1798

by Joe Murphy

  And under Shingleton’s words Thady Burke’s voice sighed like a cornfield in a summer breeze, ‘Oh, Jesus. Katie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  Katie stared, stricken, at Thady Burke, his big shoulders and wide face, his eyes round as plates and his sandy hair plastered to his head from the heat and weight of his helmet. She stared at him as in the half-dark behind him a dozen furious stars suddenly erupted into hissing, crackling life. In the flat-booming instant of their birth she saw painted in their light a congeries of gargoyle’s faces. Every face splashed with the red of fire, straggling beards and matted hair like tangles of gorse in the savage flare. Then the noise, the cannibal glare, all was gone and six yeomen were falling dead to the packed earth of the yard.

  There were no spastic throes from the men who died, no graceful salmonarcs to lend elegance to their ends. They simply dropped, like broken puppets, dropped as if their strings had been cut.

  Katie’s scream was lost in the guttural roar that came from out of the enveloping dark and with that roar came a group of thirty wretched wraiths. All wore ragged clothing, shirts and neckcloths soiled, their woollen coats and breeches rent and battered. Some came on without stockings, some without brogues but all came on with that single brutal roar of bloodlust and desperation. In the moonlight, the blades of swords and pikes winked like will-o’-the-wisps.

  In the yard, one of the remaining yeos attempted to clamber on to his panicked horse but was borne under by the steel-edged tide. One other presented his carbine and loosed a single shot into the mass of attackers bearing down on him. None seemed to fall and the first pike-head drove him backwards while the second transfixed him where he lay. His screams mounted and mounted on wings of broken glass as the pikemen stabbed and kicked and stabbed again. Death at the end of a plunging blade; horrible and cruel and slow.

  Without firelocks, both Shingleton and Thady Burke watched thirty men thunder toward them across the cold earth of Katie’s dooryard and, without a word to each other, both turned to flee. Thady had almost reached the corner of the cabin when a ball from a pilfered carbine hammered into his left side. Gore erupting from his mouth, ribs broken, Burke collapsed, gasping, to the ground.

  It is said that Lieutenant Shingleton evaded his pursuers for a mile and a half until the group of five men ran him to ground in a bog near Craanford. His naked body was found the following day, battered and pierced through with pike wounds.

  Katie Furlong, however, was still shuddering from the treatment she had received at the lieutenant’s hands when a pikeman knelt and lifted her to her feet. His thin face was filthily bearded and the bones of his skull protruded so much that he appeared to be wearing a death’s head on his scrawny shoulders. He examined her battered face and shook his head, not in anger but in a kind of sad resignation, ‘Jaysus, they don’t rein back, do they?’

  Katie felt the hardness of his hands on her trembling shoulders and let herself be supported by their firmness. Casting her gaze about, she watched as most of her tattered band of rescuers stripped and rifled the dead yeomen of anything even remotely valuable.

  ‘Are you United Irishmen?’ she said.

  He smiled then and in that moment could be glimpsed the man he might have become had the summer of 1798 not erupted in flame and death and horror. He gestured around him, ‘This dishevelled rabble is all that is left of a company of the United Irish Army. Us and others like us. The pride of our race.’ His blue eyes swept the yard as the others of his band squabbled and argued over coin or jewellery, their weapons dropped, their bony hands grasping.

  ‘Look at us madam. Look at us and tell us how proud you are of us.’

  Katie, somewhat taken aback by his bitterness, moved his hands from off her shoulders. ‘My husband,’ she said at last. ‘Can you tell me anything of Ned Furlong?’

  The rebel took a step back as though to reappraise the woman in front of him. ‘You’re Ned Furlong’s wife? The last I heard of Ned he was heading north with Anthony Perry and Fitzgerald, I think. But this was shortly after Lake came to Wexford Town. God knows where he is now.’

  Katie thought he was about to say more when a shout came from a rebel leaning over Thady Burke. ‘Here lads, this one hasn’t gone off to his eternal reward yet. What should we do with him?’

  Amidst cries of ‘Stick him!’ and ‘Kill the Orangeman!’ the man who had been speaking to Katie moved quickly to inspect Thady’s prone form. The bullet had pierced his side and even in the darkness the amount of blood streaming from the wound had soaked his jacket, dyeing it from dark blue to a sopping black. Thady’s lips were grotesquely smeared with red and his breathing was shallow and gurgled frothily.

  The man who had been talking to Katie picked up a fallen sabre and, placing a boot on the yeoman’s neck, was about to run him through when Thady’s voice exploded forth in a spray of crimson, ‘Don’t kill me, Tom!’

  The man, Tom, gasped and bent to look more closely at the fallen yeo. ‘Thady Burke! For the love of all that’s holy, Thady, what are you doing here? Knowing your family, I can understand you remaining with the yeos, but butchering women? Rapine and murder? This isn’t you.’

  ‘Twelve weeks, Tom,’ wheezed Thady. ‘Twelve weeks since I saw you riding with Knox Grogan’s yeomanry corps. Is three months all it takes to turn two soldiers into butchers?’

  Tom bent to comb his fingers through Thady Burke’s sweat-lank hair. ‘Three months? Is that all it is?’

  ‘A lifetime, Tom.’ And then Thady Burke said no more.

  A young man whom Katie had noticed off to one side, wearing a military jacket and green sash, moved to stand by Tom’s shoulder, ‘You knew him, Tom? Was he in the Castletown Corps as well?’

  ‘No, Miles. He was always in the Camolin Cavalry but we’re the one age. I knew him as one young lad knows another.’

  With that he stirred himself and raised his gaunt frame to its full height. Turning to Katie, he gestured toward the young man beside him, bearded and ragged but strangely unbowed with his short-tailed coat and grubby green sash. ‘I’m unsure as to whether you’ve made acquaintance with this man before, but your husband fought under him. Allow me to introduce him – Captain Miles Byrne of the Monaseed Corps.’

  Looking from one bearded rebel to the next, Katie felt a peculiar kind of dizziness curdle the substance of her thoughts. The events of the last half hour on this late summer’s night had so agitated and horrified her that she was shaken and rattled right down to her very soul. Yet, in spite of this she addressed the captain calmly, ‘Captain Byrne I would be very much grateful if, in a moment, you could tell me about my poor husband but first, if you will excuse me.’

  With that she strode over to the corpse of Thady Burke and, forming all the horror and fear she had experienced into a hissing ball inside of her, she spat a mouthful of phlegm and blood and bile into its sightless face. She then linked arms with Miles Byrne and began to sob softly into her cupped right hand.

  The eighteen year old captain gazed in helpless terror at the weeping woman on his arm and, clearing his throat, said, ‘Tom, assemble the corps. We leave as soon as we are able.’

  Nodding, Tom acknowledged, ‘Yes, Miles.’ But his thoughts were elsewhere, his eyes resting on the body of Thady Burke.

  Twelve weeks? Had it been only three months?

  Twenty minutes later with the moon nearing its apex and the company of pikemen assembled in two ranks, Tom Banville turned his back on Katie Furlong’s farmyard, turned his back on the body of Thady Burke and turned his back on the shattered remnants of the only home he had ever known. At the head of a small corps of pike- and musketmen, Tom Banville marched out of County Wexford and only the tears that spilled from his eyes gave testimony to what he had truly left behind.

  PART ONE

  THE BOYS OF WEXFORD

  CHAPTER 1

  Oath of Allegiance

  The 25th of April, nearly three months before Tom Banville turned his back on his county, dawned bright and b
lue and glorious. This day, on the cusp of two seasons, was a herald of the golden warmth that would permeate May and flood through to June. Around Coolgreany, between the sea and the mountains, the sunshine was washing a torrent of green across the fields and ditches. Trees were dressed in their first shimmer of emerald and bibulous runnels of birdsong trickled through branch and briar. Under the canvas sky and upon the artist’s palette of field and pasture, nothing suggested that things here were wrong, that things within this frame were grotesquely askew, misshapen.

  The morning’s cascade of sunshine brimmed the Banville stable yard with warmth. Laurence Banville was a Catholic middleman, well-to-do, liberal and respected and, as such, the large two-storey farmhouse he and his family occupied had attached to it, not just a stable yard, but a kennel as well. Even as the sun climbed to mid-morning the Banville pack of harriers could be heard yowling and snuffling. In the stables, however, there was little life. Only five horses remained. Three large hunters and two heavy-headed workhorses. Another five stables were unoccupied save for the mournful creak of hanging tack and the sick-bed buzzing of flies.

  This morning the mounting sun caught Laurence’s two sons and a companion standing in the stable yard. Tom wore a black woollen frock coat over a high-collared white linen shirt, a pair of buff buckskin breeches, linen stockings and a pair of heavy black brogues. In his hands he held a black tricorn beaver.

  Resting his broad shoulders against the wall of his father’s house, he regarded his two companions with a wry smile.

  ‘If you would like to reconsider your entering into our wager, Proctor, I won’t allow it to affect your standing in my affections.’

  Richard Proctor, a heavy-featured young man dressed in the red coat of Thomas Knox Grogan’s Castletown Cavalry, was pursing his lips and frowning, his brows like an approaching storm front. His Tarleton helmet was placed on a barrel beside him and he unconsciously riffled one callused set of fingers through its bearskin crest. At his side a light cavalry sabre hung motionless in the morning heat.

  Still frowning, the yeoman turned to Tom, ‘A gentleman never reneges, Tom.’

  He then lifted his head as four of the summer’s first flight of swallows bolted over the yard, black lightning strikes against blue.

  ‘However I feel we should hurry. We muster in Gorey at three.’

  At this, the third occupant of the yard, standing with his back to the others, snorted out a great explosion of derision and muttered something under his breath. Without another word he busied himself with a task hidden from the others by the bulk of his torso.

  Dan Banville was five years older than his brother and, apart from the fact that he wore no coat, was dressed exactly as his younger sibling. However, his carriage was slightly heavier than Tom’s, his shoulders wider, his face rounder and the blue-grey of his eyes under dark brows somehow deeper and less sparkling. Under his short hair his high forehead was already a match for his father’s.

  Tom shook his head in exasperation, ‘Dan, just because you wouldn’t take the oath does not give you license to offend me or to offer offence to our friends.’

  Dan turned around then and in his hands he carried two pistols. Both were primed and both set at half cock. ‘That coat ould Richard over there is wearing is an offence to all Irishmen and that bloody oath you’re going to take this afternoon is an offence to our family.’

  Overhead the swallows screamed and darted, hurling themselves through the honeyed air, oblivious and frantic.

  ‘Now, Richard,’ he continued. ‘A shilling for the two, or nothing. Are they the terms?’

  Proctor, still frowning, nodded, ‘They’re the terms. But I cannot fathom how you intend to accomplish this, Dan. At the first report they’ll be off like scalded cats.’

  Dan grinned, winked at Proctor then turned to his brother, ‘Just don’t drink this all in the one place.’

  Smiling, Tom blessed himself and set his lean features in a pose of beatific innocence.

  Still grinning, Dan rolled up his sleeves, brought both pistols to full cock and raised his eyes and arms skywards. He had only ever done this twice before but even as he lifted his gaze he felt the old coolness, the familiar sureness infuse every fibre. He knew, everyone knew, that he was the best sharpshooter in three baronies, possibly the county. With one of the long shore guns of Shelmalier he could hit a bullseye at four hundred yards. As he lifted his arms he felt his senses condense into that familiar sphere of ice which nothing and no one could hope to penetrate.

  Overhead, the swallows darted and yawed, pitched and swooped in erratic exultation. Watching them, Richard Proctor knew that, no matter how good Dan was, he could never be that good. And, watching him, Tom was already counting his money.

  In Dan’s hands both pistols moved, almost of their own volition and his eyes roved back and forth until, with a gradual application of pressure, he squeezed the two pistol butts. There was no abrupt and violent jerking of Dan’s hands, just a seeming caress of the triggers and the black barrels of the pistols erupted almost simultaneously.

  Through air made suddenly acrid and choked with powder smoke two small black bundles plummeted to the earth, their joyous hurtling stilled, their tiny bodies broken by the searing hammering of lead.

  Into the silent vacancy left by the pistols’ reports, into the powder-clouded air, Tom Banville’s voice said, ‘That’ll be a shilling there, Proctor.’

  Richard Proctor was just delving into a pocket when the Banvilles’ back door was flung open with such shuddering violence that the three young men were startled and spun round. As though the house had swallowed its tongue, there was a void in the wall which was immediately filled by the figure of old Laurence Banville. His balding head with its hatchet nose was a spitting ball of fury and his left fist was clenched into a knobbled mass of white knuckles and vein-scrawled skin. His frame was thin and wasting now, in his sixty-eighth year, but his voice still carried a bellowing authority, ‘What in God’s name are you two boys doing out here? If I find gunplay carrying on in my yard, I shall horsewhip the both of you!’

  Before Dan could say anything, his father’s gaze had alighted upon the smoking pistols in his hands. The old man’s face flushed puce and Dan was certain that he and his brother were about to be on the receiving end of a verbal cannonade when Laurence Banville noticed the red coat of Richard Proctor, standing dumbfounded with one hand buried in his breeches pocket.

  All colour leached from the old man’s face as though the very blood had drained from his extremities. His features became still and the fury that had flamed behind his eyes was dissipated and quenched. As Dan and Tom watched their father, he became almost a wax effigy of the man they knew. The unnatural pallor of his skin, the dull pebbles of his eyes, all bespoke of some profound change that the sight of the young yeoman had provoked in him.

  Dan and Tom looked on as their father raised one curiously tremulous finger and jabbed it like a pike towards Proctor, saying, ‘Richard, I know you and I knew your father, and I hope to God he’s not looking down on you now. He was a good Protestant but he was no bigot. That jacket makes you an instrument of the tyrant.’

  Proctor winced as though struck and splayed his hands, palms outwards, almost in a gesture of supplication, ‘Come now, Mr Banville, Thomas Knox Grogan is a moderate man. He has always concentrated his utmost endeavours to further the well-being of his Catholic tenants.’

  He pointed to Dan, who was surreptitiously attempting to push the brace of pistols into the waistband of his breeches, and protested, ‘Even Dan there was in the Castletown Corps.’

  His finger still pointing accusingly at Proctor, Laurence Banville almost spat the next words, ‘And he left. He and the majority of the good Catholic boys. All apart from my noble youngest son. And do you know why?’ He paused, ‘Because of that thrice accursed oath! It is an open wound on the face of egalitarianism and its sole function is to turn the yeomanry into an Orangeman’s plaything.’

  Proc
tor blinked in shocked silence and Dan moved forward, his mouth opening to interject something into the ragged quiet. Then Tom said softly, carefully, ‘I’m taking the Test Oath, Da.’

  Laurence Banville looked at his youngest son, an expression of contempt and disgust curdling his features and, without another word, entered his house and slammed the door behind him.

  Dan stabbed a glance at Richard Proctor, who was kicking at the hardened earth of the yard in awkward discomfiture, and then stalked over to his brother.

  ‘Tom, if you consent to take the oath Da will disown you if you’re lucky and most likely shoot you otherwise.’

  Tom did not even look his brother in the face. His expression a mocking, haughty, half-smile that set Dan’s blood to boiling, he said, ‘Da doesn’t like anyone with a bit of money. For God’s sake he calls Hunter Gowan an “upstart”. If you and Mother give him his head he will ruin this family. We will end up scratching in the muck like half the rest of our good Catholic fellows.’

  Ignoring Proctor’s polite embarrassed cough, Dan glared at his brother and felt the first real saw-edge of anger enter into his voice, ‘So you would rather take an oath that renounces your religion? Why do you think forty of us resigned on the spot when we were asked to take it?’

  Tom, with the iced superiority of the deliberately insulting, finally looked at his brother and said, ‘Because you are fools. The oath renounces the United Irishmen, not Rome. Besides, if you and father are so eager to find slight in empty phrases then I am not.’

  With that he stormed into the house, shouting, ‘I’m putting on my uniform Proctor. We shall be off presently.’

  Richard Proctor, who had been studiously examining the toecaps of his riding boots, now looked up at the sound of Tom’s voice and, turning to Dan, he mumbled, ‘I’m sorry, Dan.’

  Dan’s temper still made a blazing fist inside his chest and he fixed the yeoman with a look of molten lead, ‘Don’t apologise to me Richard. Just ensure that you preserve that lovely uniform from the dust of the road. You must look your finest beside the North Cork Regiment and Hunter Gowan. Who can suppose but perhaps even George Ogle himself might be there to hold some innocent down while you pitch cap them.’