1798

by Joe Murphy

  In the centre of the wide room, bound to a chair, Anthony Perry sagged forward. On his head a stiff paper cone, like a dunce’s cap, sat at a jaunty angle. From beneath the rim of this cone, thick black ropes of tar bubbled and oozed and, wherever it touched bare skin, lifted it from the bone, blistering and beginning to ooze in its turn. Pus and pitch seeped in vile runnels down Perry’s cheeks. Dried blood rouged his lips and plastered the front of his shirt. One eye was swollen shut while the other was masked with a steaming patch of tar. His hands rested limply on the arms of the chair, the pads of his fingers swollen and ruddy, like over-ripe summer fruit.

  Mercifully, he was unmoving.

  Two men stood over him. Both were bare-chested and drenched in the sweat of their exertions. Shafts of sunlight lanced through the room’s large, rectangular windows lighting the scene in abominable detail. Flies hummed and alighted, feasting on spilled blood and brackish sweat. The two men were like pagan gods in the sunlight, bloody-handed and rapt, their chests heaving and their eyes roving over Perry’s shattered form, bound and oblivious before them. At their feet sat two tin buckets, one smoking, one still.

  At last one of the men moved forward and cautiously toed Perry’s shin as though attempting to wake him. Shrugging, he turned to his companion, ‘I’d wager you’ve killed him, Wheatley.’

  ‘Nobody’s ever died of a pitch-capping,’ said the other man with a show of confidence not quite matched by the anxious cut of his features.

  ‘If you have,’ retorted his partner, ‘I’ll swear that I advised you to relent. Foote will have us both flogged if we’ve managed to squash his canary before it ever sang a note.’

  ‘Here, mind out of the way,’ ordered Wheatley. Stooping, he reached into one of the buckets and drew forth a sopping wet rag. Wringing it out a little, he crouched over his prisoner and allowed a trickle of water to splash the wounded face and sooth the tattered lips.

  Perry’s one good eye fluttered like a frightened butterfly and he commenced a low, grinding moan.

  ‘See, Rogan, I told you he wasn’t dead,’ crowed Wheatley. ‘We’ll give him a minute.’

  Anthony Perry slowly regained his senses. With each passing moment his agony grew more and more intense so that, as his faculties returned, so did his capacity to appreciate the horror of his situation. Every shred of his body screamed in pain, every nerve burned with the torture inflicted upon him. His head and scalp seemed to be scorched from the inside out. His one eye focused on the men before him and, to his shame, he began to weep.

  He wept not for the hurt that had been visited on him but at the prospect of more hurt to come. He wept because he was not dead.

  His torturers leered at him. Rogan turned and retrieved a sheet of paper and a pencil from where they lay on the bare floorboards. He then knelt down to look Perry in the face.

  The United man whimpered, the tears stinging the cuts and abrasions that marred his cheeks and jaw. Great ropes of saliva festooned his lips and his throat formed an unintelligible noise, clear only in its terror.

  ‘Now, now, Mr Perry,’ soothed Rogan. ‘This would have been over without any unpleasantness had you decided to be compliant. All you have to do is tell us the names of the leaders of the United Irishmen in this county. That’s all. We’ll catch them anyway, with or without you. All you accomplish with your wilful efforts to confound us is further hardship for your poor self. The names, Mr Perry and all this nasty business can be put behind us.’

  Perry, feeling as if he was in the depths of a hell beyond description, merely whimpered and felt the loose blubber of his lips spill drool down his chin.

  ‘Is that a “no”, Mr Perry?’ asked Wheatley, tugging playfully at the pitchcap now welded into his prisoner’s flesh.

  In despair, in horror, in a chaos of racking pain and self-disgust, Anthony Perry found himself able to speak. He ran a thick tongue along his split lips and, slumped like something dead, he began to mumble names.

  ‘Edward Fitzgerald, Bagenal Harvey, Esmond Kyan …’

  Hurriedly, Rogan began to scribble down every marly syllable that Perry managed to enunciate. Smiling beatifically, Wheatley reached down and patted the tortured rebel on the shoulder.

  ‘That’s a good lad,’ he said.

  At half past one on that Saturday afternoon a young dispatch rider of the North Cork Militia sprinted, hell-for-leather, across Gorey’s main thoroughfare. In his wake the two soldiers guarding the doorway to the market house were forced to grab their bicorns to prevent them flying off and into the street. In his hand an envelope flapped and fluttered, its red wax seal livid as a wound.

  Upon reaching his grey mare, tied to a hitching rail amidst a small herd of fine officers’ animals, he stuffed the envelope into his jacket and deftly undid the slipknot holding his mount in place. Whispering to the animal, cajoling her, keeping her calm, he hoped that his own alarm did not communicate itself to her. Swinging himself up into the saddle, he kicked her once, so that she reared and whinnied, and was off.

  The young rider bent low over the animal’s neck. He had never experienced such urgency before, such a crucial demand for speed. He had to reach Wexford Town by sunset or all was lost. The mare leaped forward, hooves thumping the hard earth, sounding like distant cannon or coming thunder.

  The Blakely residence sat within its nest of beeches for all the world like a nugget of gold cupped inside the gnarled and hoary palm of a miner. It was a ball of amber in the night, a world of warmth in a cosmos of swelling dark.

  Elizabeth Blakely paced the newly waxed and gleaming floorboards of her father’s library and muttered to herself.

  The library was a narrow, high-ceilinged room located to the rear of the house. Its walls were clad with polished wooden shelving devoid of books. The shelves armoured the walls, lifeless and cold, the expanse of wood pierced in two places by the high, arching framework of twin bay windows. Not yet fitted with curtains, the windows yawned vacantly out onto the stableyard. However, the light spilling from the chandelier and the deepening gloaming outside blotted the panes with black oil. No vista could be viewed through the wavering pitch of the glass. Only the contents of the room were flung back upon themselves in warped and anaemic counterfeit.

  From window to window the ghost of Elizabeth stalked; a pallid reflection of her nettle humour.

  ‘You shall have the floor worn to kindling before father has a chance to stock this place with books, sister.’

  The voice halted Elizabeth and she rolled her eyes to the moulded ceiling before turning.

  Beside the vast mass of a cold granite fireplace a girl, some years younger than Elizabeth but with the same characteristic churn and fall of mahogany hair, sat in a high-backed armchair. In her hands a needle and thread were held motionless and on her lap a red gentleman’s frock coat lay like a rumpled drift of rose petals.

  Elizabeth’s mouth tightened and she snapped with more venom than she intended, ‘Sarah, if you cannot sew quietly then remove yourself. I’m not above boxing your ears.’

  Elizabeth’s younger sister widened her eyes comically and formed her lips into a perfect ring of mock-horror.

  ‘Ooooh,’ she mewled. ‘Beth’s in a bad mood. Oh, heavens spare me from her wrath.’

  She then collapsed back into the chair, boneless with giggling, her needlework forgotten.

  Elizabeth stood in the light of the chandelier overhead and glared at her younger sister.

  ‘And heavens spare me from your foolishness,’ she said.

  Sarah leaned forward and the mockery leached from her voice. Her shoulders stooped and her face, a narrower, flintier replica of her sister’s, softened in sympathy and understanding.

  ‘Do not be so vexed, Beth,’ she said gently. ‘Young Mr Banville has sense enough not to involve himself in these goings on. Those peasants gathered on Kilthomas Hill are a mob without any firm purpose. Captain Wainwright says so himself. They’re all terribly frightened of the militia and will all be in their b
eds by morning.

  ‘Father says there will never be a croppy rebellion,’ Sarah continued. ‘A crowd of farmers on a hill is not the end of the world. Mr Banville knows this and be assured that he cannot be involved. He is quite intelligent for one of the lower sort. I am certain that father has a kind of sneaking regard for him.’

  Elizabeth looked at her sister with eyes that flared with anger. She was not angry with Sarah, she was angry with the man she hoped was sitting in his own parlour, safe and secure, many miles away across the gaping dark.

  ‘Young Mr Banville is a great stupid pig of a man,’ Elizabeth growled. She folded her arms beneath her breasts and commenced to pace briskly once more. Beneath her feet the virgin polish glimmered as her white dress, wreathed in green buds, floated over it.

  Sarah sighed, ‘Oh, so you have said. More than once on one of your many tiresome turns about this room. I believe he is also a “brainless clod” and a “jumped-up ploughboy”. Have I left anything out? Perhaps I could invent some insults of my own. It would be more diverting, I should say, than watching you stamp about. Daniel Banville loves you. He would do nothing to bring you harm.’

  Elizabeth paused then, her steps shuffling to a halt and her narrow shoulders lifting as she sucked a shuddering breath between clenched teeth. Her sister’s words had stung something deep within her. But she was not angry.

  She was afraid.

  In some awful hidden pit of her soul, a place that she could not look into for fear of what she might see, a terrible thought was growing.

  Out in the dark upon Kilthomas Hill a mass of local peasants had gathered all through the afternoon and evening. Through hedges and ditches a horde of labourers and farmhands had swarmed up the hill’s slopes until its crown of cedar trees was teeming with an unwashed and dirty-footed multitude.

  It had been the sole topic of conversation in the district all day and Andrew Blakely had had several visitors who advised him to ready his firearms and bar his doors. Captain Wainwright, from the back of his dancing mount, had related with disgusting gusto how the forces of the Crown had smashed a rebel band at Carlow and strewed the streets with dead croppies.

  And all the while, the crowd on Kilthomas Hill grew ever-larger, spreading like wildfire.

  Amidst this turmoil, Elizabeth Blakely knew with a certainty as sharp and biting as frost, Daniel Banville would be found or worse.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sarah was saying, her hands going to work once again on the buttons of their father’s old coat. ‘When the soldiers arrive, they shall all be dispersed like deer.’

  With her back to her sister, Elizabeth’s mind was filled with images of Dan, alone and proud, as Captain Wainwright bore down upon him, sword held high and bloody in the rising sun. She was certain, certain, he was there on Kilthomas Hill, with his cropped hair and his French ideas. There, in the middle of farmhands and cottiers, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ droning from his lips like a prayer.

  This was why he had sought to send her from him. This was why he had tried so hard to push her away.

  Oh, Daniel, she thought. You are a fool.

  Sarah, frowning as she concentrated on a particularly difficult stitch, hardly noticed when her older sister swept out of the room. All around her the silent, empty shelves frowned down, like ossuaries waiting to be filled.

  Elizabeth’s bedroom was the finest in the house, even more finely appointed than Mr and Mrs Blakely’s own. Andrew Blakely had spared no expense in making his eldest daughter comfortable in a home that expanded yearly. A brass bedstead supported a soft white mattress covered in a snowy dune of pristine blankets. An elegant window overlooking the front dooryard was set into one thrush-egg blue papered wall. Embossed onto the wallpaper, cunningly crafted burgundy ferns unfurled their leaves. A bureau stood to the right of the room’s panelled rosewood door, a selection of hair brushes scattered across it. At one end of the bureau, as though carelessly flung, a straw bonnet crowned with dried flowers hung over the edge. At the other, an oil lantern lit the room with an unwavering brilliance.

  At opposite ends of the room a large walnut closet and a tall full-length mirror stood. It was into this that Elizabeth Blakely now stared and it threw back her own self, slightly distorted and stained here and there with tarnish and tiny black flecks of discolouration.

  She stood silently, grimly. There was a stoop to her carriage and a depth to her eyes that Dan would have frowned to see. A depth that spoke of anguish, of thoughts so poisonous they would swallow the world. Elizabeth seemed borne under by a staggering weight.

  Mechanically, her hand rose and her long fingers pushed a curling strand of hair out of her face. Then, her eyes narrowing, she paused and allowed her fingers to dwell a moment on a tiny dimple of gossamer skin just at the corner of her right eye. Delicately, as though stroking something newborn and shivering, she caressed the minute curved scar with the soft pad of her index finger.

  She remembered the day she had received this. Though time and age had shrunk the physical wound so that nobody, not even Dan, remarked on its presence, it remained. And in Elizabeth’s mind the circumstances that led to a small sheen of blank skin being tattooed indelibly upon her forehead remained fresh and vivid.

  As she touched the arc of her scar, that day in the stables came back to her in all its physical reality. The high smells of horseflesh mingled with the earthy stink of their dung. The rustle of hay and the constant hum of flies. This was her space. Twelve years old and queen of a world of bits and bridles, horseshoes and oats.

  She did not blame the young ostler. Not even now. She had been too free with her time. Too keen to follow him on fishing trips and on adventures, clambering about the ruins of castles and fairy rings. Too close. Too intimate.

  Perhaps he was within his rights to kiss her.

  When she pulled away, shocked, her lips still feeling the questing musculature of his, her head collided with a hanging stirrup. The cold metal opened a well of red just where the fine hair of her eyebrow faded into the alabaster of her skin.

  She punched him. Her bony fist lashing out, catching him across that mouth which only a moment before had sought her own.

  His hands leapt to his face, and the hurt, the betrayal, in his eyes prompted something to twist in the pit of her guts. He backed away from her, from the rich man’s daughter, mumbling apologies and ploughing a furrow through the straw of the stable floor. And for an instant, as blood trickled across her skin like a wet strand of thread, as she watched him go, she felt something like regret. Yet, another sensation crowed within her too; one of power and burning defiance.

  Her father had thrashed the lad and expelled him from his service. Not for kissing her. She had not told her father everything for fear of what he would do to her one-time friend. But for allowing her to cut her head. The shame she had felt as the boy shambled away into the veiling haze and out of her life had lived within her like a worm ever since.

  But whenever she noticed her tiny blemish, whenever she unwittingly brushed against it or caught sight of it winking back from the depths of her looking-glass, that old blaze of confidence heated her insides.

  And as she stood, gazing at her reflection in her bedroom mirror, she realised she hated this feeling of being afraid for Daniel Banville. She was not some essence of jelly, spineless and lax.

  In that raw moment, Elizabeth resented Dan a little. Resented him for making her afraid. She had never been afraid of anything until she had fallen in love with Daniel Banville.

  She turned from her mirror and sat down heavily on her bed. Frowning once more, she gazed around her. The furniture, the fashionable wallpaper, the delicately carved wood, all spoke to her of pampering, of indulgence. The elegance of her home was a thin membrane filming over the sour fistula of her sister’s casual arrogance and the bloodlust of her father’s friends.

  She was not like them. She did not belong here.

  The dead weight of that thought sat like an anvil in her brain.


  And yet she did not belong with the tattered rabble on Kilthomas Hill either.

  She occupied a pathetic interstice. She had fallen into the gap between two cultures that seemed on the brink of mutual obliteration. Everything about her was in flux, her world liquefying and sliding away like grease down a drain.

  She breathed deeply and the scents of white lead powder and rouge – her greasepaint, as her father called it – clotted her senses. And something else, too. Something more delicate. Something with the fragrance of roses.

  Upon the floor, next to her bureau, a small, squat, thick glass bottle lay on its side. Its cork stopper had loosened and a liquid, clear as rain, made a puddle in which the bottle lay.

  Elizabeth smiled against her will.

  ‘How much did that cost you, Daniel?’ she wondered aloud.

  And simultaneously a voice far back in her mind asked how much their love might cost them both.

  Her only certainty was her love for Daniel Banville. He needed her as surely as she needed him; and the girl she used to be, the girl with the horseshoe scar, knew what she should do. Sitting here whilst events trampled her under was not even a consideration. Dan was involved in whatever chaos was engulfing the country. Of this she was sure. And, for all his fine words, she could not see him stand alone. He was hers as surely as that pale curve of skin at the edge of her right eyebrow.

  She soon regretted taking such a heavy pack.

  Beyond the spill of light from the windows of her father’s house, the twilight was brighter than she had expected. An hour earlier she had packed her small, stiff leather travelling case with as many clothes as she could stuff in, crammed her sun bonnet onto her head and, with all the stealth of her tomboy youth, she had sneaked from her home and made her way into the shrouding gloom.