The Unmourned

by Meg Keneally

  County Wexford, Ireland, 1798

  The young Hannah would play with Colm Dempsey sometimes. They would draw pictures in dirt they didn’t own, run up hills which belonged to some lord or other, who had one eye on the rents and the other on next week’s hunt.

  Hannah hit Colm sometimes, when she thought he was being particularly stupid. Making faces, or sprinkling leaves in her hair, which she hated as she considered her hair sovereign to her and was jealous of his red-gold.

  Colm’s brother Seamus often played with them, and a smattering of other boys and girls from nearby farms – she could not remember most of their names now. But Seamus’s name she would never forget, both for what had happened later and for his influence on their play. Seamus was the one to edge forward into a stream at full flood, or to test whether a particular branch would hold their weight. And when it didn’t, and they came home with muddy clothes and were chastised (with Hannah already hating the state she had been persuaded into), Seamus’s grin tended to draw most of the adult annoyance, even when Colm would say, ‘It’s not his fault, Da. Not all of it. We went along, didn’t we, Hanny?’

  She couldn’t remember exactly when she had decided to stop playing with the boys, and perhaps the decision was made for her: it was around the time that her clothes, when wet from a Seamus-led dip in the stream, began clinging to her in a way that made the boys look at her strangely.

  She still saw Colm, though. Of course she did. Their farms were next to each other, outside the town of Enniscorthy near the Milehouse crossroads, and when their father died, Hannah’s da helped them run the place.

  ‘Although all we’ve inherited is the right to pay His Lordship,’ Seamus would say. Colm told him to shut up. He knew, as did the children of many Irish smallholders, that such talk could draw hazardous notice.

  She was jealous of the boys, actually. Of the attention they got from her father. She tried to bring it back to herself by working as hard as any man, harder – cutting and felling, planting and harvesting barley like a demon. But it didn’t stop her father shaking his head some nights, saying he wondered what would become of the farm when he was gone and there was no one to tend it.

  Hannah’s mother had produced only girls, and her older sisters were all married now, scattered around Wexford. She was sure her parents had hoped for a boy. She had ended those hopes: her mother died giving birth to her, and with her father taken up with farming there was no one to warn her against running around the countryside with the wild Dempseys. No one warned the Dempseys against her either – one winter their mother was also carried beyond, by the fever.

  She never saw Seamus at the Mass stone, the blade of rock which marked the secret place where the illegal priest conducted services. Colm was always there though, devout in his way.

  Hannah’s father, Padraig, approved of their friendship, and made it no secret. So Colm might have been hoping for a more enthusiastic response when he suggested he and Hannah should marry.

  ‘I don’t know, Colm,’ said Padraig. ‘It depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘It depends on her. I’m not a brave enough man to promise her to you without her permission. What do you think, Hannah? Would you like to marry this long streak of a boy? Might not be the prettiest, I’ll grant you, but he will look after you, of that I’m sure.’

  Hannah pretended not to be delighted. She had been drawn, secretly, to the young man with the muscled back who wore in mature form the face and red-gold hair of her childhood friend.

  ‘I suppose he’ll have to do, Da. Best of a bad lot. But do you think you can get him to promise not to sprinkle leaves in my hair?’

  Colm made no effort to hide his joy. ‘I’ll use flowers this time,’ he said. ‘And I’ll wish they were jewels. For in a world set to rights it’d be jewels you were wearing.’

  But it was not a time for weddings. Not when farmhouses were burning and people being shot by the side of the road.

  Colm understood the importance of keeping his views to himself; Padraig Mulrooney had views which needed to be kept to himself. He belonged to a group called the United Irishmen, which had drawn inspiration from the French Revolution, and more recently had taken heart from a promise of French troops to back up an Irish rising, should the people stir.

  And it looked increasingly as though they would.

  Hannah was aware of her father’s sympathies but pretended not to be. Still, there were times when they were hard to ignore. Their cottage was one room, and while pretending to be asleep she sometimes heard whispers outside or inexpertly imitated birdcalls, which would make her father abandon the steaming tea that was his chief solace, indeed seemed to the young Hannah the only reliable source of comfort the poor farmer could depend on.

  The governor, sitting in Dublin Castle, hit on a strategy to disarm a population he was becoming increasingly afraid of. It was decreed that all men should go to their nearest town to hand in any weapons they possessed. Most complied, hoping to avoid a flame being set to their roofs, and some who didn’t have pikes were so eager to show their cooperation they acquired weapons to hand in.

  Padraig had walked with his pike into Enniscorthy earlier in the week. He hated having to do it, and planned to acquire another as soon as possible. He might have been more reckless still, but when they burned farmhouses they did so at night, and he did not wish to see his daughter running into the darkness as flames ate her home.

  ‘I know where they’re holding the weapons,’ said Seamus. And for a moment he put her in mind of the boy saying he knew where there was a good hill to climb.

  ‘We’ll be raiding it, so we will. Soon. The captain hasn’t set the date, but plans are being made. And once we get all the pikes back, and any muskets we find, we’ll need somewhere to hide them.’

  ‘What about your own home?’

  ‘Ah, first place they’d look. Two young men, and one of them known to be something of a croppy.’

  So it was true. Hannah had wondered, when she’d first noticed that Seamus’s hair was no longer curling down the back of his neck. Many United Irishmen liked to keep their hair closely cropped, a habit borrowed from French revolutionaries who’d wished to distance themselves from wig-wearing aristocrats.

  ‘I’d not know where to put them, Seamus. Our house is no larger than yours, and our farm only half as big.’

  ‘I’ll help you dig a hole, so. We can cover it with boards and put dirt and leaves over the top.’

  ‘And what does Colm say?’

  ‘Colm has his mind on his wedding, on keeping the farm going. He keeps his head down, that one. Something I’ve never been very good at.’

  In the end her father agreed.

  She did not know when the raid was to be, when to expect men in the night bearing bundles of sharp metal wrapped in cloth. She suspected her father didn’t know either, nor Seamus. They were told to await a signal. Simultaneous raids were planned for strongholds all around the district.

  But they were raids in which Seamus would never participate. At around the time he and Padraig were whispering, a detachment of militia was making its way towards the village of Milehouse. In the dwindling light, they saw what looked like an impediment ahead on the road. The impediment, as they got closer, resolved itself into ten or so croppies, all holding pikes. As the detachment turned, they found a further twenty had filled in the patch of road they had just vacated.

  When the croppies were done, they robbed the bodies. They didn’t particularly mind about the one soldier that got away to raise the alarm.

  This enraged the militia, men who, because of pressure from their landlords or out of a conviction that Britain must own Ireland, served as semi-regular infantry under the orders of British officers. They rode all over the county, indiscriminately burning houses and shooting on sight anyone they suspected of being a rebel sympathiser. They weren’t very careful in their assessment of a man’s leanings before they took his life; it was convenient for them that
so many rebels had distinctively close-cropped hair.

  Hannah and Colm would never know whether Seamus had heard the yeoman riding up behind him. He was found by other tenants. They put his body in their cart and drove it up to the larger of the two farms that sat beside the small stream. Seamus spent that night where he had spent most of the others of his life, in the cottage where he was born, staring up at the thatch. And the following day he was buried without a gravestone on the farm’s furthest boundary.

  ‘Should you not erect some sort of marker?’ Hannah asked. ‘How will you know where he is?’

  ‘I’ll know,’ said Colm. ‘I’ll always know.’

  Colm spent that night in a farmhouse which was unused to having only one occupant. When Hannah saw him the next day, the first thing she noticed was how closely his hair had been cropped.

  She tried to reason with him, but he would not be persuaded.

  ‘What good will it do, Colm, to die like your brother? Your sense was telling you to keep your head down, and your sense was right. Seamus’s death hasn’t changed that.’

  ‘It has changed everything,’ he said. ‘I would rather die than live in a world where they can kill my brother for the way he cuts his hair.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to die!’

  ‘Hannah, I’m not that happy with the idea myself. But my hope is there will be a rising to remove the parasites who have burrowed into our earth.’

  ‘This is not how you used to speak, Colm. You used to say a full-scale rising wasn’t the way, that we would be outnumbered and ultimately slaughtered. You were right then; you are now.’

  ‘I was a fool. Thinking the British would leave if we asked them nicely. We will ask them in a way they cannot help but understand.’

  So it was Colm who helped Padraig dig a hole behind the house, cover it with planks, and Hannah fancied she felt some sort of tug from it, some sort of nascent intent every time she walked past it, as it waited to swallow the weapons to be captured during the raids.

  But those raids, they had to be coordinated, Colm explained. No point hitting one house, however successfully, if the others would then shore up their defences, making themselves less vulnerable. Everything had to happen on the same night.

  The United Irishmen, of course, couldn’t meet openly. Their business was conducted in cottages and copses. Each area had a leader who must find a way to make sure their scattered forces acted together when the time was right. Hannah didn’t know who the Enniscorthy leader was. Few people did, unless they were actively involved in the movement. Whoever he was, he could hardly ride from house to house himself. He needed messengers. Ones who wouldn’t attract attention.

  And while women were certainly not above suspicion as far as the yeomanry were concerned, they had a better chance of escaping attention.

  Hannah made journeys to and from the town, past the farms and houses of the countryside from time to time. Occasional trips to the Enniscorthy market. She was alarmed each time at the ever-increasing presence of the militia on the streets, the suspicion with which everyone looked at everyone else, the lack of the conversation which had been almost a part of the currency of the place. She was even more alarmed one day to hear her father’s raised voice in the cottage when she returned.

  ‘I won’t permit it, Colm,’ he was saying as she entered. ‘The hole out the back, that’s one thing. But this is something you shouldn’t be asking.’

  She had entered silently, so neither her father nor her fiancé noticed her at first.

  ‘I know that,’ said Colm. ‘But Massey needs messengers. And without them, nothing else can proceed.’

  ‘I’m to be a messenger girl, am I?’ she said.

  They turned to her, two sets of agitated eyes rolling over her face.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Padraig. ‘We’re doing enough.’

  ‘Are we, though?’ said Colm. ‘Padraig, do you think that if you just stay quiet, this will pass you over? Things have gone too far for that. If the United Irishmen disbanded tomorrow, it would not stop the British killing us and burning our farms. Rising is the only way out now.’

  ‘But Hannah can’t be part of it.’

  Hannah was certainly not sure that she wanted to be. She cursed the necessity for this rising. But it was a necessity that she could see. So she sat down next to her father, put her head on his sloping shoulder.

  ‘Da, you let me decide about marrying Colm. Will you let me decide on this as well?’

  She wondered, not for the first time, whether the British were a stupid race. Might and money seemed to be all they understood, but surely they could see that destroying those from whom they made the latter would ultimately rob them of their means to find the former.

  The standard methods of extracting information from captured rebels, flayings and beatings, were being joined by other, more imaginative inducements. One magistrate travelled the region accompanied by an executioner who bore a noose and a cat o’ nine tails with him. A short frame was invented for the purposes of half-hanging – suspending a man by the neck, keeping him alive until he gave away the information that was wanted.

  And, in what seemed to Hannah to be a horrific imitation of the croppy hairstyle, there was pitch capping. Men were forced to kneel as hot tar was poured over their heads. Sometimes it dried and was then torn off, with whatever parts of scalp came with it. Sometimes it was mixed with gunpowder and set alight, and put out only when the British had the information they were looking for.

  The only way to stop the bloodshed, it seemed to Hannah, was to stop the English.

  ‘I will do it,’ she said to her father, and felt his shoulder slump a little more.

  Massey, whoever he was, came and gave her the oath of secrecy. ‘Do you walk a lot around this area?’ he asked her.

  ‘As much as I need to. Which is a fair amount.’

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a blue ribbon. ‘I don’t want you to wear this ribbon until you receive a message to do so,’ he said. ‘But when you’re asked to, put it on and walk – slowly – past the houses you would normally pass. That’s all. Erin go bragh.’

  The United Irishmen’s rallying cry. ‘Ireland forever.’

  ‘Erin go bragh,’ she repeated, as though it was a response in a Mass.

  She kept the ribbon on her, and a few days later a message was brought to Colm of a rebel victory in Oulart.

  ‘Do you know how many we lost?’ he asked her. ‘Six! Brave men, of course, and their loss is tragic. But only six dead. Miraculous. The yeomen drank an inn dry and burned it, and charged up the hill and we consumed them. They’ve abandoned Gorey now too, cramming themselves into Arklow instead.’

  The British would now be wanting a demonstration battle to show their strength, reassert their dominance over the island. And if they wanted a battle, Colm was among thousands, emboldened by good luck, who were more than willing to oblige. To do that, they needed weapons.

  A few days later, Colm came by the house early in the morning to see Hannah. Their embraces had become more heated of late. The danger, the threats they breathed in with the air, made them believe they were counting a finite number of kisses. And they were as good as married anyway. So Colm was fond of saying, and she did not know then that all men said that sort of thing.

  That morning, though, there was no embrace, no attempt to kiss her which she would playfully try to rebuff before yielding.

  ‘Wear the blue ribbon today,’ he said, and turned, walking away from his farm and hers.

  As the night fell and she imagined she heard the occasional distant shout carried on the breeze, she wondered whether her blue ribbon had killed Colm. But he came after midnight. ‘Get dressed, you’ll not believe it,’ he said. She got up and made her bed neatly to show her father she hadn’t been dragged from it unwillingly.

  She and Colm walked into the valley and up the opposite hill to the residence of the magistrate, who trotted about the countryside with his personal execu
tioner. His house was empty of people – they had fled when they saw the rebels advancing – and of weapons. Hannah’s blue ribbon had been the signal for a raid on every loyalist home where weapons were believed to have been stored. She wondered whether some of them, even now, were on their way to the hole behind her house.

  ‘I want you to realise,’ said Colm, ‘that you’re entering this house as a free woman who bows to no one, not as a servant. Tomorrow you will not be able to do the same. The only hope you have of standing equal with the owners of this house is through revolution.’

  It was odd, on this night of smoke and noise, to be walking through the dark and silent house, looking into rooms which were larger than the cottage where she and her father lived.

  At the top of the stairs, the family’s bedrooms. The magistrate’s chamber, finely decorated with rich dark fabrics and a high bed with curtains. The bed clothes were disturbed.

  ‘You know, the man who was sleeping here a few hours ago would happily see me half-hung by the side of the road, then killed when I’d given up whatever he was after.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you know he’d do the same to you, given half a chance. And of course your father.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘But we’ve chased him out, you and I and the others. And we’ll do the same again, all over the country. It’s my hope, my Hannah, that this won’t be the last time you lie down on a bed like this.’

  After all, thought Hannah, we’re practically married, and in calmer times it would have been done already. So what harm was there? And leaving her virginal blood happily on the sheets of such a disgraceful man seemed to her, somehow, fitting.

  Chapter 14

  Hannah didn’t tell Monsarrat of the magistrate’s bedroom. Of the kisses, or of Colm’s red-gold hair.

  ‘Colm died on the same day as my father. Before we got the chance to marry,’ she said. ‘Padraig is his son.’

  It had been a long time, in such a far-off place, but whenever she gingerly prodded those memories, they rose up and snapped at her. Colm was no longer on this earth, and he had died unmarried. That was all Monsarrat would be told.