by Joe Murphy
Tom marched in silence, his head bowed and water dripping from hair that was slicked and clinging to his scalp like river weeds. Behind him, he knew Miles Byrne was harassing the enemy outriders, his Monaseed Corps providing a resolute rearguard for the mass of pikemen and civilians that clogged the swampy roads around Camolin. As he marched, each slewing step bringing him closer to Vinegar Hill, he found himself wishing that Dan was with him.
Soaked and cold and exhausted, Tom Banville missed his big brother.
Dan spent four days on board the makeshift prison ship docked at Custom House Quay before Thomas Cloney found him. Four days of misery had passed with him crammed into a locked cabin with a dozen other men. All were loyalists, known informers or yeomen, and Dan was disgusted that he was interred with them. The cabin was a gloomy cavern of damp and dirt, the gaolers content to allow their prisoners to fester in the dank swamp of their own filth. The place reeked of vomit and faeces and puddled urine. He had neither eaten nor spoken one word to his cellmates since he had first been flung in there, bloodied and unconscious. He spent the hours curled up on a stinking pallet, facing the wall and thinking of Elizabeth.
On the third day, the 18th of June, the day on which she must have been buried in the graveyard of St Iberius’ Church, Dan had wept uncontrollably. It was as though a void had opened beneath his ribs that threatened to consume him utterly. The other men in the cell had moved well away from him. Grief, depthless and irremediable, had dragged him under. He wondered briefly if it were possible to be driven mad by sorrow before realising that he did not care.
Mrs Brownrigg, prudent as always, had not sought to contact him or pass him any message. Any association with one so hated by Thomas Dixon could only bring more disaster down upon her unfortunate family. Dan could not fault her for it.
When Thomas Cloney found him, he found a ragged scarecrow.
A key rattled in the cabin’s lock and Cloney barged past the astonished guard, barking at him as he went, ‘I’ll remember you if any harm has come to Captain Banville.’
Ignoring the loyalists, who cowered in a huddled mass, Cloney strode straight across to where Dan lay on his pallet, his forehead pressed into a corner.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ breathed the rain-drenched Cloney. ‘What have they done to you?’
Dan soughed forth a great shuddering breath and said, ‘She must have been buried yesterday, Thomas. Put into the hard ground where I can never see her again.’
Cloney knelt beside him and sought to turn him over but was rebuffed as Dan shrugged his shoulder away from him.
‘I heard what happened,’ said Cloney, his throat gagging. ‘I will have you out of here by tomorrow, as soon as I can get hold of Edward Roche. You have killed a fellow United Irishman, Dan, no matter what the provocation there’s no getting away from that fact. We cannot start turning on our own.’
‘They killed her like an animal,’ snarled Dan. ‘They stuck a knife in her back.’
Cloney nodded and said soothingly, ‘I know. That’s the fact that may save your life.’
Stirring himself, Dan sat up and regarded Cloney with eyes that were redraw and staring. A swollen, ink-dark bruise blurred the line of his jaw and Cloney was taken aback by the madness that seemed to crawl within Dan’s expression. Here was a man, Cloney thought, who had nothing left to live for.
Dan growled, low and threatening, ‘I would give my life, and yours as well, to have that bastard Dixon’s head on a spike.’
‘You may yet get the chance,’ replied Cloney. ‘For the moment however, you are safe here. You will have no court martial and myself and Mr Harvey are determined that you should be released as soon as the present crisis is finished.’
Blinking, his intellect roused for the first time in days, Dan asked, ‘What is happening?’
Cloney sighed and lanced a grim glare towards the loyalist prisoners crowded like sheep against the far wall. ‘There is a large force of soldiers moving out from New Ross. Fr Roche wants however many men we can press to march out and meet them at Goff ’s Bridge, by Foulkesmills. I wanted you beside me but some thought it might not be sensible to have amongst the ranks one who slaughtered a lad hardly grown out of childhood. You have become a monster in the eyes of some, Dan.’
‘I have been made a monster,’ came Dan’s anguished response.
Cloney grunted in agreement and said, ‘Have no fear, Dan. I shall return and have you at liberty as soon as I can. We have met the English before and thrown them back. We shall do so again.’
Dan nodded, his throat dry, ‘Thank you, Thomas.’
Cloney pointed to Dan’s left shoulder where blood and pus had caked and hardened the folds of his shirt, gluing them to his tattered flesh.
‘Look after that,’ he said. ‘Wash it with salt water. I shall return.’
Dan watched him leave, heard his angry words of admonishment for the guards, muffled and indistinct through the thick wood of the cabin’s door. Then there was silence, disturbed only by the rain lashing at the room’s single narrow window and the creak and groan of the ship as it rolled on the waves.
Dan slept that night in a hot frenzy of nightmares and half-imagined horrors. In the black behind his eyelids Elizabeth’s face floated like a petal on dark waters, her eyes accusing, her lips stained red with blood. A grotesque phantasmagoria lumbered through his sleeping mind, laced with the last despairing wails of William Delaney as Dan’s sword fell and rose and fell again and again and again.
He awoke the next morning filmed with a greasy patina of sweat. His cellmates regarded him with troubled eyes. Each man flicked wary glances towards him and then away, their gaze sliding across his features, never lingering for long. Dan presumed he had been talking or screaming in his sleep. He cared not a whit and for a moment wondered if this was the liberty that madmen felt, this blithe disregard for everything.
For the first time in four days he ate, a breakfast of cold stirabout provided for him with rather more civility than he had come to expect from the guard. Cloney’s words must have worked.
He waited as the sun climbed higher above the rumpled blanket of the murky sky. The rain held off and the day allowed a gusting breeze to dry the land. He waited, dwelling on what he would do to Thomas Dixon when Cloney released him from this prison ship. He would do a variety of things, using all of his old yeoman’s exquisite expertise. And above all he would do them slowly.
He waited until midday had come and gone and the first braying roar from the dockside told him something was wrong. A thousand voices rose in yelping acclamation, the mass of sound laced with hysteria.
Yes, something was very wrong.
Unmindful of the man’s feeble protestations, Dan leaped up onto the pallet of another prisoner’s and pressed his face to the narrow window that gave onto the choppy surf of Wexford harbour and the long, squat span of the bridge stretching left to right across his vision.
What he saw brought a burning surge of bile into his throat.
To his right, where Wexford Bridge joined Custom House Quay, a massive, jostling mob of people had gathered beneath the metal arch commemorating the bridge’s construction. A long table had been placed on the quays alongside the bridge and seven men sat at it, in the manner of judges at a courtmartial. Among them, the vulpine face of Thomas Dixon was prominent as he leered and guffawed, his words lost between the distance and the heaving sea. Above their heads a flag waved, snapping in the wind, black as coal and embroidered with a pale cross. Beneath this white cross was the legend, LIBERTY OR DEATH.
Before this grim court-martial a group of ten loyalist prisoners were ringed round with leering pikemen. The prisoners’ hands were bound and they had assumed the slump-shouldered attitude of men resigned to their fate.
As Dan watched, Dixon smashed his fist on the table and the gathered throng yelled their approval, every face opening up like bursting stitches and their great shout of zeal thundering across the waves. The prisoners were marched solemn
ly onto the bridge’s planking where they knelt, surrounded by Dixon’s pikemen. Then, at a signal from the men presiding over this macabre parody of a court, each prisoner was spitted in turn. Four pikes were driven into their chests and backs and they were lifted, struggling in tortured agony, high above the delighted faces of the mob. Their screams clawed heavenward until at last, mercifully, they expired and the murderers pitched the still-bleeding bodies into the dull waters below.
On the quays a frenzy of bloodlust had gripped the crowd and each onlooker writhed and wailed in an ecstasy of pagan savagery. Before Dan’s astonished eyes they became ghouls, cannibal grotesques bent on nothing but slaughter and destruction.
‘Mother of God,’ Dan breathed as another group of unfortunates was led up the quays from the gaol.
In the absence of the fighting men, in the void left by the battle that Thomas Cloney and the others were even now waging, Dixon’s rabble had seized the opportunity to murder and butcher with impunity. While others braved the musket and cannon of the soldiers, the flashing steel of the cavalry, Dixon was conducting a massacre.
Dan leaped down from the pallet and rushed to the cell door.
Behind him, his fellow prisoners were murmuring anxiously and one was climbing up onto the pallet. Dan heard him retch convulsively.
Dan, meanwhile, was hammering his fist against the heavy door. ‘Let us out!’ he roared. ‘Have you all taken leave of your senses? Can you not see what is happening?’
Not a word was uttered in response. Only an ominous silence communicated itself through the wood, a wordless promise of coming death.
Then, as Dan leaned his forehead against the door in resignation, a voice at last answered, soft but penetrating, as though the man spoke with his mouth pressed against the portal’s planking. The voice was unfamiliar to Dan, possessing the hard, aggressive edge of Enniscorthy.
‘I see what is happening, Banville,’ the voice said. ‘And I saw what you did to young William on the quays as well. You hacked him apart all because of some Orange whore. Well, all you pieces of loyalist filth are going to get it in the neck this day. Just you wait and see.’
Frightened now, Dan stumbled away from the door as, behind him, another of his cellmates was made sick by the awful scenes on Wexford Bridge.
The hours passed slowly, and the screaming agony of those dying on the bridge flooded the cabin like a pestilence. Each wail was greeted with a roar from the quays and each death lingered like a gallery of ghosts.
How had it come to this?
When they came for Dan, they came in force.
Dan sat with his head in his hands until he heard the grinding sound of a key in the lock and the door swept open. In the hallway beyond, a mob of men carrying muskets, blunderbusses and pistols made a demonic escort for him and his fellow condemned.
Dan looked up at them and growled mockingly, ‘Not taking any chances this time, boys, are ye?’
As they poured into the room Dan surged to his feet to meet them, his arms stretched out to either side like a man crucified, his face branded with a sneer of cold defiance.
‘Take me to her!’ he yelled, the tendons standing out on his neck in white ridges of gristly fibre. ‘Take me to her! I am ready!’
His hands were bound and, at the head of the dozen pale wraiths with whom he had shared a cell, he was paraded down the length of the quays. By the time he reached the seven judges he was drenched in spit and phlegm, the crowd baying and howling like banshees around him.
Dixon and his cohorts lounged in their seats like lords. Every one of them ragged and every one of them reeked of sweat and alcohol. Behind Dixon, his hulking wife leaned forward and whispered something to her preening husband.
Dixon smiled up at her and kissed her passionately on the lips, his narrow face sinking into the cushions of her cheeks.
Dan could hear his cellmate begin to retch once more.
Dixon at last ran his gaze across the doomed men before him. His eyes were unfocused with drink and, like the six other men around him, he had assumed the supercilious bearing that he guessed a judge must convey. He had become a parody of a parody. And in that instant Dan perceived him for what he truly was.
‘What are you grinning at, Banville?’ Dixon snapped.
‘Indeed,’ interjected another judge. ‘You may respect this court or you’ll live to regret it.’
Dan felt his smile grow wider as a wild abandon seize him and he crowed, ‘Why must I respect anything fools do? When brave men are even now flinging themselves against English guns to preserve the dream of liberty we have fought for, you set up an assizes to persecute innocent people. Why must I respect men such as you?’
Dixon was on his feet in a flash, ‘Do you call me a fool, Banville? Do you dare?’
Dan grinned in a lethal rictus and replied, ‘I asked why I must respect fools. Do you think perhaps that you are a fool, Mr Dixon?
‘Do you think that for your entire life thus far people have seen you as nothing but a pathetic little man, worthy of no more respect than something you might scrape off your boot? Do you think they follow you now because they are afraid of you? That you are like a rabid dog?
‘Tell me, Mr Dixon, when you lie beside your wife and you stare into the midnight dark, does it occur to you that you are nothing but a parasite?’
Dixon was apoplectic now and a ghastly silence descended over the crowd close enough to overhear Dan’s remarks. As Dixon fumed, the silence spread in downy ripples until he and Dan faced each other at the centre of a growing, pregnant hush.
Dixon’s face had become as red as brick dust and he trembled visibly. In the face of Dan’s maniacal grin he roared, ‘Kill him! Kill them all!’
A muted murmuring came from the surrounding crowd, their blood cooled by Dan’s defiance and the eagerness and relish with which he had excoriated Dixon. The pikemen circled all about exchanged uneasy glances, their faces frowning, their actions unsure. Overhead, the black flag whip-cracked in the squalling air.
Again, Dixon bellowed, ‘This man killed one of our own! You have all seen it! The people demand his death in return!’
This time, the pikemen stirred themselves and with slow, almost shameful movements, prodded the men forward, goading them in a pale, shambling line towards the executioners on the bridge. Dan, however, needed no goading.
He gathered all the hatred and bitterness that had bred in him over the last five days, battening on his grief. He gathered it all and spat onto the table in front of Thomas Dixon, his voice belling out over the crowd, ‘I accuse you, Dixon, of betraying the aims of the United Irishmen. And you will be held accountable for your actions this day. If not in this life, then surely in the next.’
Then he tossed his head like a wild stallion in full flight and flung his gaze out across the watching multitude. ‘I accuse you all!’ he cried.
With that he marched, stiff-backed and proud, along the line of the Custom House Quay and strode out onto the bridge, his guards hurrying in a graceless jog to keep up. Dixon’s eyes followed him as he went, his moment of triumph robbed of its relish, his standing in the eyes of his followers diminished. The tawdry spectacle, the grotesque circus that had played out on the bridge had been exposed as the orgy of petty hatred it was; one small, cowardly man’s attempt to stand centre-stage.
On the bridge Dan knelt as four pikemen surrounded him. He felt the smooth, wet timbers soaking the fabric of his breeches. Water mingled with the afternoon’s spilled blood drenched his knees. He felt the breeze, snapping in off the harbour, buffet him as he bowed his head. He could feel Dixon’s hatred and he rejoiced in it. His breath was coming quicker now. His shoulder burned. It would be a slow death, he knew, hoisted by his rib cage over the Slaney. He prayed that he would not scream.
One of the executioners walked down the row of condemned men, his pike and his forearms caked with blood, and said, ‘You better ask for forgiveness from the Lord, boys. You’ll be before him soon.’
&n
bsp; I am coming to you Elizabeth, thought Dan. I am coming.
Then a cry arose from the opposite end of the bridge. A shout of horror and outrage and anger.
Dan felt the planks beneath him shake like a drumhead and the sound of hooves came to his ears, hammering ever closer. His would-be executioners had fallen away from him now and were running frantically back towards Wexford Town. A frightened, milling agitation seized the crowd on the quays and handfuls began to hurry away, swarming up the narrow laneways leading into the town. The long table that had been occupied by the seven abominable judges was empty. Of Thomas Dixon there was no sign.
To either side of Dan his fellow condemned began to sob in relief.
Heaving himself to his feet, his hands still bound behind him, Dan turned his head towards the Ferrybank end of the bridge, where the east Shelmalier countryside rolled down to the Slaney’s mouth and Wexford Harbour. From out of that countryside, marching hurriedly across the bridge, came a detachment of Shelmalier marksmen, their long-barrelled guns carried easily in practiced hands. And ahead of them, whipping a huge black charger as though his life depended on it, rode Edward Roche, his face incandescent with fury.
He reined his mount to a clattering halt before Dan and, leaning down, exclaimed, ‘Jesus, Dan, what has happened to you? What has occurred here?’
Struggling to free himself from his bonds, Dan replied, ‘Abomination has occurred here, General. Massacre and murder. Thomas Dixon has engineered a slaughter of the prisoners.’
‘And why are you among them?’ asked Roche, his face pale.
‘That is a story that must wait, General,’ said Dan. ‘We must apprehend Dixon immediately before he can instigate any more savagery.’
Roche cast a stricken look towards Wexford Town and rumbled, ‘I wish we could, but time is of the essence. We must gather as many fighting men as are available and return with them to Vinegar Hill. The English are on the verge of surrounding Enniscorthy and the Northern Division with it.’
Dan shook his head in despair, ‘The fighting men left at Fr Roche’s orders to hold back the enemy at Foulkesmills. They are in action there as we speak, I would guess. The only people left in the town are that murderous rabble you see sneaking away like kicked curs.’