Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  “He’d want us to go to bed.”

  Ronan awoke to sunshine at nine o’clock and heard Toby coughing downstairs.

  Minutes later he asked, “Will you drive me to Clonmel?”

  Toby looked at him blearily, holding a cigarette.

  “Huh?”

  They left at eleven. In the car Toby asked, “Why Clonmel?”

  Ronan told him the reasons.

  “Oh? Yes, your father told me about him.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  Toby answered deliberately, a man selecting words. “He told me he came to the house. And that you loved the stories.” He coughed himself into a fit, opened the window, closed it. “Do you know you’re supposed to look at the sky any time you’re in Clonmel?”

  There it was again—the deflection!

  “You see—there’s never a cloudless sky over the place because Clonmel is ‘the town under a cloud.’ Did you ever hear that? There was a miscarriage of justice here years ago. The English hanged a priest called Father Nicholas Sheehy—they trumped up a charge of murder, and when the judge condemned him to death, Father Sheehy stood in the dock and declared, ‘From this day forth, a cloud will hang over the town of Clonmel.’”

  Half an hour later, they reached the top of the last long hill. The town spread beneath them under a clear blue sky.

  Without question or comment, Toby drove under the old castellated tower of the West Gate and along a long narrow street. He pulled up outside a Georgian stone house. Ronan looked at the door, looked a question at Toby—who put a finger to his lips. They climbed out.

  “If he’s anywhere, he’s here.”

  “How do you know?”

  But Toby merely pressed the brass doorbell and pulled up his argyle socks.

  A tiny girl, aged twenty or so, opened the door. She peered up at them through thick glasses.

  “Who’re you?”

  “We called to see Mrs. Cantwell,” said Toby.

  “Well, you couldn’t be calling to see anyone else, for if you did, you’d have to go to a different house.”

  “Yes, that’s, well—logical enough,” said Toby. “Is Mrs. Cantwell at home?”

  “She is when she’s here. This is her home. So when she’s here, she’s at home.”

  “I mean, is she in now?”

  “Well, she didn’t go out. Go straight along to the door at the end of the passage. You can knock if you want to, but the door’s open.”

  With crochet on her lap, an elderly lady sat by the fire, small, brown-eyed, and plump.

  “Mrs. Cantwell?”

  She looked up, quick as a squirrel.

  “Who have I here? Aw. Well!” She had dimples and white teeth. “I know indeed who you are! You’re Mr. O’Mara’s brother.”

  “And this is his son. I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

  “Oh, no, no, this is a welcome visit.” She brought regret into her face. “But I couldn’t go to the funeral, my hip is in a temper. Come over here and shake my hand,” she said to Ronan.

  He walked across.

  “To lose such a lovely man—that’s very hard. If ever you’re in need of comfort, just remind yourself that you were important enough to have had such a fine father.” She turned to Toby. “You’re wearing a professor’s socks.”

  “I’m not a professor yet.”

  “All the better. Wear the socks, and they’ll have to make you one. Now, you’ll have tea or a drink?” She called, “Theresa!”

  Toby said, “We met Theresa at the door.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about her. She told the parish priest last week that I was in the house with no clothes on. Which I was—but I was in the bath. Dear Heaven.”

  Theresa brought water and whiskey and poured gigantic drinks; Ronan put his to one side.

  “Tell me all about yourself,” Mrs. Cantwell said to Ronan. “How’s your mother? I must write to her, did she get through the funeral all right? I heard there was a crowd big as the Last Judgment.”

  Theresa returned with a tray of teacups and fruit cake dark as coal. Toby nodded a raised eyebrow to Ronan: Ask your question.

  “Mrs. Cantwell, d’you know a gentleman who travels Ireland telling stories?”

  Mrs. Cantwell set down her crochet.

  “I do. When I say I know him—I’ve met him, he’s stayed in this house.” She looked hard at Toby, who shook his head slightly at her. “And I’ve listened to him, enchanted. He was to have been here today, but I got a message he’s not coming.” She saw the disappointment in Ronan’s face. “I never know when he’s going to be here; he’s a very random sort of a man. If I ever know, I’ll be sure and write to you.”

  Ronan said, “I’d love that.”

  “But if it’s his stories you want—sure we all love a story, he said to me once that a good story deepens the heart.”

  “I’ve been collecting his stories,” said Ronan, who until that moment had not defined it so.

  “Ah! The same as your father and the folklore. Well, I can give you a tale he told me. A true one, and he told it to me because it’s about a member of my own family. And I remember it the way he told it to me.”

  A floorboard creaked; Ronan looked around and saw Theresa in the hallway, easing herself back out of sight against the wall and preparing to listen.

  THIS IS A STORY OF HOW MY GREAT-GREAT-great-great-great-grandmother was responsible for the defeat of that old nuisance, Oliver Cromwell. He came over here to put manners, they said, on the Catholics of Ireland, but of course the true reason he came was to kill us and take our land, because when our chieftains all emigrated and went off to France and Italy and Spain, we had no one left here to defend us.”

  “No one at all,” said the invisible Theresa from the passageway outside. “It was very sad.”

  Mrs. Cantwell continued as if Theresa hadn’t spoken, and Ronan could see she was trying to mimic the Storyteller’s rhythm.

  “As you know, Cromwell besieged the town of Clonmel here on a Friday. It was the seventeenth of May, lovely time of the year. Sixteen-fifty, it was. Well! As you can imagine, Clonmel nearly died of fright at the news he was coming.”

  Theresa cut in from outside. “They’d heard what the villain did in Drogheda.”

  Mrs. Cantwell said, “Theresa, don’t interrupt me.”

  “Ma’am, I know the story better than you, you always tell it wrong.” The invisible voice echoed in the hollow passage.

  Mrs. Cantwell shook her head in annoyance. “How’m I going to get the flavor of it right if you keep interrupting me?”

  “I’ll keep you right, ma’am. You forgot to say he called Cromwell a ‘lanky purist.’”

  “No. ‘Puritan.’ A ‘lanky Puritan.’”

  Silence from Theresa.

  “Clonmel did know that he enclosed three thousand people, men, women, and children, in the middle of the town of Drogheda, nearly the whole population, and butchered them; and if any survived, he sent them off to the West Indies as slaves.”

  Theresa called out, “Don’t forget Wexford. He did a lot worse in Wexford.”

  “Dth.” Mrs. Cantwell, irritated, clicked a tooth. “Anyway, he killed thousands in Wexford, and it was worse because they were discussing a peace treaty. God knows, when Hitler did things like that, everybody complained.”

  “Tell them about Ann Maher,” said Theresa. “Don’t forget that part.”

  “Ach, how could I forget Ann Maher, isn’t she what the story’s about? Ann Maher was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, and she had the high cheekbones of all the Mahers, and that’s in a big strand of my family, my late sister had the same cheekbones. And Ann Maher had blue eyes, they say, and very blond hair, as blond as you’d get out of a bottle today.”

  “Peroxide,” said Theresa. Her tone sounded helpful.

  “Theresa, they had no peroxide in those days, I told you that before.”

  Ronan dared not look at Toby; they would have set each
other laughing. And, Ronan felt, the odd thing was—the Storyteller was somehow shining through.

  “The people of the town didn’t know what to do, but they had some help. Lord Ormond, a local man, was very opposed to Cromwell and he had a bit of an army here in the town, about a thousand men from the north, led by a man called Hugh O’Neill—not the famous one, he was long dead, but a descendant of his, a man with a black beard, Black Hugh, Hugh Duff. They heard Cromwell was coming over from Yoh-hel in county Cork, and they got ready. They reinforced the walls and—”

  “Tell them about Youghal,” called Theresa. “You always forget it. And the local people call it ‘Yawl’—not ‘Yoh-hel,’ I was there last year.”

  Mrs. Cantwell sighed. “She wants me to tell you that William Shakespeare visited ‘Yawwwwwwwwwl’ [she exaggerated and grinned] and met the man he turned into Shylock, a moneylender from Cork who became the mayor of ‘Yawwwwwwwwwl.’ Will that do, Theresa?”

  “Tell them about Moby Dick.”

  “They know about Moby Dick—they’re not ignoramuses.”

  “You mean the film?” said Toby.

  “Five years ago they were there, and the town is still wet from it,” said Mrs. Cantwell. “Anyway, the people of Clonmel reinforced their walls where they could, to stop Cromwell from breaking in. But they knew the walls were mostly soft as putty.”

  “They could be knocked down with roasted apples,” called Theresa.

  “No, Theresa, that’s what they said about Limerick. Or was it Derry, I forget? Anyway. Then they devised a clever trick; if this trick worked, it would give them control of where the fighting would take place. They made a series of false lanes into the town, making it look as if these lanes were the real entrance to Clonmel—and they made sure that the false lanes led only to the strongest part of the walls. Sure enough, the trick worked for a while. When Cromwell arrived, he couldn’t knock down the walls. So, a siege began.”

  Theresa clarified. “Because he was attacking only the strongest part of the walls—that’s where the false lanes had led him.”

  “Theresa, would you go to the butcher’s and get the meat?”

  “Ma’am, he’s closed; ’tis one o’clock, and he won’t be open again until two.”

  “Oh, dear Heaven.” Mrs. Cantwell sighed quietly. “And everyone else is closed too. Have you any ironing you could do?”

  “I’ll do it when I’m in the right frame of mind, ma’am.”

  “God knows when that’ll be. Anyway. The siege of Clonmel went on for weeks. Cromwell attacked and attacked, and he got nowhere. And this is where my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came in. While the siege was going on, Hugh O’Neill pulled off a second trick.”

  “More false building,” called Theresa.

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Cantwell had begun to settle for the ranks of the if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them brigade. “This time, O’Neill built a false square—and he built it in behind the weakest part of the walls. It looked like an ordinary town square; you could see the houses above it. If you walked into it, you’d think you were in the heart of Clonmel. And then, to weaken the weak wall even more, he pulled stones out of it—but he pulled them out right in front of this false square.

  “The father of my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was watching this, and he said to his lovely daughter, Ann, ‘Go out there and ask that man if he’s gone mad, pulling down the wall.’

  “Off she goes, lovely as the summer, and when Black Hugh O’Neill sees her, he whips off his hat and bows—because he was a gallant soldier. She asked him what he was doing, and instead of answering her he said, ‘You’re just what I need—I have a job for you.’

  “You forgot about him falling in love,” said Theresa.

  “Dth. He didn’t fall in love with her. That’s your version.”

  “Well, how do you know he didn’t?”

  “Because she married my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

  “But she might have broken Hugh O’Neill’s heart?”

  “Theresa, that’s enough now. Or I’ll tell them about the boy from Dublin you were running after.”

  A shuffle outside the door suggested that Theresa had gone away. Mrs. Cantwell listened for a moment and looked relieved.

  “Supplies here inside the town were running short, and O’Neill knew we couldn’t hold out much longer. That night, he sent my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother out and told her to tiptoe into Cromwell’s camp and pretend she’d left the town because she was dying of the hunger. She was to tell them that part of the wall was very weak, that if they threw a roasted apple, they’d knock it down. And not only that, but that everybody was so hungry, all the soldiers inside the town were now allowed to sleep at night.

  “So when it got dark, about half-past seven in the evening, she tiptoed out and went into Cromwell’s camp. A sentry stopped her, and she asked him for food. He had her brought straight to Cromwell’s tent. She stood in front of him, and he looked down his long nose at her.

  “Ann Maher said afterward that Cromwell had the face of a man who might have a little trouble with his stomach, and he sat very straight in his chair and stared into her eyes. He had warts on his nose, and he asked her who she was, and she gave him a false name and told him how hungry she was.

  “Then he says to her, ‘What kind of a condition is the town in?’ and she answered him as if she was holding something back. He said to her again, ‘I asked you—what kind of a condition is the town in?’ and she answered by saying, ‘Sir, I’m very hungry. We’re down to eating rats at home.’ She was playing her part well.

  “Imagine that. There was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Ann Maher, standing in front of the famous English general, Oliver Cromwell, whose forces had overthrown the king himself, Charles the First, and executed him. There was a joke in my family that Cromwell’s title, ‘the Lord Protector,’ should have been changed to ‘the Lord protect us.’

  “Cromwell said to his officers, ‘Get this girl a plate of stew,’ and he sat her down at his table and watched her eat. She pretended she was like a savage with some manners, and she carried it off well. He couldn’t stop looking at her, nor could his officers, she was so easy on the eye.

  “When she was finished, he said to her, ‘Now, little Clonmel girl, I’ve been kind to you, I could have had you hung. And I might yet. But one good turn deserves another. I gave you a feed of stew, so is there anything you can tell me about the town of Clonmel that would help me to bring this foolish business to an end?’

  “She looked up at him, all innocence, and said, ‘Sir, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’re attacking in the wrong place. If you moved your soldiers east of here, where that very tall tree is growing—they say the wall there is so thin that anyone could breach it by throwing a roasted apple.’”

  Theresa had come back. “You see. I knew it was Clonmel they said it about.”

  Mrs. Cantwell raised her voice to overcome Theresa’s presence. “Cromwell, ever the soldier, said, ‘So they guard it extra carefully?’

  “And Ann Maher says, ‘Oh, no, sir, they’re all too tired, they can’t guard it at night.’ To cut a long story short, Cromwell got most of his army together that night. With one cannonball they blew down that bit of the wall, and they went charging in. Well! They charged into a trap. On all three sides of the false square, Black Hugh had raised wooden ramparts and lined up all his guns. They blasted and they blazed, cannonballs flew everywhere, there were muskets and swords—the women even joined in, hitting the English soldiers on the heads with frying pans.”

  “And chamber pots—don’t forget the chamber pots.”

  “Theresa, there’s no need for vulgarity.” And Mrs. Cantwell at last hit her stride. “Cromwell retreated as best he could. He lost two and a half thousand soldiers, the heaviest defeat he ever had. The mayor of Clonmel negotiated a peace treaty with him, and this time Cromwell had to keep to his word because his army had
been badly reduced, and he didn’t know how many soldiers were inside Clonmel. What he didn’t know either was that, while the terms were being discussed, Black Hugh O’Neill and his army had crept out of Clonmel by a quiet route, and they lived to fight another day. This was the one battle Cromwell never mentioned in the reports he sent back to the English parliament. And he never harmed my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother—if he had, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that story, would I?”

  Toby went back to Oxford, inviting them all to visit.

  “We will,” they assured him.

  Ronan and Kate stayed for Christmas—no point doing otherwise, with schools and colleges closed. And so many details to address; Alison had never learned to drive, and they found a neighbor to teach her; John’s office set the will toward probate; a gravestone had to be ordered, of which Kate took charge.

  Many people called to the house, and dozens telephoned. Ronan did practical things; he paid the undertaker, the drink supplier, the hotel who helped cater. People everywhere spoke to him.

  “Are you going to take over the firm?”

  “So sad for Christmas.”

  “At least your mother won’t have to worry, he was a great provider.”

  His own emotions had to wait; too much going on, no clear look at how he felt; and at night, a kind of fractious, unrestful sleep.

  He had hoped to experience sharper grief. One or two sights did pierce him; his father’s pocket handkerchiefs, laid out on the bed by Alison, some polka-dotted, some with horses, some paisleys; and the paperweight of stone his father had carved with the initials “J O’M”; he asked to keep it.

  Alison’s grief burst through once more—briefly when preparing Sunday’s meat; at which moment Kate peeled many onions to hide her own tears.

  Early on a quiet afternoon, Ronan browsed his father’s books. On the tall shelves he opened one, then another, looking for passages John had marked—and he found an odd assortment of items used as bookmarks; old news clippings; a flimsy red feather; and, in John’s handwriting, small sheets of song lyrics, snatches of epic poems, amusing limericks.