‘Then it’s done. I will send you a splendid invite in the largest envelope, embossed with the family crest. Your father will not be able to refuse.’
They laughed. They shook hands.
‘The day ends well,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful we can laugh.’
‘It’s a sad time for laughter.’
‘But there’s great hope in it, great hope. Goodbye, Kate, and remember your promise to come and see us.’
As they rode off their separate ways, the crayons rattled in Kate’s saddlebag and she thought again of the children waiting in Keegan’s schoolroom.
The glorious summer and the blossoming potato fields did nothing to lift Sir William Macaulay’s depression. His gloom brought everybody down. There was no laughter now from the clerks and couriers in the outer offices and no welcoming dinner for Friday guests. Trevelyan had promised him that the Commission would have completed its tasks by the autumn but Sir William knew it would not. Week by week, he was sinking deeper into the calamity. Ireland was defeating him as it had defeated centuries of Englishmen before him. There was more than blight on this land. It was arrogance, indifference and greed. It was rank and corrupting.
All this he knew to be true. Yet he was obliged to say nothing. He had to pretend he could save Ireland when he knew he could not. The country’s salvation was now in the hands of bankers, corn merchants and landlords, further encouraged in their profiteering by the dictates of his own government. He had asked for extra money to buy more grain, yet that morning he had received a prompt and terse reply from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood:
May I remind you yet again that England’s coffers will not be emptied to fill Irish stomachs. If they cannot buy their food they must stint themselves. They do nothing but sit and howl for English money. Rents must be paid. Landlords cannot be denied their dues. If they cannot collect their rents they cannot provide relief. So arrest, do what you must. Send horse and dragoons and the whole world will applaud you. I repeat, I shall not be squeamish about how close you come to the verge of the law. You may even need to go a little beyond it.
The landlords needed no spur from Whitehall. The Earl of Lucan had already evicted six thousand tenants from his estate in Ballinrobe. On his orders, as chairman of the Castlebar Union workhouse, he had turned the inmates out onto the streets and over one hundred died within a week. No mercy tempered his ruthlessness and from that day he was known by the name ‘The Terminator’.
The Marquis of Sligo and his friend and neighbour Lord Palmerston, son of an Irish peer and a future British Prime Minister, were just as ruthless. Lord Lorton had razed the villages of Ballinamuck and Drumlish on his estate in Longford, condemning a thousand families to a slow death.
Sir William was obliged to write a daily communiqué to London reporting all these happenings. Trevelyan did not condemn but defended the landlords in the language of the moralist.
Concerning the landlords, I do not despair seeing them taking the lead which their position demands of them. A deep root of social evil remains and the cure has been applied by the direct strike of an all-wise Providence. God grant we can rightly perform our part in what is intended as a blessing. I think I see a bright light shining through the dark cloud that hangs over Ireland.
Sir William held Trevelyan’s letter in his hand. ‘I tell you, Martineau. I would resign this hour, this very moment, if I was not afraid of being branded a coward.’
‘We need stricter control, sir. More soldiers.’
‘Damn it! It’s not more soldiers we need but more food. We need to open the depots and give out the grain. Why do we store it when they’re starving? Have you heard the song they are singing out there? D’you know what they’re saying? Look at it man … Look at it. I have it here.’
He shuffled through papers on his desk and handed Martineau a pamphlet. It had been scattered in the streets for everyone to read and recite out loud if they dared.
There’s a proud array of soldiers.
What do they at your door?
Why, they guard our master’s granaries
From the thin hands of the poor.
Martineau slowly crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball, rolled it tighter between the palms of his hands and threw it into the fire. He stood and watched it burn.
‘With respect, Sir William, you make too much of trivia. People are too weakened by the winter famine to be a threat to anyone but themselves. When the summer ends, men you consider a danger now will be hurrying back to their hovels to grub out their potatoes and looking to sire more children. They are no threat to us, nor can they ever be.’
But the ever-calculating Dr Martineau was wrong. The calendar should have warned him. There were still three months to September when the potatoes would be lifted. Three more months of hunger. In the spring, men had been promised employment. It was now late June. Week on week they had searched for work and there was none. They had been promised food from the Commission’s depots yet these remained closed. Reports of the continued suffering got little attention or sympathy in London. Instead, they were received with incredulity, exasperation and some ridicule. The Duke of Norfolk, in a letter to The London Times, suggested that as there was an apparent shortage of potatoes, the Irish poor should be encouraged to eat curry powder mixed with water.
Sir Charles Trevelyan had a more practical alternative. Ireland should be made to pay its own way out of its calamity. A memorandum meant only to be circulated within his own department was published in The Times. It was Treveylan at his most emphatic and uncompromising.
Enough English money has been spent on the Irish. The Exchequer will not be pillaged further. It cannot cure the blight. It has not stemmed the hunger. It is possible to have heard the tale of sorrow too often. Let us be clear. The property of Ireland must support the poverty of Ireland. If the Irish once discover they can get free government money, they will lie such as the world has never known. That said, let it be done.
At the outset of the blight, Prime Minister Peel, as part of his emergency plan to stave off the famine, had repealed the Corn Laws which enabled American grain to be freely imported to Ireland. Associations were formed there to raise charitable money to pay for it and a Board of Works was established to create employment so that the destitute could earn enough to feed themselves.
Grand projects were announced. New roads would be built. New canals dug. New agriculture would be introduced to end the Irish dependence on their potato. Government money would be lent to finance the schemes, repayable at an interest of three per cent.
But it was Peel’s undoing. Unpopular in the country, he was soon forced to resign by enemies of Ireland from within his own party. He was succeeded by Lord John Russell, who considered all his predecessor’s measures expensive blunders and immediately instructed Trevelyan to dismantle what Peel had put together. He gave Trevelyan carte blanche to do as he pleased and as director of famine relief he became its dictator overnight. Trevelyan’s power was now absolute. Life and death hung on his lips.
He immediately published a Treasury report which pleased both Parliament and landlords alike. He demanded that those employed on public works should be paid the minimum that would keep them alive. He considered ten pence a day too much. If bad weather prevented men from working they should only be given a half day’s pay. If those who applied for relief owned even a quarter of an acre of land, they must sell it or forfeit their claim for assistance.
Corruption became rife. Tickets, necessary for a labourer to work, were bought by profiteers. Landlords bribed officials to allocate the cheap labour to their estates. Those paid to supervise the schemes were not qualified to do so. Work could not start because there were no surveyors and without surveys the engineers stood idle. Where there was work, men were not paid because the pay clerks had run off with the money. The destitute were being promised a fair wage for a fair day’s work but among the hundreds of thousands who queued were women, widows and their children, un
fit for manual labour. One magistrate in County Sligo reported:
It was melancholy in the extreme to see women and girls labouring in the gangs. They were employed not only in digging with spade and pick but also in carrying loads of earth and turf on their backs and breaking stones like men. Their poor neglected children crouched in groups in the sheltered corners of the line.
Works that began did not finish and hordes of sullen, emaciated men marched from one site to the next only to find that too was abandoned. Some carried guns and knives and violence was widespread. Desperate men fought each other, man against man, gang against gang. In Waterford they broke into the supervisor’s house, carried him to the site and threatened to kill him if work did not begin. They beat him until he was dead. It changed nothing.
When the employment list was closed abruptly on work at Clare Abbey in Clare, the supervisor was shot and wounded. The site was closed and a thousand men with empty pockets were out on the road again.
The agricultural scheme to end Irish dependence on the potato collapsed just as miserably. Men were offered their ten pennies a day to harvest wheat, oats and barley on the landlords’ estates. Thousands queued with their hoes and scythes in hand. But there was no work because there was no money to pay them and the grain, ripe and ready to harvest, was falling wasted to the ground. Trevelyan had decreed that Ireland would pay its own way of out its tragedy. By his hand, it could not.
The tumbling continued apace. The estates were now being cleared ever more ruthlessly. In five days, one hundred and forty cottages were razed to the ground in Moyarta. Another hundred in Carrigaholt. In two months, over one thousand cottages from Mayo to Wicklow, from Donegal to Kerry, were destroyed by the tumbling gangs and over fifteen thousand people sent into the wild to find protection in the ditches and woods and makeshift scalpeens, primitive shelters of branches and leaves. Drawings depicting their misery now regularly appeared in English newspapers and weekly magazines, even though their editorials expressed little or no sympathy. The calamity was presented as a simple economic equation, devoid of all humanity.
The surplus, unwanted population must be disposed of, swept from the soil. If a million people were to die in the famine it could only benefit Ireland. It is doing it far more thoroughly than any government legislation.
It was an opinion many of their readers found persuasive and morally digestible. Ireland was too small an island to accommodate the Irish. It was dangerously overburdened by the weight of human stock. Ipso facto, the Irish must be reduced in numbers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Like most Irishmen, Sir Robert Fitzgerald assumed that the dual calamities of blight and hunger were as natural as Ireland’s long seasons of rain. Throughout his long life they had come and then departed, leaving Ireland unchanged, each new generation attempting to repair the damage done by the old. He was famous for his generosity, which took many by surprise, because he was both a landlord and a Protestant. He was a distant relation of the Duke of Leinster, Ireland’s premier nobleman, and he had inherited a large estate which bordered both banks of the river Blackwater to Cappoquin.
Unlike most Irishmen of his standing, he helped the poor whenever he could, providing work when additional labour was not needed, cancelling the debts of those he knew could never pay. He milled his own wheat and during the months of hunger had provided a daily ration of soup from his own kitchen to the many who had nothing. What he had he shared and whenever angry men cursed the cruelty and greed of the landowners, they would touch their caps and say, ‘The Lord excepting the good Sir Robert.’
He was standing in front of a large boiling cauldron, stirring his soup, dressed in a long leather apron and almost hidden in clouds of steam. He was a broad, well-built man with a head of curly grey hair, a red face and a moustache that hung either side of his mouth.
‘They say that soup can nourish a man. But I doubt it does as well as a bowl of lumpers. That’s what makes Irishmen strong. D’you know, Kate, we are taller than most of the English, and a damn sight stronger. Braver too, I shouldn’t wonder. Why, half the British Army is made up of us. And who was it who beat Napoleon? Another Irishman, Wellington himself, born over there in County Meath.’
Sir Robert was short on introductions. Kate had been given a warm, wet handshake and told to sit between the twins, Robin and Una. Sir Robert threw handfuls of meat and vegetables into the cauldron that hung over an open fire in the centre of his cobbled courtyard. Ireland’s politics was Sir Robert’s obsession. When he was young, his heart had been full of reform and good intent but he had long since grown accustomed to the perpetual suffering of the poor and the indifference and cynicism that smothered them.
‘Look at this,’ he shouted at them through the steam. ‘They’ve sent me a recipe for soup. It’s from your father’s office, Kate. I see that it’s printed in London and concocted by a fellow called Alexis Soyer. They’ve sent a French soup-maker and savoury inventor who’s never set foot in Ireland so that for a trifling sum he can feed Paddy. They say he cooks for a London club but God knows he must have been hallucinating when he devised this one. Read it – go on, read it!’
Before Kate could take the piece of paper from him, he read it out himself.
‘A handful of beef cuts, some dripping, two onions ... Two, mind you ... Not two dozen ... A handful of flour and some pearl barley. Then – and here’s the rub – you mix it with a hundred gallons of water. One bloody hundred! I thought they’d added too many noughts, but they haven’t. Christ almighty! I don’t know what size our Monsieur Soyer is but he could pass comfortably between the bars of my front gates after a month of that rubbish. It’s not so much soup for the poor as poor soup. The government’s even sending the stupid fellow to Dublin to build a kitchen to serve the stuff. It’s a damned disgrace! Tell your father that, Kate, a disgrace. It’ll run through them like water, which is all it is.’
‘Isn’t something better than nothing, Father?’ Robin ventured.
‘Nonsense, boy. You should know that filling famine-bloated bodies with water soup will do more harm than good. Must I tell you that? He might just as well serve them up river sand.’
‘What are we to believe, Father? Who are we to believe?’ Una asked him.
‘There’s nothing and no one we can believe, not if it is coming from London. They’re all lying and fussing about and doing nothing that matters, and the few people who are trying are hitting their heads against a tree. Look at the Quakers. They have more charity and sense than fat-bellied landowners but they’re mistrusted because they’re not the Pope’s people. The priests are telling their flocks that to take anything from a Protestant is to take from the Devil. They’re even putting it about that the Quakers deliberately serve meat in their soups on a Friday so the Catholics can’t eat it.’
‘They’re also saying that Catholics must renounce their faith to get any food at all,’ Una said.
Sir Robert thumped the side of the cauldron with his ladle. ‘What rubbish! Have them leave their Church for soup? Never! It’ll take more mischief than that to make a souper out of an O’Sullivan. Can you believe it? The stupidity of blind bigots who think that men can be bought with a bowlful of broth. Mind you, if the government thought they could get away with it they’d try it. Such is their conceit. I’ll wager that Monsieur Soyer will soon be back to his London kitchen with his dripping pans and sauce pots and good riddance to him.’
Kate sat between Robin and Una on the terrace. Beyond them was the Irish Sea. The flagstones were still warm to the touch after the day’s heat. Behind them the sun was about to sink into the other hemisphere. The sky was orange and its glow spread across the shimmering surface of the sea like fire across oil. Beyond the horizon was the Welsh coast and St David’s Head and behind the Welsh mountains were the lowlands of England. It was not a day’s sailing away, but it might just as well have been on the other side of the world, so foreign did England now seem to Kate. There were moments when she did not care whether
she ever saw it again, she who had so fiercely resisted leaving.
She sipped a glass of Sir Robert’s elderberry wine. It had been a sparse but splendid dinner of roast hare. Sir Robert had shot it that afternoon and cooked it himself. He thought it might be the last.
‘It took father four hours to find that one,’ Robin said. ‘In the old days he’d have had him in minutes. There’s nothing left out there. Not a crow in the trees, not a fox in its hole. Every starling and tom-tit has gone and I don’t think I’ve seen a hedgehog or a squirrel or even a frog for months. The hungry have finally cleared this land of life.’
‘That is why it’s so quiet now,’ Una said. ‘Haven’t you noticed in the mornings? The only sound is the wind and the rustle in the trees.’
Robin reached out and held his sister’s hand. ‘Even the nights are silent now. Do you remember how terrified we were of the owls as children? How we were told not to leave the window open or they would come and tear our eyes out?’
Una laughed. ‘And the bats would suck our blood until we were dry and no bigger than a pumpkin.’
‘And banshees were hiding behind the curtains to carry us away and turn us into frogs.’
Robin and Una had come from the same womb at the same time, but it was she who had been favoured in the making. She was plump and round with full cheeks, her skin the complexion of honey. Her hair was a tangle of chestnut curls, her eyes the colour of amber. She did not use face powder or rouge, nor did she wear a bodice, so her breasts stood full and firm against her blouse.
Her brother was slender, almost frail, and even now, in his mid-twenties, he had the look of a man who was already growing weary. Una told Kate how his health and strength had been taken from him as a little boy. She said that when he was a child he had decided that when he grew up he would become a bishop. He had turned their playroom into a chapel, with a tiny altar and a cross and every morning and evening he made her kneel and they said their prayers together. He was a determined little boy and his future as a man of the cloth seemed assured. Until the day of his conversion.
Dark Rosaleen Page 9