1798

by Joe Murphy

  Proctor’s eyes were blank and unfeeling as he replied, ‘The rebels caught wind of our approach. Doubtless they’re off hiding in the fields somewhere. We shall have to hunt for them as we’ve done before. Have no fear, Tom. Business is not concluded here yet.’

  As his words ended, a sudden bright reflection sprang into life in his eyes and an orange blush animated his brow. Tom turned in his saddle to see the tinder-dry fringe of Gormley’s thatch crackle into a tossing inferno. A handful of North Corks stood beneath the eaves, jabbing more blazing torches into the roofing. Musgrave sat and watched his men work, their shadows grotesque and capering in the glare, a demons’ ball.

  To right and left, strings of four and five infantrymen filed off along ditches and grikes, jabbing their bayonets into the bushes and peering under the hunchbacked stands of gorse. The yeomen watched the search parties, their horses dancing nervously, restlessly. They had been standing still for far too long. Lieutenant Esmonde’s voice came levelly, ‘Steady, lads. Steady.’

  Then, all at once, one party, working their way through a field rising off behind the burning cottage, broke into a lurching run. Their pale breeches and white crossbelts bobbed and weaved in the dark and, for a moment, Tom could not discern what they were chasing. As they crossed an open space, however, their warning cries gaining in volume and desperation, they were cast in the amber seepage of light flooding out from John Gormley’s flaming property. As they crossed this open space, their long shadows skittering alongside them, the object of their mad dash was also revealed.

  A grimly-dressed young man was fleeing across the field’s ridge, some fifteen yards in front of the stumbling soldiers. The harried terror of the fox before the hounds was evident in his frantic stride and flailing arms.

  Lieutenant Esmonde stood in his saddle and raised his right arm, signalling the cavalry to advance and, as he did so, Tom felt a coldness twist inside him, his heart convulsing in his chest. Esmonde lowered himself back down into his saddle and slowly returned his hand to the reins of his mount.

  On the hill the fleeing form had barrelled directly into a tangle of red-coated men who leaped upon him and bore him to the ground. Above the roar of the fire, Tom could see the heavy musket stocks driving into flesh like hooves into soft plough or an axe into wood.

  Tom watched the militiamen lift the dazed figure by the armpits and half-carry, half-drag him towards the fire-lit yard. Tom’s thoughts were a swarm of hectic contradiction. To see the battered figure so treated at the hands of the North Corks appalled him; at another, more terrible level, he was relieved that the infantry had caught up to the man before the cavalry were forced into action. The thought of riding that man – any man – down like an animal filled him with an odd dizziness and his forehead became slick with sweat.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he heard himself sigh.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Proctor. ‘The rascal very nearly showed them a clean pair of heels.’

  Tom did not respond to this. He could not.

  The entire contingent of infantry had now reassembled in the ruddy pulse of the blaze. The entire roof of what had once been John Gormley’s home was now a coruscation of unbroken flame. Burning fragments of thatch and flickering clouds of embers twirled into the sky. The higher the flames mounted, the stronger the upward draught it generated and the brighter it glowed. And so it went, gorging itself on the remnants of the family’s home and billowing with the heat of its own angry existence.

  The man the infantry had made prisoner was held propped between two soldiers, his head lolling drunkenly on a neck made limp by the violence of his arrest.

  Above the howl of the fire, Lieutenant Esmonde’s voice came hard as steel.

  ‘Let’s hear what the wastrel has to say for himself. Castletown Corps, after me.’

  He heeled his horse into a slow walk and the rest of the cavalry followed him, two abreast.

  With every step that brought Tom closer to the fire-lit yard he strove to steady himself against what could happen next. The idea that this man was most probably a rebel, or at least spying for rebels, battled for pre-eminence with the oily suspicion that perhaps, just perhaps, this man was simply caught running from an authority he hated and feared. Struggling with himself, Tom could now see against the man’s skin the murky rivulets and smeared flecks of blood.

  One soldier was now standing before the wretched figure, a swollen water-skin in his hands. One of his comrades tilted back the peasant’s head while he dashed water into the prisoner’s face and down his throat. The man choked and coughed, his eyes blinking and snapping suddenly into focus. As the yeomen lined up behind the infantry, the soldier attending the prisoner, at a sign from Musgrave, stepped away and allowed him to stand on his own buckling legs.

  Sitting his horse in the hellish billow of the burning house, Tom watched the man sway and stagger a step or two to the right like a newborn foal before steadying himself and raising his head to meet the stare of Lieutenant Musgrave. Tom could see the terror crawling across the young man’s features.

  Lieutenant Musgrave leaned forward in his saddle, his cocked hat and hooked nose lending him all the predatory menace of a vulture, and addressed the man with his customary lilting Cork belligerence.

  ‘Are you one John Gormley, sir?’

  The peasant before him, dressed in dark coat and breeches, his forehead and chin still leaking red, gazed up at the officer with eyes wide as a calf ’s and remained silent.

  In the gambolling firelight Tom thought the man could be no more than twenty years old.

  The impatience and anger in Musgrave’s voice was unmistakable as he rasped, ‘I will ask you a second time, you insolent savage, and I warn you there will not be a third. Are you John Gormley?’

  The young cottier’s jaw loosened in fear and he gushed, ‘No, your honour, I’m not Gormley. I’m Paddy Cullen. I live over there in that poor little cabin. Please, your honour, don’t treat me harshly for hiding. When we heard of your coming all the people of this place ran and hid. We were afeared, your honour, that’s all.’

  ‘“Afeared”, by God?’ bellowed Musgrave. ‘Ain’t every seditious man jack of ye got the right to be “afeared”?’

  At this the peasant raised his hands in pitiful supplication.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Your honour, there’s no one I know who’d wish any harm to anyone. Have mercy your honour.’

  ‘I am a merciful man,’ responded Musgrave. ‘If you but inform me where John Gormley may be found, no action will be undertaken against you or your property.’

  ‘Gormley?’ The note of confusion in the peasant’s voice was unmistakably genuine. ‘Why sir, John Gormley upped and left there the day before yesterday. No one knows where he went, or why. He just packed his family into the cart and left. He never said where. That’s the God’s honest truth, your honour.’

  Barely hiding his irritation, Musgrave asked, ‘Then why, pray tell, did you and the others of these parts flee at the approach of the King’s troops?’

  ‘Your honour, we had no way of knowing what you wanted. We’ve heard stories of rough handling by the redcoats in other places and we thought it would be safer to hide than be caught in our houses. The people are afeared, your honour. I was coming back to see if you were finished with your business when your men came upon me.’

  ‘So you admit to spying?’ queried Musgrave. ‘Then tell me this. Do you know of any guns, munitions or arms of any kind secreted in this vicinity?’

  ‘On my daughter’s life, I do not, your honour,’ said the man, with some vehemence.

  Musgrave regarded him with an expression cruelly and grotesquely reminiscent of a father scolding a misbehaving child. ‘Secreting weapons in contradiction of His Majesty’s law is a heinous offence.’

  The peasant frowned in confusion and, as he did, Tom’s unease deepened moment by moment.

  Paddy Cullen stood silently for a time, perplexed, and then slowly pronounced, ‘But I know of no we
apons, your honour.’

  Tom did not like the direction in which Musgrave was steering events. It was like watching a cat boxing a wounded bird, its claws sheathed but aching to tear. Tom turned in his saddle, looking left and right, but every face appeared either amused or indifferent.

  Musgrave was shaking his head now. ‘Because we have found none in this cabin does not imply or bestow innocence, sir. You and your kind are United Irish, so therefore you know of weapons. This is simple reasoning.’

  Cullen was panicking now, his features contorted, his hands wringing themselves. ‘We aren’t United Irishmen. For the love of Jesus, sir, I know of no United Irishmen in this district.’

  Musgrave sat back in his saddle, an air of resolve coming over him as his coat flared red in the glow of the blaze, and said, ‘More lies. Every Papist tongue in this county is forked.’

  He flapped a back-handed gesture towards the peasant below him and said, ‘Sergeant O’Sullivan, do your duty and then torch the rest of these flea-pits. Examples are to be made and the name of the North Corks is to be made a byword for loyalty and zeal. The croppies will be put down.’

  The sergeant stepped from the ranks and made to move towards the figure of Paddy Cullen. For his part, the cottager was dumbfounded and immobile, but at the sergeant’s approach he turned on his heel as though to run. However, his attempt at flight was strangled as two soldiers seized him by the arms and one red-sleeved forearm snaked across his throat, choking off his cries as he gasped for breath.

  At this, something deep in the centre of Tom’s chest cracked. Before he knew what he was doing, he was digging his heels into his horse’s flanks. The big hunter was about to leap forward, its muscles balling beneath the sleek sheen of its coat, when Lieutenant Esmonde’s gloved fist fastened on the length of rein just behind the animal’s bridle and held on with all the force he could muster.

  The horse’s head slewed to one side and it whinnied its distress, and Tom cast his lieutenant a frantic look, his features stricken, his eyes wild.

  Esmonde’s features, however, were placid and his voice was quiet, ‘Stay where you are Banville or I’ll shoot you myself.’

  Tom glanced from his lieutenant to where three soldiers were dragging Paddy Cullen behind the burning house.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sir Thomas!’ he protested in anguished impotence.

  Sir Thomas Esmonde appraised him frostily.

  ‘God has no hand in this, Banville. The lowest circle of hell is reserved for rebels and mutineers. You know this as well as I.’

  The sergeant and the two privates had now vanished out of sight with the struggling, screaming Cullen. His cries and the violence of his death were obscured by the inferno consuming Gormley’s cottage. All about, the North Corks had scattered into three- and four-man foraging parties and were busy rampaging from empty house to empty house. They scurried through the night like vermin, their packs and jackets bulging with loot. As Tom watched, the first flames began to curl up from the thatch of the nearest whitewashed cabin.

  ‘This is the rule of law,’ stated Esmonde.

  ‘Release my horse,’ said Tom. His voice was level but within him a swarm of fury was tearing at his guts, his lungs, the very stuff of his soul. What he had witnessed repulsed him and, worse than this, his involvement, the horror of his own inaction in the face of such cruelty, disgusted him. He was complicit in this, as bad as Musgrave and as callous as the North Corks; he had killed Paddy Cullen as surely as the bayonets that pierced his flesh.

  His brows drawn together in wary consideration, Lieutenant Esmonde relaxed his grip on the bridle of Tom’s mount and straightened wordlessly in his own saddle.

  Tom nodded to his officer and with a gentle tug of the reins he wheeled his horse around.

  ‘Tom …’ began Proctor, worry straining his voice and cracking even that single syllable.

  Tom ignored him and spurred his horse into a steady jog, his back to the collapsing ruin of the burning cottage and the small group of yeomen. In front of him, a black stain in the orange light, his shadow led him on like a malignant presence, a manifestation of his inner darkness. Around him, in the moonlight, yet more cabins erupted in flames and in the gorse the breeze sighed and rippled like the final exhalation of a dying man.

  Dan Banville sat at the heavy writing desk in his father’s study and bit the nail of one thumb in growing frustration. Before him, flattened out and held by two obsidian paperweights, a sheet of writing paper glowed in the lambency of a stag’s head of candles. It glowed and, for all his efforts, remained stubbornly blank.

  All his life he had been lauded for his capacity to speak and write with style and fluid ease. All his life the shackling of one sentence to the next had come to him as naturally as breathing. Yet now, as he bent over the arctic rectangle of the blank sheet, he found it impossible to find the right words. He could not condense, could not warp his thoughts into mere scribbles. What he sought to express was feeling – pure feeling; and syllables, whether prosaic or poetic, were suddenly too flimsy to heft such weight.

  He cupped his chin in his hands and stared glumly into the shadows of his father’s study. Beyond the wavering sphere of light cast by the yellow candles, shadows throbbed and crawled and erratic flashes licked across the curves of chairs and the corners of bureaus. Upon the looming, glass-fronted bookcase immediately opposite him, the stuffed form of a dog fox snarled down, forever at bay.

  As he watched the shadows caper and his own silent reflection gaze back at him from the depths of the bookcase’s glass, Dan found something come unbidden to his mind. As he sat there, motionless as the stuffed fox, he thought, You’ll never understand, Elizabeth. I’m so sorry.

  In that instant he knew, even if he had written page after page of searing honesty and emotion, it would still have been for naught; the pouring of his heart just so much wasted ink. Elizabeth would never understand.

  Dan flung the empty sheet of paper from him. It leapt from the table as though alive, swooped and yawed into the dark beyond the candlelight, and see-sawed gently to the floorboards.

  Dan rasped his hand across the stubble of his jaw and cursed himself for the decisions he had made.

  The entire house was sleeping, so the heavy tread of hooves beyond the room’s high, curtained window was as unexpected as it was loud.

  Dan’s lips curled sourly. He had not been looking forward to his younger brother’s return.

  Since Tom had ridden off that afternoon, the atmosphere of the Banville household had become thick with tension. Laurence Banville had seethed and stormed from empty room to empty room, seeking for some way to exorcise the fury inside him; the slamming of doors around the house providing his family with an exact map of his progress. Mary Banville had returned to bed at six o’clock, claiming a distempered headache. Dan himself had tried not to dwell on his brother’s actions but had instead wrestled with trying to express something that refused expression. All the while, Mrs Prendergast bustled and flustered as though, through stubborn activity, she could dispel the bristling atmosphere that seemed to have settled into the very stones of the place.

  And now, as Dan sat in the heat and glow of the candles, Tom returned to the home he had thrown into turmoil – Tom with his uniform, Tom with his sword, Tom with someone else’s blood caking his hands. With a cold sort of anger infusing him, Dan grasped the candle stand by its pewter base and left his father’s study.

  He moved through the house within a globe of pale light; the walls to either side and the floor at his feet were cast in honeyed shades but before and behind him the dark closed around him like a fist.

  The kitchen was lifeless and strangely eerie without its daytime chaos. The banked fire in the hearth crackled and slumped as it devoured itself. Standing by the elemental block of the table occupying the centre of the kitchen, Dan set the candles down so that their light would be invisible from the yard. Dan watched through the windows as his brother marched out of the maw of an open s
table door. Tom had a bundle of straw which he had used to rub down his mount clenched in one fist and, as Dan watched, he flung it to the earth with a violence that was startling. Tom then locked the stable door and stalked across the hoof-scarred clay, his gloved fingers fumbling awkwardly with the clasp of his helmet. Finally, and with evident relief, he unfastened the chinstrap and, to Dan’s astonishment, dashed the helmet to the ground and kicked it angrily across the yard to roll against the water pump with a dull clank.

  Tom had not noticed his brother waiting for him. He was now struggling with the back door’s latch and when he at last opened it he almost collapsed into the dim interior. He stood there for a moment, framed against the open doorway, his left hand still curled around the door handle, and then raised his eyes to meet his brother’s.

  Tom seemed to transform before Dan’s eyes. In the moonlight and the frail radiance of the candles, he had become impossibly pale. His cheeks were stretched across his bones and his eyes had a glazed look of horror in their depths.

  Dan lifted and placed the stand of candles upon the worn surface of the worktable and moved towards his brother. Concerned, he asked, ‘What happened, Tom? What have you seen? What did you do?’

  Tom wordlessly closed the door behind him. The helpless impotence he had felt as the North Corks burned cabins and butchered poor Paddy Cullen still festered in him. Every drop of bile, every ounce of spleen, churned for release. Yet the only person at whom he could vent this fevered frustration was himself. The hot blood of his body roared in his ears like the blaze of burning thatch.

  Dan’s voice came again, ‘What did you do, Tom?’

  His anger now replaced by fear for his spectral complexion and hunted eyes, Dan made to grasp Tom by the shoulders. In response, Tom brushed his hands aside and, without saying a word, he picked up the stand of candles from the table, walked mechanically out of the kitchen and further into the house. Perplexed and anxious, Dan followed.