The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “He is indeed. He keeps himself busy with his scribbling.”

  “It is an honour to the country, to have a scholar like your brother resident here. Perhaps one day he will finish his dealings with the French regicides and turn to the history of his own county.”

  “I doubt if George will ever be done with his Frenchmen. He is very clever about them, and cleverness delights him. He would find little to be clever about in Mayo.”

  “Now there you are mistaken, John. Perhaps you have been too long away, George and yourself. Your father thought so, God rest his soul. Our deepest roots are in the soil of childhood.”

  “But I knew Mayo from childhood on,” John said. “Father spoke of it to me. He was homesick all of those years in Spain. He spoke often of your own father.”

  “Ah,” Treacy said, smiling. “There was always a great friendship between our two families. A hard time we had of it in the black days, the old families of Mayo. There is the proper subject for George’s pen, and not the base king-killers of Paris. A black century stretching forward from the disaster at Aughrim. They did their best to savage and scatter us. But we are tenacious, a tenacious people, John. Your father is a case in point.”

  Treacy smiled grimly, a bit complacently, proud of survival. Well might he be, John thought. But how many other families had gone under, vanished, names lingering only as meaningless tags for townlands and hills. The Brownes had survived by turning Protestant, and the Moores by exile; O’Dowds and MacDonnells had half fallen into the peasantry, uneasy hobbledehoys. And among the peasantry, families which had forgotten an early gentility, save perhaps for a battered silver teapot, a gown of frayed and shiny satin passed down from mother to daughter. Fit subject for an artist of the pathetic and the picturesque, uncongenial to his brother’s pen.

  “An ancient chivalry,” Treacy said, warming to a familiar subject. “Destroyed by Cromwell’s rabble, and by Dutch William. Mayo once was famous for its piety and learning.” His hand gestured, vaguely, groping towards centuries. “Our early history. You have seen the ruins of our abbeys, our monasteries. One of the finest stands roofless upon your own land. Ballintubber.”

  “My brother’s land,” John said.

  Treacy did not hear him. “We were outlaws upon our own land. Our priests were hunted down. Our sons were encouraged towards apostasy. Sergeants and corporals, the sweepings of the English cities, were set over us as magistrates. It is the stuff of epic, boy, fit subject for a Virgil. But we survived. We were not forced down into the bog.”

  “It has been a bad time for us,” Moore said. “A sorry time. Perhaps it is changing. In Wexford—”

  “Wexford! Peasants, brutal peasants hacking and killing with pikes and scythes. Drunken Whiteboys burning and butchering.”

  He was hopeless, Moore had known that. Celebrant of a consoling myth, counting like prayer beads the links of his bondage.

  “Times may change,” he said. “If the French fleet had landed two years ago—”

  “With ten thousand of those ruffians and arms for fifty thousand Whiteboys? No, no, there was a time, my grandfather’s time, when ships from France would have meant the Irish brigades, the return of the Wild Geese. Not now. Those bloodthirsty ruffians are as bad as the Cromwellians were. It has begun in Mayo. We have our own Whiteboys now. Six estates have been attacked.”

  “Six?” Moore asked, startled. “Two only, surely.”

  “Six,” Treacy said. “And the last was the worst of all. Saunders’s barns were destroyed last night, the thatch fired and the walls levelled.”

  “That is a serious undertaking,” Moore said thoughtfully. “Six estates in two weeks. That is a small insurrection.”

  “Ach, sure they are Whiteboys. Cooper will hunt them down with his yeomen. It is time those little Protestant bastards did more than rattle their foolish drums.”

  “And all this because Cooper turned a bit of his land to grazing. This is a mysterious business.”

  “They don’t know what they want,” Treacy said. “There has been Whiteboy trouble in Killala before, thirty years ago, when I was a young man. It was tithes and high rents then, and it is grazing now. But there was a black, sullen hatred behind it; they did not know what they wanted but they knew what they hated. Pothouse poets had them stirred up, and prophecy men. There was a prophecy clear across Galway and Mayo that when the millrace in Oranmore ran red blood Ireland would be freed. And they put the prophecy in their letters.”

  “Their letter now is like that,” Moore said. “Cooper brought it out to Ballintubber and showed it to George.”

  “To be sure it is,” Treacy said. “They are always like that. There is always some rogue of a schoolmaster with a head stuffed wih nonsense. It was a bad time for my father. We held the land on lease only in those days, and we had parts of it sublet at rents as high as any in the barony, but we were never disturbed at all, and neither were the Blakes, who are little better than rack-renters. It was the Protestants they went after, and many of the Protestants thought there was a conspiracy among all the Catholics, ourselves included. My father said one night he was thinking of burning down one of our barns as a gesture of goodwill.” Remembering, Treacy laughed. “But it never came to that. There were four lads hanged in the heel of that hunt. One of them was a MacMahon, Padraic MacMahon, I knew him well, a great horse of a young fellow and the best hurler in the barony. There were no yeomen here in those days. Sam Cooper’s father hunted him clear to Nephin, and rode back leading Padraic by a bit of rope. God rest the soul of poor Padraic MacMahon. There was something wrong with one of his eyes, but he was the best hurler in the barony.”

  Imagining a past which had come and gone before his birth, John saw two figures entering Killala, a yeoman captain’s father, squireen back from the hunt, red-faced and self-satisfied, behind him, led like a stray cow, a tall young fellow in frieze, twisting his head this way and that.

  “There is a song about him now,” Treacy said. “A wretched bit of pothouse doggerel. That is the way of it, they are a leaderless people. Their heroes are Whiteboys and faction fighters and hurlers.”

  “Our people,” Moore said. “Yours and mine.”

  Ach no,” Treacy said. “We are a scattered people. History put its heel on our neck. ’Tis a great pity you never knew my father, and a greater one that George did not. He was a great scholar. Mind you, he taught himself, but he was a great scholar in the two languages. He corresponded with Charles O’Conor of Belnagare, the historian and vindicator of the Catholics of Ireland. I have a packet of Charles O’Conor’s letters in this house. They would be of great interest to George. Read Charles O’Conor’s history, John, and you will understand the fate of the Catholic gentry of Ireland. We have been calumniated by perjurers and slanderers. King George now has no subjects more loyal, and we ask only the rights of full citizenship.”

  “Padraic MacMahon the hurler wanted something different, I expect,” John said.

  “I don’t know what he wanted,” Treacy said. “I know what he got.”

  “The end of a rope,” John said.

  “Yes. The end of a rope and a bad song which he never lived to hear.”

  The door opened, and a girl of about eighteen carried in the tea service. She was slender and for a girl extraordinarily tall, almost as tall as Moore himself.

  He rose to his feet and said, “Your father told me that some lazy slut of a girl might bring tea. I hadn’t known that he meant you, Ellen.”

  “Neither had I,” Treacy said. “Neither had I. Have you no tasks to keep you busy, girl?”

  She placed the tray on the long oak table and sat down before it. “I have the task of making a guest welcome, which I have been instructed takes precedence over other tasks.”

  “I was riding by your gates.” Moore said, “and I was parched for a cup. I would otherwise have ridden on to the MacDonnells.”

  “The MacDonnells, is it?” she asked. “At this time of day you would be lucky at the MacDo
nnells to get anything but buttermilk in a bowl or whiskey in an eggshell.” Quietly, deftly, she poured the tea, sugared two of the cups heavily and handed the third one to Moore. “You will be a foreigner, John, until you have a sweet tooth like the rest of us.”

  “I begin to suspect that I will always be a foreigner,” Moore said. “Sugar or not.”

  “John will be stopping the night with us,” Treacy said. “If you can find time to make a bed for him.”

  For a moment her eye caught Moore’s. “I might find time,” she said. “Someday. Are you not staying with the MacDonnells then, John? With all the hospitality they can offer? Firing off pistols into the ceilings is a part of their hospitality, I understand, when they entertain young gentlemen from Ballintubber.”

  “They are a wild crew,” Treacy said. “It comes to them in their blood. Have I told you of the reputed conduct of their Major MacDonnell on the night before the battle of Aughrim?”

  “You have, Father,” Ellen said. “Twice.”

  “I was addressing our guest.”

  “Sure it was John you told it to twice. I can’t count the times I have heard it. Every time poor Grace MacDonnell comes to visit me, I hear it, as though she were herself some wild rapparee riding in from Aughrim.”

  Treacy nodded. “You would never guess that the poor mother is a Dillon, adrift as she is in that bare, draughty barn of a house. A wild crew.”

  “She is a very pretty young woman,” John said.

  “She is indeed,” Ellen said. “We are most fond of one another. Grace MacDonnell has the finest forehead in Mayo and lovely green eyes.”

  “They are blue, I believe,” John said. “Dark blue like your own.”

  “Are they so? Perhaps they change in the light.”

  “Shall we expect you for dinner?” Treacy asked.

  “That would be most welcome,” John said. “I will have a bit of a talk with Randall and then ride back to Bridge-end.”

  “Randall is a great man for the talk,” Treacy said. “Especially when he has a few jars in him.”

  “He is,” John said. “A plainspoken man.”

  “I met him at the market last month,” Treacy said, stirring his tea. “He tells me that the two of you have talked political matters until late at night.”

  Moore was silent for a space, and then said, “We have. I have never kept my sentiments a secret from you, sir.”

  “And I have no wish to press you on the matter, if it remains a matter of sentiment and no more. I am most fond of you, John, most fond indeed, and I would grieve to see you compromised.”

  “Sure what can Randall MacDonnell know about politics,” Ellen said quickly. “As little as myself. There is but the one thing that Randall MacDonnell knows, and that is horses.”

  “He is a wild rascal ready for any mischief,” Treacy said, “like his father before him. They have half sunk into the peasantry.”

  “Not Grace,” Ellen said. “I am sorry to see so fine a girl in such a disordered house.”

  “Her mother is a Dillon,” Treacy said. “Randall and the others are children by the first wife. She was a Lally of Tuam, a very cross-tempered woman. I don’t know what Aeneas Dillon was thinking of when he let a daughter of his marry into the MacDonnells of Ballycastle. A father has a heavy responsibility in such matters, does he not?”

  “He does indeed,” John said.

  “Take myself as an example. ’Tis little enough that Ellen could ever hope to bring a man by way of dowry, but she is an only child and Bridge-end and the other bits of land would go in the course of nature and law to her husband. ’Tis a tidy little estate, although it is put to shame by one so handsome as your own, for example.”

  “Not mine,” John said. “My brother’s.”

  “ ’Tis all one,” Treacy said. “George does not seem ready or likely to marry, and if he did he is not the man to wrong a brother. But it is myself I was speaking of, of course, and not George. We are a prudent family, we have had to be prudent. ’Tis bred in our bones. I would be doing very wrong, would I not, to risk Ellen by accepting for her a rash or imprudent young man?”

  “You would, of course.” Moore put down his cup. “But in troubled times it is difficult to know the prudent course. In such times the bold course may also be the prudent one.”

  “On occasion, perhaps. On occasion. But in such times as these, the prudent course for the Catholic gentlemen of Mayo, for example, is to sit quiet and pray that these winds will blow themselves out. Do you not agree, Ellen?”

  “I have given little thought to such matters,” she said. “They are for men to sort out. But when it comes to choosing a husband, I trust you will depend upon the common sense for which you have often praised me.”

  “Well, well,” Treacy said. “Time enough to attend to such matters in the future.”

  “Was it prudent of your great-grandfather,” Moore asked Treacy, “to join the Stuart army?”

  “That was a hundred years ago,” Treacy said. “Times change. The Catholic gentry at the Boyne and at Aughrim were fighting for their King, for their faith.”

  “And their country,” Moore added.

  “Perhaps,” Treacy said. “It was a different world. They were gentlemen, John, your ancestors and mine. They would have despised these United Irishmen. We have spent too long on these matters. Is there more tea, girl?”

  Ellen walked with him to his horse, and they stood to talk. He leaned towards her, but she put a hand to his shoulder. “Not here.”

  “He is a stubborn man,” Moore said. “Polite and stubborn.”

  “He is a sensible man,” she said. “What business is it of yours if some men in Dublin want to make trouble?”

  “Make trouble!” he repeated. “They want to make a revolution, and I have taken their oath.”

  “And half of them are now in gaol, did you not tell me? Sure if that is what you want, you can have it with less trouble by stealing sheep or by going off with the Whiteboys to hough cattle.”

  Moore slapped the palm of his hand upon his horse’s saddle.

  “What sense is there in talking of such matters with a woman?”

  “No sense whatever. Women have more important things to think about. There you stand with not enough land to your name to give grazing to a calf, and my father is willing that you should have Bridge-end. Why should he wish to see me wed to a fellow who may end in gaol at the heel of the hunt? My father has common sense. It would give great pleasure to the Protestants of Mayo to see a Moore in Castlebar gaol.”

  “Your father has little cause to worry. There are not more than twenty sworn United Men in Mayo. The French will land and the battles will be fought and won and Mayo will have no part in it. This is the most backward province in Christendom.”

  “But you are riding off now to make a United Man out of Randall MacDonnell if you can. You would fare better by preaching to his horse.”

  Moore shrugged. “I promised Malcolm Elliott that I would sound out some of the Catholic squires. There have been good men sworn, in other places, Papist and Protestant alike.”

  “Protestant, is it? Sure what need have the Protestants of your revolution? Aren’t they ruling the roost as it is?”

  “Some of them. It is this accursed system which rules us all, while England bleeds us white.”

  “Ach,” she said. “Go preach to Randall. I despair of you.”

  “You do not,” Moore said. “You are in love with me and I with you.”

  “A pretty way you have to show it.”

  “I know a better one.”

  “In broad daylight beneath my father’s window. When you come courting it should be for that purpose and for no other. You will drive me to tears and despair. One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you. And all the time you could have myself and the promise of Bridge-end, as fine a farm as any young
man in Mayo has ever been as good as offered. And myself with it in the bargain.”

  “Never fear that I will not come courting,” Moore said. “It is my greatest pleasure.”

  “It is not,” she said. “It is your greatest pleasure to talk with Malcolm Elliott and Randall MacDonnell. A queer sort of beau I found for myself. Far better would I have fared with Tom Bellew that I brushed aside in my infatuation.”

  Swiftly, John circled her waist and kissed her. She clung to him.

  “You will fare best with me,” he said. “And well you know it.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. She brushed his lips lightly with her own, and then stood back from him. “That remains to be seen.”

  He mounted, and sat looking down at her. “You are too tall for beauty, Miss Treacy. Now a slight and graceful girl like Grace Nugent, who does not come up to a man’s shoulder—”

  “She is the pick of the MacDonnell litter,” Ellen said. “I doubt is she a MacDonnell at all. She washes herself.”

  “You are too tall by a head,” Moore said, “and you have a sharp tongue in it.”

  “I have,” she said. “And you had best get used to it.”

  “I must learn Irish,” he said. “It is a soft and clinging speech.”

  She laughed. “ ’Tis little you know it. Have a care what you say to Randall MacDonnell, John.”

  “I will,” he said. “I will be as prudent as a Treacy.”

  On a low hill beyond the hedge of the demesne, two cottiers were digging potatoes. Ellen stood watching them, her straight, slender back to Bridge-end House. It was a firm custom that no potatoes were dug before Garland Sunday at the end of July. These fellows had begun early. It was because of the strange weather. If the weather held, it would be the fullest harvest in memory. But Paddy Lacy and his son Owen had no cause to be digging spuds before Garland Sunday. There was a time and a method for everything that had to do with sowing and reaping and gathering. The ploughman in spring must turn his horses from left to right, with the sun, and when he unyokes them, they must be facing south. Friday is the day to begin the sowing, or any task which does not require iron, and Good Friday the best day of all. And the sower, as he sets forth, must say, “In the name of God,” and throw some turf over the rump of each horse. There were a hundred pishogues like those ones, and the harvests depended upon them.