by Joe Murphy
He sat his horse some four hundred yards south of the hill and regarded its squat bulk through a brass telescope. Arrayed along the crest a large body of pikemen made a spiked wall against the sky and out in front, gathered about a brass six-pounder, a smaller group of rebels was a silent ball of distant activity. In their midst, dressed in a bright blue frock coat and with bruises marring his features, a man was pointing and gesticulating vociferously. Loftus noted how he only gestured with one arm. His left was carved from wood and hung loose by his side, burnished and worn to a dull shine through constant use, nerveless and dead.
‘I believe that is your Mr Kyan,’ said Loftus to Jones.
Jones merely grunted his agreement, his eyes fixed on the happenings on the summit of the hill. At length he commented, ‘I believe they mean to discharge that thing.’
Concurrently with his words the cannon on the hillside belched forth a roaring swirl of blue smoke and the trees arching above Loftus and Jones rattled and clattered as though in a hail storm. Behind the two officers their men exchanged uneasy glances as fragments of branches and torn leaves pattered down from the over-arching canopy.
Jones brushed a shattered twig from where it had lodged on his epaulette and said, ‘Grape shot. Interesting. Their elevation is rather too high, though.’
Loftus was shaking his head in dismay and he sighed, ‘Their next shot will not be. Have the men retreat. We shall fall back across the county to Carnew. We have no artillery and we cannot hope to gain Arklow with them astride the road like this.’
Jones cocked one eyebrow, ‘Are you sure, General?’
Loftus regarded him then with an expression that carried all the despair of a drowning man, ‘The county is lost, Mr Jones. If we dally here further we shall all join Mr Walpole in death.’
Jones nodded curtly, his face inscrutable, and rose his melodious voice into the afternoon sky. ‘The column will about face!’ he ordered. ‘We make for Carnew!’
General Loftus cast one glance back towards the rebels on Gorey Hill before wheeling his mount and trotting after his men. The army he had led to smash the Rising was in tatters, his noose to strangle the croppies unravelling before his very eyes. And in his ears from the direction of Gorey Town the sound of mocking celebration clamoured like an ache, and the faces of his men, shocked and pale, were like ghosts in the sunlight.
CHAPTER 19
An Evil Stirs
It had been four days since Dan Banville left Elizabeth behind in Wexford Town and he could still feel the feathery ghost of her lips on his. He sat on the steps of Talbot Hall, a large slate-roofed house squatting on the upper slopes of Corbet Hill, and gazed out over the countryside below. The afternoon sunlight spilled down upon the fields and hedgerows around New Ross with all the warmth of a welcoming hearth. The squares of the fields, each separated from the other by the dark sutures of heavy ditches, glowed gold where barley ripened hourly in the season’s glare. Meadows of grass rippled in elegant emerald combers as a light breeze soughed across the landscape. It was this detail that struck Dan with a chill realisation. Echoes of his former life, now seeming so distant and blurred through a fog of terrible experience, played upon his mind. All those green rectangles, all those paddocks and fields of grass should have been cut for hay a week ago. Should have and would have been cut were it not for the savagery and violence that had ripped the country open from nave to chops.
Down below, not two miles to the north-west, the town of New Ross straddled the River Barrow in a helter-skelter of jumbled buildings and narrow laneways, its streets scrawling defiles that fell steeply down to the quays and the porter-dark rush of the river. The long drawbridge that linked the counties of Wexford and Kilkenny described a shallow curve of black in the distance, stepping out across the water on the spindly legs of its supports and trusses. The town was clustered predominantly on the Wexford side of the Barrow with only a straggling few cabins desultorily clinging to the bank at the Kilkenny end of the bridge. The old medieval wall of New Ross still stood and flung its lichenstained arms in a protective embrace around the town. The fortification was pierced in three places by the ragged apertures left by what were once ancient barbicans, to the south the Priory Gate, at the south-east corner the Three Bullet Gate and at the north-west corner the Market Gate. All three gates were now barricaded and dammed against the rebel flood by the chocolate crescents of trenches and earthworks.
As Dan watched, a red, white and blue Union Jack stirred against its flagpole above the barracks in the centre of the town and lifted, tugged by some impulse of the air, before falling flaccid once more.
‘What date is it?’
Dan looked up and around at the sound of the voice. Behind him, John Kelly leaned his towering frame against the doorpost of Talbot Hall. His blond hair was in shadow now and looked like a thatching of dirty straw bundled across his skull but his blue eyes held a sapphire intensity that radiated command. He was at home in any environment, the world seeming to shape itself to his expectations, to bend about the sheer weight of his personality.
Dan smiled wryly and replied, ‘It’s the fourth, John.’
Kelly pushed himself away from the wall and sat down beside Dan. He sat a step lower and leaned forward, yet even so his eyes were level with Dan’s own.
He shook his head in exasperation, ‘So for three days we have been overlooking that shaggin’ place while they build their damned ditches ever higher?’
Dan nodded mutely.
‘What of the men?’ asked the blond colonel. ‘Have they answered Harvey’s summons?’
Dan frowned then, the conflict that had been clamouring in his mind for the past two days threatening to spill from his lips. He cleared his throat uncomfortably and said, ‘Mr Harvey was rather more insistent with his last messages. The corps are coming back. They should be assembled by tonight.’
Kelly regarded the stony ground between his splayed feet for a moment before commenting, ‘You hold Harvey in high esteem, don’t you?’
Dan felt suddenly uncomfortable, the folds of his shirt seeming to cling like burrs to his sweating skin. He looked at the side of Kelly’s face but the boy from Killann had his eyes fixed on the earth beneath his feet.
At last Dan sighed, ‘I believe Mr Harvey is a most passionate United Irishman. He is a Protestant gentleman who struggles for the rights of the down-trodden and degraded. He is the ideal that Wolfe Tone might have imagined. When the French come I am sure he will be well-received into the new parliament.’
Kelly looked up then, his blue eyes narrowing, ‘And as a military commander?’
Dan was silent for a moment before answering, ‘General Roche or Fr Murphy have more about them in that regard.’
Kelly turned his head and flung his gaze out toward New Ross, saying, ‘Harvey is a man of integrity and zeal, yet integrity and zeal may not be enough. He has a very delicate constitution for one chosen to lead in the rough-and-tumble of war.’
Dan’s lips tightened, words and thoughts buffeting him and holding him fast in the conflicting winds of crossed purposes. His loyalty to Harvey, to the dream that Harvey represented, had come under a sustained battering over the course of their stay on Corbet Hill. While Dan remained as fixed as ever on the course of rebellion, as committed to the ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the human vessels through whom those ideas were to be spread had become increasingly frail to his anxious eyes. While the beacon of Ireland free burned as brightly for him as it had always done, the men to whom this sacred light had been entrusted seemed to pale, to grow wan, the vitality of the cause replaced by something pastel and washed-out.
Kelly was regarding him now with an expression of concern on his features. ‘We will carry the day, Dan,’ he said. ‘It is to the likes of us that the task ahead falls. When Harvey gives us our head we shall fall upon that town like a lightning bolt.’
From out of his gloom Dan answered, ‘We may get all the corps back first. I don’t know why Mr Harvey and M
r Colclough allowed the regiments to go home. They must assume that the war is over and that the French have already landed.’
Kelly grinned savagely, ‘I don’t know what their thinking was but it has taken two days to get everyone back. Those Forth and Bargy men haven’t fired a shot in anger yet and they want to run off back to their beds.’
Dan nodded in agreement, ‘There are two thousand foot and horse down in that town. They’ve been coming over the bridge since we arrived here. If we had taken the place on the first night we might have the whole province of Munster risen around us by now. We will need every man we can muster when the time comes.’
A warmth had crept into Kelly’s face as he listened to Dan speak, as though he discerned the misgivings that plagued his thoughts. Putting a massive paw on Dan’s shoulder, he replied, ‘We will be victorious, Dan. As we have been in every engagement so far. The Kilkenny lads have been sending messages across that they will be waiting to ambush the garrison as soon as we push them across the bridge.’
He pointed, his long arm lifting like a spar, his fist like a cannon ball. ‘All we have to do,’ he continued, ‘is drive them from the town and across the bridge. The Kilkenny men will be waiting and we shall have them caught between us. I hope they can swim for surely some will be in for a dunking.’
He laughed then, a barking explosion of genuine good humour, and Dan found himself chuckling in spite of himself.
Then from around the hunched and gorse-pelted shoulder of the hill a broad, bullet-headed figure rolled. He was dressed in a collar-less, white linen shirt that clung to him as though painted onto his wide torso and buff breeches that terminated just below the knee. No stockings sheathed the thick hawsers of his calves but a pair of worsted brown shoes bore him across the slope. He moved with a sort swaying gait as though the land itself echoed the pitch and toss of the sea.
‘Ho, there, Captain Banville!’ he cried, the Hook Peninsula yawing in his voice.
‘Mr Rouse!’ responded Dan, clambering to his feet, a sudden gust of wind whipping at his coat, setting it to clatter and snap like a sail. ‘How are the men?’
Rouse was now standing before Dan and he raised a leather-brown hand in salute to John Kelly. ‘Captain Kelly,’ he stated as formerly as he could muster, ‘I’m Seán Rouse of the Hook. I’m one of Mr Banville here’s men, so I am.’
Rising to his feet, Kelly towered over the man like a cliff but he saluted with the deference that had led him to be held in such high esteem by all in the United ranks. ‘Mr Rouse,’ he acknowledged simply.
Smiling now, Rouse addressed Dan, the countryside spread out behind and below him like some fantastical backdrop to his words, blue and green and gold.
‘The men are grand, Mr Banville. I’ve had them hard at it from first light. They can carry themselves as well any of the Scarawalsh or Bantry lads now, sir.’ He paused for a moment, marine-grey eyes slipping mischievously to John Kelly’s face. ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he concluded.
‘You see,’ smiled Kelly, his amusement at Rouse’s audacity breaking from his face like sun through clouds. ‘Tomorrow the Barrow we’ll cross and all will be well.’
‘I hope so,’ breathed Dan, while in his head a sudden voice mewled like something lost in the dark, I miss you, Elizabeth.
The river Barrow flowed through the town of New Ross deep and brown and stinking. The detritus of the place, with its narrow streets and fisheries, its tanneries and its hundreds of hovels, all washed down its steep streets into the sliding waters. Along the riverside the quays of New Ross were crammed with the heavy hulls of sea-going ships, their spars drifting to-and-fro, metronomically in time with the heave and subdue of the Barrow’s waves. Along the quays, scores of red-coated soldiers gathered and milled, guffawing and spitting, their officers striking elegant poses whilst they debated how to garrison their men. For garrison was the only word for it. The entire town had become a military camp, its earthen laneways and thoroughfares become veins for an influx of red, steel-spangled blood. Hourly, across the Barrow’s single drawbridge, cavalry and infantry poured into the town, displacing the poor and battered populace so that they bolted themselves into their own thatched cabins and prayed that the soldiers would not come knocking. Hourly, the military din increased as horses neighed and champed at the bit and cannon rumbled into the place on wheeled carriages. War, terrible and utter, had come to New Ross.
The four-storey Custom House overlooked the Barrow and its seething quays and, within its spacious interior, Generals Henry Johnson, who now commanded the town, and his immediate subordinate Charles Eustace, consulted with their officers.
The room that they had commandeered was a vast drawing room on the second storey. Flowers and ivy leaves, moulded from plaster, ran along the join between the coral-painted walls and the gaping white expanse of the ceiling. A beech-wood floor, lacquered and polished to a hard glare in the sunlight reflected the high windows that pierced the west-facing wall. Clusters of mismatched tables and chairs stood at various points about this floor, the elaborate carvings of several showing they were native to this grand chamber. The others had been procured and dragged in here, the scrapes and gouges in the floor’s varnish testament to the hurried nature of their arrangement. Maps and rustling dunes of paper drifted over everything.
Johnson, a tall, rangy officer in pristine red coat and powdered wig stood in silhouette against one bright window and cupped his chin with his right hand. Behind him four men sat at a table and rifled through a series of documents.
At last, one of them lifted a white sheet exclaimed, ‘Ah ha! I have it, sir. Twenty barrels. The building that the yeomanry call the Main Guard has twenty barrels of powder in its stores. That should suffice, surely.’
Johnson nodded slowly. His long face a mask of concentration, his blue eyes unfocused, staring off across the river as though he perceived something ulterior in Kilkenny’s undulating hills. At length he replied, ‘Send another two just to be sure, Eustace. And set up a piece of artillery at the meeting place of Mary’s Street and Michael’s Lane. In fact set up two. Should we lose that junction, we lose the Main Guard. If we lose the Main Guard then we shall lose the town.’
Eustace nodded sombrely to himself and added in tones as dark as the waters of the Barrow itself, ‘If we lose the town, we lose Munster.’
The figure immediately to his left shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was a middle-aged officer dressed in the red coat and green facings of the New Ross yeomanry and although once a fine figure of a man, he was now going to seed. Fine wines and dripping roasts had begun to spill his gut over the top of his breeches. He coughed pointedly, ‘I say, General. I feel we are being far too cautious with this scheme of yours. These rebels should be met in the open field. The gall of the rascals really does set my teeth on edge. We should have at them, I say.’
Eustace ducked his head whilst the fourth member of the group said nothing but merely stared at the slew of documents on the table before him. His mind elsewhere, his narrow, ascetic face troubled.
Without turning, Johnson addressed the speaker in a voice harsh with contempt, ‘Mr Tottenham. You are captain of the New Ross yeomanry and as such I am compelled to afford you all the respect that position demands. However, although your brio is commendable, these rebels have whipped us at every turn in open battle. Now they sit like a plague of locusts of Corbet Hill and they wait and do nothing. It baffles me. We add to our strength by the minute and yet they watch us and do nothing. I fear some wickedness is at work.’
He turned then and gestured to Eustace, ‘You are sure they do not seek to circumvent us? They have no parties on our flanks?’
Eustace nodded curtly. He had known Henry Johnson for long enough to know his meticulous nature, his shrewdness and his razor intelligence. He also knew that Johnson regarded these rebels as the greatest threat to the Crown since the Armada. His superior mulled daily over reports of rebel movements and chewed on the gristle that was the prospect
of a French landing. Henry Johnson was a worried man.
‘Yes, sir,’ Eustace replied. ‘I am certain.’
‘Then I am at a loss,’ Johnson sighed. ‘Their inaction flies in the face of all military sense.’
Charles Tottenham tugged his waistcoat so that the buttons were placed under slightly less strain and snorted, ‘I know these people, General. They are farmers and fishermen and school teachers. They are not soldiers.’
Johnson regarded the man with irritation darkening his brow beneath the grey fringe of his wig. He sat down heavily on a vacant chair and explained as though he were addressing a particularly dense toddler, ‘Every army that has been met these “farmers”, as you describe them, in the open field has been destroyed, sir. We cannot risk the loss of this town through vanity and the ridiculous impulse to fight these miscreants among the hedges and ditches that they spring from. Should we lose New Ross then the entire south of the country is open to them. Do you understand this, sir?’
Tottenham nodded slowly, his jowls over-lapping the collar of his coat, ‘I understand, General, but it is an affront to me to sit here and do nothing.’
At last the fourth member of the group stirred himself and cleared his throat. His red and blue infantry officer’s coat was by far the most finely-tailored in the room, out-shining even those of the two generals. Upon his head a wig sat, dusted with white lead. Slowly his hand lifted and he lifted this wig free, tossing it onto the table with a palpable air of relief. With his other hand he smoothed back a frizzled thatch of hair.
‘I am fifty-three years old,’ he said at last, wearily. ‘In all my days I have not seen such calamity as this. How is it that Irishmen have all, without warning, lost the ability and inclination to talk with their fellow Irishmen?’