The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  He entered Killala at its western end, past cabins with fishing nets hung out to dry upon their walls, and walked along narrow, winding streets. He paused by the open door of Tobin’s tavern, whose sign he could make out with the moon’s help: the Sign of the Wolf Dog. Even the names they gave to places of cheer were faintly ominous: stiff-bristled mastiff, lips curled back from fangs. He was Ovid, banished to wild Tomi. From the tavern, a tide of murmurs spilled out into the street. Perhaps the travelling man had more to tell them about the broken rising in Wexford. Thousands of men upon the roads of Wexford. Towns had fallen before their onslaughts; militia and yeomanry had been beaten, scattered bodies, red-uniformed, upon thick-grassed fields. Pedlars and travelling men were now their Homers and their Virgils, tales carried to distant taverns.

  MacCarthy almost entered, but then walked on, past Hussey’s Catholic chapel, newly built and awkward with embarrassment beside the trim shops of the Protestant merchants, Bassett, Beecher, Reeves, Stanner. Once they had been wealthy; once Killala had been a thriving town. Now the trade was all in Ballina, southwards at the base of the bay, on the road to Castlebar. Poor Protestant merchants of Killala: poor Reeves, poor Stanner. Right-angled to the street, facing the market house, the Protestant church, and the residence of Broome, its clergyman. In its old, flourishing days, Killala had been an episcopal see; Broome’s house was still called “the Palace,” a large, wind-battered building of cut grey stone with tall, handsome windows. Walking beside church and bishop’s palace, MacCarthy left the town, past scattered cabins, past the large, low hut where, from late autumn to spring, he held his school. All instruction offered in grammar and navigation, Euclid’s Elements, Ovid and Virgil, bookkeeping and metaphysics. Offered but not accepted, save by a few of the brighter lads, an eye on the priesthood. The others wanted only sums and catechism, a smattering of English. But they loved the sonorities of Latin, the changelings in Ovid, the stories MacCarthy had picked up on his years of wandering across Munster. Tricked into knowledge with the honey of anecdote. He climbed a low hill to the Acres, two rows of cabins, walls of rough stone washed white, discoloured thatch.

  He pushed open a door. Against one wall, mattress of straw on low frame, Judy Conlon lay asleep. He lit a candle of tallow set in a clay dish, and then stood beside her. Kneeling briefly, he ran a finger gently along the line of her cheekbone. She stirred, and a small hand moved to the tangle of black hair. He put the candle on a table set against the opposite wall. Ranged across its far side, his two dozen books: the Aeneid, Keating’s History of Ireland, the Eclogues and the Georgics, some volumes of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, a box which held his copies of the poems of O’Rahilly and O’Sullivan.

  He opened the two boxes which contained his craft. In the larger one, his own manuscripts, poems completed, poems to be remade, his translation of the first two books of the Metamorphoses into Irish, his sheets of blank paper. In the other box, a small brass bottle of ink, a sharp knife, his assortment of pens, grey goose for poetry, black crow for business. He placed paper and ink before him, sharpened his quills, and dipped a black feather into the ink.

  In the early morning, when he felt Judy standing beside him, he was still sitting at the table, moving a grey goose feather across the page, scratching out a word, adding one, scratching that one out. Absently, with his hand, he moved along the line of her leg, cupped her haunch. A small girl, the hand had not far to travel.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “That is no concern of yours.”

  “It might be.”

  “It might be, but it is not. I was at Matthew Quigley’s.”

  “What possessed you to go out there, with three fine taverns in Killala?”

  “The Sign of the Wolf Dog. That would put a thirst on a man, right enough. I felt a need for the quiet beauty of Kilcummin strand.”

  She ran her hand through his red hair. “You can be a terrible liar, Owen.”

  “I can. It is a poet’s way of reaching for truth.”

  “There is not a sin you commit for which your poetry is not the excuse. Is it a poem that you are writing now?”

  “It might be the start of one. I won’t know for a while.”

  “That is Irish you are writing. I can tell the difference now.”

  “It is in Irish that all my poems are made. This will be a strange one, if it ever takes shape.” He put it aside, and took a fresh sheet of paper. “I have been all the night at it. My backside is numb. There was a fine handsome moon last night. It was worth seeing.”

  “Did you think of me when you saw it?”

  “I did, of course.”

  “Liar.”

  She cut slices of bread, buttered them, and handed him one. It was not a bad life at all, he thought. Buttered bread every day, as suited his craft and his calling. He was far above all the poor fellows who had only their potatoes, and perhaps a bit of salt fish. And he had a lovely small girl to slice it for him, and to open her bed to him. There had been better times in Munster, but there had been worse. When he finished the bread, he wiped his hands carefully along the side of his breeches, out of respect for the good paper.

  “Judy, in the days before I came here, used there be many evictions, the way the O’Malleys were turned out by Captain Cooper?”

  “When haven’t there been evictions? Wasn’t my poor husband’s own brother turned out, and now he is perched on the side of the mountain?”

  “Who was his landlord?”

  “The Big Lord himself. The Big Lord gave orders from London, and Mr. Foster who was the agent in those days turned out Hughey and his family. He must have done something that the Big Lord didn’t like, and the Big Lord turned him out.”

  “He must hold a heavy grudge against the Big Lord.”

  “Sure what good would that do? But he keeps wondering what thing he did that was wrong.”

  Patient beasts. Like their own cows, they are moved about, uncomplaining. Of less value than the cows, for they cannot be brought to market. Like cattle, they stand motionless in the fields, fearful of rain in one season and of drought in the next. Evicted, they walk the roads or climb the hills. Duggan had his work cut out for him. Southwards in distant Wexford and northwards in Antrim, a bare two months before, men such as these had toppled down towns and regiments. Not here.

  Lingering, regretful, his hand touched the night’s work. Grey goose and black crow, maimed cattle and the virginal moon. He drew the sheet of blank paper towards him, and picked up one of the black quills.

  PART ONE

  1

  FROM AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE

  OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1798,

  BY ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME, M.A. (OXON.)

  Some years ago, when I first took up the pastoral care of the wild and dismal region from which I write, I was prompted to begin a journal in which would be set forth, as I encountered them, the habits, customs, and manners of the several social classes, with the thought that it might someday furnish the substance of a book with some such title as Life in the West of Ireland. I rightly feared that time would otherwise hang heavy on my hands, and I have long been aware of a capacity for slothfulness which can reveal itself when my life lacks order and direction. And it was clear to me that few portions of His Majesty’s realms are less known than this island, which might for all purposes be adrift on the South Seas, rather than at our doorstep. Before setting forth from England, I had made it my business to read Mr. Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland, a sage and clear-headed book, bountiful in its information, liberal and enlightened in its temper, but being nevertheless exactly what its title claims it to be, the account of a tour. My work would have the advantage of a prolonged and steady contemplation of the scene, a natural history, as it were, of life in County Mayo.

  Alas for good intentions! The journal did have for a time a spare existence, scattered notes set down in the excitement of my encounters with novel scenes and faces, and with a society at once
picturesque and alarming. But like others of my projects, it stumbled to a halt after some months, and long lay gathering dust upon a shelf in my library. Where these notes are now I cannot say; perhaps they served to start a fire, this being a fate which locally befalls loose sheets of paper. They would have served no large purpose, however, for my early impressions were all, as I now know, misleading, this land being as treacherous as the bog which stretches across much of its surface. It is, in a most exact sense of the word, an outlandish place, inhospitable to the instructions of civilisation.

  My present purpose, more practical and limited, is to offer as fully and as impartially as I can, yet without idle digression, a narrative account of those events which, a few years ago, bestowed upon our remote countryside a transient celebrity. Those events, however, were given their particular shape by the collision of an extraordinary event with an extraordinary society. It is therefore necessary that I present at the outset my own halting and puzzled sense of that peculiar world which was to provide a theatre and actors for my drama.

  A map reveals Mayo as a county on the western extremity of what has been, for the past several years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. At the time of which I write, of course, Ireland was in theory a separate nation, possessing its own parliament, yet sharing with England King George as its sovereign ruler, and being much under English influence. Of its illusionary and fictitious “independence” I shall have something to say hereafter. It is more to the present point to observe that the events which I propose to unfold played their part in bringing down the much-boasted but trumpery “Kingdom of Ireland.” Thus do large and stately changes have at times their origins in crude and remote circumstances.

  Were I to have the colouring of that map of Ireland, Mayo would appear upon it in browns and blues, the brown of hillside and bogland, arched over by an immense sky of light blue. Save when it rains, which, alas, is often. It is raining as I write these words, steadily and copiously, and shrouding from view the bay towards which my library faces. My parish is centered upon the town of Killala in the barony of Tyrawley, once a bishop’s see and a prosperous community of coastal traders, but for decades past in a state of sore decline and disrepair. There are other towns in Mayo, of course: Ballina, our successful rival to the south; Westport on the western coast, the seat of the Marquis of Sligo and graced by his elegant mansion. But there is only one town of true consequence, Castlebar, the capital of Mayo as it is grandiloquently termed, and the town towards which all the roads of Mayo lead. A Muscovite garrison placed upon the border of Siberia must have a similar appearance, although, like all the towns of Ireland, it is built entirely of stone, save for the mud cabins of the very poor. It has streets, a courthouse, a church, a gaol, a market house, a military barracks, the houses of prosperous merchants. And yet all seems provisional, gaunt, slender buildings huddled together against the immensities of sky and land. For to speak of County Mayo in terms of its towns is entirely deceptive. The impression which it first makes upon the eye and mind is that of limitless and inhospitable space, the vast, dreary expanse of bogland westwards from Crossmolina, the steep and lonely headlands and peninsulas. It is its own huge and sombre world, and by contrast with it, the flanking counties of Galway and Sligo present a civilised aspect which is, unfortunately, entirely spurious.

  Neither is it a populous world, if we restrict our consideration to what would in England be termed “the county families.” Within a morning’s or a day’s ride, I could then have claimed as neighbours some fifty or sixty families of the gentry and the near-gentry, these latter being locally termed “half sirs,” or “half-mounted gentlemen.” Close at hand, within the Killala and the Kilcummin boundaries, I had as neighbours, among others, Peter Gibson of The Rise, Captain Samuel Cooper of Mount Pleasant, George Falkiner of Rosenalis, my especial friend, as these notes will reveal, and, on the Ballycastle road, Thomas Treacy of Bridge-end House. At a greater distance, involving arduous travel along wretched roads, stood the estates of George Moore of Moore Hall, Hilton Saunders of Castle Saunders, Malcolm Elliott of The Moat, and a score of others. All of them, save only Moore and Treacy, were members of my parish, for it is one of the most notorious facts of Irish life that those who own the land and those who till it are severely divided by sect, the landlords being Protestant almost to a man, and the tenants and labourers being Papists.

  To speak thus of our county society is to ignore its absent centre, for dominating over our barony and those adjoining it are the estates, imposing and at first sight endless, of Lord Glenthorne, the Marquis of Tyrawley, or as he is called here, in a phrase taken from the Irish, “the Big Lord.” The term falls with a faint blasphemy upon the ear, and Lord Glenthorne does resemble our Creator in that, having this vast domain at his disposal, he has elected to absent himself from it. In this there is nothing unusual, for the resident Irish landlords are for the most part the smaller ones, with estates of a thousand acres or less, while the great men of property are absentees, a circumstance which many hold to be contributory to our manifold woes. Lord Glenthorne, however, has chosen never to reveal himself, not even for brief visits, and yet so vast and so eminent is his place in our scheme of things that he has achieved on peasant tongues a legendary stature, a fathomless creature, beyond good or evil. In point of fact, before taking up my present charge, I was presented to him in London, where I found him to be a small, mild man of middle years, simple and unaffected in manner, and attentive to his religious duties. I was to meet him also a second time, much later, on which occasion I was to form a more distinct impression of him, perceiving then that he was in every sense a lord.

  To ride from here to Ballina is to ride for mile after mile beside the walls of his principal demesne, walls so high that a man on horseback can scarcely see over them, and all of cut stone. On occasion, the road will rise, and the traveller can glimpse in the distance, beyond sheltering plantations, the lovely form of Glenthorne Castle, a vast Palladian mansion which will seem to have floated down upon these inhospitable lands by some magical feat out of the Arabian Nights. And this illusion will be heightened if he reflects that this palace, for it is nothing less, stands waiting, staffed and doubtless furnished with unknown splendours, for a prince who has never visited it. It was far different in the days of his father, who indeed resided there from time to time, and who has left behind him most exotic and disreputable legends. But the traveller afoot sees nothing of Glenthorne Castle. He sees only the high, endless walls, and he may be pardoned for thinking that an army laboured to put them into place, or such nameless legions of slaves as built the Pyramids of Egypt.

  And such legions there are. In speaking as I have done of the “society” of Mayo, I have used the word in the common but un-Christian manner which excludes all whom we do not choose to see. If we admit to view the peasants, and that multitude of labourers who are infinitely more wretched even than the peasants, ours is not at all a lonely world. It is a populous, even a teeming one. They swarm like bees from their cabins, of which the meanest are made of mud, as a child builds by a riverbank, and they are everywhere, for they fasten upon every unclaimed acre which can sustain a blade of grass or a potato bed, and the hills are crisscrossed and crosshatched by fences made of the boulders which have been carried away by hand so as to expose every inch of arable land. Some few are prosperous, although precariously so—graziers and strong farmers and middlemen, but what of the numberless thousands of their coreligionists? It will be noted that here I have stumbled into the common Irish practice of confounding a social and a sectarian division. For beyond dispute there are here two worlds, “our” small Protestant world of property and their multitudinous Papist world of want.

  I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways. Begin then with creed, but add to this that most speak a tongue not merely foreign, but as grotesque as the p
rattle of Sandwich Islanders, that they live and thrive in mud and squalor with dunghills piled before their windowless cabins, that their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its favour, is wild and savage although touched upon occasion by a plaintive, melancholy beauty, that they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning—pates smashed for pleasure on a fairday, cattle barbarously mutilated, bailiffs put to death with crude tortures—that they worship foetid pools as holy wells and go on pilgrimage to clumps of rock, that their eyes look towards you with an innocence behind which dances malevolence. Yet I avow my sympathy for them, and wish that I might serve them better, or at all.

  How else can they live, poor creatures of the Father? The peasant has his few cows and pigs, his brief crops, but all must go to pay the landlord, every forkful of beef, every grain of oats, and he himself and his family must live on potatoes and milk. And he is fortunate, for worse there are who hold no land at all in the law’s eyes, but crouch upon the mountainside or huddle near the bog. They travel with their spades to the hiring fairs, where they stand like slaves upon the block. In late winter, when the potatoes have been exhausted, they wander the roads to beg. And what of those who hold a bit of land but cannot meet the rent? A good landlord, like my dear friend Mr. Falkiner, will let it hang for a season or two, provided that he himself is solvent, but many landlords are mortgaged heavily to the Dublin banks and moneylenders and they too are pressed down by the system. Many others are not true landlords at all, but middlemen to whom the land has been let for reletting, and many of these employ the barbarous practice of the “rack rent.” And there are many landlords great and small who, like Captain Cooper, when grazing proves more profitable than letting, will turn out his tenants to beg or starve upon the roads. I have myself seen families huddled in the sides of hills where they had hewn out holes, entire families, the small ones cowering and rooting beside the gaunt form of the woman.