by Joe Murphy
Tom and Dan leaned panting against the doorframe of a slate-roofed town house. It had been this way for the past two hours, moving from building to building while musket balls thudded like lethal hail around them. Dan had no idea how many United Irishmen had died so far but he shuddered to consider the severity of the losses. William Sinnott, he was sure, had perished as he entered through the Duffry Gate, cut down by sniper fire. The building housing the hidden assassin had been broken into and the man had been killed on the spot by Sinnott’s furious companions. The same had been the case as the rebel column advanced deeper into the town. Scattered groups of soldiers had stood and formed brief skirmish lines before being driven back as sharpshooters felled men to the left and right. And still the sun mounted the heavens, glorious and innocent, drenching both rebel and loyalist in sweltering heat.
The two brothers crouched with swords and pistols in hand as the massive bulk of a Kiltealy United man smashed into the door between them. The portal bounced on its hinges and flung open with a sound like tearing stitches. Immediately, Dan and Tom were through it and racing up the stairs within, ignoring the family that were huddled in the hallway, the father of the house holding a bible before him like a shield. The stairs creaked as they powered from step to step and as they gained the second floor they slowed and treaded more softly.
The stairs gave on to a short stretch of wooden landing leading to a redlacquered doorway. Even on their side of the door the smell of gunpowder permeated the air. Glancing at each other, careful not to make the slightest sound so close to their quarry, Dan and Tom sidled up to the doorway.
Tom slipped his pistol back into its holster and, gentle as falling snow, he placed one hand on the door’s brass handle.
The splintering crash of the musket ball as it punched through the wood not six inches from his head made Tom yelp and fling himself in abject shock against the wall behind him.
Dan moved then with grim and deadly purpose. He raised his foot and smashed it into the door’s panelling just beside the handle. The door whipped away from him with such force that it rebounded and almost flattened Dan as he stormed into the room.
It was a child’s nursery, the wallpaper soothing, and a painted white cot placed against one wall. In the other wall was set a window overlooking Enniscorthy’s market square and beside it a yeoman was feverishly attempting to reload his musket. Against the window the man stood in silhouette and Dan could not discern what expression he wore but at the sight of Dan the yeo stilled. He became a carven effigy, ramrod held motionless in one hand whilst the other hand was petrified even as he clawed for his ammunition pouch. Smoke wreathed the room with the incense of the battlefield.
The yeo opened his mouth to say something, to offer defiance, to plead for his life.
Dan’s pistol blew his teeth out the back of his head.
Tom approached from behind Dan, his step unsteady and his breath shaking as it sluiced between his gritted teeth. Both brothers looked down on the dead yeoman and, at last, Tom ventured, ‘He could have killed me. Quick as a wink. Six inches to his left and my brains would surely have been blown out.’
Dan nudged the dead sharpshooter with the toe of one riding boot before saying, ‘Our friend here would not have affected much of a change in your circumstance in that case.’
Tom was silent for a moment, the fact of his scrape with death dulling his wits, before Dan’s words registered somewhere deep in his brain. He grinned at his elder brother, ‘I fail to see how my near death is a matter for levity, dear brother.’
Dan clapped him on the shoulder, sighing, ‘If you don’t laugh, you cry.’
The two brothers made their way cautiously back down the stairs. The family who had clustered in the hallway were gone. Outside, the fierce fighting in the market square had been replaced by an unnerving quiet. The barricades had been stormed at last by the advancing rebels and the defenders had fled away into the choking veil of smoke that was slowly enveloping Enniscorthy. The entire northern approach to the town was burning furiously.
From out of the shrouding smoke, Miles Byrne strode imperiously, directing men with all the authority of a general.
‘Make for Vinegar Hill!’ he ordered. ‘We are to get out of this smoke. The soldiers and the cowardly yeomen have fled! The town is ours!’
Dan and Tom exchanged startled glances as around them the corps of pikemen and musketeers sent up a howling cheer of jubilation. Through the swirling black blizzard of ash and cinders, Byrne spied Tom and Dan.
‘Mr Banville!’ he cried. ‘You must see this. It is something I had never thought I’d witness even in my fondest imagining.’ He beckoned to Dan with an urgency that prompted both Banvilles to break free of their celebrating comrades and approach the young captain with twin expressions of curiosity.
‘What is it, Miles?’ asked Dan as he drew closer to the Monaseed man, whose eyes were watering now and his breath caught in his throat with every inhalation. Around them, vague shadows in the burgeoning gloom, men were streaming out of the flaming carcass of the town and wending their way toward the dark mass of Vinegar Hill. Strewn across the square, unmoving smudges in the charcoal haze, the bodies of soldiers and rebels lay side by side in the cold intimacy of death.
‘Hurry,’ instructed Byrne and with that he turned and jogged off in the direction of the castle. Wordlessly, Dan and Tom followed in his wake. Enniscorthy Castle was perched on a rocky spur, dourly overlooking the Slaney. On the far bank of the river, the road to Wexford Town wound beneath the Turret Rocks, a looming limestone cliff crowned with a copse of cedar trees and streaked by centuries of oozing rainwater. The other Wexford Road, this one following the nearer bank of the river, looped about the castle’s foot and lanced off into the countryside around St John’s Wood and Edermine. It was at this vantage point, hard by the grim towers of the castle, that Byrne and the two Banvilles halted.
Silently and with deliberate haughtiness, Miles Byrne raised his right arm and pointed into the defile below. Floating puffs of smoke wafted across their vision as Dan and Tom stared in wonderment at the scene below them.
Along both sides of the river, long chains of carriages and handcarts made a rag-and-bone shop of the roadways. Families and the contents of houses were all piled high on flatbed wagons. Screaming children clung desperately to their mothers, who in turn clung like limpets onto their husbands. Lone figures on horseback threaded their way through the hurrying throng, lashing with their riding crops should an urchin or stray animal impede their path. All were vanishing southward toward Wexford Town with as much haste as they could muster. Thousands of loyalist refugees clogged the hinterland around Enniscorthy as they sought to flee the brutal vengeance of the rural poor.
Yet, as Dan’s eyes took in the crowds gushing in exodus from the burning town, he could not help but notice the lack of red coats amongst those travelling the roads southward. ‘What of the garrison?’ he asked Byrne. ‘Why do I see no sign of the North Corks or yeomanry amongst the populace?’
Byrne laughed contemptuously, his gaze still travelling out over the frantic refugees, imperious as Caesar. At length he explained, ‘We had the yeos and militia beaten in the town and Captain Snowe had positioned himself quite advantageously on the bridge, hoping to secure the crossing point and keep the way to Wexford Town out of the people’s hands.’
He smiled then and pointed to the left, where, beyond the ponderous bulk of the castle, the River Slaney flowed down from Scarawalsh. ‘Thomas Sinnott and his boys crossed the Slaney upstream from the town,’ he continued, ‘and they gained the far bank. They had fought as far as Lett’s distillery before Snowe realised he was in danger of being surrounded and annihilated. When he did, he decided to beat a hasty retreat to Wexford Town. He left before most of those poor wretches down there knew that the battle was over.’
He laughed again, a harsh sound to come from one so young, like the soulless clanging of a smithy, and said, ‘I have never seen such an inglorious dep
arture. His men turned their coats inside out and flung away their weapons. His officers tore off their epaulettes for fear of retribution. Every man jack of them should be ashamed of himself.’
Dan was smiling too now, basking in the glow of a hard-fought victory. Tom, however, was squinting through scalding eyes towards the gnarled, humped back of Vinegar Hill, where companies of insurgents could already be seen reforming after the bloody mayhem of the urban fighting. On the crest of the hill the broken stump of a ruined windmill was ragged and dark against the blue sky. Onto the highest point of this old relic a rebel hand had fixed a huge green bough which danced in the breeze, its leaves ruffling and trembling.
‘Roche and the others want to us to make for that?’ Tom asked.
‘The town is in a state of utter devastation,’ answered Byrne. ‘The smoke alone is choking. The hill will also provide us with a good vantage point to watch for the approach of any body of men sent against us and, furthermore, I think Roche and Murphy are correct to get our men away from any temptation to exact senseless revenge on the poor people left in their homes.’
Tom was nodding in grudging agreement but still felt the need to say, ‘If we were not so fatigued, and if the men were not so bent on looting and personal grievances, we should have mounted a pursuit of those Cork blackguards and swept them into the Slaney.’
Byrne regarded Tom with something akin to respect and responded, ‘I urged the leaders to consider that very course of action but the men are utterly exhausted from the long march and the bitter struggle, they cannot do much more than recuperate and refresh themselves.’
Tom scrubbed one hand across his stubbled jaw and sighed earnestly, ‘I could do with some refreshment, myself.’
An hour later and on the western slope of Vinegar Hill Tom, Dan and Elizabeth sat about a little cooking fire and watched the town of Enniscorthy burn. Some of the park of cattle had been slaughtered and meat was being handed out as quickly as possible to the rebel army now blanketing the hill’s slopes and seething across its crest. Tom had managed to borrow a tin pot from the well-provisioned Monaseed men under Miles Byrne and, in no time at all, had a lump of beef stewing over the fire. So now they sat in the middle of a victorious army, listening as songs were sung about them and watching the smoke drift and curl down in the valley.
Here and there throughout the town, moving with the brazen confidence of bestial yahoos, gangs of opportunists roamed, jars of whiskey and jugs of porter slopping from their fists. Dan refused to think of them as United Irishmen for the mobs seemed bent on only one thing. Through the shifting smoke these packs of men and women scoured the town, searching for any remaining loyalists. When they came across these individuals they hauled them, struggling, into the street and piked or bludgeoned them in front of their families, oblivious to the pleas for mercy, inured to the crying of children. Even the dead were not safe from their outrages, for as the little group on the hill looked on, the bodies of familiar local yeomen were hacked at and mutilated, skulls caved in and pockets rifled. The mobs were drunk and vicious and the sight of their savagery made Dan sick to his stomach.
‘How are Roche and Murphy allowing this?’ wondered Dan aloud.
Tom snorted, ‘Because if they do anything about it, they will be forced to take responsibility for it. It is much better if they keep their heads down and pretend that those miscreants are simply evil-natured carrion crows taking advantage of a victory rather than elements of our own glorious little army.’
‘It is most horrible,’ breathed Elizabeth and she curled her arm tightly around Dan’s bicep.
Instinctively, he drew her close to him and kissed her tenderly on the small horseshoe shimmer of her scar. ‘It has nothing to do with the aims of the United Irishmen,’ he whispered in reassurance.
Tom shook his head mournfully, stirred the beef with the point of a knife, and sighed. ‘You are dealing with people, not ideas, Dan. Your United Irish creed may have set this course of action but it is people, with their petty jealousies and ignorant cruelty, who will carry it forward.’
‘You’re from Carnew, ain’t ya?’ the question came in a woman’s voice, saw-edged and nasal, drawing each vowel out in the distinctive Wexford drawl.
Tom, Dan and Elizabeth whipped their heads about to see a large woman standing over them. Her face was a crimson, cumulous pillow of blubber and her arms, like bags of sausage meat, were folded across her bulging stomach. Her gimlet eyes stared at Elizabeth with glassy hostility.
‘You are from Carnew, I seen ya there,’ she insisted.
‘My good woman,’ replied Dan, ‘We are from the Castletown district. My name is Daniel Banville, this is my brother Thomas and this is my wife, Elizabeth.’
At this, Elizabeth’s eyes widened slightly and her breathing quickened and, yet, she somehow retained her composure as the woman glared at her with even greater intensity. The fluttering happiness that trilled within her breast at Dan’s words caught her completely by surprise.
‘Are you originally from Carnew, then?’ the woman pressed. ‘Have ya anyone belonging to ya up there because I’m sure I seen you at a fair all dressed up like a lady, with a yeo on your arm for company.’
Elizabeth shook her head and contrived to look as innocent as physically possible, ‘No, I’m not from Carnew. I have cousins up there but I myself am rarely in the town.’
The vast woman was about to say more when Tom waspishly interrupted, ‘Bloody hell woman,’ he snapped. ‘You’re as bad the damned yeos yourself with all your questions.’
The woman bridled at his words, great ripples of indignation spreading out from the oceans of her cheeks and jowls, ‘Good day to youse,’ she said curtly and then barrelled off.
‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said softly, reaching out to touch Tom’s arm.
‘And you thought I was being overly cautious,’ he muttered.
Dan was watching the bulk of the woman as she stomped from campfire to campfire on the way down the hill. At every camp she bent to say a few words, her doming shoulders quivering with anger. Now and again she would dart a poisoned glance back up the hill to where the Banvilles and Elizabeth sat huddled together.
‘That one is going to be trouble,’ Dan growled at length.
‘Accidents happen in battle,’ Tom offered hopefully.
Elizabeth merely stared into the flames of the cooking fire, saying nothing but feeling a chill wave of trepidation coax every inch of her skin into one dimpled tract of gooseflesh. Dan looked at her curiously, protectively.
‘I’m just cold,’ she said.
CHAPTER 11
Considerations
As the 28th of May wore on into evening the sun began to sink into the welter of char-black smoke that bellied and roiled above the ruined skeleton of Enniscorthy Town. Above Enniscorthy the sun had become a bullet hole, haemorrhaging its light across emptied homes and gutted cottages, casting the hundreds of unclaimed bodies in a corrupt effulgence that only served to emphasise the horror of what had occurred. In the charnel house of the market square, a lone sow nosed at a dead North Cork militiaman, lapping at his congealing blood.
All through the afternoon rebel bands had flocked to the camp on Vinegar Hill. The pyre that Enniscorthy had become was a beacon that could be seen for miles around. The towering column of smoke rose like the wrath of God over the pastures of central Wexford and at its sight many men who had thought the rumours of a Rising and victory at Oulart to be merely the fanciful ramblings of gossip-mongers and troublemakers, now made their way to the slopes of Vinegar Hill. Captains of the United Irishmen in outlying parishes, who had been waiting for the word to rise, now assembled their corps and marched in groups of twenty and thirty to join the growing muster.
Around the county the military was flummoxed, beaten twice in two days by a rag-bag army of peasants and labourers. Yeomanry units hunkered down in areas they knew to be safe whilst elsewhere whole detachments of cavalry and infantry were in retreat to Wexford Town or
Arklow. For a while, at least, the insurgent army above the blackened town commanded the entire central swathe of the county. It was untouchable, impervious and unassailable upon its rocky redoubt.
Dan, Elizabeth and Tom lay beneath two furze bushes that had grown together, entwining their thorny limbs like lovers. They had draped a woollen blanket over the entrance to their little den and now all three sat quite comfortably on a warm floor of dry, brown earth.
Through a gap in the branches, Dan watched the arrival of yet another rebel contingent. The men had come in from the wooded country to the west of Enniscorthy, out toward Killoughram and Caim and they marched with all the bearing of strutting peacocks, a hand-sewn banner, green with a yellow harp surrounded by wreath of shamrock, floated at their head. Each man was armed with a pike and a few had fowling pieces strapped across their backs, their white linen shirts were open in the heat and perspiration made cloud-grey fans beneath their arms and between their shoulder blades. Behind them, their hands bound, a gaggle of five or six prisoners stumbled in their wake. The prisoners, all men, panted as they struggled up the slope, blood oozing from split lips and broken noses, and bruises, like streaks of ash, stained their faces. A length of rope was noosed about each prisoner’s neck and was held in the free hand of a marching rebel.
‘They have brought more,’ Dan said, troubled.
Tom was squinting over his brother’s shoulder, using a gorse spike to prise a shred of beef from between his teeth and trying to gauge the numbers of men coming up the hill. ‘That’s another hundred, at least,’ he decided. ‘If there’s not six thousand fighting men on this hill, I would be surprised.’
Dan nodded but his expression remained clouded, ‘The ranks are swelling right enough but someone may do something about the raft of prisoners that are being brought in. Each company that rallies to us brings with them persons that they claim to be Orangemen. There’s mischief at foot here. As low in my affections as I hold the magistrates and landlords I will admit that not all of them or their tithe collectors are bigots and monsters. It smacks of zealotry.’