Dark Rosaleen

by Michael Nicholson, OBE

  But she understood. How she longed now to burn her skirts and do what only men could do. How she had begun to despise her pretty lace and perfumed shackles and all the niceties of her privileged life.

  She stood. ‘When will you leave?’

  ‘I am obliged to serve this month out but on the first day of February I will deliver my notice. Tomorrow I must ride south beyond Kinsale to a place called Skibbereen. The hunger is especially bad there and until now we have sent them nothing. I am taking eight wagons of corn and if the snow stops, we might be there in time to save them.’

  ‘Let me come with you!’ she pleaded, already knowing his answer.

  ‘Kate. Do you really want to help?’

  ‘Of course. Do you think it suits me to sit by a drawing-room fire, tinkering with embroidery and sipping tea from bone china?’

  ‘Then let us be real allies, you and me. You cannot come to Skibbereen but you can be more help to me by staying. I can expect to see the worst down south and I shall report what I see. But I know for certain that it will never be read by your father. It will never reach his desk. So let me send you a copy by another route. I will tell you everything I see. Make sure it is known in England. I don’t know how you can do it but let them know a little of this horror.’

  So the pact was made. As he left he went to take her hand but instead she took his and pressed it to her cheek and then kissed the palm of it. She had never done such a thing to anyone before but in this cold and captive country she had finally found someone warm and open and she was grateful. He smiled, leant forward and put his lips gently to her forehead.

  ‘Goodbye, Kate. You are like a sister to me. Be my conspirator too. It will be worthwhile if we can find a way. You will be my secret agent.’

  From the window she watched him go down the steps to his carriage. He looked up at her to wave his goodbye, his dark cloak already turning white, his face speckled with flakes. She wanted to run to the door to stop him, to make him stay longer, to speak more to him. It was as if she never expected to see him again.

  The winds that came from Russia blew colder by the day and more of the hungry began to freeze to death. A month before, Sir William had reported to Sir Charles Trevelyan that thousands were affected by the famine. Now, had he the courage, he would have reported them in their hundreds of thousands. At the Cork workhouse, there were queues a mile long of people, half-naked, young and old, waiting in the snow for someone to die inside the walls so that they might take their place. It was reported from Leitrim that two wagonloads of boy orphans had been turned away from the workhouse gates. They had been found the next morning abandoned and frozen to death. The magistrate reported he had counted thirty-two bodies and ordered they should be buried together in lime.

  Captain Shelley had been gone a fortnight and still Kate had not received his promised letter. She asked after him as often as she dared and as discretely as she could but no one could or would tell more than she knew already. February the first, the day of his resignation, passed without any further news and she became more and more anxious. Her father mistakenly interpreted this as her impatience at being housebound and promised that just as soon as the weather broke and the thaw began, he would ask Edward Ogilvie to call again. He would have liked to involve her more in the Commission’s work, but the Reverend Martineau reminded him of his daughter’s emotional lapses and pointed out how much concern it would cause in London should her sympathies and opinions ever become public. Sir William agreed.

  His work was at a critical stage. His relief programme was now into its eighth month and he still wanted to believe that it would be finished by late summer. But Trevelyan was, as ever, introducing further complications. He was insisting that it was not the government’s intention to freely give food to any but the truly destitute. It was his opinion that the Irish peasant was not so poor as to be unable to buy food if it was cheaply available. With that in mind he had persuaded Prime Minister Peel to authorise the buying of shiploads of maize from America to sell on the Irish markets.

  This enraged the Irish grain merchants and their bankers, all disciples of free trade, who feared cheap imports would undercut the market with a consequent loss of profit.

  They had no need to worry. The Corn Law and a British government brimming with contradictions ensured the market stalls in Dublin, Cork and Waterford would still be heavy with oats and wheat and the butchers would continue to hang out their hooks of beef and lamb and pork and every sort of wild fowl, so that a stranger with a full purse might wonder who it was who was hungry. But those with empty pockets and empty stomachs knew well enough. Everything they owned had been pawned to the gombeen man, the wandering pawnbroker who went about the countryside with his donkey and cart, swindling the last penny from a hungry man and taking the shawl off a suckling child for less.

  There were times, especially in this cold weather, when Sir William, who was not by nature a hard man, wondered whether his government might not be more generous. In one moment of rare courage he had even suggested it in a letter to Trevelyan, but was brusquely told that the government had set a ceiling on the amount of money allocated to Irish relief and it was already over budget. What was being provided was considered enough for the poor to survive one famished winter. The devout Sir Charles reminded his Commissioner that conscience was not always the best guide and that God and market forces were on the same side. To interfere was tantamount to economic blasphemy. Sir William was careful not to mention his concerns again.

  Kate had made a pact with Captain Shelley and already he seemed to have abandoned it. She had waited for his letters and the waiting had meant so much. Imprisoned by snow, their alliance promised liberation, his message would revive her spirit. He would tell her what she must do to become part of what was happening. But he had left over a month ago and there had been silence since.

  The thaw began in the third week of February. The wind turned around from the east and, for the first time in this new year, the snow clouds split apart and there was blue in the sky and the promise of sun. Everything began to drip, snow turned to slush, roads became rivers and the fields slow-moving lakes of brown water.

  It was evening and she was eating alone at the dinner table. Taking advantage of the milder weather and the forecast of still better to come, her father, with Dr Martineau and his retinue, had ridden to Dublin for a meeting with Lord Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant.

  She had snuffed out all but a single candle, preferring in her mood to eat by the light of the fire. She remembered the night at this same table when she had so brazenly declared herself and she thought yet again of the young man who had sat opposite, the captain who had braved the anger of his superiors and exposed his humanity. Where was he now? Why had he forgotten her?

  ‘Miss Kathryn.’ She turned as Moran the butler came into the room.

  ‘I didn’t call,’ she said. ‘And I shall need nothing more tonight.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Kathryn. There’s a fire in your room. But I’ve come to give you something. It came by special messenger two days ago but I thought it would be unwise to bring it until your father had left. I hope you will forgive my caution but this may help you understand.’

  He placed a small parcel on the table, bowed his head and left the room. It was wrapped in moleskin and for a moment she thought it was the present Edward Ogilvie had so frequently promised her. It was sewn together and with the cheese knife she carefully cut the threads apart. There was no writing on the envelope but even as she unfolded it she knew who it was from and why he had sent it so disguised, so secretively. She went to the fireplace, knelt and held it to the light of the flames.

  My dearest Kate, sister, conspirator. You must have despaired of me. Perhaps you thought I was playing a game with you. Forgive me but once you have read this you will see how difficult it has been not only to conclude my business here but to arrange that this letter reach you and no one else.

  These are evil times and I have disco
vered that people are not always what they seem to be. But you must trust whoever passes this letter to you. He is part of what I want to be and maybe you too one day.

  When you have read this, find ways to dispatch it to as many people in England as you think will act on it. A Member of Parliament, a newspaper editor, whoever can create a flood of disgust at what is happening here. I have witnessed such scenes as I cannot relive.

  I am at Schull. Once it was a thriving centre of farming but no longer. Would you believe that the market has food for sale and I hear that ships all along the coast are sailing away laden with Irish grain and Irish livestock, yet starvation is worse here than at any place I have yet seen? Yes! There is food here but people are starving. They are stripping the beaches of seaweed, and many I have seen on the roads have green saliva running from their mouths from eating nettles and any number of weeds.

  Women and their children climb the sheer face of the cliffs searching for seagull’s eggs. Yesterday, I heard that three children and their mother had fallen to their deaths and no one cares. Today an old man, little more than a skeleton, came crawling towards me on all fours along the beach with his dead son tied to his back. At the tide’s edge he scooped out a shallow ditch, lay the boy in it and covered him in sand. The surf soon showed him again and the tide then took him away. That was his burial. It is for hundreds here.

  To buy food the fishermen have sold their boats and everything to the gombeen men, who tramp the countryside in their carts, preying on them like vultures that soar over the battlefield of the dead. Today I saw fisherfolk on the beach. They were sucking the wool of their jerseys, looking at a shoal of herring only a few hundred yards to sea and they could do nothing. I even saw them breaking up sea shells to eat.

  I cannot believe what I saw, even now, all these days on. I can smell their diseased bodies, I can hear their babies croaking like wizened old women. The dying wander among the dead. These people have not eaten properly in five months. I stood and prayed for them as I pray now.

  God help them and do not blame us for all that is happening.

  And pray for me dear Kate.

  John

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Moran the butler was a quiet man. Many thought him wise. For half a century he had served in the houses of some of Ireland’s oldest families and his loyalty and attention to his responsibilities were considered impeccable. In the drawing rooms and at the dining tables of the rich and powerful he had listened to them talk of Ireland’s perpetual calamities and knew by heart all their random, brutal remedies. Yet he had stood as still as a statue, awaiting the beckoned call or the snap of a finger, an obedient, discrete and utterly trustworthy servant, seemingly deaf to it all.

  He had been born into service. His mother was a scullery maid to Lord Bessborough, his father was His Lordship’s senior groom. From the cradle Moran had known only his mother’s warmth and love. He was a stranger to the pangs of an empty stomach. As he grew older, he knew little of the world outside the estates. He would listen to the kitchen staff tell of the hunger among the poor but, hearing the contrary from his employers, preferred to believe them. To him, kitchen talk was grossly exaggerated gossip and he reminded the storytellers that among the Irish there was considerable verbal licence. He seemed to care nothing for his country’s ills. Until the day the English hanged the son of his sister, his only nephew, Liam.

  The boy had been a month short of his nineteenth birthday, an innocent in Ireland’s mayhem. He was a simple boy who snared hares for a living, content to pass the time of day with anyone who offered a smile. But he shared a cottage with men who lived very differently, men who lived violently, men prepared to kill for a living. In time they were caught and sentenced to hang and Liam was sentenced with them.

  Outside the walls of Dublin’s Newgate Prison, Moran watched the three climb the steps to the scaffold, the killers shouting their defiance, kicking the air until their last breath. He saw the noose tighten around Liam’s neck, the boy with the guiltless face who was asking why, even as the death hatch opened. And without an answer, dropped to oblivion.

  They would not let Moran bury him in the family grave. The boy’s body was taken back inside the prison walls and flung into a pit of lime with the other two. A month later his mother died of grief and since that day the quiet butler lived only to avenge her. Now he worked for another master within Sir William’s household. As ever, he stood silent and respectful in the hub of government activity where many confidences were freely available and many secrets unguardedly revealed. Now he was the prime source of information for men who were not England’s friends. He knew the risks he was expected to take on their behalf and the penalty of being discovered. But he was unfamiliar with the ways of a man long skilled in the black art and this was his undoing.

  Greville Martineau believed that the world surrounding him was so threatening, so evil, his Church could only be made safe by using the weapons of evil and the strategies of evil men. He believed that Church to be so precious that, like truth itself, it must be protected by a cordon of cunning, lies and deceit.

  When Captain Shelley had left for Skibbereen with his wagons of food, Martineau sent one of his trusted spies with him, under the guise of a wagon master. In time the man reported back all the captain did and said. He made mention of the young man’s distress, his anger at the land agents for demanding rent from paupers, at the corn merchants for profiting from the rise in wheat prices. Shelley was seen shouting at the dockers loading the sailing ships with Irish wheat and oats, bound for England. The spy reported that the captain had since sold the Commission’s wagons and horses, had bought food with the money and was giving it out free. Hundreds of families were flocking to him.

  Dr Martineau sat reading the report in his dressing room. He was not alarmed by it nor was he surprised. He realised it was too late to have the captain arrested. Shelley had already thrown off his uniform and retreated to the hinterland with men not of his own kind, men jubilant they had recruited such a prize, an English army officer, a young gallant, now a rebel himself. The doctor decided that Shelley must go the way of all desperate men and he must go soon. It would not be enough simply to capture him.

  He gazed into the hand mirror on his dressing table, daubed a touch of powder on his cheeks and a little more rouge to his lips. He caressed the heavy gold crucifix that rested in the cleft of his neck, saw his reflection in the shimmering candlelight and felt a surge of pleasure. He knew now what he must do and the prospect excited him. He snuffed out the candle and left the darkened room smiling.

  ‘She is not sick, Sir William, simply bored, and an empty mind is a dangerous vessel. It has been a long winter and Cork is not a place for young souls denied their hunting and prancing. It is not a doctor she needs but a little employment.’

  Dr Martineau sat with Sir William Macaulay in the room of beechwood, drinking his mid-morning coffee. He continued.

  ‘Your daughter is not herself. She is listless and depressed but I really do not believe she is suffering from anything more serious than boredom. We must find her something to do.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Sir William. ‘What is there do in this cursed country except what we are doing? I promised her lively company, people of her own sort, parties and the like and she has had none of these things. And she’s changing. She is not the Kathryn I brought with me from England. She says the oddest things in the oddest way. Sometimes I close my eyes when she is speaking and wonder if it is her. Reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago. Indeed she does.’

  For some minutes he said nothing. Martineau waited. Sir William poured himself more coffee. ‘Damn it, Martineau, I’d send her back home if I could but Trevelyan insists that she stay, though for the life of me I can’t understand why. She’s hardly the flower of society and that’s why he wanted her here.’

  Martineau was soothing. ‘You must not blame yourself. Ireland is presently the most upsetting country on God’s earth.’

&nb
sp; ‘It’s cursed!’ Sir William rose from his chair, angry. ‘I tell you, it’s cursed. That’s why God cut it off from the rest of us and dumped it out here in the Atlantic. Ireland is damned.’

  ‘I do not believe in curses.’

  ‘Then maybe you should. Explain it any other way.’

  ‘It’s God’s will.’

  ‘And God’s will be done. Well, he’s certainly doing it here with a vengeance.’

  ‘With respect sir, we must not blaspheme.’

  Sir William settled himself in his chair again, his anger gone. ‘You talked of Kathryn.’

  ‘We must make her busy. Here in the Commission. I think it will lift her spirits and yours too, perhaps.’

  ‘It wasn’t so long ago that you told me she ought not to be privy to our work.’

  ‘I did, and with good reason. But I think her temper has subsided. She has quietened decidedly. Now she needs employment.’

  Sir William nodded. ‘Perhaps you are right, Martineau. As you always are. Maybe she might work for me as my personal assistant, looking after all the trivia that flies back and forth from Trevelyan. He’s a monster for detail and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with him. One minute he’s complaining there is not enough activity here and the next he’s protesting we are spending too much of his money. How can we be active if he’s reined in our budget? He’s now threatening to end this entire thing next year, close us up and have us go home. We’ve hardly arrived and they’re still hungry out there. The man has no heart. He should come and see for himself.’

  ‘And of Kathryn, sir?’ Martineau asked.

  ‘What? Yes! Do it. She’ll help soothe me.’

  Martineau bowed his head. ‘Just one small thing, Sir William. It might be best if you make no mention of my part in this. She may consider it too patronising and young people are so sensitive. I suggest the initiative is entirely yours.’