by Joe Murphy
Proctor reeled as though drunk and his jaw slackened in genuine anguish. However the words that came next from his lips were toneless and shorn of any demonstration of emotion, ‘I am aggrieved to hear you speak so, Dan, you and your father both. I shall not besmirch your doorstep again. If you do not mind I shall await your brother at the front of the house where my horse is tethered. Good day to you.’
He had spun on his heel and was marching around the corner of the farmhouse before Dan could utter another word.
A few moments later, while Dan was cleaning his pistols, Tom came striding out the back door, buckling on his sword belt as he did so, his carbine tucked under one arm. His red coat glowed in the morning sun and the black helmet on his head cast highlights of deep blue back towards the sky. His eyes looked up from under the bearskin crest and, glancing about, he asked, ‘What have you done with Proctor?’
Dan shrugged, big shoulders bunching under his shirt, ‘He rambled off around the front.’
Tom grunted and with raking strides crossed the yard and disappeared into one of the stables. Some while later he reappeared leading the big grey mare on which he sometimes accompanied their father behind the hounds. The horse’s tack was carefully polished and the long holster for Tom’s cavalry carbine gleamed with a greasy lustre.
Mounting the animal, Tom glanced down at his elder brother, ‘Tell Ma and Da I won’t be home for dinner this evening.’
Looking up at him from where he stood in the yard, an empty and oily pistol in one hand, Dan was suddenly struck by some inexplicable notion. Reaching out his other hand, he grasped the grey’s bridle before Tom could wheel her and, taking in his brother’s face, his bright eyes and the obsidian stubbornness about his mouth, he stated simply, ‘Grogan’s lucky to have you.’
Then, like a flame breaking from dead ash, a smile swept across Tom’s face and he said, ‘Indeed, I should be flattered at that had Thomas Knox Grogan and his ilk any standing whatsoever in my affections.’
Laughing, Tom nudged his mount into a walk and called out, clear under the blue sky so that his voice must carry over the farmstead’s roof, ‘Proctor, you rascal, you still owe us a shilling!’
Grinning in spite of himself, Dan watched his little brother go, listening to the heavy clop of hooves grow ever more distant, listening to their father’s hounds bawl and keen at the horse’s passing. Then Dan returned to his cleaning as a thin layer of dust settled like a dry frost on the shattered remnants of two dead summer swallows and the first of the flies began to land.
The road from Coolgreany to Gorey ran roughly due south through the village of Inch and then swung southwest into Gorey. Bordered by ditches on both sides, the road was little more than a wide band of hard-packed clay, a deep brown scar slashing through the countryside. Along this road Tom Banville and Richard Proctor trotted their mounts. Proctor’s black gelding was not as deep in the chest and maybe a hand smaller than Tom’s big mare but, nevertheless, their animals afforded both yeomen a clear view over the ditches and into the neighbouring fields.
They passed by pasture and smallholding, bawn and cabin, all bright and somehow cheerful beneath the porcelain sky. Most cabins in County Wexford were large in comparison to the hovels found in other parts of the country. The majority contained two or three partitioned rooms within their stout, whitewashed walls and every one was in good repair. Windows, some even glazed, were opened to the warming air and from the thatched, low-eaved roofs, the narrow turrets of brick or stone chimneys exhaled hazy membranes of smoke into the sky. Around the cabins, the rich, deep soil of Wexford was corrugated and furrowed with potato drills, whilst a little further away the straining stalks of oats and barley needled towards the sun. Sties for pigs and cattle and even a small barn frequently adjoined these little cottages and each plot of fifty or so acres was farmed by five or six different families. Gorse, briar and copses of trees encroached here and there, creating natural boundaries and barbed impenetrable barriers. Prosperity and industry seemed to radiate from every tilled garden, every fat pig and calf.
As they rode, Tom and Proctor waved or nodded to people they knew. Men in the fields, their short coats hanging on branches and their shirts clinging and damp through the efforts of clearing briar or hoeing earth, grunted in the heat. Women standing at doorways in gay straw hats battled with children who pulled at the dun cotton of their unstiffened, sleeveless bodices, like waistcoats, worn over their blue muslin dresses. Occasionally, some cottier’s daughter would smile coyly at them and be cuffed by her mother or father. And all along as they travelled the songs of birds mingled with the rough sounds of agriculture.
It was then, just as Tom was half convinced that he had found paradise under an April sky that a crawling unease began to spread its delicate tendrils beneath his skin.
A burned cabin was the first incongruity.
Then an old farmer, standing at a gate, his gnarled form leaning on his scythe, spat upon the road as they passed by. There, a young mother, seeing their uniforms, shielded her six-year-old daughter’s eyes and dragged the child behind her skirts. Here, two young men without hoe or fork, took to their heels at their approach and vanished into the ditches. And now a boy, no more than ten, stood in the growing barley and smiled a slow, lazy smile. A smile that seemed to say, I know something you do not.
As Tom rode, his feeling of unease swelled into something black and awful. Behind the verdant façade in front of him, something dark stirred. The people, his people, saw his uniform and were afraid. Here, in his own land, Tom Banville suddenly felt like a stranger.
He had not realised that he was swivelling in his saddle, warily scanning the small paddocks to either side, until Richard Proctor’s voice brought him back to himself.
‘There are rats in these fields, Tom.’
Tom shrugged noncommittally, ‘The people seem afraid, Richard. Have Hunter Gowan and Hawtrey White over at Peppard’s Castle exceeded themselves so badly?’
Proctor nodded, a curt jerk of his chin, ‘You know yourself. Ever since those sixteen parishes around here were proclaimed last November, men like those two have been given the whip hand.’
‘Can Mountnorris not do something to limit the worst of it?’
Proctor snorted, ‘He tries, but a proportion of loyalists are frightened out of their wits by the spectre of the French. The very mention of a United Irishman makes them either wet themselves or spurs them to violence.’
Tom undid the top button of his tunic and rubbed a hand briskly across the back of his neck, trying to dislodge the hard knot of anxiety that had suddenly tangled itself there.
‘By God, Proctor,’ he began at last, ‘I know not one man who has sworn himself to the United Irish cause. Not one. But if I know not one, then the predations of Gowan and White and that idiot Ogle down by Enniscorthy will have the green flag hoisted in Wexford by the end of the year. With or without the French.’
Richard Proctor looked at his comrade and, reaching across the gap between their horses, he placed one gloved hand on Tom’s shoulder. ‘That’s why we need the likes of you, Tom. Stout Papists but loyal. If the yeomanry became what your brother and father think they’ve become, if all Catholics are driven to the United Irish banner for protection, then this county will go up in flames.’
Tom chuckled and fastened the button of his high collar once more, ‘You do know Wolfe Tone is a Protestant, Proctor.’
Proctor’s heavy brows scuttled together like fat caterpillars, ‘He’s a traitor though. When you cut away all the dead wood and obfuscation, religion has little substance in this matter. ‘Loyalty’, that should be our byword. The Pope or the King can be used as a stick to beat people but if there’s a revolt like in France, a priest will go to the guillotine as quickly as you or I.’
‘And what pray tell should a people do when the ‘stick’, as you so put it, is wielded by a bully like Hunter Gowan and his mob?’
Puffing out his cheeks Proctor let slip a sigh of resignation, �
�That, my friend, is the rotten heart of things.’
They rode on in silence after that, jogging south towards Gorey. Tom tried to keep his mind from wandering, tried to focus on mundane things and not consider the implications of what he was about to do at the muster in the market town. Tom was neither blind nor numb to the brutality of the county’s corps of yeomanry. He knew that a uniform and sabre were, to some men, a license to rape and pillage. He also knew that John Beauman of the Coolgreany Cavalry had avowed to put his corps ‘upon a true Protestant and Orange system.’
The countryside between Inch and Gorey was, on the surface, as peaceful seeming as the rest of the county. Yet, even here, amidst green fields and nodded ‘Good days’, dark coils of smoke would occasionally snake over the horizon, testament to a smouldering atrocity.
The market town of Gorey was built on the slope and crest of a gradually steepening hill. It consisted of one long main street with a number of smaller streets leading off it at right angles. It had no defensive wall or ditch and was in fact one of the few modern, planned towns in the county. The streets of Gorey were all of dark clay, trampled and packed to such an extent as to be almost impermeable. At the top of the main street, where the road crested the brow of the hill, was a market diamond. In the centre of this diamond grew a venerable old beech tree, its bark grey and wrinkled, like cords of cooled lava. The main body of the town was made up of two- and three-storey townhouses, stores and market premises all with slate roofs and high gaping windows. However, all the inroads to this main street were lined with small grubby cabins, some standing singly and others crammed in fetid intimacy against their neighbours, their thatch drooping and ragged.
It was past a row of these dilapidated labourers’ cottages that the two yeos entered Gorey’s main thoroughfare at two o’clock. Immediately upon entering the town both Tom and Proctor became aware of a number of other yeomen in the uniform of their Castletown corps standing or lounging in the street. One figure, a tall, thickset man with the neck and shoulders of a bull terrier waved to them in greeting and strode over to them.
Both Tom and Proctor saluted smartly from their saddles. ‘Lieutenant Esmonde,’ they chorused.
Their lieutenant saluted in return and regarded the two younger men with frank scrutiny. ‘Proctor, fix your chin strap before the muster.’
He then ran a hand through his hair to slick back its chestnut waves and nodding to himself addressed the two men on horseback once more, ‘We are to be all present in squadron files at the diamond before the stroke of three. I would advise you gentlemen to keep an ear out for Pat Healy’s bugle. Lord Mountnorris has come up from Camolin Park to inspect us, as a consequence of which Mr Knox Grogan decided to muster here and save his lordship a journey.
‘Now boys,’ he growled, ‘with both those esteemed gentlemen present I shall not be amused to find you too deeply in your cups. Look sharp lads. Do you hear me Banville?’
Tom looked down at his lieutenant, his face a mask of pious sobriety, ‘Lieutenant, you may place your complete trust in us as individuals and indeed in the corps as a whole. To offer slight to Mr Knox Grogan or Lord Mountnorris would be to invite ridicule upon ourselves.’
Lieutenant Esmonde studied both young yeomen and simply intoned, ‘You have been cautioned. Heed it.’
He then saluted and without waiting for their response he marched off to where a group of six yeomen were gathered outside the Peacock Inn.
Tom slumped forward in his saddle, relaxing the straight-backed posture he had adopted in the presence of his lieutenant. ‘Well the old goat is certainly exerting himself today. We’ll find it hard to sink a drop anywhere in this town with him galloping about like that.’
Proctor was frowning to himself and then one of his eyebrows rose in a speculative arch, ‘Unless we head up to that place off the diamond itself. You know, ourselves and Thady Burke had a nice sup there a couple of weeks back. The Old Beech it’s called or something very similar.’
Tom, stretching slightly so that he was leaning out of his saddle, slapped Proctor between the shoulder blades and exclaimed, ‘Richard, beneath that bovine aspect, you are undoubtedly nursing a functioning mind. Come then, let’s do as much damage as we can before young Healy and his damned trumpet summon us to do our duty.’
Gorey’s main street was an odd sight as Tom and Proctor jogged their mounts up its gradual slope. Hundreds of locals strolled or hurried or stood in muttering groups, clenched about some grumbled secret. Occasionally a hot glare would be lanced towards the yeomen from some scuttling urchin or pipe-sucking labourer. The rich in their frock coats and waistcoats, their sunbonneted ladies sashaying at their sides, the poor with their patched jackets and stocking-less breeches, their bare calves grimed and soiled, all milled and moved, jostled and bumped in the heady Brownian motion of a prosperous town. Yet here and there amidst the civilian scurrying, the uniforms of the Castletown yeomanry gathered in scabrous clusters of red. To Tom this was to be expected but what surprised him, took him so completely unawares that it forced him to rein his mare to a halt, and unhinged the firm set of his lower jaw, was the presence of other uniforms amidst the mundane to and froing of Gorey’s citizenry.
Clotted on street corners or strolling along the boardwalk that ran on either side of the roadway, the red coats and black bicorns of an infantry regiment blazed out from the blues and greys of their surroundings. Beneath white crossbelts, clasped at their intersection by a brass buckle, the soldiers’ wide lapels were turned back to reveal their yellow facing colour.
Tom found himself shaking his head, ‘The North Cork Militia. Jesus, they’re everywhere.’
Proctor nodded, ‘I believe the regiment numbers about six hundred. They’ve been arriving in detachments to be billeted around the county.’
Tom’s face was expressionless but his eyes, blue-grey as a calm sea, were now abruptly threatening as thunderheads. ‘And I believe,’ he stated, ‘that they marched into Wexford openly wearing Orange insignia and that one of their principle acts was to set up an Officer’s Lodge in Wexford Town.
‘Damn Ogle’s black heart for inviting them into this county. It is like inviting a wolf to your door.’
Proctor was also regarding the infantrymen with a look of vague distrust, ‘I stand shoulder to shoulder with you Tom. If the county is put under martial law, those blackguards will be to the forefront of any mischief that occurs.’
Then he turned to his companion, ‘I have it on good authority that the pitchcap was never seen in Wexford before the introduction of the tenantry to our good Cork friends.’
‘I’ve heard that also. God in heaven, with the North Corks at people’s throats and Catholics leaving the yeomanry in floods, any United Irishman in the district must be awaiting the call to arms sure in the knowledge that every peasant in Wexford will rally to them.’
Proctor set his horse in motion once more, saying as he did so, ‘Day by day Tom, things get a little worse. And every new element added to the mix simply brings it all to the boil more quickly. I fear for us, Tom.’
Tom watched Proctor as his horse moved off through the scattered clumps of townsfolk, watched and let the yeoman’s words settle into his brain like a corpse to the bottom of a pond. Then, without any conscious thought, without any effort of will, Tom’s right hand came up and he blessed himself. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It was at that moment, that vulnerable instant when he unthinkingly beseeched the Almighty for protection, that Tom Banville realised he too was afraid.
Almost an hour later, the shrill brassy tone of Pat Healy’s cavalry bugle climbed above the hive buzzing of Gorey’s streets and alleyways. Climbed and climbed until its piercing note reached a high sustained pitch only to fall again into the chatter and laughter of shopkeeper and storehand.
Squatting on low stools in the smoky murk of The Old Beech, Tom and Proctor looked up from their pewter mugs of whiskey. Proctor’s shilling had stretched without difficulty over t
he distance of half a dozen drinks and both young men had consumed more than was prudent in such a short space of time. While neither was drunk both found themselves struggling to articulate certain words and their eyes were laced with a tracery of red.
Raising a finger to his lips Proctor whispered, ‘Do you think they would miss us from the ranks?’
Tom grinned, ‘As much as it pains me to say so, I would assume that two such gallant figures of soldiery as ourselves would be immediately noted as absent and almost as immediately drummed out of the corps.’
Tilting his mug and tossing its harsh contents down his throat, Proctor said with a grimace, ‘That might not be such an ignominious fate.’
Both yeomen rose to their feet and strode through suspended ribbons of pungent pipe smoke on their way to the door. As they passed a table of motley-looking cottiers, Tom thought that, soft as falling eiderdown, the word slieveen was whispered by one of the men. Tom did not slow his stride but his flinty stare was returned by each one of the grimy gathering, unabashed and brazen.
Once the two young men had stepped beyond the inn’s doorway and into the afternoon glare of the street, Tom turned to Proctor who circumvented his indignant outburst, saying, ‘I heard it too, Tom. But it’s best not to get involved in any kind of a brawl in the current climate. The entire population would turn on us. Besides, we can’t have bloody noses for his Lordship’s inspection.’
Tom regarded his friend with eyes bloodshot from drink and squinting in the sudden light of day, ‘I suppose that is true enough but, regardless of this uniform, as a man I cannot countenance such insolence.’
Both yeomen moved toward the splintered hitching rail to which their two horses had been securely tied. Proctor, attempting to appease his friend, gave Tom a light punch on the shoulder. ‘If you allow your temper to bubble so, you will find yourself in a bout of fisticuffs with some low ruffian. The insult wasn’t public and wasn’t directed toward you personally.’