by Clio Gray
The victories of the United Irish have been paltry, sporadic and few, at least by General Lake’s reckoning – Oulart, Ballymena, Larne and Carrickfergus among them, and the holding of Antrim town for several inglorious hours. But by the early months of 1798 the rebellion is on its last legs, retreated all to Wexford to regroup, and from Wexford to the Hill, where the rebels have been holed up in its precarious protection since the back end of May.
There’d been several battles since – New Ross notable amongst them, both for what had happened during and after. The tales that went the rounds of that particular confrontation had been ferocious: of the summary executions and the burning of hospitals on both sides, but mostly of the lone man who had been bludgeoned and bayoneted to death on the streets of Scullabogue, the man who hadn’t had his boots on and whose bloody body nobody came to claim. His suicidal mission had been apparently to let the enemy know in which cottages a large part of the Loyalist Command in Wexford had been holed up in. Holed up, and then burned out.
It was just the sort of legend General Gerard Lake had been sent here to stamp out, along with all the other incursions against the Crown forces hereabouts. Most of leaders of the Irish opposition had already been captured, arrested, exiled or hung, but a few still clung on, including Father John Murphy, nominal commander of the forces on Vinegar Hill, and his fellow ex-priest Father Mogue Kearns. Not to mention the squint-eyed Mick Malloy who had caused them so much bother at New Ross.
Time to sweep them all away like the lice they were. One last push, one last extermination, and all would be over. Time to take a last glass of wine in anticipation of the glories the morning would bring, General Gerard Lake the most fêted man in Ireland since Cromwell himself.
All three of those named leaders of the United Irish were there that night outside the windmill, alongside the nine other men who made up their command. All were worrying about how little chance there was of victory when they engaged in battle the following day. All were clinging to the desperate hope that the French would get here in time – as the message from France had promised, a message from Wolfe Tone himself.
He’d tried it before: fourteen thousand Frenchmen sent out in December 1796 to invade Ireland, and several more times since, with no incursion as yet successful, beaten back by bad planning, storms and winter seas swirling up against them, lashing at their sails, breaking their masts. Or by too many English being nearby or too narrow a harbour to negotiate, too difficult a coast-line, too little local knowledge on board to guide them in.
But right now it was the height of summer, the weather calm for weeks, and Wolfe Tone had given them his word, had sworn it. The men on the Hill were not entirely without hope, believing there was still a chance that three thousand French soldiers were on their way at that very moment to help them out, if only they could hang on a little longer.
The night was warm on Vinegar Hill, low clouds settling on its summit with the partial going down of the sun, hiding the windmill and its men from the eyeglasses of the Loyalists gathered down below. They’d no fires lit up top for there were no trees with which to fuel them, the few thickets of whin and juniper skirting its lower slopes not fit to provide timber and only wide-bladed grass here on the flat plateau where they were encamped. They counted out the minutes, marking down the hours until the sun would rise again, a bare half mile of scrubland dividing them from their enemy.
Their clothes were heavy and uncomfortable from the mizzle, and scraps of sounds came up at them from the valley below of men moving, leather creaking, horses’ tackle jingling in the windless night. A few bars of English song reached them, which unnerved them all the more, hinting of men so relaxed, so convinced of their coming victory that they thought nothing of indulging in so commonplace an activity as bawling out a few ballads around their camp-fires as if they were all on a weekend jaunt, instead of being seven or eight hours away from massacring every last man, woman and child garrisoned above them on the Hill.
Eleven of the twelve-strong committee of the United Irish commanders up there tried to block out the sounds of those merry English songs, tried to focus their energy and attention instead on making plans, devising strategies. Already they had earmarked several escape routes from the westerly side of the hill primarily, they’d agreed, for the women and children, and any wounded, whose numbers they anticipated would not be few. Such escape routes would also serve the rest if things tomorrow went as badly as seemed likely.
Only the ever-optimistic Myles Byrne, the youngest of their crew, protested at these plans, insisting they would not be needed, that victory would be theirs. Whether or not the rest of them agreed they were loath to begin evacuation under shelter of the night, conceding that to do so would be to admit to defeat before it happened, and would only serve to demoralise the several thousand fighting men who were gathered about them in the thinness of the night.
‘No news of the Frenchies, then?’ asked Murray O’Dowd, hardly expecting an answer, and no one immediately replying.
‘Nothing,’ Gerry Monahan finally said. A small shuffle of movement followed this single word as they all involuntarily pulled in their boots and shoulders a little, as if by doing so they could make themselves less vulnerable to what must come.
‘Has Greta Finnerty not got back from the bay?’ O’Dowd asked, meaning the bay outside of Rosslare just below Wexford. It was where the French – according to Wolfe Tone’s missive – should already have landed from Brest several days before, and if not then, then any minute now.
‘Nothing,’ Gerry Monahan said again. ‘But she’s a good lass is Greta, a staunch one. She’d’ve come here soon as she could if she’d any news.’
‘So,’ stated Harry Doherty, ‘it’s not good.’
Silence.
The mist shifted about them of its own volition. There was no wind, only their collective bodies’ exhalations, the warmth escaping from their damp clothes and the smoke of their pipes drifting out about them. Then up spoke Myles Byrne again, young maybe, but already a hero of Bunclody and Arklow who’d seen worse odds than this and was not about to give up now, a boy young enough to have no real notion of dying or defeat, who saw his future only as one bright victory piled upon the next, as only the youngest can.
‘It could be worse,’ Myles said. ‘At least if all goes badly,’ – although plainly, from the jaunty tone of his voice, he did not expect this to be so – ‘then Greta’s her cousin to tell all that’s happened, remember our names, if nothing else.’
Mick Malloy coughed.
‘Peter Finnerty’s been arrested,’ he said gruffly, ‘no one knows what’s happened to him yet. No news out of Dublin with Greta in Rosslare.’
There was a collective sigh. This was not what they’d wanted to hear, which was why Mick had left it so late in the telling. Peter’s success in getting out what was going on in Ireland had been of great cheer to them all ever since he’d set up The Press in his father’s print works. He’d managed the seemingly impossible, getting some of his articles into the Scottish broadsheets, and several into the English ones too. The most recent exposed the public executions of thirty-four rebel men of Dunlavin to the banging of English drums back in May. Probably the precipitating factor in Peter’s arrest, Mick thought gloomily.
It was a bad blow, Mick hating that he’d been the one to give it out, harbouring the same claustrophobic fear they all did – excepting Myles Byrne – of being trapped inside a body that was shutting itself down, its blood getting thinner with every successive attack, its extremities being lopped off one by one by their enemy, digit by digit, wrist after hand, elbow after knee, shoulder after hip. Despite such blows Mick felt the thrum of the blood of their rebellion in his sinews, in his veins, within this heart of them, still having the urgent need to fight and survive.
They heard approaching footsteps and saw the dishevelled figure of Father Mogue Kearns appearing from the mist. He’d long since abandoned religious garb, as had John Murphy, who both looked
the same as the rest – like old potatoes dragged up too late in the season from the ground, all tufts and tatters, mud and scrapes. But Mogue Kearns was a different kind of man altogether, and the tale going the rounds at the moment was that when he’d been studying his vocation in Paris, during the Frenchies’ Revolution a decade before, he’d been seized as a traitor by the raging mob for the crime of being English – which he most certainly was not. He’d been strung up from a lamp-post until the weight of his body bent the post down enough to allow his toes to touch the ground, giving him just enough breath to survive until some passing Samaritan cut him down and brought him back to life. Just how true this was no one knew, but it bucked them up just to think on it, for a man who could survive that could survive anything.
‘What’s up, friends?’ Mogue Kearns asked, sitting himself down between Malloy and Harry Doherty, laying a hand briefly on each of their shoulders as he did so, his knees cracking audibly as he got himself cross-legged to the ground.
‘Myles here was just telling us how we’ll all be heroes by tomorrow,’ Harry said, uplifted by Kearns presence as if they’d been a failing arch whose keystone had just been pressed back into place.
‘Ay, but only once we’ve all been gutted like herrings,’ O’Dowd added, his voice a cheery antidote to his words.
‘Ah but,’ Kearns said, joining in the casual banter that is all a man has left between himself and the abyss he knows he is about to fall into, ‘the jig’s no up yet, not until the last man takes his dance.’
His comrades smiled grimly in the shallow darkness. Mogue was the man everyone wanted by their side in battle, a man who’d been with them from the outset and somehow survived to be with them now. And sure enough Mogue went on to say what they’d all been trying to formulate in their heads but not had the words to do so.
‘Hold fast, friends,’ said he, his voice strong and clear despite having spent the last couple of hours administering the Eucharist in the form of scraps of stale bread and some muddy water pretending to be wine to any of his rebel flock who would accept it, no matter their creed.
‘We’ll maybe fall tomorrow,’ Kearns went on, ‘as we’ve fallen before, but there’ll always be others who’ll rise up to take our place.’
He nodded briefly in the direction of young Myles Byrne, whose smile could be discerned from the glinting of his teeth – a boy, Kearns reminded himself, who’d come through worse than this. He rubbed his hands together, a familiar gesture to the others, before lowering them to his knees, began to knead his battle-swollen, damp-eaten joints with his finger-tips. No one spoke, all aware of the pain Kearns was hiding, the weakness to his body he never mentioned, not wanting to trouble anyone, yet which everyone knew about from his lop-sided gait, his uncomfortable manner of sitting and trying to remain still.
A few moments passed until Mogue stilled his fingers, until he lifted his head and looked about him, looking above the heads of his comrades towards the tall black stillness of the windmill that stood against the slow-wheeling stars of the sky. It seemed to Mogue as if it had been anchored to the ground for the specific purpose of pointing upwards to God’s greater creation, reminding them just how small they were in the grand scheme of things.
‘There’s still the small matter of the Scotsman’s Bauble,’ he said into the darkness, mainly for a bit of light relief.
The rest exchanged furtive glances as Mick Malloy stiffened but did not flinch.
‘I’ll not apologise for what happened,’ Malloy said quietly. ‘We’re at war, and I only did what needed doing.’
Everyone knew about New Ross and the burnings and the lone man who’d died in Scullabogue – the Scotsman Mogue had mentioned – Malloy having had the grace to give Fergus a good backstory despite having practically sent the man to his death. The little package Fergus had given Mick he’d passed on to Mogue a couple of hours previously, just after Mick himself arrived on the hill.
‘So let’s have at it, then,’ Myles Byrne spoke eagerly into the darkness, his voice untrammelled by the cynicism the rest had adopted. Mogue Kearns smiled to hear his enthusiasm, his lack of fear, could see the lad’s straight back silhouetted against the dark grey of the mist beyond, the strength coiled within his young limbs. They might lose tomorrow’s battle, Mogue thought, but if lads like this could be relied on then he had spoken truly when he’d said they’d not yet lost their war.
‘Well, my young friend,’ Mogue Kearns rejoined. ‘Why not indeed?’
He nodded to himself, then bent down and undid the satchel that contained everything he now owned: a couple of crumpled, unclean undergarments, a handful of mismatched laces for his boots, his beloved bible – several of its pages ripped and splotched with the blood of men he’d given last rites to on other fields of battle – his portable monstrance, empty of anything but a few crumbs of consecrated, if mouldy, bread; and also what had been christened the Scotsman’s Bauble. He lifted out the small leather pouch, grimy with dust and dirt, but with its buckle tightly locked and closed.
‘Very well,’ Mogue said, laying the pouch on his knee. For a moment it seemed the world had grown quieter, as if everyone about him had taken stock of some important moment, as if the rest of the men and their families encamped on the hill had all of a sudden subsided into sleep. Even the English and their loyalist lackeys down below in the valley had ceased their songs and the only sounds he could hear were the faraway grating calls of a couple of competing corncrake somewhere in the distance, the slight shuffling of his fellow commanders as they moved forward, and then the slighter rasping of the metal tongue as he slid it from its hold.
Nothing then but the creak of the leather as he slid his fingers inside the neck of the pouch and withdrew a waxed-paper bundle. It was soft and light and he unfolded it carefully, bade young Myles bring closer one of the shuttered lanterns they had lit so he could see the object more clearly. It lay there, limp upon his knee, and he looked at it curiously, unfolding its edges to reveal an object that was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It appeared to be some kind of belt made for the smallest of waists: an inch-wide strip of embroidered material from which strong yarns dangled from its length, all different colours, most of them beaded and knotted once or several times, some not at all.
Gerry Monahan sighed loudly, and spat in disgust, but Mick Malloy beside him sat quite still.
‘What the feck?’ Myles Byrnes said succinctly, but Kearns had no answer. He looked at Mick curiously, and Mick’s squinty eye wandered off to the left as he offered explanation.
‘Just said it was something we could use, that Greta knew what to do with it…’ Jesus, he wished he could remember exactly what Fergus had said about it in those last garbled minutes before Fergus left the knoll. ‘Something about codes, lines of communication… uncrackable,’ he offered the random words before trailing off again. Mogue Kearns nodded, although couldn’t see how it could function as such.
‘What do you think, John?’ Mogue asked, seeing Murphy’s pale fingers moving with practiced speed as if he thought it might be a rosary of sorts. Murphy shook his head, but now Mogue had thought of rosaries he also thought of beads, and a sudden thought occurred to him, something he thought he’d seen in France way back in the day.
‘It’s just a bloody load of nothing,’ Doherty said, speaking for all the others, all except Malloy who was looking intently not at the object itself but at Mogue Kearns, knowing that if anyone could work it out then it was he. Sure enough Mogue held up his hand.
‘I don’t think so,’ he countered, ‘but I need to think on it. It reminds me of something…’
‘What else is in there?’ Myles asked, dismissing the cats-cradle on Mogue’s knee as the rest had done.
‘Well, let’s see,’ Mogue said, going back to the pouch and tipping it up. Out came another smaller package, rounded this time, that fell straight to the ground, the paper unwrapping as soon as it hit, a large gold ring rolling out of its own accord with an enormous emerald at it
s centre.
‘Jesus and Mary!’ Myles whispered, bringing the light closer as he bent in for a better look, making the green stone glare back at them like the eye of a malevolent fox spotted in the middle of the night. Kearns picked up the ring and brought it level with his eye.
‘But there’s some engraving here,’ he said. ‘I can’t make out what…’
He passed it to his left, to Harry Doherty, aware of the shiver of anticipation that was thrilling through the gathered men at this new discovery. Doherty handled it deferentially, took his look but passed it almost straightway to O’Dowd, whose hand was already eagerly outstretched to take this more easily understood part of the Scotsman’s so-called bauble.
‘Looks like it might be worth a bloody fortune,’ murmured O’Dowd as he took the ring and held it up. ‘I done some work with goldsmiths afore I went into smithing proper,’ he continued, his voice rising with excitement as he tilted the ring this way and that, ‘an’ I seen some stones then, but this is the biggest bloody emerald I ever seen!’
The ring went the rounds then, every man taking their look before passing it on to the next.
‘A result at last, then,’ Malloy said lightly, relieved. But even as he spoke his attention was sliding back to the many-tasselled belt and Mogue saw that look, rubbed at the stubble on his chin. His movement dislodged the pouch and, as it fell, a small scrap of paper fluttered out. He picked it up. It was newspaper article, the print far too small to read, but there were also a few larger words blocked out in pencil in the margins. He’d broken his reading glasses several months previously but could just about make them out, faint as they were.
Brother Joachim/Walcheren. Grimalkin/Deventer. Golo Eck & Ruan Peat/Loch Eck, Scotland.
The linkage of words meant nothing to him except for Walcheren, for that place was well known to the United Irish. It was the first port of call on the established escape route the exiled rebels had established from Ireland to France, there to carry on the fight by joining Wolfe Tone’s Irish Legion. Walcheren, home of the Servants of the Sick whose Abbot was Irish and sympathetic to their cause.
