”

  He took in his surroundings as though for the first time. There was respect in the regard, as for a worthy opponent: so this is what I have been up against all these years?

  “Hannah told us she had heard someone leave by the front door shortly after two o’clock,” he resumed, and dabbed again with the handkerchief. “We overturned your room completely, looking for anything else that could make sense of what you were about.” He produced from another pocket a sheet of paper, which he handed to me. The creases told the story of its having been screwed into a ball before being smoothed flat and folded. “Dear Lord Donegall,” I read. “You will forgive, I hope, my presumption in writing, but I crave a meeting with you on a matter . . .”

  If I had not known otherwise I would have said it had been written by a chimpanzee in woollen mittens.

  “It was under the bed. Molly had to lie flat to retrieve it with a brush, Hannah having requested that she be spared such an exertion.”

  My ears had continued to receive, but my mind was still some sentences back.

  “Mrs Barclay?”

  “I have lived a long time in this town,” my grandfather said. “Enough, I sometimes feel, for two or even three lives. Mrs Barclay was a friend in one of them.”

  The colour had begun at last to return to his face. “If you could help me stand,” he said, and motioned for me to take his arm. “I think we should walk.”

  “The horse,” I said. The horse had removed itself to a distance safe from shouts and bawls and flashes in the pan and buried its nose in the dew-rich grass. I recognised it now as belonging to Dr McDonnell. What emergency, I wondered, could my grandfather have invented for his cousin in Gransha that necessitated the borrowing of a mount at half past three in the morning?

  My grandfather got to his feet gingerly. He cast a sidelong look at the animal. “I think I would rather walk.”

  So we walked, out of the Ring and down the lanes, and my grandfather, for the first time in our lives together (though I am one to criticise), talked.

  He had known them all, he told me. All the “Men of Ninety-Eight”: Neilson, Russell, Hope, McCracken. There were scarcely twenty thousand souls then in the entire town: not many were complete strangers. But neither had his encounter with those particular souls been a matter of chance. He had gone several times to meetings of the “Muddlers’ Club”, for it was under that innocuous name that they first met, in the tavern in Sugarhouse Entry that Mrs Barclay and her husband had, the Dr Franklin. (Forget for a moment Peggy Barclay and Henry Joy McCracken: my grandfather in a tavern? Truly this was another life.) A veritable warren of a place where a room might always be found for friends and for Muddlers who did not wish their conversations to be overheard, but where equally, so numerous were the comings and goings, the corridors and the corners, anyone might observe you without your being aware of it.

  Among the couple of dozen serving girls and potboys and cooks and waiters required to keep the establishment running was one young woman, Belle Martin, of whom my grandfather had heard some report from a connection in her native Portaferry. “Handsome and in manner easy-going,” the connection said, “and utterly untrustworthy.” What she fished for at one door she used as bait at the next, trying to set friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour. By the time she left to find work in Belfast there was not a house in the town where she was welcome.

  My grandfather had tried on more than one occasion to broach these suspicions with James Barclay, to suggest to him that Belle Martin should perhaps be kept away from the room where the Muddlers’ Club met. But that gentleman believed in taking people as he found them – who was to say but that spite at her advancement had set the Portaferry tongues wagging? And, besides, the Muddlers were particularly fond of the girl.

  Half a dozen of them saw the inside of a Scottish prison as a result of their fondness. They were the lucky ones. She betrayed as well four members of the Monaghan Militia, then billeted in the town, who went to their deaths before a firing squad at Lisburn.

  James Barclay was taken up along with his clients when the soldiers raided. It was six years before he returned home, by which time Belle was long, long gone from Belfast town.

  “That”, said my grandfather, “ought to have been a warning to the others. If they could not organise safely in a town of twenty thousand how could they hope to organise across a country of eight million? They were some of the best men living, and full of the noblest intentions, but they allowed their ambitions to get ahead of their ability to deliver on them.”

  He broke with them definitively a year and more before they rose up. Several of the United men – he never did discover which – had taken the decision to act against another suspected informer, a man named Small, who made the honest portion of his living selling brushes from door to door about the town. They invited him one night to a house where there was to be music and drinking and a swearing-in of volunteers. Small was exceedingly partial to the first two and for information on the third would be handsomely rewarded by his paymasters in the barracks, assuming those were his paymasters and not just heavier than normal users of yard brushes and scrubbing brushes, the half-dozen varieties of brush required to keep a horse well groomed.

  Of course he accepted.

  Towards the end of that week, Mrs Small appeared in the town with her children – the brush-makers – in tow, asking had anyone met with her husband or heard anything of his whereabouts. They were still walking the streets at nightfall, as pitiable a sight as could be imagined. Shortly after that, soldiers searched the houses of a number of people known to be sympathetic to the United men’s cause, turning the furniture out of the windows and threatening pitch-cappings and half-hangings, the whole gamut of tolerated tortures (an extreme reaction admittedly to the disappearance of a favourite brush-seller), but not one word to the purpose did any of those so menaced utter.

  Months later a man’s naked body floated to the surface of the Mill Dam. There was speculation, of course, but the body had been in the water much too long for anyone even to hazard a guess as to its identity; too long certainly for Mrs Small to be put through the further ordeal of making a judgement.

  “Small,” my grandfather repeated, as t
hough that one word were the whole of the man. “I can see him as well, bowed down under the basket on his back. It was hard to know sometimes looking at him where his hair ended and the bristles began.”

  We were walking at no great pace, the horse even then dawdling behind us, all unperturbed by the course that its day was taking, the frantic gallop giving way to the indulgence of fresh grass, and now this leisurely retracing of its steps through the countryside, towards town. My grandfather’s narration matched his gait, halting, easily deflected.

  “I tried for several days to find someone with influence within the Society to whom I could speak, but those who were not off organising elsewhere were lying low. In the end and quite by chance I ran into McCracken, home in secret from a mission of his own to Armagh. I could not even wait, in my agitation, until we were some place private, but began asking him straight away, in the middle of the street, what he knew of the affair. And to his great credit – and at great risk, for it was no secret that the authorities wanted only the pretext to arrest him – he took the trouble to answer me. He swore to me that he would have no part in such a deed, or have dealings with any man who did, that he had heard from Jemmy Hope of a meeting at which the setting up of a committee for managing assassinations had been proposed, and that Hope had personally seen to it that it was thrown out the door.

  “His right hand, as he said this, was flat against his heart. And yet, I told him, somebody must have done something. I had seen the woman with my own eyes, turning circles outside the Market House, asking all and sundry, ‘Please, can anybody tell me where these children’s father is?’”