1798

by Joe Murphy

  The stables stank in the heat. The stench of horse and old leather made a fetid cavern of the low, thatched building. The heat was oppressive, an almost physical weight, and in the light flung from the open half-door dust motes whirled in spangled golden galaxies. Flies lightning-bolted through the air and buzzed with insistence and, in one shadow-webbed corner of the stables, a nest of swallows screamed with fear and alarm.

  Dan and Tom stood facing each other between the empty straw-scattered stalls. Dan, taller and more powerful, his deep grey eyes stormy; Tom, slighter and more angular, his blue eyes flashing like flintlocks; both seething with temper.

  ‘What do you think you know, Tom?’ Dan asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘I “think” I know nothing. What I do know is that you are a sworn traitor to the Crown. My own brother!’ Tom whispered hoarsely, as though the words themselves might summon soldiers to the door.

  ‘How—’ began Dan, but his brother cut him off.

  ‘I was listening to you last night,’ Tom raged in a frantic whisper. ‘You and Miles Byrne and Anthony Perry and Peter Bolger. I was there when Byrne said you were all United Irishmen. I was there when Perry was discussing orders from Dublin. I was there when you, Dan, when you wished the priests would side with the people so as to expedite a Rising! Jesus, Dan, what are you thinking? The United Irishmen are prohibited. You are set upon a course that could very well get us all killed!’

  ‘You were spying on me?’ came Dan’s appalled response.

  ‘My God, Dan. Don’t presume to climb the higher moral ground with me. You’ve kept your conniving secret from me for God knows how long because I “can’t be trusted”. Don’t dare to assume that you can lecture me on morality when you have been plotting and scheming for months. Years, maybe? How long, Dan? How long have you concealed the truth of your rebel actions behind that intellectual veneer?’

  Dan sighed. ‘Since the spring, Tom,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve been a United Irishman for three months or more.’

  Tom reeled then as though physically struck. He leaned against the side of the empty stall and felt his anger drain from him. Despondency instead filled him and fear began to eat away at him, curdling his stomach. His hands, of their own volition, went to his face and he breathed into their cupped palms.

  ‘Dan, Dan, Dan,’ he sighed. He tilted his head back and looked up into the spider-haunted dark of the rafters. ‘What have you done to us? What if the yeos or soldiers come calling? What then?’

  ‘If they come I should rather go with them than bring further trouble down upon our family.

  ‘You don’t understand though, Tom. This is our chance. This is our poor, degraded country’s turn to stand up and be counted amongst the nations of the world. We could create a new order. One based on equality and rights for all. Surely even you can see the good we can accomplish?’

  ‘What I see,’ snapped Tom, ‘is see a chance for fat aristocrats to keep their taxes for themselves. I see Irishmen spouting nonsense from foreign shores. I see a Wexford farmer willing to take arms against the greatest empire in the world. What I see, Dan, is a fool.

  ‘I want no part in this and I will not allow you to drag the family into it either.’

  Dan regarded his brother with eyes brimming with pain. At length he nodded and dropped his head like some exhausted draught horse, ‘So be it.’

  With that he turned and, scattering the dry straw as he went, he hastened out of the stable. Tom stood and watched his brother hurry away from him.

  Shortly after Dan and Laurence Banville had departed across the upward sloping fields, Tom strode purposefully into his bedroom. He carried with him his pair of horse pistols, his uniform jacket and his cavalry sabre. Awkwardly tossing these onto his freshly made bed, he marched over to his wardrobe and wrenched it open. On the floor of the wardrobe, beside his cavalry boots and spurs, was an iron-bound box containing several score rounds of pistol ammunition, powder and oil cloths.

  Hefting this out, he placed it beside his other equipment, opened it and began the slow, methodical task of cleaning his pistols.

  He had no idea what had spurred him into such sudden activity. The sun climbing the sky in its blazing arc seemed to instil in him a vague presentiment of danger. While his mother occupied herself with needlework in the drawing room, he had oiled and polished his sword, cleaned his jacket as best he could, and made sure the horses were properly shod and well-watered. It was as though Dan’s confession had bred in him a myriad of little nettling demons, each one anxious to prick his mind into consideration of some other terrible possibility.

  Reeling through his thoughts were scenarios in which the North Corks, the Camolin Cavalry or even the Castletown Corps themselves came to take his brother. And in each scenario, Tom found himself acting differently. Each action irreconcilable with the one before. Each imagining spiralling around and around; a whirlpool of supposition that merely served to feed his growing panic.

  Could he give up his brother?

  Could he even allow Dan to give himself over willingly?

  Could he watch Dan hang or be shot in the road like a dog?

  And in the back of his mind a tiny, poisonous voice asked the awful question – if he sided with the Crown, how would his family stand then? How might he, himself, escape implication in his brother’s crimes?

  To silence the Judas screech, to consign it to just one voice amongst the hundreds that bawled within him, he checked his pistols’ flints, their trigger actions, he counted his ammunition, he oiled their barrels. And then he did it again.

  Check the pistol. Cock the hammer. Squeeze the trigger.

  Again and again and again.

  Gasping, he sat on the edge of his bed and forced great swallows of air into his lungs.

  Dan would be taken, it was only a matter of time, and Tom knew from the bitter experience of Killinerin the fate that awaited him. Still the question remained: what would he do? What could he do?

  At length, as minutes dragged into hours and the sun’s blank inferno soared ever higher, Tom’s frantic activity calmed. His anxiety remained but the chaos in his mind had stilled somewhat. He found himself staring at his hands laced before him, propped on his knees as he sat. He traced their cuts and old scars, he traced their lines and calluses. He frowned at the powder burns that seemed to have tattooed a blue-black fan into the webs of each thumb and along the backs of both hands. His time as a yeoman was indelible, it seemed.

  As he stared blankly at his hands he found himself constructing plans. No mere conjuring of terrifying possibilities this time; now he was constructing certainties.

  A bleak sort of smile hooked the corners of his mouth and into the silence of his room, Tom Banville began to laugh, a sound filled with all the sick desperation of the damned.

  The afternoon was filled with the warm smell of baking. The kitchen of the Banville household was a sun-flooded grotto. Broad beams of sunlight made a bright checkerboard of the table where they lanced through the windows’ leaded panes. The crackle of the fire and quick splash and slop as Mrs Prendergast bent, toiling, over the sink were the only sounds to be heard. All appeared peaceful, all was heavenly beneath the eternal blue of May.

  Then, slowly, Mrs Prendergast lifted her head. A deep crease formed between her greying brows and she stood still, wrist-deep in soapy water. Unmoving, Mrs Prendergast listened to a low sound that, with each passing moment, grew in strength and volume, like a rising storm.

  Dan Banville’s yelling voice, on the edge of hearing, was growing louder and louder.

  Frozen, Mrs Prendergast watched through the kitchen windows as Dan came tearing into the cluttered expanse of the yard. His powerful frame was in full flight, every muscle propelling him with a pounding conviction toward his home. He hurdled the fallen traces of an old cart, stumbled and regained his feet. His mouth was a ragged tear in his face and from it, breathless but frantic, came his roaring voice.

  ‘Ma! Mrs Prendergast! Get into the
dairy! The yeos are coming!’

  The old servant stood, shaking, words of protection tumbling from her lips like eggs from a basket, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ Her right hand moved numbly and she blessed herself, leaving a small splash of greasy water on her forehead.

  Dan crashed through the kitchen door, nearly smashing it from its hinges.

  He exploded into the kitchen in a panting whirl of limbs and noise and sweat.

  He seized Mrs Prendergast by her doughy shoulders and, gazing at her with fierce intensity, bellowed, ‘Where in God’s name is my mother?’

  Terrified, every inch of her skin gone grey and bloodless, the old woman stammered, ‘She’s in the drawing room. She’s doing her needlework.’

  Dan dashed out of the kitchen and moments later returned, hauling his flustered mother by the arm. His hand was clenched tight about her bicep and his hard fingers made white-lipped trenches where they dug into her flesh. Mary Banville looked horrified and sceptical all at once.

  ‘What are you doing, Daniel?’ she protested. ‘Have you gone mad? Why would the yeos come here? Sure, Tom’s a yeo. You’re hurting my arm, Daniel.’

  Whirling her about to face him, Dan spat, ‘Shut up, Ma!’

  Laurence Banville, wheezing like a bellows, was suddenly leaning on the splintered frame of the kitchen’s back door. Framed in the late afternoon sunlight, his arms outstretched to either side holding himself up against both door jambs, he looked crucified upon the brightness of the day. Gasping for air, he nonetheless had the wherewithal to chastise his eldest boy.

  ‘Daniel, that is your mother. You must never speak to her in such manner.’

  Dan flung the old man a withering look before turning to the two women and saying, ‘Get yourselves into the dairy. It’s got stone walls, a slate roof and strong doors. Lock yourselves in. The cavalry are not a mile distant.’

  His mother opened her mouth to interrupt him but his raised hand, cut and bleeding from his work in the fields, silenced her.

  ‘We have not the time, Ma. Mrs Prendergast, you have the key to the dairy don’t you?’

  The old woman looked confused for a moment and said, ‘Yes, Mr Banville. It’s hanging up on a nail beside the dairy door.’

  ‘Then go. Hurry,’ snapped Dan.

  With stricken looks the two women scuttled into the yard. As they passed Laurence, he caught his wife about the waist and kissed her full on her age-puckered lips. Dan allowed his vision to fall to the floor, strangely embarrassed by his father’s show of affection.

  With the women gone, Laurence turned to his son, ‘Now boy,’ he said. ‘Whatever occurs here today you are to have no act or part in it. You or that wastrel brother of yours.’

  ‘Da,’ he began.

  Laurence’s fist made a ball of gristle as it bunched in the fabric of Dan’s shirt front. The old man’s fissured face came close to his and from the snarling mouth Dan could smell the bread and cheese they’d eaten earlier. His father’s eyes held him, fixed.

  ‘Do you think I don’t know why the yeos are coming, son? Do you hold me so low in your considerations? An old man baffled by the happenings of the world? You do me a disservice, boy.’

  Dan’s mouth worked silently before his father was moving again. Laurence Banville dragged his son, with surprising strength, up the wooden staircase and down the bedroom hallway. When they reached Dan’s room the old man flung open the door and pushed his feebly struggling son inside.

  ‘Da, you can’t do this,’ protested Dan. ‘This calamity is of my own making.’

  Laurence considered his son carefully before saying, ‘And you are of my own making. You are my son and, as my son, you will do as you are told. Stay here.’

  He slammed the door and to Dan’s consternation he heard the grind and click of a key being turned in the lock.

  In the hallway, Laurence slipped the key back into his breeches pocket and tried to recover his breath. Dan is heavier than he looks, he reflected. The big ox.

  A sudden, sharp creak made him look up from where he stood. Some yards down the hallway, Tom’s door had inched open. Tom leaned from his room, his face troubled and wan. As Laurence watched, his youngest son made to step towards him.

  ‘Don’t,’ Laurence cautioned. ‘Don’t you dare interfere.’

  Tom stopped and blinked as though he had been awoken from a dead faint. ‘What is happening, Da?’ he asked.

  ‘None of your business,’ came his curt reply. ‘Now get back into your room or, so help me, I shall give you the thrashing that your conduct of late has so richly deserved.’

  Tom frowned for a moment but, with the innate obedience of the scolded child, he stepped back into his room and closed the door on his father’s bristling glare.

  ‘Now,’ muttered Laurence Banville. ‘Where’s my gun?’

  Dan, locked in the bright confines of his bedroom, crept carefully over to his window and looked out onto the dimpled clay of the front dooryard. There was no sign of the yeos yet, but they were coming.

  From where he and his father had been working in the top field the countryside fell away into a shallow valley of gorse ditches and barley fields. The brown scar of a narrow road sliced through this countryside until it began a slow ascent, disappearing some three miles distant over the crest of a small rise. It was a gleam of metal from the brow of this small hill that had first caught Dan’s attention as he worked. Leaning on his slash-hook, he had squinted against the daylight and the hammering heat, and, to his dismay, his grey eyes perceived a line of blue-coated Camolin Cavalry wending their way along the road. Shouting a warning to his father, he leaped forward, jumping ditches and flattening corn as he barrelled downhill.

  He had brought them. The thought horrified him. Tom was right. He had brought them, brought disaster down upon his family, home and all.

  Now, sequestered in his room, locked away like a bould child, he cursed himself for his foolishness. He twitched the curtains to one side so that he could cast his vision over the short avenue of rutted earth leading from the road to the Banville household. Everything was silent. The world seemed to hold its breath. Dan thought for a moment that he could hear his own heart pounding over the hush of anticipation. But this thought lasted only a moment before he realised, with a lurch of nausea, that he was listening to the drumming of horses’ hooves.

  In a torrent of jangling tack and scintillating steel, in a wave of sweating horseflesh, the yeoman cavalry swept into the dooryard.

  Two rooms down from Dan, Tom Banville too watched the approach of the yeomen and on his face a cruel smile grew ever wider.

  As the brothers watched, Laurence Banville strolled, with all the nonchalance of a house cat, out of his open front door and into the sunshine of his dooryard. Cradled in his arms was the grim length of a fowling piece, his thumb resting with calculated weight upon the hammer of its flintlock. His face was, however, a study in affable surprise and he greeted the yeomen with good humour.

  ‘Hallo, gentlemen!’ he cried. ‘I’m just off to shoot a few pests that have been making a nuisance of themselves. Care to join me?’

  The cavalryman leading the troop, a sergeant judging by his uniform, pushed back his crested helmet and wiped one gloved hand across a forehead soaked with sweat and caked with dust. He regarded the old man before him with an air of wary curiosity. Leaning forward, he gestured toward the gun in Banville’s hands.

  ‘You should really have surrendered that firearm, Mr Banville. It would be wise of you to consider allowing me to take custody of it.’

  Laurence Banville returned the man’s stare and said, ‘I don’t know that you Camolin boys have much authority here, Mr Cullen. This is Knox Grogan’s land. The Castletown Cavalry, of which my son is a member, patrols this neighbourhood.’

  ‘We have the authority of the law, Mr Banville,’ came the response. ‘As well you know. And it is the very intimacy with which your family is connected to Grogan’s corps that necessitates our presence here.
<
br />   ‘Now, let us not prattle like women, Mr Banville. Where is your son, Daniel?’

  ‘I am not my son’s keeper, Sergeant Cullen.’

  The expression of exasperation on the sergeant’s face would have been comical were it not for the sword and pistol by his side. Perspiration dribbled in oily tendrils down his cheeks, matting his sideburns and gathering in a slimy film along the thick band of his helmet’s chin strap. Around the horses, flies buzzed and droned.

  Shaking his head, Sergeant Cullen implored, ‘Why must you be so difficult, Laurence? If you insist on travelling the rocky road when smoother paths are open before you, then on your shoulders be it.’

  ‘James Cullen,’ stated Laurence Banville, softly, silk over steel. ‘I know you James Cullen. I knew your father before you. I see you sitting your big horse with your cavalry coat and your bearskin hat and by God I swear to you, the first sign of action from one of your friends and I’ll put a ball between their eyes.’

  Behind Cullen the creak of saddle leather betrayed the unease of his men.

  Tight-lipped now, angry, the yeoman sergeant drew himself up in his saddle and Laurence Banville tightened his grip on his long firelock.

  Then, at the apex of the moment, with all held in the balance, the old man heard his front door swish further open and apprehended the heavy, gritty tread of a man stepping close behind him. Oh, Daniel, he thought, why couldn’t you do what you were told?

  ‘Dan’s not here, lads.’

  Tom’s voice made Laurence spin on his heel.

  Standing there before the dark throat of the house, Tom gazed upon the yeomen, a hangman’s smile twisting his features. He wore his blood red yeoman’s coat, riding boots and spurs. In his hands the great bulk of his horse pistols were heavy and black, deadly in the bright sunshine. Sweat plastered his dark fringe to his head but his eyes were ice cold with the certainty of his own demise.