Much did John Moore know of such matters, or his brother for that matter, but Mayo knew them, even the Protestants. They had no head for any of the practical concerns of life. You will have no luck at the fair if the first person you meet is not fair-headed, and when you buy a horse you must put a lump of earth on his back. John Moore knew that, because she had told him, but he paid no attention to it. He did not have the luck of the beast he was riding, and it would one day do him a mischance. Why had she fallen in love with a man who knew so little?
“A lovely beast,” Randall MacDonnell said, running his hand along the flank of Moore’s hunter. “A lovely beast. Who bred her?”
“Steward of Foxford,” Moore said. They were standing in the MacDonnell stable yard, amidst a clutter of farm wagons and harnesses.
“A heretic lady, but she is nonetheless sound for that. Stewart did well by you. But come over here now, John, and you will see how a Papist lady stands.” He walked with Moore to the stalls, unlatched a door, and led out a black mare. “This is Vixen. I am riding her next month at the Castlebar races. Bred on this farm.” He was the right height for a rider, but he was too broad, with wide, square shoulders and the beginning of a paunch although he had just turned thirty. “You will be there, will you not?”
“I will,” Moore said. “Unless I have more pressing business.”
“You should never let business keep you from the Castlebar races. Sure there will be no business done in Mayo that week save at the races. And if you will be guided by me, you will have a few pounds on Vixen. There are few of them can see her run, but you can yourself in the morning if you stay the night.”
“That is kind of you,” Moore said, “but I am promised at Bridge-end House and from there I am riding out to Tom Bellew.”
“Making your stations, is it, in the name of the republic?”
“Something like that,” Moore said. “I am hoping that you will give me a word to take back to Elliott.”
MacDonnell rooted in his pocket for lumps of sugar, which he divided between his horse and Moore’s.
“Elliott and I hunted together,” MacDonnell said. “A decent enough fellow.”
“He is,” Moore said. “A sound man. And he has been accredited by the Society as Secretary for Mayo.”
“Of course,” MacDonnell said, “there was a time when Sam Cooper and I were close, or as close as you can get to a Protestant. He was a wild lad for a few years after his father died. My God, the gatherings we used have at Mount Pleasant! They would go on for days. I remember riding back here to Ballycastle from Mount Pleasant with George Blake, one winter’s morning, just after Christmas it was, and the two of us out of our minds with drink. We had been at it for three days. The need came upon us, and we made a wager, which one of us could piss the farther. Not the more mind you, George would have had me there, but the farther.”
As he talked, he took Moore by the arm and walked with him to the house. When his tiresome anecdote had wound itself out, he gave a sudden whinny of laughter and clapped Moore on the shoulder.
“Seven years ago that was, if it was a day. By God, but has not Sam Cooper become a bloody fool. He was a bloody fool to turn out Squint O’Malley. He was looking for trouble and now he has it. And he was daft to put in for command of the yeomanry, a job every other Protestant was too busy or too lofty to take. What is it but a lot of bother and expense?”
“To keep the King’s peace,” Moore said, “and to guard Mayo against the French.”
“Hah!” MacDonnell cried with delight. “Have you ever seen them drill? It is the drollest sight you have ever seen. Bailiffs and shopkeepers.”
“You have a fine stand of barley there,” Moore said. “It is the same at Ballintubber. The harvest will be prodigious if the weather holds.”
“Prodigious,” MacDonnell said. “There is the word for it. One of the cottiers, an old fellow named Flaherty, says there was as fine a harvest in my father’s time, God rest his soul, but there has been nothing like it in my time or yours. Well sure ’tis not the crops you have in mind at all, is it, or how far can George Blake piss. Come into the house where we can talk like gentlemen, not standing with our ankles deep in stable muck.”
It was what Treacy had called it, a great draughty barn of a house, a two-storey farmhouse, slate-roofed and narrow-windowed, to which low, almost random rooms had been added, sprawling and graceless. MacDonnell ushered Moore in with unaffected pride, kicking a clear pathway through a litter of tackle and sacks of grain in the hall, and shouting for punch. He cleared away clutter from two chairs close to the fireplace and waved Moore towards one of them.
Ten minutes later, a dark-haired girl in red shift and bare feet brought in the punch, and placed it steaming on the hob. “There is a good girl,” MacDonnell said, and as she passed him to leave he patted her casually on the buttocks. “There is a good girl, Nora. She is, by God, John, as fine a girl as has ever served in this house.” He ladled punch into two cups and handed one to Moore, who noticed that the rim was smeared. The cup was greasy to his touch.
“Now I am going to give you a straight blunt answer, John.”
Moore recognised this as the local preface to any tortuous circumlocution. “All right, Randall. Provided you do not lecture me upon how little I understand about Mayo. I have already had that lecture at Bridge-end House.”
“From old Treacy, is it? There is a cunning old fox. You would think you were listening to a poem to hear that fellow talk about the old world that was destroyed at Aughrim, and all the while he is not doing so ill in this one, and neither did his father before him. That old fox in Ballycastle my father used call him.”
“We rub together well enough,” John said. “I am fond of him.”
MacDonnell darted a shrewd glance at him. “There is a fine estate there at Bridge-end waiting for the right young fellow, and a fine girl standing on it. A great friend of my own sister, Grace. Mind you, the hips seem a bit narrow for children, but sure where there’s a will there’s a way, as the saying goes.”
“It is a wife that I am looking for,” Moore said. “Not a brood mare.”
“Indeed? Treacy was right, you don’t know Mayo. Well now, John.” Moore’s cup was still full, but he refilled his own. “I have been talking to some men that the two of us have discussed, Corny O’Dowd and George Blake and Tom Bellew and a few others. The old stock, if you take my meaning. And I think I can tell you that we are well disposed. Yes, that is the word. Well disposed.”
“I am very glad to hear that,” Moore said, “and so will Malcolm Elliott be.”
“Ach,” MacDonnell said, rubbing a short, blunt hand across his neck. “You keep talking about Elliott, but it is yourself that I am saying this to.”
“Elliot is a member of the Connaught Directory and I am not,” Moore said. “It is the directory which is in correspondence with Dublin. You have no cause to distrust Elliott.”
“I doubt if it is much of a directory,” MacDonnell said gently. “There are some United Men in Sligo and in Galway and a scattering of them here in Mayo. All that is common knowledge. But I doubt if there are enough to make up a good hunt. You could fill the green of Castlebar perhaps with United Irishmen but it is a small green.”
“I admit that we are small in numbers now,” Moore said. “That is why I have been talking with you. Elliott has recommended me for the directory, and he is prepared to recommend O’Dowd and yourself if you will take the oath.”
“Would that not be the great honour. There are members of the Leinster Directory, down in Wexford, who are waiting trial at the moment, and some are already swinging from gibbets. That is altogether too high an honour for a poor Mayo squireen.”
Moore shook his head. “No one is proposing action until the French have landed, and Munster has risen. All that is needed now is preparation. Men like Corny O’Dowd and yourself have a good name among the tenantry. They would listen to you and they would take the oath from you.”
“T
hey might,” MacDonnell said. “They might. But would they fight is a different matter. Sure what would they fight with? Would you have me set them to work making pikes?”
“That is what Wexford did,” Moore did.
“Ach, sure don’t tell me about Wexford. It greatly weakens your case.”
“The French will come,” Moore said. “We may depend upon that. There will be a fight worth making.” He sipped the punch. As he had feared, it was sweet, but he drank again, more deeply.
“By God, I like the sound of that. This country needs a fight. Drink up, John. Drink up.”
“It will have one,” Moore said. “And when the fight is over, it will be a country, and not England’s granary. Will the people of Mayo fight for that?”
MacDonnell laughed, and emptied the remainder of the small bowl into their cups. “Nora,” he shouted. “More punch.” He waited a moment, and then shouted again. “Nora!” He nodded to Moore. “She has it ready. The secret with punch is to keep it hot. The hottest day of summer, I will take punch over cold whiskey. It clears the head.”
“Will they?” Moore repeated.
“There are wilder young fellows in this county than you could find in the whole of the two kingdoms,” MacDonnell said. “Jesus, in the last faction fight of the men of Ballycastle and the men of Killala, they were breaking skulls the way yourself or myself would crack open an egg. They had blackthorn cudgels, some of them, the size of a stout man’s wrist. There were two men killed outright, and mind you those fellows were fighting for nothing at all but only the honour of their towns. Jesus, the honour of Killala!”
“I know about faction fights,” Moore said. “They are a silly brutal business. George has forbidden them in Ballintubber.”
“No sillier than a republic would seem to a faction fighter. Or a Whiteboy. They have no notion of such things. But they are fine haters. They will fight what they hate.”
The girl brought in a fresh bowl of punch and placed it beside the empty one. Before she could straighten, MacDonnell encircled her waist and pulled her to the arm of his chair. “Do you have the likes of this in Ballintubber, John?” He put his hand on her rib cage, and then shoved it upwards, pressing one of her breasts towards the opening of her shift. “Study a creature like this and it will put every other thought out of your mind.” She leaned against his shoulder and smiled shyly at Moore.
MacDonnell slid his hand over the breast and stroked it softly. “Get along now,” he said. “We have business.”
When she had left, MacDonnell looked towards the closed door. “But she is a damned lazy serving wench for all that. Her name is Nora Duggan, and she is the niece of a strong-farmer named Malachi. He is one of Gibson’s tenants. It is to Duggan that the men in Kilcummin look. Duggan and a fellow named Ferdy O’Donnell. A decent enough fellow Ferdy is. We are somehow related, far back. You may depend upon it that those two lads are somehow thick in this Whiteboy trouble. By God, if that trouble spreads to Ballycastle they will oblige me by sticking to Protestants.”
“I have wondered,” Moore said quietly, “whether it is not to these Whiteboys that we should be looking for our recruits.”
MacDonnell nodded. “I thought we would come to that matter.” He bent down and put his hand on the bowl, then drew it quickly away. “O Jesus, I’m burned. How the hell did the girl carry it? She must have hands of leather.” He took a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the hand. “Do you know, those fellows down in Wexford, there must have been thousands of them by all we hear, I cannot believe they were all United Men. They may have taken that oath you have, but at heart they were Whiteboys. A country lad in Wexford is much like one in Mayo, and I cannot believe he was fighting for something called a republic. He took his pike and he went out after what he hated—yeomen, militiamen, Protestant magistrates.”
Moore shook his head. “I would be sorry indeed to see that here or anywhere in Ireland. The first intention of the Society has been to break down those wretched barriers of religion.”
MacDonnell laughed as he ladled out the punch. “By God, it took us centuries to build them up. You have your work cut out for you. ’Tis little enough that I know about rebellions, but I know that you must work with what you have. It isn’t a hundred years ago, when a lad like Corny O’Dowd could go riding out and haul his peasants after him. If there is a rebellion this time, the peasants will make it and it will be a Whiteboy war.”
Moore shook his head again, his full lips compressed. “It will not. It must be controlled by the Society. The French are not sailing here to support a country rabble.”
“The French! Much the French have ever cared about us. If the French come it will be to shove a thorn into England’s flank. There is a bit of the Whiteboy in me, John, and if I were to ride out with you, it would be because of that bit. For a hundred years or more those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish, hogging all the power and all the land. There are men still living who can remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant. The priests were hunted like wild wolves with five pounds’ bounty on their heads, and the people had to hear Mass in wild caves with a guard posted. Why do you think the Tyrawley Yeomanry is all Protestant? It is to keep us in our place, and to keep muskets out of our hands. I can meet Sam Cooper at the Castlebar races, and we will have a drink and a bet together, but if it comes to a fight, I will gut him or he will gut me.”
He spoke with what Moore found an impressive and unsettling calm, as though expressing facts so clear as to require no emphasis. Moore turned his eyes away from him, towards the bare, graceless room. On the walls hung only a few awkward portraits, the work of journeyman artists riding from county to county with canvas and paints. There were strong family resemblances, long, protuberant jaws, high, harsh cheekbones. The resentments which MacDonnell nursed had been passed on, a family inheritance, from father to son. In this room 1641 and 1691 were as young as yesterday, shaping conduct and governing passions. It was a history without triumphal arches or squares named after victories. It clung to the dour, treeless bogs and the low, abrupt hills, a history of defeats and dispossessions, of smoke rising from gutted houses.
“Let the French make their landing down in Munster,” MacDonnell said, “and let the people there rise up. If there is no one to guard Mayo then but the Tyrawley Yeomanry, by Jesus but we will give them a whipping. You must rest content with that, John.”
“Blake, Bellew, O’Dowd,” Moore said. “Are you speaking for them as well as for yourself?”
“I am,” MacDonnell said. “We have talked about this, you know, one way and another. We have no objection to taking the oath of your Society, and I don’t greatly care what it says. I am certain it must be a very fine oath. But your Society had damned well better understand that there is little that can be done here in Mayo.”
“We know that,” Moore said. “As well as you do.” He smiled, a young man venturing upon deep waters. “Then my ride was not wasted. You might have begun by telling me that.”
“Ach,” MacDonnell said. “Here, let us finish up the punch. You don’t have much—four squires and perhaps a few others that Corny and myself can find for you.”
“Those two men you mentioned—Duggan and that other fellow.”
“Ferdy O’Donnell. Let that rest for a bit. We are all Papists, right enough, but those fellows are peasants and we are landlords. It may be that Cooper will prove a good recruiting sergeant for us, if he turns the yeomen loose upon the barony.”
Moore managed to down his third cup of punch with a show of pleasure. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “he just might manage that, if he is as foolish as he would seem to be. George despises him.”
“George despises all of us,” MacDonnell said, and held up a hand when Moore began to speak. “All of us,” he repeated, “and who can blame him? Look at me, a man my age, and I have been a dozen times to Dublin and there is
the extent of my travels. I have read one book in the last six months, a trifling romance that I found in Tom Bellew’s house. It was all about some English lord who was in love with the daughter of a Spanish duke and you have never read such sorry stuff. Some woman wrote it. There is no other man in Connaught with my knowledge of horses, but what is that, when all is said and done?”
As Moore walked back with MacDonnell to the stables, he felt oppressively the truth of the remark. MacDonnell was clearly an able man, for all his reckless talk, but like the hillside thorn trees he had been shaped by the winds of Mayo, and like the thorn trees, he was rooted to the land.
MacDonnell, as though to confirm this, said, “Mind now, the Castlebar races. The finest week in the year, and it will give us a good shove forward into the harvest. By God, there is nothing like a fine race.”
Moore drew riding gloves from the tail pocket of his jacket. “You have agreed to join a seditious society, and all you can think of are the Castlebar races.”
“Well now,” MacDonnell said, leading Moore’s horse from the stable, “the French won’t come until after the races, surely? If they do, they will lose a few friends.”
Paris, July 7
He walked with jaunty haste down the Rue Saint-Jacques, a slight, knife-faced man with a prominent nose, dressed in the uniform of a chef de brigade in the army of the French Republic. He was singing a snatch of opera in a harsh, high-pitched voice which attracted attention, and when a head turned towards him he saluted it with a wave of his hand. He wanted to embrace every passerby, to take all of them off to the café for toasts in French and in English. In the mirror of his pleasure he saw a young and handsomely dressed officer walking the streets of the capital of revolution on a fine summer night. He was Citizen Wolfe Tone, formerly of Ireland and shortly to return there. He was the founder of the Society of United Irishmen, its accredited representative in France, and that afternoon he had received the final decision of the Directory.
The Year of the French Page 12