1798

by Joe Murphy

  He turned his slim head to fix Charles Tottenham with a thoughtful stare, ‘You say you know these people? And yet you have done nothing to parley with them. Perhaps they can be convinced to return home. Perhaps the wrongs they perceive can be righted in the courts?’

  Tottenham frowned at this but it was Johnson who answered, ‘Lord Mountjoy,’ he began.

  Mountjoy’s raised hand interrupted him, ‘I would prefer if you called me Luke, General. I was christened Luke Gardiner and I would fain die as Luke Gardiner.’

  Johnson smiled then, warmly and without contrivance, and continued, ‘Lord Mountjoy, Luke, I appreciate your presence here and the Dublin City Militia are without doubt some of the finest men under my command but you are far from home. These croppies do not wish for representation at the bar. They do not care for the niceties of proper conduct. They would seek to supplant our way of life with superstition and barbarism. They would have a guillotine at every crossroads and a Popish priest in every church. These people do not “parley”.’

  Mountjoy looked at Johnson with an unmistakable sadness sluicing through his eyes, ‘So we wait and pile cannon upon cannon. We wait until we have the opportunity to blow our fellow countrymen to atoms? Is that it?’

  Johnson nodded as beyond the windows of their elegant room a roar of coarse mirth rose from the soldiers on the quays.

  ‘We wait,’ he said.

  Abigail Brownrigg sat at her elegant coffee table and sipped strong tea from a white porcelain cup. Late afternoon sunlight flowed in from the garden at the rear of her house, yet there was a constant air of the crypt about her drawing room. The shadows formed more thickly in the space beneath table and chairs, and in the corners of the room murk was webbed more densely than seemed natural. It was a gloom which Mrs Brownrigg had accentuated through the deployment of dark carpets and wallpapers, all the wood lacquered to an inklike intensity. She enjoyed the dark. It brought deep thoughts.

  Now, over the white rim of her teacup, she watched her niece pace the floor.

  ‘My dear,’ said Mrs Brownrigg, ‘your pacing is most unladylike and is quite likely to wear a hole in my carpet. Do sit down, child.’

  Elizabeth flung her aunt a look of exasperation and continued to stalk back and forth, her skirts swishing and her forearms knotted beneath her breasts.

  Mrs Brownrigg continued to sip her tea, a study in placid serenity.

  Eventually Elizabeth had had enough and she stood before her aunt, bristling like an angry cat. ‘Why won’t you let me go to him? He must be made aware of this.’

  Mrs Brownrigg smiled at her niece with all the pleasantness to be found in the upturned mouth of a hunting pike. Placing her cup carefully upon its saucer she asked, ‘What would you have him do? Your young man is a rebel officer and might certainly sway them if he were here. However, he is not and until his return you should sit yourself down and fret less over events you are powerless to influence.’

  Elizabeth sniffed, ‘If Daniel were to hear of this he would come flying back to me like a bird. He could not countenance it. He would not allow it.’

  Mrs Brownrigg regarded her coolly before saying, ‘Your young man is no fool, Elizabeth. There will be terrible business at New Ross and he will not abandon it for the petty skulduggery that we have heard reported last night.’

  Elizabeth stared, wide-eyed, at the old woman.

  ‘Aunty!’ she exclaimed. ‘I would hardly call it petty skulduggery. They are killing prisoners!’

  Mrs Brownrigg lifted one gnarled hand, the translucent skin taut over white bone and gristle, marbled with the blue of veins. Smiling, she extended one crooked finger, the joints swollen with the onset of rheumatism.

  Holding this solitary finger aloft, she stated flatly, ‘They have killed one prisoner my dear. The noun is in the singular.’

  The previous morning, just as dawn was glimmering in the eastern sky, Captain Thomas Dixon and a group of ten men had forced their way into the town’s gaol. There they had seized a loyalist prisoner by the name of Francis Murphy and had dragged him out into the street past the guards who mumbled some half-formed protestations, impotent in the face of Dixon’s hate. The mob had harried Murphy down the street and into the Bullring where Dixon promptly accused him of informing on his cousin, his voice ringing in the cold steel of the dawn light. Without ceremony and without recourse to any defence, Murphy was piked to death, his body hauled off to the quays and dumped in the sea. Blood, bright red and frothy where it had come in a gout from Murphy’s punctured lungs, had pooled in the drains of the Bullring until one of Dixon’s men emptied a bucket of sawdust over it. Indignity piled on indignity.

  The news had spread through Wexford Town like a disease.

  Matthew Keogh, the town’s newly-installed governor, came into the streets to decry the outrage, his voice trembling with indignation.

  And yet nothing was done.

  No move was made against Dixon. The captain stood across the street from Keogh and listened while his actions were lambasted. He listened as he was declared an enemy of civil accord and a man whose lawlessness was an affront to everything the United Irishmen stood for.

  He listened and smiled a slow, creeping smile.

  It was the lack of resolve in the face of such evil that so appalled Elizabeth. How Keogh could stand and castigate the actions of a handful of brutes while one of them stood and sneered at him was beyond belief. Action was needed, not platitudes, and while Dixon was at large, while the new authorities were floundering in indecision, an outright massacre drew ever closer.

  In the face of such outrages Elizabeth could not understand her aunt’s dispassion, her lack of urgency.

  Offended now, she addressed Mrs Brownrigg with something like genuine anger in her voice, ‘I cannot fathom you, Aunty. How can you be so cold?’

  The old woman sighed then, the rigid set of her back relaxing slightly and her shoulders sagging. She regarded her niece with twinkling eyes and asked, ‘My dear, does your father know you are here?’

  Elizabeth frowned, ‘No, he does not. And do not even consider sending me back to him for I should rather brave battle alongside Daniel than be sent back to Carnew now. Daniel tried to keep me safe by abandoning me, I will not have you do the same.’

  Mrs Brownrigg allowed her to finish before stating, ‘That is all well and good my dear, but safe you shall be kept. I shall not send you to your father through a countryside filled with bandits and God alone knows what. Neither shall I allow you to even suggest such idiotic actions as haring off to New Ross.’

  She paused and breathed deeply before continuing, ‘I asked if your father knew of your whereabouts because I am sure it would cause him incalculable distress to know that you have placed yourself in such danger. I asked because, although he and I are of a different cut, we are of the same material. You are my niece, girl, and I will have you remain so.’

  ‘But—’ began Elizabeth.

  ‘But nothing,’ interrupted Mrs Brownrigg. ‘No matter how many poor innocents those ruffians put to death, you shall remain quiet and placid in my home. You shall allow all this unpleasantness to pass over us until your young man and his croppy army return to impose a little order on things.

  ‘Until then, you will wait, safe and sound. To take public umbrage at the actions of murderous savages is to invite notice. A thing that in the current climate might be most unwise.’

  Elizabeth deflated, the anger that had filled her sails suddenly dispelled. She sat down across from her aunt with a sigh like a ruptured bellows.

  ‘Have a cup of tea, dear,’ said Mrs Brownrigg.

  That evening Elizabeth sat at the dressing table that stood beside her narrow bed. Before her, a large square mirror was propped against the wall and she stared into its depths without her mind truly apprehending what it saw. In one hand she held her mahogany fall of hair tightly and with the other she dragged an ivory-backed hair brush through the curls. Her bright eyes were now vacant, her thoughts centr
ed on a hill overlooking New Ross.

  ‘I miss you Daniel,’ she murmured.

  She placed the brush on the dressing table and focused her attention on the face staring at her from out of the fathomless silver of the mirror. She looked clean and healthy and for the first time in a week, she reflected, she felt clean and healthy too.

  Never in her wildest imaginings had she ever thought she might see and experience the brutality she had bore witness to since the day she climbed Kilthomas Hill in search of Daniel Banville. Her mind recoiled from the memory but she forced herself to hold it in her mind’s eye. The charge of the cavalry thundered through her thoughts and the screams of women and children were clawing talons against the inside of her skull. Her despair at not finding him, the horror that he might have lain amongst the dead scattered in the fields and along the roads around Kilthomas, came back to her as raw as ever. And another feeling crept upon her from out of the well of her memory. The feeling of disgust, of terror as she made her way south toward Ballyorril, surrounded on all sides by a wretched flotilla of human agony. She was not one of them, with her pale dress embroidered with green buds, her sun-bonnet, tattered but still betraying the expense of its craftsmanship. She was not one of them and they knew it. The nicking flicks of flinty eyes, the sullen stares, the resentment boiling off the other women in waves, all this spoke of her alien nature, her freakish difference.

  And then she had held Daniel tight to her bosom and all concern fell away. His strength, his deep, deep eyes seemed to lift her from the tangle of bitterness and discord into which she had fallen.

  And what was more she knew it to be true for him also.

  When he looked at her he changed. His fierce passion for the Rising, the brooding melancholy with which he contemplated outrages perpetrated by both sides, all transformed into something gentler in her presence. When he looked at her he was filled with a different light, something as bright as anger, as intense as fury, yet somehow not as consuming. Something that grew and swelled with the promise of more growth to come, something warm and passionate, something suggestive of future days and long nights shone from him like a lighthouse through fog.

  All this communicated itself through every line in his face and body. Every angle of his big carriage belled forth, ‘I love you.’

  And every atom of her answered, ‘I love you, too.’

  This she knew and it made her sick with grief that things as profane and grotty as politics and religion had reared between them like a wall. When this was all over, she found herself hoping, when the Rising had swept away the old order of things, then they would be married and be damned to anyone who raised an objection.

  This was the most frightening thing of all. She had abruptly found herself invested in Daniel’s great enterprise. With a creeping subtlety that had caught her completely unawares she had suddenly discovered that she wished for the revolution to be a success. She wished for all the old chains to be shattered and all the oppressive shackles to be broken.

  She wished to be free. Free of the label of Protestant. Free from the yoke of Catholicism. Free from the ancient feud that had made a killing field of Ireland and for so long kept Daniel and herself apart.

  And yet the women’s eyes on that long flight from Ballyorril and the harsh words on Vinegar Hill and on the streets of Wexford Town, flung themselves into her thoughts like a vile pestilence. What if human nature was that awful, she found herself contemplating. What if every change possible was wrought in the system of government and still that animal hatred persisted? What would that speak of a humanity determined to consume itself and sink into a morass of vulgarity, senselessness and barbarism?

  What if the Rising solved nothing?

  She was stirred from her reverie by a swell of noise that permeated the stones of the house. Frowning, she stood and made her way out onto the landing. Turning right she made her way down the hall to where a small window overlooked the street at the front of the house.

  Below her, thronging the street, a mass of townsfolk had congregated. Gone were the fighting rebels who had packed the town with rural accents, and now only trouble-makers like Dixon or administrators like Keogh were left to shape the place as they saw fit. The crowd below in the street seemed to consist entirely of the poorer citizens, their ragged shirts and dirty bare feet proclaiming that they hailed from John Street and Oyster Lane. On an upturned crate, the object of every single peasant gaze, Thomas Dixon was giving an impromptu sermon. Standing on the ground beside him, her bulk accentuated by a dark blue shawl girding her shoulders, Dixon’s wife beamed like a queen greeting her subjects.

  Gingerly, Elizabeth cracked open the window and, stepping well back into the concealing shadows of the house, she allowed Dixon’s oratory to waft up to her.

  ‘And I would not hesitate to do it again!’ he was braying in his nasal manner as a wave of cheering and wild applause erupted from the mob before him.

  Dixon theatrically adjusted the lapels of a suspiciously well-tailored frock coat that he must surely have purloined rather than bought, and continued with the air of someone who had found his proper place.

  ‘I ain’t one to stir up trouble mind you. But I think that Matthew Keogh and the others who are suddenly in charge should take a good hard look about themselves. I don’t see any poor Catholics such as you and me getting anything out of this Rising so far. Meanwhile the Orange monsters who squashed us underfoot ever since Cromwell are treated like kings in the gaol. They aren’t held there for punishment says I. They’re there to protect them from the justice of the people!’

  At this the crowd roared in acclaim but silenced as Dixon raised his hands and said, ‘Now I ain’t one to stir up trouble but I think that Mr Keogh is allowing his religion to cloud his judgement. I say there should be money for the poor and hang the lot of those rich scoundrels who have our backs broken while they drink the best wine and eat the best meat.’

  As Elizabeth watched and listened the crowd collapsed into a frenzy, howling, ‘Hang them!’ and ‘Dixon for Governor!’

  Before Elizabeth’s disgusted gaze a wide grin split Dixon’s hatchet face and he waved his hands frantically for quiet. Eventually the shouting and outcry died to a few drunken yelps which provoked scattered bubbles of laughter amongst the gathering.

  Dixon had adopted a conspiratorial air now and leaned forward over the mass of people, his voice pitched at the level of an exaggerated stage whisper, ‘Let you and me go our separate ways for tonight for even at this distance from his house Mr Keogh’s lackeys might seek to intrude upon us. But bear in mind what I have said this day and if any you fine people should be in need of me, you know where I am.’

  With that he leapt down from the crate and was enfolded in the clay-soft arms of his wife.

  As Elizabeth watched, the crowd gave one last cheer and was soon rapidly dispersing, coursing through the lanes and alleys as though escaping from something terrible.

  ‘Now you see why I am so concerned about you.’

  Elizabeth jumped at the sound of her aunt’s voice.

  The old woman had ascended the staircase on cat’s paws or else Elizabeth’s horrified attention had been so completely captured by Dixon’s speech that she had failed to hear her approach. Mrs Brownrigg now stood before her, tall and angular, her body a collection of sinew and bones, and regarded her niece with eyes filled with subtle emotion. A smile creased her lips and her expression somehow lay halfway between mockery and compassion.

  ‘Child,’ she said, ‘you are safe here.’

  Elizabeth was embarrassed at the relief she felt at those words.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Gateways to Ross

  Nightfall on the 4th of June made Talbot Hall on the slopes of Corbet Hill a beacon in the darkness. All about, drawn up in battalions and companies, the men of the Southern Division of the United Irish Army had assembled at last. Yet something had gone abysmally wrong. Where fifteen thousand men had marched out of Wexford four days befo
re, just over ten thousand remained. Where the five thousand others had disappeared to, no one seemed to know. The one fact that remained as the darkness deepened, was that Bagenal Harvey’s dithering had proved disastrous.

  Behind one glowing window in the looming edifice of Talbot Hall, black silhouettes moved back and forth and voices, dulled and muffled by the stone walls, were raised in anger.

  Inside the room, a long dining table standing on lion paw legs was a no man’s land between John Kelly of Killann and Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey. The other occupants of the room were sitting in chairs around the table but had removed themselves from the discussion so that Kelly and Harvey seemed to be the only figures of consequence. Harvey was sitting in his chair at the head of the table, his face haughty and his arms crossed above his bulging stomach. John Kelly, a giant of a man with blond hair, was positioned halfway down the table, half-risen to his feet, resting his entire weight on the pillar of his left arm while his right was pointing at Harvey. Oil lamps and a wrought iron chandelier lit the tableau in smoky yellow light.

  ‘Allowing the men to go home was lunacy, Mr Harvey. Thousands have not returned,’ Kelly railed.

  Bagenal Harvey curled his lip and replied, ‘You cannot hold me responsible for simple farmers refusing to fight.’

  Kelly rose to his full height, his anger flaring like the candles overhead, ‘I hold you responsible for discipline, Mr Harvey. We have sat here for days while you dithered about a plan of attack. We watched as New Ross was reinforced hourly. The English have built trenches and breastworks. Of course the men refused to return! They are not as simple as you think. You have thrown away the initiative entirely. We will have to take New Ross over a mound of bodies because of your hesitancy.’

  He quieted as Thomas Cloney, sitting in a chair to his left, placed a cautioning hand on his forearm.

  ‘We were all guilty of complacency,’ interjected Cloney softly. ‘I honestly thought that the country must be in up in rebellion and that the King’s troops would be in open flight all around us. It seems that this is not so. The Kilkenny United Irishmen have sent word across the water that we are definitely alone in our struggle but all it will take is a spark to ignite rebellion in their own county. If we cross the Barrow they will come out into the field with us. No matter the delay, the imperative is still that we take New Ross.’