The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “You had no choice?”

  “I had none. Do you think I like driving a man and his family onto the road? The way it is, I am fair crippled under the mortgages and the debts. In March I went down to see the worst of them in Dublin and he gave it to me straight. I am to offer proof that Mount Pleasant can be made to pay, and it is cattle that will make it pay. He is dead right about that. I have no choice.”

  “It may not be Whiteboys,” Moore said. “It may only be O’Malley out for revenge.”

  “Not at all,” Cooper said. “O’Malley is out of it. I hear he is out in Erris, on a bit of land his wife’s brother has. No, it is Whiteboys, and they are out to stop all of us.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out the letter, unfolded it, and handed it to Moore. Moore made room on his desk, and smoothed the letter flat with a long, pale hand. Then he took his reading glasses from their case. “ ‘To the Landlords and the Middlemen of this Barony. A warning take by Cooper.’ ” He read through the letter, glanced once towards Cooper, and then read it again more attentively. He smiled several times, but otherwise maintained his quiet seriousness of manner.

  “This is a most curious document,” he said. “I have never seen anything quite like it.”

  “Of course you have not, not in London nor any other civilised place. But they have been common enough here in the past.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Moore said. “This is written with considerable eloquence. Listen. ‘Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.’ ”

  “That is me,” Cooper said. “Am I to admire insults as eloquence?”

  “‘Let all churls take warning from Cooper. The people of Tyrawley have stained with their sweat the acres they till. When the sun rises up they are before it at their labours, and the white moon keeps its watch upon their poverty.’ That was not written by a ploughboy.”

  “Of course it was not,” Cooper said in exasperation. “Any of twenty hedge schoolmasters in the barony could have written it. Proper bastards those schoolmasters are.”

  “Yes,” Moore said, pleased. “That could be it. It has the stiffness of a translation.”

  “There used to be laws against schoolmasters, and good laws they were. What business have Papist peasants learning to read and write?”

  Anger, like chips of ice, flecked Moore’s mild blue eyes, then vanished.

  “This could indeed be a serious matter,” he said. “Am I to take it that you have ridden all the way to Ballintubber for my advice?”

  “Not exactly. Or rather, yes, we would be most happy for your advice, but it is your assistance we need.”

  “And by ‘we’ I take it that you mean Gibson and Saunders and the others in your neighbourhood?”

  “That is it. The small landlords of Kilcummin and Killala. We have had Whiteboy trouble before, years ago, and we know how to deal with it. It is the goodwill of Dennis Browne that we need now.”

  Moore passed the tips of his fingers across his forehead. “I don’t understand this at all, Captain Cooper. If it is Dennis Browne you need, you should be talking to him and not to me. But why do you need Browne? If there are popular disturbances in Tyrawley you should report this to General Hutchinson in Galway City.”

  “This is not a task for Hutchinson’s soldiers. We can deal with these lads, if we are given a free hand.”

  “Surely that is a matter for the magistrates. You are a magistrate yourself, are you not? And Gibson?”

  “We are, to be sure.” Cooper was beginning to doubt the wisdom of Kate’s advice. Moore was apparently a very slow-witted man, his brain bogged down in his books. “And we have no wish to act beyond what the law would allow.”

  “A most commendable attitude on the part of the magistrates, if I may be allowed, as a Papist, to comment on such matters.”

  Or that was it, perhaps. Scratch a Papist deep enough and you came upon some gnawing ambition or other. A seat in Parliament or on the bench of magistrates. Anything and everything that was forbidden to them by law.

  “It isn’t a sectarian matter at all,” he assured Moore in what he believed to be a conciliatory manner. “This is Whiteboy trouble, and we both know what that means. Once we have a few of these rogues tied to the cart’s tail, and a few ribbons cut out of their backsides, we will be close to the bottom of things. And the matter will be over before it has properly begun. That’s the way.”

  Moore stared at him incredulously. “And that is what you mean by a free hand. Do I understand you correctly? You have come for help so that you can turn your yeomen loose upon the peasants of the barony?”

  “Not your help exactly, Mr. Moore. But you stand in very well with Dennis Browne. Everyone knows that the Brownes and the Moores have been friends time out of mind.”

  “You foolish man,” Moore said.

  “Perhaps you are the foolish one, Moore,” Cooper said. He was stung less by the sudden, unexpected words than by the casual manner of their utterance. “You don’t know Mayo yet.”

  “I know enough to be appalled,” Moore said. “And so would Dennis Browne be, unless I greatly misjudge him. So would be any man of prudence and discretion. Have you discussed your ideas with George Falkiner? He seems a sensible fellow.”

  “You don’t know Mayo,” Cooper repeated stubbornly. And he had spent an entire afternoon riding here, to be insulted by a Papist ignorant of the county. Prudence and discretion in a county governed by the hounds and pistols of the gentry, the loaded whips of the middlemen, the clubs of the peasantry.

  “You are a magistrate, Captain Cooper, and so are your friends, and the magistrates of this country have more power than I would once have thought possible. Use it, and keep your Tyrawley Yeomanry out of the matter. The last thing needed at this moment is the dragooning of the county by red-coated Protestants.”

  “Protestants, is it?” Cooper asked, seizing happily upon the word. “Now we have it out in the open at last.”

  Moore sighed. “I will not lecture you upon morality or law. It would be a waste of breath. You said that you would welcome my advice and you shall have it. Parts of this island have been in rebellion, and the danger is not yet past. The French may make another effort. We have been most fortunate in Mayo, and we should protect our good fortune. You must deal with these Whiteboys, of course, but it would be most unwise to inflame the countryside. I am quite certain that this is the advice which Dennis Browne will give you.”

  “What advice?” Cooper said, the irritation squeezing him like the choker of his uniform. “To sit quietly until I go into ruin, and am swept away off my own land?”

  “I am certain that your affairs are not quite so desperate,” Moore said. “You have time enough to act quietly and within the law. Must this county be turned upside down in troubled times because one landlord is heavily mortgaged?”

  “By God,” Cooper said, stung again by Moore’s insufferably cool manner, “and to think that I came here out of the goodness of my heart, to draw you in a bit into the affairs of the county.”

  “That was kind of you,” Moore said. “I take such part in county affairs as your laws permit to me.”

  “Those laws,” Cooper said, his anger at last bursting its dam, “are here for the very proper purpose of keeping Papists in their place.”

  “Just so,” Moore agreed. “I am in my proper place. Moore Hall. And I wish the countryside around me to be as tranquil as possible.”

  Cooper puffed out his cheeks, and then expelled the air in a gesture of baffled defeat. What did this man know, with his blue ceilings decorated with naked white goddesses, of the problems a poor man faced, squeezed between the cabins and the mortgage brokers, and no place for him to turn?

  “Come now,” Moore said. “It is foolish of us to lose our tempers. Let us discuss this a bit more, while you sample another glass of sherry.” He slipped his watch from his pocket, snapped it open, and studied the time.

  “ ’Tis little enough the two of us have ever had to discuss,” Cooper said wi
th dignity. “And we have less now than ever before.” He rose up, and smoothed his scarlet coat. The action soothed him; authority leaked from the wool into his fingertips. “I had best be going now. It is a long ride.”

  Moore lifted his glass, and Spain burst upon his tongue. About one thing Cooper was right: Spain was far distant from here. He looked through the window towards the lake, and tried to picture the blazing sun upon winding streets of white walls and ochre walls. “Do nothing rash, Captain,” he said, without turning his head. “Be careful.”

  “I shall take care,” Cooper said. “You may depend on that. We have been taking care of this county for a good many years now, and we know what must be done.”

  Moore leaned towards him suddenly, his lips thin and the blue eyes glittering. “Do you? Has this land no other resource of governing but the whip and the cudgel, no other form of justice than a peasant’s bloody back and a greasy sovereign in the hand of an informer?”

  Amazed, Cooper stared at Moore.

  “The whipping post and the lash and the gallows, those are your laws,” Moore said, spitting out the words, “whatever may be the statutes which they enact up in Dublin. It is small wonder that your brutes of peasants murder your agents and tumble their bodies into the bog. And you have the insolence to seek my assistance in your filthy plans.”

  “Are you mad?” Cooper asked. He meant the question. The abrupt change from Moore’s manner of icy indifference was bewildering. He had been a fool to take Kate’s advice, which had provided Moore with an opportunity first to taunt him with cool ironies and then to rant at him like a Presbyterian minister.

  “Perhaps I am,” Moore said, regaining control of himself with an effort. “To have sat here listening to your foolishness.”

  “And I was foolish to have come here,” Cooper said.

  “You mustn’t forget this,” Moore said, handing him the Whiteboy letter. Clownish churl. Whoever had written that letter had a gift for phrase. A most curious document indeed. He walked Cooper to the door, as though they had exchanged only pleasantries, and bade him a polite farewell. Cooper was speechless with indignation.

  Mounted on his chestnut gelding, Cooper rode glumly down the avenue. Leafy rowan trees flung dappled shadows in his path. They were all alike, Fogarty, Moore, twisting, clever men who could always get the best in words over a blunt, plain-spoken Protestant. He rehearsed speeches that he might have made, withering Moore into silence, but gave up the effort. What kind of Papist was he at all, with his elaborate manners and his English speech? What kind of a gentleman could he be, the son of a huckster who smuggled wine ashore at Kilcummin strand in the old days? It would do him good to have such words flung in his face, a man who could never sit on the bench of magistrates or hold the King’s commission. Ach, much would it bother him, with his fine house and his vast acres and his quarter-million pounds. Old Joshua Cooper would have put him in his place. Cooper’s spirits lifted slightly at the thought of old Joshua, and he remembered the face in the portrait, a hard, capable soldier who had beaten all the Moores to their knees, all the Papists.

  Moore, standing on his balcony, watched the small, dumpy figure in its uniform of resplendent red. Exactly the kind of small man who could create large trouble, a very specimen of the type. A sceptic in spiritual matters, Moore had prided himself in London upon his indifference to sectarian divisions. It was different here. Beneath his contempt for Cooper’s foolish swaggering had glowed a hot coal of anger. How dare this improvident farmer set himself above me, he had found himself thinking at one point. And now, as he watched Cooper’s receding back, the coal was still warm. Ill-bred vulgarian, spawn of some Cromwellian trooper, history had given him licence to crow over this dunghill of a country. Clownish churl: admirable phrase. He turned his back on Cooper and left the balcony.

  But not even at dinner that night was he allowed to forget Cooper’s visit. John came late to table, and still in his riding clothes, the neckband loose, and with his loose yellow hair falling about his forehead.

  “In Father’s day,” he said as he picked up his napkin, “a man like Cooper would never have been a guest in this house.”

  Moore glanced up from his soup. “You are mistaken there. Father was a politic man, far more so than either of us. And when he was a young man, before Spain, he had to be very wary of such fellows. They ruled the roost. Things are a bit better now.”

  “They may seem better,” John said.

  “Whiteboys have been busy in Kilcummin. As a landlord I was gratful for the information.”

  “Whiteboys?” John asked, startled. “Is he certain of that?”

  “Quite certain,” Moore said. “He brought me their letter; it was the usual bombast, better written than most. They are not—” He broke off, and waited until Haggerty had served John’s soup and had left the room. “They most certainly are not rebels, if that was the point of your question.”

  John said nothing. He picked up his spoon and stirred his soup. “I have been at Malcolm Elliott’s,” he said. “That great chestnut mare of his has foaled. It will be a lovely creature.”

  “Elliott is well, I trust, and Mrs. Elliott? She is also lovely, in her way. I am very fond of Mrs. Elliott.”

  “She is well,” John said shortly.

  “And Elliott and yourself found time for a long talk about political matters, no doubt?”

  John put down his spoon and faced his brother. “Yes,” he said, “we did. Elliott and I often discuss political matters.”

  “These must be depressing times for Elliott,” Moore said. “The leaders of his organization imprisoned in Dublin, and the rebellion shattered.”

  “Have a care,” John said, glancing towards the closed door.

  “Oh, you are safe enough here,” Moore said. “And safe enough with Malcolm Elliott in Moat House. But everywhere else, you do well to guard your tongue. This is a poor season for sedition. This wine is a bit off. Had you noticed?”

  “No,” John said. “If you do think it sedition, you are devilish cool about it, George.”

  “What I may think it is not to the point,” Moore said. “It is a hanging offence.”

  They said nothing further until Haggerty, assisted by an untidy maid, had served the meal.

  “I have no wish to meddle with another man’s politics,” Moore said. “You spent a year in Dublin. Perhaps you joined the Society there, and perhaps Malcolm Elliott did. But as a brother I am thankful that you are safe in Mayo, and many miles away from the Society of United Irishmen.”

  “That is fair enough,” John said. “You have never affected any sympathy for the ideals of the Society.”

  “For their ideals?” Moore asked. “A very large sympathy.” He put down his knife. “Why can they not cook meat properly in this country? The best beef in Europe, and they burn it to cinders. One might suppose that with their long tradition of arson—”

  “Not enough sympathy to take them seriously.”

  “I have met several of the United Irish leaders. I know Tom Emmet, and MacNevin. And I have known many men like them, in France, in the first year or two of the Revolution. Liberty, equality. They want all the proper things, all the admirable things. And it ends in butchery.”

  “It need not,” John said.

  “History is what happens,” Moore said.

  “Freeing one’s country from oppression has usually been accounted a virtue,” John said. “For the first time in the history of this country, Protestant and Catholic have united in a common purpose.”

  “A union of some Dublin solicitors and a handful of briefless barristers, a few Catholic physicians and merchants. But when the rising broke out in Wexford, the United Irishmen had no control over it. Do you believe that the peasants of Wexford had read Tom Paine? It was a rising up of the peasantry against the men of property, the Papists against the Protestants. ‘The army of the Gael,’ they called themselves.”

  “Surely a wish to be free does not require the reading of Tom Pa
ine,” John said.

  “An excellent point,” George said. “But you should make it to your friends, and not to me. Their minds are fixed upon a republic, but the peasants who do their fighting for them have their minds fixed elsewhere. When peasants respond to oppression, the response is brutal, violent. Those barristers in Dublin know nothing of the Irish peasantry. I doubt if Wolfe Tone has ever spoken with one. I doubt if he would know how.”

  “But you agree as to the fact of the oppression.”

  “Oh, I do indeed.” Moore pushed his plate aside impatiently. “The landlords of this island, taken in the generality, are both savage and silly. A dangerous combination. Men like Cooper are intolerable. Even Dennis Browne—”

  “Then what hope is there for the country, short of—”

  “Alas, John. You cannot call this a country, this battered old hulk adrift on the Atlantic. You have seen France and England and Spain. You know what nations are. France is just now emerging from a convulsion, but it has remained a nation. Ireland has never been a nation. It cannot be. We have savaged each other too long, and we have cut too deep.”

  John laughed. “By God, if you find Ireland so complicated, how can you hope to write a history of the Revolution in France?”

  “No trouble at all,” George said. “The French Revolution is merely a momentous cataclysm which has changed the direction of human events. I could never write a history of Ireland.”

  “They are in gaol now, most of them,” John said. “If I had stayed in Dublin, I might be there now myself.”

  “Not Tone,” George said. “Tone is still in France making mischief. I wish him joy of the Directory. Not all the world’s rogues are in Ireland.”

  “I wish him well,” John said quietly.

  George looked at him sharply, and with a slight smile. “You don’t believe a word I’ve said, do you?”