The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Leaving Bridge-end House some hours later, and walking towards the boy who held my horse, I passed the open door of one of the outbuildings, and again hearing MacCarthy’s voice, I looked within. A number of the servants were gathered there, and MacCarthy, very drunk, was standing with one foot upon a bench. A girl was standing beside him, and his free arm was curved around her waist, his hand fondling her bosom. I needed no cicerone to explain to me the meaning of the song which he was singing. As I rode off, the song ended, but the air was then filled with the sound of a violin, playing a most engaging air, very quick and lilting, as though for a dance.

  Music and dance. What I have written must surely suggest a people cursed by Heaven, men sullenly in movement beneath a lowering sky. And yet most, were they to hear my words, would deny them utterly. For if the mind’s eye perceives the grinding poverty, the ear of the mind hears music. No people on earth, I am persuaded, loves music so well, nor dance, nor oratory, though the music falls strangely upon my ears, and the eloquence is either in a language I cannot understand or else in an English stiff, bombastic, and ornate. More than once I have been at Mr. Treacy’s when, at close of dinner, some travelling harper would be called in, blind as often as not, his fingernails kept long and the mysteries of his art hidden in their horny ridges. The music would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets. Riding home late at night, past tavern or alehouse, I would hear harps and violins, thudding feet rising to frenzy. I have seen them dancing, at evening on fairdays, in meadows decreed by custom for such purposes, their bodies swift-moving, and their faces impassive but bright-eyed, intent. I have watched them in silence, reins held loosely in my hand, and have marvelled at the stillness of my own body, my shoulders rigid and heavy.

  Darkness hides them from me, and my sympathy is un-Christian and chill. We fear the unknown. Most earnestly do I wish to enter their lives, yet everywhere my wish is mocked, by Captain Cooper’s complacent swagger, by the memory of MacCarthy’s foot upon a bench, by a cabin bursting with music, by the thronging foreign faces at markets and fairdays, by dancers in a meadow, by the sounds of an alien speech. Yes, and by the very look of the land itself, the forbidding hills, the monotony of brown moorland, the small lakes set like watchful eyes upon the bog. It seems to me a land furiously guarding its meagre secrets, gloating over its incomprehensibility. Whether it seems so to the people themselves, I cannot say. They are an ancient people, and possess an ancient knowledge which, because it falls short of wisdom, is frightening to a stranger.

  And thus, in the narrative which I shall now commence, many of the actors come from a world which is recognisably my own, however altered by local conditions. Mr. Falkiner, my dear friend, might well be found in my native Derbyshire, arguing crops or politics with my brother. And Mr. Moore of Moore Hall would surely be more at home in London than in Mayo. Nor can England boast that it lacks such men as Captain Cooper, village Caesars and Hannibals, doughty captains of Sunday soldiers. But there my pen pauses, for one at least of Cooper’s feet rests upon the bog. And when my thoughts move from him to the native Irish, to O’Dowd and to MacDonnell, to MacCarthy and above all to Ferdy O’Donnell, I feel them slipping towards the unknown, towards men whose actions and passions issue from that fearsome world of hillside and bog, choked with the petrified roots of the past. And beyond such men lies the multitudinous world of the peasantry, the dark sea which swept up upon us so suddenly that we were almost covered by its waves.

  I shall nonetheless strive to present those events with such understanding of them as I have come to possess, and with an attempt at a strict impartiality. I fear in advance that I shall fail, for my knowledge of events is not matched by an understanding of their causes. But yet I hold it almost sinful not to seek after causes, the black roots of flowering passions. The rain has ceased to fall, and beneath a sky suddenly bright and almost cloudless, fields of a most intense green stretch northwards towards the bay.

  2

  Mount Pleasant, June 16

  It was a long letter, closely filling three sheets of excellent paper. Copies had been nailed by night to Cooper’s door and to the door of the Killala market house. Cooper held the pages flat beneath one hand, while the other, elbow propped on breakfast table, supported a head within which brandy seemed to roll as in a half-filled jug. Across from him sat his wife, Kate, and at his side, perched on the chair’s edge, sat Fogarty, his steward.

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said, temporising, while studying the wild blur of words.

  “Not all of them, by no means all or even most,” Fogarty assured him. He was a jovial man, and could not help but bring an air of buoyancy to the least appropriate circumstances. “Only the cows we turned onto O’Malley’s acres. Squint O’Malley. Do you remember the way he kept bobbing his head when he talked to you? It was the shut eye that did it.” He imitated the gesture, and Cooper closed his eyes against the sight.

  “These are terrible times for Mayo,” Kate said, “when a man cannot use his land as he sees fit.”

  “Sees fit, be damned,” Cooper said. “Uses it as some bloody mortgage broker in Capel Street sees fit. I think I might be able to take some tea.” He sucked it in red and strong, heavily sugared. He pressed small, square hands on plump knees which strained against buff breeches, a short-legged man with a head round and compact as a cannonball. “As if the country wasn’t in bad enough trouble. The Whiteboys of Killala. O Jesus, what have I ever done to deserve my troubles.”

  “Troubled times, Captain,” Fogarty said. “Troubled times.”

  “I’ll trouble them,” Cooper said. “I’ll trouble them to dance on a rope’s end in Castlebar.”

  “To be sure you will, Captain. To be sure you will. No better man. Once we know who they are.”

  “My own tenants is who they are, and I haven’t so many of them that their ways are mystery. And if the law can’t give me satisfaction, I will take out after them with a pack of the MacCaffertys.”

  “Oh, to be sure, Captain.”

  “This isn’t Dublin, you know. This is Mayo, and we settle matters in our own way here. We’re Irishmen here, and Irishmen by God who stand on their own two feet.”

  “If you are over that now,” Kate said, “maybe you will tell us what you intend to do.” She was a handsome, coarse-featured woman, with a broad, humourous mouth and eyes like green agates.

  He looked towards her and then away. “Fogarty, there is no need for you to sit there with an empty belly. Kate, ring the bell for Brid, and while the man is waiting pour him some tea.”

  “Tea would be grand,” Fogarty said. “I have had my breakfast in me for two hours. I put Paddy Joe and his son to work on the fence that was knocked down.”

  “Well, aren’t you the thoughtful hoor,” Cooper said, but then said quickly, “Ach, Tim, I’m sorry. I am fair beside myself.” He rubbed the palm of his hand across his eyes. “I was counting on those cattle for the market. I don’t know what I will do now at all.”

  “No offence taken, Sam. ’Tis a sore business.” He sipped at the scalding tea, and added sugar.

  “And now, Sam,” Kate said. “What do you intend to do?”

  “I have about a fifth of the land marked out for pasturage, and ’tis the only way. The both of you know that. And I won’t be the last landlord to do it here, only I had the bad luck to be the first.”

  “You might better have waited, then,” Kate said. “Until you had some company.”

  “Wait wasn’t in it, Kate, the sore way we are in. This bitch of a barony wasn’t built for farming. It is land for cattle.”

  The room was too small for the furniture which had been crowded in, a broad expanse of mahogany table, heavy chairs with wide arms and high, tapestried backs, a sideboard of olive wood. Two smoke-darkened portraits faced each other across the table.

  “You can’t leave it this way,” she said. “With a Whiteboy threat hanging over you if you move.”


  “And those Dublin leeches fastened onto my arse. Do you not think I know that?”

  Across the hall, in the small office, paper bulged from his desk, lay scattered across the table. How could a man have this much land, and yet be so poor? True enough, the land was heavily mortgaged when his father died, and there was no turning back from the road of heavy mortgages. But the road had seemed pleasant once, seven or eight years ago. Those had been good years, after his father’s death and before he married. Liberty Hall, you might as well have called Mount Pleasant, but without extravagance, all considered. Not a rakehelly young man of the barony but had his welcome, and not all of them Protestants by any means, he was no bigot. The two Routledges had their welcome and Tom Bellew and Corny O’Dowd, the old Catholic stock, good mounts for the chase. There were still marks on the hall floor from the time Corny O’Dowd had ridden up and through the door. All that was over now, with black hatred building up again between the creeds.

  “You must stop them now,” Kate said.

  He spilled his tea. “You are as bad as the rest of them. Didn’t my own father tell me that marrying a Papist was like building your house upon mud?” He shifted in his seat. “What in hell was the need to marry you at all, is the question I ask myself every night I can’t sleep.” When they had children, she would be teaching them their beads when he wasn’t watching; it always went that way in this kind of marriage.

  “Then you cannot have often to ask the question.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Fogarty said, “with my best thanks for the tea.”

  “You will sit where you have been bid to sit,” Kate said, “and you will leave when you have been excused.” She leaned towards her husband. “You married this particular Papist because you were besotted by the pleasures of the bed, and you knew a bargain when you saw one.”

  Cooper drew in his breath to answer, but then expelled it. “By God, you are right, Kate. A damned good bargain it was. But I can’t let your bloody Papists—”

  “My bloody Papists, are they? Do you think that Thomas Treacy would be safe, or George Moore? If Whiteboys are left unpunished, not a landlord will be safe against them.” She rested her hand on the table. “Haven’t you enough sense to puzzle things out? You have a handful of men frightened they will be turned out and maybe some ramblers with no business but mischief. And barring you find yourself an informer you will never find out who they are, not until half the men in the barony have taken the oath, and for you that will be too late. You heard no whispers of this, did you, Tim?”

  “I did not, ma’am. When we turned out Squint O’Malley and flattened the cabin, there was a crowd of them standing in the road to make their moans, but that is always the way. You have the right of it there, ma’am. This is but a handful of men now, but it will grow fast.”

  “Do you hear that, Sam? There is no way out of this but to make them all more afraid of you than they are of the Whiteboys. And there will be no way to frighten them until you flatten cabins and send a few off to Castlebar in a cart.”

  “Jesus but you are a hard woman, Kate.”

  “Ireland is hard. I learned how to live in it by watching my father. There was a man to take lessons from. On one side of him was the Protestants and on the other side was the Whiteboys, and all he had in this world when he commenced his progress was a lease on a few hundred acres of bad land that he let to those who could get no better. And what had he to protect it but a whip with a load of lead in the handle.”

  “This is no morning to hear about your father,” Cooper said. Shaggy, mountainous form, hairy ears and nostrils, the loaded whip around which legends had clustered.

  “You remember my father, don’t you, Tim?”

  “I do, ma’am,” Fogarty said reverently. “I do.”

  Two of a kind, her father and Fogarty. Tucked somewhere in the thatch of Fogarty’s cabin was a leather sack of silver shillings and gold sovereigns, a bit added to it each year, his eye on some nice bit of land, perhaps part of Cooper’s own land. They hungered for land, as other men for women or whiskey. One of these years, Fogarty would be around, stroking the greasy band of his hat, ready to talk about a long-term lease, bag plump on the desk. Then he could start in business as a middleman. That is how old Mahony, Kate’s father, had started forty years before, when Papists were forbidden by law to own land by outright purchase. They complain about the heretic landlords, but it is their own that sweat them worst. The worst rack-renters are the Papist middlemen. Servants make bad masters.

  “There is not even need for Castlebar,” Kate said. “Let the magistrates seize up a few of the likeliest rogues and throw them into Ballina gaol. And if they are too finicky about the selecting, they themselves will be the losers. It works wonders to toss a lad in gaol and hold a whip under his nose.”

  “It isn’t forty years ago, Kate. There must be charges now.”

  “Are you not yourself the law in Killala now? Is not the Tyrawley Yeomanry the law? Why else did you throw away our sore needed money on red uniforms?”

  “That is a different matter altogether,” Cooper said, suddenly stiff. He seemed to rise taller in his chair. “The Tyrawley Yeomanry was founded to hold this barony for our lord the King.”

  “Whatever that means,” Kate said acidly.

  “Well you know what it means. It is our task to guard these shores against the French, and to protect this barony against rebels.”

  Kate suddenly broke into laughter. “Listen to him, Tim. Listen to him.” She seized Fogarty by the arm, as though they were allied in judgement against her husband. “I declare to God that all men are children.”

  All save her father.

  “You great fool,” she said to Cooper. “What is a Whiteboy if he isn’t a rebel?”

  “Not against the Crown,” Cooper said, making an effort at patience. “Have you no ears in your head? Have you not heard about the south of this island and the north of it? The peasants rose up in rebellion against the Crown. They destroyed Wexford. The English had to send over an army to put them down. Thanks be to God there are no United Irishmen in Mayo, there are no rebels. These are only Whiteboys.”

  “Only Whiteboys,” Kate echoed contemptuously. “It is Whiteboys and not rebels of Wexford who can send you naked and starving on the roads. It is against you that the Whiteboys are in rebellion, and you have a hundred men who owe you the red coats on their backs.”

  Cooper shook his head. “A Whiteboy war in the middle of a rebellion. My God, what a country!”

  “Small difference,” Kate said. “Whiteboys this year and rebels the next. If there was ever a rebellion in Mayo, wouldn’t your Whiteboys be in the thick of it?”

  “They would, by God,” Cooper said.

  “There you are then,” Kate said. “Take your yeomen and ransack the barony. Bring the wrath of God down on them. That is what your own father would have done. He was a mean, yellow-skinned Protestant, but he knew how to deal with Whiteboys.”

  “Will you not listen to me when I tell you that it is not my father’s time now, and much less is it the time of your own father. I hold my commission from Dublin, and I am answerable to Dublin.”

  “You are fearful to make use of the yeomen, is that it? Then why must I tell you what you must do? You must have a word with Dennis Browne. He is the High Sheriff for Mayo and he is the Member of Parliament for Mayo and he is brother to Lord Altamont. If there is one man who has the management of Mayo in his own two hands it is Dennis Browne.”

  “Dennis Browne, is it?” He laughed and turned to Fogarty, who responded with a smile. “It is little you know about the affairs of your own husband. Sure didn’t Dennis Browne and I stand on the field five years ago and bang away at each other with pistols.”

  “Indeed I did not know that. What possessed the pair of you?”

  “It was a matter closely touching a young lady’s honour. Now that is enough said on that subject.”

  “Touching a lady’s honour,” Kate said. “Tha
t is the only part of a woman that Dennis Browne would not touch. He is as bad as MacCarthy below in Killala.”

  “There were circumstances,” Cooper said. “Very delicate circumstances. It was all over and done with before ever I met you, love.”

  “You may depend on that,” Kate said.

  “Over and done with,” Cooper said. “But there is little affection between us. Ach, what use has he ever had for fellows like myself or Gibson or Saunders or any of the other small landlords? He cares only for the men of great property, his brother and the Big Lord and those. And his brother and himself are safe, out there in Westport.”

  “No one will be safe,” Kate said. She bit her lip in thought. “Is there no one in these parts who has his ear?”

  “One man,” Cooper said. “George Moore of Moore Hall.”

  “A fine-looking man,” Kate said. “He keeps to himself, but he is a fine-looking man. And he is a Roman Catholic.”

  “Sure the Brownes are half Papist themselves. They are neither fish nor fowl. And George Moore is mad. A man who sits in the middle of Mayo and writes books is mad.”

  “Unlike yourself,” she said, “he never tried to kill Dennis Browne, and unlike yourself, he is gentry.”

  “Gentry, is it? By God, there is fine talk from Mick Mahony’s daughter.”

  “I am glad you like it. I have more.”

  “Fogarty, why the hell are you sitting there, gawking at your betters while the affairs of the barony are being discussed? The tea is stone cold, and Paddy Joe and his son are down by the pasture fence wondering how do you put one stone on two others without it falling off.”

  “My own thought, Captain. My own thought. I’ll be on top of them in two shakes,” He stood up, and then pointed to the letter. “Mrs. Cooper is right, though, Captain. It has to be stopped now. You saw who that was written to. Not to yourself alone. ‘To the Landlords and the Middlemen of this Barony,’ it begins. That is the proper Whiteboy stuff, and it has to be stamped out, the way your father used do in the old days.”