Dark Rosaleen

by Michael Nicholson, OBE

  When the snows came early that November, she had ridden with them to all but a few of Ireland’s counties. From Donegal north to Bantry south, from Wicklow in the east to Mayo in the west. It was there, in the shadow of the Connemara Mountains, that Coburn took Kate to the place where he was born.

  It was desolate country, a narrow corridor of camouflaged greens and browns, dividing the two vast loughs of Mask to the north and Corrib to the south. The towering Maamtrasna Mountain, its plateau mostly hidden in mist, sloped down to flooded plains and there was not a tree to be seen from Cornamona to Clonbur. It was as if all living things had fled from the place. Or that life had never come to it. Coburn stood by the water’s edge.

  ‘This was my home, Kate. The stones you see scattered here were once my family’s home. I was one of many, nine of us, maybe more. The cottage was always full of children coming and going from other families, so I never did know how many were ours. My mother was always carrying, every year there was another baby. Some died soon after they were born and were buried at night so we wouldn’t know.’ He pointed towards the foot of the mountain.

  ‘They’re out there somewhere, along with the others.’

  Kate followed his gaze.

  ‘What others, Daniel? Who else is buried there?’

  ‘I don’t know them all, Kate. Only a few of them belong to us. There was so much dying then. You’ve only seen this famine but it was almost as bad then, twenty years ago. Many went down, starved to death, frozen to death, black and bloated with the fever.’

  ‘It’s hard for me to think of it that way when we stand here,’ Kate said. ‘There’s a grand beauty about it, as if it has never been touched.’

  ‘Maybe it’s been given new life by the blood of the dead.’

  ‘It’s horrible to say that.’

  ‘I think of it no other way. I never stop thinking about it.’

  He paused. ‘We shouldn’t have come here, Kate. Not to this place. I have been many times before but I should not have brought you now. All my good memories have long been drenched by bad ones.’

  ‘I asked you to bring me here’ she said. ‘You promised. It’s a part of you I wanted to see.’

  ‘There is nothing to see, Kate. Only the mountains and the loughs and they are no longer mine. They’re nobody’s now. Do you see the ripples along the slope of the mountain? You might think them the scrapings of a glacier sliding its way down the valley all those millions of years ago. A stranger might think them nature’s own work. But they are the potato beds, dug by man and woman, husband and wife, child and child, generations of them, year on year for hundreds of years. How much work is that, Kate? And for what? Twenty years ago the potato failed them as it has failed again and they died of hunger just as we are dying now.’

  ‘There was no other way?’

  ‘No, Kate. We knew no other way. There was no other way. See that pile of stones just beyond the stream? My ancestors carried them down from the mountain, one by one, to build their home. Now the mountain has taken them back. For centuries, my people worked this land and they wanted nothing more. In all his sixty years, my father barely travelled beyond Cornamona, a few miles to the west or eastwards to Cong. Can you believe that? My mother never ever left the plot. She never wanted to. She wouldn’t have known how to. They were simple people asking for very little, always ready to welcome a neighbour or give a bowl of broth to any traveller who happened to wander off his path.’

  ‘Were there many families here?’ she asked.

  ‘There must have been a few dozen hereabouts but I can only remember some of the names. The Philbins, the O’Sullivans, Joyce, the O’Donnells. We all kept our distance but if there was a fight between them, we’d all join in, even if we didn’t know what it was all about. But if a family was in trouble they hadn’t to wait long for help and a bit of comfort.’

  ‘What did you do with yourself?’

  ‘I spent my time mostly alone. Sometimes days away just wandering and no one missed me. The best of it was on top of Maamtrasna, up on that plateau. There’s a lake up there – Nafooey it’s called – and it was mine. I’d spend days there, swimming, living on tiny fish and birds’ eggs. It was grand place to be for a little boy, on top of the world. On top of Ireland.’

  He splashed the shallow water between the reeds.

  ‘I had a friend called Murdoc. He was a wild one, always making mischief, but a grand fisherman. He would go out onto the loughs with his curragh and nets and poach for trout and sometimes salmon. He sold them as far away as Ballinrobe and Clifden. I would dig worms for him and he would cut off a couple of fish heads and mother would make a soup that lasted all of us a week or more. I remember how we had to make for the boat quickly because of the thunderflies.’

  ‘Thunderflies?’

  ‘Biting midges that could make your life a hell. And the mosquitoes too. We called them buzzers because of the sound they made. But it was grand once we were out there on the water. I remember the evenings best, at dusk, the whir of bats, the drumming of the snipe, the curlew and the clack of the ducks being chased by otters.’

  ‘You must have been a happy little boy.’

  ‘I don’t think we knew what happiness was, Kate. Not that I’ve ever really known it. We wanted very little from life, but we were content, hard-working, shying away from violence and deceit. All we asked for was enough to eat at the end of the day, some pennies for father’s tobacco and decent put-ons for the children’s Sunday best. It was our lot until somebody bettered it.’

  ‘Where are they now, Daniel? Your family?’

  Clouds quickly hindered the sun and the bright greens of the valley became sullen grey. A cold breeze came off the Corrib and she felt its sharpness on her face and hands.

  ‘Where are all my dead now?’ he answered. ‘Where are their plots? There are none. They have no graves, Kate, no tidy mounds of earth, no settled peat, no headstones above the heather. You ask me where my dead are. They are hereabouts, hiding themselves. On every rock there sits a ghost who nods its head and whispers quietly as I pass.’

  He walked away and turned his back to her.

  She wanted to go to him, to touch him, to mourn with him. He stood by a scattering of stones that had been his home. She watched him pace the spaces between them. He stopped and knelt and stroked them as he would the neck of his horse. Then he stood and faced her.

  ‘Why, Kate?’ He was shouting. ‘What had they done to finish this way? Were they not good Catholics? Did they not keep the faith? Didn’t they bow their heads and give thanks to their invisible God morning, noon and night? And when they lay shrivelled and filthy and dying here among these stones, did they not ask themselves why? Why us? Maybe they did ask but they were never given an answer.’

  He went away slowly towards the mountain. She did not follow. They were still too far apart.

  She had become Coburn’s constant companion, at his side at every rally, with him at every speech. The crowds that came to hear him were fired by his passion but it was not his words alone that gave them hope and new resolve. It was the young woman with him, the Englishman’s daughter who had deserted her own to become part of them. With her shining black hair, tied up with green ribbons, she had become a legend of their own making. The one they called the ‘Dark Rosaleen’.

  British newspapers eagerly grasped at it. The Young Irelanders rarely featured in their coverage but this was something extraordinary and they made it more so in the exaggerated fashion of their trade. It was magnified so that Kate, not the rebels and their aspirations, became the story. Cartoons in The London Times and the Illustrated London News caricatured her with fire in her eyes and snakes, not ribbons, streaking from her hair, like Medusa. She was held responsible for acts of violence they had not committed, attacks on landlords where there had been none. She was reported to have been seen in Kerry on a white stallion at the head of a hundred armed riders. In another report from Wicklow, she had charged and trampled under hoof an en
tire platoon of carabineers. The newspaper proprietors and their editors knew well enough the value of the story and the insatiable appetite their readers had for drama.

  How easily fiction became fact. How quickly truth was absorbed by lies, the lies themselves becoming accepted truths. The make-believe in print began to assume such substance that the government was obliged to take notice. A proclamation soon appeared in the London Gazette, stating that Kathryn Macaulay, daughter of Sir William Macaulay, formerly Commissariat General for Irish Relief, was indicted for treason. A reward of five thousand pounds would be paid for information leading to her arrest.

  Since his disgrace and departure from Ireland, Sir William had lived the life of an exile in his house in the Lincolnshire fens. Except for his two manservants, he saw no one and nobody wished to see him. It is said that memories serve old men well, that their lives are given extra spice in retrieved fond and loving reminiscences. But all that had been good and dear in Sir William’s life had been erased by the tragedy that was Ireland. So he spent his days sitting alone and filled the vacuum with whiskey and brandy.

  News of the proclamation was posted to him from London. It was brought to his bedroom with his early morning coffee. When his manservants later returned to help him dress, they found him still in bed. He would not talk. They thought he could not. He lay perfectly still, looking at the ceiling, his eyes unblinking, unmoving, and they thought him paralysed. They called the doctor but he could not rouse him. He would not move. He would not eat his broth nor drink his medicines. On the seventh day his servants heard him shouting. As they entered his bedroom they saw him convulse, raise himself from his pillows and call out a woman’s name. Then his heart stopped beating. As he fell back, the air gushed from his lungs and he called out her name again for the last time.

  The servants closed his eyes, pulled the bedcover over him and went for the undertaker. The name their master had uttered in his last breath meant nothing to them. They had never known his wife.

  It was Moran who told Kate of her father’s death. Sir William had been in the ground a fortnight, buried within the family enclosure of St Botolph’s church in Boston. The vicar was the only one to witness the disgraced knight’s departure and three lines in the obituary column of The London Times were all that marked a half century of devoted public service.

  Kate sat with Moran in the refectory at Dromoland. He had ridden that night from Tipperary with the news. He said people were rejoicing at it.

  ‘It grieves me, Miss Kathryn, to tell you of this. He should not be dishonoured this way. He was a good man, forced to do dreadful things.’

  ‘Tell me, Moran. How should I mourn?’

  ‘I cannot answer you, Miss Kathryn.’

  ‘I disgraced him’.

  ‘That is not for me to say’.

  ‘There was no one at his grave?’

  ‘So it was written in the newspapers.’

  ‘I would have gone if I had known.’

  ‘You would not have come back, Miss Kathryn. We know they had agents at Fishguard and Swansea in case you did cross the sea. In Boston too. They’d have caught and hanged you. Better he was buried alone.’

  He could not help her. He wanted to comfort her but he could not touch even her hand. She was of them now, a rebel, an outlaw, but in her company he would always be her butler.

  Late that afternoon Coburn took her to Clenagh, a half hour’s ride south of Dromoland. He knew it well. He had walked its beaches many times. He knew of the ancient ruin of a tower there that would serve as a chapel where she could mourn the memory of a father she had loved and barely known. He knew too that she would take her rosary with her, a symbol of the faith that had finally broken them apart.

  Coburn sat at the foot of the tower and listened to her prayers. How often had he done the same? A young man mourning those he had lost, those who had had no burial, no grave, no cross, no evidence of having lived at all.

  She came and sat by him. Across the Shannon, in the evening light, they could just see the blurred outlines of Coney Island and Inishmore and the promontory of Rineanna Point. A sea mist was slowly snaking its way up river. Soon it would cover the sands and creep up the headland and before long all of Clare would lay damp and hidden under it. Coburn pointed.

  ‘Look, Kate. Over there to the left. Another one off to the promised land.’

  A three-master edged its way into view, the wind on its beam, its sails stiff and full. They watched in silence as it moved slowly down river until it too was swallowed up in the blanket of mist. The hundreds aboard had glimpsed their last of the land they would never see again.

  ‘I blame them, Kate, and yet I envy them too,’ said Coburn.

  ‘You read my thoughts, Daniel.’

  ‘I think I often do.’

  ‘If you envy those who leave, you must have thought of it yourself.’

  ‘Many times. But to think is not to do. I could never leave. There is something too deep inside me, call it what you will.’

  ‘I think it’s called love, Daniel. There must be many kinds of love and to love what you have been born to might be the strongest.’

  ‘Then you must love England still.’

  ‘Yes! You would think so. Perhaps I did once. But not now and it’s not England’s fault. But you will never change, Daniel.’

  ‘I love Ireland. Indeed I do. But I wonder if there is a stronger love.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have never loved. I have never been loved.’

  He stood up. ‘Maybe there’s a way of not knowing love but feeling it. If it comes as a stranger you might not recognise it. Then you might lose what you might have loved.’

  She watched him walk slowly to the edge of the cliff. It was as if he was ending their talk, as if there was nothing left for them to say, when she felt there was so much more. She did not want an ending. She had been with him, ridden at his side for over a year and yet he had never spoken this way to her before. She waited. He turned and beckoned.

  ‘Kate, will you come to me?’

  ‘Must we leave, Daniel?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No! But read my mind, Kate. Read it and tell me what you see. Tell me what I feel.’

  ‘Daniel, I cannot.’

  ‘Try, Kate. Let me hold your hands. Put them in mine. What do you feel?’

  ‘I feel your pulse, your heart beating. It’s very strong.’

  ‘Kate, have you never really loved?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘And no one has ever loved you?’

  ‘No.’

  He held her hands tight and brought them to his chest.

  ‘I think I love you, Kate. I have never known it but what I feel for you must be love. It is stronger than anything I have ever felt. You must know it too. You felt my heart pounding.’

  ‘Is it stronger than your love of Ireland?’

  ‘I do believe it is.’

  He smiled and kissed the palms of her hands. She leant up to him and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she kissed him again. He picked her up in his arms and walked back slowly towards the tower. He put her down in the soft ferns that ringed its walls and lay beside her. The air was still warm. The first wisps of sea mist circled above them. The only sounds were the soft rattle of waves along the sands below and the call of a distant curlew.

  ‘Let me woo you with your own poem, Kate. The one they’ve named you after.’

  She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his warm breath on her face. She closed her eyes as he spoke.

  I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills.

  I could kneel all night in prayer to heal your ills.

  One smile from you would float like light

  Between my toils and me,

  My own, my true, my Dark Rosaleen.

  ‘A little boy from Kinsale taught me that,’ she said. ‘A million years ago.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘I knew him
only as Eugene.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Buried only a short walk from where he was born. That was as much as he knew of this world and he had such a yearning to learn more. I was so proud of him, he might have been my own child. He lost his family in the first year of the famine.’

  ‘I was that same little boy,’ Daniel said. ‘One of thousands of children left to survive as best as they could on their own.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was eleven years old, but so small and thin that people thought I was six. It was just another year of many hungers but the worst of it was in my own Mayo. It takes three months to starve to death. Did you know that? That’s a long time for a little boy to watch that much suffering. And to think that only a month before we had flowering potatoes with stems as thick as that little boy’s wrists.

  ‘One morning, we woke and knew we had lost them just by the smell. Father had seen it all before. He knew there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the bailiffs and the tumbling gangs. So he went off to the whiskey dens and never came back. I looked for him and my sisters and brothers searched too. But mother knew he was gone.

  ‘I tried to feed them. I stole turnip tops and at night I milked the udder of a rich man’s cow. Sometimes I would cut a vein in its neck and draw out the blood and mix it with the milk. But everyone was doing it and men sold their cows before they were bled to death. I searched the beaches for dead crabs and rotten fish and when a storm fetched up seaweed we ate that too. Once I found a cockle but I never found another. Do you know that there wasn’t a bird flying, not a frog or a snail to be found anywhere? The land had been scoured clean of life.

  ‘So we sat by the peat fire and ate blind herring. Do you know what that is, Kate? It’s a fish that isn’t there except in your mind. We sat eating fish that wasn’t there and we wasted away. They died, slowly, one after the other. It must have been the fever.