1798

by Joe Murphy

  Dixon and the disheartening sight of Kelly’s splinted leg made Dan consider the very existence of the United Irishmen. What had they accomplished, apart from violence and vengeance? Unless the French came – and what was keeping them? – might the heroism he had witnessed, the spilled blood and the campaign of terror that had prompted it, be consigned to mere footnotes in history?

  Wexford must hold, he thought.

  A light knock on the bedroom door snapped him out of his bleak reverie and he quickly pressed a wad of gauze to his shoulder and pulled his shirt over his head, calling, ‘Come in,’ as he did so.

  The door opened and Pat the manservant stood on the threshold bent and wizened. He regarded Dan from under his brows with the same gruff dislike that he had conveyed ever since first clapping eyes on the young rebel captain.

  ‘Ms Blakely wants to know if you’re ready for your afternoon exercise,’ he intoned flatly.

  ‘She treats me like a race horse,’ replied Dan in an effort to coax even the suggestion of a smile from the man.

  ‘I’ll tell her you’ll be down in a minute,’

  Dan finished dressing and then, without thinking, he reached under the bed and dragged out his sword. The leather of its belt and scabbard was worn and battered and the blade was nicked in half a dozen places, but its weight was reassuring.

  Wincing at a twinge from his shoulder, he belted on the sabre, its presence at his thigh like a familiar and loyal hound.

  Elizabeth frowned as he came down the stairs. Her eyes fastened onto the sword and she asked, ‘Why are you wearing that?’

  ‘He wears it because he is sensible.’

  Mrs Brownrigg stood in the open doorway leading to her drawing room and cast a withering gaze down the length of the hallway. Her arms folded and her features hard, she continued, ‘Any man who antagonises the likes of Thomas Dixon must arm himself.’

  Dan came to the foot of the stairs and nodded towards Elizabeth’s aunt, ‘Mrs Brownrigg.’

  ‘Mr Banville,’ she replied. ‘I trust you have not forgotten your undertaking to keep my niece safe?’

  ‘Of course not, Mrs Brownrigg.’

  ‘These are dangerous times, children. I would have you both be very careful.’

  Dan smiled and replied, ‘I will look after her, Mrs Brownrigg.’

  Elizabeth’s arm snaking around his waist surprised Dan, but her words broadened his smile and set his eyes sparkling.

  ‘We will look after each other,’ she said.

  When they left, Mrs Abigail Brownrigg stood for a moment in the hallway of her cavernous house and listened to the ticking of clocks in the gloom. She blessed herself and walked slowly into her drawing room, closing the door behind her.

  The afternoon sun was pitching from its zenith as Dan and Elizabeth strolled along the quayside. To their right the tall ships at anchor creaked and heaved against their hawsers, the sea sucking toothlessly at their barnacle-studded hulls. The boardwalk along the quay was crowded with people, wounded rebels and townsfolk all mingling freely in the afternoon warmth. Yet there was a palpable tension in the air, the laughter a little too forced, the smiles a little too like grimaces.

  ‘We shall go to France,’ Dan was saying. ‘If we cannot hold this port in readiness for a French landing, if the French do not come, then we shall go to Paris. I have never seen Paris.’

  Elizabeth smiled up at him, ‘My love, you can barely speak English, let alone French.’

  Dan laughed and squeezed her to him, saying, ‘I wish the English would come out from behind their walls and end this stalemate. The people grow more and more frustrated and every day more and more slip away home. This inertia is a killing thing. General Lake is smothering us, defeating us through claustrophobia and fear, rather than through force of arms.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘I fear we may all need lessons in French.’

  In the middle distance, wending through the crowd, a man who Dan vaguely recognised was making his way towards them. He wore a tricorn on his head but every so often, from under its peak, he shot a furtive glance to where the couple were walking. It was the wariness of these glances, the birdlike abruptness of them, that had caught Dan’s eye.

  Elizabeth, however, was oblivious.

  ‘If the Rising does not succeed,’ she was saying, ‘we will need to get safe passage to Dublin and thence to France. My father has many relatives in Dublin, some of whom are quite well-to-do, once there it should not be difficult to book passage.’

  Dan nodded distractedly, his attention taken up entirely by the oddly familiar figure that was now quite close. The man was pushing through the crowd with a little more urgency than was normal, as if he were in a hurry to make some vital appointment.

  Where, Dan thought, had he seen him before?

  The man was almost upon them, when the sudden realisation burned through Dan’s mind like a bullet. He was one of Dixon’s men.

  Dan tried to untangle his sword arm from Elizabeth’s grasp as the man rushed closer, his last few steps taken at a half-run, something glimmering bitterly in the grip of his right fist.

  It was at that moment, on the raw edge of that jagged lip of time, that Elizabeth Blakely stepped in front of Dan. Her face was smiling, warmer than any sun, and her mouth was just beginning to open, readying to chide him for not paying attention. She stepped between him and Dixon’s man and Dan’s face whitened in horror and his right arm convulsed, questing for his sword’s hilt.

  The man in the tricorn’s right hand drove forward. His glittering eyes were fixed on Dan’s face, not even aware of Elizabeth as she slid in front of his plunging blade.

  Elizabeth gasped in surprise and pain. Her bright eyes opened wide and she stared at Dan as his big arms enfolded her, supporting her, as the strength seemed to leak from her body all at once.

  For a moment all three figures stood in shocked silence. Dan, his face an open wound, embracing Elizabeth as she sagged, her eyes beginning to roll and a trickle of red leaking from the corner of her mouth, the assassin with his blade still lodged in her back, a look of surprise masking his features.

  All three stood in mute horror and then the last of Elizabeth’s strength drained from her.

  Dan lowered her to the ground as a ring of bystanders formed about the horrible tableau. He leaned over her as tears sprang into his eyes and a battery of cannon seemed to erupt in his chest.

  ‘Elizabeth!’ he sobbed. ‘Elizabeth! Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.’

  She lay with her eyes half-closed, her sun-bonnet awry on her nest of mahogany curls. A few strands of her hair had come loose and spiralled out around the pale curve of her neck and a spreading pool of deepest crimson began to spread out from around her shoulders.

  Dan bent and kissed her lips. A warmth still resided within them but that was the only residue of life that remained. It was like pressing his lips to warm clay.

  When he arose his mouth was smeared with her blood.

  The assassin still stood before him, the centre now of an anxious circle of townsfolk. He was a young lad, no more than a teenager, and beneath his toobig tricorn his skin still bore the scars and pits of ravaging acne. He faced Dan in trembling terror, the bloodied filleting knife still held in his right hand.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to stick her. She stepped in the way. Jesus Christ.’

  The first cut of Dan’s sword caught him across the right bicep.

  The lad screamed and dropped his knife, turning to flee. Dan hamstrung him with a vicious snap of his forearm and the boy fell to the boardwalk. Away back in some dark corner of his mind, locked there by grief and fury, his conscience screamed that this was wrong. This lad was no more the author of this work than Elizabeth herself. And yet his muscles worked of their own brute volition, his shoulder screaming in agony. Not a word escaped his lips as he flailed at the scrawny figure beneath him, only the grunts of his exertions gave testament to his emotions. The wet chop and slap of Dan’s blade
as it rose and fell sent gouts of gore spraying into the crowd of onlookers.

  One by one, slowly at first and then with gathering momentum, the crowd turned and began to stream away, the women sobbing and children bundled into the blinkering folds of skirt and shawl.

  And still Dan hacked in blind rage, his arm growing tired and the wooden planks at his feet becoming slick with blood.

  ‘Captain Daniel Banville, I arrest you for the murder of William Delaney, a fellow United Irishman. I further charge you with consorting with the enemy and seeking to thwart the will of the people.’

  The nasal whine of Thomas Dixon made Dan pause. Dixon’s voice cut through his anger, refocusing it and giving it new form.

  ‘You!’ he spat. ‘You did this! It is you who should be lying under my sword, not this wretch.’

  Dixon stood amidst a gang of a dozen pikemen, his face snarling with grim glee. He watched Dan with the wariness of a man confronting a wounded but predatory beast and said, ‘You’re coming to gaol, Mr Banville. And delighted I am for you, too.’

  At these words Dan surged forward, unmindful of the pain in his shoulder that told him his stitches had burst open, uncaring that the men before him were armed to the teeth and waiting for his charge. Only Elizabeth, lying pale and beautiful, robbed of life by treachery and hate, meant anything to him now. He had lost her and with her he had lost everything.

  Dixon took a frightened step back at the abandon of his charge, at the wild hate that crawled across Dan’s face.

  For Dan the world had collapsed into an all-encompassing need to tear Thomas Dixon limb from limb. He did not see the pikestaff of one of Dixon’s men until it had smashed bluntly into his jaw. He was on his knees when the next blow landed, cracking across the back of his skull and sending him sprawling, dazed and in helpless anguish, across the quayside.

  The last thing he saw before his senses left him was Elizabeth, her face tranquil, her skin porcelain. He had loved her with everything good he had in him. And everything good had not been enough.

  CHAPTER 23

  Liberty or Death

  General Gerard Lake sat behind a desk in his field tent and ate his breakfast from a pewter plate. The day before, the 18th of June, had been the first truly overcast day in a month and a half and now the rain was coming down in sheets. On the canvas roof of the tent the rain drummed in a relentless roll and flowed from the eaves in wind-flung waterfalls. Before him a dripping infantry captain stood to attention.

  Lake was fifty-five years of age, a tall man and grey-haired beneath his powdered wig. His lantern jaw worked like a horse’s as he chewed a mouthful of porridge, and his dark, hazel eyes were narrow as he ruminated. At length his pinched mouth opened and his voice, in its clipped Harrow accent, came from around a ball of cud, ‘You are sure of this, Captain Dalhousie?’

  The shivering captain nodded, ‘Yes, sir, quite sure. The rebels have begun a general retreat towards Enniscorthy.’

  General Lake was an uncomplicated man, but he had seen enough of insurgent armies in America to make him doubly cautious. He gestured with his fork to his subordinate, saying, ‘You’re sure they ain’t feinting?’

  ‘Very sure, sir.’

  ‘Splendid!’ exclaimed Lake. ‘The fools have saved us the trouble of a fight in the open countryside.’

  Despite the weather, General Lake felt his spirits lift immeasurably. The Rising in the midlands and north had been put down and the French were not on the sea. The little county of Wexford was surrounded, its immense rebel peasant armies matched in numbers and overwhelmed in firepower by the Crown forces now ringing them.

  For the first time in a month he was confident that he would not lose Ireland as the colonies in America had been lost.

  But the spectre of the French remained. If – and he prayed it would not be so – the Wexford rebels could hold a beach head against him and if the French were to land even a token force of two thousand men, then all would be placed in the balance. He had spent the last ten days since New Ross and Arklow patiently building an army of twenty thousand. And now at Arklow, Newtownbarry, New Ross and here, just below the slopes of Kilcavan Hill, his forces were ready to advance.

  A smile made a crescent of bone beneath the fleshy hook of his nose and he asked Captain Dalhousie, ‘The other general officers have responded to our orders, yes?’

  Dalhousie nodded, his eyes fixed on a patch of vacant air about a foot above his superior’s left ear, and replied, ‘Yes, sir. General Johnson is marching north from New Ross so as to take Enniscorthy from the west, and Brigadier General Moore with the Light Division has moved out of New Ross and is making towards Wexford Town. General Needham has committed to move south from Arklow and Generals Loftus and Dundas together with Sir James Duff have all confirmed receipt of your orders. They should be converging on Scarawalsh Bridge within a day.’

  Lake’s smile grew wider and he said, ‘I am very pleased at the manner in which this is being brought to a close, Captain Dalhousie. General Johnson at New Ross and Needham at Arklow deserve to be well-rewarded for their actions in stopping the rebels breaking out. God help us if they had marched on Dublin. It would have spelt our doom.’

  He leaned back in his chair then and raised his left hand to scratch his long jaw thoughtfully. ‘Let this be known, Captain,’ he said. ‘The taking of prisoners is not to be encouraged. Any man found under arms is to be shot. These people are rebels against the King. We afforded the colonial irregulars far too much respect. It will not happen here. I want every man jack of them scoured from the face of the world. Is that clear?’

  Captain Dalhousie saluted, ‘Very clear, sir.’

  Then he turned and left General Lake to his breakfast, slopping out into the downpour, splashing through the puddles as he hurried to spread the general’s word.

  The same bellying sky over the tents of General Lake and his staff hissed down upon Tom Banville as he and the battered remains of the Northern Division of the United Irish Army floundered south towards Camolin. The rain came down in a cold, iron-grey curtain. The roar of the rain as it thundered into the ground was interrupted occasionally by the squelching splatter of men slipping in the muck and the phlegmy suck and slurp of mud dragging at men’s feet. All along the rebel line, men walked stoop-shouldered like poor beasts. Already the depressions and ruts in the road, the hollows of the surrounding fields, were filled with dark lakes that mounted moment by moment, growing and consuming as their creeping edges met.

  Tom Banville reflected gloomily on the circumstances that had brought him to this rain-soaked point on the Gorey to Camolin road.

  After the defeat at Arklow, both he and Fr John were accepted back into the ranks without any rancour or ill-feeling. The men were too exhausted to harbour grudges and were only too glad to have experienced officers among them again. Fr Murphy had once more argued the merits of marching into the Wicklow Mountains, for they mustered still around seven or eight thousand strong. However, he was ignored again and a frustrating stalemate had ensued with the garrison at Arklow refusing to be drawn into battle and the United Irish Army becoming more and more exasperated.

  The fact that they were surrounded and alone had filtered through the ranks like a poison. Desertions had accelerated and the lust for vengeance to be taken on loyalist prisoners grew with every passing hour.

  Word arrived of government armies at Carnew and Newtownbarry almost at the same time as orders from Edward Roche called them south to Vinegar Hill. They were to provide a bulwark against the Crown’s advance and keep Wexford Harbour free for a French landing for as long as possible.

  Again Fr Murphy railed against this prospect. Another set-piece battle could only succeed with huge numbers of guns and supplies, in which they were sorely deficient. Yet this time, overruled by both Edward Fitzgerald and Anthony Perry, Fr Murphy consented to lead his men into battle once more. With government armies ringing the county, there was nowhere left to go.

  When Tom had informe
d his Castletown Corps of the intention to make a last stand on Vinegar Hill, a wounded Jim Kehoe, his left arm in a sling, asked, ‘And you will stand with us, Mr Banville?’

  Tom had laughed bitterly at this and replied, ‘If you had broken out of the county, lads, I would have wished you well and turned south to be with my dead brother. Now with the county infested with redcoats once more we are all chained to each other out of fearful necessity. I am afraid, lads, that we will either be shot together or shot separately. It would be my pleasure to die with you in battle rather than at the hands of some patrolling yeoman in a country lane somewhere.’

  ‘We could defeat them at Vinegar Hill,’ replied Kehoe.

  Looking at him, Tom’s expression softened. He took in Kehoe’s young face, the desperate hope that kindled in his eyes, the yearning in him for something to hold on to.

  ‘We could,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve beaten them before.’

  Jim Kehoe had smiled at this and the other Castletown men had slapped each other on the back with renewed confidence. And, watching them, Tom felt his heart slip even further into despair.

  Now they slogged south from Gorey, abandoning the whole north of the county to a razor-edged tide of red. Around them, refugees stumbled through the mire; Catholics and peasants this time rather than the frightened lines of loyalists that had so recently thronged the roadways of Wexford.