by Joe Murphy
That’s what Harvey is up to, thought Dan. Why in God’s name could he not just assemble the corps and march on Ross? Why did he dawdle so?
‘And?’ he prompted the man.
Still without looking, the rebel answered, ‘There’s half the Orangemen of Wexford in there, including that bastard Edward Turner. Captain Dixon wants him turned over to us.’
Dan frowned darkly. ‘In order for him to be held accountable for his actions against the people?’
At last the big man turned to him and Dan saw that across his right eye a scorch mark had left his brow and cheek bone a red swathe of scar tissue and had turned the eyeball into a blind, milky white sphere. The man stared at Dan with his one good eye but all the malignancy in his gaze seemed to emanate from the other sightless, pus-filled blank.
He considered Dan’s words and then his lips wriggled into a sneer. ‘To kill him,’ he pronounced slowly.
Dan had moved away from the man then and worked his way into the crowd so that he was only a person or two away from the pacing Dixon.
‘Justice!’ Dixon cried again and then turned to the closed building behind him. ‘Hand us over Edward Turner! Give him to the people or we shall take him by force. A new era is upon us, no more will Ireland shelter the despot.’
Dan fancied one of the curtains framing the house’s tall windows twitched like the fluttering of an eyelid.
‘Liberty and vengeance!’ roared Dixon.
And the mob echoed, ‘Liberty and vengeance!’ Every throat flung its words against the stone-clad edifice like the ocean flinging waves.
Across the space that had formed about Harvey’s doorway Dan could see the burly form of Dixon’s wife, her sack-like arms folded and her ham head violet with heat and fervour.
Then Harvey’s door opened and Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey stepped forward into the maw of the crowd. He was sweating profusely and his sideburns were damp against his heavy jowls. With a face pale as the belly of a frog, Harvey looked about him. The assembly fell silent and Dixon stepped smartly back into the ranks like an animal seeking safety in its pack.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the United Irish leader began, his voice trembling and struggling to be heard over the cries of people trying to extinguish the flames of Boyd’s former residence in George’s Street.
Harvey coughed and began again in a slightly stronger voice, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please, you have no reason to disturb my dinner. I am entertaining citizens who may be of much benefit in rebuilding our stricken county.’
‘You’re feeding monsters!’ yelled an outraged voice and the crowd surged forward a step or two.
‘Please!’ pleaded Harvey. ‘There must be a time for conciliation, the two traditions cannot be enemies forever. Please return home and we shall be off presently towards another great victory over the tyrant.’
This was greeted with a stony silence that extended and deepened as the moments passed. Harvey swivelled anxiously, questing for a friendly face, the heels of his shoes horribly loud on the hard ground as he turned and turned about.
‘Mr Harvey,’ came Dixon’s voice, like something crawling out from under a corpse. ‘I do not think that the good people of Wexford can be so easily mollified by trite words.
‘With all due respect, you were not with us at Oulart or Enniscorthy. You sent us a letter pleading on behalf of the creatures who persecuted us for so long. And now you stand and seek to thwart the will of the people? How do you expect us to follow you into battle, Mr Harvey? How can we hope to storm the gateways to Ross when you display such concern for the comfort of our oppressors?’
He paused for a heart beat before repeating, ‘With all due respect.’
A moist segment of tongue ran out and along Harvey’s lower lip and he stood stock-still for a moment, unsure of what to do.
Dan felt the weight of providence bear down upon him. He knew that were this exchange to continue that Bagenal Harvey would be piked and every one of his guests massacred. In the interstice between one second and the next, the seeds of the Rising’s failure were sown and about to burst into miserable life. With Harvey’s death the United Irishmen would tear themselves apart and Dixon and his ilk would reign supreme on a tidal wave of terror and butchery. Wexford would eat itself like a fox caught in a trap until the government finally put it out of its misery with musket and bayonet.
Dan moved reflexively, barging out into the open and stepping quickly to Harvey’s side. It was a measure of the man’s fear that, when he perceived Dan meant him no harm, he clung to his sleeve like a child to its father.
A murmur went up from the surrounding insurgents but Dan let it wash over him as he bent close to Harvey and whispered, ‘Mr Harvey, unless you hand over Edward Turner to these people then you and everyone in your house must surely be murdered. Think on it.’
Harvey looked at the tall young man before him with eyes brimming with confusion and terror. ‘But they will kill him.’
Dan growled, ‘He might deserve such a fate. To entertain such an avowed loyalist in your house was ill-judged, sir. His only hope is to stand trial and so present some form of defence.’
Harvey sighed, ‘I will send him out.’
Dan turned to the crowd as Harvey disappeared back through his front door.
Every face before him was masked with suspicion and bubbling fury. A dark muttering began to circulate and as Dan faced them he felt the first twinges of the terror that had stupefied Bagenal Harvey.
All moisture seemed to have evaporated from his mouth and his gums and tongue felt as though they were made of leather. He knew he must say something, anything, to stem the flood of rancorous grumbling that surrounded him. Thomas Dixon was staring at him with a poisonous sneer that soured further moment by moment.
‘Mr Harvey has gone to fetch Mr Turner,’ Dan heard himself say. ‘He has agreed to surrender him for trial.’
At this a large number of the gathered rebels let out a huzzah but some remained mired in sullen silence.
Dixon spat, ‘What need have we for a trial? The man is a monster.’
Dan nodded calmly, keenly aware of the knife edge he walked. ‘I was at Oulart, Mr Dixon, and I am aware of his reputation but only the yeos and soldiers execute people without due process. Would you place us in the same category as our enemies?’
Then, in a voice louder and more commanding he asked, ‘Who here would wish to be like the yeos and North Corks?’
There was a general murmur to the negative and a few limp shouts of, ‘No one’ and ‘Not I’.
Dixon scowled but said nothing. His wife, however, lowered her great soft head and whispered something into Dixon’s ear. The man’s expression changed subtly. The scowl remained but it darkened somehow, becoming more intent, more pointed. His wife lifted her face then and a wide marly smile stretched across her lips.
Dan watched this tableau with a growing, sickening repulsion. All at once, a cold dread for Elizabeth had opened, gaping, beneath his ribs.
When Bagenal Harvey’s door opened once more it was to reveal the pasty features of Edward Turner peering out into the street.
At the sight of him, a wild whoop ululated up from the crowd and the head withdrew a little as though Turner had decided to barricade himself into the house rather than face his persecutors. Instantly however, and with a violence that suggested unseen hands had propelled matters, the door widened further and Turner seemed to spill clumsily out onto the steps. Behind him the door slammed shut like a falling guillotine.
Turner regarded the people before him with a face that had taken on the colour of ashes. His wig was askew and his frock coat rumpled, his hands crawling over his paunch like white crabs as he attempted smooth out the wrinkles. A bellicose spew of insults flowed from the watching rebels and Turner’s wide eyes drifted from face to vicious face.
Dan growled at the quivering magistrate, ‘Say something, Mr Turner, or they will likely pike you where you stand.’
Turner whimpered but managed to stut
ter, ‘I offer myself up to the justice of the people, where neither the house nor the interference of my friends nor the chief commander can offer me protection.’
A feral howl greeted his words and, as one, the mass of rebel bodies swarmed forward. Dan moved quickly to one side as urgent hands quested for Turner’s terrified form. His coat was stripped from him and, as though through some magic trick or infernal conjuring, a gash was opened along the raised contour of his cheek. Blood flowed down the man’s face and was smeared and grotesquely smudged by hands which punched and slapped, tearing the wig from his head and battering him like a storm.
‘To the gaol!’ someone cried.
‘Pack him in with the others!’ another voice answered. ‘We’ll have his head on a spike by tomorrow!’
Through the mêlée of bodies, prodded and jabbed by the brutal steel of pike-heads, Turner was goaded down the street. His face hung from his skull like empty sacking, every line loose and nerveless, his eyes doleful puddles. The mob of insurgents flowed around him, swirling like dirty water down a drain, hurling spittle and vitriol, cat-calls and curses. Amongst it all, within this maelstrom of barbarity, Edward Turner made a pathetic figure. Abandoned by his friends, surrendered to his enemies, he was doomed.
Dan watched the mob depart with an odd flux of emotions warring within his mind. He knew what Turner was, he had watched him burn cottages, had heard of his pronouncements of flogging and transportation, he had lived hand in glove with the North Corks and had turned a blind eye to their excesses. Dan knew all this, yet he could not help but feel a sort of sympathy for the man, hounded and humiliated as he was, baited like an animal. Dan thought that if Dixon was presiding over his trial then Turner could expect nothing but the same perverse bigotry that he himself had visited upon others. He was a man reaping the whirlwind.
‘Feel sorry for him, don’t you?’ a voice asked from over his left ear sending a soft feathering of foul breath across his cheek
The question was asked in a sticky whine, nasal and grating and Dan knew that Dixon’s wife stood behind him; he could sense her oppressive bulk pressed close to him.
‘Madam,’ he said without turning, ‘I would advise you never again to sneak up behind an armed man. It is inadvisable and likely to precipitate a nasty accident.’
Mrs Dixon moved around Dan like a leviathan sluggishly rolling in the deeps and looked at him with brazen disdain leaking from her hooded eyes. ‘You’ll get yours, too,’ she grunted and then turned to follow her husband and the mob he led, moving through the thickening smoke like a figure in some awful dream.
Dan stared at her blurred back as it faded from sight, his mind a ball of ice. Behind him, Harvey’s house was silent and cold, its windows staring blindly out onto the street. A curtain, unnoticed by anyone, twitched and then stilled, leaving all motionless, only the roiling smoke and a lone, screaming gull lending any life to the scene.
CHAPTER 17
Ambitions
The afternoon of the 1st of June crumbled slowly into a purple sea of dusk. A mackerel sky was all aflame with the bloodlight of the dipping sun and its high clouds were spun gold across the heavens. The rough prominence of Carrigrew Hill was swamped in the effulgence of the dying day and upon its summit Tom Banville gazed southwest across the countryside, a frown darkening his brow.
That morning, full of laughter and arrogance, the Northern Division of the United Irish Army had split at Scarawalsh Bridge. Fr Mogue Kearns, a redoubtable, bumptious United man, had been given command of two and a half thousand pike- and musketmen, a howitzer and a handful of ship’s swivels. Roche, Fr Murphy and Edward Fitzgerald had instructed this force to take and occupy Newtownbarry and from there to scout in force into Carlow and Wicklow and ascertain the state of the rebellion in those two counties. With Kearns went Miles Byrne and his Monaseed Corps, ranging ahead in the now-familiar role of vedette.
Tom had stood at Byrne’s stirrup as the young officer had prepared to depart. Scarawalsh Bridge flung itself over the Slaney to their right and the dusty hump of its back was thronged with the dark masses of the rebel army. A forest of pikes made a rippling porcupine of the fields and paddocks all about and green flags flapped sullenly in the fading breeze.
‘Mind yourself, Miles,’ Tom had cautioned.
Byrne had smiled roguishly and replied, ‘The fiends that occupy Newtownbarry are the ones in need of minding. Our fine boys will make them run as far as Maryborough. We’ll be into the midlands and have the place risen around us before the end of the week.’
Tom had patted the sinewy neck of Byrne’s mount and repeated simply, ‘Mind yourself.’
Miles had sobered then, and nodded, ‘Thank you, Tom.’
He paused and added, ‘Speak to Roche and Fr Murphy about the goings-on at Vinegar Hill. Luke Byrne can’t be left there. Thirty-two done to death in two days is inordinate.’
Tom’s face had clouded and he had said, ‘I will do what I can but I fear the leaders have no stomach for discipline. They will not risk driving a wedge between moderates and fanatics.’
Miles had wheeled his horse, saying, ‘I fear you are right but do what you can. I shall see you tomorrow or the next day when the land around Newtownbarry has been swept free of redcoats.’
Tom had waved goodbye to the young captain and watched him trot through the ranks, a wave of cheers and thrown hats marking his progress like the wake of a man-o’-war.
The rebel detachment moved off then, with flags flaring in the few shallow gusts of wind before settling against their flagpoles like dead game hanging from a nail. Men laughed and joked and wives and children blew kisses and waved handkerchiefs, sure that nothing could stand before them. Enniscorthy and Wexford had fallen and so no earthly thing now exceeded their grasp.
Now Tom stood on the crest of Carrigrew Hill with the main mass of the Northern Division encamped all about him, thousands of men standing as he did, staring southwest with horror blanching their countenances. Tom stood and counted the corps as they returned in bloodied dribs and drabs. Exhausted men stumbled along the road and flung themselves over ditches, scrambling through the fields beyond, frantic to gain the safety of the camp. Wounded, supported by their comrades, they lurched step by agonised step out of the gloaming. In scattered groups of twos and threes, in battered clusters of ten or twelve, the remnants of Fr Kearn’s detachment struggled through the twilight. In their movements and in the relieved faces of those who had already returned was a ghost of the panic they must have experienced mere hours before, the latent venom of defeat.
The wailing anguish, the keening of the widows and children of those men killed or missing wreathed the hill and filled the dusk with heartbreak.
And still Miles Byrne had not returned.
Tom waited silently, a sour sense of foreboding curdling his insides.
He had not expected this. To his shame he had allowed his optimism to strangle his good sense. Miles Byrne had rode off and with him Tom’s thoughts had flown to images of struggle, a hard-fought victory with hundreds of casualties, a garrison pitted in desperation against a horde set to destroy it. He had not once considered defeat. He looked out over the fields and hedgerows of central Wexford and considered the fact that this was much worse than a defeat. The insurgent regiments had not come marching home, bloodied but unbowed. They had streamed through the countryside up from Scarawalsh as though the devil himself was at their backs, panicked and ragged and shattered. It had been a disaster.
Something here was not right and he was sure Roche, Fitzgerald and Fr Murphy had grasped it the moment the first survivor fell into the arms of an outlying sentry. The man had been brought into the camp and within minutes his story was snaking from fireside to fireside, twisting and warping as it did so but maintaining the hard core of its essence.
Fr Kearns and his men had taken Newtownbarry with all the bravery and enthusiasm that the United Irish Army had so far demonstrated. Then things had gone wrong and Tom felt compelled to point t
he finger of blame squarely at the good Fr Kearns. His men had watched the red-coated garrison flee along the road to Carlow and had then set about burning any loyalist house they could find, raiding cellars and pantries for whiskey and porter with every bit as much abandon as they had attacked the King’s troops.
Minutes stretched by as Fr Kearns sat his great white charger in the middle of Newtownbarry’s main street with a beatific air and the indulgent expression of a benevolent Pope. Men drank and blustered and looted and no one noticed that the garrison had rallied.
Strengthened by a detachment of Queen’s County Militia that had come marching down the road to support them, the soldiers had rediscovered their spines and had turned around. They had stationed themselves on the high ground overlooking the smoke and bedlam of Newtownbarry and had moved a heavy nine-pounder into position. Its black bore glared down upon the rebels like the baleful eye of an ancient cyclops.
Not a soul in the town perceived the danger until grape shot and musket balls tore into the celebrating multitude. Again and again the guns sounded as rebel captains roared orders at drink-numbed subordinates and Fr Kearns pirouetted his mount, dumbfounded and bewildered. Men fell like cut weeds, spilling gore onto the packed earth, and an awful panic gripped the survivors as the yeoman cavalry and soldiers charged them.
A fighting retreat had turned into a rout and this in turn had become a massacre. In the countryside around Newtownbarry, scores of dead insurgents blighted the fields in pathetic tangles of mortality.
Tom sighed and thought of Fr Kearns, sequestered now with the leaders in their tent, engaged in heated debate, as the evening wore on and men and women continued their mournful vigil, waiting for friends and loved ones to plod, bleeding, out of the sunset. Tom wondered if Kearns had any idea of the importance of his defeat, the gravity of what it had revealed.
Even if one were to ignore the ill-discipline and downright stupidity of the rebel actions at Newtownbarry one must be forced to confront the fact of the involvement of the Queen’s County Militia, the blue facing of their red coats distinctive as a banner. How had they been dispatched? How had the garrisons of the midlands found the men to reinforce Newtownbarry when they should have been busy fighting their own battles?