by Joe Murphy
1798
Tomorrow The Barrow We’ll Cross
Joe Murphy
Contents
Title Page
PART ONE THE BOYS OF WEXFORD
CHAPTER 1 Oath of Allegiance
CHAPTER 2 The Rising of the Moon
CHAPTER 3 The Need for Law
CHAPTER 4 The Rule of Law
CHAPTER 5 Revelations
CHAPTER 6 Confrontations
PART TWO WITH HEART AND HAND
CHAPTER 7 Outbreak
CHAPTER 8 The Coming Soldiers
CHAPTER 9 Meetings at Ballyorril
CHAPTER 10 Enniscorthy’s in Flames
CHAPTER 11 Considerations
CHAPTER 12 Hard Councils
CHAPTER 13 Events at Three Rocks
CHAPTER 14 Old Wexford is Won
CHAPTER 15 Debates and Divisions
CHAPTER 16 With Brave Harvey
CHAPTER 17 Ambitions
CHAPTER 18 Walpole’s Horse and Walpole’s Foot
CHAPTER 19 An Evil Stirs
CHAPTER 20 The Gateways to Ross
PART THREE THE SLANEY’S RED WAVE
CHAPTER 21 Taking Leave
CHAPTER 22 Evil Ascendant
CHAPTER 23 Liberty or Death
CHAPTER 24 United in Blood
CHAPTER 25 What is Left Behind
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
When twilight falls on north County Wexford it falls in purples and golds. The sun behind the Blackstairs spills the gore of its setting up and over the dark backs of the mountains so that the western sky is a swamp of vermilion, a haemorrhage of red. Yet, above this, the light is less harsh, less angry. Above Mount Leinster the sky pales to a lustrous gold that washes and arcs upwards and eastwards until, seemingly without transition, the doming heavens darken to violet, darken to royal blue, darken so that the first stars dapple and strew the horizon. The day is an emptied church, its columns fire-fluted, its ceiling a sweep of colour.
There is a quiet upon everything. Birdsong and the barking of dogs on lone farms ripple the tranquillity. But they do not rend it. There is a calm, a stillness, deeper than the mere absence of noise. The inkspill of shadow creeps out from the foothills of the Blackstairs and little by little isolated lights begin to appear amidst the woods and river valleys. The day burns itself to ashes, and clusters and swirls of streetlights and sodium arcs flicker and blink into a buzzing existence. Around these earthbound stars, sootsoft whirls of moths gather in silent and dusty agitation.
The ditches, the fields, the discarded tarmac ribbons of the roads, all are limned in the purple and gold of the dying day. All is quiet, all is calm.
In the distance the lights of Kiltealy, Enniscorthy, Ferns, Oulart, New Ross, Wexford, Duncannon, Rosslare, Gorey, the lights of a hundred other villages and towns flicker in the swelling dark. And upon this dusky ocean the moon crests the eastern edge of the world and throws its bloodless sheen over sea and over land.
This is now. It is late summer and all is quiet, all is calm.
But it was not always.
When twilight fell on north County Wexford in late summer of the year 1798, it fell in purples and golds. The sun sank in a welter of crimson behind the Blackstairs and upon the patchwork countryside rolling out from their feet. In the distance the lights of Kiltealy, Enniscorthy, Ferns, Oulart, New Ross, Wexford, Duncannon, Rosslare, Gorey, the lights of a hundred other villages and towns flickered in the swelling dark. But smaller then, smaller and a smoky yellow, where the naked flames of lamps and candles wavered and danced in the vagaries of a summer breeze.
Only the sunset was unchanged, the sunset and the bonelight of the rising moon, pallid and grinning and cold.
Katie Furlong sat on a rough stool at the small table occupying most of her kitchen. She trailed her fingers over the table’s unvarnished surface, feeling her calluses rasp across the knots and gouges. She trailed her fingers across the wood until they found the deep marks chiselled into one corner. The pad of her index finger followed the grooves of its own volition, tracing the letters N.F. Katie did not know her alphabet but she knew these grooves were her husband’s mark. Her husband, who had made most of the furniture in this two-roomed cabin. Her husband, who had limed the walls and cut the straw to cover the hard, clay and who had left her and not come back. Her husband, Ned Furlong, gone now for two months.
Until the first briny drop spattered upon the skin of her left forearm Katie had not realised that she was crying.
Without a candle, Katie Furlong sat at her vanished husband’s table and cried softly as the twilight gathered at her bolted door and the shadows darkened amidst the rafters. For how long she sat there and wept Katie did not know; but when she was roused, it was by the clatter and hard drumming of horses’ hooves.
For the briefest of moments she felt a sea-surge of warmth in her breast. She was on her feet and smoothing down the bodice of her linen dress before she realised what she was doing and the first twitch of a smile began to uplift the corners of her mouth, downturned and morose for so long. Then a terrible instinct quelled the hot tide within her and a frigid core of ice abruptly formed about her heart. The yearning for her husband that had brought her so suddenly to her feet was now a thing of lead, lumpen and cold.
Ned Furlong had had no horse.
Katie’s breathing quickened and she found herself straining for any clue as to the identity of the horsemen beyond her little cabin’s walls. Her fists balled into white lumps, she listened for the inevitable and she felt her anger and fear rise in equal measure within. She stood like something carven whilst her insides churned and her brain grew frantic. So chaotic were her thoughts that when the hooves finally stilled and the first voices came, she almost missed them.
They were Irish voices, speaking English in local accents but there was something strange about them. Something alien. Something clipped and razoredged. Something wrong.
Silently, Katie slipped around the table and sidled up to the single window set into the whitewashed wall. The window’s wooden shutters were closed and barred but Katie pressed her sorrow-raw eye to the loose join between the shutters and prayed she would not see what she already knew to be there. In the dark, the moonlight painted a band of brightness down her face where it was pressed to the gap in the shutters and in this glowing band Katie’s eye widened with an awful terror. She almost stumbled away from the window then but instead, in the shaft of moonlight, her visage hardened. Her eyes that only moments before had brimmed like wellheads were now narrowed and emotionless.
The spectacle that played out just beyond her home’s walls petrified her and leached all emotion from her body.
In the moonlight, on the packed earth of her small farm’s yard, ten yeoman cavalry stood or sat their saddles. Even now, the sound of their coarse guffawing permeated the stone of the walls like a contagion. The silver light on their Tarleton helmets, the breeze riffling the bearskin coverings, the spilled ink of their coats, all were etched in Katie’s mind. Indelible as a scar.
She stood, quiet and unmoving as a leaden fist crashed once, twice, three times, upon the heavy planking of the cabin door. She stood quiet and unmoving, as a voice, a voice in her own Wexford drawl, filled the caverns and empty places of her mind with a dread desolation.
‘Open in the name of the King and Lord Mountnorris.’
Katie stood, a study in emptiness, as the voice roared again, ‘Open or we’ll burn it down around your ears.’
Another voice, less bellicose but in an accent that Katie did not recognise, rose in commendation of the first, ‘That’s the spirit trooper, we ain’t here to mollycoddle.’
The cabin’s door shivered like a drumhead on its hinges, rattling and creaking as the fis
t came again and again and again.
Katie Furlong, in the dark of her little kitchen, felt with each hammering blow a gradual withdrawing of her faculties. Terror, fear, rational thought, had all fled at the yeomen’s voices. Only a bleak sort of anger remained. In the dark of her kitchen with the thick smell of the soldiers’ horses beginning to intrude upon her senses, Katie Furlong moved numb step after numb step, towards the cabin door. Delicately, her white hand withdrew the simple deadbolt and with a cool sureness that lent her face a startling serenity, she opened wide the door.
Before her stood a young man dressed in the uniform of the Camolin Cavalry. He seemed to Katie to be barely out of his teens and yet his countenance was twisted and puckered about a snarl. His gloved hand was raised to fall once again on the door’s planking and as the portal was swept aside the yeoman froze with his fist stalled in its downward trajectory.
Katie’s own fist, rising in a tight arc, caught him completely by surprise.
The yeoman fell away, curses exploding from his lips as the flintlocks of nine carbines were drawn back. To Katie they sounded like the breaking of bones.
The spluttering yeoman Katie had struck was now bristling and indignant. His mouth was shrunken into something bitter and outraged and his eyes gleamed like spurs in the moonlight. ‘You bitch!’ he began before the other voice halted his words and stymied whatever action he was about to take.
Katie stood with the moon washing her of all colour, stood with her white skin and white dress, stood with her lips trembling, stood pale against the empty dark of her door. Through her mind, a comet against icy black, a thought burned hideously. In the silence of her own skull, Katie screamed, I’m going to die.
The yeo she had struck was panting with fury and his gauntlets creaked as his fists clenched and unclenched. And the other voice came again.
‘Summers, if you do not step aside from the lady I shall have you standing in irons before a military court.’
The yeoman hesitated and then stood to one side, drawing his midnight blue sleeve across his swollen lips as he did so. Behind him, Katie perceived an officer dismounting from his big bay. The man, with calculated nonchalance, sauntered across the hard earth of her yard. As he drew nearer the voice in Katie’s mind howled to a banshee pitch. Under the moon the braiding of the officer’s jacket glowed like quicksilver and at his hip his sabre swung with each slow step. Horse sweat, the reek of men and the mouldy waft of wine and stale cologne made Katie suddenly want to retch. As the officer stopped in front of her she could taste the bile scalding the well of her throat.
The officer seemed a young man, no more than mid-twenties, and under his crested helmet his smooth cheeks looked freshly shaved. They were marble into which the coal pits of his eyes were set. Then his wide mouth, a mouth made for smiling, Katie found herself thinking, opened and he addressed her sharply.
‘Good woman, my name is Lieutenant Shingleton of the Camolin Cavalry. I have come for your husband. Where is he?’
Katie felt her jaw slacken. Her faculties became lax and her stomach heaved in violent spasm beneath her linen dress. The lieutenant’s words had caught her off guard and blown her heart wide open. She felt physically buffeted. Her knees unhinging, every joint of her frame dislocating, she somehow brought her arms up to fold them beneath her breasts and struggled to dull the vibrancy of her emotions. She took in the young lieutenant’s handsome face and cold eyes and strangled the cockerel crow of exultation that hammered her insides for relief.
Ned was still alive.
The young Lieutenant Shingleton watched with the shrewd vision of one unnaturally aged. The rebellion had hardened him and honed his wits, had quickened his anger and had bred in him the rapacious demons of hatred and contempt. Beneath his gentleman’s refinement, beneath his good looks, something had soured.
A small pink triangle of tongue licked out and along Shingleton’s lower lip.
‘Have a care woman. For the toss of a pin I’d shoot you where you stand. Do not lie to me, I warn you.’
Katie met his considering gaze with the hot defiance that came so readily to her. ‘Ned went off to Carnew to visit his cousin. He’s sick,’ she said.
Katie did not know she had been struck until she saw the blood emptying out of her nose and mouth and onto the back of her hands. With each hacking breath she took, the gush of warm wet coming from her face became a sticky spray. Each inhalation caught gore in her throat and she sprayed her own vitality over her forearms and over the thirsty earth of her yard.
Shingleton stood over Katie’s wretched form and allowed her a moment or two to regain her senses. He stood over her and watched her nose and lips spill blood onto the ground at his feet.
‘In the moonlight,’ she thought he whispered, ‘all blood looks black.’
He watched as Katie struggled to her knees, her clawed hands laced over her ruined face, tears and blood a torrent beneath them. Looking up at him, her blood soaking into the front of her dress, making it cling to her breasts, Shingleton could see the sheen of terror in her eyes. Relishing this, he grinned down at her.
‘Not to sully your character madam, but you are a lying rebel whore!’ He ended his words in a shout, a roar so savage it should have come from a beast. The yeos’ horses whinnied, their hooves pawing at the yard and over them another voice came pleading and insistent.
‘For God’s sake, Lieutenant let me talk to her, I know this woman. Don’t do her any more violence I beg you.’
Shingleton’s boot heels ground into the earth as he turned to face his troop. Almost to a man they stared with rapt attention towards the bloodied figure of Katie. Their features were set in expressions of eager anticipation or set-jawed stoicism. Two even stood with eyes downcast and shoulders slumped. One figure however was moving quickly forward. His carbine sheathed in his saddle holster he jogged forward, his left hand gripping his sabre’s hilt to stop it tangling in his stride.
Shingleton eyed the man with an air of curiosity and then abruptly moved aside. His lips curling around a sneer he drawled, ‘If, Burke, you feel you can prevail upon her to provide the information then so be it’.
He massaged the knuckles of his right hand, ‘I find violence towards women rather distasteful.’
Burke was already kneeling beside Katie. He had taken his helmet off and had produced a cotton handkerchief from the cuff of one leather gauntlet.
Katie jerked away from him. Her entire world still reverberated to the concussion of Shingleton’s fist. Yet one certainty gripped her mind and bound it close and whole. If the yeos were looking for Ned, then he was still alive.
Through this one crystal thought, through the pain and confusion of the rest of her, a voice came soft and penetrating. ‘It’s me Katie. Thady Burke. It’s me. You know me.’
Like frost under sun, Katie’s vision seemed to clear and before her, in the dark of her dooryard with the moon turning the earth into a puddle of silver, crouched a man she had known all her life. Gently he held his handkerchief to her bleeding mouth and nose.
Katie stared at him and words came slurred and soft as marl from between her split lips. ‘Thady, why are you still with them? Why are you doing this? You’re no Orangeman.’
Thady Burke’s expression crumpled as though the bones had been removed from his face. ‘Shhh, whisht now Katie. I’m no Orangeman but I’m no rebel either. I’m in the yeomanry to protect what little land and property I have, from God knows what.’
Swallowing blood and almost gagging on it Katie asked, ‘You fought against your own people?’
Thady shook his head and smiled ruefully, aware that his lieutenant was standing behind him, ‘Cavalry corps find it difficult to engage in such rough country.’ He paused then and looked her directly in her tear-swamped eyes, ‘We know Ned was a United Irishman. We know he went off with Miles Byrne and the Monaseed boys. No harm will be done to you Katie if you but tell us where you think he is or if you have anyone else at all sheltering in your c
abin.’
Katie, kneeling at her own door with Thady’s gentle hand stemming the flow of blood from her face, felt the fulcrum of events within her. Her life had reached its perfect point of equilibrium. Her next words would either save her or kill her. She did not know where Ned was and she had never sheltered a soul inside her meagre house. If the yeos accepted this she would see the morning. If not she would lie here until the neighbours came to put out her burning home and bury what was left of her body.
At night, from high hills and the slopes of mountains, all over the countryside you could see the lofty blaze of another torched haggard and if the wind was in the wrong direction, and if you were unfortunate enough, you could hear the screams. This was the price of rebellion against the Crown. This was General Lake’s idea of peace.
Thinking this, Katie Furlong stared through Thady Burke, stared through him into an abyss of nothingness and said, ‘I don’t know where Ned is and I’ve never sheltered anyone in my cabin but I do know that if Ned is alive he’s fighting you crowd of bastards and I only wish I had a hundred fine boys hiding in my kitchen to cut every one of you down’.
Thady Burke’s mouth was a hanging black hole in his face and as he took his handkerchief away, soaked and crusted with Katie’s blood, he moaned, ‘Oh, Katie, Katie, Katie.’
Lieutenant Shingleton’s hand on his shoulder brought Thady to his feet.
‘You should remove any weight of responsibility from your shoulders Burke. Every opportunity was afforded this croppy bitch to abide by the law. The consequences of her actions are her own to suffer.’
Katie, still kneeling, her face a broken and pulsing mess, watched as in the frigid light of the arcing moon, the lieutenant turned to his men. In her clogged nostrils and throat, the taste of her own blood made her feel faint and in her ears Shingleton’s next words roared like a tidal wave.
‘Burn this hovel. If anything comes out, shoot it. What you do with the woman is up to you but I believe precedents have been set as to the example you should make of her.’